“What’s that?”
“The alternative,” Fel said. “A Huragok. An Engineer, as humans call them.”
Staffan had heard Kig-Yar talk about Huragok but he’d never seen one. It was utterly alien despite the long, almost animal face with multiple pairs of small black eyes. It hovered level with him, a translucent bag of gas with bioluminescent patches and wafting tentacles. The blue, pink, and lavender coloring made it look like an oversized toy. Kerstin would love it.
Naomi would have been fascinated, too.
“So this is your alternative, is it?” Staffan asked.
“A Huragok can repair anything. Improve anything.”
The creature just stared at him. Staffan tried to look it in the eye, opting for the largest pair. “Can it talk?”
“It uses sign language. They can understand us, but it needs a translation unit to answer you. They’re artificial. The Forerunners—the aliens, the false gods—made them. Now they replicate themselves.”
“Does it have a name?”
“Sometimes Sinks.”
“Seriously?”
Fel cocked his head. “All their names have something to do with their buoyancy qualities. Why they’ve never run out of words to describe that, I have no idea.”
“If he’s such a wondrous asset, why do you want to sell him?”
“I need weapons and transport more than I need an Engineer. And he can’t replicate. He needs other Huragok to do that, and the rest of them disappeared when the San’Shyuum cowards ran away.”
“Why not sell it to the Sangheili?”
“They have no money and they have nothing else we want at the moment.”
“You mean the Arbiter’s people don’t trust you enough to arm you, and if the rebels catch you, you personally, they’ll kill you.”
Sav Fel didn’t look fazed. “All those things may well be true. Much better to sell him to you, yes?”
It was a plausible story, but Staffan hadn’t survived in the world of arms dealing by taking anything at face value, especially Kig-Yar. “Why do I need him? I just want a ship.”
“How will you maintain the ship without him? He absorbs all data he encounters. You need very few special parts for the ship, because he can make almost anything from raw materials.”
“Just as well, seeing as the Covenant spares shop is out of business now.”
Staffan was still looking for the catch. A lone Huragok wasn’t as lucrative as two that could replicate, but it was still a technical edge that no sane man would pass up. If what he’d heard about them from Kig-Yar over the years was true, then they were a fantastically useful toolbox if nothing else. Staffan was a mechanic; all he could see were the possibilities that a Huragok could open up, not just weapons and ships but all kinds of products and processes. Just one of the things, for as long as it lasted, could transform a town.
Kig-Yar didn’t think like humans, though. They’d tried imperial culture once and decided it wasn’t for them. Maybe they were right: humans were constantly in denial about their ape-sized social circles, always pretending they could think on a global scale when history proved every time that they really couldn’t.
The Kig-Yar had space flight and planetary colonies when we still thought tallow candles were the state of the art.
Kig-Yar also robbed, murdered, and shat anywhere they pleased, though, so progress wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Staffan racked his brains to think what angle Fel might be playing to forego a prize like a Huragok. Maybe the price he could get for the thing was worth it in his short-term mindset.
Remember that he might well have a point, too.
“I hear they’re a pain in the ass,” Staffan bluffed. He’d heard the opposite, that all they wanted to do was work. “More trouble than they’re worth.”
Fel cocked his head left then right, his hang-on-while-I-think-of-an-objection gesture. “If your ventral beam systems breaks down, how will you fix it?”
“It only has to work once.”
“You say that now, but you’ll get a taste for it.”
“We’re not in the business of empire-building,” Staffan said. “This is about self-defense. We just want to stay free of Earth.”
“In my experience,” Fel said, “the humans who talk most loudly about freedom are the ones who think it’s so good that nobody else should have any of it.”
Fel ambled around, probably hoping the scale of the ship would make the sale for him. Sinks wafted after him at a discreet distance. It was hard to work out if the Huragok was following him like a loyal dog or just keeping an eye on him in case he stole anything.
