First Strike Read online

  “William, you have a cracked tibia and some internal bleeding. Get some biofoam into that wound and avoid strenuous motions for the next day.” She turned to face Fred and Will. “You two are in the best shape. I want you to go to Level Aqua, Section Lambda, and retrieve a few things.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Fred said.

  Dr. Halsey was only a civilian, but the Spartans had always accepted her authority. Perhaps because she had acted as an equal among the Fleet Admirals and Generals who were constantly trying to co-opt her work. Or maybe it was more than that. She wondered if the Spartans viewed her as some sort of mother figure. As much as this notion amused her, she doubted that they viewed anyone outside their team as family. Not even her.

  William retrieved a can of biofoam from the rover and inserted the tip into the tiny injection port in his armor, then pushed it through the skin between his fourth and fifth ribs. He filled his abdominal cavity with the space-filling coagulant/antibacterial/tissue-regenerative polymer.

  “Cold?” she asked.

  “Nothing worth noting, ma’am.”

  She nodded, not making much over William’s courage. She’d always kept her admiration for her Spartans to herself. The last thing she wanted was to make them feel different. They got enough “special” treatment from everyone else.

  Dr. Halsey picked up a clipboard, tapped a few items onto its display, and handed it to Fred. “Additional weapons arrived last week,” she told him, “as well as parts for the MJOLNIR Mark Five armor system. We’ll swap them out for your damaged components. Kalmiya, show them the way, please, and give them access to the restricted areas.”

  “Yes, Doctor,” Kalmiya said. The med bay doors opened. “This way.”

  Fred studied the items on the clipboard. “Very, very good,” he said, and his voice was thick with satisfaction. He nodded, took a long look at his teammates, and then he and Will departed.

  Dr. Halsey returned to her medical readouts. “Vinh, you have a torn deltoid muscle, three broken fingers, and a herniated disk. Isaac, internal contusions and both shoulders have been dislocated and reinserted incorrectly, which is pinching off the blood vessels. I’ll get you both fixed up in a moment, but first I want you to survey the route we took here and suggest further perimeter defenses.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” they replied, cast a look at Kelly, and left.

  Dr. Halsey concentrated on Kelly’s internal scans. Her injuries were by far the worst. She had seen that from the extremely low blood pressure and high body temperature even before she’d glanced at the MRI. There was moderate bleeding in her liver—a fatal condition if not treated—and her right lung was completely collapsed. That the woman was still on her feet, let alone fighting, was tantamount to an act of God.

  Of course, that’s what the SPARTAN-II project was all about, wasn’t it? Playing God for the greater good.

  “Doctor Halsey,” Kelly asked. “Where are the others?”

  “As I said, they evacuated,” she replied. “On the table, please. I’m going to perform some minor repairs.”

  Kelly complied. “Then why are you still here, ma’am?”

  Dr. Halsey picked up a curved, long-handled magnetic wrench, built specifically to fit this, and only this, access panel. She inserted it and popped open a fist-sized section of Kelly’s battered MJOLNIR armor. Blood and hydrostatic gel bubbled from Kelly’s wounds.

  “I volunteered to be the fail-safe option,” she told Kelly. “In the lower levels of these caverns are enough high explosives to level the facility—in case we were ever overrun by the enemy. I’m here to make sure no one gets access to our technology.”

  Dr. Halsey injected a local anesthetic and inserted a flexible laser-tipped catheter into Kelly, carefully monitoring her progress on the MRI. She pulsed the laser, fusing the lacerations in her liver. Dr. Halsey then inflated her lung. Kelly would lose half of that organ, regardless of her treatment. The tissue was already turning blue and mottling necrotic brown.

  “Kalmiya, prep the flash clone facility and retrieve Kelly’s DNA sequence from the archives. I’d like to get a new liver and right lung started for her.

  “You’re fine for now,” Dr. Halsey lied. “I just want to get replacements made for you, in case we’re down here for a long time.”

  “I understand,” Kelly rasped.

