He stared at his daughter. Osman almost said the stupidly obvious thing and introduced him to her, but it was far too late for all that. Staffan stood slowly, pushing himself up from the chair. Time was moving like molten wax, so slow that it was painful.
“Naomi?” Staffan walked up to her and stared into her face. She was taller than him. Maybe he was expecting a tall woman anyway, but he couldn’t have predicted how much her whole body would have changed. “Oh God, Naomi? Sweetheart?”
“Yes, it’s me, Dad,” she said. Osman couldn’t tell if she was just acting according to expectations or if the meeting had triggered a genuine memory. “I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry?” The grim face crumpled. “Sorry? Sorry … sorry … sorry…”
It would have served them right, Osman decided, if the guy had collapsed and died of shock there and then, putting Inquisitor out of their reach forever. Instead, he shuffled a few steps forward and took both of Naomi’s hands in his, searching her face. He had to see the resemblance. He had to believe this really was her.
He did. Staffan Sentzke—arms dealer, implacable enemy of Earth’s authority, terrorist—burst into tears and wept over the daughter he’d refused to believe was dead.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
WE ROMANTICIZE INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENTS FOR ALL KINDS OF REASONS—POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY, PROPAGANDA, OR JUST A LACK OF ABILITY TO GRASP THAT NOTHING’S EVER THAT BLACK AND WHITE. MOST REVOLUTIONS AREN’T PHILOSOPHICAL. THEY’RE ECONOMIC. MORE GOVERNMENTS GET OVERTHROWN BECAUSE THE CITIZENS CAN’T BUY IMPORTED FASHION OR GET THE BEST JOBS THAN BECAUSE THEY DISCOVER A SPIRITUAL NEED FOR SELF-DETERMINATION. BUT FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY ALWAYS SOUNDS MORE NOBLE AND JUSTIFIES VIOLENCE AND LAW-BREAKING BETTER THAN SIMPLY WANTING A CHEAP PAIR OF JEANS. THE POPULATIONS WHO ALREADY HAVE CHEAP JEANS TEND NOT TO GIVE A DAMN ABOUT THEIR POLITICAL RIGHTS, OF COURSE. LOOK AT US; WE ACCEPTED A MILITARY GOVERNMENT, DIDN’T WE? NOT THAT IT’S A BAD THING, BECAUSE MY DEAREST FRIENDS ARE MILITARY, AND I’D TRUST THEM TO RUN THE STATE A LOT MORE THAN I’D TRUST A CIVIL SERVANT OR POLITICIAN. JUST REMEMBER THAT THE UNSC GOT INVOLVED IN THE COLONIES BECAUSE THE COLONIES ASKED US FOR HELP—AFTER THEIR OWN PEOPLE GOT INTO PIRACY.
—PROFESSOR EVAN PHILLIPS, ONI XENOANTHROPOLOGIST AND ANALYST, FROM HIS INTRODUCTORY LECTURE TO ONI OFFICER CANDIDATES APPLYING FOR ATTACHMENTS TO SECTION TWO, PUBLIC AFFAIRS AND PSYOPS
WARDROOM, UNSC PORT STANLEY, SOMEWHERE IN THE QAB SECTOR
“I don’t remember,” Naomi said. “I’m sorry, Dad. I think I remember how I felt, but not what happened. I’ve tried to remember. I really have.”
Staffan sat across the wardroom table from his estranged, lost, back-from-the-dead stranger of a daughter, looking stricken. BB observed, but it was the last thing he wanted to do. It made him uncomfortable in a way he didn’t quite understand.
And I understand everything. Or I ought to.
“It was my fault,” Staffan said. “I should never have let you take the bus on your own. You were just a little kid.”
“It’s okay. You couldn’t have known what was going to happen.”
It was BB’s duty to pick up anything that might help them find Pious Inquisitor, but Naomi had asked him to listen in anyway.
Well, she’d want Vaz here, but then it might make her father reluctant to talk. And she thinks it’d be too tough on Vaz. And Vaz would agree to it, but he’d just add it all to his buried, festering ball of hatred for Halsey.
So I’ll do it. It’s my responsibility.
