Mendez emerged from the gloom and gave her a long, unblinking stare, lips pressed in a tight line. It was his don’t-push-me look. During the Spartan-II program, she’d rarely been the recipient of it. But Mendez had dropped off her radar more than twenty years ago, and he was a lot less deferential now than she recalled.
Is that when he first betrayed me? I was pretty sure he’d been sucked into another classified project, but I never dreamed he’d team up with Ackerson.
“They’re experienced special forces,” Mendez growled. “Not malfunctioning AIs. What do you want me to do, power them down?”
That stung. Did he know? Did Ackerson himself even know that she’d eventually shut down—killed—Ackerson’s interfering AI, Araqiel? Probably not. She brazened it out.
“Chief, do you understand what I’m saying? Even Kurt acknowledged that the Threes’ judgment would be shaky.” Halsey abandoned her trust-me-I’m-a-doctor voice. “You know damn well that he modified them genetically to reduce frontal lobe activity. That needs regular medication to keep it in check, but we don’t have those antipsychotics, do we? I won’t bore you with the details, but you might want to look up RADI some time. Reactive aggression. In a nutshell—your Spartans might be better at coping with injury and stress, but without their happy pills they’re going to get dangerously violent.”
Mendez sucked in a breath. “Yeah, I do understand the big words, Doctor. But I trained them from the age of six, so I know them. They’re my men and women. They’re as rational and professional as anyone.”
“How can you say that? Is Lucy even functioning?” Halsey had to make him understand that kind of aphasia just wasn’t normal. “Nobody that traumatized should be serving frontline. How long has she been mute?”
“Coming up seven years.” Mendez shrugged, almost as if he was provoking her. “Maybe eight.”
“Eight damn years? Are you serious?” Halsey was appalled. A soldier who can’t communicate? “She’s not just a liability to herself, Chief, she’s a liability to her whole team. Especially with that frontal lobe modification.”
“Well, Doctor, she didn’t have that. That’s how she is naturally. Any other dazzlingly wrong diagnoses you want to share with us?”
That stung. He’d made her look like an idiot. But a sudden muffled silence settled on her like a wet fog. There was enough light in the tunnel for her to see the body language around her, even if the Spartans’ helmets made their expressions unreadable. Olivia and Tom were looking at her, heads turned, unmoving. She’d expected the Spartan-IIIs to resent comments about Lucy, but Kelly looked a little troubled too. Halsey could tell from the way she swung her arms slightly.
“I admit it’s not ideal, ma’am,” Kelly said, “but we work around it. Lucy can signal just fine.”
The passage suddenly filled with light, harsh and bright enough to sting Halsey’s eyes for a moment. Ash and Mark cheered and came jogging back down the passage. As her eyes adjusted, Halsey could now see the layout of the corridor and the wall ahead of her.
“We might be latent psychos,” Mark said, “but we can still operate a light switch.”
Halsey couldn’t tell from his tone if he was making a friendly joke or taking a pop at her. Seeing as the lights were indeed on, she let it pass and examined the wall one-handed. There appeared to be a rope-edged margin cut into the blocks, a rectangle five meters by three, with a vertical row of symbols set down the right-hand side. It said door to her, and it also said kept shut for a good reason.
“They’re back,” Ash said.
Halsey looked around. The other gray cylinders had returned, floating like ghostly bottles. One peeled off from the others and drifted over to Mendez, settling about thirty centimeters from his face. He stared at it. If it had the slightest understanding of human expressions, it would have fled. Halsey let go of her cylinder and it floated up to head height, making no effort to escape.
“Ah,” she said.
She and Mendez were the only two not wearing helmets, and they were also the only two with cylinders peering into their faces.
“What’s different about you and me, Chief?” she asked. “Why are they interested in us and not the Spartans?”
Mendez took out his cigar and parked it in the corner of his mouth again. “Age? Unsocial habits? Guilt?”
“I’m being serious.”
