“We take ‘Telcam down there and wait for his ships to drop out of slip,” Osman said. “Then we thin out so that he doesn’t have any embarrassing questions to answer. Prepare for a few dreary weeks of evaluating troop strengths and counting hulls.”
She patted all of them on the back and did a bit of gripping forearms, almost willing them to go and leave her to deal with the Sangheili. Phillips didn’t. He looked her in the eye and tapped the damaged radio still clipped to his jacket.
“I completed the mission,” he said. “I got the intel, Captain. I know it’s not been everyone’s top priority over the last few days, but I’m pretty damn sure I’ve got locations and other data we can’t even begin to guess at. Can I call in some analytical support from Trevelyan?”
“Certainly.” Osman looked embarrassed. “I didn’t think you were sightseeing, Evan. Really. I didn’t. And I’m glad we didn’t have to needle you. Thanks.”
Phillips’s mouth pursed as if he was going to say something, but looked as if it was going to be too difficult just then. He did a little resigned smile, lips pressed together, then handed her the radio.
“Mind your fingers.”
Naomi climbed back into the crew bay and Osman sat down opposite ‘Telcam and Naomi. He didn’t move a muscle. He wasn’t wearing cuffs, so the time for exploding in a rage had obviously passed. BB watched intently.
“I’m sorry about your ship,” Osman said. “But we got three of them clear, and put a dent in the Arbiter.”
‘Telcam paused a few moments as if he was picking his words carefully. “Why did you not warn me exactly what Infinity could do?”
“Because I wasn’t sure what she would do, but also because I’ll be shut down if Hood works out what I’m doing.” That wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t wholly true. She knew she was doing it, though. The tension in her jaw muscles betrayed the effort. She seemed to want to hang on to that lifeline of self-awareness. “The deal stands. My life’s been complicated a little by needing to track down Pious Inquisitor before she becomes a problem, but I’m willing to carry on supplying you.”
“But am I willing to carry on trusting you?”
“You tell me, Field Master.”
“I believe I may need a ship now, or the ability to seize one from the Arbiter.”
“Okay. I’ll see what’s around.”
“And Philliss has amassed a great deal of scripture.”
“You want that as well? Done. I’ll see that we get a translation done for you.”
‘Telcam waited. Osman waited. Naomi looked as if she could have waited all week, but then she was a self-contained person in every sense.
“Take me to Laqil,” ‘Telcam said. “And leave me there. Don’t wait, just in case Jul ‘Mdama has shown up. He might well know of this assembly point by now.”
“Friend of yours?” Osman asked.
“Associate.”
Osman just nodded and got up to leave. “We’ll be discreet, then.”
BB took the precaution of locking down Tart-Cart’s systems just in case Naomi couldn’t hold ‘Telcam at some point, but he looked as if he was going to stifle his anger to get what he wanted. While BB kept an eye on the two of them, Osman was on the bridge, fussing over the rest of the squad and generally looking as if she hadn’t had a single doubt about any of this.
It’s easy, Captain. Just look in the mirror and tell yourself a lie every day. You think you have, but you’ve only just started.
And don’t worry. I’ll be here.
BB noted that she’d put the damaged radio in her pocket. Sooner or later, he’d have to look in that mirror, too.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
HE SPENDS A LOT OF TIME IN THE FORERUNNER STRUCTURES, BUT THEN I SUSPECT HE’S MORE LIKE A HUMAN THAN HE WANTS TO ADMIT. IN PRISON, YOU TEND TO FIND GOD MORE EASILY BECAUSE THERE’S NOTHING ELSE THAT CAN MAKE SENSE OF THE FACT THAT YOU’VE BLOWN YOUR ONE AND ONLY LIFE ON A STUPID INABILITY TO JUST PLAY BY THE RULES.
(DR. IRENA MAGNUSSON, ONIRF TREVELYAN, REPORTING ON JUL ‘MDAMA’S PROGRESS TO ADMIRAL MARGARET PARANGOSKY)
ONIRF TREVELYAN
The humans came in to Trevelyan, and—presumably—the humans went out.
Jul sat in the long grass, trying to convince his eyes that the blue sky above him wasn’t the foothills of infinite space but a very high, wholly unnatural roof. They refused to believe him. There were times in recent weeks when he wondered if this was all part of some human game and that this was actually an ordinary planet after all, not a sphere. But the Forerunners had left other feats of impossible engineering across the galaxy, such as the Ark, and he could see no logic in using such a lie to lever something from him.
It could just have been malice, of course. Humans enjoyed tormenting things. He’d seen enough of them in their colonies and now on Trevelyan to know that. They were pointlessly cruel, as if violence had once been an essential part of their evolution but had now become a reflex and casual thing that they didn’t even notice or control.
But whether this was an enclosed sphere or an open sky, he was as marooned here as ever. He still needed a way off the planet. That required a vessel. The aerial monitoring devices patrolled high overhead, watching him, just as the device that helped him communicate with Prone sent back his position.
