Outcasts, page 4
By the end of the excursion, the Vales had decided to dissolve their marriage. The divorce was completed ten days later—coincidently on their daughter’s eleventh birthday—and Nerina and Olympia boarded a diplomatic shuttle for Earth. What was supposed to be a six-day journey ended up taking six months because the slipspace drive failed, and Vale suspected her father of somehow sabotaging it in a last-ditch effort to return his family to Luyten. Her mother dismissed the notion so scornfully that Vale concluded it was a dumb idea… until well after the war, when she tried to contact Caleb Vale to tell him that Nerina had perished during the Battle for Earth.
Caleb Vale, it turned out, did not exist. Vale used her ONI connections to learn it was a false identity assumed by one Caleb Aagard, who had been born on Luyten in the same year as her father. That was where the trail ran cold. The only note in Aagard’s file was that he had refused conscription in 2517, then vanished—which made no sense. Aagard’s date of birth had been listed as May 16, 2511, which would have made him six years old at the time.
Vale had suspected there would be a ghost file explaining the discrepancy. But when she tried to look for it, her superior had suggested it was a simple case of a father and son having the same name… then advised her to stop wasting ONI resources and devote herself to her proper assignment. The “advice” had been offered in a tone of voice indicating it had come down from somewhere far above both their heads.
So Vale had stopped poking around ONI files concerning anyone from Luyten and started to look for more subtle ways to learn about her father’s true identity. Then the Cortana Event had come, and she could no longer be sure the information still existed—or that she would ever be able to access it, even if it did. But part of her knew she didn’t need it, for the dark shadow of truth about her father’s past reared its head when a rogue journalist began circulating information about the SPARTAN-II program. Vale had never been interested in conspiracy theories, but the revelation that Spartan-IIs had been conscripted as six-year-olds all but confirmed the connections in her mind. Her father was Caleb Aagard, and he had fled conscription into the SPARTAN-II program.
She wondered where her father was, if he was still alive… what he would say if he could see her now. But these were questions she would have to pursue another day, once this mess with Cortana had been resolved and she felt she’d earned the closure.
When the little Worik reached the Villa of Long Views, instead of turning toward the gate, it merely continued up the road. The side windows of its passenger box had not been darkened, so Vale could see that no one rode in back.
The Sangheili in the operator’s bubble was leaning forward over the controls, his head turned toward her villa as though searching for its name… which was written in huge Sangheili characters via a brightly lit panel on the gate. The driver lifted the bubble a crack—just high enough to push a hand out—then flicked something the size of a grenade toward the building and continued at the same slow pace.
Which probably saved his life.
Vale already had her plasma pistol in hand and was gathering herself to leap over the balustrade. But when the operator made no attempt to flee, and nothing exploded, she realized it was all part of a covert delivery.
Vale remained on the balcony as the Worik rounded the next curve. Once the Aethra trailing it had vanished behind the villa’s roofline, she went downstairs and slipped through the pedestrian gate onto the street-side veranda.
She heard the capsule first. It was a Sangheili trysting pod, emitting a soft but maddeningly erratic chirp. Discreet females used the devices to summon mates to secret nidus dates, a custom that supported the tradition of hiding the father’s identity from the child. As Vale was neither Sangheili nor male, she suspected this pod had been adapted for another purpose. She retrieved it from the stone planter where it had landed, then slipped back through the gate and inspected it under a light near the visitor’s door.
It wasn’t a particularly ornate pod, just a polished green orb—the kind available in shops across Vadam Valley. The surface and hinge showed no signs of tampering, the seam no indication of a triggering device. She held it at arm’s length and pinched the sides to disengage the locking mechanism, then slid the two halves apart… and caught a small folded note in her hand. The message inside was hand printed, in English:
OPEN THE SALLY PORT
Vale crushed the trysting pod with her foot and started toward the villa’s hangar, tearing the note into tiny pieces as she walked. Not a lot of Sangheili could write English, and none that she knew among the Arbiter’s subordinates, so the message wasn’t from ‘Vadam’s inner circle. It seemed likelier that it came from one of her human contacts at the Manufactorum, perhaps even an ONI agent who had learned something worth breaking cover to convey.
