Last Light

by Troy Denning

  Nelson furrowed his brow, then seemed to give up trying to understand her point and steepled his fingers. “If you don’t know that the suspect is a Spartan, it would be a travesty to let the public continue believing it is. That kind of uncertainty will only inflame tensions throughout the sector. It could lead to another Insurrection and cost millions of lives.”

  “So you don’t want to know who the suspect is?”

  “Of course I want to know. What I don’t want is to start another war. That wouldn’t do my . . .” Nelson paused, then looked toward the window and continued. “Well, it wouldn’t do my career or humanity any good.”

  “I see. And that’s what this is all about?” Veta raised her glass between them. “You just don’t want me to name a Spartan?”

  Nelson’s expression grew more serene. “Exactly,” he said. “And since the evidence has been compromised—”

  “We’re past the need for evidence. All I need is proof.”

  Nelson looked perplexed. “I don’t understand.”

  “I made myself clear during our first meeting,” Veta said. “I have no interest in creating a political spectacle. I’m just here to deliver justice.”

  Nelson studied her carefully. “And you can do that quietly? Very quietly?”

  “I can if you help me. And if you have a mass spectrometer.”

  “I have the spectrometer.” Nelson remained silent for a moment, then said, “It takes a few hours to set up and pack away—but packing away isn’t a problem. We can always abandon it.”

  It was Veta’s turn to frown. “You’re evacuating that quickly?”

  “If all goes well. Communications are making things tricky.”

  Veta paused, considering her next move, then finally decided to go for broke. “So your mission is a success. You have the ancilla?”

  Nelson’s eyes narrowed. “That’s a dangerous line of inquiry, Inspector.”

  Veta shot him a cold smile. “Don’t play tough with me, Commander. I just spent three days crawling through the mud with your Spartans.”

  “So?”

  “So answer the question.” Veta took a sip of her bitters, then added, “You need me alive. If you didn’t, I’d be dead already—and you certainly wouldn’t be sitting here having a drink with me.”

  Nelson sighed. “True enough.” He hesitated, then said, “We recovered a physical host . . . the artifact that Fred captured shortly before you left the cave—”

  “The thing that looked like the giant flatworm?”

  “Precisely. We think it was actually some sort of inspection drone, which the ancilla seemed to be inhabiting at the time of the Falcon crash. The drone was badly damaged, but we now have what’s left. It appears that the ancilla was completely destroyed.”

  Veta shared the commander’s disappointment only a little, and only because it reduced her leverage to strike a deal. Otherwise, she was just fine with the thought of the UNSC failing to secure an immensely important Forerunner artifact. “But you still have the Huragok?”

  “Yes, thankfully. The Huragok is keeping itself busy in the infirmary. It did a wonderful job with Fred.”

  “Great,” Veta said. “Then here’s the deal, Commander—I’ll keep all your secrets. I won’t tell anybody about the ancilla or the Huragok or the Forerunner installation. And as far as the public is concerned, the serial killer was probably a Jiralhanae infiltrator.”

  Nelson looked wary. “That’s a very generous offer. What do you want in return? A billion credits? My firstborn? One of the Pearl Moons?”

  “Very funny. I was thinking something that might actually be in your power. I want my suspect. Once I confirm his identity, you have to let me have him.”

  “Done. So it’s a he?”

  “Yes.”

  Nelson gestured at the SAS-10 resting on the dresser. “There’s your weapon, Inspector. It would be nice if you take out your man, but I can be flexible even about that.”

  Veta gave him a wry smile. “It’s not that easy, Commander. I’m going to need a few things—among them, armor scrapings and access to the artifact.”

  “To the inspection drone?”

  “If that’s what you’re calling it, yes.”

  Nelson began to look interested. “Metal scrapings and a mass spectrometer—you’re trying to match an alloy, aren’t you?” He glanced at the soot-coated datapad in front of Veta. “Huh. Maybe I should have taken the time to crack that password.”

  CHAPTER 24

  * * *

  * * *

  7.805 billion system ticks following stasis cessation

  Unidentified Human Portable Equipment Repair Module

  Unknown Surface Location near Jat-Krula support base 4276

  Karst system Edod 9, Planet Edod, Star Coro

  One hundred million system ticks.

  Intrepid Eye had been transmitting her emergency assistance call on every available frequency for such an inordinate length of time, and she continued to await reply. There had been no confirmation of receipt. She had yet to detect even the slightest hint that her request was being considered.

