Mal stuck his head through the cockpit hatch, squeezing Vaz out of the way. “You got a sitrep, Dev? How bad is it?”
“How bad do you want? Phil ips ran into ‘Telcam, and ‘Telcam asked him what he knew about Jul ‘Mdama.”
“Oh, Christ. So our cover’s blown.”
“No idea. There was an explosion, and the last thing Osman heard over the radio was ‘Telcam tel ing Phil ips that it wasn’t them, whatever that means.” Devereaux paused and the dropship suddenly shot up almost vertical y, making Vaz grab for a handrail. He should have buckled in. “Then she lost the signal.”
That was what came of playing a double game—a treble game, in fact, smiling at the Arbiter while arming the religious zealots who wanted to overthrow him, as wel as kidnapping one of the rebels who happened to get in the way. Wel , ONI had certainly succeeded in keeping Sanghelios off balance. That was what Parangosky wanted: to kick the hinge-heads while they were down, to kick them so hard that they could never get up and bother Earth again. Vaz didn’t have a problem with that. He was just finding it tangled.
The patch of sky framed in the cockpit screen faded from blue to violet to black. They were clear of the planet now. Devereaux turned the shuttle over to the onboard AI with a tap on the console. She didn’t look back over her seat.
“He’l be okay, Dev,” Mal said.
She sounded a little hoarse. “Yeah.”
Her tone was resigned. Vaz realized he hadn’t picked up something that Mal already had. So Devereaux was fond of Phil ips. It wasn’t until Vaz heard that slight crack in her voice that he realized it was more than a comradely concern for his safety.
“I mean it, Lian.” Mal’s voice dropped to firm, quiet reassurance, the first time Vaz had heard him cal Devereaux by her actual name. There was a rock-solid fatherly certainty about him now. “He’l make it. He can talk his way out of anything in three alien languages. Chin up, kid.”
Devereaux just nodded. Somewhere in the glittering black void, the ONI corvette Port Stanley lurked with an impatient captain, a Spartan who was about to get more bad news after a very bad week, and an AI who’d lost part of himself along with Phil ips. On the console, the navigation plot showed the ship as a delicate green mesh of light.
“So how was your day?” Devereaux seemed to be making an effort to be her chirpy self again. “Track down any bad guys?”
It was hard to answer. As Kilo-Five’s commanding officer, Osman should have been told first, but then Naomi had the moral right to know before anyone else. On the other hand, Devereaux was ODST, 10th battalion, one of their own, and Vaz didn’t like keeping fel ow marines in the dark even for a few hours. He struggled with the news. Mal didn’t step in to help him out.
“We did,” Vaz said at last. “And it’s complicated.”
HANGAR DECK, UNSC PORT STANLEY: VENEZIA ORBIT Pain was a strange sensation when you didn’t have a body.
BB was an entity of pure thought, beyond the reach of aches and injuries, but now he realized what a traumatic amputation felt like. He’d been integrated with his fragment while it was stored in Phil ips’s radio cam. Then there’d been an explosion. The link had been cut. And it hurt.
That was the only way he could describe it. It was the interruption of his thought processes, unpleasant, disorienting, and lingering. He felt something of him was missing and gone forever.
But I’m used to splitting off fragments and closing contact with them. I’ve got a fragment wandering around Bravo-6 in Sydney, too, and I’m out of touch with that all the time. I could split off a dozen more, no problem. This feels different.
He’d been inserted into Naomi’s neural implant just once, plugged into her nervous system in combat, so he knew what stress and adrenaline felt like to a human. Perhaps that was the cause of this. He was identifying too much with flesh and blood. His existence, his body, was input and data: suddenly pul ing the plug was like having a chunk of him ripped away, leaving him in shock.
And thought is all I am. It’s my blood. Data is my existence, like breathing. Without it, I’m dead.
It was also worrying to imagine what might have shut down the radio. Just a blast? Surely not. ONI kit was far more robust than that. Radios even went on functioning when their owner stepped on a mine.
Well, there’s only one way to find out … BB was spread around Port Stanley’s systems, performing bil ions of operations a second and monitoring events light-years beyond the ship.
