“So what was of interest in Acroli, other than crops?” he asked.
“Forerunner ruins,” Phillips said, distracted. “You have so many on Sanghelios. Far more than on Earth. I exited in a collapsed building. A few inscriptions, but nothing significant.”
If Phillips had been ported to another Forerunner site, even the wrong one, then that confirmed Jul’s theory. The answer was small but had been worth the effort.
Suddenly Phillips frowned at his screen and looked put out. “I’m sorry, Jul,” he said. “I’ve just had a message. I have to go back. I’d hoped we’d have longer. Perhaps I can come again sometime.”
Make it soon. Or you won’t find me here. “I hope you find your key.”
“I’ll keep looking. And if I can, I’ll ask about Raia. I promise.”
Magnusson didn’t say a word. She followed Phillips out of the cell and Jul went to the window to gaze out and make sense of what he’d gleaned from that conversation. It had made up his mind to risk accessing a portal as soon as he could. The Warthog was still parked where he could see it, in the shade of some trees. A few minutes later, Phillips walked briskly up to it, punching his palm.
It was a strangely inverted human gesture, just like baring teeth to show peaceful intent. They hurt their hands to show they were pleased.
Phillips would keep his word and try to find out about Raia. But if he found out anything, if he passed that back to Jul—it would be unbearable.
Jul would never see her again. The humans would never let him go home. He had to do it soon, very soon, now, or die in the attempt.
UNSC PORT STANLEY, FORMER ONYX SECTOR
Mike Spenser was a patient man. He nursed a mug of coffee while he chatted on the secure link, more like a man catching up with his family than an agent operating undercover on a planet where the entry permit was a criminal record, official or otherwise.
“I hear you’ve been wreaking havoc on Sanghelios, Mal,” he said. “Are you on your way back now? It’s kind of quiet here. I could do with some entertainment.”
Mal still wasn’t sure how much to tell Spenser. That was a job for Parangosky, but she wasn’t here, and Osman was on the hangar deck with the rest of the squad. In a day or so, Mal would be relying on Spenser to help them infiltrate New Tyne. He wanted to build more trust with the man.
“Not exactly us,” Mal said. “We just had to extract Phillips. The hinge-heads were killing each other pretty efficiently without any help from us.”
“Well, if Infinity had the same effect on them that it’s had on the rest of UNSC, then I’d call that a result.”
“It’s amazing how you can hide something that big for years, isn’t it?”
“Even from fellow intelligence agencies.”
“Yeah, sorry about that. But half of ONI didn’t know about it, either.”
Spenser didn’t look as if he believed him. It was just a faint flash of the brows. “And word’s out in Kig-Yar cafe society about a new chick in town. Shipmistress Lahz.”
“Ah. BB’s missed his calling as a female impersonator.”
“He did a good job. Maybe too good. I’m not sure whether to keep that show going or not.”
BB popped up out of nowhere and hung between Mal and the screen. “What do you mean, too good? I’ll have you know I got rave reviews for my Lady Macbeth.”
“You know Kig-Yar. Very territorial, all the gang bosses panicking about who this character is and how she can get hold of UNSC missiles.” Spenser spun around slowly in his chair to pick up something from the table behind him. He was in his makeshift basement ops center, the one where Mal had first realized that Venezia was going to get personally messy for Kilo-Five. “Anyway, word travels fast. Might be useful when we need to do deals with the buzzards. Now … Sentzke. He left Venezia a couple of days ago, and I’ve lost track of him. He rarely travels, and I rarely lose his trail, but this time I’ve no idea where he’s gone.”
“But he’ll be back, right?”
“He always has been. Do I take it that you’re going to handle this internally?”
“Yes,” Mal said, without thinking. “Leave him to us.”
“Okay. And still no sign of Pious Inquisitor, although I think I know where Sav is. Sav Fel. Handy intel, by the way. Thanks.”
“So if you were a Kig-Yar, who would you sell a stolen battlecruiser to?”
