“Where are all the other doctors?” Naomi asked. “There were always more than this.”
That made no sense at all. Staffan glanced at Lena. She looked worried too. Just when he thought it would be enough to have Naomi back alive, it looked like they had a new problem.
“Keep an eye on her for the next few days,” the doctor said. “I’ll refer her to the consultant neurologist. It’s the memory loss that concerns me. She might just be scared of a telling-off, but let’s err on the side of caution.”
Staffan carried Naomi to the car and put her in the backseat. She was still clutching her satchel. He watched her for a moment, desperate to see some hint of the normal Naomi, but maybe that was asking too much. She opened the satchel and looked inside as if she wasn’t sure what was in there. Lena drove while he sat in the back, holding Naomi’s hand. It was more for his benefit than hers.
“No school for a few days, sweetie,” Lena said. “You’ve had a nasty fright, that’s all.”
Staffan didn’t think that Naomi would ever be too scared to tell him anything, but there was always a first time. Maybe the doctor was right; maybe she’d behaved like a little girl for a change instead of a child prodigy.
“We’re not angry with you, baby,” he said. “But did you go into town to look at that doll’s house again?”
Naomi gazed up at him, baffled. “What doll’s house?”
“Doesn’t matter.” That was weird. She couldn’t have forgotten it already. “I’ve got you something even better for your birthday.”
“Okay.” That was all she said. “Okay.”
Staffan was really scared now. There was something wrong. When they got home, he tucked her up in a blanket on the sofa and sat watching her for the rest of the day, frightened to take his eyes off her. Whatever had happened, she was a lot quieter than normal. When she got up to go to the bathroom, she stood in the hallway for a moment as if she was working out where it was, and Lena had to lead her upstairs. When she came back and started reading her book, she turned it over from time to time to frown at the cover, and she didn’t finish her favorite sandwich—crustless triangles filled with mashed egg, dill, and mayonnaise. Lena put her to bed early and she didn’t beg for a few more minutes to finish the chapter. She didn’t do anything that she usually did.
Weird. Wrong.
“Yeah, I think she’s ill,” Lena said, folding the blanket. “Whatever the doctor said, she’s sickening for something. Flu, maybe.”
“I hope that’s all it is.”
Lena just looked at him, arms folded. “And we’ll keep a closer eye on her, because Naomi or not, we nearly lost her. She’ll grow up fast enough. Until we know exactly what happened, she isn’t going anywhere on her own again, okay?”
“Okay.”
It was strange how Naomi had forgotten all about the doll’s house. Some kids had a different fad every day, but once Naomi set her mind to something, it was hard to derail her. Perhaps she’d been into the shop after all, seen how much the doll’s house cost, and realized that she was expecting a very expensive thing. Maybe she’d felt guilty about that, and was too embarrassed to come home and admit it until she’d worked out a way to change her mind without sounding like she felt her dad had let her down.
Come on, she’s smart, but she’s still five—okay, six. On the other hand … she’s like her grandma. She’ll pretend she didn’t really want it after all.
Staffan couldn’t afford the doll’s house, but he could certainly make one like it. How hard could it be? He worked in a machine shop. If he could cut and grind metal to fine tolerances, he could make a wooden house and all the furniture that went in it. And he could make it special and personal for her.
But that would take time. Naomi needed something special right now. He unwrapped the planetarium lamp and put it on the table next to her bed. She opened her eyes just as he switched it on and filled the room with drifting stars.
“There,” he said. “You’ve got the whole galaxy now. And all the galaxies beyond it. See that one? And that? Can you remember what it’s called?”
Naomi gazed up at the ceiling. She seemed mesmerized. “No. But it’s pretty.”
She could normally name the constellations. Staffan put his hand on her forehead, but she didn’t feel feverish. “We got it for your birthday. But you deserve a treat right now.”
“Thank you, Daddy. I’m sorry for not remembering.”
“It doesn’t matter, sweetheart. You’ll be right as rain before long.” He turned the dial to the rainbow setting. If she woke in the night, the first thing she’d see would be the soothing play of lights. He stroked her hair as she watched the ceiling. He had his little girl back, and right then nothing else mattered. “Just enjoy the stars.”
