The Thursday War

  “Is there word from my wife?”

  “No. Or at least not that I’m aware of. I can inquire, but we have very limited information from Sanghelios.” She stood beside him and gazed out of the window as if she were searching for the same thing that he was. “We’ve just landed a special forces squad on Sanghelios so perhaps we’ll be getting better intelligence from now on.”

  “That’s impossible.” She had to be lying. This was very crude, amateurish maneuvering. “You could never breach our defenses.”

  “I didn’t say we did. The Arbiter gave permission, just as he did for Professor Phillips.”

  Jul’s heart sank. The Arbiter was even more of a threat to his own kind than he’d imagined. Why did he have this foolish tolerance for these creatures? “Why?”

  “Because we asked nicely. Imagine, a Spartan and some ODSTs wandering around your world.”

  “Spartan.”

  “Naomi. You’ve met. I hear she knocked you down and throttled you.”

  Jul resisted the taunt. Yes, the Spartan had captured him, single-handed and unarmed. The shame was painful. “The Spartans are artificial. Like the Huragok.”

  “You’re a sore loser, Jul. Yes, we enhanced humans to make Spartans. But they’re still human.”

  “Even a squad of them can’t achieve much on Sanghelios.”

  “Ah, that’s your problem. You see us as maggots. You do, don’t you? You used the word nishum a lot when you were cussing, according to the AI. Well, maggots might be small and soft, but they can strip flesh from bone eventually, given time.” Magnusson’s tone was almost friendly, simply telling him the way things were. “Look, I’ll ask the squad to see what they can find out about your wife. Maybe the fighting hasn’t reached your home yet. What’s her name?”

  “Raia,” Jul said, without even thinking. Somehow he felt he had handed Magnusson a great deal of power that he now regretted.

  “We’re in touch with ‘Telcam, so perhaps he knows.”

  That scared Jul even more. “‘Telcam is a naive fool.”

  “Because he believes in the gods?”

  “Because he believes in you.”

  “We’ll see.” She looked him up and down. The guard was still in Jul’s peripheral vision. “We’re generating our own crop of irukan, so that we don’t have to keep running to the Kig-Yar every time we need groceries for you.”

  “That will take a season.”

  “No, not at all. We clone plants and accelerate their growth to days. We can engineer them to survive in any condition, to suppress weeds and pests, to produce specific compounds, to be any color. So we can easily grow some dinner for you. Who knows? We might make it suitable for humans, and then ONI can patent it and generate some revenue from it.” She closed one eye in a quick, strange gesture. “We even imported some colos to breed. They’re not exactly appealing, but at least you get fresh meat now.”

  Jul struggled with the idea of this generosity. “Why go to all this trouble?”

  “I’m operating in a rapidly changing environment, Jul. You saw too much, so we had to stop you from warning the Arbiter, but then we weren’t sure what to do with you. First you’re a potential source of intelligence—but then we find the Huragok more than answered all our questions. Now you’re a potential prisoner exchange. One day, we might need to swap you for one of our people. Or maybe the Arbiter will fall sooner than we think, and ‘Telcam will take over, and you can go home. So why would we kill you until we know for certain that you’re no use to us?”

  “I could become a very embittered enemy.”

  “True, but if we shoot you now, I might regret it later. And I really don’t get any thrills from mistreating prisoners. I’m not a sadist. I’m objective-driven. I do things solely to get results. Right now, understanding the Sangheili better is enough of a goal for me.”

  It might have been an elegant and oblique threat, but Jul didn’t respect those. Even in translation, he felt he was shuffling through a minefield of unknown elements and misunderstandings.

  “You fear you can’t destroy us. Why else would you need to study us?”

  “Jul, we know all there is to know about a bird called a dodo. We sequenced its genome from bones. But it’s still been extinct for nearly a thousand years, and it’s not coming back. We wiped it out.”

  Jul was lost now. He couldn’t tell threat from comment from reassurance. He knew he had to stop worrying about Raia, because that would become a sore and then a vulnerability that ONI would exploit, but it was impossible to forget. He felt suddenly small and pathetic. It was even making his stomach feel heavy. This was how children reacted.

