Mal couldn’t look at Vaz. He wasn’t sure what the normal reaction of an innocent person would be to that kind of news. Bewilderment was always a good option, and Staffan might even take it for embarrassment. Anything would do as long as it didn’t look like guilt.
A sudden voice in his ear made him flinch. “Chol Von.” Minus his avatar, BB could startle you like the voice of God out of nowhere telling you to stop that disgusting behavior at once, or your conscience, or delusional mutterings in your head. Mal kept forgetting the bugger was in his radio, listening and watching. “‘Telcam’s hired Chol Von to locate Inquisitor. And Chol Von is the nationalist who wants a united chicken navy. Shall I draw you a picture?”
BB distracted him completely. He hoped it just looked like he was a baffled marine. A theory formed in his head like a little trailer for a movie: Fel hot-wires the ship, Chol tracks him down, he won’t tell her where the ship is, and she beats it out of him. Oh shit. Well, as long as Staffan doesn’t work out who tried to hack the system. If he doesn’t get to keep a battlecruiser, then maybe we can all go home and leave him be.
But Parangosky wanted that ship. Mal had his orders. “So you want us to help you find him.”
“That’d be a start. Have you dealt with Kig-Yar much?”
“We’ve shot a few. Actually, quite a lot. But we’re better with Sangheili. They’re pretty consistent. If they’d found Fel or whatever his name is, they’d have left a bloody big smoking crater. No house, no wife, and no fluffy chicks.”
Vaz nodded, impressively calm. He really did look like he hadn’t any idea about that nasty hacking business. “Does Fel know where the ship is now? Any sane criminal would do a deal and let someone have the ship in exchange for not telling the Sangheili where he is.”
“But they can’t get in. Sinks will see to that. Complete lockdown.”
Noted. Thanks for the warning. Mal hoped BB was relaying all this back to Stanley, and then maybe Phillips could intervene at the Sangheili end and pull some flanker on ‘Telcam. Osman had the ship’s position. Suddenly it didn’t seem clear at all. The priority was to get the ship out of Staffan’s hands, because even if he didn’t use it, someone else on Venezia would. A lot of the factions from the insurgency had ended up here. But would it be a bigger loss to ONI? The data on board might be priceless, as would a working ventral beam, but stopping Venezia from using the ship against Earth had to be the top priority now. If ‘Telcam got it back, they weren’t any worse off than they’d been a few weeks ago.
But they want it all. Even the nice officers. They want you to do it all. Get the bad guy, bring the WMD back in one piece, and save the cat. Okay. That’s our job. But screw the cat.
“If you think Fel can’t resist a friendly question from his captors for long,” Vaz said, “why don’t we just go and move the ship? Okay, you still have a problem. You still have someone who can link the theft to this place, and you don’t want a visit from the hinge-heads. But to keep the ship, you need to move her now. You want help? We’re free.”
Staffan chewed it over, unreadable. Edvin never said a bloody word, which rattled Mal almost as much as Staffan swinging between chatty sociability and expressionless ice. Vaz had seized a natural opportunity. Mal went with it.
“Okay, let’s do that.” Staffan nodded at Edvin. “Come on. We’ll take my truck.”
He got up and motioned to Mal and Vaz with a jerk of his head. It was starting to feel too easy. Mal tapped his fingernail against his radio, a warning to BB to stand by. Outside, it was a balmy night with insects clouding around the streetlights and the sound of chatter and laughter wafting from open doors. Edvin walked on ahead. Staffan hung back almost level with Mal, with Vaz slightly behind them. They’d fallen instantly into patrol mode. Beer and handshakes or not, this was behind enemy lines, and Mal was ready for an ambush.
He glanced over his shoulder at Vaz. He got a discreet nod back.
“I’m relaying all this,” BB said. “Osman’s tracking your position.”
Once on board Inquisitor, Mal’s priority was to find a port for BB to plug into. He had a compatible connector, courtesy of Adj. After that, though, he’d play it by ear. They might get off the ship again in one piece, with Staffan none the wiser until BB hijacked the ship later. Or it might end in a shoot-out. For the first time in years, he felt a moment of real panic.
“Relax,” BB whispered. He could detect Mal’s pulse rate. “You can take those two any time.”
