Osman was tal er than the average man, and at one-ninety she wasn’t used to having to look up at anybody. But the Bishop towered half a meter above her like a monument in gold armor. For a moment she found herself looking into a disturbingly featureless face before she settled on the black eyes and smal , flaring nostrils just below them. The Bishop was sniffing her scent. Unsettling didn’t even begin to cover it.
“Captain Osman,” Phil ips said cautiously, looking back and forth between her and the Sangheili. “Let me introduce you to Avu Med ‘Telcam, speaker for the Servants of Abiding Truth. He used to be a field master but he’s … renounced the ways of the infidels and cleansed his name, because they’ve brought shame and misery on the Sangheili … and they deserve to hang from spikes.” He seemed to be quoting very careful y, glancing at the Sangheili as if for confirmation. He gave her a don’t-say-anything-daft look. “He means the Arbiter.”
‘Telcam sniffed again. Osman could smel him, too. It was a faintly leathery scent, like the seats of a new car. It wasn’t unpleasant.
“I’m Captain Osman. I’m a shipmaster.” ‘Telcam would get the point. “So I keep my word. May we talk?” She gave Phil ips her get-lost look. This wasn’t for his ears, and that was as much for his own good as Earth’s. “Can you give us ten minutes, Professor?”
Phil ips nodded and turned to walk away. This was why Osman didn’t like using co-opted specialists. If he’d known what she was about to do, he would probably have gone al ethical on her.
I might be underestimating him, of course. But his job’s done. It’s not his problem now.
‘Telcam tilted his head to one side. Osman had to strain to make out the words, but it was no harder than concentrating on a bad radio signal.
The creature real y could speak pretty good English.
“Shipmaster, my people have been punished because they had no faith, ” he said. A fine mist of saliva cooled on her face every time he hit a sibilant or an F. It didn’t look easy to articulate those four-way jaws. “The traitor Thel ‘Vadam and his ilk now say the gods are deceivers, and so they shal die. We have been in thral to mongrel races long enough. We have let the false prophets of the San’Shyuum corrupt our pure connection to the divine. Now we shal do our penance and bring the Sangheili back to the true path. So what can you possibly want with us? Do you want to agree to a truce?”
“How were you planning on kil ing ‘Vadam and the other … traitors?”
“We have few ships left now. Few weapons, too. But we have our devotion. We wil find a way.”
Osman noted the energy sword on his belt. We’ve got a right one here. A god-bothering, heavily armed maniac. Lovely. I can do business with that. She tried to find genuine common ground in case he could smel fear or deceit on her. A smal dash of truth in a soup of lies worked wonders.
“What if we supplied you with some weapons?”
He jerked his head back. “And why would you do that? The traitor sides with humans against his own.”
“Humans gamble. I’m betting that your side wil win. Dead friends aren’t much use.”
“Ah.” ‘Telcam made a little sound like a horse puffing through its lips. A fine spray rained on her again and she tried not to recoil. She picked up a whiff of something far too much like dog food. “Kingmaker. This is your policy. You help us take control so that you know your enemy and think you can then control us. ”
“Look, we’re never going to be friends, Field Master. But we can agree to stay out of one another’s way and lead separate existences. Too many lives have been lost. It has to stop.”
‘Telcam leaned closer again as if he was doing a uniform inspection. “You have colonies here. This is part of the war. This is the cause of our enmity.”
“Some of our colonies don’t like us very much either. Humans kil humans too.”
“How tangled your lives are.”
“My, you do speak good English.”
“I was a translator once. I interpreted your communications for my old shipmaster. I speak several human languages.”
Wel , that explained a hel of a lot. Phil ips obviously didn’t know, or at least he hadn’t said, but Osman decided to cut him some slack because he’d only been tasked to do one thing: to get her an audience with dissident Sangheili who were likely to disrupt any peace deals. He was lucky to get that far without having his head ripped off.
“Wel , Field Master, I think we can help one another keep our troublesome factions in line.” Osman turned slightly to keep Phil ips in her peripheral vision, just in case he wandered back and heard too much. “It might require some discretion, because we can’t be seen to al y with you.