And there are birds up there, not just surveillance drones. I can see them.
Hijacking a vessel was a possibility. So was stealing one. Getting off the surface would be harder, though, because a sphere would have a complex airlock system. He had a great deal of intelligence to gather, and it was the kind he would have to glean layer by layer, innocent and incidental.
The Huragok would know all these things because they were the engineering custodians, but co-opting them was a guaranteed way of exposing his plan. They answered when asked. They answered anybody.
But the more of the world that I see, the better I’ll be able to plan an escape.
He lay back as far as the harness would allow and thought of home to galvanize himself to begin his daily search for … what, exactly? He would recognize it when he saw it. How was the rebellion progressing? Raia would be looking for him. So would Forze, and they would both be angry. When he finally got home, he would have a great deal of apologizing to do. It would be especially hard to treat his sons as if they weren’t unique and special to him. He missed them.
It was the second time in his life that he’d wondered if it was such a fine thing to let sons grow up not knowing who their fathers were. It wasn’t fine for him. He simply accepted it as necessary to sustain a society based on merit and ability.
Something rustled in grass nearby and a shadow fell across him. It didn’t startle him. If he didn’t begin the day by seeking out Prone, Prone would come and find him.
Prone said.
Jul got to his feet and stuck out his arm to indicate to the Huragok that he would follow him. “So, the Forerunners. Tell me how they thought.”
Jul took a little time to pick his words and followed Prone through the ghost city that still waited for inhabitants who would now never come. He had an unseen audience—probably.
“And what data do you think I require?”
A theological debate could draw out all kinds of detail. Jul remembered extraordinary conversations with ‘Telcam and the monks who followed him, how they performed the most tortuous mental gymnastics to make black white and white black, how they could argue perfectly plausibly that a forbidden thing was allowed. All examples of Forerunner technology were sacred relics, and the faithful weren’t supposed to defile them by using them, yet they managed to circumvent this by some elaborate argument that using holy items to defeat blasphemers was acceptable. At first he thought
they were trying to fool their gods, like some Kig-Yar contract notary twisting every word and vowel in an agreement, but soon he realized they were simply trying to fool themselves. This was the only way they could live in the world they’d created. This was how they squared what they wanted to believe—needed to believe—with the fact that life, every moment of it, contradicted their faith and threw its impossibility and even its unpleasant pettiness back in their faces. They bent the world into a less confusing shape.
I refuse to believe that gods want to make mortals unhappy and torment them. That’s what humans do. And humans are very definitely not divine.
“I wanted to believe in gods,” Jul said, and meant it. “But the gods I was taught to revere didn’t seem to like mortals. They seemed to want the prohibition of the most simple acts. If you created the world, all that magnificence, why would you care who walked where, or who pronounced certain words, or who touched stone and metal?”
Prone didn’t say anything for a long time. Jul was happy to walk in silence because the conversation had genuinely started him thinking about the stranglehold that the San’Shyuum had placed on the Sangheili with their version of religion.
The Forerunners were no myth. They had existed and left a great deal of evidence. But they feared things that gods needn’t have worried about. They feared the Flood, or else they would never have built all this. The buildings were precise and beautiful, the straight lines true and the roads level, but this wasn’t a temple: it was a place for people to live, practical and of this world. The warmth of the sun bounced off those perfect white and silver-gray walls and soothed him. It was like the solid masonry of a keep, a place meant to be lived in.
Prone said.
“I can see that.”
Now things were getting interesting. Jul had to probe carefully. They’d reached a crossroads, a small square with a fountain in the middle. There was no water, but a central column rose from a low basin twice as wide as he was tall, and he could only interpret that as a fountain. He stopped and sat down on the edge.
“Did they believe in gods?” If Magnusson was monitoring this, then she would think he was simply groping for his inexplicable faith again. “Is any of this religious in nature?” No, that was the wrong question. It assumed too much about Prone’s opinion, if he had one. “Do you believe the Forerunners were gods?”
“Yes? No?”
Jul knew he could rely on Engineers for logic. “So … did they believe in gods?”
It wasn’t an answer, but it was interesting. He thought of the disappointing revelation that Prone had given him, that the Forerunners were more like humans than Sangheili. “Did the Forerunners have castes, like us? Were they warriors, priests, kaidons?”
Jul would have happily spent the rest of the day coaxing answers out of Prone. He needed those answers. But what fascinated him was something irrelevant that pricked at his pride, at his very identity: the idea that these near-godlike beings were like humans, vermin who knew nothing of the Forerunners until the war, not like the Sangheili who’d revered them and preserved their works. That seemed wrong and deeply unfair.
Stupid. Focus on getting out, not on what’s fair. Perhaps we have a shared culture. Perhaps we were given that gift instead.
“Did they have names?”
