Halo: First Strike (7 page)

improbable names:  Dortmunds with red, papery petals, large Garden

Parties flamboyant in white and yellow, Montezumas, Martin

Frobishers, and Mighty Mouses.  He stopped and inhaled the strong

perfume of purple Intrigue.  In the recombinant section, Halos,

blossoms in careful rainbow stripes, had grown immense.  Giant

psychedelic grids, only vaguely rose-shaped, they pushed

everything else aside.  Gonzales put his nose above a pink blossom

on a nameless bush; the rose smelled like peppermint candy.

He recognized the woman at the bottom of the path from

dossier pictures Traynor had shown him.  Diana Heywood wore a

culotte dress of white cotton that exposed her shoulders, wrapped

tightly about her waist, split to cover her thighs.  Small and

slender, she had close-cut dark hair, streaked with grey.  No age

in her skin; fine, sculpted features.  She wore glasses as opaque

as Gonzales's own.

She held out the thorny stem of a dark-red rose.  "Would you

like a flower?" she asked.  Sun across her face erased her

features.

"Thanks," he said as he took the flower gingerly, aware of

its thorns.

She said, "Who are you, and what do you want?"

"My name is Mikhail Gonzales, and I want to talk to you. 

I'll be working with you at Halo."

She said, "Will you?"  Her back to him, she knelt and snipped

away a greenish tangle of vine and thorn.  The clippers choked on

a clump of grass.  She freed them, then threw them to the ground,

where they stuck point-first, buzzed for a moment, then stopped. 

She looked over her shoulder at him and said, "I've been waiting

for someone like you to show upthe company's lad, the one who

keeps watch on me and poor old Jerry, to make sure we don't do

anything unauthorized."

She stood and strode away from him, up the hill, her angry

steps kicking dirt off the stones.  She stopped and turned to face

him.  "Come on, Mister Gonzales," she said.

Cautiously holding the thorny stem, he followed her up the

path.

 #

Diana Heywood and Gonzales sat drinking tea.  He said, "I'm

the outside observer, yesthe spy, if you wantbut I don't think

we're at odds.  They're asking you to do one job, me to do

another, but I don't see where our jobs conflict."  She turned to

look at him; one eye was blue, the other green.

She said, "When Sentrax called me last week, that was the

first time I'd heard from them since they got rid of me years ago. 

Not that they treated me badly, not by their standards.  When they

fired me, years ago, they didn't just turn me loose, they paid me

well  they're so prudentit was like oiling and wrapping a tool

before you put it away, because you might need it again.  Now

they've found a use for me and unwrapped me and put me to work,

but I know they don't trust me.  And of course I don't trust

them."  She stood up.  She said, "Come on, I'll show you what this

all means to me."

She led Gonzales into the next room, where their entry

triggered the lighting systems.  Silk walls the color of pale

champagne were broken with floor-to-ceiling rosewood bookcases;

teak-framed sling chairs and matching tables stood together under

a multi-armed chrome lamp stand.

She stopped in front of a 1:6 scale hologram of a thin-

featured man, apparently ill at ease at being holoed; hands in

pockets, shoulders hunched, eyes not centered on the lens.

"That's Jerry," she said, pointing to the hologram.  "He's

what this is all about, so far as I'm concerned.  He's been

terribly injured, and Aleph thinks something can be done for him,

and as unlikely as that seems, given the extent of his injuries, I

will help as best I can."  She looked at him, her face giving

nothing away, and said, "Are we leaving tomorrow morning?"

"Yes."

"Well, then, I'd better get ready, hadn't I?  Where are you

staying?"

"I thought I'd get a hotel room."

"No need.  You can sleep here.  I'll finish packing, and

we'll go out to eat."

#

Diana Heywood and Gonzales sat high in the Berkeley Hills,

looking onto the vast conurbations spread out beneath them.  To

their right, the carpet of lights stretched away as far as they

could see, to Vallejo and beyond.  In front of them lay Berkeley,

the dark mass of the bay, then the clustered lights of Sausalito

and Tiburon against the hills.  Oakland was to their left,

reaching out to the Bay Bridge; and beyond the bridge, San

Francisco and the peninsula.  Connecting all, streams of

automobiles moved in the symmetry of autodrive.

Gonzales's mouth still tingled from the hot chilies in the

Thai food, and he had a buzz from the wine.  They had eaten at a

restaurant on the North Side, and afterward Diana Heywood guided

the Truesdale up the winding road to an overlook near Tilden Park.

