Halo: Glasslands

by Traviss, Karen

  UNSC PORT STANLEY, IN ORBIT AROUND ONI RF TREVELYAN, ONYX SECTOR.

  Vaz took his life in his hands and stepped into Naomi’s path as she came thundering down the passage.

  “You can’t see her,” he said. “Captain’s orders. Parangosky’s orders. Just leave it, Naomi. Please.”

  It took a lot of balls to try to intercept a Spartan who didn’t want to be intercepted. Vaz expected her to roll right over him and break a few bones in her determination to talk to Halsey before she was transferred to Compton-Hall. Those were his orders, but that wasn’t the only reason he was doing it.

  He tried to imagine what it would feel like to live and fight under that kind of unnatural stress for more than thirty-five years, and then find the only person you thought of as a mother was in fact a monster who’d ripped your family apart. Spartans weren’t machines. It had to hurt like hell.

  Naomi hadn’t known what had gone on back home while she was being whisked away to Reach with dozens of other unlucky kids whose only mistake had been to be born strong, smart, and a long way from Earth. Vaz could see her imagination was now working overtime picturing the misery that Halsey had left in her wake.

  Halsey was a genetics expert. She should have known those cloned kids would stand a high risk of dying. What kind of a bitch would do that to another human being after kidnapping their real child?

  “Vaz, I need to talk to her,” Naomi said quietly. “I might not get another chance. I just want to know why she kept all that from us.”

  Vaz still blocked the passage, boots planted firmly and shoulders squared, although if a Spartan wanted to get past him there would have been nothing he could do about it. He had a pretty good idea why Halsey hadn’t bothered to explain to her adoring trainees exactly what she’d done, but it would only make things worse if he said so.

  “She didn’t want to hurt you,” Vaz lied.

  “Nice try, but I want to hear it from her.”

  Now he could hear the stampede sound of the other Spartans heading his way. He wasn’t going to let them past, either. He wondered if the brutal truth might actually be kinder than letting them think that ONI was extraditing some kind of saint.

  The guy in front was a lieutenant, which made things doubly awkward: Frederic. Even that offended Vaz—that Halsey had given them just first names, as if they’d always be children. They had a right to their surnames. Okay, they didn’t remember them, but they had lineage, and they had ancestors, and they came from somewhere.

  “Corporal, we just want to talk to Dr. Halsey,” Frederic said. What was Vaz supposed to call him, Lieutenant Frederic? What kind of a name was that for a grown man, let alone an officer? “I don’t see what harm it can do.”

  “Admiral’s orders, sir,” Vaz said. “Please don’t make me disobey my captain. She might be the next head of ONI and I value my nuts.”

  Frederic looked uneasy. “I’ll make my representations to Admiral Parangosky, then.”

  Frederic turned back up the passage with the other two female Spartans. Naomi looked at Vaz and did a slow headshake that was more confusion than disagreement. She’d obey orders, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t having a hard time with it.

  “Come on,” he said. He decided to try another tack. “You’re a Spartan. You don’t need to hear her excuses. She doesn’t control you.”

  “Okay, but can I ask a favor, Vasya?” She used the Russian short form. Nobody else did that. “Osman says I can see my records if I want to. She thinks I ought to see the whole thing, like there’s worse to come.”

  “And do you want to?”

  “I don’t know. I wish I did. I don’t have the courage to look.”

  But she had the guts to take on a hinge-head with her bare hands, and any number of crazy things that could get even a Spartan killed. Vaz understood why it was too much for her, though. Once she read the detail, she could never forget it. Most of her childhood memories were too deeply buried to plague her consciously. But she was almost certainly speculating what her parents had been like, and how the events had devastated them, and she could have been imagining a lot worse than the reality. His automatic response was to do it, like he’d do the same for Mal. Looking out for your buddies didn’t just mean giving them covering fire.

  “What do you want me to do?” Vaz asked. “Just say.”

  “Would you read my files and decide whether I should know or not?”

  Damn. How the hell will I know?

