by Kelly Gay
As she turned to leave the lounge, that thin bubble broke at the sight of the armiger standing hunched in the doorway.
She took a carefully controlled breath. “Move.”
He didn’t budge.
Her blood pressure rose. Behind her, Spark called out, “Captain Forge . . . Rion.”
She turned to find the avatar above the lounge table’s holopad.
“I wanted to tell you. . . .” he started. “I truly did. But when I attempted it . . . I could not do it. I did not want to be the one to cause such pain. But I know now it was inevitable.” He paused. “You have not asked me how I knew.”
No, she hadn’t. It was too new, the knowledge that her father was really gone, the accepting of it. For so long, she’d felt that he was out there somewhere, lost, waiting. . . .
But she also knew that she’d have to get it over with some time. One giant messy lump of details and more grief . . .
She met Spark’s gaze, and stepped back into the lounge, waiting.
“As 343 Guilty Spark, I had a number of interactions with species of the former Covenant—Sangheili, Huragok, San’Shyuum—as well as with humanity and their United Nations Space Command and Office of Naval Intelligence. . . . I have been to many interesting places due to those meetings, and I gleaned such a marvelous collection of data from them. So much data, it would astound you. In fact, the number of—”
Rion lifted a brow and brought him back on topic.
“When I was recovered and placed on your ship, I did as my nature dictated. I gleaned data. The name of your father’s ship triggered an echo in my memory. It took several days, but I managed to coax this recollection from my memory stores.
“The Spirit of Fire routinely engaged in preprogrammed scheduled maintenance sheds and data drops. It was—or is—their hope to leave behind a trail, you see? Embedded within a recovered drop was a message to you from your father, John Forge. This message was left in every drop, a promise made by the ship’s AI, Serina, and the ship’s captain to your father.
“I should have purged the information. But, given my nature, it is hard to part with even the smallest byte of intelligence, especially those that ring with such humanity. . . . I have sent the packet to the datapad in your quarters.”
His revelation should have come as a surprise, but Rion was becoming used to the shocking, the unexpected, the awe-inspiring. It was part of their new normal. At least, that’s what she told herself as she inclined her head, and then left the lounge.
In her quarters, she sat at her desk and powered on her datapad.
She paused, unsure if she was ready. . . .
But with a steadying breath, she opened the datapad and accessed the message.
An instant blast of pain hit her square in the chest. Her father’s face loomed large in the frame, looking off to the side for a moment before he ran a hand down his scruffy jaw, then let out a heavy sigh. He was standing on a hard light bridge on a Forerunner structure that Rion now knew to be Etran Harborage, the shield world.
It was the same day, she realized, the same clothes, and the same view as the video Little Bit had shown her.
Only now he wasn’t grinning.
As he turned back and stared into the camera, she saw it all written in his dark eyes and the tight set to his face. What he was about to do. The decision already made. Her heart pounded, throat raw as she tried to swallow. He opened his mouth, shook his head, and then tried again.
“Hey, kiddo.”
His words lodge in his throat, his expression searching, looking for the right way to begin. But there are no good words for this, no good way to say what he needs to. So he shrugs. There’s nothing he can do now.
“I’m out of time, Lucy. . . . This war, it’s coming on hard and fast. . . .
“When you see this, you’ll be older. I told Serina to wait. Don’t be mad about that. Little you doesn’t need to grow up with this on her shoulders. But . . .” He shakes his head; a muscle ticks in his jaw. He is struggling. “Can’t go without saying good-bye. We have a deal, you and me. Always be straight with each other. I’m not about to back out of it now.
“Without a reactor, Spirit will drift a while before she’s found or makes it back home. Serina will hold on to this message and make sure you get it when enough time passes. She and Cutter promised me that.”
He looks away, rubs his jaw again.
“Look, kiddo . . . what we’re facing . . . it doesn’t look good. There’s a fleet of alien ships here. Tech like we’ve never seen before. If it falls into the wrong hands, we’re done for. You, your mom, your granddad, Aunt Jill—everyone. So I’m doing my part, okay?
“This is what it takes. This is a sacrifice I knew came with the job.
“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me. Never doubt that. Never think that what I do now means I don’t love you, cuz, kid, I swear my heart is full.”
His eyes turn glassy. He knows it, and gives them a quick swipe. The next part seems to hurt him the most. “You’re going to be one hell of a lady. I’m already proud of the person I know you’ll be.”
He stops, and his breath is shaky as he takes a moment to get a hold of himself before looking back into the camera.
“So this is good-bye. I’m so sorry. I hope one day you can forgive me for leaving you. Until then, chin up, shoulders straight, and you never, ever be afraid to take life by the horns and make it what you want it to be.”
He gives a sharp nod, kisses his fingers, and then slaps them onto the camera lens.
Rion sat very still as her heart shattered, feeling every stab of pain, every break and fissure. The last twenty-six years of her life washed away, leaving behind a little girl who loved her father more than life itself and missed him terribly.
Tears fell onto the desk.
