Halo: Glasslands

by Traviss, Karen

  “It’s okay, Captain, I’ve got my suicide pill.”

  BB tried to make light of it. “It’s just a sharp ejected from your personal radio, and you won’t feel a thing,” he said. “I’ll be gentle.”

  “It’s so good to have friends like you, BB.”

  Osman didn’t seem to find it funny. Her lips compressed in a tight line for a moment. “We’ll be back to extract you in a week. And you don’t go anywhere without that radio—not even the shower. Got it? I don’t care which body cavity you have to insert it in. They’ll expect you to have personal comms anyway, but there’s no sense in making them too interested in it.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “Okay. Good luck.”

  Osman half turned to go, then seemed to change her mind and turned back to give him an awkward pat on the back. It was the kind of stiff exchange that suggested she was convinced he wouldn’t make it back. BB hoped Phillips didn’t notice.

  Devereaux raised an eyebrow as Osman walked off. “You’re well in there, Prof.”

  “I’m not even going to ask what that means, but I think it scares me. Shall we go?”

  They were interrupted by a cacophony of off-key singing from the gantry above. Mal and Vaz were watching from up top, arms folded on the rail and singing the theme tune from Undercover. It was a popular spy drama, although not with BB. Phillips laughed.

  “I may be back sooner than you think, Control,” he said, doing a pretty good impression of the actor’s catchphrase.

  “Don’t get yourself killed,” Mal called. “And don’t let BB stick that needle in you. Nobody else can do that stupid puzzle.”

  “Phyllis,” Vaz called. “Is it true the hinge-head calls you Phyllis?”

  “BB, you’re a bastard,” Phillips muttered. “Yes, Vaz, he does, because he can’t pronounce my name.”

  “Okay, Phyllis. We believe you.”

  They roared with laughter. Phillips seemed to understand the oblique language of slagging now, and take it for what it was—the ODSTs’ way of telling him that he was one of their own and that they were seriously concerned for his welfare. A nickname was a sure sign of comradeship. He gave them a Girl Scout salute and climbed into the dropship.

  This was the point where BB was more conscious of his many fragments. One aspect of him was now clipped on Phillips’s top pocket, and another was still light-years away in Sydney, walking through electronic corridors to gossip, argue, peer into filing cabinets, slam doors, rap knuckles, and play pranks in the invisible and politically tangled community of AIs. At the same time, his matrix occupied Port Stanley and oversaw every aspect of the corvette and her crew, both consciously and subliminally. He’d tried to explain this multitasking to Mal and Vaz, and finally achieved it by comparing himself with a human being watching TV while having a conversation with the person sitting next to them, holding a datapad on their lap, and keeping an ear on a conversation taking place in the kitchen. It could all be done, even by humans. It was just done on a far broader, more complex scale by an AI.

  Phillips made the journey to Sanghelios in the cockpit, sitting in the copilot’s seat and chatting to Devereaux. BB was both there and not there as far as they were concerned. They seemed to have reached the stage where they could talk freely without embarrassment. He could hear how their voices and language had changed since the end of January, from the hesitation and carefully chosen words of the first days to complete informality now. In a few weeks, a group of complete strangers from unpromisingly different backgrounds had not only welded themselves into a cohesive team, but had grown comfortable with a permanent and intrusive presence like himself. He didn’t judge them like a human, and they knew it

  BB was happy. He could define it now. It made him feel thoroughly satisfied with his existence. He turned his attention back to Port Stanley while the dropship approached Sanghelios and picked up its fighter escorts.

  “Do you have five minutes, Captain?”

  Osman swung her chair away from the console. “Shoot.”

  “The Admiral’s instructed me to brief you on a project that’s been withheld from you until now. And don’t take offense at that, by the way.”

  “None taken,” Osman said. “I’ve been in ONI for too long. She said you’d brief me.”

