Halo®: Mortal Dictata

by Karen Traviss

  “Can’t.” Vaz stopped dead and checked the time on his TACPAD. “Sinks sealed the hull. There’s no opening now. We’ll never cut through it in time. Are you free of the mainframe? Christ, what can we do and not do now?”

  “I’ll deal with it. Trust me. Get to Bogof. Now. Please.”

  “Sinks? Stop jamming the signals.”

  Sinks said.

  Screw the ship: Vaz had two friends stuck on the other side of the bridge and Tart-Cart was still waiting to extract them. Port Stanley was probably in range, too. When a full torpedo bay blew, it caused a massive explosion, more than enough to cream any vessels nearby. Vaz ran back toward the shuttle bay, trying to set his chrono to count down and flashing Stanley on his comms.

  “Red One to Stanley.” How long did they have? Could Sinks give an accurate count? “Red One, Stanley come in.”

  “Done,” BB snapped. “I did it already. I’ve warned them off. Just get out, will you? I’ve turned Mal and Naomi back and I’m going to direct them across to the starboard side with Sinks. Thirteen minutes, Vaz. Move it.”

  Vaz’s gut flipped. “Where’s Staffan?”

  “In the shuttle bay.”

  “Pity he can’t fly a dropship.”

  “He can. Not an ace like Dev by any means, but he can.”

  “But he said he couldn’t—”

  “Obviously. Wouldn’t you?”

  Vaz tried to keep a grip on it all. Diving from orbit was easy. Being a spectator wasn’t. “So why hasn’t he escaped?”

  “He’s waiting.”

  Vaz ran through into the shuttle bay and looked down to the deck below, somehow expecting to see Staffan waiting by Bogof, because that was why he hadn’t grabbed the chance to go, that was why he was still here, because BB’s fragment wouldn’t let him take the Pelican and leave Vaz stranded. But he was wrong, totally wrong. There was no sign of Staffan at all, and when Vaz reached Bogof, he wasn’t on board.

  Then movement caught his eye in one of the Spirits suspended above him in its antigravity mooring. It rotated 180 degrees to face the bay doors, and his helmet comms link crackled.

  I should have known better. Staffan wants to see Naomi safely out of here.

  “Can you hear me, Vaz?”

  “Five by five.”

  “Ten minutes, Sinks says. Come on. I want my girl out.”

  “Okay, BB, you’re coordinating this.” It would have been so much easier if Staffan had been an asshole, if he’d lived up to the insurgent stereotype and made a run for it. Instead it just kept getting harder to do what ONI said had to be done. “How are we playing this?

  “Sinks is taking them through to the starboard side. He can clear any obstructions.” BB cut back to the helmet link. “Staffan could have asked Sinks to disable me in Bogof. But he didn’t.”

  “Why are you telling me this, BB?”

  “So that you understand.”

  Understand what, the nature of the man? Vaz knew now. He followed Staffan out of the bay and into open space. As Bogof looped under the battlecruiser’s hull, he checked his chrono a dozen times, trying to calculate how fast Mal and Naomi would need to move to make it to the shuttle bay. It didn’t seem possible in that time. He should never have left them. He should have got Sinks to make a hole in the doors. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Maybe they’d retraced their steps too far. Shit, it was too late to run through the if-onlies now.

  The horseshoe-shaped Spirit rotated again and moved forward, hugging Inquisitor’s starboard flank. Vaz could now see Tart-Cart standing by. Devereaux was blocking the bay doors. If anyone was going to pull Mal and Naomi out of there, it was her. She was made for tough extractions. It was what she excelled at, the tougher the better, and she didn’t like a well-meaning audience.

  “I’ve got it covered, boys,” she said. “Stanley’s jumped to stand off at a safe distance. I suggest you do the same.”

  But how fast could a Spirit get clear? It didn’t have a slipspace drive.

  Vaz knew their upper limit. He’d banged out of Imber in one with Mal, flat out with angry hinge-heads on his ass, and he hadn’t pushed it much past 1100 KPH with its gauges in the Sangheili equivalent of the red zone, creaking and whining.

  Oh Christ. No. That’s just not fair.

  “Staffan, get going,” Vaz said. He didn’t say where. That was up to Staffan, but Vaz hoped it was a long way from Port Stanley and ONI. “Do it.”