  It was a massive responsibility. If he told her, it might be too painful, and if he didn’t, she’d know it was because the details were too awful and maybe imagine worse anyway. Even for a Spartan, there was such a thing as the final straw.

  But an ODST didn’t let his buddies down.

  “Okay,” he said. “You trust me to do that, do you?”

  “Of course I do. Thanks, Vasya. I’ll let the Captain know you’ll need the file.”

  She looked past him at the door to the compartment where Halsey was being held, and for a stupid moment he was tempted to let her in and face the consequences. But he could see Halsey making hand-wringing excuses for what she’d done, and then he’d be sorely tempted to punch the shit out of her, sixty years old or not.

  The other Spartans—the ones they called the Spartan-IIIs—were huddled in the senior rates’ mess with Devereaux, who was plying them with coffee and a mountain of snacks. So these were the expendable suicide troops, the colonial cannon fodder. Damn, they were teenagers: none of them could have been older than eighteen. If they’d been pumped full of growth hormones and ceramics like Naomi, then it hadn’t worked. They were just regular-sized kids. One of the girls was so small and fresh-faced that she didn’t look old enough to be out of school, let alone given firearms. She stared at Vaz like a malevolent ferret and didn’t say a word.

  And we’re the good guys, are we?

  “Everyone okay?” he asked, looking from face to face. They stared back at him. Edgy was an understatement. “We’re going to cross deck you to Glamorgan in an hour. She’s got a proper doctor.”

  “We’re okay,” said one of the lads. His name tab said ASH. “Just peckish. Are we going to Earth?”

  “Yes, you’re getting a debrief at HIGHCOM in Sydney. Bravo-Six. Are you old enough to drink? There’s still some good bars in Sydney.”

  Ash stared at Vaz as if he was senile. “I’m thirteen,” he said. “And we’ve never been to Earth.”

  That brought Vaz up short. “Jesus. What about the rest of you?”

  “I’m twenty,” Tom said. “So’s Lucy here.” He patted the mad ferret kid’s shoulder. “But the other guys are about Ash’s age, yes.”

  It was just making Vaz angrier by the second. For a moment, he got a glimpse of why so many of the colonies hated Earth. He’d had enough of all this Spartan crap.

  “We’ll make sure the UNSC shows you some gratitude,” he said at last. “We’ll talk to your CO about it.”

  Vaz walked off. Devereaux came trotting down the passage after him.

  “Wow,” she said. “You saw that little girlie? She decked Halsey. She’s the one who blacked her eye. They’re all psychos.”

  “You’d be crazy as well if they gave you a rifle when you were six.”

  “Chief Mendez must have a magic touch to cope with all that.”

  “Either that,” Vaz said, “or he’s a complete bastard.”

  Devereaux held her hands up in her I’m-just-saying gesture and returned to mind the delinquent Spartans. Vaz went in search of Mal and found him in the galley with Mendez.

  They were talking quietly in the corner, arms folded, with that seen-it-all-no-shit expression peculiar to senior NCOs. Two cans of beer sat on the counter. Mendez was in his late fifties or early sixties, a real thug of a guy with whipcord forearms and a broken nose. So this was the man who trained all the Spartans. What the hell was he doing while Halsey was doing the Frankenstein stuff on the kids? Vaz couldn’t work out why Mal was sharing a beer with him, but
he nodded at him anyway. Maybe Mal needed to hear Mendez’s side of the story first.

  “Everything quiet out there?” Mal asked.

  Vaz shrugged. “The lieutenant wanted to talk to Halsey, but I told them she was off-limits. When’s Compton-Hall taking her off our hands?”

  Mal checked his watch. “Six hours. Then we head back home.”

  Mendez wasn’t saying much. He retrieved his beer and took a cigar stub out of his top pocket, staring at the frayed tip. “At least I get to replenish my supply of these.”

  “So you and Dr. Halsey.” Vaz just couldn’t make small talk with him. Something had to be said. “You’ve worked together a long time, yes?”

  Mendez might have been born looking suspicious. He certainly looked suspicious now. “I worked with her a long time ago, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Well, we’ve spent the last few weeks working with a couple of Spartans. It’s hard to know what to say about a project like that.”

