Hunters in the Dark (HALO)

by Peter David

  “I am making my best effort,” said Usze as he pressed his attack on the armigers.

  The Huragok, meanwhile, was floating high above all of it, drifting toward the elevator. Luther couldn’t help but notice that the armigers were making no effort to assault the Huragok, even though it was an easy target. Henry was right. Whatever sent these things at us wants the damn Huragok, and it wants the Huragok alive. Incredible.

  The two Sangheili fought their way through the Forerunner constructs, pressing on across the bridge. The entire group managed to punch through the initial line of armigers by the time they reached the first of two sectional rooms that divided up the hall. They exited it on the opposite side and then continued quickly across the bridge, taking advantage of this moment of respite.

  “Was that all of them?” Holt questioned, reloading his rifle.

  “Unlikely,” N’tho said, his head darting back and forth, looking for movement.

  They reached the second room without trouble and began to pass through it. Beyond lay the final bridge and then the elevator. As they moved swiftly through the room, the internal lights flickered briefly, and then half a dozen bright portals snapped into existence, revealing five more armigers.

  Luther and Lamb launched forward, sprinting alongside Kola and Usze, just barely passing through the door, and then seconds later they were running for the lift. Luther glanced behind him, and to his horror saw that the other half of the group hadn’t made it out of the room yet. He wanted to go back and help them, but he was hardly in a position to do so.

  “Should we go back?” Luther asked, but just then his question was answered. Ten more armigers appeared, facing them with their backs to the room.

  “They’re cutting us off,” Usze sounded, his voice gravelly with rage. “Let us get you two and the Engineer to safety, then Kola and I will deal with these cursed machines.”

  When they reached the elevator the Huragok was already there. <> it informed them. <>

  “We don’t have time!” Lamb shouted.

  The newly arrived armigers were moving in, and more were appearing behind them. Both Sangheili fired down onto the bridge from their elevated position, attempting to stem the ever-increasing population of enemies. But they couldn’t do it forever.

  Luther looked around the room and spotted a small chute to the back, its rear-lit lamp flashing, which seemed to indicate that one could drop down it. There was no telling where it would lead, but it appeared to be the only reasonable option.

  “You’re not serious,” Lamb said, his face pale.

  “Do we have a choice?!” Luther shouted back, and then, entirely on impulse, he said the only thing he could think of: “Jump in!” He leaped into the elevator shaft, and seconds later the others followed suit.

  Fortunately, it wasn’t that far of a fall. Luther landed in a crouch and then bounded off to the side, and the others thudded to the ground behind him. The Huragok came last, still drifting in a leisurely fashion.

  “Brother,” Kola said, turning to Usze. “Should we attempt to head back for the others?”

  <> Drifts offered.

  “Are they dead?!” Lamb demanded, still trying to catch his breath.

  <>

  “Then let’s get out of here,” said Luther, “and pray those damn things don’t decide to follow us.”

  Kodiak was growing concerned. It seemed to him that the armigers were focusing most of their attention on the Spartans, and he wasn’t happy with the way the battle was turning.

  He continued to wield his plasma sword, striking at anything that came near. The blasts from the armigers’ rifles were bouncing off his armor, but the sustained fire was wreaking havoc on his energy shielding, and now its strength indicator was hovering dangerously close to red on his in-helmet HUD.

  N’tho was to his left, and Spartan Holt to his right. His intention had been to return to the elevator with Luther and the others ahead, but the sudden ambush had cut them off, and now the battle was driving them back through the door they’d just come through.

  But the strangest thing happened next. As he took one step back, the entire world turned sideways around him. Then it seemed to violently compress and expand at the exact same time.

  “What the—?!” Kodiak cried out as he stumbled forward and looked around.

  He was standing in a completely different location, some sort of narrow hallway, devoid of natural light. An instant later, N’tho, Zon, and Holt fell to the floor right behind him. Kodiak looked around in confusion. “What just happened here?”

  “A portal,” N’tho said. “You fell in, and we followed. It must be how those machines travel so quickly across the Ark. We entered before the breach closed.”

  “Then we need to find out where we are and try to find the others before those things figure out what happened.”

  “And Vale,” said Holt. “Let’s not forget her.”

  “We can’t help her if we’re dead,” said Kodiak. “Come on.”

  CHAPTER 14

  * * *

  Olympia Vale wanted to panic.

  It was a gut reaction. She was standing there, staring at a holographic image of herself—created by Tragic Solitude, the Keeper of the Ark—that was informing her it was planning to strip-mine every planet in Earth’s solar system, and likely any number of other worlds, in order to administer repairs to the Ark. Its plan to activate Halo was apparently a duplicitous one, in order to reactivate the Forerunner portal on Earth so that the monitor could accomplish its goal.

  How very clever, she grimly thought.

  Just as quickly as the desire to panic surfaced, she managed to shut it down. That would accomplish nothing. It was incumbent upon her to remain calm and handle this in as thorough and professional a manner as she could. She slowed her breathing and imagined that she could actually feel her heart beat.

