Halo: Glasslands

by Traviss, Karen

  The illusion of water was overpowering. He looked down at his chest plate and dragged his gloved finger through a fine layer of slightly sticky dust. It was going to clog his filters if he didn’t flush them through as soon as he got back to the ship.

  Vaz walked up behind him. “How come it’s still standing?”

  “Dunno.” Mal ventured out onto the glass and walked gingerly between the debris embedded in it. “Maybe all this blew in while the glass was cooling.”

  It was pretty slippery, just like sheet ice. In some places it looked translucent with the hint of things trapped beneath. For the most part, though, it was a dense, opaque layer of mottled grays speckled with black patches that reminded Mal of carbon from a candle embedded in its melted wax. He squatted to inspect a charcoal velvet girder jutting out of the vitreous layer at a steep angle.

  Vaz followed and stood over him. “Weird.”

  “Fancy being stuck here on your own for a couple of years. Can’t do much for your mental health.”

  They waited, kicking around on the glassland and listening for movement. Vaz sighted up on the horizon for a few moments and then Mal heard crunching sounds like boots on gravel. A scruffy middle-aged man emerged from nowhere as if he’d crawled out of a hole. It had to be Spenser, and he looked exactly like he’d sounded.

  He was in his fifties, face deeply lined with a good crop of gray stubble, one hand thrust deep in the pocket of a thick mountaineering jacket. He dropped a couple of rucksacks by his feet. Judging by the thud they made, that was his surveillance equipment.

  “We didn’t see where you came from,” Vaz said.

  “Down there.” Spenser pointed. “The mine shafts are still mostly intact.”

  “Got that one right, then,” Mal said. “You ready to go now? Destroyed everything sensitive that you can’t carry?”

  “I set fire to my underpants, if that’s what you mean.” Spenser looked around with that finality of a man fixing something in his memory for the very last time. “Can’t say I’m sorry to leave this behind. Where are you dropping me off?”

  “We’re going to RV with Monte Cassino to cross deck you.” Mal could see some movement in the ruins. Vaz spotted it too and lifted his rifle slowly. “We picked up a survivor on New Llanelli, so you’ll have company.”

  Spenser frowned at Vaz and then glanced over his shoulder to see what he was looking at. “It’s just the Kig-Yar.”

  “Are they your informers?” Vaz asked. “Because if they are, they’re on their own. We can’t take the whole zoo with us.”

  “No, my boys are off camp. That bunch just drops in occasionally to scavenge for tantalum.”

  The Kig-Yar started breaking cover and trotting out into open ground, spiky crests bobbing as they moved. Most people called them Jackals, but the scrawny, scaly little bastards reminded Mal more of deeply unattractive herons. Maybe it was the long beaklike muzzle, or the long, bony limbs, but either way there was a reptilian birdness about them. They were clutching an assortment of weapons. One had a UNSC-issue sniper rifle.

  You better not have looted that from one of our dead, dickhead.…

  The other three had Covenant needle rifles. The Kig-Yar with the sniper piece moved to the front and seemed to be leading his mates over for a chat. Mal decided it was time to go. Then his radio crackled. Devereaux hit the alert.

  “Guys, I don’t want to worry you, but I’ve got a crowd of Jackals here too.”

  “Well, don’t sell them the dropship,” Mal said. “We’re on our way. Move out, Spenser.”

  Spenser grabbed his bags and the three of them began walking back to the ship, trying to speed up as they went. It was a slight uphill gradient. Mal just wanted to get out without a shooting match, but the Kig-Yar leader wasn’t having any of it.

  “You take?” he rasped. “No—ours! Our mines! You leave it!”

  Mal turned and took a few paces backward as he walked, doing his friendly act but with his finger on the trigger. “Yeah, all yours, mate. Help yourself. Fill your boots.”

  Naomi cut in on the radio. That was all he needed, a Spartan for a backseat driver. “Staff, have we got a situation down there?”

  “Small dose of Jackals. We’re dealing with it.” The Kig-Yar leader kept coming. They were usually pretty relaxed around humans as long as they were getting something out of it. They hadn’t exactly been Covenant zealots, the lowest of the low as far as the Elites were concerned, less obedient than a Grunt and lacking the in-your-face ferocity of Brutes. “Stand by. We’re banging out.”