That didn’t sound very Sangheili. Jul decided to retreat a little and think in terms of where docking facilities would be. They had to be nearby. He hadn’t seen ships landing, and the transports were small vehicles, so materials and personnel were probably brought over a relatively short distance. Prone would know.
Prone asked.
Jul had no plan. “I thought you were going to show me something interesting. What’s inside these buildings? More empty rooms and corridors?”
“Show me something that’ll help me to know the Forerunners better. Like the temples on Sanghelios.”
“Yes, I know that. I meant things I can learn from. Carvings. Writing. The holy symbols.”
“I have nothing more pressing to do.”
Huragok were nothing if not literal. It really was a very long way. Prone led him along a riverbank for an hour, two hours, then five: Jul could tell by the position of the sun and his understanding of how the humans divided their day. He could see a slim, charcoal gray spire protruding from the ground and nothing else.
It had to be a monument. Jul started reasoning that such a small structure couldn’t contain much else, but he was dealing with Forerunners, and they could bend entire dimensions. As he approached, he could see symbols carved into the surface of the stone. There were few of them and they were large—a name, perhaps, a place, but probably not a great deal of information.
Prone circled the spire.
“What are they?”
“What does that mean?”
Humans had those inside their complex. Muster stations, they called them. If there was a fire or other emergency, they were supposed to report to them to be counted. Jul tried to imagine the mighty Forerunners doing something so mundane, but they’d built a shelter the size of a solar system, so it wasn’t inconceivable. Their sheer ordinariness was beginning to trouble him. He scuffed his boots around the base of the spire, trying to work out how they’d constructed it and how deep the foundations went in a world where the surface was a shell. Then he felt something brush his face like an insect or a cobweb. He put up his hand to bat it away, and that was when the lights went out.
They didn’t go out for long, though.
He wasn’t on the surface any longer. He was standing in a stone-lined chamber with passages leading off it on all four sides, evenly lit, and each wall bore rows of engraved symbols. It was too quiet for him to know if the chamber was insulated from exterior noise or not, but he could hear nothing.
“Prone,” he said. “Prone, where are you?” He shouted in case the communications device had failed, although he doubted Huragok handiwork was that unreliable. “Prone!”
There was no answer. He pressed the small device but there was still no response. He had no idea where he was, no idea of how he’d arrived here, and he wasn’t sure if this was a disaster or a way out. Only one thing was clear: he couldn’t stand here indefinitely. All the passages looked much the same, so he made a note of some of the most noticeably different symbols on each wall by scratching them into his belt with his nails. At least he’d be able to tell which passage he’d already walked down if he retraced his steps.
“Prone? Can you hear me?” He walked down the passage to his left. The walls were mostly plain, precisely made blocks with velvet-smooth surfaces, but some bore rows of symbols or even rectangular panels with a few single symbols within their margins. They looked very like the carvings on the ruins around Mdama. Eventually he came to a dead end and stared at the wall for what felt like a long time, mesmerized by the symbols and what they might mean. Why put them down here? What were they supposed to do?
Why hide them down here?
He was guessing the intent of ancient aliens whose technology was still far beyond anything modern societies could create. He was doomed to fail. Now he could hear a slapping sound that he recognized. Prone was rushing down the passage. He’
d found an entrance, then. Now he could explain to Jul how he’d ended up down here.
Jul half-turned and reached out to touch one of the panels, more to feel how precise the edges of the inscribed symbols were, and then his comms device came alive.
Jul’s fingers brushed it just as Prone gave the warning. The next thing Jul knew, Prone had cannoned into him and wrapped his tentacles tightly around his arm. Prone pulled Jul backward so violently that he felt a tendon rip. He landed flat on his back, winded, and his head cracked against the stone floor. For a moment he lay stunned. It wasn’t just the force of the impact. It was the shock of being flung across the room by a Huragok. His reflex was to leap to his feet and strike down whoever struck him, but he was too shocked. It was like being struck in the face by a female. These things didn’t happen. They just didn’t happen.
Prone was like all Huragok, utterly passive, focused to the point of fixation on technology and repairing it. Some would become very agitated if Forerunner artifacts were damaged, and he’d heard of some Huragok defending their brothers against physical threats, but they didn’t start fights. Jul turned his head to make sure that Prone wasn’t going berserk with some form of technology that nobody had imagined. He could see the Huragok huddling by the wall. For a moment he thought Prone was cowering from him, expecting punishment, but then he realized he was actually shielding that wall—the wall that Jul had been told not to touch. The creature’s bioluminescence was now vivid, brighter than normal, a sign that he was afraid or stressed.
Jul had no idea Huragok were so strong. But then they had to handle machinery, and nobody ever asked them if they needed a hand. It had never occurred to him to wonder how strong they had to be to do that, even though it was staring him in the face: very strong indeed. Because their bodies were sacs of gas and they floated, it was easy to think of them as delicate and fragile. Forerunners were masters of design, able to defy time and space, and more than capable of combining delicacy and immense strength in one structure.