She could barely breathe, afraid that if she blinked or spoke or moved the rest of her would break too, just crack into a million pieces. She lost all sense of time, her mind a daze, full of hazy images of the past and the present.
Her father was gone.
She’d never get to rescue him, never fulfill the fantasy she’d lived with for so long of the moment he saw her face and knew she’d never given up on him. She’d never get to throw her arms around him and hug him so tight until he laughed and told her he was choking.
Like so many others in the war, he’d died a hero’s death—a soldier, a marine through and through. He loved what he did, and he protected what was his.
He was stardust now. She’d flown her ship through his final act. And leave it to him to go out big. John Forge had lived true to his beliefs—as he said, taking life by the horns and wrestling it into submission, even if that meant going out in the process.
A warrior’s heart and a wild soul.
And she’d never see him again.
It was all over.
Had Rion learned of her father’s death early on, she wouldn’t be the person she was now. She’d never have left Earth, wouldn’t have loved being out among the stars so much. . . .
Everything she’d become was because of him.
She thought of this other life she might have lived, of things like fate and destiny, and questioned whether any of it really mattered at all. Her mind told her it was all random—it was far easier that way—but her heart told her there were paths and plans, that maybe John Forge hadn’t died for nothing, maybe he had made an enormous difference, his single courageous act reverberating across the entire galaxy.
She held on to that thought, rubbing her wet eyes, head aching with regrets and revelations, heart burning with loss and grief.
And she let go of what might have been, and embraced what was.
Her calling was in the stars.
With her father.
Where she belonged.
CHAPTER 52
* * *
Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, Africa, Earth
When her team checked in, Annabelle breathed a sigh of relief. No losses
. Some minor injuries, the worst being Agent Hahn’s cracked tibia.
Ferg had been working around the clock in conjunction with the stat bots, trying to solve the riddle of why Guilty Spark had wanted into their system in the first place. Ferg had had some success creating a timeline of the splinter’s movements within the facility’s framework. The monitor hadn’t just wanted them to shut down; it had been searching for very specific data—namely, the repeated intrusion by an unknown Catalog, which had been hounding ONI since its sudden emergence in 2552, along with the files on the other Catalog recovered from the savanna.
Just that small splinter of Guilty Spark could have done massive damage, and yet it had withdrawn without any real harm to their systems at all, which was something of a conundrum.
They might never know why.
According to reports, the colored light shooting into the atmosphere, which had been witnessed by several hundred people across the area, carried what the AR team and Apollo claimed was a pod seen hovering inside the hard light column within the mountain. Since the armiger had stepped into this light and two humanoid shapes were then seen floating inside, Dr. Iqbal theorized it was a Lifeworker pod, and the other shape inside the light had been an imprint of the Librarian.
Annabelle had to admit the idea held weight. Despite their beliefs, however, everything witnessed by both teams was being run through ONI’s knowledge base of Forerunner discoveries.
That 343 Guilty Spark had actually made its way to Earth to hunt for the Librarian was something Annabelle couldn’t seem to wrap her mind around. She supposed she’d never really believed it would happen. One of the big eventualities they’d prepared for had occurred.
They were no closer to obtaining the monitor than before, but they did have a new Forerunner facility to excavate, study, and learn from.
The Taurokado was on its way back to Onyx to do Barton’s bidding, while Fireteam Apollo was off to rendezvous with the UNSC Infinity for reassignment. Annabelle’s team, along with BOOKWORM’s science division, was now engaged in what would be a very long process of cataloging and exploring the newly exposed site in the mountain.
Annabelle made her way into the site, passing through the narrow passage and into the cavern, now flooded with light. The rubble that had nearly killed her team and the Spartans had been cleared away from the approach to the light bridge, reactivated by Dr. Iqbal.
The hard light cast the entire chamber in a pale, otherworldly glow.
Such an amazing feat of technology, harnessing photons and exciting them enough to form a solid surface—and stranger still to be walking on one. Annabelle hesitated, staring across the divide to the other side, where several scientists in white lab coats inspected the translocation pad, recording notes and taking readings, while a number of drones were mapping the interior site.
Dr. Iqbal was across the bridge, kneeling in front of the terminal, studying something of note. With a deep breath in, then out, Annabelle headed across to the platform, imagining how it had looked to her team when they first arrived, finding the Ace of Spades crew with a Forerunner armiger. They’d been eyewitnesses to the column of light, to the armiger entering and exiting with something in its grasp.
Dr. Iqbal sensed a presence and glanced over his shoulder. “Director.”
“Doctor. Any idea where they might have gone?”
“None. We were able to access the translocation platform,” he said, looking up at the cylindrical column carved out of the rock and leading to the surface. “It’s a static portal. Takes us to the base of Mawenzi’s peak.”
“So Forge and her crew used the portal, and met up with her mystery ship there.”
“And the armiger, don’t forget.”
She smiled. “Hard to. And the artifact?”
“No clue. I’ve watched the team’s footage several times, as I’m sure you have as well. Most of it was hidden in the armiger’s grasp, but it looks like some sort of metal box. Doesn’t match anything in our database.”
