Halo: Glasslands

by Traviss, Karen

Phillips nodded. “Apparently.”

  “That could get interesting. Naomi says he definitely wasn’t on overwatch. He was doing some sneaky observation.”

  “Maybe he’s an agent for the Arbiter. A plant. A sleeper. Or whatever the Spookish is for undercover these days.”

  Now there’s a thought.

  “Cover blown, then,” Osman said. “Now let’s work out the most divisive and strife-inducing way I can use that information.”

  MAINTENANCE AREA, FORERUNNER DYSON SPHERE, ONYX: LOCAL DATE NOVEMBER 2552.

  “Easy, Lucy. Back off.”

  Mendez had Lucy in a headlock and she was finally running out of adrenaline. She knew she’d kicked him, but she really didn’t mean to, not the Chief, not the man who’d raised her and turned her into a soldier. “I said stand down, Spartan. Did you hear me? Stand down!”

  She took a deep wheezing gasp, deafened by her own pulse. Her legs almost buckled and her face and neck felt like they were on fire. She realized that Mendez was now holding her up rather than holding her back.

  And she was crying—sobbing like she hadn’t sobbed for years. Mendez turned her around to face him and crushed her to him so tightly that she thought he’d break a rib.

  “Good girl. Let it out. It’s okay.” She’d just punched out the ONI’s chief scientist but Mendez didn’t sound angry at all. “Let it all out. Damn. That was a long time coming.”

  Lucy had a small crowd around her now and suddenly felt completely humiliated. Tom ruffled her hair ferociously. “You’re back, Lucy. You’re back. Come on. Keep talking.”

  But she wasn’t sure what to say next. It should have been an apology, but she wasn’t sorry, not one damn bit, not for defending Prone. She couldn’t see Halsey behind a cluster of Spartan-IIs, but she knew that she must have hit her a hell of a lot harder than she thought. Her hand was throbbing.

  “She’ll be okay,” Kelly said, straightening up. It was hard to tell if she was looking at Lucy but her voice was flat calm. “Nothing that can’t be fixed.”

  Mendez let Lucy go but still kept a tight grip on her shoulder. He’d never been a kindly-looking man but the granite expression softened just for a moment. “I ought to put you on a charge, Petty Officer. But I’m just too damn glad to hear you talking again.” He looked over her head in Halsey’s direction. “You’re lucky she’s a small one, Doctor. Are you okay?”

  Halsey was on her feet now, supported by Kelly and Linda. Fred took his helmet off and looked at Lucy as if he was working out who the hell she was.

  “I’ll live,” Halsey said. She dabbed at her nose with the back of her hand, trying to mop up a thin trickle of bright red blood. “You and I had better have a talk, Chief.”

  Halsey went outside with her Spartan escort like she was some kind of general. Lucy bristled. It must have shown because Mendez gave her his don’t-even-think-about-it look.

  “Now I’m going to get my ass kicked,” he said. “Tom, look after her, will you? I’d better make sure Halsey gives the Engineers some space or we’ll be here until hell calls time.”

  The adrenaline had ebbed away and Lucy was now at the embarrassed and shaky stage. She’d never lost control like that before. The doctors had warned her that anger was part of traumatic stress, but she was a Spartan, for goodness’ sake. She should have had enough discipline to resist throwing a punch.

  There was just something about Halsey haranguing the Engineers that snapped something inside her, and for a few seconds she didn’t care whether she lived or died as long as she lashed out and stopped it.

  Tom and Olivia kept ruffling her hair. “That’ll make her think twice about treating us as cheap knockoffs,” Olivia said, putting her arm around Lucy’s shoulders. “How’re you doing, Luce? Take it a step at a time, though. I bet that this time next week we won’t be able to shut you up.”

  The Engineers were huddled in a corner, probably wondering what the hell they’d let into their sphere. They’d seen Lucy shoot one of their buddies, and now she was swinging punches at civilians. Prone floated away from the group and headed her way, clutching a page-sized piece of the same milky white glass used on the walls. He fluttered his cilia over it and held it in front of her.

  YOU ARE PARTLY REPAIRED. WHO WILL FINISH REPAIRING YOU NOW?

