Whatever the Forerunners made recognizes us as a special species—most of the time, anyway.
It didn’t help her. If this colony of Engineers had that same programming, that same ability to spot human language and work out how to communicate, then she was still stuffed. The Forerunners probably hadn’t made allowance for someone with her problems.
Okay. I know I’ve got problems. Just because I know that, though, it doesn’t mean I can sort myself out.
The doctors and psychiatrists had told her she could speak if she wanted to. Well, she wanted to. She’d wanted to say good-bye to Kurt for the last time when he made the squad leave him behind, and right now she wanted to speak more than she ever had in her life. She had to find a way to make herself talk. She needed to communicate with this creature if she was ever going to get out of here.
The Engineer signed again. Lucy found herself clenching and flexing her fingers with the effort as she brought her hands up. The Engineer backed away a little, probably expecting a punch in the face after what he’d seen her do to his friend.
He. Him. I’m thinking of them as people. That’s good. Keep it up.
Lucy strained to connect her mind to her mouth. It felt like trying to push a weight up a ramp. If she could just strain that little bit more, just push that little bit harder, then the weight would reach the edge, balance for a moment, and then tip over the edge, opening the floodgates. But something stopped her reaching that edge. She was almost there, but—
She opened her mouth. The sensation in her throat was … confused. She thought she remembered how to make sounds, but when she tensed unfamiliar muscles, it triggered her gag reflex and she almost coughed. It would not come. She felt her eyes fill with hot, angry tears. The Engineer reached out and stroked her head.
It was almost a human gesture, and she wasn’t expecting that. He didn’t seem to bear a grudge for what she’d done.
Shame we didn’t meet your lot before we met the Elites.…
Suddenly the Engineer cupped her face with two tentacles, holding her chin just under the jaw like a dentist. It scared the hell out of her. She jerked away and he recoiled, tentacles signing rapidly.
That had to mean sorry or take it easy. Lucy beckoned him back, trying to look as harmless as possible. He floated back nervously and took hold of her chin again.
She had to trust him.
He pushed down and the gentle pressure made her open her mouth. Now it made sense. He realized she couldn’t speak and he was trying to work out how to fix her. That HUD icon that didn’t seem to work—if he’d improved the audio, he’d probably tinkered with the microphone too, but she couldn’t make use of it.
For a moment, she felt elated. She was stranded inside a prison within a prison, but she’d made him understand something, and she’d understood him. The sense of connection was incredible.
It’s worth a try. We’re getting somewhere now.
She put her hand on his tentacle and held it still, then gestured to her mouth and shook her head. Did he get that? Was a headshake a universal negative? There were places on Earth where it meant the opposite. Did he realize she meant that she couldn’t speak, or did he think she was telling him not to touch her mouth? It was impossible to tell. He just hung there, peering at her. The last time anyone had stared her in the face at such close range was when a medic had checked out her eyes.
I haven’t even got a pen to draw pictures for them. Nothing to write on. Damn, there isn’t even any dust I can scrawl in.
The other two Engineers reappeared and just watched their friend. Lucy had to be sure that they understood what her problem was. She opened her mouth, held his tentacle just under her jaw, and struggled to make a sound. He had to be able to feel the muscles tensing. Even if he’d never seen a human before, he had to know how sound was made. He made sounds himself.
The tentacle felt like soft down. She could see a fine fringe of tiny cilia along it, glowing with that blue phosphorescence. For a moment, she looked into those odd little eyes and something seemed to click into place. He withdrew his arms and floated away between the vessels with his two friends. Had he given up?
He hadn’t.
He turned as if he was looking over his shoulder, seemed to notice that she wasn’t following, and drifted back. One tentacle curled around her wrist and he pulled gently.
Come with me. The meaning was crystal-clear.
Lucy followed, hand in hand with a living computer that didn’t bear grudges.
UNSC PORT STANLEY, BRUNEL SYSTEM: JANUARY 2553.
BB started the count to take Stanley into slipspace and found himself with a few idle seconds to fill.
