“—brace brace brace!”
She thought she saw a streak of light followed by a faint starburst like a flare, but it was gone before she could study it. Whatever it was, it definitely hadn’t hit Monte Cassino. Any impact would have been visible at this range. But it looked like the bastards really had opened fire on the destroyer.
“What the hell was that, BB?”
“Ground-based triple-A. Let me nose around.”
Osman could now hear what was happening on the ship’s bridge.
“Point of origin identified. Acquiring lock—standing by.”
“Take, take, take.”
“Missile away. Time to target—eighty-two seconds.”
Eighty-two seconds was a painfully long time when you couldn’t see what was happening. If Monte Cassino hit the launch site, then Osman would be none the wiser until the ship confirmed a kill. But she was far more worried about the prospect of Venezia now having space-capable missiles, which they’d certainly never had before. They’d confined their off-world activities to ship-to-ship attacks and landing personnel to plant explosive devices. They’d never been in the big weapons league.
Who the hell was selling them that stuff?
There was a lot of black market hardware floating around these days, and Osman knew that better than anyone. But it was a worrying development at a time when Earth didn’t need any more problems.
“That’s a kill, confirmed,” said a satisfied voice that she didn’t recognize. It was probably the weapons officer. “Target destroyed. Stand off, helm.”
“Port Stanley, we’re pulling back to five thousand klicks. Do you still want to transfer personnel?”
Osman had no choice. She couldn’t keep Spenser and Muir in tow for a mission like this. “Yes, Commander, we do. And we’ll take over from here. Return to Earth.”
“Normally I’d ask the captain about that,” Cerny said, “but we don’t usually argue with ONI.”
“I appreciate the cooperation. Have you identified the weapon?”
“T-thirty-eight triple-A. I can only hope they picked it up at a Covenant yard sale, because the alternative’s pretty worrying. There must be plenty of disappointed Sangheili who’d love to see humans infighting again.”
“I’ll bet,” Osman said. And I’d be amazed if we were the only ones pulling this destabilization stunt. “But that’s definitely ONI’s part of ship. We’ll take it from here. Port Stanley out.” She looked up toward the deckhead to call BB, a reflex she’d suddenly picked up. She felt she was appealing to a guardian angel.
“Is that right, BB?”
“On the nose, Captain. I piggybacked on their comms signal and checked the return myself.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
Mal, Naomi, and Vaz came onto the bridge, looking offended at being dragged away from a decent fight. Mal raised his eyebrows.
“Couldn’t help overhearing, ma’am.”
BB popped up again. “Me and my big mouth.”
“Reckon it’s worth inserting and doing a recce?” Mal asked. “They don’t know we’re here. Once Monte leaves, we can pop in for a look.”
Osman gave it five seconds’ serious consideration. It wasn’t something she could ignore, but she had to keep the kettle boiling on Sanghelios, too. She put Venezia on her mental must-screw list at number two and started drafting a contact report for Parangosky.
“We’ll come back later,” she said. “I promise.”
CHAPTER
EIGHT
DON’T WORRY—YOUR SECRET’S SAFE WITH ME. I’M NOT GOING TO TELL ANYONE THAT YOU’RE MY MOTHER BECAUSE I’M PRETTY SURE I KNOW WHAT YOU’VE DONE, AND I LOVE DAD TOO MUCH TO SEE HIM ASSOCIATED WITH IT. I DON’T KNOW WHICH IS WORSE—WAITING FOR EVERYONE TO FIND OUT WHAT YOU DID, OR WAITING TO SEE IF I TAKE AFTER YOU. IF IT’S ALL THE SAME TO YOU, MOTHER DEAR, I’M GOING TO MAKE SURE I TAKE AFTER DAD.
(MIDSHIPMAN MIRANDA KEYES, IN A RARE MESSAGE TO HER ESTRANGED MOTHER, DR. CATHERINE HALSEY)
FORERUNNER DYSON SPHERE, ONYX: LOCAL DATE NOVEMBER 2552.
Dust. Lucy needed dust. But there wasn’t a trace of it anywhere.
