Battle Born

by Cassandra Rose Clarke

  “That sounds like one of your holo-film plots,” Evie said.

  Victor grinned. “If it works.”

  “You kept saying we.” Dorian gestured at Saskia. “You okay with this? Charging into town with just a plasma pistol?”

  Victor turned to Saskia.

  “No,” she said.

  Anger and disappointment jolted down Victor’s spine. “What?” he said. “Why not?”

  “We can’t fight the Covenant!” she cried. “We should wait until the UNSC gets here. We’ll tell them what we know, and they can—”

  “It’s been almost twenty-four hours,” Evie said. “Don’t you think they’d be here by now?”

  Dorian gestured, and Salome materialized again.

  “Are the UNSC in town?” he asked.

  “The UNSC?” She shook her head. “No, there’s no evidence of military involvement with the invasion.”

  “Thanks.” His voice was strained. He swiped through Salome and looked up at Victor.

  “Well?” he said. “What do we want to do? There’s no UNSC. But Saskia’s not wrong either.”

  Saskia looked down at her hands.

  “She’s not,” Evie said slowly. “But we don’t know how much time we have.” She hesitated. “We have no idea why the Covenant haven’t—why they haven’t started glassing the colony yet. Maybe we have some time.”

  Victor shivered with fear. Saskia pressed one hand to her forehead.

  “That’s fair,” she whispered. She looked right at Victor. “Your plan does make sense,” she said after a time. “But I’ll only go if you agree that we won’t try to start a fight.”

  Underneath the blanket of exhilarated terror, Victor felt a swell of joy. He smiled at her. “Of course,” he said. “We’ll lie low. That’s the whole idea.”

  “But if things look like they’re getting too dangerous,” Saskia said, “I’m coming back. Salome can track us so she’ll know where we are. If we aren’t at the shelter entrance, don’t open the door.”

  “Which entrance should we use?” Evie looked over at Dorian. “Any ideas? You knew about this place.” She gestured at the computer, the green lights brilliant in the gray mist.

  Dorian looked at her for a long time without saying anything. Then he looked over at Saskia, then at Victor.

  “You’re really sure about this?” he asked.

  Victor drew himself up. The needler felt suddenly too heavy.

  “I’m sure.”

  I’m going to be honest with you,” Dorian said as Victor and Saskia disappeared behind a row of trees. “Saskia was right. This is a really stupid idea.”

  Evie glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. Like all of them, he was soaked with rain, his long hair plastered against the side of his face. Glowering there in his dark clothes, he looked more intimidating than either Saskia or Victor, and he didn’t even have a weapon—he’d begrudgingly handed the rifle over to Saskia before she left.

  “I kind of agree with you,” she said. “But we don’t have a choice.” She paused. “I mean, we have to do something.”

  “Can’t disagree there.”

  They crouched in silence for a few moments, rain pattering around them. Evie shifted uncomfortably, aware of Dorian’s presence next to her. He was a stranger, really—she’d never spoken to him in school. But now they’d been lashed together by this invasion.

  “I guess we should try Salome.” He glanced at her. “You really think you’ll be able to mess with her programming?”

  Evie blushed. “I don’t know. It’s not exactly something I’ve tried before.”

  Dorian laughed. “Yeah. You never seemed like the type.”

  He turned and walked back over to the computer. Evie lingered a moment longer, watching the woods. Victor and Saskia were long gone. Evie dreaded hearing the whine of plasma fire.

  “Hello again, Dorian Nguyen.” Salome’s voice chirped like a bird in the shimmering forest. “Oh! That rhymes a bit, don’t you think?”

  Evie tore herself way from her vigil of the forest. Salome’s projection glowed in the rain.

  “We just sent Victor Gallardo and Saskia Nazari into town,” Dorian said, crouching so he was eye-level with her. “They’re going to the shelter entrance at Rue Camélia and Rue Violette. Can you let them in?”

  Evie moved over to Dorian’s side. Salome made an exaggerated frown.