  “Sinks says I’ll be fine.” Staffan let out a long breath. “Eight minutes, conservative estimate. Probably be a little more.”

  “I swear we’ll get them out. Go.”

  Dev interrupted. “Hey, macho men—piss off, will you? You don’t get points for being dead. Leave this to the pro.”

  Vaz almost did, but Staffan wasn’t moving. “BB, where are your fragments now, other than the usual?”

  “Here and Naomi’s helmet. Got the data chip?”

  “Yeah, of course I have.”

  “Put it in the console dock and upload it to Stanley now. If you insist on risking UNSC property and this goes horribly, horribly wrong, I’d hate to have nothing to show for losing all my friends.”

  Vaz was so focused on watching the hull cam view of the shuttle bay that he took two fumbled attempts to dock the chip. “Ready.”

  “Whoosh…” BB said. “Data away. And by the way, Admiral Osman says to leave now.”

  “Did you hear that order?”

  “Deaf as a post, me.”

  “You’ll still be in Stanley when Bogof’s a cinder.”

  “And you won’t. But don’t worry, we’re spooled up to slip and holding. See the pretty little amber light?”

  Vaz counted down the remaining minutes and seconds on Bogof’s instrument panel. “Can you get into Staffan’s system via the radio?”

  “Of course.”

  “Will you do me a favor? I’ll say I forced you. In fact, I am forcing you.”

  “What, exactly?”

  “Access my personal datapad. Quick.” Vaz fumbled for it in his dump pouch and docked it. “Naomi’s file. Send Staffan the page that proves he was right. The one that says how she was abducted, and the bit about the clone.”

  BB didn’t say a word. Circulating classified material to a terrorist on the watch list was about as serious as it got in ONI. Vaz knew he wouldn’t be looking at life without parole. He’d be looking at a firing squad.

  Might as well be shot for something that matters, then.

  It would probably have been enough to let Staffan slip away, which would be bad enough when Osman found out, but the guy probably wasn’t going to get out of here alive. He must have known it.

  Vaz watched his datapad’s display. The icon blipped. Well, it was done now. Maybe Staffan would have time to relay it back home to Edvin, then at least his family would know it wasn’t a crazy conspiracy theory after all. It was up to him if he took it to his grave or not.

  “Seven minutes,” said BB. “Chop chop, boys and girls.”

  FORMER COVENANT SPIRIT, ALONGSIDE PIOUS INQUISITOR, NOW KNOWN AS NAOMI: APPROXIMATELY SIX MINUTES TO DETONATION

  “Coo-ee. I really shouldn’t be here, you know.”

  Staffan thought the AI’s voice was still on his radio, but then a display on the Spirit’s control panel flickered and he realized BB had infiltrated the dropship’s systems.

  “Did they send you to arrest me again?” he asked. “Because this isn’t great timing.”

  “What do you plan to do next?”

  “Either see my daughter safely out of that ship, or get her out myself. I hadn’t thought much past that, really.”

  “You know they’ll come after you one day if you go back to Venezia.”

  Staffan decided it was a ruse to distract him and went back to watching the clock. Sinks said fifteen minutes to torpedo overload was an average, but it ranged from eleven to nineteen minutes. If the battlecruiser was on the wrong end of the bell cu
rve, then Staffan had sixty seconds to make his peace and Naomi wasn’t getting out.

  “One day’s too far ahead to plan,” he said.

  “Oh, really?” BB was humming tunelessly to himself. What was he doing? Staffan was never sure what this kind of AI could and couldn’t do. “My, Sinks has been keeping himself busy, hasn’t he?”

  Staffan wondered if BB was somehow setting a tracking program, but he’d said it himself: they’d pursue him to New Tyne eventually. He had a wife and kids there, a granddaughter too. He wasn’t going to run.

  I should have called them. In case I don’t make it.

  But the thought of deciding who to call first, how long to spend, what to say, and all those agonizing decisions that simply couldn’t be made in a few minutes overwhelmed him. He decided to say nothing. He kept his eyes on the shuttle bay, waiting to see Mal and Naomi emerge.

  And Sinks.

