Legacy of Onyx

by Matt Forbeck

  Despite the early struggles of their new relationship with Molly, Asha and Yong had never tried to take the place of Molly’s parents. Not entirely.

  Even though they were the ones raising her, they sincerely wanted to remember their old friends just as much as she did. They kept a framed picture of Molly’s parents in the living room and often told her about the wonderful things they had all done back in college. It was vividly clear to Molly that they’d genuinely cared about one another.

  Asha and Yong didn’t have any children of their own, and for the most part they seemed pretty thrilled to have Molly around. But they worked long hours, something she’d come to appreciate over the past few years. After Molly would get home from school, she had complete freedom until they got back from work, and that buffer had helped her cope with a lot of the pain she’d wrestled with.

  Molly eventually came to prize that solitude, that freedom. It was the one time of day she didn’t have to deal with peers or anyone looking over her shoulder. It was her time alone.

  Though she now fought it, memories of the day Asha and Yong had come home early with the news of Grace began weighing down in the pit of her stomach. She wondered what other kind of information could possibly drag them both away from work.

  Asha greeted Molly from the couch in their living room with a wide, toothy smile. Asha had long, sleek hair, dark and shiny as her eyes, which glinted with curiosity and kindness. She liked to wear long, flowing clothes, and since the move to Aranuka, she’d adopted most of its native Polynesian styles because of how much they delighted her. Embracing this new culture was one of her newfound joys.

  “Hi, Molly!”

  Molly crinkled her brow. “You’re home early.”

  “Yes, well . . . Yong and I have something to tell you,” Asha said, completely ignoring Molly’s suspicions.

  Molly cocked her head and sauntered into the living room, which was filled with wicker furniture on a bamboo floor and slanting sunlight—also part of Asha’s efforts to embrace the local culture. The hopeful look in her eyes only made Molly more nervous. Something was off, but this clearly wasn’t bad news.

  Then Yong strode into the living room from the kitchen and stood beside Asha. Yong was tall and rangy, his dark hair cropped in a sharp and stylish cut. He’d recently started wearing half-moon, gold-rimmed glasses with which he could pull up data at will for his job, but he had them folded up and stuffed into his blazer’s breast pocket. He clearly didn’t want to be distracted. Whatever this was, it was big.

  Yong leaned over the back of the couch, which faced toward the sea, and put a hand on Asha’s shoulder, presenting Molly with a united front. When they were both standing, Yong towered at least a foot over Asha, but despite their vast differences in style, height, and temperament, to Molly they always seemed like a well-matched pair.

  “It’s huge news, sweetie,” he said, wearing the same fragile smile as Asha.

  This sounded familiar to Molly.

  The two had pulled the same trick when they’d announced the family was moving to Aranuka. To Molly, it had turned out all right in the end, but at the time she’d done a great job of making them all miserable. She’d absolutely hated moving—especially being uprooted. She did not share her Newparents’ excitement over novelty and change.

  Molly dropped her chin and stared at the floor for a moment. She thought for a split second that maybe if she waited long enough, they would see how upset the whole thing had already made her and forgo spilling whatever it was that would wreck her world.

  That didn’t happen. They were far more patient than Molly, so she eventually gave up and raised her eyes to meet theirs, forcing the words out of her mouth.

  “Okay, guys . . . what is it?”

  “We got new jobs!” Asha’s smile spread even wider.

  “Both of us, as a matter of fact.” Yong came around from behind the couch and sat down next to Asha. He gave her a proud sidelong hug.

  Molly sighed. A stab of fear hit her insides, validating all of the dread that had built up since she’d stepped through the front door and seen their briefcases. She wanted to be happy for them, but a change of employment wasn’t what this announcement was about. This was just the prologue.

  “Don’t fret.” Yong held out a hand as if that would allay Molly’s fears. “We’re all going.”

  That answered that question. Molly tried to put on a serious face and handle this with maturity, but everything in her fought against it.

  “So . . . that means we’re moving? Again?” She sat down next to Asha. “I was just starting to like it here.”

  Asha reached up and put a gentle hand on Molly’s shoulder. “Yeah, I know it’s another move. There have been a lot of them, haven’t there?” Asha said, echoing Molly’s concerns. “After this, though, I don’t think we’ll be moving again for a long time. Maybe never.”

  Never? The thought had rarely entered Molly’s mind, as she just assumed all homes were temporary. She wasn’t sure how she felt about something permanent.

  Molly didn’t have too many friends in Aranuka. There weren’t all that many others her age here, at least not yet.

  But she hadn’t made a lot of friends back in Wisconsin either. That was for an entirely different reason. Many of the kids there had family in the UNSC. A number of them had even lost someone they loved in the war.

  But none of them had survived the glassing of a planet.

  Except for Molly.

  The media had made such a big deal out of her survival that some had taken to calling her “the miracle child.” Molly was one of only a handful of people to have lived through the destruction of Paris IV, and the story of her unexpected rescue in the tunnel had been blasted across the newsfeeds. The real miracle was that anyone had been looking for survivors at all. Most of the UNSC was, by that point, pulling out of the star system, abandoning what little was left of the planet.