Vale entered the hangar, circling past the Owl stealth craft stored there to a maintenance locker on the west wall. There she pulled out a rolling shelf unit stacked with cleaning agents and half-filled bottles of hydraulic fluid. The floor of the locker looked like normal fibercrete, but when she tapped all four corners in diagonal sequence, an array of triangular symbols appeared. She entered an alphanumeric code she’d been provided when the Arbiter arranged for her to take the villa, and the floor drew aside, revealing a fixed ladder that descended into darkness.
As soon as Vale dangled a foot into the shaft, the walls began to glow with a warm ambient light. She descended five meters to the bottom of the shaft, then traveled down a spacious horizontal tunnel to a blue-tinted door large enough for a Ghost light assault vehicle to use. When she pressed her palm to the control pad, a panel near the top grew transparent.
By human standards, Vale was tall, standing just over two meters in bare feet thanks to the physical augmentations of the SPARTAN-IV program. But compared to the Sangheili, she was quite short, and she had to raise herself on tiptoe just to see through the bottom of the panel.
Vale found herself looking out into a rocky draw four hundred meters to the east of the Villa of Long Views. She could tell by the lack of shadows that it was inky dark down inside the belly of the gulch, but the light-enhancing panel showed every boulder and bush in fine detail. Hunkered down behind the gangly twigs of a spider bramble, pressed against an outcropping about thirty meters down the slope, was a familiar woman with a meter-long braid draped over one shoulder and a rucksack resting between her feet. She was wearing a dark field jacket, wide-brimmed hat, and dark pants with large square pockets that appeared to be stuffed with water bottles and food packs.
Keely…?
Vale pressed her palm to the door and made a sliding motion. The tunnel lighting went out, then the door retracted into the wall with a soft shoosh. The woman outside gave a startled gasp, and gravel shifted as she turned toward the sound of the door.
Vale stepped out into the ravine.
“Keely?” She spoke the name in a hushed voice that she hoped would carry far enough for a nonaugmented human to hear. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you.” The last Vale had heard, Keely Iyuska had overcome a few career setbacks to become a junior xenoarchaeology professor at the University of Edinburgh on Earth. Though Iyuska was a dear friend from their student days at Sydney University, it had been four and a half years since they’d actually seen each other—until now. “Pia… I’m in trouble.”
“Aren’t you always?”
“This is different.” Iyuska started up the ravine toward Vale’s voice, stumbling in the dark. “This time it’s big. Really big.”
“No kidding.” Vale had no idea how her old friend’s unexpected arrival might be related to the armiger deployment, but she didn’t doubt it was. Iyuska had a reckless disregard for consequences—so much so that she often seemed to be deliberately courting catastrophe. Vale rolled a forty-kilogram boulder onto the sally port threshold to prevent the door from closing, then started down the ravine. “Wait there. And stop calling me Pia.”
“I thought you liked it.”
“I’m not fourteen anymore, desperate to feel accepted by my nineteen-year-old classmates.” As a Spartan, Vale’s vision had been augmented along with most of her other physical attributes. Even in the inky darkness, she had no trouble picking her way through the broken terrain to reach Iyuska’s side. “The appeal wore off.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I did.” Vale took Iyuska by the arm and led her through the black night toward the sally port. “At our commencement party. And every time I’ve seen you since.”
“So… three times, total?” Iyuska made a scoffing sound. “Excuse me for thinking we had other things to focus on.”
Vale took three steps in silence, then sighed. “Okay, that might be fair.”
