Halo®: Mortal Dictata

by Karen Traviss

  A small fleet of armored freighters and small, obsolete frigates and patrol craft were all that Venezia had by way of a navy. But then they’d been thinking in terms of fending off attacks from Earth, not becoming an expeditionary force in their own right.

  But now we can have a battlecruiser.

  And I’ll donate it for the common good—when I’ve worked out how to use it to get the answers I need.

  That was the trouble with opportunities. If they were exceptional, then they had to be seized first and thought through later. He’d never get a chance like this again.

  Staffan locked his workshop in case Kerstin visited unannounced and went into the house for lunch. Edvin was helping Laura in the kitchen while his wife, Janey, kept Kerstin occupied reading a book. Janey looked up at him as he walked in and raised her eyebrows. Staffan nodded and put his finger to his lips. It was their code for asking how the doll’s house was going and being told it was fine.

  “Ed, are you free tomorrow or Wednesday?” Staffan asked. “I need someone to look at a used car with me.”

  Laura never asked questions or offered an opinion. The euphemism wasn’t for her sake but just a good habit to get into with a child around. Edvin squatted to take the casserole out of the oven.

  “Just say the word, Dad.”

  “Might take a day or two. I don’t know where the testing ground is until we leave.”

  “I’ll make sure I pack a change of clothes and a few extra ammo clips, then.”

  “It’s a look-see.”

  “Just give me a time.”

  “Noon tomorrow, here?”

  “Fine.”

  Edvin farmed and did odd jobs in exchange for favors and food, like most of the adult population. Life was a mix of barter and cash, and everyone was expected to make a contribution to communal projects like roads and schools. For the most part, it worked. It was certainly enforced. If anyone back on Sansar had told Staffan that he’d be ready and willing to put a round through someone’s head for robbing a neighbor, he wouldn’t have believed them. But he had: and it seemed entirely reasonable. You didn’t prey on your own. There were plenty of real enemies out there, enemies that wanted you dead, both alien and human. The rule of law had never protected the colonies. It had certainly never given Staffan any justice.

  In the dining room, Kerstin coughed. To Staffan it was just a cough. But Edvin darted away to check on her. He came back into the kitchen, looking relieved.

  “Just sniffles,” he said.

  “What else would it be?” Staffan asked.

  “She’s six.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I’m just cautious, that’s all. She’s coming up to the age when you said Naomi got sick.”

  Edvin was his son, as close to his father as two men could be, but he still had the capacity to shock the shit out of him. It hurt. “Kids don’t all get sick at that age, Ed.”

  “I know.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. Really.”

  “What, you think there really is some genetic disease in this family? Is that it? You don’t believe a frigging word I told you?”

  “Take it easy, Dad.”

  “No, you listen to me.” Staffan wanted to cry rather than rage, but he was too hurt to let it out. His own son; how could he say that? How could he not believe him after all these years? “We never had any genetic disease in the family. Naomi didn’t die of it. Some other kid died. It was all a bullshit cover story, because that girl who came back was never, ever my daughter. Do you hear me? After all these years, you think I’m some crazy old asshole? You know damn well I’m not. I wasn’t the only one. You know it.”

  “I’m just being an anxious dad. That’s all. Of course I believe you.”

  Staffan found himself shaking. He wasn’t sure if it was from anger or shock. Laura stepped silently between them and gave Edvin a push into the dining room. It was just as well, because Staffan wanted to grab Edvin and shake him. He doesn’t believe me. He still doesn’t believe me. The one thing Staffan held on to was his sanity, handed back to him by an equally broken father called Andy Remo after years of knocking on doors and making calls. If it hadn’t been for that one conversation a few years after the poor kid who replaced Naomi had died, Staffan was sure he would have followed Lena and killed himself. Anything that threatened to upend his certainty might plunge him back into those depths, and that would be the end of everything.

  “He didn’t mean that,” Laura whispered. “Come and sit down. You love chicken casserole. I made it specially.”

  Staffan couldn’t get himself back together right then. “I’ll be a few minutes,” he said. “I need to wash my hands. Don’t wait for me to start.”

  He went into the bathroom, locked the door, and sat down on the toilet with his head in his hands. Not being believed by his own family was the most painful thing he’d ever experienced. He was reliving it right now. His shoulders shook as he fought back tears.

  Lena had never believed him, either. She believed the doctors.

  Sansar didn’t have the best medical facilities in the outer colonies, but the pediatrician at New Stockholm’s main hospital had been adamant about why their daughter was dying, and that had convinced Staffan that the child struggling through one illness after the next was not Naomi. It was a rare genetic mutation, the doctor said, an extreme metabolic failure that was crippling her with arthritis, making her skin raw and infected, and destroying her lungs and kidneys.

  Did they still have any pictures of her? Staffan was sure he’d kept one as evidence, but he’d burned the rest after Lena died. They weren’t happy family snaps. He only wanted to keep the ones of Naomi, the real Naomi, and remembering that now made him feel like the impostor child had died twice.

