Halo: Glasslands Read online

  “Look, we’re never going to be friends, Field Master. But we can agree to stay out of one another’s way and lead separate existences. Too many lives have been lost. It has to stop.”

  ‘Telcam leaned closer again as if he was doing a uniform inspection. “You have colonies here. This is part of the war. This is the cause of our enmity.”

  “Some of our colonies don’t like us very much either. Humans kill humans too.”

  “How tangled your lives are.”

  “My, you do speak good English.”

  “I was a translator once. I interpreted your communications for my old shipmaster. I speak several human languages.”

  Well, that explained a hell of a lot. Phillips obviously didn’t know, or at least he hadn’t said, but Osman decided to cut him some slack because he’d only been tasked to do one thing: to get her an audience with dissident Sangheili who were likely to disrupt any peace deals. He was lucky to get that far without having his head ripped off.

  “Well, Field Master, I think we can help one another keep our troublesome factions in line.” Osman turned slightly to keep Phillips in her peripheral vision, just in case he wandered back and heard too much. “It might require some discretion, because we can’t be seen to ally with you. But an unstable Sangheili empire doesn’t help us, and an unstable human one is a threat to you. Yes?”

  “And some of my brethren might not understand my willingness to talk to infidels. So we do favors, you and I.”

  “Indeed. For the greater good.” Osman paused a beat and made sure she didn’t blink. Sangheili had a military sense of honor, and the truth she was about to drop into the deceit went some way toward satisfying her own. “If I thought ‘Vadam would survive as leader, I would be doing deals with him instead.”

  She wasn’t sure if Sangheili ever smiled. If they did, she had no idea what it looked like, not with that four-way jaw. But ‘Telcam’s expression shifted a little. The muscles in his dog-reptile face relaxed for a moment.

  “I have a condition,” he said.

  “I thought you might.”

  “You blaspheme about the gods. You spread vile lies about them. This must stop.”

  “We just showed you what the Halo was.” Oh shit. Come on, think. There’s a way through this. “We didn’t set out to insult your beliefs.”

  “So the Halos are machines of destruction. So you say the gods themselves were killed by them.” ‘Telcam leaned over her, almost nose to nose. He was so close that she couldn’t focus on those doglike teeth. They were just cream blurs in a purplish haze of gum. “Your god chose to die for you and that is precisely why you revere him, yes? And why you say he also lives. This so-called proof about the Halos means nothing. Not even to you.”

  And he uses the plural. Halos.

  Osman suspected that he wanted her to agree with him, to reassure him that gods could be both dead and eternal at the same time like some divine Schrödinger’s cat, to put some certainty back in his life. She knew that feeling. But the last thing she wanted was a theological argument with a heavily armed alien four or five times her weight. She bit back a comment that her name was Osman and that he was thinking of someone else’s religion.

  “We’ve had scientists who claim they’ve disproved the existence of God, and others who argue you can’t prove anything,” she said carefully. “But it hasn’t made any difference to any of our religions. Faith is quite separate.”

  “Then you understand.” ‘Telcam drew back. “If you arm us … if you stay away from our worlds … then when we take power and restore the rightful ways, we will leave you alone.”

  “Deal,” she said. She almost held out her hand to shake on the agreement but thought better of it. “I’ll be in touch very soon.”

  The Sangheili just turned and loped away to his ship without another word. It was too easy to look at them and see only an ungainly animal with strangely bovine legs, and not a superior force that had almost brought Earth to its knees. Phillips walked up to her but didn’t ask what had happened. His expression said he was bursting to find out.

  “Are we done?”

  Osman nodded. “That’s one enemy we don’t have to fight for a while.” She gave him a thumbs-up. “Well done. I never thought we’d get one of them to talk to us, let alone reach an agreement. We owe you.”

  “I admit it’s satisfying to be able to put the theory into practice. And wonderful to have unique access to Sangheili space with all expenses paid, of course. Good old ONI. My taxes, well spent.”

