by Various
Alone and afraid in the space between spaces
He gazed with fear at his companions’ faces
He wiped frost from their visors
But onward they slept
Safe and preserved while poor Hamish just wept
When he got it together, he resolved to survive
Alone on a starship, now surely he’d thrive
All he’d need is some heat and a good source of food
But on waking the AI, the news wasn’t good
“Apologies, Beamish, but this ship is unmanned
“You and the others are effectively canned
“We ship you like cargo to some distant star
“But this uncrewed transporter has no buffet bar
“Nor heating for humans, but there’s plenty of air
“So if you wrap up in blankets, you might still make it there
“Your sleep chamber’s ruined
“And the backup is rusted
“So if you get to Corbulo
“You’ll be all old and busted
“It’s been called a flat circle
“And a relative hitch
“But the fact of the matter’s
“Time is gravity’s bitch
“So you have my condolence
“And I’ll help if I can
“But I suggest that indolence
“Is the best kind of plan.”
So the darkness and cold would make anyone spooked
And young Master Hamish knew that his goose was cooked
He examined his options
And set in for the flight
He’d be cold and hungry for this long, lonely night
So he needed some fuel for a possible fire
And protein to eat lest his body expire
He looked high and low
And through every dark passage
But all he could find was an Oberto sausage
Two hundred years old
Discarded, incredible
But because it was jerky
It was still kind of edible
As he chewed the last meat
That he might ever enjoy
He thought about girls and he thought about boys
Though frozen intact, nails and hair would still grow
And the seeds of his madness had started to show
He would shave them and clip them
With tender composure
And burn hair and eat nails lest he die of exposure
The smell, it was dreadful
And the sight even worse
But better this madness
Than a flight in a hearse
And so ten long years passed
And Corbulo drew near
And Hamish’s madness
Replaced all his fear
He got used to the routine
As we are wont to do
But he dreamed of poutine
And he played his kazoo
Oh, I didn’t explain that he kept that toy whistle?
Or that he wore a tattoo of a plain Scottish thistle?
His buzzing lament did not keep him sane
In fact, you could argue it addled his brain
So when the ship at last reached the Corbulo banner
He was thirty years old and as mad as a spanner
The medics tried hard to habilitate Hamish
His exploits aboard were disturbing but famous
They found him a job doing what he does best
Which is making the most of a terrible mess
So they put him in whites and they gave him a broom
And set him about cleaning room after room
The other cadets soon forgot Hamish’s story
And Hamish got used to his missed chance at glory
He’d never a soldier or an officer be
But he never got used to the odor of pee
He’d clean it in bathrooms from floor to the sink
But I never revealed . . . what did poor Hamish drink?
So here is the moral of this dreadful tale
Check all of your gaskets before you set sail
And if in your world, you’re aware that it’s cleanish
Remember the ballad of poor Hamish Beamish
DEFENDER OF THE STORM
* * *
* * *
JOHN JACKSON MILLER
This story takes place near the end of the Forerunners’ three-hundred-year war with the Flood, a little more than 100,000 years BCE (Halo: Cryptum, Halo: Silentium).
Ancilla, can you confirm what I just saw?”
The electronic voice at the back of Adequate-Observer’s mind responded: “You will have to be more specific.”
You can read my mind, the Forerunner thought. How is it that you do not already know what I mean?
He growled in frustration and hurried from one window of the station to another. No, there was nothing special outside—and if there had been, it was gone now. The station was rotating too fast. From each port he beheld only clouds racing through the darkness of the gas giant Seclusion, the same picture he’d seen for the past fifteen solar years.
Adequate-Observer was a lookout who rarely saw anything. Rated a Warrior-Servant, the Manipular had neither gone to war nor been of much service. Filed away far from inhabited space, he stood guard over this gas-mining station designated as Seclusion Spiral. A pinwheel ten kilometers across, the station twirled along atop the clouds of an immense eternal storm on the planet. Rows of electrostatic collection devices lined each of five colossal vanes. A single collector could draw enough exotic particles from the storm to supply the needs of a Forerunner world for a solar year.
Even after all this time, Adequate still didn’t know what the particles were, or why the Forerunners needed them. His ancilla—his armor’s mental assistance system—had explained it all once, but it hadn’t made much sense to him. The universe was teeming with things to know; an individual could easily get bogged down with useless trivia. Adequate didn’t require the specifics of what happened to the product of Seclusion Spiral, so he didn’t clutter his mind with it. Sometimes it was better that way.
In truth, having an ancilla handy had given Adequate an excuse to forget many things. The designers of his armor had intended to create a symbiotic relationship between wearer and suit, and in this, they had succeeded perhaps too well. Adequate-Observer had no need to think about the big issues or the small ones anymore. Keeping track of his location on the station? The ancilla handled that. Bodily functions? The ancilla regulated them. On days when he was feeling particularly frustrated with his assignment, he was tempted to ask the ancilla to move his arms and legs for him while he made his rounds.
