“Okay, Dev, you’re covered,” he called. “Out you go.”
Devereaux jumped down from the starboard door with a canister of metal foam and ducked under the wing. Naomi followed her. There was still no movement in the Phantom. Vaz wondered if the hinge-head was flying it on his own and didn’t like the odds.
“How’s it looking, Dev?” Mal asked.
Devereaux sounded as if she was scrambling up the hull. “I can fill in the skin, but it’s going to take some time to repair the conduits. I might have to just seal off the lines and risk overheating. Anything beats letting the Sangheili get their hands on her.”
“Or us.” Mal switched over to Stanley’s channel, triggering the feed in Vaz’s HUD. “Ma’am, are you getting this? Dev’s trying to fix the coolant.”
“I can see it, Staff,” Osman said. “BB’s monitoring the comms. Forze’s trying to contact ‘Telcam.”
“What’s he asking?”
“Whether he should let you go or stop you leaving.”
“We could just fire an Anvil up his turbine now, ma’am. That might attract more of them, though, and we can’t make a fast getaway.”
“Just let me talk to them,” Phillips murmured.
Osman carried on like she hadn’t heard him. “We can probably give you some assistance if you need it. The cavalry’s arrived, all six kilometers of it. Well, five and a bit. We’ve got some pruning to do to make sure the Arbiter–‘Telcam game is a draw, so I’m anxious to get you off Sanghelios pronto.”
“Oh. That cavalry. Is her paint dry yet?”
“Maybe not. No carpets, but she’s fast and nasty.”
“We’ll let you know if we can’t fix it. The fewer people we have to extract, the better. Keep it simple.”
“Don’t take any more risks. I’ve told BB to spy on you and alert me if you do.”
“Understood, ma’am. Kilo-Five out.”
Vaz watched Mal’s expression brighten. He could put on a brave face at the end of the world, but there was resilient, and then there was pleased. He was verging on pleased.
“They haven’t sent Infinity all this way for us,” Vaz said. “Seriously?”
“Nah, they’re rattling the galaxy’s biggest saber.”
“Saber wasn’t the word I had in mind.”
“Yes, it’s all very Freudian. Ours is bigger than theirs.” Mal leaned on the door gun again. “Let’s just get this done and RTB. Oh … here we go. Look.”
The ramp of the Phantom began to lower. Vaz sighted up. He had no idea how many Elites were in there, one or a whole platoon, but he’d make sure he got them before they got him. Mal’s grip tightened on the trigger.
“It’s not like them to hang around,” he said.
Two hinge-heads came down the ramp, one in a shipmaster’s armor and the other a smaller figure—possibly a female—in a fabric tunic. The female stopped at the foot of the ramp while the shipmaster carried on toward Tart-Cart with his pistol held at his side.
“They’re heading this way, Dev,” Vaz said. “You two want to get inside?”
The shipmaster suddenly looked toward the tail of the dropship. It must have been Naomi. A Spartan could always get a hinge-head’s attention. He slowed down and finally stopped about thirty meters from Tart-Cart.
“Okay, BB, translate for me,” Vaz said. He slid down from the door and took a couple of paces toward the shipmaster. “So you’re Forze, are you?”
“I am,” said the hinge-head. “‘ Telcam told me to find Philliss and bring him back, because he needs to honor a promise. Who are you?”
“We’re UNSC marines,” Vaz said. “Does ODST mean anything to you?”
“Ah, the fools who arrive conveniently packaged in their own coffins.”
“Well, we’ve got Phillips, and we’re heading home as soon as we’re ready.” Vaz thought he was doing really well. He was having a civilized conversation with a hinge-head when all he really wanted to do was open fire and make sure it never got the chance to kill another human. “What are you waiting for?”
“Because I don’t know why ‘Telcam would do a favor for humans, and that’s a question that would have troubled a comrade of mine.”
Mal said nothing. Naomi walked into Vaz’s peripheral vision from the left, slow and deliberate. This was the awkward bit: ‘Telcam couldn’t tell his pals that he was getting arms from ONI. Vaz could see why all this looked dodgy to them. Forze meant Jul. Jul had followed ‘Telcam to a handover and that was when Naomi had jumped him. The monk didn’t seem to inspire trust in his sidekicks.