He could perform five billion six-dimensional operations in that time. And time had to be filled, because he was pure intellect. Unless he was thinking and knowing, then he wasn’t existing.
One part of his mind, the dumb AI at his core, counted down, calculated, and spoke to the hundred thousand components of a lightspeed-capable corvette readying herself to punch through into another dimension. He could ignore all that and let it run in the background like an autonomic nervous system. The rest of him, though, was consumed with raw curiosity; around the ship, back on Earth, and on the various comms channels he was monitoring, there were fascinating things going on. He listened to them all simultaneously.
Mal was on the CPOs’ mess deck, arguing with Muir, the refugee they’d picked up on New Llanelli. The man didn’t understand why he had to be locked in a cabin. Mal was telling him in his odd singsong accent that he was quarantined, there was a shower in the cabin, and maybe it was high time he used it. Vaz and Devereaux were on the bridge with Phillips, trying to explain what it felt like to enter a planet’s atmosphere in a drop pod. Naomi was listening to the translated recordings of Sangheili voice traffic at the navigation console.
In the captain’s day cabin, Osman talked to Parangosky on the secure link, swapping sitreps. Still no sign of Halsey yet, then; and the battle reports and casualty lists were still trickling in months late from remote places with almost nonexistent comms. It was a grim picture.
Colonel James Ackerson was finally confirmed dead, as well as Commander Miranda Keyes.
BB suspected that Parangosky was the only person who would miss Ackerson. “I was planning to give him the Spartan-Four program and make Halsey work for him,” she was telling Osman. The captain listened, chin resting on her hand. “I’ll have to settle for telling her that he died a hero. Just after I let her know what happened to her daughter.”
She really wasn’t that venomous, old Parangosky. BB knew that personal slights were too insignificant to incur her wrath, which was a cold and calculated thing geared solely to the achievement of clear objectives. She exercised power for a reason, not for its own sake, although Halsey probably wouldn’t benefit from the difference when the Admiral finally caught up with her.
Miranda Keyes, Miranda Halsey to be legally accurate, had died heroically too. Halsey thought nobody knew she even had a daughter, even though it was impossible to hide that kind of thing from ONI or even from a curious UNSC HR clerk who could count. Routinely stored DNA samples, the period when Halsey was known to be having a fling with Jacob Keyes—no, it wasn’t exactly particle physics to work that one out. BB thought of Halsey’s journal again and how much it revealed of her mind.
How extraordinary. She refers to people as my lieutenant, my Spartans. She has this sense of ownership. And yet she hands her small daughter to Jacob Keyes and washes her hands of her. How … odd.
BB wondered how Miranda would have felt if she’d read Halsey’s journal, or if Halsey had read hers. He realized he was getting a little too invested in humans. He didn’t want to end up like Cortana.
It was three minutes to jump. He checked on Captain Hogarth back at Bravo-6 on Earth via another fragment of himself that he’d left in the ONI systems. Chip off the old block. Ha. Not quite a child, though. Just a little bit of me. Is that how Halsey sees her daughter? Hogar
th was still jockeying for Parangosky’s job, rifling through her virtual filing cabinets for dirt on her via his own AI, Harriet.
Impertinent oaf. He really thinks Harriet can get past me? Well, she will … but only when I choose to let her. Maybe I’ll play dumb and feed her bogus information. That’ll ruin Hogarth’s day.
The rising whine of Stanley’s Shaw-Fujikawa drive permeated the whole ship. Parangosky was talking to Osman again. “You can RV with Monte Cassino off Venezia to cross deck Spenser and the evacuee. There’s no vessel that’s closer. If there’s any risk of compromising the mission, though, lose them.”
“Spenser’s no risk.” Osman had worked with him years ago. BB wondered if she’d developed quite enough dispassionate ruthlessness yet to take over from Parangosky. “I’ll make sure of it.”
“Did you have a reason for not disposing of the evacuee?”
Osman’s voice tightened. “I didn’t want to start the relationship with my squad by killing an unarmed civvie in front of them.”