  Isolation. This is how humans break down prisoners. They leave them to fret and imagine the worst, with nobody to comfort them or tell them the truth. I must resist this.

  “I’ll call someone about Raia,” Magnusson said. “Is there anything else you need?”

  Jul felt himself sliding. He’d been certain he would withstand years of this if he had to. It was more like days. He was weakening.

  “I would like to walk in the sunlight,” he said. “This room is too small for me to take proper exercise. But that’s too big a request, isn’t it? You must confine me.”

  Magnusson stared right into his face, into his eyes. He always found human eyes unsettlingly pale and watery even if the irises were dark. There was so much whiteness, like a terrified animal. It made humans look constantly hostile and agitated.

  “There’s no way off Trevelyan,” she said. “But I don’t trust you not to do a great deal of damage. If you’re prepared to accept some restrictions, though, I might be able to give you outside access.”

  This was his only chance. Part of him really did want to breathe fresh air, though, even if it was as wholly artificial and managed as the rest of the planet.

  “Very well,” he said.

  “I’ll come up with something. Give me a day.”

  “One question. Why do you call this place Trevelyan and Onyx?”

  Magnusson broke that intense and personal gaze, looking as if she was weighing up what he might be seeking in the answer. “Onyx was the original name it was given when it was surveyed,” she said. “We renamed it Trevelyan in memory of the Spartan who gave his life for it. That was his family name. I don’t suppose you understand why that’s so unusual.”

  “No, I don’t. Many a Sangheili has given his life to defend his keep. Don’t humans do that?”

  “I meant the family name. Never mind. There’s no reason why you should know.”

  “Were you just testing me?”

  “Perhaps.”

  She nodded to the guard and he opened the door to see her out. Jul was left standing at the window, mulling over the temptation of a sunny day and open spaces. His heart really did feel heavy—literally heavy. He was made of stronger stuff than this, surely.

  But I’ve never been alone behind enemy lines before. I’ve never been a hostage.

  And that’s not a sky. It’s a roof.

  The feeling was like a weight in his chest, pressing ever more heavily. The longer he stood there, the more urgent the pressure became. He dragged himself away from the temptation of illusory freedom and paced around the edge of the room to get some exercise, twenty-five paces along one wall, then twenty along the next, then twenty-five again, then twenty. He’d have to do this a hundred times a day to keep his circulation healthy.

  Very well. I shall play this game.

  He shut his eyes and visualized home as intently as he could. As he felt his way along the wall, he could see every pace as the path from the keep to the quarry, and then to the fields. If he concentrated, if he focused and made this real in his mind, the locked door didn’t matter.

  But he really did feel … strange.

  It grew harder to concentrate. Now he was starting to feel too hot, prickly, disoriented. How many times had he walked this unreal path? How long had he been doing this?

  He opened his eyes and suddenly fou
nd himself panting. Saliva flooded his mouth. His stomach cramped like a punch just as he swung around and tried to reach the basin in the corner of the room. It was too late: he vomited where he stood, knees buckling, and slumped to all fours.

  It hurt more than he expected. He retched and coughed for several minutes until his jaws ached and he was just bringing up air and spittle. Before he could manage to stand up, the door crashed open and Magnusson was standing over him. He recognized the boots. She edged around the pool of vomit.

  “Something must have disagreed with you,” she said calmly. “Come on. Let’s get this cleaned up.”

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  THE GODS ARE STILL WATCHING US, EVEN IF SANGHELIOS HAS TURNED ITS BACK ON THEM.

  (THE SERVANTS OF THE ABIDING TRUTH, BDAORO CITY, IN DISCUSSION WITH BROTHER MONKS)

  ONTOM, SANGHELIOS

  “Osman says Phillips is in the temple and ‘Telcam’s told his minions to hand him over,” BB said. “You can walk straight in.”

