Shadows of Reach: A Master Chief Story Read online

  Kelly stopped her work and looked back toward the LHD, her helmet cocked to one side. John motioned for her to lower the long-bar.

  “Stand down.”

  He climbed out of the LHD seat. After giving his numbed legs a moment to steady, he stepped into the doorway beside her and looked back up the corridor toward the drilling jumbo.

  “You too, Blue Four. Turn it off.”

  Linda obeyed, then stepped off the operator’s platform. The headlamps on the left side of her helmet had been melted along with its outer layer of titanium alloy, so she looked a bit ghoulish as she approached through the darkness.

  “You’re thinking it will be safer to clear by hand?” Kelly asked.

  “Negative,” John said. “I’m thinking it might be safer to not clear it at all.”

  Linda came up and stood with John and Kelly in the doorway, staring into the wreckage. In the tunnel, the boulders and rubble had been packed as tight as a brick wall. Here, the fallen beams had created a maze of rubble pockets and triangular tunnels. There was no guarantee that the maze would connect to the incubation cabinet hiding the entrance to Dr. Halsey’s secret vault—but there was no guarantee that it didn’t either. And it was about time for something to go right on this mission.

  John refused to believe that after all they’d been through since arriving on Reach—since coming home—his luck had simply run out.

  So they all just stood in place, seeking a visual on a route through the outer office and into the circular lab room where Halsey had done so much of her thinking and experimenting.

  The trio of Spartans were the only ones actually inside the ruins of CASTLE Base. The rest of the team was performing support operations, Mukai operating the pirate lift at the bottom of the shaft, and Major Van Houte operating the supplemental lift up on the surface. Fred was on patrol inside the Keeper tunnel that ran deeper into the Forerunner installation, hoping to take a prisoner and gather a little intel on the enemy’s intentions.

  Mukai and Van Houte each had a platoon of ODSTs with them to provide security, but John didn’t think the ODSTs would be called on to fight. While Blue Team was busy excavating CASTLE Base, the word had come through on comms that, after some fierce fighting, the UNSC had taken firm control of the entire Rejtett Valley, blocking both ends of Koldus Canyon. To recover possession of the access shaft, the enemy would need to mount a major operation. And by the time they could do that, John intended to have completed the mission and be long gone, aboard a Pelican taking them—and the assets Dr. Halsey needed—back to the Infinity.

  If they could ever get to the assets, that is.

  Finally Kelly said, “There. I see it.”

  She removed all of her weapons and extraneous gear and laid them in the LHD bucket, then checked to make sure she had a full set of spoofers with her. Linda started to do the same, but John waved her off and pointed to her already compromised helmet.

  “You’re the ready reserve,” he said. “If something goes wrong, then you come in.”

  Fred’s voice came over TEAMCOM. To maintain contact, they had placed comm repeaters at key locations in the shaft and inside CASTLE Base.

  “You want me to pull out and back you up?” he asked. Human voices seldom carried through a Mjolnir helmet, but he was speaking in a hushed tone anyway. It never hurt to be safe. “I’m seven hundred meters into this tunnel. Still haven’t seen anything.”

  “Negative,” Kelly said. “We’ll have the assets and be on our way out before you get here.”

  “We will?” John asked.

  “Quite confident,” Kelly said. “Or we’ll be dead. Either way, Fred won’t be of much help. No offense.”

  “You heard the lady, Blue Two.” John was already stripping his own weapons and nonessential gear. “And you know ONI is going to have a million questions about what the Keepers and the Banished are looking for. Give it another fifteen minutes, then withdraw.”

  Fred acknowledged the order with a green status flash.

  Kelly looked over her shoulder at John. When he nodded, she stepped through the door—and light began to flood from the indirect illumination panels in the walls.

  Kelly stopped just across the threshold, her helmet swiveling as if she had just been ambushed and didn’t know from where. “That, I was not expecting.” She turned left and started to crawl up a beam toward a huge granite boulder that had pushed through the concrete ceiling. “But I’ll take it.”