  Dr. Halsey wondered if she did—if Kelly understood that getting shot and burned and having your internal organs traumatized wasn’t supposed to happen to you every day…unless you were a Spartan. She wished the war were over. She wished her Spartans had some measure of peace.

  “Doctor?” Kalmiya whispered through the tiny private speaker bud in Dr. Halsey’s glasses. “There is an anomaly in SPARTAN 087’s DNA files. You may want to review this in private.”

  Dr. Halsey sealed Kelly’s injuries with biofoam, removed the catheter, and cauterized the incision. “Rest,” she said.

  “No, ma’am. I’m ready to—” Kelly tried to sit up.

  “Down.” Dr. Halsey set a hand on her shoulder. She had no illusions that she could have stopped Kelly with the gesture, but it reinforced her words and her will. “Doctor’s orders.”

  Kelly sighed and lay back.

  “I’ll be in my office just over there”—she pointed to the next room—“if you need anything.”

  Dr. Halsey left Kelly and moved to her office. Two walls were covered with giant displays; old disposable coffee cups littered the floor; a holographic projector flooded with data, lines, rotating graphics, and unanswered correspondence overflowed her desk. She turned down the blinds that separated her office from the medical bay, but only halfway, so she could keep an eye on Kelly.

  “Let’s have it, Kalmiya.”

  Kelly’s medical history scrolled across a display.

  “Here,” Kalmiya said, and highlighted a surreptitious data request at the end of the file. “It’s dated three months ago. That’s Araqiel’s routing code.”

  Dr. Halsey picked up the snowglobe off her desk, shook it once, and set it down, watching the swirls of particles.

  “Araqiel—Ackerson’s watchdog?”

  “Affirmative, Doctor.”

  “Can you trace the request?”

  “Done and terminated contact at node FF-8897-Z. Access restricted to X-ray level clearance.”

  “Restricted?” Dr. Halsey gave a short, soft laugh. “Does that mean anything now? There’s no one here to stop us, is there, Kalmiya?”

  “Entering those files without proper clearance is a treasonable offense, Doctor.”

  “They can come and arrest me, then. Do as I have instructed, Kalmiya,” Dr. Halsey said. “Override your ethics center subroutine four-alpha. Nullification code: ‘Whateverittakes.’”

  Dr. Halsey found a half-full cup of coffee on the floor and gingerly picked it up. She sniffed its contents and, satisfied it wasn’t rancid, swirled it once then downed its cold contents.

  “Yes, Doctor. Working. Done.”

  Kalmiya was Cortana’s older “sister.” Dr. Halsey had designed and tested the software intrusion routines on her. Once the process had been debugged and streamlined, she’d incorporated the routines into Cortana. The brass in ONI Section Three had been quite explicit in their instructions to destroy any prototype routines—an order that Dr. Halsey had promptly disobeyed.

  “There is an unusually voluminous amount of counterintrusion software, Doctor.”

  “Show me,” Dr. Halsey said.

  The holographic display flickered and solidified into colored crystal blocks representing the code barriers. Dr. Halsey traced a seam with her forefinger along a shard of ruby to the ninety-degree angle made by a stair-step-cut emerald. “This data cluster here. Spike that and backfill with a neutralizing pulse.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  The holographic crystal shattered into a thousand glittering fragments and swirled upward into a helix.

  “I’m in, and—”

  The shards pulsed and coalesced. Facets an
d hard shimmering planes fit together into curled horns, an elongated jaw, and over-sized eyes that flickered with holographic fire. It turned and smiled at Dr. Halsey, baring razor jags of teeth.

  “Civilian consultant 409871,” it said in a deep bass rumble that contained a crackle of thunder. “Doctor Catherine Halsey.”

  “Araqiel,” she muttered. “Did your master leave you behind when he was reassigned? Don’t you have anything better to do than steal data from my SPARTAN program?”

  The doctor leaned toward a side display and, without looking, tapped in line commands, accessing the base’s root directory.

  “You are in violation of UNSC military security code 447-R27,” Araqiel stated with a growl. “This has been recorded and the proper authorities have been notified. You will cease and desist all activities.”

