“Yes, ma’am,” Naomi said at last. “I think I know you, but I don’t know where from.”
“It’s been a long time. And my name wasn’t Osman back then. Like you, I didn’t even have a surname.”
Osman had rarely come face-to-face with Spartans from her batch. On the handful of occasions when she had, she found they were pretty good at forgetting because they’d been made to forget so much. She concentrated on Naomi’s pale gray eyes, searching for the moment the penny dropped. The Spartan had now stopped blinking completely.
Naomi struggled with the name. “Sarah?”
“Serin. Serin-Zero-One-Nine. Remember me now?”
As Osman watched the revelation build on Naomi’s face, she felt the tension drain from her own shoulders. The relief was both unexpected and incredible. She hadn’t realized she’d been that worried about it.
But it’s out. Thank God for that. Someone other than me and the select few in ONI knows who I am.
Nearly half of the seventy-five children who’d been taken for the program didn’t make it past augmentation treatment at fourteen. The few who didn’t die were left disabled. Osman didn’t know what Halsey had actual y told her successes about the fate that had befal en her failures.
“We thought you’d died,” Naomi said.
Wel , that answered Osman’s question. “I did, near as damn it. ONI put me back together again, so now you know. And don’t tel me how normal I look. I stil have some enhancements, but nothing skeletal.”
Al Osman had needed was to see the look on Naomi’s face. It was a kind of validation. She’d been wiped out of existence twice, first as a kidnapped kid taken to Reach, then erased from the Spartan program, but now nobody could erase her again.
I exist. I’m here. And I’m going to head up ONI.
Naomi settled at one of the comms stations and secured the seat belt as if nothing had happened. “We’d better get going, ma’am.”
Osman wasn’t sure if the subject was closed or not. If it wasn’t, it would have to wait. She was about to summon the ODSTs when they arrived on the bridge with Phil ips and BB. Al three of them—even Devereaux—stood at ease looking like everyone’s worst nightmare; unsmiling, unblinking, and silent. Mal and Vaz had do-not-spil -my-beer written al over them. It was partly the buzz-cut hair and complete absence of expression, but also … damn, Osman couldn’t quite pin it down. Whatever it was, she was sure she could pick an ODST out of a lineup every time, male or female.
It was that earnest hardness, that sense that they would do absolutely anything they were tasked to do, however insane or impossible, and that once they were let off the leash only shooting them would stop them.
“Cabins okay?” she asked.
Mal thawed a little. His file said he was thirty-three but he looked younger, with a fuzz of dark hair and just a few lines around the eyes that suggested he actual y spent a lot of time laughing. Vaz—ho managed to look both time-worn and twenty-something at the same time—had one of those lean, high-cheekboned Slavic faces and a spectacular scar the ful width of his jaw. He didn’t seem the laughing kind at al .
“Brammers, ma’am,” Mal said, deadpan. Osman assumed from his tone that it was high praise. “We never normal y get a pit to ourselves. Vaz is delirious about it. Honest.”
“I’l take your word for it.” The only problem with drawing ODST recruits from al nations and al three services was that many of them were completely unintel igible even in English. It was part of their curious charm. “There’s a set of upgraded recon armor for each of you, too.”
“Thank you, ma’am. Luxury.”
“Okay. Secure for launch. BB, you have the ship.”
Phil ips never said a word as he buckled in. Osman caught his eye. If anything, he looked amused, as if she hadn’t fooled him at al about what ONI was actual y up to.
BB appeared settled on the console in front of her. “Thirty seconds … receiving final updates … you could have sedation, you know.”
Osman couldn’t hide a thing from him. She knew she’d kissed good-bye to privacy before she was even old enough to understand what it was, but an AI could know more about someone than their own mother. Protective or not, it rattled her. BB had access to every cockpit recording and medical report, and he could probably pick up her pulse rate, too, the intrusive little bastard.
She heard one of the ODSTs trying to stifle a yawn. Nothing fazed them. Port Stanley’s drives rose from a faint whine to what she could only describe as an intense nonsound that made her brain feel like it was being sucked down her Eustachian tubes.