  “Not a wasted journey, then.” Mal took a look around to check who was where. Sporadic shots led his eye to a low retaining wall on his left as one hinge-head popped up for a moment and bobbed back down again, then another. Got to be a sniper somewhere. Why don’t they just fry the whole area? This isn’t like them. When a chunk of brick just a whisper away from one of the Sangheili’s heads exploded in a ball of dust and white light, Mal’s guess was confirmed. “If they’re going to keep this up, I’ll get Dev to land the dropship in the temple compound.”

  “Is that all that’s holding them up?” Vaz asked. “Why don’t they put a few grenades up there?”

  “Then they’ll open fire on us.” Normally, that wouldn’t have been a problem. It would have been routine, even satisfying. But Mal was wrestling with a new political reality in which some Sangheili were fair game and some weren’t. It was quicker to follow the rules for once. “Find a way around it. We’re only here for Phillips.”

  “I still don’t understand why they’re not pulverizing the place.” Vaz was persistent. “They’ve glassed each other’s cities before now.”

  “If you had gunmen holed up in Canterbury Cathedral or Mecca,” BB asked, “would you call up artillery to demolish it?”

  “I thought hinge-heads were more pragmatic.”

  “Belief in the Forerunners isn’t going to stop instantly just because the San’Shyuum were disgraced. Lots of them are still pretty touchy about Forerunner sites.”

  Mal eased himself up a little to take a longer look across the square. “Okay, so every stone is sacred. How do we exploit that?” The walls on both sides merged into the temple complex. He could see from the shape and precision of the blocks that at least a third of the wall was original Forerunner handiwork. “Grab a chunk of masonry and tell them to let us through or the brick gets it?”

  Naomi squatted with her back against the wall, helmet tilted up as if she was sunning herself. “I’ve got a more diplomatic solution.”

  “Does it involve a cattle prod?”

  “No. But I can take the Brutes.”

  Mal knew that when a Spartan said that, it had already been assessed and calculated. She’d taken on two Brutes single-handed before. She was also fast. The Mjolnir was more vehicle than body armor.

  “Plan?”

  “Get up to the top of the wall and hit them from above.” It was a bloody big wall and there was a lot of open ground to cross to get to it, but not enough to make a Spartan think twice. “I can drop straight into the temple grounds from there, too. Give you cover if the Sangheili get overexcited and open fire.”

  Technically, they were here with permission from both sides—the Arbiter and the rebels. It should have meant a few tactful conversations and being allowed to pass, but life was never like that. Mal suspected the niceties of it would be overlooked in a stew of adrenaline and religious fervor, and whatever the squad did would now be taken as storming a holy site. But he couldn’t abort the mission.

  “Okay, do it,” he said. “BB, you make sure you transmit Naomi’s helmet view to us, because that’s going to give us a lot of help.”

  “I’ll tell you when to run.” Naomi balanced on the balls of her feet, still squatting. “BB—no enhancing unless I ask for it. Got it?”

  “I won’t lay a finger on you, dear. Promise.”

  Naomi sprang up from the squat and burst from cover, kicking gravel against Mal’s armor. No normal human could run like that. Sixty kph. Holy shit. She reached racehorse speed in seconds and made the far wall before he’d even had a chance to take it all in. Then she jumped, not even breaking her stride. She just launched herself in an arc with the armor’s built-in propulsion and landed hard on the stone parapet.

  Mal had never seen a Spartan actually fly before. The Brutes either didn’t see her coming or didn’t react fast enough, because she loped along the top of the wall and fired down—still running—onto the sniper position below her. Mal tried to keep one eye on her point-of-view feed in his HUD but she was moving too fast. He caught a blur of rubble and bodies before the output tilted into a stomach-churning view from a narrow, uneven path with a sheer drop on either side. Now he had an aerial view of the temple. It was a lot smaller than he expected and ringed by grounds that were a mix of paving and short turf.

  Naomi kept running. Four hinge-heads stood up to watch and didn’t even raise their pistols until she leapt off the end of the stonework and thudded down behind the temple walls. Something went crack, loud enough to echo across the plaza. The rocky cam feed steadied into a shot of stone slabs, a couple of them cracked from edge to edge, and then swung up to frame the heavy four-meter-high gates.