  Dr. Halsey snorted and continued to type. “I’m the only authority left here, Araqiel. For a ‘smart AI’ you are extremely thick.” She glanced at the display before her. “Kalmiya, I need you.” She tapped level-seven security barriers, which popped up over her command line prompt. “Here.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “Oh, ‘thick’ indeed, Doctor,” Araqiel rumbled. “While I allowed you to ‘access’ these medical files, I have taken control of the air reclamation system for your medical wing. I can pressurize your office and cause pulmonary edema. I can release narcozine gas to para—” His eyes narrowed to a squint. “What are you doing there?”

  “We’re in,” Kalmiya said.

  Dr. Halsey tapped in a flurry of commands.

  The holograph of Araqiel leaned over her shoulder. “What is that? I don’t recognize that directory path…or those”—he sniffed derisively—“archaic line commands.”

  “These commands were invented, refined, and then discarded and forgotten long before even the first functional dumb AI went online,” Dr. Halsey told him. “I learned them when I was fifteen, working on my second doctoral thesis.”

  “An antiquated input methodology for an obsolete human.”

  “Antiquated? Obsolete? Really?” She smiled and said, “Let’s test your hypothesis, Araqiel. I supervised the creation of the template for every third-generation smart AI on this planet. I know everything there is to know about you, including your borderline disregard for human life.” She paused and tapped her chin. “Maybe that’s why you and Ackerson always got along so well.”

  “Colonel Ackerson is a great man. He’s—”

  “To answer your original question,” she said, ignoring him, “this is the nexus of your being.” She tapped the display. “Your code directory, the center through which all impulses in your mind flow. And this”—she quickly typed in another command—“is the code that activates your personal fail-safe. It generates a pulse beam of high-frequency UV light in your Riemann cycling-thought matrix, clearing your high thought functions. It will effectively erase you.”

  “No!” Araqiel said and reared back. Flames roared about his crystalline skull. “Don’t—”

  Dr. Halsey punched the ENTER key.

  Araqiel vanished.

  Dr. Halsey sighed and closed the display. “A waste of memory crystal.”

  She wondered if the AI had been bluffing. Maybe not; ONI Section Three gave its AIs broad discretionary powers for dealing with security breaches. Still…she was happy not to have found out how far Araqiel would have gone.

  “Kalmiya, please retrieve the data file and show me the contents of Colonel Ackerson’s directory.”

  “Working, Doctor. There’s some minor encryption to unravel. It should only take a moment.” She paused and then asked, “Doctor Halsey, the UV fail-safe in Araqiel’s Riemann matrix…are they planted in every smart AI? In me?”

  “They are not implanted in every AI,” Dr. Halsey said, carefully controlling her voice.

  Kalmiya would undoubtedly stress-analyze her vocal patterns, so she told her the truth. It was always a game of chess with smart AIs—move and countermove. It was a constant challenge to earn and keep their respect. That’s why she preferred their company to humans—they were so deliciously complex. Yes, she told her the truth…just not the whole truth.

  “Here they are, Doctor.”

  Holographic file and folder icons filled the space over her desk.

  “Filter by proper names,” Dr. Halsey said. “Let’s not waste our time with Ackerson’s petty blackmails. Also remove any files dated before the SPARTAN-IIs went online, and any not accessed more than a dozen times. I want to see what black ops topped his list.”

  The folders and files winked away, and only two folders remained floating over Dr. Halsey’s desk: S-III and KING UNDER THE MOUNTAIN. She tapped on the first one and it opened, revealing hundreds of separate files. Dr. Halsey examined them—there were medical files on each of her Spartans: complete records from their preindoctrinated origins; their childhood vaccinations; their parents; their extensive injuries and treatments during their training; even the experimental procedures used to enhance their strength, agility, and mental resiliency.

  “What the hell was he up to?” she muttered. She felt her pulse quicken as she scoured his records. There were DNA pro-files on each Spartan, and there were extensive files on the old flash clone techniques that ONI had used to replace the originals. Ackerson seemed especially interested in this aspect of the program. He had followed the medical records of the replacements as they grew up, succumbed to congenital diseases, and inevitably died. He even had the bodies retrieved and autopsies performed.

