He looked over Lucy’s remodeled backpack, wondering if Engineers ever left anything alone.
“And next time, Petty Officer, you will listen to the lieutenant’s orders and you will fol ow them,” he said, holding up a warning finger. “Because I don’t want Dr. Halsey lecturing me on how you’ve al got poor impulse control.”
It would have raised a laugh under normal circumstances, but they’d al lost too many people now. Just getting Lucy back in one piece seemed to be enough. For an hour, Mendez al owed himself the respite of sitting on the grass with the Spartans, picking over the leftover barbecued fish and contemplating when he’d be able to replenish his supply of Sweet Wil iams. The brief break came to an abrupt end when his radio crackled in his ear.
“Chief, you real y need to come and take a look at this,” Fred said. “And bring a tranquil izer dart to calm down Dr. Halsey. She’s in hog heaven.
Just walk down the corridor and you’l find us.”
“On my way, Lieutenant.” Mendez got to his feet and jerked his head at Lucy. She was now the Engineer wrangler, after al . “Come on, kid. Let’s go see what the good doctor’s found.”
Fred might have been joking about the tranquil izer dart, but if Mendez had had one, he would have been sorely tempted to use it. Lucy seemed to know where she was going and led Mendez into the darkness. He felt something brush his arms and face as if he was pushing through curtains, and then he was suddenly in an enormous, brightly lit hangar faced in stone like everything else in this world. It was busy with at least a dozen Huragok drifting around an assortment of vessels that he didn’t recognize at al .
He could hear Halsey cal ing him. “Chief? Chief, you won’t believe what we’ve got here.”
“I can see it, Doctor.” He ducked under the fuselage of a large satin-gray ship about the size of a Pelican, but he couldn’t tel if it was brand-new or if it had seen a thousand years’ service. He fol owed the sound of Halsey’s voice and stuck his head inside the first hatch he found open. “Is it just fantastical y interesting, or is it actual y going to be any use to us?”
Halsey’s indignant face popped up right in front of him, almost making him flinch.
“Yes, just a little,” she said. “You want to transform slipspace navigation? You want to know when you slip exactly where and when you’re going to drop back into realspace, and not end up hours and mil ions of kilometers from your target? Wel , it comes as standard on every damn model in this showroom. And we’re going to have it.”
Mendez thought of Kurt and the others with a strange kind of regretful relief, a realization that their lives had brought something priceless and hadn’t been wasted. He decided he might crack a new cigar after al .
“Thanks, Kurt,” he murmured. “Thanks.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WE CAN’T FORGIVE, AND WE CAN’T FORGET. BUT THERE’S A THIRD OPTION WHICH ISN’T RELATED TO EITHER. IT DOESN’T REQUIRE US TO BE FRIENDS. WE CAN SIMPLY BOTH AGREE TO STOP KILLING EACH OTHER.
(ADMIRAL LORD HOOD TO THEL ‘VADAM, STILL KNOWN AS THE ARBITER)
MAINTENANCE AREA, FORERUNNER DYSON SPHERE, ONYX: LOCAL DATE NOVEMBER 2552.
Halsey communicated with Prone to Drift with an ease that Lucy envied.
The Engineer seemed to have picked up an understanding of spoken English with typical speed, and al Halsey had to do was keep her datapad focused on his tentacles while it relayed the conversation back to her in a neutral male voice. It was a quick exchange of software and algorithms, nothing like the painful, primitive steps that Lucy had had to go through to communicate with Prone.
Halsey looked excited even though she was putting on her I’m-a-detached-professional voice. Lucy noted the way she kept licking her lips like she was desperate to interrupt with new questions.
“But can that slipspace navigation be adapted to fit human ships?” she kept asking. “Look, I’ve got some schematics here.” She brandished the pad. “Can we achieve that degree of insertion accuracy?”
“If your drives are sufficiently responsive,” said the flat, disembodied voice emerging from her datapad. “We need to examine one.”
“We can fetch a whole fleet here for you to play with,” Halsey said. Lucy watched Mendez rol his eyes very slowly and then look away. The rest of the Spartans were wandering around the hangar, examining the Forerunner vessels. “Al we have to do is get a message out to my people.”
“We are not in your time,” Prone said. “And there is something out there.”
“What do you mean, something out there? You told me there was no evidence of the Flood and the Halo hadn’t fired.”
“There is something out there that is both there and not there. It may be a threat. Are you not interested in the condition of the Reclaimers in stasis?”
He meant the Katana personnel and the unidentified civilians. Lucy felt ashamed that she’d been too tied up in her own problems to ask Prone to open their slipspace pods.
“We’re interested in them,” Mendez said. “Why are they in there? What happened?”
Prone paused for a moment. Lucy wasn’t sure if Engineers were capable of lying, but they were definitely sensitive to agitation and seemed to want to avoid upsetting humans.
“We went to the portal when the first shield procedures activated,” the proxy voice said. “They are too damaged for us to repair. We placed them in stasis for those with greater knowledge to attend to them.”
So Team Katana were either dead or dying, and the Engineers had done the only thing they knew; they put them on life support and waited for the medical experts to show up. But the Forerunner medics were never going to come. Lucy hoped that Halsey’s medical genius was al it was cracked up to be and that she could do something for the Katana guys, even though she seemed to think of them al as substandard merchandise.
“Explain what you mean by not in our time, ” Halsey said. “I realize this is a slipspace bubble, but exactly how far out of sync are we with the galaxy?”
“Varies,” the virtual voice answered. “And can be varied. If the other space talks to you, it hears your reply fifteen or twenty times later.”
Halsey seemed to be struggling to pin Prone down to terms she understood. She tried another tack.
“Can you tel me the date in the human calendar on the outside? Access my datapad again. Extrapolate from the calendar we use.”
Prone reached out and fluttered his cilia over the datapad. “The year division is two-five-five-three. The lesser division is two.”
Lucy was now used to Prone’s turn of phrase, and understood that as February 2553. They’d been here days, yet months had elapsed outside.
But what was out there waiting for them?
Mendez took a couple of steps forward and eased himself into the conversation. “Now I’m real y grateful that you brought Lucy back to us,” he said. “But is there any way you can let us signal one of our own ships so we can take her home?”
“Until we know if the object is a threat, we must remain concealed.” Prone seemed to be getting jumpy. His lights were growing more intense.