Halo®: Mortal Dictata

  Mal was expecting trouble. He always did, and he wasn’t wrong all that often. The driver, sporting a big, studded Sam Browne–type belt and bedraggled plumage, gave Mal that weird sideways leer that they seemed to have. It was probably something to do with focusing on him. Whatever it was, it came under the heading of looking at me funny, and Mal didn’t warm to it.

  You don’t know what I did. And I’m not going to react like I did it.

  “You want to sell any handguns?” the driver asked.

  The situation flipped from being spotted as a bounty to being mugged for their bloody magnums. Only a Kig-Yar would be daft enough to do that.

  Vaz raised his, almost in the safety position, but angled so that it was clear he might conceivably use it. Mal was convinced. Vaz did have a temper. That was how it had all kicked off on Reynes to start with.

  “I can’t sell you this,” Vaz said calmly, “but if you can pay, I’ll see if I can get you one.”

  “Is it as accurate as they say?”

  He must have meant the KFA-2 sight. Vaz shook his head.

  “No use to you, comrade,” Vaz said. “The scope’s linked to armor systems. It’s just a regular thirty-mill handgun without all that.”

  “We still like,” the Kig-Yar said. “You get some, come and find us at Stavros’s place.”

  And then he drove off. Mal hated to admit it, but his heart was pounding. It was simply not being able to do what he was trained to do and blow the buzzard’s head off that stressed him.

  “Phew,” he said.

  Vaz holstered his magnum. “See? I can be diplomatic.”

  Mal turned onto the road and headed back to Spenser’s place. He was counting the event as a good result until he thought it through a little, and then the reality dawned on him. Two strangers had identified them as ex-UNSC and decided that where there was UNSC, there were magnums. That meant their faces were getting known.

  They couldn’t blend in. They’d have to brazen it out, and Staffan Sentzke was going to find out that they were here. Even if he hadn’t worked out all the details about Naomi, he certainly had no love for Earth.

  He might assume they didn’t, either. Mal wasn’t sure if that was good news or bad.

  MOUNT LONGDON ROAD, NEW TYNE

  Peter Moritz never arrived at Staffan’s house without a bottle or two. Staffan looked up from his bench to see the man leaning against the door frame, dangling a string bag that clinked enticingly.

  “Shochu,” Peter said. “That sweet potato glut we had last year. It’s mellowed a little.”

  “Grab a seat. There’s some glasses on the shelf.”

  Staffan carried on painting the tiny gilt mirror. It took a pair of forceps and a steady hand. He couldn’t look away, but he heard Peter twist the top off a bottle and then there was the comforting glug-glug-glug of liquid slopping into a glass. He wasn’t sure where Peter had learned to make shochu, but it was a pleasant, fragrant drink that didn’t leave him wrecked later.

  “That looks like a labor of love.” Peter put a glass on the bench, just within reach. “When’s the birthday?”

  Staffan put down the brush and reached for a miniature clamp to hold the frame while it dried. “Next month. Plenty of time.” He sat back and took a sip of the shochu. “Damn, that’s good.”

  They laughed and toasted the progress of the doll’s house, walking around it as it sat on the table and inspecting it like building surveyors.

  “I hope it dismantles,” Peter said. “Or else you’re going to have a damn hard time moving it.”

  Staffan nodded. “Yeah. I’m a pro, remember.”

  “So … you said you had something to discuss.”

  The more Staffan thought about it, the less concrete his plan became. Edvin was right. Inquisitor—or Naomi—was too big an asset to be wielded without a lot of thought, and she had to be deployed intelligently to achieve the desired result. What did he want? Did he want to lash out blindly, still not knowing which authority had taken his child, or did he want answers?

  But without answers, there could be no target to lash out at.

  He had to put the impotent, bitter anger aside and channel it. He’d waited more than thirty years for this. He could wait a little longer. Was he losing it? He’d always been careful, always a meticulous planner, a man taught by his carpenter father to measure twice and cut once, and the sudden urge to vent his pain in indiscriminate destruction caught him off guard.

  Is that me? Is that really me?

