Halo: Glasslands

by Traviss, Karen

  But if I could walk out here now, would I? I want my martyrdom, don’t I? I’ve done appalling things. I shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. But it suited Parangosky for decades that I did. What’s changed now?

  It took Halsey a couple of moments to break off from that predator’s gaze and analyze the words. She’d always thought she’d spit defiance in Parangosky’s face, buoyed up by the certainty that she always escaped punishment for her misdemeanors, but it wasn’t like that at all. She was a helpless, scared child. And she was scared because she had no idea what was coming next or what would happen to her tomorrow, the tactic that torturers had exploited successfully since time immemorial.

  And I did that too, didn’t I?

  Parangosky just waited. Halsey knew she deserved whatever was coming but still felt the reflex to be defiant. She recognized this as the unlikable part of her, the self that she tried to dress up as necessary, daring, and unsentimental, but that was just a streak of selfish indifference.

  “So now you know how it feels when your life is utterly at someone else’s disposal.” Parangosky’s tone was incongruously soothing. “Like I said, you’re dead, Catherine, and you’ll remain dead for as long as it pleases me or my successor. And in the end, you may well face the actual death penalty if I decide to try you, although it’s rather unsatisfying that the charges won’t relate to your worst excesses.”

  Halsey still felt a little indignation that she wasn’t entitled to. Her guilt was becoming time-worn, familiar, something she woke with every morning; but the only reason she was sitting here was because she’d done the right thing for once in her life. And Parangosky had approved everything she’d done in the Spartan program.

  More or less.

  “How do you live with it, Margaret?” Halsey asked. “Do you sleep any more soundly than I do?”

  Parangosky seemed to take it as a normal conversation. She looked off to one side in the way that people did when they were considering things they didn’t fully remember, and shrugged.

  “I spend every day ending people’s lives and manipulating them, doing things that most people in uniform would consider unconscionable. I’m not going to pretend that there’s some higher morality at work here, but I’m prepared to do the dirty work to spare the consciences of others, and my barbarous acts mean fewer people die than would have done if I’d played by the rules. I think that’s as near as I can come to tolerating my reflection in the mirror.”

  “So why am I so much worse than you?”

  “Oh, I’m not sure that you are. I’m a different kind of guilty. But you lied to me, Catherine.”

  She could have said that years ago. “About what in particular?”

  “Cloning.”

  “You knew about that.”

  “Not until years later.”

  “Oh, so this is about massaging the budget. You got your results, though, didn’t you? You got Spartans, and they ended the war.”

  “My, there’s a lot to unravel there. A little mythology, a little fudging of the dates and objectives … just tell me one thing. Why the clones? What was the point of that? It was totally unnecessary.”

  “I think the cost was justified.”

  “I didn’t ask you for a budget analysis. I asked why you cloned those children.”

  Halsey found herself focused on the pens lined up on the table. For some reason she couldn’t look away from them.

  I thought I was trying to put things right. I told myself I went to all that trouble to spare their parents. But I should have accepted the small odds of the clones surviving. It was just a stupid, pointless token to make myself feel less of a monster.

  But it made me even more of one. And now I finally know how it feels to lose a child.

  “To atone,” Halsey said at last. She could hear how hollow and pathetic it sounded, a spoilt brat’s excuse for killing a pet. “I didn’t know those clones would die.”

  “You’re the world’s foremost expert on genetics. Why didn’t you know?”

  “Because it’s not that simple, and you know it.”

  Parangosky suddenly brought her fist down on the table with a thundering crack that no ninety-year-old should have had the strength to manage. Halsey flinched. She felt the table shudder. Parangosky leaned right over her, nose to nose, and Halsey now understood why grown men feared her more than the Covenant.

  “If you genuinely believed cloning would produce a healthy child identical to the one you’d abducted, then why the hell didn’t you use the clones for the Spartan program instead?”

  Halsey had never asked herself that question. She realized she’d made sure she hadn’t. She felt herself going under.

  “Answer me, Doctor. You will damn well answer me.”

  “It’s no more or less moral than—”

  “You knew. I refuse to believe you didn’t. If you didn’t, then you were incompetent. And that’s one excuse you can never use.”

  Halsey had no answer, but there were worse things than being incompetent. She hadn’t felt that way before. “And you knew I’d done it, eventually, so spare me the outrage.”

  “Think of it as late onset retribution,” Parangosky rasped. Halsey had never known her to raise her voice. “We’re not dependent on your skills now, so I don’t have to stomach your sense of entitlement one second longer. I’ve had my use of you. I think you used those clone replacements to comfort yourself, not the families. Oh, don’t blame me, I made new children for them, it’s not my fault that it all went wrong…”

  Halsey could feel her breath struggling in her throat. She wasn’t going to take this. It wasn’t like that at all.

  She went to stand up but Parangosky pushed her down again by the shoulder. “No, damn it, you’ll sit and listen for once in your life.”

  “Don’t you dare unload all this on me.” Halsey had lost control of the situation, but then she realized she’d never had any in the first place. That was the most frightening thing of all. “You approved the program. You knew it was extreme. And now you’ve got the gall to moralize?”

