Halo: Glasslands (45 page)

“Prone,” she said hoarsely.

I CANNOT RESTORE YOU. WHO WILL DO IT?

Lucy gestured to the squad around her. “Them.”

“Good going, Luce,” Mark said, almost shaking her by the shoulders. “Keep it up.”

Prone peered into her face for a few moments and then wrote on his pad again. YOU WANT TO GO HOME.

Lucy knew that if she asked in the right way, he’d send a message for her. He trusted her despite what she’d done, and he obviously didn’t trust Halsey.

But was it the right thing to do? Engineers weren’t stupid, and if Prone was worried about what was lurking outside the sphere, then he had good reason. On the other hand, maybe he’d just show them what he could see. It was only a small step. It didn’t mean breaking radio silence and making themselves into potential targets.

But how do you breach a Dyson sphere in another dimension anyway? Can anyone get at us?

Lucy nodded at Prone. She didn’t have a home to go back to, and even her base on Onyx was gone, but that was too complicated for her to explain to him right now. The important thing was that she focused again and continued with the mission, or everyone she’d lost would have died for nothing.

It was a massive effort. She looked into Prone’s face and squeezed the unfamiliar words out of weak vocal cords.

“Show us.”

“She means show us your data on the threat,” Olivia said. “Maybe we know what it is.”

Prone didn’t respond. He seemed to be studying Lucy’s face in return. Then he just wandered off and rejoined his friends.

“Sometimes I think those things react to humans, and sometimes I think they’re just looking at a complicated circuit diagram,” said Mark. “But maybe he’s gone away to mull it over.”

For the moment, there was nothing that they could do. Lucy wondered whether to stay out of Halsey’s way, but she had to face the woman sooner or later, and they were still stuck here with no immediate hope of rescue. No, she had to stop thinking of it as a
rescue.
She had to see it as the retrieval of high-value technology. She walked outside into the sunlight, suddenly terrified that she didn’t know what to say—literally
say
—next. If she didn’t try to keep talking, she knew she would slide back into silence.

She looked around the camp at the underclothes and jerky drying side by side on the bushes and saw the Spartan-IIs standing in a huddle, talking. Mendez and Halsey were head to head a few meters away. Their body language said it all.

They were standing square on to each other, shoulders braced in confrontation. Lucy could hear the discussion building into a fight. They were oblivious. Maybe they didn’t care that they now had an audience of Spartans.

Halsey had her arms folded tight across her chest, more a blocking gesture than a defensive one. “Do you take my point now, Chief? They’re just not stable. They’re a liability.”

“So what do you want me to do, Doctor?” Mendez growled. “They were broken when we got them. It was their goddamn qualification to get into the program, for Chrissakes. Terrified, angry little kids who’d seen their parents killed and wanted to lash out.”

“Well, yes, that’s a classic profile, but—”

“You know what regular recruits are like when you draft them?” He started stabbing his finger in her direction to make his point. “A mixed bag. Some are downright psychopathic. Some are bone idle. Some are scared of their own shadows. All kinds.” He took out his cigar and shoved it between his lips, still talking as it dangled there while he felt in his pockets for that ancient Swedish fire-starter he always carried. “But dumb guys like me make them into fighting men and women by giving them discipline and pride. That’s the way the armed forces always ran before we started
designing
soldiers.” He paused for breath as he struck furious sparks off the two metal strips onto a scrap of dry grass, then lit the Sweet William. “You know something?” He gestured with the cigar right under her nose, wafting her with smoke. “It’s the way the rest of the UNSC
still
runs. What
you
call disorders and abnormalities,
I
call different personalities. You just want to medicate and tweak and modify people into one vanilla definition of perfect, lady, and it’s not what humans are like.”

“You finished, Chief?”

“Hell,
no,
Doctor, I only just got started. You were never much good at accepting imperfect people, were you? You dumped your own goddamn daughter on her dad when she got too
imperfect.
Poor Jacob Keyes. Nice guy. Good father. Great officer. So then you made your own perfect daughter with that AI of yours, Cortana, a tidy little copy of yourself who thinks you’re the Virgin Mary. I don’t need a goddamn Ph.D. in psychiatry to work out what’s wrong with
you.
”

Lucy couldn’t move. She didn’t really know Halsey and she didn’t care what the woman thought of Spartan-IIIs. But she could hear Mendez losing his temper. His voice was getting more gravelly as his throat constricted. He almost wheezed when he puffed on that cigar. This was the man who’d looked after her and the other Spartan recruits from the day she’d landed on a strange planet with a bunch of six-year-old savages who’d almost forgotten what it meant to be human beings. He asked them who wanted a chance to kill the Covenant.
Me. I wanted that. I wanted to kill them all.
Mendez had faced the same risks alongside them. She knew whose side she’d be on in any fight.

“You
bastard,
” Halsey said at last. It was more of a hiss. “How
dare
you pry into my private life.”

“You’re not the only one with a nosey AI, Doctor. But a lot of UNSC staff can access the DNA database—and the goddamn
calendar.
A lot of people know. They’ve just got too much respect for Miranda to gossip.”

“You and Ackerson. A matching pair of treacherous assholes.”

“At least he only took volunteers.”

“Six-year-olds can’t possibly
volunteer.
Spare me the competitive morality.”

“They didn’t have parents
grieving
for them, either.”

“You’ve been saving this up, haven’t you?”

“Not really. Work in a sewer long enough and you don’t notice the smell until you go outside.”

Lucy was transfixed. All the stuff about Halsey and her daughter and parents grieving—it was getting ugly, even if she didn’t understand the context. She realized Tom and Fred were now standing next to her, helmets in hands.

