Halo: Glasslands (20 page)

Osman’s voice tightened. “I didn’t want to start the relationship with my squad by killing an unarmed civvie in front of them.”

“Good thinking. Glad to see the team’s gelling, Captain.”

“Good people, ma’am. Osman out.” She took a breath. “All hands secure for jump. Do it, BB.”

“Hope you’ve taken your ginger, Captain,” BB said.
“Chocks away…”

The drive opened an instant wormhole in space and
Port Stanley
slipped. Osman just swallowed hard. In the quarantine cabin, Muir muttered a string of fascinating and original expletives.

“You do realize this is the first warship I’ve ever piloted for real, don’t you?” BB said. “Piece of cake.”

Devereaux chuckled to herself. “Cabbage crates over the briny, BB.”

“Tally ho, Skip.”

It was oddly satisfying to be able to make humans laugh. If only Muir had been so relaxed about it all. He was hammering on his cabin door now, demanding to be let out. Osman eased herself up from the captain’s seat and her expression hardened into resignation.

“How long to Reynes, BB?” she asked.

“Best estimate now—thirty-two hours. Do you want the cargo moved before Spenser arrives?”

“No. Let’s transfer him via the docking ring and then you can make sure he doesn’t go near the hangar deck. I’m going to visit our passenger.”

“Need a hand, ma’am?” Naomi asked.

“He just needs
picturizing,
” Osman said. That was the Navy’s deceptively harmless word for bawling someone out at skin-peeling volume. BB suspected her approach would be the quietly menacing kind. “But thank you, Petty Officer.”

Osman walked off with a purposeful stride and headed down the ladders through the decks. BB could see Mal standing outside the locked cabin, leaning against the bulkhead opposite with his eyes raised to the deckhead for a moment as if he was praying for strength.

“Button it, will you?” he yelled. The hammering on the other side of the door stopped for a moment. “Another ship’s going to take you somewhere safe. Then you can do whatever you want. But in the meantime—just wind your neck in.”

“Why lock me up? What the hell is it with you people? I’m not the goddamn enemy.”

Osman could cover a lot of distance fast. She still had that Spartan turn of speed to match a long stride. She slid down the ladder to the officer’s accommodation deck—BB found it interesting that nobody used the elevators—and bore down on the cabin. Mal stood away from the bulkhead.

“It’s okay, Staff,” Osman said. “I’ll talk to him.”

BB decided to manifest just as she opened the cabin door. Muir took a step back. He’d had a shave and he was wearing baggy engineer’s coveralls, but being rescued hadn’t produced a warm sense of gratitude to the Navy.

“Am I under arrest?” he demanded. He looked over Osman as if he was searching for a name tag or insignia. “Why am I a prisoner?”

“Quarantine, Mr. Muir,” she said. “You’ll be out of here in a couple of days.”

Muir peered past her. He’d spotted BB. They probably didn’t see many AIs on a colony like New Llanelli.

“What
are
you people?” he asked. “If you’re Navy, why aren’t you wearing badges? What’s that square blue thing? And why are you talking to the Covenant?”

“The fighting’s stopped,” Osman said. Ah, that was a very careful word. She didn’t say the war was over. “No peace treaty yet. Just trying to get back to normal.”

“But what did you
give
them? I saw the ship land the last time, too. Why Llanelli? Why talk to them there?”

Oh dear. Time for some airlock diplomacy.
BB did a quick pass around the security cameras and put all evidence of Muir being on board in standby-erase, just in case. Osman shot back an answer, cool and unblinking.

“We’ve started exchanging bodies,” she said. “They’re like us. They want to bring their fallen home.”

Muir’s life expectancy now depended on whether he believed that story. BB was sure Muir couldn’t possibly have seen the contents of the crates. He checked the record of the comm signal locations against the contours of the ridge where the exchange had taken place, and there was no direct line of sight. Muir could only have seen the dropship land and the trailer driven away.