Yet he never resorted to that option. It felt too much like cheating—and he worried that his superiors would find out. The ancilla answered to them too, after all. If his masters wanted a robotic drone, they would have sent one. No, his great hope was getting off the station and into the fight against the biological terror known as the Flood, and the only way to prove his worth was to do his job, such as it was.
That meant spotting things, even when his own ancilla didn’t believe him.
“There it is again,” Adequate said, pointing as a mass darker than the surrounding maelstrom swept past. “Something is out there. In the storm.”
“There are more than six hundred known substances circulating in the winds of the vortex,” the artificial intelligence responded. “You could have seen any one of them.”
“I have been here for fifteen years, ancilla. I know what is outside.” He really didn’t, not with any specificity. “Whatever that object was, it was not dust. It was solid and dark—mostly.” He frowned. “You are controlling my combat skin. The armor’s sensors must have seen the same thing I did, correct?”
“If the sensors noticed anything, nothing exceeded parameters enough for the systems to issue an alert. But there is a simple way to find out. I am rerunning the imagery now. Tell me when
you see it.”
Adequate stood still as a statue and closed his eyes as the ancilla, through the symbiotic mental interface in his armor, replayed the seconds in question. Since the images were being piped directly into the theater of his mind, shutting his eyes was unnecessary—in theory. In practice, since receiving his first Warrior-Servant combat skin as a young Manipular, he had never been very good at shutting out the outside world.
The ancilla did its job, and the moment reappeared to him, as clear as any memory he ever had. “There,” he said, when an amorphous form peeked out from the clouds.
“Evaluating.” The image froze, and Adequate saw symbols dancing alongside the dark blob, the result of his ancilla’s studies. “Spectroscopic analysis is unrevealing—but the strongest possibilities are all Class-D ices, which accrete in the upper elevations of the atmosphere near here and get swept into the storm.”
Adequate’s brow furrowed as he tried to concentrate on the image. “What is that in the center? It seems to be”—he tried to focus—“It almost appears to be a light.”
“There is intense electrical activity below us, Adequate. Anything that drifts into the cyclone is bound to be struck by lightning.” The ancilla paused. “Does that resolve the matter?”
“I suppose,” he replied. “That is all.” The image vanished from the part of his mind that his ancilla had access to but remained in his living memory. It was a curious thing, and he had seen something like it twice before during his posting. But he had never mentioned it, certain that if it were anything special, his ancilla would have caught it.
He was only an Adequate-Observer, by nature.
He was also sure his ancilla was correct that nothing could survive in the storm below. He rose for every duty shift relieved that Seclusion Spiral only rode the top of the great storm. Immense enough to encapsulate whole planets, the storm had raged on the gas giant’s equatorial region for half a million years so far and showed no signs of dissipating. As long as it churned and wobbled its way across Seclusion’s relatively warm midsection, the dynamo would run indefinitely.
That, he understood. What the ancilla had never been able to dispel his confusion about was how it was possible for Adequate to move about on the station without being tossed around or becoming violently ill. The forces of gravity and motion were somehow constantly being compensated for—not just at the station’s hub, but along the hallways several kilometers long heading out to the tips of the twirling vanes. The Builders responsible for the station clearly knew things far beyond his comprehension. He’d stopped asking about how the station functioned after the first solar year.
Still, there was something odd about what he’d seen. He idly tapped against the window with his boltshot, his trusty directed-energy pistol. Trusty because it was always at his side, not because he’d ever had occasion to use it. What benefit was it in this place?
“Your metabolic rate is increasing,” the ancilla said. “Would you like me to have your armor apply a minor relieving agent?”
“I have no need for it.”
“Perhaps you would like to discuss your concerns instead. I theorize your agitation may be at least eighty-four percent explained by tomorrow’s arrival of the annual transport ship.”
“Eighty-four percent.” He shook his head and started walking up the hall, continuing his rounds. “How do you calculate these things?”
“Is that a rhetorical question?”
“It is,” he said. “And do not think that I am concerned about the visit. I already know what will happen to me when the tanker arrives. Absolutely nothing.”
Adequate-Observer watched through the stockroom skylight as the tanker disengaged from its docking portal atop Seclusion Spiral’s hub. The Forerunner had waited anxiously through the six work shifts it took for the vessel to load up on a solar year’s worth of exotic particles; the transfer of personnel always came at the end.
And, as always, Adequate had not received orders to depart.
The experience was worse this time. He had looked on in dismay as all twenty of the other soldiers posted on the station had been reassigned to faraway places to fight the Flood. Never before had Adequate seen so many retasked at once. How bad must the struggle be for the Forerunners?
