Halo: Glasslands (46 page)

The word SPEAK appeared in the white glass in front of her. She didn’t hesitate.

“This is Dr. Catherine Halsey,” she said. “All UNSC callsigns, this is Dr. Catherine Halsey, ONI, and I require assistance. Respond to receive coordinates.”

There was no crackling static or any sound of dead air. Either Forerunner comms equipment was as perfect as their masonry, or there was no signal. Halsey repeated the message a couple of times and then a voice filled the entire room—an old woman’s voice, slightly husky with age and authority, but as clear as if she was standing there with them.

“Hello, Catherine,” the voice said. Lucy could hear something in it that sounded more like satisfaction than genuine warmth. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

Halsey obviously wasn’t expecting that. Her head jerked back and her gaze flickered across the walls as if she was trying to pin down the source. And she didn’t look happy.

Lucy’s peripheral vision caught the Chief shifting his weight and clasping his hands in front of him, head bowed. She looked straight at him and didn’t recognize the expression on his face at all. It might have been amusement, or surprise, or just relief. She was normally tuned in to the attitudes of the people around her, but today she got the feeling that there was a parallel set of events taking place that she wasn’t part of and never would be.

“Admiral Parangosky?” Halsey said at last.

“Do call me Margaret. You always did. I suppose we’d better get you out of there, hadn’t we?”

The line popped and went on standby. Nobody spoke for a few moments.

“Who’s that?” Tom asked.

“We’re honored,” Halsey said, but Lucy saw real dread on her face for the first time. “It’s the Empress of Naval Intelligence. That’s Margaret Orlenda Parangosky.”

CHAPTER

FOURTEEN

BB, I THINK WE’RE APPROACHING THE POINT WHEN OSMAN NEEDS TO BE BRIEFED ON
INFINITY.
CHECK BACK IN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS FOR THE LATEST SCHEMATICS. I’LL GIVE YOU A NOD WHEN IT’S TIME.

(ADMIRAL MARGARET O. PARANGOSKY, CINCONI, TO AI BLACK-BOX)

UNSC
PORT STANLEY,
SOMEWHERE OFF SANGHELIOS: FEBRUARY 2553.

The humans came back to peer at him from time to time.

Jul could hear them outside even if he couldn’t see them. He wasn’t sure if they were simply checking to see if he was still alive or plucking up courage to enter the cell again. He had no way of knowing the layout of the ship, but how complex could it be? Ships needed hangars, he knew he’d been brought up from the hangar deck, and it was only a matter of finding his way back down there, seizing the shuttle, and smashing his way through the stern doors.

It would breach the corvette’s hull and kill its occupants, almost certainly, but that was a welcome but unintended consequence. First, though, he needed to get out of the cell.

The footsteps outside stopped and there was a slight hiss as a viewscreen opened in the door.

“Shipmaster? It’s me, Phillips.” He was much more slightly built than the others, with even less muscle than the tall female shipmaster, but he was clearly someone of importance to them. “Jul ‘Mdama, your clan’s worried about you. They don’t know where you are. Your friend Forze is searching for you.”

Phillips spoke a Sangheili dialect. He pronounced it like an idiot child, the kind best culled for the good of the clan, but the words were understandable and his grammar was excellent. Against his will, Jul found himself drawn instantly into debate. He knew he shouldn’t have responded but he found it impossible to resist.

Poor Forze. Poor Raia.

He would have thought it was purely interrogator’s bluff if Phillips hadn’t mentioned Forze’s name. How did he know all this? He must have been monitoring radio channels. Humans were much better at spying and sneaking around than they were at honest warfare, just like the Kig-Yar. Those two were made for each other.

“And he may find me, vermin, but I expect to be long gone from the ship by then,” Jul said.

He stepped right up to the door and roared against the screen, jaws wide open. Phillips didn’t even flinch. That was remarkable in itself. Jul could see outside into the passage now, and one of the armored soldiers was standing beside Phillips, helmetless but carrying a short carbine. Jul had looked into enough human eyes in their final moments to be able to gauge their feelings. The soldier clearly loathed Sangheili to the depth of his being. He had a conspicuous scar along his jaw and greenish-brown eyes that didn’t blink, those awful pale human eyes like a dead fish’s. Jul doubted that the man wanted to ask him any questions.

“So what were you doing down there?” Phillips asked. He was a complete contrast to the other human. His eyes were burning, alive, consumed with the desire to know. “Why were you stalking the monk?”

“Why don’t you let me out of here before I simply tear my way out?”

“Here’s the problem.” Phillips did that display of teeth which was supposed to be a friendly gesture in a human, although Jul had always found that very odd. What was the point of displaying your fangs if it wasn’t a warning? “If we let you go, you’re going to cause a lot of problems. If we keep you, we avoid those problems. You might even be helpful to us, and then one day we can hand you back to your clan.”

“If you think you can threaten me, you should know better. No matter how many times you send that demon to give me electric shocks.”

Phillips frowned for a moment. The soldier whispered something to him that made him shake his head. Phillips leaned close to the viewscreen and held up the
arum
that one of the soldiers had taken.

“This is wonderful. It’s beautifully made. It’s an
arum,
isn’t it?” He started fiddling with it, moving the spheres around. Jul could hear the clunk and tap of the stone inside. “It certainly teaches you patience, doesn’t it?” Phillips was moving sections of the spheres more slowly now, one click at a time, and holding it up to his ear to listen to it with that bared-teeth expression. “There … nearly got it …
there
!”

He held his palm beneath the
arum,
the fingers of his other hand barely able to grip the sphere, and shook it.

To Jul’s horror, the stone fell out.