  I knew she wasn’t ours when we picked her up from the hospital. I knew there was something wrong. She said all those weird things about usually having more doctors around.

  She didn’t remember the house.

  She didn’t want to read her books.

  She never mentioned the doll’s house.

  She was sickly from the moment we got her home.

  She changed. Quiet, withdrawn … a stranger with my girl’s face.

  And there were never any genetic illnesses in my family or Lena’s. We checked. We went back through all the records. We would have known.

  Staffan could still feel his fingers gripping the molded plastic of the wheelchair handles as he pushed that frail, paralyzed little girl through the park and tried to make her unhappy life a little easier. She’d had to wear a hat and cover herself up so that her raw skin and distorted body didn’t upset passersby. He hated it when people stared at her. He’d hit a guy for that once. He wished he’d killed him.

  Staffan knew that she wasn’t his, but she was a kid, and she didn’t deserve that suffering. Her funeral was a strange new low point in his nightmare existence. He both mourned her and felt relief that she was finally gone. Lena hated him for that; she could see his relief, and she didn’t understand his anger and denial. She wanted him to shut up about the girls being switched. She just wanted to believe the doctors. Who wouldn’t? Who would choose to believe the crazy idea that the child wasn’t Naomi? It hurt more, if such a thing was possible.

  Maybe if we’d had another baby, she’d have seen then. She’d have seen the kid was okay, and that I was right. And she’d be here now, helping me look for the real Naomi.

  Staffan had been through this cycle of tortured thought so often over the years that it was like a familiar bus journey. He knew exactly what scenery was coming next, and if it was too awful to watch he could shut his eyes until the bus had passed a certain point. But the journey was always in his head, lurking behind his eyes, and there was no blanking out the image of Lena lying fully clothed in the empty bath, wrists cut, bled out, too house-proud even in death to make a mess on the floor.

  He felt the relief again and hated himself for it.
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  And I wanted to be dead as well. I envied Lena for having the guts to do it.

  Staffan hadn’t relived it with that intensity for years. Just when he thought he’d come to terms with that part of it, he realized he hadn’t. He’d just parked it because it was too much to deal with. He could only focus on what he was able to do.

  He took his phone out again and checked through the numbers. Andy Remo’s file was still in there. Staffan still couldn’t delete it, even after all this time. It would feel like murder, like destroying those pictures of the girl who wasn’t Naomi.

  What was her real name? Who was she?

  “Staffan?” Laura rapped on the door. “Your chicken’s getting cold.”

  Staffan stood up and turned on the tap, making hand-washing noises. He snapped back to being the guy that Remo had made him, the man who didn’t give a shit about authority and was ready to spit in its face, not the meek tax-paying citizen who kept his nose clean and thought that obeying the rules would stop his government from picking on him.

  “Coming, honey.”

  Staffan sat down to eat, trying not to let what he’d been thinking leave its awful marks on his face. Edvin got up, stood behind his father’s chair, and put his hands on his shoulders.

  “Sorry, Dad.”

  “No problem.” Staffan squeezed his arm. How could he be angry with his own son? “When we get back, let’s have everyone around here for a barbecue. Then Hedda can eat her surströmming and we won’t be trapped with it in a confined space.”

  “I want to try it,” Kerstin said, chin almost level with the table.

  “It’s horrible,” Janey told her. “It’s what trolls eat. That’s why they have to live under bridges.”

  Everyone was laughing again. One thing Staffan had learned over the years was that you could make yourself do anything if you needed to badly enough. That night he packed his rucksack and picked his weapons, “tooling up,” as Remo used to call it. It had taken Staffan months to work out that this pleasant, serious, unhappy man, another father who believed he’d buried a stranger’s child, was actually a criminal, and a very successful one. Nothing too violent, not unless he was backed into a corner: he specialized in fraud and robbery. He’d taught Staffan a lot about breaking the rules and taking care of himself.

  “We’re not mad, buddy,” Staffan said aloud, mimicking Remo’s accent. “It’s the rest of the bastards—they’re the crazy ones for thinking we won’t find out.”

  The next day, he and Edvin did their usual feint to throw off any of Sav Fel’s rivals who might have been informed that he was on Venezia and had come to see what they could get out of it. The end of the war had thrown up a fair few newcomers of various species, from Unggoy who wanted a fresh start to humans who needed to disappear now that order and record-keeping was making a return to the inner colonies and Earth itself. Discretion was an automatic precaution. Staffan drove Edvin to the airfield, took a shuttle out to the coast, and met Sav Fel’s vessel on Weymouth Island. He was pretty sure he wasn’t being tailed, but if they were, then they definitely shook off any tracking when they docked with the Kig-Yar vessel farther out in the Venezia system.