  “Wheeee!” BB said. “Can we do that again?”

  Naomi ignored him. “When you’re ready, Staff.” Mal saw her appear in the gateway just as her helmet feed picked him up in the distance. “Move it. I don’t know what’s behind me yet.”

  Mal and Vaz took a couple of careful steps into the open, just in case any quick movement made the hinge-heads open fire on a reflex. For a moment he thought the Elites were okay and just surprised to see a couple of ODSTs ambling around, but then they went into overdrive and started firing.

  There was no more cover, nothing to do but run and hope that Naomi could keep the hinge-heads busy. Blind instinct was a great thing. Mal realized Naomi’s shots were shaving past him and one quick but wrong move would kill him. Vaz overtook him just as he felt something hit his back-plate—one, two, three hammer blows—a second before he stumbled the last few meters through the temple gates.

  The noise levels dropped instantly. For a moment he thought he was dead. Vaz turned him around by his shoulder.

  “You’ve got some serious scorch marks,” Vaz said. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine.” Mal tried to peer over his own shoulder to check. “Is there anybody home?”

  He’d expected to be confronted by some of ‘Telcam’s gang but it was all remarkably peaceful, quiet as a churchyard, and all the more creepy for it. So Elites wouldn’t trash a holy site like this, then. That was going to come in useful. Naomi and Vaz walked up to the temple with weapons raised and stacked either side of the door.

  “Let them know we’re here, BB,” Naomi said.

  “Can I use your helmet audio? I’ll even do your voice so that it doesn’t get too surreal for them. I mean, my manly voice, your body, very odd…”

  “They can’t see that I’m female in this armor. Just make sure they know who we are and that we just want Phillips.”

  “And me.”

  Mal was still keeping an eye on the open gates, just in case. Now that things had slowed down a little, he was starting to notice the bigger picture. He couldn’t hear much because the walls seemed to soundproof the place, but he could see two columns of smoke rising about five klicks to the north, and half a dozen small vessels were tracking back and forth above the city.

  “Here he comes,” Naomi said.

  Mal swung aroun
d. An Elite emerged from the doorway and stood staring, first at their weapons and then at their visors. Then Naomi spoke, or at least BB did, and Mal didn’t understand a word of it. The Sangheili responded. They had quite a long chat.

  “What did he say?” Mal asked, one eye still on the gates.

  BB’s voice was his own again, transmitted through the helmet comms. “His name is Olar and he says Phillips has gone exploring in the tunnels.”

  “Tunnels?”

  “The temple’s full of passages.”

  “It’s not that big.”

  “That’s what I said, but he says there’s a complete warren underground that runs for kilometers.”

  Phillips must have been fine if he had the time and inclination to do a spot of tourism. “Okay, so ask him to bring him out.”

  BB switched back to his Naomi-speaking-Sangheili voice, but the tone didn’t match Naomi’s impatient body language. That must have confused the hell out of the hinge-head. “He says he’s been gone for hours and he can’t leave his post to go and retrieve him.”

  “Lazy sod. Okay, so we go in and get Phillips. He’s going to let us in, isn’t he?”

  Mal could pick out two words of Sangheili on a good day but he knew hinge-heads well enough to work out when they were getting upset. Olar was. He gestured, slapping his arms down at his sides. BB sounded as if he was reasoning with him. Mal decided to call Osman with a sitrep while BB ironed things out.

  “Kilo-Five to Stanley.”

  Osman must have been sitting on the comms. She responded instantly. “Receiving, Staff.”

  “Phillips is okay, ma’am. We’re just negotiating access to the temple to get him out.”

  “Do you need me to talk to ‘Telcam again?”

  “Doesn’t look like it. I’ll report in when we’ve actually got him.”

  “Watch your backs when you exfil. We’re only monitoring the northern hemisphere, but there’s a fair bit of fighting going on.”