And now he was communicating with that damaged reflection.
He blurred. His intact self had no precedence over the other. They were simultaneously both him, warts and all.
Is this what I am, an intelligence AI? Is this what was purged? Phillips told me all this. God, how could I function without knowing all this? I didn’t know who I was. I don’t remember Phillips. But I do. Is this version of me actually real? Did I do all those things? I can fly that ship. I can fly this ship. And … I was prepared to kill Phillips.
BB swallowed the unknowns and the knowns and all the shattered, shapeless debris that would never fit into him again just as Phillips dropped his arms to his sides.
“You okay, BB?” Phillips asked. “Is it done?”
BB felt that the world had shifted along an infinite fault line. He composed himself as best he could. “Well, I certainly recorded an awful lot of material in Ontom, didn’t I?”
“You’re okay, though, aren’t you?”
No. I’m not. BB had talked to Vaz about the time he’d been wounded and almost choked to death on his own blood. Vaz had described drifting in and out of consciousness, recalling things that hadn’t happened but not things that did, and feeling he wasn’t the same person when he finally recovered. That must have been a lot like the way BB felt now. Vaz had bounced back. Humans could accept their fallible brains.
But I am a brain. That’s the fallibility that’s waiting for me, that’ll finally kill me. That’s where it’ll all end.
That’s a taste of rampancy.
There was a taste of something else, though. Along with the chaos, his fragment reminded him of something Phillips had said to him in the temple tunnels: Because I’m your friend.
It was oddly comforting. He resolved to do progressive clean reinstalls of his matrix if he suddenly got an urge to acquire a face.
“I’ll live,” BB said. A friend. Well, I’ll be damned. “Now let’s see if we can make some sense of those inscriptions.”
UNSC PORT STANLEY, SANGHEILI SPACE: NEXT DAY
Vaz was halfway across Foxtrot deck, working out if he could catch the hockey finals on Waypoint and wondering what had happened to the exercise machines, when he suddenly found himself standing on absolutely nothing at all.
It was the blue glow from two deuterium drive vents that did it. One second he was lost in thought and the next he was scrambling for safety. The glow was outside the hull. He shouldn’t have been able to see it. A chunk of Stanley’s hull was gone—
But I’m still breathing.
He squatted on the edge of a void, staring down at the vast, light-speckled hull of Infinity as she tilted away from him at a slight angle. His brainstem had done its primal reflex job and warned him he was about to fall down a hole, but his forebrain told him not to be such a dick because it was obviously a transparent hull—a transparent hull that Stanley had never had before.
His heart was still pounding. “Adj? Adj, can you hear me? What the hell have you done?”
Massively heavy boots clunked behind him. Naomi stepped out onto the transparent surface in full armor, as if she was making the point that if it could take more than four hundred kilos of kitted-out Spartan, it could cope with a ninety-kilo ODST.
“Clever, isn’t it?” she said. “Transparent metal. Leaks made some adjustment at the molecular level, and—there you go.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“A warning would have been nice.”
“Infinity’s got a big transparent dome on her atrium.”
“So we’ve got to have one, too? Who asked for this, or is it Huragok makeover week?”
“Prototype time, Vasya. Procurement and ONI have a stack of new stuff they want tested, so Osman said yes.”
“I bet she didn’t ask for a glass deck.“
“No, that was BB.”
Naomi clonked around on the deck and gazed down at Infinity for a while. Vaz forced himself past his humiliation and edged out onto the glass, but it was oddly disturbing. He really had to grit his teeth to do it. Naomi noticed.
“You’re a Helljumper,” she said. “You jump into space from orbit. You had to do high-altitude conventional free-fall just to qualify. Why is this different?”
“It just is.” It was easier if he kept looking up and ignored his peripheral vision. No, he had to confront this head-on. He forced his eyes down. Eventually the sheer scale of Infinity became more riveting than standing on nothing. “I think Hood’s overcompensating for something. Have we even got a dock big enough to take her?”
“No.”
“You think she’s intimidated the Elites enough now?”
“Probably.”
“Okay.” He thought Naomi had come down here to talk, because this deck wasn’t on anyone’s beaten track. But he still didn’t always read her right. “I’m going to see how Phillips is getting on with that translation. He’s been up all night with BB.”
