He resisted breaking into a run. He was sure that would attract the attention of the surveil ance drones. But he speeded up as much as he could and stood at the threshold of a hal whose ceiling was so high that it vanished into darkness. There was a wal to his right. When he took a step inside and his eyes adjusted to the light, he could see that the wal was covered with il uminated symbols, some stable and some constantly changing.
“Air conditioning,” said a voice behind him. “Fancy, but it’s stil air conditioning.”
He spun around to find himself looking down at one of the guards. He hadn’t even heard the man approach. The guard held his rifle one-handed, not exactly aiming it, but he had a smal device in one hand and tilted it so Jul could see it.
“If you ever see me back away fast,” the guard said, “it probably means I’m going to press this. We’ve al got one. And then the jel yfish guys wil have to repair everything.”
So it was a remote detonator for his harness. It was another thing Jul might work on acquiring, but this wasn’t the right time. Very wel ; he would play this game and live up to the human expectation of a Sangheili.
“This is the work of the gods,” Jul said, playing his role with gusto. Blasphemy was an imaginary crime now. There was nobody up there to offend. “Show respect.”
“Whatever you say.” The guard stabbed a finger toward Prone. “You’re supposed to keep him out of operating areas. Do you understand?”
< He can do no harm here. > Prone drifted away, looking back as if he expected Jul to fol ow him. There was no point pushing the issue with the guard, because that would almost certainly end in being confined to the cel again. Jul walked off.
It was a tactical withdrawal, nothing more.
“So I’m not al owed to go into operating areas, ” he said. “Where can I go?”
< Go where you wish. If it isn’t permitted, you’ll be made aware. > “By being blown up.”
< I don’t know. But there is nothing you can damage here. > Prone had said that a few times now. Jul decided that simply getting a better idea of the layout of the area would be time wel spent. He moved off into open country and away from the towers, heading for the deserted town some distance away. As he reached the top of a ridge, he could see Warthog vehicles making their way slowly in the same direction, with a soldier on the back of one of them manning a gun. Two more Warthogs converged on a point and drew up side by side but facing opposite directions while their drivers talked. Perhaps the humans were drawing some conclusions by watching where he went and what he did.
< Nobody ever came back to live in the cities, > Prone said suddenly. It was the first time he’d opened a conversation. < It was all made ready for them. > The closer Jul got, the more wonderful the buildings looked. The structures were silver-gray and smooth, al heights and shapes, almost inviting exploration. He could hear the Warthogs in the far distance. He expected one to come roaring down the road that led into the city to head him off and tel him he couldn’t enter, but nobody intercepted him, so he carried on between the buildings and into a large square. The first thing that struck him were that the doors were al wildly different heights, some human-sized and some two or three times tal er than him.
The silence was extraordinary. Jul wondered whether the not-quite-gods had been kil ed or had found somewhere even better to hide.
“So the Forerunners planned to shelter here until the galaxy was cleansed of the Flood,” he said. “They must have intended to re-create their society here. Their entire civilization. The Halo would have destroyed everything sentient outside when it was activated.”
< Yes,> Prone said. < This would have been their capital and their refuge. > “There weren’t that many of them, then.” If there had been bil ions upon bil ions, there would have been many more cities visible, unless the Forerunners had construction techniques he couldn’t even imagine, let alone see. Perhaps, though, this was a shelter for the chosen few, and the less fortunate Forerunners would have perished. “Only enough to populate this planet. Was this al they had?”
Prone drifted from doorway to doorway, looking as if he was lost. < Everything they had could be re-created here and reached from here. But no longer. > The Huragok was an irritating mix of rational explanation and cryptic comment, but Jul stil wasn’t sure which was which. “No longer what?”
< We did our duty. We still do our duty. It’s not our fault. > “What isn’t?”
There was no point getting angry with a Huragok because it didn’t achieve anything. Sometimes they’d even flee to avoid confrontation, and Jul wanted this one to trust and obey him. He waited for the answer.
