Halo®: Mortal Dictata

  Central Tilu was all nooks and crannies, a little like the asteroid belt. They were both ideal places to hide things. The ancient city was one of the cradles of Kig-Yar civilization, but the little streets and alleyways that had been designed for small carts were now an annoyance for a modern-day shipmistress in a hurry. The streets were so narrow that it was impossible to get a vehicle through them. It had its advantages, though. It was easy to melt into the crowd and lose anyone who might be tailing her.

  Trust was a carefully stacked nest of boxes. Chol preferred to take her chances with a fellow Kig-Yar than with another species, but among Kig-Yar she could only trust T’vaoan, and among T’vaoan she could only really trust her own clan, none of the others. The humans had a phrase for it; the devil you knew was preferable to the devil you didn’t. But the humans had a wonderful phrase for everything, then proceeded to ignore the wisdom in all of them.

  “There’s nobody following us,” Zim said. He wasn’t T’vaoan, but he was scared of her and probably thought he had a chance of mating with her if he behaved deferentially enough. That created its own loyalty. “I’d have noticed.”

  “The world is full of carrion eaters.” Just as humans said they saw their own core selves in apes, Chol looked to her distant cousins in the wild birds of Eayn as a guide to their shared fundamental instincts. “Vultures always follow hawks in the hope of stealing their kill.”

  “But they still get clawed if they get too close.”

  “Perhaps we should end the analogy before we get on to feather mites.”

  “Yes. Sorry.”

  Word would be out now that she’d taken ‘Telcam’s contract, and other clans would keep an eye on her to see if they could follow her and move in at the last moment after she’d done all the hard work and spent all the resources. But any fool trying to muscle in on her quarry now would definitely feel more than her claws. They’d get a plasma pistol in the face.

  She tried to dodge the street merchants shoving ornaments and brightly colored leathers at her. But once she sidestepped those, she found herself cornered by snack vendors, yelling their prices in hoarse voices—half a gez for neatly coiled roast snake, one for a loop of small rodents threaded like a bead necklace, and two for wafers of an air-dried and unknown meat packed so tightly onto a central skewer that it looked like a bottle brush. The smell of spice, sizzling fat, and charcoal was overwhelming, but she ignored the temptation and pushed past. Behind her, Zim’s footsteps stopped. Chol carried on struggling against the tide of bodies, but eventually she stopped to look back.

  Zim had stopped to buy something to eat. He dodged through the crowd, trying to catch up with her.

  “Apologies, mistress.” He held out a paper wrapper full of snake coils as if he was offering her one. “I haven’t eaten this morning.”

  “No thanks. I don’t trust their hygiene here.”

  “Germs build your immune system.”

  “They also give you jha-sig.”

  “True.” Zim uncoiled one of the snakes, holding it carefully over the sheet of paper, and bit off the head. “How do they keep them flexible once they’re cooked?”

  “Marinade,” Chol said.

  “I never thought to ask before.”

  “Didn’t your clan mother cook them for you?”

  “No. She said they were vulgar.”

  “Very true.”

  “So we just wait for Eith to show up again? The ship will be long gone.”

  “I’m not waiting for him,” Chol said. “How many times do I have to explain this? I’m narrowing down the number of places he might have gone.”

  “Yes, mistress.” Zim put a section of snake between his teeth and pulled, stripping off the meat to leave a ragged zip of vertebrae. “Sorry, mistress.”

  “Eat the bones.” Chol hoped her mother was making sure the boys ate theirs while she was away. “Calcium’s good for you.”

  It was a big galaxy, but most of it was cold, hostile, and transparent, and there actually weren’t as many places to go as Zim seemed to think—not if you were trying to hide a warship, anyway. Sav Fel had fewer planets to flee to than ever because so many worlds had been reduced to rubble, and those that hadn’t generally had populations that would either turn on him or turn him in. He had to sell that vessel to somebody. This wasn’t like offloading a dropship or a few rifles. Inquisitor was still a capital ship, even if she wasn’t the biggest, but her only purpose was destruction and invasion. Apart from the Sangheili who still intent on wiping each other out, there were few people left in the business of galactic-scale warfare.

