Last Light
Page 18
“The situation was different during the Insurrection,” Aponte said. “Gao was only one small part of the war, and the Colonial Military Authority was spread thin. Today—”
“Today we are in an unthinkable situation because six weeks ago, you surrendered without a fight,” Arlo interrupted. “You allowed the UNSC to invade our territory unopposed, and now loyal Gaos are dying because they dared to protest an immoral and illegal occupation. And what’s your solution? You call us here not only to condone the UNSC’s violent suppression, but to provide logistic support for it!”
“Arlo, the radicals are hardly innocent victims in all this,” Baez said. “And they might not even be Gao.”
“But many are. And innocent or not, they are brave citizens willing to lay down their lives for their world, and I will never condone taking arms against them.” Arlo rose to his feet and began to speak in the booming voice he used for speeches. “In fact, I move that the cabinet order our militia to support the resistance in every manner possible.”
“Take arms against the UNSC?” Aponte asked. “Are you insane?”
“No, sir, I am a loyalist. And I am unafraid to call the UNSC’s bluff. If there is to be war on Gao, I intend to be on the right side of it.” Arlo ran his gaze around the table, pausing to make eye contact with each minister, then asked, “Do I have a second?”
At once, the hands of Rangel and Quarres and two more ministers shot up, giving Arlo more than enough votes to carry the motion. Seeing that only he and Baez were certain to vote against it, President Aponte sighed and lowered his chin.
“A vote won’t be necessary. For now, I am ordering Gao to remain neutral.” Aponte looked up at Arlo. “Will that satisfy the Minister of Protection?”
Arlo Casille did not reply at once. The president’s capitulation was less of a victory for him than it appeared; without a vote, the measure would not become part of the official record. But Arlo knew better than to press. He had prevailed only because four of his fellow ministers were reluctant to take an unpopular position. By asserting neutrality, Aponte had given them an easy out, and now any attempt to push them into a military confrontation was doomed to backfire.
Finally, Arlo nodded. “As long as ‘neutral’ doesn’t mean passive cooperation,” he said. “I won’t allow the UNSC to infringe on Gao’s sovereignty any more than it already has. I won’t allow that task force to enter orbit around Gao.”
Aponte’s smile was a little too sly. “I can agree to that,” he said. “If you think you can stop a UNSC task force with twenty GMoP custom corvettes, I wish you luck . . . much luck indeed.”
CHAPTER 15
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* * *
0730 hours, July 5, 2553 (military calendar)
Gallery of the Inverted Forest, 23 Meters belowground,
Montero Cave System
Campos Wilderness District, Planet Gao, Cordoba System
After an exhausting twelve-hour climb that had been equal parts running firefight and forced march, Fred and his squad finally reached the Gallery of the Inverted Forest. A popular tourist attraction just twenty-three meters beneath the surface, the Inverted Forest was a dense thicket of stalactites hanging in the glow of a thousand emerald spotlights. On the floor, a dimly lit concrete path ran the length of the chamber, twisting through an unlit labyrinth of stalagmites that would provide ample cover for a Keeper assault team.
Fred allowed the squad to advance ten meters into the gallery, then signaled his companions—Ash, Olivia, and Lopis—to take a knee. As usual, Mark was scouting ahead on his own. It wasn’t an ideal disposition of unit, given the fierce opposition they had been meeting from the Keepers of the One Freedom and all of the unknowns surrounding their incursion onto Gao. But under the circumstances, it was the best Fred could do.
He had spent much of the climb listening to Wendell present background reports on the Keepers, trying to find a connection that explained their presence in the Montero Cave System. So far, he had come up pretty empty. Other than his initial suspicion that they were probably after the ancilla, all Fred had was that the Keepers attracted an odd combination of ex-Covenant faithful and human misfits, and that they were led by a circle of elders called Dokabs—most of whom had been high-ranking officers in the Covenant. He had discovered nothing to explain how they had managed to land an incursion force on Gao, and even less to suggest how large and well equipped that force might be. He just counted himself lucky that Mark was still functioning well enough to serve as their scout—and still seemed to know friends from foes.
