Halo: Glasslands

by Traviss, Karen

  “Exactly who do you have with you at the moment?” Parangosky asked. “Are you certain the sphere’s uninhabited?”

  “It looks that way, but bear in mind that the land area is the inner surface of a sphere, which gives us perhaps five hundred million times the surface area of Earth to recon. You’ll forgive us if we haven’t quite covered that yet. But I only have Chief Mendez, Spartans Frederic, Kelly, and Linda, and five of the Spartan-Threes here. Plus eight casualties in cryo. We lost a lot of people.”

  “I’ve had a post-action report on Onyx. You obviously realize the planet disassembled itself.” Parangosky paused for a moment and Halsey almost interrupted, but there was no end click. “And I’m glad that you’re now fully aware of the Threes’ existence.”

  “This probably isn’t the time to raise it, but if I’d been told about the program, I could have assisted.”

  “I believe Colonel Ackerson had it fully under control.” Again, Parangosky’s voice had changed pitch. “And there were many projects you weren’t aware of, Catherine, just as many weren’t aware of yours.”

  She never calls me Catherine. Halsey waited for the click, anxious not to interrupt if the Admiral hadn’t finished.

  “Which brings me on to the bad news,” Parangosky said. “The Master Chief and Cortana stopped the Halo Array from firing, but I’m afraid they’re MIA. It’s been five months, Catherine. I think we have to assume the worst.”

  Halsey’s stomach plummeted. Her first reaction was to look at Fred, Kelly, and Linda.

  He’s gone. He made it through the whole war, and then—he’s gone. Right at the end. It’s not fair.

  Fred just shook his head. Linda and Kelly stood frozen. John, John-117, the Master Chief—the focus of all Halsey’s hopes and ambitions in the Spartan program. When she’d first met him as a small, scruffy child, he was so outstanding and his genome so unusual even among the exceptional children she’d selected that she knew he’d be their leader, and that he would eventually turn the course of the war. She’d been right. She knew she would be. But John had always seemed indestructible. She couldn’t believe that his luck had run out.

  At least Cortana was with him. At least he wasn’t alone.

  She wondered if she should have felt worse about Cortana. But all she could do was worry that the AI might have fallen into Covenant hands.

  “Are you sure?” she asked at last. The pause must have seemed an eternity to Parangosky. “Absolutely sure?”

  “There’s something else I have to tell you, too, Catherine. Your daughter was killed in action. I’m sorry. I realize this is going to hit all of you very hard.”

  It took a few moments to sink in. Parangosky knew about Miranda, just as Mendez knew, and Halsey had always thought the revelation would bring her to her knees. But it was nothing—absolutely nothing—compared with the way the word killed triggered a terrible pressure at the roof of her mouth and squeezed tears from her eyes. She felt the sensation before the words had meaning in her mind.

  When did I last see her?

  When did I last speak to her?

  Halsey couldn’t remember, and she couldn’t even recall what their last words had been, only that there had been no affection in them. She was standing in the middle of a technical miracle and all she could think about was the daughter she hardly knew and now never would.

  Everyone she gave a damn about had been taken from her. Fred, Kelly, and Linda were all she had left. A normal family would have hugged and cried at a time like this, but the four of them weren’t normal, and they weren’t a family.

  Mendez leaned closer to the console. “Admiral, this is Chief Mendez. What else do you need to know before we bring this sphere out of slipspace? Remember that we’ve got eight personnel in slipspace stasis, too—either clinically dead or close to it. They’ll need immediate medical attention if the cryotubes end up back in realspace as well. We just don’t know how that’ll work yet.”

  Mendez looked distorted through her glaze of tears, but Halsey was damned if she’d break down in front of him.

  “Understood, Chief,” Parangosky said. “We’ll need coordinates on the surface of the sphere to effect an entry. We have a Huragok standing by to assist with communication if need be.”

  “We’ll establish an entry point and get back to you, ma’am. Mendez out.”