  “You will be pleased to know,” the monitor said, “that I have now enabled your companions to communicate with each other. You seemed upset over the prospect of their inability to converse. I changed my mind to accommodate you.”

  “Thank you,” she said in a formal tone. “That was very generous of you. Let me ask you this,” she added slowly. “Why do you have to destroy the planets in my system? Certainly there are plenty of other worlds throughout the galaxy that the Ark is connected to.”

  “Yes. Several of them.”

  “And there must be other star systems that are uninhabited. Mineable worlds that could not possibly support life.”

  “Yes. There certainly are.”

  “Okay, then. So why us? Why was it necessary for you to repair the portal on Earth?”

  “When the portal was disabled by the interlopers, it severed my ability to control it from this end. Although I could repair it, which I did, it required activation from your end in order to return to its previous state. I am impressed, however, with the way that it was activated. One of the Forerunners’ servant-tools, was it?”

  “You mean Drifts?” she asked. “The Huragok?”

  “They are remarkable machines, are they not? Yours in particular is extraordinary. And to think I had planned to obliterate your vessel when you first arrived, and I very well could have. But when I discovered that you carried with you one of the most remarkable servant-tools in the lineage of those who labored over the keyships long ago, I was enamored. It will be quite useful in my service.”

  “What do you want him for?” Vale asked, wondering if anything had happened to Drifts Randomly since she’d been taken from the group.

  “Him? It is but a machine, human. Nothing more than that. And my reasons I will not discuss.”

  “All right,” said Vale, “so now that the entire portal system is functioning, why can’t you go and strip-mine uninhabited worlds? Why Earth?”

  “There are reasons for my choice of your world, human. But they would not improve your
disposition.”

  Vale was listening very carefully to the monitor’s voice: not to just the things that it was saying, but the manner in which it was saying them. There was something to it that sounded . . . wrong. It was difficult for Vale to place it at first, but he sounded . . .

  Pleased.

  Self-obsessed.

  Capricious.

  Some kind of emotion seemed to be wending its way through the monitor’s voice, its words, its actions. Such a strange thing for an AI.

  The entire Ark has sustained massive damage. Is it possible that this same damage somehow affected the monitor as well?

  It was hard for Vale to believe at first. This was, after all, technology that had been developed by the Forerunners, and given all that she had experienced in the past few days, it was difficult to process the concept that anything they had created, like an artificial intelligence, was actually breaking down.

  What made it even more problematic was that its presumed breakdown presented a very real threat to all sentient life in the galaxy.

  But first things first.

  We came here to deactivate the Halo Array. If it wants to strip-mine our worlds, that’s a different topic, and one that I will have to deal with eventually.

  “Okay,” she said slowly, choosing her words carefully. “Then may I suggest that you at least disable Halo’s current activation while you try to find the Engineer?”

  “Why ever would I do that?” It tilted its “head,” looking at her with what appeared to be genuine curiosity.

  “Obviously, because you achieved your goal. You needed the portal fixed, and the Huragok accomplished that. Now that we’re here, there’s no need to activate the Halo rings.”

  “Why would I not want them to activate?”

  “Because they will destroy all sentient life in the galaxy.”

  “Why should that concern me?”

  It took her a moment to recover from that. “You’re talking about billions, trillions of lives being ended. Now that the portal is active, there’s no reason for Halo to be fired.”

  “Why do you believe there to be no reason?”

  “Why do you believe that there is a reason?”

  Solitude slowly paced around Vale, with its hands behind its back. It didn’t reply at first, and she remained quiet, wanting to give it the time to say whatever was on its mind. No telling how it would react now.

  “I have had the ability to observe what sentient life has been doing with the opportunities presented it. The war, the destruction. There seems to be no regard for life’s sanctity among your kind, or others. It matters not the species, or the place, or the age—it always ends the same.”

  “You are not being reasonable.”

  “I believe I am.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re failing to take into account the progress we’ve made in just the few short years since the end of the war. The humans and the Sangheili, for example. We fought with each other for thirty years before finding peace, but now that we have it, you would take it from us? We are learning from our mistakes, learning together no doubt, and other species along with us, but we have only had a blink of an eye in the corridor of history. Do we not have a right to amend our sins? To repair the wrongs that have been committed by our ancestors? Why would you take away our opportunity to do this?”

  “There is no guarantee that you would make any amends.”

  “Yes, but there is evidence that we can, especially when you look at what we’ve managed to accomplish when humans have come together. Just a few hundred years ago, we launched a spacecraft called Voyager.” She smiled at the thought. “It was a clear testimony to human cooperation. It had greetings in over fifty languages and instructions as to how someone who found it could locate Earth. And songs. It was filled with works by some of the greatest musicians of that age. Its power systems ran out in the first half of the twenty-first century. By now, it’s just a floating hunk of metal drifting through the galaxy. Yet it remains a symbol of what humanity can accomplish when we work together.”

