Halo: Glasslands (47 page)

“We’re coming up to a busy few days,” she said. “You spend months waiting for something significant to happen and then two interesting ops come along at once. Number one—Hood’s visit to the Arbiter is on, and we’re going to accompany him.”

“Ooh,” Phillips said, miming boyish glee. Or maybe it was real. “Can I volunteer for that, please?”

“He’s been given permission to bring up to three minions with him, presumably because they think we’re trouble in larger numbers. So that’ll be me, someone who can drop a Sangheili with one shot, and someone who might give us an advantage when speaking to them. And that would be you, Evan. Any volunteers for the other position?”

“Me, ma’am.” Vaz was itching to do something physical. He was used to being pumped on adrenaline and expending energy, not sitting around and waiting. He knew he wasn’t cut out for the intelligence services. “They might find Naomi too threatening.”

“You could take Devereaux,” Mal said. “She’s much more evil than she looks.”

“I’ll be driving the bus,” Devereaux said, pinning up her hair again. A strand had started to work loose and was clearly annoying her. “So when is it scheduled for, ma’am?”

“Sixteen hours,” Osman said. “And as soon as Hood’s safely away, then we’re heading for Onyx.”

It had to be important for Parangosky to want to divert Osman there. Vaz reached out and took the
arum
away from Phillips to see if it was as easy as he made it look. Osman seemed very upbeat about Onyx, as if it was something she’d been looking forward to for a long time. She even perched her backside on the comms console rather than sitting down in the captain’s chair. She kept looking at Naomi, but when she did she seemed almost nervous. But Osman didn’t do nervous. Vaz realized something big was going down, and she’d said there were UNSC personnel stranded on Onyx.

So it had to be the Master Chief: they’d found him.

It was the only thing that would explain the excitement and urgency. There were plenty of ONI personnel around to deal with less critical situations. They would only send Parangosky’s heir on a real showstopper.

“The anomaly at the Onyx coordinates is a Dyson sphere,” Osman said. “And we’ve now had transmissions from it. Right now it’s enclosed in a slipspace bubble and compressed to less than the size of a soccer ball in this dimension. But we’re working on bringing it into realspace. Once our techies get in there, there’s a lot of brand-new Forerunner technology that they’re going to strip out and use. This is big stuff, people.
Really
big stuff.”

“But who’s transmitting?” Devereaux asked.

Osman hesitated for a moment. Naomi perked up. She had to be thinking the same as Vaz, that they’d found the Master Chief.

“Is it John?” Naomi asked at last.

Osman paused for a moment before shaking her head. Even Vaz felt the disappointment, but it must have crushed Naomi.

“I know none of you so much as cough without taking opsec into account, but what follows
cannot
leave this bridge,” Osman said. “It’s Catherine Halsey. She’s alive inside the sphere, along with Chief Mendez, a detachment of Spartans, and a population of Huragok who’ve never encountered the Covenant.
Forerunner originals.
Okay, you have permission to squeal with excitement.”

It was hard to take all that in. The Engineers were one hell of a find, but the technology must have been the mother lode to light up Osman like that. Vaz was still disappointed that it wasn’t the Master Chief.

Naomi shut her eyes for a second. “So how did Dr. Halsey end up at Onyx after she went missing on Reach, ma’am?”

“By breaking every law in the book.” Osman’s voice now changed.
This
was what she had been waiting for. Vaz had read it totally wrong. “She hijacked a vessel, she lied to Admiral Hood to get him to deploy Spartans to Onyx, she abducted a Spartan, and she did so with the sole intention of hiding there with the Spartans until the war was over.” Osman paused as if she was letting it sink in, and boy, she really needed to. Vaz felt his scalp tighten. Halsey might have ranked above God on the ONI distribution list, but Vaz was sure Parangosky was going to have her ass for that. “So we’re going to Onyx to help secure the Dyson sphere, and to arrest the bitch on charges of aiding the enemy. For starters.”

