“We’ll be out of here in an hour or two. Kilo-Five out.”
BB was still negotiating. Mal was getting fed up with the delay. He took another look through the gates and counted about thirty hinge-heads gathering fifty meters outside, so they’d obviously decided it was safe to come out and start the clear-up. Vaz stood back from the door and scanned the roofline.
“Come on, BB, what’s his problem?” Mal asked. “Is this a setup or something?”
“He says we’re not supposed to enter the temple, being unbelieving scum and all that. I’m trying to convince him that we won’t touch anything and we’ll be gone before he knows it.”
“Tell him I’ll make sure ‘Telcam knows how uncooperative he’s being.” Mal took a couple of slow steps forward to make it clear that they weren’t going away anytime soon. “Tell him I’ll get Osman to call his boss right now.”
Vaz shifted his attention to the gate and wandered away from the door. Mal was about to push his luck and just step past Olar when Vaz called out to him.
“Mal, you need to take a look at this.”
“What?”
“Hinge-heads,” Vaz said. “They’re gathering outside the gate and they don’t look very happy.”
Naomi looked over her shoulder and BB carried on talking to Olar. She gestured at Mal, tapping her visor and pointing. Look at that. So Mal looked.
“Oh shit,” he said. Vaz was right. There were a lot more Sangheili outside now, right outside, and they were snarling and gesturing toward the temple. The gates were three-quarters open. Mal didn’t have to be a linguist to pick up the mood. “Is it us? BB, can you listen to this as well? What’s pissing them off? Is it because we didn’t wipe our boots or something?”
BB didn’t miss a beat. Mal could hear him still arguing with Olar, but he managed to carry on a simultaneous conversation with the squad.
“They’re arguing whether to come in and drag us out,” BB said. “It’s some theological debate about whether it’s permitted to kill an unbeliever on holy ground, or whether they have to haul us outside to do it. You get a more intellectually rigorous class of violence here.”
“Great. So we’re pinned down.”
“I think we should bar the gates, just to be on the safe side.”
“There’d better be a back door out of this place.”
Naomi broke off and ran for the gates, ramming one with her shoulder to slam it shut just as the grumbling outside turned into shouting and the Elites surged forward. They didn’t open fire. That was all that saved Mal and Vaz as they struggled to slam the other door shut. Naomi slid the security bars into place and Mal held his breath for a few moments.
“Are they going to kick those doors down?” Vaz asked.
“They’re still dithering about whether they’ll be violating a Forerunner site,” BB said. He shot out a stream of Sangheili at Olar and got an arms-spread gesture back. “Come on, get inside. I’ve told him to let us in and lock the door in case the faithful out there turn ugly. Okay, even uglier.”
Mal brushed past Olar. The hinge-head was a head taller and he could have snapped Mal’s neck in a heartbeat, but he seemed too overwhelmed by events to bar the way. He’d been left to mind the store and was probably now wondering how he was going to explain all this to his boss. They clattered down the passage into a vaulted chamber full of crates, tables, and equipment.
“Where are the rest of them?” Vaz asked. “Is this it?”
There was only one other Sangheili in there, a smaller male sitting at a communications desk. He looked up at Mal and didn’t seem surprised. Whatever he was listening to had a firmer grip on his attention. BB, still using Naomi’s helmet speaker, started talking to Olar again. Olar gestured to a doorway and threw up his hands.
“He says Phillips went that way,” BB said. “And that we mustn’t touch anything.”
“Okay, first things first.” Mal went ahead, following a line of overhead lights, and called Devereaux while he still had a signal. This was Forerunner territory and he couldn’t take anything for granted. “Dev, we’re inside the temple. He’s in here somewhere.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Yeah,” Mal said. “We’ve got a tough crowd tonight. Take a look at BB’s plot of the area and check if you can land inside the compound.”
UNSC PORT STANLEY, SANGHEILI SPACE
Osman had never been a people person, but today she felt the need for company.