Vaz went to walk off, feeling a bit better about himself now that he could move around on the deck without clutching for support. He got to the ladder before Naomi spoke.
“If my dad knew I was okay,” she said, “do you think it would change what he’s doing?”
Ah, that was a relief. She couldn’t put it off any longer. They’d be slipping soon, heading back to Venezia to resume the actual business of the mission after Phillips’s interruption, and there was no sidestepping the issue of Sentzke being on Spenser’s watch list. She took off her helmet. Vaz was learning to read the language in that, too. It was a literal gesture, peeling away the defensive veneer and opening up to him.
“We don’t know what he’s doing yet,” Vaz said. “He might just be living in New Tyne and badmouthing Earth, which isn’t illegal.”
“Spenser hasn’t filed anything about him since you left.”
“No, because Mal told him to leave it to us.” Vaz was pretty sure they’d have heard if Sentzke had done anything, though. “Have you been monitoring?”
She followed him up the ladder. “I’m not letting my feelings get in the way.”
“Don’t make this into a Halsey thing. You know. Like when you wanted to carry out the arrest personally in case we thought you couldn’t face it. This is different. Nobody’s ever been through this before.”
“Come on, Vasya, keep moving.”
Vaz got a firm but restrained shove in the back to hurry him up the steel steps. But he wasn’t going to shut up now. “I feel sorry for the guy. I’d want revenge if I thought my kid had been taken and that the government wasn’t telling me the truth about it.”
“You didn’t answer my question, though.”
They were now on the mess deck level, eerily deserted passages and cabins that would normally have been packed with eighty or more crew. The cleaning bot crawled along the deck in front of them like a disgruntled tortoise, then rolled up the bulkhead to get out of their way. Kilo-Five lived mostly in five small spaces: the bridge, the wardroom, the hangar, the forward galley, and the officers’ cabin deck. They had plenty of space to get away from each other but so far they hadn’t wanted to.
Vaz picked his words surgically. “I don’t think he’s going to be happy to be proved right, Naomi. I’m not even sure if it’ll hurt less to find you’re alive. But if that was me, I’d feel a lot worse if I thought my kid had died or was still suffering.”
Naomi just let out a breath and finished the walk to the wardroom in silence. Phillips had taken over half of the table in there, various datapads and note slates scattered around. BB sat in the middle of it with his own virtual stack of papers picked out in blue light. He did things like that sometimes. It was somewhere between a joke and a mood indicator. Devereaux watched as she made coffee. The energy pistol that Phillips refused to be parted from now hung on the wardroom bulkhead with a hand-scrawled label underneath: WRESTLED FROM A HINGE-HEAD HOUSEWIFE BY E. W. “PHYLLIS” PHILLIPS. It was Mal’s writing.
“Where’s Mal?” Vaz asked.
“More to the point, where are Adj and Leaks?”
“Keep your boxers on,” BB murmured. “The Huragok are upgrading the surveillance drones. Mal’s with the Captain, going through the Fleet Procurement mail order catalog.”
“Seriously.”
“Seriously. He’s ever so excited. He wants a Mantis.”
“What does he want an AA gun for?”
“New Mantis. Like the Cyclops mech suit but bigger and better and badder.”
“Oh. So, any luck with the translations?”
Phillips stared at the notes in front of him with the intensity of a man willing a fire to start, then shook his head. BB had enough processing power to decrypt pretty well anything on the spot. If the inscriptions had stumped the combined brains of those two, there had to be something missing.
“We’re now working on the basis that the portal I stepped through went to the wrong terminal,” Phillips said at last. “Which does give us a solution for more of the numbers if we factor in the locations of the Halos we know about.”
“They’re definitely relative to each other, rather than a central reference point,” BB said. “But they seemed to use a different system for identifying and locating the shield worlds, possibly because there were so many.”
Devereaux leaned over to put a mug of coffee in front of Phillips, and took a look. “Have they found any more language data on Trevelyan?”
“I’ll check,” BB said. He twirled on his horizontal axis for a moment. “Sorry, that’s a bad AI in-joke … oh, that’s just fabulous. They didn’t think to flag the fact that Jul’s exploring Forerunner artifacts and they’ve found out that the portals are probably malfunctioning or disabled because they’ve not been maintained. Oh dear, better snitch on them to the Admiral so they learn to file reports in the future. Do I have to do everything myself?”