< The portals, > Prone said. He made a sad little keening noise, starting high and dropping to a low note that faded into a breath. < The terminals no longer work properly. They were not maintained, therefore there are no other Huragok there. > That seemed perfectly clear. Prone and his brothers had maintained this world and the portals built here, but there was nothing they could do about the other end of the slipspace route, the destination portals. There was nobody left to maintain them. If anything told Jul that the Forerunners were al gone, it was that. He understood Prone’s depressed little sigh. There was something unutterably lonely about a tunnel through space that ultimately went nowhere.
“So they could travel al over the galaxy from here.” Jul started to see fragments of the Forerunners’ contingency plan for the end of the world.
Even the gods had emergency procedures. “Or they could reach this shelter from many other places.”
< Once,> Prone said. He floated over to a wal covered in elegant carvings and held a tentacle out to caress the stone. < Once. > “How long ago was this?”
< Lucy-B-zero-nine-one asked and I told her one hundred thousand years. > Jul felt a slow heaviness in his chest. He could have left this place for perhaps countless destinations and reached them in an instant, but he was a hundred mil ennia too late. The humans had found a locked room the size of a star system in which to carry out their research. No wonder they weren’t worried about letting him walk where he pleased. He stood beside Prone and put his hand on the stone, too.
“That,” he said, “is too long ago to be of any help to me.”
UNSC TART-CART, SANGHELIOS: FOURTEEN HOURS INTO REPAIRS Devereaux balanced precariously on the dropship’s tail and knelt to run the ultrasound scanner over the repaired section of hul .
“Looks solid enough to me, Staff.” She rapped the metal with her knuckles and peered down at Mal over the edge. “I’m not convinced about the conduits, though.”
“It’s your cal , Dev,” he said. “Do we take off or not?”
“Put it this way—we’l be vacuum-tight, but I can’t promise that the drive wil make it.”
“Are we talking about drifting? We’ve got plenty of help out there to reel us in.”
“No, we might be talking about failing to reach escape velocity. Which might end in a very involuntary reentry. As in barbecue.”
Mal wasn’t seriously worried yet. By ODST standards, this was a minor inconvenience. There wasn’t an enemy for fifty kilometers, and he hadn’t lost anyone. But Osman wanted them out of Sanghelios before things kicked off, and they were cutting it fine. He cal ed Port Stanley again and waited.
“She knows your status,” BB said. “I’m streaming it.”
“I stil need to talk to her. No offense. It’s a meatbag thing.” Mal waited, wondering if they’d actual y be able to see Infinity from the ground when the sun was in the right position. He tried to imagine how much of Sydney she’d cover if they could berth her at Bravo-6, mental y dropping her bow on the map and realizing her stern would be on the far side of the harbor. The crew could run marathons in that thing. “Ma’am? How long have we got?”
“We’re waiting on the Arbiter, Staff. Is time going to make much difference?”
“No, we’re as repaired as we’re ever going to be.”
“Do you need a recovery team?”
Mal didn’t like the idea of pouring even more people into the problem. He gave Devereaux a shrug. She looked like she was considering it, then shook her head.
“Dev says not, ma’am. But stand by to give us a tow.”
“Understood.”
Phil ips wandered out to watch and stood gazing up at Devereaux, who gave him a big grin. He fiddled with his radio cam like a rosary. “You got five minutes, BB?”
“Are you addressing me, Professor?” It was the fragment. “What can I do for you?”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake shut him down,” BB said wearily. “Go on. Just tel him to go into standby mode.”
“But he’s you, ” Phil ips said. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just … I don’t know, reabsorb him, whatever it is you do?”
“I said I’d do that when we get back.” BB sounded pissed off. “I need to assess the damage first.”
“Okay. Sorry.”
The weirdly distant conversation between the two versions of BB left Mal feeling disturbed. He was starting to feel sorry for the dumb bit. But if it didn’t have al of BB’s personality now, perhaps it wasn’t offended.