She trailed along behind the Engineers, looking frantically for anything she could draw diagrams on. The parking garage area seemed to be a long way behind her now. If she turned around, she wasn’t even sure if she could find her way back. Every meter of the passages of plain, smooth stone looked the same.
The Engineer who’d taken her hand kept stopping and turning, either to check that she was still behind him or to hurry her along. She knew that somewhere outside, Chief Mendez and the others would be looking for her. She hated herself for putting them through this. They had enough problems without having to rescue her as well.
Why didn’t I just do as Tom told me? How hard could that be?
The Engineers led her into a room that looked something like a control room, all screens and lights. Engineers built and rebuilt things, so she allowed herself the luxury of an assumption that this wasn’t going to be a sauna. She tucked her helmet under her arm and looked around for a polished surface.
And there it was—a smooth panel of some glasslike material. It was worth a try. She took off her glove and leaned close to the glass, breathing on it to form condensation. For a fleeting moment, a fine bloom dulled the surface and she dragged her finger through it. The Engineers clustered around her, heads bobbing, but it was impossible to interpret any reaction on their faces. She tried again. The condensation evaporated almost instantly, so she licked her finger and scrawled L-U-C-Y on the glass and tapped her chest.
It’s like the Galapagos Islands. I’ve got a population of Engineers that’s evolved in isolation from the rest of the galaxy. And I still can’t tell if they know anything about humans.
They were certainly trying to find out what they could, though. One of them darted into a passage and emerged with a container that looked like a smooth white ceramic mug with no handle. He held it out to her.
Lucy took it and peered in. A brownish translucent sludge that smelled faintly of yeast shivered inside. The Engineer dipped a tentacle into the sludge and put it to his mouth, flicking out a small, pointed blue tongue to lick it. Lucy now couldn’t shake that mental association with an armadillo.
So he thought she was hungry.
She could understand why he thought a woman who seemed to be sniffing and licking their machinery might be trying to tell them that she wanted food. She handed the mug back and shook her head. Actually, she was ravenous now, but it could wait. The Engineer held his tentacles up in front of her and formed them into exaggerated shapes in a slow sequence, some overlapping and some making simple lines or loops. It was quite touching: he was speaking slowly and loudly to her, the stupid foreign tourist, trying to make her understand.
If she’d been him, though, she’d be spelling out her name. Maybe that was what he was doing.
A distant memory flashed through Lucy’s mind and was gone almost as quickly as she tried to grasp it. She was playing charades. It might have been her birthday or Christmas, but she was having fun, miming a title and counting out the syllables by holding up her fingers. Could she even count? She remembered that she hadn’t been sure how many fingers to hold up. She tried to focus on the faces watching her, but the scene dissolved into a brightly colored blur and all she was left with was the awareness that she’d been happy and that it had been a long time ago.
Well, if Engineers were that smart, she’d hand them the contents of her backpack and they could work it out from there. She unslung her rifle and clamped it between her knees while she eased off her backpack to stop them from wandering off with a loaded weapon. They gathered around her as she tipped the contents out onto the floor.
There was a routine for packing a rucksack with different items in specific layers. Her meager pile of possessions looked as if an archaeological dig had excavated a cross-section of her life. It was probably the same as any soldier or marine carried in their pack, and she susp
ected it hadn’t changed all that much for centuries: spare shirts, socks, and underwear, extra ammunition clips, a comb, a bar of multipurpose soap, a mess tin with folding cutlery, solid fuel pellets, first-aid supplies, a snare, a length of fishing line, and signaling equipment. But there were no photos of family or any of the little private things to remind her of family or home. She didn’t have one.
And no datapad. That would have helped. And there’s always my neural interface. There’s got to be some data in that. But that’s got to be removed carefully, and if they don’t know enough about humans to do that … it’ll kill me.
The Engineers rummaged enthusiastically through the contents of the backpack. The signaling device proved to be a big draw and they passed it between themselves, tentacles whisking over it in a blur of busy cilia. Each time one passed it on, the shape changed completely in a matter of seconds before he handed it over. Then one of them picked up her underwear and stretched a pair of briefs between his tentacles. She was wondering what modifications he could possibly make to her pants—well, at least he wouldn’t care how gray they were—when she spotted the lettering on the waistband.