  Ah, Osman was a little gem. She fully accepted there were things she was better off not knowing for the time being. It made her easy to work for. Damian Hogarth didn’t have that subtle judgment, though, and expended far too much energy in pointless fishing expeditions. There was a time for trawling, BB decided, and there was a time for hauling in your nets and conserving your fuel. Osman trusted Parangosky as much as she seemed to trust anyone. There weren’t many people who felt that way about the Admiral, but however Machiavellian she could be—and Machiavelli was an uncomplicated soul by comparison—she wasn’t untrustworthy. What you saw was what you got; provided you saw it coming, of course.

  Many hadn’t.

  “It’s a project called Infinity,” BB said. “To be exact, Infinity is a warship—a very, very expensive prototype, because she’s been fitted with every scrap of Forerunner technology we’ve picked apart during the course of the war, and now she’ll benefit from the tech Halsey found in the sphere. Unfortunately, the Woodentop Navy needed to know about her because even ONI couldn’t hide anything that big in the budget, but it’s still known to only a handful of very senior officers.”

  He got a smile out of Osman with Woodentop Navy. It was what he called any branch of the senior service that wasn’t ONI. “So how about all those yappy shipyard workers and technicians, then?” she asked.

  “There’s not much yapping they can do when they’ve been permanently deployed in the Oort Cloud with full comms lockdown for the past few years,” BB said. “Would you like to see the schematics?”

  He flashed up the deck-by-deck blueprint on the screen to her left. She rested her elbows on the console and leaned forward, lips slowly parting as the full wonder of Infinity began to sink in.

  “Ooh.” She hovered on the edge of a smile. “And all that wonderful kit that Halsey’s found.” Then the smile iced over again. “Is that really why she went to Onyx, then? Did we misjudge her?”

  “Oh, good grief, no. She really didn’t know anything about Infinity, believe me. She would only have tried to take over the project. No, the crazy hijacker act was just that. Crazy. Not a cover for anything.”

  Osman’s gaze went back to the blueprints again. “Who’s going to have command?”

  “Andrew Del Rio’s been driving her for a few years. It’s not easy to find competent commanders who can drop off the grid unnoticed for that long. And we’ve had some Spartan-Fours out there for a while too. But with the slipspace navigation refinement, I think Infinity’s going to be ready for trials a lot sooner than planned.”

  “I don’t suppose I get to do any working-up in her.”

  “You’re the heir to the ONI throne, my dear. I imagine you can do anything you like when the time comes. We might even get you on a Thursday war.”

  “Just tell me Hogarth isn’t going to pip me at the post now my back’s turned.”

  BB coughed. “I am your back. I have contingency plans to make sure that doesn’t happen in the event that the Admiral’s wishes aren’t immediately honored.”

  “Bless you, BB.”

  “Bless the Admiral, Captain.”

  BB left Osman to pore over the blueprints. If he’d had physical hands, he’d have brought her a nice strong coffee so she could fully enjoy browsing through the fine detail of the ship. Where other women read magazines, Osman liked nothing better than to while away the time with a dense pile of data. There was still a lot of the Spartan in her. BB sometimes wondered what kind of operational Spartan she would have made, just the averagely terrifying kind or a full-blown angel of death.

  He turned his attention back to the dropship, where Phillips was landing at the Arbiter’s keep in Vadam. If Phillips had had a neural implan
t, BB would have known exactly how nervous he was. But in the absence of monitoring hormone levels, he could still make an educated guess from the pitch of Phillips’s voice and the physical pounding of his heart. There was a lot BB could glean from riding a comms unit in contact with the man’s chest. Phillips had had the sense to leave the unit clipped to his jacket pocket—conspicuous, so that the Sangheili wouldn’t think he was doing any covert recording—and that also gave BB a good view of the environment.

  Almost like being there, as Mal would say. Actually, I am there.

  Phillips walked down a long, highly polished corridor toward huge double doors at the far end, then stopped for a moment to look back at Devereaux. She was silhouetted by the light, waiting at the open door to the landing pad, and gave him a quick wave before turning and heading back to the dropship. The outer doors closed.

  Phillips was on his own now. When he walked through the imposing entrance, it wasn’t the Arbiter who came to meet him but one of his staff, a particularly huge Sangheili festooned with weapons. Phillips did seem to understand them even better than BB had realized. He knew how to appear so harmless and curious that it was probably an affront to their masculinity to harm him. He was a child to them.