Staffan was getting cold feet. What the hell was he going to do with this? He could get a crew together, and there were enough ex-Covenant personnel on Venezia to train a human crew if they were paid enough. But this was far bigger than he’d expected, despite the fact that he knew the battlecruiser’s dimensions before he set out. It must have cost an arm and a leg to maintain it. He kept finding more reasons why the Kig-Yar wanted to sell it on.
Edvin’s right. I can’t keep this as a private vengeance machine. I have to give it to the militia.
But not yet.
Edvin leaned in close to him. “We can’t call her Pious Inquisitor,” he murmured. “That’s revolting. It’s everything we despise. State religion, hierarchies, witch hunts … but the name alone is going to get the UNSC’s attention.”
“I haven’t said I’ll take her yet.” Staffan ambled across the deck to Fel and his cronies. Damn, this thing was big. Crossing from one side of the bridge platform to the other was like walking across a ballroom. “Fel? What about the armaments? What else is still on board?”
“Missiles. The larger ordnance that we don’t have a market for.”
“Yes, it would be a bit of a giveaway trying to sell those on, wouldn’t it? Okay, let’s see what she can do. Where’s that barren planet you promised me?” There was one thing Staffan needed Inquisitor to be able to do above all else. “I want to see her glass the surface.”
UNSC TART-CART, EN ROUTE TO NEW LLANELLI, BRUNEL SYSTEM—KNOWN TO THE SANGHEILI AS LAQIL
Phillips had run out of arum puzzles to challenge him. Naomi could tell. As he twisted the sphere in his hands, making it click and rattle, the light had gone out of his eyes.
“You need a new one,” she said. “You know all the combinations.”
“Okay, I’m hooked. I admit it.”
“You could always make your own.”
“But I’d know all the solutions. It’d be like trying to tickle yourself.”
He fiddled with the polished wooden ball, obviously knowing exactly what was coming next. A small green stone dropped onto the deck.
“I meant you should ask Adj to make you a new one,” Naomi said. “BB can help. That’ll keep you all busy.”
“Yeah, that’s a good idea.” Phillips released his safety belt to retrieve the stone. “I’m sure BB can come up with something to defeat me.”
Naomi waited for BB’s ghostly blue-lit box to appear in the cabin to make some cutting remark, but it didn’t. The AI was listening, though, either through the real-time FTL comms link to Port Stanley or via a fragment of himself that he’d split off and inserted into Tart-Cart’s systems. Phillips leaned back in his seat with his helmet in his lap, almost at home in ODST armor now. He put the helmet on and took it off a couple of times as if he was doing a safety drill. He’d been shaken by the cabin fire a few weeks ago. BB, who’d obviously kept an eye on him, said he constantly practiced getting the helmet on and sealed in two seconds.
“I still haven’t got the hang of this HUD,” he said. He must have felt that she was staring at him. “Like sticking my head inside a busy nightclub when I’m drunk. Too many flashing lights.”
Naomi had never seen the interior of a nightclub. She took his word for it. “I disabled half the data feeds for you to make it easier.”
“I know. But I tried activating them again. I wanted to see
the three-D plot of the approach to Laqil.”
“New Llanelli.”
“Sorry. Bad habit.”
Naomi wasn’t sure if he was pumped up about the mission or just talking to avoid straying onto the subject of her estranged family. She knew the others must have talked about it. It was hard to explain to them that it was a theoretical thing for her, underpinned by vague remnants of emotions that had faded years ago, and that she was far more deeply affected by losing fellow Spartans. By any definition, they were family. But she knew that what had happened to her and her parents had been criminal, unthinkable, even if time had spared her the capacity to feel just how bad it had been. The rest of the squad was doing that feeling for her.
Her father had another family now. She was glad. He seemed happy. It didn’t put anything right, but she felt less guilty for not … she didn’t know what, but it was something. She just felt it was her fault, the same way Osman said that she did, that they both had some responsibility for being the source of so much suffering for their families.
“I’m okay,” she said. “Really. Don’t tread on eggs, Phyllis.”
“You’ve never called me that before.”
“Would you prefer Evan?”
“No. I’ll always be Phyllis now, won’t I?”
