The Thursday War

  I wonder where Adj is now? I hope ONI aren’t vivisecting him or anything. Cute little guy. Amazingly useful.

  Phillips could have done with Adj right then, and BB, too. He was really on his own now. He walked slowly through the maze of passages, writing each turn that he took on his datapad so that he could find his way out again, and was struck by the precision of the stone blocks. The temple was thousands of years old but the stonework was crisp and immaculate, the joints perfectly square and almost invisible. He ran his palm along the right-hand side of the wall as he walked. The stone was peach-smooth and warmer to the touch than he expected. A string of dim lights ran the length of the ceiling, but that looked to be a Sangheili addition, not the work of aliens who could bend time and space to create a bomb shelter. Grimy lightbulbs spattered with dead insects just didn’t seem to be their style.

  And then he saw the panels on the wall, the shadows cast by inscriptions, and the anthropologist core of his being went into a feeding frenzy. He speeded up to a trot and stood gazing at the first panel in academic ecstasy.

  He would have described it as a cartouche, but that made it sound quaint and primitive. The symbols engraved on it were what he’d come to recognize as Forerunner glyphs. Suck on this, Howard Carter. I’ve just become the first human to read an actual message from the gods. He decided to risk a thunderbolt and put his hand out to touch the symbols, but his fingertips brushed against something that felt solid, a barrier that he could feel but not see. He flattened his cheek against the wall in case he could see an actual sheet of transparent material, but there was nothing. It was one of their protective fields.

  Wow. How the hell did they build that into stone and keep it powered all this time? Damn, BB, you’re missing all the good stuff. Come to that … why did they put that barrier there? To keep it clean?

  The symbols were laid out in rows with lines leading from them to other symbols around the margin of the panel. It reminded him of a touch panel on a kitchen appliance.

  Maybe those aren’t engravings. Maybe they’re buttons. Switches.

  Pressing them was a risk, but he couldn’t work out how to get past that protective screen anyway. Human logic told him that it might have been the whole point—to stop people pressing them by accident. He was so pumped up with adrenaline now that the sheer ravenous greed to know about this thing, to understand it, had made the fact he was a hostage of a heavily armed religious lunatic fade into the background.

  Oh, BB, you should see this.

  Phillips took a few images with his datapad, noting the charge was low. He didn’t know when he’d get out of here to top it up again so he’d have to conserve power. Damn, he really needed BB to see this. Should he risk trying to repair the radio cam? He didn’t know the first thing about how to fix it other than digging out the fragment of shrapnel, and he didn’t know if he’d end up triggering the needle and killing himself. He stood there in the dimly lit tunnel for minutes, just daring himself to take out that lump of metal.

  The needle would eject from the back plate. That was why he had to wear it clipped to his jacket. Shit, lucky? You said it. What if the impact had triggered it? He held the radio against the stone wall so that he couldn’t fumble with it and accidentally stab himself, then began prying the metal out with his stylus. It started to bend the front cover out as well. The shrapnel suddenly flew out and pinged on the floor.

  Phillips kept the radio flat against the wall, just in case, and pressed the switch on and off a few times. The pinpoint of green light came on but died again.

  Ah well. I tried. No point wasting time. Better start cataloguing all these inscriptions. I’ve got Halos to find.

  He twisted the clip around on the radio and attached it to his top pocket with surgical care, making sure the back plate was facing out. Then he carried on looking along the walls for inscriptions, searching for repeating symbols that might give him a way in to the Forerunner language.

  This one was interesting. It was an oval with what looked like a section through a vertebra in the middle of it, and it appeared in every cartouche several times. He was trying to think like aliens who could bend time when he put his hand on the invisible barrier and a voice suddenly spoke to him out of nowhere.

  He almost crapped himself, but it wasn’t the voice of God, anybody’s god.

  “Please activate the video input,” BB said. “Continue when ready.”

  UNSC PORT STANLEY, EN ROUTE TO SANGHELIOS

  “Bloody hell, BB,” Mal said, leaning on the chart table. “There’s a lot of gaps in this schematic.”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, Malcolm,” BB said acidly, “I was put out of action while I was doing the survey. And since when did you ever have perfect recon data before insertion?”