But ODSTs are expendable. Remember that? That’s my bloody job. Christ, I’ve got a short memory. They drop us onto the battlefield and if we survive, it’s a bonus. When did I start thinking I was special, that I had a right and expectation to come out of all this alive?
“So where did you park?” Mal asked.
Staffan turned around like a tail man, walking backward. “Next junction.”
Mal heard a car behind them. He turned, pure reflex. Vaz turned too. It was a small delivery truck, lights dimmed, and it wasn’t going particularly fast. Suddenly it was right behind Vaz, about ten meters away, moving at walking pace.
All Mal could do was grunt and hope BB read all the right meanings into that. Of course he did. The AI was the cleverest thing in the universe, and sneaky with it. He’d be ready to flash Spenser a warning, bang out up the channel, and wipe the radio’s memory behind him.
“Oh dear,” BB said.
“Go. Go.”
Mal walked on, hand ready to draw his magnum. His earpiece went dead. BB had followed orders for a change. Had he left some tracking running in the radio? As Mal glanced back over his shoulder again, Vaz stopped and reached for his weapon, and that was when every muscle in Mal’s body went haywire.
The pain was incredible. He couldn’t breathe. He could hear himself making a strangled animal noise as he hit the concrete path. Normally he’d run through injuries like any marine, but he had no control over his body whatsoever and the paralyzing pain just kept coming. He’d been tasered once in training. He knew bloody well what had happened now. He should have been able to hear Vaz, but his own agonized howls drowned out everything. Then five or six blokes—he thought six, but he was in no position to count—pinned him down, put cuffs on him, and hauled him into the truck.
He knew it was the vehicle that had been following them because his face was pressed against the molded metal floor of the cargo space, and he could see Vaz facedown on the floor as well. The metal vibrated as the truck drove off.
Staffan’s boots were level with his face. Now that Mal’s eyes were adjusting to the light and his disorientation was ebbing, he noted that Staffan had come mob-handed to deal with them. There were seven, maybe eight men crammed into the space as well as Edvin.
“Sorry about that,” Staffan said, squatting with one hand against the wall of the compartment to steady himself. “But I need you boys to tell me the truth. I’m really big on the truth, you see. I’ve been looking for it for thirty-five years.”
UNSC REPAIR AND REFIT STATION ANCHOR 10, NEAR DRYAD
Naomi should have known that the arrival of a lone Pelican with no visible support from a ship would make Anchor 10’s crew curious.
That was putting it mildly. Nobody had seen a Pelican with a slipspace drive before. As Devereaux maneuvered Tart-Cart into the hangar and the bay doors sealed, six civilian dock marshals emerged from alcoves and doors in the bulkheads to take a look. There was usually only one on duty per hangar.
“There was a time,” Devereaux said, powering down the thrusters, “when guys would line up to look at me, not the ship. Ah well. Let’s go impress on them the need for discretion.”
Naomi put on her helmet and jumped down from the hatch behind Devereaux, motioning to Adj to stay inside for the moment. As soon as Devereaux walked up to the ladder, five of the marshals disappeared. The duty marshal slid down the ladder from the gantry and touched the peak of his hardhat.
“All monitors disabled, ma’am, and observation panels shuttered. As pe
r ONI instructions. You know you’re breaking about a dozen health and safety regulations by not having a hangar crew present, don’t you?”
“I won’t tell if you won’t,” Devereaux said. “Our Engineer’s a little shy.”
He glanced at the patches on her flight suit—the 10th Battalion ODST death’s head, her pilot’s brevet, and the all-seeing cyclops pyramid emblem of ONI. Even if you were a top secret unit, the rest of the Navy had to know you existed before they could fear you properly, or so Osman said. Naomi could see the logic in that.
Then the marshal looked up at her. “Damn,” he said. “You’re a Spartan, aren’t you?”
“Either that, or I ate all my greens.” Naomi knew all the right things to say most of the time, but she never felt she connected with people like Mal or Phillips did. “Yes, sir. I’m a Spartan.”
He grinned and held his hand out for shaking. That took her aback. She found herself gripping it, trying not to squeeze too hard.
“You’re bloody heroes, ma’am,” he said. “Thank you. We wouldn’t be here without you.”
