Point of Light

by Kelly Gay

  The problem was, Niko had a history with the blackmailer, and allowing anyone to help him meant revealing a truth he’d sworn would never get out. And, unfortunately, Bex knew it.

  After creating a temporary backdoor access into his old Waypoint profile, one that ONI was monitoring, along with all the others, he’d found the message waiting in his mail folder. Innocuous, but he had read between the lines, saw Bex’s alias, and knew where to go to get the real message.

  Another server. Another account. Another back door. Simple enough.

  And there it was, straight from the one person he never imagined would turn on him and use the truth against him, especially for her Courier guild, Holson Relay. He supposed he couldn’t blame her. He’d left without so much as a good-bye, though he had tried to make amends over the last couple of years, to keep in touch.

  But his attempts paled against the fact that he had gotten away from Aleria and Bex hadn’t. They’d been partners of a sort, Holson Relay and Cross Cut aligning for a time. She’d been their resident tech expert and he’d been theirs.

  If Bex didn’t get the tech she was asking for now, she threatened to spill the truth they’d uncovered and it soured his gut. They’d made a pact. How could she have swung a one-eighty so quickly?

  He had one month to get his hands on a bank of midsize slipspace capacitors. Talk about one hell of a deadline. Too pricey to buy outright… though, if he gathered his income from the Forerunner tech they’d sold earlier in the year along with a loan, he might be able to pull it off. But even then, he’d have to forge the necessary paperwork and bypass sales regulations. There wasn’t time to go to Triniel, salvage, and then sell the goods to raise funds. Nor was there time to recover a bank of capacitors from salvaging a decent wreck. The black market was looking like his best option.

  Or you could ask for help…

  No. He had a good situation now. The best, in fact. He wasn’t going to jeopardize it by letting the truth get out. Sometimes you had to hold those past deeds and truths close to your chest, bury them down deep where no one could find them, where they’d be forgotten, where it was better for everyone.

  After burning his trail, Niko used a new encryption key to make a new account, addressed a reply to Bex, and hit send.

  Fine. I’ll do it.

  He burned the account and prayed to God this was a onetime deal. He sat back in his chair, wanting to vomit.

  CHAPTER 5

  Ace of Spades / Slipspace to Emerald Cove

  Like faint breath on the back of one’s neck, I feel them.

  I know they are there.

  Not errant bits of data or misplaced logs. They are old memories, I am sure of it. So old I am certain they do not belong to me.

  At times, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, these deep things will stir and stretch, about to wake and reveal themselves only to settle back down to their slumber and deny me once again.

  Such inability to recall that which I know is there is completely unacceptable. It prompts me to run diagnostics and sector scans to no avail.

  During my transformation from human to machine, Bornstellar said I was becoming a keeper of the biological records of my race. “That seemed the best way to salvage your memories and your intellect, and to safely contain the most dangerous components of the Librarian’s experiments.”

  For so long these words were forgotten. Now I ponder them, and their meaning, more and more.

  Patience, however, is the key. More or less.

  Waiting—though I never liked to do so in any form, human or ancilla—has become a special talent of mine. Patience never fails to produce the response I desire. This would be true for most beings, but then, most beings are biological and, sadly, they simply run out of time.

  This musing gives me pause.

  I might, once again, outlive the majority of life in the galaxy—a quite conceivable and troubling notion, one I do not wish to repeat.

  Or… do I?

  All this knowledge and power curtailed in order to exist in this technologically unimpressive time period. Perhaps the next age will be more challenging, and I should indeed practice patience.…

  Rion enters the bridge with a cup of steaming drink, Casbah coffee, no doubt—it is her favorite. She sets it on the arm of her captain’s chair and then walks to the navigation console to check on our progress before settling down in her seat.

  She will die too.

  I will surpass her and the rest of the crew as I have surpassed everyone else.

  There is a quickening in me. It races through my core like a static charge burning a painful path. I am reminded of pain and loss and do not want to experience these things again.

  Not ever again.

  “So…,” Rion says with a wry smile. “You summoned me.”

  “Yes. Precisely thirty-eight minutes ago.”

  She sips her beverage. “This about the key?”

  “Of course it is.” The holo image of said object has been hovering above the tactical table for the last thirty-eight minutes. Clearly she can see it. “I’m glad you find this amusing. You were napping.”

  “Power nap. We mere humans need our rest. Believe me”—she shifts in her seat to get more comfortable—“after the morning I just had, I needed it.”

  She has yet to divulge events on Sonata, but I have decided against pushing her too fast simply to appease my curiosity, though I am sorely tested. Perhaps after my appeal…

  “Thought you’d have that symbol figured out by now.” She gestures to the slim rectangular device given to me by the Librarian’s imprint during our trip to Earth. A key, one with very curious properties.

  “Still a coordinate key?” she asks.

  I walk my holographic avatar around the key. “Yes…”

  “But…”

  “It bears the hallmarks of one, yes, but it is far more than that.” I magnify the key’s image. It hovers there, marvelous in design and ominous in meaning. Its beauty and the pain it brings me are undeniable.