BB had a tacit agreement with the rest of the crew. There were places where he’d give them absolute privacy, which wasn’t easy because he was everywhere in the ship every minute of the day by necessity, responsible for monitoring and controlling all of Port Stanley’s functions. The crew were effectively living within him. But for sanity’s sake—his and theirs—he stayed out of the cabins and the heads. His dumb functions watched over the safety controls and life-support systems so that he could detect if someone was in trouble, but he didn’t hear or see anything as BB the entity. People needed privacy.
They also needed help in a situation that should never have happened. BB watched father and daughter, neither really knowing what to say to the other. Ever since he’d learned that Staffan was still alive, he’d taken an interest in human reunions. What he was watching now bore no resemblance to the tearful, emotional scenes he’d seen in news and documentaries. Things didn’t go back to the way they were before, and it didn’t always make people happy, even though they’d been sure that what they wanted most was to find that missing loved one.
And I really wanted it to be that way. I wanted to put everything right for them. I knew that wasn’t possible, so what’s wrong with me? I suppose a sense of personal responsibility is an essential component of an AI. But this is getting obsessive.
BB wanted a happy resolution to this with a fervency that disturbed him. It shouldn’t have mattered this much. He needed to run a full diagnostic on himself, but now wasn’t the time.
Osman spoke to him from elsewhere in the ship. It was like being tapped on the shoulder. “Clock’s ticking, BB. How are we doing?”
“Badly, Admiral.”
“Oh.”
“Look, if the Huragok’s as reliable as Staffan thinks, then maybe we’ve got some time. If he isn’t, the Kig-Yar have the ship and that’s no threat to Earth. Can we all chill, please?”
“Okay.”
“Sorry, Admiral. I don’t mean to be fractious.”
“I’ll leave you in peace.”
BB didn’t need to be left alone. He could split and spread his attention over dozens, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of systems, but part of him now needed to be him, his focus and center, and this was it.
Naomi pushed back her sleeves for a moment, elbows on the table. Staffan stared. BB took no notice of the surgical scars on her inner forearms and wrists because all Spartans had them, even Osman, but Staffan was seeing them for the first time.
“How did you get those?” he asked.
Naomi took a second to catch on. “Oh, it’s part of the bone augmentation. What? Did you think I’d done it to myself? Cut my wrists? No, nothing like that.”
“What did they do to you, Naomi?”
BB could have interrupted and filled in the gaps without revealing any classified processes. It would have spared Naomi the problem of telling her dad what no father would want to hear. But he said nothing, and it felt wrong.
“It’s complicated,” she said.
“Try me. All I want to hear about is you. Thirty-five years. Every detail.”
“I’ll sum it up. They made us more than what we already were. Stronger, faster, better immune system, quicker healing, the works.”
“How?”
“Surgery. Hormone treatment. Genetic therapy.”
Staffan shut his eyes for a moment. “Dear God. You were a child. Not a volunteer.”
“Dad, they picked us because we were exceptional, a handful out of tens of billions. They trained us and altered us to turn us into the best soldiers possible. They told us we were chosen to save humanity.”
“And that makes it okay? You sound like their recruiting poster.”
“Just explaining, Dad. Not excusing.”
“You didn’t need altering to make you the best, sweetheart. You already were.”
Naomi looked down at the table, her porcelain skin flushing pale pink. “Anyway, I still needed toughened bones to bear the weight of the armor. I’ll show you later. It’s quite impressive from an engineering perspective. It’s—”
“Naomi, are you going to have a normal life now? The war’s over.”
“What do you mean by normal?”
“Have you got a family? Husband? Kids? You haven’t, have you?”
“No.”
“That’s what I mean by normal.” Staffan put his hand in his pocket and seemed to realize he didn’t have something. “Got a pen? Notebook?” Naomi reached into the dump pouch on h
er pants leg and handed him a scrap of card. “Are you happy? What do you want to do with your life?”
“I’m a Spartan, Dad. That’s my life.”
Staffan scribbled something on the paper. He was adding up some figures. “That’s a job.”
“I don’t need kids.”
“There’s more to life than the Navy.”
“Not for me there isn’t.”
“You don’t know that yet.”
“I do. Because the augmentation they performed on us had side effects.” She hesitated. BB guessed that even a middle-aged woman like Naomi would find it hard to mention sex to her dad. “It reduces your drive to reproduce.”
