Broken Circle

by John Shirley

  With a kind of rueful despair, Zo decided that Exquisite was correct. Zo was as physically weak as most modern San’Shyuum—he had no hope of breaking free from these two powerful guards. His chair was weak, too; at other times he might have attempted to use its antigrav fields to wrest a weapon free, or to lift him over the thugs. But the ceiling was too low here, and the gravitational fields of the chair had already been compromised by the damage done to it. He had just enough mobile power to keep up with the Jiralhanae.

  The blue metal door was but a little way up ahead. Another locked door stood to its right—perhaps an entrance to another cell, where some other grotesque killing machine could be tested. But no—he saw a holosign on it that read, in San’Shyuum lettering, Energy Conduit Access.

  Zo forced himself to consider the records hidden in his chair. Could he use them, perhaps, to bargain with the Prophet of Exquisite Devotion? In his most recent study of Mken ‘Scre’ah’ben’s writings, it appeared that the Refuge, the Forerunner world taken hold of by Ussa ‘Xellus’s forces long ago, did not simply detonate and vanish as the histories told, but evidence of its survival remained. Could the site still be there, with all its many relics? And perhaps the descendants of the ancient Ussans as well? The prospect, Zo thought, might entice Exquisite Devotion, and ultimately the High Prophet of Truth. Would they see value in such a record now as they began to finalize their efforts of consummating the Great Journey? Perhaps not, but there might be just enough that Exquisite would see fit to spare his life.

  But why should Exquisite Devotion bargain for what he could simply take?

  Something must be done to save the records, which should have been left with someone trustworthy. Mken ‘Scre’ah’ben’s writings, and his own . . . they were his treasures, his legacy, whether or not they had value to bargain . . .

  Soon they would wrench him from the chair, strip him of his antigrav belt, force him into the gore-splashed room . . . and it would begin.

  He could almost feel the crushing hand of extreme artificial gravitation on him now as they approached the door. He could imagine his lower half flattening, bone and blood forced into his upper half. His skin rupturing, bursting. Exquisite would take his time and then . . .

  The door to the right banged open, and Zo saw G’torik and two other Sangheili half crouched in the open doorway, beyond them a room clustered with pipes and glowing energy concentration cubes.

  G’torik had an activated energy sword, and the other two were armed with plasma rifles. He knew one of the others—Crun ‘Brinsmee, an experienced commander. The Jiralhanae instantly reacted, the one in front swinging his spike rifle toward the ambushing Sangheili.

  “Get down, Zo!” shouted Crun.

  Zo threw himself onto the floor. His chair bobbled up a bit and he glimpsed, from the corner of his eye, something being thrown by Crun. A plasma grenade.

  G’torik blocked the rounds from the spike rifle with his energy sword, and then struck hard at the Jiralhanae’s throat, driving the charged blade deep, even as the other Sangheili fired at the rear Jiralhanae to keep him off balance.

  There was a thud and a flash of light. A shock wave slapped Zo and he staggered, seeing G’torik stumble back, struck indirectly by the blast from the grenade. Something thick and purplish-red splattered over Zo. It took him a moment to realize it was Jiralhanae blood.

  Zo got to his feet, switching on his antigrav belt, and looked around. The two Jiralhanae were dead on the floor of the narrow passageway, and he was relieved to see that G’torik was getting up. “Are you hurt, G’torik?”

  “Nothing significant.”

  “There was a battle—Exquisite told me . . . at the control center.”

  “We exploited the signal being captured by his drones . . . and saw your little exchange with Exquisite. Yes—a battle, though it would be more accurate to call it an ambush. I was knocked off the balcony and . . . when I could, I stowed away aboard a Phantom and found my way here.”

  “Enough chatter!” Crun growled. “Come with us! You will have to leave that chair, San’Shyuum—it won’t fit where we need to go and we cannot linger. The Prophet will realize something has gone wrong soon enough!”

  “They could have us under surveillance right now,” said the smaller Sangheili nervously. He peered down the hallway. Though he carried a rifle, he was dressed as an engineering officer, not a warrior. G’torik, meanwhile, had found new armor, Zo saw, and was recovering from his injuries. Crun wore the classic heavy armor, shiny silver and blue, of a commander.

