“They never knew,” Osman said, still matter-of-fact. “We were all colonial kids, taken from our families. They thought that we’d died.” She changed tack instantly as if nothing remotely unusual had been said. Vaz thought he’d misheard. “BB’s picked up some interesting voice traffic. We’ve got a small Jiralhanae transport inbound to Sanghelios with a high-value passenger. A Huragok. An Engineer. That’s worth bothering them to acquire, don’t you think?”
Mal looked as if he hadn’t heard anything shocking. Vaz decided he must have imagined it.
“I wondered where they all went,” Mal said. “Definitely one for the tool box.”
“My thoughts exactly. Best estimate is that there are six Jiralhanae embarked. They’re transporting weapons for ‘Telcam, so we’re not helping our primary mission, but the Huragok’s far too valuable to pass up. We’ll intercept them in approximately eighty-two minutes, so let’s meet in ten and plan that out. Better break out the dead Kig-Yar.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Mal checked his watch as she walked off. Nobody said anything for a painfully long moment.
Phillips finally let out a breath. “Did she say what I think she said?”
“Kidnapped as kids,” Mal said, apparently not shocked at all. “Yeah, I think that’s what she meant.”
Phillips looked at Vaz and then turned to Devereaux, almost appealing for a verdict. “I expected some reaction from you. Did you know all that?”
“Of course we didn’t.” Vaz had reached the stage of not caring what BB overheard now. “Who the hell tells us? It’s all classified. We’re just marines. The only reason ONI admitted the Spartan program even existed was to boost public morale.”
“I just want to know why she’s telling us all this,” Mal said. Maybe he wanted BB to relay that to the boss. “Whatever she wants from us, we’ll do it. We just want clear orders.”
Devereaux was still hefting her wrench, looking at its jaws with a glazed, distant expression. “What do people generally do when a war’s ending and all kinds of dirt’s going to come out? They clear their yardarm. Only following orders. That kind of thing.”
“If she’s right, then we used child soldiers,” Phillips said. “We kidnapped them from their families before performing experiments on them. Christ … and this is my government?”
“You think anyone would care as long as we won?”
“Actually, yes, they would.” Phillips was doing his embarrassment gesture again, one arm folded across his chest and his free hand pinching his top lip, as if he was worried about disagreeing. “I think the public would give a pretty big damn about that.”
“Don’t bank on it,” Mal said. He seemed underwhelmed by it, which wasn’t like him at all. “Outrage fatigue set in years ago. The colonies are a long way from Sydney. And they weren’t always on our side.”
Phillips just stared at him for a few seconds, then shook his head and began walking away. “I’ll go and be outraged on my own, then. I’ve got some monitoring to do.”
Devereaux turned to Vaz and shrugged. “Well, at least we never claimed we were fighting this war for decency and freedom. Just survival.”
“Which war?” Vaz asked. “The one where we were fighting other humans? Because that’s when all this started.”
“That was before my time,” she said. “And yours.”
There wasn’t really much Vaz could say, not because BB would hear every word, but because he really didn’t know where to start. The strong had done terrible things to the weak ever since the first caveman discovered he could crack his smaller neighbor’s skull with a well-placed rock. Only the technology changed. Even so, the idea of little kids being abducted and carted off to boot camp made Vaz’s scalp crawl.
He was glad that it did. It told him he was still normal, still able to feel something after eight years of numbing warfare.
“Win the war, and nobody says a word about that kind of stuff until you’re dead,” he said. “Lose the war, and you end up at Nuremberg.”
“What’s Nuremberg?” Devereaux asked.
Mal wandered off to move some crates. He balanced a table-sized lid across two of them and then got down on all fours to pick up something from underneath it. Vaz waited for him to crack his head and start cursing.
Kidnapping six-year-olds. ONI can’t get any worse. Can it?
“Vaz?” Mal called. “Give us a hand, will you?”
Vaz squatted to stick his head under the lid. Mal was hunched underneath it, scribbling something on his palm with an orange marker pen.
“What is it?”