  Osman headed back to the shuttle, suddenly aware of small fragments of glass crunching under her boots. Damn, that’s not broken bottles. It’s vitrification. “You don’t feel your academic cred’s been stained by mixing with us grubby little spooks, then.”

  “God, no. I’m not that naive. I know what you’re up to. Just don’t tell me, that’s all. I have to be able to deny it with a straight face.”

  So he certainly wasn’t stupid, and ONI wasn’t doing anything that countless governments hadn’t done over the centuries to look after their interests. She should have expected him to work it out. “And we’re doing what, exactly?”

  “Oh, I thought I was helping you establish diplomatic channels with the hard-to-reach Sangheili demographic.…”

  “You told me not to tell you.”

  “Yes, so I did.” He winked at her. “Well, you’ve slapped a saddle on that tiger. Now you better make damn sure you don’t fall off.”

  They settled into their seats and she ran the preflight checks before handing over to the AI. Phillips was whistling tunelessly under his breath, as if he was glad to be leaving. Osman had expected him to be reluctant to go home but he obviously had what he wanted—some dazzling scientific paper, some award-worthy research, maybe even a lucrative book—that nobody else in his field had, and that seemed to be enough.

  He wouldn’t be coming back here. He probably realized that. ONI regarded him as a single-use sharp.

  “Just remember that my enemy’s enemy isn’t my friend, Professor,” she said, opening a secure comms channel. “He’s my enemy who’s just taking a sidebar.”

  Phillips burst out laughing. “You sweet, innocent little flower. You’ve never worked in academia, have you? Red in tooth and claw. Feuds, plots, vengeance. The works.”

  “I can imagine.” The secure channel indicator flashed and Osman lowered her voice. “Osman here, ma’am. Professor Phillips and I are on our way back.”

  “Thank you for letting me know, Captain.” Admiral Margaret Parangosky, head of the Office of Naval Intelligence, never raised her voice and never needed to. “I assume things went well.”

  Osman could translate Parangosky-isms easily enough. Have you set up the Sangheili insurrection? That was what she meant. Few outside the Navy and the senior ranks of government knew who Parangosky was, let alone knew to fear her. Osman suspected she was the only person in the Admiral’s circle who would always be forgiven even if she failed. But she wasn’t in a hurry to test it.

  “Everything’s fine, ma’am,” she said.

  “Thank Professor Phillips for me. Safe flight.”

  Osman signed off and the AI took over. The shuttle shuddered on its dampers as its engines reached peak power. In a few hours, they’d rendezvous with Battle of Minden and head back to Earth, where the mission would be over for Phillips but only just beginning for her.

  So far, so good.

  “Do I get a gold star?” he asked.

  “Maybe an extra cookie.”

  “Where’s the best Turkish restaurant in Sydney?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh. Really? Sorry.”

  It always caught her short. She’d never actually said she had Turkish roots, and—odd, for a woman so used to lying for a living—she couldn’t bring herself to construct a cover story for herself. She simply allowed everyone to make assumptions based on her name and her Mediterranean coloring. Her real name hadn’t been Osman, not as far as she knew
, and she had no plans to use her access to ONI classified files to find out who she really was. She could only be who she was now.

  Phillips would have treated her very differently if she’d had Spartan-019 on her ID badge. It was better if nobody knew what she was, and what she was not.

  “Yes, I’ve been away too long,” she said, relenting. “But I can smell a good imam bayildi ten klicks away.”

  Anyone could. It wasn’t really a lie. Phillips rubbed his hands together, miming delight at the thought of food that didn’t come out of a ration pack. The shuttle lifted clear of New Llanelli, and Osman caught one last glimpse on the monitor of that lake of vitrified sand.

  That’s why I’m entitled to break the rules. To make sure it never happens again.

  Osman was sure she’d heard that argument before, more than thirty years ago, but she couldn’t remember if it was before or after she met Dr. Catherine Halsey.

  “Academia,” she said. “Yes, it’s a savage old world, isn’t it?”

  MARK DONALDSON WAY, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA: AUSTRALIA DAY, TWO MONTHS AFTER THE BATTLE OF EARTH, JANUARY 26, 2553.