  “You, I do not know,” said Zo to the engineering officer.

  Zo knelt by his antigrav chair and opened a panel on the back. He took a small black satchel from the niche hidden under the seat.

  “My name is Tul ’Imjanamee,” said the small Sangheili. “I hope you are worth all this risk.”

  “I promise you he is worth it,” G’torik said. “He is one of our only true San’Shyuum allies.”

  “I will do anything I can for you,” Zo said, feeling giddy at this wrenching turn of events. “You have risked all for me. I now have more loyalty to the Sangheili than to any so-called Prophet on High Charity.”

  Although I’ll be sorry to leave the chair, Zo thought, slipping through the door after the others. It has served me well. He slung the satchel over one shoulder. If he lost it, he’d never again have access to the writings of his ancestor.

  Zo could immediately see the reason for leaving the chair behind, though. Fat, daunting pipes and energy conduits flowed in mazelike confusion around the room, criss-crossing the scuffed metal floor. He would have never gotten his chair through those spaces and over those obstacles. A Hierarch’s antigrav throne could lift over most anything; some could even teleport in close quarters, and fire powerful energy projectiles. Zo’s chair was third rate in comparison.

  The only light here in the energy conduit chamber was from places where the conduits were interrupted by energy transmutation cubes, which throbbed with a yellow illumination. The light didn’t reach the dim corners of the big room; the high ceiling was in shadows.

  Crun paused, went back, and locked the door behind them. “That won’t hold them long.”

  They followed G’torik across the open space, Zo moving as quickly as he could, adjusting his antigrav belt to a higher mode. They came to a series of waist-high pipes that blocked the way; Zo tried to climb over on his own, but finally had to accept help from G’torik. Staying well clear of the glowing cubes that the pipes passed through, they crossed two sets of contiguous conduits and then spied two more sets ahead. They’d gotten most of the way across the room before they saw, beyond the pipes, a closed door lit with a red light.

  “That is the way out,” said Tul. “It leads to a ramp that will take us to a maintenance ship. We can use it to get away from High Charity . . . if they do not realize we’re aboard.”

  “Tul!” Crun called. “Run up ahead and open the door so we can get through it as quickly as possible—and scout outside!”

  Zo knew this order came about because he was slower in clambering over the large pipes than the Sangheili. Crun wanted that door open and ready when Zo finally got there.

  Tul ran ahead, while Zo looked back at the door they’d come through—no one seemed to be trying to break it down. That was good. It—

  The door was suddenly blasted inward.

  “By the Great Ones!” Zo swore, as they all paused, startled and unsure, seeing smoke and flame rise from the blackened, punched-through entrance. He could see a Mgalekgolo hunkering down, trying to force its way through the opening, which was not quite big enough for it.

  “Tul!” said G’torik, “this chamber—what does it do, precisely?”

  “It serves the laboratories,” Tul said, rubbing nervously at his mandibles as he watched the Mgalekgolo forcing its way inside. “The experiments with gravitational projection take fantastic amounts of power and this room controls the output of that energy. It is highly unstable, not
to be trifled with.”

  The Hunter was now through the door . . . and now its bond brother was making its way into the high-ceilinged conduit room.

  “You should simply run,” Zo said. “I will be close behind. I can evade those worm-bellied oafs, I hope.”

  G’torik gave a clack of his mandibles accompanied by a growl—a Sangheili way of signifying angry refusal. “No—we came to rescue you from the Prophet of Exquisite Devotion. And rescue you we will!”

  Then Tul came huffing back to them. “The exit door—it is locked from outside.”

  “By now you must realize you’re trapped in here!” called someone from behind the Hunters.

  Zo looked, and saw the Prophet of Exquisite Devotion gliding his throne across the floor behind the Mgalekgolo, still a good distance off at the far end of the room.

  “Hold, Hunters,” commanded Exquisite. “I would speak to these fools!”

  The Mgalekgolo lowered their cannon-fitted arms, but kept their shields up, as Exquisite paused beside them. “I am fitted with a rather good force field,” he said. “Don’t waste my time by firing upon me. Now, surrender, and I may let some of you live. Just hand over this former Prophet and depart. Leave him to me and I will forgive your sins.”