  It just wasn’t every day that a small country—a city-state, nothing more—was handed a warship that could worry an empire.

  Staffan drained his glass and held it out for a refill. “I’ve acquired something. Something that’ll change the game if Earth decides to pick up where it left off with the colonies.”

  “Well, everyone’s wondering what’s going to happen now the other war’s over.”

  It was always that other war, not the war. Staffan knew Venezia was lucky to avoid the Covenant, and that the Sangheili would have glassed New Tyne regardless of whether the humans there were loyal to Earth or happy to see it burn. But that didn’t change history. It didn’t change how Earth had used its proxies in the colonies to kill its own people. You could keep a lot quiet if it happened light-years from home. Everyone here knew what had happened to Far Isle. How many on Earth knew, though? Did they know the UNSC had used nukes to put down the insurrection?

  That’s what we’re dealing with. Don’t forget it.

  There were assholes in the colonies, of course. He knew that. He knew how many “freedom fighters” were criminals, opportunists, psychiatric cases, or just social inadequates who embraced a cause because it was convenient, profitable, or gave their pitiful existences some meaning. He’d met them. He wasn’t going to glorify them by calling them patriots. He’d studied Earth history and seen the inevitable cycle of thugs acquiring respectability through time and myth and ending up as heads of state. An asshole was an asshole, regardless of passport or species.

  But he’d also met too many guys like himself, crushed under the wheels of politics, robbed of family or livelihood or both, who wanted to hit back or just go someplace else where it would never happen again. He was somewhere between the two. On any given day, he might find himself at one end of that spectrum or the other. It depended how tired he was and how many nightmares had kept him awake.

  Today, though, he needed to be on an even keel. He needed to plan.

  Peter topped up his glass again. It was only a shot glass and shochu wasn’t full-proof liquor. It wouldn’t affect his judgment and make him say something he’d regret later.

  “I’ve got a battlecruiser,” he said.

  Peter looked at him for a moment, frowned, then glanced at the doll’s house. Staffan could see the thought form and crumble: Peter was still thinking in terms of toys for kids, and then suddenly he wasn’t. He studied his glass for a few seconds, blinking.

  “You want to flesh that out a little, Staffan?”

  “I’ve lined up a CCS-class Covenant battlecruiser in working order and almost fully armed.”

  Peter stopped blinking. “I’m not good on tech specs, but I’m assuming that’s fairly big.”

  “Eighteen hundred meters. At the smaller end of the Covenant fleet. Ventral beam, plasma cannon, laser close-in defense.”

  Peter looked as if he was holding his breath. It took him a few moments to even move.

  “Jesus,” he said, shaking his head. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

  “I’m glad that’s finally sunk in.”

  “Where the hell did you get it? How?”

  “Fallout from the Sangheili civil war. Some buzzard who was transporting the ship for the rebels decided it wasn’t his war.”

  “They passed on a battlecruiser?”

  “What use is it to them? They’re tribal. It’s a nation’s asset. It’s designed for big objectives, not piracy. Besides, it’s expensive to operate.” Staffan was starting to f
eel a little more like he’d done a prudent thing rather than squandered serviceable small ships on a white elephant. “It cost me some fighters and a few dropships.”

  “Shit.”

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “There’s something I want, something I have to do or I’ll die crazy. But a battlecruiser puts us on a more level playing field with Earth. I can’t start a war just to get what I want and not think beyond that.”

  “What are we talking about exactly?”

  “Naomi.”

  Peter looked lost for a moment and then his face changed. He remembered. Staffan didn’t talk about her outside the family these days, but he’d known Peter for a long time, ever since Remo had introduced them, and he’d felt no shame in telling him a story that made others smile nervously, nod, and walk away.

  I am not insane. I know I’m not.

  “Why are you so sure?” Peter asked.

  “Because it happened to Remo too. You know it did. You know he lost his son. His gifted son. His son who kept getting visits from educational psychologists. Same time period, same scenario. Same unexplained genetic illness. Same death. And he managed to pull all the colonial police files for that period, all the reports of missing kids, all the death certificates from the CAA, all the school records. That’s what you can do if you’re a gangster with cops and city hall in your pocket.”