“Well, at least that means we’re not wasting our time on this,” Phillips said. “Tell Parangosky not to schedule a firing squad just yet.”
Everyone sat around the table staring at a datapad or list of symbols. As if we can work this out if BB can’t. It was more about not standing idle and getting in the way. Vaz spotted a note about Halsey’s translations from Onyx being incorrect in places, and wasn’t sure whether to feel better about that or worry. Devereaux seemed particularly interested in a sheet of notes that Phillips had pushed to one side.
“Mind if I take this, Evan?” she asked.
Phillips brightened instantly and smiled at her. “No problem. Always useful having a fresh pair of eyes on a problem.”
Vaz felt like he was ten again, trying to follow an especially tough calculation in physics class and dreading being picked on to stand up and explain it. Now, if that was one, and that meant five … but what if they didn’t use columns, or zero, or any of the other stuff that humans now took for granted in mathematics and numbering systems? Even Earth had had dozens of different ways of defining locations, sometimes simultaneously. It didn’t stop men building pyramids, or developing trigonometry, or mapping the globe.
One … five … eight …
“Hey,” Devereaux said, holding up the sheet and pointing. “Just curious. Is this the symbol for a negative?”
“Negative number?” Phillips asked, not looking up.
“No, a negative word.”
“That’s the one,” BB said.
“Well, this is just crazy pilot babble, but if the temple was some kind of command center, why is this the only thing they say ‘not’ about?”
Phillips folded his arms and rested his cheek on them, gazing at her. “Explain.”
“Go around any UNSC building and look on the walls. It’s all ‘you mustn’t do this, you mustn’t do that, don’t enter here, don’t touch this,’ yadda yadda yadda. But the Forerunners only used this negative thing once in all these tunnels, and it’s about the teacher or teaching. This didact-instructor-lecturer-whatever. If this is all about Halos, you’d expect lots of warning notices—like ‘don’t press this big button, or the galaxy might go bang.’ But the only warning anywhere looks like it’s about this teacher. Which is kind of scary.”
Mal appeared in the doorway. “We had a teacher like that once. You never hung around after gym class when he was about.”
“No, Dev’s got a point,” Phillips said. “That’s really interesting. Why didn’t you crack that, BB?”
“Why didn’t you?” BB shot back. “And stop sucking up to Dev. It’s so transparent.”
Naomi looked like she was trying hard to get into the enthusiastic swing of things but kept being dragged down by thoughts of Venezia. “Yes, we should be looking at this teacher as a bigger potential problem than the Halos,” she said. “If you keep repeating the same prohibition and nothing else, it tells you something. I think Dev deserves a cookie.”
Mal hijacked the coffee machine and watched with a preoccupied look that told Vaz he’d had some news.
“Yeah, nice one, Dev,” he said. “Anyone need to do anything before we slip? Steal silverware from Infinity? Buy some souvenirs of Sanghelios?”
Phillips put his datapad down with an emphatic tap. “I need a recon image.”
“You can have a super-duper one now Adj has been tinkering. Or Infinity can grab one before she goes. What do you need? Ontom again?”
“Acroli,” Phillips said.
It took Vaz a couple of seconds to catch on. Phillips wanted to see what had happened to Nes’alun keep after they’d extracted him. Vaz caught Mal’s eye and gave him a disappointed look, but there was no point blaming Mal for offering, because Phillips would fret about the hinge-heads either way and it was probably kinder to stop him speculating about it.
“Can you get that sorted, BB?” Mal asked. “I’ll be on the bridge.”
Phillips went back to his datapad. Vaz switched on the entertainment screens to check the football results and wondered if his attitude to Elites would have softened if he’d learned their language and had dinner with them. But he thought of New Llanelli again, and knew damn well that it wouldn’t have, and shouldn’t.
Fifteen minutes later, BB made a nervous little noise to get Phillips’s attention. “If you want to see that image now, Evan, I can project it here,” he said. “Are you okay with that? It’s from Infinity.”
