Halo: Glasslands (50 page)

He might have had her welfare at heart, of course. Perhaps he thought she was going to start it again with Mendez. She shoved her hands in her pockets and found something fascinating on the console to stare at, aware of eyes boring into her.

“Admiral, you’ve probably worked out we’re in a slipspace bubble, so we have a time differential—perhaps a factor of eighteen or twenty. What’s happening outside?”

Parangosky’s whole tone had changed, but then she’d been waiting a long time for Halsey’s reply. “The Flood’s been eradicated and the replacement Halo was neutralized.” Halsey twitched. What did Parangosky mean,
replacement?
But the time differential meant that she couldn’t interrupt her. “The most important thing is that we effectively have a cease-fire with what’s left of the Covenant.”

Mendez let out a breath, but nobody else reacted to the news. Perhaps they didn’t believe it.

Halsey waited for the click to indicate the transmission was finished and that it was her turn to send. She had to concentrate on getting the vital information over first in case she lost contact. “We have good news here, too.
Technology.
This is a Forerunner bunker. It’s going to take months or even years to assess this place thoroughly, but one breakthrough’s immediately available to us. We now have access to technology that can make slipspace insertion and de-insertion absolutely accurate. And we have a Huragok crew left here by the Forerunners. We need to get a technical assessment team in here right away.”

There was only a two-second delay at Halsey’s end, but Parangosky sounded slightly different yet again.

“That confirms a theory, at least. We have ships standing by. How do we get access?”

Ah, so you
did
know there was something special down here.…
“The Huragok need to be convinced that it’s safe to bring the sphere back into realspace.”

Click. One, two …

“We have a Huragok that can communicate with them.”

“That’s a stroke of luck.” Halsey didn’t trust Parangosky as far as she could spit against a gale. She knew the feeling was mutual. “I’d recommend your ships stand off by two point five AUs before the mechanism’s activated. And I don’t know how we factor Zeta Doradus into this. Onyx’s old sun is in an awkward place, so to speak.”

“Exactly who do you have with you at the moment?” Parangosky asked. “Are you certain the sphere’s uninhabited?”

“It looks that way, but bear in mind that the land area is the inner surface of a sphere, which gives us perhaps
five hundred million times
the surface area of Earth to recon. You’ll forgive us if we haven’t quite covered that yet. But I only have Chief Mendez, Spartans Frederic, Kelly, and Linda, and five of the Spartan-Threes here. Plus eight casualties in cryo. We lost a lot of people.”

“I’ve had a post-action report on Onyx. You obviously realize the planet disassembled itself.” Parangosky paused for a moment and Halsey almost interrupted, but there was no end click. “And I’m glad that you’re now fully aware of the Threes’ existence.”

“This probably isn’t the time to raise it, but if I’d been told about the program, I could have assisted.”

“I believe Colonel Ackerson had it fully under control.” Again, Parangosky’s voice had changed pitch. “And there were many projects you weren’t aware of, Catherine, just as many weren’t aware of yours.”

She never calls me Catherine.
Halsey waited for the click, anxious not to interrupt if the Admiral hadn’t finished.

“Which brings me on to the bad news,” Parangosky said. “The Master Chief and Cortana stopped the Halo Array from firing, but I’m afraid they’re MIA. It’s been five months, Catherine. I think we have to assume the worst.”

Halsey’s stomach plummeted. Her first reaction was to look at Fred, Kelly, and Linda.

He’s gone. He made it through the whole war, and then—he’s gone. Right at the end. It’s not fair.

Fred just shook his head. Linda and Kelly stood frozen. John, John-117, the Master Chief—the focus of all Halsey’s hopes and ambitions in the Spartan program. When she’d first met him as a small, scruffy child, he was so outstanding and his genome so unusual even among the exceptional children she’d selected that she knew he’d be their leader, and that he would eventually turn the course of the war. She’d been right. She knew she would be. But John had always seemed indestructible. She couldn’t believe that his luck had run out.

At least Cortana was with him. At least he wasn’t alone.

She wondered if she should have felt worse about Cortana. But all she could do was worry that the AI might have fallen into Covenant hands.

“Are you sure?” she asked at last. The pause must have seemed an eternity to Parangosky. “Absolutely sure?”

“There’s something else I have to tell you, too, Catherine. Your daughter was killed in action. I’m sorry. I realize this is going to hit all of you very hard.”

It took a few moments to sink in. Parangosky knew about Miranda, just as Mendez knew, and Halsey had always thought the revelation would bring her to her knees. But it was nothing—absolutely nothing—compared with the way the word
killed
triggered a terrible pressure at the roof of her mouth and squeezed tears from her eyes. She felt the sensation before the words had meaning in her mind.

When did I last see her?

When did I last speak to her?

Halsey couldn’t remember, and she couldn’t even recall what their last words had been, only that there had been no affection in them. She was standing in the middle of a technical miracle and all she could think about was the daughter she hardly knew and now never would.

Everyone she gave a damn about had been taken from her. Fred, Kelly, and Linda were all she had left. A normal family would have hugged and cried at a time like this, but the four of them weren’t normal, and they weren’t a family.

Mendez leaned closer to the console. “Admiral, this is Chief Mendez. What else do you need to know before we bring this sphere out of slipspace? Remember that we’ve got eight personnel in slipspace stasis, too—either clinically dead or close to it. They’ll need immediate medical attention if the cryotubes end up back in realspace as well. We just don’t know how that’ll work yet.”

Mendez looked distorted through her glaze of tears, but Halsey was damned if she’d break down in front of him.