  “You can make patterns out of anything.”

  It had taken Staffan and Remo years to pull it all together, and most of the leads were dead ends. But they’d found enough. What they couldn’t work out was why. Who would want to abduct exceptional kids? All Staffan could think of was a government eugenics program. It wasn’t unknown. Earth’s history was peppered with schemes that had taken children from their parents to be raised by others, usually based on some racial ideology of improving the species. There was nothing crazier than reality.

  “I need to know the truth, Pete,” Staffan said. “When wars end, all the shit comes tumbling out. People talk, point fingers at each other, reveal things they’ve kept quiet for years. I know we’ve lost pretty well all the colonial records, but Naomi disappeared long before the Covenant showed up. I can’t pass up the chance to ask what’s in the UEG’s records. But now I can ask those questions from a position of strength.”

  “What, hold a gun to their head? The ship? Are you serious?”

  “Okay, okay, I know the politics are more complicated than that. But you know where I’m going with this.”

  Peter put his hand out to locate the chair behind him without looking. He was definitely shocked. Who wouldn’t have been? Even in Staffan’s world, where arms deals were daily routine, acquiring a planet-killer was in a different league.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Peter asked.

  “Because we’re the nearest thing that New Tyne has to a legitimate government, and I suppose that makes you as near as damn it the head of state. Whatever I do with that ship affects everyone here. I know I can do as I please with it, but one thing I know I can’t do is head for Earth, aim the ventral beam at Sydney, and demand answers from—well, who, exactly? Who actually runs Earth? It isn’t the goddamn civilian government. Not that they were any great loss.”

  “You’ve got one warship. A serious one, yes, but what do we do if they come after us with a whole fleet? We’ll be charcoal.”

  “Well, gee, that’s fighting talk, Pete.” Staffan was the same age as this guy. They both remembered the galaxy when it was just human-on-human violence. “Weren’t you the one planting bombs and hijacking ships around the inner colonies? You obviously had more balls in those days.”

  “We weren’t a fixed target then.”

  “Hey, I’m not the one who managed to piss off the UNSC a few months ago by refusing to help a ship with a reactor going critical.”

  “You know that could have been a ploy to insert UNSC personnel.”

  “We’re on their list already. Maybe if they thought there’d be consequences if they pissed around with us, they’d think again. You know how you do that? You treat a battlecruiser like a submarine. You keep it out there, hidden, moving around, ready to launch a strike if anything happens to the home country. We can do that now. It changes everything. You don’t need an entire navy to make that work.”

  Staffan had been sure he was doing the right thing. Edvin had convinced him that this was an asset for Venezia, not a private war. Now Peter Moritz, firebrand and insurgent, a man who’d sworn to overthrow Earth control by any means necessary, was pissing his pants and worrying what Earth would think of them.

  They all want to be statesmen in the end. Respectable and comfortable.

  I just want to know what happened to my little girl.

  “So where’s this ship at the moment?” Peter asked.

  “I’m keeping everything on a need-to-know basis because of the Kig-Yar.” Staffan meant that, because they’d steal whatever they could if there was a buck in it. Now he was worried that Peter would muscle in. “If a rival clan decides to seize it, they could end up selling it to Earth, and no prizes for guessing where the UNSC would test the ventral beam.”

  Peter was looking slightly past him in defocus. “I think the phrase is poisoned chalice.”

  “Not quite,” Staffan said. “Having the ship brings a lot of tough choices. But not having it gives us no choice at all. Letting someone else have it puts us at risk.” He drained his glass. “So I’m going to hang on to it, and not do anything dumb. I’m not planning to rush out and glass Earth next week. But I have a big military advantage that could also be Venezia’s.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Nothing. I was just telling you.”

  “Jesus, Staffan, are you okay with this thing?”

  “I told you. I’m not mad. And I’m not going to do anything rash. But I have it, and now I need a plan.”

  Peter got up and refilled their glasses. “I’ve got to hand it to you. Nothing’s too big for you to take on, is it?”