“Well, if I were them, I’d be making sure that nobody who got in here was contaminated with that Flood thing you were talking about,” he said. “Because if they were, I’d have to destroy them. Maybe they’re sampling what we’re exhaling. Which they obviously can’t do with anyone in a helmet.”
That was actually rather solid logic. She hadn’t thought in terms of Flood infiltration. She didn’t know enough about it, just references to the parasite in Cortana’s transmissions, but if that was what the Halo Array was designed to wipe out then the Forerunners had obviously decided the Flood was a catastrophic threat.
Maybe she’d bought into the Forerunners’ perfect technical genius a little too much. They seemed to accept that their systems needed multiple fail-safes, and if these cylinders were bio-sentries, then maybe doors that wouldn’t open were a bio-security mechanism as well.
“Let’s see,” Fred said, and lifted his helmet. One of the other cylinders that was waiting patiently moved across to hover in front of him. He huffed on it but it held its position. Halsey wished she’d checked the display underneath its base. “Gold star, Chief.”
Olivia turned back to the wall and pressed the symbols, head cocked as if listening. Fred reached into his belt and pulled out a ration bar. It had been a long time since any of them had eaten. He unsealed it and stared at it as if he was steeling himself to put an angry cobra in his mouth.
Halsey hoped he didn’t call the rations what some of the other Spartans did. If he said that word, the association would be unbreakable and she’d never be able to stomach eating them. She accepted that the texture was … deeply unappealing.
Fred bit a chunk off the end, rewrapped the remainder, and chewed slowly.
“Vile,” he said. “One day, I’m going back to UNSC Procurement to find the jobsworth who designed these, and force-feed them to him.”
“What if it’s a woman?” Kelly asked.
“I’m very equality-minded. Her as well.”
Halsey took comfort from the fact that they were at least sounding upbeat even if their internal reality was very different. Fred clipped his helmet to his belt and walked up to the wall. The cylinder stuck with him, managing not to get in his way.
“Would we hear her if she was hammering on the other side?” he asked. He looked at Mendez as if for a nod of approval, then glanced at Halsey. It struck her as an attempt to head off more arguments. “Linda, take Mark and Ash and do another check around the perimeter of this place.”
If Lucy had managed to pass through this barrier, Halsey reasoned, then she could follow too. It was just a matter of reproducing whatever Lucy had done, and those options had to be fairly limited. Halsey spent the next twenty minutes examining every block of the wall between head and waist height and then walking straight at it in case there was a proximity sensor that would react to her. She didn’t seem to be getting very far. The cylinder followed her around patiently like an attentive PA waiting on her instructions.
“What’s the matter?” Fred asked. Halsey turned around to see who he was talking to. “Getting bored?”
The cylinder that had been hovering around Fred had drifted off and was now making its way down the passage to the entrance. Halsey looked to check if Mendez was still being pursued by his cylinder—he was—and wondered what had prompted Fred’s to leave.
It wasn’t her biggest problem right now, though. They were no nearer to finding Lucy than they had been an hour ago. Sometimes Jacob Keyes spoke to her very clearly, like a conscience.
You’re really only interested in solving puzzles, Catherine. That’s the only reason you ask me what I’m
thinking.
She’d expected to hear that voice more often now that Jacob was dead, but she accepted that her ability to forget about people when she no longer needed them wasn’t an admirable quality. She couldn’t remember ever having a proper row with him during their brief relationship, and there had been few harsh words even afterward, but once, just once, he’d told her that her apparent concern for people was just fascination when they didn’t behave as she expected or wanted them to.
Halsey wanted to believe right then that she was worried about Lucy, who was in no shape to be fighting a war. Sometimes Halsey could look within herself and see clearly the gulf between what she wanted to believe and what actually drove her. She looked now, and admitted to herself that the need to unlock all the Forerunner mysteries was driving her slightly more than the need to locate Lucy.
Does it matter, though, as long as she ends up safe? Does my motive matter?
Yes, it did. The only way she’d justified what she’d done in the Spartan program was to focus on trading a few hundred lives for billions. Motive was her sole defense.