  “You know I can’t.” She pouted. “I can’t open the doors until the Covenant are completely removed from the vicinity. Why haven’t you left like I asked, Dorian Nguyen and Evelyn Rousseau?”

  Evie frowned. Her father was always complaining about Salome’s programming—she was a dumb AI, meaning her intelligence had been built with code rather than by replicating the scan of a human brain. And while she’d been designed as a typical municipal infrastructure AI, over the years the city engineers had kept going in and messing with her programming. Cutting some focuses, adding others. Giving her this bizarre personality.

  “Saskia and Victor have weapons,” Dorian said. “They can clear out the Covenant in the area long enough to get inside the shelter safely.”

  “I can’t open the doors for any reason.” Salome jutted out a hip, tossed her hair over her shoulder. It was so unnerving, how flippant and obstinate she’d been programmed to be. “Not until the Covenant are gone. It’s a safety protocol.”

  “You’re not going to reason with her,” Evie tried.

  “There’s nothing reasonable about letting the Covenant inside the shelter,” said Salome.

  “I’m going to turn you off now, okay?” Dorian flicked his wrist without waiting for an answer, and Salome vanished.

  “I’m going to have to change that protocol,” Evie said. Her thoughts whirred, going back to her AI classes at school, and to the chats she and her father would have over dinner, arguing about the best way to create a truly artificial intelligence, no brain scanning allowed. “It’s probably part of her core programming, so it’s going to be tricky.”

  “Can you do it?”

  Evie took a deep breath. “Will the holo-menu work if I’m using it? It’s not tied to your DNA or anything?”

  Dorian laughed. “You’re giving this town way too much credit.” He tapped one of the blinking green lights, and the holo-menu materialized, shortcuts to access pathways floating around the air like butterflies. Evie could feel the electric prickle along her skin that meant Dorian was watching her, and she forced herself to concentrate. It’s just like Victor’s dragon. You can do this.

  It was nothing like Victor’s dragon. All of her experience with this level of AI programming was purely theoretical. Still, she reached out, tapped one of the icons. The computer’s processing information bloomed in front of her. She scrolled through it, scanning, until she found the linkup to Salome. She tapped it.

  Immediately, all the lights on the computer turned red, and the words ACCESS DENIED materialized.

  “Should have known it wouldn’t be that easy,” Evie ground out. She swiped back, scrolled through the processing information, looking for an in.

  Dorian, at least, didn’t say anything. Evie leaned closer, squinting at the information—there. A back door. Municipal computers usually had at least one, since they were worked on by multiple engineers spanning decades. She tapped it, pulled up a holo-keyboard, and began to type.

  This part was easy. Her father had shown her how to hack into a computer system like this when she was a little girl. It took her about five minutes to find the back door into Salome’s code. When she opened it, the code unfurled in a loop around Dorian and Evie, drawing them together in a ring of binary light.

  “Whoa,” Dorian whispered.

  But Evie just felt a stone sink into the bottom of her stomach. The code was a mess. The language looked like a baroque version of M-Tran, which was difficult enough. But there were layers of patches and programming protocols inserted at random, half in M-Tran and the other half in SASO for some inconceivable reason. />
  “No wonder she’s so screwy,” Evie mumbled.

  “What is it?” Dorian turned, the holo-light shining golden across his features. “Can you change that protocol or not?”

  “Maybe?” Evie threw up her hands. “It looks like thirty different programmers have been in here messing around. And the baseline code is—weird.”

  She spun through the code, trying to peel back its dense, complicated layers to get at the center. All dumb AIs began essentially the same way, with a core of programming that sparked them into intelligence. After that, everything that made them who they were was incorporated, starting with those infallible programming directives—like never opening the shelter doors once the town had been ferried away into safety.

  Was that it? Evie squinted. She couldn’t read this stuff. It was like the original programmer had used five commands when one would do. No, this wasn’t tied to the shelter; it had to do with prepping the town for storms. But there was something about not letting the shelter flood? Evie followed the trail, winding through Salome’s programming, as dense and overgrown as the surrounding jungle.

