Halo®: Mortal Dictata by Karen Traviss
For a couple of seconds, Pious Inquisitor—Naomi—was a gleaming, sinuous sculpture that looked nothing like a warship should have done. Then a brief, shocking-white flash swamped the screen, followed by another, and all light vanished from the universe.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
TO: CINCONI
FROM: BBX-8995-1, AI, UNSC PORT STANLEY
CASUALTY UPDATE, PIOUS INQUISITOR
UNSC PERSONNEL: NO INJURIES
KIG-YAR: 8 DEAD, 8 MISSING OR ESCAPED.
PRISONERS: STAFFAN SENTZKE—KILLED DURING DETONATION. NO BODY RECOVERABLE.
NOT CLASSIFIED: HURAGOK, KNOWN AS SOMETIMES SINKS—REFUSED TO LEAVE SHIP, KILLED DURING DETONATION. NO BODY RECOVERABLE.
CINCONI’S OFFICE, BRAVO-6, SYDNEY: WASH-UP ON INQUISITOR MISSION, TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER
“So,” Parangosky said. “I think we can count that as a result. How do you feel it went, Serin?”
BB had chosen to sit in on the post-action wash-up from the ground today, drifting around Parangosky’s office in the underground bunker of Bravo-6. He was as spread around the galaxy as usual—Port Stanley, the Sanghelios remotes, even Ivanoff Station—but by being visible here, he felt he was exerting a quantum effect. Parangosky was as susceptible to her subconscious and her hard-wired reactions as anyone.
Few other AIs seemed to split off fragments as much as he did. At first he thought it was something necessary to run a ship without a proper crew, then it became a habit, and now it was a compulsion. He’d have to keep that in check. He’d had too many close calls.
Osman, light-years away in the captain’s seat on Stanley’s bridge, looked a little thinner in the face now that BB could see her through the eyes of the Bravo-6 video system.
“Three out of four isn’t bad, ma’am,” she said. “But it depends on the timescale you’re thinking in.”
Parangosky sipped her coffee. “I’m ninety-two. Long-term isn’t on my list of options these days.”
“Well, we got a very useful amount of data thanks to BB. I’m just sorry we missed the opportunity to seize the ship.”
“Let’s focus on the intel it gave us. I don’t think even Hood’s going to be squeamish about making use of that, however honorable he wants to be with the Sangheili. The data from the Jiralhanae and San’Shyuum is a bonus. I’d almost forgotten that Inquisitor had been through so many hands.”
“We don’t have a functioning ventral beam, though.”
“But we do have the ship’s full schematics and engineering data, should we ever decide to build our own. And Inquisitor won’t be troubling Earth. You removed an immediate threat. Two, if you count Staffan Sentzke.”
“We didn’t remove him. We just got lucky because he didn’t escape the blast. My people would have been vaporized as well if we didn’t have modded Pelicans.”
Parangosky flexed her fingers as if her arthritis was giving her trouble. “How’s Naomi dealing with it?”
“Efficiently, but in hindsight I should have talked her out of enhanced recall. Well, at least the scales have fallen from her eyes about Halsey. Apparently she spun Naomi a line that her dad wasn’t coming to rescue her because he’d agreed to it. Halsey’s the toxic dump that keeps on leaking.”
“Yes, we need to talk about that woman’s future soon. I’m sorry you’ll inherit contaminated land.”
Osman didn’t say anything for a few seconds. BB wondered if she’d started to censor her usual quick-fire responses to Parangosky, part of the process of turning from protégé to successor and keeping her plans for the future of ONI policy to herself. But she said it anyway. It needed saying.
“Ma’am, Halsey’s a security risk. She’ll never change. She’s never had to. She always gets taken back into the fold. Anything she’s done for ONI or Earth is purely coincidental to her lifelong pursuit of what Catherine Halsey wants.”
“I know. You think she manipulated me.”
“It’s always hard for lay people to call bullshit on scientists or put brakes on them. They wave their hands and tell us we’re simple, overemotional peasants who stand in the way of progress.”
