“Is New Llanelli the colony itself or the whole planet?” Vaz asked.
Osman stood over Phillips, watching something on the screen in front of him. “Was both. There were only three townships there anyway. BB, found any contacts out there?”
“I’ve got a live connection to Kilo-Three-Nine,” BB said. “No response, but he’s receiving. I’ll loop it until he picks it up.”
“Where is he, ma’am?” Mal leaned on the chart table, bracing for an ONI need-to-know rap across the knuckles. “If you’re allowed to say.”
Osman didn’t turn a hair. “There’s a listening station on Reynes. He’s been camped out in the glasslands running a string of Jackal informers. He knows Sangheili dialects even better than Dr. Phillips. But he’s not ONI, and he thinks this is all part of brokering peace with the hinge-heads so that Hood can waltz in and shake hands with the Arbiter.”
Phillips took the news that he was the understudy pretty well. He didn’t even flinch. “Hope I get to debrief him one day.”
“He’d talk your ears off. He’s not had much human conversation for some years.”
Mal was aware that agents had been working undercover for years in Covenant space, but it suddenly struck him as a lonely and miserable job. He’d never given it much thought before. When he was plummeting through a planet’s atmosphere in a drop pod smaller than a car, trailing flame and heading for an uncertain landing behind enemy lines, he could only think of himself and his mates. Sometimes he didn’t even have the time to think at all. The pod would crash into the ground—upright if things went to plan, flat on its side if they didn’t—and the front hatch would burst open, coughing him out into a hail of fire. The job was clear-cut and immediate. All he had to do was kill everything in front of him before it could kill him. Even the slower tasks like training militias or doing long, patient recons had finite objectives most of the time. But to live in hiding on your own for years at a time, just listening and always in danger of being betrayed by informers … no, he really didn’t fancy that at all. He preferred to hunt his enemy down, look him right in his dog-ugly face, and then slot the bastard.
“Captain, I’ve got Kilo-Three-Nine,” BB said. “Do you want him on the speaker?”
“Let’s hear him,” Osman said. “Hey, Spenser. How are you doing?”
“Good to hear you, Oz.” Spenser sounded like a grumpy uncle who smoked fifty a day. “You came all this way to check on me?”
“What have you got?”
“It’s going to rats out here. You want me to cut to the chase? I’ll upload all the comms codes and detail to your AI, but the headline is headless chicken mode. Most of their C-Two’s gone. They were reliant on the Prophets for the big command picture. Plus there’s a real split in the ranks about the Arbiter allying with us. One interesting development for you—a religious sect just killed a couple of keep elders for blasphemy.”
Osman’s voice didn’t change at all. “What did they do?”
“According to the chatter, these old hinge-heads wrecked a Forerunner relic and ended up disemboweled by the Abiding Truth. I sent Big Maggie a file on them a while ago. Anyway, the mad monks hit the keep with an air strike. They’re cannoned up.”
This was what the mission was all about: to get the hinge-heads to focus on killing each other. Mal searched for a hint of satisfaction on Osman’s face, but she just looked totally unmoved.
“You’re still on Reynes, then,” she said.
“It’s kind of nice this time of year. I have a Grunt who comes in once a week to clean.”
“I’m going to pull you out, Spenser. We’ll take over local surveillance now. It’s getting too dangerous.”
“It’s been pretty damn dangerous for the last two years.”
“You said it yourself. It’s falling apart. Can you exfil to an RV point on your own?”
“I haven’t had orders to pull out.”
“You have now. We’ll extract you after we’ve done a recon. Stay in touch with BB and keep your head down.”
“Okay, Oz. Hang on to your entrails. Three-Nine out.”
Mal found himself staring at the bulkhead, wondering what it was like to live alone on a dead colony world. Spenser obviously knew Osman well enough to call her by a nickname. It was hard to think of her as Oz. But it was even harder to think of Margaret Parangosky as Big Maggie.
“How long has he been there, ma’am?” Vaz asked.