“Forze, it’s okay.” Phillips stuck his head out of the door. Forze stared at him. “These are my friends. Ask ‘Telcam. He needs me to get home safely. Go on, ask him.”
“Get back inside, Phillips,” Mal whispered. “Now.”
Vaz kept a wary eye on the female. This could have been a clever distraction, and he’d seen what hinge-head women could do in a fight. She was watching, head cocked, very intent. She had a plasma pistol in her belt, though. That was warning enough for Vaz.
“Is that your wife?” he asked. He couldn’t judge the age of Elites and he wasn’t worried about offending them. “Daughter?”
Forze didn’t look around at her. Vaz didn’t blame him for not turning his back on humans.
“My friend’s wife,” Forze said. “She came with me to search for him. Why?”
Phillips was still being a pain in the ass. He wouldn’t get back inside and Vaz was on the verge of shoving him out of the way. The best he could do was to raise a discreet warning finger.
Keep it zipped, Prof.
“What was your friend’s problem with ‘Telcam?” Phillips asked, taking no damn notice.
“He wanted to know where he got his supplies. Jul always asks awkward questions.”
He’d let the name slip. Well, that didn’t take them any further. They knew all the connections.
Phillips still went on, though. “So this is Jul’s wife.”
“What does that matter to you?” Forze asked.
“I’m trying to work out what I need to tell you to convince you that these are the people ‘Telcam was going to hand me over to.”
Forze looked down his nose at Phillips. Vaz stood by to cut off any more conversation. Then Forze turned for a second and called out to the female. “Raia, try to contact ‘Telcam again. Tell him there are coffin-worms here who say they have a right to take Phillips.”
“Say the name Osman to him,” Phillips called. Vaz decided enough was enough and got back into the crew bay to shove him out of sight. “Then he’ll know it’s okay.”
“Phillips, shut up, will you?” Vaz bundled him inside and held him back. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Authenticating.” He seemed upset, looking from side to side. “And realizing what I am.”
“Alive. That’s what you are, so let’s keep it that way.” So that was Jul’s wife. It wasn’t a happy thought and he could see that it upset Phillips, but that was just too bad. Nobody had asked the hinge-heads to start a war with humans so now they had to live with the consequences. “Stay inside and shut up.”
Phillips looked a little hurt. Vaz went back to the door and squatted beside Mal. Forze was just standing there, arms at his sides. There was no sign of the female.
“Where did she go?” Vaz asked.
“Back in the ship,” Mal muttered. “Christ, this is bloody weird. I’m not cut out for this secret squirrel stuff. What’s Phillips up to? Trying to forge some bond with them so they don’t blow the crap out of us?”
“He’s feeling guilty and trying to fix things.”
Mal got on the radio. “Talking of which, Dev, how are we doing?”
“I need something like a length of fuel line or polymer tubing,” she said. “I can’t tie off what’s left. It’s too short. I might be able to clamp a new section in, though.”
“Are you telling me we’re stuck here?”
“Maybe.”
Ma
l didn’t say anything but dropped his head for a second or two. Vaz patted his back. “Hey, remember when we hijacked that Spirit on Imber?”
“You’re not suggesting we nick the Phantom, are you?”
“We could. We’d have to destroy Tart-Cart, though.”
“I heard that,” Devereaux said. “And the answer’s over my dead body.”
“What about trashing the Phantom for parts? Hey, BB, you’re not translating all this, are you?”
BB sighed. “Vaz, have you got enough fingers to calculate my IQ? No. Oh, look … here comes Mrs. ‘Mdama. Is she smiling? It’s so hard to tell.”
Jul’s wife strode across to Forze and said something to him. Forze held out his arms, whatever that meant, and took a few steps closer to Tart-Cart.
“‘ Telcam says he understands but he also expects agreements to be honored.”
Mal nodded. “We’ll pass that on.”
“He’s told me to offer you help with repairs.”
“Pipe,” Devereaux said instantly. “Ask him for a couple of meters of solvent-proof flexible tubing, about fifty-millimeter diameter, and any composite solder he can find.”