Stanley was a very empty ship now and she’d grown used to having Kilo-Five around in all too short a time. She sat in front of the viewscreen to try to feel some connection with her team down there on that rust-red planet, a world that she could see but that couldn’t even detect her vessel. That feeling kept creeping back. If she looked away, if she didn’t keep an eye on that planet, then she was abandoning her crew. It was illogical but none the less insistent for that.
“Well, at least Phillips is okay, BB,” she said. “Are you there? Oh, what am I saying … of course you are.”
She looked around for the AI’s avatar. Maybe if he’d remained a disembodied voice then she would have started to think of him as he truly was, as a distributed entity inhabiting not only every part of the ship but capable of extending himself across light-years on a carrier wave. Now he was pulling off that brilliant trick of being in several places at once in multiple forms but still functioning as a single mind.
The cube of blue light popped up from the console. “You don’t enjoy sitting and waiting, do you, Captain?”
“That obvious, is it?”
“You’ll be doing this a lot as CINCONI. You’ll deploy your people and then all you can do is let them get on with it.”
It was a sobering thought. Osman was forty-one, and she already knew that she’d be promoted to rear admiral in a few weeks. She wouldn’t have to wait for the list to be announced like all the other hopefuls. Parangosky had told her what was to come, and what was not, and the only thing she didn’t know yet was the date on which she’d succeed the admiral as head of ONI.
She preferred not to know. She wanted to think that it was still years away, and not just because she wasn’t sure if she was ready for the top job, or because she didn’t want to see Parangosky leave. Now that she’d had a taste of being in the field with a team, she found that she liked it, and she wanted a little more of it before she retreated to Bravo-6 and that big, big office to see out her career.
See out? I could be looking at fifty years in that post. God, fifty years. That’s terrifying.
And that’ll mean at least six more AIs after BB goes rampant. I don’t think I’m ready for that, either. I don’t even want to think about it.
“I should have gone down there with them,” she said.
“And that would have been for your benefit, not theirs,” BB said. “Which is why you didn’t do it. You might not be an operational Spartan, but the characteristics that got you selected are still there. You’re a doer. A scrapper.”
“Selected. Love that word.”
“Have you decided how you’re going to handle Naomi’s situation?”
“Awkwardly, BB.”
“She took a massive risk by deciding to open her file.”
“And I haven’t. Is that the point? That you still think I should man up and take a look at mine?”
“As if I’d be so judgmental.”
BB wasn’t actually nagging her to relent and find out who she really was, but he’d raised it more than once. Sometimes she wondered if he was nudging her because he knew the contents would soothe her or make her happy, take away the guilt she felt at not trying harder to escape from Halsey and get back to her parents. But she was too afraid to open that file and find that she was wrong. The Pandora’s box that Naomi had opened had made her even more reluctant to take the plunge.
“I’m wallowing now, BB,” she said. “Make me do some work. I can’t keep pestering Mal.”
“Don’t worry, I’m tracking them. I’ve stil
l got a signal from me. I mean the Kilo-Five fragment. Not the Phillips one, of course.” BB projected a hologram of the temple’s interior, an incomplete mesh of multicolored lines that was growing steadily as Vaz, Mal, and Naomi progressed deeper into the maze and their telemetry was sent back to the ship. “Gosh, it’s always fun deploying in Naomi’s implant. It’s so physical.”
“Are you mooching around Infinity at the moment as well?”
“Indeed I am. You’re going to love it. The Huragok are doing some extraordinary things.”
“Where else are you?”
“Bravo-Six, naturally, and I’m eavesdropping on low-orbit transmissions to see what ‘Telcam’s fleet’s achieving. Are we making conversation, or are you concerned about something?”
BB’s matrix was based on a donated human brain. Osman sometimes found herself wondering how much if anything he had in common with the anonymous donor. She was sure she would have liked him—or her.