“Two years, this time around.” Osman moved along the bank of monitors and readouts, eyes darting from screen to screen. Port Stanley’s bridge looked more like a TV studio crossed with a reactor control room than a warship. “I don’t want him restabilizing what we destabilize. BB, patch me in to ‘Telcam and let’s get this done.”
Nobody asked for confirmation that Hood was out of the loop on this, but Mal could work that out for himself. It was one of those gray areas that he hated. But Osman’s the boss now. What goes on above her is between Parangosky and Hood. He turned his head very casually, just to get Vaz’s reaction without BB noticing, and Vaz held his gaze for an extra second that said it all.
Ours is not to reason why. Right, Vaz.
They waited. Only the faint sigh and hum of the ship’s systems broke the silence for a long five minutes, and then there was a burst of static.
“It’s the Bishop for you, Captain,” BB said. “I’ve taken the liberty of piggybacking on his comms just to check who else he’s talking to. I’ll route that audio separately to Dr. Phillips.” Phillips jerked in his seat as if BB had plugged him straight into the main power supply. “Oops, volume problem there … sorry.”
Osman wandered over to the viewscreen and stared out as she tapped her earpiece, then turned back to the surveillance screens. “‘Telcam, this is Captain Osman. Are you ready to take delivery of the consignment?”
“Your arrival is timely, Shipmaster.” Mal hadn’t expected the thing to speak such good English. “More of the faithful turn to us every day, and they need arming.”
“So we rendezvous on New Llanelli.” Osman gestured to Naomi and pointed to the radar screens. Mal could see several small returns on one of them. “How soon can you get there?”
“By your time—five hours, maybe six. Where are you? I detect no ships.”
Osman gave Naomi a thumbs-up. “I’m hiding, ‘Telcam. Most of the Jiralhanae aren’t on your side and they aren’t on ours either. Very well, same coordinates as last time. Six hours from now.”
The comms line went dead. Naomi stood in front of the radar screen with her arms folded.
“He’s got three ships,” she said. “What are they, BB?”
“One boarding craft and two old Tarasque fighters. He’s been rummaging through the scrapyards.”
Phillips swiveled his seat to face Osman. “Anyone want a quick summary of the comms chatter? They don’t trust us and they can’t work out why they can’t locate us or the source of the signal. They just don’t have access to the technology they’ve been used to, and it’s thrown them.”
“That’s what I like to hear,” Osman said. “Blind, deaf, and needy.”
“And one of the pilots wants permission to attack us on the surface once we do the handover. Someone told him to shut up and remember that they need us to keep bringing the goods until the sect’s strong enough to seize the Arbiter’s fleet.”
“Yes, but remember we can’t touch them, either,” Osman said. “We need to find some willing Jiralhanae. Nothing like a few angry Brutes to keep things interesting for them.”
“So much for all that Elite warrior honor,” Devereaux said. “They’re just as bad as us.”
“Then we need to dirty up our game.” Osman looked like she was starting to enjoy herself. Mal couldn’t work out if that was good or bad. “I’d hate to see ONI lose the title of Most Devious Bastards in the Galaxy to a bunch of hinge-heads.”
“Go, Team Devious,” Phillips muttered, one hand to his earpiece. “No moral depth left unplumbed.”
Am I a bad bloke?
He didn’t feel any better or worse than anyone else. But he looked around the bridge, and he didn’t see a weird Spartan, one of ONI’s most senior spooks, a creepy AI with way too much mouth, and a bloke with a Ph.D. in hinge-heads.
He just saw his CO and his mates. Not ODSTs, admittedly, but people whose backs he’d watch, just like Vaz and Devereaux.
And he’d expect them to watch his.
CHAPTER
FIVE
IF YOU’RE GOING TO PRACTICE DIVIDE AND RULE TO MAINTAIN SOME SORT OF EQUILIBRIUM IN ONI, IT’S NOT ENOUGH JUST TO SET PEOPLE AGAINST ONE ANOTHER. THE TRICK IS TO MAKE SURE THAT YOU GET SOME USEFUL WORK OUT OF THEM AS WELL. OTHERWISE JUST DISPOSE OF THEM AND SAVE YOURSELF SOME TIME.
