Halo: Glasslands

by Traviss, Karen

  “Tell me the dropship’s hardened,” Devereaux said.

  “Of course it is.” BB sounded indignant. “Like Naomi’s armor. But it’s a contingency measure. If one EM pulse keeps Piety disabled, all well and good. If the busy little Huragok keeps fixing it every few seconds, then I keep firing. In which case, Naomi is best placed to breach Piety while I do that. If you go in, you’ll lose your HUD and environmental controls, so you’ll be rebreathing air and sweating a lot. Which gives you far less time to operate.”

  Mal looked at Vaz. He shrugged. “No problem.”

  Phillips was very quiet, one hand to his ear. Mal could see waveforms of the various Brute voices on the display in front of him.

  “That’s six distinct voice profiles,” he said. “Doesn’t mean that there’s only six on board, though. Best guess.”

  It didn’t matter now. Mal knew there couldn’t be a hundred, and one Brute could kill you as surely as six, twelve, or fifty. They’d be logjammed in that small ship anyway, so their bulk and their numbers would work against them.

  “Okay, is everyone going to remember all that?” Mal asked. “No? Too bad. Stand to. See you when we get back, BB.”

  “Oh, I’m coming too.” BB rotated and moved in Naomi’s direction. “A fragment of me will remain here to pilot the ship, but I’ll transfer to the Mjolnir. We’ve never done this for real before, by the way. Have we, Naomi?”

  “Why now?”

  “Why not? I know I’m not your dedicated AI, but I can do anything Cortana can.”

  Mal picked up a little rivalry there. He’d have to ask about Cortana later. BB’s hologram suddenly vanished and Osman pulled a data chip out of the command console. If BB had any physical entity at all, then that chip was as near as damn it him, the raw being.

  “Put your pants on, BB,” Mal said. It was a sobering sight, all that power and knowledge—and their lives, like it or not—in a small wafer of silicon and crystal. “There’s ladies present.”

  Naomi took the chip from Osman and stared at it for a moment. “There would be better occasions to try this for the first time.”

  “Oh, you’ve done dry runs with other AIs,” BB said cheerfully. “Why not just plunge in? I can improve your response times, pipe data straight to your brain, do that crossword you can never quite crack…”

  Naomi really didn’t look happy about it. Quiet misery was her default expression, but Mal watched it twist into real dismay. But she was too much of a Spartan to give in to it. She slotted the chip into her helmet.

  “As long as we’re clear,” she said, lifting the helmet onto her head, “that I call the shots.”

  BB didn’t say a word. Maybe integrating into Naomi’s systems had shut him up for once. Mal decided to keep a watchful eye on the relationship. Everyone was getting on fine: better than fine, in fact, a really close-knit and easy-going team. The last thing they needed was a Spartan saddled with an AI she didn’t want.

  But that wasn’t a problem he could solve, given that they were the two most advanced and expensive pieces of defense technology the UNSC had ever produced.

  They were stuck with each other.

  BRIDGE, UNSC PORT STANLEY: TEN MINUTES LATER.

  Phillips was still sitting quietly at the comms console and listening to the voice traffic, but Osman felt utterly alone in the ship as she looked out of the viewscreen at Piety.

  The nearest that she could get to experiencing the HUD data that her team relied on was to have their helmet cam feeds overlaid on the viewscreen. It was a cheap and simple modification, just a matter of adding a projector that could display a few centimeters in front of the plate. But it made all the difference to her. She felt less helpless, a little more in touch with what was happening to them.

  I should be out there doing it. I’m still fit and I ought to fight.

  “BB, move Devereaux’s POV to the left, please, and keep the others on the right.” The individual screens showing the cam outputs moved across her field of vision. Against the black backdrop of space, they were vivid and sobering. “Thanks. Perfect.”

  “Imagine that all scrunched up in your visor instead of spread out across a viewscreen,” Phillips said.

  “Yes, there’s a lot going on in those HUDs. Distracting.” Movement in Devereaux’s icon caught her eye. The dropship was moving into position. “And upside down.”