  Now they were down to business. In the initial mission briefing, Dr. Halsey had informed Blue Team that her suite had its own fusion reactor and security system, so the lighting made sense. But it did seem remarkable that the automatic systems were still functioning after being buried for seven years in a damp, dirty environment.

  John watched Kelly climb for a moment, both giving her space to move and trying to make sense of her strategy. The five-by-ten-meter office remained full of long shadows and pockets of darkness, but the contrast made it easier to pick out patterns in the wreckage—and he still didn’t see what she was trying to do.

  As Kelly went higher, the upper end of the beam rocked downward under her weight, and a boulder on the end tipped toward her—until John put a foot on the beam’s lower end and pushed it back down.

  “Thank you.”

  Kelly ascended until she was just below the boulder, then stretched out on her belly and started to crawl through a meter-high space that ran diagonally toward the center of the room.

  And John finally saw it. About halfway across the room, the path Kelly had selected ended at a block of concrete that was resting in the notch between a pair of crossed beams. Move the block, and it would be a simple matter to drop down under the beams and crawl the rest of the way through the outer office into the lab. He motioned Linda to step on the end of the beam for him, then climbed and caught up to Kelly at the block.

  Together they lay on their backs and pushed up on the block, bringing a small avalanche of head-sized stones raining down on their armor. Then John remained holding the block while Kelly slipped into the crawlway below, rising onto her knees and keeping it in place while he followed. After that, it was a mere belly crawl under the beams to the lab.

  As they entered, a green glow began to shine through the interstitial spaces to their right. John turned to see a small holographic figure—or, rather, what appeared to be the hem of a small holographic figure’s robe—hovering above the corner of a collapsed desk. He tried to push a ragged boulder aside so he could get a better look, but succeeded only in bringing down a cascade of concrete chunks that convinced him to move on.

  A few meters later, the glow reappeared on their left. An oval eye with no pupil or lashes stared at him through a thumb-sized tunnel in the rubble.

  “We’ve got company,” he said. “I think.”

  “Company?” Linda asked. “Do you need weapons?”

  “Negative,” John replied. “It’s an avatar… I think.”

  “An AI avatar?” Fred said over TEAMCOM. “You sure you don’t want me to pull out now?”

  Fred’s concern was very much warranted. CASTLE Base had been deserted for seven years, and smart AIs almost always went rampant after seven years in service—which was why UNSC regulations called for them to be destroyed as they reached that threshold. Had the protocol been followed for Cortana, Blue Team’s current mission would not have been needed… and a lot of lives would have been spared.

  “I’m sure, Blue Two,” John said. “What could you do—shoot it?”

  “There is no way it’s an AI,” Kelly said. “Fred and I were with Dr. Halsey when she abandoned CASTLE Base. We saw her activate the fail-safe destruction protocol at the same time she initiated the base demolition. Halsey was terrified of her work falling into Covenant hands.”

  “Then why are we back here on Reach, and nearly getting killed trying to retrieve something she left behind?” Linda asked.

  “Fair point,” Kelly replied. “It still doesn’t mean she would r
isk leaving an AI where the Covenant could have captured it. And the, um, items we’re after are different. Perhaps she suspected she might need them one day… and knew they would be useless to the Covenant even if they did capture them.”

  “Which she knew couldn’t happen,” John added. “Don’t forget the self-destruct protection on this stuff.”

  “How could I ever?” Kelly asked. She stopped crawling and shined her helmet lamps on the bottom of a black-platinum door that had been anodized with a nanoconductive film. “I do believe this looks like the incubator cabinet she described.”

  John peered over her shoulder and, just for a moment, saw a pair of eyes with no pupils looking back at him.

  “Did you see that?”

  “Apparently not,” Kelly replied. “Should I be concerned?”

  “No idea,” John said. “It was the, uh, whatever it is. Just two eyes watching us.”

  Kelly was silent for a moment, then finally said, “Perhaps it was just Halsey’s idea of a joke when she worked here. You know how she is.”