Each sensor was his eyes, ears, nose, and fingertips, but he could detect and interpret inputs far beyond a human’s senses. He knew more than any individual man ever would. Uncertainty was a new and disturbing experience for him.
Curiosity is wonderful. Ignorance … isn’t.
“Tart-Cart to Port Stanley—put the kettle on, BB. ETA four minutes.” That was Devereaux, forcing cheerfulness but betrayed by the slight rise in the pitch of her voice. BB knew the dropship’s position to ten centimeters and exactly when he’d need to seal the interior bulkheads and activate the hangar doors. He wasn’t the only one struggling, then. “Any news?”
“No.” BB could hear a conversation going on behind Devereaux, just broken snatches while she was transmitting, and too quiet for human ears to pick up. “Contacting the Arbiter’s people requires some diplomacy.”
“Oh,” Devereaux said.
Mal and Vaz were arguing. BB could detect the changes in frequency that indicated clenched jaw muscles and more rapid breathing. BB caught half a phrase from Vaz, his Russian accent more pronounced, which meant he was angry: —mi, then I will. “Okay, then. Tart-Cart out.”
BB was linked only to the dropship’s onboard nav now, talking machine to machine. While he monitored and adjusted its flight path, he speculated on what the rest of that overheard sentence was, and what had preceded it.
Mi. Nao … mi. “Then I will” … usually preceded by “If you don’t.”
So if Mal didn’t do something regarding Naomi, then Vaz would. Do what? Ask her something, tel her something, give her something? The last crisis before the Venezia mission was unsealing Naomi’s personnel file—ghastly stuff, details that would disturb any woman, even one who’d been trained and engineered to cope with traumas that would floor a regular human. It had to be something left over from that. Naomi had asked Vaz to read her file and break the bad news to her, so he was best placed to make the decision on what to tel her and when. Yes, that was what it was al about. BB decided to keep an eye on things and make sure everyone was okay—or as okay as they could be under the circumstances.
It was probably an authority thing. Mal was a staff sergeant; Vaz was a corporal. Vaz also had an inflexible moral streak, the sort that got him into arguments in a political world ful of very gray areas.
I wonder if I’ll ever regret stopping him from shooting Halsey?
The bulkhead warning lights flashed, the seals engaged, and the aft section of the hangar opened to the vacuum as the dropship maneuvered into position. Voice comms were stil disabled. Ah, so they were stil arguing. They knew BB heard and saw everything. That was why they’d once resorted to hiding under a cargo crate and communicating in silence. He thought they’d got over that by now and had started to trust him, so this had to be rather more serious.
“Come along, chop chop,” BB said. “Osman’s waiting to slip. We don’t want poor Phil ips to have to sit through the Arbiter’s home movies any longer than he has to, do we?”
Tart-Cart powered down. The deck clamps snapped into place on her landing gear and the hangar repressurized as the doors sealed shut. The starboard side hatch opened. BB caught the tail end of the argument before the ODSTs jumped out.
“It’s got to be her first,” Mal said.
“And what if she finds out? This is about trust.”
“And what if she goes mental about it? Did you consider that?”
“Then let her go mental.”
“This is what OPs are for.”
Devereaux interrupted. “Hey, how about buttoning it?”
The three ODSTs walked away from Tart-Cart with their jaws set. BB projected his blue-lit hologram right in front of them as they jogged up to the metal steps leading to the gantry. He manifested as a box, plain and unadorned, because that was how he thought of himself: not a surrogate human, but a black box, a complex and unknowable machine behind a featureless facade.
“Everything al right?” he asked. Because it’s not all right with me. He wasn’t used to being cut out of the comms loops on missions, and now there were two blank spots in a memory that was built to know and retain everything. “You need a shave.”
Mal glanced at Devereaux. “Yeah, Dev, ditch the mustache. Come on, BB. Out of the way.”
“I’ve missed you, too.”
Mal seemed anxious to change the subject. Vaz went silent, jaw twitching with unspoken objections. BB drifted ahead of them as they clattered along the passages to the bridge.
“What happened to your fragment?” Mal asked.
“I don’t know. I went down at the same time Phil ips did.”
“You don’t sound right, BB.”
