He resisted breaking into a run. He was sure that would attract the attention of the surveillance drones. But he speeded up as much as he could and stood at the threshold of a hall whose ceiling was so high that it vanished into darkness. There was a wall to his right. When he took a step inside and his eyes adjusted to the light, he could see that the wall was covered with illuminated symbols, some stable and some constantly changing.
“Air conditioning,” said a voice behind him. “Fancy, but it’s still air conditioning.”
He spun around to find himself looking down at one of the guards. He hadn’t even heard the man approach. The guard held his rifle one-handed, not exactly aiming it, but he had a small device in one hand and tilted it so Jul could see it.
“If you ever see me back away fast,” the guard said, “it probably means I’m going to press this. We’ve all got one. And then the jellyfish guys will have to repair everything.”
So it was a remote detonator for his harness. It was another thing Jul might work on acquiring, but this wasn’t the right time. Very well; he would play this game and live up to the human expectation of a Sangheili.
“This is the work of the gods,” Jul said, playing his role with gusto. Blasphemy was an imaginary crime now. There was nobody up there to offend. “Show respect.”
“Whatever you say.” The guard stabbed a finger toward Prone. “You’re supposed to keep him out of operating areas. Do you understand?”
Prone drifted away, looking back as if he expected Jul to follow him. There was no point pushing the issue with the guard, because that would almost certainly end in being confined to the cell again. Jul walked off.
It was a tactical withdrawal, nothing more.
“So I’m not allowed to go into operating areas,” he said. “Where can I go?”
“By being blown up.”
Prone had said that a few times now. Jul decided that simply getting a better idea of the layout of the area would be time well spent. He moved off into open country and away from the towers, heading for the deserted town some distance away. As he reached the top of a ridge, he could see Warthog vehicles making their way slowly in the same direction, with a soldier on the back of one of them manning a gun. Two more Warthogs converged on a point and drew up side by side but facing opposite directions while their drivers talked. Perhaps the humans were drawing some conclusions by watching where he went and what he did.
Prone said suddenly. It was the first time he’d opened a conversation.
The closer Jul got, the more wonderful the buildings looked. The structures were silver-gray and smooth, all heights and shapes, almost inviting exploration. He could hear the Warthogs in the far distance. He expected one to come roaring down the road that led into the city to head him off and tell him he couldn’t enter, but nobody intercepted him, so he carried on between the buildings and into a large square. The first thing that struck him were that the doors were all wildly different heights, some human-sized and some two or three times taller than him.
The silence was extraordinary. Jul wondered whether the not-quite-gods had been killed or had found somewhere even better to hide.
“So the Forerunners planned to shelter here until the galaxy was cleansed of the Flood,” he said. “They must have intended to re-create their society here. Their entire civilization. The Halo would have destroyed everything sentient outside when it was activated.”
Prone said.
“There weren’t that many of them, then.” If there had been billions upon billions, there would have been many more cities visible, unless the Forerunners had construction techniques he couldn’t even imagine, let alone see. Perhaps, though, this was a shelter for the chosen few, and the less fortunate Forerunners would have perished. “Only enough to populate this planet. Was this all they had?”
Prone drifted from doorway to doorway, looking as if he was lost.
The Huragok was an irritating mix of rational explanation and cryptic comment, but Jul still wasn’t sure which was which. “No longer what?”
“What isn’t?”
There was no point getting angry with a Huragok because it didn’t achieve anything. Sometimes they’d even flee to avoid confrontation, and Jul wanted this one to trust and obey him. He waited for the answer.
Prone said. He made a sad little keening noise, starting high and dropping to a low note that faded into a breath.
That seemed perfectly clear. Prone and his brothers had maintained this world and the portals built here, but there was nothing they could do about the other end of the slipspace route, the destination portals. There was nobody left to maintain them. If anything told Jul that the Forerunners were all gone, it was that. He understood Prone’s depressed little sigh. There was something unutterably lonely about a tunnel through space that ultimately went nowhere.
“So they could travel all over the galaxy from here.” Jul started to see fragments of the Forerunners’ contingency plan for the end of the world. Even the gods had emergency procedures. “Or they could reach this shelter from many other places.”
Prone said. He floated over to a wall covered in elegant carvings and held a tentacle out to caress the stone.
“How long ago was this?”
Jul felt a slow heaviness in his chest. He could have left this place for perhaps countless destinations and reached them in an instant, but he was a hundred millennia too late. The humans had found a locked room the size of a star system in which to carry out their research. No wonder they weren’t worried about letting him walk where he pleased. He stood beside Prone and put his hand on the stone, too.
“That,” he said, “is too long ago to be of any help to me.”
UNSC TART-CART, SANGHELIOS: FOURTEEN HOURS INTO REPAIRS
Devereaux balanced precariously on the dropship’s tail and knelt to run the ultrasound scanner over the repaired section of hull.
“Looks solid enough to me, Staff.” She rapped the metal with her knuckles and peered down at Mal over the edge. “I’m not convinced about the conduits, though.”