“How do you incorporate your past into your life, BB?” She did what she thought of as looking him in the eye, focusing on the front panel of his box. “When you’re separated from a fragment and you catch up with it when you drop out of slipspace, it tells you what it’s been doing, doesn’t it? All the things you’ve missed. But it’s still you. Just your past, even if it’s microseconds.”
“That’s a good summary.” The blue box didn’t move. “Is this about your past?”
“Partly. But also about your fragment with Phillips. You’re afraid it’s been damaged.”
“Yes, of course I am. I felt something go wrong.”
“What if it’s really damaged? Do you reintegrate it? Erase it? Select the best bits and delete the rest?”
“Depends. If it’s so damaged that it compromises my function, I’d have to erase it, but I’d lose data, and that’s a kind of scar. There’s no avoiding it. One way or another, I can’t ignore it and pretend it never happened.” BB drifted slightly, so close that she thought he was going to settle in her lap like a cat. “But I do love a good analogy, and that was a very elegant one. I can’t avoid my past. And neither can you.”
“I was being literal.” Ouch. He’s right. “I know you’re worried about what you’re going to find.”
“Aren’t we all.”
He lifted and spun away. Osman leaned back in her seat and popped her earpiece into place to listen to the translated voice traffic, although BB was monitoring it all in real time anyway. It was patchy and chaotic: the comms drones that Tart-Cart had launched into low orbit around Sanghelios were picking up everything from routine intercontinental calls to ship-to-ship messages. If this was a representative sample, then half the planet didn’t even know there was an uprising going on yet. Vadam was busy, though. Sangheili were calling each other. There were a lot of messages going from Vadam to other keeps.
“What’s going on between Chaura and Hilot?” she asked.
“The Vadam keeps are warning other cities,” BB said. He processed information at such speed that he was now way ahead of her. “They’re probably the ones that the Arbiter thinks are most loyal to him. There you go, Captain, instant intel. I’ll map it. There’s a cascade of calls now, city to city.”
“Can you grab any visuals? We should be able to get imaging down to five meters without being detected.”
“I’ll divert some drones to Vadam now.”
“Put one over Ontom, too, and patch it through to Devereaux. I don’t want Mal walking straight into another firefight.” She leaned over the console and opened the channel to Mal, even though she knew BB was synced up with the squad. She needed to stay in voice contact to feel she was doing her job. “Stanley to Kilo-Five. How’s it going, Staff?”
Mal didn’t sound as if he was in a stone tunnel at all. “Still no sign of him, ma’am. It’s a case of trying every passage.”
“Dumb question. Are you calling out?”
“We are. No response. Maybe it’s the weird acoustics in this place.”
“Okay. Be aware that the fighting’s spreading. I won’t overload you with data, but I’ll keep Devereaux up to speed.”
“I’m more worried about the mob we left outside, ma’am.”
Osman checked her watch. They’d gone into the temple forty-five minutes ago. There was plenty of time. It was just idleness feeding her anxiety, the helplessness of being able to do nothing but watch while every minute dragged by.
“Here you go,” BB said. “Here’s a satellite-level view of Vadam. Can you see the smoke?”
“I’ll take it on my datapad.”
He punched up a two-dimensional image. Osman struggled to pick out the detail until he helped her out by enhancing the smoke plume and other features.
“I’ve put a thermal overlay on that,” he said. “You can see the areas where there are fires, and those blobs on the top margin are the anti-air batteries. I’m picking up warships, too. See that red mark here?” He made the icon flash on her screen. “That’s a ship that’s been shot down.”
“Abiding Truth didn’t have much of a fleet to start with.”
“Let me magnify this for you. Would you like it on the head-up display?”
Osman nodded. “We could intervene, but how much could we do?”
“Not much in a ground assault,” BB said. The aerial view of Vadam now filled much of the viewscreen, diverting her attention from the red disc of the planet. “We’d need direct contact with ‘Telcam’s fleet to coordinate it, and it would be awfully hard to keep ONI’s name out of that.”