It was too late to stop. The drives were spooled up and committed to jump now. “I can deal with it,” she said.
“Late databurst incoming … never mind, that’l have to wait … five seconds.” BB executed a smart one-eighty-degree spin. “Place your bets on where and when we emerge, ladies and gentlemen … and jump. ”
Osman never looked at the external view. She couldn’t. Her gut plummeted and went on fal ing. Her brain told her she was tumbling head over heels down an unending tunnel, even though she could see her own fingers digging into the padded black armrests of her chair. Her eyes flickered uncontrol ably as they tried to make sense of the misleading impulses from her brain. She was fal ing, completely out of control, and that was al there was to it. The sickening sensation behind her eyes crept down her neck and made her hunch her shoulders.
Then she hit a brick wal . For a moment she was swaying horizontal y on a storm-tossed deck, and then everything slowed to a stop. Throwing up wasn’t a very captainly thing to do. She gritted her teeth and waited for it to pass.
She must have sat there longer than she realized. One of the ODSTs leaned over her.
“You okay, ma’am?” Devereaux asked.
Osman made an effort to stand up and look vaguely in command. “Jumps don’t agree with me.”
“Like Nelson. Never did his reputation any harm, though.”
“Nelson had a translight drive, did he? Wel , that explains Trafalgar.”
“No, ma’am, but he always puked his ring when he went to sea.…”
Osman smiled despite herself. She was grateful not to see her breakfast in her lap. “Could be worse, then.”
The view from the forward bulkhead projection was a dense, featureless void far blacker than normal space. But it wasn’t just Port Stanley that had slipped into a different dimension. Osman found herself in a new reality as wel . This wasn’t ONI. Nobody here was calculating the best moment to make a play for her job or sending their AI to hack her systems. The people around her were just doing a job and watching their buddy’s back, not looking for the best place to insert a knife in it. Osman suddenly found herself disarmed by something that wasn’t exactly innocence—they were ODSTs, after al —but that pressed the same button in her.
Uncomplicated. Straightforward. Transparent. Loyal. No threat. Well, not to me, anyway.
“Okay, people, I make it forty-eight hours to Brunel, so familiarize yourselves with the ship,” Osman said. “BB, what was in that databurst?”
The AI flashed an image onto the bulkhead display. It was a video transmission showing the pennant code ident of UNSC Ariadne. Osman wasn’t an engineer, but she could recognize an accelerator-shielding bulkhead when she saw one. Ariadne’s engineers were sending back images of a technical problem and asking for advice from Earth. There was no way of finding out what had happened until Port Stanley was back in normal space and comms were restored.
“Where is she?” Osman asked.
“She had to drop out of slip near Venezia,” BB said. “The CO made contact with the colony to ask to land nonessential personnel because of the safety risks, but they refused.”
“Since when did a human colony get to say no to a UNSC request for assistance? Even Venezia?” Osman realized Ariadne was only a smal patrol ship, but she was stil armed. Osman would have landed shuttles and argued the toss later, cannoned up if need be. Venezia had gone quiet during the Covenant War, but everyone remembered what it had done during the colonial insurrection. “Who the hel ’s driving that tub?”
“Commander Pasquale.”
The name didn’t ring a bel . She started to check her datapad for the UNSCN list, but decided to leave it for later. “As soon as we’re out of slip, check whether anyone else has responded or if they’re stil in trouble.”
“You’re not planning to divert, are you?”
“I know my orders, BB. I just want to know what Venezia’s playing at.”
Osman had mental y filed most of the hundreds of human colony worlds with one-word labels: glassed, silent, hiding, resentful, struggling, loyal, outlaw. Venezia had dropped off the plot more than ten years ago, when it was a known safe haven for terrorists. It could have been dusting off old grievances now that it thought the Covenant was gone.
Vaz stared at the image of the backside of a hazmat-suited engineer squeezing into a smal machinery space. He didn’t look amused.
“Can’t help hoping the hinge-heads pay Venezia another visit,” he muttered. “But I suppose you can make that happen, can’t you, ma’am?”
