“It’l brush off,” Vaz said, distracted by the reckless workman again. He held up a warning finger. “Wait. I have to see what this guy does.”
He knew Mal wasn’t being disrespectful. He was just nervous about being summoned to ONI without explanation, and Vaz understood that, but they had another mission to complete. A visit to Sydney was rare.
And we made a promise. Admiral or no Admiral.
A smal crowd watched from the shore, a mix of construction workers, firefighters, and sappers who were stil digging bodies out of the rubble two months after the bombing. The workman, now teetering on the end of the gantry, lunged at the flagpole and managed to haul in the halyard. He clipped the flag to it and wobbled for a moment before tugging on the line to reveal the white stars of the Southern Cross on a deep blue ground, with a single gold Commonwealth star on green ground in the canton.
Everyone cheered. A fleet tender in the harbor sounded its klaxon.
Mal seemed to be working something out, lips moving as if he was counting. “Wel done, Oz. Seven hundred and sixty-five not out.” He nudged Vaz in the back and strode off. “Come on, we’ve got to find the bar. If we don’t do it now, we won’t get another chance for years.”
Vaz watched the workman edge back down the gantry to relative safety before he felt able to turn away and catch up with Mal.
“Okay, why seven hundred and sixty-five?” he asked.
“Seven hundred and sixty-five years since the first migrants landed here. It’s Australia Day.” They walked across a temporary walkway that spanned a crater the ful width of the road. It vibrated under their boots like a sprung floor. “You understand not out, don’t you? Don’t make me explain cricket to you again.”
“I understand cricket just fine.” Vaz bristled. “What’s your problem?”
“Sorry, mate. Parangoskyitis.”
Both of them had done more than a hundred drops behind enemy lines and accepted they might not survive the next one, but the prospect of being hauled before a very elderly woman with a stoop and a lot of gold braid had kept them awake every night for the past week. Even ODSTs were wary of Margaret Parangosky.
“She’s over ninety,” Vaz said. “None of those stories about her can be true. She just spreads them for effect. Like my grandmother used to.”
“Look, we said we wouldn’t play guessing games about this. We’l know soon enough.”
“You started it.”
“Wel , she’s not invited us for tea and medals, has she? It’l be a bol ocking.”
“You want ODSTs to do a job for you, you ask for a fire team. Or a company. A battalion, even.”
“You know how paranoid ONI is. Top-secret-eat-before-reading.” Mal picked more specks off his sleeve, frowning. “Ah, come on. It’s just a bloody meeting. It’s not like we’re storming a beachhead.”
But why us? Vaz checked the tourist map again. “This thing’s useless. I can’t see any landmarks.”
Mal fumbled in his pocket and took out the ancient button compass that he always carried. “Fieldcraft, Vaz. Back to basics. If we can’t find a bar, we’re not worthy of the uniform.”
There wasn’t a living soul in sight, not even a cop or a construction worker to ask for directions. The hum of activity—bul dozers, trip hammers, dril s—was receding a street at a time. The bank that should have been standing on the next corner was a tangle of metal joists and col apsed masonry.
There was no sign of the plaza ful of pavement cafés, either, and the shopping center that was supposed to be on Vaz’s left looked like a slab of honeycomb with the wax layer ripped off. Al he could see was a procession of composite block wal s, now just a few courses high. Red-and-white cordon tape fluttered between steel poles. The smel of raw sewage hit him.
“You lads look lost.”
A civil defense warden popped up like a range target behind a barrier fifty meters away, and Vaz almost reached for a rifle he wasn’t carrying. It was hard adjusting to a place where there were no threats.
“Yeah, I think we are,” Vaz said.
“You trying to find Bravo-Six?” The warden meant the UNSC headquarters. “Wrong direction, son.”
“No, a bar,” Mal said. “The Parthenon.”
“It’s gone.” The warden glanced at his watch as if he thought it was a bit early for a drink, then studied Mal’s uniform, peering at the death’s-head insignia with a baffled frown. Maybe the Corps had taken the low-profile special forces thing a bit too far. “What are you, then, marines?”
“ODSTs.” Mal paused. The guy didn’t seem to be catching on. “Orbital Drop Shock Troopers. Yeah, marines.”