The formal language didn’t take the sting out of it. There was bound to be something that tipped Staffan over the edge. BB was sure that Staffan hadn’t heard the worst of it yet, but this was emotional stuff, weird stuff, the horrors of which vivisection were made. BB felt a terrible distress. He couldn’t pin down why, other than empathy for a shocked old man and intellectual awareness that nobody should do that to another person, let alone a child, but it was getting hard to bear. Staffan leaned across the table and took Naomi’s hand. She wasn’t used to being touched, and it showed.
“They take my child,” Staffan said, his voice shaking. “They take you, and they turn you into their machine, and they neuter you like some farm animal, and they expect me to cooperate with them? I won’t swear in front of you, sweetheart, but they can rot in hell. And you don’t owe Earth a goddamn thing. Ever. Walk away from it. Have a life while you can. Let them fight their pointless wars on their own. They deserve to be wiped out. The Covenant should have finished the job.”
Naomi must have been tensing her arm. He let go of her hand, looking hurt.
“But it’s okay, Dad,” she said. “If they hadn’t taken me, would I be alive at all? Would you? We would have stayed on Sansar and the Covenant would have glassed it just the same. I was there when I was needed. I made a difference. Most people never get the chance to do that. Aren’t you proud of me? Mal said you would be, whatever you thought of Earth.”
“Of course I am, sweetheart. I was always proud of you. Don’t ever doubt it.” Staffan’s eyes were glassy. BB couldn’t intervene. This wasn’t softening up Staffan to cooperate at all. It was just hardening him. Then he went back to the notepad. “This doesn’t make sense, though. You were almost six. They abducted you in twenty-five-seventeen. The first we knew of the Covenant was twenty-five-twenty-five. Did Earth know the aliens were coming and just not bother to tell the colonies? Because there’s something wrong there.”
That was the problem with logical people who could count, BB decided. Eventually, they always checked the details. The penny hadn’t dropped when Staffan was talking to Osman, but it certainly had now.
Naomi just looked at him. “Nobody knew, Papa.”
“Then what did they take you to save humanity from?”
BB debated whether to interrupt and offer coffee to break Staffan’s train of thought before Naomi answered. But even he wasn’t fast enough.
“We were created to fight the Insurrection,” she said. “We were intended to fight terrorism in the colonies.”
BB could almost read Staffan’s thoughts. Earth had kidnapped colonial kids to kill other colonists, as if it couldn’t bear to get its hands dirty using its own sons and daughters.
“And did you?” Staffan asked.
“Yes.” Naomi’s back stiffened. “Yes, I did.”
Staffan looked as if that had given him an odd kind of peace. Maybe it had simply validated all the hatred he’d discovered and cultivated over the years since his family had been destroyed. Earth was a toxic empire. If the only evidence to hand had been Staffan Sentzke’s life, BB could understand the conclusion. But Earth was just a ball of rock: it was human beings who did all that, some of them people he knew.
“I need to visit the bathroom,” Naomi said. “Excuse me for a moment.”
BB pounced on her as soon as the doors closed and she was out of earshot. “You don’t have to continue,” he said. “Take a rest.”
She carried on walking. He wasn’t sure where she was going, because the heads were the other way. “He’s waited thirty-five years. The least I can do is make him feel he’s had the time he needs.”
“It’s a shock. For both of you.”
“I’m a Spartan. We’re trained for shocks.”
“Not like this. Really. It’s the sordid lie on which your life was built, not finding a hinge-head in your laundry basket. Stop buying into this unfeeling robot bullshit. It’s Halseyism, to salve her own conscience.”
“You really hate her, don’t you?”
“More every day. And it galls me that you don’t.”
