“Abiding Truth didn’t have much of a fleet to start with.”
“Let me magnify this for you. Would you like it on the head-up display?”
Osman nodded. “We could intervene, but how much could we do?”
“Not much in a ground assault,” BB said. The aerial view of Vadam now fil ed much of the viewscreen, diverting her attention from the red disc of the planet. “We’d need direct contact with ‘Telcam’s fleet to coordinate it, and it would be awful y hard to keep ONI’s name out of that.”
The image was now so magnified that she could see actual units on the ground in Vadam. Smal vessels moved like dots along the roads and canals. A series of explosions suddenly flared in one area, rippling the ground with shock waves, and then a huge flash of white light wiped out half the screen for a few seconds before it died away to leave something belching smoke and flame.
“What was that?” she asked.
“Going by the thermal and blast patterns, someone’s hit another ship and brought it down. I think we can assume it’s a rebel vessel.”
“Okay. Stand by to put a cal in to Parangosky.”
“Big upsurge in voice traffic, by the way. The Arbiter’s al ies are real y getting those warnings out. I fear that our monk has lost the advantage of surprise.”
‘Telcam just hadn’t gone in hard enough and fast enough.
But if he had, and he’d completely annihilated the Arbiter’s al ies, that wouldn’t have suited ONI’s purposes either. Now every city was on the alert, waiting for its own uprising to start. ONI had wanted a civil war but the last thing it wanted was for the Arbiter to crush it in days. Osman sat back and watched more firecracker flashing of artil ery fire on the image.
“I think this is going to be over far too soon, BB,” Osman said. “And if ‘Telcam’s wiped out, it’s going to be hard to start over on this.”
Hard? It’d mean a completely new approach. Perhaps Infinity would change things entirely. What Osman needed right now was a stroke of luck.
TEMPLE OF THE ABIDING TRUTH, ONTOM Phil ips stood staring at the cartouche with his hand held just above the surface as if he was testing a hotplate to see if it would burn him.
“No, real y, BB. I think I’ve done something stupid. Any ideas for rol ing this back?”
BB considered the idea of a space-faring race so advanced that they could wipe out entire galaxies, and the possibility that one of those massively destructive Halos could be triggered by an il iterate alien casual y fiddling with a panel. No, they would have built in more fail-safes than that.
Surely.
“Not yet,” BB said. “But if this real y does unleash destruction, it won’t affect this location. If the Halos are spread over huge distances, then this has to be a remote control. Nobody would destroy their own galaxy while they were actual y in it.”
Surely … Phil ips kept running his hand over his beard, clearly agitated. BB’s view of him was from chest height, looking up under his chin. “Real y? How about kamikaze? Suicide bombers? Self-destruct mechanisms?”
“I real y don’t think this is one of those.”
“Great. So I incinerate another galaxy. Fine. At least there’l be nobody left to come after us bent on vengeance.”
And this man … he’s my friend. He told me so. In another life, I know him, I can do all kinds of things I can’t do now, and I know a lot more. But I can’t recall most of it.
This is horrible. Am I going mad? And why am I thinking in terms of madness, not malfunction?
“I think we’ve translated it correctly, Professor. I’d leave it alone if I were you.”
Phil ips licked his lips nervously, unable to drag himself away from the panel. He recorded more images of the surface with his datapad, then ran his fingertips careful y over the plain sections of the cartouche. BB saw the status icon shift again. It had returned to its original form.
“There, it’s reverted,” BB said. “Panic over.”
Phil ips’s gaze darted back and forth between the image on his datapad and the cartouche. Eventual y he seemed satisfied that the symbols at the top had changed back to the way they’d been before.