Vaz glanced at Mal and got a quick flash of the eyebrows.
Holy shit.
Osman’s professional detachment hadn’t so much slipped as been deliberately tossed out of the airlock. He’d never heard her talk like that before.

He was almost afraid to look at Naomi but he had to. Her face was completely blank, lips slightly parted, almost as if she hadn’t heard and wanted it repeated, but that was how she always looked when she was trying not to react. One minute she’d thought this Halsey was dead, and now she was being told that not only was she alive but that she was also going to be arrested on charges that carried the death penalty.

What the hell was Halsey thinking? Who ran out in the middle of a battle and took vital UNSC assets with them? Vaz was ready to volunteer for the firing squad already. He didn’t like what he’d heard about the Spartan program, and now he didn’t like what he heard about the woman behind it.

So that’s why Osman told us all the gruesome detail. Just so we know what we’re dealing with. Just so we wouldn’t feel too sorry for the poor old dear. But that means Osman must have known she was alive.

Vaz didn’t expect to be told everything. Osman had her reasons. The bridge had now fallen into an awful silence broken only by the sound of swallowing and fidgeting.

“Just as well we didn’t need those Spartans to save Earth,” Devereaux said quietly. She examined her nails. “Seeing as they’re the last ones we’ve got.”

Naomi’s lips pursed for a moment as she finally worked up to a question. “Ma’am, Dr. Halsey would have had a good reason for doing all that. Do we know what explanation she’s given?”

“Not yet, because Parangosky’s the only one talking to her at the moment. Halsey’s got to be told about her daughter’s death as well. I’ve agreed with the Admiral that there’ll be no indication to Halsey—
none whatsoever
—that she’s going to be arrested until she’s cuffed and rendered no-risk. We don’t want a siege in a Dyson sphere.”

“You’re not telling us she’s special forces, are you, ma’am?” Devereaux asked. “Isn’t she sixty-something? Or do you mean the Spartans are planning to defend her? Because that’s a whole different game, even for ODSTs.”

Vaz saw Osman frown for a fraction of a second as if she hadn’t thought of that. He was pretty sure she had, though. She was one of them. “No, Halsey’s just a sixty-year-old academic,” she said. “But she’s got one hell of a history of kidnap, theft, hijack, crimes against children, and conning ONI. So don’t think she’s your dear old mom. She’s dangerous.”

“So,” Mal said, a little bit sheepish. “You’re not going to be appearing as a character witness for her, then, ma’am.”

“I might even end up prosecuting her personally.” Osman pushed herself off the console and went over to Phillips to hold her hand out for the
arum.
He surrendered it without a struggle and she wandered around the bridge, frowning as she rotated its layers. “But as far as ONI’s concerned, the fact she’s even been found is classified and will
not
be spoken of. There’s going to be a suitably patriotic plaque commemorating her on the Voi Memorial. Halsey is officially dead—killed in the attack on Reach. That status obtains until Admiral Parangosky says otherwise.”

She handed the
arum
back to Phillips, who looked uncomfortable. Even Mal fidgeted. When Vaz glanced at Devereaux, she seemed to be the only one who was taking it as routine.

There was no sign of BB.

“So we’ll have two high-value prisoners embarked,” Devereaux said. “That’ll be interesting. At least we’ve got plenty of spare cabins to confine people in.”

“No, we’ll hand over the hinge-head when we RV with
Glamorgan.
” Osman leaned over the console and tapped a few controls. “Then we’ll get our orders about Halsey. Unless you’ve got any questions, then you’re on stand easy. Dismiss.”

It was a nice way of telling them to go and have a smoke while she wrestled with something awkward. Vaz made sure he caught Naomi before she went to ground in the armor bay. Halsey was virtually her mother. That had to hurt.

“Coffee,” Mal said. “Wardroom. Everybody.
Now.
”

If there was any good place to hear news like that, Vaz decided, it was with your buddies on hand to mop up if need be. Mal took over the crisis. For all the jokes and flippancy, he knew exactly when to do the sergeant stuff.