“Good thinking. Glad to see the team’s gelling, Captain.”
“Good people, ma’am. Osman out.” She took a breath. “All hands secure for jump. Do it, BB.”
“Hope you’ve taken your ginger, Captain,” BB said. “Chocks away…”
The drive opened an instant wormhole in space and Port Stanley slipped. Osman just swallowed hard. In the quarantine cabin, Muir muttered a string of fascinating and original expletives.
“You do realize this is the first warship I’ve ever piloted for real, don’t you?” BB said. “Piece of cake.”
Devereaux chuckled to herself. “Cabbage crates over the briny, BB.”
“Tally ho, Skip.”
It was oddly satisfying to be able to make humans laugh. If only Muir had been so relaxed about it all. He was hammering on his cabin door now, demanding to be let out. Osman eased herself up from the captain’s seat and her expression hardened into resignation.
“How long to Reynes, BB?” she asked.
“Best estimate now—thirty-two hours. Do you want the cargo moved before Spenser arrives?”
“No. Let’s transfer him via the docking ring and then you can make sure he doesn’t go near the hangar deck. I’m going to visit our passenger.”
“Need a hand, ma’am?” Naomi asked.
“He just needs picturizing,” Osman said. That was the Navy’s deceptively harmless word for bawling someone out at skin-peeling volume. BB suspected her approach would be the quietly menacing kind. “But thank you, Petty Officer.”
Osman walked off with a purposeful stride and headed down the ladders through the decks. BB could see Mal standing outside the locked cabin, leaning against the bulkhead opposite with his eyes raised to the deckhead for a moment as if he was praying for strength.
“Button it, will you?” he yelled. The hammering on the other side of the door stopped for a moment. “Another ship’s going to take you somewhere safe. Then you can do whatever you want. But in the meantime—just wind your neck in.”
“Why lock me up? What the hell is it with you people? I’m not the goddamn enemy.”
Osman could cover a lot of distance fast. She still had that Spartan turn of speed to match a long stride. She slid down the ladder to the officer’s accommodation deck—BB found it interesting that nobody used the elevators—and bore down on the cabin. Mal stood away from the bulkhead.
“It’s okay, Staff,” Osman said. “I’ll talk to him.”
BB decided to manifest just as she opened the cabin door. Muir took a step back. He’d had a shave and he was wearing baggy engineer’s coveralls, but being rescued hadn’t produced a warm sense of gratitude to the Navy.
“Am I under arrest?” he demanded. He looked over Osman as if he was searching for a name tag or insignia. “Why am I a prisoner?”
“Quarantine, Mr. Muir,” she said. “You’ll be out of here in a couple of days.”
Muir peered past her. He’d spotted BB. They probably didn’t see many AIs on a colony like New Llanelli.
“What are you people?” he asked. “If you’re Navy, why aren’t you wearing badges? What’s that square blue thing? And why are you talking to the Covenant?”
“The fighting’s stopped,” Osman said. Ah, that was a very careful word. She didn’t say the war was over. “No peace treaty yet. Just trying to get back to normal.”
“But what did you give them? I saw the ship land the last time, too. Why Llanelli? Why talk to them there?”
Oh dear. Time for some airlock diplomacy. BB did a quick pass around the security cameras and put all evidence of Muir being on board in standby-erase, just in case. Osman shot back an answer, cool and unblinking.
“We’ve started exchanging bodies,” she said. “They’re like us. They want to bring their fallen home.”
Muir’s life expectancy now depended on whether he believed that story. BB was sure Muir couldn’t possibly have seen the contents of the crates. He checked the record of the comm signal locations against the contours of the ridge where the exchange had taken place, and there was no direct line of sight. Muir could only have seen the dropship land and the trailer driven away.
Muir stared at BB, then at Mal, and then back to Osman, suspicious and much quieter. “Screw them, and their goddamned fallen. But why lock me up? You know damn well that I’m not infected.”