  Osman could see the inverted tail of Piety ahead. The Jiralhanae were still unaware that they had stalkers. They couldn’t detect Port Stanley electronically and they couldn’t physically see her. They had reasonable forward visibility, but none aft, so they wouldn’t realize they were being attacked until they felt the dropship grapples slam against their hull. No, maybe not even then: it would be when they were dragged in a U-turn toward the hangar and saw Port Stanley’s bow doors wide open like a maw.

  “Devereaux,” Osman said. “If Piety recovers her power and starts dragging you, then break off and get clear. We’ll take her out from here. Understand?”

  “Hoping it won’t come to that, ma’am. This is like old-style submarine warfare. Minus the bit where one submarine misjudges things and collides with the other, of course. Not that bit at all.”

  Osman checked the right-hand side for the outputs from Naomi, Vaz, and Mal. The helmet cam views tilted back and forth between the black and navy blue marbling of space and the yellow chevron stripes marking the emergency bulkhead, now fully sealed at two-thirds of the length of the hangar deck. The three of them were talking quietly, working through the various permutations of ways to enter Piety.

  “Stand by,” Osman said. “In you go, Devereaux. We’ll work around you.”

  “They’re still chattering, Captain,” Phillips said. “I’ll let you know when I lose the signal.”

  Osman counted down to herself as if she was the one who would take the decision to fire the EM pulse. But that was the task of BB’s fragment, with his vast processing power and an accuracy far beyond even the best human gunner.

  For a disorienting moment, Osman saw the viewscreen she was standing at framed upside down in Devereaux’s HUD as the dropship moved up past the corvette’s bows. When she looked up, the dropship was passing above her, inverted. Port Stanley still had a clear line of sight with Piety. It was all a matter of timing.

  “EMP firing … now,” BB said.

  There was no sound, no light, and no impact, just Phillips’s whisper.

  “Lost the signal, Captain.”

  Only the indicator on the console told her that BB had fired. The dropship settled neatly on top of Piety’s hull and the grapples extruded from the wing nacelles to latch on to it. Osman held her breath. There was nothing she could do now; no orders, no advice, nothing. She just had to watch.

  Ten seconds … eleven …

  The Engineer hadn’t fixed things yet, then, or else the creature was confined somewhere. Osman could imagine what was happening inside Piety—total darkness, drives dead, shouts and curses, Brutes stumbling around trying to restore power and still with no idea yet of what had happened to them. Behind her, the comms speakers fizzed briefly as if the radio had come back to life but died again. The EMP indicator lit up and faded. The dropship’s drives were at full thrust now, blue-hot rings in the blackness, and the crew of Piety would be feeling vibrations as the dropship began forcing her around in a loop.

  Port Stanley’s bow dipped as the corvette did a smooth, slow somersault. The dropship and Piety, locked together like mating insects, slid up and out of Osman’s field of view.

  “Hangar, stand by,” she said.

  It was all so silent, so smooth, and such a complete contrast to what she knew was going on inside the ship. The stars swept up past her as if she was falling and then she was facing out into a different star field, rock steady. To the right of the viewscreen, the HUD icons of the ODSTs and Naomi showed the two locked vessels heading into the hangar, filling their field of view.

  The radio fizzed again and the EMP indicator fla
red.

  “I don’t think it’s the Huragok.” BB sounded oddly breathless. He’s an AI. He can’t be. But he was integrated with Naomi now, plugged into her nervous system, experiencing much of what she was feeling. “I zapped her again just to be on the safe side. In she comes.…”

  “Can openers ready, boys and girls,” Mal said. “Our brave Brute boys are really pissed off.”

  Osman could see that. Two of the Jiralhanae crew were at Piety’s forward viewscreen, harshly lit by the landing lights facing outward. Their lips were drawn back in a snarl over huge white fangs. The view shuddered for a moment. Piety had been forced down onto the deck, and the three HUD views went haywire. Mal’s veered one way, Vaz’s veered to the other, and Naomi’s—Naomi’s just seemed to jet into the air.

