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But without the ability to make sounds, whatever information she exchanged with them would have to be in symbols. Finding a common set— other than pictures—was going to be hard.
Great. We’ll kick off with cave paintings and evolve through the development of written language, all before lunch. Why did I get myself into this? Why didn’t I follow orders?
And Dante, William, and Holly are dead. And so’s Kurt. And—again—I’m not. Why? Why not me?
The boss Engineer returned in time and stopped her sliding down that path of misery again. He’d only been gone for a minute, perhaps two, before he drifted back clutching her helmet like a footbal and reached out to run his tentacle across one of the screens on the wal .
Letters faded up, black script seeping out of a milky-white sheet of glass.
LUCY-B091 RECLAIMER WELCOME TO SHIELD WORLD SARCOPHAGUS BUT LIFE GOES ON.
The font was identical to the one in her underpants. She sucked in a breath and found herself nodding. Life … had to go on.
She hadn’t realized her emotional state was so visible to an alien life-form.
So now she could write. She reached up to the screen and struggled to frame a response in her mind. But it wasn’t just her ability to form spoken words that had withered; she now struggled to express herself even in a written form. The conversations she had with herself in her own mind weren’t the same. She hadn’t realized that until she tried to get them out of her head and make them solid.
Just write something. Anything.
She dragged her finger down the white glass, expecting to see a line form. It remained stubbornly blank. Of course—it was designed to respond to whatever input the Engineers used, not human handwriting. She looked at the Engineer and did a frustrated shrug.
Damn. Damn. But he’ll get the idea. He’ll watch and then he’ll work out what I need. I know he will.
The Engineer placed a tentacle on the screen next to her hand and more letters formed.
WHERE IS THE PLAGUE? NOTHING IS DEAD. WHY ARE YOU HERE?
His fluency was improving word by word. Lucy tapped the glass with her forefinger. Damn it, he was supposed to be a technical genius, and he couldn’t see that she couldn’t use the screen? Don’t disappoint me. I thought you could do anything. She grabbed his tentacle, like folding her fingers around a little kid’s hand to guide his crayon. He flinched and tried to pul away.
The “hand” felt delicate and smooth, like silicone, and cooler than human skin. Maybe she’d squeezed too hard and scared him. She hung on and patted the arm to calm him down, but pressing his cilia against the glass didn’t produce any text. She let him go, out of ideas and lost for what to try next.
But he stroked the glass again and more letters formed. Maybe the thousands of tiny cilia were operating microscopic touch-keys.
ALL LIFE LIVES. TALK TO PRONE TO DRIFT.
Okay, maybe he was extrapolating too far now. That looked like gibberish to her. She shook her head and frowned theatrical y. I don’t understand.
PRONE TO DRIFT.
Lucy frowned again, this time with a shrug. There had to be some body language that would get through to him. But she was running out of nonwords.
He touched the screen again.
PRONE TO DRIFT IS ME.
Is me. Is … me. God, how did she ever forget that briefing? It was his name. Engineers named their offspring according to how they floated when their gas sacs were first adjusted for buoyancy. His name was Prone to Drift. She wanted to say it, and strained to make a sound, but her throat just felt strangled by the effort again and she gave up.
WHY ARE YOU SILENT? he tapped.
Lucy shrugged. She wasn’t the only Spartan who’d been through traumas, just the only one who’d been driven to silence by it. She managed a sigh, more a heavy breath than anything. Prone to Drift perked up and cocked his head as if listening harder, but then appeared to realize it was the only sound he was going to get out of her.
He didn’t seem to be losing patience with her, though. Al the frustration was coming from her side of this mimed conversation and unlike the half-remembered game of charades, it wasn’t fun. She suddenly wanted to burst into tears.
The other Engineers drifted back into the room and exchanged a flurry of gestures with Prone to Drift before vanishing again. He took her ungloved hand and examined her palm and the tips of her fingers like a fortune-tel er.
Prone turned her hand as if he was showing it to her, then let go and touched the display.
YOU HAVE BLUNT APPENDAGES. WE MAKE ADJUSTMENTS.
Lucy felt a warm flood of revelation in her chest. He understands. He really understands. He was going to fix the screen so that she could write on it. And that meant she had to think in formal language again. She could do it. She had to. She had to let him know that she needed to find her squad.