(ADMIRAL MARGARET O. PARANGOSKY, CINCONI, TO CAPTAIN SERIN OSMAN)
FORERUNNER DYSON SPHERE, ONYX: LOCAL DATE NOVEMBER 2552.
Where the hell was she now?
Lucy struggled to her feet by pressing her back to the wall and sliding up it, rifle leveled. The ferocious blue-white light that flooded the chamber left her a sitting duck. She had no cover and she couldn’t see a damn thing. It took her a second or two to work out that there was a column to her right, a five-meter dash that she decided was worth the risk. She ran for it.
The light dimmed to daylight levels as she dropped behind the column and got her bearings. To her left, she could see her helmet in the middle of a patch of pale gray tiles. She turned her head to the right as far as she could, still flat against the column, wondering if she was going crazy. The wall seemed to extend a lot farther than she’d expected, as if the room was bigger than it appeared from the outside. But it was hard to tell. She’d stumbled in here in pitch blackness.
She sucked in a breath and held it for a moment, listening for movement. The place smelled oddly like a hospital and had the muffled deadness of a room full of heavy drapes. But that wasn’t what she could feel under her boots. She put her left hand on the ground to confirm it, and felt perfectly smooth, cool stone, a kind of terrazzo just like the entrance.
Either there’s a lot of bodies in here or it’s soundproofing. Let’s take a look.
Lucy detached the scope from her rifle and angled the lens to see the reflection of what was behind her. It didn’t help much. It was a segment of a curved surface, maybe white or pale gray, and it could have been anything from another Dyson sphere to a piece of Forerunner art.
Whatever it was, she couldn’t stay here.
She snapped the optics back on her rifle and decided to make a grab for her helmet before she worried about anything else. It wasn’t just protection. It was her comms and sensors, too, for whatever good they’d do in here. She eased herself into a squat, ready to dart out but not sure yet where she’d find cover on the other side.
Okay—three, two, go.
She sprang out and ran for the helmet. She found herself in a warehouse full of machinery, none of it instantly recognizable, and scooped the helmet under one arm before sprinting full tilt for the nearest cover, a bizarre statue that made her think of an ancient Babylonian frieze.
Winged bull. No, not a bull. A lion? A horse?
Whatever it was, she skidded under one of its pillar-sized legs—not vertical, raked back at an angle—and flattened herself against it before putting her helmet on one-handed. The head-up display scrolled through a menu of red status icons: no bio signs from the rest of the squad, no radio signals, and no global positioning. Well, at least its optics worked. And it would save her from a headshot.
She looked up at the underbelly of the bull-lion-horse, much less animal in form now that she was up close to it. It was a dark gray, boat-shaped vessel with four landing struts and a headlike bow section. The organic curves didn’t look aerodynamic at all and she couldn’t see anything that resembled a human ship, but the openings at the stern had to be afterburners or something. She just knew it. She might simply have been jumping to the wrong conclusion, misled by familiar shapes, but it was a guess she felt confident about.
Maybe this is the Forerunners’ parking garage. Makes sense. All part of rebuilding their civilization if the worst happened, just like the Chief said.
As she looked along the hull above to find a hatch, she picked up a sound. Her hearing was hypersensitive at the best of times. But the helmet’s audio amplified a noise exactly like someone sliding a pair of pants off the back of the chair, dragging a leather belt over wood. It was so slowly done, so careful, that all Lucy could think was ambush.
I can’t just wait for it to get me.
It’s coming from …
Lucy leveled her rifle and swung around in the direction of the noise. Her eye caught movement and short-lived shadow, but whoever it was had taken cover between the vehicles. She started stalking it.
Okay … let’s see your legs.
The vessels or whatever were all different shapes and sizes, some ten or fifteen meters high, some much smaller. But the terrazzo floor was perfectly smooth and flat. Lucy darted under the nearest vehicle and lay cheek to the ground, looking for boots moving between the stands and struts. Over the sound of her own rapid breathing—pumping adrenaline, fiercely focused—she could still hear the slithering leather, and what she thought was a gasp of effort.