Name tag. There’s a name tag.
If old tech worked, it stayed. The simplest, cheapest, most durable way to identify your pants among a hundred identical pairs in the barracks laundry was to have your name and service number dye-embossed into the fabric. Lucy’s briefs, like all her clothing, bore the name LUCY-B091. She grabbed them from the Engineer and held the label up to him, then tapped her chest. She pointed to the name and then to herself a few more times.
The Engineer who she’d come to think of as the boss made a shape with his tentacles and then pointed at himself, then repeated the gesture and waited. Now she was getting somewhere. They seemed to know they were talking about identities. Lucy tried to mimic the shape he was making with his tentacles, but fingers were a poor substitute for completely flexible appendages that divided into increasingly fine cilia. The closest she could get was to form two linked circles with her thumbs and forefingers.
And knowing my luck … that’ll be the Engineer sign for “Your mom’s a skank.”
The Engineer reached for her helmet and she almost snatched it back, but she had to trust him. She kept her arms at her sides. Letting a creature she couldn’t understand take away her lifeline required all her self-control.
Engineers—they’re harmless. The most they’ll do is try to defend themselves. They’re not even very good at that.
And now all she could do was wait. The two Engineers left in the workshop drifted away and left her on her own. She found a low ledge to sit on and tried to think her way out.
The Sentinels worked out how to speak English just by listening to Ash. So the Engineers can work out some basics from whatever data they can find in my armor systems, right?
But without the ability to make sounds, whatever information she exchanged with them would have to be in symbols. Finding a common set—other than pictures—was going to be hard.
Great. We’ll kick off with cave paintings and evolve through the development of written language, all before lunch. Why did I get myself into this? Why didn’t I follow orders?
And Dante, William, and Holly are dead. And so’s Kurt. And—again—I’m not. Why? Why not me?
The boss Engineer returned in time and stopped her sliding down that path of misery again. He’d only been gone for a minute, perhaps two, before he drifted back clutching her helmet like a football and reached out to run his tentacle across one of the screens on the wall.
Letters faded up, black script seeping out of a milky-white sheet of glass.
LUCY-B091 RECLAIMER WELCOME TO SHIELD WORLD SARCOPHAGUS BUT LIFE GOES ON.
The font was identical to the one in her underpants. She sucked in a breath and found herself nodding. Life … had to go on.
She hadn’t realized her emotional state was so visible to an alien life-form.
So now she could write. She reached up to the screen and struggled to frame a response in her mind. But it wasn’t just her ability to form spoken words that had withered; she now struggled to express herself even in a written form. The conversations she had with herself in her own mind weren’t the same. She hadn’t realized that until she tried to get them out of her head and make them solid.
Just write something. Anything.
She dragged her finger down the white glass, expecting to see a line form. It remained stubbornly blank. Of course—it was designed to respond to whatever input the Engineers used, not human handwriting. She looked at the Engineer and did a frustrated shrug.
Damn. Damn. But he’ll get the idea. He’ll watch and then he’ll work out what I need. I know he will.
The Engineer placed a tentacle on the screen next to her hand and more letters formed.
WHERE IS THE PLAGUE? NOTHING IS DEAD. WHY ARE YOU HERE?
His fluency was improving word by word. Lucy tapped the glass with her forefinger. Damn it, he was supposed to be a technical genius, and he couldn’t see that she couldn’t use the screen? Don’t disappoint me. I thought you could do anything. She grabbed his tentacle, like folding her fingers around a little kid’s hand to guide his crayon. He flinched and tried to pull away.
The “hand” felt delicate and smooth, like silicone, and cooler than human skin. Maybe she’d squeezed too hard and scared him. She hung on and patted the arm to calm him down, but pressing his cilia against the glass didn’t produce any text. She let him go, out of ideas and lost for what to try next.
But he stroked the glass again and more letters formed. Maybe the thousands of tiny cilia were operating microscopic touch-keys.
ALL LIFE LIVES. TALK TO PRONE TO DRIFT.
