Read The Thursday War Page 19

  “Very well.” He held his arms out from his sides. “I can’t stand these four walls any longer.”

  The Huragok hesitated for a moment, then rose to place the collar section over Jul’s head. He could see its tentacles working frantically and feel the slight movement of air that they generated. The creature was remaking the harness as it went. The collar was heavier than Jul expected.

  “Can this thing understand me?” he asked.

  “He has a translation device, yes. Whether you want to understand him is another matter.” Magnusson glanced at her datapad, smiling. The Huragok was obviously communicating with her. “He says he’s heard that Huragok have worn them with no ill effects. Until they go off, of course.”

  Jul was still coming to terms with human humor. He understood sarcasm a great deal better. Perhaps that observation had come from her, and maybe it really had come from the Huragok, but either way they were mocking him. The idea of a Huragok with a sarcastic side was more than he could accept. They were machines.

  The creature finished securing the harness. Jul could see no clips or closures, no obvious point at which to unfasten the straps, and he was sure that trying to cut or tear them would trigger the explosive.

  “Ask it a question for me,” he said.

  “Ask him yourself. His name’s Prone. Short for Prone to Drift.”

  “If you insist.” Jul found it impossible to make eye contact with it. It had too many eyes. “If you can put these devices on, why couldn’t you remove them from yourselves?”

  Prone floated over to the window and peeled Magnusson’s datapad from her hand. She seemed amused by it—him—and perhaps even a little fond. Huragok dismantled and rebuilt equipment so fast that it was hard to see exactly what they were doing. Prone’s cilia were a translucent blur for just a few seconds before he appeared to extract something the size of a claw from the screen of the datapad itself and returned the device to Magnusson. He drifted back toward Jul, holding the tiny fragment in one tentacle.

  “What’s that?” Jul demanded.

  Prone placed the object on Jul’s harness, where it merged instantly with the fabric and sat there like a decorative silver thread.

 

  Jul didn’t so much hear the words as feel them. It was like having a communicator buried in his skull. “I understand you.”

  Prone paused.

  Jul wondered if he detected a little vengeance in there somewhere. No, Huragok cared only about repairing and building. If they had any emotion, it was a response designed into them by the Forerunners to ensure that they were moved to compassion by the plight of faulty machinery. Had they been human … he knew humans well enough by now to realize they would exact revenge whenever servants became masters.

  Magnusson checked something on her datapad. “Got you. I can track you anywhere.”

  “May I go outside now?” Jul asked.

  “Yes, but be careful of the traffic.” It seemed like foolish advice, but she started laughing. “Prone was one of the custodians of this place, so I’m sure he’ll be your tour guide.”

  The words didn’t translate into Sangheili, but their meaning seemed clear in context and Jul made a note of them. He was picking up English a word at a time. Hinge-head. He’d finally worked that out.

  The armored guard stood back to let him pass with a completely blank expression, but his chin was drawn back a little as if he found Jul repellent and was trying to hold his breath. The man would probably have killed him if he hadn’t had orders not to. Suddenly Jul was in a narrow, featureless corridor with a door at one end and a rectangle of bright, beckoning sunlight set in it. His stomach was cramping and sore and his legs felt unsteady, but he drew himself up to his full height and strode toward the door with as much dignity as he could muster after vomiting and soiling himself for two days. The door opened as he approached it.

  The air was so sweet and fresh that it tasted like perfume. Jul sucked it in gratefully. Now he was standing in a quadrangle of prefabricated buildings around a central area of grass dotted with wild flowers. Through the gaps between them, he could see open downs dotted with more gray and steel blue buildings, and, in the far distance, elegant towers that could never have been made by humans.

  Magnusson shoved him gently in the small of his back.

  “Go on,” she said. “Go for a walk.”

  “Where?”

  “Go look at the Forerunner ruins. Be inspired. And Prone can show you where we’re growing the irukan.”

  Why was she doing this? Jul had asked himself that question a hundred times a day and none of the answers convinced him. She was far too compliant, far too soon. And that’s the same face that I present to her. But what if that’s what she wants? What if she’s observing me for some reason; what if this is exactly what she wants me to do? But that didn’t matter. He’d taken a vital step toward getting out of Trevelyan.

  He could waste the rest of his life asking himself endless questions and taking no action. It was time to act. He set off across the grass, unsteady and uncomfortably aware of the Huragok trailing a few paces behind him, but he kept going through the gap between the buildings and out into open land. He passed humans in pairs and groups, some of them wearing baggy single-piece garments in various drab colors with rank markings he didn’t understand, others in uniforms with gold trim that were more familiar. They looked at him with expressions that he’d learned to recognize—loathing, suspicion, dread—and some that he hadn’t. But none of them seemed startled or afraid. He wasn’t the victor here, the conqueror, the invader: he was their prisoner, a curiosity at best and an object of contempt at worst.

  When he finally stopped, his legs were shaking. He turned to look back on the human settlement and noted again how rapidly it had spread.

  Prone said.

  “Show me that first, then.”

