Halo: Glasslands

by Traviss, Karen

  Her looks didn’t set him at ease, either. It wasn’t so much the sharp features as her pale, translucent skin and platinum hair. They reminded him of nightmarish folk tales his grandmother told him as a kid, where female demons who looked like ice princesses dined on the giblets of unwary children. There wasn’t much happily-ever-after in Russian fairy tales.

  Come on, I’m ODST. I’m a big boy now. This is insane. Stop it.

  Naomi tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “You have to know how much gas to pour on a fire,” she said, not even looking at him.

  It sounded a bit zen. But they were up to their elbows in a crate of identity-tagged Sangheili rifles, so he decided they were back on the topic of the wisdom of arming hinge-heads.

  “How come they’re short of arms?” he asked. “I don’t recall that being a problem when they were blowing our heads off.”

  “The Covenant civil war. The Great Schism. It cost them a lot of ships and equipment. And once they drove out the Prophets, they lost their supply chain. And their command and control.” Naomi was suddenly transformed into something like a regular woman. This was obviously her pet subject. Her pack-ice eyes lit up. “So most of the rank and file don’t have access to serious hardware now, and they’re too disorganized to use it effectively anyway.”

  “So are they still fighting the Brutes?”

  “Some. As far as we know.” She seemed to be working up a sweat, puffing a bit as she heaved crates around. Without that power-assisted Mjolnir armor she had to rely on raw muscle, just like him, but he still didn’t think he’d beat her at arm wrestling. She was genetically enhanced and it showed. “That’ll spread them thinner than the butter on a Navy sandwich.”

  As soon as she said that, as soon as she even brushed close to griping, Vaz felt her change from the terrifying Baba Yaga into one of his own. Everyone in uniform griped about everything all the time. It was one of those fundamental things that bonded ships and armies. When the griping stopped, officers worried. Vaz relaxed a little.

  “That’s one feud we won’t need to stir up.” All the weapons were invisibly tagged to make them trackable, the transponder material worked into the metal itself. Vaz examined one of the energy swords to see if he could detect it on a casual inspection. “Will the hinge-heads fall for the tracking?”

  “They’ve lost their Prophets and Engineers so they’re not so technically hot now. But even if they spot it, I doubt they’ll care. They’ll think they can pick us off later.”

  Naomi suddenly jerked her head up, frowning. Vaz strained to listen and caught the sound of two Elites chattering on the radio. It had to be a recording of voice traffic intercepted before they entered slipspace, but it still had the power to make his flesh crawl. He wasn’t going to shake it that easily. Nobody who’d fought those things at close quarters ever would.

  He followed the sound, squeezing between the stowed drop pods, and ended up outside a small fire-control compartment aft of the dropship. The hatch was open. When he stuck his head inside, he found Phillips with his boots up on the console, fingers meshed behind his head, and eyes shut. His datapad sat in his lap. Its screen was flickering with rapidly scrolling lines of text.

  Vaz waited for him to notice someone was there. It took a full minute. Phillips just opened his eyes and didn’t even look startled.

  “Dialect variation,” he said. “Good stuff, this ONI eavesdropping kit.”

  Vaz had never actually heard Elites just talking before. He’d only heard them roaring what he assumed were terms of abuse as they came at him, or gurgling out their last curses or pleas as he finished them off the hard way. It was strange to imagine them having a chat. “You understand all that?”

  Phillips tapped his jaw with his index fingers. “I understand it, and I can read it, but I don’t have enough jaws to speak it like a native. There’s a whole tonal layer I can’t reproduce.”

  He cocked his head at the sound. There were two distinct voices, then a third cut in. The rumbling tones didn’t mean a thing to Vaz but he was suddenly aware of a lot of clicks and gulps within the words.

  He still didn’t know what to make of Phillips.

  They’d met less than two days ago and now they had to trust each other with their lives. Phillips was about Mal’s age, with reddish brown scrubby hair and a matching beard. He looked a little fitter than the average civvie in a set of unbadged UNSC fatigues. Vaz suspected he’d probably wanted a bit of adventure in his life but hadn’t had the balls to enlist. He wondered how Phillips was going to shape up when an Elite took a potshot at him.

