Authors: Karen Traviss
“The Forerunners were well traveled,” he said. If he’d been allowed the time to study the panel, he’d have been looking for six or more identical symbols and worrying about them, but he couldn’t begin to make sense of the map—if that was what it was. “And generous. But what do they really want from us?”
“To wait patiently for their return,” ‘Telcam said. “To trust them.”
Jul wondered how much trust he was willing to put in gods who would destroy a galaxy to save it. But that was another theological debate he didn’t plan to pursue.
UNSC
PORT STANLEY,
10,000 KILOMETERS OFF VENEZIA.
If only it hadn’t been Venezia.
If only.
If
Ariadne
had gone down near any other planet, any other colony world, then it would have been just that—a tragic and avoidable loss of life caused by an unhappy conjunction of inadequate maintenance, a colonial bureaucracy mired in safety concerns, and sheer rotten bad luck.
But it
was
Venezia, and Venezia had a history.
Osman stood at the viewscreen, hands in her pockets, staring out into space in the direction of
Ariadne
’s drifting debris and tried to work out if what she wanted to do now was actually what needed doing.
I know what Chief Mendez would say. Stick it to the bastards. Make them pay.
There was a whole generation of UNSC now who didn’t remember the colonial insurrection, and even Osman was too young to recall the detail of the war that shaped her life before the Covenant gave humanity a much bigger problem to worry about. But however bloody the war with the Covenant had been, it was colonial terrorism that shaped her fate. It was the real reason why her life and her parents’ lives had been wrecked by Catherine Halsey. The Spartan program had been Halsey’s personal plan to give the UNSC the upper hand in the insurrection. That fact tended to get forgotten these days.
That’s the last thing I should be thinking about right now. All hands lost in
Ariadne.
And those bastards on Venezia could have made a difference, but they didn’t.
Even when they don’t lift a finger, they’re still killing us.
BB’s reflection glided into view and floated next to her. “Agent Spenser’s ready, Captain. Phillips has finished extracting every last drop of juice from his brain.”
“Well, I’m glad he found something to pass the time.” Osman went back to her seat and tapped the console. She liked to see an on-off switch when it came to comms, just in case. “
Port Stanley
to
Monte Cassino,
how long do you plan to continue the search?”
“We’re mapping the outer edge of the debris spread. That’ll take another hour.”
Monte Cassino
’s executive officer, Cerny, gave her the impression that he felt personally responsible for arriving too late and that he was now busy overcompensating. “We’re ready to transfer your personnel whenever you’re ready. Do you want us to send a shuttle?”
“Negative,
Monte Cassino.
There’s not enough room to dock.”
And the last thing I need is some matelot nosing around the hangar.
“We’ll come to you.”
There wasn’t a hope in hell that anyone had survived the explosion.
Ariadne
was only a small patrol vessel with a four-man shuttle. But
Monte Cassino
insisted on doing it by the book. Occasionally, crew had managed to survive catastrophic accidents when sealed compartments were blown clear and didn’t rupture. The Navy tended to cling to scraps of hope like that.
Reality wasn’t on their side, though.
“
Monte Cassino
to
Port Stanley
—Venezia’s getting a little grand and warning us that we’re encroaching on their territorial limits. Stand by.”
Osman gestured to BB.
Take us in closer.
“What are they planning to do about it? Complain to the Colonial Authority? Too bad they blew up the local CAA bureau.”
“I’ve reassured them that we have no intention of landing.”
They need reassuring with a few warheads.
“We’ll keep an ear on your channel.”
Osman debated whether to break cover and pay a visit to whatever passed for an administration on Venezia. But it wasn’t any of her business, much as she wanted it to be, and she had to keep her mind on the main mission. The old problem had suddenly reared its head again: did UNSC turn a blind eye to whatever the colonies did, or did they exact some kind of vengeance and kick off the whole conflict again?
She’d grown used to thinking of those sorts of policy decisions as being above her pay scale, but very soon they wouldn’t be.
I’m supposed to be destabilizing Sanghelios. I’m not supposed to be opening up rifts between humans. But God Almighty, somebody needs to put Venezia in its box once and for all.
She could hear Spenser walking down the passage onto the bridge, muttering with Phillips and Vaz. The word
bastards
carried a long way. It was all those sibilants.
“I think this is where I came in,” Spenser said, holding his hand out to her for a final shake. “It’s been good seeing you again, Oz. I suppose the next time we meet, you’ll be convening an ONI star chamber and I’ll be the accused.”
“Never.” Osman held on to his hand. Spenser might have been buried on Reynes for years at a time, but he still seemed to keep up to speed with the gossip. “Parangosky’s set on staying in post until she reaches her century.”
“Just don’t get caught up in any Sangheili cross fire, that’s all. The lid’s going to come off that pretty soon.”
She would have forced a smile if she hadn’t been flying into a cloud of pulverized ship. “Don’t worry, we’ll stand from under,” she said. “You know ONI. Nine lives, all of them deniable.”
“I’m not going to ask what you’re shipping. But your noisy passenger might.”
“Tell him we’re selling narcotics to the Unggoy. It’s an idea whose time has come.”
She let go of his hand and he disappeared in the direction of the top hatch with Phillips, who seemed to be intent on wringing every last scrap of Sangheili cultural trivia out of him.
Vaz hung back. “Are we getting involved in the
Ariadne
thing, ma’am?”