  They were only fifty meters from the ship. Now Mal could see what was worrying Devereaux. Five or six Kig-Yar were wandering around the dropship, looking it over like they were thinking about buying it. Mal almost expected them to start kicking the tires. The hatches were shut, but there was nothing Devereaux could do to drive them off short of opening the starboard bay door and using a rifle. The things were so close to the ship that they were too far inside the range of the close-in cannon.

  And at some point, Devereaux was going have to open the hatch for Mal and the others. Knowing what pushy scavengers the Kig-Yar were, Mal decided the priority was to keep them out of the ship.

  “They’re just Jackals,” Vaz said, striding ahead without breaking his pace. Mal was more worried about Spenser. He had both hands full of kit. “They’ve got bird bones. They break. I’ll get them to move.”

  “Vaz, we’re bloody well surrounded. Take it easy.”

  The Kig-Yar with the sniper rifle was right on Mal’s heels. If Mal gave him his MA5C and told them all to go away, he suspected they probably would. There was nothing secret about the rifle, either, especially with the number being traded on the black market. But just as he slowed down to turn and talk his way out of a confrontation, Sniper Jackal made the mistake of reaching out and grabbing him by the shoulder with a clawed hand.

  “Whoa there, mate.” Mal jerked away and held his rifle aside so that the Kig-Yar could see his finger on the trigger, fending him off with his free hand. “I said we were going, didn’t I? Now take your buddies and sod off. We don’t want any trouble.”

  Sniper Jackal spat out a stream of what Mal assumed were obscenities. Mal, Vaz, and Spenser were now at a standstill with a ring of Kig-Yar between them and the dropship.

  Life was normally straightforward for an ODST. Mal encountered an enemy and blew its brains out, no ifs, ands, or chats about the weather. If he slotted any of these, though, the news would be around the sector in ten seconds flat, and he was pretty sure the last thing Osman wanted was for Port Stanley’s presence to become common knowledge.

  “Come on, guys,” Spenser said, doing an arms-spread gesture at the Kig-Yar. “What’s your problem? You know me. We’ve done business.”

  Vaz was now standing at the dropship’s hatch, or at least he would have been if there hadn’t been a couple of Kig-Yar in his way. Mal saw him look around, sizing up the odds before he grabbed one of them by the collar and shoved the muzzle of his rifle under its chin. Sometimes they responded to a bit of alpha male aggression.

  “You’re in my way,” Vaz said. “Move it.”

  “You only got small ship,” said Sniper Jackal from behind Mal. They couldn’t detect the corvette in orbit, of course. “You got big mouth for human with no backup. We take it and drop you somewhere nice, yes?”

  Things were now going pear-shaped at a rate of knots. “Don’t say I didn’t try to be reasonable,” Mal said. “Naomi? You getting this? Now would be a good time, sweetheart.”

  He hoped she had a good fix on his signal. If she hadn’t, then BB certainly would. Mal shoved Spenser to the ground just as a searing bolt of white light sizzled through the thin cloud cover and blew a fountain of soil and rock high in the air about twenty meters to their left.

  Debris rained on them, rattling off his armor. Some of the Kig-Yar threw themselves flat. Sniper Jackal tottered sideways, thrown off balance by the blast, and Mal put two shots through him. The next t
hing Mal heard was the whhfft-whhfft-whhfft of needle rifles discharging and something striking off his helmet. He opened fire in the direction of the sound. And Spenser wasn’t on the floor anymore. He was right next to Mal, squeezing off a few with his pistol.

  All Mal could hear now was automatic fire—his rifle and Vaz’s, he hoped—and then suddenly it all stopped dead in a ringing silence. His pulse hammered in his throat. When he looked around, Vaz was turning a dead Kig-Yar over with his boot and rummaging through the pouches on the thing’s belt.

  Mal straightened up and got his breath back, then did a quick head count to check that none of the Jackals had escaped. Spenser dusted himself down and gave Mal a weary look of disapproval.

  “Better hope one of these vultures isn’t related to any of my informers,” Spenser said irritably. “It took me years to build up that network.”

  Yeah, tough. Join the club. Mal got on the radio. “Thanks, Naomi. Captain? I’m afraid we’ve left a bit of a mess.”