  “Do you like them?” Vaz asked.

  “I’ve had direct contact with them. They’re fascinating.”

  Vaz had had pretty direct contact with them too, and fascinating wasn’t the word that sprang to mind. “But you don’t mind shafting them like this. Because that’s what we’re doing.”

  “Come on, it’s not as if I’m falsifying research.” Phillips made that sound like the worst possible thing a man could do. “I’d rather stay alive than die academically pure. Look, I know the Sangheili. They despise us. There’s no forgive and forget, not after nearly thirty years of killing each other. The only reason they split from the Covenant and allied with us was because the Prophets were trying to exterminate them. Hardly the basis for a lasting marriage, is it?”

  “We’re not good at forgetting either,” Vaz said. “Glad to know you haven’t grown fond of them.”

  The conversation ended abruptly when BB appeared and hovered in the gap next to Vaz. ONI might have taken AIs for granted, but Vaz didn’t, and judging by the way he jumped, neither did Phillips.

  “Come along, gentlemen,” BB said. “Chop-chop. Places to go, mayhem to cause.” He rotated and headed for the ladder, not that he even needed to. “Final briefing at eighteen hundred. Captain on deck.”

  Phillips swung his feet off the console and stood up as BB vanished through the bulkhead. Port Stanley was so crammed with systems and holoprojectors that an AI could cover almost every centimeter of the ship. Vaz decided BB was just jerking a few chains for his own amusement.

  “This is why I didn’t do theology,” Phillips whispered, as if he thought BB wouldn’t hear him. “He isn’t actually in any one place, is he? Omnipresent. That really messes with my mind.”

  It was a frank admission for a smart guy. “He’s spread throughout the whole ship,” Vaz said. “He’s in every system. Right now, he is the ship.”

  “That occurred to me when I was taking a leak. It’s not a happy thought.”

  Phillips didn’t seem used to the indignities of communal living like service personnel. Vaz stifled a smile. “Don’t you have AIs at the university?”

  “Not like that. They’re either dumb or they’re terminal-restricted. And they’re not that human.”

  “I think that’s why UNSC ones have avatars, so we don’t get too paranoid. I don’t think the AIs actually need them.”

  “But he’s not where his avatar is. That’s what I’m struggling with.”

  “No.” Vaz had learned the art of not fretting about unsettling things that he couldn’t control. He just worked on the basis that BB, like the Corps, saw every move and heard every cough and spit he made. “Assume the worst. It makes life simpler.”

  He could hear Osman’s boots on the gantry. As he picked his way between the crates around the dropship, Devereaux looked busy in the cockpit, head down and shoulders moving as if she was running her hands across the instrument panel. When he stepped up into the crew bay it was instantly clear that it wasn’t a regular security vessel. The ONI engineers had gutted it. Now every centimeter of bulkhead was lined with surveillance equipment and screens.

  Mal was stacking small crates. “Luxury, eh?” he said. “Can’t remember the last time I landed on a planet without smashing into the ground.”

  Devereaux’s voice came over the bulkhead speaker. “Can’t recall the last time I did, either.”

  “Okay, that�
�s it. I’m changing my airline.”

  Both of them roared with laughter. Devereaux squeezed through the hatch into the crew bay and gave Vaz a friendly thump in the chest with her fist. “You know we haven’t got a plan, don’t you?”

  “We never do.” Vaz checked over his shoulder to see where Phillips was. He’d vanished. “They just drop us into the sewer and we work out how to clear it.”

  “Have you been charming our Spartan?”

  “Just talking.”

  “Keep at it, Vaz,” Mal said, winking. “Older birds are more grateful. Did she say why she keeps giving Osman the hairy eyeball?”

  “No. I didn’t ask.”

  “Trust me, there’s definitely something going on there.”

  Vaz put his finger to his lips. They really weren’t used to having fully sentient AIs around. Then it occurred to him that he was standing in a snake’s wedding of cables and surveillance feeds accessible to BB, so even a shut-it gesture wasn’t private.