“We can’t,” she said. “Much as I’d love to. That’s Hood’s problem now. He’s the one who’s supposed to be getting touchy-feely with the colonies. We’ll just hang around and see
Monte Cassino
safely away.”
Vaz nodded, looking unconvinced, and walked off. For a moment she thought she might have offended him by referring to the colonies so dismissively, but he was from Earth, just like Mal, Devereaux, and Phillips. It hadn’t been a deliberate policy to pick a team of Earth boys. But it didn’t do any harm either.
Naomi had been taken from a colony world, just like Osman herself. She wondered if Naomi could even remember where she came from. After years of having their past bleached away and replaced with an artificial destiny, it was hard for any Spartan to tell what was a genuine memory and what had been part of the brainwashing process.
“Persuasion and acclimation—a lifelong training.” What a lovely euphemism. Was that what you called it, Halsey?
There were times when Osman wished she’d never been given access to Halsey’s private journal, but she kept going back to the file and staring at the self-serving, self-deluding garbage, driven by that same stomach-churning cocktail of compulsion and revulsion that made humans stare at mangled corpses.
Training? You bitch.
Osman made a conscious effort to forget the journal and checked the security display. Anyone in the ship with a neural interface showed up as a transponder code on the deck plan. Naomi was still messing around in the engineering space where her armor was stored; Vaz and Mal showed up as two small dots moving back and forth around her, as if they were trying to give her a hand and she was telling them she could manage just fine on her own. Phillips had no implants, so Osman needed a little help from BB to locate him walking back to his cabin. The dropship was now on its way to rendezvous with
Monte Cassino,
and then they’d all be free of the embarrassing complication of passengers who had to be kept away from the incriminating cargo in the hangar.
Phillips, to his credit, hadn’t been idle. He’d fed all the intercepted Sangheili comms through transcription so that Osman could physically read it while she was listening to something else. BB could have intercepted, recorded, translated, transcribed, and analyzed the whole lot in a matter of seconds, but he could also navigate and fight the ship, too, and she still preferred to do much of that herself. BB—in full control of
Port Stanley
—only needed humans to shake hands with dignitaries and handle the fiddly close-quarters combat. But he knew that they needed to feel more useful than that to make life worth living.
She’d never had an AI like him before. He was more than an assistant. He was an intelligence officer in his own right, and he was also her bodyguard. They’d been teamed up for less than a month and she already found herself dreading the day when he wouldn’t be around any longer.
Damn. That’s depressing. Got to stop that. I’ll be volunteering for a full AI neural interface next.
Osman kept half her attention on the radio as she let the hours of transcript scroll in front of her on her main CIC screen. The ebb and flow of voice traffic had blended into a white noise of requests for checks as
Monte Cassino
spiraled slowly out from the center of the explosion, scanning for debris as she went and then working her way back in again. It was only when an abrupt and unfamiliar voice broke into the circuit that her attention was dragged from the transcript and made to listen.
“UNSC warship, this is Venezia TC. You are now in sovereign space. Suggest you withdraw.”
It was like hearing archive material from fifty years ago. There was something oddly distressing about a human voice issuing a hostile challenge to a warship, and Osman could only listen. Venezia couldn’t detect
Port Stanley
and that was how it had to stay.
“Venezia TC, this is
Monte Cassino
. We’re keeping you fully informed of our intended movement. You’re fully aware that we’re searching for possible survivors.”
“
Monte Cassino,
unless you turn back we’ll open fire.”
There was a brief pause, and then Commander Cerny’s tone changed from the flat calm of a few seconds earlier.
“I suggest you don’t do that, Venezia. Because we will return fire.”
“You were going to do that anyway. Venezia out.”
She jerked forward in her seat. Venezia didn’t have the firepower to take out
Monte Cassino,
but Osman still had a pilot and a dropship out there. BB appeared instantly just above the console and shivered slightly.
“I think it’s National Foolhardy Day,” he said. “I’ve alerted Devereaux and she’s standing off until this nonsense is over.”
“Thanks, BB. Flash
Monte Cassino
discreetly and tell them we’re here for backup if they need us.”
Port Stanley
was close enough to Venezia now for Osman to see the planet and the faint point of light that was the warship. She watched from the viewscreen, waiting for Cerny’s voice over the radio saying that they’d completed the search and were pulling back, but about a minute later she caught a burst of static and the tail end of a warning.
“—brace brace brace!”
She thought she saw a streak of light followed by a faint starburst like a flare, but it was gone before she could study it. Whatever it was, it definitely hadn’t hit
Monte Cassino.
Any impact would have been visible at this range. But it looked like the bastards really had opened fire on the destroyer.
“What the hell was that, BB?”
“Ground-based triple-A. Let me nose around.”
Osman could now hear what was happening on the ship’s bridge.
“Point of origin identified. Acquiring lock—standing by.”
“Take, take, take.”
“Missile away. Time to target—eighty-two seconds.”
Eighty-two seconds was a painfully long time when you couldn’t see what was happening. If
Monte Cassino
hit the launch site, then Osman would be none the wiser until the ship confirmed a kill. But she was far more worried about the prospect of Venezia now having space-capable missiles, which they’d certainly never had before. They’d confined their off-world activities to ship-to-ship attacks and landing personnel to plant explosive devices. They’d never been in the big weapons league.