Halo: Glasslands (51 page)

“That’s why we’ve got the smartest woman in the universe and all the Engineers working on this,” Vaz said. “They get the decimal point in the right place.”

“Is it really only fifteen centimeters across? I just can’t get my head around dimensional physics.”

Naomi wandered up behind them. Mal could see her reflection in the pressure-proofed glass, helmet tucked under one arm.

“Most of the scientists can’t see it in their mind’s eye either,” she said. “But they can do the numbers. I always found that very disappointing. Dr. Halsey always said she could visualize it conceptually, though.”

BB popped up beside them. “So can I. But then I’m just all pure brilliant thought.”

“And modest with it.”

“Are we going to feel a bump or what?” Mal kept his eyes on the imagined point in space where the sphere was going to expand into a solar system. “And we go in via the basement, right?”

He looked at Vaz and Devereaux to see if there was that same sense of wonder. Vaz just kept checking his watch as if there was somewhere else he needed to be.

“That’s it,” Naomi said, seeming equally disinterested in the universe’s miracles. “Inside out.”

“Are you okay about all this?”

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

“Seeing Halsey again. Knowing what we know now.” Mal meant what happened to Naomi’s family, not that they were going to cuff Halsey and haul her off, but that was going to be an awkward moment too. “Osman won’t make you do this if you don’t want to.”

“I’m a Spartan.” Naomi rammed her helmet into place with some force. “I’ll do my duty.”

“You better leave it to me and Vaz.”

“You think I can’t face arresting her?”

“No, I’m sure you can. But if your mates need someone to hate for doing it, it’s probably easier if it’s us.”

Naomi shrugged. “Let’s see how things go.”

That pretty well finished the conversation. Mal was worried that she now saw it as a test of her professionalism rather than an option to take the easiest path. Mal wanted to do it for her, and also for Osman: she’d been abducted too, and that kind of thing was bound to have messed her up at some level. They were both big, strapping girls well able to take care of themselves, but all Mal could see right then was little kids screaming for their mothers.

He went back to staring at nothing until his vision started to swim with wobbling points of light that weren’t there, and the kids faded away. Osman arrived on deck a few minutes later and walked up to the viewscreen. She stared out, arms folded and jaw set, and suddenly he couldn’t imagine her ever being a helpless kid at all.

“Doesn’t look much like a momentous moment in the history of space exploration, does it?” she said. “BB, any word from the sphere? Have we got docking instructions yet?”

“Patience, Captain, our clock’s running up to twenty times faster than theirs,” BB said. “They’re communicating with Adj at the moment. Or at least the Huragok are.… Oh, apparently we don’t have to worry about docking. Provided we land at the right coordinates, the surface of the sphere’s designed to restructure itself around the ship and create a secure airlock.”

Devereaux gave BB a thumbs-up. “Now that sounds pretty damn useful. I hope we’re going to make good use of all this tech.”

“We are,” Osman said. “Parangosky’s promised a briefing on what we might do with it. Adj is going to be a busy boy.”

“Ma’am, if they’ve got Engineers down there, can we find him a friend to play with?”

“I think we’ll have to, if only to make sure there’s someone to maintain him.”

Mal looked at Vaz, and then at Devereaux, and both of them were still watching with arms folded as if they wanted to get it over with.

“Oh, come on,” Mal said. “This is going to be something to tell your kids about.”

It was the kind of harmless thing that people said, but as soon as he did, he realized it was peculiarly painful for a crew who didn’t have a single regular human being on the books. The nearest they had to a normal family man on board was that bloody hinge-head.
Well, sod it.
Mal was determined to savor the moment anyway. The other ships shrunk rapidly from blobs of light to pinpricks and then vanished as
Port Stanley
withdrew at top speed.

“Are we going to get a countdown on this?” Vaz asked.

“I don’t think that Huragok do countdowns.”

“Here we go,” BB said. “Stand by.”