Muir stared at BB, then at Mal, and then back to Osman, suspicious and much quieter. “Screw them, and their goddamned
fallen.
But why lock me up? You know damn well that I’m not infected.”

“This is a spy
ship.
” Osman said it with slow deliberation as if she was getting impatient with his naiveté. She stepped back across the coaming, hand on the edge of the door. “Everything on this vessel is classified. Just
breathing
here is in breach of the Official Secrets Act. I can drop you back on New Llanelli, if you like.”

“You really are all bastards, aren’t you? You know how many people died on Llanelli? One million, four hundred thousand. Don’t you get it? No, Earth was never hit, was it?”

“Oh, we lost a few billion on Earth,” Osman said. “I think we get it just fine.”

The door shut with a clunk and BB activated the locks. There was no more hammering.

Osman looked at Mal and shrugged. “He’s just an ungrateful dick, Staff, not a security risk. He can’t tell anyone anything.”

“And if he could?”

“Then I’d do the necessary. I wouldn’t expect you to do that.”

That
wasn’t spelled out. BB studied the look on Mal’s face as he watched Osman’s vanishing back. Mal had that deepening, distracted frown that said things were crossing his mind that made him uncomfortable. If Muir had seen arms being handed over to the Sangheili, then he would have had to be silenced, and killing other humans was something only the older troops could recall. Mal was too young to have known anything but an alien enemy, and killing hostile aliens was a clear-cut thing.
Funny things, humans.
They really were hard-wired for anxiety about killing their own kind, whatever the history books showed.

“Square blue thing,”
Mal whispered, leaning close to BB’s hologram. “Go on, get your own back. Show up in his cabin and rattle your chains.”

He turned and headed down the passage to the galley. BB took another look around the ship and decided he had more in common with his organic colleagues than he liked to admit. They were all making themselves busy whether they needed to be or not. Devereaux and Naomi had gone back to the hangar to tinker with the Spartan’s Mjolnir armor, working out the easiest way to get Naomi into it. Vaz was sorting laundry. And Mal was cleaning the galley. It was all the small stuff that filled their down time and had to be done, covert mission or not. It made them all look rather harmless and domestic.

And, as Parangosky was fond of saying, the most successful missions were those that were unnoticed and of little remark, where nobody needed to fire a shot.

BB hoped the squad was savoring the enforced idleness. He couldn’t see it lasting long.

REYNES, FORMER MINING COLONY: UNSC TEMPORARY LISTENING STATION.

Reynes hadn’t been a pretty place to start with, but a visit from the Covenant hadn’t done much to improve the ambience.

Mining wasn’t scenic. The endlessly fascinating CAA Factbook flashed up the planet’s dismal history in Mal’s HUD.
Aluminum, tantalum, copper.
There’d been about fifty thousand workers here when the mines were operating. Now there weren’t any, unless he counted Mike Spenser, but there were still signs of where they’d been before the Covenant had launched its attack.

“Where is he?” Devereaux asked. She kept the dropship’s drive idling and got on the radio. “Kilo-Five to Agent Spenser—the meter’s running, sir. We’re at the extraction point and you’re not.”

It took a few moments for Spenser to respond. “Just shutting the shop. Wait one.”

“You need a hand?”

“I’m packing up the transmitter. Working to the last moment, that’s me. Not that the bastards pay me overtime.”

Mal stepped down from the dropship’s bay and decided the view was worth recording for posterity. He’d seen a lot of glassed planets in the last fourteen years, but this was the weirdest landscape he could remember. The intense heat that vitrified the soil was enough to vaporize everything combustible and melt metal into slag, leaving just the characteristic ice-rink pools of glassy material. But sometimes structures survived. There was probably a sensible explanation for that, like a low-orbit bombardment, but whatever it was it had left a landscape that looked like a freeze-frame of a flooded town.