But an unstable Sangheili empire doesn’t help us, and an unstable human one is a threat to you. Yes?”
“And some of my brethren might not understand my wil ingness to talk to infidels. So we do favors, you and I.”
“Indeed. For the greater good.” Osman paused a beat and made sure she didn’t blink. Sangheili had a military sense of honor, and the truth she was about to drop into the deceit went some way toward satisfying her own. “If I thought ‘Vadam would survive as leader, I would be doing deals with him instead.”
She wasn’t sure if Sangheili ever smiled. If they did, she had no idea what it looked like, not with that four-way jaw. But ‘Telcam’s expression shifted a little. The muscles in his dog-reptile face relaxed for a moment.
“I have a condition,” he said.
“I thought you might.”
“You blaspheme about the gods. You spread vile lies about them. This must stop.”
“We just showed you what the Halo was.” Oh shit. Come on, think. There’s a way through this. “We didn’t set out to insult your beliefs.”
“So the Halos are machines of destruction. So you say the gods themselves were kil ed by them.” ‘Telcam leaned over her, almost nose to nose.
He was so close that she couldn’t focus on those doglike teeth. They were just cream blurs in a purplish haze of gum. “Your god chose to die for you and that is precisely why you revere him, yes? And why you say he also lives. This so-cal ed proof about the Halos means nothing. Not even to you. ”
And he uses the plural. Halos.
Osman suspected that he wanted her to agree with him, to reassure him that gods could be both dead and eternal at the same time like some divine Schrödinger’s cat, to put some certainty back in his life. She knew that feeling. But the last thing she wanted was a theological argument with a heavily armed alien four or five times her weight. She bit back a comment that her name was Osman and that he was thinking of someone else’s religion.
“We’ve had scientists who claim they’ve disproved the existence of God, and others who argue you can’t prove anything,” she said careful y. “But it hasn’t made any difference to any of our religions. Faith is quite separate.”
“Then you understand.” ‘Telcam drew back. “If you arm us … if you stay away from our worlds … then when we take power and restore the rightful ways, we wil leave you alone.”
“Deal,” she said. She almost held out her hand to shake on the agreement but thought better of it. “I’l be in touch very soon.”
The Sangheili just turned and loped away to his ship without another word. It was too easy to look at them and see only an ungainly animal with strangely bovine legs, and not a superior force that had almost brought Earth to its knees. Phil ips walked up to her but didn’t ask what had happened. His expression said he was bursting to find out.
“Are we done?”
Osman nodded. “That’s one enemy we don’t have to fight for a while.” She gave him a thumbs-up. “Wel done. I never thought we’d get one of them to talk to us, let alone reach an agreement. We owe you.”
“I admit it’s satisfying to be able to put the theory into practice. And wonderful to have unique access to Sangheili space with al expenses paid, of course. Good old ONI. My taxes, wel spent.”
Osman headed back to the shuttle, suddenly aware of smal fragments of glass crunching under her boots. Damn, that’s not broken bottles. It’s vitrification. “You don’t feel your academic cred’s been stained by mixing with us grubby little spooks, then.”
“God, no. I’m not that naive. I know what you’re up to. Just don’t tel me, that’s al . I have to be able to deny it with a straight face.”
So he certainly wasn’t stupid, and ONI wasn’t doing anything that countless governments hadn’t done over the centuries to look after their interests. She should have expected him to work it out. “And we’re doing what, exactly?”
“Oh, I thought I was helping you establish diplomatic channels with the hard-to-reach Sangheili demographic.…”
“You told me not to tel you.”
“Yes, so I did.” He winked at her. “Wel , you’ve slapped a saddle on that tiger. Now you better make damn sure you don’t fal off.”
They settled into their seats and she ran the preflight checks before handing over to the AI. Phil ips was whistling tunelessly under his breath, as if he was glad to be leaving. Osman had expected him to be reluctant to go home but he obviously had what he wanted—some dazzling scientific paper, some award-worthy research, maybe even a lucrative book—that nobody else in his field had, and that seemed to be enough.