“Understood, Chief,” Parangosky said. “We’ll need coordinates on the surface of the sphere to effect an entry. We have a Huragok standing by to assist with communication if need be.”

“We’ll establish an entry point and get back to you, ma’am. Mendez out.”

Halsey struggled to snap out of it. She’d never needed anything more than her work and had always been able to take refuge in it. But this punch was too big. She wondered if she’d ever get up again.

“Doctor,” Mendez said, quiet and awkward. “I’m sorry about your daughter. Come on. We need you to prepare the Engineers for what’s coming next.”

He hates my guts, yes. But he knows what keeps me going.

Halsey swallowed. Her throat was thick and salty with unshed tears. “Yes. Let’s do that, Chief.”

And she’s gone. Miranda’s gone. And John. And even Jacob, too.

She looked at her hands, palms up, and didn’t recognize them for a moment. She didn’t recognize
herself.
The whole world had shifted slightly and become an alien place, and it wasn’t anything to do with slipspace.

But she couldn’t afford to fall apart now. She did what she’d done so many times before, and done very well: she took her feelings and what she’d persuaded herself was her normal humanity, and sealed them far away from her rational mind.

It was a prudent thing to do. But it was also the only way she could manage to draw her next breath.

When she turned around, the rest of the Spartans had gone but Fred was still there, arms at his side as if he suddenly didn’t know what to do with them.

“Are you okay, ma’am?”

Halsey nodded back. Her Spartans genuinely cared about her. She wanted to think that was because she had some redeeming features, but perhaps it was all part of that relentless indoctrination that made her the center of their world by default. Either way, she was going to finish what she’d set out to do—to protect them all, whether they were hers or Ackerson’s, and repair what was left of their lives regardless of what fate awaited her.

“Are
you
okay?” she asked.

Fred sounded as if it was an effort to talk. “I just never thought it would be him. I thought he’d always be there.”

Olivia appeared again from a side entrance. “The Engineers want to talk to you, Doctor.”

Prone drifted past Olivia and floated in front of Halsey. He started gesturing, but there was no voice translation. She realized she’d switched off the datapad. She fumbled with it, not really seeing it, and the voice came to life.

“You require us to help those who arrive,” Prone said. “We can do this.”

Halsey grabbed the diversion of dealing with something urgent. “Yes … yes, we do. We also need your help to transfer this technology to our own fleet. We want you to come back to Earth with us.”

“Impossible.” Prone to Drift had a stubborn streak that Halsey hadn’t expected to find in a Huragok. “We were created to remain with the shield world and to maintain it.”

Halsey didn’t have any energy left for argument. “But we have to remove some of the Forerunner technology,” she said carefully. “Some of you are going to want to come with it to make sure it’s safe, aren’t you?”

Prone backed away and conferred with the other Huragok in a flurry of tentacles. He edged back to her as if he had a deal.

“We will create new ones among us for that duty,” he said.

“You’re going to build some more Engineers, do you mean?”

“That is what we do.”

“Our colleagues will be here soon. Are you convinced now that there’s no threat outside?”

“We are.”

“Good. Then all we need to know is when this world can be safely moved back into normal space, and where my colleagues can land to get in here.”

“We will inform you,” Prone said, and drifted away like a union convener who had to sell the deal to his members again. Mendez was still standing at the communications console, leaning on one arm, staring down at his boots. He’d run out of venom. He looked up for a moment but he wasn’t looking at Halsey.

“Onyx to ONI control, this is Chief Mendez,” he said. “Admiral, seeing as Onyx no longer exists, can we name this sphere instead of just giving it a number?”

Parangosky must have heard all the chatter in the background while she waited. “What did you have in mind, Chief?”

“If you’re willing, ma’am, I think we should call it Ambrose. If Lieutenant Commander Ambrose hadn’t sacrificed himself, we’d all be dead now and we’d know nothing about this sphere.”

“No,” Halsey interrupted. There was one thing she could still do for Kurt, and it was long overdue. “Call it Trevelyan. That was his surname before I took him from his family. The least we can do for a hero is to give him the dignity of his real name.”

There was a brief silence. “I’ll see that’s done,” Parangosky said. “And one day I’ll make sure that name is declassified.”

It was no more than a single grain of sand from the mountain of sins that Halsey had to atone for. It didn’t change a thing for Kurt.

But she had to start somewhere.

UNSC
PORT STANLEY,
ONYX SECTOR: FEBRUARY 2553.

“Well, that’s something you don’t see every day.”

It really wasn’t. Mal pressed right up to the viewscreen but all he could see was another ONI corvette much like
Port Stanley
—UNSC
Glamorgan
—that had been patiently searching the sector for months, trying to find the near-invisible source of the weird EM readings. Standing off by a few kilometers were two fleet auxiliaries,
Belleisle
and
Dunedin.
It was hard to believe there was a star out there somewhere with an artificial world wrapped around it, like a kid’s surprise toy rattling around in a giant Easter egg.

“How far back do we have to stand?” Vaz asked. “It’s not like they know how that thing works.”

“Yeah, and they better mind that sun.” Zeta Doradus was still there, minding its own business and probably wondering what had happened to the nice little planet it used to have spinning around it. “Don’t want to expand right into that, do they?”

Mal had visions of the planet, or whatever he was supposed to call it now, suddenly inflating and spreading everywhere like those ill-advised times when he’d activated flotation jackets in confined spaces for a laugh. Everyone did it at boot camp when they were training to ditch over water, but this was going to be a prank on a much bigger scale.