  Halsey struggled to snap out of it. She’d never needed anything more than her work and had always been able to take refuge in it. But this punch was too big. She wondered if she’d ever get up again.

  “Doctor,” Mendez said, quiet and awkward. “I’m sorry about your daughter. Come on. We need you to prepare the Engineers for what’s coming next.”

  He hates my guts, yes. But he knows what keeps me going.

  Halsey swallowed. Her throat was thick and salty with unshed tears. “Yes. Let’s do that, Chief.”

  And she’s gone. Miranda’s gone. And John. And even Jacob, too.

  She looked at her hands, palms up, and didn’t recognize them for a moment. She didn’t recognize herself. The whole world had shifted slightly and become an alien place, and it wasn’t anything to do with slipspace.

  But she couldn’t afford to fall apart now. She did what she’d done so many times before, and done very well: she took her feelings and what she’d persuaded herself was her normal humanity, and sealed them far away from her rational mind.

  It was a prudent thing to do. But it was also the only way she could manage to draw her next breath.

  When she turned around, the rest of the Spartans had gone but Fred was still there, arms at his side as if he suddenly didn’t know what to do with them.

  “Are you okay, ma’am?”

  Halsey nodded back. Her Spartans genuinely cared about her. She wanted to think that was because she had some redeeming features, but perhaps it was all part of that relentless indoctrination that made her the center of their world by default. Either way, she was going to finish what she’d set out to do—to protect them all, whether they were hers or Ackerson’s, and repair what was left of their lives regardless of what fate awaited her.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  Fred sounded as if it was an effort to talk. “I just never thought it would be him. I thought he’d always be there.”

  Olivia appeared again from a side entrance. “The Engineers want to talk to you, Doctor.”

  Prone drifted past Olivia and floated in front of Halsey. He started gesturing, but there was no voice translation. She realized she’d switched off the datapad. She fumbled with it, not really seeing it, and the voice came to life.

  “You require us to help those who arrive,” Prone said. “We can do this.”

  Halsey grabbed the diversion of dealing with something urgent. “Yes … yes, we do. We also need your help to transfer this technology to our own fleet. We want you to come back to Earth with us.”

  “Impossible.” Prone to Drift had a stubborn streak that Halsey hadn’t expected to find in a Huragok. “We were created to remain with the shield world and to maintain it.”

  Halsey didn’t have any energy left for argument. “But we have to remove some of the Forerunner technology,” she said carefully. “Some of you are going to want to come with it to make sure it’s safe, aren’t you?”

  Prone backed away and conferred with the other Huragok in a flurry of tentacles. He edged back to her as if he had a deal.

  “We will create new ones among us for that duty,” he said.

  “You’re going to build some more Engineers, do you mean?”

  “That is what we do.”

  “Our colleagues will be here soon. Are you convinced now that there’s no threat outside?”

  “We are.”

  “Good. Then all we need to know is when this world can be safely moved back into normal space, and where my colleagues can land to get in here.”

  “We will inform you,” Prone said, and drifted away like a union convener who had to sell the deal to his me
mbers again. Mendez was still standing at the communications console, leaning on one arm, staring down at his boots. He’d run out of venom. He looked up for a moment but he wasn’t looking at Halsey.

  “Onyx to ONI control, this is Chief Mendez,” he said. “Admiral, seeing as Onyx no longer exists, can we name this sphere instead of just giving it a number?”

  Parangosky must have heard all the chatter in the background while she waited. “What did you have in mind, Chief?”

  “If you’re willing, ma’am, I think we should call it Ambrose. If Lieutenant Commander Ambrose hadn’t sacrificed himself, we’d all be dead now and we’d know nothing about this sphere.”

  “No,” Halsey interrupted. There was one thing she could still do for Kurt, and it was long overdue. “Call it Trevelyan. That was his surname before I took him from his family. The least we can do for a hero is to give him the dignity of his real name.”

  There was a brief silence. “I’ll see that’s done,” Parangosky said. “And one day I’ll make sure that name is declassified.”

