Halo: Glasslands (57 page)

“Are you seriously going through with this?” Devereaux asked.

“How can I say no?” Phillips was fiddling with the
arum
and trying to look nonchalant, but BB knew better. He suspected that Devereaux did, too. “It needs doing. And it’s an incredible opportunity.”

“It will be, if you survive to write the paper.”

“Come on, I’m a guest of the Arbiter. I’ll be as safe as houses. It’s only for a few weeks.”

“And he’s
really
safe, of course. Because people like us aren’t trying to foment civil war all around him.”

“Most people say
ferment,
” Phillips said, winking at her. “Correct usage always impresses us academics.”

“Well, you better leave that toy behind or they’ll know something’s not quite right.” She took the
arum
from him. “Are you
really
okay about this?”

“I don’t know enough to be dangerous.”

Actually, he did. That was partly why BB was going along for the ride in fragment form, with just enough of his program installed in Phillips’s personal comms kit to be useful and to flag problems to
Port Stanley,
but with none of the core matrix accessible to those busy Sangheili fingers—or Huragok, if he was unlucky—if anything went badly wrong.

And if the worst happened, he would silence Phillips permanently if he couldn’t be extracted. He wasn’t sure if Phillips had fully grasped what a lethal injection did, because he’d hardly reacted to the news. But the man had a pretty good imagination, and he’d now settled into this dirty business with a speed and enthusiasm that made BB wonder whether he’d actually been planted within ONI by a rival agency.

But there
are
no rival agencies. We castrated them all. Left them cowering in our shadow. What am I thinking?

The natural state of paranoia affected even AIs, BB reflected. But it was a lot healthier than being a trusting soul. It certainly made for a longer lifespan.

Devereaux and Phillips hung around the dropship, waiting for Osman to show up and see him off. The captain came thundering down the gantry a few minutes later.

“All ready, then?” she asked. “Now remember what I said. However tempting it is, don’t get too clever. Just observe. Concentrate on the cultural stuff, not data gathering. Just be what you really are.”

“It’s okay, Captain, I’ve got my suicide pill.”

BB tried to make light of it. “It’s just a sharp ejected from your personal radio, and you won’t feel a thing,” he said. “I’ll be gentle.”

“It’s
so
good to have friends like you, BB.”

Osman didn’t seem to find it funny. Her lips compressed in a tight line for a moment. “We’ll be back to extract you in a week. And you don’t go
anywhere
without that radio—not even the shower. Got it? I don’t care which body cavity you have to insert it in. They’ll expect you to have personal comms anyway, but there’s no sense in making them too interested in it.”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Okay. Good luck.”

Osman half turned to go, then seemed to change her mind and turned back to give him an awkward pat on the back. It was the kind of stiff exchange that suggested she was convinced he wouldn’t make it back. BB hoped Phillips didn’t notice.

Devereaux raised an eyebrow as Osman walked off. “You’re well in there, Prof.”

“I’m not even going to ask what that means, but I think it scares me. Shall we go?”

They were interrupted by a cacophony of off-key singing from the gantry above. Mal and Vaz were watching from up top, arms folded on the rail and singing the theme tune from
Undercover.
It was a popular spy drama, although not with BB. Phillips laughed.

“I may be back sooner than you think, Control,” he said, doing a pretty good impression of the actor’s catchphrase.

“Don’t get yourself killed,” Mal called. “And don’t let BB stick that needle in you. Nobody else can do that stupid puzzle.”

“Phyllis,” Vaz called. “Is it true the hinge-head calls you
Phyllis
?”

“BB, you’re a bastard,” Phillips muttered. “Yes, Vaz, he does, because he can’t pronounce my name.”

“Okay, Phyllis. We believe you.”

They roared with laughter. Phillips seemed to understand the oblique language of
slagging
now, and take it for what it was—the ODSTs’ way of telling him that he was one of their own and that they were seriously concerned for his welfare. A nickname was a sure sign of comradeship. He gave them a Girl Scout salute and climbed into the dropship.

This was the point where BB was more conscious of his many fragments. One aspect of him was now clipped on Phillips’s top pocket, and another was still light-years away in Sydney, walking through electronic corridors to gossip, argue, peer into filing cabinets, slam doors, rap knuckles, and play pranks in the invisible and politically tangled community of AIs. At the same time, his matrix occupied
Port Stanley
and oversaw every aspect of the corvette and her crew, both consciously and subliminally. He’d tried to explain this multitasking to Mal and Vaz, and finally achieved it by comparing himself with a human being watching TV while having a conversation with the person sitting next to them, holding a datapad on their lap, and keeping an ear on a conversation taking place in the kitchen. It could all be done, even by humans. It was just done on a far broader, more complex scale by an AI.

Phillips made the journey to Sanghelios in the cockpit, sitting in the copilot’s seat and chatting to Devereaux. BB was both there and not there as far as they were concerned. They seemed to have reached the stage where they could talk freely without embarrassment. He could hear how their voices and language had changed since the end of January, from the hesitation and carefully chosen words of the first days to complete informality now. In a few weeks, a group of complete strangers from unpromisingly different backgrounds had not only welded themselves into a cohesive team, but had grown comfortable with a permanent and intrusive presence like himself. He didn’t judge them like a human, and they knew it

BB was happy. He could define it now. It made him feel thoroughly satisfied with his existence. He turned his attention back to
Port Stanley
while the dropship approached Sanghelios and picked up its fighter escorts.

“Do you have five minutes, Captain?”

Osman swung her chair away from the console. “Shoot.”

“The Admiral’s instructed me to brief you on a project that’s been withheld from you until now. And don’t take offense at that, by the way.”