  “Not where my daughter’s concerned, no. I’ve come halfway across the galaxy to find out what happened to her.”

  “What will you do for a crew?”

  “It won’t be Kig-Yar, for a start. I’ll find humans. Maybe some Grunts to make up numbers.” Staffan wondered if he should mention the Huragok. He decided not to for the time being. It was too complicated a distraction and he’d be under pressure to use it for all kinds of unrelated things. “But there’ll be ex-Covenant aliens willing to train us on those systems.”

  “Nairn says we’ve got UNSC deserters showing up.”

  “See? This is where it all starts spilling out, like I said.”

  “They’ve got some experience. Anyway, we’ve signed them up for the militia.”

  “Do they know anything about Covenant ships?”

  “Nairn says they do.”

  There was nothing more to discuss without going into detail that Staffan wasn’t willing to risk sharing. Peter was a friend, not a guy looking to stiff him at the first opportunity, but Staffan could see that he didn’t trust him not to use the ship in a fit of anger and bring down the wrath of the UNSC on the whole planet.

  Like I said. I’ve waited thirty-odd years. I need my answers first. But if the UNSC wanted to nuke us, they would have done that when we wouldn’t save their warship.

  Missiles had been fired both ways. But all the UNSC had done was take out an anti-air battery. Maybe they had their reasons for restraint.

  Peter left the shochu on the bench and they parted with slaps on the back, as if nothing had happened and there’d been no talk of battlecruisers glassing Earth. Staffan picked up the clamp and touched his fingertip against the gilt paint of the tiny mirror frame. It was already dry. Now he could add the reflective panel, plastic in place of glass for safety.

  UNSC deserters? Venezia didn’t get hundreds, but it wasn’t unknown. They were the first for a few years, though. It would do no harm to debrief the
m.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  IT WAS A LONG SHOT, REALLY. I WASN’T EVEN LOOKING FOR CONSPIRACIES. I WAS SO BLIND WITH GRIEF THAT I LET MYSELF GET TALKED INTO GOING TO A SUPPORT GROUP FOR BEREAVED PARENTS. I EVEN MET SOME FOLKS WHO BELIEVED THEIR KID HAD BEEN SWAPPED FOR A CHANGELING, BUT IT WASN’T UNTIL I MET A COUPLE WHOSE KID HAD BEEN KIDNAPPED YEARS BEFORE THAT I TRIED THE MISSING CHILD CHARITIES. I FOUND ONE THAT LINKED PARENTS FROM DIFFERENT COLONY WORLDS WHO WERE LOOKING FOR ABDUCTED KIDS. AND THAT WAS HOW I EVENTUALLY MET ANDY REMO, A GUY FROM HERSCHEL, AND WE COMPARED NOTES.

  THEN I KNEW I WASN’T MAD. OR ALONE.

  —STAFFAN SENTZKE, TALKING ABOUT HIS SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH ABOUT HIS DAUGHTER

  TILU CITY, EAYN: Y’DEIO SYSTEM

  “It’s been days, and we’re still here,” Zim said. He followed Chol through the crowded street, making impatient clicks. “Mistress, we’re losing time. I could take a ship and start searching the—”

  “You will not,” Chol said. “Time spent here will save time wasted going around in circles. Fel may well be anywhere, but he had to start somewhere, and he has to stop somewhere. And we look for his crew, not him. Because that’s what we call not attracting attention.”

  Barbed comments never seemed to ruffle Zim’s feathers. “I can’t find a record of him living in the system anyway. Not even in his clan home.”

  “He might use an alias. It’ll prolong his life expectancy.”

  “You’re sure he has a customer?”

  “You said it yourself. A warship that size is no use to him. It’s just a giant beacon summoning ‘Telcam to kill him.”

  “True. Only an idiot would want to keep it.”

  Maybe she was an idiot. She’d be the owner of that kill-me beacon herself before long. But that wasn’t reason enough to change her mind and hand the prize over to ‘Telcam, and it was far easier to take a battlecruiser from a small force of Kig-Yar than to try to seize a fully crewed one from the Sangheili.