Olivia moved next to Kurt. "Five of these have to be Team Katana," she whispered. "This one is still tagged with the lime-green 'kill' flag from top-honors exercise."
Kurt smoothed his gauntlet over the pod's surface. Were they alive inside? Dead? Somewhere in between? He had come here first—not gone after the technology that the UNSC needed, risking everything for Team Katana.
You never leave a fallen comrade behind.
But there was more to it than that: given a choice between alien technologies that might save all of humanity and these five Spartans… he had picked them first. He would have done anything to protect them.
"Let's see what we're dealing with here," he said.
Kurt flickered on his helmet's tactical lights, and panned them over the chamber. Organometallic appendages cradled each pod and radiated branches that connected to banks of two-meter cubes.
On closer inspection, Kurt saw a faint light leaking from these cubes… and staring closer, he noticed they were not at all cubes—their edges distorted and radiated extra dimensions.
He staggered back, hands reflectively grasping for his temples. Disorientation washed over him as he tasted the faint green light, inhaled the dusty odors of meaning from the symbols on the floor, and heard the bell-like tinkling of the organic electronics of the pods.
He sank to one knee and the tangled sensory input faded.
"Stand back," Kurt warned the others. Over the COM he said, "Will, escort Dr. Halsey up here."
Another wave of disorientation hit Kurt and his vision swam. When he again could see. Dr. Halsey knelt next to him.
"Move him away from the machines," she told Will.
Will dragged him back to the room's entrance, and Kurt's vision immediately cleared and the dizziness vanished.
"What was that?" he asked Dr. Halsey.
"Unshielded Slipspace field," she said. Her face was a mask of concentration, staring at the cubic machine housing. Frowning, she crossed to the pods. "Linda," she said, "your assistance please."
Linda moved up to Dr. Halsey, her sniper rifle aimed at the floor.
"Use your weapon's range finder; point at the interior of the pod."
Linda nodded, raised her rifle, and aimed at the Spartan inside the pod. After a moment,
she lowered the weapon, checked her Oracle scope's settings, and then repeated the procedure. She shook her head.
"You are reading an infinite range?" Dr. Halsey said.
"Yes," Linda replied, uncharacteristic annoyance in her tone. "There must be something wrong with it."
"No," Dr. Halsey replied. "I'm afraid it is in perfect working order."
She turned to Kurt. "I cannot revive your Spartans or the other three, Lieutenant Commander. They are not in cryogenic suspension."
Kurt shook off the last traces of confusion. "Explain," he said.
"They are encased in a Slipspace field. The process to stabilize such a field in normal space is well beyond any technology we or the Covenant possess. Essentially these Spartans are here, but not, extruded into an alternate set of spatial coordinates and excluded from time."
"They're right here," Linda said, and pointed at the pods.
"No," Dr. Halsey said. "You are merely seeing their afterimage. It's like looking at a mass accelerated past the event horizon of a black hole. Its image may linger there forever, but it
is gone."
"So they're gone?" Linda whispered.
"Oh no," Dr. Halsey replied. "They're right here."
Kurt said, "You just said they're gone. Which is it?"
Dr. Halsey considered a moment and then replied, "Both. The quantum-mechanical
implications do not translate to simple, nonparadoxical, classical terms."
"Then let's stick to practical terms," Kurt said, growing annoyed. "Are they safe?"
She tilted her head, considering, and then replied, "You could detonate a nuclear
warhead on these pods and because the extruded Slipspace within is not in this dimension, there would be no effect to their contents."
At this reference to "nuclear warhead," Ash shifted his pack, which held the two cut-down FENRIS bombs.
"Can we move them?" Kurt asked.
Dr. Halsey walked to the end of one pod. She examined the trunk line attached there and uncoupled it. There was a hiss and the pod rose a half meter off the floor.
"It appears they were designed to be moved," she said, her last words trailing off into deep thought.
Kurt motioned to the pods. "Teams Saber, Blue, get them uncoupled. We'll take them with us to the core-room entrance."
The Spartans detached the pods.