  He didn’t want to leave the Huragok to die. The creature was defective, but he was useful, and he was still a sentient being. And he’d given Staffan the best chance of surviving today. He owed the creature something.

  “Aren’t you going to check your comms for messages?” BB asked. “You’ve got a document from Vaz.”

  “What?”

  “He believes you’re a man of your word. So he thought you might like the evidence about Naomi. Something to stop your son thinking you’re a fruit-loop. It’s in your onboard data.”

  Despite himself, Staffan glanced down at the control panel. There was a document image waiting. It was watermarked and classified top secret, a term which always sounded weirdly comic to him, except this wasn’t funny at all. He took a quick look at the screen and wondered why Vaz had taken such a massive risk for him.

  “Good God.”

  “Yes. I’ve wiped the routing records, of course, not that it’ll take a detective to work out roughly where it came from, but I’d hate to see Vaz punished for being a decent man. You know what’s in it anyway. If I’m feeling especially evil one day, I might frame Halsey for it. Say she had a sudden attack of conscience. Hah.”

  Staffan tried to keep his mind on the clock. “He didn’t have to do that.”

  “Oh, he did. That’s Vaz.” BB cleared his throat. It was an odd thing for an AI to do. “I once boasted that I could frame the Archangel Gabriel for armed robbery. I’m also very good at unframing people too.”

  “What are you playing at, BB?”

  “Checking out your dropship. I’m impressed. It doesn’t look this spiffy from the outside. When did Sinks fit the slipspace drive? We did that too. Goes like a greased weasel.”

  BB was in the Spirit’s systems, so he knew. “You’re going to turn me in, then.”

  “What your Huragok does to your ship is your business. I’m going to forget I ever saw any upgrades. But you know how unreliable these small slipspace drives are, don’t you?”

  Staffan really didn’t need to hear that. He knew he was about to attempt something dangerous that he probably wouldn’t survive. He didn’t know if the modified Spirit could jump fast enough. But it wasn’t the first time that he’d done something desperate like this.

  It might well be the last, though. “So?”

  “Of course you do. And you’ll be so close to a humungously big explosion when Inquisitor blows that you can forget about identification by dental records. If you get my drift.”

  Staffan wasn’t sure he did. “You are trying to do some deal with me.”

  “Oh, puh-leeze, do I have to draw you a picture? Once more for the dim ones. In a few minutes, I’ll make myself forget this conversation, the document, and that I knew your ship was upgraded. Because you’ve sworn to forget you have a beef with Earth. And, with luck, if you manage to pull off this jump, you’ll live out your years as the healthiest dead man in history. Because nobody will believe you made it. And if you don’t give us cause to doubt that, we won’t look twice.”

  Now the penny dropped. BB wasn’t setting him up. He was helping stage a disappearance. Why, though? To give ONI someone to call in favors from later? “Okay. I get it. Just tell me why. You bastards never do anything for free.”

  “I do. Because I think justice trumps the law. And I can put my hand on my heart, virtually speaking, and say we neutralized a terror threat to Earth. Everybody gets what they want. Most enduring kind of deal, remember?”

  Stay off the radar and you get to live. It wasn’t what Staffan had been expecting. “What are my chances?”

  “One in four. You could go now, of course.”

  “Naomi thought I’d abandoned her once. I won’t let her think that twice.”

  “Or Sinks.”

  “Stop it.”

  “And Tart-Cart would spot you jumping. Or exploding, as the case may be.”

  “I’ll just say thanks, then, BB. And cross my fingers.”

  “Naomi and Mal are about a minute from the bay now. Want to listen?”

  Staffan knew it would tear him apart. But he had to. He wanted to be there with Naomi. He’d been robbed of a lifetime with her and every second was precious, even by proxy. If he survived today, he’d still probably never see her again.

  “Okay.” His heart was thumping. “Let me hear.”

  BB switched to an audio channel that sounded echoey and distant. Staffan could hear the rough breathing of someone running, but no speech. He couldn’t tell if it was Naomi or Mal panting their way toward the hangar. Then he caught a voice. It was Naomi responding to someone he couldn’t hear.