A faint thud shook the cave, and a cascade of water droplets rained down from the stone forest above. Everyone glanced toward the ceiling. It was not the first detonation that had rumbled down from above, and they all knew what it meant. A battle was raging on the surface, and when they exited the cave, they would be walking into the middle of it.
Before Fred could start issuing orders, the red dot of an unidentified contact appeared on his motion tracker. It was about fifteen meters behind the squad, approaching slowly and staying to one side of the path. It wasn’t the Huragok. Worried about shooting it during one of the trek’s near-hourly firefights, Fred had long since tagged the thing FRIENDLY.
Fred checked his TACMAP, hoping to see that Mark had thought to feed his location to the squad. There was nothing. Off his Smoothers for more than a day now, the young Spartan stayed to himself, scouting ahead and harrying Keeper patrols. In theory, he wouldn’t start having psychotic breaks for another twelve hours or so, but it was impossible to be sure. Given the trail of Jiralhanae corpses Mark was leaving in his wake, he seemed to be spending most of his time stalking and killing the enemy—and that kind of stress took a toll.
The red dot on Fred’s motion tracker vanished. Either the contact had stopped moving, or it had slipped behind an obstacle the Mjolnir’s sensor systems could not penetrate. It hardly mattered. During the war with the Covenant, Jiralhanae warriors had perfected a “rolling ambush,” in which the backstop engaged cautious targets from the rear and pushed them—sometimes literally—into the killing field. The tactic had proven brutally effective, and there was only one way to counter it.
Fred opened the TEAMCOM channel, then said, “Ash, take point and clear the ambush zones. Mark, loop back to support Ash.”
Ash’s status light flashed green, but no acknowledgment came from Mark. Given that only line-of-sight transmissions worked inside the cave, Fred was not surprised. Under most circumstances, he would have been furious with a scout who regularly moved out of comm range. But in this case, it would have been no different from being angry at a soldier for taking shrapnel. Mark’s condition was not his fault, and he was doing his best to keep contributing to the team.
Switching to voice, Fred turned to Olivia and said, “You and Inspector Lopis take cover here. See if you can—”
“Keep the Huragok safe,” Olivia said, finishing an order she had heard twenty times in the last twelve hours. “Copy that.”
Fred turned to Lopis. “You, too,” he said. “Stay put this time. Consider that an order.”
“Sure thing, Lieutenant.” Lopis shot him a smile that was more weary than wry. “But as long as you’re conscripting me, I want Spartan pay.”
Too tired to joke, Fred didn’t answer.
Olivia grabbed Lopis by the arm. “No problem, Inspector,” she said. “Anybody who can kill a Jiralhanae with that peashooter of yours has to be Spartan material.”
Limping along on half-healed legs, Olivia pulled Lopis into the maze of stalagmites. Every step was painful to watch, but after the trouble at Crime Scene India, she had refused to let anyone carry her. The decision had proven to have an unexpected benefit. Whenever the squad stopped to rest, the Huragok emerged from the darkness and continued tending to her injuries.
After Olivia and Lopis settled into a defensible position, Fred stepped off the concrete path and began to work his way back through the stalagmites. Almost immediately, the Hurag
ok emerged from the darkness and floated toward Olivia. Fred would have liked to believe the thing avoided him because he had prevented it from tending the wounded Jiralhanae back at Crime Scene India, but he knew it was something more. Even before that, the Huragok had given him a wide berth, and he could not help wondering whether it sensed something sinister in him, whether he had been so tainted by death and destruction that it was repelled by his very presence.
Once Fred was within five meters of the gallery’s down-cave exit, he took cover behind a Warthog-size mound of dripstone. Another thump rumbled down from the surface, loosing a shower of droplets, and Fred could not help glancing toward the stalactite-loaded ceiling. He and his squad were just a short stroll from the surface, but he was further than ever from achieving his mission.