It would have been unreasonable to expect Iyuska to remember anything from their commencement party. Their next get-together had not come until shortly after the Covenant War ended, when Vale had returned from a walkabout on the Sangheili world of Khael’mothka. Iyuska had been so full of questions about Sangheili culture that Vale had begun to feel like her old friend considered her nothing more than research. Since then, they’d seen each other only once, in a professional capacity that had left little time for cultivating their friendship.
Iyuska stumbled on a rock in the pitch dark and would have gone down hard, had Vale not been holding on to her arm and simply lifted her off the ground. The surprised cry that resulted reminded Vale that her friend had not seen her since her enrollment in the SPARTAN-IV program… and would no doubt be more than a little surprised at what she saw when they finally entered the light.
Vale set Iyuska back on her feet, then said, “I couldn’t believe it when I heard that the University of Calippus denied your tenure, by the way.” Vale guided her through the sally port into the tunnel. “They were fools.”
“They weren’t. I never should have pushed for it so young.” Iyuska laid a hand on Vale’s forearm. “But thank you for saying that. I’ll try to do better about the nickname.”
“That would be good.”
Vale used her foot to push the improvised doorstop clear of the threshold, and the sally door slid closed behind them. The tunnel’s automatic lighting returned, revealing a sturdy, slender-faced woman of just under thirty. She still had pale skin, red hair, and deep green eyes that could be alarmingly guileful… or fiercely observant. She took a step back and spent a moment studying Vale’s augmented frame, then gasped, letting her jaw drop.
“What did they do to you?! When you said ‘special assignment,’ I didn’t think you meant—”
“I couldn’t be more specific,” Vale said. “Sorry.”
Vale had last seen her friend in late spring of 2555, after returning from a joint Sangheili-human mission to an ancient Forerunner installation known as the Ark. Iyuska was still at the University of Calippus then, working on the side as an ONI xenoarchaeology consultant and a guest lecturer at the Luna OCS Academy. Vale had been given permission to brief her on the technology and architecture she’d observed while on the Ark. What Vale hadn’t been free to share, however, was that she was about to leave for Mars as a candidate in the SPARTAN-IV program.
“But you’re subject to the same security directives I am,” Vale said. “You know how it works.”
Iyuska rolled her eyes. “Yeah, but… you could have hinted. I was worried sick about you.”
“No, you weren’t. You were busy on Heian, excavating its ruins. It’s what you live for.”
“How do you know about…?” Iyuska paused, then shook her head. “Never mind. Let’s not talk about the things we can’t talk about, right? So what’s a girl gotta do to get a drink around here?” She flashed a smile and started up the tunnel.
Vale caught up and walked at her side. “You can start by explaining why there’s an Aethra trailing you.”
“There is?”
“You had a Worik deliver a message to me in a Sangheili trysting pod.” Vale didn’t bother to ask how Iyuska had known where to send the pod, or where to look for the sally port; the first was an open secret in Vadam, and the second would be obvious to anyone with an archaeological background and a map of the terrain. “I doubt it’s because you want to make out.”
“Well… lovely as that sounds, not really.” Iyuska paused a moment. “Okay, I did expect someone to be watching. Just not her. Not this soon.”
Vague as it was, the reply confirmed what Vale already knew in her gut. Iyuska was not simply caught up in the armiger deployment—she was the reason for it.
“Keely—I need to know what’s going on. And I need to know now.”
“Fine.” Iyuska sighed heavily. “Just don’t judge me.”
“There’s an entire battalion of Cortana’s armigers hunting you. We are long past judging.”
“Okay… remember you said that.” Iyuska continued to walk, her gaze fixed on the tunnel ahead. “You heard about the University of Edinburgh, right?”
“Yeah. You’re a junior professor.” Vale braced herself for bad news. “Specializing in pre-Forerunner civilization theory. I know what you’ve been up to.”
Iyuska looked over. “So I do have you to thank.”
“I heard about it. But that’s all. I don’t have the pull to arrange anything.”