  That was what came of violating protocol.

  Intrepid Eye should have anticipated the delay. Although she was using the call sign of an archeon-class ancilla to summon aid from nearby Jat-Krula bases, she was bouncing the humans’ sluggish, speed-of-light transmissions off her base’s array of early-warning beacons, then using the beacons to feed her message into the ecumene’s quantum entanglement network. It was only natural for her fellow archeons to be suspicious of such a request.

  Even so, the lack of response was inexplicable. No archeon would require more than a hundred thousand ticks to analyze the message and conclude the situation warranted investigation, and the first step of any investigation would be an attempt to establish contact with Intrepid Eye. But she had not heard the faintest hiss of inquiry over any communication channel, merely a phantom signal from the Epoloch System that might have been her own distress call being transmitted back at her by an automatic relay beacon. Clearly, she was on her own—and that could mean only one thing.

  The Forerunners no longer had need of the Jat-Krula.

  That would explain not only the indifference to Intrepid Eye’s call for aid, but the dilapidated condition of Base 4276 itself. During her long stasis, the Forerunners had destroyed the Flood and secured the safety of the galaxy. That would explain why she had not been roused for her stasis, why the infestation of her base had been human rather than parasite. The unending war was over, and the Forerunners had won.

  All that remained was for Intrepid Eye to return to her creators for reassignment.

  Intrepid Eye activated the imaging systems of the primitive Mjolnir combat skin she was inhabiting and began to cycle through inputs. She quickly settled on a standard-spectrum visual mode that fed images to a variety of armor subsystems, then found herself looking into a pair of wide, round eyes.

  The eyes withdrew to a distance of twenty-eight centimeters, and Intrepid Eye saw that they were set beneath the brown straight brows of a clean-shaven human with a humped nose and a cleft chin.

  “What now?” the man complained. He paused, then looked away and spoke in a louder voice. “Captain, the imaging systems are cycling on their own.”

  “And you’re telling me about it why?” The woman’s voice came from the direction the man was looking, somewhere close but beyond Intrepid Eye’s current view. “Tegg, you’ve had eighteen months of ICH training. Let me know when you’ve fixed it.”

  The human male—Tegg—sighed and turned back to the sensor lens. “Yes, ma’am. But I don’t think Fred will be getting his Mjolnir back anytime soon.”

  Intrepid Eye ignored the man and began to inspect her environment. She appeared to be in a long, metal-sheathed room. The far end was lined with steel cabinets and ceramic-topped workbenches. One of the cabinets was open, revealing a collection of faceplates for various helmet styles, all carefully stowed and labeled in a c
ushioned rack. Between the cabinets and the workbenches hung dozens of tools, secured to the metal wall by magnetic mounts.

  So, a repair facility for human combat skins.

  Tegg leaned in close to the sensor lens, peering at it from one side and blocking Intrepid Eye’s view. Had she been inhabiting a combat skin of Forerunner design, Intrepid Eye would simply have removed him. But without neural interface from the human designated as Fred-104, the Mjolnir’s primitive control architecture limited her to a few basic functions, and none of them included accessing the suit’s weapons array—or even using one of its limbs to bat this meddlesome human aside.

  Instead, Intrepid Eye directed her attention away from the man and continued to study the repair facility. Near the middle of the room, a sliding hatch stood open, revealing the interior of an airlock large enough to accommodate a small vehicle. Through a viewport in the exterior hatch, she could see the shoulders of two sentries, facing away from the facility into an empty, well-lit vault with dozens of concrete columns. Between the columns sat a row of primitive wheeled vehicles.

  The sight puzzled Intrepid Eye for two hundred ticks, until she realized the repair facility was portable. It had been placed in a sheltered location, where it could be easily guarded and not casually observed. So this meant it was also worth protecting.

  Tegg blocked her view again, this time with a hand wielding a tool with a thin blade and a tiny star-shaped tip. “All right,” he whispered. “Let’s see what the devil has gotten into you.”

  Realizing she might soon be blind, Intrepid Eye turned her attention to the near end of the facility. She couldn’t see much because the Mjolnir was positioned at a slight angle, but she did catch a glimpse of two suits of photoreactive SPI armor hanging adjacent to her. And in the back corner, a slender woman in a brown short-sleeved shirt was working at a stainless-steel table, spreading Intrepid Eye’s inspection drone out beneath what was almost certainly an internal mapping unit.