  “Those families had to watch their child die.”

  “They didn’t lie awake every night wondering if their child had been raped or murdered or was being held captive by some pervert. They had closure.”

  Parangosky’s voice was just a hiss. “Some of those parents are still alive.”

  “No.” Halsey shook her head. “You can’t possibly know that. I kept the only set of records. And those are a pile of ash along with everything else on Reach.”

  “I’m the head of ONI, for God’s sake. I’ve had copies of all your records for many years, because you’re not quite as smart as you think you are.” Parangosky paused. “And you’d be surprised what survived on Reach. Your journal, for example.”

  Out of all the things that Parangosky could have said or done, reading that journal upset Halsey more than anything. It was a child’s reaction, outrage at a parent for violating her privacy, and yet she’d always written it with that subconscious eye on posterity.

  “Then I don’t imagine there were that many surprises for you,” she said stiffly.

  “You’re quite a competent artist.” Parangosky straightened up, all ice again without a trace of the afterburn of anger. Halsey couldn’t tell if it was a careful act or just the way the woman handled her rare displays of emotion. “I’ve had a team of psychologists crawling over it, but I hardly needed them.”

  Halsey had sketched people and diagrams as well as pouring out her thoughts. “The more people who see that, the more it compromises security.”

  “Whose? Yours?” Parangosky walked back to her side of the table and sat down. “State secrets are to protect society. They should conceal information like jamming frequencies, troop strengths, code words. They shouldn’t be used to cover up our most bestial acts or save us from embarrassment. I’ve drafted a statement about my role in the Spartan program and I’ll be handing it to the UEG’s defense committee in due cours
e. I’m going to die sooner rather than later, and I will not take this to the grave with me.”

  “You realize the damage that could do to restarting the Spartan program.”

  “There won’t be any program—not like the Spartan-Twos, anyway. Or the Spartan-Threes, if I can help it. We’re back to using consenting adults now, like we did in Project Orion.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, another project you were never told about. The fourth-phase Spartans. And you know why nobody told you? Because you sabotage as much as you create, Catherine. You’re not a team player. But if you think you’re going to spend whatever time remains to you writing your memoirs, think again. I have work for you, work that doesn’t involve manipulating people, and you’ll report to someone else and do as you’re told. Because if you don’t, I can do whatever the hell I want with you, and nobody will lift a finger to help you. How does that sound?”

  Parangosky put her pens back in her purse with slow care. She hadn’t written anything after all. And she hadn’t asked Halsey a single question, not really, because she already knew all the answers. Detectives always said that was the best kind of interrogation.

  But it left Halsey with a lot of unanswered questions. The one that was troubling her most was still the most personal and embarrassing one.

  “Who else has seen my journal?”

  “At least two of your Spartans,” Parangosky said, heading for the door. “I’m giving the survivors the opportunity to look at their family records if they wish. But I admit I’m not sure how to square the requirement for transparency with reopening old wounds for the surviving parents whose children really are dead now.”

  Parangosky slung the strap of her purse over her shoulder and opened the door. As it swung back, Halsey caught sight of an armed marine standing outside.

  She was happy to accept a life sentence—damn, even a death sentence—if they’d just gave her one chance to talk to her remaining Spartans again and apologize, perhaps even try to explain.

  “Admiral? Admiral!” Halsey called out before the doors swung shut. “What’s going to happen to them now? The war’s over. What are you going to do with them?”

  Footsteps came back to the door again, and Parangosky stood in the entrance.

  “That depends on what they want to do,” she said. “We’ll probably offer them the opportunity of pulling together the remaining Spartan-Threes and integrating them into the Spartan-Four program.” Halsey had to hand it to Parangosky. She really knew how to drop the full payload on someone. “Oh, and you might want to keep this. I hope you feel it’s appropriate.”

  Parangosky reached into the folder tucked under her arm, pulled out a photograph, and held it out to Halsey.

  “I thought you’d like to see the memorial they gave you.” Parangosky stared into her face with evident satisfaction. It was a picture of a plaque with its neat inscription. “Ackerson has one too. Galling as it must be for you, he died a hero. Welcome to your afterlife, Dr. Halsey.”

  Halsey studied the photograph as the door closed again. It took her a few seconds to work out what she was looking at, but then she understood. It was a plaque on a memorial, as Parangosky had said, and it was her epitaph.

  Under her carefully engraved name, service number, date of birth, and a summary of her career, the inscription read: “Dr. Halsey was on Reach at the time of its attack by the Covenant and though no body was recovered, she is presumed dead.”

  As memorials went, it was rather long and not at all poetic.

  She wondered how much they’d found to say about John-117.

  UNSC PORT STANLEY, VENEZIA SECTOR: MARCH 2553.

  Mike Spenser hadn’t called for assistance on Venezia, but then he wasn’t the kind of man to send out casual invites for no reason, either. Osman checked on Phillips one last time before jumping to slipspace.

  “How’s he doing, BB?”