  Prone did no more than lead him in the right direction. Huragok generally spoke when spoken to and volunteered nothing. But why would they? They were just machines. Jul could see the irukan now, a long, broad strip of yellow-green leaf topped with white spikes of seed heads that stretched over the brow of a small hill. That in itself was incredible. The crop took two seasons to mature, but here it was, growing and ripening in what could only have been days. It took longer than that to germinate. He remembered playing in the fields around Bekan as a child, digging up the seeds from the furrows while the Grunts who were still busy sowing it made angry gestures at him.

  “How did they achieve that?” he asked. “How did they make it grow this fast?”

  Prone said.

  Jul struggled with the word bubble. “A glass house? A plant shelter?”

 

  No Huragok he’d ever come across could manipulate time. That made these creatures even more dangerous as a weapon for the humans to use. Jul couldn’t yet imagine all the ways that could be misused, but he was certain that it would be. He walked through the crop, half expecting to find that it was somehow artificial, but the leaves smelled strongly when he accidentally trod on them. When he reached the top of the hill he looked down on another familiar sight that shouldn’t have been here in this outrageous lie of a world: colos, wandering around in pens with high fences that seemed to be woven loosely from strands of metal. The pens had concrete floors, and the animals nibbled at irukan plants piled in a mesh trough.

  It took him a few moments to work out what he was actually looking at. In one pen, the colos appeared strong and healthy, with thick, glossy coats. In the
other, they looked thin and listless. Some of them were stretched out on the floor, flanks heaving. He wasn’t sure why the humans had separated the flocks.

  “Do the humans know how to take care of these animals?” Jul asked. He didn’t, but any fool could tell what a sick colo looked like. “What’s wrong with the ones in that pen?”

  Prone said.

  Prone clearly had a talent for being annoyingly enigmatic. Jul would have to get more answers from Magnusson the next time she visited. He wondered if the colos were infected, and whether the same sickness was causing his symptoms. He carried on past the pens and Prone speeded up to head him off.

  The Huragok was remarkably insistent.

  Jul wanted nothing more than to curl up in a dark corner and sleep, but he was relatively free now and he was determined to make the most of it.

  “Take me to the nearest ruins, then.”

 

  Perhaps it was reverence. The word might have sounded disrespectful to the Huragok, and Jul knew just how sacred even the most derelict heap of crumbling stone was to the monks back home. Interfering with those relics could still mean death. He followed Prone in silence, getting closer to the elegant towers that he’d seen from a distance, until he could pick out the shapes of the gold stone blocks and the smooth curves. The buildings looked as if they’d been constructed yesterday. They were perfect.

  “So they’re not ruins,” he said. There were many remains of the Forerunners that were in excellent condition, but none like this. “What are they? What did they do?”

  Prone said.

  “Function?”

  Prone said, and didn’t elaborate.

  NES’ALUN KEEP, ACROLI, EIGHTY KILOMETERS FROM ONTOM

  “What are you?” Elar demanded. More females clustered around her, all armed and all staring at Phillips as if they were sizing him up for cuts of meat. “And how can you speak our language?”

  Phillips had no strategy to fall back on except harmlessness. He could see youngsters creeping into the hall to check what their mothers were doing. With any luck, the females wouldn’t open fire with kids around.

  “My name’s Evan Phillips,” he said. Now came the big gamble. Whose side was this keep on, if any? He prepped for some creative embroidery. “I’m … a language scholar. The Arbiter gave me permission to visit sacred sites to study the inscriptions. But I got lost.”

  The females loomed over him. Some of the kids were as tall as he was. But it was the plasma pistols that worried him most.

  “How, Efanphilliss?” Elar said.

  Phillips waited for a chance to play the arum card. Maybe one of the kids would have one. “How did I get lost?”

  “Yes. Nobody strays here by accident.”

  “I did. I stepped through a Forerunner portal in the temple at Ontom.”

  It had far more effect than he bargained for. Elar leaned over to stare into his eyes. It was that awful moment when you felt an animal’s breath and didn’t know if it was going to lick you or sink its teeth into your face. “Not possible. No monk does this. No human ever could.”

  Dengo butted in. “He did, my lady. I saw him. He just popped up in the holy ruins. Out of nowhere.”

  Everyone took a step back from Phillips. It was like the sun coming out. He would have preferred them to hail him as a miracle worker, but instead they just seemed more hesitant about ripping him limb from limb. He decided to quit while he was ahead.

  “It had a lock like an arum,” he said. “I opened it. Do you want me to show you?”

  They looked blank. He’d been sure that the arum was universally understood, but maybe not. Then one of the bigger kids stepped forward and thrust a polished ebony ball into his hands. Phillips smiled, utterly confident, and began to rotate and click the parts. The stone at its heart rattled invitingly.

  Click … click … click.

  This was taking longer than he expected. He could feel the parts moving and hear the whisper of wood on wood as the sections rotated and moved apart deep inside.

  Damn.

  He looked up for a moment into disbelieving eyes. This was a really bad time to find he’d lost his magic touch. Even the Grunts were watching, transfixed, as he gave it one more quarter-turn in its vertical axis. Then a sudden, reassuring chonk indicated that the core had opened. He shook the stone out into his sweating palm. It was scarlet shot with black veins, the size of a marble.