CHAPTER
TWO
EVERY VESSEL COUNTS. WE CAN’T YET REPLACE WHAT WE LOSE, SO THE WAR AGAINST THE ARBITER AND THE OTHER BLASPHEMERS MAY BE WON OR LOST ON A SINGLE HULL. WE NEED TO RECOVER PIOUS INQUISITOR FROM THE KIG-YAR. THE SIMPLEST WAY TO FIND HER IS TO PAY ANOTHER KIG-YAR TO BETRAY HIS OWN KIND. THEY HAVE NO HONOR—FORTUNATELY.
—SHIPMASTER AVU MED ‘TELCAM, SERVANT OF THE ABIDING TRUTH, ADDRESSING REBELLION COMMANDERS AT HIS HEADQUARTERS ON LAQIL, FORMERLY THE HUMAN COLONY WORLD NEW LLANELLI
UNSC PORT STANLEY IN STEALTH MODE, OFF VENEZIA; THIRTY-FIVE YEARS LATER—APRIL 2553
“Smooth icing,” Mal Geffen said, gesturing at Adj. “Come on, BB. Can’t you make him understand? I thought you’d fixed his translator.”
BB projected his plain, box-shaped avatar into Port Stanley’s galley, where Mal, Devereaux, and Adj were putting the finishing touches to a cake for Osman. Adj floated around the table, occasionally reaching out a tentacle to tease a layer of navy blue frosting into even more ragged peaks. On closer inspection, the curved tips of the frosting turned out to not to be random; they were fractals. Huragok didn’t do anything by halves. The common name for them, Engineers, didn’t even begin to cover their skills.
“Serves you right for using the galaxy’s most sophisticated organic computer as a food processor, Staff.”
“I was trying to be inclusive,” Mal said. “You know. Team building.”
BB projected two holographic tentacles to begin signing. Huragok appreciated someone talking to them in their own language.
Adj’s translucent mantle shimmered with a hint of violet bioluminescence. If he’d been agitated, he’d have lit up like a Christmas tree.
BB signed. Huragok knew best, and it baffled them that humans sometimes didn’t want what was best.
Mal leaned against the counter, arms folded, and fixed Adj with a narrow-eyed stare. “Is he pissed off because he thinks cooking’s beneath him?”
“No, he’s fine, and he understands you perfectly well.”
It was clear to BB that Mal was joking, but maybe not to Adj. “Just being arsey, then.”
“Let’s say perfectionist.”
Huragok didn’t care what they were doing as long as they were busy and improving things. Sometimes that meant more elegant patisserie; sometimes it meant a more lethal nuclear missile. They didn’t seem to make moral judgments. BB marveled at the human capacity to see that as innocence rather than an inherent danger.
Adj switched to his translator’s quiet, monotone male voice.
He’d had the last word, which seemed to make him happy. His mantle sparkled with bioluminescence as he reworked the frosting. BB wondered if that was the Huragok equivalent of whistling while he worked.
“Can you write ‘Congratulations Rear Admiral Osman’ on the top as well, please?” Devereaux asked. “In gold?”<
br />
Adj waited.
“And in English,” Devereaux said, taking the hint.
BB took that as a scolding. Adj pounced on the cake and in seconds it was as smooth as a Johansson block. His tentacles plunged into the bowl of sugar again, worked furiously, and strands of gleaming gold paste emerged. One paid out like a rope trick onto the top of the cake to form the lettering, and two more—one wide strip, one narrow—appeared as a replica of a rear admiral’s lace. How he’d managed to build metallic color into the sugar was anyone’s guess.
Adj placed the sugar braid around the sides of the cake, then licked one tentacle with a tiny anteater tongue. Huragok could adapt to survive on any energy source, and even recharge from a power outlet, but when given a choice they seemed to prefer something sugary. It just added to their deceptive cuteness as far as BB was concerned.
“Thanks, Adj.” Devereaux put her hand on his back like a favorite child. “You’ll never be unemployed. Do you want us to save a couple of slices for you and Leaks?”
