Halo: Glasslands (54 page)

BB’s logic was seductive. “Very well. What must I do?”

“They’ll insist that you’re handcuffed. Please don’t resist.”

BB was absolutely correct. To die resisting the enemy, with or without an audience to witness the event, was a noble thing. But returning to defeat the enemy was smarter and infinitely more satisfying. Jul waited for the door to open and presented his outstretched wrists without comment as the Spartan moved in to put restraints on his arms.

“You have a very persuasive way with you, BB,” Osman said. “What did you do, threaten to tell his family that he cried like a girl?”

“You have to admit it’s very effective,” BB said. “A little trick that Phillips taught me, which I believe he dredged up from World War Two. That’s anthropologists for you.”

“Sometimes I think honor is vastly overrated,” Osman said. She nodded at the Spartan. “See him off, Naomi.”

It was the female Spartan again. She had the cattle prod hanging from her belt. Jul kept his word and walked beside her down the passage toward the hangar, where a group of six troops were waiting. Four other humans who looked like technicians were waiting there too, all clutching datapads and all far too frail or fat to be soldiers. The hangar was as crowded as a Kig-Yar bazaar with two dropships berthed and every available space behind the safety barrier filled with crates.

One of the technicians, a female with long pale hair scraped back from her face, looked up and smiled at him as if she’d never seen a live Sangheili before and didn’t know how much damage he could do her. He suspected it was delighted curiosity rather than goodwill. She said nothing.

“Jul, I’ve instructed Dr. Magnusson’s AI in the Sangheili language, so you should be able to communicate adequately,” BB said. “Don’t forget to send a postcard.”

“Who is this Dr. Magnusson?” Jul demanded.

“You’ll find out.”

“Wait—”

Jul was slammed flat on the deck in the small shuttle, facedown, secured by clamps. He wanted to show them that the Sangheili didn’t take this sort of treatment without protest, but it was pointless trying to educate humans, and there was nobody he cared about who could see him compound his shame by surrendering again. He would bide his time. Once he was on the surface of this planet, wherever it was, he would find a way home.

And he would also find a way to inflict great damage on these vermin.

But first he had to learn to think like them, and he realized that escaping from his new prison wouldn’t require physical strength and daring, but learning to play the humans’ games of lies and deceit.

It’s shameful. But I can do it. There is a greater need that it serves.

He was expecting the journey to be much longer. It seemed that the shuttle’s drives had only just run up to speed and left the ship behind when they powered down again and the ship settled on its dampers. He was certain he hadn’t felt the vessel enter slipspace, and he was also sure from the distinctive sound of the drive that the ship wasn’t slipspace-capable anyway.

The pressure lifted from his back as the securing straps were removed. Light flooded in behind him as a hatch opened.

“This is your stop, buddy.” The troops hauled him to his feet. “Come on. Just be a good hinge-head and nobody gets hurt.”

Individual words jumped out at him in the noise that made up the human language. He’d heard the word
hinge-head
a lot. He put it on his mental list of words to learn and understand. He walked down the shuttle’s ramp with his wrists still secured, and into a bright, sunny day rich with the smell of green things on the air, the landscape all trees and rolling grassland with no buildings in sight.

A man and a woman in a uniform that he hadn’t seen before were waiting for him. They smiled in that confusing human way as if he was welcome here.

“Shipmaster Jul ‘Mdama,” the woman said, nodding at him politely. He could hear her speaking her own language, but he could also hear a simultaneous translation in Sangheili. “I’m Dr. Magnusson. I hope you enjoy your stay here. Please don’t think of it as extraordinary rendition. Think of it instead as helping to ensure that we never have to go to war again.”

The man with her—hairless and unsmiling in the same dark gray fabric coveralls as the woman—looked Jul up and down and didn’t seem impressed.

“Yes, welcome to ONI Research Facility Trevelyan, Shipmaster,” his translation said. “This is where we gather intelligence to protect Earth. And this is where you disappear from the galaxy.”

Jul understood him, too. It lifted his mood no end.

If he could understand what the humans said, then he was one step closer to working out how to get home.

“Temporarily, human,” he said. “Just temporarily.”

UNSC
PORT STANLEY,
IN ORBIT AROUND ONI RF TREVELYAN, ONYX SECTOR.

Vaz took his life in his hands and stepped into Naomi’s path as she came thundering down the passage.

“You can’t see her,” he said. “Captain’s orders.
Parangosky’s
orders. Just leave it, Naomi. Please.”

It took a lot of balls to try to intercept a Spartan who didn’t want to be intercepted. Vaz expected her to roll right over him and break a few bones in her determination to talk to Halsey before she was transferred to
Compton-Hall.
Those were his orders, but that wasn’t the only reason he was doing it.

He tried to imagine what it would feel like to live and fight under that kind of unnatural stress for more than thirty-five years, and then find the only person you thought of as a mother was in fact a monster who’d ripped your family apart. Spartans weren’t machines. It had to hurt like hell.

Naomi hadn’t known what had gone on back home while she was being whisked away to Reach with dozens of other unlucky kids whose only mistake had been to be born strong, smart, and a long way from Earth. Vaz could see her imagination was now working overtime picturing the misery that Halsey had left in her wake.

Halsey was a genetics expert. She should have known those cloned kids would stand a high risk of dying. What kind of a bitch would do that to another human being after kidnapping their real child?

“Vaz, I need to talk to her,” Naomi said quietly. “I might not get another chance. I just want to know why she kept all that from us.”

Vaz still blocked the passage, boots planted firmly and shoulders squared, although if a Spartan wanted to get past him there would have been nothing he could do about it. He had a pretty good idea why Halsey hadn’t bothered to explain to her adoring trainees exactly what she’d done, but it would only make things worse if he said so.