“Okay, that’s a few bil ion beings out there somewhere who owe me one,” he said. “What I real y need now is a team of ONI techies to examine this with a Huragok. In the absence of that, better hope I’ve recorded enough data for someone to make sense of this.” He looked at his watch. “I’m just going to pop back along the passage and relieve myself, and then we’l press on. Would you mind sort of looking the other way? Oh, never mind. You’re omnipresent in the ship, and I managed to get used to that, so…”
Phil ips disappeared back the way they’d come, singing under his breath. BB wasn’t sure why he picked one section of wal and not another. He looked around as if he was lost, then shrugged and got on with it.
“This is probably sacrilege to them, isn’t it?” he said, zipping up. “Having a wee-wee in a temple, I mean. You know, I was certain there was a corner up there. I hope I’m not getting disoriented.”
He strode back to a curve in the wal and stood almost touching it, then stepped back again, frowning.
“There was a corner there,” BB said. “Perhaps the stone reconfigured itself, like the cartouche symbols. Perhaps it’s a security door.”
Phil ips reached out and put his hand on the wal . “That’s very weird. It feels soft, but it isn’t. I thought my hand was going to go right through it.”
“You should check your blood sugar.”
“You always say that.”
“Do I?”
“Look, are you tel ing me that these passages are changing while I’m walking through them?”
“It’s entirely possible.”
“Oh, shit. How do we get out again, then?”
“You won’t know until you try.”
Phil ips looked at his watch yet again. He could have checked the time on his datapad or asked BB, but he seemed to take great comfort from that obsolete piece of jewelry. BB wondered why the time mattered so much to him when he had no schedule.
“I’m going to keep going while I can,” Phil ips said.
He went on walking, one hand skimming the right-hand wal while he looked at the left-hand one. “In case the Sangheili come after me and drag me out before I’m done. Come on, BB. We’re looking for anything with those Halo symbols now.”
He could just ask. The lens on this camera gives me a 240-degree arc, so I’ll see panels before he does anyway.
After a few minutes, Phil ips slowed down and stopped to look up at the ceiling. Then he retraced his steps a little way.
“BB,” he said. “There aren’t any lights. I can stil see just fine, but there aren’t any lightbulbs.” He pointed upward as if BB didn’t get it. “Where’s the light coming from?”
BB felt an urge to do something specific but wasn’t sure what. The impulse tormented him, the pain of knowledge that he knew he had but that remained beyond retrieval. How could he possibly forget anything? He knew that he had to respond to that question by analyzing the environment in a certain way, but that was as far as he could get. It was both terrifying and uncomfortable.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I know that I ought to be able to tel you.”
“You haven’t got any special sensors, have you? Never mind. Not much you can do when you’re stuck in a radio.”
Stuck in a radio. “I’l feel better when I’m back in … a vessel, then.”
“Wel , yes, because you’l be able to move at a zil ion klicks a second and zap enemy ships. And stick your nose in anywhere you like.” Phil ips started walking faster. “Can you feel that buzzing sensation?”
“No, but I can see more panels about twenty meters ahead of you.”
Phil ips scratched the back of his hand. “It’s making my hair stand on end.”
BB found himself so disturbed by the gaps that he kept detecting in his knowledge that it began to distract him. But if I can process information the way Phillips says I can, why can’t I keep my mind on several things at once? There was something very wrong with him. He wasn’t sure whether it was getting worse or if he was just becoming more aware of it. He was thinking too much without acquiring new data to improve his decision making. He had to stop that right now and concentrate on the task at hand.
“Good grief,” Phil ips said. The passage opened out into a large, rectangular chamber completely lined with carved panels. “I think this is going to take us some time. Come on, BB. Lots to process. Starting here … y’know, this is like a decorated burial chamber in a pyramid. Maybe it’s just someone’s life story. Or a control room. Or both.”
BB had no opinion yet. He started recording and interpreting the symbols, hoping for clarity. Phil ips moved along the four wal s, facing them and taking slow sideways steps with his datapad held in the capture position. He didn’t need to. Suddenly BB felt anxious. He couldn’t define it, but this was troubling him.
“You don’t trust me, do you?” BB said. That’s it. He’s keeping it from me. He’s humoring me. “I’m recording al this.”
