Halo®: Mortal Dictata

“Oh, splendid. Very El Cid. Dignified but lethal. Anywhere in particular?”

  “So many deserving targets, so little explosive capacity.”

  They were safely in the realm of black humor, all the unpleasant business of fear and dread put back in its coffin. “So, drum roll…”

  “Hit me.” She meshed her hands behind her head and leaned back in the chair, not relaxed at all. BB could detect the hike in the heart rate and the slight rise in the pitch of her voice as her throat muscles tightened. “Informal summary first, and if I don’t collapse in hysterical sobbing, take me through the detail.”

  BB took a breath and puffed out the flat sides of his cube into convex curves before he exhaled. “Real name—Serin Çelik. Mother—Pinar Çelik. Ah, so you do seem to have the proud blood of the Ottomans in your veins, dear. You really are of Turkish heritage. Father—unknown. Place of birth—St. Malo, Cascade. There. You weren’t glassed. It’s all still standing.”

  BB paused. Osman was still locked in that I-don’t-care-honest pose, hands behind her head.

  “So far, so good,” she said. “And I’ve got an excuse to eat lokum now. Carry on.”

  Now came the awkward part, depending on how elaborately and benignly Osman had invented an ideal family in her head over the years. It’ll set you free. It really will. BB took a deep virtual breath.

  “Your mother was a junkie. She supported her habit by prostitution. She wasn’t the hooker with a heart of gold, alas. The summary says you were neglected, left at home on your own, and the neighbors called child services when you were found eating scraps out of garbage bins. Taken into care briefly, handed back to Mother, neglected again, more complaints to child services, nothing done, usual story.” BB paused to let that sink in. Osman had always felt guilty for not trying to escape and get back to an imagined happy family that she didn’t actually recall. “You were lured away by a female ONI agent who offered you a hamburger. The only person who seemed to give a monkey’s toss about you was your teacher. She brought food into class for you. She was the one who reported you missing, and—ahhh, look at this, you didn’t even get a clone. ONI’s snatch team advised that it wasn’t appropriate because if you just went missing, nobody would be remotely surprised and substituting a clone would just complicate things. The police didn’t have any evidence to charge your mother, but they thought you’d either been killed by her, by one of her boyfriends, or snatched by a passing pervert. Your mother dropped off the radar about ten years after that. Maybe she scored a bad batch.”

  BB waited for a reaction other than the slow and microscopically small slackening of the muscles around Osman’s mouth.

  “Shit,” she said at last.

  “There you go.”

  “Wow.”

  “Isn’t it.”

  She finally put her hands in her lap and slumped a little in her chair. “So no Mommie and Daddy going crazy with grief like the Sentzkes did.”

  “No.” BB steered her, for the kindest reasons. “So you needn’t have spent all those years beating yourself up for not escaping. I told you so, didn’t I? I told you that you judged your childhood with an adult’s eye, not as the child you were. Apart from having to face the utterly ghastly fact that—technically—Halsey saved you from starving to death or worse, you actually got something out of SPARTAN-II. You probably wouldn’t be Head of Practically Everything now if you’d had a normal life.”

  Osman was either taking it well or stunned into quiet reflection. “Well, well.”

  “You want to know who your lovely teacher was? The woman who fed you?”

  “I don’t remember her at all.”

  “She kept hassling the police to look for you for years. Mrs. Alkmini Leandro.”

  BB was rifling through Cascade’s public sector databases while he waited for Osman to digest the news properly. He hoped she wouldn’t see herself as worthless and unwanted, picked up by ONI and recycled into something fairly useful that still didn’t make the grade as a full Spartan and had to be binned. It wasn’t her fault that the surgical enhancements failed so badly and crippled her. She wasn’t the only casualty rescued and put back together by ONI, and some kids didn’t survive the process at all. He wanted her to see herself as what she was: the ultimate survivor, the kid dealt a terrible hand repeatedly throughout her life but who managed to come through and win, if being brilliant and successful was a victory. It certainly beat ending up like her mother.