Adj drifted away, job done. Sharing food was one thing, but the minutiae of human social customs appeared to be of no interest to him.
Mal slid the cake onto a tray and stood back to admire it. It really was very professional. “Okay, BB. Where’s Phillips?”
“Moping around on the hangar deck.”
“Really?”
“He’s preoccupied.”
“The hinge-heads.”
“He felt he should have saved them.”
“Hinge-heads.”
“He sees them as women and children.”
“Okay, I’m going to put my boot up his arse and un-preoccupy him.” Mal would probably take Phillips to one side and give him a sympathetic sergeantly chat instead, but BB could translate Geffenese now. The time to brace for impact was when he went quietly polite. “Christ, you can’t save every stray in the kennels. Are you going to round him up, or shall I?”
“I’ll do it,” Devereaux said. “I’ve got the special touch.”
“Don’t leave any bruises.”
Devereaux made a show of tucking her shirt in her belt and tidying her hair as she headed for the door. “Poor old Phyllis. He’s got to learn not to make pets of species we might have to kill.”
She had a soft spot for Phillips. BB wondered whether to give the relationship a gentle nudge in the right direction, but decided to mind his own business for once. Mal adjusted the cake on the tray and sighed.
“Do you want a single red rose to put with that?” BB teased.
Mal raised a middle finger. “Vaz is the one with a thing for Spartans. Not me.”
“Oo-oo-ooh…” Sometimes Mal would respond to a heart-to-heart, but sometimes dressing things up in a joke worked better. “Is it Naomi you’re worried about, Staff? Or are you missing Vaz? You do get stroppy when your little chum’s away.”
“I worry about everybody. It’s my job.” Mal fidgeted with the cake again. “Osman doesn’t seem delirious about her promotion. Is she okay?”
“Oh, it’s just the sobering reality of coming one step closer to omnipotence. That’s much healthier than the alternative. Look, would you excuse me a moment? I have to pay a courtesy visit to Admiral Parangosky.”
Mal opened the galley lockers to collect plates and napkins. “I thought you could do fifty things at once.”
“I can, but you get confused by it. Linear time. Don’t you just hate it?”
BB could spread his attention through a thousand separate systems in locations light-years apart, but he tried to keep his visible presence restricted to one place at a time. I’m not going soft. No face, no limbs, none of that cutesy-pie corporealist nonsense. Really. It’s just good manners. He wasn’t trying to be human, just considerate of his human crewmates. He split off a fragment of himself and rode Stanley’s instant comms channel to appear in Margaret Parangosky’s office, light-years’ away in UNSC’s Bravo-6 HQ in Sydney.
Parangosky looked up from her elevenses—Kona coffee, one sugar, two ginger nut biscuits—and smiled. “Morning, BB. How’s our brand-new admiral?”
“We’re waiting for the List to be formally promulgated before we wheel out the cake, ma’am.”
“I’ll send her a Bravo Zulu later. Everything okay?”
“We’re expecting a sitrep from Venezia in a couple of hours.”
“I’m not stepping on Osman’s turf.”
“Of course you’re not.”
“Just curious. Mainly about the Naomi situation.”
BB thought that over for several nanoseconds, an AI’s eternity. It was a delicate topic. “How would you feel if you discovered your father was not only still alive but living on Venezia under surveillance by DCS counter-terrorism?”
“That wasn’t quite what I was asking.”
“Naomi’s a Spartan, ma’am. And a Spartan-Two, at that. If you can’t rely on a Spartan, who can you trust?”
“That wasn’t what I was asking, either.”
“Ah. I see.” BB read between the lines. “Kilo-Five is very close-knit. Very supportive of their oppos. Very loyal. But they do the job, regardless of their personal feelings, or else Dr. Halsey would be frozen solid and floating somewhere in space by now. Wouldn’t she?”
Parangosky laughed, a throaty chuckle. “I’ll cherish that image on dull days, BB. It’ll be my happy place.” She checked her watch. “CINCFLEET’s releasing the List at noon, Alpha Time. Do you think Osman’s getting cold feet about doing the job?”