“I better break this up,” Fred said.

Tom shook his head. “No, sir, I think you better leave them to air their differences.”

Halsey dropped her voice, but it was still crystal-clear. “You knew what the deal was, Chief. You could have walked away at any time.”

“So I deserve what’s coming to me. I should have asked for a transfer as soon as I found out what you’d done to their parents. And those goddamn clones. You know what? Just saying it out loud now makes me sick to my gut. It was all wrong. All
completely wrong.
Well, I hope someone charges me with the crimes, because this should never be hidden. This should
never
be covered up.”

“But you did it once,” Halsey said, hands on hips, “and then you did it
again,
without me. And you did it for the same reason that I did—because creating Spartans gave us the best chance of saving the human race.”

“Steady with that airbrush, Doctor. You created the Spartans to counter colonial insurgents. That was a hell of a long time before the Covenant showed up.”

“And they were just as big a threat. Remember Haven? I wanted to stop that ever happening again.”

“You wanted to do it because you
could.
Curiosity. Goddamn vanity. You don’t give a damn about human life, not even your own daughter’s—only about being the smartest kid in the class.”

“Don’t you
dare
lecture me on Miranda. I asked Jacob to bring her up because I knew I was a bad mother.”

“I never said you weren’t self-aware.”

“Look, I
know
I can’t give anyone unconditional love. But I’m smarter than most abusive parents and I knew Jacob would do a better job than I ever could. I didn’t want a doll to play with, Chief. I got pregnant, it wasn’t convenient, and I wasn’t prepared to take an unborn life.”

“Don’t you dump that pious handwringing bullshit on
me.
” Mendez was now white with fury. He was gesturing so hard with the cigar that ash was flying everywhere. Lucy hovered on the edge of stepping in to break it up. “You had no damn respect for
born
life.”

“Okay, that’s enough.” Fred strode forward, pushing between them until they backed apart. “This stops
now.
Both of you. Wind your necks in, and that’s an
order.
”

Mendez just stood his ground and took a drag on what was left of his cigar. “Yes, sir.” Then he walked back to the tower entrance and went into the lobby.

Halsey stood there for a moment, expressionless, then looked up at Fred. Lucy could see that her neck was flushed bright red. That was something she couldn’t hide.

“He’s right, I’m afraid,” Halsey said. “Why else do you think I went slightly crazy and brought you all here? Late onset of menopause?”

“Preserving vital assets, ma’am.”

“Salving my conscience,” Halsey said, and walked away toward the river.

Lucy’s mad moment seemed small and forgotten by comparison. Everyone was looking either in the direction of the tower entrance or toward the river, which she took as a sign of whether they were more worried about Mendez or Halsey. A split was forming. If the Engineers didn’t find them a way out of here, that was going to become a major problem. Fred might have been the ranking officer but there wasn’t a lot he could do to keep Halsey on a leash.

“That’s really sad about her daughter,” Kelly said at last. “Miranda Keyes? I’d never have guessed. She’s so much like her father.”

“And what about your parents?” Olivia asked. “What did the Chief mean about clones?”

Kelly shrugged as if she wasn’t bothered about it at all. With a helmet on, Spartans could hide a lot of turmoil. “You’ll need to ask him about that.”

Tom nudged Lucy with his elbow and steered her away for a walk. If Lucy had a close buddy in the squad, then it was Tom. They’d been the only two survivors from the raid on the Pegasi Delta refinery. She knew that was where she’d started to come unraveled, while Tom just kept on going, dependable and unflappable as ever. Sometimes she wondered why he could handle it and she couldn’t, but by the time that thought started to form in her mind she was past the stage of being able to have a discussion about it. The doctors said that sooner or later, given enough pressure, shot at enough times, isolated and deprived of sleep for long enough, almost everyone would succumb to traumatic stress. Everyone reached their individual tipping point, and hers just happened sooner than Tom’s.

But she could still function in combat. And that was all that mattered to her, because her punishment had been to survive her friends, and that meant she had some duty to perform before life would let her off the hook.

“Talk to me, Lucy,” Tom said. “You know the last thing you said to me? To anyone?
How do we know we’re still alive.
Yeah, living’s hard after all that.”

Lucy pursed her lips, making a conscious effort to shape the word. “Sorry,” she said. “Sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry for, Luce. Nothing at all.”

She knew it was going to take a lot more effort to get back to the person she’d been, if she ever made it at all. In the meantime, she was satisfied that she would be able to say enough to be a more useful member of the squad. She walked around for a while with Tom, searching for edible plants, until a shout from behind made them turn.

Mendez had come out of the lobby, walking behind Prone to Drift. The set of his shoulders had changed and it looked like there was some news. Lucy and Tom jogged back to the others.

“You’ve got a persuasive way with you, Petty Officer,” Mendez said to her. “Your friend has something to say.”

Prone was still clutching the small sheet of white glass, his message pad. He held it in front of her.

YOU MUST BE FULLY REPAIRED. MAKE THE CALL.

Maybe he was trying to encourage Lucy to speak. But if he wanted her to send a signal and was prepared to risk alerting whatever was lurking out there, she wasn’t the person for the job. Halsey was best qualified to do this stuff. Lucy gestured.

“Her,” she said. “Ask her.”

Halsey plunged straight in. “Thank you, Prone.” She was doing her “mommy” voice again. “The worst that can happen is that someone realizes we’re in here, but it’s a Dyson sphere in another dimension. We’re still safe.”

Prone drifted back inside and everyone followed him. The rest of them seemed to have gone into hiding again. He tapped a couple of the symbols on the wall and beckoned Halsey forward.