“If you say so. Anyway, it was a good place to land after the Oxford mess, even if the chair is a jealous cow. She only agreed to have me because she wants more ONI funding.”
Vale didn’t bother to ask for clarification. From the rumors she’d heard, the “Oxford mess” involved an affair that somehow grew so tawdry it ended up being designated “need to know,” if only to avoid embarrassing an important ONI ally.
As for the funding comment, it was common knowledge that ONI supported xenoarchaeology and xenoanthropology departments in every major university on Earth, both to advance humankind’s knowledge of alien cultures and to develop unparalleled talent for clandestine missions. Of course, ONI’s support always came with strings. In Iyuska’s case at Edinburgh, the string had apparently been an academic post for a troublesome consultant with the kind of talent and security clearance that made her worth protecting. In Vale’s case at Sydney, that string had been exclusive poaching rights to a sixteen-year-old prodigy who had just earned her master’s degree in xenoanthropology with first-class honors.
“So, this jealous cow?” Vale urged. “What does she have to do with the armigers and the Aethra?”
“Nothing directly. She just wants to be rid of me as quickly as possible. She gave me a full load of intro courses to teach. Not even xenoarchaeology… just plain old human archaeology.”
“Isn’t that normal for first-year lecturers? I would think a good chair would want to observe your style before assigning advanced courses. You know, give you some time to develop your niche.”
“It might be normal, but it’s not how you treat someone who led the most important excavation on Heian.”
“What are the chances the jealous cow was actually briefed about that?”
Iyuska sighed. “Not very high. She has no need to know—her specialty is the San’Shyuum. She keeps insisting they’ll be back, the silly woman.”
Once the ruling caste of the Covenant, the San’Shyuum were a species of bipeds so fragile they relied on antigravity machines to move around. They had vanished so completely after the Covenant War that they were considered either extinct or on the verge of it, depending on where one sourced their information.
“That’s delusional,” Vale said. “And yet, I’m sure it’s hard to accept, one’s area of expertise evaporating like that. But… the armigers? Keely, why are you here?”
“Because of what I found in Edinburgh. As a condition of my appointment, I had to screen UNSC after-action reports for indications of protogenic civilizations. They wanted a canvass of the entire Orion Arm.”
They, Vale assumed, meant ONI—and specifically whoever had arranged for Iyuska’s appointment.
“It would have been mind-numbing work,” Iyuska continued, “but I had funding for a dedicated AI and a research assistant to help me set search parameters.”
“Without the AI, it wouldn’t have been just mind-numbing.” Vale had been in the military long enough to appreciate the sheer number of documents even a small battle could generate. “It would have been impossible. There had to be millions of reports.”
“Closer to a billion. Which produced three hundred and fifty-two candidates on two hundred and eleven celestial bodies. I wrote them all up, with special callouts for any that could conceivably have Forerunner-contemporaneous human sites. After what we found at the Heian excavations, I thought those were the ones they’d be most interested in sending teams to survey.”
“Makes sense.”
“Yeah. Well, if they did, I wasn’t invited.” Iyuska shrugged. “And, actually, that was fine with me. During the canvass, I started to see something more interesting.”
“Hard to imagine something more interesting than whatever the ruins on Heian were.”
“Not that hard. In fact, I thought I was imagining it. But I kept seeing ghosts of a culture older than the Forerunners, one that was even more advanced… and elusive too. Every time I spotted evidence of some device that required an unattainable amount of energy, or a structure that was impossible to build, or a settlement that seemed to exist outside space and time, the observation would dissolve in my mind like sugar in water. Or it would be explained away by the next report I examined. Or my research assistant would track down a reference to a similar phenomenon that established the technology as firmly Forerunner. I began to think I was deluding myself.”
“Were you?”
“The department chair certainly thought so. I wrote a grant request asking for funding to survey a few of those new sites. Instead, she suggested I’d have a better chance if I framed it as a preemptive search to track down her missing San’Shyuum.”