He wouldn’t be coming back here. He probably realized that. ONI regarded him as a single-use sharp.
“Just remember that my enemy’s enemy isn’t my friend, Professor,” she said, opening a secure comms channel. “He’s my enemy who’s just taking a sidebar.”
Phil ips burst out laughing. “You sweet, innocent little flower. You’ve never worked in academia, have you? Red in tooth and claw. Feuds, plots, vengeance. The works.”
“I can imagine.” The secure channel indicator flashed and Osman lowered her voice. “Osman here, ma’am. Professor Phil ips and I are on our way back.”
“Thank you for letting me know, Captain.” Admiral Margaret Parangosky, head of the Office of Naval Intel igence, never raised her voice and never needed to. “I assume things went wel .”
Osman could translate Parangosky-isms easily enough. Have you set up the Sangheili insurrection? That was what she meant. Few outside the Navy and the senior ranks of government knew who Parangosky was, let alone knew to fear her. Osman suspected she was the only person in the Admiral’s circle who would always be forgiven even if she failed. But she wasn’t in a hurry to test it.
“Everything’s fine, ma’am,” she said.
“Thank Professor Phil ips for me. Safe flight.”
Osman signed off and the AI took over. The shuttle shuddered on its dampers as its engines reached peak power. In a few hours, they’d rendezvous with Battle of Minden and head back to Earth, where the mission would be over for Phil ips but only just beginning for her.
So far, so good.
“Do I get a gold star?” he asked.
“Maybe an extra cookie.”
“Where’s the best Turkish restaurant in Sydney?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh. Real y? Sorry.”
It always caught her short. She’d never actual y said she had Turkish roots, and—odd, for a woman so used to lying for a living—she couldn’t bring herself to construct a cover story for herself. She simply al owed everyone to make assumptions based on her name and her Mediterranean coloring. Her real name hadn’t been Osman, not as far as she knew, and she had no plans to use her access to ONI classified files to find out who she real y was. She could only be who she was now.
Phil ips would have treated her very differently if she’d had Spartan-019 on her ID badge. It was better if nobody knew what she was, and what she was not.
“Yes, I’ve been away too long,” she said, relenting. “But I can smel a good imam bayildi ten klicks away.”
Anyone could. It wasn’t real y a lie. Phil ips rubbed his hands together, miming delight at the thought of food that didn’t come out of a ration pack.
The shuttle lifted clear of New Llanel i, and Osman caught one last glimpse on the monitor of that lake of vitrified sand.
That’s why I’m entitled to break the rules. To make sure it never happens again.
Osman was sure she’d heard that argument before, more than thirty years ago, but she couldn’t remember if it was before or after she met Dr.
Catherine Halsey.
“Academia,” she said. “Yes, it’s a savage old world, isn’t it?”
MARK DONALDSON WAY, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA: AUSTRALIA DAY, TWO MONTHS AFTER THE BATTLE OF EARTH, JANUARY 26, 2553.
There was just one flagpole left intact on the shattered Sydney Harbour waterfront, and a workman in a hard hat and orange overals was clambering up a maintenance gantry to reach it.
It was a damn long way to fal .
Corporal Vaz Beloi wandered out onto a stump of a girder that had once been part of a pedestrian overpass, trying to get a better view. A piece of dark blue fabric dangled from the workman’s back pocket. Vaz couldn’t see a safety harness, but then there wasn’t much left of the crumbling building to secure it to.
And they say ODSTs are crazy.
He watched the man with renewed curiosity. Mal Geffen caught up with him and leaned on what was left of the overpass safety rail. It creaked as he put his weight on it.
“Come on, we’ve only got an hour.” Mal gestured irritably with his wrist, brandishing his watch, then frowned at something on his sleeve. “Sod it, I’m covered in crap already. We can’t rock up in our number threes looking like this. It’s the Admiral. ”