“No, Buran assured me he was reliable. He had a very important cargo, and I don’t just mean weapons. He had a Huragok they recovered from Serene Certainty.”
Had they been discussing Kig-Yar, Jul would have assumed that the shipment had been diverted and sold by now. But Jiralhanae weren’t interested in profits. Everything stemmed from their unfathomable pack politics. The feud between Jiralhanae and Sangheili had finally erupted again with the Great Schism, but Jul had never quite worked out where the fault lines were. Jiralhanae fought each other, they fought the Sangheili, and, for no reason Jul could truly understand, some of them remained loyal to Sanghelios.
“Give him a little longer,” Jul said. “Now let’s transfer the cargo before we attract an audience.”
“Something’s wrong. I know it.”
“Brother, if the vessel had crashed, we would have heard by now.”
“Would we? What’s happened to our communications? Our monitoring? No, we would not know. That yawning gap is also what enables us to stand a chance of succeeding, but sometimes it conspires against us.”
Jul had formed the opinion that ‘Telcam was blessed with the calm certainty of the faithful, so seeing him agitated was unsettling. But Jul understood the importance of acquiring a Huragok or two. The Covenant had run on them, invisible and reliable, repairing everything from machines and buildings to living bodies, and constructing every piece of technology a modern empire needed. He’d grown so used to their presence that he’d ceased to notice them. Now his wife and brothers were forced to learn construction skills, and he was starting to see all the things, large and small, that were starting to fall apart because the Huragok had fled.
There were so many. Where did they all go?
He was certain that the Great Schism hadn’t killed all the San’Shyuum. That wasn’t possible. As he unloaded the shuttle with ‘Telcam, he wondered where the survivors had gone. They had almost certainly taken most of the Huragok with them, and that meant they might be regrouping to return one day and take back their old empire.
The idea was so appalling that he stopped in his tracks. What was he doing worrying about the humans? They were no more than an infestation, backward vermin, and could be eradicated. The San’Shyuum, though, would be another matter.
“What’s wrong?” ‘Telcam asked.
Jul got on with the job, wondering what had happened to his strategic judgment. “Merely speculating what might happen if the San’Shyuum recovered and came back.”
“That would take many years,” ‘Telcam said, as if it had already occurred to him and had been dismissed. “And by then, we’ll be more than ready for them.”
‘Telcam made no complaint about having to do the heavy lifting himself in the absence of any Jiralhanae. Jul found himself thinking of him less as a fanatical monk and more as a decent warrior who happened to have some extreme views on the subject of religion. As long as they had the same objective, Jul wasn’t too worried about the separate paths that brought them there.
“Where are you getting your supplies?” Jul asked, heaving a crate up the ramp into the frigate’s hold. “Who funds this?”
“Donations,” ‘Telcam said. “From many sources.”
“Are all of them aware they’re donating?”
“No.”
“And how much do we really need?”
“You mean when should we act, because you grow impatient.”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
“I’m waiting upon the whims of an old nobleman.” ‘Telcam dusted off his hands and stood back to look at the growing arms cache. “And Buran needs to know that he has a fully competent crew when we make our move. Some of his old crew have gone back to their keeps to try to feed their families.”
Jul tried to imagine which kaidon could be so important to the plot that ‘Telcam would feel he needed his approval. Perhaps this was just a regular power struggle after all, a coup on behalf of another kaidon who’d chosen not to show his face, rather than an outpouring of religious zeal.
“Which nobleman?”
“Admiral Hood,” ‘Telcam said. “The human Shipmaster of Shipmasters. He’s made it clear to the Arbiter that he wants to formalize this cease-fire. There’s much talk of it in Vadam.”
“What cease-fire?” Jul demanded. “There is no cease-fire. Just an absence of fighting.”
“We don’t know that, and neither does the Arbiter—or Hood. Communications are what the humans call patchy.” ‘Telcam, who was unusually fluent in the primary human language, pronounced the word with care. It was hard to form a human P when trying to compress four lips. “The humans have lost many of their communications relays, too, so both sides flounder in the dark and eavesdrop where they can. There are worlds out there where the battles may still be raging. We may not know for years.”