  “Never mind.” Osman sounded surprisingly relaxed about it. “Have you got any Sangheili rifles down there? You might want to make a bit more of a mess so we can blame it on them as well. Stir it up wherever you can, gentlemen.”

  Mal liked a woman with a positive outlook on life. Vaz moved from body to body, collecting weapons. He looked up at Mal and frowned, tapping his helmet.

  “Dent,” he said. “Needle must have hit you.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “You never know.” Vaz went back to rifling the Kig-Yar’s pouches. “These are bound to come in handy, if only for fitting someone up with false evidence.”

  “Bring back a couple of bodies, too,” said Osman. “We might find a use for those.”

  Kig-Yar stank to high heaven, and being dead didn’t make them any more fragrant. The smell worked its way through the entire dropship on the run back to Port Stanley. It was an aroma that Mal could only describe as mudflats at low tide after a passing tanker carrying acetic acid had shed its load on the beach.

  “I want one of those little lavender air fresheners,” Devereaux muttered as she settled the dropship onto the docking ring. “You better get me one of those, Vaz.”

  Mal wondered how long it would take him to live down one of the worst extractions in the Corps’ history, but Osman seemed perfectly satisfied. She came down to the hangar while they were unloading.

  “Where do you want me to put the Jackals, ma’am?” Mal asked.

  “Stick them in the cryo store with the Jiralhanae,” she said, as casually as telling him to put a liter of milk in the fridge. “Everybody stand by to jump. Next stop, Monte Cassino. I’m going to go and do some catching up with Spenser.”

  Mal and Vaz bundled up the Kig-Yar corpses in body bags and heaved them onto a gurney. BB appeared and made tutting noises.

  “I think he’s a bit old for her, don’t you?” BB said. “Do you want a hand with those?”

  “Yeah, very funny.” Mal took the head end and Vaz steered from the rear. “Have we really got dead Brutes in storage?”

  “They’re next to the grape jelly,” BB said.

  He was joking about the grape jelly, because there wasn’t any, but there really were a couple of intact Jiralhanae corpses and assorted body parts in a cryo-sealed container. Mal stared. Vaz shrugged.

  “You realize nobody back home is going to believe this,” he said.

  “You realize we can never tell them anyway.”

  Mal went back to the dropship and found Devereaux scrubbing the deck of the cargo area on her hands and knees with good old-fashioned water and disinfectant.

  “If you’d known it was going to be this weird, would you have volunteered?” Devereaux asked.

  “I don’t think we did,” Mal said.

  When he flopped onto his bunk at the end of his watch, he was sure that he still stank of vinegar. He shoved his fatigues in the laundry and scrubbed himself raw in the shower before finally gargling water up his nose in the hope that it would flush the remaining molecules out of his nose hairs. At one point he looked up from the basin and caught his reflection in the mirror, coughing and choking, and prayed that BB wasn’t going to materialize in the cabin and laugh at him. But he was on his own, genuinely on his own for maybe the first time in ages, and it felt oddly lonely.

  The alarm woke him six hours later. Port Stanley had already dropped out of slipspace. He walked onto the bridge in time to hear Naomi talking to the comms officer in Monte Cassino.

  “Stanley, we’re still five hours behind you.” Monte Cassino’s officer of the watch sounded apologetic. That was slipspace for you, a lottery of reentry points. “How long before you reach Ariadne’s position? She’s venting reactor coolant now and she still can’t land her crew.”

  “You mean Venezia still won’t help them,” Naomi said.

  “Well, they won’t let the ship land, and they’re not willing to board her to evacuate the crew. They say it’s too dangerous.”

  “Okay, our AI estimates we can be there in two hours at sublight—we’ve actually got a visual on her. We’ll take the crew off and wait until you show up. Stanley out.”

  “Is the boss okay with that?” Mal asked.

  “Insists on it,” Naomi said.

  Ariadne was a patrol ship, with a complement of thirty at most. Mal estimated that it would take half an hour to secure a docking ring and cross deck everyone. All they had to do then was stand off at a safe distance from Ariadne, just in case, and hand out coffee—the ordinary stuff—until Monte Cassino rocked up. It wouldn’t compromise opsec at all.

  “Where is she, then?” he asked, trying to pick out Ariadne in the star field.