  Chol would find Fel. Intelligence would answer the question of where, because it would tell her who.

  “There,” she said. Up ahead, a woven arch of vines thicker than her waist formed the entrance to a teahouse that had been in business since before the Covenant ever came to the Y’Deio system. That was the story put about by those who wanted to lure big-spending visitors to Tilu, anyway. It certainly looked ancient. “You wait here. If I need you, I’ll call.”

  Zim wiped his hands on the crumpled wrapper and tossed it into the gutter. “Nobody knows me. I could slip in there anonymously and simply enquire after Fel.”

  “It’s not going to be that simple. This requires an oblique approach.”

  She kept walking. Zim peeled off and disappeared around the corner of the block. As she stepped through the vine arch, the noise and smells of the street were suddenly gone, shut out by thick mud-brick walls and a line of ornamental trees smothered in bright orange flowers with the scent of honey gum. It was like walking through a Forerunner portal to another world. In the shade of the trees, elderly matriarchs sipped from sequin-studded porcelain bowls while a couple of males—quite well off, judging by their waistcoats—tried to catch the eye of some younger females by preening their forearm plumage. If you had a little wealth, or wanted to latch on to someone else’s, this was a good place to be seen. It was such an upmarket and genteel venue that there was even a separate latrine some distance from the building, not just a scrape by the front door.

  It was also a place where shipmistresses and masters did business, at least for high value expeditions. Chol thought it was worth the price of a bowl of tea. She strutted into the building and was swallowed up by deep, cool shade. An artificial breeze rustled through wreaths of dried tea fronds hanging from the beams, filling the room with a smoky sweetness.

  “Tea, your best fermentation,” she said to the waiter, sitting down at a table. “Is there any shipping business being done here today?”

  “In the back room, mistress.”

  “I’ll take my tea in there, then.”

  She got up and wandered into the room, pushing aside the heavy tapestry curtain across the arch. There were no automatic doors or holographic displays here, just the simple decor and utensils that her ancestors a thousand summers ago would have recognized. That was remarkably relaxing. When she sat down, nothing vibrated or hummed on the threshold of her hearing. A ship was a noisy, confining thing, not like true flight at all, just a box in motion, and however central spaceflight was to all their lives, it was good to be reminded that there was such a thing as a quiet roost.

  The ship commanders hunched around the table looked across the room at her.

  “I’m looking for Eith Mor,” she said. “I want to offer him a position. Does anyone know where I might find him? This is his clan’s territory, isn’t it?”

  One of the shipmistresses was making notes on a data module or tallying a price. It was hard to tell from here. She took a few moments to finish and look up.

  “I hear he’s waiting for payment from a previous trip. He’ll be back next week when that’s concluded. Can I send him a message?”

  That was news Chol didn’t want to hear. It might have meant the handover had already taken place, so there might be a new owner to separate from his or her purchase. If Inquisitor had been bought by Brutes, then that was going to be a challenge. But she wasn’
t giving up before she’d even spooled up her drives.

  “Tell him to contact my lieutenant.” Chol handed Zim’s comms code to the shipmistress on a slip of paper. Unless Eith was an idiot, he’d check who was looking for him, and it was too easy to find out that she’d been hired by ‘Telcam. There was no documentation to link Zim to the mission yet, though. “The sooner the better. I need to pick up a cargo in a fairly volatile sector, so there’ll be a bonus. Depending on where he is, he could join my ship en route.”

  “I’ll pass that on.” The shipmistress squinted at the comms code and cocked her head. “You could ask his cousins on the other side of town, too, in case he’s made contact. Huz Mor-Kha, I think it is. He processes scrap metal at a place out on the Riran highway.”

  “Very helpful,” Chol said. “Thank you.”

  She’d go and lean on the cousin. She drained her bowl of tea and left. Zim was squatting in the alley at the side of the teahouse, snatching at beetles in flight and crunching them.

