The Sangheili, of course, no longer did. Their species—once the most important members of the Covenant as the protectors of the weaker yet, in theory, more powerful San’Shyuum—had come to realize that the Sacred Rings, as they called them, were not keys to divine transcendence, but instead weapons of mass destruction on a galactic scale. But to those who still worshipped the Forerunners as gods or godlike beings, it seemed that there was no bit of knowledge that was beyond the wisdom of this ancient race. He wondered if humanity would live long enough to see it ever reach a point in its development where it could possibly achieve Forerunner status.
Somehow he doubted it. Humanity was far too obsessed with numerous piddling things of no interest.
In a way, he missed the Human-Covenant conflict. He knew it was unpatriotic—indeed, almost sacrilegious—to have that attitude. But at least humanity had been united during that seemingly endless incursion. Sure, there might have been internal squabbles and battles, but ultimately humankind was unified in its fight for survival against the alien invaders. Part of Luther was worried—now that the war had ended and a truce had been settled between all sides, humans might go back to their favorite pastime of blowing each other up.
Try not to be that way. Try to hope for the best, instead of anticipating everything going wrong.
Luther and Henry passed other explorers and archaeological parties as they moved through their sector of Zeta Halo. That wasn’t surprising. Throughout the vast structure, there had to be something like three hundred people exploring different areas, each looking for something else. Some were specialists in planetary engineering, studying biomes that had been seeded here from other worlds long ago. Others explored flora, still others fauna. Some, such as Luther, had particular interest in the language of the Forerunners, which was indispensable in the effort to unlock Halo’s many secrets. In addition to the people, there were hundreds of automated probes scanning every canyon, riverbed, and facility. No expense had been spared, and indeed, it only made sense. The entire place was 10,000 kilometers in diameter, with its band 318 kilometers wide. That was a lot of territory to cover, and there was a lot to risk if something was missed.
Luther had found one corridor of particular interest near an immense but inexplicable drop-off in this part of the ring’s terrain, and that was where he and Henry were heading today. It was vast and expansive, and the alloyed walls were lined with all manner of machinery, the purpose of which he could not even begin to guess. That was Henry’s department, and he had been very methodical in determining the function of every single object in there. This was in sharp contrast to Luther’s buried urge to simply turn everything on. Henry wouldn’t hear of it, and Luther understood his concerns. No matter their expertise in what they were dealing with, this remained alien technology and had to be approached with great care.
The careful study that Henry was devoting to the machinery likewise enabled Luther to spend time translating the extensive, cartouche-like notes that were carved upon the wall. Not carved, actually—decorated, almost holographically inscribed there in ways that Luther could only wonder about. But he was, for the most part, able to discern their meanings. This was no small accomplishment. He was positive, in this instance, that the room was designed specifically to monitor and control the Halo’s vast spectrum of preconditioned environmental behaviors, generating everything from the shifting of tectonic plates to dark and intimidating thunderheads. He had not discerned the exact means by which this was accomplished—no one really had—but he was nevertheless certain that the machinery surrounding them was designed to that end.
Luther was carefully going over yet another mystery control board, studying the symbols that would have been indecipherable to a layperson. He had come to believe that it had something to do with atmosphere control. But he couldn’t manipulate any of them, of course—in addition to standard protocols for all of the Halo installations, there was an additional mandate from ONI against doing so, due to the peculiarity of this ring, and not a single individual on the Zeta Halo was inclined to disobey. No one wanted to take a chance that by flipping a switch somewhere they might accidentally wipe out a portion of the galaxy.
Besides, it was clear that whatever was causing Zeta Halo to operate was doing a perfectly good job, because after all these eons, the atmosphere remained fresh, the clouds unthreatening in most parts, the various flora and fauna in perfectly good condition. Luther was concerned that if he tried manipulating anything, he could possibly throw the entire installation out of whack. It gave him a brief but nightmarish mental image of the entirety of Zeta Halo malfunctioning. Perhaps it might begin spinning out of control, causing the artificial gravity to completely fail. Three hundred innocents would be scattered sky high or smeared all over the walls or have some other horrific thing happen to them, courtesy of physics run amuck. And it would naturally be all Luther’s fault, his legacy.
No thanks.
Luther was perfectly content to study the material around him without actually touching it or interfering with it in any way. And he knew that Henry felt exactly the same.
Which was why he was mildly surprised when he heard a gentle clicking from next to him.
He turned and saw that Henry was very carefully, very precisely, taking video records of the materials in front of them. The clicking was a leftover from, amazingly enough, centuries ago, when cameras actually had movable shutter switches and made noise whenever they took images. Those interior devices were long gone; the clicking was simply reproduced as a cue for the picture taker to know that the shot had been recorded. One of humanity’s own artifacts, though with notably less splendor than those of the Forerunners.
“What are you doing?” Luther asked.
Henry blinked in surprise, not a difficult thing for him, given that his eyes were so huge. His thick black hair hung in front of them, so that he always seemed to be peering out from behind it, making him look even more quizzical. He brushed his hair out from in front of his face and said, “I already told you.”