“Any theories?”
“Not yet. But if it was the Librarian’s imprint he accessed . . . if he spoke to her, received something from her, it must be of great importance.”
Perhaps something she’d felt was imperative to leave behind before the Halo’s pulse reached her. . . . Just a hunch, given what they knew so far. Annabelle glanced around the chamber again, realizing how much work was left to do here and elsewhere. “Keep me posted, Doctor.”
“Of course.”
Annabelle left him to his task and walked to the edge of the outcrop, staring down into the dark, then across the divide where the team had nearly been crushed by falling rock. Odd.If the armiger—controlled as it was by Guilty Spark—wanted them dead, all it had to do was deactivate the light bridge, and her ARs and Fireteam Apollo would have fallen into the darkness below.
As with the intrusion into the facility’s mainframe, it seemed the goal had not been destruction or damage.
Guilty Spark had merely wanted to access their files and to interact with the supposed imprint of the Librarian.
And, once again, they might never know why. They did have that light anomaly, though, which had been captured on the team’s feed. For three seconds, this entire chamber had lit up. The footage time stamp had stopped, and then picked up another anomaly four seconds later. Thea was certain there was a code within the light itself.
And as for the crew of the Ace of Spades . . . ? Well, they were living on borrowed time.
CHAPTER 53
* * *
For the record, we never left Earth.
For the past week, the Ace of Spades has remained hidden. We are still on the continent of Africa, perched on a plateau overlooking the Tsavo National Forest. Rion was not in the right mind-set to concern herself where I took us when we escaped, so I kept us here, knowing our business was not yet complete.
She has not seemed to care about anything for so many days that I began to wonder if I made a terrible mistake in telling her the truth about her father.
She spent the days hiking the local trails, going through normal routines with the crew, and ignoring me as much as she could. A shade of her former self.
And then suddenly, like the sun returning after a long bout of rain, she came back.
Still not ready to forgive me, of course.
Though her agreement to participate in the ritual we are about to perform strikes me as a positive sign that forgiveness may be forthcoming.
“Are you ready?” I ask her.
Lessa, Niko, and Ram join us, dressed in the finest clothes they have, which for Niko is the same outfit he wears every day. Lessa has donned a dress, and Ram is wearing his salvager coat with its many stolen medals and ribbons. Rion’s dark hair is loosely braided and hanging over her shoulder. She wears a clean pair of pants and a type of shirt referred to as a “tank top.”
I have already built the fire.
The sun is just beginning to set, casting the land in shades of orange and yellow and pink.
In my short life on Earth, we had many rituals for saying good-bye to those we lost. Songs sung, bodies painted, dances around a tall fire . . . We might have been a primitive people, but we loved and we mourned those we lost all the same. These actions do not change across the vast oceans of time or with the rise and fall of civilizations.
I believe there is a very good chance that we might never return to Earth. So this particular farewell matters.
This time, I will say a proper good-bye to my home, my family, and my friends.
I am letting them go.
The Lifeworker pod and imprint left without me. That too was a loss in many ways, a difficult choice after so many thousands of years, but the right one. I know that now.
I will learn to look forward, not back.
And so, as the sun sinks into the western sky, I begin to sing.
I sing for Forthencho, for Gamelpar and Vinnevra, for Bornstellar and Riser. I sing for Ram’s lost crew, and the parents t
he siblings never knew, and I sing for John Forge and his great sacrifice.
We write their names on the stone ledge nearby with red ochre and charcoal, and we send their spirits off into the west.
We then stay awhile and watch the sun disappear beyond the horizon.
I admire the view. There is nothing quite like a sunset in this part of the world, the sky now awash with fiery pinks and oranges, purples and dusky blues.
Eventually the heavens turn black and the air grows cold. The fire is almost burned away. Ram is sitting with his legs dangling over the plateau’s edge, smoking one of his hand-rolled “cigarettes,” a curious habit. The siblings are painting symbols around the names written on the rock behind us. Rion sits at the fire, her fingers stained with charcoal and red.
“Rion—” I begin, but she holds up a hand to silence me and finally pulls her gaze away from the flames. Her look is stern, eyes hard.
“Why did you come here? What did you want from the Librarian?” she asks me.
“I wanted to access the Domain.”
This is partially true.
“Why?”
I can see this is my moment to be honest. This is her test.
“To find the memories, the ghosts of my friends . . . to join them or to bring them out, of which I am not certain.”
“You would have left this world, for what? The afterlife?”
“It is not an afterlife . . . but yes.”
“Why did you come back, then?”
“Because . . . what I wanted when I first retrieved my human memories was to find those I knew, my friends. All the time I had spent alone . . . it was all very fresh and startling . . . and horrifying. So my immediate aim was to find them, to make the Librarian return them, through a geas perhaps. But as I assembled my memories on Geranos-a and was then rescued by you and your crew, many things began to change. . . .
“I now have my freedom. My programming is my own. And I no longer wish to be chained to the past. It is time for me to move on.”