Halo: Glasslands (32 page)

Naomi went aft again and squatted to look into the ventilation duct. The Huragok was huddled inside. Then it shot out of the opening in a flurry of tentacles, aiming for the nearest opening.

“Whoa—”

“Grab it!”

Vaz tackled it rugby-style at the cargo door and crashed down onto the hangar deck. It started squealing like a balloon losing air. Mal pitched in and subdued it with a headlock, no easy feat given the Huragok anatomy. He got to his feet with his arm still tight around its neck.

It was wearing the explosive harness that the San’Shyuum fitted to stop Engineers falling into enemy hands. Mal took a long, slow breath.

“Okay, who’s good at EOD?” he asked quietly. “And I do mean
really
good.”

Osman came clattering down the ladder from the gantry but Naomi gestured at her to stay back.

“I’ll do it.” Naomi took out a few tools from her belt and assessed the locking mechanisms. “What do you reckon, BB?”

“I just happen to have an ONI schematic … there. How’s that look?”

Her focus adjusted to the diagram in her HUD. “Great. Keep still, Mal.”

“Tell that to jelly boy here.”

Naomi fed the release codes into each port on the harness in the right order—with just the tiniest blip of adrenaline—and the harness slid onto the deck with a thud. Osman didn’t wait to be given the all-clear and jogged across to take a look.

“Textbook,” she said. “Absolutely textbook. What do we do with it now, BB?”

However many bells and whistles the Huragok could add to a ship, BB wanted to play it safe for now. “We need to confine it where it can’t access me or any other critical systems. You know what they’re like. It’ll start tinkering and next thing you know … well, we
don’t
know. Proceed with caution.”

“So what are we going to do to keep it occupied?” Mal asked. “Give it a coloring book?”

“Let me talk to it. But if it gets into me, then it assimilates all my knowledge. That’s classified ONI intelligence. It’ll siphon it up and share it with the next computer or Engineer it meets. Even if it only shares that data with UNSC systems, you’ll have an interesting time explaining
that
to Admiral Parangosky.”

“Bloody good point, BB.” Mal still had hold of the Engineer by its neck. “Can it pick locks? I mean, can we secure it in a compartment, or is it going to rebuild the security systems?”

“Give it something noncritical to play with,” Naomi said. “Upgrade the basic ODST armor or something. You’re not going to need it now everyone’s got their ONI rig.”

The Engineer gave up trying to squirm out of Mal’s headlock and wrapped its tentacles around his shoulders like a scared child.

“Yeah, okay,” Mal said. “Steady on, son. Don’t throttle me. Come on, BB, talk to it.”

BB decided he’d collated enough data on Huragok sign language to attempt a conversation. He projected a set of holographic tentacles and began signing. The Engineer’s head whipped around and it let out a long, soft trill that BB hoped was an
oooooh
of amazement.

< Not going to hurt, >
BB signed.

The Engineer seemed totally riveted by the unexpected conversation. <
Where are the others? What will not hurt? >

BB made a rapid recalculation of his syntax. He was used to total mastery of every subject he encountered, but his pidgin Huragok obviously wasn’t perfect. He tried again.

< We will not hurt you. What others? >

< My brothers. We need to repair one another. >

< Where did you come from? >

< I waited in a damaged ship until the Jiralhanae came. It was a lot of work for one. >

BB had hoped the Huragok would have a team of little friends waiting somewhere for him, but it didn’t look like it. <
We do not know any others. What is your name? >

< Requires Adjustment. But you are an AI. So like the Forerunner ones. >

Oh, really? The Forerunner comment intrigued BB but he’d return to that later. Right now his priority was to keep the Engineer out of their systems until they’d worked out what to do with him. Perhaps just asking him not to tinker with the ship would be enough. The creature was certainly intelligent enough to understand their reluctance.

< I am Black-Box. Address me as BB. Do not access the ship’s systems until we ask you. I have some fascinating work for you to do, but first we must take you on a journey. >

Requires Adjustment seemed satisfied for the moment. <
Good, >
he signed. <
Good.
>

“So?” Mal twisted his head as far as he could to see where the tentacles had wound around his backpack. “What was all that about?”

“It’s a
he
and he’s called Requires Adjustment,” BB said, resolving into a tidy box again. “I think I’m going to call him the Adj. Gives him a quasi-military chumminess, I think.”

“Well, we’re never going to sign well enough to speak to him direct, so I suppose that makes you his agent,” Vaz said.

He reached out a wary finger to touch Adj as if he’d never seen a Huragok before. These ODSTs had led relatively sheltered lives by ONI’s standards, but in intelligence terms, they were clean; no complicated associations with other ONI officers or senior commanders, or any previous knowledge of the service other than a healthy dread. BB thought that was a smart move. They were just efficient, willing, intelligent marines, top-grade raw material for Osman to shape to her own unique needs.

And you’ll need them when the Admiral finally passes the baton to you, Captain. You really will.

The Adj slithered one tentacle around Mal’s neck and slackened his grip, visibly calmer.

“They’re very appealing, aren’t they?” Vaz said.

“Well, you can take him for walks, then.” Mal went over to the armor racks with Adj still draped around his shoulders and tapped his old helmet to encourage the Engineer to look at a new toy. “Go on, Adj. Look at that nice armor.
Lovely
armor. Isn’t that fun? Good boy! Do the business.”

Adj reached out a tentacle and explored the helmet for a few seconds, then let go of Mal and floated free. BB decided the language barrier wasn’t going to be a major problem. Adj worked over the armor in a flurry of tentacles and cilia, removing components and parking them in his free tentacles while he made adjustments and generally tinkered.