“It’s not a pleasant sensation.”
Mal slowed down and looked at him as he might have looked at Vaz. Organics needed to make eye contact. There were times when BB had considered relenting and projecting some kind of basic face, eyes and a mouth at least, to make humans more comfortable. But that wasn’t who he was, and right now he felt a desperate urge to cling to his own sense of self. The squad had managed to cope with his box facade so far.
“Did it hurt?” Mal asked.
That was perceptive of him. “Yes.”
“You’re an honorary ODST, then. You’ve got a scar—you’re in. Vaz has got one, Dev’s got one, I’ve got one…”
“Yeah, he was shot in his ass while he was talking through it,” Devereaux said. “Come on, we should be worrying about Phil ips.”
That was exactly what they al seemed to be doing in that mock-aggressive ODST sort of way. Osman was on the bridge with Naomi, leaning back in her seat with her fingers digging into the armrests in anticipation of the jump into slipspace. She hated it. Naomi sat at the nav console in her UNSC fatigues, a monument to stoic indifference. It didn’t fool anyone and BB suspected she knew that al too wel .
Osman glanced over her shoulder. “Okay, time to burn and turn. BB, spin us up. How did it go, Staff?”
“We’l brief you when you’ve got five minutes, ma’am,” Mal said, settling into his seat for the jump. Vaz shot him a slow I’l -get-you-for-that look.
“So what’s the plan?”
“Wel , by the time we reach Sanghelios, Phil ips might have surfaced again. But let’s assume he hasn’t. It might not be easy to get down to the surface and find him, but I’d rather be there than here.”
“We’re up for anything, ma’am.”
“I know. I’ve asked the Admiral to enlist Hood’s help, too.” Osman shut her eyes for a moment. It was probably more about steeling her stomach for the jump than despairing about things going wrong. “We’re giving them enough time to realize he’s in trouble before we tel them we’ve noticed.
Not that the Arbiter won’t assume we’ve got our ways and means to stay in touch with him.”
BB was reaching the end of the countdown. He ran a last-minute comms scan to make sure there were no messages waiting before the jump put Stanley out of comms contact, and took a sitrep from his fragment in Bravo-6, UNSC’s Sydney headquarters. It was keeping an eye on the other ONI officers and AIs at HQ. Everyone knew by now that Osman was Parangosky’s choice to succeed her when she final y retired as CINCONI, but that didn’t stop rivals jockeying pointlessly for position while her back was turned. BB kept watch.
Al seemed quiet: everything was under control, even Captain Hogarth and his irritating AI, Harriet. There was also an interesting update from Parangosky on the initial findings from the Forerunner technology discovered in the Dyson sphere. He’d pass that to Osman for leisurely reading later.
“Eight seconds, boys and girls.” BB read the report while he timed the jump. The Huragok were already adapting Forerunner tech for Infinity. The nav systems that Halsey had discovered on Onyx could control a ship’s exit from slipspace so accurately that they could predict exactly where and when it would emerge—no more jumping and hoping, then. Perhaps Stanley would get that retrofit next. “We’re going to test the drives’ theoretical maximum. Enjoy.”
Osman let go of the armrests and clasped her hands in her lap. BB released the drive inhibitor. The corvette punched instantly into slipspace and the stars in Stanley’s forward viewscreen streaked into white lines, then vanished, leaving a truly black and featureless void. Osman sat staring at the absence of a view for a few moments.
“Okay,” she said. “We know where Phil ips was, and we’ve got enough positioning data from him to map the immediate area. BB, I want a projection we can start planning with if we have to insert and go looking for him.”
“It’s going to be hard to do that covertly in a city, ma’am,” Vaz said.
“We might not need to do it.” She stood up, but BB noticed her put a careful y casual hand on the back of the seat to steady herself. She took a few minutes to recover from a jump. “So what’s happening on Venezia, Staff?”
Mal’s heart rate jumped, and so did Vaz’s. BB could detect that simply by micro-measuring the visible pulse in their necks. These were men who didn’t even sweat when they jumped from orbit straight onto the battlefield with just a coffin-sized pod between them and hard vacuum. He couldn’t imagine what Venezia could do to rattle that composure.