As Ash maneuvered one pod. Dr. Halsey held up a hand, indicating that he halt. She bent closer to the last pod and ran her fingers over the Forerunner icons along its side, translating as she did so: " 'That which must be protected… behind the sharpened edge of the shield… beyond the reach of the swords… for the reclaimed.' No, that's not quite the correct meaning."
"Reclaimed…" Ash echoed. "Maybe 'Reclaimers'?"
Dr. Halsey looked up, startled, at him. "Yes. A title. Specifically, an honorific."
"Yeah," he said, "that's what the Sentinel called us."
"One spoke?" Dr. Halsey asked. She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and moved to Ash.
"I'd forgotten it with everything else going on." Ash shook his head, embarrassed.
"What exactly did it say?" she demanded. "The precise wording. It may be important."
Ash shifted foot to foot. "… I don't remember, ma'am."
Chief Mendez came up and set a hand on Ash's shoulder. "Take a deep breath. Spartan. Go back and think: what were you doing just before the thing talked?"
"We'd moved to the edge of Zone 67," Ash said slowly, "to disengage from Team Katana and Gladius. That's when they started to blow up the ONI bunkers… and then one came after us. It chased Holly right to the edge of a cliff.
"I got its attention. Threw a rock at the thing. It chased me, got me pinned in a ravine. I started to broadcast in the open, to let Saber know you could get past its shields with a slow ballis-tic object—didn't have much to lose at that point. But the Sentinel attenuated my COM signal, and transmitted it back to me."
"Slow it down," Chief Mendez whispered. "Take your time. What happened next?"
"At first it didn't make any sense," Ash continued. "Like untranslated Covenant—only it was different. 'Pungent Juber' something. I tried to talk back to it. Told it that I didn't understand. It spoke again, still gibberish, but then it said 'non se-quitur' I was certain it spoke Latin."
"Linguistic analysis based on a microscopic sample set," Dr. Halsey said. "It tried to communicate with a root language."
"Then it said 'Security protocols enabled' and 'Shield in countdown mode. Exchange proper counterresponse. Reclaimer.' I told it that I meant it no harm. I guess that was the wrong thing to say,
because that's when it told me I was not a Reclaimer, and reclassified me as an 'aboriginal subspecies.'"
Dr. Halsey stared off into space, thinking. "Yes…" she murmured. "This all makes sense."
"It was about to flash me with its energy beam when the rest of Saber came along and dropped a few rocks on it." Ash shrugged. "That's it, sir,"
Kurt had heard enough… more important, he had seen Dr. Halsey's reaction. She knew much more than she was telling them. And it was time he found out what.
"Okay," Kurt said, "everyone grab the pods and move them to the translocation platform."
He stepped closer to Dr. Halsey. "I'd like a word with you, ma'am."
The Spartans maneuvered the pods back into the corridor. Mendez spared a look at Kurt and Dr. Halsey, and then left.
"We don't have much time," Kurt said to her.
She glanced at her watch. "Forty minutes, to be precise, until the core-room entrance shuts."
"You know what's inside."
There was the slightest hesitation, and then she repli
ed, "How could I, Lieutenant Commander?"
"But you haven't told me everything."
Dr. Halsey's eyes hardened and her mouth set in what Mendez would have called a poker face.
"Doctor, I'm not going to risk my Spartans" lives without knowing everything. Even what you might consider an insignificant detail could have grave tactical repercussions."
"Indeed," she whispered, and her expression softened a bit. "If they mean that much to you, then tell me first about their neural augmentations."
Kurt tensed, unsure how to proceed. Dr. Halsey was a civilian outside his chain of command. There were rules and protocols dictating how the military interacted with the civilians under its
protection—all too slow, for his purposes. If he were not reliant upon her scientific expertise, Kurt would have considered more direct action; instead he tried again.
"I am not bartering. Doctor. You do not have the proper clearance for that information. Now please tell me about the core. You could save lives."
"'Save lives' is exactly what I am attempting to do," she replied, and crossed her arms. The gesture was identical to the one Kelly made when she set her mind to be resolutely stubborn.