The image was now so magnified that she could see actual units on the ground in Vadam. Small vessels moved like dots along the roads and canals. A series of explosions suddenly flared in one area, rippling the ground with shock waves, and then a huge flash of white light wiped out half the screen for a few seconds before it died away to leave something belching smoke and flame.
“What was that?” she asked.
“Going by the thermal and blast patterns, someone’s hit another ship and brought it down. I think we can assume it’s a rebel vessel.”
“Okay. Stand by to put a call in to Parangosky.”
“Big upsurge in voice traffic, by the way. The Arbiter’s allies are really getting those warnings out. I fear that our monk has lost the advantage of surprise.”
‘Telcam just hadn’t gone in hard enough and fast enough.
But if he had, and he’d completely annihilated the Arbiter’s allies, that wouldn’t have suited ONI’s purposes either. Now every city was on the alert, waiting for its own uprising to start. ONI had wanted a civil war but the last thing it wanted was for the Arbiter to crush it in days. Osman sat back and watched more firecracker flashing of artillery fire on the image.
“I think this is going to be over far too soon, BB,” Osman said. “And if ‘Telcam’s wiped out, it’s going to be hard to start over on this.”
Hard? It’d mean a completely new approach. Perhaps Infinity would change things entirely. What Osman needed right now was a stroke of luck.
TEMPLE OF THE ABIDING TRUTH, ONTOM
Phillips stood staring at the cartouche with his hand held just above the surface as if he was testing a hotplate to see if it would burn him.
“No, really, BB. I think I’ve done something stupid. Any ideas for rolling this back?”
BB considered the idea of a space-faring race so advanced that they could wipe out entire galaxies, and the possibility that one of those massively destructive Halos could be triggered by an illiterate alien casually fiddling with a panel. No, they would have built in more fail-safes than that.
Surely.
“Not yet,” BB said. “But if this really does unleash destruction, it won’t affect this location. If the Halos are spread over huge distances, then this has to be a remote control. Nobody would destroy their own galaxy while they were actually in it.”
Surely …
Phillips kept running his hand over his beard, clearly agitated. BB’s view of him was from chest
height, looking up under his chin. “Really? How about kamikaze? Suicide bombers? Self-destruct mechanisms?”
“I really don’t think this is one of those.”
“Great. So I incinerate another galaxy. Fine. At least there’ll be nobody left to come after us bent on vengeance.”
And this man … he’s my friend. He told me so. In another life, I know him, I can do all kinds of things I can’t do now, and I know a lot more. But I can’t recall most of it.
This is horrible. Am I going mad? And why am I thinking in terms of madness, not malfunction?
“I think we’ve translated it correctly, Professor. I’d leave it alone if I were you.”
Phillips licked his lips nervously, unable to drag himself away from the panel. He recorded more images of the surface with his datapad, then ran his fingertips carefully over the plain sections of the cartouche. BB saw the status icon shift again. It had returned to its original form.
“There, it’s reverted,” BB said. “Panic over.”
Phillips’s gaze darted back and forth between the image on his datapad and the cartouche. Eventually he seemed satisfied that the symbols at the top had changed back to the way they’d been before.
“Okay, that’s a few billion beings out there somewhere who owe me one,” he said. “What I really need now is a team of ONI techies to examine this with a Huragok. In the absence of that, better hope I’ve recorded enough data for someone to make sense of this.” He looked at his watch. “I’m just going to pop back along the passage and relieve myself, and then we’ll press on. Would you mind sort of looking the other way? Oh, never mind. You’re omnipresent in the ship, and I managed to get used to that, so…”
Phillips disappeared back the way they’d come, singing under his breath. BB wasn’t sure why he picked one section of wall and not another. He looked around as if he was lost, then shrugged and got on with it.
“This is probably sacrilege to them, isn’t it?” he said, zipping up. “Having a wee-wee in a temple, I mean. You know, I was certain there was a corner up there. I hope I’m not getting disoriented.”