“She didn’t want to hurt you,” Vaz lied.

“Nice try, but I want to hear it from her.”

Now he could hear the stampede sound of the other Spartans heading his way. He wasn’t going to let them past, either. He wondered if the brutal truth might actually be kinder than letting them think that ONI was extraditing some kind of saint.

The guy in front was a lieutenant, which made things doubly awkward: Frederic. Even that offended Vaz—that Halsey had given them just first names, as if they’d always be children. They had a right to their
surnames.
Okay, they didn’t remember them, but they had lineage, and they had ancestors, and they
came
from somewhere.

“Corporal, we just want to talk to Dr. Halsey,” Frederic said. What was Vaz supposed to call him,
Lieutenant Frederic
? What kind of a name was that for a grown man, let alone an officer? “I don’t see what harm it can do.”

“Admiral’s orders, sir,” Vaz said. “Please don’t make me disobey my captain. She might be the next head of ONI and I value my nuts.”

Frederic looked uneasy. “I’ll make my representations to Admiral Parangosky, then.”

Frederic turned back up the passage with the other two female Spartans. Naomi looked at Vaz and did a slow headshake that was more confusion than disagreement. She’d obey orders, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t having a hard time with it.

“Come on,” he said. He decided to try another tack. “You’re a Spartan. You don’t need to hear her excuses. She doesn’t control you.”

“Okay, but can I ask a favor, Vasya?” She used the Russian short form. Nobody else did that. “Osman says I can see my records if I want to. She thinks I ought to see the whole thing, like there’s worse to come.”

“And do you want to?”

“I don’t know. I wish I did. I don’t have the courage to look.”

But she had the guts to take on a hinge-head with her bare hands, and any number of crazy things that could get even a Spartan killed. Vaz understood why it was too much for her, though. Once she read the detail, she could never forget it. Most of her childhood memories were too deeply buried to plague her consciously. But she was almost certainly speculating what her parents had been like, and how the events had devastated them, and she could have been imagining a lot worse than the reality. His automatic response was to do it, like he’d do the same for Mal. Looking out for your buddies didn’t just mean giving them covering fire.

“What do you want me to do?” Vaz asked. “Just say.”

“Would you read my files and decide whether I should know or not?”

Damn. How the hell will
I
know?

It was a massive responsibility. If he told her, it might be too painful, and if he didn’t, she’d know it was because the details were too awful and maybe imagine worse anyway. Even for a Spartan, there was such a thing as the final straw.

But an ODST didn’t let his buddies down.

“Okay,” he said. “You trust me to do that, do you?”

“Of course I do. Thanks, Vasya. I’ll let the Captain know you’ll need the file.”

She looked past him at the door to the compartment where Halsey was being held, and for a stupid moment he was tempted to let her in and face the consequences. But he could see Halsey making hand-wringing excuses for what she’d done, and then he’d be sorely tempted to punch the shit out of her, sixty years old or not.

The other Spartans—the ones they called the Spartan-IIIs—were huddled in the senior rates’ mess with Devereaux, who was plying them with coffee and a mountain of snacks. So these were the expendable suicide troops, the colonial cannon fodder. Damn, they were
teenagers:
none of them could have been older than eighteen. If they’d been pumped full of growth hormones and ceramics like Naomi, then it hadn’t worked. They were just regular-sized kids. One of the girls was so small and fresh-faced that she didn’t look old enough to be out of school, let alone given firearms. She stared at Vaz like a malevolent ferret and didn’t say a word.

And we’re the good guys, are we?

“Everyone okay?” he asked, looking from face to face. They stared back at him. Edgy was an understatement. “We’re going to cross deck you to
Glamorgan
in an hour. She’s got a proper doctor.”

“We’re okay,” said one of the lads. His name tab said
ASH
. “Just peckish. Are we going to Earth?”

“Yes, you’re getting a debrief at HIGHCOM in Sydney. Bravo-Six. Are you old enough to drink? There’s still some good bars in Sydney.”

Ash stared at Vaz as if he was senile. “I’m thirteen,” he said. “And we’ve never been to Earth.”

That brought Vaz up short. “Jesus. What about the rest of you?”

“I’m twenty,” Tom said. “So’s Lucy here.” He patted the mad ferret kid’s shoulder. “But the other guys are about Ash’s age, yes.”

It was just making Vaz angrier by the second. For a moment, he got a glimpse of why so many of the colonies hated Earth. He’d had enough of all this Spartan crap.

“We’ll make sure the UNSC shows you some gratitude,” he said at last. “We’ll talk to your CO about it.”

Vaz walked off. Devereaux came trotting down the passage after him.

“Wow,” she said. “You saw that little girlie? She decked Halsey. She’s the one who blacked her eye. They’re all psychos.”

“You’d be crazy as well if they gave you a rifle when you were six.”

“Chief Mendez must have a magic touch to cope with all that.”

“Either that,” Vaz said, “or he’s a complete bastard.”

Devereaux held her hands up in her I’m-just-saying gesture and returned to mind the delinquent Spartans. Vaz went in search of Mal and found him in the galley with Mendez.

They were talking quietly in the corner, arms folded, with that seen-it-all-no-shit expression peculiar to senior NCOs. Two cans of beer sat on the counter. Mendez was in his late fifties or early sixties, a real thug of a guy with whipcord forearms and a broken nose. So this was the man who trained all the Spartans. What the hell was
he
doing while Halsey was doing the Frankenstein stuff on the kids? Vaz couldn’t work out why Mal was sharing a beer with him, but he nodded at him anyway. Maybe Mal needed to hear Mendez’s side of the story first.

“Everything quiet out there?” Mal asked.