  Lucy put her hand out to the screen, looking for the makeshift keyboard. Olivia caught her wrist.

  “No, speak to the guy, Lucy.”

  She’d managed one word, but that didn’t mean it had opened the floodgates. A connection in her brain was still fragile and rusted, the one that most people took for granted from the time they were small children—thinking what they were going to say before their vocal cords took over a fraction of a second later. It was an easy habit to lose. Just as she’d found herself struggling to frame written words, she was now back to square one trying to do the same with speech. She took her hand off the screen and touched Prone’s tentacle.

  “Prone,” she said hoarsely.

  I CANNOT RESTORE YOU. WHO WILL DO IT?

  Lucy gestured to the squad around her. “Them.”

  “Good going, Luce,” Mark said, almost shaking her by the shoulders. “Keep it up.”

  Prone peered into her face for a few moments and then wrote on his pad again. YOU WANT TO GO HOME.

  Lucy knew that if she asked in the right way, he’d send a message for her. He trusted her despite what she’d done, and he obviously didn’t trust Halsey.

  But was it the right thing to do? Engineers weren’t stupid, and if Prone was worried about what was lurking outside the sphere, then he had good reason. On the other hand, maybe he’d just show them what he could see. It was only a small step. It didn’t mean breaking radio silence and making themselves into potential targets.

  But how do you breach a Dyson sphere in another dimension anyway? Can anyone get at us?

  Lucy nodded at Prone. She didn’t have a home to go back to, and even her base on Onyx was gone, but that was too complicated for her to explain to him right now. The important thing was that she focused again and continued with the mission, or everyone she’d lost would have died for nothing.

  It was a massive effort. She looked into Prone’s face and squeezed the unfamiliar words out of weak vocal cords.

  “Show us.”

  “She means show us your data on the threat,” Olivia said. “Maybe we know what it is.”

  Prone didn’t respond. He seemed to be studying Lucy’s face in return. Then he just wandered off and rejoined his friends.

  “Sometimes I think those things react to humans, and sometimes I think they’re just looking at a complicated circuit diagram,” said Mark. “But maybe he’s gone away to mull it over.”

  For the moment, there was nothing that they could do. Lucy wondered whether to stay out of Halsey’s way, but she had to face the woman sooner or later, and they were still stuck here with no immediate hope of rescue. No, she had to stop thinking of it as a rescue. She had to see it as the retrieval of high-value technology. She walked outside into the sunlight, suddenly terrified that she didn’t know what to say—literally say—next. If she didn’t try to keep talking, she knew she would slide back into silence.

  She looked around the camp at the underclothes and jerky drying side by side on the bushes and saw the Spartan-IIs standing in a huddle, talking. Mendez and Halsey were head to head a few meters away. Their body language said it all.

  They were standing square on to each other, shoulders braced in confrontation. Lucy could hear the discussion building into a fight. They were oblivious. Maybe they didn’t care that they now had an audience of Spartans.

  Halsey had her arms folded tight across her chest, more a blocking gesture than a defensive one. “Do you take my point now, Chief? They’re just not stable. They’re a liability.”

  “So what do you want me to do, Doctor?” Mendez growled. “They were broken when we got them. It was their goddamn qualification to get into the program, for Chrissakes. Terrified,
angry little kids who’d seen their parents killed and wanted to lash out.”

  “Well, yes, that’s a classic profile, but—”

  “You know what regular recruits are like when you draft them?” He started stabbing his finger in her direction to make his point. “A mixed bag. Some are downright psychopathic. Some are bone idle. Some are scared of their own shadows. All kinds.” He took out his cigar and shoved it between his lips, still talking as it dangled there while he felt in his pockets for that ancient Swedish fire-starter he always carried. “But dumb guys like me make them into fighting men and women by giving them discipline and pride. That’s the way the armed forces always ran before we started designing soldiers.” He paused for breath as he struck furious sparks off the two metal strips onto a scrap of dry grass, then lit the Sweet William. “You know something?” He gestured with the cigar right under her nose, wafting her with smoke. “It’s the way the rest of the UNSC still runs. What you call disorders and abnormalities, I call different personalities. You just want to medicate and tweak and modify people into one vanilla definition of perfect, lady, and it’s not what humans are like.”