What could she say to that? She wasn’t even sure it was true. She had an urge to take off her helmet so he could look her in the eye and see her for what she was, but she suspected that would ruin the moment for him. He needed to see the Spartan from the ONI public affairs posters, a mirrored visor that brooked no intrusion, no knowledge of the man or woman behind it, the invincible warrior untouched by petty human concerns like pain and fatigue. Spartans were icons. They didn’t have fathers, uncertainties, or fears. They slew monsters.
But I was created to fight humans. People like my father. How’s that for certainty?
“You’re welcome,” she said.
The marshal hesitated for a few seconds, then climbed back up to the gantry and dogged the hatch shut behind him. Five meters to Tart-Cart’s starboard side, hatch aligned with hatch, another Pelican sat awaiting Adj’s rapid upgrade. Adj could work in peace now. Few personnel in the UNSC knew that ONI had acquired Huragok.
“You can come out now, Adj.” Devereaux climbed into the crew bay to coax him out. “Nobody’s watching. We’ll give you a hand.”
Adj drifted out and made a bee-line for the Calypso drive.
“You sound just like my uncle,” she said. “He never liked anyone breathing down his neck while he worked.”
Naomi had rarely heard Devereaux mention her family. Nobody in Kilo-Five had one—all dead, estranged, or unknown—which was part of the selection criteria; they could disappear for long periods without explanation, without disruption to a wider domestic circle or distraction from the job in hand. There were no relatives to demand inquiries when the bad news reached them.
Except me. I now have a family. And I’m distracted, and I shouldn’t be.
Naomi felt obliged to help Adj move the large drive parts. Huragok were much stronger than they looked, or else they wouldn’t have been able to do the heavy maintenance work they’d been designed for, but she had power-assisted armor. It seemed churlish not to lend a hand. Adj was a natural-born foreman. He bossed her around in his quiet little artificial voice—put that there, don’t touch that, hold this—and labored at a breakneck speed, more like a potter shaping clay on a wheel. He worked at the molecular level, remaking materials from the ground up with the fringes of tiny cilia on the ends of his tentacles.
Sometimes it looked as if he was melting the metal and composite and re-forming it, strengthening the Pelican’s airframe to accommodate the weight of the drive and the extra stresses that slipspace acceleration would place on it. It wasn’t the kind of metalworking that her father would have recognized.
Metalworker. I remembered Dad was a metalworker. Always building things. A mechanic, too. Did I really remember that? Or did I just remember it from the file?
There was no sawing or hammering. Apart from a clang of metal when Adj offered up a part to housing, all Naomi could hear was the occasional sigh, as if he wished he was somewhere else.
But he wasn’t. He was a Huragok, designed and bred to love his task obsessively to the exclusion of all else.
Like me.
She hadn’t thought about it much before, or if she had, she’d made herself stop. Have I got free will? Has Adj? If I’m that indoctrinated, that programmed, am I still human, or an organic machine like him? Now she knew why she avoided the issue. Surrounded by other Spartans, her world and purpose was defined and reinforced daily. She had a destiny, a mission, a duty to save humanity, and Spartans were its only hope. Catherine Halsey had told them so. It was the one message that had dominated Naomi’s life from the moment she arrived on Reach as a terrified, confused child who just wanted to go home to her parents.
Your mission is critical for the fate of all humanity.
Halsey had said it. She repeated it lots of different ways, from the simple explanation to a six-year-old child that they would stop people from killing each other, right through the years until her motivational speech when she declared that you Spartans—you—were all that stood between humanity and its extinction.
And if I didn’t step up to the challenge, or if I didn’t succeed, that extinction would be all my fault.
Naomi wasn’t sure if Halsey or Chief Mendez had ever put it in those terms, but the subtext was painfully clear. For a moment, she was angry. The intensity of it caught her by surprise.
For the last few months, that reinforcement of unquestioning Spartan dedication hadn’t been there, though. Osman was openly hostile to the SPARTAN-II program in ways that only a Spartan could be. Mal, Vaz, and Devereaux were highly disciplined and courageous to the point of being suicidal, but also cheerfully anarchic and cynical about the UNSC, as if they’d once been like her but were now a lot older and wiser, no longer buying into any of this noble mission stuff. Phillips was a civilian, and an academic, but absolutely nothing like Halsey: the culture he brought with him was oblique, with savage wars over the most trivial and abstract things, and he ridiculed it. And then there was BB. BB was the essence of iconoclasm, not just thinking the unthinkable but saying it loudly.