“Goddamn.” Mendez was muttering to himself, a little indistinct as if he had something in his mouth. “I swear I’m going to eat grass before I have to swallow another mouthful of this crud.”
Halsey turned. Mendez was struggling with one of his ration bars. He held out half of it to her without a word, but she shook her head and walked back to the entrance to study the symbols on the walls again, trying to piece together the sequences that she could recognize from the lexicon on her laptop. Her stomach could wait.
The cylinder was still shadowing her like a bodyguard. A few minutes later she heard Mendez grunt and say “’Bye,” as she spotted movement in her peripheral vision. One of the cylinders drifted past her and went outside. She was too engrossed in trying to find symbols that might shed some light on the unyielding door at the end of the passage to pay more attention to it.
But then something sharp and painful stabbed her in her right thigh. She yelped.
It was more surprise than anything, but it damn well hurt. She looked down, expecting to find one of the long-tailed beetles that Olivia had plucked from her jacket, but saw a cylinder withdrawing what looked like a needle from the folds of her skirt.
Kelly, Fred, and Mendez came running. Halsey made a grab for the cylinder but it darted away. It didn’t get very far; a shot rang out and it shattered into a dozen pieces that went bouncing across the flagstones. Halsey looked up to see Linda standing outside the entrance with her rifle still raised.
“Better safe than sorry,” she said, and started collecting the fragments. “What did it do to you, Doctor?”
Halsey rolled up the hem of her skirt and checked the damage. A blob of blood welled from a small puncture in her thigh. It suddenly struck her how thinly white and blue-veined her skin looked these days.
So I’m getting old. How the hell did that ever happen to me?
“I don’t know yet,” she said. “But it’s going to be interesting finding out.”
SANCTUARY OF THE ABIDING TRUTH, ONTOM, SANGHELIOS.
The Servants of the Abiding Truth were at best misguided and at worst certifiably insane, but Jul had to admire their creativity.
He watched the motley assortment of monks handing out weapons to the assembled malcontents and patriots who had shown up at the secret rally in the crypt of the sanctuary. Judging by the numbers, it couldn’t have been that secret.
Some of the weapons, he knew, were based on technology that had come directly from the Forerunners. The Abiding Truth clung to the old orthodoxy, the beliefs that first started the war between the Sangheili and the San’Shyuum in the distant past and had ended with Sanghelios being annexed by the Covenant. Their stance was clear: all exploitation of Forerunner relics— what Jul preferred to call technology—was a sacrilege. But it didn’t seem to stop them bearing arms for the revolution.
Jul leaned over one of the monks as he opened another crate of weapons. “A theological point, brother. Can you explain to me why it’s permitted to use sacrilegious technology?”
The monk turned his head and looked up at him, slightly bemused. “Because, brother, by using sacrilege to counter sacrilege, we return to balanced grace. And the weapons have passed through the hands of heretics and nonbelievers, so by using them for a holy purpose we erase sin.”
Jul wrestled with that for a few moments and decided it was a debate he was better off avoiding. It seemed that the more rules a religion laid down, the more precise its strictures, then the more devious its adherents felt obliged to become. The gods had laid down the law: but frequently that law was inconvenient, so the only way to break it without incurring damnation was to argue over what humans called the small print. Jul felt that it bred sly morality and specious argument, unattractive traits in a race. If the gods wanted their bidding done then they owed it to mortals to turn a blind eye to infractions.
Forze tilted his head to get his attention. Jul walked over to him to see what he wanted.
“It’s been two days,” Forze said quietly. “Don’t you think you should contact Raia and let her know where we are?”
“She knows. And she also knows that what we have to do is best left undiscussed.” Jul looked around the crypt. He didn’t expect to see anyone he recognized, but he was sure he had once served with at least three former shipmasters in the crowd. He didn’t know if it was piety or pragmatism that had brought them here. In the end, it didn’t matter.