“Forze, have you got any fuel line?” Mal asked. He held his fingers apart. “This wide. And composite solder.”
Forze rolled his head and walked back to the Phantom in silence, Raia ‘Mdama trailing behind him and occasionally looking back at the dropship. He came down the ramp again with a snake’s wedding of pipes and wire coiled in his arms and walked right up to Tart-Cart to dump them in a heap on the ground.
“I know little of mechanics,” Forze said. “We had Engineers for that. This is all I could find.”
“Thanks.” Mal gave him a thumbs-up and Forze walked off, apparently confident that Vaz wouldn’t shoot him in the back. Devereaux appeared from under the wing and began sorting through the pile.
“Great,” she said, whipping out a pocket gauge and measuring the diameters. “If I ever get back to the mess, I’ll tell this story and I’ll never have to buy another beer as long as I live.”
“Does any of it fit?” Vaz asked.
“This bit might.”
While they waited, the Phantom’s drives started up and the ship lifted off. Naomi watched it out of sight and then climbed back into the crew bay. Vaz followed her inside and sat down between her and Phillips.
“She doesn’t know where her husband is,” Phillips said. “Doesn’t know if he’s alive or dead. That’s my fault.”
Naomi folded her arms. “I did it, actually. So you can stop beating yourself up about it.”
“Yeah, they’d have glassed Sydney and everything else if they’d had a chance,” Vaz said.
“And the females and children at Nes’alun. What the hell happened to them? I just abandoned them.”
“Prof, it’s hinge-head on hinge-head violence. None of your business.” Vaz tried to bite down on his temper. Here they were, marooned in a damaged ship behind enemy lines, and Phillips was worrying about Elites who would have used him for target practice without a second thought. “We didn’t start it and we won’t finish it. Usyok?”
It was rude, and even if Phillips didn’t speak Russian he could understand the tone. He shut up. Vaz suddenly felt guilty for snarling at him. The guy was just a civvie. He’d done pretty damn well for someone who didn’t know how to use a weapon or carry out recons. Vaz reached over and slapped his back to make amends, embarrassed.
“Sorry, Prof,” he said. “You must have been scared shitless. You did a great job. You even grabbed a souvenir. Not that we needed any more plasma pistols with a hold full of them, but they say provenance adds value.”
“I didn’t know you were coming for me,” Phillips said meekly. “I thought I was supposed to try to escape.”
“We never leave our people behind. Not even the annoying ones.”
Vaz debated whether to lance a few more boils and raise the topic of BB’s fragmentation issues, but it didn’t feel like the right time. BB didn’t seem to be joining in the conversation at all; he didn’t even manifest himself. Vaz watched the time tick by in his HUD, then took off his helmet and went outside to pass the time, watching creatures that could have been birds or even disturbingly big insects wheeling around overhead on the thermals.
“Vultures,” Vaz said.
Mal didn’t blink. “Bluebirds of happiness.”
Naomi squeezed past them and jumped out to stalk around the edge of the wing. “Someone’s got to secure the ship,” she said. “Just in case.”
“Okay,” said Mal, “a paranoid, a depressive, and an incurable optimist walk into a bar, and—”
Devereaux cut in on the radio. “Someone get off their ass and give me a hand with this, please.”
“Coming, dear.” Mal pushed the door gun over to Vaz and trotted off. “You want a big strong man to do it for you?”
“Yeah. Find me one, will you?”
The hinge-heads could come back at any time so Vaz didn’t plan to relax. He put his helmet back on to check the feed from the drone cams, most of which seemed to be focused on Vadam. It was hard to square the memory of Manny Barakat and all the other ODSTs who hadn’t made it home from glassed, murdered colony worlds with a hinge-head like Forze helping out with spare parts, or the mother Elite defending her kids to the death. Gray areas were interesting, but Vaz couldn’t live his life in them. There was one side, and there was the other, and he knew which one was his.