Apparently not bad enough for them to want him.
And so he had remained, mutely restocking the supply shelves as his exultant companions from the previous year exited the station. The newly arriving Warrior-Servants said little to him as they entered, and he said nothing in return. What was the point, really, in learning anything about them? They would be gone in another year too, and Adequate would be trapped, same as always. Never to fight, never to evolve as he spent the last useful moments of his life spinning in the dark.
He spoke to his ancilla only after the tanker vanished from sight. “Did they provide a reason?”
“No. They never do.”
That fact, Adequate didn’t need reminding about. In previous years, his ancilla had tried to cushion the blow, rationalizing that the Forerunners in charge of things must value his service and knowledge too much to let him leave this place. It could be argued, after all, that after fifteen solar years, he was now the wizened master of Seclusion Spiral, trusted with mentoring an entirely new staff of neophytes.
Yet the ancilla did not argue that notion this time, and Adequate would not have believed it anyway. He knew the truth about himself. He was no sage, no expert. The past year’s class of Warrior-Servants had not made any effort to look to Adequate for guidance and advice, and he had not offered any. The crew that had just arrived was even less likely to need his help.
From their service records, his ancilla had already determined that half of the new arrivals were more experienced. One called Capital-Enforcer had once stood guard at a facility visited for three daily cycles by the Librarian herself. What was there for Adequate to say to such distinguished people? Why, there was no need for his teachings at all. The departing sentries’ ancillas had already transferred everything else they needed about serving on the station.
And the sum of that was: walk the halls, look out the viewports, repeat.
Worse than useless.
The last of the newcomers having departed for their new quarters, Adequate looked back out into the darkness. There was nothing to see, of course.
He went back to his shelving.
Hub detail. It was the one day in twenty-one when Adequate’s routine changed at all. He watched from the center of the station as his new companions prepared their boltshots and headed in groups of four into the spoke passageways to police the enormous, labyrinthine interiors of the vanes.
Because the desired particles settled in the atmosphere at night, Seclusion Spiral could only do its collecting during the day; as a result, the Forerunner designers simply programmed the life-support systems to shut down outside the hub during the night hours. That meant twenty of the twenty-one on staff were gone at once, four per spoke, leaving the automated command center and living quarters all to Adequate.
It was no day of leisure. Adequate collected the refuse the squad had generated and worked to clean the galley; it was already clear to him that his new teammates were more slovenly than the last. Another sign that things were going badly in the war with the Flood. Discipline during off-duty hours was one of the first things to suffer.
He’d recently seen that in action. Normally, when two or three new replacements arrived, upheaval was limited: they worked to integrate themselves into the established social order on the station. Not so this time. The twenty newcomers had already bonded on their flight in and had quickly realized from Adequate’s service record that his career was at a dead end. Since her arrival, Sprightly-Runner, the jokester of the new crew, had made constant sport of him.
“Such a wonderful modern facility,” she’d remarked in passing. “With just one out-of-place antique.”
“Adequate is a beautiful name,” Sprightly had stated another time. “You re
ally should use your honorific title with it.”
“I do not have a title.”
“Of course you do. It is ‘Barely,’ correct?”
Barely-Adequate had been his designation around the hub barracks ever since. He didn’t understand why he deserved such cruelty.
“Ignore their taunts. Understand that they do not wish to be here either,” his ancilla explained.
Worst of all, they had collectively decided the dirtiest assignment on the station should again fall to him: gathering up packs of the occupants’ waste for delivery to the digester units, one located at the end of each vane. Microorganisms inside the units broke down the foul matter to generate power, while releasing unwanted gases into the atmosphere. He didn’t know why the relief stations were not constructed near the ends of the vanes in the first place. All he knew was that he was tasked with the detail—again.
He didn’t care—and had no desire for the others’ companionship. Increasingly, he had taken to spending his off-duty hours outside the quarters and in the command center: there he could avoid harassment while studying the monitors in search of his pet phantom. At least he had not made the mistake of mentioning to the others that he’d been seeing things outside. Why provide them with any more ammunition?
The completion of his chores gave him a chance to return to his search. He had always known how to operate the visual sensors located on Seclusion Spiral’s hull; it was part of his basic training for posting here. The hostile environment outside made checking the sensors a fruitless task for the watch keepers, who focused instead on their similarly futile inspection marches to the vanes. A true invader from space would be detected and announced by the station’s core computer.
The radar emitters, consequently, pointed up. With his ancilla’s help, Adequate found he could direct one partially downward. Four times, the sensors had found something moving in the storm—perhaps. But the data made no sense. Whatever was down there was traveling slower than the surrounding winds, almost tacking against them—quite peculiar behavior for an ice fragment or a bit of debris. Adequate hoped the change of seasons on Seclusion would allow him a better opportunity.