Halsey got up to col ect firewood from the log pile that they’d started building next to the tower. It was a regular Girl Scout camp. She stood by the fire, pleased that she hadn’t forgotten how to build one and keep it going, and smiled at the sight of thornbushes draped with the Spartan-IIIs’ underwear drying in the sun.
The hunting team returned first. Fred, Linda, and Olivia ambled into the camp clutching more smal dead animals, an assortment of greens, and those yel ow tennis bal fruits. Olivia held something in her arms as careful y as if it was a newborn.
It was a fish. A huge, silver, meaty-looking fish. It was the first one Halsey had seen here. They definitely weren’t going to starve, then.
“We decided to skip pizza,” Olivia said. She cradled the fish, looking wistful. “We’ve gone organic.”
The fish seemed to perk everyone up. They took off their helmets and settled down with Halsey to prepare the food, skewering chunks of vegetable and meat on twigs, making morale-boosting comments about everything being al right now but not mentioning Lucy. Mendez appeared from the trees a hundred meters away with Mark, Ash, and Tom trailing behind him.
“You know what we real y need?” Fred said. “A nice big cooking pot. I think it’s time we invented ceramics.”
Mendez walked into the cooking circle, grunted an acknowledgment at nobody in particular, and seemed to be doing a head count. He didn’t meet Halsey’s eyes. “Anyone mind if I light up before dinner?”
“Ration yourself, Chief,” Ash said. “Four puffs. Or you’l have to find some local stuff to dry and smoke.”
“Uh- huh. ” Mendez lit his cigar stub from the taper of dry grass and inhaled deeply. “I may wel do that, Ash. I may yet weaken.”
He walked away and stood with his back to them, facing the river. Halsey wasn’t counting, but he’d taken a lot more than four puffs by the time he turned around, and when he did his turmoil was etched into his face, possibly the first time that Halsey had ever felt the urge to go to him and ask if she could help.
But she knew she couldn’t. It was about Lucy. Nobody was speculating openly about it now, but Halsey was certain that if she could access everyone’s thoughts for most of their waking day, then the majority of them would be about that girl—where she was, what had happened to her, whether she was badly injured and unable to cal for help, and what she’d been chasing when she went missing.
Whatever it was, it hadn’t come back.
Halsey decided she couldn’t just stay out of Mendez’s way and say nothing indefinitely, because this exile might last for years. Assuming he doesn’t shoot me first. She got to her feet and wandered over to him.
“I’ve nearly finished translating the symbols, Chief,” she said, brandishing the achievement like an olive branch. “I’m betting that we’l be able to work it al out then.”
Mendez looked down at the glowing tip of his cigar, then extinguished it careful y on the sole of his boot. “Hope so, Doctor.”
“Like everyone says, Lucy’s smart and tough. She’l hang in there, wherever there is.” Halsey real y was trying to make placatory conversation.
Whatever Mendez had done in the intervening years, she wouldn’t have been able to turn her Spartans into soldiers without him. “So how did you actual y select the Threes?”
He looked up slowly. “Is this going to be about me betraying you and helping Ackerson hijack your project? Because if it is—”
“I was just asking,” she said. “Because I want to know.”
“Wel , you know we didn’t select them on the basis of perfect genomes,” he said. Halsey had suspended the second tranche of the Spartan program because she’d run out of candidates with the ideal genetic profile. She knew he wasn’t going to let her forget it. “They were al orphans. No qualification beyond the Covenant slaughtering their entire family. We asked them if they wanted to get their revenge, and we took the ones who said yes.” He put his cigar back in his belt pouch, but he was staring right into her face. “We took volunteers. We enhanced them some, but we took whatever we could get, and they turned out fine.”
“No filtering at al ?” A six-year-old couldn’t possibly understand combat enough to volunteer, but she didn’t want to start a pissing contest with him over ethics, not in front of the Spartans. “Not even genetic screening?”
“You think it’s al about genes, Doctor? The Spartans that I trained were made from random, raw, imperfect humanity. But by God, they were motivated. And that’s what it’s al about. A state of mind.”