“Told me what?”
“Told you this yesterday. About Cynthia Diggs.”
The name meant absolutely nothing to Luther, but that wasn’t surprising. Henry Lamb had a habit of engaging in constant conversation, oblivious to the fact that Luther was the exact opposite of a conversationalist. Luther preferred quiet contemplation. Henry had not yet figured that out, however, and Luther hadn’t come up with any way to politely explain it. So he had settled on allowing Henry to natter on at length about whatever was going through his mind and then simply shutting him out. Luther would smile and nod and say “good” or “interesting” at random times, and that provided the illusion that he was actually paying attention to what Henry was talking about.
This, however, seemed to be one of the times when Luther’s technique had utterly failed him.
“Please remind me,” he said.
Henry was perfectly happy to do so. Apparently the idea that Luther had been ignoring him in the previous day’s discussion never occurred to him. “Cynthia Diggs. The woman I met before coming out here? At a university bar. I told her I was heading here and she was very—”
Luther’s jaw dropped. “You what?”
“I told her I was—”
“I heard you! I just can’t believe—” Luther paused, taking a moment to recover what was left of his rapidly dwindling patience, and then he dropped his voice to a sudden whisper, as if worried that an ONI operative might be listening in. “Do you have any idea how confidential the material that we are working on is?”
“Luther, there are at least three hundred people here.”
“People who have received security clearances at the highest levels. Henry, you are familiar with ONI, right? They could technically, and probably legally, kill you for this. . . .”
Henry put up his hands as if he expected Luther to take a swing at him . . . an action to which Luther was seriously putting some thought. “Luther, can you take for gra
nted, just for a moment, that I am not an idiot?”
“Right now, I’m honestly having real difficulty with that,” he said tightly.
“She’s the wife of—”
“The wife?” You were hitting on—”
“I wasn’t hitting on anyone. I went to the same university as her. She’s the wife of the manager of the entire Zeta Halo project. Bob Casper’s wife.”
“Oh.” Luther immediately started to feel a bit abashed. He had broken bread with Casper, and Casper had of course mentioned Cynthia, who worked on reverse engineering Covenant technology recovered during the war. Cynthia was also a scientist, and although she was involved in a different field, she was certainly under the security umbrella for research on this installation. “Oh,” he said again. “Well, that’s . . . that’s very different.”
“Yes, I know. She asked that if I saw something that I thought might interest her I should send her video of it. She has a friend she wants to show it to,” Henry said, and then before Luther could protest, Henry put his hands up once more defensively. “She’s on ONI’s payroll as well; she’s a postwar political liaison and has the proper clearance. Cynthia felt that she should keep her friend apprised of this stuff.”
“Why?” Luther asked suspiciously.
“Because Cynthia was concerned that we might encounter something that would involve the participation of the Sangheili. That certainly wouldn’t be unprecedented. And her friend works as a translator and negotiator with the Elites, representing the UNSC. And she just wanted me to keep her informed about whatever we found.”
“Can’t her husband do that?”
“Since he got this assignment, her husband barely ever looks up from his work anymore to keep her apprised. Far too many things to manage from where he’s at to be involved in details. She’s simply endeavoring to do whatever she can to keep one step ahead. With you and me on the ground, it makes sense for me to handle this.”
“I don’t know. I still don’t like it,” said Luther. “I don’t want you sending her anything else. And I certainly wouldn’t want her to send it on to . . . who?”
“Her friend’s name is Olympia Vale.”
“Fine. From now on Cynthia and this Olympia Vale are on the outside looking in, unless we get written, authorized approval from Casper or his superior. I do not need you doing anything that might get ONI fired up. We do not want to screw with those people.”
“That I know,” said Henry. “They can make you disappear so fast that you’ll forget you were even born.”
“Exactly. So let’s be smarter about this moving forward—we need to keep this material to ourselves and never mention it to anyone not directly involved in what we’re working on here. Last thing we need is this Vale woman slipping up and giving this info to the wrong Sangheili. God knows that could go bad really quick—it’s only been two years since the end of the war.”
The day went briskly, and Luther wasn’t even aware of the passage of time. Instead, even though he remained irritated with his partner, he was by Henry’s side, meticulously studying the paths of the energy fields that pulsed steadily through the unknown Forerunner machinery. He spent hours following the glyph interpolation of one particular pulse, just trying to determine where it was going and what it was doing. His hope was that the frequency and cadence of the pulse might reveal a source that they could backtrack to the ring’s primary systems. From there, they might be able to thread their own way to the phase pulse generators, a series of critical machines that required enormous amounts of energy to function and had, thus far, remained hidden. Were the ring ever to be activated, these machines would launch the installation’s destructive power deep into space in every direction, so they had historically been located near the control center on other installations. If they found the generators, they’d likely also find the room they were looking for, but so far this approach had yielded no luck. At the end of the work cycle, Luther wasn’t especially satisfied with the lack of answers that his investigation had failed to reveal. But that wasn’t so bad—most of his daily tasks tended to result in dead ends. That was simply part of the game.