  “Have you got tapeworms?” Chol said. “I’ve never seen anyone eat so much.”

  “I try to eat natural foods.” Zim dusted off his pants and stood up. “Any luck?”

  “You might get a call from Eith. I gave a shipmistress your code to pass on. Just a scam telling him I’ve got work for him, so we can trace the comms nodes and work their route backward.” She headed back to the business district, the modern expansion of Tilu that had been tacked on outside its southern city wall. “But I have details of a cousin who might be more helpful.”

  She’d rented a ground vehicle to cover her tracks, an ugly thing called a Mongoose. The humans had no sense of design. They did churn the machines out in large numbers, though, and they were prone to lose them the hard way on the battlefield, so there was a market for them in places like this. Zim always wanted to drive. This time she let him and clung to the rack on the rear, directing him to the Riran highway.

  The wealth map of Tilu and its neighboring towns was like a set of concentric target rings. The money was at the old heart, and the farther out you went, the poorer the clans became. Huz was a scrap metal dealer. He should have been able to make a very good living at that, but there he was, in what humans called the buttock part of town. Or at least she thought that was the term: sometimes Brutes lost a lot in translating conversations.

  “I see it, mistress.” Zim took one hand off the controls to point across toward the lush green forest. “What a mess.”

  He turned the Mongoose into an approach road and bounced the vehicle across soil rutted and scarred with burned tree stumps. Huz looked as if he was expanding the site, so business couldn’t have been so bad. Chol slid off the rear rack and went into the yard to look for him. This time, Zim followed her with his hand resting on his sidearm, which was touchingly protective under the circumstances.

  Chol followed the hiss, thump, and creak of a metal press in a workshop on the far side of the compound. The path to the door was a canyon of pallets and containers, all loaded with reclaimed metals and sorted by type. By the time she got to the workshop doorway, Huz had emerged from the gloom and stood there in a leather apron, wiping his hands.

  “You tripped the alarm,” he said. “What do you want, mistress?”

  “I need to contact a cousin of yours. Eith. I know he’s going to be back soon, but I need to call him urgently.”

  Huz cocked his head on one side and considered Zim, then her, then Zim again.

  “Why? What’s he done now? Whatever you think he’s got, he paid for it. He always does. He’s a good boy.”

  Chol held up an imperious hand for silence. “I need to talk to him to see if he can do an urgent job for me.”

  Huz just stood there, as if she’d get bored and go away if he did it long enough. Zim moved up beside her. Huz gave in.

  “Very well.” He took out a comms device and turned his back on them. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  He was routing a message. That was all Chol needed, really: a clue to where Eith was, which would filter a hundred possible locations down to perhaps half a dozen. If Eith was traveling on his own budget, he’d take the most direct and economical route home. Chol debated whether to interrupt the call and seize the device as soon as Huz appeared to get a response, or wait for him to finish and then grab it.

  Or just ask him, of course. It’s worked well so far.

  She waited. Zim moved in. Huz talked in hushed tones, head bent over the device, then ended the call and turned to her.

  “He says he’ll be back in a few days.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Because if he’s on the other side of Covenant space, it’ll be too late.”

  Huz looked resigned. “He’s at the Station of Constant Sustenance.”

  Chol had to look interested in anything except establishing Eith’s route. “Is that still functioning?” It was a former Covenant resupply station, one of a network that had spanned the galaxy. “I’m surprised he’s found any of them left.”

  “It’s much depleted, mistress. They’re stripping it of cable and metal sheeting. No point passing up an opportunity, after all. But he’s traveling alone, so he’s arranging passage at the moment.”

  If he was alone and arranging passage, that meant Sav Fel had split the crew and everyone had scattered. At least that might take her nearer to the location of his customer.

  Zim was poring over his data module. “That’s near the Korfo system.”

  Huz looked uneasy. He turned away and looked like he was reaching under his apron, and that was when Zim sprang at him and knocked him to the ground. He slashed at Huz with his clawed feet, leaving a big rip in the leather apron, a blow that would have disemboweled the scrap dealer if he hadn’t been wearing it. Then Zim shoved the pistol in his face.

