Halo: Glasslands (36 page)

So I have no soul. And why are the only concepts I have for this religious ones? Can’t reason provide the answers?

She couldn’t actually remember what she’d written in the journal, not in any detail. She wondered if she didn’t want to.

She only recalled that when she wrote, she had an awareness at the back of her mind that one day those words and sketches would be seen by others, studied by historians, quoted and analyzed, because she was
important.
She was one of the greatest thinkers of her century. Everyone had told her so.

Right now, though, she was sixty years old, hungry, and half scared and half thrilled, trapped in a Dyson sphere through a debacle of her own making and trying to put a brave face on it. There were only three people here who thought she was a great thinker and a boon to humanity. The others didn’t really know or care what the hell she was, except for the one who knew her only
too
well and had finally lost his ability to hide his contempt for her.

And if the Flood’s now overrun the galaxy and the Halo Array’s fired, then this is our seed corn to rebuild humanity. Two sterile and miserable old bastards, and at least one of the females of childbearing age is genetically predisposed to violence and aggression. Let’s hope Kelly and Linda are still firing on all cylinders.

But that was a problem for the long term. The short-term one still had to be tackled. Halsey was now pretty sure she knew what the tower structures were, which was a start. So far it had taken her three days to capture images of the Forerunner symbols spread across the walls and map the symbols to the language algorithm in her datapad. She had no AI this time to help her.

But that’s fine. I
create
AIs. I shouldn’t need to rely on them. The human mind’s still the best tool for the job.

The results were slow in coming, but they were fascinating. This sanctuary wasn’t a single, self-sustaining ecosphere but a customizable range of environments. Halsey noted the symbols for temperature, humidity, ratios of gases in the atmosphere, and even gravity. Some other symbols didn’t make sense on first examination because they appeared to be names rather than common elements of language, and names were notoriously hard to pin down in translation. But an intuitive leap told her the names were not those of individuals, but of
species.

So which is which? What’s the symbol for human? We had to be part of the plan. Look how closely this environment mirrors Earth. But why is that all we can see? Does the first species to find its way in dictate the setup?

That didn’t make sense, but she was confident that it would in time. Halsey took another guess—another intellectual gamble—that the Forerunners had created a bunker not just for themselves but for other sentient species they wanted to protect from the devastating effects of the Halo Array. They’d have found a way of catering for different requirements. She found herself wondering whether the Forerunners had thought in terms of a diverse community of equals, or simply a zoo for their own amusement.

And if you were so powerful, so advanced, so able to play God—what happened to you all?

For a moment, she forgot the wider predicament and found she was actually enjoying herself. She knew that was wrong and that she should have been as worried as the others were about Lucy, who’d now been missing for days. She realized that she was equally untroubled about the food supply. She hoped that was because she’d made a rational calculation about their environment and the kind of plant and animal species it would support, but something at the back of her mind told her that it was an almost religious faith in salvation by genius—that she was so brilliant, and her Spartan-IIs were so resourceful, that they were bound to come up with a solution to the problem in the nick of time.

Child. Belief in magic. Belief in grown-ups’ omnipotence. Get a grip, Halsey.

But it really was yet another lovely, balmy day and it was hard not to believe in providence.
We could have found this sphere set up for methane-breathing extremophiles, couldn’t we? It’s working out somehow.
The river was ice cold, so bathing was a bracing experience and her hands were numb by the time she finished washing her clothes each evening. But something perverse within her was actively enjoying the sheer adventure of it all. The temporary camp around the tower had settled into a daily routine, with half the Spartans rostered to gather wild food and the other half carrying out recons in the sprawling but still stubbornly empty city a few kilometers away.

Halsey stayed back at the camp with a sidearm and her research. It was a comfortable solution. She didn’t have to indulge in conversation or try to maintain a civilized working relationship with Chief Mendez, which was looking less possible by the day. She sat cross-legged on the grass with her laptop balanced on one knee, savoring the current intellectual puzzle and now not at all bothered by the disgusting taste of the ration bars.

When she looked up she could see Kelly emerging from the woods with her hand resting against her shoulder as if she was carrying something draped across her back. Judging by the swagger in the Spartan’s walk, Kelly was pleased with herself and grinning from ear to ear under that helmet.

She came to a stop in front of Halsey and swung the load off her back, holding it up like a prize. It was a rather sad bundle of destruction, a haul of dead animals that she’d managed to trap. Halsey could see three or four of the small green lizards, one of them temptingly plump, as well as an assortment of birds and two hare-sized mammals of a species she didn’t recognize, covered in dense chocolate-brown fur.

“Whatever you do, ma’am, don’t say it tastes like chicken.”

“Well, all we need now is a few cloves of garlic and a bottle of decent red,” Halsey said, smiling. “Although there
is
that herb growing on the riverbank that’s got quite a tang to it.”

Kelly looked around, not so relaxed now. Her shoulders braced. Halsey got the feeling that she’d been tasked with babysitting her and didn’t want it to look that obvious.

“Still no change inside the tower, then?” She meant Lucy. “There’s got to be some link between these towers and the city. Maybe Lucy’s going to pop up inside the buildings somewhere.”

“It’s only a matter of time before I finish translating the symbols, and then we’ll work out how to access the other parts of the building,” Halsey said, trying to be reassuring. “I promise you that I haven’t forgotten about her.”

“I didn’t say you had, ma’am.”

No. I think it was me.

Kelly began gutting and skinning her catch, oblivious of Halsey’s reaction. Then she stopped and put her hand to the side of her helmet. “Chief Mendez is on his way back. I think that man can smell dinner ten klicks away.”