  Done with such care and exquisite simplicity, it is unusual, graceful, and refined, and I clearly see the Librarian’s hand in its making. “It is the key of a Lifeworker, to be sure,” I say. “Clean quantum code written into hard-light filaments, which run through machine-cell alloy similar to my own. This allows the key to reshape itself. As you may recall, some months ago, Lessa’s handling of the key inadvertently triggered a command. One length of it”—I move the hologram and show the precise area—“collapsed inward by twelve millimeters to form an outline of this symbol.”

  The symbol, an old sigil, might be forgotten by time, but not by me.

  If I had a soul, it would bear this brand.

  And yet, this is what the Librarian asks of me. Always the hardest things.

  “It is a mark of identification,” I continue. “An old, forgotten symbol given to one of the Master Builder’s war machines before it was modified and assigned a new mark—a new sigil that it bears to this day.”

  Rion leans forward in her seat. It is about time she shows interest. “Are you telling me that symbol belongs to a Halo?”

  I am pleased she remembered the stories I have shared.

  There can be no war machines championed by the Forerunner known as the Master Builder other than Halo. They were his egregious yet ultimately successful legacy.

  The captain sits back, properly stunned.

  “We did have a deal,” I remind her. Another one. We were fond of making deals, she and I. “I was to aid in the search for the Spirit of Fire for six months”—I can be quite charitable when the occasion calls—“and if nothing was forthcoming and I was ready, we would turn to my key.”

  “I wouldn’t say nothing was forthcoming. What about Oban? Those Vultures and Sparrowhawks weren’t nothing.”

  Even I had been hopeful. To discover a group of support ships in such pristine condition, the same variants in Spirit of Fire’s complement, was a stroke of luck. The sale in the Oban market went to an Insurr
ectionist, but our goal was not to buy—it was simply to get close enough to access the crafts’ system logs. All wiped clean, but they did bear corresponding serial numbers to those assigned to the missing UNSC warship.

  “And then backtracking their provenance,” I reply. Four and a half months chasing phantoms. Another great disappointment.

  That frustration, felt by all, led to a respite. The crew went to Emerald Cove, and I accompanied Rion to Sonata.

  There is no better time than now to begin our journey.

  Rion regards me for quite some time, and though she appears dubious, it is clear she will honor our agreement. “You said the key led to a safe place. You didn’t say anything about a Halo.”

  “Upon initial examination, that was my assumption… my hope. I thought perhaps the key pointed to a shield world, one that I had only heard about in whispers.”

  One that might grant me access to the Domain, among other things.

  The captain releases a long sigh before cupping her mug with both hands and sipping. Eventually she acquiesces. “A side trip might liven things up a bit.”

  “It is apparent you can use a distraction.”

  “Thanks.” Her tone is flat and without an ounce of gratitude. “You’ll have to put together one hell of a preliminary brief. If we can’t get in and out clean and safe, it’s a no-go.”

  “I would be happy to.” I watch her a moment longer. She relaxes back in her chair, suddenly far away.

  Several hours have passed since we departed Sonata for our slipspace route to Emerald Cove, and now I must know. “Would you like to discuss your time on Sonata?”

  My query brings her back from wherever her mind wandered. A faint grimace tells me it might be a conversation she would rather not have, which only fuels my curiosity. “Your demeanor suggests things did not go as planned?”

  A soft snort is her initial response, but then her dark eyes settle on my avatar. “You had family, when you were human, sisters.”

  Even more curious now, I tilt my head. “Yes. Three of them.”

  “Were you close?”

  “They were much older.” Retrieving their distinct features is now impossible—those recollections are long gone. What remains are shadows, brief smudges, images seen across a crowded Marontik street, heads bowed, walking together toward the temple, the distortion of heat and dust in the air. “Sent to serve in the Librarian’s temple when I was a boy.”

  While her expression is contemplative, it does not hide the turmoil and hurt surrounding her. And I believe I understand. “You have family, besides your mother.”

  A low hum of affirmation vibrates her throat. “I do now, apparently.”

  “And you did not before?”

  “Surprise.” Her attempt at sarcasm is halfhearted at best. “I have a half-brother, sixteen years old. My mother remarried, I guess? Maybe. I don’t even know… we didn’t get into it.”

  “I presume it was not a happy reunion, then.”

  “How do you keep something like that from someone?” Her confusion weighs heavily on this question. Indeed, it is a difficult thing to understand.

  I think of my own mother, a hazier memory than that of my siblings. I barely recall my early family life; so much of it was spent running through the streets, no care to my safety or well-being.… Though I do recall her linen dress and ruddy blue apron, the basket she always carried held to her stomach as she bent over to help me up, the sun behind her.…

  Though her face is in shadow, I know she was smiling.

  How can I comfort Rion or offer words of wisdom when I too do not fully understand the motivations of mothers (both supreme and biological) or why they shape outcomes the way they do?

  “There is not always a logical answer for the things people do when they care—or when they don’t.… I wish I had more to offer.”

  “Well, I appreciate the thought.” Her attention zeroes in on me, her eyes narrowing. “Do you dream?”

  The question is quite unexpected.