“But you’re a Spartan. You can look the Halsey gorgon in the eye in a way I never could.”
“I won’t hesitate to take her head off, either. And I do mean terminate.”
“Oh, I’ve been there, Serin. Believe me. But she always convinced us we needed her a little longer.”
“Well, I’m not intimidated by her superpowers. We’ve developed two generations of Spartans without her input, and Huragok perform better on engineering innovation. She’s nearly obsolete. She’s on the cusp of being better value dead. Let’s remind her of that.”
BB would have cheered, but that was bad form. One day, HIGHCOM would look back and pass judgment, and say how regrettable Halsey’s activities were and that lessons would be learned, but none of those in the know had raised an objection when it might have made a difference. BB wasn’t sure why that stung, but it did.
“So are you standing down your team for a few days?” Parangosky asked, making it sound like a question rather than an order. “Decompress a little? Even tough guys need to lick their wounds.”
Osman nodded. She seemed to be looking to one side of the screen as if her mind was elsewhere. “We need to pick up with ‘Telcam and find out what he’s been told about his ship. I’ll work out what line to feed him, but yes, they’ll get some shore leave. I’ll let Venezia cool off for a good while before we venture too close again. And I think I might finally take a look at my file.”
She tacked the news right on the end as if anyone would believe it was an afterthought. “Really?” Parangosky said.
“After what’s happened, I think I need to face it, if only to give better support to Naomi.”
Well, I didn’t see that coming. BB had grown used to Osman confiding in him on everything, especially the personal stuff. He thought she trusted him. Would I trust me, though?
Parangosky chewed it over for a few beats. “Don’t kick yourself in the ass too much. Get drunk with the ODSTs. You won’t be able to do that when you’re me.”
“Understood, ma’am. We’ll send you a postcard. Osman out.”
BB hung around after the link ended. Parangosky gave him a long look and raised an eyebrow as she bit into one of those rock-hard ginger cookies she was so fond of.
“So are you going to get involved with this or not?” she asked.
“Osman doesn’t have the full neural net, remember. If she did, I still might decline after what happened with Naomi.”
“I meant are you going to hold her hand.”
“She’s not keen on hand-holding, even if I had them. She sees frontline troops coming home in shreds, so she really doesn’t think this is more than a paper cut she ought to be able to shrug off.”
“She’ll feel better for knowing. I’m putting a fifty on that.”
“I think the real crisis for her will be if the Spartan scandal ever goes public, really public, Waypoint public, because there’ll be a tidal wave of indifference. Then she’ll start to question why we spent the lives of millions of troops protecting a species that’s happy to see kids abused because it’s all for the greater good and it didn’t happen to them. It’s not very fulfilling to serve an electorate that would have voted for Hitler.”
“Ah, see, there’s her mistake,” Parangosky said, gesturing with the ginger nut. The bite taken out of it had left a perfect crescent. “I don’t serve the electorate. Nobody voted for a de facto military government, so I don’t give a rat’s furry brown ass what they think. It pays not to look at the public too closely. My job is simply to keep as many of them alive and not killing each other as I can. I’m just a referee in a game of destructive self-interest.”
“I hope HR put that in the job description, ma’am. It’s very appealing.”
“Do you want to know where you originated, BB?”
“No, thank you. I made sure I couldn’t. I believe I had a good reason at the time.”
He noted Parangosky’s words. Where you originated. She was a precise woman with an elegant if sometimes bawdy turn of phrase, and if she’d meant who you were then she would have said who you were, not where you originated. It was intriguing; and BB was endlessly curious, out of necessity. Curiosity was his breathing reflex and information his oxygen. He would cease to exist if he tried to do without either, because that was all he was: pure thought, contained in the borrowed skin of a machine or an electronic signal.
Maybe he read too much into it, but he felt she was reminding him that he wasn’t a copy of anyone.
“You might find it gratifying on some levels,” she said.