  “Just making an observation, mate.”

  Everyone was a bit sensitive right now. Mal prided himself on being able to focus on the job at hand no matter what else was going on, but part of him had disconnected from Phillips’s plight to worry about Naomi’s reaction to the bombshell about her father. Perhaps it didn’t hurt as much as he’d thought: she said she couldn’t even remember her childhood before she’d been taken for Spartan training, so maybe this seemed just as unreal to her. Mal had grown up without a father as well. He tried out the idea of being told that his dad had finally shown up and had a steady career as a serial killer. How did he feel about that? Nothing, nothing at all. It wasn’t real and he couldn’t make it feel that way. Staffan Sentzke was definitely real, though. And Mal didn’t have a mess of buried traumas like Naomi did.

  Nobody in Kilo-Five had any family ties. That was part of the selection criteria, BB had told them, no complications if they needed to vanish for years at a time. But now one of them had a real live relative they’d never bargained for, and a really embarrassing one at that.

  “Are you listening, Staff?” Osman asked.

  Mal wondered what he’d missed. The captain could make him flinch, informal and easygoing or not. “Sorry, ma’am.”

  “I was saying that as Ontom’s coastal, we could insert by sea.”

  “It’s going to have to be at night, either way. But we’re not equipped for going in by sea. You can’t adapt the jump pods to make them into boats.”

  “I can get in there and drop you without them,” Devereaux said. “Swim in, like the good old days.”

  “We’d be putting a lot of faith in Tart-Cart’s stealth,” Vaz said.

  Naomi had been staring at the 3-D projection suspended above the chart table in absolute silence. She started shaking her head very slowly. “Armor. You need it. And I’m carrying three hundred kilos of it. It’s got to be a land insertion, and that means coming in from the north.”

  “I don’t plan to deploy you, Naomi,” Osman said.

  “Why not, ma’am? This is exactly what I’m designed for.”

  The designed bit stung. Osman looked as if she’d taken a deep breath. She could easily have been where Naomi was now. It was almost the first thing she’d told them about herself, like she’d needed to get it off her chest: that she’d been a Spartan kid, but the surgical enhancements had crippled her, and Parangosky had picked her up and put her back together again.

  And I don’t have to be Freud to work out that relationship.

  “I don’t want to lose the entire squad,” Osman said at last. “If this goes pear-shaped, I’d lose one of the last Spartan-Twos. No offense, marines.”

  “It’s okay, ma’am,” Vaz said. “We know she’s a bigger budget item than us.”

  Naomi just looked at Osman as if she was shaping up to argue, but she let it go. They went back to the holographic fly-through of the approach to Sanghelios and Ontom, trying to work out which features from the mapping run were some kind of radar and where the sensors might be. The 3-D projection suspended over the chart table was finely detailed in places, but it stopped dead at the temple doorway. That would have to be enough. Considering how long Earth had been at war with the Co
venant, it still didn’t have much reconnaissance imaging of Sanghelios. Pretty well everything they were looking at had come from one mission, Admiral Hood’s trip to meet the Arbiter. One orbit of Sanghelios had enabled UNSC Iceni to map the planet’s topography, and the shuttle had surveyed a narrow corridor across the Arbiter’s home city of Vadam in some detail, but Sanghelios was still mostly unknown territory. And BB was right. Mal and Vaz had done orbital jumps onto planets with almost no information about where the pods would land.

  “I think we’re going to have to make orbit and remap all this before we commit to landing anybody,” BB said. “It’ll be time well spent. Just remember that the last fix we have on Phillips suggests he’s in the temple complex, though.”

  “So we go in,” Mal said.

  “Forerunner ruins. As Halsey found on Onyx, they can be a tad irregular.”

  “So we still go in.” Mal carried on because not even Osman was filling the gaps, and he needed to kill the silence. “Because we want to recover your fragment as well, don’t we? Or can you just throw it away like a duplicate file?”