Mal was still trying not to blink and miss it when the stars suddenly vanished and he felt a weird tugging at his boots as if the deck beneath him was sprung. The trampoline sensation stopped as quickly as it started, but the stars didn’t reappear.

“Oh my, that was spectacular,” BB said. “No, seriously. It was. You should see what that looked like in the microwave spectrum. And the magnetic field. Extraordinary. But it’s not
really
a Dyson sphere, not as Dyson hypothesized, because a solid shell wouldn’t—”

“Go on, rub it in.” Mal felt cheated. “So why can’t we see it? Or any stars?”

And then it dawned on him. He
was
looking at the sphere. It was pretty well all he
could
see. His view of space was completely obscured by a vast, matte black sphere, and he could only tell what he was looking at because there was a dim arc like a crescent moon, the curve of the sphere picked out by the distant light of Onyx’s sun. That sphere was as big as Earth’s orbit. The expansion was both a massive anticlimax and the most amazing thing he’d ever—never—seen.

“Y’know, I don’t think the Forerunners had any sense of theater,” Devereaux said. “They could at least have painted it an interesting color. Or stuck navigation lights on it or something.”

Osman put on her helmet, a standard infantry model with a ten-minute rating in hard vacuum. She obviously didn’t think the Forerunners’ technology was infallible. “Okay, people, let’s get in there. You’re navigating, BB.”

As they piled into the dropship, Mal’s adrenaline was pumping as hard as if he was about to do a drop behind enemy lines, not strolling in to arrest a sixty-year-old woman. He tested the vacuum integrity on his bodysuit, checking the display in his HUD more often than he needed to.

Just one little old lady. Okay, she hijacks ships and experiments on kids. But come on. How hard can it be to drop her? On the other hand, she kidnapped a Spartan
 …

Vaz sat opposite him, completely motionless apart from the fact that he was drumming the heel of his right boot on the deck; nothing obvious, not even enough to really move his knee. ODSTs were trained for police actions but that was all theory. Mal had only ever subdued Covenant aliens, and the general idea wasn’t to take them alive and unharmed.

“I wonder what Venezia’s getting up to now.” Devereaux’s voice came over the broadcast system. It was only a short flight to the sphere’s surface, just enough time to encourage idle chat. “It’s all gone quiet, hasn’t it?”

“Well, I’ve not forgotten about them.” Osman said it in that same deceptively calm, neutral way that Parangosky did. “They’re still on my list.”

Mal interpreted
on my list
as glassing with extreme prejudice before she
really
got down to expressing how seriously pissed off she was. There was something both comforting and inspirational about working for a ruthless bastard. He was certain she was. Letting the Muir guy live when it would have been easier to shoot him hadn’t fooled Mal one bit.

So … what do I say to Halsey? “You’re nicked”?

He did a few mental rehearsals. This would be like detaining Rasputin. “How are we doing this, ma’am?” he asked. “Do you caution her while I put the cuffs on?” He fidgeted with a couple of microfilament cuffs strong enough to hold a Brute. “If she’s capable of abducting a bloody Spartan, then we better not take any chances.”

“We do this by the book,” Osman said. “If she doesn’t cooperate, you have full authorization to use whatever force you see fit. Just remember that Parangosky wants her in one piece and capable of answering questions.”

“Shame,” Vaz murmured.

The good thing about having a full-face helmet was that you could take a sneaky look around as long as you didn’t move your head. Mal glanced in Naomi’s direction. The feed from her helmet cam said she was staring straight ahead. There was no way of telling where she was actually looking.

“Anyone interested in the hull cam feed?” Devereaux asked. “Stand by for docking in five minutes.”

One of the icon positions in Mal’s HUD lit up and he could now see some of the surface details of the sphere. There were no seams visible, no solid shipyard workmanship that showed its construction, just an incredibly smooth and almost velvety surface that now looked chocolate brown. He still couldn’t get the scale of it yet.