  “That we will not do!” G’torik shouted. In a low aside to Zo, he asked, “Does he have so strong a force field around that chair?”

  “Not as good as a Hierarch’s. But your rifle or sword won’t get through it. It’ll need some powerful energy to do it.”

  G’torik grunted at this news, deactivated his energy sword, and tucked the hilt away. “Tul—give me your rifle!”

  Tul handed it over, but said, “What use will it be?”

  “Go,” G’torik whispered. “See if you can get that exit door open. I’ll be there quick as I can. Go. All of you. I have a plan . . .”

  “What is your answer?” shouted the Prophet of Exquisite Devotion.

  “I have an offer for you, Exquisite,” G’torik replied. “Leave this room—or die here with the worm-guts!” Just to make his point, he fired the rifle at Exquisite. The plasma bolts splashed harmlessly on the globular force field.

  “So be it—destroy them,” Exquisite commanded. “All of them.”

  “We’re not leaving you here, G’torik!” Crun said, raising his weapon.

  The Mgalekgolo opened fire with their assault cannons, the weapons making a sound that was like the bellowing of some gigantic primordial beast.

  In the strobing green light of the plasma energy projectiles fired from the cannon weapons built into the creatures’ right forearms, Zo saw the titans with a momentary photographic clarity. Heavily armored in blue-gray and silver metal, their weapons tipped with green crystals, massive, scythelike spikes projecting over their backs, their helmets only partly disguising the writhing mass of Lekgolo worms functioning as a gestalt mind to control each Hunter’s conglomerate body. The Mgalekgolo carried shields that were themselves bigger than most ordinary bipedal creatures. They had no real faces. He had always found the Hunters especially repellent.

  And then the plasma projectiles struck, hitting thick alloy collars holding the conduit pipes to the floor, not far from Zo. He ducked, but not before the shock wave knocked him off his feet, sending him skidding backward.

  Trying to get up, Zo felt a searing pain on the right side of his face—he’d been burned in the blast from the assault cannons. He wondered blearily if he was now disfigured. But it didn’t matter—the Mgalekgolo would kill him soon enough. Zo felt Crun helping him to stand. The collars over the pipes were blackened and warped, one of them twisted apart—charged gas was pluming up, roaring, from the breached conduit. About thirty strides beyond the blast mark, the Mgalekgolo were climbing clumsily but inexorably over another set of pipes. On either side of the Hunters were the glowing energy transmutation cubes. Exquisite Devotion was levitating his chair over the same pipes—and firing a blast from his chair’s weapons system, which hissed overhead.

  G’torik fired his rifle repeatedly and shouted, “Crun—hit the transmutation cubes!”

  Crun, too, fired, and they hit the cubes together. There was no immediate effect. Another blast of green plasma energy flashed by. G’torik and Crun kept firing at the transmuters built into the pipes—

  And then the cubes exploded, releasing their concentrated power in a double detonation that ripped through other pipes nearby; a series of conduits erupted, and flak from shattered metal ricocheted from the distant ceiling, making temporary stars out of sparks. Exquisite Devotion shrieked, vanishing in a sudden fireball.

  Something else was flying asunder—the Mgalekgolo bond brothers, fountains of orange blood flecked with hot metal shrapnel, both blown to pieces, gone in an instant. The room reeked with a thick, nauseating wormlike odor.

  “Ho!” shouted Crun triumphantly. “Two Hunters exterminated!”

  “And—where is Exquisite?” Zo asked, coughing from the fumes of pipes and blasted Hunters.

  “There!” Crun said, pointing.

  Zo saw him then. Exquisite had been thrown from his chair, which lay spitting sparks behind him. He was crawling across the floor.

  Tul said, “You have started a chain reaction—we must get away from here!”

  “One moment!” G’torik shouted. “The Prophet’s vaunted energy shield is down!” He vaulted over a pipe, then another, drawing his energy sword. He skidded to a stop in front of Exquisite Devotion, activated the sword—and Exquisite screamed as G’torik quickly sliced him into three parts.

  “That is for those who died for your pleasure, false Prophet!” G’torik cried.