She also had to find out what this place actual y was, and how they were going to survive here. If she could get Dr. Halsey or Chief Mendez together with Prone and his friends, that discussion would be a lot easier.
She’d reached the point of seriously considering using her own blood as ink and scrawling on the wal s when the surface of the glass in front of her changed. At first it seemed to liquefy, with colored chunks drifting in it like a tutti-frutti dessert, and then the colors coalesced and she was looking at a vertical line of capital letters and a few dots.
Her reflex was to try to read it as a word, but then she counted and realized the line was twenty-six characters long and none of them repeated.
The dots looked like symbols—a question mark, a comma, a dash, and a ful stop.
It was a keyboard.
Ah. That information must be stored in my HUD. The text display. Of course.
It wasn’t in any kind of alphabetical or keyboard order she’d ever seen, but she knew what she had to do with it. She hunted for the letters and prodded them laboriously like someone learning to type. Few people did that these days, but then very few could stil use Morse, either. She could.
Prone seemed to be getting excited. WE CAN TALK. NOW WE CAN DISCOVER MORE. THE SHIELD HAS ACTIVATED BUT WHERE IS THE FLOOD?
Lucy was way behind him, hunting not only for the right letters but trying to frame the right words, a hard thing for most humans to do without some degree of subvocalization. She didn’t have that option.
Prone tried again. HAS THE ARRAY FAILED? WE FOUND NO HAZARD WITHIN THE SHIELD WORLD. JUST TRACE.
Lucy tapped as fast as she could. ARRAY?
RING, Prone replied. ARC. BAND. CIRCLE.
HALO, Lucy interrupted. HALO.
Prone didn’t have shoulders but she could have sworn that he sagged visibly with relief. YES, HALO. NO HALO, NO FLOOD, NO FIGHTING, AND LIFE CONTINUES OUTSIDE, BUT THE BULKHEADS CLOSED. MOST PERPLEXING.
Oh … that’s it. I get it now.
Revelation was as powerful an emotion as love or fear. It was probably the remnant of a survival mechanism for escaping predators or starvation rather than a sense of intel ectual bliss, but the penny dropped and Lucy savored the elation for a moment.
Prone wasn’t being philosophical about grief when he’d told her that “life goes on. ” He was asking her why the Dyson sphere had been accessed when there was no threat outside and the Halo Array hadn’t fired to wipe out everything that had been contaminated by the Flood.
And if he knew there was no threat outside the Dyson sphere, then he had access to real-time information about the outside world. Lucy’s pulse raced.
Information could pass both ways. That meant the squad could cal for extraction. The war might already be over.
Lucy grabbed Prone to Drift and hugged him, then tapped out four painful words.
SORRY ABOUT YOUR FRIEND.
She hoped he understood that she’d regret pul ing the trigger for the rest of her life.
AANRAR SHIPYARD, RANARUM ORBITAL PLATFORM, SANGHELIOS SYSTEM:
FEBRUARY 2553 IN THE HUMAN CALENDAR.
“There’s a human proverb,” ‘Telcam said, beginning the long walk to the security barrier at the brow. “The devil makes work for idle hands. ”
Jul, Buran, and Forze ambled along beside him, trying to look casual while six of Buran’s loyal crew—two of them Jiralhanae—trailed behind.
They’d had to beg passage on a repair detail’s shuttle to make the flight to the orbital yard. It was crewed by Jiralhanae and the only maintenance workers around seemed to be Unggoy, hardly a substitute for Huragok. The wretched ships up here would be patched with glue and spit if they were repaired at al .
But ‘Telcam seemed to know a great deal about humans. Jul was intrigued. “What’s the devil?”