It took them an hour to move all the containers, but there was still no sign of the Jiralhanae. Jul found himself sitting in the shuttle cockpit with ‘Telcam in awkward silence, waiting. Every half hour, ‘Telcam opened a channel and listened to crackling static.
“Their radio’s working,” he said. “You can hear it. I don’t understand this.”
“Perhaps it’s malfunctioning. Whether they have a Huragok on board or not.”
It was another hour before the shuttle’s comms indicator lit up to indicate an inbound message. ‘Telcam pounced on the console, teeth bared.
“Manus? Where in the name of the gods have you been?”
“This is not Manus, brother. This is the temple. We hear Piety is returning, but isn’t responding to her radio. A sympathetic shipmaster picked her up on his radar.”
‘Telcam’s lips settled back over his fangs and he leaned back in his seat. His relief was obvious. “We’ll wait for the ship. We have little else to do.”
“I told you as much,” Jul said. “Everything breaks down these days.”
“You’d think they’d let the Huragok repair it.”
“They’re Jiralhanae. Their logic eludes me.”
Jul got out of the cockpit to listen for the sound of Piety’s drive. Nearly an hour later, he heard the rumble of a small auxiliary and the ship appeared above the quarry, looking predictably scraped and battered, then hovered over her landing coordinates for a few moments before descending in a storm of dust. Jul could have sworn that her nose hatch was dented.
‘Telcam climbed down from the cockpit, looking murderous. “I shall have an explanation,” he murmured.
Piety’s side hatches had taken some damage and there were dents around the lock plates. She was an old tug used in the docks to berth warships, so it might have been wear and tear, but Jul was getting concerned. He strained to see what was going on in the cockpit. But it was dark inside, and he was sure he’d been mistaken about the nose hatch. ‘Telcam stood about ten meters from the ship and kept glancing irritably at the hatches. Manus seemed to be taking his time about things.
So they waited. After five silent minutes, ‘Telcam ran out of patience.
“This is the last time I allow those idiots to go on missions without supervision, I swear.” He strode up to the main side hatch and hammered on the hull. Nothing happened. “Manus? Open this damned hatch. Where have you been?”
Jul looked over the smaller side hatches. He could now see slight ripples, as if the metal had been distorted by force, and he was sure he could see a gap. If he was right, then something terrible had happened to Piety.
Her hull’s breached. Her atmosphere’s leaked away.
“Brother, she’s damaged,” Jul said. “Look at the metal. Something’s very wrong.”
‘Telcam just grunted. Jul drew his energy sword and approached Piety cautiously. He couldn’t imagine what form the danger inside a ship opened to vacuum might take, but he wasn’t prepared to take a chance so close to his home and his family. If anything was going to leap out of there, he would be ready for it.
‘Telcam turned to him, nodded, and drew his own weapon.
&n
bsp; There was a manual override for the main cargo hatch. ‘Telcam closed his fingers slowly around the handle and twisted it to the left, slowly and carefully, then stood to one side as the door slid back on its runners. Jul aimed squarely into the open compartment. But the only thing that emerged was a stench.
‘Telcam jumped in, teeth bared. “Manus? Manus!”
Jul still expected to hear weapons discharging, but when he climbed into the ship behind ‘Telcam, it was clear that Piety still had her cargo. There was no sign of the Jiralhanae.
They’re dead. They ran out of air.
Then ‘Telcam stumbled over something, knocking into crates, and cursed loudly. He was looking down at the deck. Jul squeezed through the gap after him and saw the bodies.
A Kig-Yar lay slumped against a bulkhead with a human rifle beside him. Jul stepped over the body and saw there were four dead Jiralhanae in the compartment as well, but his first glance told him they hadn’t asphyxiated. There were projectile wounds to their faces. ‘Telcam pushed through to the cockpit and roared with anger.
“All of them, dead,” he snarled. “All of them. And where’s the Huragok?”
