Halo: Glasslands (33 page)

“Understood, Chief.”

Officer or no officer, Fred was like anyone else in the UNSC. A senior NCO like Mendez could put him politely in his place and get away with it. Even admirals trod carefully around old senior chiefs. Halsey would just have to suck it up. Mendez wasn’t on her private staff, and the Spartan project wasn’t her patented property.

“Seven,” he said, and the elevator stopped without any gestures from him.

They stepped out onto an empty floor and worked their way around it, overlapping cover. But if this was accommodation or an emergency center of some kind then it certainly wasn’t ready for an influx of refugees. There wasn’t a stick of furniture in the place. However advanced the Forerunners’ technology had been, Mendez was sure they’d still have needed chairs or beds, however unrecognizable those might now be to a human being. But the place was just a shell. He inhaled, trying to pick up any smell of decay, but if anything had rotted away here then it was long past the decomposition stage.

“Good view.” Fred reached the window and leaned on the sill. “There’s some kind of glass in this, not that you can see it.”

Mendez stood beside him and took his binoculars out of his pack. “You see anything I can’t, Lieutenant?”

“Looks like a ghost town,” Fred murmured. “Nothing moving. Nothing on infrared. No active radio channels except ours.” He moved his head back and forth as if he was trying to focus. “Blue Team, everybody got those images?”

Olivia responded. “Got it, sir.”

As ghost towns went, it looked pretty good. Below the window, an elegant but apparently dead city stretched as far as Mendez could see. The buildings were a mix of sleek towers, single-story domed structures, and sprawling low-rises that could have been anything from theaters to warehouses. Mendez had no idea if the Forerunners had had that kind of society, but the size of most of the doors was the same as back home. That told him more about them than he’d first realized.

He tapped his radio. He was fed up waiting for the shoe to drop. “Kelly, everything okay back there?”

“Still no sign of her, Chief.” Kelly must have said something to Halsey because the mike cut out for a moment. “Interesting recon you’ve got going there.”

“Empty. Just shells of buildings.”

“Never mind. We’ve got fruit and lizards. A girl can whip up a decent meal from those.”

“What’s Halsey doing?”

“Running translations on the Forerunner controls. She says it’s just a maintenance area but there’s still some symbols she’s not sure about.”

“I’ll trust her not to press any buttons she can’t translate. Mendez out.”

Fred just looked at him. The visor might as well not have been there. Mendez avoided the discussion and headed back to the elevator, and the two of them didn’t say another word on the way down.

Damn. An elevator’s an elevator wherever it is. I could be back in Sydney avoiding an awkward conversation like this. Not in some slipspace bubble in God knows where.

He stepped out into the lobby and walked over to the doorway to gaze at the deserted street. On the open radio channel, he could hear the Spartans calling out cleared rooms, finding nothing. Fred ambled over to stand next to him.

“Halsey said this sphere’s about the same diameter as Earth’s orbit. That’s a hell of a big place to recon.”

“Maybe, but if there was any civilization here, even one that makes us look like chimps, then we’d pick up something,” Mendez said. “Even if we couldn’t receive up their comms, we’d detect something.”

“We might be here a very long time, Chief.”

“And you want Mom and Dad to get on.”

“Something like that. What changed?”

“Me.”

Olivia and Linda emerged from the elevator. “All clear, sir,” Olivia said. “Okay if we go check out the other buildings? Some of them look like storage facilities.”

“Go ahead.” Fred nodded toward the door. “We’ll be right behind you.”

The two women went off up the road. Fred didn’t seem about to resume the conversation, so Mendez changed the topic.

“We ought to pick a spot to set up camp for the night,” he said. “Which might sound crazy when we’ve got a few million square meters of prime accommodation to choose from, but I haven’t seen a faucet around here yet. Somewhere near the river’s our best bet.”

“Yeah, where there’s water, there’ll be fish and animals.” Fred looked toward the elevator and the sound of voices. “And I’d rather be near the towers.”

He didn’t need to say why. Tom, Mark, and Ash came out of the elevator and shrugged. Fred gestured to the street.

“Three hours, max,” he said. “Then we regroup at the tower.”

Mendez gave the Spartans a few minutes’ start to put some diplomatic distance between them before following with Fred. A crisis was a handy thing. It could stop him from thinking about the slow-burning, intractable problems. All that mattered right then was finding Lucy and keeping the team alive and fed. Thinking beyond that was asking for trouble.

But after another forty minutes of checking out deserted buildings, he did it anyway.

“You ever feel a sense of injustice about your life, Fred?” This was man-to-man now. At some point Mendez would need to say sorry, but it had to be more than a word and it had to be discussed. “About the life you never had, I mean.”

Fred didn’t answer for a few moments. They walked on in the echoing silence. “I don’t recall that life,” he said. “But wherever I came from, I’m pretty sure it was glassed. So I got a life I might not otherwise have lived. And how many people get to fulfill their full potential? I’m okay with it, Chief.”

Mendez wasn’t sure if it was just a kind answer for his benefit, a rationalization because regret was a sour and painful thing, or if it was simply the way Fred really felt.

And how can I be sorry if I went and did it all over again with the next batch of Spartans?

Linda’s voice came over the radio. “Sir, I might be jumping to conclusions, but I think we’ve found a food warehouse. First dome on the left. Not good news.”

“Got you,” Fred said. “On our way.”

Mendez jogged down the street after him. Linda was standing outside the arched entrance to what could have been a spa, hands on hips. She didn’t say a word. She jerked her head at them to follow and led them into the building.

The interior reminded Mendez of a dance hall or an ice rink, a big open tiled floor with a kind of colonnade on three sides. The dome had looked opaque from the outside but from in here he could see the sky, blue and marbled with wispy clouds. The place was another immaculate shell. This time, though, there were plenty of Forerunner glyphs on the walls and above the doors.