“Look, mate,” he said, sitting Naomi down at the table and handing her a mug of coffee, “we can stay off the subject, or we can talk about it. Your call.”

Naomi stared into the mug. BB materialized in the doorway to the galley.

“Can’t avoid it, really, can we?” she said at last. “I mean … I had no idea.”

“Crimes against children,” Devereaux said. “That’s not exactly fiddling expenses.”

“Osman let me see Halsey’s journal,” Naomi said. “It’s genuine so I have to believe it. But I thought she was letting me see it for closure because Halsey was dead.”

BB glided across to the table. “If it’s easier, I’ll tell them,” he said. “Seeing as I know more about it than what’s in the journal.”

Naomi just nodded and sipped her coffee. Vaz couldn’t work out why he felt so protective toward a Spartan who could probably squeeze a guy’s liver out through his nostrils if she was in a bad mood, but he was conscious that she’d never had a normal life like he had. The more he found out about the Spartan program, the more he was amazed that she was remotely sane.

“Come on then, BB,” Phillips said. “Spit it out. And before anyone says anything, I know just what utter bastards academics can be when there’s a chance of making a name for themselves.”

“I’m glad you chose that word.” BB parked himself at the end of the long dining table. When the ship was operating normally, there’d be at least ten officers taking meals here and generally relaxing. It was on a more human scale than the rest of the ship. “I’ll try to be brief. Halsey selects the first candidates for the Spartan program, which was all her idea, naturally. She sifts through genetic profiles of children from right across the colonies, picks the brightest and the best, and then abducts them. Poor old Jacob Keyes is her bagman while she’s assessing the kids, but she has him reassigned when he begins to work out what she’s doing. He fathered her daughter, by the way, but she got bored with all that and handed Miranda over to him. So … where was I? Ah, yes. She abducts these exceptional children, replaces them with flash-clones that seem to convince the parents, but then they develop terrible cloning-related health problems and die. Isn’t that considerate? Anyway, she’s breaking every statute on the book by using cloning for those purposes, but she gets one of her AIs to cover her tracks in the budget. Then she takes these seventy-five six-year-olds to Reach and begins turning them into super-soldiers. Before puberty, it’s all intense training, endocrine therapy, and medical intervention to make them stronger, more resistant to injury, and speed up their reactions. At puberty, she makes really big surgical changes to them with enhancements like ceramic bone implants, because without that they can’t operate in Mjolnir armor. That’s the point at which thirty of them die and twelve more end up crippled, which is where our good captain washed out of the program.”

BB stopped. Vaz wasn’t aware of anyone else around the table because all he could do was stare at that blue box of holographic light and wonder if he’d really heard all that. He could feel his cheeks burning.

“Christ Almighty,” Mal said. “Naomi, do you remember any of this?”

She shook her head. “I can remember ending up in a dormitory with a lot of other kids and crying, and after a while I forgot why. I don’t even remember where I came from. But I know that from the very first day, there was Halsey and Chief Mendez, and Halsey told us that we were humanity’s only hope to end the war and that we were incredibly special.”

“Yeah,” Devereaux said. “I bet that made all the difference. You didn’t know about the clones, then.”

“Not until I saw Halsey’s journal.”

“But why bother with cloning?” Vaz asked. “If she thought it was all right to abduct kids, why not just leave it at that?”

“I’m not a psychiatrist,” BB said. “But I agree that it adds a certain extra yuck factor to the whole business.”

“Penance,” Devereaux murmured. “Or denial.”

It all went very quiet. It was amazing how noisy swallowing could sound in a room where everyone was desperately trying to hold their breath or find the right word to say in a situation where there just wasn’t one.

“How do you feel about Halsey now?” Vaz asked.

Naomi took a long time to answer and he wasn’t going to hurry her along. She took at least three more gulps of coffee, then put the mug down and meshed her fingers on the table in front of her, staring at them as if that would hold everything together.

“Dr. Halsey was everything to us,” she said. “We thought the world of her. But I can’t tell you what I feel right now.”