Halo: Glasslands (55 page)

Vaz shrugged. “The lieutenant wanted to talk to Halsey, but I told them she was off-limits. When’s
Compton-Hall
taking her off our hands?”

Mal checked his watch. “Six hours. Then we head back home.”

Mendez wasn’t saying much. He retrieved his beer and took a cigar stub out of his top pocket, staring at the frayed tip. “At least I get to replenish my supply of these.”

“So you and Dr. Halsey.” Vaz just couldn’t make small talk with him. Something had to be said. “You’ve worked together a long time, yes?”

Mendez might have been born looking suspicious. He certainly looked suspicious now. “I worked with her a long time ago, if that’s what you mean.”

“Well, we’ve spent the last few weeks working with a couple of Spartans. It’s hard to know what to say about a project like that.”

“Then it’s probably best to say nothing.”

Vaz bristled. Okay, so Mendez trained the Master Chief and was some kind of legend, but Vaz couldn’t let that intimidate him. He wanted to know how all this Spartan stuff could possibly fit alongside the Navy’s sense of decency. He’d always despised people who wouldn’t stand up and be counted. And here he was now, dithering like some gutless little clerk about whether to say something that might upset a man who’d stood by while Halsey played Dr. Mengele.

Okay, they can stick me on a charge for disrespect to a superior. But I’ve got to live with myself.

“One question, Chief,” Vaz said. “If you knew what was happening to those kids, why didn’t you do something? Any of you? I mean, how many people does it take to create dozens of flash clones and run a program that size? There must’ve been a whole army of technicians and doctors and military personnel working on it. Just tell me
why.
For Naomi if nothing else.”

Mendez took so long putting his cigar away and moving his can of beer across the counter that Vaz thought he was preparing to swing a punch.
Yeah, why don’t you try that, grandad? Go on. See what you get.
But the punch didn’t come, and Vaz found himself disappointed.

“And you’d like to think that you would have handled things differently,” Mendez said.

Vaz stared into his face, searching for any loss of nerve. “There’s some things that you can’t do and still call yourself a man.”

He waited for an explosion or a punch. He didn’t dare look at Mal. What he’d said didn’t change a damn thing, and it wouldn’t stop it happening again with other people and other kids, but he’d said it. That was better than
not
saying it.

I don’t care if he’s the biggest damn hero in the UNSC and rescues blind kittens in his spare time. It’s still wrong and it’s always going to be wrong.

“Yeah, I think I reached that conclusion a few years ago,” Mendez said at last. He didn’t seem to be avoiding Vaz’s gaze so much as staring past him at something on the bulkhead that only he could see. “Next time I’ll try to find my conscience
before
the event, not after it.”

He drained his beer in one pull, tossed the can in the trash, and left.

Mal turned to Vaz, arms still folded. “Feel better now?”

“Actually, yes.” Vaz didn’t plan to apologize. “I do. A sense of right and wrong is all we are.”

Mal rolled his eyes. “If I knew the names of any Russian philosophers, I’d probably have a really good line to shoot back at you, but I don’t, and I haven’t,” he said. “So come on, what do you think should happen to Mendez? Okay, Halsey—it was her project. But what are you going to do about people like Mendez and everyone else? How far down are you going to drill?”

“As far as it takes. Because it’s ordinary people who let it happen.” Vaz busied himself refilling the coffee machine. He didn’t want a fight with Mal, and he didn’t want to discover anything about the guy that he didn’t respect. Mal was his best friend. They’d been through a lot together. But it was a lot easier hell-jumping than wrestling with this kind of stuff. “The monsters don’t run the gulags and the death camps and the reeducation centers. Regular people do. If they all had the balls to say no, the likes of Halsey, Zhou, or Stalin could never do it all on their own. Could they?”

“I’m not saying forgive and forget. But you know bloody well that ninety-nine percent of humans do exactly what everyone else around them is doing, even if they know it’s evil or plain stupid, because that’s the way humans
are.
”

Like keeping my mouth shut about this.
“That’s not a defense.”

“No, but would
you
tell ONI to shove it in the middle of a war? Look at what
we’re
doing right now.”

“It
wasn’t
the middle of a war. This was before the Covenant showed up. It was about counterinsurgency, not genocide.”

“So being killed by the Covenant is worse than being killed by some colonial tosser? You hate it when civvies second-guess us with the luxury of hindsight.”

“This wasn’t some split-second decision under fire. It was deliberate, it went on for twenty-odd years, and it involved kids. How hard is it to work out that was
wrong
? Seriously, Mal, how hard?”

Sometimes Mal argued for the hell of it. Vaz wasn’t sure if he was arguing now or just trying to make sense of a bad situation, but this was suddenly personal, not a high school ethics debate. Whatever Halsey—and Mendez—had done, they’d done it to Naomi and Osman, too.

“This coffee’s taking forever,” Vaz said. “I’ve got stuff to do.”

He needed to go before he said something he’d regret. And he had a promise to keep to Naomi. He went to Osman’s day cabin and peered around the open door.

She was in there with the Chief, so she was either about to repaint the bulkheads with his innards or she didn’t feel too badly about his involvement. But that was her business—the individual Spartans were the only ones who had the right to forgive anyone.

“I said I’d take a look at a file for Naomi, ma’am,” Vaz said, avoiding eye contact with Mendez.

Osman nodded. “Probably best done in your cabin. BB can display it for you.”

He had to ask. “Have you read it, ma’am?”

“Yes.”

“Would you read your own now?”