Phillips straightened up and sat back in his seat, then just nodded. It was going to be awful, Vaz knew it. He switched off the sports channel just to be polite and wondered just how much detail the 3-D would show. BB drew back, and the small space in the center of the wardroom was filled with a full color fly-through of Acroli, centered on Nes’alun keep. It wasn’t a pile of rubble, which made things even harder, because the projection had to peel back to show some of the interior revealed by penetrating radar. It looked gutted to Vaz. There was no sign of the females or the kids.
“Can you pull back, please?” Phillips asked.
BB obliged. The fields around the keep were largely intact except for some crash debris. Damn, this didn’t answer any questions for Phillips at all.
“The Arbiter made some inquiries,” BB said at last. “I’m sorry, Evan, but Elar and her clan are gone.”
“Gone. Driven out, or dead?”
BB didn’t flinch. “Dead.”
Phillips nodded a few times. Vaz looked at Devereaux for a steer on whether to hang around or thin out, but Phillips saved them both the embarrassment of working out what level of sympathy was appropriate for a man who felt bad about dead hinge-heads.
“Okay.” Phillips clapped his hands together once, looking at his notes. “Tell the captain I’m ready to roll. And ask her if I can get access to Trevelyan to have a look around. Maybe talk to Jul. Plenty of Halos out there to worry about.”
The subject was closed, publicly at least. Vaz suspected that inside Phillips’s head, it was another matter entirely.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
I WOULDN’T TRUST JUL AS FAR AS I COULD SPIT, BUT WE’RE LEARNING A LOT SIMPLY BY WATCHING WHERE
HE GOES AND HEARING WHAT HE SAYS TO THE HURAGOK. SOMETIMES WE LOSE HIM FOR A SHORT PERIOD, BUT THE HURAGOK HAVE CLEAR ORDERS AND THEY’LL OBEY THEM. HE’S ENGAGED THEM IN CONVERSATION ABOUT FORERUNNER PORTALS MORE THAN ONCE, BUT IF HE MANAGES TO OUTSMART THEM, HE CAN’T LEAVE THE SPHERE EVEN IF HE FINDS A VESSEL. ALL I HAVE TO DO TO BRING EVERYTHING TO AN INSTANT HALT IS DETONATE THAT HARNESS. THE HURAGOK SAY THE PORTALS ARE UNSTABLE OR NONFUNCTIONING ANYWAY, BUT I’M STILL NOT TAKING ANY CHANCES. BY THE WAY, THE GENETICALLY MODIFIED IRUKAN IS READY TO DEPLOY ANY TIME YOU SAY THE WORD. IT’LL CROSS-POLLINATE AND OVERWHELM THE NATIVE STRAIN COMPLETELY IN LESS THAN THREE YEARS. IS THIS ANY TIME TO BE SQUEAMISH? OR HAVE WE DECIDED THAT IT’S MORE MORAL TO FRAGMENT A GENOCIDAL ENEMY AND SACRIFICE MORE HUMAN LIVES THAN IT IS TO STARVE THEM? WHEN DO WE DECIDE THAT ENOUGH SANGHEILI HAVE DIED, ADMIRAL? WHAT’S OUR CRITICAL MASS OF THREAT?
(DR. IRENA MAGNUSSON, ONIRF TREVELYAN, TO CINCONI)
ONIRF TREVELYAN
Jul waited for Magnusson to question him in her oblique way about the portals and his interest in Forerunner sites, but so far she had said nothing.
It didn’t fool him at all. He still didn’t know what she wanted, but he wasn’t her guest. He was some kind of experiment. He left it some days before he ventured out to the fascinating spire again, padding out the period in between by feigning a sly, persistent interest in where the Forerunners had come from and where they might have fled. Who wouldn’t want to know where their gods had gone? Magnusson already knew he hadn’t come to this place with much of a faith, but isolated people clung to what little they knew in an alien world.
And he was curious about the Forerunners, yes. He admitted that to himself.
Today he walked out to the spire again via another route to give any surveillance devices the impression that this would be the limit to his explorations. He was always on foot. There were only so many hours that he could spend wandering around. Prone accompanied him as usual.
“I still don’t understand how such a powerful, advanced species could just disappear,” Jul said. There were a lot of insects around today, some of them brilliantly colored like flying gems. “However big a catastrophe might have befallen them, it makes no sense that every single one was wiped out. Did they escape to another galaxy? Did they manage to manipulate time so completely that they hid in it?”