  “Got it, Dev.” She sounded completely calm, not even out of breath. She must have run at least eight hundred meters through passages and down hatches in that armor and that was a lot tougher than covering eight hundred meters on a level track. That’s my girl. One in a billion. Staffan was still proud of everything she did. “Just hit it and jump when you can … no, we didn’t know … Mal?”

  Mal was the one who was panting. “What’s he waiting for? Sinks? Don’t expect me to arrest him. I’m a bit busy.”

  Staffan felt better for hearing that Naomi wasn’t distressed. But she was a Spartan. He knew what that really meant now, and there was nobody more suited to the role. That didn’t change how bitter he felt, but at least she was respected and admired, and that was some comfort.

  “She sounds okay,” he said.

  BB’s voice transferred to his radio. “If you’ve ever got a message for her—well, in the next seven years, anyway—relay it via this code.”

  “Why seven years?”

  “Because that’s my maximum lifespan. Oh, don’t pull that face. It’s not so bad. A lot can happen in that time. I’ll make sure I party a lot and date very saucy software. Process fast, go offline young, and leave fabulous documentation. That’s my motto.”

  “Why are you doing all this?”

  “Because I can. Because I’m the smartest entity in existence. What’s the point of being pure magnificent genius if you can’t do something good with it? I don’t want to be like Halsey.”

  Mal’s voice cut back in again. “No, sorry, tell her I have no bloody idea where Staffan is. Tell her he’s too close to get clear. Christ … that’ll have to wait … no, I’ve got one minute of air if anything goes pear-shaped.”

  Staffan could see the lights in the shuttle bay blooming out around the Pelican, and the shimmering energy field across the aperture. The dropship was almost in the bay itself. The tail ramp had to be resting on the deck. They’d run straight in, the ramp would shut, and then it would be over; Naomi would be gone from his life again. He hadn’t even talked to her much about what she’d actually done in the war.

  “Here they come,” BB said. “I’m going to have to love you and leave you, Staffan, but make sure you take care of yourself. You won’t find any trace of me in your systems, or any record that we ever spoke. Nobody will find the logs in my records, either.”

  AIs were strange things. Staffan didn’t argue. “Can you give Vaz a message?”

  “Certai
nly.”

  “Tell him I keep my promises.”

  Staffan was still watching the hull cam view of the shuttle bay. The Pelican’s nose lifted.

  “There,” said BB. “They’re out. Good-bye. And I’m sorry, sir. I truly am.”

  Staffan heard the thuds and shouts. “What are you sorry for? And why sir?” But BB was gone. Staffan could still hear one half of the comms, though, the sound of Mal and Naomi arguing with someone.

  “Come on, Sinks, now or never.”

  “If he won’t come, we can’t wait.”

  “Come on—”

  “Now. I said now.”

  “Ramp up.”

  “Staffan, she’s safe. Sinks won’t board. Sorry.” That was Vaz. “Pakah, Staffan.”

  The dropship shot forward from a dead stop and kept accelerating. As Staffan moved in to give Sinks one last chance, Tart-Cart’s nav lights and blue thrusters seemed to smear into the black, then a flash of white light erased them. Another flash followed, probably Bogof making her own jump to safety. Staffan pulled alongside the hatch and lowered one of the Spirit’s drop-down bulkheads through the energy barrier.

  Maybe this was a nineteen-minute overload after all. “Come on, Sinks. You’ve got ten seconds to make up your mind.”

  Staffan really did count to ten. He didn’t want to die, but he knew the next second might be his last. He breathed again when he saw the Huragok drift in, caught for a moment in one of the monitors. Then he hit the controls to secure the crew bay again. There was only one way out. He pushed off sideways to starboard and banked sharply, hammering the Spirit’s maneuvering drive to maximum as he pressed unfamiliar controls to spool up.

  Two minutes.

  He sweated. He should have relayed that document to Edvin, but his hands were too full now. He tried not to watch the monitor image of the battlecruiser dwindling behind him nowhere near as fast as he would have liked. Sinks drifted into the cockpit.

 

  “You’re welcome. You risked yours.”

 

  “Are you ready, then?”

 

  Staffan had done what he’d set out to do. He’d lived long enough to learn the truth about his daughter, and Remo’s boy as well. That was more than the other poor bastards ever got. He counted down the final seconds to the jump, one eye still on the aft-facing monitor.