  There was just one flagpole left intact on the shattered Sydney Harbour waterfront, and a workman in a hard hat and orange overalls was clambering up a maintenance gantry to reach it.

  It was a damn long way to fall.

  Corporal Vaz Beloi wandered out onto a stump of a girder that had once been part of a pedestrian overpass, trying to get a better view. A piece of dark blue fabric dangled from the workman’s back pocket. Vaz couldn’t see a safety harness, but then there wasn’t much left of the crumbling building to secure it to.

  And they say ODSTs are crazy.

  He watched the man with renewed curiosity. Mal Geffen caught up with him and leaned on what was left of the overpass safety rail. It creaked as he put his weight on it.

  “Come on, we’ve only got an hour.” Mal gestured irritably with his wrist, brandishing his watch, then frowned at something on his sleeve. “Sod it, I’m covered in crap already. We can’t rock up in our number threes looking like this. It’s the Admiral.”

  “It’ll brush off,” Vaz said, distracted by the reckless workman again. He held up a warning finger. “Wait. I have to see what this guy does.”

  He knew Mal wasn’t being disrespectful. He was just nervous about being summoned to ONI without explanation, and Vaz understood that, but they had another mission to complete. A visit to Sydney was rare.

  And we made a promise. Admiral or no Admiral.

  A small crowd watched from the shore, a mix of construction workers, firefighters, and sappers who were still digging bodies out of the rubble two months after the bombing. The workman, now teetering on the end of the gantry, lunged at the flagpole and managed to haul in the halyard. He clipped the flag to it and wobbled for a moment before tugging on the line to reveal the white stars of the Southern Cross on a deep blue ground, with a single gold Commonwealth star on green ground in the canton.

  Everyone cheered. A fleet tender in the harbor sounded its klaxon.

  Mal seemed to be working something out, lips moving as if he was counting. “Well done, Oz. Seven hundred and sixty-five not out.” He nudged Vaz in the back and strode off. “Come on, we’ve got to find the bar. If we don’t do it now, we won’t get another chance for years.”

  Vaz watched the workman edge back down the gantry to relative safety before he felt able to turn away and catch up with Mal.

  “Okay, why seven hundred and sixty-five?” he asked.

  “Seven hundred and sixty-five years since the first migrants landed here. It’s Australia Day.” They walked across a temporary walkway that spanned a crater the full width of the road. It vibrated under their boots like a sprung floor. “You understand not out, don’t you? Don’t make me explain cricket to you again.”

  “I understand cricket just fine.” Vaz bristled. “What’s your problem?”

  “Sorry, mate. Parangoskyitis.”

  Both of them had done more than a hundred drops behind enemy lines and accepted they might not survive the next one, but the prospect of being hauled before a very elderly woman with a stoop and a lot of gold braid had kept them awake every night for the past week. Even ODSTs were wary of Margaret Parangosky.

  “She’s over ninety,” Vaz said. “None of those stories about her can be true. She just spreads them for effect. Like my grandmother used to.”

  “Look, we said we wouldn’t play guessing games about this. We’ll know soon enough.”

  “You started it.”

  “Well, she’s not invited us for tea and medals, has she? It’ll be a bollocking.”

  “You want ODSTs to do a job for you, you ask for a fire team. Or a company. A battalion, even.”

  “You know how paranoid ONI is. Top-secret-eat-before-reading.” Mal picked more specks off his sleeve, frowning. “Ah, come on. It’s just a bloody meeting. It’s not like we’re storming a beachhead.”

  But why us? Vaz checked the tourist map again. “This thing’s useless. I can’t see any landmarks.”

  Mal fumbled in his pocket and took out the ancient button compass that he always carried. “Fieldcraft, Vaz. Back to basics. If we can’t find a bar, we’re not worthy of the uniform.”

  There wasn’t a living soul in sight, not even a cop or a construction worker to ask for directions. The hum of activity—bulldozers, trip hammers, drills—was receding a street at a time. The bank that should have been standing on the next corner was a tangle of metal joists and collapsed masonry.