“Mind the tables,” Linda said.

Fred was a few paces ahead of Mendez. “What tables?”

Linda put her left hand out to her side as she walked, then stood still. Where her hand cast a shadow, the tiles deformed and the flooring coalesced into something almost like extruded plastic. It rose up in a column and stopped at hand-height, then spread horizontally like a mushroom cap opening. It was now a table.

“Well, at least we know where some of the furnishings are,” she said.

Mendez grunted. “Neat technology.”

“And we weren’t far off the mark about Lucy walking through the wall, either.” Linda kept going and seemed to be on a collision course with a panel halfway along the colonnade. “Look.”

She was a meter from the wall when it parted. It didn’t slide apart: it dissolved. That was the only way Mendez could describe it. As he stood on the threshold, he could feel something on his face which he would have thought was a constant breeze, but knowing the Forerunners it couldn’t be that simple. The room he stared into was lined with completely plain shelves.

“Is this a cold store?” he asked.

“Not sure if it’s chilled.” Linda walked inside and cast around with that head movement that told him she was switching through the different filters in her visor. “But the atmosphere
is
different in here. I can’t swear to this, either, because I can’t even begin to guess how the Forerunners cleaned premises, but I don’t think this place has ever been stocked. I’m not picking up any traces of organic material in my filters.”

Mark, Ash, and Tom walked in behind them, boots clattering on the tiles. Their silence was telling. They looked around and eventually Tom took off his helmet.

“You ever get the feeling that they started building this place but never finished it?” he said.

Yes, that was exactly how it looked. Mendez wasn’t sure just how much worse that made things, but it did raise a question. What had stopped the Forerunners? A civilization like that didn’t shelve projects because the budget ran out.

But it was thousands of years ago, something to keep Halsey occupied, and he had a Spartan missing.

“Come on,” he said. “Lucy’s still out there somewhere.”

UNSC
PORT STANLEY,
URS SYSTEM: FEBRUARY 2553.

“It’s just like Earth,” Phillips said. “You sell arms to some bunch of revolutionaries you think are on your side, and before you know it, the stuff ends up in the wrong hands. Well, that’s why you tagged the weapons, isn’t it? Just to work out who’s in cahoots with who.”

Osman checked over
Piety
again to make sure that there was nothing else of use that she could strip from it. BB, evicted from Naomi’s armor, was buzzing around the ship’s systems harvesting data. He seemed to be enjoying himself. Every few minutes she heard him say “
Yoink…”

“That’s true,” Osman said. “I don’t mind if they share the kit with Beelzebub as long as they’re squabbling between themselves and not bothering us. I just want to know the supply route.”

“Venezia,” BB said suddenly. “There’s a link to Venezia in the comms log.”

“How?” Osman knew BB could process information in nanoseconds. He’d taken his time about that. “This ship hasn’t got anything like that range. No slipspace drive, for a start.”

“No, but they
are
in touch with a party of Kig-Yar who appear to be transmitting from within the Venezia sector.”

Osman’s mind went straight back to the Covenant AA battery that Venezia had fired at
Monte Cassino.
She’d wondered how the colonists had acquired missiles, and now she knew.
Bastard Jackals.
The aftermath of government collapse in a war was usually a free-for-all with the hardware. Who was left to keep an inventory? It wasn’t a surprise, but it did complicate matters in both good and bad ways. The Prophets hadn’t trusted the Kig-Yar any more than she did, and restricted the slipspace drives they were allowed access to. The Kig-Yar got what the UNSC diplomatically termed the
de-enriched
spec.

Well, I’d make sure they got the monkey model, too. But Venezia doesn’t care. They need the arms, and I bet they’ve acquired some really interesting vessels now.

“Any indication of how chummy they are?” she asked. “Did they know the Brutes had an Engineer embarked?”

“I don’t think they’re doing business,” BB said. “The flight path suggests they were avoiding another ship. So the Kig-Yar probably knew.”

The compartment was starting to smell foul now, a blend of Kig-Yar and rapidly decomposing Jiralhanae that prodded at her gag reflex. The Kig-Yar corpses were a fairly safe bet as bogus evidence went. It was simply a case of sending
Piety
back to the Sangheili in a way that would fuel mistrust. She could always destroy the ship, of course, but the cumulative effect of small incidents could stoke hatred far faster than one huge outrage, especially now the Sangheili were reliant more on gossip than efficient imperial communications from the San’Shyuum.

“Are the Sangheili likely to do any forensic tests on corpses, Evan?” she asked. “Because
we
would, obviously.”

Phillips squatted to look at one of the dead Brutes with a flashlight. He really did grab every single new experience, even the gruesome ones. “They don’t
do
doctors,” he said. “If a warrior accepts any medical care apart from a few bracing herbal remedies, it’s a shocking disgrace—especially surgery. They think he’s a big girl. So without the San’Shyuum around, I think their chances of finding a pathologist are pretty slim. Added to which … they’re so culturally arrogant that they’ll probably assume the Kig-Yar took on too much raiding the ship, and the Jiralhanae were too dumb to deal with it.” He prodded the huge corpse, running the back of his fingers over the bristly gray fur on the Brute’s neck. “Wow, they’re
big
boys, aren’t they?”

“But they can tell the difference between a projectile injury and an energy weapon wound, so we’d better give our Kig-Yar a UNSC rifle.”

“You’re a devious woman, Captain.”

“Flatterer.”

She’d done all she could for the moment, so she withdrew from the cargo bay to inhale clean air in the hangar. BB was now whistling tunelessly to himself. She had to smile.