“This was good,” Luther finally said. “I think we accomplished a lot.” In point of fact, they really hadn’t, but that was how he always ended the work shift, and Henry knew it.
Henry naturally agreed, or at least he started to agree. But then he frowned, looking over Luther’s shoulder. Luther saw the confusion in his face. “What is it?” he asked, and turned to follow Henry’s gaze. “What is it?” he said again.
Then Luther spotted it.
In the middle of one of the Forerunner control boards, a light was pulsing . . . one that had not been blinking before. It was large and blue and had been, as far as Luther could tell, inactive the entire day and, for that matter, as long as Luther had been investigating this particular area.
But now, for no discernible reason, the blue light was steadily blinking.
Henry leaned forward, studying it. “Not sure what this is connected to,” he said. “I’d have to—”
And then came a steady noise, like a beeping. Luther couldn’t determine the location of the speaker emitting the sound. It was faint and yet somehow managed to fill up the entirety of the chamber.
It took Luther a few moments to perceive it. Not a beeping—words. Speech.
There was a pause between each word. Each intonation was one or, at most, two syllables, then a pause, then speech, then a pause, on and on. It was a very unnerving, synthetic voice as well, which made it even more bizarre.
“What the hell?” said Henry softly. As he did so, he brought his recording device up and activated it.
“Did you touch anything?” said Luther.
“What? No! Of course not.”
“Then what set this off?”
“We don’t even know what ‘this’ is.”
“Are you getting this?”
Henry nodded. “Not that I have the slightest idea what it is that I’m getting.”
“Yes, I know.” Luther didn’t know why, but he very much disliked the entire situation. Having spent a full minute attempting to ascertain the source, but to no avail, Luther shifted mental gears to try to determine the content of the speech.
Dammit. The words sounded so familiar. It was as if . . . they were a combination of several other languages, but he couldn’t discern exactly what they—
Oh no.
Luther felt his eyes go wide and the blood drain from his face. Henry immediately noticed, and it was all he could do to keep his voice flat and not panic at seeing Luther’s reaction. “Luther . . . what is . . .”
“It’s numbers. It’s Forerunner numbers.”
“What numbers? You mean in sequence?”
“Yes, but it’s very high in the sequence. It’s counting very slowly, but I think it translates equivalently to about . . . three million?”
“Three million?” This was making no sense to Henry at all. “Why would it be counting down from three million? What is it counting down to?”
“We don’t know for certain,” said Luther, “but I have a hunch.”
“Okay. What?”
“How about, it’s counting down to activation.”
At first Henry didn’t understand, but then he did. “Wait. You mean . . . activating the Halo? Causing it to . . .”
“To generate a pulse of energy that would annihilate every sentient creature within range.”
“On what the hell do you base that theory?”
“Worst-case scenario.”
This was partly true, but there was more to it. Much more.
Back in November of 2552, shortly after the UNSC stumbled upon Delta Halo, local Covenant forces managed to activate that particular ring. Installation 05, for a matter of minutes, was preparing to fire; if unhindered it would, by design, bring the other remaining Halo rings online and bring an end to all sentient life across the galaxy. But UNSC forces had managed to stop the activation, sending
the entire Array into stand-by mode.
Around the same time as this, however, a number of human ships were conducting scans of Delta Halo’s surface. One of them, the Redoubtable, had picked up a unique sequence emanating from the ring’s internal systems. In all of the time since then, analysts and AI ciphers couldn’t crack it, but when everyone had finally compared notes, they all knew it was somehow linked to the ring’s activation. By now, Luther knew this sequence very well, and in fact, had gleaned much of his understanding of Forerunner numbering from this data.
What he now heard was eerily similar, almost identical in tone and pacing to the Redoubtable’s findings. But it was slightly different. These numbers were much higher, it seemed.
“I refuse to accept it,” Henry said immediately. “We cannot simply assume the worst-case scenario based on the fact that we don’t have any other information.”
Luther turned and gripped Henry by the shoulders. “Can you determine if I’m right? If it is going to activate?”
“Probably.”
“Probably?”
“Yes, okay? Yes.” Henry started looking around the room and thinking out loud about what he’d have to check over. To see if there was any sort of an onboard energy matrix that was starting to escalate. “If this is an actual firing sequence, similar to the ones producible by the other rings, I should be able to confirm it from any systems terminal. But it might take a day, maybe two,” he said thoughtfully, and then abruptly turned to Luther. “How long?”
“How long what?”
“How long until—and I’m only saying this out of scientific curiosity, not out of expectation—how long until it gets from three million to zero?”
Luther was already running calculations. “If it maintains its current rate of countdown? Approximately five weeks.”
“Okay, well . . . better get started, then.”
“Yes. And Henry . . . a bright side, at least . . .”
“What?”
“ONI may not have to kill you. If this Halo does activate, it’ll take care of that just fine by itself.”