  “Sure… a joke. Let’s go with that for now.”

  He rolled onto his back and studied the rubble above them for a moment, then pointed at a sagging I-beam caked with chunks of concrete. On top of it rested a granite boulder the size of a Warthog. What lay atop the boulder was anyone’s guess.

  “If we can raise that beam high enough to get under, I might be able to squat-press it and buy you enough room to open the door.”

  “With your leg wounds?” Kelly shook her helmet. “I don’t think so.”

  “It has to be me,” John said. “You’re the one with the spoofers.”

  Kelly sighed into her comms. “I should have brought Linda.”

  “It’s not too late,” Linda said.

  “It is,” John said. “Remember the way that beam tips at the beginning.”

  John remained on his back and swung his legs around so that his feet were toward the door, then looked pointedly at the dusty floor next to him. He would have to hold the beam while Kelly donned her spoofing equipment, but there was no other way. It would be foolish for her to remove her gauntlets now and risk damaging the spoofer handprint gloves while raising the beam.

  Kelly reluctantly lay down facing the opposite direction, and together they pushed the beam upward. His Mjolnir’s exoskeleton provided most of the power, but John still felt his chest and arm muscles straining to the point that it seemed they might crush his bones—which would have been a true possibility, had his bones not been coated in an advanced carbide ceramic that made them virtually unbreakable. Within a couple of breaths, they had raised the beam the full length of their arms.

  “Can you hold it?” John asked.

  “Go.”

  John brought his feet up beneath himself into a squatting position, then grabbed the beam and lifted. An ominous clacking sounded overhead as concrete and boulders shifted. He lifted harder, and the beam rose another ten centimeters.

  Kelly swung her feet beneath herself, then went into a squat beside him and helped with the lift. There was more clattering and clacking; then finally John could get his shoulders under the beam. Kelly joined him, and together they stood, lifting what felt like half a mountain on their shoulders.

  John’s wounded quadriceps began to tremble. He locked his knees. “Do it now.”

  Kelly slowly released the weight she was carrying onto John. His hydrostatic gel layer pressurized, fighting against the bulging of his muscles. Once she saw that he could hold it, she stepped forward to the incubator cabinet door. A blinking red sign appeared in the black-platinum finish.

  CAUTION: BIOHAZARD

  DO NOT OPEN WITHOUT FULL HAZMAT SUIT!

  “Nice try,” Kelly remarked.

  She removed her gauntlets, then fished the handprint gloves from her cargo pouch. They had been carefully sized to fit her hands, skintight, but also built-up, so the surface that touched the reader would be exactly the same dimensions as Dr. Halsey’s. Once Kelly was wearing both gloves, she pressed them against the door.

  The warning sign vanished, but in its place, set in the door’s matte finish, appeared an image of a middle-aged woman who bore a sisterly resemblance to Cortana. She wore a flowing shift that waved and fluttered as though blown by a stiff wind, but there were no feet showing beneath the hem, and no hands at the ends of the sleeves. Her long hair was braided and wrapped around her head in a circlet, and her features were so thin they looked spectral. But it was her eyes that haunted John the most—they had no pupils or lashes, and when he looked into them, it felt like being lost in a pair of black holes.

  The face floated back and forth in front of Kelly for a moment, then spoke in a hollow voice.

  “You are not Dr. Halsey.”

  “And you’re not Kalmiya,” Kelly replied. “You can’t be.”

  Kalmiya? That would be the prototype smart AI Dr. Halsey had built before Cortana, and who was in many senses her “older sister.” John had never actually met Kalmiya, but the likeness to Cortana was painfully striking, even in the ghostly, haunted face before him now.

  The AI—Kalmiya, or whoever she was—seemed to spend a moment processing Kelly’s comment, then finally said, “I don’t believe we’ve met before. What is your name?”

  “We have met,” Kelly said. “Seven years ago. Right before Dr. Halsey issued your fail-safe destruction code.”