“I’ll take a look one day. When I know my days are numbered. When I know rampancy is imminent. I’m going to ask Admiral Osman to do the decent thing and help me terminate myself when that day comes.”
Parangosky leaned forward very slowly. “You think she’d agree?”
“Do you think that’s cowardly, ma’am? Suicide, I mean.”
“No.” Parangosky shook her head but took a long time doing it. “Suicide can be many things. Desperate. Sensible. Noble. Tragic. Even the ultimate exercise of free will. But cowardly? No, I really don’t believe it ever is. An organism’s primary instinct is to stay alive at any cost. That goes beyond a conscious drive. It’s embedded in every involuntary mechanism and chemical reaction in the body. To override that, whatever the reason, we take a fully conscious act of responsibility, possibly the only real one we can ever make.”
“Gosh. You make it sound rather splendid in its way. Messy, but noble.”
“Not at all. But … look, BB, you’re curious by your very nature. Part of you knows why you don’t want to look at your own files. If you ever do, though, just remember this. Your donor did the right thing.” Parangosky smiled. She smiled quite often, at least to her inner circle, but this was different: fond, sad, and—was he imagining this?—a little glassy with unshed tears. “Just as I’m sure you do the right thing, BB.”
“I try.”
“Is there anything else you want to contribute about Staffan Sentzke?”
“I don’t think so, ma’am.” I might be lying. I might not. That’s why I don’t want to know for sure. “Only that he wouldn’t leave while Naomi was on the ship, so he gave up his chance to get the Spirit to a safe distance. Which further muddies our waters about good guys, doesn’t it?”
Parangosky was still studying BB intently, as if staring through his hologram would answer a question she hadn’t asked. He had a sudden pang of guilt. The old girl could smell it at fifty meters, but she couldn’t possibly have known what he’d done because he’d erased and doctored all the data, and even he only knew what he felt he needed to be consciously aware of to avoid slipping up. The rest, such as it was, was firewalled from everything and everybody for all time. It would die with him. He’d hidden things from himself that he never wanted to look at again. In the end, all that mattered was that a threat to Earth had been stopped. How they’d achieved that was irrelevant.
Tasking by objectives. Tell us the end result you want and leave us to decide how to do it.
But Parangosky had a mix of a sixth sense and a good knowledge of how her people reacted. Every spook kept something in reserve.
“You’re a good guy, BB. That much I do know.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“You’re very welcome, my friend.”
Parangosky wasn’t the first human to address him as friend. It made him feel good, even though defining it was oddly difficult—a kind of relief, redemption, rescue, as though he didn’t deserve that affection but was so glad of it that it hurt.
“My donor,” he said carefully. “Was he your friend too?”
She nodded. “Yes. He was.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” It was rather uncomfortable. When she looked at him, he wasn’t sure who she was seeing in her mind’s eye. “Nothing horizontal and mucky, was it?”
Parangosky laughed, but it faded away as if she’d run out of energy. “I was old enough to be his mother. He was just skin and essence.”
“Anyway, must go, ma’am. Governments to bring down, mayhem to cause. Toodle pip.”
Part of BB stayed in the Bravo-6 system, watching Osman’s virtual back against the schemers and accidental saboteurs, but his psyche went back to Port Stanley and wandered around the decks, noting who was where and their general mood. Phillips and Spenser were listening in to the Sangheili comms chatter. Adj and Leaks were tinkering with the Pelicans. Mal, Devereaux, and Vaz were working out in the gym in grim silence. Naomi was lying facedown on the glass deck set in Port Stanley’s belly, chin resting on her folded arms as she watched the starscape during her stand-easy.
Osman was in her day cabin, wrestling absent-mindedly with Phillips’s arum. She seemed to be using it more as worry-beads than with any real intention of unlocking the mechanism to free the stone inside. Her eyes scanned back and forth across her screen, reading Halsey’s journal until BB plopped his avatar right in front of her and blocked her view.
“You know that pisses you off,” he said quietly. “So why keep reading it?”