“I might keep it for myself, if I had designs on lifting Jackal-kind up the social ladder in the new world order. But as long as it doesn’t end up in a used warship auction here, that’ll be a result. Because that’s what’s really worrying me.” Spenser put his mug down with a thunk and looked like he was finished. “Okay, I’ll wait to hear from you. Just remember to give me some notice if you need to land anything really big and hide it.”
“See you later,” Mal said. “We’ll bring the coffee.”
BB placed himself on the chair next to Mal, hovering at head height. “Phillips is back. Just docked, wittering on about knowing who the teacher is. I hope Trevelyan’s evil boffins haven’t tested some new psychotropic drug on him.”
“You’re in a good mood. I thought you were having a sulk.”
“I’ve been contemplative, yes.”
“But your reintegration thing worked okay, didn’t it?”
“Sort of.” BB knew everything and ran everything. Hearing him say sort of wasn’t reassuring. “Mal, what are you more afraid of, death itself—you know, the things you’ll never do, the finality of it—or of how you’re going to die?”
Mal had a feeling he knew where this was going. “The how, I think,” he said, “and I’m an ODST, so I’ve given it plenty of thought. Normally two seconds before they drop my pod. But the way things are going now, I’ll probably die from sitting on my arse and overeating. There are some ways of dying that seem less crappy than others. I’ve seen a fair old selection to help me make up my mind.”
“I know exactly how I’m going to die. And almost exactly when. Unless someone like Halsey pulls my plug, there’s only one way out for an AI.”
“It’s okay to be scared of that. We can kid ourselves that it’ll never happen to us, but you’re too smart for that.” There was no shoulder to slap or hair to ruffle. Mal couldn’t even drag him out to a bar and pour beer down his throat. “Do what I do. Make yourself think about it until you’re sick of it, then get on with your life.”
“You know, you’re rather good at this leadership thing. Have you ever considered a career in the marines?”
“See, you’re better already.”
“Look sharp, Staff, Captain on deck.”
Osman swept in with the rest of the squad and took her seat. No ginger to ease the jump today, then; maybe she was going cold turkey on it.
BB twirled away and settled on the nav console, back to his usual self. “Everyone got their passport? False nose and mustache? Let’s spin up for sunny New Tyne, then.”
Phillips plopped down into his seat on the bridge, looking a bit breathless. “I know who the teacher is. Or was. A Forerunner called the Didact. He hated humans.”
“Well, the Forerunners are extinct and we’re not,” Mal said. “So neener-neener.”
“Jul said something about him needing to be hidden. I think he was just winging it, though, because this Didact guy has only just popped up. If this was part of their faith that even a semi-atheist like Jul knows, then the Abiding Truth would have had a whole library about it. A sub-cult, even.”
“So was he hiding from something, or did they lock him away? Don’t tell me they had a nutter god.”
“No idea, but the only risk to us is probably any countermeasures they put in place that still work. Like the Halos. Which is what I’m going to focus on.” Phillips gave Devereaux a grin. “So you were right. The Forerunners had some issue with the Didact, but that was a hundred thousand years ago.”
“So was Onyx,” Devereaux said. “And it’s still going strong.”
Mal was sure that the dr
ives felt smoother as Port Stanley wound up for the jump and flung herself into another dimension. Sometimes he spent a few minutes concentrating on the featureless nothingness beyond the viewscreen, trying to get some feel for what slipspace was beyond a set of numbers and diagrams. He still couldn’t quite grasp it. It was a curtain behind which the real world went on, a blackout blind, a tunnel that he’d emerge from sooner or later, never a separate reality. It was one of those things he knew existed, and could prove and see, but didn’t believe in at a level that resonated in his chest. Sometimes, when he was having trouble sleeping and needed to numb his brain, he thought about religion. There were people like ‘Telcam and Manny Barakat, not even the same species, who could believe completely in something that not only couldn’t be proven but showed no sign of existence at all—quite the opposite, in fact. The nearest Mal could get to knowing how they felt was to take hold of his unbelief in the slipspace he knew to be there and turn it upside down in the hope that he’d finally understand how they felt. Occasionally, for a few fleeting seconds, he did. Vaz had told him that a doc could stick an electrode in a certain part of the brain and give even an atheist a religious experience with every zap, guaranteed, but Mal didn’t want his sense of reality messed around any more than it already was.