“You know, it would really help if someone inside could talk me down,” Devereaux said irritably. “Just some damn
numbers,
people. Okay, I’ll do it the old-fashioned way from the coordinates.… Oh, now
that’s
what I call runway lights.”

Mal picked it up in his HUD at the same time Devereaux saw it. Beneath the dropship, the sphere had suddenly come to life. A riot of colored lights zipped out below them like a carpet being unrolled at high speed, resolving into blue, yellow, and coral stripes along its length. Then it started pulsing.

“I think I’m supposed to follow that down,” Devereaux said. “If I’m wrong, it’s been a blast serving with you all, and Vaz still owes me ten bucks.”

Judging by the camera angle, the dropship was now aligned right over the light strip. Every time Devereaux veered to port or starboard, the lights at the margins glowed bright red until she aligned with the central yellow strip again. Then cobalt blue discs began popping up at increasingly closer intervals. If that wasn’t a universal language, Mal didn’t know what was. If he’d been the pilot he’d have assumed the lights were telling him he was coming up on his target. Eventually pulsing coral bars appeared across the width of the strip before resolving into concentric rings. They kept pulsing until Devereaux brought the dropship to a hover vertically above them, and then they locked.

“Coordinates acquired,” she said. “I think I’m going to park here. Apologies for the sloppy RT procedure, but I don’t know what to call this.”

“On the nail. That’s what you call it.” BB’s voice interrupted. “Stand by for a novel experience, boys and girls.”

The landing strip lights disappeared and the world outside went pitch-black. Mal assumed the landing lights had been shut down and he was looking into the blackness of space again, but his gut did a somersault. Then the lights came on again, this time piercingly white in his HUD icon and throwing long shafts into the crew bay through the cockpit bulkhead hatch.

“We’re inside now.” Devereaux sounded very matter-of-fact. Mal always wondered if pilots squealed with delight when they opened birthday presents, or if they just grunted. “We’ve come through the shell of the sphere. This is the basement, more or less. I can see Engineers. Four of them, heading this way.”

The dropship’s drive whined down the scale and stopped. Osman popped her helmet’s seal and took it off, tidying her hair one-handed. Mal couldn’t read her expression at all.

“Okay, let’s do it,” she said. “She’s expecting an ONI tech team. I wonder if she’ll recognize me.”

“I did,” Naomi said. “And she will, too.”

Mal stepped down from the dropship and landed on pristine cream flagstones. It looked like the place had never been used. Vaz sidled up to him and switched over to their helmet-to-helmet comms link, triggering the red light in Mal’s HUD.

“I hope the other Spartans are as understanding about this as Naomi,” Vaz said. At the end of the long passage, Mal was sure he could see shafts of daylight. “We’re arresting their mother in front of them.”

“Well, if they’re not,” Mal said, “I’m really going to miss my head.”

FORERUNNER DYSON SPHERE: FEBRUARY 2553.

Halsey looked at her watch, then at her datapad, and then at Prone to Drift.

“Is that it? Have we—
ohhh…”

Her stomach flipped and her ears buzzed, a moment of flulike faintness. It lasted only a second. Scientist or not, she was expecting such a massive unraveling of space and time to be a little more momentous. She looked around to see where the Spartans were, but she was the only one left in the workshop now.

Prone to Drift spoke via the datapad. “The shield world is now back in the other space. Your friends have entered. Is there anything else you require from us?”

“Will you cooperate with our scientists?” Halsey asked. She wondered if there was any point leaving now. She could stay here and work, without any reminders of the world outside and the precious people she’d let slip through her fingers so carelessly. “They’ll spend years exploring this place.”

“We maintain this shield world. Allow us to do our duty.” It was one of those persistent Huragok non sequiturs. “We must maintain this shelter.”

Halsey had started to understand that these were actually precise responses, gentle warnings combined with earnest pleas. This was all they did, all they were created to do, and they would carry on doing it until someone killed them or they died by some other means. Were these sterile lives, or meaningful ones? Whatever they were, they were painfully like her own.