  “I’m very grateful for the opportunity to visit Sanghelios,” he said. BB could tell from the involuntary compression of the hinge-head’s jaws that he wasn’t expecting a human to speak so fluently to him in his own language. “Thank you for your hospitality.”

  There was just the tiniest hint of sly humor in that, but the Sangheili didn’t spot it. Phillips followed him across the vast hall that was proof of that Sangheili taste for big, echoing, empty rooms. There wasn’t a comfy chair in sight. Poor old Phillips was going to be glad to get back to Port Stanley, whatever enthusiastic noises he made about unprecedented access. They wound through a maze of passages until the Sangheili stopped and flung open a door.

  “A child’s room,” the Sangheili said grimly. “Small furniture for your little human legs.”

  The room contained a functional mattress on a dais and what looked at first glance like a fountain. No, it was the local plumbing. The bathroom. Oh dear. Good luck with that, Evan. It was very Spartan, and not in the reassuringly armored and heroic sense.

  “Thank you,” Phillips said. “That’s very thoughtful.”

  The Sangheili left him there and closed the door. Actually, it really was rather kind by Sangheili standards. Phillips sat on the edge of the bed and braced his elbows on his knees.

  “Just the right size, Goldilocks.…”

  “Sit up,” BB hissed. “I can’t see a damn thing.”

  “Sorry.” Phillips was trying to keep his voice down. “I’m not going to think about the food. I swear I’m not going to worry about that. I’ll just stick to the roast meat.”

  “Very wise.”

  They sat there for a long time in silence, wondering if anyone was ever going to come back. It was a good twenty minutes—a geological age to BB—before heavy, plodding steps echoed in the corridor outside and the door opened. This time it really was the Arbiter.

  “My apologies for not receiving you, Scholar,” he said. “You profess an interest in our culture. What can we show you?”

  Phillips sounded genuinely taken aback. “That’s most kind of you, sir. It would mean a great deal to me to see something of your ancient history.” He was a little breathless. Odd: the higher gravity couldn’t have been taking a toll on him yet. “If you don’t regard it as sacrilegious, I’d like to see your most ancient cities. I’d like to study the evolution of your language.”

  The Arbiter’s head jerked back a fraction. If a Sangheili’s eyes could glaze over, then his just had. But it took even a prodigious intellect like BB’s a second to see what was going on here. Where would Phillips be able to see the earliest examples of Sangheili language?

  Almost certainly at Forerunner relic sites. Oh, very clever. Very clever indeed.

  “Then I shall have a pilot show you some of the less contentious shrines,” the Arbiter said. “Since the San’Shyuum were overthrown, the more pious of my brothers regard me as an atheist and a heretic.”

  “That’s very generous, sir. May I make one more request? Do any of your youngsters have an arum that they would be willing to lend to me?”

  The Arbiter drew his head back even farther. It was definitely either a sign of wariness or amusement. “You understand what this thing is? A very challenging puzzle.”

  “I know,” Phillips said. “I’d like to examine one.”

  The Arbiter inclined his head. “Very well. As a favor to the Shipmaster of Shipmasters. The nursery analogy is complete, then.”

  The Arbiter left. So he had a sense of humor after all. Phillips held his breath for a few moments.

  “Remind me what you’re looking for,” BB whispered.

  “Ah, this predates our meeting, my little cubist friend. The mad monk we do business with claims to have ancient Forerunner relics from their first contact, remember. If there’s a trace of that in other locations, then perhaps I can find some clues to original Forerunner data—like Halo locations.”

  “Gosh, I think I want your autograph.”

  “I have my moments. I would have asked ‘Telcam himself, but something tells me he wouldn’t have volunteered the information. And I really don’t want to run into him on this trip.”

  Phillips put his finger to his lips. They waited for another half hour until another Sangheili opened the door, slapped an arum into Phillips’s hand, and jerked his head at him to follow.