Halsey wanted to resist a debate, but if she’d just nodded and smiled it would have made him just as angry. “If that were true, then we wouldn’t have needed the Spartan program. Exceptional genes create an advantage in any field.”
“What was it you said to me once? Genome is the blueprint, environment and training is the engineer. Phenotype. ”
“Yes, but—”
“I realize you need justification, but your history isn’t up to your science,” Mendez growled. “The most successful special forces in history weren’t genetic supermen. They were every damn size and shape, every age, and some of them weren’t even especial y fit, but they al had one thing that made them great commandos. They believed they could do anything, and then they went out and did it.”
Mendez always knew where to strike to disable. It was part of his training. He could wound psychological y just as wel as he could place a fist or a blade.
My research mattered. My research made a difference. Don’t you give me that commando state of mind bullshit, don’t you dare … “But you let Kurt tamper with their neurobiology, so what kind of state of mind is that?” Halsey defended herself. Why the hel should she take this? She’d dedicated her entire life to the defense of Earth and its colonies, surrendering any chance of the kind of normal family life that other women took for granted. “And that was made il egal years ago.”
“So was goddamn kidnapping and using nonconsenting humans in medical experiments, Doctor, but I never noticed that stopping you. ”
Her attempt to reestablish diplomatic relations with Mendez had crashed and burned inside minutes. She was fuming. You could have chosen to put it aside, Chief, but you didn’t. You found the first chance to take a pop at me. She was suddenly aware of the Spartans in her peripheral vision, frozen in position and watching warily. When she turned, what she saw troubled her. Her Spartans were standing in a knot, and Mendez’s were sitting on the other side of the fire. She got the feeling that it was about more than just sticking with the people you’d known al your life.
Olivia cal ed to them. “This fish is going to be ready soon,” she said, ever the diplomat. “If you want to stake your claim, you better get over here.”
If there had been cold beer and good humor, Halsey reflected, it would have been a pleasant barbecue. Everyone settled down and ate in silence for a while. Eventual y Mendez licked his fingers and wiped them on one of the large leaves that did duty as plates.
“As long as she’s got water, she can last a couple of weeks without food,” he said. He didn’t need to say the word Lucy. “So how far have you got, Doctor?”
“Wel , the more I translate, the more I see an environment that can be tailored to the needs of any species.” Halsey took refuge in a neutral topic.
“What I’ve not worked out yet is how they would divide up the planet into different ecosystems for different species, but they’re the Forerunners. If they can build a Dyson sphere like this and a Halo Array, then compartmentalizing atmospheres would probably be very simple housekeeping for them.”
“So, whatever was moving around in the corridor before we lost Lucy,” Mark said. “Is it possible that another species landed in here just like we did?”
Halsey liked to think of this as a tactical withdrawal into the only safe space between them and the Covenant rather than blundering in. But she knew there was always the chance that they were in over their heads. Even if—even when—she shook al the facts and information out of this place, there was no guarantee that they would ever find a way out. Perhaps the Forerunners had given up on colonizing the galaxy and had decided to sit tight on one safe, barricaded world for the rest of time.
“I’d be lying if I said no,” Halsey said at last.
Normal conversation didn’t resume. Al the Spartans had heard every word that Halsey and Mendez had said, and now there was no use pretending that the pair of them weren’t wrestling with battered, painful consciences.
“I stil got a couple of panels to analyze,” Halsey said, getting to her feet and finding that her knees were a lot less flexible than she remembered.
Once she could have stood up from a cross-legged position in one fluid movement, but that time was long gone. “Better crack on with the task. I’l leave you to wash the dishes.”
Kel y tossed some of the large leaves on the fire. “Dishes done,” she said.
Halsey went back into the tower and framed up the shots on her datapad, moving the device back and forth until she was satisfied that al the symbols on the panel were clear enough for the program to interpret. She sat down in the corner, back against the smooth, cool stone, and started tapping out the beginning of another journal while the program ran its course. No, it real y wasn’t like a decent pencil on honest paper. But it would have to do.