She always looked him straight in the eye, but her gaze flickered for a moment. “No.”

That told him all he needed to know. He took the long route back to his cabin to avoid everyone and flopped down on his bunk. BB needed to be summoned. He made a point of not crossing the threshold, except for keeping his dumb processing eye on the environmental and safety controls. It was a thoughtful gesture.

“Come in, BB,” Vaz said. “Let’s get this over with.”

BB’s avatar popped up and the screen on the bulkhead switched from its portal to a file with more security warnings on the cover than he’d ever seen in his life.

“You’re doing a very kind thing, Vasily.”

Vaz tried to mimic Mal’s accent, embarrassed.
“She’s me mate.”

“I know you well enough by now to realize this is going to make you angry.”

“Most things do.”

“Call me when you need me.”

“Hang on.” A thought crossed Vaz’s mind as the first page filled the screen. “You must have read all the files. Osman’s too.”

“Of course I have. I
am
the files.”

“But you don’t snoop in the cabins. I just wondered where you draw the line.”

“I’m required to know personnel details. But it also helps me understand the Captain better. And Admiral Parangosky.”

BB vanished, which in this case meant he really had withdrawn from the room. Vaz forced himself to look at the file, guts knotted. Naomi’s family name was Sentzke, she came from a colony world he’d never even heard of—Sansar—and she was an only child. There were pages of reports signed by Halsey, detailing her exceptional genetic profile and so full of jargon that he started skimming over the detail, but the next page that flashed up hit him right between the eyes.

It was a weekly psychological assessment form, detailing how this six-year-old kid was coping after being snatched by ONI agents on the way home from school; whether she was eating, how much she was crying, how often she asked for her mom, and how aggressive or withdrawn she was on any given day. It would have been bad enough reading that about a total stranger, but it was all too close to home now.

Vaz found himself drowning in questions, like why people hadn’t noticed all these kids disappearing for a few weeks and then miraculously being found alive, but the colonies were a long way from Earth, and a long way from one another.

There were only seventy-odd kids involved. Kids went missing all the time. They were spread across so many planets that no cop would ever have spotted a pattern in all that.

So like Devereaux said—why bother with the clones? Why the hell go to all that trouble? Halsey didn’t need to.

The reports were written in disturbingly neutral clinical terminology, but they all boiled down to one thing. Naomi, like all the other Spartan kids, was terrified and wanted to go home.

Vaz read the names of the psychologists and medical officers at the bottom of those reports carefully. He wanted to remember who the monsters really were. The one currently imprisoned on the deck below him couldn’t have done it without them.

You rotten bastards. You took an oath to do no harm.

He wasn’t sure if he grasped half of the medical stuff in front of him, but he understood enough to realize that he didn’t want to go on reading about the drugs and surgery, the brutal training, or the assessments of the kids’ pain and stress levels. It would surface in nightmares one day. He was sure of it. He didn’t want to know how Halsey changed them out of all recognition.

He had to, though. If the people he served with had gone through this, the least he could do was read it. He stuck at it for half an hour, getting every bit as angry as BB had warned him he would, until he had to take a breather or explode. He flicked forward to the end of the file, knowing there would be no happy ending, and found he was looking at a subfile of social workers’ reports about Naomi’s parents.

Even in a situation like that, with outrage piled on outrage without a thought for how far the ripples of misery would spread, it was still a shock to see what had happened to the Sentzkes.

Their daughter had been returned to them, or so they thought, and for a while they’d been relieved to have her back. Then she fell ill and spent eighteen months dying. The Sentzkes were told it was a genetic illness. The social reports tossed in the consequences of that lie as if it was just a footnote:

Mrs. Sentzke is concerned that the genetic abnormality will affect any other children she might bear. She has asked to be sterilized and the decision is putting considerable strain on the marriage.

The next page was a coroner’s report, an inquest, dated six months later. Naomi’s mother had finally slashed her wrists. There was a comment from the coroner about her inability to deal with her bereavement.

Vaz read it a few times, unable to get past that paragraph. Had Osman actually told Naomi all that? He’d have no idea until he asked, but if she hadn’t, the worst news of all would fall to him. Part of him resented Osman for not giving Naomi the full story right away.

God Almighty. How do I tell Naomi that?

Her father, Staffan, seemed to be made of more obstinate stuff, though. The social worker had included a number of police reports detailing how he insisted that the girl who’d come back wasn’t his daughter, and that it was all a dirty government conspiracy. There was no genetic abnormality like that in his family, he said.

Vaz was now riveted. This factory worker, this ordinary guy, hadn’t realized just how right he was. Vaz scrolled through the pages as fast as he could, but then he found himself reading Naomi’s service record. The trail went cold. There was no more mention of Staffan Sentzke.

“BB,” he said. “Quick question. Sitrep on Sansar, Outer Colonies.”

“Glassed,” BB said, not even materializing.

Vaz thought of that Staffan, screwed by his own kind and then glassed by the Covenant, and wondered if there was any justice left in the world. He lay on his bunk for a long time, staring up at the deckhead in chaotic, numb anger. More than seventy families had been through something like that, and the only thing that had put an end to their misery was the Covenant. How many of them had been as tragic as Naomi’s parents? How the hell was he going to tell her
any
of this?

He swung his legs off the bunk, determined to come back later and finish reading every last damn word. One thought wouldn’t go away, though. Halsey was still down there, one deck below. She’d led a charmed life, paid and praised and given nice big budgets, while all the time she was no better than any of the other war criminals throughout history who’d been tried and hanged, or who’d never faced justice at all.