He still felt worse about not shooting Halsey than leaving a bunch of hinge-heads to fight for their lives.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
THE PROBLEM FOR AN AI ISN’T DOING A THOUSAND THINGS AT ONCE. IT’S SLOWING DOWN AND IMPARTING ALL THAT INFORMATION TO HUMANS. I LOVE YOU ALL TO BITS, BUT YOU’RE SOMETHING OF A BOTTLENECK IN MY PROCESSES.
(ONI SPECIAL OPERATIONS AI BLACK-BOX, EXPLAINING IMPATIENCE TO HIS ORGANIC COLLEAGUES)
UNSC PORT STANLEY: HANGAR BAY
“The first thing I’m going to do is to put Adj and Leaks to work on upgrading the comms,” BB said. He realized he’d missed the Huragok touch around the place. “Then the drives. Then they can work on the drones.”
Osman fastened the collar of her jacket as if Parangosky’s arrival was an admiralty inspection. The Pelican settled in Stanley’s hangar bay and the outer doors sealed, accompanied by the hiss of repressurization and flashing vacuum hazard lights.
“Aren’t you even going to offer them a cup of nutrient sludge first?” she asked. “They’re ship’s company now. Besides, we can’t afford the downtime at the moment.”
“They’ll take minutes. Okay, an hour, perhaps. We’ve got plenty of material they can use.”
“You’re a slave driver.” She snapped to attention. “Admiral on deck. Look sharp.”
The hazard lights stopped and the inner doors parted. BB put all thoughts of his damaged fragment out of his mind and positioned his avatar to one side of the ramp, honor guard style, with his box edges extra-defined in lieu of standing to attention.
If the two Huragok were going to be a permanent addition to the crew, he’d have to find a way of firewalling his more sensitive sectors. The creatures were just too thorough for his liking. Adj had behaved himself on his last stay and heeded warnings to stay away from certain things, so perhaps BB could get around the problem by just giving both Huragok a stiff talking-to. If that didn’t work, he’d have to add partitions to his matrix. The thought of them poking around in his code and knowing his most private processes was rather … creepy.
Hoist by my own petard. Now I know how the crew feels.
The ramp lowered and Parangosky stood at the top, clutching a small candy-striped bag. Somehow arriving with gifts did nothing to make her seem less fearsome. She made her way down the deck and placed the bag in Osman’s hand. Ginger. It had to be crystallized ginger. There were things that even BB didn’t know.
“Just a very quick visit, Serin.” She used Osman’s first name more often now, as
if the captain was making the transition from protégé to peer. “Ginger. Let me know when you run out.” Parangosky turned around and looked back at the open door. “Come on, don’t be shy, Adj. You know Captain Osman.”
Adj drifted out of the dropship, leading another Huragok by one of its tentacles. It was quite touching: they looked like refugees. They drifted to a halt in front of Osman and gazed around the hangar, probably working out what to completely rebuild first.
“The other one’s called Leaks Repaired,” Parangosky whispered, as if they wouldn’t hear her. “They’ve both consolidated the Forerunner knowledge from Onyx, so you can safely let them loose on BB’s translation project now.”
“Welcome back, Adj,” Osman said, holding out her hand. Adj wrapped a tentacle around it but didn’t quite manage to shake it. Still, it was the thought that counted. “Hello, Leaks. This is BB. He can do Huragok sign language.”
BB extruded a set of holographic tentacles.
“There, everyone’s made friends now.” Osman seemed to think it was a greeting. “What’s the plan?”
“Hood’s making contact with the Arbiter about now,” Parangosky said, checking her watch. “It’s all going to be about timing. The more rebels who show up at Vadam, the easier it is to give them a MAC surprise, so we need to work out how and when to tip off ‘Telcam. We’ll be in BB’s capable hands for comms monitoring.”
“Infinity too?”
“Aine’s not a combat AI, let alone spec ops or intel.”
“But she’s going to have to manage the firing solutions, surely.”
“She has dumb AI capability for that. She won’t mind BB carrying out the intelligence functions.”
“Trust me, Captain.” BB drifted off after the Huragok, who’d started exploring the hangar. “She won’t even know I’ve been in her underwear drawer. Now come along, you two.” He signed flamboyantly.
Parangosky took out her datapad and scribbled. “Handy.”