  There was little useful intelligence to glean from the two-seater transport they boarded, but when the vessel lifted clear of the keep walls and headed south to the coast, a very different Sanghelios was spread below them. Phillips leaned close to the viewscreen and adjusted his jacket discreetly so that BB could get a good shot.

  The glare of the sun wasn’t reflecting off the sea. Fifteen minutes outside Vadam, an area of vitrified soil covering at least ten square kilometers gleamed like an ice floe. It looked like the Sangheili had unleashed their own weapons on their neighbors and glassed them during the recent civil war.

  Phillips did his idiot child act again, playing with the arum. “So there’s been fighting here,” he said. “Was it the Prophets?”

  “No,” the pilot grunted. “It was the war between the keeps. And the war continues.” He glanced at Phillips as if he couldn’t believe he was messing around with an arum. “Fool. You’ll never release the stone like that.”

  Phillips twisted the arum a few more times and then shook the small gemstone from its heart. “Oh … beginners luck, perhaps.”

  The pilot stared at him. It was just as well the vessel appeared to be on autohelm.

  “You have great discipline,” the pilot said at last, with just the slightest hint of awe. “Can all humans do that?”

  “I can only judge by similar puzzles we have … but no, they can’t.”

  “Good,” the pilot muttered. “Then you would be a much more dangerous species.”

  Phillips had a new fan. Brilliant. BB made a note to sweet-talk him into donating his brain to the AI program when he was done with it.

  He hoped that time wouldn’t have to come too soon.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHTEEN

  OZ, BIG MAGGIE SAYS YOU MIGHT SWING BY VENEZIA SOME TIME SOON. I THINK YOU’LL FIND IT AN INTERESTING DAY OUT.

  (SIGNAL FROM AGENT MIKE SPENSER TO CAPTAIN SERIN OSMAN, VIA GC MONITORING NODE BACCHANTE)

  UNSC IVANOFF RESEARCH STATION, ORBITING INSTALLATION 03: MARCH 2553.

  “Are you familiar with Dante’s Inferno, Catherine?”

  Parangosky placed a folder on the table opposite Halsey and pulled a datapad out of it before sitting down. The room was a windowless compartment in a UNSC orbital research station that Halsey had never known existed. If there was anything that told her she’d been out of favor for a very long time, it was finding that the chief scientist
of the ONI had been kept in the dark about an awful lot of research.

  But what did I expect? I kept others out of my pet projects. Now it’s payback.

  “It’s been a long time since I read it,” Halsey said.

  “In English, or Italian?”

  “English.”

  “Then you won’t be familiar with a particularly exquisite Italian word. Contrapasso.” Parangosky took an assortment of pens and styli out of her regulation black leather purse and lined them up neatly next to the folder. She was either going to make a lot of notes or sign a death warrant. “Poetic justice falls woefully short. English may be the language of Shakespeare, but when it comes to economy and elegance, you can’t beat Italian.”

  “You’re going to have to prompt me, I’m afraid.”

  “Contrapasso—the fortune-teller spends eternity in Hell with his head facing backward. The lovers obsessed by their lust are condemned to be locked in permanent coitus, longing for separation. Ironic and precise.”

  Parangosky got up and walked around to the other side of the table to stand over her, so close that Halsey could smell her faint perfume of jasmine and orange blossom. Halsey was rarely scared by anything that couldn’t break bones or kill her, and although she was absolutely certain that Parangosky could arrange for both to happen, it was the sheer presence of the woman that made her bowels cramp.

  “This is your contrapasso, Catherine,” she said. “You’ve been kidnapped. You’ve been snatched away from all you know and hold dear. You’ve vanished. Only a handful of loyal and very secretive people know that you’re here. And as far as the grieving world is concerned, Catherine Halsey, you are dead.”

  Halsey understood contrapasso perfectly now.

  Parangosky was effectively the most powerful woman on Earth or off it, whatever power the UEG or Terrence Hood thought they possessed. Halsey wasn’t sure if she resented that or not. She’d only ever sought to do whatever she pleased, but it was sobering to see true power exercised and realize that she could do nothing to save herself in the face of it.