Halo: Glasslands (2 page)

FORMER COLONY OF NEW LLANELLI, BRUNEL SYSTEM: JANUARY 2553.

It was an ugly bastard, and the temptation to kill it where it stood was almost more than Serin Osman could handle.

It was also pretty upset. Its arms flailed as if it was on some passionate Sangheili rant about politics or religion or whatever they played instead of football, its cloverleaf jaws snapping open and shut like a demented gin-trap. Osman watched from the shuttle cargo bay with her rifle resting on the control panel. Matters could get out of hand with a two-and-a-half-meter alien before you knew it. She was ready to drop the thing before it crushed Phillips.

He could actually speak their language, even if some of the sounds defied simple human jaws. She wondered what he sounded like to them. He was making mirroring gestures back at the Sangheili, and although she couldn’t hear the conversation it seemed to be working. The alien did that odd trick with its split mandibles, pressing the two sides together to mimic a human jaw and trying to force out more articulate sounds.

So the hinge-head was mirroring too. It was a good sign.
A good sign in a bad deal.
No, not a bad deal: a dirty one. Osman stepped down from the bay, careful to keep her rifle close to her leg so she looked prepared but not threatening. Phillips glanced over his shoulder at her, seeming oblivious of the risk.

I’d never take my eyes off that thing. God, what do they teach these academics about personal safety?

She leaned against the hatch frame and waited, glancing at her watch to check Sydney time. Around her, the ruins of New Llanelli felt like a rebuke. The dead tapped her on the shoulder, appalled:
And you’re talking to these bastards now? On our graves?

A shaft of sunlight struck through a break in the clouds and threw up a bright reflection from a lake in the distance.
No … that’s not a lake.
Her brain had joined up the dots and made the wrong assumption. She eased her datapad out of her jacket pocket one-handed and checked. There was no body of water for a hundred kilometers on the map in the CAA Factbook. The reflective surface was vitrified sandy soil, mirror-smooth, square hectares of it where there had once been rye and potatoes.

When the Covenant glassed a planet, they really did just that.

Phillips gestured to get her attention and distracted her from the uncomfortable thought that the planet was making a point to her. He walked over to the shuttle, looking pleased with himself.

“The Bishop wants a word,” he said. “I told him you were the boss woman. His English is pretty good, so play it straight. And don’t call him an Elite. Use the proper name. It matters to them.”

Osman pushed herself away from the bulkhead with her hip. “What, like
bishop
?”

“Ignore that.” Phillips—Professor Evan Phillips, another respectable academic who’d been sucked down into ONI’s drain—put on his serious face again. “They told me he was devout, but I didn’t realize
how
devout.”

“Is that going to be a problem?”

“Might be a bonus.”

“Yes, they do tend to stick to a plan.”

“I meant that he’s a fundamentalist. The Abiding Truth. Very,
very
old tradition of faith.”

“Prompt me. I’m not an anthropologist.”

“They’re said to have squirreled away original Forerunner relics from the time of their first contact. Their equivalent of saints’ fingers.”

“It must be my birthday.” Osman wasn’t sure when that really was. Today seemed as good a day as any. “Maybe they’ve got some schematics in a dusty drawer or something.”

“Come on, don’t keep him waiting.”

“How is he with women? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a female Sangheili. Do they keep them in purdah or something?”

“It’s not that simple.” Phillips beckoned to her to follow. “The ladies wield a hell of a lot of political power in the bloodline stakes. When you’ve got a few hours to kill, I’ll explain it.”

She didn’t, and it could wait. She walked up to the Sangheili, steeling herself not to call him an Elite or a murdering hinge-head bastard.

Osman was taller than the average man, and at one-ninety she wasn’t used to having to look up at anybody. But the Bishop towered half a meter above her like a monument in gold armor. For a moment she found herself looking into a disturbingly featureless face before she settled on the black eyes and small, flaring nostrils just below them. The Bishop was sniffing her scent. Unsettling didn’t even begin to cover it.

“Captain Osman,” Phillips said cautiously, looking back and forth between her and the Sangheili. “Let me introduce you to Avu Med ‘Telcam, speaker for the Servants of Abiding Truth. He used to be a field master but he’s … renounced the ways of the infidels and cleansed his name, because they’ve brought shame and misery on the Sangheili … and they deserve to hang from spikes.” He seemed to be quoting very carefully, glancing at the Sangheili as if for confirmation. He gave her a don’t-say-anything-daft look. “He means the Arbiter.”

‘Telcam sniffed again. Osman could smell him, too. It was a faintly leathery scent, like the seats of a new car. It wasn’t unpleasant.

“I’m Captain Osman. I’m a shipmaster.” ‘Telcam would get the point. “So I keep my word. May we talk?” She gave Phillips her get-lost look. This wasn’t for his ears, and that was as much for his own good as Earth’s. “Can you give us ten minutes, Professor?”

Phillips nodded and turned to walk away. This was why Osman didn’t like using co-opted specialists. If he’d known what she was about to do, he would probably have gone all ethical on her.

I might be underestimating him, of course. But his job’s done. It’s not his problem now.

‘Telcam tilted his head to one side. Osman had to strain to make out the words, but it was no harder than concentrating on a bad radio signal. The creature really could speak pretty good English.

“Shipmaster, my people have been punished because they had no
faith,
” he said. A fine mist of saliva cooled on her face every time he hit a sibilant or an
F
. It didn’t look easy to articulate those four-way jaws. “The traitor Thel ‘Vadam and his ilk now say the gods are deceivers, and so they shall die. We have been in thrall to mongrel races long enough. We have let the false prophets of the San’Shyuum corrupt our pure connection to the divine. Now we shall do our penance and bring the Sangheili back to the true path. So what can you possibly want with us? Do you want to agree to a truce?”