Jul squeezed into the small cockpit. Two more dead Jiralhanae, one of them Manus, were draped over the seats. Above him, Jul could see the daylight through gaps around the hatch seal. Piety’s console was on idle, the flickering lights indicating that her autopilot was still engaged, which explained how she managed to return and why her radio had been working but silent.
“They’ve taken the Huragok.” ‘Telcam was almost sitting with indignation. “They attacked the ship. Damned Kig-Yar vermin. They’ll pay for this.”
He gestured Jul back into the main section of the ship and went back to the dead Kig-Yar. Jul swallowed his revulsion and moved the body with his boot to look at the wounds.
“Projectiles,” he said. “It’s been shot several times.”
“Human weapons.” ‘Telcam squatted and poked around in its clothing, then picked up the human rifle. “They like these things. They’ll trade with anybody.” He examined the interior of the compartment. “Look at the number of rounds expended. There was quite a firefight here. I imagine this idiot got himself caught in the cross fire and his comrades didn’t bother to retrieve him.”
Sangheili always called Kig-Yar cowardly, but it was just an unthinking insult and didn’t reflect how aggressive the creatures could be. They were very effective in large numbers, which often made up for their slight build. Jul suspected that the San’Shyuum preferred them in individual roles, not just because they were excellent snipers and scouts, but because they knew what trouble the scavengers would be if deployed in battalions.
If they could hijack a shuttle and overpower six Jiralhanae, it was a worrying development. They were on the offensive.
“I forget their pirate heritage,” Jul said. “Anarchy. That’s what’ll follow if we don’t impose some order on the situation.”
‘Telcam didn’t comment, shaking his head slowly as he searched the ship. He seemed more shocked now than angry. He looked behind every panel and in every space, however small, but there was no sign of the Huragok.
It was worth a lot of money on the black market, Jul knew. But it was even more valuable as an asset to bring Kig-Yar weapons and ship technology up to the level of the Sangheili.
That worried him much more.
“We are, as the humans might say, spoilt for choice,” he said at last. “Who should we deal with first? Should we depose our heretical Arbiter, or teach these vermin some respect?” He picked up the Kig-Yar’s rifle, a MA5B, a weapon Jul had seen scattered among the human corpses in the aftermath of many a battle. They were fiddly, cumbersome things, too crude for a Sangheili. “The Kig-Yar need to learn their place.”
“Well, let’s find out which nest was responsible for this.” Jul went back to the cockpit and had to heave Manus’s body off the navigation console. For a moment he wondered if Manus had a family and what they might be doing now. He’d never considered that they had their own lives before. Buran would have to tell his mate and children. “The flight recorder should answer some questions.”
‘Telcam tapped the console and the recorder flashed a stream of data on the screen, most of it simply coordinates and speeds. The attack wasn’t instantly visible in the output, but the communications log was much easier to read from raw data. Jul read through the station idents: Piety had had radio contact with Kig-Yar from within a human-occupied sector, a colony world that had once been called Sqala.
No. That world is not theirs. They’re interlopers. I won’t dignify them by calling their infestations colonies.
It was now called Venezia. And it would pay for harboring criminals.
BLUE TEAM CAMP, FORERUNNER DYSON SPHERE: LOCAL DATE NOVEMBER 2552.
They said you could always judge a woman by the contents of her purse, and Halsey was content to be judged by hers.
Datapad … pocket archive … change of clothes … self-amalgamating tape … lip salve … pocket saw … solar power pack … Mom’s antique Patek Philippe … medications … folding knife … coffee. To be opened in case of emergency, as they say.
She sorted through it all again, knowing that the item she valued most was gone. She’d lost her journal during the Covenant assault on Reach. It must have been ash by now.
Damn … so much of her life was in there, not just the years spent on the Spartan program but the personal things too. She’d start another one, but she didn’t have the right technology at the moment, and that meant paper—paper and pencil and ink. She needed to feel the faint drag of the lead or the way a nib glided on a cushion of liquid ink. Talking to a datapad or scribbling and tapping on it was no substitute when it came to outpouring rather than thinking.