  Chol had never seen Zim fight, not like that. It was a dirty move, a real street brawler’s reaction. Her admiration for him shot up a few points.

  “Were you thinking of drawing a weapon on my mistress?” he rasped, looming over Huz. “She asked you a polite question.”

  Huz drew up his knees, arms almost crossed as if he wasn’t planning to surrender but to pick the right moment to slash back. “You just want to muscle in on my supplier.”

  “We’re not interested in your supplier.” Chol stood over him. If Zim didn’t stomp some sense into him, she would. Maybe it was time to simply drop the pretense. “We don’t care what he supplies. We’re not even looking for Eith. I just need to know where he is. Where he’s been.”

  “See? I knew it.”

  “Start making sense before I kick you. I’m not looking for your trade secrets.” She squatted over Huz. Zim still held the pistol on him. “I’m looking for someone that Eith’s been with. If you give me a location, I won’t share it with your rivals. But if you make me beat it out of you, I will. I might even shoot you anyway. Do we have an understanding?”

  Huz looked defeated. Then he nodded, and she let him stand up. A change of tack sometimes worked with males. She took off the pendant she happened to be wearing today, nothing of any great sentimental value, just a faceted yellow beryl that a previous mate had wooed her with, and dangled it in front of Huz’s face.

  “If you were to give this to a prospective mate, I’m sure she’d be impressed enough to give you the time of day,” she said. Huz’s eyes followed the glittering stone. “I’m not asking you to sell your grandmother to a human pervert. Just tell me if you know where Eith went. Where he’s been.”

  “He took a contract to deliver a ship.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who hired him?” It was a circular question, more to test Huz’s willingness to be honest than anything. “I need a name.”

  “Fel.”

  Now she was getting somewhere—she hoped. “And where’s Fel right now?”

  “He’s probably gone home to his family.”

  “Do you
remember what I said?”

  Huz held out his hands. “He lives on a pebble in the middle of nowhere. I only know it as Fen-Es-Ya. It’s not even on the charts. I’ve never been there. They trade ore and arms.”

  Kig-Yar pilots weren’t good at pooling navigation knowledge; who wanted their rivals to show up when they’d found a private source of minerals or metals? But the Covenant had been much more keen on record-keeping, and insisted on a database for each world visited. She had Korfo, then, and now she had Fen-Es-Ya. It was part of the puzzle.

  Zim consulted his module. “No Fen-Es-Ya in the Covenant records.”

  “Try the human records, then,” Huz said. “Fel trades with the flat-faces as well.”

  Humans.

  Chol hadn’t really factored them into this. What would they want a battlecruiser for, when they’d won the war and were now stronger than the Elites? She was hearing gossip coming back from the civil war on Sanghelios, stories from Kig-Yar pilots about a massive new human warship. Why would they want a ship like Pious Inquisitor?

  Whatever their motive, they were probably the only faction left that Fel could sell to without risking discovery by ‘Telcam, apart from the Brutes. It was worth pursuing.

  “Do humans have different clans?” she asked. “Warring tribes?”

  “Oh, yes,” Huz said. “They had a civil war too. Doesn’t everyone?”

  “Zim, find me their records.” Chol handed Huz the pendant. He seemed quite satisfied for someone who’d just been threatened and knocked down, but net profit was the only measure of happiness on any given day. “Find me the flat-faces’ history.”

  NEW TYNE, VENEZIA

  “Damn, I must be getting old.” Spenser fumbled inside his jacket for his security pass as his Warthog approached the barracks gate. “It took me more than two weeks to infiltrate this place. You guys managed it in what, three days? Four?”

  “Right place, right skills, right time,” Vaz said. He’d left all his incriminating kit at the house, including the scanner that checked weapons for the micro-tags they’d inserted to track ‘Telcam’s supply routes. If they searched him, they wouldn’t find anything awkward to explain. “Either that, or they already know who we really are, and they’re going to cut our throats the second the door’s closed.”