“One of their evil lesser gods. ”
“I thought they only had one. ”
“Some of them do. But some of them have many. The devil is the opposing force of the single omnipotent god. ”
Jul grappled with the idea. “But doesn’t omnipotence mean there is no opposing force? And if there’s only one god, then how…” He realized he’d invited a theological discussion, and changed tack rapidly. “Explain the proverb. ”
“It means,” ‘Telcam said, “that those left idle wil usual y find something dishonest or criminal to occupy themselves. ”
Forze grunted. “I usual y found that my troops would keep themselves busy with self-improvement and healthy exercise. ”
“Only humans veer from the path of virtue when not gainful y employed. ” Buran glanced at Forze as if they’d reached a tacit agreement to tease ‘Telcam and hope that he didn’t notice. “But I agree that you can’t take a war away from warriors and expect them to settle back into quiet domesticity. And that’s a concern we should be aware of. ”
Buran sounded like Raia. It was the same question: how would the Sangheili find a purpose again? Jul kept his sights lower and concentrated on the immediate task, which was to stage a coup. No—it wasn’t even that. He had no plans to take the Arbiter’s place. He simply wanted to stop the appeasement of humankind. It was the Arbiter’s policy, and once he was gone it would wither and die if a strong enough voice provided an alternative.
After that … Jul would leave the future to those who knew how to govern. He didn’t.
Buran moved to the front of the pack as they reached the sentry at the brow airlock. Unflinching Resolve sat tethered to one of the booms of the orbital yard, looking remarkably undamaged for a ship that had seen so much service since her last refit. Jul could see other warships that hadn’t escaped so lightly berthed in the rows behind her, some bearing much bigger scars from the fighting in the Great Schism, breaches in hul s temporarily sealed with sheets of al oy and drive housings crumpled from impact. One ship wasn’t a ship at al . It was just the aft section with its drive, a wreck recovered for parts. But there were no Huragok left to carry out the engineering work.
There seemed to be a lot more empty berths than Jul remembered.
The guard, an old warrior, was a monument to lonely patience. He didn’t look as if he’d dared move a muscle throughout his watch. Buran walked up to him with arms spread in greeting.
“How goes it, Pidar?” he asked. “I didn’t realize you were stil serving. ”
“This level of activity best suits my age, Shipmaster. ” Pidar looked on nodding terms with death already, but retirement was out of the question for a warrior. “Have you come to inspect Resolve? I’m sorry, but no maintenance has been carried out yet. At least she’s stil here, though. Some Jiralhanae crews have sided with their brother traitors and stolen ships. ”
“Did nobody try to stop them?”
“Hard to do, Shipmaster. They never returned to port. And al the Huragok have fled, although I wonder who gave them passage. ”
“Appal ing,” Buran said, very convincing in his disgust. “May we pass? I’ve brought some brothers to see what we can achieve with our own hands. ”
“Shocking, my lord, that shipmasters should have to repair their own ships. ”
“Nevertheless, it must be done. ” Buran tilted his head toward the airlock. The ship was connected to the dockside by an assortment of umbilical cables and conduits, one of them a pressure-sealed brow for the crew to board. “We do what we can. We plan to run up her drives and test her helm, Pidar, so if you’ve been relieved by the time I return, give my regards to your kaidon. It’s been good to see you again. ”
Pidar didn’t appear to notice the finality and regret in that. He just stood back and opened the inner airlock door for everyone to file across the brow. So this was how rebels seized a ship; they just spoke politely to a guard who assumed—as he ought—that a shipmaster was beyond reproach, and walked up the brow without a single shot being fired. It wasn’t satisfying or something to boast about to the youngsters of the keep in his old age, but Jul had to admit that it worked.
Buran opened one of the supply hatches and stuck his head in to take a deep breath.
“It stinks,” he said flatly. “Filthy Kig-Yar cowards. So that’s one problem I no longer have to deal with. They’ve al deserted. ” He squeezed through the hatch and dropped down into the deck. “Very wel , let’s see how much ordnance they forgot to loot. ”
“We can worry about that later,” ‘Telcam said. “I have my sources for resupply. What we need most is transport. A mobile command center, as a precaution. ”
Buran turned to the Jiralhanae. “Search the ship. If you find any Kig-Yar stil around, you have my permission to eat them. In fact, I insist. ”
The two Jiralhanae lumbered away down the passage. Jul wondered how the Covenant had held together for as long as it had, given how fast the old species’ hatreds resurfaced once the restraints of San’Shyuum domination were stripped away. It was a very thin veneer of unity. And now it was gone.
And how long can we trust the Jiralhanae who are still with us?
Jul looked at Forze and knew he was thinking the same thing. There was probably no such thing as a loyal Jiralhanae, only one that was more scared of his Sangheili superiors than he was of his packmates’ wrath or his reputation. The two species loathed one another. It was just a matter of keeping a close eye on those that remained.