Vaz seemed to catch on fast. Good choice, that one. The Psych Eval deadbeats have their uses. Ethics were never simple in ONI, because planetary politics weren’t simple either, but Osman could see that lines would get much more blurred before too long.
“Yes, I can,” she said.
Parangosky’s words came back to her. Never settle a score until it’s tactically useful and you’re certain you can finish the job. Then make sure they know you did it. That’s how you keep them all in line. Osman had al her mentor’s words of wisdom filed mental y too, just like the disposition of colony worlds.
She went back to her cabin and splashed her face with cold water to stop the throbbing in her temples. When she straightened up from the basin and scrutinized herself in the mirror, she stil looked drained of blood. That wasn’t going to inspire confidence in anyone. She reached into the smal cabinet behind the mirror to find a shot of analgesic, but her fingers brushed against something smooth and sharp-edged that crackled.
It was a glistening, transparent bag of crystal ized ginger, scrunched into a pouch and tied with a gold bow. A tiny handwritten tag dangled from it. Osman read it, chuckling to herself.
You’ll find this works pretty well for nausea. MP.
Yes, Parangosky had hidden facets. If you crossed her, she could make sure you ended up very, very dead. But if she liked you—if she trusted you, if she respected you, if she felt you deserved better than the hand you’d been dealt—then she’d be your guardian angel.
It didn’t happen often.
Osman popped a cube of ginger in her mouth and savored the burn al the way down to the hangar bay.
MDAMA, SANGHELIOS.
Jul ‘Mdama realized that the old ways weren’t working any longer, but he had nothing to take their place.
He stood at the kaidon’s door and waited for the old man to acknowledge him. Courtesy cost nothing, after al , and Levu had always been a sensible leader. Jul was ready to tear down society but he drew the line at personal disrespect.
“You don’t look happy, Jul.” Levu, seated at his huge wooden table, beckoned him into his office. The table had been carved from a single piece of jet-wood, legs and top together, no joints or separate pieces at al , and a thousand years of constant use had polished it to a satin blackness.
“What can I do for you?”
“I have to know where you stand on the Arbiter,” Jul said.
“On the truce with the humans?”
“That’s our most immediate problem. Whatever my wife says.”
“I haven’t opposed him, if that’s what you mean. But I don’t plan to sanction an assassination, either.”
“Wel , I have my answer, then. A mistaken answer, but an answer nonetheless.”
Jul had no idea why he stood there a moment longer. He’d been given his answer and Levu wasn’t going to change his mind. Helplessness overwhelmed him for a moment, a frustration akin to seeing flames licking at a building and being unable to make its occupants heed his cal s to run and save themselves. But it was his world that would burn if nobody listened. He was sure of that.
“Do you think we can make peace with humans, Kaidon?”
Levu put his hands flat on the table in front of him. It was a gesture of resignation. He’d always been a pragmatist. “I think they’re devious creatures that can be held in place with the right degree of mutual threat,” he said. “And I think that we’re in no shape to mount the kind of attack that could wipe them out cleanly. But that’s not to say I want to make peace with them. We do what we must.”
The only items on Levu’s desk were his computer from the San’Shyuum system that had linked the Sangheili city-states to their Prophet masters, and an arum—part puzzle, part ornament, a wooden bal of nested concentric spheres carved from a single piece of wood much as the ancient desk had been. It sat on a carved base. Hidden in its core was a smal gem crystal of some kind that could only be shaken free when the player worked out the complex alignment of spheres.
The object seemed impossible to anyone except the craftsman who made it. Youngsters learned patience from it. Apart from providing diversion and strengthening character, it was said to represent what made the Sangheili strong; a perfectly engineered, orderly system that presented a smooth, impenetrable face to the outside world, and each had his appointed place in it. Jul suddenly saw it another way.
He reached out for it and waited for Levu to give him a nod to pick it up.
“Have you ever released a crystal?” Levu asked.
“Once. Then never again.” Jul held the arum in his right hand, one thumb on the anchor piece, and pushed his nail into one of the holes to move one of the inner spheres. He put it back on its base. “But this is indeed what we are. Good day, Kaidon.”