As minutes passed, the streets and highways and

municipalities disappeared into semiotic abstraction  these

millions of human beings all gathered here for purposes one could

only guess atsome conscious, most not, no more than a beaver's

assembly of its structures of mud and wood.

A robot blimp passed across their line of sight.  Beneath it,

a sailboat hung upside down.  It swayed from lines that connected

its inverted keel to the blimp's featureless gondola.  Lights on

the side of the blimp read EAST BAY YACHT OUTFITTERS.

Diana Heywood said, "I know you people have your own agendas,

and that's finethat's the nature of the beastbut if you

complicate these matters because of corporate politics, I will

become very difficult."

Gonzales said, "I have no intention of being a problem."

"Well," she said.  "Maybe you won't be."  She turned to him. 

"But remember this:  you're just doing your job, but the stakes

are higher for me.  Aleph, Jerry, and Iwe've known each other

for years, and I've got unfinished business up there.  Also, I

want to get back in the game."

"I don't understand."

"Sure you do, Mister Gonzales.  You're in the game, have been

for years, I'd guess. Unless I'm seriously mistaken, it's what you

live for."  She laughed when he said nothing.  "Well, I've done

other things, and for a long time I've been out of the game, but

I'm ready for a change.  Silly SenTrax bastardsmanipulating me

with their calls, sending you  oh yeah, you're part of it, you

remind me of Jerry years ago, if you don't know that."

"No, I didn't."

"It doesn't matter.  Their machinations don't matter.  They

want to convince me to come to Halo?"  She laughed.  "My past is

there, when I was blind and Aleph and I were linked to one another

in ways you can't imagine  and I found a lover I'd wish to find

again.  Come to Halo?  I'd climb a rope to get there."

#

Gonzales had flown into McAuliffe Station once before, though

he'd never taken an orbital flight.  In the high Nevada desert,

the station stayed busy night and day.  Heavy shuttles composed

the main traffic:  wide white saucers that lifted off on ordinary

rockets, then climbed away with sounds like bombs exploding when

orbital lasers lit the hydrogen in their tanks.  Flights in

transit to Orbital Monitor & Defense Command stations were marked

with small American flags and golden DoD insignia.  Cargo for them

went aboard in blank-faced pallets loaded behind opaque,

machinepatrolled fences half a mile from the main terminal across

empty desert.

>From Traynor's briefing, Gonzales knew a few other things. 

Civilian flights fed the hungry settlements aloft:  Athena

Station, Halo City, the Moon's bases.  All the settlements had

learned the difficult tactics of recycling, discovery and

hoarding.  Water and oxygen stayed rare, while with processes slow

and expensive and dangerous, metals of all sorts could be cracked

out of soil so barren that to call it ore was a joke.  And though

water and metals had been found lodged in asteroids transported

into trans-Earth orbit, Earth's bounty stood close and remained

richer and more desirable than anything found in huge piles of

crushed lunar soil or wandering frozen rock.

#

Standing at a v-phone booth in the hotel lobby, Gonzales made

his farewell calls.  His mother's message tape on the phone screen

said, "Glad to hear you're back from Myanmar, dear, but you'll

have to call back in a few days.  I'm in treatment now.  I'll be

looking good the next time you call."

"End of call," Gonzales said.  He pulled his card from the

slot.

#

Atop a sand-colored blockhouse next to the launch pad, yellow

luminescent letters read TIME 23:40:00 and TIME TO LAUNCH

35:00 when a voice said, "Please board.  There will be one

additional notice in five minutes.  Board now."

Gonzales and Diana Heywood walked across the pad together,

down the center of a walkway outlined in blinking red lights. 

Robotrucks scurried away, their electric engines whining.  Faces

hidden behind breather muzzles, men and women in bright orange

stood atop red, wheeled platform consoles of girder and wire mesh

and directed final pre-launch activities.

The white saucer stood on its fragile-seeming burn cradle, a

spider's web of blackened metal.  The saucer presented a smooth

surface to the heat and stress of escape and re-entry. 

Intermittent surges of venting propellant surrounded it with

steam.

A HICOG guard stood at the entrance glideway.  He verified

each of them with a quick wave of an identity wand across their

badges, then passed them on through the search scanner.  The

glideway lifted them silently into the saucer's interior.

#

The hotel lounge stood halfway up the cliff.  Its fifty meter

wide window of thick glass belled out and up so that onlookers had

a good view of the launch and ensuing climb.

"One minute to launch," a loudspeaker said.  The hundred or

so people in the lounge, most of them friends and relatives of

saucer passengers, had already taken up places by the window bell.

The screen on a side wall counted down with gold numerals