Halo: Glasslands (37 page)

Mendez always knew where to strike to disable. It was part of his training. He could wound psychologically just as well as he could place a fist or a blade.

My research mattered. My research made a difference. Don’t you give me that
commando state of mind
bullshit, don’t you dare …

“But you let Kurt tamper with their neurobiology, so what kind of state of mind is that?” Halsey defended herself. Why the hell should she take this? She’d dedicated her entire life to the defense of Earth and its colonies, surrendering any chance of the kind of normal family life that other women took for granted. “And that was made illegal years ago.”

“So was goddamn kidnapping and using nonconsenting humans in medical experiments, Doctor, but I never noticed that stopping
you.
”

Her attempt to reestablish diplomatic relations with Mendez had crashed and burned inside minutes. She was fuming.
You could have chosen to put it aside, Chief, but you didn’t. You found the first chance to take a pop at me.
She was suddenly aware of the Spartans in her peripheral vision, frozen in position and watching warily. When she turned, what she saw troubled her. Her Spartans were standing in a knot, and Mendez’s were sitting on the other side of the fire. She got the feeling that it was about more than just sticking with the people you’d known all your life.

Olivia called to them. “This fish is going to be ready soon,” she said, ever the diplomat. “If you want to stake your claim, you better get over here.”

If there had been cold beer and good humor, Halsey reflected, it would have been a pleasant barbecue. Everyone settled down and ate in silence for a while. Eventually Mendez licked his fingers and wiped them on one of the large leaves that did duty as plates.

“As long as she’s got water, she can last a couple of weeks without food,” he said. He didn’t need to say the word
Lucy
. “So how far have you got, Doctor?”

“Well, the more I translate, the more I see an environment that can be tailored to the needs of any species.” Halsey took refuge in a neutral topic. “What I’ve not worked out yet is how they would divide up the planet into different ecosystems for different species, but they’re the Forerunners. If they can build a Dyson sphere like this and a Halo Array, then compartmentalizing atmospheres would probably be very simple housekeeping for them.”

“So, whatever was moving around in the corridor before we lost Lucy,” Mark said. “Is it possible that another species landed in here just like we did?”

Halsey liked to think of this as a tactical withdrawal into the only safe space between them and the Covenant rather than blundering in. But she knew there was always the chance that they were in over their heads. Even if—even
when
—she shook all the facts and information out of this place, there was no guarantee that they would ever find a way out. Perhaps the Forerunners had given up on colonizing the galaxy and had decided to sit tight on one safe, barricaded world for the rest of time.

“I’d be lying if I said no,” Halsey said at last.

Normal conversation didn’t resume. All the Spartans had heard every word that Halsey and Mendez had said, and now there was no use pretending that the pair of them weren’t wrestling with battered, painful consciences.

“I still got a couple of panels to analyze,” Halsey said, getting to her feet and finding that her knees were a lot less flexible than she remembered. Once she could have stood up from a cross-legged position in one fluid movement, but that time was long gone. “Better crack on with the task. I’ll leave you to wash the dishes.”

Kelly tossed some of the large leaves on the fire. “Dishes done,” she said.

Halsey went back into the tower and framed up the shots on her datapad, moving the device back and forth until she was satisfied that all the symbols on the panel were clear enough for the program to interpret. She sat down in the corner, back against the smooth, cool stone, and started tapping out the beginning of another journal while the program ran its course. No, it really wasn’t like a decent pencil on honest paper. But it would have to do.

The analysis eventually chirped to let her know it had done the best it could. When she looked at the screen there were still some gaps that were proving hard to pin down. Normally her attention would have gone straight to the missing words, but something else grabbed her and that was the word
vessels.

She looked at the components of the symbol, the equivalent of speech phonemes, and she had to agree with the program. One particular symbol had to mean transport of some kind. Suddenly the information fell into place.

The panel appeared to be instructions for decontaminating vessels with possible Flood contagion. There was a mention of the word that the program interpreted intriguingly as either
barn
or
tomb,
but that she suspected was
garage.

Or storehouse. Or sarcophagus. Or mausoleum—perhaps they liked to have their possessions in their tombs, like we once did.

No, she settled on garage. Somewhere around here, there was either a cache of existing vessels, or the facilities for maintaining them, and that would need to be enormous. The panel didn’t say where it was, but it certainly hinted at what might have happened to Lucy.

“Chief?” She got up and went in search of Mendez. “Chief, have you seen anything above ground that looks like a garage?”

UTILITY AREA, DYSON SPHERE, ONYX: LOCAL DATE NOVEMBER 2552.

Lucy stood in front of the screen, trying to phrase her problem in a way that Prone to Drift would understand.

His two friends—Refill Needed and Effortlessly Buoyant—didn’t seem to be interested in the conversation and were working their way through her rucksack again. When she glanced their way, she saw that they’d reshaped the composite backpack into a more streamlined shape that slotted onto her armor more neatly. She’d thought they would want to help her, but whoever had reported that their only interest in life was fixing things had been absolutely right.

Prone persisted, though. He kept returning to another screen on the other side of the room, flicking through lists of symbols as if he was searching for something. Lucy tried to work out how to get him to focus on her. She went up to him and tapped him on the back of his carapace, forcing him to turn around. She pointed at her screen and tapped furiously.

LET ME OUT, Lucy wrote. PLEASE.

Prone considered the words, head tilting back and forth. WHY?

MY FRIENDS ARE WAITING FOR ME, Lucy responded.

WE KNOW.