“How were you planning on killing ‘Vadam and the other … traitors?”

“We have few ships left now. Few weapons, too. But we have our devotion. We will find a way.”

Osman noted the energy sword on his belt.
We’ve got a right one here. A god-bothering, heavily armed maniac. Lovely. I can do business with that.
She tried to find genuine common ground in case he could smell fear or deceit on her. A small dash of truth in a soup of lies worked wonders.

“What if
we
supplied you with some weapons?”

He jerked his head back. “And why would you do that? The traitor sides with humans against his own.”

“Humans gamble. I’m betting that your side will win. Dead friends aren’t much use.”

“Ah.” ‘Telcam made a little sound like a horse puffing through its lips. A fine spray rained on her again and she tried not to recoil. She picked up a whiff of something far too much like dog food. “
Kingmaker.
This is your policy. You help us take control so that you know your enemy and think you can then control
us.
”

“Look, we’re never going to be friends, Field Master. But we can agree to stay out of one another’s way and lead separate existences. Too many lives have been lost. It has to stop.”

‘Telcam leaned closer again as if he was doing a uniform inspection. “You have colonies here. This is part of the war. This is the cause of our enmity.”

“Some of our colonies don’t like us very much either. Humans kill humans too.”

“How tangled your lives are.”

“My, you
do
speak good English.”

“I was a translator once. I interpreted your communications for my old shipmaster. I speak several human languages.”

Well, that explained a hell of a lot. Phillips obviously didn’t know, or at least he hadn’t said, but Osman decided to cut him some slack because he’d only been tasked to do one thing: to get her an audience with dissident Sangheili who were likely to disrupt any peace deals. He was lucky to get that far without having his head ripped off.

“Well, Field Master, I think we can help one another keep our troublesome factions in line.” Osman turned slightly to keep Phillips in her peripheral vision, just in case he wandered back and heard too much. “It might require some discretion, because we can’t be seen to ally with you. But an unstable Sangheili empire doesn’t help us, and an unstable human one is a threat to you. Yes?”

“And some of my brethren might not understand my willingness to talk to infidels. So we do favors, you and I.”

“Indeed. For the greater good.” Osman paused a beat and made sure she didn’t blink. Sangheili had a military sense of honor, and the truth she was about to drop into the deceit went some way toward satisfying her own. “If I thought ‘Vadam would survive as leader, I would be doing deals with him instead.”

She wasn’t sure if Sangheili ever smiled. If they did, she had no idea what it looked like, not with that four-way jaw. But ‘Telcam’s expression shifted a little. The muscles in his dog-reptile face relaxed for a moment.

“I have a condition,” he said.

“I thought you might.”

“You blaspheme about the gods. You spread vile lies about them. This must stop.”

“We just showed you what the Halo was.”
Oh shit. Come on, think. There’s a way through this.
“We didn’t set out to insult your beliefs.”

“So the Halos are machines of destruction. So you say the gods themselves were killed by them.” ‘Telcam leaned over her, almost nose to nose. He was so close that she couldn’t focus on those doglike teeth. They were just cream blurs in a purplish haze of gum. “
Your
god chose to die for you and that is precisely why you revere him, yes? And why you say he also
lives.
This so-called proof about the Halos means nothing. Not even to
you.
”

And he uses the plural. Halos.

Osman suspected that he wanted her to agree with him, to reassure him that gods could be both dead and eternal at the same time like some divine Schrödinger’s cat, to put some certainty back in his life. She knew that feeling. But the last thing she wanted was a theological argument with a heavily armed alien four or five times her weight. She bit back a comment that her name was Osman and that he was thinking of someone else’s religion.

“We’ve had scientists who claim they’ve disproved the existence of God, and others who argue you can’t prove anything,” she said carefully. “But it hasn’t made any difference to any of our religions. Faith is quite separate.”

“Then you understand.” ‘Telcam drew back. “If you arm us … if you stay away from our worlds … then when we take power and restore the rightful ways, we will leave you alone.”

“Deal,” she said. She almost held out her hand to shake on the agreement but thought better of it. “I’ll be in touch very soon.”

The Sangheili just turned and loped away to his ship without another word. It was too easy to look at them and see only an ungainly animal with strangely bovine legs, and not a superior force that had almost brought Earth to its knees. Phillips walked up to her but didn’t ask what had happened. His expression said he was bursting to find out.

“Are we done?”

Osman nodded. “That’s one enemy we don’t have to fight for a while.” She gave him a thumbs-up. “Well done. I never thought we’d get one of them to talk to us, let alone reach an agreement. We owe you.”

“I admit it’s satisfying to be able to put the theory into practice. And wonderful to have unique access to Sangheili space with all expenses paid, of course. Good old ONI. My taxes, well spent.”

Osman headed back to the shuttle, suddenly aware of small fragments of glass crunching under her boots.
Damn, that’s not broken bottles. It’s vitrification.
“You don’t feel your academic cred’s been stained by mixing with us grubby little spooks, then.”

“God, no. I’m not that naive. I know what you’re up to. Just don’t tell me, that’s all. I have to be able to deny it with a straight face.”

So he certainly wasn’t stupid, and ONI wasn’t doing anything that countless governments hadn’t done over the centuries to look after their interests. She should have expected him to work it out. “And we’re doing what, exactly?”

“Oh, I thought I was helping you establish diplomatic channels with the hard-to-reach Sangheili demographic.…”

“You told me not to tell you.”