  Devereaux gave Vaz a very discreet wink. She nudged Mal with her elbow to get him moving kit again. “Come on, Mal. Put your back into it.” She stuck her head out of the crew bay. “Phillips? You too. Come and shift this.”

  Vaz didn’t have to wait long for proof that BB saw all and heard all. Osman appeared at the bay door with Phillips at her heels. He looked as if she’d smacked him for being a bad boy.

  “How’s it going?” she asked.

  Mal straightened up. “Fine, ma’am. What’s the plan?”

  “I do have one.”

  Mal didn’t even blink. “Ah. Permission to feel reassured.”

  “Granted. The Sangheili effectively have no top-level command and control left so the best we can do is hand them the weapons and see where the fault lines form.” She didn’t seem irritated, whatever BB had relayed to her. If anything, she seemed a little apologetic. “We’re at the mercy of very patchy short-range comms, so there’ll be a lot of surveillance to carry out.”

  “We can do patient too, ma’am,” Mal said. Naomi appeared in the door and stood with one boot on the step, half-turned toward them. “We don’t just jump out of orbit and shoot bad guys.”

  “Don’t worry, Staff, you’ll see some action.” Osman paused a beat as if she was working up to something, then glanced at Naomi. “And you might as well know this now,” she said, carefully matter-of-fact. “I was in the Spartan-Two program until I was fourteen. Naomi and I knew one another. But I’m not a Spartan now. Everybody okay with that? We’re going to be living in each other’s pockets for quite some time, so I don’t want there to be any more secrets than are operationally necessary.”

  That was an unnatural thing for an ONI officer to say. Secrets were meat and drink to them. But it wasn’t half as unnatural as the word fourteen. Osman just stood there as if she was inviting comments. Vaz assumed it was calculated, because ONI officers were never lost for words and patted down every syllable for incriminating evidence before it was allowed to leave their mouths.

  Mal filled the gap. “You said fourteen, ma’am. Eighteen’s the minimum age for enlistment.”

  “Correct. We started the program aged six.” Osman gave Naomi a slow look and turned back to Vaz. “They couldn’t complete the full augmentations until we were fourteen.”

  Mal went quiet, probably doing the same calculations and gap-filling that Vaz was right then. But Phillips just dived in, unafraid of the braid as only a civvie could be.

  “This was a military academy, I assume,” he said.

  “Not exactly.” Osman seemed to be on a gutspill. Vaz couldn’t imagine any ONI officer doing that without a calculated reason. “Boot camp. Live rounds.”

  She looked as if she was going to say more but stopped dead. Vaz caught Naomi looking at Osman. Her thin-lipped expression said one thing: traitor. Vaz didn’t know why the captain had decided to share it with them, and he definitely didn’t know why it had pissed off Naomi so much, but Spartans obviously disapproved of talking outside the tent. Naomi just stood there, grim and silent.

  Osman scratched the nape of her neck as if her neural interface was bothering her, then glanced at her watch. “Well, that’s obviously broken more ice than I expected. Okay, BB, prepare to drop out in two hours and carry out a full comms sweep of the sector.”

  She jumped down from the crew bay and walked away. Naomi peeled off in the opposite direction. Nobody spoke until the click of Osman’s boots changed to a metallic clang as she climbed the ladder to the upper gantry.

  “Wonder why they didn’t share that little gem with us,” Mal said. “And why she did.”

  Phillips looked from face to face as if the ODSTs knew more than he did. He really didn’t understand the military yet. “Was she serious? That means they started the Spartan program before the Covenant war.”

  “Correct,” said a disembodied voice. BB took a couple of seconds to appear, and Vaz noted that nobody flinched this time. “It’s a long and complex story. A rather messy one.”

  “Thanks for not engaging our interest, BB,” Devereaux said, sliding back through the cockpit hatch. “We’re not remotely curious. Really.”

  Mal wasn’t amused at all, though. Vaz saw his jaw muscles working. “BB, are you going to trot off to her with every bloody thing we say?”

  “You were concerned about the obvious tension,” BB said calmly. “I thought it was worth getting the captain to address it, seeing as we’re living en famille, so to speak.”