  “You finished, Chief?”

  “Hell, no, Doctor, I only just got started. You were never much good at accepting imperfect people, were you? You dumped your own goddamn daughter on her dad when she got too imperfect. Poor Jacob Keyes. Nice guy. Good father. Great officer. So then you made your own perfect daughter with that AI of yours, Cortana, a tidy little copy of yourself who thinks you’re the Virgin Mary. I don’t need a goddamn Ph.D. in psychiatry to work out what’s wrong with you.”

  Lucy couldn’t move. She didn’t really know Halsey and she didn’t care what the woman thought of Spartan-IIIs. But she could hear Mendez losing his temper. His voice was getting more gravelly as his throat constricted. He almost wheezed when he puffed on that cigar. This was the man who’d looked after her and the other Spartan recruits from the day she’d landed on a strange planet with a bunch of six-year-old savages who’d almost forgotten what it meant to be human beings. He asked them who wanted a chance to kill the Covenant. Me. I wanted that. I wanted to kill them all. Mendez had faced the same risks alongside them. She knew whose side she’d be on in any fight.

  “You bastard,” Halsey said at last. It was more of a hiss. “How dare you pry into my private life.”

  “You’re not the only one with a nosey AI, Doctor. But a lot of UNSC staff can access the DNA database—and the goddamn calendar. A lot of people know. They’ve just got too much respect for Miranda to gossip.”

  “You and Ackerson. A matching pair of treacherous assholes.”

  “At least he only took volunteers.”

  “Six-year-olds can’t possibly volunteer. Spare me the competitive morality.”

  “They didn’t have parents grieving for them, either.”

  “You’ve been saving this up, haven’t you?”

  “Not really. Work in a sewer long enough and you don’t notice the smell until you go outside.”

  Lucy was transfixed. All the stuff about Halsey and her daughter and parents grieving—it was getting ugly, even if she didn’t understand the context. She realized Tom and Fred were now standing next to her, helmets in hands.

  “I better break this up,” Fred said.

  Tom shook his head. “No, sir, I think you better leave them to air their differences.”

  Halsey dropped her voice, but it was still crystal-clear. “You knew what the deal was, Chief. You could have walked away at any time.”

  “So I deserve what’s coming to me. I should have asked for a transfer as soon as I found out what you’d done to their parents. And those goddamn clones. You know what? Just saying it out loud now makes me sick to my gut. It was all wrong. All completely wrong. Well, I hope someone charges me with the crimes, because this should never be hidden. This should never be covered up.”

  “But you did it once,” Halsey said, hands on hips, “and then you did it again, without me. And you did it for the same reason that I did—because creating Spartans gave us the best chance of saving the human race.”

  “Steady with that airbrush, Doctor. You created the Spartans to counter colonial insurgents. That was a hell of a long time before the Covenant showed up.”

  “And they were just as big a threat. Remember Haven? I wanted to stop that ever happening again.”

  “You wanted to do it because you could. Curiosity. Goddamn vanity. You don’t give a damn about human life, not even your own daughter’s—only about being the smartest kid in the class.”

  “Don’t you dare lecture me on Miranda. I asked Jacob to bring her up because I knew I was a bad mother.”

  “I never said you weren’t self-aware.”

  “Look, I know I can’t give anyone unconditional love. But I’m smarter than most abusive parents and I knew Jacob would do a better job than I ever could. I didn’t want a doll to play with, Chief. I got pregnant, it wasn’t convenient, and I wasn’t prepared to take an unborn life.”

  “Don’t you dump that pious handwringing bullshit on me.” Mendez was now white with fury. He was gesturing so hard with the cigar that ash was flying everywhere. Lucy hovered on the edge of stepping in to break it up. “You had no damn respect for born life.”

  “Okay, that’s enough.” Fred strode forward, pushing between them until they backed apart. “This stops now. Both of you. Wind your necks in, and that’s an order.”

  Mendez just stood his ground and took a drag on what was left of his cigar. “Yes, sir.” Then he walked back to the tower entrance and went into the lobby.