  “Then it’s probably best to say nothing.”

  Vaz bristled. Okay, so Mendez trained the Master Chief and was some kind of legend, but Vaz couldn’t let that intimidate him. He wanted to know how all this Spartan stuff could possibly fit alongside the Navy’s sense of decency. He’d always despised people who wouldn’t stand up and be counted. And here he was now, dithering like some gutless little clerk about whether to say something that might upset a man who’d stood by while Halsey played Dr. Mengele.

  Okay, they can stick me on a charge for disrespect to a superior. But I’ve got to live with myself.

  “One question, Chief,” Vaz said. “If you knew what was happening to those kids, why didn’t you do something? Any of you? I mean, how many people does it take to create dozens of flash clones and run a program that size? There must’ve been a whole army of technicians and doctors and military personnel working on it. Just tell me why. For Naomi if nothing else.”

  Mendez took so long putting his cigar away and moving his can of beer across the counter that Vaz thought he was preparing to swing a punch. Yeah, why don’t you try that, grandad? Go on. See what you get. But the punch didn’t come, and Vaz found himself disappointed.

  “And you’d like to think that you would have handled things differently,” Mendez said.

  Vaz stared into his face, searching for any loss of nerve. “There’s some things that you can’t do and still call yourself a man.”

  He waited for an explosion or a punch. He didn’t dare look at Mal. What he’d said didn’t change a damn thing, and it wouldn’t stop it happening again with other people and other kids, but he’d said it. That was better than not saying it.

  I don’t care if he’s the biggest damn hero in the UNSC and rescues blind kittens in his spare time. It’s still wrong and it’s always going to be wrong.

  “Yeah, I think I reached that conclusion a few years ago,” Mendez said at last. He didn’t seem to be avoiding Vaz’s gaze so much as staring past him at something on the bulkhead that only he could see. “Next time I’ll try to find my conscience before the event, not after it.”

  He drained his beer in one pull, tossed the can in the trash, and left.

  Mal turned to Vaz, arms still folded. “Feel better now?”

  “Actually, yes.” Vaz didn’t plan to apologize. “I do. A sense of right and wrong is all we are.”

  Mal rolled his eyes. “If I knew the names of any Russian philosophers, I’d probably have a really good line to shoot back at you, but I don’t, and I haven’t,” he said. “So come on, what do you think should happen to Mendez? Okay, Halsey—it was her project. But what are you going to do about people like Mendez and everyone else? How far down are you going to drill?”

  “As far as it takes. Because it’s ordinary people who let it happen.” Vaz busied himself refilling the coffee machine. He didn’t want a fight with Mal, and he didn’t want to discover anything about the guy that he didn’t respect. Mal was his best friend. They’d been through a lot together. But it was a lot easier hell-jumping than wrestling with this kind of stuff. “The monsters don’t run the gulags and the death camps and the reeducation centers. Regular people do. If they all had the balls to say no, the likes of Halsey, Zhou, or Stalin could never do it all on their own. Could they?”

  “I’m not saying forgive and forget. But you know bloody well that ninety-nine percent of humans do exactly what everyone else around them is doing, even if they know it’s evil or plain stupid, because that’s the way humans are.”

  Like keeping my mouth shut about this. “That’s not a defense.”

  “No, but would you tell ONI to shove it in the middle of a war? Look at what we’re doing right now.”

  “It wasn’t the middle of a war. This was before the Covenant showed up. It was about counterinsurgency, not genocide.”

  “So being killed by the Covenant is worse than being killed by some colonial tosser? You hate it when civvies second-guess us with the luxury of hindsight.”

  “This wasn’t some split-second decision under fire. It was deliberate, it went on for twenty-odd years, and it involved kids. How hard is it to work out that was wrong? Seriously, Mal, how hard?”

  Sometimes Mal argued for the hell of it. Vaz wasn’t sure if he was arguing now or just trying to make sense of a bad situation, but this was suddenly personal, not a high school ethics debate. Whatever Halsey—and Mendez—had done, they’d done it to Naomi and Osman, too.