  It was a weird-looking thing, something known as a missionary ship, all storage bays and recovery equipment, more like a factory than a vessel designed to carry bibles and earnest men and women intent on bringing the word to the heathen. Missionary work had been the Kig-Yar’s sweetener from the Covenant. They’d searched for ancient relics for their masters as long as they were allowed to do a little piracy and appropriation on the side. It had seemed to work.

  “Another hull you liberated from the Covenant?” Staffan asked as they docked.

  “Now they know that their gods were just an extinct alien race,” Fel said, “they don’t need to look for holy artifacts any longer, do they?”

  Staffan hadn’t left Venezia more than a dozen times in the last twenty-odd years. He’d forgotten how rough a slipspace jump could feel. Sav Fel spent the short transit listing what equipment he needed, occasionally glancing at Edvin as if he was worried that he might shoot him, and Staffan was so engrossed in negotiating what weapons and transport he might be willing to part with that he was caught short by the sudden drop out of slipspace. He stood up and went to the viewplate in the forward section.

  For a moment, he couldn’t see anything except the speckling of stars and the hazy streak of a gas cloud across the dense blackness. Then he spotted a patch of more intense black without the dappling of starlight, and realized he was looking at something solid. It was hard to tell what it was or how close he was to it, only that it was big and irregular. Then the Kig-Yar ship moved, and he found himself looking along a short line of small, dim lights that definitely weren’t stars.

  Now he got it. He was actually looking at the stern, and the lights were from an open hangar bay door on the starboard side.

  “Jesus,” Edvin said. “That’s big.”

  “You’ve seen very few Covenant ships, then,” Fel said. “This is quite small by comparison.”

  Staffan still couldn’t see it for what it was. He felt he was staring at one of those optical illusions that someone had to point out to you before something clicked in your brain and your perspective shifted. Fel ushered him to the missionary ship’s docking bay and into a six-seater shuttle that slid out of the bay doors and tracked along the length of the black hull.

  No, Staffan still couldn’t get the scale. Pious Inquisitor was just a landscape of curved surfaces, too big to take in as a single object. It was only when the open hangar swallowed the shuttle that he got a sense of being inside a warship. The shuttle maneuvered into a berth that was level with a deck, and Staffan stepped out.

  Everything that hit his senses disoriented him. It was cold. The deck tugged at his boots as if the ship was still set to Sanghelios gravity, and the air smelled of chemicals, dog food, and smoke. The light was dim and purple. And everything seemed to be bigger and higher, with the controls set farther up the bulkheads than he was used to.

  Sangheili were big. He knew that, but he’d never seen one in person. Just raising his arm to touch a panel by a hatch brought that home to him. He could hear Edvin walking behind him.

  Is he thinking what I’m thinking? No. He never saw Sansar. He doesn’t remember much before Venezia. He’s never seen a devastated world.

  In a ship much like this, a crew of Sangheili had calmly pressed controls to incinerate the surface of Staffan’s home world and reduce it to molten slag that eventually cooled into a glass lake. It might even have been this very ship that had turned Sansar into glasslands.

  But Staffan’s world had already been destroyed long before then, while the buildings and trees were still standing. There were times when he wished he’d known the Covenant was coming so that he could have waited for it to end his misery. But he hadn’t: and here he was, about to take possession of one of its ships to use against another empire that didn’t give a shit who it rolled over.

  There were no more than thirty Kig-Yar on board. The ship seemed largely shut down and in darkness, with occasional glimpses of dimly lit control panels in passages leading off the one they were walking along. Staffan had left Sansar on a big mining freighter, but this thing had to be twice its size.

  Edvin looked around. “I can see why you want to dispose of it, Fel. It must need a big crew.”

  Edvin was an old hand at playing backup on his father’s business deals, so it might have been part of a ploy to drive down the price, but he did sound like he meant it. Staffan wasn’t sure if Fel had heard him. They stepped into an elevator, pressed together more closely than he was comfortable with for a few moments.

  “You don’t need many,” Fel said. “But it depends what you want to do. She can carry an army. She can take out other warships. She has pulse lasers and plasma torpedoes.”

  “Minimum.”

  “I appropriated her with a crew of forty or so, and many of the functions are automated.�
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  “Does it have an AI?”

  “The Covenant forbade the construction of AIs. Not that they didn’t try to make use of human ones they captured. But don’t worry. I may be able to offer you a better alternative.”

  “I’m not paying extra for it.”

  Fel didn’t say a word. The elevator stopped on a deck that was fully lit and Staffan could now hear noise—Kig-Yar noise. He took a guess that they were near a bridge or control room. Fel stood back to let Staffan and Edvin step off the platform.

  This had to be the bridge or the command center. A central platform overlooked consoles dotted with holographic displays. A few Kig-Yar were lounging around, apparently checking the status of various systems as if they knew what they were doing. There was another bank of mauve and pink lights to the right of the doors.

  Then the mauve lights moved, all at once. A faintly glowing shape glided toward him.