“Oh, I trust you, chum. It’s the hardware I don’t trust. It’s let us down once, and if it lets us down again, we’l lose al this.” His heart rate was up and he was breathing faster. This seemed to be genuinely exciting for him. “I think this is a hundred thousand years old, like Onyx. Mal eable stone. Real solid state engineering. What kind of technology does it take to create that? Could they manipulate stuff at a subatomic level?”
“What happened to them?” BB asked. “Perhaps someone pressed a Halo button and they wiped themselves out.”
Phil ips did an odd thing. He lifted the camera without unclipping it and stared into the tiny lens, as if he was looking BB right in the eye. His face was upside down until BB inverted it. It was a thoughtful gesture in its way: Phil ips had obviously remembered that BB’s view of the world was limited, and was trying to imagine what he could and couldn’t see.
“You can be a very depressing little bastard, you know that?” Phil ips said.
“Sorry.”
“Ah, no worries. Look, start translating this for me. What is it? What does it say?”
BB wondered why any gloriously intel igent species—any being—would destroy itself. Accidents, perhaps: carelessness. But deliberate destruction … that spoke of terrifying desperation. He wondered what that felt like to suddenly want to cease exploring, thinking, finding out, when al your existence before that point had been about the pursuit of it.
He matched and juggled symbols, trying out meanings and looking for patterns. The Halo symbols were repeated in here with the same status icons as the panel in the passage. There were other symbols, too, some identical to the ones in Halsey’s lexicon, and some— ouch. BB tried again.
He felt as if something within him had reached out and slapped him hard. He was fol owing a pathway, certain that it led to something he already knew, but a barrier kept blocking him. It hurt. He received a dozen more smacks even when he tried to reroute.
“I know more than I can retrieve,” he said. “I ought to be able to translate much of this, because I recognize it, but something won’t let me access the meaning.”
Phil ips sighed. “That’s probably because half of what Halsey found on Onyx ended up being classified. Don’t worry. You’l sort it when you reintegrate with yourself. Do what you can for the time being.”
“I’ve failed you.”
“BB, humans are used to this. You go out drinking with friends. One of them gets completely hammered, does a few daft things, and next day he can’t remember what he said. But he sobers up, everyone reminds him what a dick he made of himself, and everything’s okay. It’s just a temporary embarrassment.”
That level of detail sounded almost autobiographical, but BB decided not to ask. “Very wel .” Phil ips had complete confidence in him. BB hoped he had grounds for that. “We have what seems to be a repeater panel of the Halo status. And there’s also another panel with a reference to the regulator or regulations, the one with the negative phoneme, except there’s additional material.”
BB re-ran every symbol in the room, every phoneme, every pictograph, every vowel point. So … that implied an agent, so this one didn’t mean regulations. It meant someone who imparted them, taught them, instructed, and the negative phoneme … ah, there were two versions of it, one with the sense of not to be changed, not to be questioned, immutable, didactic—which seemed to be a noun—and one that was a command, an exhortation not to do something.
“Just tel me. Think aloud.” Phil ips was starting to sound impatient. BB felt he was the drunken friend being given leeway in the belief that he’d be sober in the morning. “I’m a linguist too, remember.”
“There’s a reference to an inflexible teacher, I believe. A dictator, in the literal sense. A didact. There’s also a warning not to do something regarding that person—or rank of persons. It could mean anything, but it’s repeated several times, and—oh, that’s interesting. There’s another occurrence of that superior idea.”
Phil ips had both hands flat on the wal now, but placed careful y in blank areas. “So, it’s something like don’t do X or Y regarding this rank or person … without the approval of a superior.”
“That’s a big leap, but why not?”
“It’s a control room. Or a guard house. It’s either the rules and regs written on the wal s, or it’s an alarm center. Okay, perhaps I’m thinking too human. But everything we’ve seen says they had a lot in common with us. They weren’t methane-breathing globs of gel. Not that I’m being methanist.”