Well, I might as well make myself useful. It’ll save an argument.

Jacob Keyes had once asked Halsey why she kept a pocket saw in her purse, and she remembered making some crack about putting uppity men in their place with it. But she was an Endymion girl and it was just a handy thing she might need one day. She’d had a comfortable, middle-class upbringing, but Endymion was still a frontier colony, and beyond the boundaries of her hometown the wilderness always loomed.

It was all glasslands now. She knew that. Reading the official signal as it passed through the ONI system didn’t evoke sobbing and regret. Endymion was gone, her parents were gone—not that she’d seen much of them in the preceding years—and life had to go on.

I have no soul. I know that. But that lets me think the unthinkable and create the things that enable decent, feeling people to survive. That’s the price—for all of us.

Halsey got up to collect firewood from the log pile that they’d started building next to the tower. It was a regular Girl Scout camp. She stood by the fire, pleased that she hadn’t forgotten how to build one and keep it going, and smiled at the sight of thornbushes draped with the Spartan-IIIs’ underwear drying in the sun.

The hunting team returned first. Fred, Linda, and Olivia ambled into the camp clutching more small dead animals, an assortment of greens, and those yellow tennis ball fruits. Olivia held something in her arms as carefully as if it was a newborn.

It was a fish. A huge, silver, meaty-looking fish. It was the first one Halsey had seen here. They definitely weren’t going to starve, then.

“We decided to skip pizza,” Olivia said. She cradled the fish, looking wistful. “We’ve gone organic.”

The fish seemed to perk everyone up. They took off their helmets and settled down with Halsey to prepare the food, skewering chunks of vegetable and meat on twigs, making morale-boosting comments about everything being all right now but not mentioning Lucy. Mendez appeared from the trees a hundred meters away with Mark, Ash, and Tom trailing behind him.

“You know what we really need?” Fred said. “A nice big cooking pot. I think it’s time we invented ceramics.”

Mendez walked into the cooking circle, grunted an acknowledgment at nobody in particular, and seemed to be doing a head count. He didn’t meet Halsey’s eyes. “Anyone mind if I light up before dinner?”

“Ration yourself, Chief,” Ash said. “Four puffs. Or you’ll have to find some local stuff to dry and smoke.”

“Uh-
huh.
” Mendez lit his cigar stub from the taper of dry grass and inhaled deeply. “I may well do that, Ash. I may yet weaken.”

He walked away and stood with his back to them, facing the river. Halsey wasn’t counting, but he’d taken a lot more than four puffs by the time he turned around, and when he did his turmoil was etched into his face, possibly the first time that Halsey had ever felt the urge to go to him and ask if she could help.

But she knew she couldn’t. It was about Lucy. Nobody was speculating openly about it now, but Halsey was certain that if she could access everyone’s thoughts for most of their waking day, then the majority of them would be about that girl—where she was, what had happened to her, whether she was badly injured and unable to call for help, and what she’d been chasing when she went missing.

Whatever it was, it hadn’t come back.

Halsey decided she couldn’t just stay out of Mendez’s way and say nothing indefinitely, because this exile might last for years.
Assuming he doesn’t shoot me first.
She got to her feet and wandered over to him.

“I’ve nearly finished translating the symbols, Chief,” she said, brandishing the achievement like an olive branch. “I’m betting that we’ll be able to work it all out then.”

Mendez looked down at the glowing tip of his cigar, then extinguished it carefully on the sole of his boot. “Hope so, Doctor.”

“Like everyone says, Lucy’s smart and tough. She’ll hang in there, wherever
there
is.” Halsey really was trying to make placatory conversation. Whatever Mendez had done in the intervening years, she wouldn’t have been able to turn her Spartans into soldiers without him. “So how did you actually select the Threes?”

He looked up slowly. “Is this going to be about me betraying you and helping Ackerson hijack your project? Because if it is—”

“I was just asking,” she said. “Because I want to know.”

“Well, you know we didn’t select them on the basis of perfect genomes,” he said. Halsey had suspended the second tranche of the Spartan program because she’d run out of candidates with the ideal genetic profile. She knew he wasn’t going to let her forget it. “They were all orphans. No qualification beyond the Covenant slaughtering their entire family. We asked them if they wanted to get their revenge, and we took the ones who said yes.” He put his cigar back in his belt pouch, but he was staring right into her face. “We took
volunteers.
We enhanced them some, but we took whatever we could get, and they turned out fine.”

“No filtering at all?” A six-year-old couldn’t possibly understand combat enough to volunteer, but she didn’t want to start a pissing contest with him over ethics, not in front of the Spartans. “Not even genetic screening?”

“You think it’s all about genes, Doctor? The Spartans that I trained were made from random, raw, imperfect humanity. But by God, they were
motivated.
And that’s what it’s all about. A state of mind.”

Halsey wanted to resist a debate, but if she’d just nodded and smiled it would have made him just as angry. “If that were true, then we wouldn’t have needed the Spartan program. Exceptional genes create an advantage in any field.”

“What was it you said to me once? Genome is the blueprint, environment and training is the engineer.
Phenotype.
”

“Yes, but—”

“I realize you need justification, but your history isn’t up to your science,” Mendez growled. “The most successful special forces in history weren’t genetic supermen. They were every damn size and shape, every age, and some of them weren’t even especially fit, but they all had one thing that made them great commandos. They
believed
they could do anything, and then they went out and
did
it.”