The analysis eventual y chirped to let her know it had done the best it could. When she looked at the screen there were stil some gaps that were proving hard to pin down. Normal y her attention would have gone straight to the missing words, but something else grabbed her and that was the word vessels.
She looked at the components of the symbol, the equivalent of speech phonemes, and she had to agree with the program. One particular symbol had to mean transport of some kind. Suddenly the information fel into place.
The panel appeared to be instructions for decontaminating vessels with possible Flood contagion. There was a mention of the word that the program interpreted intriguingly as either barn or tomb, but that she suspected was garage.
Or storehouse. Or sarcophagus. Or mausoleum—perhaps they liked to have their possessions in their tombs, like we once did.
No, she settled on garage. Somewhere around here, there was either a cache of existing vessels, or the facilities for maintaining them, and that would need to be enormous. The panel didn’t say where it was, but it certainly hinted at what might have happened to Lucy.
“Chief?” She got up and went in search of Mendez. “Chief, have you seen anything above ground that looks like a garage?”
UTILITY AREA, DYSON SPHERE, ONYX: LOCAL DATE NOVEMBER 2552.
Lucy stood in front of the screen, trying to phrase her problem in a way that Prone to Drift would understand.
His two friends—Refil Needed and Effortlessly Buoyant—didn’t seem to be interested in the conversation and were working their way through her rucksack again. When she glanced their way, she saw that they’d reshaped the composite backpack into a more streamlined shape that slotted onto her armor more neatly. She’d thought they would want to help her, but whoever had reported that their only interest in life was fixing things had been absolutely right.
Prone persisted, though. He kept returning to another screen on the other side of the room, flicking through lists of symbols as if he was searching for something. Lucy tried to work out how to get him to focus on her. She went up to him and tapped him on the back of his carapace, forcing him to turn around. She pointed at her screen and tapped furiously.
LET ME OUT, Lucy wrote. PLEASE.
Prone considered the words, head tilting back and forth. WHY?
MY FRIENDS ARE WAITING FOR ME, Lucy responded.
WE KNOW.
LET ME FIND THEM.
NOT YET, Prone replied.
I MUST CONTACT—Lucy paused. She had no cast-iron guarantee that the war was over. Could she risk mentioning Earth? Could the Huragok send signals outside this sphere, or were they just monitoring the situation with sensors on its surface?
She started on a new line, in too much of a hurry to ask how she could delete what she’d written. I MUST LET MY HOME WORLD KNOW WHERE WE ARE.
Wel , if nothing else, she was relearning how to form sentences. That was something, even if she couldn’t yet work out why Prone was being uncooperative. They didn’t take prisoners—or at least the Covenant ones didn’t. She might have been making too big an assumption about this group of Engineers.
Prone started to drift off again, but she caught one of his tentacles and steered him back to the screen.
HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN HERE? she wrote.
SINCE I WAS MADE.
HOW LONG IN MY YEARS? She wasn’t sure if that would make any sense to him. A year on Earth wasn’t the same length as a year on a colony world, and her years were always based on a military calendar of 365 days, twenty-four-hour Earth days on Zulu time, a relic of a world that wasn’t hers because UNSC was Earth in culture, loyalty, and administrative habit. She could remember the name of the town she came from, but not the planet. DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THE WAR?
Lucy knew the Dyson sphere had been sealed for a long time, or else the UNSC teams who’d been on Onyx for sixty years would probably have found it. The Engineers had been down here since before first contact with the Covenant. Prone seemed distracted for a moment.
THAT WAS A LONG TIME AGO, he said.
Lucy struggled with that answer. Halsey had said that time inside the Dyson sphere was elapsing at a slower rate than in normal space, but she didn’t know exactly how much more slowly. A terrible thought occurred to Lucy. Maybe the relative time here was so slowed that hundreds or even thousands of years had passed outside, and even if the Halo hadn’t fired, then everything and everyone she knew was already long gone.