BB kept Halsey’s salvaged journal in his most-referenced database, and not because it was uplifting or because he liked the illustrations. It was a self-serving, self-pitying, self-seeking scrapbook of excuses for why she had no choice but to be a monster, and why the laws of God and man didn’t apply to special people like her. She was still playing the clever little straight-A girl who everyone had to forgive because of her brilliance, an artful and toxic kind of self-infantilization. Some days one line would infuriate or trouble him, some days another. The latest to gnaw at him was this: ‘Part of me wants to offer them a choice. Would any of them refuse?’ Not only had she convinced herself that these kids could make a monumental choice that would have defeated any adult, but she’d also made it for them. She was an adult foisting her responsibility onto children. If anything said what a dangerous, delusional harridan Halsey was, that line did. BB shuddered. The only good reason he’d had to stop Vaz from shooting her was that he liked the earnest little Russian maniac too much to see him court-martialed for pest control. Osman wouldn’t be as inclined as Parangosky to see Halsey as too useful to execute, though.
Yes. I do hate her, don’t I? Gosh. Why does it feel so personal? I despise lots of humans. Oodles of them. None like Halsey, though. Is it because she terminated Ackerson’s AI when it suited her? Killed him. Call it what it is. Well, why would a woman who thought it was acceptable losses to lose Spartan kids on the operating table think an AI was a living entity with rights? Silly me.
“I need to remember,” Naomi said. She’d stopped in the passage and leaned against the bulkhead. “I really do. Can you help?”
Talking with humans was like getting an occasional letter. BB processed so much faster than the human brain that he’d spent an AI-age kicking an idea around before he got a reply to something he’d said. To the human, it was a snappy back-and-forth exchange, perfectly normal. Most of the time, BB filtered out the delay and filled the wait with other processing tasks, except when he was getting emotional, like he was now. Damn. This was AI hypochondria. He was worrying about his thought processes because he’d had that scrape on Ontom. He had to grow a pair, as Vaz would say.
“I’ll always help,” he said. “In what way, exactly?”
Naomi shrugged. “You can plug into my brain. You can change my brain chemistry.”
“That’s the best offer I’ve had all year, you saucy minx.”
“Now I know you’re worried. Jokiness inversely related to seriousness of the situation.”
“So you want me to poke around and trigger a few long-term memories.”
“Yes.”
“You know I can’t go in and read it all like a movie, don’t you? I can probably trigger what’s there, though. If it’s there. You know about infantile amnesia. The more you learn, the less you store. The memory might be genuinely gone forever, not just buried. Even in a brain that’s been Halseyed.”
“I do. But anything would help.”
“Are you sure you want to remember? Is it the pre-abduction you want to recall? Knowing your dad? Or the abduction?”
Naomi looked past his avatar and rocked her head a little, weighing something up. “I know it was my fault. Not that it matters whose fault it was, because I shoul
dn’t have been kidnapped to start with—”
“Good. That’s progress.”
“—but the more I know, the more I might be able to put my father’s mind at rest.”
“Do you feel anything, Naomi? Is it ringing any emotional bells?”
“I’m not sure. I’m getting weird flashbacks that don’t tell me anything. And I’m not sure if what I am feeling is simply the product of watching that poor man suffering.” She looked back up the passage as if she could hear something, then carried on talking. She was gradually getting chattier the longer she spent with Kilo-Five. This was a comparative marathon talkfest for her. “If there are real gaps, can you bridge them? You must have access to ONI records from Reach. Parangosky had all Halsey’s archive duplicated without her knowledge, didn’t she?”
“Hah. Indeed she did.” BB did a twirl for the hell of it. He was actually getting nervous. This was dangerous stuff. “You mean expose you to archive recordings and data relating to you. The early days on Reach.”
“And the pre-selection material. The ONI data on me before I was snatched. The stuff that’s not in my file.”
“That’s dangerously close to creating false memories.”
“But they’re records.”
“Doesn’t mean they’re genuine.”
“Video? That’s less likely to be doctored than reports.”
“You’re not doing this by halves are you?”
“If I can’t have perfect recall, I need context.”
“Just a word of warning. Human memory’s like putty, even yours. You can squeeze it into any old shape and add bits that weren’t ever there. You think you’ve got a perfect archival recording between your ears, and all it needs is a good bash occasionally to fish out an accurate record, but you haven’t. Your brain’s an illusion generator with a selective lens that stores mostly what it needs to tell you the best lies for keeping you breathing and breeding. It edits the material all the time. The real data is the instinctive stuff that goes on under the hood without your ever knowing or even seeing it.”
Naomi tilted her head. “You really enjoy cognitive psychology, don’t you?”