  “You making any progress?”

  Dorian’s voice made Evie jump. The holo flickered as her hand sliced through it.

  “Sorry,” he said, not sounding at all like he meant it. “But they’re probably at the shelter by now—I mean, if they didn’t run into any trouble—”

  “What?” Evie looked over at him. “It’s been like five minutes. There’s no way—”

  “It’s been half an hour,” Dorian said.

  Evie stared at him. Half an hour? But she always lost track of time when she was coding. It was the same with her father.

  “Yeah,” Dorian said. “You were looking pretty intense for a while there.”

  “I’m not—” Evie looked over at the glimmering code and surged with a sudden blast of hatred for it. “I’m not going to be able to hack into her fast enough. This stupid code makes no sense.”

  Dorian studied her, and she braced for him to insult her, to yell at her for overselling her abilities. But he didn’t, and the silence was honestly worse.

  “We need to get them back here.” Evie stared at the code. The holo-light made her eyes water. She swiped one hand diagonally, and all the code was sucked back into its icon. “Salome,” she said.

  Salome flickered into existence. “Evelyn Rousseau,” she said. “Did you find what you were looking for inside me?”

  “Ugh, that is creepy,” muttered Dorian.

  “Salome, can you locate Saskia Nazari and Victor Gallardo?” The question tasted sour. “They should be near town. Or in town. At the shelter entrance on Rue Camélia, like Dorian said.”

  Salome tilted her head. Frowned. “I don’t see them through any of my usual channels,” she said. “But access to the town has been difficult since the Covenant landed.”

  Evie’s knees felt suddenly as if they couldn’t hold up her weight, and she stumbled backward, feet slipping over the mud. But Dorian grabbed her by the arm before she could fall.

  “They’re dead,” she murmured. “We sent them off and they’re dead.”

  “Not necessarily!” Salome perked up. “They’re just not showing up on any of the town cameras. And many of those were destroyed by the Covenant.”

  Evie activated the computer’s holo-keyboard again. “There’s got to be a way to get to them—through the emergency broadcast, maybe,” she said. “We’ve got to tell them to come back.”

  “I’ll give them the message if I see them!” Salome said cheerily.

  “Okay, I think that’s enough,” Dorian said. Evie glanced over, thinking he was talking to her, but she saw that Salome was gone.

  “Didn’t think she was helping the situation much,” he said.

  He didn’t say I told you so and Evie was grateful for that. She dove into the town’s warning system. Had either of them brought their comm pads? It seemed unlikely that Victor would have left his at Saskia’s house—having his comm pad for the holo-camera was second nature to him.

  Evie went in and changed the emergency message from Seek shelter immediately to Return immediately. It was the only thing she could think to do. When she finished, she leaned up against the vines growing over the computer and slid down to sitting. She couldn’t believe that the one time she needed to hack into something for real, she couldn’t do it. How did the city engineers update Salome?

  Maybe they didn’t. That would definitely explain some things.

  A rustle of vines—Dorian was sitting down beside her. “That was impressive,” he said. “Hacking in there like that.”

  Evie laughed. “Not that it mattered.”

  “You got into her code.” Dorian looked at Evie sideways. His expression was still the same dark, serious one he’d worn since last night, but there was a light in his eyes. “And you did it like it was nothing. I don’t know many people who could manage that.”

  Evie pulled her knees into her chest. The rain had stopped and the wind had picked up and she shivered in her wet clothes. She wondered what time it was. Probably late afternoon. If the Covenant hadn’t attacked, she would just be getting out of school. Maybe meeting up with Victor to do homework and talk about his holo-film.

  The normal world felt like a dream, fragmented and half-forgotten. She sighed.

  “We shouldn’t have sent them into town,” she said. “We shouldn’t have split up. That’s the first rule, isn’t it? Never split up.”

  Dorian frowned. “Yeah,” he said, drawing the word out like he wanted it to lead into something else.

