“The top line says access, or pathway, or connection,” he said. “The row beneath that—I’m uncertain. But the lines below that al contain the word for circle. Loop. Ring.”
“Halos. Please tel me it’s Halos.” Everyone thought there were more out there, on standby to be activated and wipe out al life, but finding and decommissioning them was another matter. “With locations.”
“It could wel be, but I can’t see any coordinates. Just ordinal numbers. And something that might be relative bearings.”
“So … one through seven, yes?”
“Correct.”
“Why the symbols? Why are there two sets of symbols?”
“Location, perhaps, and the assumption of the person who created this was that others knew what that symbol was shorthand for. Or status.”
“You mean status status, or black, red, amber status? Like the security alert escalation?”
“I mean on or off, locked or unlocked, up or down—”
And then it hit Phil ips right between the eyes. Status. One of the Halo rings had been destroyed.
He counted again, comparing the shapes. No, there are six like this, one like that. Did I remember right?
But these symbols must have been here for thousands of years. They were carved into the stone. How could they mean what he thought they did?
How could they be indicators of functioning and nonfunctioning Halos when one of them had only been deactivated in the last year?
“Sorry, I was getting too excited,” Phil ips said. “I real y thought this might be a status panel, but it’s just stone.”
He reached out to touch the symbols, the ones he now thought of as on-off switches. The layer that he could feel and but not see yielded and he found his fingertips against the intricately detailed shape. He could feel it.
“I wouldn’t touch that if I were you, Professor,” BB said.
Phil ips stepped back. “Yeah, if that was a big red button, I might have wiped out half of the galactic core.”
“Wel , you’ve activated something. Look.”
Phil ips felt his stomach knot. He looked, but he couldn’t see a damn thing except the cartouche. “What?”
“Look at the symbols at the top. They’ve changed.”
“They haven’t. It’s just stone.” Phil ips looked up at the ceiling and scanned 360 degrees in case he was missing something that BB had detected. “Nothing’s changed.”
“It has. I can compare every microframe I’ve recorded.” BB was persistent but polite. “I don’t know what the words meant before, but they’ve changed, and now they say to find someone or seek something beyond, or higher, or better. I’m sorry that this is rather vague. Halsey left copious notes and some of them are a little too fulsome and extrapolative.”
It sounded like a religious text, some self-improving stuff. But this was stone, moving stone, stone that changed while he was standing right in front of it. No, that was impossible. But the Forerunners—if they could bend time and build artificial planets, a bit of conjuring with stone was probably easy-peasy for them.
What had he triggered? What did he have to strive for or aspire to? He was thinking in puzzle terms and juggling the language when an idea struck him, one that came straight out of the initial question he’d put to BB.
Black, red, amber status? Like the security alert escalation?
He was an academic learning to be military intel igence the hard way, and the way he thought was changing from anthropologist to marine. The cartouche wasn’t tel ing him to do something spiritual y uplifting. It was tel ing him he had to find someone senior to him.
Maybe it was like any weapon of mass destruction on Earth. They usual y needed more than one person to validate the launch and activate it, just to be on the safe side. Maybe the garrison here hadn’t been trusted to fire Halos on their own. How he’d been able to get the stone to react—and why the Sangheili hadn’t already tried this—wasn’t half as important right then as working out what the hel he’d done.
“Oh, bugger it, BB,” he said. “I think I might have just primed a Halo.”
UNSC TART-CART, PREPARING TO ENTER SANGHEILI SPACE “So how many fragments have you split off now, BB?” Mal asked. “You’re not going to have a dissociative episode, are you?”
“Three,” BB said. Vaz thought he sounded irritable. “And no. And stop making Naomi nervous. She hates me being in her neural implant at the best of times.”
Naomi interrupted on the radio. She sounded as if she was heading their way at a brisk pace. “You know the rules, BB. Do the translating, but don’t mess with my nervous system unless I’m in trouble.”
“I behaved impeccably last time.”
“Tourist.”
“Oh, it’s al bitch, bitch, bitch. You love me real y.”
Vaz looked at Mal and said nothing. Mal just raised his eyebrows. The ODSTs put on their helmets as Naomi thudded into the crew bay like a truck being dropped on the deck, transformed by her Mjolnir armor into an icon of lethal inscrutability. Behind that gold mirrored visor she was probably a long way from inscrutable, but that was one of the comforts of ful -face helmets. Nobody could real y tel if you were scared, worried, or just checking your pay-slip.
She settled down in one of the reinforced seats and folded her arms across her chest. “Don’t worry, Vasya, I’m okay,” she said, reading him like a book. Vaz wasn’t sure if she was talking about her father or the fact that she now had a piece of BB on the loose in her brain, ready to enhance her reactions. “Worry about Phil ips.”
“I already did that.”
She didn’t take the conversational bait and Vaz found himself wondering if he could pul the trigger on Staffan Sentzke. Staffan needed to know he’d been right, and that his kid had survived. He had to be told how she’d spent her life and what she did now, because he’d paid a hel of a price for it. But Vaz didn’t know if that would give him closure. It might just make him worse.
I’d go crazy. I know I would. No wonder the colonies hated us. If all this ever goes public, the ones that are still left are going to hate us even more.
Osman stuck her head into the crew bay. “Just fol ow the Elite escort and don’t let the bastards provoke you, okay? Vaz, Devereaux—you’ve been there before. Relax. And remember to launch those comms drones, because that’s our only chance to monitor voice traffic down there.”
“We’re very relaxed, ma’am,” Mal said. “But I hope you declined the civic reception and parade.”
“I’l keep trying ‘Telcam. Remember what I said about cultural sensitivity and don’t go crashing around the temple.”
Just seeing UNSC troops on their patch would offend most Elites. Vaz recal ed the reaction to the Arbiter showing up in Kenya for the dedication of the Voi memorial, not exactly a forgive-and-forget moment. Nobody lobbed bricks at him, but the expressions on their faces said they’d have real y liked to, given half a chance.