Halo: First Strike

Halo

Tom Maddox

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V

From the author:

You may read these files, copy them, and distribute them in any

way you wish so long as you do not change them in any way or

receive money for them.

I have entered HALO into the distribution networks of the Net, but

I retain the copyright to the novel.

If you paid for these files, you were cheated; if you sold them,

you have cheated.

Otherwise, have fun and spread the book around.

If you have any comments on the book or this distribution, you can

send me e-mail at:

           
[email protected]

November, 1994

HALO

Tom Maddox

To the memory of George Maddox, my father; Paul Cohen,

my friend; and all our lamented dead, lost in time.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Here are some of the people I owe in the writing of this

book.

My wife Janis and son Tom.  They have had to put up with the

problems of a novelist in the houseincluding arbitrary mood

swings and chronic unavailability for many of the usual pleasures

of life.  To both, my love and gratitude for their love, patience,

and understanding.

My best friends:  Leo Daugherty, Jeffrey Frohner, Bill Gibson

and Lee Graham.

My mother Jewell, my brother Bill and sister Janet.

Ellen Datlow:  she published my first stories in Omni and

showed me how a really good editor works.  Also, two friends who

patiently read through drafts of those stories before Ellen got

them:  Geoff Hicks and Larry Reed.

The readers of various incarnations of this book:  Beth

Meacham, my editor at Tor Books; Merilee Heifetz, my agent; Bruce

and Nancy Sterling, great readers; Melinda Howard and Gary

Worthington; Lynne Farr; Carol Poole.  Also, the members of the

Evergreen Writers' Workshop, especially Pat Murphy.

The Usenet community, friend and foe, for ideas about a quite

astonishing number of things, and for the continuing fascination

of life online; with special thanks to Patricia O Tuana and the

members of "eniac."

The usual suspects at the Conference on the Fantastic, with a

special nod to Brian Aldiss, because we'd all be happier if there

were more like him running around.

At The Evergreen State College, many people who gave

technical advice.  (Perhaps needless to say, any consequent

blunders are entirely mine.)  Mike Beug and Paul Stamets, world-

class mycologists and explainers, talked to me about mushrooms and

provided invaluable references.  Mark Papworth applied a coroner's

eye to a carcass I made.  The faculty and students of the Habitats

Coordinated Studies Program, 1988-89 helped me to think about a

space habitat's ecosystem.

A list, much too long to include here, of friends, both

colleagues and students, at Evergreenthough I have to mention

Barbara Smith and David Paulsen, whose cabin and cat make cameo

appearances.

And all I've known who can find a piece of themselves in this

book.

PART I. of V

Everything is destined to reappear as simulation.

Jean Baudrillard, America

1. Burning, Burning

On a rainy morning in Seattle, Gonzales was ready for the

egg.  A week ago he had returned from Myanmar, the country once

known as Burma, and now, after two days of drugs and fasting, he

was prepared:  he had become an alien, at home in a distant

landscape.

His brain was filled with blossoms of fire, their spread

white flesh torched to yellow, the center of a burning world.  On

the dark stained oak door, angel wings danced in blue flame, their

faces beatific in the cold fire.  Staring at the animated carved

figures, Gonzales thought, the fire is in my eyes, in my brain.

He pushed down the s-curved brass handle and stepped through

to the hallway, his split-toed shoes of soft cotton and rope

scuffing without noise across floors of bleached oak.  Through the

open door at the hallway's end, morning's light through stained

glass made abstract patterns of crimson and buttery yellow. 

Inside the room, a blue monitor console stood against the far

wall, SenTrax corporate sunburst glowing on its face; in the

center of the room was the egg, split hemispheres of chromed

steel, cracked and waiting.  One half-egg was filled with beige

tubes and snakes of optic cable, the other half with hard dark

plastic lying slack against the shell.

Gonzales rubbed his hands across his eyes, then pulled his

hair back into a long hank and slipped a circle of elastic over

it.  He reached to his waist and grabbed the bottom hem of his

navy blue t-shirt and pulled the shirt over his head.  Dropping it

to the floor, he kicked off his shoes, stepped out of baggy tan

pants and loose white cotton underpants and stood naked, his pale

skin gleaming with a light coat of sweat.  His skin felt hot, eyes

grainy, stomach sore.