‘Telcam stepped up onto a dais at the north end of the crypt and spread his arms. “Brothers,” he said. “What we do now is neither illegal nor unpatriotic. Sangheili common law has always permitted warriors to challenge a decision by a kaidon when they feel that decision is flawed or harmful. Normally that challenge would not be made covertly, but these are global issues, and the consequences of failure will affect more than our own keeps. This struggle is for the very future of Sanghelios. We must be discreet if we are to succeed, in case our many enemies seize a chance to further divide us.”
There was a rumble of approval throughout the crowd. Jul believed that every state, every race—every species—had its own special failing. Kig-Yar would do anything for money, Jiralhanae would go out of their way to seek a fight, humans would never tell the simple truth when a lie was available, and Sangheili took refuge in believing they were what they were not. Every Sangheili believed that he was open, straightforward, and driven by honor. Jul wished that he were, but he was honest enough to admit to himself that it was more an aspiration than a description. This was a secret uprising that would be carried out in the most devious manner possible, because that was the only way it was going to succeed.
They were planning a coup. They were going to assassinate the head of state. He preferred to face that head-on.
The shipmasters Jul recognized had now gravitated together and stood in a small huddle in the center of the crowd. One of them raised his arm to ask a question.
“This is a promising array of weapons, holy brother,” he said. “And I commend you on your procurement skills. But we’ll need warships to challenge the Arbiter. I believe I still have the personal loyalty of my crew, so I offer up my old command, Unflinching Resolve. But we might require some … emphatic persuasion to release her from the shipyards.”
‘Telcam gave the shipmaster a polite nod. “Buran, that’s most generous. Everyone in this room has seen service, so I’m certain there will be no shortage of volunteers to help reclaim her.”
Forze leaned his head slightly toward Jul. “Don’t. I beg you. This is one time not to volunteer.”
But Jul was busy assessing the caliber of the revolutionaries in the crypt. Apart from the three shipmasters, most of them seemed to be enthusiastic youngsters or elderly middle-ranking warriors, and it was going to take more than motivation to deal with the Arbiter. Jul had no choice but to volunteer. It was a peculiar feeling: he really didn’t want to do this, and he feared where it woul
d end, but he couldn’t bring himself to walk away from it. It was the first time he’d ever felt a sense of inevitability that verged on helplessness.
So he stepped forward because it was impossible now for him to step back.
“Brothers, if the Arbiter still had the stomach to finish the true war, then I would currently be the master of a cruiser.” Jul raised his voice and hoped it didn’t sound as shaky as it felt in his throat. “In the absence of anything else to occupy my time, I volunteer my services to reclaim Unflinching Resolve and return to duty.”
The ship was a frigate. Jul didn’t wish to be seen as pulling unspoken rank on the master of the smaller ship, and was simply stating his qualifications. But Shipmaster Buran turned to stare at him as if he had challenged his authority. Then his jaws compressed in amusement.
“Four shipmasters and one warship,” he said, nodding his head enthusiastically. “That’ll be interesting, won’t it?”
“No long watches, that’s what it means,” one of the other shipmasters said. Everybody barked with laughter. “Nothing like being fresh for the fight.”
Forze made a despairing rumble in his throat. He caught Jul by the shoulder and turned him discreetly away from the crowd.
“Why do you always fling yourself into these situations?”
“Because if I don’t act, who will?” But Jul’s stomach was busy tying his intestines into bows. “And this is the first time that I’ve ever defied the will of my so-called superiors.”
Forze slapped him on the back, relenting as if his reluctance had shamed him. “It was more a question than a rebuke. I’m still here.”
Jul watched the three shipmasters having what looked like a hushed, very private conversation and waited for the right moment to walk over and interrupt. He’d now volunteered to take part in a raid on a shipyard and seize a frigate. Now he had to embark on the more difficult part of that bold decision and actually work out a plan for doing it.
He found himself fidgeting with the arum in his pocket as he waited for the natural break in the conversation. The device was starting to become the obsessive habit it had been when he was a boy, because he hated losing, especially to inanimate objects. The arum hadn’t taught him persistence and acceptance. It had simply fueled his sense of frustration with procedure.
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