Listen to me. Just listen to the stuff I take for granted as being normal. This time last year, I’d never even spoken to a smart AI. Now I’m playing agony aunt to one.
“Okay, let’s do it.” Devereaux climbed down from the hul and put on her helmet. “I think this must be the slowest extraction on record. We could have walked out of here faster. Al aboard. Come on, move it.”
Everybody piled in, the hatch seals hissed, and the status lights went to green. They didn’t real y need lights, but it was more comforting to be able to see that the hatches were shut. Mal tightened his safety restraint until it made him realize how much weight he’d put on in the last few weeks, courtesy of ONI’s lavish victual ing and a lot less running around in heavy armor while being shot at. He patted his gut.
“Porker,” Vaz muttered. “Have you found the gym in Stanley yet? You want me to show you where it is?”
“Yeah, and you’re not exactly built like a racing snake yourself these days, are you?” Mal leaned across and poked Phil ips’s knee. It was time to cheer him up. “So now we can breathe again, how sure are you about the Halo locations?”
“Not a hundred percent,” he said. “It’s almost certainly locations, or at least something that identifies them, but we haven’t worked out the Forerunner coordinates system. They might not have thought in terms of having a capital. Positions might be relative to other Halos rather than to a central reference point.”
“But how did you manage to activate a portal?”
“It had a lock thingie like an arum.”
“See, I knew you’d come in handy.”
“And now we know where the portal exited, we might be able to use that to decipher the system.”
“Ah, that’s what I like to hear. Clouds with silver linings.”
“Okay, fingers crossed.” Devereaux throttled up and the drive started its usual song, starting at a low-pitched hum and working up through the scale to a soprano whine and then a sensation of nothingness that only a dog might hear. The airframe trembled. But it always did. It was nothing to worry about, nothing at al . “On a wing and a prayer. By guess and by god. Held together with string and gum.”
“You’re not sel ing this to me, Dev,” Mal said.
Naomi twisted in her seat and checked the neck seal on Phil ips’s helmet. He looked total y lost in ODST armor, like a smal boy trying on his dad’s jacket. “Don’t want you decompressing, do we?”
“But it’s instant, isn’t it?”
“No. It’s not.”
“Oh. Lovely.”
Mal was reassured. Things were fine again. Everyone was indulging in the usual chummy, healthy things that squads did: taking the piss, slagging, and joking about things that definitely weren’t funny at al . He stil wasn’t sure if Naomi had a sly sense of humor or meant every literal word, but for a woman with a cloud of family misery hanging over her, she seemed to be bearing up.
Tart-Cart lifted, banking to starboard as she rose above the scrubland, and a piece of plastic tube rol ed across the deck. Mal could see Dev through the open cockpit hatch. Her head was turned toward the drive readouts, even though she could have seen that data in her HUD, but everything felt and sounded normal.
How many times have I done this? A hundred? Five hundred? I’d know if there was something wrong. You get used to this. If there’s anything out of the ordinary, you can hear it. Smell it. Feel it.
Mal watched the sky in his hul cam feed, wil ing it to darken faster. Every second that they didn’t explode in a bal of flame or start to slow down and lose height was a bonus. The bright blue shaded to violet and then navy, and suddenly he could see stars without the filter of the atmosphere.
Nothing had fal en off, cracked up, or burst. Tart-Cart moved out into the black velvet safety of space. They’d done it.
“Dev?”
“Yes, Staff?”
“Is the radiator boiling over yet? Or whatever the coolant does.”
“Of course it is. You should see the readouts.”
“Oh.”
“But we’ve passed the point of greatest demand on the drives. It’s okay. The conduits are holding up.”
“I’m ever so impressed,” Phil ips said.
Naomi did a couple of restrained claps but said nothing. Mal joined in.
“Yeah, wel done, Dev,” he said. There were two bored Huragok waiting in Stanley who’d pounce on Tart-Cart as soon as she docked to make repairs. They’d love it. The dropship would be better than new by the time they’d finished with it.