  Dr. Halsey’s stomach soured. It was her fault, in part, that these replacement children had died so young. They had never perfected flash cloning for an entire human. They had done it anyway thirty years ago because the Earth government was on the verge of falling apart…collapsing into a hundred civil wars. They had desperately needed the SPARTAN program.

  And of course, they had done it simply because they could.

  No matter the legitimacy of her reasons, she knew she had killed these children as sure as if she had shot them dead.

  There was one last file in the S-III folder.

  As Dr. Halsey tapped it open, Kalmiya said, “That is only a fragment. It had been erased, but I managed to reconstruct it from trace ionization in the memory crystal.”

  Dr. Halsey examined its contents. There was only CPOMZ followed by a 512-character alphanumeric string. “This longer portion is a star chart reference,” she whispered.

  “Yes, Doctor, but it’s not a reference to any recognized locations in UNSC-controlled space.”

  What the hell had Ackerson been up to? “No good at all,” she murmured and ran her finger over the first word in the file: CPOMZ.

  “I’ll have to deal with this later,” she said. She downloaded the files to a nearby data pad. “Let’s see what else the good Colonel was up to.” She opened the folder marked KING UNDER THE MOUNTAIN.

  There were only three files.

  The first was the original construction blueprints of this base; it appeared on her desk. Dr. Halsey noted that this holographic representation of the base was much larger than she had been led to believe. While her security clearance was the highest possible for a civilian, she apparently had seen only a third of the facility she had worked in for the last decade.

  Dr. Halsey tapped open the second file. It was the transcripts of the debriefing at Camp Hathcock, August 12, 2552. That was the inquiry of John’s destruction of the city on Côte d’Azur and the alien artifact the Covenant had tried to procure there. Curious.

  A third file was an analysis of the symbols John had captured from the alien artifact. According to Ackerson’s notes it, too, was a partial star map. Dr. Halsey returned to the stellar chart reference in the Spartans’ files.

  No good. This location had seemingly nothing to do with that reference.

  The stellar reference in the alien artifact was…she did the math in her head—

  “I’ll be God damned,” she muttered.

  She pul
led up star charts and NAV records for confirmation, and checked her math one last time.

  No question: It was the Epsilon Eridani system.

  Here.

  This was more than a curiosity, now. Ackerson had been sitting on a tremendous secret—a very dangerous secret. “Just his style to play with fire and get us all burned.”

  Additional files detailed the procurement of digging equipment, and a new set of blueprints and geological surveys. The new maps looked like a network of veins and arteries.

  “What am I looking at, Kalmiya?”

  “According to the coordinates of these secondary maps, Doctor, this facility was built over an old titanium mine…and before that this site was surveyed as an extinct volcano. These are designated as a series of lava tubes.”

  “I wonder if they used the natural passages to help build the mines, and later this facility?” Dr. Halsey removed her glasses and cleaned them as she thought this through. “No…if it was as simple as that, why would Ackerson be interested? And why then classify this data as level X-ray? How does this connect to the alien artifact on Côte d’Azur?”

  “I can’t say,” Kalmiya replied, “but perhaps there’s a back door you can use to escape.”

  “Yes, yes.” Dr. Halsey downloaded all of Ackerson’s secret files to her data pad. “I’ll consider that later. Right now we should concentrate—”

  “Detecting increased seismic activity, Doctor.”

  Dr. Halsey froze. She felt it more than saw it—a series of faint, rhythmic thumps, like thunder in the distance.

  Dust rained from the ceiling tiles and scattered the light for the holographic system into a dazzling starburst.

  “They’re coming,” Dr. Halsey whispered. She opened a COM channel to the Spartans. “Get back to the lab ASAP. I might have a way out!”

  She stumbled as a powerful blast rocked the chamber. There was a shriek of stressed metal, and the main support beam overhead shifted, fell, and crashed onto her desk.