The job meant only one thing; Parangosky’s job, Commander in Chief of the Office of Naval Intelligence. BB fully understood her fixation with making sure she was succeeded by someone with the right stuff, which in ONI’s case was best described as the bad stuff. Parangosky had transformed the branch from just another tribe within the rivalry-ridden intelligence world to effectively its sole power—clear in its purpose, unflinching in its resolve, and free of the budget squabbles that made agencies put preserving their own existence before the needs of Earth. BB had no illusions about the bodies that Parangosky had buried to achieve that, but only the very mean-spirited would deny that the woman was brilliant. Even as a mere captain, she’d punched well above her weight and brought down senior officers. When nobody wanted the Department of Colonial Security after the CAA fell from grace, she took it on as a doer-upper and acquired her own instant spy army of civilians with no preexisting loyalties to anyone else in the UNSC.
That took vision. Parangosky had it in spades. It extended beyond her own lifetime, too, which was where Serin Osman came in, because this wasn’t about empire or the exercise of power, but the pursuit of a goal that would span generations. BB, doomed to a seven-year life span, took enormous comfort from a human who refused to let a small detail like being dead stop her from finishing what she’d started.
“I think Osman just needs a sustained run of unsavory choices to harden her casing,” BB said. “That’s the trouble with spending her formative years in the Spartan program. Her default setting is to seize the initiative and go it alone. To take one for the team. Not to send someone else to die in her place.”
“And to bond with her squad. I am aware, BB.”
BB picked his words as carefully as someone trying to avoid the coffee cremes in a box of chocolates. Coffee cremes. Why did I think that? I’ve never even seen them. “I know you couldn’t possibly have set this up, Admiral, but I imagine the dilemma presented by Naomi’s father will be rather character-forming for Osman.”
There was a hair-fine line to walk between serving Osman and knowing what not to tell Parangosky, and Parangosky made it clear that she knew BB walked it. Sometimes he wondered whether it was a test to check that he would side with Osman instead of her if push came to shove—as he had to, as Osman would need him to when she became CINCONI. Parangosky was ninety-two and had ruled the Office of Naval Intelligence with a rod of unforgiving iron for decades, making some people di
sappear and others wish that they could. Osman was only forty-one, which was nowhere near enough time to build a throne of skulls like Parangosky’s. On the other hand, her early childhood had been one of life-or-death survival in Halsey’s boot camp on Reach, so he wondered how fast the adult Osman would revert to that primal ruthlessness when her back was against the wall.
And she’d been raised on the concept of killing a human enemy, colonial terrorists, not the clear-cut and easily digested threat of invading alien monsters. She was used to morally dirty warfare. No, she’d be fine. BB was sure of it.
He felt he’d been waiting minutes for Parangosky’s reply, but that was the price of being an AI, running so fast that a blink for a human was an hour’s internal debate for him. She’d simply paused for a second to brush a crumb of ginger nut off her jacket. The biscuits sounded like concrete when she crunched on them. Even in her choice of cookies, the old girl liked something that put up a fight.
“Very well, BB,” she said. “Keep me posted.”
He rode the comms channel back to Port Stanley in an upbeat mood. There was good news to impart, even if it wasn’t actually news to anybody, and he enjoyed being the bearer because it was always in short supply. He changed his box-shaped avatar into a gold envelope and projected himself at eye level above the desk in Osman’s day cabin.
“Ta-da.” His hologram glittered with a ripple of light. The latest Fleet promotions list, known simply as The List in every wardroom across the fleet, was the UNSC’s official notification of which officers had been promoted and which were doomed to toil in the same rank for another year, or maybe forever. BB opened the envelope’s flap and slid out a holographic sheet of paper with an accompanying drum roll. “And the winner is … gosh, not Captain Hogarth! Not even nominated for best-supporting minion. No, it’s Rear Admiral Osman.”
Osman leaned back a little, almost cringing from the news. “I’m not breaking out the Krug for this, you know. Maybe a cup of ONI’s finest Jamaican, though.”