“Show us.”
“She means show us your data on the threat,” Olivia said. “Maybe we know what it is.”
Prone didn’t respond. He seemed to be studying Lucy’s face in return. Then he just wandered off and rejoined his friends.
“Sometimes I think those things react to humans, and sometimes I think they’re just looking at a complicated circuit diagram,” said Mark. “But maybe he’s gone away to mul it over.”
For the moment, there was nothing that they could do. Lucy wondered whether to stay out of Halsey’s way, but she had to face the woman sooner or later, and they were stil stuck here with no immediate hope of rescue. No, she had to stop thinking of it as a rescue. She had to see it as the retrieval of high-value technology. She walked outside into the sunlight, suddenly terrified that she didn’t know what to say—literal y say—next. If she didn’t try to keep talking, she knew she would slide back into silence.
She looked around the camp at the underclothes and jerky drying side by side on the bushes and saw the Spartan-IIs standing in a huddle, talking. Mendez and Halsey were head to head a few meters away. Their body language said it al .
They were standing square on to each other, shoulders braced in confrontation. Lucy could hear the discussion building into a fight. They were oblivious. Maybe they didn’t care that they now had an audience of Spartans.
Halsey had her arms folded tight across her chest, more a blocking gesture than a defensive one. “Do you take my point now, Chief? They’re just not stable. They’re a liability.”
“So what do you want me to do, Doctor?” Mendez growled. “They were broken when we got them. It was their goddamn qualification to get into the program, for Chrissakes. Terrified, angry little kids who’d seen their parents kil ed and wanted to lash out.”
“Wel , yes, that’s a classic profile, but—”
“You know what regular recruits are like when you draft them?” He started stabbing his finger in her direction to make his point. “A mixed bag.
Some are downright psychopathic. Some are bone idle. Some are scared of their own shadows. Al kinds.” He took out his cigar and shoved it between his lips, stil talking as it dangled there while he felt in his pockets for that ancient Swedish fire-starter he always carried. “But dumb guys like me make them into fighting men and women by giving them discipline and pride. That’s the way the armed forces always ran before we started designing soldiers.” He paused for breath as he struck furious sparks off the two metal strips onto a scrap of dry grass, then lit the Sweet Wil iam.
“You know something?” He gestured with the cigar right under her nose, wafting her with smoke. “It’s the way the rest of the UNSC still runs. What you cal disorders and abnormalities, I cal different personalities. You just want to medicate and tweak and modify people into one vanil a definition of perfect, lady, and it’s not what humans are like.”
“You finished, Chief?”
“Hel , no, Doctor, I only just got started. You were never much good at accepting imperfect people, were you? You dumped your own goddamn daughter on her dad when she got too imperfect. Poor Jacob Keyes. Nice guy. Good father. Great officer. So then you made your own perfect daughter with that AI of yours, Cortana, a tidy little copy of yourself who thinks you’re the Virgin Mary. I don’t need a goddamn Ph.D. in psychiatry to work out what’s wrong with you. ”
Lucy couldn’t move. She didn’t real y know Halsey and she didn’t care what the woman thought of Spartan-IIIs. But she could hear Mendez losing his temper. His voice was getting more gravel y as his throat constricted. He almost wheezed when he puffed on that cigar. This was the man who’d looked after her and the other Spartan recruits from the day she’d landed on a strange planet with a bunch of six-year-old savages who’d almost forgotten what it meant to be human beings. He asked them who wanted a chance to kil the Covenant. Me. I wanted that. I wanted to kill them all.
Mendez had faced the same risks alongside them. She knew whose side she’d be on in any fight.
“You bastard, ” Halsey said at last. It was more of a hiss. “How dare you pry into my private life.”
“You’re not the only one with a nosey AI, Doctor. But a lot of UNSC staff can access the DNA database—and the goddamn calendar. A lot of people know. They’ve just got too much respect for Miranda to gossip.”
“You and Ackerson. A matching pair of treacherous assholes.”
“At least he only took volunteers.”
“Six-year-olds can’t possibly volunteer. Spare me the competitive morality.”
“They didn’t have parents grieving for them, either.”
“You’ve been saving this up, haven’t you?”
“Not real y. Work in a sewer long enough and you don’t notice the smel until you go outside.”
Lucy was transfixed. Al the stuff about Halsey and her daughter and parents grieving—it was getting ugly, even if she didn’t understand the context. She realized Tom and Fred were now standing next to her, helmets in hands.
“I better break this up,” Fred said.
Tom shook his head. “No, sir, I think you better leave them to air their differences.”
Halsey dropped her voice, but it was stil crystal-clear. “You knew what the deal was, Chief. You could have walked away at any time.”
“So I deserve what’s coming to me. I should have asked for a transfer as soon as I found out what you’d done to their parents. And those goddamn clones. You know what? Just saying it out loud now makes me sick to my gut. It was al wrong. Al completely wrong. Wel , I hope someone charges me with the crimes, because this should never be hidden. This should never be covered up.”
“But you did it once,” Halsey said, hands on hips, “and then you did it again, without me. And you did it for the same reason that I did—because creating Spartans gave us the best chance of saving the human race.”
“Steady with that airbrush, Doctor. You created the Spartans to counter colonial insurgents. That was a hel of a long time before the Covenant showed up.”
“And they were just as big a threat. Remember Haven? I wanted to stop that ever happening again.”
“You wanted to do it because you could. Curiosity. Goddamn vanity. You don’t give a damn about human life, not even your own daughter’s— only about being the smartest kid in the class.”
“Don’t you dare lecture me on Miranda. I asked Jacob to bring her up because I knew I was a bad mother.”
“I never said you weren’t self-aware.”
“Look, I know I can’t give anyone unconditional love. But I’m smarter than most abusive parents and I knew Jacob would do a better job than I ever could. I didn’t want a dol to play with, Chief. I got pregnant, it wasn’t convenient, and I wasn’t prepared to take an unborn life.”