“This is a spy ship.” Osman said it with slow deliberation as if she was getting impatient with his naiveté. She stepped back across the coaming, hand on the edge of the door. “Everything on this vessel is classified. Just breathing here is in breach of the Official Secrets Act. I can drop you back on New Llanelli, if you like.”
“You really are all bastards, aren’t you? You know how many people died on Llanelli? One million, four hundred thousand. Don’t you get it? No, Earth was never hit, was it?”
“Oh, we lost a few billion on Earth,” Osman said. “I think we get it just fine.”
The door shut with a clunk and BB activated the locks. There was no more hammering.
Osman looked at Mal and shrugged. “He’s just an ungrateful dick, Staff, not a security risk. He can’t tell anyone anything.”
“And if he could?”
“Then I’d do the necessary. I wouldn’t expect you to do that.”
That wasn’t spelled out. BB studied the look on Mal’s face as he watched Osman’s vanishing back. Mal had that deepening, distracted frown that said things were crossing his mind that made him uncomfortable. If Muir had seen arms being handed over to the Sangheili, then he would have had to be silenced, and killing other humans was something only the older troops could recall. Mal was too young to have known anything but an alien enemy, and killing hostile aliens was a clear-cut thing. Funny things, humans. They really were hard-wired for anxiety about killing their own kind, whatever the history books showed.
“Square blue thing,” Mal whispered, leaning close to BB’s hologram. “Go on, get your own back. Show up in his cabin and rattle your chains.”
He turned and headed down the passage to the galley. BB took another look around the ship and decided he had more in common with his organic colleagues than he liked to admit. They were all making themselves busy whether they needed to be or not. Devereaux and Naomi had gone back to the hangar to tinker with the Spartan’s Mjolnir armor, working out the easiest way to get Naomi into it. Vaz was sorting laundry. And Mal was cleaning the galley. It was all the small stuff that filled their down time and had to be done, covert mission or not. It made them all look rather harmless and domestic.
And, as Parangosky was fond of saying, the most successful missions were those that were unnoticed and of little remark, where nobody needed to fire a shot.
BB hoped the squad was savoring the enforced idleness. He couldn’t see it lasting long.
REYNES, FORMER MINING COLONY: UNSC TEMPORARY LISTENING STATION.
Reynes hadn’t been a pretty place to start with, but a visit from the Covenant hadn’t done m
uch to improve the ambience.
Mining wasn’t scenic. The endlessly fascinating CAA Factbook flashed up the planet’s dismal history in Mal’s HUD. Aluminum, tantalum, copper. There’d been about fifty thousand workers here when the mines were operating. Now there weren’t any, unless he counted Mike Spenser, but there were still signs of where they’d been before the Covenant had launched its attack.
“Where is he?” Devereaux asked. She kept the dropship’s drive idling and got on the radio. “Kilo-Five to Agent Spenser—the meter’s running, sir. We’re at the extraction point and you’re not.”
It took a few moments for Spenser to respond. “Just shutting the shop. Wait one.”
“You need a hand?”
“I’m packing up the transmitter. Working to the last moment, that’s me. Not that the bastards pay me overtime.”
Mal stepped down from the dropship’s bay and decided the view was worth recording for posterity. He’d seen a lot of glassed planets in the last fourteen years, but this was the weirdest landscape he could remember. The intense heat that vitrified the soil was enough to vaporize everything combustible and melt metal into slag, leaving just the characteristic ice-rink pools of glassy material. But sometimes structures survived. There was probably a sensible explanation for that, like a low-orbit bombardment, but whatever it was it had left a landscape that looked like a freeze-frame of a flooded town.
A winding derrick, the head end of a conveyor, and something that might have been a radio mast jutted from the glass lake at odd angles, silhouetted against thin gray clouds. The structures looked submerged rather than incinerated. Mal started walking toward the lake. As he got closer he could see that the skeletons of the buildings were charred to a uniformly matte dark gray, like a coating of velvet. He grabbed a few images and eventually stopped about ten meters from the edge. All he could hear was the wind.
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