Mal put a finger to his lips and tilted his palm so that Vaz could read it. Ah, got it … There was no shipboard tech—or anything in his neural implant—that could detect things scribbled on skin. If you wanted privacy and anonymity, you used old-fashioned ink. BB couldn’t snoop down here. Not even the 360-degree safety cams, BB’s eyes and ears, could get a look at what was going on through ten centimeters of composite. Vaz read the letters carefully.
PSYCH TEST
Vaz mimed a what-the-hell frown. What?
NO IDEA TELLING US STUFF TO SEE HOW WE REACT
Mal ran out of palm and tried writing with his left hand on his right. Val wrestled the marker pen from him.
LIP READ PLEASE
Mal shook his head and grabbed the pen back. The only space he could use now was the back of his left hand. YOU SAW THE OLD MOVIE BB WILL SPACE US
Mal laughed his head off. He had a point, though. There were very few ways of avoiding BB’s attention. Vaz started laughing too. He didn’t know which movie Mal meant, but here he was, hiding under an ammo crate in an invisible ship in enemy space while his own side used small kids for cannon fodder. It wasn’t remotely funny. It wasn’t that kind of laughter.
Devereaux stuck her head under the lid from the other side. “Good God, it must be funny to crack you up,” she said. “Share, Vaz.”
Mal just offered his hand for reading. If BB wasn’t wondering why he could see three ODSTs’ backsides sticking out from under a crate lid, then he wasn’t much of an AI.
Devereaux shrugged and tapped her watch. She didn’t seem bothered whether Osman was running some experiment on them or not.
“Huragoks come preloaded with a lot of Covenant technical intel.” She might have been saying it for BB’s benefit. “So ONI won’t even have to interrogate it. Just let it play in a workshop.”
“You make them sound like puppies.”
“Well, they’re harmless. We just don’t seem to have ever captured any. It’s really sad to think of the Covenant detonating them rather than let them fall into enemy hands. All that lost information.”
Yeah. They’re solid gold. Osman’s right.
Vaz had only seen Engineers in diagram form at briefings, never in the flesh. He wondered how the creature would feel to be cut off from its own kind and everything it knew, left to the dubious mercies of ONI.
Sad. Wrong. Like us using kids.
No, the war hadn’t numbed him at all.
UNSC PORT STANLEY, URS SYSTEM, 500,000 KILOMETERS FROM SANGHELIOS: ON INTERCEPT COURSE WITH FORMER COVENANT AUXILIARY VESSEL PIETY.
Phillips seemed to be warming to the intelligence business.
He paced around the deck, adjusting his earpiece with the air of a man who’d been spying on hostile aliens all his life. For all Mal knew, he could have been listening to Gregorian chant or stock prices, but he had a familiar glazed stare that said he was translating. He stopped in his tracks for a moment and then changed direction to home in on Mal.
“I don’t want to worry you,” he said, “but some Kig-Yar have put out a mev-ut on you and Vaz for shooting up their buddies on Reynes.”
“That’s bad, is it?”
“If they catch you, yes. It’s a reward for bringing back body parts as proof of a kill.”
“Any parts in particular? I use some of mine more than others.”
“With UNSC, it’s heads and cervical
vertebrae. And they love ones with neural implants.”
“Dearie me.” Mal hauled one of the Kig-Yar corpses out of the cold store, holding its slack beak shut with one hand while Vaz grappled with its clawed feet. “We’ll have to be more diplomatic next time, Corporal Beloi. Make a note of that.”
Vaz let go of the Kig-Yar’s legs and took off his glove to scratch his chin. His scar seemed to be bothering him again. “Hey, BB? Is there mail today? Haven’t had any for two weeks.”
BB didn’t appear but his voice boomed over the ship’s broadcast system. “Opsec,” he said, which always explained every irksome event that did and didn’t happen. “But the worthless trollop hasn’t tried to contact you anyway. Listen to Mal’s advice.”
Vaz sighed. “So you’re my mother now.”
“I have the crew’s welfare at heart. Anyway, do you want to look at the schematics for the target or not? Briefing on the bridge.”