  If dreaming is memory, if it is hearing lost voices, seeing pieces of a past not my own, then: “In a manner, yes. Why do you ask?”

  “I dream of her. Not my mother. The Librarian.”

  “Does she speak to you?”

  “No. She’s just working in a garden, going down rows of… I don’t know, some kind of flowers or plants… stopping to nurture them, speak to them, prop one up, or pull a withered leaf from another.”

  The imagery builds in my mind. At her core, at the core of every Forerunner who took the rate of Lifeworker, lay an innate desire to preserve and nurture, to study and intimately understand the nature of all life.

  “When did the dreaming begin?”

  “Africa. After we left Kilimanjaro.”

  “Ah.” It explains much. “All humans retain some level of genetic memory and geas manipulation, passed down through generations, which stretch clear back to the first humans reseeded onto Earth after the firing of the Halo Array. Perhaps the imprint that appeared in Africa triggered an aspect of a long-existing geas in your family tree or is simply the leftover recognition pattern the Librarian once placed in all of her human populations at birth.”

  “How do I tell the difference—if it’s just my dream state at work or some genetic coding making me see certain things?”

  An alert pings the bridge.

  While information flows to me instantly, I do not interrupt as Rion drains her mug and checks the datapad at her seat. “We’ll be dropping out of slipspace soon.” She rises to exit the bridge. “Once we pick up the crew, we’ll see about your key.”

  “Thank you, Captain.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Ace of Spades / High Orbit above Emerald Cove

  Lessa hated leaving Emerald Cove, but like Niko and Ram, she was happy to reunite with the captain and Spark and be back on board Ace. After their reunion, and a quick lunch together in the lounge, they’d gone their separate ways while she remained, curled up in one of the ship’s lounge chairs, a commpad on her lap as she scrolled through her options. Excitement and guilt tangled in her chest.

  Option one was to keep traveling the stars with her brother and Rion, with Ram, and Spark—her family. The other option was to live a very different life, one she’d dreamed of since she was a young girl eking out a life in the slums of Aleria with Niko.

  She’d narrowed her search to two universities: Escada U and Baker-Verding. For kicks, she added the wild-card, never-in-a-million-years University of Edinburgh. The imposing buildings and manicured lawns, the smiling faces of students and teachers caught in frozen moments of educational bliss—none of it seemed real. It was more alien to her than run-ins with Sangheili bounty hunters and Kig-Yar pirates, or living on a ship with an ancient Forerunner AI.

  As was so often the case after scrolling through college galleries and guides, her excitement soured. Who the hell was she kidding?

  A year after salvaging Spark from Geranos-a, right under the high-and-mighty Office of Naval Intelligence’s nose, and then sneaking through Home Fleet’s defenses to find the Librarian’s imprint on Earth, their faces were still being plastered all over Inner and Outer Colony waypoints and every other media outlet ONI could influence with their lies.

  Their names had become synonymous with outlaw, renegade, wanted criminal. Crimes against the UEG, they said. Rewards issued across the colonies.

  Ridiculous. All of it.

  Still, if she wanted it badly enough, she could change her appearance and get Niko and Spark to work their magic with documents and IDs down to fooling DNA readers and bio scanners. She was one young woman in a galaxy of billions. Hiding in plain sight as a college student would be the easy part.

  But, it wasn’t ONI or bounties that worried her; it was making the decision itself, leaving the crew or going to school. After everything Rion had done for her, how could she just take off? See you later, thanks for everything?

  It didn’t feel right. But neither did turning her back on he
r dreams.

  With a sigh, she powered off her pad and stared beyond the lounge’s viewscreen, where an arc of Emerald Cove still dominated the bottom corner. She’d never tire of planetary blues and greens. Not when all she had grown up with was dust. Crewing with Rion had allowed her to see so many amazing things. She’d been to Earth. Earth! Colonists lived their whole lives, families went from generation to generation, without ever getting to visit the homeland.

  A flash of light caught her eye as Spark appeared over the holopad inlaid in the center of the lounge’s main dining and meeting table. His avatar was an exact copy of the physical armiger construct usually confined to the cargo hold, only this one was scaled down to a little over half a meter tall. Glowing blue eyes and a sleek silver-alloy head turned in her direction, dipping in recognition.

  Spark tilted his head suddenly, as though he heard something.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Yes…,” he answered, rather slowly.

  His avatar appeared a little different from the last time she’d seen him, though she couldn’t quite put her finger on any one thing in particular. The first time she’d seen him, he’d been a pile of black alloy parts, pinged and scratched and damaged.

  Salvaged from Geranos-a, he’d given them one hell of a surprise when he reassembled in Ace’s hold, hard-light technology pulling the floating parts together into a menacing three-meter-tall Forerunner soldier called an armiger—a deadly sniper variant. An amazing salvage find on its own, but far more extraordinary was what had found refuge inside the damaged armiger shell—the former Halo monitor 343 Guilty Spark.

  Over time, he had slowly transformed the armiger’s appearance thanks to the machine cells in the construct’s alloy, which allowed form manipulation. The soldier variant had given way to a sleek, futuristic-looking advanced alien intelligence.

  “When are you going to tell them?” he asked. “Have you decided?”