  Naomi stared for a while, then pointed. “Here. Take a look on the long-range monitor.”

  Ariadne was just a speck of light even at maximum magnification. The marbled crescent of Venezia seemed Jupiter-sized by comparison.

  “Not very efficient, the Covenant,” Mal said. “You’d have thought they would have glassed Venezia early on.”

  Naomi just grunted. Mal was wondering if all the Spartans were that antisocial when the pinprick light that was Ariadne suddenly grew a lot brighter and then vanished.

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, and neither did Naomi. Then they looked at each other.

  “I hope that’s not the reactor,” he said, but knew it bloody well was.

  “BB.” Naomi tapped the console. “BB, what happened? What did we just see? Is it what I think it is?”

  BB took a second or two to respond.

  “I’m afraid I’ve lost her,” he said. “Ariadne’s gone.”

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  IT’S THE ONE THING WE CAN’T CRACK. ALL THE FORERUNNER TECHNOLOGY WE’VE BEEN ABLE TO EXPLOIT, ALL THE IMPROVEMENTS IN DRIVE PERFORMANCE AND WEAPONS CAPACITY WE CAN NOW INCORPORATE INTO INFINITY, AND WE STILL CAN’T SEND A SHIP INTO SLIPSPACE AND CALCULATE EXACTLY WHERE AND WHEN SHE’S GOING TO EMERGE FROM IT. THAT ADVANCE ALONE WOULD HAVE SAVED ARIADNE’S CREW.

  (REAR ADMIRAL SAEED SHAFIQ, UNSC PROCUREMENT)

  FORERUNNER DYSON SPHERE, FORMERLY ONYX: LOCAL DATE NOVEMBER 2552.

  “Wherever she is, she’s almost certainly safe,” Halsey said, slapping one palm against the wall. She still held the gray cylinder in the other. “The Forerunners built this for safety. Let’s just think our way through this.”

  Mendez seemed to be taking no notice of her. He turned to the right and vanished into the gloom. Fred and Linda were working their way across the wall at the end of the passage with tactical lamps from their rifles, searching for signs of an opening. The masonry seemed to swallow any light that fell on it.

  “They were also trying to keep something out, Doctor.” Mendez’s voice boomed out of the darkness. “And there was something moving around in there. That’s why she went in. Why don’t you take another look at the control panel? It’s got to be linked.”

  Halsey knew when she was being told to shut up and get lost.
It made her scalp prickle. She wasn’t used to being surplus to requirements. She couldn’t see Olivia or Tom, but Ash and Mark, who seemed to be giving her a wide berth, were back in the control lobby working their hands across the dazzling display of symbols. She got as far as the end of the passage and thought better of it.

  Her natural tendency was to tell them to stop and leave it to someone who knew what they were doing, but she wasn’t so sure that she did. Things just seemed familiar. That was inevitable, she supposed, if humans did share some common origin with the Forerunners. Many symbols were rooted in basic physiology, like the dominance of red as a warning. But she still felt uneasy leaving this to gifted amateurs.

  Are they gifted? Are they exceptional? How did Ackerson select them?

  Halsey had assessed enough children in her time to be able to spot ability and character traits. Crisis or no crisis, her curiosity was consuming her. She wanted to know more about the Spartan-IIIs.

  She could still hear Mendez calling for Lucy. The girl couldn’t respond even if she could hear him, of course. What was he thinking, letting someone in that condition serve on the front line? She turned around and went after him. He probably wasn’t in a teachable moment, but things had to be said.

  Then there was Kurt’s misguided attempt to enhance the Spartan-IIIs’ neurobiology. No, she refused to believe that was Kurt’s idea, whatever he’d told her. Her Spartans were too intelligent to make that mistake. They’d have realized that deliberately creating a personality disorder that had to be kept in check with medication was asking for trouble. Spartans were likely to be cut off from supply lines in the field, forced to live off the land, and the last thing they needed was reliance on drugs that could run out. This had to be Ackerson’s amateur tinkering.

  Halsey wandered up to Mendez as casually as she could. “I should have realized that Lucy’s judgment was impaired,” she said carefully. “It’s neurobiological. How long since the Spartan-Threes had their meds? Too long, Chief. And we’re not likely to get resupplied anytime soon.”