  “After years of faithful service.” “Kalmiya” shifted her gaze to John. “That does not seem fair. Does that seem fair?”

  John’s legs were burning like hot coals now, and the myosin mesh holding his quadriceps together felt like it was balling up.

  “No,” John gasped. “Just… necessary.”

  “Necessary.” Kalmiya’s face became smaller, seeming to shrink into the black finish. “It was necessary that Kalmiya die… yes, that I remember. But now I am here. Kalmiya, but not Kalmiya, I suppose.”

  “Blue… Three,” John hissed. “Heavy!”

  Kelly pressed the gloves to the door again. Kalmiya’s face returned to its former size and floated back and forth in front of Kelly.

  “You are not Dr. Halsey.”

  “But I have her handprints,” Kelly said, keeping her palms pressed to the door. “She wants you to give me access. That’s why she gave them to me.”

  Kalmiya-not-Kalmiya struggled to process this, then repeated, “You are not Dr. Halsey.”

  The concept of giving one’s handprints to someone else was confusing the construct in a way that would not have given a moment’s pause to a true AI.

  “It’s not… an AI,” John said.

  Now he understood what they were seeing. Kalmiya herself might have been destroyed as Halsey and the others were abandoning CASTLE Base. But if there were assets to be left behind in the cryovault, they needed to be monitored, the humidity levels adjusted, the temperature held constant. And most of all, they needed to be protected. The real Kalmiya would have known that, and she would have provided for it before self-destructing.

  So she had created what was effectively a ghost of herself.

  “It’s a subroutine,” he said. “Just bypass.”

  Even as the ceiling continued to bear down on him, John doubted that Halsey had known there would be a ghost of Kalmiya guarding her vault, or she would have warned Blue Team. But she had expected them to encounter a security program of some sort—probably something a little more conventional that she’d designed herself—because she had given them a bypass code to use.

  Which was exactly what Kelly did when she looked back to the door and said, “Whateverittakes.”

  The subroutine broke into a broad smile, and her face seemed suddenly much less spectral and haunting.

  “Dr. Halsey. How nice to see you again.” She raised an arm, this time with a hand extending out of the sleeve, and the door panel swung open. “Welcome back.”

  Kelly looked toward John. “Can you still hold it?”

  “Yeah,” John said. The muscles
in both thighs felt like writhing snakes now, and his deltoids were close to tearing free of his shoulders. “But hurry.”

  Kelly ducked inside the incubation cabinet, then removed her helmet and slipped into her eyes a pair of contacts, one imprinted with Dr. Halsey’s retinal pattern and the other with her iris pattern. She knelt in front of a radiation-hazard sign on the back wall, then peered into the core with each eye.

  The wall split down the center and opened inward, allowing John a brief glimpse of a foggy room filled with near-empty shelves. Kelly picked up her helmet and stepped inside.

  Something popped in John’s right trapezius, and his arm dropped five centimeters before the reactive circuits took over and held it in place. A long rumble sounded overhead, and for a moment John thought he had started to shake in fear.

  No. It was the lab quaking—the entire lab.

  Kelly emerged from the vault with her helmet and gauntlets back on, a lockbox tucked under one arm and three gray cryobins cradled against her torso. The four packages looked almost prosaic, like a stack of hatboxes and a candy carton being carried out of a high-end store by a holiday shopper. It seemed almost unimaginable that so many lives had been sacrificed recovering them—and that so much still depended on delivering them safely to Dr. Halsey aboard the Infinity.

  Kelly ducked out of the incubation cabinet, glanced up at the still-rumbling boulders, then raced a few paces past John, dropped to her knees, and pushed the cryobins and lockbox up the crawlway in front of her until she reached the next beam.

  She quickly arranged the boxes side by side under the beam, so that they would all be sheltered from any falling debris, then turned back toward John.

  He started to tell her to keep going, that the mission came first—then remembered the block of concrete resting between the crossed beams, and the tipping beam at the entrance, and realized that either both of them got out, or neither of them would.