  “This coffee’s taking forever,” Vaz said. “I’ve got stuff to do.”

  He needed to go before he said something he’d regret. And he had a promise to keep to Naomi. He went to Osman’s day cabin and peered around the open door.

  She was in there with the Chief, so she was either about to repaint the bulkheads with his innards or she didn’t feel too badly about his involvement. But that was her business—the individual Spartans were the only ones who had the right to forgive anyone.

  “I said I’d take a look at a file for Naomi, ma’am,” Vaz said, avoiding eye contact with Mendez.

  Osman nodded. “Probably best done in your cabin. BB can display it for you.”

  He had to ask. “Have you read it, ma’am?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you read your own now?”

  She always looked him straight in the eye, but her gaze flickered for a moment. “No.”

  That told him all he needed to know. He took the long route back to his cabin to avoid everyone and flopped down on his bunk. BB needed to be summoned. He made a point of not crossing the threshold, except for keeping his dumb processing eye on the environmental and safety controls. It was a thoughtful gesture.

  “Come in, BB,” Vaz said. “Let’s get this over with.”

  BB’s avatar popped up and the screen on the bulkhead switched from its portal to a file with more security warnings on the cover than he’d ever seen in his life.

  “You’re doing a very kind thing, Vasily.”

  Vaz tried to mimic Mal’s accent, embarrassed. “She’s me mate.”

  “I know you well enough by now to realize this is going to make you angry.”

  “Most things do.”

  “Call me when you need me.”

  “Hang on.” A thought crossed Vaz’s mind as the first page filled the screen. “You must have read all the files. Osman’s too.”

  “Of course I have. I am the files.”

  “But you don’t snoop in the cabins. I just wondered where you draw the line.”

  “I’m required to know personnel details. But it also helps me understand the Captain better. And Admiral Parangosky.”

  BB vanished, which in this case meant he really had withdrawn from the room. Vaz forced himself to look at the file, guts knotted. Naomi’s family name was Sentzke, she came from a colony world he’d never even heard of—Sansar—and she was an only child. There were pages of reports signed by Halsey, detailing her exceptional genetic profile and so full of jargon that he started skimming over the deta
il, but the next page that flashed up hit him right between the eyes.

  It was a weekly psychological assessment form, detailing how this six-year-old kid was coping after being snatched by ONI agents on the way home from school; whether she was eating, how much she was crying, how often she asked for her mom, and how aggressive or withdrawn she was on any given day. It would have been bad enough reading that about a total stranger, but it was all too close to home now.

  Vaz found himself drowning in questions, like why people hadn’t noticed all these kids disappearing for a few weeks and then miraculously being found alive, but the colonies were a long way from Earth, and a long way from one another.

  There were only seventy-odd kids involved. Kids went missing all the time. They were spread across so many planets that no cop would ever have spotted a pattern in all that.

  So like Devereaux said—why bother with the clones? Why the hell go to all that trouble? Halsey didn’t need to.

  The reports were written in disturbingly neutral clinical terminology, but they all boiled down to one thing. Naomi, like all the other Spartan kids, was terrified and wanted to go home.

  Vaz read the names of the psychologists and medical officers at the bottom of those reports carefully. He wanted to remember who the monsters really were. The one currently imprisoned on the deck below him couldn’t have done it without them.

  You rotten bastards. You took an oath to do no harm.

  He wasn’t sure if he grasped half of the medical stuff in front of him, but he understood enough to realize that he didn’t want to go on reading about the drugs and surgery, the brutal training, or the assessments of the kids’ pain and stress levels. It would surface in nightmares one day. He was sure of it. He didn’t want to know how Halsey changed them out of all recognition.

  He had to, though. If the people he served with had gone through this, the least he could do was read it. He stuck at it for half an hour, getting every bit as angry as BB had warned him he would, until he had to take a breather or explode. He flicked forward to the end of the file, knowing there would be no happy ending, and found he was looking at a subfile of social workers’ reports about Naomi’s parents.