  Ah, here it is. BB found the records in a couple of databases and cross-matched them. Alkmini Leandro was still alive, retired and still living on Cascade, still in St. Malo.

  I have to ask.

  “Do you want to look her up?” Maybe Osman still had family on Cascade, but he wouldn’t suggest finding them unless she developed a burning need to know complete strangers on the basis of shared mitochondrial DNA. Family meant people who cared about you and loved you, and Mrs. Leandro fitted that description more than any relative. “She’s still there.”

  Osman drummed silently on the desk, just the pads of her fingers, as if she was playing a keyboard. BB hoped she wasn’t looking for somewhere else to lodge her guilt. She simply needed to know that she hadn’t been abandoned or forgotten. She activated the chart repeater and Cascade and its two moons appeared as a ghostly blue holographic chart next to her desk, which then changed scale to show transit times and distances.

  “Ask the team how they’d feel about a few days’ shore leave on Cascade,” Osman said. “If they vote to go home to Earth instead, we’ll fit that in too. But there’s plenty for them to see in Mindoro or Kowloon while I take care of what I have to.”

  “I’ll contact the naval base there and arrange cabins at Fort Southwick. Flash an ONI budget code and you can get NCOs and civvies into the officers’ mess.” BB bounced on the desk top. “Oh, goody. And I can set up a dinner à deux for Dev and Phyllis. Get something going there.”

  “You really are quite a sentimental romantic, aren’t you, BB?”

  “I just like to see people wring what happiness they can out of this life. Because the world’s shit, really.”

  Osman laughed. “Most of the time.”

  “Promise me something, Serin,” he said. God, why did I call her that? I never use her name. “Don’t forgive Halsey. Don’t rewrite history and think it was all for the best, just to cope with the wrong that was done to you. Stay angry. Even if it transformed your life, it was still a crime. It still took your choices away. It still did you harm. And she’s still dangerous, whether we won the war or not.”

  Osman put on her jacket and checked herself in the mirrored panel set in the bulkhead above the full-length sofa. She wasn’t smiling, but she didn’t look stunned anymore either. Then she transferred her file to her datapad and went out onto the deck.

  “Oh, I won’t forget,” she said. “Ever.”

  UNSC PORT STANLEY: FOXTROT DECK

  “As you were,” Osman said, gesturing to Naomi to stay put. Even now, she’d snap to attention when Osman came on deck. “No admirals here. Just a couple of Spartans. Well, one Spartan and a washout.”

  Osman put two coffees on the transparent deck, sat down, and pushed one of the cups in Naomi’s direction. It was easier to stick to formality back in Bravo-6 with the rest of the paper-shufflers, but Osman still didn’t feel like a real admiral here, not in the solid, warfighting, time-served sense that Terrence Hood was. The last rank where she’d felt that she fitted the suit was lieutenant. She was neither properly admiralish nor fully Spartan. The best she could do when her time came was to be a real CINCONI, and that meant dumping procedure that didn’t get the job done.

  Naomi sipped the coffee. “Thanks, ma’am.”

  “How about we stick with Serin and Naomi? It’s not like we didn’t grow up together.”

  “Okay.”

  “So how are you doing today?”

  “Functioning.”

  Osman wondered what she’d expected her to say. She’d been reunited with her fath
er and lost him in less than two days. It was hard to imagine how long it would take anyone to process that. “Sorry doesn’t really cut it, does it?”

  “You didn’t kill him.” Naomi concentrated on her cup, gazing into it and then down through the deck. “Nobody did. It just happened. At least it was quick.”

  Osman didn’t like the ONI side of herself. It jostled its way to the front in any tight spot, and she felt she had to keep an eye on it in case it scared away the normal Serin for good. As long as she knew it was a separate part of her, she could keep it on a leash. As soon as she couldn’t see it any longer, then it had taken her over like a Flood infestation, and the metamorphosis would be complete.