  It was no more than a single grain of sand from the mountain of sins that Halsey had to atone for. It didn’t change a thing for Kurt.

  But she had to start somewhere.

  UNSC PORT STANLEY, ONYX SECTOR: FEBRUARY 2553.

  “Well, that’s something you don’t see every day.”

  It really wasn’t. Mal pressed right up to the viewscreen but all he could see was another ONI corvette much like Port Stanley—UNSC Glamorgan—that had been patiently searching the sector for months, trying to find the near-invisible source of the weird EM readings. Standing off by a few kilometers were two fleet auxiliaries, Belleisle and Dunedin. It was hard to believe there was a star out there somewhere with an artificial world wrapped around it, like a kid’s surprise toy rattling around in a giant Easter egg.

  “How far back do we have to stand?” Vaz asked. “It’s not like they know how that thing works.”

  “Yeah, and they better mind that sun.” Zeta Doradus was still there, minding its own business and probably wondering what had happened to the nice little planet it used to have spinning around it. “Don’t want to expand right into that, do they?”

  Mal had visions of the planet, or whatever he was supposed to call it now, suddenly inflating and spreading everywhere like those ill-advised times when he’d activated flotation jackets in confined spaces for a laugh. Everyone did it at boot camp when they were training to ditch over water, but this was going to be a prank on a much bigger scale.

  “That’s why we’ve got the smartest woman in the universe and all the Engineers working on this,” Vaz said. “They get the decimal point in the right place.”

  “Is it really only fifteen centimeters across? I just can’t get my head around dimensional physics.”

  Naomi wandered up behind them. Mal could see her reflection in the pressure-proofed glass, helmet tucked under one arm.

  “Most of the scientists can’t see it in their mind’s eye either,” she said. “But they can do the numbers. I always found that very disappointing. Dr. Halsey always said she could visualize it conceptually, though.”

  BB popped up beside them. “So can I. But then I’m just all pure brilliant thought.”

  “And modest with it.”

  “Are we going to feel a bump or what?” Mal kept his eyes on the imagined point in space where the sphere was going to expand into a solar system. “And we go in via the basement, right?”

  He looked at Vaz and Devereaux to see if there was that same sense of wonder. Vaz just kept checking his watch as if there was somewhere else he needed to be.

  “That’s it,” Naomi said, seeming equally disinterested in the universe’s miracles. “Inside out.”

  “Are you okay about all this?”

  “Why shouldn’t I be?”

  “Seeing Halsey again. Knowing what we know now.” Mal meant what happened to Naomi’s family, not that they were going to cuff Halsey and haul her off, but that was going to be an awkward moment too. “Osman won’t make you do this if you don’t want to.”

  “I’m a Spartan.” Naomi rammed her helmet into place with some force. “I’ll do my duty.”

  “You better leave it to me and Vaz.”

  “You think I can’t face arresting her?”

  “No, I’m sure you can. But if your mates need someone to hate for doing it, it’s probably easier if it’s us.”

  Naomi shrugged. “Let’s see how things go.”

  That pretty well finished the conversation. Mal was worried that she now saw it as a test of her professionalism rather than an option to take the easiest path. Mal wanted to do it for her, and also for Osman: she’d been abducted too, and that kind of thing was bound to have messed her up at some level. They were both big, strapping girls well able to take care of themselves, but all Mal could see right then was little kids screaming for their mothers.

  He went back to staring at nothing until his vision started to swim with wobbling points of light that weren’t there, and the kids faded away. Osman arrived on deck a few minutes later and walked up to the viewscreen. She stared out, arms folded and jaw set, and suddenly he couldn’t imagine her ever being a helpless kid at all.

  “Doesn’t look much like a momentous moment in the history of space exploration, does it?” she said. “BB, any word from the sphere? Have we got docking instructions yet?”

  “Patience, Captain, our clock’s running up to twenty times faster than theirs,” BB said. “They’re communicating with Adj at the moment. Or at least the Huragok are.… Oh, apparently we don’t have to worry about docking. Provided we land at the right coordinates, the surface of the sphere’s designed to restructure itself around the ship and create a secure airlock.”