“Can’t you project it here?” Mal sniffed his gloves. He’d never get that Kig-Yar smell out of them. “Come on, square blue thing. We’ll make the place stink.”
“Move it, Staff. Captain’s waiting.”
Just a few weeks into the mission, and even the AI was acting like they’d all been together since boot camp: Mal took that as a good sign. BB wasn’t like a real person. He was one. Mal wondered how the software boffins had managed to make the top-grade AIs that good.
If he asked BB, he knew the AI would tell him, sparing no detail. It would have to wait until they’d abducted the Engineer.
They abandoned the Kig-Yar corpses and made their way up to the bridge. Phillips trailed after Vaz. “Call me Evan, will you? Professor. I only use that to psych out other academics.”
“Okay. Not Killer Robot, then?”
“Oops. Yes. Did I offend Naomi?”
“No. That’s probably a Spartan’s idea of flirting.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, she’ll give you a big ceramic hug,” Mal said, “and you’ll never play the piano again.”
When they reached the bridge, BB had already set up the hologram over the chart table. Osman was studying it with Devereaux and Naomi. There were also voices droning over the radio in the background, ones that Mal didn’t recognize. But he realized he was listening to a conversation between ships, or a ship and a control room somewhere, and despite the accents and fluency it wasn’t quite human somehow. Then an exchange clued him in.
“It’s your problem, you cretinous lump of meat. Just don’t try to tear it off.”
“You wanted one. You got one.”
“So who’s that, BB?” Mal asked.
BB hovered over the ship’s hologram. “Voice traffic between ‘Telcam and the Brutes in this little gin palace here. He’s telling them not to try to remove the Huragok’s booby trap.”
“But that’s not his voice.”
“Of course it’s not,” BB said. “I’m giving you a simultaneous interpretation from the chatter. Like dubbing a foreign movie—colloquial English, better voices. Quality of service, Staff. Quality.”
Vaz seemed in a good mood today despite the lack of mail. “So why do we need the prof at all?”
“Opposable thumbs, Corporal. Someone’s got to pour the gin and tonics, after all.”
Phillips raised an eyebrow. “Ice, a slice, and some arsenic for you, then, BB?”
“Excellent, you’ve found your vocation.” BB expanded the schematic of the small vessel above the chart table. “Pay attention, ladies and gentlemen. She’s called Piety, and she’s one of these—a Hudal-class auxiliary. A glorified tug. Close-in cannon, no slipspace capability, and no hardening, so an EMP pulse will shut her up before any of her brave but brutish tars can put out a mayday.”
The schematic rebuilt itself layer by layer to expand detail of the interior bulkheads and compartments, but there were no guarantees that she was still configured that way. Piety was the same length overall as their own dropship, though, so it wasn’t like storming a frigate. Mal’s only worry was getting in and out without turning the Engineer into Huragok puree.
“So, once we’ve zapped her, we’ve got two options,” Osman said. “Board her, or haul her in and crack her open in the hangar.”
Mal looked at Naomi. She nodded. Devereaux nodded too and poked her forefinger down into the hologram.
“I don’t know how robust Engineers are, but sucking hard vacuum isn’t generally good for anybody,” she said. “This here is the only place I can maintain a seal with the docking ring. If we breach her hull out there, then chances are we’ll kill the Engineer as well. I’d rather take the risk of dragging the vessel back in here.”
“How upset are you going to be if we lose the Engineer, ma’am?” Mal asked.
“I accept it’s a risk,” Osman said. “If we lose it, then we use it—blame it on the Jiralhanae that ‘Telcam trusts. I’ll think of something suitably devious. The question is whether we want a potential self-destruct on the hangar deck.”
“Well, seeing as the best way to carry out an opposed boarding is simultaneous entry at multiple points, we’re stuffed. We’ll end up venting their atmosphere anyway. I’m not saying we can’t take the ship, but there’ll be a lot of ordnance flying around, we won’t know where the Engineer is until we get in there, and it might not survive until we find it anyway.”
Naomi leaned on the chart table with both hands. It creaked a little. Mal noted all the small detail. So everything on board has got to be built to take a few hundred kilos of armored Spartan. No wonder the budget’s the way it is. She indicated a hatch near the bow.