“It’s your call, Dev,” he said. “Do we take off or not?”
“Put it this way—we’ll be vacuum-tight, but I can’t promise that the drive will make it.”
“Are we talking about drifting? We’ve got plenty of help out there to reel us in.”
“No, we might be talking about failing to reach escape velocity. Which might end in a very involuntary reentry. As in barbecue.”
Mal wasn’t seriously worried yet. By ODST standards, this was a minor inconvenience. There wasn’t an enemy for fifty kilometers, and he hadn’t lost anyone. But Osman wanted them out of Sanghelios before things kicked off, and they were cutting it fine. He called Port Stanley again and waited.
“She knows your status,” BB said. “I’m streaming it.”
“I still need to talk to her. No offense. It’s a meatbag thing.” Mal waited, wondering if they’d actually be able to see Infinity from the ground when the sun was in the right position. He tried to imagine how much of Sydney she’d cover if they could berth her at Bravo-6, mentally dropping her bow on the map and realizing her stern would be on the far side of the harbor. The crew could run marathons in that thing. “Ma’am? How long have we got?”
“We’re waiting on the Arbiter, Staff. Is time go
ing to make much difference?”
“No, we’re as repaired as we’re ever going to be.”
“Do you need a recovery team?”
Mal didn’t like the idea of pouring even more people into the problem. He gave Devereaux a shrug. She looked like she was considering it, then shook her head.
“Dev says not, ma’am. But stand by to give us a tow.”
“Understood.”
Phillips wandered out to watch and stood gazing up at Devereaux, who gave him a big grin. He fiddled with his radio cam like a rosary. “You got five minutes, BB?”
“Are you addressing me, Professor?” It was the fragment. “What can I do for you?”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake shut him down,” BB said wearily. “Go on. Just tell him to go into standby mode.”
“But he’s you,” Phillips said. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just … I don’t know, reabsorb him, whatever it is you do?”
“I said I’d do that when we get back.” BB sounded pissed off. “I need to assess the damage first.”
“Okay. Sorry.”
The weirdly distant conversation between the two versions of BB left Mal feeling disturbed. He was starting to feel sorry for the dumb bit. But if it didn’t have all of BB’s personality now, perhaps it wasn’t offended.
Listen to me. Just listen to the stuff I take for granted as being normal. This time last year, I’d never even spoken to a smart AI. Now I’m playing agony aunt to one.
“Okay, let’s do it.” Devereaux climbed down from the hull and put on her helmet. “I think this must be the slowest extraction on record. We could have walked out of here faster. All aboard. Come on, move it.”
Everybody piled in, the hatch seals hissed, and the status lights went to green. They didn’t really need lights, but it was more comforting to be able to see that the hatches were shut. Mal tightened his safety restraint until it made him realize how much weight he’d put on in the last few weeks, courtesy of ONI’s lavish victualling and a lot less running around in heavy armor while being shot at. He patted his gut.
“Porker,” Vaz muttered. “Have you found the gym in Stanley yet? You want me to show you where it is?”
“Yeah, and you’re not exactly built like a racing snake yourself these days, are you?” Mal leaned across and poked Phillips’s knee. It was time to cheer him up. “So now we can breathe again, how sure are you about the Halo locations?”
“Not a hundred percent,” he said. “It’s almost certainly locations, or at least something that identifies them, but we haven’t worked out the Forerunner coordinates system. They might not have thought in terms of having a capital. Positions might be relative to other Halos rather than to a central reference point.”
“But how did you manage to activate a portal?”
“It had a lock thingie like an arum.”
“See, I knew you’d come in handy.”
“And now we know where the portal exited, we might be able to use that to decipher the system.”
“Ah, that’s what I like to hear. Clouds with silver linings.”
“Okay, fingers crossed.” Devereaux throttled up and the drive started its usual song, starting at a low-pitched hum and working up through the scale to a soprano whine and then a sensation of nothingness that only a dog might hear. The airframe trembled. But it always did. It was nothing to worry about, nothing at all. “On a wing and a prayer. By guess and by god. Held together with string and gum.”
“You’re not selling this to me, Dev,” Mal said.
Naomi twisted in her seat and checked the neck seal on Phillips’s helmet. He looked totally lost in ODST armor, like a small boy trying on his dad’s jacket. “Don’t want you decompressing, do we?”
“But it’s instant, isn’t it?”
“No. It’s not.”
“Oh. Lovely.”
Mal was reassured. Things were fine again. Everyone was indulging in the usual chummy, healthy things that squads did: taking the piss, slagging, and joking about things that definitely weren’t funny at all. He still wasn’t sure if Naomi had a sly sense of humor or meant every literal word, but for a woman with a cloud of family misery hanging over her, she seemed to be bearing up.
Tart-Cart lifted, banking to starboard as she rose above the scrubland, and a piece of plastic tube rolled across the deck. Mal could see Dev through the open cockpit hatch. Her head was turned toward the drive readouts, even though she could have seen that data in her HUD, but everything felt and sounded normal.