The intercom popped. “Starting descent,” Devereaux said. “Stealth measures off. Practice your best smiles for the nice hinge-heads.”
Tart-Cart set down near the RV point. Every sign that New Llanelli had been a small agricultural colony had been erased by the near-stellar heat of a Covenant ship’s ventral beam seven years ago. When the clouds parted, the sky was incongruously blue, and the reflected glare from the vitrified land gave the cruel illusion of a sunlit ocean in the distance. And that was what a ship just like Pious Inquisitor had done.
Naomi put on her helmet and walked a few meters from the ship. As she crunched through a thin layer of glass, she kicked up fragments that sparkled like diamonds in the sunlight, something that would have been magically pretty if she hadn’t known how it had happened. Phillips backed the heavily laden Warthog down the ramp and she swung into the passenger seat. The last time she’d seen ‘Telcam, he’d been furious because she’d dragged him bodily from the siege of Vadam keep. Maybe he was in a more forgiving frame of mind now. They reached the rendezvous point and waited, watching the horizon until a black dot appeared and grew into a ground transport heading straight for them.
“No fighting,” Phillips said, taking off his helmet. “Let me charm him.”
‘Telcam’s transport drew up with a couple of Brutes to unload the weapons. Naomi was mildly surprised that any Brutes had stayed loyal after the last of their buddies on Sanghelios had finally turned on their masters, but even Brutes needed a job. ‘Telcam walked up to her, looked her in the visor, and nodded. It was an acknowledgment of a sort. Then he towered over Phillips.
“Scholar Philliss.” Sangheili didn’t have the anatomy to cope with bilabial sounds like P, even the ones who were as fluent in English as ‘Telcam was. The best they could do with their four-way jaws was something like an F or an S, much to the ODSTs’ amusement. “Did you bring the translations?”
Phillips reached inside his chest-plate and pulled out a small notebook. He’d taken the time to hand-copy all the Forerunner inscriptions from the Ontom tunnels that he’d recorded on his datapad, adding the Sangheili translation underneath, all written out with painstaking care. The effect was one of a bible copied by a devoted abbot. There was a much more pragmatic reason for it, of course: he couldn’t hand over all the images to ‘Telcam because he and Osman had decided to redact all the symbols that might give the Sangheili portal locations and other hard data they might not already have. But that wasn’t what ‘Telcam wanted. He wanted the word of his gods. He wanted them to reassure him that they still existed despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Naomi watched ‘Telcam as Phillips handed over what was effectively an album of signage from a garrison complex, basic housekeeping and safety warnings. But these Sangheili would somehow derive deep spiritual meaning from it like some bizarre cargo cult. There was nothing that the Neru Pe’Odisima—the Servants of the Abiding Truth—couldn’t interpret as a coded message from the gods, even a site maintenance manual for an ancient Forerunner base that had somehow passed into history as a temple. Naomi didn’t find it funny. It was actually rather disturbing.
Thou shalt not commit murder. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not allow garbage to accumulate in the communal areas because of the fire hazard.
She wondered if Phillips should have doctored the transcript a little and added a few lines where the gods said humans should be left in peace. ‘Telcam took the notebook like a movie Moses accepting the commandments at Sinai.
Naomi was there to make sure nothing went wrong while Phillips made small talk with ‘Telcam. She expected them to converse in Sangheili, but ‘Telcam stuck to English as if he thought it was more polite with her present. Would he mention that he’d hired Kig-Yar to find his missing warship? It was the kind of thing that allies would share, even uncomfortable ones who didn’t much care for each other.
“Did your friend ‘Mdama ever show up?” Phillips asked. He was very convincing, sounding as if he was clutching at conversational straws. “You said he vanished.”
“No,” ‘Telcam said. “That remains something of a mystery. But our war is not over, and in dangerous times, warriors are lost.”
He couldn’t have known how true that was. The last thing Parangosky wanted was for Jul to show up again shooting his mouth off about how ONI had kidnapped him and held him at one of their research stations before he escaped. But if he had, Naomi wondered if ‘Telcam could keep it to himself. Maybe he could. The average Sangheili would have confronted Phillips with it, but ‘Telcam was a much more subtle individual.