  There was no sign of the plaza full of pavement cafés, either, and the shopping center that was supposed to be on Vaz’s left looked like a slab of honeycomb with the wax layer ripped off. All he could see was a procession of composite block walls, now just a few courses high. Red-and-white cordon tape fluttered between steel poles. The smell of raw sewage hit him.

  “You lads look lost.”

  A civil defense warden popped up like a range target behind a barrier fifty meters away, and Vaz almost reached for a rifle he wasn’t carrying. It was hard adjusting to a place where there were no threats.

  “Yeah, I think we are,” Vaz said.

  “You trying to find Bravo-Six?” The warden meant the UNSC headquarters. “Wrong direction, son.”

  “No, a bar,” Mal said. “The Parthenon.”

  “It’s gone.” The warden glanced at his watch as if he thought it was a bit early for a drink, then studied Mal’s uniform, peering at the death’s-head insignia with a baffled frown. Maybe the Corps had taken the low-profile special forces thing a bit too far. “What are you, then, marines?”

  “ODSTs.” Mal paused. The guy didn’t seem to be catching on. “Orbital Drop Shock Troopers. Yeah, marines.”

  “Oh. Them.”

  “So how do we get to the Parthenon Bar?” Vaz asked.

  “I told you. It’s just rubble now. They’re clearing the site.”

  “We don’t want a drink. We’ve got something else we need to do.”

  The warden gave Vaz a sideways look. Maybe the man thought his English wasn’t so hot because of his heavy accent. “Just keep going that way,” he said, indicating forty-five degrees and slowing his speech down a bit for the hard of understanding. “You’ll see the bus station. It’s two streets north of there.”

  Vaz was starting to sweat as he walked away. It was midsummer and his formal uniform was frying him, not that he had the option of showing up in shirtsleeves. Mal somehow still looked pristine despite the concrete dust on his elbows and boots.

  “What are we going to use for a drink?” Mal asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe we just say what we have to say and leave it at that.”

  They’d promised Emanuel that if they ever passed through Sydney, something Vaz had thought highly unlikely, then they’d find the man’s favorite bar and raise a toast to his memory. It had been a very matter-of-fact conversation. ODSTs didn’t think of getting killed as an if. It was more like a when.
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  Doesn’t make it any easier, though. Doesn’t mean we miss him any the less.

  “Ah,” said Mal. As soon as they turned the corner and looked up the road, they could see the bulldozers at work. “Ripe for development.”

  Some of the clearance crew stopped to watch them walking along the center line of the road. Vaz counted the stumps of internal walls and decided that 21 Strathclyde Street had stood where there was now a ragged crater fringed by the remains of four bright turquoise Doric columns. Mal looked them over, uncharacteristically grim.

  “Manny never did have much taste in bars,” he said quietly. “Poor bugger.”

  One of the construction workers took off his hide gloves and picked his way over the rubble toward them, head down and eyes shielded by the peak of his hard hat. It was only when “he” looked up that Vaz realized it was actually a woman, a nice-looking redhead. Vaz sometimes tried to imagine how alien he must have looked to a civilian these days, but he could guess from the slight frowns he’d been getting this morning that he didn’t come across as the nice friendly boy next door. He decided to let Mal do the talking and stood back to look down into the crater. A pool of stagnant water lay at the bottom like a mirror, busy with mosquitoes.

  “What can we do for you, mate?” the redhead asked.

  Mal pointed at the complete absence of a bar. “Was that the Parthenon?”

  “Yeah. Better stay clear of the edge. You can see it’s not Happy Hour.”

  “We’ve got a promise to keep to a mate who didn’t make it back.”

  The redhead cocked her head on one side. “We’re supposed to keep people out of this road. Safety regs. You know what the council’s like. But what they don’t know won’t hurt ’em.”

  Vaz pitched in. They had half an hour to do this and then make themselves presentable to report to Bravo-6. “We just want to raise a glass to him, ma’am. Then we’ll go.”

  The redhead stood with her hands on her hips, inspecting Vaz. “Did you bring a bottle?”