Kurt was cornered. If he threatened Dr. Halsey, he could lose her cooperation. If he didn't get the information, he might lose the lives. With time running out, he only had one option, and she knew it.
He took a deep breath and said, "Very well. The neural mutation for the SPARTAN-IIIs alters their frontal lobe to enhance aggression response. In times of extreme stress it makes them nearly immune to shock, able to endure damage not even a SPARTAN-II could."
"Like Dante?" Dr. Halsey said. "Still moving when he should have been in a coma?"
Kurt relived that moment, holding Dante who had just a second earlier saluted him and told him that he thought he had been nicked.
"Side effects?" she asked.
"Yes," Kurt whispered. "Over time, higher brain functions are suppressed and the Spartans lose their strategic judgment. A counteragent blocks this, but it must be regularly administered."
"I'm not sure I agree that trade-off is worth it," she said. "Unless, their needs were, even by Spartan standards… extraordinary." She carefully examined Kurt, and then whispered, "What happened to Alpha Company?"
"They were deployed to shut down a Covenant shipyard on the edge of UNSC space." Kurt stopped, straining to hold back
the blackness that rose within him. Shane, Robert, every one of them dead, and the fault his.
"I never heard of the operation," Dr. Halsey said.
"Because it was a success," Kurt replied, regaining some control. "If it hadn't been, the Covenant would have destroyed every Orion-side colony… But the entire company, three hundred Spartans, was lost."
Dr. Halsey started to reach out toward him, and then stopped, thinking better of it. "Tom and Lucy… ?"
"The only survivors of Beta Company from the Pegasi Delta Op," he replied.
They were silent a moment. Kurt wrestled to rise above his emotions and the memories. But with so many lost he felt like he was drowning.
"I understand why you would risk such an outlawed protocol," Dr. Halsey said. "You would do anything to help them, your Spartans… as would I for mine."
Over the COM Chief Mendez spoke: "We're at the platform, sir. Awaiting further orders."
"Stand by," Kurt replied. He banished his feelings to a dark vessel in his mind, one brimming to overflow with pain, and then he focused on Dr. Halsey.
"Why are you here?" he asked her. "It is not to recover Forerunner technology. If you had really suspected, you would have told John and he'd have sent more assets than a single Spartan and a fifty-year-old ship converted for civilian use."
Dr. Halsey dropped her gaze to the intricately tiled floor. "There is no need for this pretense with you," she whispered. "Only, one becomes so accustomed to keeping secrets; one forgets how to tell anyone… anything." Her forehead crinkled almost as if it hurt to speak. "You are correct. I did not come to Onyx looking for Forerunner technology. I came for the Spartans. We want the same thing: their survival."
She set one hand over her throat—some reflexive defensive gesture to protect herself.
"This is not a war the UNSC can win, Kurt. Surely this has occurred to you?"
He nodded, although in fact it had not.
She seemed to accept this, however, and continued. "We have been slowly losing this war. 'Slowly,' I think, because we had not been the main focus of the Covenant hegemony until recently. Now they have found and targeted Earth. Add to this grim scenario the Flood… an emergent biology that even the Forerunners could not control."
"But we have to fight," Kurt said. "The Covenant don't take prisoners. And from what you've told us of the Flood… there's no other option."
Dr. Halsey smiled. "So like a Spartan… and, at the same time you are so unlike any of them. You crossed a line none of your kind has ever dared before: breaking regulations and engineering a massive cover-up. All to protect your charges. AVhat I had planned, though, went much farther…"
Over the COM Fred broke in. "Sir, the Forerunner controls on the platform are moving. Going crazy I'm not sure what it means."
"Stand by" Kurt replied.
"You see," Dr. Halsey said, "my SPARTAN-lls would never leave a fight. They are too indoctrinated to know any other way. But when I learned of the possibility of a new generation of Spartans, I realized there was a chance to lure them away. Perhaps place them in cryo and fly as fast and as far away as I could from this sector of the galaxy.
"To live and fight another day," Kurt murmured.
"Stumbling upon this Forerunner installation," Dr. Flalsey continued, "was pure chance… Or as much 'chance' as it was building Camp Currahee next to Zone 67. In any event, there may or may not be weapon technologies we can repurpose here.