“Oh. Them.”
“So how do we get to the Parthenon Bar?” Vaz asked.
“I told you. It’s just rubble now. They’re clearing the site.”
“We don’t want a drink. We’ve got something else we need to do.”
The warden gave Vaz a sideways look. Maybe the man thought his English wasn’t so hot because of his heavy accent. “Just keep going that way,” he said, indicating forty-five degrees and slowing his speech down a bit for the hard of understanding. “You’l see the bus station. It’s two streets north of there.”
Vaz was starting to sweat as he walked away. It was midsummer and his formal uniform was frying him, not that he had the option of showing up in shirtsleeves. Mal somehow stil looked pristine despite the concrete dust on his elbows and boots.
“What are we going to use for a drink?” Mal asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe we just say what we have to say and leave it at that.”
They’d promised Emanuel that if they ever passed through Sydney, something Vaz had thought highly unlikely, then they’d find the man’s favorite bar and raise a toast to his memory. It had been a very matter-of-fact conversation. ODSTs didn’t think of getting kil ed as an if. It was more like a when.
Doesn’t make it any easier, though. Doesn’t mean we miss him any the less.
“Ah,” said Mal. As soon as they turned the corner and looked up the road, they could see the bul dozers at work. “Ripe for development.”
Some of the clearance crew stopped to watch them walking along the center line of the road. Vaz counted the stumps of internal wal s and decided that 21 Strathclyde Street had stood where there was now a ragged crater fringed by the remains of four bright turquoise Doric columns.
Mal looked them over, uncharacteristical y grim.
“Manny never did have much taste in bars,” he said quietly. “Poor bugger.”
One of the construction workers took off his hide gloves and picked his way over the rubble toward them, head down and eyes shielded by the peak of his hard hat. It was only when “he” looked up that Vaz realized it was actual y a woman, a nice-looking redhead. Vaz sometimes tried to imagine how alien he must have looked to a civilian these days, but he could guess from the slight frowns he’d been getting this morning that he didn’t come across as the nice friendly boy next door. He decided to let Mal do the talking and stood back to look down into the crater. A pool of stagnant water lay at the bottom like a mirror, busy with mosquitoes.
“What can we do for you, mate?” the redhead asked.
Mal pointed at the complete absence of a bar. “Was that the Parthenon?”
“Yeah. Better stay clear of the edge. You can see it’s not Happy Hour.”
“We’ve got a promise to keep to a mate who didn’t make it back.”
The redhead cocked her head on one side. “We’re supposed to keep people out of this road. Safety regs. You know what the council’s like. But what they don’t know won’t hurt ’em.”
Vaz pitched in. They had half an hour to do this and then make themselves presentable to report to Bravo-6. “We just want to raise a glass to him, ma’am. Then we’l go.”
The redhead stood with her hands on her hips, inspecting Vaz. “Did you bring a bottle?”
It was a good question. They’d expected the bar to be open, not demolished, and they’d run out of time to find a bottle shop, as the locals cal ed it. Mal shrugged, doing his I’m-just-a-lovable-rogue look that usual y worked on women. The redhead gave him a sad smile and turned to her crew with her hand held out like she was asking for a tool. One of the men picked up a lunchbox from the seat of a dump truck and tossed her a plastic bottle. She handed it over to Mal with due reverence.
“Best we can do, Marine,” she said. “Go ahead, but don’t fal in and break your neck.”
After some of the jumps Vaz had done, that would have been an embarrassing way to go. Mal read the label and smiled.
“Fruit juice. He’d see the funny side of that. Thanks, sweetheart.”
The clearance crew moved back a little but they were stil watching. Vaz squirmed. It felt like taking a leak in public. So what did they do now? Al the vague plans to get hammered and reminisce about Emanuel had gone out the window, and Parangosky would be waiting.
Mal unscrewed the cap and handed it to Vaz. He took a swig—passion fruit or something, warm and fizzy—and handed it back. Mal took a pul and held up the bottle like a glass of vintage champagne.
“Emanuel Barakat,” he said. “Hel jumper. Brother. One of the best. We miss you, Manny.”