He looked Naomi up and down. “And you,” he said. “Are you winning your war?”
“That’s not for me to decide, Field Master.” She hadn’t expected him to make small talk with her. Neither of them were equipped for it. “That’s one for the historians.”
Go on, ‘Telcam. Tell me you’re so pissed off with Sav Fel that you’ve put a bounty on him and you’ve got a Kig-Yar repo team looking for Inquisitor. You know you have.
But ‘Telcam didn’t mention it, and he didn’t ask Phillips if Osman had located the ship, either. It was one of the last things she’d said to the monk, that she’d have to find the battlecruiser before it became a problem for anyone else. It was a natural thing to discuss.
Maybe he’d already worked out that Osman had no intention of handing Inquisitor back if she got to the ship before he did.
“I think ‘Mdama is dead,” ‘Telcam said suddenly. “If he could have returned, he would have.”
Phillips took over the conversation. He was good at this verbal fencing. “You think the Arbiter’s forces caught him?”
“Perhaps. He has nothing useful to tell them, though. Or perhaps he ran across your troops. The ones who don’t know what you do to thwart them.”
“We haven’t heard anything. If I do, I’ll let you know. Just as well Sangheili children grow up in a communal environment. What with ‘Mdama’s wife dead as well.”
“You remembered.”
“I just thought it was really sad for their kids to have both parents gone at the same time. Not that they know who their father is, I suppose, but they’d miss anyone they thought was an uncle, wouldn’t they?”
“It has been hard for them.”
That sounded as if ‘Telcam had stayed in touch with the Bekan keep. His English was too precise for that to be a slip of the tongue. Who would be the clan elder now, then? Naomi realized she knew nothing about the Sangheili laws of inheritance within keeps.
“Are you still looking for Pious Inquisitor?” ‘Telcam asked suddenly. “And has this Shipmistress Lahz shown up again?”
Phillips didn’t look at Naomi. He jus
t shook his head. “Still searching. If the ship ends up in the hands of our rebels, we’ve got problems.”
He hadn’t told ‘Telcam any more than he already knew or could work out for himself. Shipmistress Lahz was never going to make another appearance, though, not unless BB decided to resurrect her. When BB did a spot of misinformation and spoofed a ship, he really made a thorough job of it—not just false transponder codes, but a false commander, too, one that had even convinced Kig-Yar. Naomi had to keep reminding herself that Lahz didn’t actually exist.
“So how long are you going to sit it out here?” Phillips asked.
“Until we persuade more keeps to join the rebellion, or we acquire enough ships to destroy all those who refuse,” ‘Telcam said. “It’s an equation. As you say, a numbers game. And it would help if your Admiral Hood would stay out of Sangheili affairs and withdraw support for the Arbiter.”
“I wasn’t aware we were giving him assistance anymore.”
“Maybe not practical support, but the legitimacy it confers is provocative.”
“But it’s just words. Not weapons.” Phillips was impressively relaxed. Naomi had to admire his nerve. “And Sangheili don’t care what humans think, do they?”
Port Stanley had left remotes in orbit around Sanghelios to transmit real-time surveillance. A stalemate was exactly what ONI had set out to achieve, a finely balanced and long-running civil war that would eat what was left of Sangheili military capability while Earth sneaked out the back door to strengthen its position. But they were only months into this. They needed to keep it going for years, and arming factions in civil wars had much the same success rate as buying lotto tickets. Naomi wondered if the Sangheili might ever think of playing exactly the same game with Earth and Venezia.
“Well, let us know if Inquisitor shows up.” Phillips paused a beat, almost as if he was waiting for ‘Telcam to come clean. “Or your friend ‘Mdama. Like you, I hate mysteries.”
‘Telcam did that little sway of the head that Naomi interpreted as regret. He was clutching the notebook of Forerunner translations to his chest in a way that made him look like he was living up to the nickname that Phillips had first given him—the Bishop.
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