  Devereaux gave BB a thumbs-up. “Now that sounds pretty damn useful. I hope we’re going to make good use of all this tech.”

  “We are,” Osman said. “Parangosky’s promised a briefing on what we might do with it. Adj is going to be a busy boy.”

  “Ma’am, if they’ve got Engineers down there, can we find him a friend to play with?”

  “I think we’ll have to, if only to make sure there’s someone to maintain him.”

  Mal looked at Vaz, and then at Devereaux, and both of them were still watching with arms folded as if they wanted to get it over with.

  “Oh, come on,” Mal said. “This is going to be something to tell your kids about.”

  It was the kind of harmless thing that people said, but as soon as he did, he realized it was peculiarly painful for a crew who didn’t have a single regular human being on the books. The nearest they had to a normal family man on board was that bloody hinge-head. Well, sod it. Mal was determined to savor the moment anyway. The other ships shrunk rapidly from blobs of light to pinpricks and then vanished as Port Stanley withdrew at top speed.

  “Are we going to get a countdown on this?” Vaz asked.

  “I don’t think that Huragok do countdowns.”

  “Here we go,” BB said. “Stand by.”

  Mal was still trying not to blink and miss it when the stars suddenly vanished and he felt a weird tugging at his boots as if the deck beneath him was sprung. The trampoline sensation stopped as quickly as it started, but the stars didn’t reappear.

  “Oh my, that was spectacular,” BB said. “No, seriously. It was. You should see what that looked like in the microwave spectrum. And the magnetic field. Extraordinary. But it’s not really a Dyson sphere, not as Dyson hypothesized, because a solid shell wouldn’t—”

  “Go on, rub it in.” Mal felt cheated. “So why can’t we see it? Or any stars?”

  And then it dawned on him. He was looking at the sphere. It was pretty well all he could see. His view of space was completely obscured by a vast, matte black sphere, and he could only tell what he was looking at because there was a dim arc like a crescent moon, the curve of the sphere picked out by the distant light of Onyx’s sun. That sphere was as big as Earth’s or
bit. The expansion was both a massive anticlimax and the most amazing thing he’d ever—never—seen.

  “Y’know, I don’t think the Forerunners had any sense of theater,” Devereaux said. “They could at least have painted it an interesting color. Or stuck navigation lights on it or something.”

  Osman put on her helmet, a standard infantry model with a ten-minute rating in hard vacuum. She obviously didn’t think the Forerunners’ technology was infallible. “Okay, people, let’s get in there. You’re navigating, BB.”

  As they piled into the dropship, Mal’s adrenaline was pumping as hard as if he was about to do a drop behind enemy lines, not strolling in to arrest a sixty-year-old woman. He tested the vacuum integrity on his bodysuit, checking the display in his HUD more often than he needed to.

  Just one little old lady. Okay, she hijacks ships and experiments on kids. But come on. How hard can it be to drop her? On the other hand, she kidnapped a Spartan …

  Vaz sat opposite him, completely motionless apart from the fact that he was drumming the heel of his right boot on the deck; nothing obvious, not even enough to really move his knee. ODSTs were trained for police actions but that was all theory. Mal had only ever subdued Covenant aliens, and the general idea wasn’t to take them alive and unharmed.

  “I wonder what Venezia’s getting up to now.” Devereaux’s voice came over the broadcast system. It was only a short flight to the sphere’s surface, just enough time to encourage idle chat. “It’s all gone quiet, hasn’t it?”

  “Well, I’ve not forgotten about them.” Osman said it in that same deceptively calm, neutral way that Parangosky did. “They’re still on my list.”

  Mal interpreted on my list as glassing with extreme prejudice before she really got down to expressing how seriously pissed off she was. There was something both comforting and inspirational about working for a ruthless bastard. He was certain she was. Letting the Muir guy live when it would have been easier to shoot him hadn’t fooled Mal one bit.

  So … what do I say to Halsey? “You’re nicked”?