Why was I so careless with it?
Halsey tried to apply the same intellectual rigor to analyzing herself as she did with others. A Freudian slip, much as I hate to admit it. Subconsciously, perhaps she wanted to lose it, or—more to the point—she wanted it to be found. That could only mean that she needed to explain herself to posterity, to put her plea in mitigation for all her sins.
If I really believed they were sins, though, would I do that? But if I acknowledge they’re sins, then I’ve demonstrated morality, haven’t I?
Stop it. Stop it, right now.
When she found herself spiraling into those circular arguments, she slammed on the brakes. Like an AI, she knew she would ultimately think herself into oblivion. The more onion layers of ethical debate she indulged in, and the more she peeled them back and looked underneath, the more she realized she would find nothing concrete of herself left at the core. She was just ideas: just thought. There was nothing she believed in except her own intellect. She wondered if she was more of an AI than Cortana, so very conscious of her virtual body and emotionally invested in her Spartan. At times Halsey felt the AI was more human than she could ever be.
So I have no soul. And why are the only concepts I have for this religious ones? Can’t reason provide the answers?
She couldn’t actually remember what she’d written in the journal, not in any detail. She wondered if she didn’t want to.
She only recalled that when she wrote, she had an awareness at the back of her mind that one day those words and sketches would be seen by others, studied by historians, quoted and analyzed, because she was important. She was one of the greatest thinkers of her century. Everyone had told her so.
Right now, though, she was sixty years old, hungry, and half scared and half thrilled, trapped in a Dyson sphere through a debacle of her own making and trying to put a brave face on it. There were only three people here who thought she was a great thinker and a boon to humanity. The others didn’t really know or care what the hell she was, except for the one who knew her only too well and had finally lost his ability to hide his contempt for her.
And if the Flood’s now overrun the galaxy and the Halo Array’s fired, then this is our seed corn
to rebuild humanity. Two sterile and miserable old bastards, and at least one of the females of childbearing age is genetically predisposed to violence and aggression. Let’s hope Kelly and Linda are still firing on all cylinders.
But that was a problem for the long term. The short-term one still had to be tackled. Halsey was now pretty sure she knew what the tower structures were, which was a start. So far it had taken her three days to capture images of the Forerunner symbols spread across the walls and map the symbols to the language algorithm in her datapad. She had no AI this time to help her.
But that’s fine. I create AIs. I shouldn’t need to rely on them. The human mind’s still the best tool for the job.
The results were slow in coming, but they were fascinating. This sanctuary wasn’t a single, self-sustaining ecosphere but a customizable range of environments. Halsey noted the symbols for temperature, humidity, ratios of gases in the atmosphere, and even gravity. Some other symbols didn’t make sense on first examination because they appeared to be names rather than common elements of language, and names were notoriously hard to pin down in translation. But an intuitive leap told her the names were not those of individuals, but of species.
So which is which? What’s the symbol for human? We had to be part of the plan. Look how closely this environment mirrors Earth. But why is that all we can see? Does the first species to find its way in dictate the setup?
That didn’t make sense, but she was confident that it would in time. Halsey took another guess—another intellectual gamble—that the Forerunners had created a bunker not just for themselves but for other sentient species they wanted to protect from the devastating effects of the Halo Array. They’d have found a way of catering for different requirements. She found herself wondering whether the Forerunners had thought in terms of a diverse community of equals, or simply a zoo for their own amusement.
And if you were so powerful, so advanced, so able to play God—what happened to you all?
For a moment, she forgot the wider predicament and found she was actually enjoying herself. She knew that was wrong and that she should have been as worried as the others were about Lucy, who’d now been missing for days. She realized that she was equally untroubled about the food supply. She hoped that was because she’d made a rational calculation about their environment and the kind of plant and animal species it would support, but something at the back of her mind told her that it was an almost religious faith in salvation by genius—that she was so brilliant, and her Spartan-IIs were so resourceful, that they were bound to come up with a solution to the problem in the nick of time.
Halo: Glasslands Page 25