  That Molly was in a tunnel when the land around her was glassed had made a huge difference. If not for the accident that had lifted the back of her car off the ground—above the liquefied material that surged into the tunnel—she probably wouldn’t have made it either. In some weird twist of fate, the glassing of Paris IV had ultimately kept Molly alive long enough for her to be rescued.

  Molly had wound up in a military hospital for almost a week, and it had taken the UNSC another week to get her on a transport headed for Earth. She had only been seven at the time, but she still remembered desperately trying to find out what might have happened to Grace the whole time she was there. No one could tell her.

  In the years that followed, Molly had found herself slowly becoming obsessed with news about the war, and with the UNSC in general. Part of it had stemmed from a genuine interest in humanity’s survival—the Covenant threat was real and needed to be stopped—but the other part was that she desperately wanted to find and thank Sergeant Avery Johnson for hauling her out of that mess.

  She never got the chance to see him again. Apparently, he’d died helping the legendary Spartan super-soldier, the Master Chief, stop the Covenant, once and for all . . . or so the declassified version of the story went.

  By the time Asha and Yong had brought Molly home, news of the arrival of “the miracle child” had reached their town in Wisconsin. Because of that, people treated Molly differently. She wasn’t an average little girl to them, but a conversation point over dinner. Given her loss and the spectacle surrounding her survival, it took a long time for her to start feeling like a normal kid again. Therapy helped in the early years, but eventually her psychologist said she’d done all she could, and Molly would have to continue her journey on her own.

  So she did.

  Shortly after that, they’d made their way to Aranuka.

  Although Molly had been against it at first, coming to this isolated place had helped in ways she had not foreseen. Many of the people who lived alongside them had lost family to the Covenant, just like her. Even though the war was over,
some people would still be fighting the pain it had brought till the day they died.

  So they had that in common at least. It may have been mostly empty, but over the years Aranuka had slowly become home.

  And now that was going to end.

  “You’re going to love it,” Yong said, veiling some of his enthusiasm. “Where we’re headed . . . it’s not what you think. There’s nothing like it in the galaxy.”

  At sixteen, Molly knew hyperbole when she heard it, but she wasn’t ready to respond. She’d let Yong continue before mounting her defense.

  “The place we’ve been assigned to is . . . well, it’s a whole new world to explore. To be honest, even that doesn’t do it justice! And we’ll have a real house with a real yard in a brand-new town made specifically for researchers like us—”

  “It almost sounds too good to be true,” Molly interrupted, only partially attempting to restrain her sarcasm. If she didn’t know him so well, she’d have guessed that he’d made the whole thing up. “Where exactly is this paradise?”

  His face took on a stern grimace. “Well, that’s the thing, Molly. It’s top secret. So you can’t tell a soul.”

  Asha gave Yong a tug on the shoulder. “Take it easy, hon. Molly’s been with us for years now. You know that she’s able to keep a secret.”

  “I’m being serious,” he said, going several shades colder. “Molly, where we’re headed is a matter of Naval Intelligence. You know ONI, right? They’re hardcore folks, and they keep their cards very close. Even casual conversations about what we’re about to tell you could end . . . badly for everyone.”

  The Office of Naval Intelligence. That piqued Molly’s attention.

  Since her Newparents were now working on a site that had been the target of the Covenant during the war, Asha and Yong were sometimes involved in highly classified projects. Over the past few years, that had become business as usual. Once in a while, they told Molly briefly about things they were working on, always using the vaguest terms and only after swearing her to complete secrecy. Molly knew that if she didn’t keep this information safe, it could destroy them all.

  So no, the Office of Naval Intelligence did not play around.

  Molly narrowed her eyes at Yong. “Now I’m actually intrigued.”

  “Oh, honey,” Asha said in a hurry. She’d seen that light in Molly’s eyes before, and Asha wanted to rein her in before she got too excited about the wrong thing. “This new project doesn’t have anything to do with the war. Not directly, at least.”

  “It’s better than that,” Yong said, struggling to restrain his excitement. “It’s the most intriguing place in the entire galaxy.”

  “So . . . what is it?”

  “You know what kind of work we do, right?” Asha asked.

  “You study alien cultures. Like the Forerunners.”

  “That’s right,” Yong said.

  “None of that’s classified, though,” Molly said. It was hard for anyone to hide the news about the Forerunners, since the Covenant had dug up one of their artifacts in Kenya before the end of the war. Rumor had it that they excavated an enormous machine built a hundred thousand years ago, a structure over one hundred kilometers wide. Specific knowledge about the Forerunners was still sketchy, at least to the public, but Molly had managed to fill in some of the gaps with what she’d gleaned from Asha and Yong.

  “What you might not know, though, is that ONI funds our research of the Forerunner culture and technology. We’re private contractors for them with the UEG,” Asha said. “So our work ultimately helps the government reverse engineer the ancient technology in order to help build better tech for humanity in the future.”

  Molly recognized this had to be true on some level, but she thought if ONI wanted this technology, it was probably for a specific purpose. “Why? Do they want to use it to fight someone?”

  “What? No.” Yong’s face filled with concern. “Why would you think that?”