  Halsey stood there for a moment, expressionless, then looked up at Fred. Lucy could see that her neck was flushed bright red. That was something she couldn’t hide.

  “He’s right, I’m afraid,” Halsey said. “Why else do you think I went slightly crazy and brought you all here? Late onset of menopause?”

  “Preserving vital assets, ma’am.”

  “Salving my conscience,” Halsey said, and walked away toward the river.

  Lucy’s mad moment seemed small and forgotten by comparison. Everyone was looking either in the direction of the tower entrance or toward the river, which she took as a sign of whether they were more worried about Mendez or Halsey. A split was forming. If the Engineers didn’t find them a way out of here, that was going to become a major problem. Fred might have been the ranking officer but there wasn’t a lot he could do to keep Halsey on a leash.

  “That’s really sad about her daughter,” Kelly said at last. “Miranda Keyes? I’d never have guessed. She’s so much like her father.”

  “And what about your parents?” Olivia asked. “What did the Chief mean about clones?”

  Kelly shrugged as if she wasn’t bothered about it at all. With a helmet on, Spartans could hide a lot of turmoil. “You’ll need to ask him about that.”

  Tom nudged Lucy with his elbow and steered her away for a walk. If Lucy had a close buddy in the squad, then it was Tom. They’d been the only two survivors from the raid on the Pegasi Delta refinery. She knew that was where she’d started to come unraveled, while Tom just kept on going, dependable and unflappable as ever. Sometimes she wondered why he could handle it and she couldn’t, but by the time that thought started to form in her mind she was past the stage of being able to have a discussion about it. The doctors said that sooner or later, given enough pressure, shot at enough times, isolated and deprived of sleep for long enough, almost everyone would succumb to traumatic stress. Everyone reached their individual tipping point, and hers just happened sooner than Tom’s.

  But she could still function in combat. And that was all that mattered to her, because her punishment had been to survive her friends, and that meant she had some duty to perform before life would let her off the hook.

  “Talk to me, Lucy,” Tom said. “You know the last thing you said to me? To anyone? How do we know we’re still alive. Yeah, living’s hard after all that.”

  Luc
y pursed her lips, making a conscious effort to shape the word. “Sorry,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry for, Luce. Nothing at all.”

  She knew it was going to take a lot more effort to get back to the person she’d been, if she ever made it at all. In the meantime, she was satisfied that she would be able to say enough to be a more useful member of the squad. She walked around for a while with Tom, searching for edible plants, until a shout from behind made them turn.

  Mendez had come out of the lobby, walking behind Prone to Drift. The set of his shoulders had changed and it looked like there was some news. Lucy and Tom jogged back to the others.

  “You’ve got a persuasive way with you, Petty Officer,” Mendez said to her. “Your friend has something to say.”

  Prone was still clutching the small sheet of white glass, his message pad. He held it in front of her.

  YOU MUST BE FULLY REPAIRED. MAKE THE CALL.

  Maybe he was trying to encourage Lucy to speak. But if he wanted her to send a signal and was prepared to risk alerting whatever was lurking out there, she wasn’t the person for the job. Halsey was best qualified to do this stuff. Lucy gestured.

  “Her,” she said. “Ask her.”

  Halsey plunged straight in. “Thank you, Prone.” She was doing her “mommy” voice again. “The worst that can happen is that someone realizes we’re in here, but it’s a Dyson sphere in another dimension. We’re still safe.”

  Prone drifted back inside and everyone followed him. The rest of them seemed to have gone into hiding again. He tapped a couple of the symbols on the wall and beckoned Halsey forward.

  The word SPEAK appeared in the white glass in front of her. She didn’t hesitate.

  “This is Dr. Catherine Halsey,” she said. “All UNSC callsigns, this is Dr. Catherine Halsey, ONI, and I require assistance. Respond to receive coordinates.”

  There was no crackling static or any sound of dead air. Either Forerunner comms equipment was as perfect as their masonry, or there was no signal. Halsey repeated the message a couple of times and then a voice filled the entire room—an old woman’s voice, slightly husky with age and authority, but as clear as if she was standing there with them.