  “I think the arum was based on those locks somehow,” he said. “It’s a little link with the Forerunners.”

  Elar looked him up and down again. “Clever, but I hope you can make yourself more useful than that. You don’t look like a warrior. And that’s what we have most need of.”

  She caught him by the shoulder and steered him up the hall toward a window. The keep was all rough stone blocks, uneven flagstones, and heavyweight rustic wooden furniture, nothing like the polished minimalism of the places he’d visited in Vadam. When he looked through the long slit of rippled glass, he was staring down a shallow valley at a thick layer of smoke. Now he could see more buildings in the distance. That had to be the town itself.

  Elar leaned over Phillips as if she was checking what he was looking at. He’d never been stuck in a room with a group of Sangheili females before, and they smelled of clean feathers, distinctively different from the leather upholstery scent of the males. The youngsters were watching him intently with unnerving little head movements that reminded him way too much of baby mongooses being taught to hunt snakes. He felt like prey.

  “Our husbands have gone to fight the Arbiter,” Elar said. “And in their absence, the elder of Lacalu keep has come to seize our land because he’s a coward who can only fight females and infants.”

  Oh dear. I should have kept walking and found the Arbiter’s guy. “He’s loyal to the Arbiter, is he?”

  “He’s loyal to whoever enables him to claim our territory.” She let out a long hiss. “They’ll be back soon.”

  “Back?”

  “I thought you could speak Sangheili.”

  “I understood you. I’m just worried.”

  “Then this will comfort you. Shobar, give me that.” Elar held her hand out to one of the other females and took a pistol from her. She slapped it in Phillips’s palm. “Can you handle this?”

  It was far too big for him. He had to grip it in both hands like a submachine gun, which made him feel pretty warry until he saw how easily a bunch of housewives hefted the weapon in one hand.

  “You’ll need to show me how it works,” he said. Like I know the first thing about firearms. You promised to teach me, Vaz. “Is this the trigger?”

  “Yes. At least a hundred rounds. If you hold it down, though, it overcharges and you can destroy larger targets—provided someone doesn’t kill you while you’re waiting.”

  “I’ll stick to single shots, then.”

  “Most sensible.”

  Phillips thought of those screaming fighter craft zipping overhead. “Is this going to be any use against Banshees?”

  “They won’t use aircraft now they’ve cut us off from the town. They want this farm in one piece. This will be a siege. Especially as we shot down one of their smaller vessels.”

  Siege. No. Not again. This is not happening. Now I’m holed up with Ma Baker and her sisters.

  How the hell did he end up walking into another crisis after walking out of the first? He couldn’t take his eyes off the pistol. It was probably more of a danger to him than to the enemy. How fast would he burn through a hundred rounds?

  “I need to tell my ship where I am,” he said. “Will you let me contact the Arbiter?”

  “He won’t be able to save you.” Elar held up her free hand for silence, head cocked as if she’d heard something. “Shobar, go to the rear doors and take the Unggoy
with you. Efanphilliss, your call will have to wait.”

  Bang. Something crashed against the heavy doors behind him, shaking off particles of varnish. Smoke curled in around the cracks. Most of the children fled up the stairs but the bigger ones stayed, some armed with wooden staves, others with small pistols. Why not give me one of those? Maybe they weren’t real. If a battalion of crazed Sangheili commandos stormed the keep right then, though, Phillips didn’t know if he had what it took to pull the trigger. He wasn’t even going to get a chance to practice. One thing was certain. Whoever was outside wasn’t going to care if he was a human or a Sangheili in the heat of the moment, and most of the planet would still see him as the enemy.

  Bang. The door shook again. It sounded like lightning cracking overhead, not a battering ram. He guessed someone was using a plasma weapon on the doors. Bang. Elar and a couple of the other females just stood there calmly and slowly raised their pistols. Bang. And then one half of the door burst off its hinges.

  Phillips saw an arm poke through, but that was as far as it got. From that moment on he couldn’t take his eyes off the door or look to either side. Bolts of brilliant light poured in. He squeezed the trigger instinctively instead of ducking, and then his entire field of vision was a wall of what looked like continuous tracer fire. If there were any people—bodies—on the receiving end, he only saw them as vague dark shapes. The noise, the smell, and the smoke made him reel. He was holding the pistol so tightly that his right hand was starting to go numb. He only stopped when a big Sangheili hand slapped down on him and he realized the noise and plasma bolts were now coming from him and nobody else. There were a couple of bodies in the door frame, smoke curling off their backs, and the door was mostly charcoal splinters.

  “Stop,” Elar barked. “The door is dead now.”

  Phillips still couldn’t see a thing. His vision was dappled with bright red spots wherever he looked, the aftermath of staring into those points of light, but he felt charged up and hyper-alert again, almost shaky. God, he loved that feeling. He was scared shitless, but he could feel every nerve and muscle fiber in his body. He could almost see them. Elar stalked over the debris of the firefight and turned one of the bodies over with her boot.