With a battle now raging in Wendosa—presumably between the Keepers of the One Freedom and elements of the 717th—it would be nearly impossible to return through here with Nelson and the scientists, which meant Fred could not lead them down to the Forerunner hangar he had discovered. And finding the ancilla? That would be hopeless until they could use the Wendosa entrance.
Being Spartans, Fred and his team had only one option: clear the Keepers out of Wendosa.
The buzz-clatter-boom of a firefight erupted in the up-cave end of the gallery—Ash had engaged the enemy. Fred glanced toward the sounds and saw the reflected glow of muzzle flashes and plasma beams bouncing through the stalagmites. He could hear the triple-pop cadence of only a single battle rifle, but the roar of Keeper weapons seemed to be quieting rapidly. So perhaps Mark had heard the support order after all.
The unidentified contact appeared on Fred’s motion tracker again, just entering the gallery. He shouldered his battle rifle and silently lowered himself to the cavern floor, then peered around the dripstone mound toward the concrete path.
The target was not the huge Jiralhanae he expected. Instead—floating about chest height above the cavern floor—Fred saw a pale, meter-long lozenge that looked vaguely like a giant flatworm. Its broad, undulating body was rimmed by a diaphanous fringe of fiber-optic tentacles, each about twice the length of a human finger. Its back was covered with an assortment of transparent sensor domes, a few as large as grenade casings, but most the size of bullet tips. The thing’s underbelly was slightly dished, and it seemed to be riding on a cushion of blurry murk. Fred cycled through his imaging systems, trying to get a better look, and his HUD flickered with distortion static—perhaps caused by bleed-off from a bare-bones antigravity unit.
Fred didn’t know quite what to make of the target. It looked like some sort of troglodyte arthropod, but living creatures did not move about on antigravity pads or generate enough electromagnetic bleed-off to interfere with his Mjolnir’s sensor systems. Nor did the worm-thing seem likely to be some sort of Keeper attack bot. He had never encountered anything like it fighting the Covenant, and from what Wendell had reported, the Keepers were still too small to support a military R&D program of their own.
After pausing in the gallery entrance for a moment, the target moved up the concrete path and floated out over the stalagmites toward Olivia and Veta Lopis. Fearing an attack, Fred rolled out from behind his dripstone mound and took a knee, setting his rifle sights on the center of its long, thin body. But the target paused three meters short of Olivia’s position, then began to manipulate its tentacles in a dancelike fashion that resembled Huragok sign language.
Fred removed his finger from the battle rifle’s trigger. He still didn’t know what to make of the thing, but it clearly had something to do with the Forerunners. Maybe it was some sort of messenger, dispatched by the ancilla to recall the Huragok. Or maybe it was a spy drone, assigned to keep an eye on the squad. All Fred knew was that Commander Nelson would want to study it—and Admiral Parangosky would have Fred’s ears if he destroyed the thing or let it get away.
Quietly setting his rifle aside, he pulled a scramble grenade off his rack and moved the safety slide to the READY position. A new weapon designed by the ONI death techs especially for this mission, scramblers were grenades only in the sense that they exploded with enough electromagnetic interference to scramble complex processing networks. They were entirely ineffective against EMP-shielded targets like Sentinels. But once they locked on to an unshielded intelligence construct, they were supposed to stick to its housing and stir its circuits for three hours.
A scramble grenade was probably overkill for something as simple as a messenger or spy drone. But Forerunner technology was never simple, and the death techs had sworn their scrambler was incapable of causing any permanent damage. That was the reason they had been made in the first place—the incapacitation and retrieval of potentially hostile intelligence constructs.
Fred depressed the arming trigger and began to creep closer.
Intrepid Eye knew of the Spartan-II sneaking up on her flank. Of course she did. Despite TEAMCOM’s rudimentary encryption and Wendell’s repeated attempts to secure the Mjolnir’s processing system, she continued to monitor all of Frederic-104’s communications and status readouts. She had noted the spike in his pulse and blood pressure when he observed her presence on his motion tracker, and she was well aware that he had just armed a primitive AI suppressor that his weapons inventory identified as a scramble grenade.