A winding derrick, the head end of a conveyor, and something that might have been a radio mast jutted from the glass lake at odd angles, silhouetted against thin gray clouds. The structures looked submerged rather than incinerated. Mal started walking toward the lake. As he got closer he could see that the skeletons of the buildings were charred to a uniformly matte dark gray, like a coating of velvet. He grabbed a few images and eventually stopped about ten meters from the edge. All he could hear was the wind.

The illusion of water was overpowering. He looked down at his chest plate and dragged his gloved finger through a fine layer of slightly sticky dust. It was going to clog his filters if he didn’t flush them through as soon as he got back to the ship.

Vaz walked up behind him. “How come it’s still standing?”

“Dunno.” Mal ventured out onto the glass and walked gingerly between the debris embedded in it. “Maybe all this blew in while the glass was cooling.”

It was pretty slippery, just like sheet ice. In some places it looked translucent with the hint of things trapped beneath. For the most part, though, it was a dense, opaque layer of mottled grays speckled with black patches that reminded Mal of carbon from a candle embedded in its melted wax. He squatted to inspect a charcoal velvet girder jutting out of the vitreous layer at a steep angle.

Vaz followed and stood over him. “Weird.”

“Fancy being stuck here on your own for a couple of years. Can’t do much for your mental health.”

They waited, kicking around on the glassland and listening for movement. Vaz sighted up on the horizon for a few moments and then Mal heard crunching sounds like boots on gravel. A scruffy middle-aged man emerged from nowhere as if he’d crawled out of a hole. It had to be Spenser, and he looked exactly like he’d sounded.

He was in his fifties, face deeply lined with a good crop of gray stubble, one hand thrust deep in the pocket of a thick mountaineering jacket. He dropped a couple of rucksacks by his feet. Judging by the thud they made, that was his surveillance equipment.

“We didn’t see where you came from,” Vaz said.

“Down there.” Spenser pointed. “The mine shafts are still mostly intact.”

“Got that one right, then,” Mal said. “You ready to go now? Destroyed everything sensitive that you can’t carry?”

“I set fire to my underpants, if that’s what you mean.” Spenser looked around with that finality of a man fixing something in his memory for the very last time. “Can’t say I’m sorry to leave this behind. Where are you dropping me off?”

“We’re going to RV with
Monte Cassino
to cross deck you.” Mal could see some movement in the ruins. Vaz spotted it too and lifted his rifle slowly. “We picked up a survivor on New Llanelli, so you’ll have company.”

Spenser frowned at Vaz and then glanced over his shoulder to see what he was looking at. “It’s just the Kig-Yar.”

“Are they your informers?” Vaz asked. “Because if they are, they’re on their own. We can’t take the whole zoo with us.”

“No, my boys are off camp. That bunch just drops in occasionally to scavenge for tantalum.”

The Kig-Yar started breaking cover and trotting out into open ground, spiky crests bobbing as they moved. Most people called them Jackals, but the scrawny, scaly little bastards reminded Mal more of deeply unattractive herons. Maybe it was the long beaklike muzzle, or the long, bony limbs, but either way there was a reptilian
birdness
about them. They were clutching an assortment of weapons. One had a UNSC-issue sniper rifle.

You better not have looted that from one of our dead, dickhead.…

The other three had Covenant needle rifles. The Kig-Yar with the sniper piece moved to the front and seemed to be leading his mates over for a chat. Mal decided it was time to go. Then his radio crackled. Devereaux hit the alert.

“Guys, I don’t want to worry you, but I’ve got a crowd of Jackals here too.”

“Well, don’t sell them the dropship,” Mal said. “We’re on our way. Move out, Spenser.”

Spenser grabbed his bags and the three of them began walking back to the ship, trying to speed up as they went. It was a slight uphill gradient. Mal just wanted to get out without a shooting match, but the Kig-Yar leader wasn’t having any of it.

“You take?” he rasped. “No—ours!
Our
mines! You leave it!”