  He always bristled when Molly talked about fighting. He was determined to show her just how awful he thought it was. Sometimes he even seemed to take it personally, as if he were angry that she didn’t want to become an academic like them.

  Molly didn’t mean to insult their professions, but she’d watched them at work for years. While she could see why their careers were both important and interesting—especially to them—if she had to sit in an office and try to grok alien tongues or even go out to a dig in the middle of nowhere and unearth dusty old artifacts, she knew it would drive her mad.

  All of that was stuff done behind the scenes. Molly wanted to be on the front lines, right in the thick of things.

  “Well, they were powerful, right?” she asked.

  “We study the Forerunners because their understanding of the universe was so much deeper than ours,” Yong responded patiently. “Like Asha said, if we can decipher the things they left behind and then reverse engineer them, we can make massive leaps forward in our technology and our knowledge of the way things work. It’s hugely valuable, not just to the UNSC, but to all of humanity. Everything from medicine to urban infrastructures and things like faster-than-light transportation . . . their technology touches every aspect of our lives.”

  “But can’t you just do that from here? I mean, haven’t you been doing that?”

  “Yes”—Asha smiled wanly—“but that was a while ago. Years even. We’ve finished what we came here to do and exhausted most of what we were brought here to research. We’re done with our core research now, and others will pick up where we left off. This next thing . . . that’s what we’re being tasked with again.”

  “Oh.” A tragic picture spontaneously entered her mind. She could see where this was heading. The rest of her life on some backwater dustball of a planet where she’d be lucky to find enough oxygen to breathe. Somewhere that would have even fewer people than Aranuka, if that was possible.

  “The Office of Naval Intelligence has made some astonishing finds over the years since the war ended,” Asha continued. “And, as it turns out, Yong and I happen to be at the top of our fields with regard to researching Forerunner technology, especially in our respective areas of specialization. There aren’t really any researchers out there with our specific skillsets, at least not readily available.”

  “So what?” Molly tried to rein in her frustration. “Why does this immediately mean another move? You just said they sent you the artifacts to research before. Can’t they just do that again?”

  “They do, honey,” Asha said, “with some of the assets we research. But other artifacts are simply too big, even for the largest ships we have. There are Forerunner installations out there as massive as an entire world. The bottom line is that the UNSC needs every expert out in the field, doing this research in person. In particular, they need us.”

  “Something we’ve worked on in the past . . . well, we have really intimate knowledge of it,” Yong said. “In fact, no one understands these things as well as Asha and me. This is why ONI’s reassigned us, and it’s why we have to leave Aranuka. We need to be on-site and doing the initial research in person. There’s just no other way.”

  The writing was on the wall, and Molly’s fear began setting in. This was going to happen, no matter what she said. What is this place going to be like? Will it be dangerous? Will it be exposed to the Covenant?

  Asha and Yong immediately sensed her palpable shift from fight to flight. “Listen, Molly. Where we’re going is entirely safe,” Yong said. “When it comes to avoiding the threats that are out there, like whatever’s left of the Covenant, this place . . . it might be the safest place in the galaxy.”

  Molly had a hard time buying that. “What’s safer than Earth?”

  Yong smiled and looked at Asha, before turning back to Molly. “Imagine living inside an immense hollow sphere, heavily secured from any and all outside forces. Something that enemies can’t attack from above. And then imagine that it’s classified and completely off-limits to most of humanity, and s
o large it would actually take a full battalion of researchers several lifetimes to even come close to exploring it all.

  “Honestly, Molly, the site I’m talking about here . . . there’s so much room that we could lose the entire population of Earth in it and not even notice.” Then he leaned in close with complete seriousness etched on his face. “Hundreds of times over, even.”

  “The fact that it exists at all is proof of just how unimaginably far ahead of us the Forerunners were from all other civilizations, even the Covenant,” said Asha. “It’s the largest and most profound single archaeological find—alien or otherwise—ever recorded. There’s just nothing like it.”

  The Newparents were not prone to exaggeration, but Molly couldn’t help but be filled with skepticism. It didn’t sound like reality at all, but something they’d lifted from one of the stories they used to read her at bedtime. “So where exactly is this archaeological marvel?” Molly asked, expecting more hyperbole.

  Yong leaned back with a slightly conspiratorial grin. “It’s a place called Onyx.”

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  * * *

  What the hell is that?!” Spartan Tom-B292 shouted as the UNSC Pelican he was riding in arced high over what had become a full-on battle zone inside Onyx. He pointed down at a massive structure looking something like a giant stainless-steel skull that had been flattened out with a hammer to the size of a small town. It sat half-buried in the top of a once-grassy hill that had been decapitated as part of an archaeological dig.

  A dozen smaller figures cast in the same metallic style stood arrayed around it, blasting away at a scattered pack of archaeologists, who were cowering behind whatever cover they could find. Tom recognized them right away as Forerunner armigers, robotic soldiers programmed by a long-dead alien race to protect their artifacts from other people—which apparently included the archaeologists. The armigers carried energy rifles powered by the same high-tech source that emitted a reddish glow through their eyes.