Your guess is as good as mine. There is, however, something far more valuable to us: a way to save their lives, what I think may have been part of the Forerunners' original plan. There is a haven for these 'Reclaimers' that—"
Gunfire echoed down the hallway.
Kurt turned and raised his rifle.
Fred announced over the COM: "Covenant scout party appeared on the translocation platform. Three Elites dispatched. No injuries here. Control panel is still active. Advise."
"Listen carefully if you want them to live," Dr. Halsey told Kurt. She wore her poker face again and there was steel in her voice. "Order Fred to move the pods onto that platform— now."
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SEVEN
2130 HOURS, NOVEMBER 3, 2552 (MILITARY CALENDAR) ZETA DORADUS SYSTEM UNDETERMINED LOCATION IN THE FORERUNNER CONSTRUCT KNOWN AS ONYX
The Spartans stood in a half-circle "kill" formation around the platform. The sarcophagi-like pods had been pushed into the center.
The bodies of three Elite scouts in their blue armor had been dragged to one side and stripped of their weapons. Fluorescing blood pooled there and reeked like fresh tar.
Dr. Halsey strode directly to the control console. As she tapped and arranged holographic symbols, she told Kurt, "The Slipspace fields that render the pods impervious to attack effectively block any incoming matter translocations. They are perfectly safe."
Fred reported to Kurt, "For what it's worth, sir, the Elites looked surprised. I don't think they knew we were here."
"Well, they probably do now," Kurt replied. "Doctor?"
"I'm unsure how the Covenant learned so quickly," Dr. Halsey said, glistening symbols reflecting in her glasses, "but I'm logging repeated attempts to gain access to this platform. Nearby systems have activated. They are trying to find alternate routes to our location."
"Then we move," Kurt said.
"If the pods block the translocation." Ash said, "will they go though the system?"
Dr. Halsey considered this. "I believe so. They are designed to be transported. Once their Slipspace fields are caught in the wake of a locally g
enerated spatial distortion they should be carried along."
"Set mission timers in countdown mode." Kurt told them, and he looked to Dr. Halsey.
She consulted her watch. "Thirty-two minutes until the doorway to the core room closes," she said.
"On my mark." Kurt said. "Mark."
"52:00" appeared in the lower right corner of his heads-up display
"Defense formation beta," he ordered, and motioned everyone onto the platforms. "Use the pods for cover."
Will carried Dante's wrapped body and set him gently onto the platform. Kurt quickly looked away; every time he saw the corpse, it reminded him that Dante's death was his responsibility, and that he had failed the young Spartan.
The SPARTAN-IIs made a ring inside the pods protecting Mendez. The SPARTAN-IIIs lay flat and aimed under the floating pods, giving them a 360-degree field of fire.
Dr. Halsey joined them on the platform, crowding next to Chief Mendez. She opened her laptop and linked to the Forerunner controls. "Are you certain?" she asked Kurt. "The Covenant
may be able to track us to the core room. We might lead them directly to it." The look on her face was unreadable.
Kurt recognized the question as strategic: continue to the core room or escape while there were UNSC forces in the space over Onyx?
Dr. Halsey had also hinted there was a way to save the Spartans' lives—something linked to the Forerunners' original plan for these "Reclaimers." But he didn't have the luxury of making plans based on Dr. Halsey's half-explained theories. He'd stick with his plan: get to the core room, grab whatever technology or weapons were there, and get off this world. He had a mission to accomplish, and failing that—his gaze moved to Ash and his pack with two FENRIS warheads—he could still deny the enemy their prize.
"Core room," Kurt said.
Dr. Halsey sighed and nodded. Was it resignation he detected on her face? Or relief? She was the most difficult person to read he had ever encountered.
Rings of golden light enveloped them, the walls of the corridor melted, and Kurt felt his insides pulled out and around and then stuffed back into his armor.
The light, however, didn't fade as it had before. It intensified to a brighter magnesium-burning white.
Mendez dug into his vest pocket and donned an antique pair of mirrored wraparounds.