Kilo-Five wasn’t a spiritual outfit at all. ONIHR had personality-matched the squad pretty well, he decided, and went down the hangar bay to see what Adj and Leaks were doing with Tart-Cart. Even the Huragok had merged into the team without a hiccup.
“Oh, great,” Vaz said. “You’ve accessorized it.”
The dropship, already subtly altered, was now changing color. Her hull cycled through various camo patterns—desert, arctic, forest—and then took on the palette of the hangar so exactly that it looked like some street artist had done it for a laugh. Then the hull went back to matte charcoal gray.
“I don’t know why I didn’t think to ask for that before.” Devereaux walked around the ship with her arms folded, grinning from ear to ear. “Reactive camo. It was just a matter of getting Adj and Leaks to incorporate it into the stealth coating without messing up the carbon nanotube kit.”
“So how invisible are we going to be?”
“Still not completely invisible, and there’s not much I can do about the noise, but I can land this and lay her up with more peace of mind.”
“Shame we couldn’t have had these extras while the war was still on.”
“Hey, that’s life in a blue suit. And our war isn’t over.”
Mal felt that his was. He went back to the galley and set the processor to whip up some more yeast nutrient for the Huragok, then drew up a roster for making the stuff and posted it on the bulkhead. It was like arguing over whose turn it was to feed the bloody cat. The idea of Adj and Leaks making a fuss of him to get fed struck him as funny, not that he could ever see them doing that, and he was still laughing to himself when Vaz came in and tapped his finger to his ear to indicate his earpiece.
“Come on, we’ve got a briefing,” he said. “Have you unplugged? Osman’s rounding us up.”
“Yeah. Can you get a TV signal in the wardroom?”
“Hockey finals, live from Saint Petersburg.” Vaz actually smiled, a proper smile with a show of teeth this time. “Two hours’ time.”
“Girls’ hockey?”
Vaz narrowed his eyes. He’d heard it all before. “Ice hockey.”
Slipspace comms were a little strategic miracle. It was going to be great to drop out of slip fully briefed instead of being dumped into a crisis that had germinated, grown, and ripened during the time you were cut off. But nothing brought it home to Mal quite like the idea of Vaz being able to watch his beloved hockey live. It was the small detail that taught him the most.
“They’ll be using slipspace bubbles to preserve food one day,” Mal said. “That’s what happens to all technology. The descent into the mundane.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Come on, it’s your turn to give Adj and Leaks their sludge.”
“Leave it in the wardroom for them, on the nice tableware. They’re ONI now.” Vaz seemed to think Huragok had developed some kind of team spirit, but Mal suspected that their psychology was still ambivalent, no matter how much lovingly prepared yeasty stuff he fed them. “Let’s go. Briefing.”
Osman was pretty transparent for a spook; she’d thawed a lot since Mal had first met her. He still had no doubt that she was worth fearing, because nothing less than absolute ruthless efficiency would have made her Parangosky’s chosen heir, but as far as the squad went she was a considerate commander who treated them with respect and fondness. She let them take over the wardroom—a lot of officers would have taken a very dim view of that—and she was prepared to get her hands dirty alongside them. Mal couldn’t ask for more. Unfortunately, the situation on Venezia was going to push that to the limit. He knew it. He watched her move from her seat at the wardroom table to sit next to Naomi, as loud a statement of here-comes-the-awkward-stuff as he’d ever seen.
“Okay, people, ONI closed-door rules,” Osman said. Phillips and Devereaux shrank visibly. “I’ll speak my mind and you’ll speak yours. Venezia. We pick up where we left off, and I admit there’s been some mission creep. We’re not interested now in who else is arming ‘Telcam so much as who’s turning into a problem for Earth. We’ll continue to track the tagged weapons we gave ‘Telcam, but mainly to work out what the supply networks are now. The new focus of our interest is Pious Inquisitor.”