“Mjolnir’s good for over an hour in hard vacuum,” she said. “What’s your pressure suit rated at? Fifteen minutes? Ten? But I don’t know if I can seal the hatch fast enough to avoid killing the Engineer. So I’ll vote for bringing the ship inboard. It’s still going to be an opposed boarding, but we have a little more time to do it sensibly.”
“Just thinking aloud,” Mal said. “What if they decide to blow the ship while they’re in the hangar, or they get their drives going, or fire their weapons?”
“Or decide to kill the Engineer rather than let us take it,” Vaz said. “Although that suicide harness is going to blow either way.”
Whichever way they cut it, Mal decided, the Engineer still stood less than a fifty-fifty chance of survival. The only question was how much of a risk they wanted to take themselves. Port Stanley was designed specifically for ONI’s kind of unorthodox warfare, but she wasn’t heavily armored and she probably couldn’t withstand a massive explosion in a hangar.
We could just blow up the ship, of course. At least that would deny them the asset.
But something deep in Mal’s core refused to let him walk away from this even if he’d been given the choice. When he looked at the faces of everyone else around that chart table, he could see that they were just as reluctant to pass up the chance.
If we’d captured some Engineers early in the war, we would have known exactly what Covenant weapons could do and how to counter them. We could have used Engineers to develop better weapons ourselves. We could have stopped the war. We could have saved billions of lives. Lose this one? No bloody way.
But he had to ask. “How come we haven’t got any Engineers already, ma’am? It’s not like we haven’t come across them before.”
Osman looked him straight in the eye. “We have. Or at least we had. We captured and defused one a couple of years ago and got some very useful developments out of it. But we need more than one. They repair one another, remember. And they make more Engineers.”
“Got to do it, then, ma’am.” Mal didn’t ask what had happened to the lone Engineer because he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear any more upsetting stuff about ONI. “What if we seal the hangar’s emergency bulkhead and do the business in the aft section with the doors open? We can repressurize fast when we need to. Devereaux, can you maneuver in that space?”
Devereaux nodded. “Bit tight, but probably.”
“And you’re still dead,” Osman said. “It’s your call. If you think I’m going to get you all killed, then you tell me, and we just destroy Piety and sacrifice the Engineer.”
Mal was finding it hard to get used to voting on whether to attempt a mission. “But if we have a mishap, then the ship’s still recoverable, along with BB.”
“Okay, do it,” Osman said. “Remember—once we hit it with an EMP, then we can’t hear their radio, and Engineers can fix things in seconds. Unless the crew’s locked it up, then it’ll head for the generator compartment to restore power, and it won’t think it’s being rescued. It’ll try to hide.”
There didn’t seem to be many places to hide in Piety, but there was still that explosive harness to worry about. Mal would usually have planned a boarding like this down to the smallest detail and done a dry run or two before committing anyone to it. They didn’t have that luxury now. It was all on the fly, all guesswork and reaction.
Now he was starting to understand why ONI had assembled this particular team. He just had the feeling that he knew exactly how each of them would react and what they’d do in a given situation, planned or unplanned. Maybe the HR psychologists weren’t as useless as he’d thought.
On the sensor displays, Piety was tanking along at a sedate pace, oblivious of the fact that Port Stanley was now almost up her tailpipe. And she still couldn’t detect the corvette.
“Okay, BB,” Osman said. “Show us the fly-through.”
The hologram schematics snapped out and were replaced by an exterior of Piety, Port Stanley, and the dropship. The display animated to align Stanley on Piety’s tail, then flipped her 180 degrees so that she was belly-up to her target. The dropship took up position below Stanley’s upper hull and aft of the EMP cannon, the cannon fired, and the dropship shot forward and upward to maneuver onto Piety’s back and lock grapples on her. The EMP cannon fired a few more times, Stanley pivoted 180 degrees about her midships in a relative nose-down movement until she was facing the other way, and the dropship slotted straight into the hangar bay.
Halo: Glasslands Page 21