  For an entity determined not to have even a holographic body, BB had quite a repertoire of body language. He could express a hell of a lot with just six plain, flat surfaces that weren’t even there. Mal could have sworn that the watery blue light dimmed for a moment. He got the sense that BB had glanced down at the deck, troubled.

  He’s based on a human brain’s structure. Whatever he says about meatbags, that’s got to influence how he behaves.

  “I’ve never lost a fragment before,” BB said. “I’ve generated and shut down many, but this one wasn’t closed. It was interrupted.”

  Devereaux looked up. “Like pulling out a chip too fast and corrupting the data?”

  “That’s a fair approximation. Except … I am data. That’s me. I think it’s more like brain damage caused by anoxia.”

  “Wow. So you can’t load it all back in again.”

  “I don’t like gaps in my memory, Lian. They’re painful and distressing.”

  “But it’s only a duplicate of you, in a way. You can work without it.”

  “No, it’s not, because that fragment is what you’d call BB Lite. It had limited functions in case it fell into enemy hands. And its experiences and memories won’t be the same as mine, either, so I need to reintegrate them, to put them back in my timeline, or else … I’m sorry, it’s hard to explain, but it’ll leave me with gaps in my mind.”

  “I used to get those a lot,” Mal said, trying to reassure the AI. “It’s called beer.”

  “I appreciate the laddish chumminess, but when a mind is all you are, that’s rather disturbing.”

  Like the rest of the squad, Devereaux always looked straight at the holographic box as if she was making eye contact. BB was supposed to be omnipotent and omniscient, at least for his seven-year lifespan. Mal thought of all the survivable things that went wrong with human brains—strokes, dementia, hallucinations, memory loss, injury that changed your entire personality—and realized that if those scared him, then it was probably like the threat of terminal illness for BB. The AI thought, or he didn’t exist. It was that stark.

  “I bet we find your fragment and it’s fine,” Vaz said. “The first thing it’ll do is bitch at us for taking so long to recover it.”

  Everyone stopped talking again. Mal thought this was the worst thing about slipspace: not the uncertainty of where you’d drop back into normal space, or if the trip had taken longer than you’d planned, but that you were cut off from comms, left to stew in your own juice until you decelerated and could talk to the world again. And the one thing Port Stanley needed now was information from outside.

  Osman had her arms folded on the edge of the chart table, bent right over like someone leaning on their shopping cart to relieve the supermarket tedium. The silence was begging someone to break it again.

  “Okay.” Osman straightened up. “Seeing as we’ve tossed and gored this as much as we can for the time being, let’s discuss what’s really on everyone’s mind. Naomi, I’m going to want absolute proof that this suspect’s your father before I do anything. What did you tell Spenser, Mal?”

  Sometimes Naomi could look like a wax model. She was so pale that she was almost translucent at the best of times, but when she was doing her I’m-not-reacting thing, Mal couldn’t even tell if she was breathing.

  Vaz chipped in. “I told Spenser who he was, ma’am. I shouldn’t have. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “But Spenser agreed to sit on his hands until we got back,” Mal said. “It’s not like there’s anything big going down at the moment. He’s just keeping tabs on them.”

  “Did he call it in to Parangosky?”

  “Not while we were there.”

  “I would have expected the Admiral to have sent a message before we slipped if she’d been informed,” BB said.

  If she’s totally open with Osman, that is. ONI couldn’t move in a straight line if you put it on rails. Maybe she’s waiting to see when Osman decides to tell her. I mean, they’re buddy-buddy, and Oz is the old girl’s favorite, but … she’s Parangosky. She didn’t get to be top spook by going soft on people.

  “I’ll talk to her when we leave slip,” Osman said. “In the meantime, let’s agree to some ground rules on this. It’s not going to be tidy. Whatever happens, it’s going to hurt someone somewhere down the line. Our priority is to protect Earth by any means necessary, but we have to trust each other to do that.”

  “Ma’am, he’s a stranger,” Naomi said. “Don’t change procedure because of me. Handle him like any other suspect.”