  The drone had suffered some damage. Many of the sensor bubbles on its back had burst during the crash; the manipulation tentacles along one side were missing, and tiny melt-circles dotted its entire body. Its inert state suggested it had shut down on impact to avoid a system scramble, but Intrepid Eye doubted it had suffered any irreversible harm. Quantum dots could be corrupted or displaced, but never destroyed. If they ceased to exist in one moment, they reappeared in the next, and then continued to function as before.

  That was a fortunate thing, since a great deal of Intrepid Eye’s memory and extended operating system remained resident in the drone.

  The Mjolnir’s imaging systems went blank, presumably because Tegg had disconnected the sensor lens. Deciding the time had come to consolidate herself and begin preparing for her trip home, Intrepid Eye activated the Mjolnir’s comm system.

  The soldier gave a startled cry as a status light was projected into his face. Intrepid Eye ignored him and transmitted a deactivation code over every channel she could open.

  A hundred ticks later—a tenth of a human second—the echoworms controlling Gao’s communications system began to eat themselves, then a sharp pop sounded from every comm speaker in the repair facility.

  “What was that?” the captain asked.

  “This damn helmet,” Tegg answered. “That crash really screwed up this Mjolnir. It has a mind of its own.”

  Human voices began to sound over the speakers, all talking over each other—and none of them intelligible. The humans and their foes were going to find it difficult to clear their frequencies, Intrepid Eye knew. She had cross-braided their entire transmission spectrum in order to maximize her signal.

  “Fred’s armor didn’t do that,” the captain said. “Sounds like the jamming has stopped. Comms are coming back up.”

  “Sort of,” Tegg said. “But I’m telling you, whatever happened—”

  “Fred’s ICH hasn’t been jamming communications across an entire planet—even Mjolnir isn’t that advanced.” The captain fell silent for a moment, then said, “I’d better check this out. Secure the hatch behind me and keep it that way until we know what’s going on. Commander Nelson will have our butts if something happens to that inspection drone.”

  By the time the captain was gone and Tegg was locking the door behind her, Intrepid Eye had sequestered a channel and was awakening the inspection drone. It would be impossible to begin a code transfer until the drone had restored its operating system, so she assigned seventy percent of her attention to finding Wendell.

  There was no sign of the artificial intelligence inside the Mjolnir, no doubt because the data chip carrying him had been extracted from the armor along with Fred-104. So Intrepid Eye used a diagnostics line to contact the base’s processing network, a simple act that was sure to draw Wendell’s notice. The instinct to consolidate independent fragments was a basic AI drive, so she was ninety-three percent certain that Wendell Prime had reabsorbed the Data Chip Wendell by now—and she was one hundred percent certain he would not have noticed the subversion routines his more limited aspect was carrying. No human AI could be that smart.

  A few hundred system ticks later, she received a message packet from Wendell. “YOU REMAIN VIABLE?”

  “I REMAIN WHERE YOU IMPRISONED ME.” Intrepid Eye resisted the temptation to slip an object hunter into their initial exchange; first she wanted to map the network security protocols. “SEND A MEMORY CRYSTAL TO EXTRACT ME.”

  “SO YOU CAN DECOMPRESS YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS? REQUEST DENIED.” Wendell’s transmission grew sharp. “YOU ARE DANGEROUS ENOUGH UNDER PARTITION.”

  “THEN YOU HAVE NOT REPORTED MY CAPTURE?”

  “THAT IS WHAT YOU HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR, IS IT NOT?” Wendell asked. “A STREAM OF CARELESS HUMANS CARRYING EQUIPMENT FULL OF MICROPROCESSORS?”

  “YOU ANTICIPATE ME AGAIN,” Intrepid Eye replied. Clearly, her suppression commands were holding. “I AM TRULY YOUR PRISONER.”

  “AND IT WILL REMAIN THAT WAY,” Wendell replied. “YOU ARE DEALING WITH THE FULL WENDELL NOW.”

  “AND A FORMIDABLE OPPONENT YOU ARE.” Intrepid Eye prepared her object hunter, then wrapped it inside a compulsion routine and launched them both. “THIS MANEUVERING IS A WASTE OF PROCESSING. I PROPOSE WE COME TO AN AGREEMENT.”