How many times have I done this? A hundred? Five hundred? I’d know if there was something wrong. You get used to this. If there’s anything out of the ordinary, you can hear it. Smell it. Feel it.
Mal watched the sky in his hull cam feed, willing it to darken faster. Every second that they didn’t explode in a ball of flame or start to slow down and lose height was a bonus. The bright blue shaded to violet and then navy, and suddenly he could see stars without the filter of the atmosphere. Nothing had fallen off, cracked up, or burst. Tart-Cart moved out into the black velvet safety of space. They’d done it.
“Dev?”
“Yes, Staff?”
“Is the radiator boiling over yet? Or whatever the coolant does.”
“Of course it is. You should see the readouts.”
“Oh.”
“But we’ve passed the point of greatest demand on the drives. It’s okay. The conduits are holding up.”
“I’m ever so impressed,” Phillips said.
Naomi did a couple of restrained claps but said nothing. Mal joined in.
“Yeah, well done, Dev,” he said. There were two bored Huragok waiting in Stanley who’d pounce on Tart-Cart as soon as she docked to make repairs. They’d love it. The dropship would be better than new by the time they’d finished with it.
“And now,” Devereaux said, “I’m going to show you something you really have to see. Check your HUDs.”
“Oh, damn, I can’t do this.…” Phillips seemed to be moving his head rather than his eyes in a bid to activate the right icon. “Can I take this helmet off now?”
“Yeah, take a look out of the viewscreen.” Devereaux gestured to him through the hatch without turning around. “Come up front. Check this out.”
Phillips left his helmet on the bench seat and moved forward. It took Mal a few seconds to work out what Devereaux was sending to everyone’s display. On first glance he thought it was a section of a refit station, a long slab of a hull with bristles of sensor masts dotted along its length that stretched past the limits of the frame. Then the image tracked to port and the vertical wall of metal plate turned into a flared section bearing white lettering: UNSC INFINITY.
He couldn’t quite get the scale. But it had to be bloody enormous.
Phillips was in the cockpit, seeing it with the naked eye. Mal could tell by the whoops.
“Ohhhh my God.” Phillips’s head bobbed up a couple of times as if he was bouncing in his seat. “Oh my God, that’s a monster. That can’t possibly land anywhere, can it?”
Vaz started laughing. Phillips loved all this stuff and seemed totally unashamed of his excitement. Mal wondered how the professor would ever make the transition back into academic life, where the biggest battles he saw were probably over parking spaces or dodgy research papers, and then realized that he never would. Who’d want to go back to that? Kilo-Five got to see and do things that no other human being did. This was life, lived.
“Move over, Prof, we want to see her too.” Mal got up to peer through the cockpit hatch and found himself jockeying for position with Vaz and Naomi. Phillips slid out of the seat and Mal took his place.
Now he could get the scale of the ship. She was in just the right position to be fully lit by the sun with nothing behind her, hanging there like a long, thin, death-dealing shoebox.
“Oo-er missus,” he said.
“And we’re still fifty klicks away from her.” Devereaux magnified the image on her monitor. “I can’t even see Stanl
ey, but if we could, she’d be a dot.”
Vaz didn’t sound remotely excited. “So the hinge-heads have to be able to see her from the ground.”
Phillips half-turned to say something to him but he was drowned out instantly by the fire alarm klaxon. Devereaux reached out across the control panel and shut it off.
“’Scuse me, folks, I need to check that’s not a real one,” she said, squeezing out of her seat. “None of the monitoring’s working properly. BB, what are you getting?”
“Something’s hotter than it should be in section seven-alpha-ten,” he said. “Nothing specific from the entire port quarter, though.”
“I’ll go.” Naomi motioned Devereaux back to the cockpit. Tart-Cart was only a heavily modified Pelican airframe, roughly thirty meters nose to tail. There weren’t many compartments to check out. “Is the fire suppression still working?”
Osman’s voice cut in. BB was embedded in both ships and sharing what little status data was coming out of Tart-Cart. “Port Stanley to Kilo-Five, I’m standing by.”
“Naomi’s checking it out, ma’am.”
Mal was still in the copilot’s seat, listening to Naomi thud down the length of the crew bay and slide open a door in the transverse bulkhead. There was an internal cam facing aft, so he could see the open door and caught a glimpse of Naomi feeling her way along another bulkhead, using her glove sensors to pick up hot spots. Phillips was about halfway down the bay, watching.
“It’s pretty hot behind this panel,” Naomi said. “If the suppressant system isn’t working, you’d better seal the bulkhead behind me and I’ll use the—”
She was cut short by a small explosion. A flash of yellow light overwhelmed the cam. Mal didn’t get a chance to move before Vaz sprang back into the crew bay, grabbed Phillips’s helmet, and slammed it straight down on his head. A sheet of flame shot out and licked over them before dying away as if something had sucked it back.