  Evie looked at him. His hair had fallen into his face, hiding his expression from her as he glared into the forest. He had told them this morning about swimming to shore after the Covenant attacked the boat where he’d been the night before. But he hadn’t told them why he was on a boat. And for the first time, Evie realized that his dark clothes were the same as the ones he’d worn the night she’d seen his band play in the shelter.

  “You were performing,” she blurted out. When his gaze swung over to her, she slapped her hand over her mouth. His eyes glittered.

  “Yeah,” he mumbled, looking away again.

  “The rest of your band,” she whispered. “Did they—”

  “I don’t know.” Dorian lifted his gaze toward the gray sky. “We split up. We were in the middle of a set when the attack happened. I sent them backstage.”

  “Why didn’t you go with them?” She cringed at the question—why would he want to talk about this? With her? But she wanted to know. Her ankle still ached from where the Jackal had grabbed her and dragged her out of the car, and the idea that maybe she wasn’t alone in that kind of near death was a thin comfort.

  “I was covering for them,” he said. “So they could get to safety. But then more of those things boarded the boat and I had to get the hell out.” He shook his head. “They might have escaped. Might have been able to get to a lifeboat or something. The Covenant probably weren’t backstage. But I don’t know if they would have gone to Port Moyne or here …” He gestured vaguely.

  “You didn’t ask about them,” she said quietly.

  He was silent for a long time. “I don’t want to hear they aren’t down in the shelter.”

  A pang stabbed at Evie’s heart, and without thinking, she laid one hand on Dorian’s arm. He looked at it, looked at her. Gave a slight nod.

  They didn’t say anything more.

  The first Covenant soldier they spotted was right on the edge of the woods. Saskia saw him first, a squat, hulking creature of the same species they had found dead in the forest.

  “Stop,” Saskia hissed, throwing out one arm against Victor’s chest.

  “I see him,” Victor said softly. He lifted the needler but didn’t shoot. Saskia stood holding her breath, her father’s rifle heavy in her hands. The Unggoy loped along, heavy arms swinging, oblivious to them, moving farther along the perimeter of the forest until it disappeared down a side street decor
ated with an ancient, flickering Brume-sur-Mer: Town of a Million Sunsets! sign.

  Saskia let out a deep breath. “Thanks for not shooting him,” she whispered.

  “Yeah. I didn’t want to draw attention,” Victor whispered. “Do you think it’s safe?”

  No. There was nothing safe about Brume-sur-Mer. They should never have left her house.

  “I don’t see anyone else,” she murmured.

  They crept forward, stopping at the tree line. An open field stretched out to a street and then an outcrop of buildings, mostly abandoned warehouses. The perfect place to keep troops, Saskia thought, but then she caught sight of the Covenant ship through the trees. It was still hanging in place over the town, lights glowing faintly. Or the troops were up there. Waiting. For whatever the Covenant expected to happen here in the middle of nowhere.

  “That’s Rue Glycine,” Victor said, tilted his head at the road separating the field from the warehouses. “It’ll take us right to Rue Camélia, where the shelter entrance is. Are you ready?”

  Saskia took a deep breath. “Are you?” She couldn’t bring herself to lie and say no.

  “Do we have a choice?”

  So he didn’t want to say no either. Saskia grinned, although it stretched uncomfortably at the skin of her mouth and she figured she must look like a madwoman. “I guess not.”

  They stepped out of the forest at the same time. Beyond the press of trees, the world seemed enormous, and Saskia’s head spun with all that extra space. She was certain a million Covenant eyes were on her and Victor. Her whole body tensed with anxiety and she lifted the gun, pointed it at nothing.

  The wind gusted, the trees rattled, no one attacked.

  “This way.” Victor skittered forward, and Saskia followed. He crossed Rue Glycine and made his way under the shadow of the warehouses, head flicking around. He moved like he’d done this before. His sisters had taught him some things about the Covenant, he’d said. They must have shown him how to creep along like a commando.

  Something stepped out from between the buildings only a few meters away from them.