  She wasn’t sure now which Serin Osman had made the decision that led to Naomi becoming the negotiating point with Staffan, or how far she would have gone with it if Naomi had refused. The nice Osman thought she’d done the only decent thing possible in an insoluble situation and reunited a father with his long-lost daughter, however briefly and fraught with problems. The ONI Osman had identified Naomi as Staffan’s sole motive and used her to try to take the ship, with no forward planning about where that might lead. She didn’t know which motivation had actually driven her and how much was just rationalization after the event, as BB said. It wasn’t only Halsey who could rewrite her own internal reality on the fly.

  Was it one of those rites of passage that BB talked about, the test to see how detached and ruthless she could be in a crisis? It couldn’t have been planned to test her. Parangosky couldn’t have known what was going to happen, and almost certainly wouldn’t have done it even if she could, but it was textbook. Puppy strangling. Are you loyal and devoted enough to follow orders and kill your dog? Osman had read somewhere that it was how one intelligence service had decided which cadets were loyal enough to make the final cut. They gave them each a puppy at the academy, encouraged them to bond with it, and later ordered them to throttle it. Was it the SS or the KGB? She didn’t remember. Maybe it was just propaganda from the other side, a clever lie. But it summed up how she felt.

  But I didn’t create the situation that led to it. Halsey did. I just couldn’t find a way to put it right.

  “Anyway,” she said, taking a sip of her coffee and finding it was already cold. “I opened my file today.”

  Naomi turned her head slowly and raised her eyebrows. “And?”

  “My mother was a prostitute. And a junkie. I foraged in garbage cans. My teacher fed me. They didn’t even need to replace me with a clone.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “I didn’t mean that to sound like self-pity. Just illustrating how nothing’s ever how you expect it to be.”

  Naomi shook her head. “That reminded me. You always ate everything you could get your hands on. John used to tease you about taking other kids’ leftovers.”

  “Did he?” There would be recordings in the SPARTAN-II archive like the ones BB had collated for Naomi. If Osman ever wanted to, she could look back at herself from those days, not a still image that invited a kinder interpretation but real footage that would show her the messed-up kid she’d been. “I’m not sure if I want to remember the early days or not.”

  “You don’t. Take it from me.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that.” Osman picked her words carefully. “You know you can get treatment, don’t you? I checked. There’s an old drug that targets the limbic system. It doesn’t erase traumatic memory like gene therapy, but it stops the spontaneous recall. Rather like BB’s firewalling trick.”

  “Not if I have to be treated by Halsey.”

  “She’s not the only doctor in the world.”

  “Anyway, we’re going to Cascade, are we?” Naomi changed the subject. “That’s a first for me.”

  “Yes, I know it’s irregular to use UNSC resources for personal errands, but my teacher’s still alive. I’m going to see her.”

  Naomi just nodded. If anyone understood the need for shared closure, she did. “Have you spoken to her yet?”

  “No.”

  “Nervous?”

  “Very.” Osman tried to think like Naomi. Whatever Naomi did or didn’t recall, it was obvious that her family had been close. She’d actually seen a half brother and a niece, too. It wasn’t like being left to run wild in a rough neighborhood in St. Malo. “This is hard to say, but if you ever need to go see your family, I’ll make it happen. Even if you decide to stay. No questions asked.”

  “I thought about it,” Naomi said. “But even if Dad was still alive, how would I ever fit in there? I’ve been engineered to fight and nothing else. I couldn’t be a mother or a wife. I’d end up an angry, lonely, bitter, dangerous animal. I’d be Earth’s worst nightmare. You’re worried about the insurgency acquiring ventral beams? I’d be more worried about them acquiring a Spartan.”

  Osman was about to say she understood, but she knew she didn’t. She’d just been relieved of a burden that she’d struggled with for years. Naomi had just been given another freshly painful one to carry forever.

  But Osman now had to find a way to inform Edvin Sentzke. It was yet another dilemma growing out of this whole mess again—the right thing to do, but dangerous to carry out. If this had been a proper war, then the UN Repatriation Office would send humanitarian information to next of kin in its neutral capacity, but who was going to do the civilized thing between the UNSC and Venezia, or any of the other separatist and rebel colonies that were probably still out there? Osman wished she could take Halsey to New Tyne, introduce her to the Sentzkes, and leave her there to explain to them just what a great job she’d done.