He stepped up and into a chrome half-egg, then shivered and

lay back as body-warmth liquid bled into the slack plastic, which

began to balloon underneath him.  He took hold of finger-thick

cables and pushed their junction ends home into the sockets set in

the back of his neck.  As the egg continued to fill, he fit a mask

over his face, felt its edges seal, and inhaled.  Catheters moved

toward his crotch, iv needles toward the crooks of both arms.  The

egg shut closed on him and liquid spilled into its interior.

He floated in silence, waiting, breathing slowly and deeply

as elation punched through the chaotic mix of emotions generated

by drugs, meditation, and the egg.  No matter that he was going to

relive his own terror, this was what moved him:  access to the

many-worlds of human experiencetravel through space, time, and

probability all in one.

Virtual realities were everywherevirtual vacations, sex,

superstardom, you name itbut compared to the egg, they were just

high-res videogames or stage magic.  VRs used a variety of tricks

to simulate physical presence, but the sensorium could be fooled

only to a certain degree, and when you inhabited a VR, you were

conscious of it, so sustaining its illusion depended on willing

suspension of disbelief.  With the egg, however, you got total

involvement through all sensory modalitiesthe worlds were so

compelling that people waking from them often seemed lost in the

waking world, as if it were a dream.   

A needle punched into a membrane set in one of the neural

cables and injected a neuropeptide mix.  Gonzales was transported.

#

It was the final day of Gonzales's three week stay in Pagan,

the town in central Myanmar where the government had moved its

records decades earlier, in the wake of ethnic rioting in Yangon. 

He sat with Grossback, the Division Head of SenTrax Myanmar, at a

central rosewood table in the main conference room.  The table's

work stations, embedded oblongs of glass, lay dark and silent in

front of them.

Gonzales had come to Myanmar to do an information audit. The

local SenTrax group supplied the Federated State of Myanmar with

its primary information utilities:  all its records of personnel

and materiel, and all transactions among them.  A month earlier,

SenTrax Myanmar's reports had triggered "look-see" alarms in the

home company's passive auditing programs, and Gonzales and his

memex had been sent to look more closely at the raw data.

So for twenty straight days Gonzales and the memex had

explored data structures and their contents, testing nominal

functional relationships against reality.  Wherever there were

movements of information, money, equipment or personnel, there

were records, and the two followed.  They searched cash trails,

matched purchase orders to services and materiel, verified voucher

signatures with personnel records, cross-checked the personnel

records themselves against government databases, and traced the

backgrounds and movements of the people they represented; they

read contracts and back-chased to their bid and acquisition; they

verified daily transaction logs.

Hard, slogging work, all patience and detail, and so far it

had shown nothing but the usual inefficienciesGrossback didn't

run a particularly taut operation, but, as of the moment, he

didn't seem to have a corrupt one.  However, neither he nor

SenTrax Myanmar was cleared yet; Gonzales's final report would

come later, after he and the memex had analyzed the records at

their leisure.

Gonzales stretched and rubbed his eyes.  As usual at the end

of short-term, intensive gigs like this, he felt tired, washed-

out, eager to go.  He said to Grossback, "I've got a company plane

out of here late this afternoon to Bangkok.  I'll connect with

whatever commercial flight's available there."

Grossback smiled, obviously glad Gonzales was leaving. 

Grossback was a slight man, of mixed German and Thai descent; he

had a light brown complexion, black hair, and delicate features. 

He wore politically correct clothing in the old-fashioned Burmese

style:  a dark skirt called a longyi, a white cotton shirt.

During Gonzales's time there, Grossback had dealt with him

coldly and correctly from behind a mask of corporate protocol and

clenched teeth.  Fair enough, Gonzales had thought:  the man's

operation was suspect, and him along with it.  Anyway, people

resented these outside intrusions almost every time; representing

Internal Affairs, Gonzales answered only to his division head,