  An image of a gray ceramic bowl full of something brown and lumpy flashed up on the screen in front of her. It took her a few moments to work out that she was looking at Phillips’s breakfast from the perspective of his breast pocket. She was careful not to start a conversation that would attract any Sangheili attention, but it was hard to resist.

  “Yum,” she said quietly. “Who ate that before you did?”

  Phillips let out a sigh. “Don’t. Please.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Except the food, yes.” The view shifted. Phillips had stood up and was moving toward an open window. The cityscape that Osman could see was a lot prettier than whatever he’d been trying to eat. The architecture was massive, ancient, and impressive, all billowing curves and vast arches in multicolored stone. “That’s Ontom. And somewhere down there is our mad monk’s HQ.”

  “How long are you going to be there?”

  “A few days.”

  “Okay, we’ve got to slip and check out Venezia, but we’ll drop out regularly to sync up BB’s fragment. Don’t take any risks trying to find the temple.”

  “I won’t. I promise. Phillips out.”

  Osman was sure he was having the time of his life despite the occasional peaks in his heart rate. BB drifted across to the comms console and settled in front of her.

  “I’m having second thoughts,” she said.

  “We couldn’t have turned down that chance. The Arbiter would have thought it was suspicious, too.”

  “Maybe. Has Vaz told Naomi what’s in her file yet?”

  “Finally. He’s been very diplomatic, though. He might be ninety kilos of surly muscle, but he’s fundamentally kind to people he’s not been instructed to kill.”

  There was no finer compliment, Osman decided. “He’s okay, our Vaz. Although I had Mal down for ship’s agony aunt.”

  Well, that was one boil lanced, except it wouldn’t now heal cleanly. Osman made a conscious effort to put her own forgotten family out of her mind and focused on Venezia and Infinity until it was time to drop out of slip again and check on Phillips.

  BB rotated, loitering. “Are you sure you don’t want to know?”

  “About my family?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ever wondered why I haven’t looked for myself? You must have.”

  “Well, motivation makes me curious. But humans … sometimes you can step back when you know you’re not going to be able to handle knowledge. That’s one thing I can never do.”

  “Nothing more important than knowledge, right? Awareness is all we are.”

  “I can’t hold hands or enjoy a coffee. I’m sure you can understand why my priorities aren’t the same as yours.”

  “Okay, BB, I’ll tell you. I don’t want to know because I’m ashamed of myself. As long as I don’t know who my folks were, I can avoid thinking what I could have done to spare them whatever misery they went through. I was a Spartan. Even as a kid, I could have hacked the system to find them, or even tried to escape—some kids managed that, but not me. I could have let them know I wasn’t dead and that the child they’d buried wasn’t me. I could have saved them from all that.”

  “In theory. So why didn’t you?”

  “I’d love to blame Halsey for brainwashing me into accepting the need for total secrecy. But looking back on it I wonder if I was just too incapable or too cowardly. Why didn’t I even try?”

  “You were just a child. That’s why. You were a victim.”

  “You sure you’re an AI, BB? That’s a very human reaction.”

  “Hmm. Perhaps I need to reboot.…”

  “Thanks for trying to make me feel better.”

  “I’m not. Just telling it like it is. Children don’t have the power or awareness that their adult conscience tells them they had at the time. You were a child, held against your will.”

  Awareness is all we are. Yes, that was true. She thought of Vaz, struggling to find words for all that terrible stuff from Naomi’s file, stuff that would make any human being want to throttle the life out of whoever plunged their parents into that he
ll, and almost weakened.

  “What would you say to your parents now?” BB asked. “Purely hypothetical. If you found them now, what would you say?”

  Osman had no idea. She’d shut it out of her mind a long time ago. Maybe Naomi had too, but she got the feeling that Halsey hadn’t quite erased her as thoroughly as she’d wiped the other kids clean of their pasts.

  “I couldn’t make up for all that lost time,” she said. “If they were still alive, then they’d have reached some kind of acceptance of it. What would be the point of giving them more shocks and unhappiness?”

  “People have late reunions all the time. They say any time together is better than none.”

  “BB, are you trying to break something to me?”

  “No. I said hypothetical. But when the Admiral finally gives her evidence to the Select Committee, we might well find parents coming out of the woodwork. There’ll be no avoiding it then. We’ll get every parent who ever lost a child between the ages of six and nine grasping at that straw. And that’s going to be a lot of bereaved people.”

  Osman’s business was intelligence, thinking through every angle before she acted. The one thing she hadn’t analyzed was what would be unleashed in the colonies when Parangosky cleared her yardarm. Part of her wanted to ignore it, and the other part saw things in terms of the impact on the UNSC.

  She was going to have to get used to those gray areas.

  “I’ll worry about that later,” she said, walking onto the bridge. The ODSTs looked up at her as if she’d said walkies to a dog. “Prepare to slip. Let’s see how Spenser’s getting on.”

  “Does that mean we get to stretch our legs, ma’am?” Mal asked. “Vaz wants a souvenir of Venezia.”

  “Why not?” That was what ODSTs were for: operating behind enemy lines. “Want to check out some covert insertion sites, Devereaux?”

  “Yes ma’am.”