  It’s a damn shame that Edvin never knew that his father wasn’t delusional. Of all the crap that’s fallen out of this, that gets to me. Not being believed.

  “Are you going to come out for a run ashore?” she asked, knowing what the answer would be.

  Naomi did a slow shake of the head. “If it’s okay with you, I’d rather stay on board and babysit Adj and Leaks. But thank you.”

  It was going to be more of a wake than long-overdue leave anyway. Osman kept finding herself on the verge of contacting Mrs. Leandro and breaking the news to her at a safe distance, but every time she went to ask BB to route the call, she lost her nerve. It wasn’t dread on her part. It was not knowing how her teacher had fared after the abduction. For all Osman knew, Mrs. Leandro could have been through a parallel hell to Staffan Sentzke, dismissed by the authorities and consumed by not knowing, looking at every face in the crowd in case it was the little girl who’d gone missing.

  On the other hand, she might simply have thought she’d done all she could, accepted that terrible things happened to at-risk kids, and gone on with the business of life with her own family. Osman hoped she had.

  One by one, Osman shared her story with the rest of Kilo-Five over the course of the day. The more she repeated it, the more distant it became and the more it had happened to someone else. She didn’t even feel any animosity toward her mother, who might as well have been a character in a movie she’d forgotten ever seeing. Spenser and the ODSTs all listened with sympathetic nods. But Phillips took her aside.

  “You’re not going to try tracing your mother, are you?” he asked.

  “Of course not.” It hadn’t actually crossed Osman’s mind. That was revealing. “And no, I’m not going to go on some half-assed quest to find my father. He probably paid cash anyway.”

  “There’s no shame in it, you know.”

  “What, eating garbage?”

  “Your mother’s situation.” Phillips looked nervous and steered off the rocks toward a joke. “But it’s not like she was a lawyer. That’s something to be thankful for.”

  “An honest prostitute does a more socially useful job than I’ve done this week, Evan.”

  Osman meant it. She’d been sober, alert, and not worried about paying the bills when she took her decisions on Inquisitor, so she had no excuse. It made her think again about Jul ‘Mdama, another unsuspecting indi
vidual who’d crossed the path of an ONI operation and had his life put through the shredder. He still hadn’t popped up on the radar again. She hoped the faulty portal he’d stepped through had given him a quick and humane end by exiting into a star, not that hinge-heads deserved a humane death, because he’d be a very bitter and resourceful enemy if he’d survived. She imagined him a little like Staffan; biding his time and building up a small army to one day wreak vengeance on those who’d caused his wife’s death. As far as Jul was concerned, that was humans, whether it was their fault or not. As far as Staffan had been concerned, it was the Earth and all it stood for, but he wasn’t entirely wrong.

  Is it treasonable to think that? Does it make me unfit to do this job? Or am I just facing up to reality?

  It was too late to decide ONI wasn’t for her. But if she worked out what her mistake was, she might become the kind of CINCONI she could live with.

  “Okay, BB,” she said, addressing the ether. He was always there, always keeping watch. “Prepare to slip. First stop, Anchor Ten. Spenser’s got to get back to the land of the living.”

  “And the chaps need to visit the PX.” BB appeared in front of her and drifted ahead to the bridge. “They had to leave all their civilian kit on Venezia. Mal wants to know if he can claim a few pairs of boxers on expenses.”

  “Sure, tell them to replace whatever they need. I’ll sign it.”

  Port Stanley diverted via Anchor 10 to drop off Spenser, then picked up another cargo of arms for ‘Telcam from UNSC Thatcher three days later before heading for Cascade. They’d make the drop after shore leave. Everyone needed to get their esprit de corps back on track before they did anything else.

  When Stanley dropped out of slip, Osman saw Cascade for the first time that she could remember. As far as she knew, she’d been transported to Reach under sedation and had never had the chance to look back on her home. One side of the planet was in darkness, studded with the bright clustered lights of cities. Even if she’d remembered anything about St. Malo or Mindoro, they would have changed beyond recognition by now.