  Osman had never heard an AI whoop before.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  MESSAGE PRIORITY: FLASH

  FROM: CO UNSC GLAMORGAN

  TO: CINCONI

  CYCLICALLY FLUCTUATING ANOMALY LOCATED 5,000 KM FROM ONYX COORDINATES. READINGS AT PEAK CONSISTENT WITH 1.37 SOLAR MASSES. SPHERICAL FORM, 23 CM (TWENTY THREE CENTIMETER) DIAMETER. SEE REPORT FOR FULL EMR/ GRAVITATIONAL ANALYSIS. POSSIBLY DIMENSIONAL PORTAL.

  (Received at Bravo-6 February 2553.)

  HANGAR DECK, UNSC PORT STANLEY

  A human being was an extraordinary machine, but oh, how chaotic: how thrillingly disjointed.

  BB spent a nanosecond reassuring himself that splitting the critical ship functions from his higher processing had been a sensible move. The input flooding him from Naomi’s neural net was so new that he wanted time to savor it.

  Being the heart and brain of a starship was a joy, but experiencing the adrenaline-distorted, frantic awareness of a human under stress was far, far more … visceral.

  And I have no viscera. How about that.

  “Drive—offline,” Naomi said. “Cannon down.”

  “Okay, she’s dead in the water,” Mal called. “Blowing hatches in ten seconds. Stand by to close the airlock.”

  The dropship lifted off Piety and peeled away. Mal and Vaz were already at the hatches on either side of the ship, placing shaped charges on them as Naomi took a short run at the bow. Her boot hit the vessel’s nose and propelled her five meters up onto the sloping forward hatch right above the bridge. BB, used to predicting with certainty what his physical anchor would do—be it ship, circuit, or data drive—was left in the wake of real events for the first time in his existence.

  He had no idea what Naomi would do or feel in the next fraction of a second, or the second after that, even though he detected the impulses in her brain before the muscles engaged.

  She landed knees first on the hatch. The exposed deck was still pulling at one G, and BB felt the hatch cover deform slightly with the impact of four hundred kilos. Naomi sprang back immediately, boots planted either side of the hatch frame, and reached down to rip out the emergency release plate. BB could calculate precisely how much force it took to do that. But it didn’t give him half as much information as feeling the contraction in Naomi’s latissimus muscles and the pressure on her palms as she gripped and pulled. A glittering mist of fine ice crystals sprayed out from the edges of the hatch like escaping steam. The ship was venting atmosphere.

  “Hull breached—seal the hangar!”

  BB felt Piety shudder. The charges had detonated on her side hatches. Naomi pulled the nose hatch clear and dropped through the opening feet first, rifle clutched tight to her chest as the hangar doors shut.

  She’s ripped open a shuttle craft. She’s torn metal apart like cardboard. Her heart rate’s near 180 and I can feel it in her throat—my throat—and it’s like nothing else I’ve experienced. She’s lost her depth perception. But I won’t step in yet.…

  Somewhere else in the ship automatic fire hammered in short bursts, but in Naomi’s ears it faded into the background. She landed in the cockpit between two Jiralhanae apparently mired in slow motion. She didn’t even raise her rifle. There wasn’t enough space, and that was a stroke of luck: the Brutes couldn’t make full use of their massive weight. She brought her fist straight up under the first Brute’s chin and snapped his head back so hard that BB felt the small shock wave of his breaking spine travel back up her arm. The blow didn’t kill the Brute outright, but he went down.

  The other swung at her, bellowing. He was a head taller but Naomi got her hand around his trachea and dug her fingers in hard while she brought the stock of her rifle down hard on the top of his skull. It took her a good seven or eight pounding blows to stun him before she could lean back and fire into his face at point-blank range. BB, attuned to what she perceived, saw her depth perception fade back in along with clear, full-volume sound.

  Adrenaline. Even in a Spartan, its effect is—messy. But carry on, dear. You’re doing okay without any help from me.

  “Cockpit clear. Two hostiles down.”

  “Four contacts back here,” Mal said. “One down. No Engineer yet. Oh—”

  Mal was drowned out by weapons fire and raw, animal bellowing.

  “Mal?” Naomi pushed through the cockpit hatch and into the cargo compartment, charging through a gap between stacked crates. “Mal!”