Vaz forgot the audience of hard hats. Al he could see was the water trickling from a broken main into the pool at the bottom of the crater. “Yeah, Manny. Rest in peace.”
Mal handed the bottle back to the redhead. “Thanks again. We’l get out of your hair now.”
“No worries. I’m sorry about your mate.” She paused. “Is it al over, then? Is the war real y over?”
“I don’t know.” Mal turned and started to walk away, Vaz fol owing. “But it’s pretty quiet out there for the first time I can remember.”
They were a few paces down the road before the clapping started. It was the strangest thing. Vaz turned around, and there they were, a dozen men and women in high-viz tabards and rigger’s boots, just clapping and looking at them. And it wasn’t a general reaction to Mal’s comment on the war, either. The workers were applauding them.
Nobody said a word. Vaz couldn’t have managed one even if he’d known what to say. They’d reached the end of the road before Mal spoke.
“That was decent of them.”
Vaz wasn’t sure if he meant the fruit juice or the applause. But maybe the war was final y over. Everywhere they’d stopped off in the last few days, at every shop and transit point, the atmosphere was a strange blend of dread, bewilderment, and elation. Civvies were stil getting used to the idea.
He’d expected it to be like the newsreels from the end of the Great Patriotic War, with people dancing in the streets and climbing lampposts to hoist flags, but that war had only lasted six years, however bloody the battles. People in 1945—and 2090, 2103, and 2162—could recal what peace felt like and knew what they’d missed.
But now there were two generations that couldn’t remember a time when Earth wasn’t at war with the Covenant. Nobody had signed any surrender or cease-fire yet, though. Vaz wasn’t taking anything for granted.
Mal quickened his pace and Vaz matched it, deciding not to tel him he had a splash of mud drying on his pants leg. He’d sort it out later. They headed back to the nearest intact main road to hail a cab. Even in a city smashed to rubble, there was stil a decent living to be made from ferrying UNSC personnel around, and one of the few places that remained untouched by the attack was the massive underground complex of Bravo-6. The driver who picked them up just glanced at them in the rearview mirror and said nothing for a while. When he caught Vaz’s eye, he looked away.
“Were you here when the Covenant attacked?” Vaz asked, trying to be sociable.
“Yeah.” The driver nodded. “Hid in the sewers. Didn’t even know where I was when I came out.” He licked his lips. “Is it al over, like the news keeps saying? I mean, you’d know better than anybody, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Vaz said. “But the Covenant looks like it’s fal en apart. Maybe that’s the same thing.”
It wasn’t, and he knew it. It just meant the certainties of Us and Them would be replaced by a ragbag of trouble from unpredictable quarters, just as it always had on Earth. Aliens were a lot more like humans than anyone liked to admit.
But, like humans, they could al be dropped with the right ordnance, too. That wasn’t going to change. Vaz was glad there were stil some things he could rely on.
“Come on,” Mal said as they showed their ID to the duty sergeant. “Practice your nice big smile for She Who Must Be Obeyed. Whatever she wants—it’s only pain.”
FORERUNNER DYSON SPHERE—LAST DEFINITIVE POSITION, ONYX: THREE HOURS INTO RECONNAISSANCE PATROL.
Catherine Halsey jerked her head around and stared into the bushes.
She realized she was the last person to react to the rustling in the leaves. Mendez, Tom, and Olivia already had their rifles trained on the same spot and Kel y had sighted up and was edging toward it. Something smal and green shot up the trunk of the nearest tree to cling to the bark and stare at them.
“Not much meat on that, I’m afraid.” Kel y lowered her weapon. It was a lizard with a narrow, almost birdlike face and a fril ed crest. For a moment it paused, crest raised and absolutely stil , then zipped down the tree again to vanish back into the bushes. “Stil , it confirms we have a food chain here.”
“Just as long as we’re at the top of it,” Olivia murmured.
Halsey wished she stil had her sidearm. While she respected the Forerunners’ vastly superior technology, they hadn’t been around to mind the shop for a very long time, and there was no tel ing what might have evolved since they’d left this place ticking over. There were plants here that definitely weren’t from Earth. If the fauna here was drawn from al the worlds the Forerunners had visited, then anything was possible.