LET ME FIND THEM.

NOT YET, Prone replied.

I MUST CONTACT—Lucy paused. She had no cast-iron guarantee that the war was over. Could she risk mentioning Earth? Could the Huragok send signals outside this sphere, or were they just monitoring the situation with sensors on its surface?

She started on a new line, in too much of a hurry to ask how she could delete what she’d written. I MUST LET MY HOME WORLD KNOW WHERE WE ARE.

Well, if nothing else, she was relearning how to form sentences. That was something, even if she couldn’t yet work out why Prone was being uncooperative. They didn’t take prisoners—or at least the Covenant ones didn’t. She might have been making too big an assumption about this group of Engineers.

Prone started to drift off again, but she caught one of his tentacles and steered him back to the screen.

HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN HERE? she wrote.

SINCE I WAS MADE.

HOW LONG IN MY YEARS? She wasn’t sure if that would make any sense to him. A year on Earth wasn’t the same length as a year on a colony world, and her years were always based on a military calendar of 365 days, twenty-four-hour Earth days on Zulu time, a relic of a world that wasn’t hers because UNSC was Earth in culture, loyalty, and administrative habit. She could remember the name of the town she came from, but not the planet. DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THE WAR?

Lucy knew the Dyson sphere had been sealed for a long time, or else the UNSC teams who’d been on Onyx for sixty years would probably have found it. The Engineers had been down here since before first contact with the Covenant. Prone seemed distracted for a moment.

THAT WAS A LONG TIME AGO, he said.

Lucy struggled with that answer. Halsey had said that time inside the Dyson sphere was elapsing at a slower rate than in normal space, but she didn’t know exactly how much more slowly. A terrible thought occurred to Lucy. Maybe the relative time here was so slowed that hundreds or even thousands of years had passed outside, and even if the Halo hadn’t fired, then everything and everyone she knew was already long gone.

How could she get an answer out of Prone that she could understand? She shared one common unit of time with him, and that was this artificial world.

HOW LONG? she asked again. IN ONYX DAYS. WE CALL THIS PLACE ONYX.

The years had been longer here, but the days were very close in length to Earth’s, one of the factors that got the colonists’ interest. Earth-bred crop varieties could grow in their natural cycles without much modification.

Does Prone know there was a planet outside here, though? Come on, he’s an Engineer running a Forerunner bunker. Of course he knows.

She wasn’t sure what the length of the day was inside the sphere, but she knew it wasn’t ten hours or anything that would give her an answer that was too far off the mark. Prone paused, then scribbled some symbols on the glass.

37000000

She counted the zeroes. That couldn’t be right. IN WORDS, she responded. ONE, TWO, THREE?

Prone got it right away. THIRTY SEVEN MILLION.

Lucy had to stop and reread it. Was he really saying 37 million days? That was … she shut her eyes to move the decimal place and get a rough idea of the years.

She made that a hundred thousand.

Oh God. Oh God, no. We’ve been in here that long?

It hadn’t been much of a world, and her life had been miserable, but she wasn’t ready to turn her back on all that it had been. Now she definitely had to make sure Halsey got this information.

I HAVE TO GET OUT, Lucy wrote. NOW.

She could feel her throat tightening and an awful pressure building up at the roof of her mouth. Her eyes brimmed. She was going to burst into tears. She’d always managed to hold it together in combat, but being ripped out of time wasn’t something she was prepared for at all.

Prone seemed to notice. He fussed over her with his cilia. He might just have been trying to take samples of her tears because he didn’t know what they were, but she preferred to think that he was being kind.

I MUST RESTORE YOU, he wrote.

They were communicating in English, but that didn’t necessarily mean that they were using words the same way. Maybe it was her: maybe she really wasn’t making sense, however sane she sounded to herself.

RESTORE WHAT? she asked.

RECLAIMER, he said.

Prone drifted away to gaze at his own screen for a while. Then he flashed up some diagrams. She thought he was bored and that his attention had drifted back to machines, but every few minutes he would float across and put the flat paddlelike end of one tentacle on her cheek. She felt a tickling sensation every time the cilia touched her skin. Now that he thought the Flood hadn’t overrun the galaxy and the Halo hadn’t fired, he seemed to believe the crisis was over—
one hundred thousand years
over.

Well, hers wasn’t. She had to make him understand that. She walked up behind him, intending to grab him if she had to, but she found herself looking at the schematic on the screen that was occupying him. It looked like a complex wiring loom, a closed system with dense networks in a couple of places and long, much thicker routing connecting them.

No, that wasn’t right. Some of the routing looked vaguely familiar.

Lucy took a few steps back so that the detail blurred and she could get a sense of the overall shape. Then it struck her. She had to cast her mind back to the earliest period of her training on Onyx. She was seven or eight years old, grappling with subjects she’d never had to worry about at school, and she was trying to copy a diagram from a biology text.

Human circulation. It’s the human circulatory system.

It was now obvious, an outline almost like an elongated figure of eight or an infinity symbol, the classic stylized diagram that had appeared in anatomy references for centuries.

She tugged at one of Prone’s free arms and tried to get his attention back on the writing screen.

WHY CIRCULATION? she wrote.

TO HELP ME REPAIR YOU.

Lucy now knew where this was going. Prone reached out to one side of the workshop, a flurry of tentacles and cilia, and whipped out a small spatula and a gray cylinder exactly like the ones that had been stalking the squad outside. She was ready to trust him with anything now.

HOLD OUT YOUR HAND, he wrote.