Actually, it sounded more like a fart. It was a weird, unfunny moment. She was trying to get the jump on someone who was more likely to blow her head off than shake her hand, and here she was listening to a damned fart. But she still couldn’t see any legs. Elites just couldn’t move that quietly. And a Brute would have smashed through everything in the garage to get at her.
But she saw a shadow moving slowly right to left about four vessels ahead of her. She crawled under the ships on elbows and knees, rifle cradled in the crook of her arms, keeping her eyes on that shadow. It paused for a moment.
Is there a gantry above me? Is that what I can see? Someone on a gantry?
Lucy couldn’t look up to check. She kept going. She didn’t think she was making much noise, but it was hard to be completely silent. She was trying to tiptoe on joints. It was slow going.
And then she was under the curved hull of another dark gray ship, one that gave her a glimpse of much more familiar undercarriage gear, and within two meters of the shadow.
Okay. Still no legs. You’re standing on something above me. Maybe some walkway between the vessels. So I’m coming up underneath you. That’ll be a lovely surprise, won’t it?
Lucy left it to the last moment to flip over onto her back. It wasn’t easy with a backpack, but she did it, balancing herself on it and putting one boot against a strut. If she pushed off hard enough, she’d skid out like a skate and come up under the bastard, whoever it was. She clutched her rifle to her chest, right index finger on the trigger, left hand cupped around the muzzle, then tested her boot against the strut and braced her quads.
Deep breath. Three … two …
She drove off from the strut and shot out into the gap between the vessels. Right above her, a dark shape blotted out the light. In the fraction of a second between seeing it and squeezing the trigger, her brain told her tentacles, Engineer, could be rigged to explode, do it.
She squeezed off a burst, straight up. Liquid splashed her visor. A terrible squealing noise like a balloon venting air told her she’d hit it. She tried to roll clear, but it crashed down on her, tentacles flailing.
It didn’t blow up. And neither did she.
Oh God. I shot an Engineer. I shot a poor damn Engineer.
Lucy couldn’t move for a moment. Engineers—Huragok—were lightweights, less than sixty kilos, but it was still hard to move with a dead weight like that on her chest. She squirmed out from under it. It was stil
l alive, making terrible wheezing, sucking noises now, looking like a beached squid with a face. The creatures had gas sacs that enabled them to float and that was what she’d hit. But the sacs were their lungs as well. It was suffocating.
Lucy couldn’t even tell it she was sorry. She couldn’t explain that she’d seen too many Engineers with booby traps strapped to them by the Covenant, and that she was trained not to take chances.
She couldn’t explain that she overreacted to threats and sometimes got it wrong, either.
She tried to lift its head and comfort it. Its face reminded her of an armadillo, long and narrow. She took off her helmet and tried to look into its eyes, three on each side of its head, and make some sort of contact with it, but it was hard to work out where to focus. The poor thing was dying. It was like shooting an autistic child. Huragok were harmless, obsessed with repairing technology and tinkering with machinery. They didn’t fight or take sides; they were only dangerous when the Covenant strapped explosives to them.
That had always disgusted Lucy. She had a faint recollection of a pet cat before the Covenant killed her family and glassed her colony.
Savages. Monsters.
But humans did that too. We did it with dogs and dolphins and all kinds of helpless creatures. We made them into bombs. And now I’ve killed an Engineer.
It might not have troubled most Spartans, but it troubled her. All she could do was hold it. The sucking noises were getting weaker. There was nothing in her medical pack that could save it. She didn’t even know where to start.
And I’ve killed the only sentient being that could help us find a way out of this place. Or get me out of here.
The Engineer seemed to get heavier as she tried to prop up its head, then it stopped wheezing and its tentacles went limp.
God, I’m sorry. Did you realize I didn’t mean to do it?
Lucy sat back on her heels and wondered what the hell to do next. Now she knew there was no real threat, she had to work out how to contact the squad and let them know where she was and what she’d found. If she could locate the point where she’d entered the chamber, maybe she could tap a Morse message on the stone.
Halo: Glasslands Page 11