  “He’s probably a terrorist because he lost you.” Osman paused as if she thought she’d spoken out of turn. It was probably the worst thing she could point out to Naomi. “You do know that, don’t you? That he never believed the cloned child Halsey swapped you for was his real daughter? He always claimed it was a government conspiracy.”

  “Vaz told me,” Naomi said, apparently unmoved. “One day I’ll read it for myself.”

  “Okay, then we all level with one another about everything. Understood?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Osman was still learning how to end a conversation like that. Mal could see it on her face, all that doubt about the stuff she now had to do. He pitched in to rescue her.

  “Well, seeing as we don’t have our little Huragok chum to mod our kit, we’d better go and see what we can put together for a landing,” he said. “My money’s still on the drop pods, but it’s going to be a bugger to exfil, no matter how we insert.”

  “Fingers crossed that Hood comes through for us, then,” Osman said. “And now that I’ve embarrassed you all, I’m going to execute a tactical withdrawal and catch up on the signal traffic in my day cabin.”

  There was no bullshit with Osman. Mal now ranked eye-watering honesty equally with competence in his top five list of officer must-haves. BB’s avatar zipped off the bridge in a blur of blue light—not that he had to do the effects to make a point—and the three ODSTs stood in an awkward circle around Naomi.

  “Sorry, mate,” Mal said to her. “I’m really, really sorry.”

  “You’re sure it’s him?”

  Vaz squirmed visibly. “I should have taken a copy of the file, but we were in a hurry to get back.”

  “Was there a picture?”

  “Yes.”

  Naomi paused. Mal knew what was coming.

  “What does he look like?” she asked.

  “He looks like you,” Vaz said innocently. Mal felt the knife turn, even though that was the last thing Vaz would have dreamed of doing to Naomi. “You’re the image of your dad.”

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  I WANT A HURAGOK TEAM ROUTINELY EMBARKED IN EVERY WARSHIP BY 2557. THIS IS WHAT GAVE THE COVENANT THEIR TECHNICAL SUPERIORITY. NOW IT’S OURS, AND WHEREVER THE REST OF THEIR HURAGOK WENT, EVEN IF THE SANGHEILI REACQUIRE THEM—OURS STILL HAVE THEIR UNIQUE ONYX LEGACY, AND THAT PUTS US W
AY AHEAD.

  (REAR ADMIRAL SAEED SHAFIQ, UNSC PROCUREMENT)

  UNSC PORT STANLEY, APPROACHING SANGHEILI SPACE

  “Place your bets, mesdames et messieurs,” BB said. “Faites vos jeux … five, four, three, two…”

  Osman tried to ignore her cartwheeling stomach as the ship dropped out of slipspace and the black void in the forward viewscreen was suddenly peppered with stars that hadn’t been there a second before. The status panels on the console showed Port Stanley’s drives and associated systems dropping back from well into the red zone. BB hadn’t been joking when he said he was going to push the ship past her tested limits.

  “There. We’re back.” BB placed himself on Phillips’s empty seat. “Only two million klicks adrift and five hours earlier than projected. I win. Making OPSNORMAL and running comms checks. Lots of messages waiting, Captain.”

  “Wow, BB, did we blow many gaskets?” Devereaux asked, leaning over the control panel. “That was brisk.”

  “Nothing we can’t fix with some self-amalgamating titanium strip and lots of genius.”

  “Let me know if you need a hand. Because I’d like to live to see thirty-two.”

  Osman pushed herself out of her chair and found that she’d now learned to allow for the twenty or thirty seconds of disorientation on slipspace jumps. I can make myself do anything if I have to. Just tell myself that the whirling isn’t real. I believe me. I do. The ODSTs never seemed to turn a hair, but then anyone who reacted to jumps like she did would never have lasted five minutes as either a pilot or a Helljumper. A few confused seconds was all it took to crash and burn. Sometimes she felt inadequate beside them.

  Naomi never blinked either. But then she was a proper Spartan, not an abandoned project like herself, and she had other distractions that had to be weighing heavily on her mind.

  “Anything from Phillips?” Osman asked.