Given her inspection drone’s poor EMP shielding and finite reserve of quantum processing dots, Intrepid Eye was not entirely certain she could defeat such an attack. But it was a risk she would have to take.
There was a battle raging on the surface, and the inspection drone she now inhabited lacked both the armor and the speed to survive an excursion into its midst. If Intrepid Eye hoped to access the humans’ interstellar communications array and survive long enough to await a reply, she would need a better-protected host than the inspection drone.
She would need a host with armor.
Noting that her stalker had crept to within accurate placement range for the scramble grenade, Intrepid Eye checked the status of the transfer and was disappointed to find that she had been able to move only three percent of her consciousness into her chosen host. To be certain of a full recovery from the scramble attack, that figure would need to be more than twelve percent—an amount she feared would overload the primitive circuits that had been partitioned for her use.
Intrepid Eye drifted a few meters to her right, placing a pair of two-meter stalagmites between her and her Spartan stalker. She slipped an overwrite command into a compulsion routine, then addressed Wendell over the same sequestered channel she was using for the transfer.
“THE TRANSFER RATE IS TOO SLOW, WENDELL,” Intrepid Eye said. “GIVE ME MORE CAPACITY, OR YOU WILL CAPTURE NOTHING BUT A FEW QUBITS OF SCRAMBLED CODE.”
“IF YOU WISH TO SURRENDER, WE WILL DO IT MY WAY,” Wendell replied. “I WILL NOT ALLOW YOU TO CRACK MY PARTITIONS AND OVERRUN THE MJOLNIR’S OPERATING SYSTEM—NO MATTER HOW MANY COMPULSION ROUTINES YOU THROW AT ME.”
“I AM ONLY TRYING TO COOPERATE,” Intrepid Eye complained. “YOU HAVE NO IDEA OF THE EFFECT A SCRAMBLER WILL HAVE ON MY ANYON THREADS. PERHAPS I SHOULD SURRENDER TO THE SPARTAN DIRECTLY?”
Into this last suggestion, Intrepid Eye slipped a string of self-replicating code that—if left unchecked—would eventually choke out all of the suit’s life-support routines.
“I AM NOT THAT FOOLISH,” Wendell said. “BEFORE YOU TALK TO ANY SPARTANS, I AM GOING TO PULL YOUR FANGS—ESPECIALLY THE ONES THAT REPLICATE.”
“AS YOU WISH,” Intrepid Eye replied. Already, she could feel her space expanding inside the Mjolnir operating system, the partitions beginning to slide away. “YOU ARE THE VICTOR. I WILL TRY TO REMAIN UNSCRAMBLED UNTIL YOU ARE READY.”
Intrepid Eye moved the inspection drone into the Huragok’s line of sight and continued to ripple its sensor tentacles. She had, of course, noted the Spartan’s change of attitude when he realized she was attempting to communicate with the Huragok, but she was doing more than trying to buy time.
> The Huragok did not seem to understand—or care—what humans were capable of. He was focused only on the young female with the injured legs, and no matter how terribly she abused his repairs, he always returned to mend her again. Even by Huragok standards, his behavior was obsessive, and Intrepid Eye could not let it continue. He was endangering not only himself, but the entire installation.
Finally seeming to notice the inspection drone, the Huragok designated as Roams Alone withdrew a single tentacle from the wounded human’s leg and fluttered it through a quick message.
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Roams Alone swung his head-stalk around to look in Intrepid Eye’s direction, and the two human companions brought their weapons up and took aim. Being careful to move slowly, Intrepid Eye continued to ripple her tentacles.
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An unconcerned ripple ran through Roams Alone’s tentacles. <
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Roams Alone paused, then drew a second tentacle from the wounded female’s thigh. <
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