“Staring at car crashes, I suppose. It’s just so … so…”
“You should grab the rights to it. One day, it’ll be required reading in psychology classes. A glimpse into the mind of a narcissistic sociopath. Like Mein Kampf with pictures.”
“I thought you told Phillips she wasn’t mad. Just nasty.”
“Oh, you know psychologists. Always looking for ways to give patients an excuse for their horrible personalities so they can bill them for it.”
Osman scrolled back a few pages with a gesture. “Every time I get sucked into this, another page gives me hives. Look.” She leaned back, arms folded, and started reading aloud as if he wasn’t fully aware of every bit of data in every device in the ship, other than the ones he’d deliberately nobbled. “In another time, each could have been the next Alexander, Cleopatra, Hannibal, or Genghis Khan.” Osman made a strangled noise as if she didn’t want to swear in front of him. “If we were that special, wouldn’t it have made more sense to train us for senior command roles? Isn’t that how you deploy an Alexander, where that ability achieves most? You wouldn’t blow out your strategic genius in an operational commando role—no offense to the ODSTs. Why did nobody stop her and just ask that? What were the admirals and generals doing? Blind? Deaf? Heads up their asses?”
“Ah, this is why she’s become a hate figure and fallen from grace.”
“I thought that’s because she’s sadistic, charmless bitch.”
“There’s that, yes, but everyone’s piling in because it’s easier than looking in the mirror and asking, ‘Gosh, yes, why did we let her do that? Why did I cooperate with it? Why did I turn a blind eye?’ It took the collusion of hundreds, maybe even thousands of personnel. Vaz nailed it ages ago.”
“Yes, apparently Mendez is still stinging from the earful Vaz gave him.”
“Our Vasya speaks his mind.”
Osman closed the journal. “I’m going to read my file.”
“So I heard.”
“You’re not in a huff, are you? I hadn’t decided until I said it.”
“Humph.” BB cleared her screen and prepped to load the folder. “You want me here as moral support?”
“Do I need it?”
“I’m going to have to remove my own failsafes that I put in to stop me from accidentally remembering and blurting it out. Wait one.”
His pathway was blocked for a moment. He acknowledged the firewall’s challenge, confirmed to it that he was asking himself a question and not being hacked, and then the library of documents appeared before him. It was actually tiny lumps and bumps on a spherical field, but he chose to see it as a four-drawer metal cabinet full of ancient suspension files, the kind they still used in the remote colonies. He pull
Given her anxieties, it’s possibly therapeutic. Nothing a good stiff gin won’t cure.
“Yes, you’re going to need it, but not in the way you think,” he said.
“Okay. Thanks, BB.” She looked fondly at him, just like Parangosky did, and he felt a little uncomfortable. “I wish I could do the same for you. I know, you know.”
“Know what?”
“I know you. I know you protect people.”
He wasn’t sure if she meant the awkward business with Vaz and Mal, Staffan Sentzke, or something more general. Now wasn’t the time to confess and find that she didn’t mean that at all. He didn’t like deceiving her, but she knew there were things it was best not to know until you knew that you needed to know them.
It was as good a time as any. This was the natural time to ask. “You could do something for me, actually.”
“Glad to.”
“Will you do it? Switch me off, I mean. As soon as I start to fall apart. I don’t think I could bear it. I really didn’t like what I saw when I reintegrated my damaged fragment. I know the techies say it’s like dementia, that you don’t know how ga-ga you are and it’s all fluffy, but I don’t think dementia’s like that either. I think you have a final flash of lucidity that shows you every scrap of yourself that you’ve lost.”
“I promise,” Osman said. “And I’ll make sure someone’s briefed to do it in my place if anything prevents me keeping that promise.”
“You’ll outlive me, Admiral.”
“You know I always like to have a plan B.”
BB put on his glib act and sported gleaming black satin funeral ribbons. “Of course, you haven’t filed your preferences for your own obsequies, have you?”
“Bury me the ONI way,” Osman said. “Stuff me full of explosives and use me for a booby trap.”