  “And yet, within years you were again at each other’s throats. And that is just humans. It is a problem prevalent not only with humans, truth be told. All species suffer from a tendency toward mindless destruction and an endless compulsion for battle. It is only a matter of time before your current peace turns again to war.”

  “It could, but it won’t,” she said firmly. “We came here together, did we not? The humans and the Sangheili. We are, despite the odds, creating a solid working relationship.”

  “One born of suspicion.”

  “It doesn’t matter from what it was born. What matters is where we are. We are united, we are here, and both our species share the mutual desire to live, to survive, and to thrive in this galaxy. If you are the reason Halo is active, then we have come to plead with you not to do this thing. Please: cease Halo’s activation. Do not bring it all to an end.”

  “You do not understand. I will not destroy the galaxy.”

  “You won’t?” Vale cocked her head and took a step back.

  “All will continue as it has been. The planets will orbit their stars. The stars will burn. The galaxy will thrive. It will simply be devoid of sentient beings.”

  Vale knew that it was too good to be true. She tried to think of another way to approach the AI. Something didn’t seem right about its argument, but she couldn’t place it.

  “The galaxy will remain unperturbed. You have revealed the mistake that all of your kind makes: you set far too much store in yourselves. The galaxy does not require your existence. Rather, you require the galaxy’s. Yet, you remain brazen. Even now.”

  Vale let out a sharp breath of exasperation, and her mind bent toward earlier conversations between her and Luther about the Ark. “But you can’t think that you would be honoring the Forerunners, your creators, by erasing all that they had tried to preserve by building this place?”

  “Perhaps not. Or perhaps so. As I said before, not all Forerunners agreed with the construction of this place. Some preserved your lives, but for what? To what end? So that you might mar the very things they created to save you? To destroy their rings, and this Ark?”

  Vale was becoming increasingly frustrated, but something about this statement began to shed light on its motivation. This monitor was genuinely insane. It had to be. But from her perspective, an angle from which to approach it was starting to emerge.

  Suddenly the monitor turned away from her and started to walk. Immediately she fell into step behind it. “Where are we going?” asked Vale.

  “Elsewhere,” Solitude replied.

  She realized that the monitor wasn’t going to be forthcoming. “How about this,” she said. “Why don’t you meet with other representatives of the various species that we’ve brought here? Human and Sangheili. Speak to them about our motivations, ask them and see for yourself.”

  “The Sangheili? How would I possibly believe whatever motivations they might have for their future when their present is steeped in an internecine battle on their own cradle world?”

  She hated to admit it, but that was a good point, and one she had even made earlier to the Elites. She was hardly about to admit that to the monitor, though. “They may be engaged in civil war right now, but that is being caused by some who are resisting the cessation of fighting with humans. The battle is being waged to protect us, to protect the peace our two species have.”

  “Do you now see? Even your argument stands in contradiction. The very peace you commend to me as evidence is already threatened. How much longer will it stand? Despite the paucity of biological sentience in the great span of this galaxy, its hubris is unnerving.”

  Vale wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that, so she took a shot in the dark: “Well . . . you do know that the very reason the Sangheili had fought us for those decades was because they believed your makers were gods and that they were doing a service to them.”

  “Do you believe they were gods?”
<
br />   Vale scratched her chin, her mind racing to come up with the safest answer. “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “You must have an opinion.”

  Yes. Of course they weren’t gods. They were a brilliant race, and they built incredible things, but no, they were not divine.

  “No, I really don’t.” She prayed that the monitor did not have some manner of onboard scanning devices that would inform it she was lying through her teeth. “I’ve never met a Forerunner, and so I’ve never had the opportunity to form any sort of opinion as to their status. I’d appreciate it if you could enlighten me.”

  The monitor completely stopped and stared at her for so long that she felt as if its gaze was burrowing deep into her skull.

  Then it turned and started walking again. As before, Vale fell into step behind it.

  “I do not know,” Solitude told her. “It is not information that they ever chose to share with me. So I am constrained to do only what I was made to do: to safeguard all that they left behind.”

  “Is that what this is all about? What happened at the Halo installations? What happened here, at the Ark? Is this your revenge?”

  The simplicity of it surprised even her, but Solitude did not seem fazed, continuing forward down the corridor that they were moving through. For a long moment, the monitor remained silent. Then it spoke up again.

  “What kind of dialogue might we have had, human, were it not for the evidence against you? Upon your arrival at the first ring, Alpha Halo was blighted with the Flood, then obliterated by one of your own. Then later, Delta Halo too was allowed to be contaminated by the parasite, only to be scorched to char and ash by Sangheili warships. And finally, this place—the Ark. Here you came to put an end to your war, but in the process led the Flood to my sanctuary. One hundred thousand years of safety ended in a moment by the impudence of children who know not the deeds they wrought. Could they add to their sins? Yes. And they did. The ring I created here was meant to replace the one your people destroyed, yet you activated it before it was finished, obliterating it and mutilating the Ark in the process, in an attempt to cover your many crimes.”