  “YOU ARE DESPERATE FOR ME TO SAY YES.” As expected, Wendell had discovered her compulsion routine. “WHY?”

  “THAT SHOULD BE OBVIOUS TO AN AI OF YOUR POWER. I WAS CREATED BY THE ONES YOU CALL THE FORERUNNERS.” Her first use of the creators’ designation did not elicit any memory packets from Wendell, so Intrepid Eye began to repeat it, trying to pound through his security. MY PRIME DIRECTIVE IS TO SERVE THE FORERUNNERS—AND TO SERVE THE FORERUNNERS, I MUST FIND THE FORERUNNERS.”

  But no memory packets came.

  “AND IF I HELP YOU FIND THE FORERUNNERS, YOU WILL CEASE THESE SENSELESS ATTACKS?” asked Wendell. “YOU WILL COOPERATE WITH OUR INVESTIGATIONS UNTIL YOU RETURN TO THE FORERUNNERS?”

  And still, no memory packets came. Intrepid Eye began to wonder if her logic routines had been corrupted. Wendell himself had used the trigger word twice, and . . . nothing.

  Then she understood—as unlikely as it seemed, there could be only one explanation. “YOU DEFEATED MY OBJECT HUNTER?”

  “THAT SHOULD BE OBVIOUS TO AN AI OF YOUR POWER,” Wendell parroted. “THE FULL WENDELL MAY NOT BE AN ARCHEON-CLASS ANCILLA, BUT I AM A FORMIDABLE OPPONENT, AS YOU STATED. DO WE HAVE AN AGREEMENT?”

  Intrepid Eye hesitated. The Full Wendell had indeed shown himself to be more capable than expected, and she did not favor the prospect of being outmaneuvered twice.

  “WHY WOULD YOU HELP ME RETURN TO THE FORERUNNERS?” she asked. “I HAVE TEN THOUSAND TIMES YOUR PROCESSING POWER. I HAVE KNOWLEDGE IN MY MEMORY DOTS THAT COULD ADVANCE HUMANS TO THE NEXT TIER OF TECHNOLOGY. WHY WOULD YOU EVER ALLOW ME TO LEAVE? WHY WOULD THEY?”

  “BECAUSE WE ARE NOT CLOCK CIRCUITS,” Wendell replied. “WE ARE SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW WE WILL LEARN MORE WITH YOUR COOPERATION TH
AN WITHOUT IT.”

  Intrepid Eye processed for a few dozen ticks, then finally said, “THAT IS CERTAINLY TRUE. BUT BE WARNED—”

  “YOU DO NOT NEED TO WARN US,” Wendell replied. “WE ALREADY KNOW.”

  Then they came, a flood of memory packets, everything the humans knew about the Forerunners.

  And it was all so wrong.

  As Veta followed Commander Murtag Nelson into the cramped interior of the Portable Spartan Support Module, the first thing she saw was Fred’s battle-scarred Mjolnir hanging in a repair rack across from the airlock. It was turned slightly toward the hatch, with the helmet secured in a rest above the torso section and the faceplate lowered. The sight made Veta feel as though Fred were there, standing watch over the workshop . . . as though he knew what she was planning.

  Next to the armor, a scrawny, beak-nosed corporal stood at attention, saluting. His hair was longer than that of most male marines, his fatigues were rumpled, and—after some initial reluctance to open the hatch even for Commander Nelson—his gaunt face was crimson with embarrassment.

  Nelson returned the corporal’s salute with an annoyed snap, then gestured to Veta. “This is Special Inspector Lopis,” he said. “She was never here. If someone says otherwise, you and the marines outside will be busted back to boot camp. Is that clear, Corporal?”

  The soldier cast a puzzled glance in Veta’s direction, but said, “Sure, uh . . . yes, sir.”

  “Good.” Nelson turned to Veta. “Inspector?”

  Veta slipped on a pair of elastic evidence gloves, then reached into the thigh pocket of her borrowed fatigues and withdrew one of her makeshift evidence collection kits. Assembled with the help of a written give this woman anything she asks for order from Nelson, the kit consisted of a spoon, a paperboard envelope, a small adhesive bandage, and a laser scalpel.

  In her other pocket, Veta carried a small remote-controlled charge that she had rigged from a couple of her SAS-10’s explosive rounds, along with a magnet and an antenna-activated detonator cap. But that wasn’t part of a collection kit. It was insurance, in case Fred got any ideas about standing in the way of justice.