  She almost fell over Vaz. One Brute lay twitching on the deck and another had Vaz pinned down one-handed. But the marine wasn’t giving up without a fight. He had a tight grip on his knife, now buried up to the hilt in the roaring, snarling Brute’s neck. BB, whose every process was tied to his system clock, felt two separate time frames happening—his own, real and objective, and Naomi’s, suddenly very much slower and more densely packed with only the data she needed to fight and win.

  So that’s what adrenaline does to her time perception. Extraordinary.

  Naomi grabbed the Brute by the collar and jerked it off Vaz in one movement, freeing his arm so he could aim his carbine. He shoved the muzzle in the Brute’s mouth and pulled the trigger. Another layer of noise vanished. Naomi reacted to the bursts of fire that were still coming from the aft section.

  “One down.” Vaz scrambled to his feet. “Mal, talk to me.”

  “Two not down—the bastards.”

  Naomi shoved past Vaz and followed the noise. BB felt her heart rate fall to 140 as her adrenaline steadied, and she moved forward with her rifle trained—much more deliberate, thinking more consciously. The next thing she saw spiked her heart rate for a couple of seconds and she’d already opened fire on it before her frontal lobes identified it as a Brute.

  “Four down,” she said. “Two left.”

  More fire rattled behind the bulkhead of the next compartment. BB stood by to give her some neural assistance but she still showed no sign of needing it. She punched her way through the flimsy hatch and stepped into a hail of needle projectiles that skidded off her armor. BB’s sole sources of imaging right then were Naomi’s helmet cam and her optic nerve. He looked into the wide-open, fanged mouth of a Brute and turned—against his will—to watch Mal finish off the last one standing with a full clip emptied into its chest. The creature still took a surprisingly long time to stop moving.

  No amount of biological studies, data, recon footage, or any other kind of third-hand input could have prepared BB for this. His choices were either to see what Naomi saw or disconnect from her optic nerve, a very limited but intense set of options compared to the freedom of infiltrating every circuit, system, and carrier wave in his electronic existence. This was her experience of the world, however much he could use his processing power to enhance her nerve signals. He swallowed the microscopic detail and understood.

  “All clear,” she called.

  The world suddenly changed color, shifting from near-monochrome to the full spectrum. Someone had opened Piety’s loading bay and the bright lights of the hangar flooded in. Naomi didn’t need the ODST’s night-vision visors to see in very low light, one of those little details that BB knew but had to experience to truly appreciate. The ODSTs took off their helmets and both
scratched their scalps like a pair of bookends.

  They’re okay. Good. We need that Huragok more than they realize, but they’d be a high price to pay for getting it.

  BB still didn’t want to be human. Poor old Cortana. How cruel, Halsey. But he liked some humans, he found even the ones he disliked fascinating, and he marveled at the ability of all of them to do so much with such limited hardware.

  “Clear. Six down.” Mal got his breath back. “Now where’s the flying jellyfish?”

  “Racist,” BB said.

  “I’m looking at you, Naomi, but all I can hear is Square Blue Thing. Are you possessed? Any projectile vomiting?”

  Naomi stifled a laugh. BB could feel the last of her adrenaline metabolizing as she wound down from the fight. The uncharacteristic laughter was all part of it.

  “I’m bearing up,” she said. “Everyone okay?”

  “Where’s Devereaux?” Vaz asked.

  Osman came on the radio. “Docked on the top hatch, waiting for a parking space. Good work, people. But have we got a live Engineer?”

  “Looking, ma’am.” Mal started opening lockers and tapping on panels. “It’s hiding. It’s not daft.”

  “Might have been hit by a stray round.”

  “Thanks, Vaz. Big morale booster.”

  It wasn’t a big ship. Naomi had only gone a few meters back toward the cockpit when Vaz called out.

  “Aww, look,” he said. He squatted in front of an opening and held out his hand. “It’s terrified. Hey, come on out. It’s okay. You’re safe now.”

  Naomi went aft again and squatted to look into the ventilation duct. The Huragok was huddled inside. Then it shot out of the opening in a flurry of tentacles, aiming for the nearest opening.