It was marbled blue and green, like a little planet, like a tiny version of Earth, the world that had nearly been within the Covenant’s grasp. Jul almost felt more ashamed at seeing a human solve the
arum
with such ease that he did at being captured.

“It took me a few hours to get there.” Phillips dropped the stone back in the slot and scrambled the spheres again. “I used to love things like that when I was a child.”

Jul couldn’t work out if it was a psychological trick or genuine innocence, but whatever the intention it had shaken him to his core. Very few Sangheili could unlock an
arum
within days, let alone hours.

Phillips tossed the sphere between his hands, back and forth. “Jul, I’m well aware that you find it honorable to die rather than give us answers. Many humans feel the same way. But what do you think your brothers and your clan would think if we let everyone on Sanghelios know that you’d surrendered to us?”

Phillips just looked at him, teeth now covered by his lips, but still with that stupid upward curve of his mouth that might have been amusement or an attempt at friendliness. This creature understood Sangheili better than Jul had anticipated. This was the worst possible shame, and Phillips obviously knew it. To be exposed as a traitor and a coward, someone willing to trade his honor for his miserable life, was something that would not only soil Jul’s memory but also cast a massive stain on his entire clan. Raia would never be able to remarry. All the children of the keep would be shunned, shut out of Sangheili society, in case he had fathered them. It would be both the end of his personal bloodline and that of all his brothers. It was beyond death.

Yes, humans were infinitely devious.

Jul struggled for a retort. This wasn’t the way Sangheili dealt with an enemy. He should have grabbed the human by his scrawny throat and squeezed the life out of him, but that was a pleasure he’d have to reserve for later. He had to think his way out of this.

“But if you tell anyone that you have a Sangheili prisoner,” he said, “how can your Shipmaster of Shipmasters make peace with the Arbiter? That’s what you seek, isn’t it?”

Phillips blinked, nothing more. “Well, that makes the assumption that we would tell them you surrendered while you were doing something honorable. If we were to say that you’d given yourself up while doing a deal with us to overthrow the Arbiter, how do you think that that would be received at home?”

“I forgot,” Jul said. “You just lie, don’t you?”

“So we do.” Phillips did that nauseating curve of his lips again. “It saves on ammunition, my friend here tells me.”

“There’s no help that I can possibly give you,” Jul said. “Even if I was such a disgrace to my clan that I wanted to.”

Phillips hunched his shoulders up and let them fall again, possibly indicating that he didn’t care. “You’re going to be handed over to the Office of Naval Intelligence. If that doesn’t worry you, then it should. They can do whatever they want with you. Now, I’ll take a guess that you’re working undercover for the Arbiter to keep an eye on those who want to overthrow him, which is all very honorable, but if word of that reaches Avu Med ‘Telcam, then Abiding Truth knows where your keep is and where your children are, and they’ll exact their revenge.”

My children. My keep.

Jul had nothing left to say. He dissolved into a mass of rage and drew back his head to spit with all his strength against the glass. That was a gesture these humans understood as well any Sangheili. Phillips still didn’t flinch. He just stared, smiling.

When Jul’s rage and frustration subsided a little, something struck him that he could use to his advantage. Phillips didn’t have all the answers. He had guessed wrongly about allegiance to the Arbiter.

That was something Jul could cling to and use, although he wasn’t sure quite how yet. This bargaining business, this sly maneuvering, wasn’t something he was used to.

Phillips was still looking at him, neither afraid nor angry, as if he had all the time in creation.

“Why should I even listen to you?” Jul asked. It was more a question he was asking himself, because at any point during this exchange, he could simply have turned his back and started ripping the cell apart again. Yet he was standing here, having a conversation with this lying little human insect, when there was nothing he needed to do or say except refuse to cooperate with them. “There is nothing in this for me. There is nothing in it for Sanghelios. So this is pointless. Have your sport with me now or kill me, whatever amuses you, but there’s no way you can engage me in your plot.”

Phillips cocked his head on one side, just like a Kig-Yar. It was tempting to think they had some common genetic ancestry. “I noticed that you’ve been looking at my friend Vaz from time to time. You can see he’d love to cut your throat and watch you bleed to death. He’s a very nice man, but he’s like almost every other human—most of us hate you because you’ve tried to wipe out our entire species. There’s only three human beings who’d be sorry to see you go extinct, in fact, and that would be me and my two research assistants, because we study Sangheili. So remember that we’re both a long way from home, Shipmaster, and the balance of power in the galaxy has just
changed.
”

Phillips looked as if he was going to continue the conversation, but then he jerked back as if someone Jul couldn’t see had interrupted him. The viewscreen and the audio link were still open. He caught one word that he understood in the garbled, mumbled human language.

It was
Hood
—the Shipmaster of Shipmasters. The other word that kept being repeated was
onyx.
He didn’t know what
onyx
was, only that there were now several people outside his cell and they kept repeating the word as if they needed it confirmed.

Phillips put his hands to the viewscreen and tapped as if he was trying to get Jul’s attention. “I’m afraid I’ve got to go, Shipmaster,” he said. He looked a little confused. “Something’s come up. Just think about our conversation, that’s all I ask you.”

Then the viewscreen closed, leaving the cell door an unbroken sheet of composite again, and Phillips was gone. Jul stood staring at the bulkhead for a few minutes, out of options and in danger of drowning in his own frustration, but there was one thing he could cling to.

He was definitely going to think about this conversation. He would learn from it.

BRIDGE, UNSC
PORT STANLEY.

Vaz was fascinated by the strange spectrum of things that brought a glow to women’s cheeks.

He’d been doing it all wrong. He could have ditched the chocolates and roses a long time ago and saved himself a lot of trouble. Naomi perked up when she was talking about military tactics, and Osman was now definitely radiant at the prospect of getting boots on the ground on Sanghelios.