Mal stuck his head through the cockpit hatch, squeezing Vaz out of the way. “You got a sitrep, Dev? How bad is it?”
“How bad do you want? Phil ips ran into ‘Telcam, and ‘Telcam asked him what he knew about Jul ‘Mdama.”
“Oh, Christ. So our cover’s blown.”
“No idea. There was an explosion, and the last thing Osman heard over the radio was ‘Telcam tel ing Phil ips that it wasn’t them, whatever that means.” Devereaux paused and the dropship suddenly shot up almost vertical y, making Vaz grab for a handrail. He should have buckled in. “Then she lost the signal.”
That was what came of playing a double game—a treble game, in fact, smiling at the Arbiter while arming the religious zealots who wanted to overthrow him, as wel as kidnapping one of the rebels who happened to get in the way. Wel , ONI had certainly succeeded in keeping Sanghelios off balance. That was what Parangosky wanted: to kick the hinge-heads while they were down, to kick them so hard that they could never get up and bother Earth again. Vaz didn’t have a problem with that. He was just finding it tangled.
The patch of sky framed in the cockpit screen faded from blue to violet to black. They were clear of the planet now. Devereaux turned the shuttle over to the onboard AI with a tap on the console. She didn’t look back over her seat.
“He’l be okay, Dev,” Mal said.
She sounded a little hoarse. “Yeah.”
Her tone was resigned. Vaz realized he hadn’t picked up something that Mal already had. So Devereaux was fond of Phil ips. It wasn’t until Vaz heard that slight crack in her voice that he realized it was more than a comradely concern for his safety.
“I mean it, Lian.” Mal’s voice dropped to firm, quiet reassurance, the first time Vaz had heard him cal Devereaux by her actual name. There was a rock-solid fatherly certainty about him now. “He’l make it. He can talk his way out of anything in three alien languages. Chin up, kid.”
Devereaux just nodded. Somewhere in the glittering black void, the ONI corvette Port Stanley lurked with an impatient captain, a Spartan who was about to get more bad news after a very bad week, and an AI who’d lost part of himself along with Phil ips. On the console, the navigation plot showed the ship as a delicate green mesh of light.
“So how was your day?” Devereaux seemed to be making an effort to be her chirpy self again. “Track down any bad guys?”
It was hard to answer. As Kilo-Five’s commanding officer, Osman should have been told first, but then Naomi had the moral right to know before anyone else. On the other hand, Devereaux was ODST, 10th battalion, one of their own, and Vaz didn’t like keeping fel ow marines in the dark even for a few hours. He struggled with the news. Mal didn’t step in to help him out.
“We did,” Vaz said at last. “And it’s complicated.”
HANGAR DECK, UNSC PORT STANLEY: VENEZIA ORBIT Pain was a strange sensation when you didn’t have a body.
BB was an entity of pure thought, beyond the reach of aches and injuries, but now he realized what a traumatic amputation felt like. He’d been integrated with his fragment while it was stored in Phil ips’s radio cam. Then there’d been an explosion. The link had been cut. And it hurt.
That was the only way he could describe it. It was the interruption of his thought processes, unpleasant, disorienting, and lingering. He felt something of him was missing and gone forever.
But I’m used to splitting off fragments and closing contact with them. I’ve got a fragment wandering around Bravo-6 in Sydney, too, and I’m out of touch with that all the time. I could split off a dozen more, no problem. This feels different.
He’d been inserted into Naomi’s neural implant just once, plugged into her nervous system in combat, so he knew what stress and adrenaline felt like to a human. Perhaps that was the cause of this. He was identifying too much with flesh and blood. His existence, his body, was input and data: suddenly pul ing the plug was like having a chunk of him ripped away, leaving him in shock.
And thought is all I am. It’s my blood. Data is my existence, like breathing. Without it, I’m dead.
It was also worrying to imagine what might have shut down the radio. Just a blast? Surely not. ONI kit was far more robust than that. Radios even went on functioning when their owner stepped on a mine.
Well, there’s only one way to find out … BB was spread around Port Stanley’s systems, performing bil ions of operations a second and monitoring events light-years beyond the ship.
Each sensor was his eyes, ears, nose, and fingertips, but he could detect and interpret inputs far beyond a human’s senses. He knew more than any individual man ever would. Uncertainty was a new and disturbing experience for him.
Curiosity is wonderful. Ignorance … isn’t.
“Tart-Cart to Port Stanley—put the kettle on, BB. ETA four minutes.” That was Devereaux, forcing cheerfulness but betrayed by the slight rise in the pitch of her voice. BB knew the dropship’s position to ten centimeters and exactly when he’d need to seal the interior bulkheads and activate the hangar doors. He wasn’t the only one struggling, then. “Any news?”
“No.” BB could hear a conversation going on behind Devereaux, just broken snatches while she was transmitting, and too quiet for human ears to pick up. “Contacting the Arbiter’s people requires some diplomacy.”
“Oh,” Devereaux said.
Mal and Vaz were arguing. BB could detect the changes in frequency that indicated clenched jaw muscles and more rapid breathing. BB caught half a phrase from Vaz, his Russian accent more pronounced, which meant he was angry: —mi, then I will. “Okay, then. Tart-Cart out.”
BB was linked only to the dropship’s onboard nav now, talking machine to machine. While he monitored and adjusted its flight path, he speculated on what the rest of that overheard sentence was, and what had preceded it.
Mi. Nao … mi. “Then I will” … usually preceded by “If you don’t.”
So if Mal didn’t do something regarding Naomi, then Vaz would. Do what? Ask her something, tel her something, give her something? The last crisis before the Venezia mission was unsealing Naomi’s personnel file—ghastly stuff, details that would disturb any woman, even one who’d been trained and engineered to cope with traumas that would floor a regular human. It had to be something left over from that. Naomi had asked Vaz to read her file and break the bad news to her, so he was best placed to make the decision on what to tel her and when. Yes, that was what it was al about. BB decided to keep an eye on things and make sure everyone was okay—or as okay as they could be under the circumstances.
It was probably an authority thing. Mal was a staff sergeant; Vaz was a corporal. Vaz also had an inflexible moral streak, the sort that got him into arguments in a political world ful of very gray areas.
I wonder if I’ll ever regret stopping him from shooting Halsey?
The bulkhead warning lights flashed, the seals engaged, and the aft section of the hangar opened to the vacuum as the dropship maneuvered into position. Voice comms were stil disabled. Ah, so they were stil arguing. They knew BB heard and saw everything. That was why they’d once resorted to hiding under a cargo crate and communicating in silence. He thought they’d got over that by now and had started to trust him, so this had to be rather more serious.