“None taken,” Osman said. “I’ve been in ONI for too long. She said you’d brief me.”

Ah, Osman was a little gem. She fully accepted there were things she was better off not knowing for the time being. It made her easy to work for. Damian Hogarth didn’t have that subtle judgment, though, and expended far too much energy in pointless fishing expeditions. There was a time for trawling, BB decided, and there was a time for hauling in your nets and conserving your fuel. Osman trusted Parangosky as much as she seemed to trust anyone. There weren’t many people who felt that way about the Admiral, but however Machiavellian she could be—and Machiavelli was an uncomplicated soul by comparison—she wasn’t untrustworthy. What you saw was what you got; provided you saw it coming, of course.

Many hadn’t.

“It’s a project called
Infinity,
” BB said. “To be exact,
Infinity
is a warship—a very, very expensive prototype, because she’s been fitted with every scrap of Forerunner technology we’ve picked apart during the course of the war, and now she’ll benefit from the tech Halsey found in the sphere. Unfortunately, the Woodentop Navy needed to know about her because even ONI couldn’t hide anything that big in the budget, but it’s still known to only a handful of very senior officers.”

He got a smile out of Osman with
Woodentop Navy.
It was what he called any branch of the senior service that wasn’t ONI. “So how about all those yappy shipyard workers and technicians, then?” she asked.

“There’s not much yapping they can do when they’ve been permanently deployed in the Oort Cloud with full comms lockdown for the past few years,” BB said. “Would you like to see the schematics?”

He flashed up the deck-by-deck blueprint on the screen to her left. She rested her elbows on the console and leaned forward, lips slowly parting as the full wonder of
Infinity
began to sink in.

“Ooh.” She hovered on the edge of a smile. “And all that wonderful kit that Halsey’s found.” Then the smile iced over again. “Is that really why she went to Onyx, then? Did we misjudge her?”

“Oh, good grief, no. She really didn’t know anything about
Infinity,
believe me. She would only have tried to take over the project. No, the crazy hijacker act was just that. Crazy. Not a cover for anything.”

Osman’s gaze went back to the blueprints again. “Who’s going to have command?”

“Andrew Del Rio’s been driving her for a few years. It’s not easy to find competent commanders who can drop off the grid unnoticed for that long. And we’ve had some Spartan-Fours out there for a while too. But with the slipspace navigation refinement, I think
Infinity
’s going to be ready for trials a lot sooner than planned.”

“I don’t suppose I get to do any working-up in her.”

“You’re the heir to the ONI throne, my dear. I imagine you can do anything you like when the time comes. We might even get you on a Thursday war.”

“Just tell me Hogarth isn’t going to pip me at the post now my back’s turned.”

BB coughed. “I
am
your back. I have contingency plans to make sure that doesn’t happen in the event that the Admiral’s wishes aren’t immediately honored.”

“Bless you, BB.”

“Bless the Admiral, Captain.”

BB left Osman to pore over the blueprints. If he’d had physical hands, he’d have brought her a nice strong coffee so she could fully enjoy browsing through the fine detail of the ship. Where other women read magazines, Osman liked nothing better than to while away the time with a dense pile of data. There was still a lot of the Spartan in her. BB sometimes wondered what kind of operational Spartan she would have made, just the averagely terrifying kind or a full-blown angel of death.

He turned his attention back to the dropship, where Phillips was landing at the Arbiter’s keep in Vadam. If Phillips had had a neural implant, BB would have known exactly how nervous he was. But in the absence of monitoring hormone levels, he could still make an educated guess from the pitch of Phillips’s voice and the physical pounding of his heart. There was a lot BB could glean from riding a comms unit in contact with the man’s chest. Phillips had had the sense to leave the unit clipped to his jacket pocket—conspicuous, so that the Sangheili wouldn’t think he was doing any covert recording—and that also gave BB a good view of the environment.

Almost like being there, as Mal would say. Actually, I
am
there.

Phillips walked down a long, highly polished corridor toward huge double doors at the far end, then stopped for a moment to look back at Devereaux. She was silhouetted by the light, waiting at the open door to the landing pad, and gave him a quick wave before turning and heading back to the dropship. The outer doors closed.

Phillips was on his own now. When he walked through the imposing entrance, it wasn’t the Arbiter who came to meet him but one of his staff, a particularly huge Sangheili festooned with weapons. Phillips did seem to understand them even better than BB had realized. He knew how to appear so harmless and curious that it was probably an affront to their masculinity to harm him. He was a child to them.

“I’m very grateful for the opportunity to visit Sanghelios,” he said. BB could tell from the involuntary compression of the hinge-head’s jaws that he wasn’t expecting a human to speak so fluently to him in his own language. “Thank you for your hospitality.”

There was just the tiniest hint of sly humor in that, but the Sangheili didn’t spot it. Phillips followed him across the vast hall that was proof of that Sangheili taste for big, echoing, empty rooms. There wasn’t a comfy chair in sight. Poor old Phillips was going to be glad to get back to
Port Stanley,
whatever enthusiastic noises he made about unprecedented access. They wound through a maze of passages until the Sangheili stopped and flung open a door.

“A child’s room,” the Sangheili said grimly. “Small furniture for your little human legs.”

The room contained a functional mattress on a dais and what looked at first glance like a fountain. No, it was the local plumbing.
The bathroom. Oh dear. Good luck with that, Evan.
It was very Spartan, and not in the reassuringly armored and heroic sense.

“Thank you,” Phillips said. “That’s very thoughtful.”

The Sangheili left him there and closed the door. Actually, it really was rather kind by Sangheili standards. Phillips sat on the edge of the bed and braced his elbows on his knees.