Kilo-Five was subversive. They were subverting her, too. Humans could be indoctrinated until some habits stayed with them for life, but they normed as well. They behaved like the humans around them. Naomi knew all that. Experiencing it was very different. Kilo-Five was eroding her, wearing away the rock to reveal layers she’d never known were buried.
“I’ve got to go collect a parcel,” Devereaux said, snapping Naomi out of her thoughts. “You want to come along? Explore the station?”
Naomi really didn’t feel like it. “What parcel?”
“Candied ginger. From Parangosky. For Osman’s nausea.”
“Why doesn’t she just get medication for that?”
“What would you rather receive from your boss? A memo with a prescription, or a fancy gift box with a nice bow on it?”
The psychology of it intrigued Naomi. There was a strong streak of penance in there somewhere, Parangosky’s need for forgiveness from Osman or maybe all the Spartan-IIs. Naomi sometimes wondered if that had influenced the recruitment of Kilo-Five, too. They were all very off-message, not ideologues at all. Either Parangosky thought that dissenting voices were healthier for the organization, or she was quietly sticking pins in ONI to make herself feel better about what she’d let it become.
It got the job done. That was all that mattered. Halsey had said so.
“Okay, I’ll come with you,” Naomi said. It was purely to be sociable to Devereaux. “Adj is okay. BB can keep an eye on him. If anyone tries to breach security, he’ll fry them.”
BB had been abnormally quiet on the transit. Now his voice filled her helmet. “Can I come too? Don’t leave me here alone with Adj.”
“You’re always with Adj. And everyone else. You’re always everywhere in some form or another.”
“Oh, go on. Plug me into your
neural interface. Please please please please please.”
“But you’ll leave a fragment in Tart-Cart, right?”
“Oh, of course. But … please. Don’t make me beg. You’re going to need me plugged in for the flight home anyway.”
When BB was downloaded to a chip and inserted in her interface, he linked directly to her brain. He saw and felt what she did exactly the way that she experienced it, not through a range of sensors. He could also beef up her responses so that she was temporarily even faster and stronger, as well as providing her with data and direction. She’d plugged him in once for an opposed ship boarding—naval understatementese for fighting your way into an enemy vessel—and it had felt a little like being a horse with a jockey. BB hadn’t manipulated her brain in any way, but she’d still had a sense of being … being … no, she didn’t have a word for it. Not ridden or steered: just under a close scrutiny that was almost sentimental, like someone holding her hand in a dark and dangerous place.
BB had enjoyed the outing, though. For all his bitchy comments about his fellow AIs being wannabe humans because they all chose avatars that looked like people, he definitely got something out of experiencing the world as flesh and blood.
“Okay, then, mount up.” Naomi climbed back into the cockpit and removed the chip from the console. Now that her interface had been filed down by Adj, it was easier to put the chip in the helmet first and then press it home by pulling her helmet down hard on her head. “So how many fragments have you got on the prowl at the moment? You know what happened last time you overstretched yourself.”
She felt him merge with her. It was an odd sensation, like shutting yourself in a closet with someone, muffled and stifling, and then slightly embarrassing. Did I ever do that? And she was sure that she could feel something of his state of mind. No wonder he made all those snarky remarks about Cortana.
Poor John. I thought he’d survive us all.
“I’m never overstretched, dear.” BB’s voice wasn’t outside, like the helmet audio. It was both silent and in her head, almost a thought she wasn’t thinking for herself. “It’s just fairer on the world to share myself with as many people as possible. Let’s see … I’m in Port Stanley, and I’m in Bravo-Six giving that ghastly harpy Harriet the runaround, and I’m sort of in a number of remotes stationed off Sanghelios and Venezia … oh, and Mal’s radio. That’s why I’ve been quiet. We’re in a pub. He’s telling Vaz all about the utterly disgusting local recipes from his home area. I don’t know if he uses a cookbook or a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, to be honest.”