Osman had that half-lidded look that said she was pleased. “Parangosky’s going to love this.”

“But we need another one,” BB pointed out.
How odd to look at Osman through human eyes.
“And it’s cruel to keep one on its own, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is,” Naomi said. BB decided to take that at face value.

Osman looked over Adj wistfully. “I know I should send him back to HQ, but he really would be useful on a mission like this. Let’s see what the Admiral’s got to say. Was there any food for him in the ship? They do need nutrients, don’t they?”

“If there isn’t, I can formulate an amino acid mix.” BB wanted to search
Piety
anyway. There was plenty of work to do to her before she was sent on her
Marie Celeste
-like way. “Come on, Naomi. Housekeeping time.”

Naomi climbed back into
Piety
and dragged the dead Jiralhanae aside to get at the crates. She pried one lid open and rummaged around inside, turning over assorted hand weapons and spare power packs.

“BB,” she said, “are you sure this ship was heading
toward
Sanghelios, not
away
from it?”

“Definitely. Plug me into her nav computer and I’ll confirm it. Why do you ask?”

“Have you scanned this stuff for tags?”

He hadn’t. The only tags he would check for would be those on the arms supplied to ‘Telcam, and this shipment didn’t fall under that heading.

“I’ll do that right now,” he said, embarrassed, and activated the signal via her radio. “Oh…”

He got a return. Four, in fact. There were four weapons in this shipment that had been supplied by ONI and handed over to ‘Telcam.

“Maybe there’s a simple explanation for this,” Naomi said. “Let’s check
Piety
’s nav computer.”

URBAN STRUCTURE, FORERUNNER DYSON SPHERE, ONYX: LOCAL DATE NOVEMBER 2552.

The Forerunners must have been pretty confident about their engineering skills, because there were no stairs here.

Mendez stood in the lobby and looked around for an alternative to stepping into a rectangular opening that looked exactly like an elevator. He already had one Spartan missing. He didn’t plan on adding any more.

Who’d build a tower block with no goddamn emergency stairs?

“Clear right, Chief,” Linda called. She backed out of a small side lobby, rifle raised, and rejoined the cluster of Spartans watching the main entrance and the doors leading onto the lobby. “I’m not picking up any movement on my HUD. And no EM. Nothing at all. It’s deserted.”

The lobby was built in the same pale gold stone as the towers, completely empty and with no sign of ever having been used or occupied. Mendez had cleared plenty of abandoned buildings in his time on colony worlds, kicking doors open and checking room by room for booby traps. The floors were usually scattered with the sad debris of normal lives that had been interrupted for one reason or another, even if it was just scraps of paper or broken glass. But he’d never seen anything as sterile as this. There wasn’t a single trace of dust or evidence of wear on anything. The place could have been constructed yesterday, except he’d never seen a new building quite this clean.

“Well, if we want a vantage point,” he said, “we have to get up top somehow.”

Mendez walked outside again and stood back to count the windows. There were seven openings top to bottom, but he had no way of telling if the spacing meant there were a few floors with very high ceilings, or if some floors just didn’t have any natural light. He went back in and paused at the entrance to the elevator.

I hope that’s what it is, anyway. Assumptions get you killed.

“Come on, Chief.” Fred put one boot on the floor of the elevator cage. “Nobody goes anywhere on their own until we figure out how this maze works. Everyone else—stay put.”

Mendez stepped in beside Fred. The two of them stood there for a moment, looking around for anything that resembled controls. Maybe it was a gravity lift: there were no signs on the walls at all, recognizable or otherwise. The ceiling of the elevator cage didn’t give Mendez any clues either, but then his stomach lurched and he realized he was moving. The entrance vanished below them.

“Okay, people, going up,” Fred said. “I don’t know what the Chief did, but it worked.”

“I just looked up,” Mendez said.

“Okay, so maybe it responds to that. Up for up, down for down…”

“And stop?”

They were now looking at a blank wall and it was hard to tell if they were still moving. Mendez shut his eyes for a moment to see if he could detect motion, but he wasn’t sure of it until he saw the opening onto another floor slide slowly past them. Another open floor followed, then another.

“Well, that’s two, and I counted seven.”

“That’s … three.” The cage rose past another opening. “And four…”

Light spread down from the tight seam between the cage and the wall, indicating another floor coming. Mendez reached toward the wall, and the cage slowed to a stop. It leveled out with the fifth floor and waited.

“You’ve got a way with elevators, Chief.” Fred stuck his head out to take a look, boots still inside the cage area. “Very hygienic. No germ-laden buttons.”

Mendez tried out his newfound mastery and looked up to the ceiling again. The floor began to rise. “Yeah, the more I see, the more I wonder if this is some decontamination facility. It feels like a hospital.”

“If you were escaping from the Flood, and this is the first place you end up after you get into the Dyson sphere, that makes sense.”

Mendez watched floor six go by. He’d expected Kelly to be on the radio by now, passing on Halsey’s questions as the resident Forerunner expert, but she hadn’t called in.

“How long do you think this place has been here, Lieutenant?”

“In real time or the Dyson time? I’d guess thousands of years.”

“I came here twenty-odd years ago,” Mendez said. “We were sitting right on top of this thing all that time and never knew it was here.”

He heard the slight drop-out on Fred’s helmet audio as the lieutenant muted his radio. “Dr. Halsey’s really upset about that, Chief.”

“Yes, she’s already indicated her displeasure to me, sir. But I answer to the chain of command. Not a civilian.”