  The deck vibrated and hummed under their feet as G’torik rushed back to Zo. They stumbled to the next set of pipes, scrambling over in frenzied haste, Crun and G’torik helping Zo, and then to the door . . .

  But what was the point? The door was frozen shut. Locked.

  And yet—not quite. It had started to swing aside, and then stopped, open just a hand’s width. What had moved it?

  Then Zo saw the tentacles feeling their way through the opening—a Huragok.

  “That would be Sluggish Drifter,” said Tul, pleased. “We’ve worked together many a time.” He thrust his hand into the open space and made a series of hand-signing gestures designed for the Huragok. The alien Engineer slipped its wispy tentacle tips into small openings in the doorframe, overriding the order the door had been given, and it swung out of the way.

  Zo thought as they all hurried through, They’ll be waiting for us out there. The High Prophet of Truth and a legion of Jiralhanae.

  But when they stepped into the corridor, they saw that emergency vacuum-sealant doors had closed off this part of the corridor. There was a vibrant slamming at the sealant door on their right—no doubt Exquisite’s Jiralhanae trying to break through.

  “The Huragok’s locked them out for now,” Tul said. “But we have to move like a skorken with its tail afire!”

  The door they’d just come through sealed behind them—and not a moment too soon. An angry thoom! shook the corridor, and the force of the chain reactive explosion in the conduit room dented the door, making it crumple partway inward, as if some vengeful god had throttled it from the other side.

  “That was too close,” Tul said. “But at least now it won’t open for them. Come.”

  He led the way down the ramp ahead, and Zo, driven by raw fear, had no difficulty keeping up.

  Tul waved them through another door and across the deck of a small hangar. They climbed into an oval metal-and-glass vessel, just big enough for the four of them and the Huragok. No sooner had Zo followed the others than the hatch in the maintenance vessel sealed.

  “Get to your seats, get to your stations!” Tul shouted, rushing to the controls. The Huragok trilled a question to him, and Tul hastily gestured and answered before activating the maintenance vessel.

  Moments later the small hangar had depressurized and the air lock had opened, the little craft sai
ling out of the upper levels of High Charity. As they passed through the murky clouds within the Holy City’s massive dome interior, Zo used one of the ship’s viewscreens to take in the destruction below.

  It had begun. Already the city was in complete chaos, wracked by all-out civil war. Then, in the corner of the screen, Zo saw something he could not believe. His Sangheili companions came and stood near, gazing in shock at what the viewscreen conveyed.

  The immense Forerunner Dreadnought at the center of High Charity, which had for so long served as a reminder of the Writ of Union between San’Shyuum and Sangheili, had suddenly rent free from its moorings and begun to climb, a burning sun beaming from where its long-since-decommissioned engines were. The noble and ancient vessel shook the entire city, concussively reverberating through the air, and rumbling through the supply ship as it rose skyward to the upper parts of the dome. Zo gazed in horror at what he saw—the entire city began to dim and darken with the Dreadnought departing upward, having lost the source of much of its power. This truly was a sign of the times.

  “By the gods,” Zo said, covering his face in shame. The Dreadnought had been the skeletal core of High Charity for century after century. He could not conceive of High Charity without it, or the Dreadnought without High Charity. The sum of the two was the last homeworld of the San’Shyuum, the only world left to them. But it appeared the Dreadnought was abandoning them all.

  “It is Truth in that ship, Zo,” G’torik said solemnly. “He has taken what is left of the Covenant fleets and is heading for the human world, Earth. He is seeking the Ark.”

  “What about Delta Halo?” Zo wondered. “Why would he abandon it?”

  “He has given Tartarus the Icon and sent him to activate the Ring,” G’torik explained. “The Arbiter and our allies there have planned to stop him; they claim to have new insight about the Ring’s purpose, which leads them to believe that activating Halo could bring an end to everything and everyone we know. I would like to join my brothers and avenge those we have lost, but the space between Halo and High Charity is now perilous—far too dangerous to pass through. Not only is it filled with Brute ships warring with our own vessels, but there is rumor of the Flood as well. That is a risk we cannot afford. Our best chance is escape to a remote system, and then reassess what options we have.”