  There was no answer to that. BB turned to Vaz. For a cube that wasn’t really there and didn’t actually need to turn to look at anything, his ability to convey which way he was looking fascinated Vaz. He seemed to have a faint dappling of light on one face of his cube.

  “And you’re right, Vasily,” BB said. “An avatar is for the benefit of humans. Not for the AI. Well, in my case, anyway. Some of my kind have issues about identity.”

  The question escaped before Vaz even thought about it. “So why not look human?”

  “That,” BB said, drifting away through the door, “would just be too needy.”

  BRUNEL SYSTEM: TWO HOURS LATER.

  Mal savored the novelty of being on the bridge when Port Stanley dropped out of slipspace.

  It was better than the movies. He’d never take a moment for granted. At this stage of a mission, he was usually already sealed into his drop pod in the launch bay of a frigate, blinded by the instrument panel and too preoccupied with final checks to think about the physics. Now he was sitting in front of a full-height viewscreen—the real deal, not some projection from an exterior cam—and about to watch creation return to existence.

  BB sat on the chart table like a ghostly box of donuts. “Five … four…”

  Osman just grunted. Mal watched her press back into her seat’s headrest as if she was steeling herself not to throw up. Beyond the viewscreen was absolute, unbroken nothing. Mal let the slight giddiness of reentry roll over him.

  “Three … two … and we’re back.”

  And then there was light.

  Stars, rank upon rank of stars, red and yellow and blue-white, were somehow not there one second and there the next. Even the black of space was a different black. He fought down an urge to grin like a kid. After more than five centuries of space exploration, there was still only a relative handful of people who got the chance to do this on a regular basis. He turned to look at Vaz and Devereaux; no reaction. How could they be that jaded? Naomi and Phillips weren’t in his eyeline.

  “So how did we do, BB?” Osman got to her feet and moved to the chart table. She couldn’t predict exactly where and when the ship would drop back into realspace, even with the combined processing power of BB and the corvette’s own dumb navigation AI. “How far off target?”

  “Oh ye of little faith,” said BB. “Current position is approximately one hundred and forty-nine million kilometers from Brunel, so we’re about five hours from New Llanelli, and well within our time window. That’s not too shabby. Making OPSNORMAL
and starting comms scan now.” It couldn’t have taken him more than a second. The speed those things worked at was frightening. “Messages waiting—sitrep for you from the Admiral, Captain. She’s also passing on personal messages from Ten-ODST Five-Five Flight and Fifteen-ODST Lima Company. Awww. Bless.”

  Cocky little bugger. But as soon as the thought formed, Mal realized that he’d accepted BB as an oppo, a brother in arms—body or no body. And good old Parangosky. How about that? Any admiral who understood that ODSTs worried about their mates disappearing was okay in his book.

  “Any update on John, BB?” Naomi asked quietly.

  BB paused for a second, which must have been a long time for an AI. “We haven’t given up, but it’s not looking hopeful.” He sounded genuinely sorry. “The Master Chief’s gone.”

  Naomi just blinked a couple of times. “And Dr. Halsey?”

  “She died on Reach,” Osman said flatly. “They’re still recovering bodies.”

  Mal felt for Naomi. Spartans had mates just like everybody else. He had no idea who Halsey was, but everyone knew about the Master Chief.

  “Okay, Prof, this is where you earn your keep,” Osman said, changing mood. She gestured Phillips to the communications console and Naomi moved in beside him. “You’re our ears.”

  Phillips seemed to be an old hand at this kind of thing. He took a molded earpiece from his top pocket and pressed it into his ear canal two-handed like a woman putting on a fiddly earring, then sat back in the seat, staring in defocus at the display in front of him while he listened for Elite comms frequencies.

  Devereaux went over to the chart table. “Give me another look at New Llanelli, BB.”

  Twenty centimeters above the surface of the table, an image of the colony world rotated as a sphere and then peeled itself like an orange, flipping out into a grid of colored lines to show the planet’s topography. Mal and Vaz had nothing better to do right then than to take a look and work out the least likely place to get ambushed.