Okay, maybe he was extrapolating too far now. That looked like gibberish to her. She shook her head and frowned theatrically. I don’t understand.
PRONE TO DRIFT.
Lucy frowned again, this time with a shrug. There had to be some body language that would get through to him. But she was running out of nonwords.
He touched the screen again.
PRONE TO DRIFT IS ME.
Is me. Is … me. God, how did she ever forget that briefing? It was his name. Engineers named their offspring according to how they floated when their gas sacs were first adjusted for buoyancy. His name was Prone to Drift. She wanted to say it, and strained to make a sound, but her throat just felt strangled by the effort again and she gave up.
WHY ARE YOU SILENT? he tapped.
Lucy shrugged. She wasn’t the only Spartan who’d been through traumas, just the only one who’d been driven to silence by it. She managed a sigh, more a heavy breath than anything. Prone to Drift perked up and cocked his head as if listening harder, but then appeared to realize it was the only sound he was going to get out of her.
He didn’t seem to be losing patience with her, though. All the frustration was coming from her side of this mimed conversation and unlike the half-remembered game of charades, it wasn’t fun. She suddenly wanted to burst into tears.
The other Engineers drifted back into the room and exchanged a flurry of gestures with Prone to Drift before vanishing again. He took her ungloved hand and examined her palm and the tips of her fingers like a fortune-teller.
Prone turned her hand as if he was showing it to her, then let go and touched the display.
YOU HAVE BLUNT APPENDAGES. WE MAKE ADJUSTMENTS.
Lucy felt a warm flood of revelation in her chest. He understands. He really understands. He was going to fix the screen so that she could write on it. And that meant she had to think in formal language again. She could do it. She had to. She had to let him know that she needed to find her squad.
She also had to find out what this place actually was, and how they were going to survive here. If she could get Dr. Halsey or Chief Mendez together with Prone and his friends, that discussion would be a lot easier.
She’d reached the point of seriously considering using her own blood as ink and scraw
ling on the walls when the surface of the glass in front of her changed. At first it seemed to liquefy, with colored chunks drifting in it like a tutti-frutti dessert, and then the colors coalesced and she was looking at a vertical line of capital letters and a few dots.
Her reflex was to try to read it as a word, but then she counted and realized the line was twenty-six characters long and none of them repeated. The dots looked like symbols—a question mark, a comma, a dash, and a full stop.
It was a keyboard.
Ah. That information must be stored in my HUD. The text display. Of course.
It wasn’t in any kind of alphabetical or keyboard order she’d ever seen, but she knew what she had to do with it. She hunted for the letters and prodded them laboriously like someone learning to type. Few people did that these days, but then very few could still use Morse, either. She could.
Prone seemed to be getting excited. WE CAN TALK. NOW WE CAN DISCOVER MORE. THE SHIELD HAS ACTIVATED BUT WHERE IS THE FLOOD?
Lucy was way behind him, hunting not only for the right letters but trying to frame the right words, a hard thing for most humans to do without some degree of subvocalization. She didn’t have that option.
Prone tried again. HAS THE ARRAY FAILED? WE FOUND NO HAZARD WITHIN THE SHIELD WORLD. JUST TRACE.
Lucy tapped as fast as she could. ARRAY?
RING, Prone replied. ARC. BAND. CIRCLE.
HALO, Lucy interrupted. HALO.
Prone didn’t have shoulders but she could have sworn that he sagged visibly with relief. YES, HALO. NO HALO, NO FLOOD, NO FIGHTING, AND LIFE CONTINUES OUTSIDE, BUT THE BULKHEADS CLOSED. MOST PERPLEXING.
Oh … that’s it. I get it now.
Revelation was as powerful an emotion as love or fear. It was probably the remnant of a survival mechanism for escaping predators or starvation rather than a sense of intellectual bliss, but the penny dropped and Lucy savored the elation for a moment.
Prone wasn’t being philosophical about grief when he’d told her that “life goes on.” He was asking her why the Dyson sphere had been accessed when there was no threat outside and the Halo Array hadn’t fired to wipe out everything that had been contaminated by the Flood.
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