“Are we just observing, or will we have an active role?” Naomi asked, like it was just another mission.
“Observing, initially. But this isn’t a regular operation for us, so let’s work out our ground rules. Naomi’s father. We can make all the dutiful noises we want, but this isn’t just painfully personal, it’s without precedent. What do we do about him?”
“If this is about my feelings, ma’am, then you treat him like any other suspect,” Naomi said. “Victims take revenge and society feels sorry for them, but it’s still illegal. They still get prosecuted if they take the law into their own hands.”
“I meant before we get to that stage. Should he be told what happened to you? And do you want him to know? They’re different questions.”
“He’ll be the first parent to find out, ma’am,” Vaz said. “Shouldn’t that be a consideration? Security, I mean.”
“I’ll square that with Parangosky. She’ll go public on it herself eventually.” Osman looked at Naomi for a long time but didn’t seem any closer to getting an answer from her. She glanced away. “Mal?”
Mal could only put himself in Staffan Sentzke’s place and imagine his own reaction. “He’s got a right to know, ma’am. Whether it pisses him off even more or not.”
“So how do we let him know?”
Naomi folded her arms. “Maybe I’ll tell him myself.”
“Well, there’s a few stages we have to get through before you can do that.”
“So do we grab him and do the reunion thing here?” Mal asked. “Then what do we do with him? Jail him? Shoot him? Because if we just throw him back like some fish, then where does he go from there?”
“Earth’s security and the security of its colonies comes first,” Naomi said. She was still trying to prove to them that she put duty first. She really didn’t need to. “If what happened to my family is to have any meaning at all, that’s got to be paramount.”
It all depended on how Sentzke reacted to the news. But they had to find a way to tell him first, and Mal didn’t know if that would make him an even bigger threat. He spooled forward in his mind to an appalling tragedy, the worst scenario: that some hardworking, ordinary bloke who’d never done anything wrong in his life had watched his family torn apart, had somehow survived the Covenant attacks, and then was finally reunited with his kid just before getting his brains blown out because he had a grudge against Earth. A justified grudge, as it turned out. Mal wondered how he’d feel about that when he was old an
d looking back on his service career, if he made it to old age and a peaceful death in his sleep. It wasn’t the kind of deathbed reminiscence he wanted to have.
Yeah, it’s all about how you meet your end, BB. It’s about making sure the last thought on your mind isn’t regret.
“So have we made a decision here?” Vaz asked. “Are we going to somehow let Sentzke know he’s got a daughter and that he was right all along?”
Osman looked at Naomi as if she was going to give her the casting vote, and Mal didn’t think that was right. She had the right to decide if she wanted to be revealed to her father or not. But it was also a terrible responsibility to give her for whatever Sentzke did when he found out.
I’d go ballistic. Completely and utterly frigging mental. Any father would.
“Naomi, I don’t know if it’s fair on you or not,” Osman said at last.
“I said I’d do it, ma’am.” Naomi had done nothing but brood on this since she’d found out. Mal damn well knew it. “But maybe we make the decision when we have enough contact with him to assess the consequences—for everyone.”
It was a sensible Spartan kind of answer. Naomi pushed back from the table even though Osman hadn’t dismissed the meeting. She didn’t actually get up and leave, but it had the effect of bringing things to a gradual halt.
“I want to deploy to the surface, ma’am.” Naomi said it as if Osman hadn’t worked that out yet. “If there’s one concession I want from you, it’s being allowed to do my job instead of watching this play out.”
“You’re two meters tall, at least, so you’re not going to go unnoticed,” Mal said. “And if you’re undercover, you can’t clonk around in a bloody Mjolnir suit.”
“Staff, there are plenty of really tall women in the world, and I’m still enhanced even without the armor.” Naomi looked right into him—not into his eyes but through them and right into him. “Let me do this. You think you know what a Spartan can do, but you don’t know what I can do.” She had that intense look just like her dad’s, those completely gray eyes without a trace of blue in them. “And I don’t know, either, but I do need to find out who Naomi Sentzke really is.”