Hunters in the Dark (HALO) Read online

  It made me feel so good about myself. I felt as if my attention to her lessons and my dedication to doing things the way she wanted them was helping restore her to the woman she had once been.

  I even said as much to my father. He didn’t react other than to nod.

  I didn’t care.

  I loved my mother so much, and I was grateful that she had come back to me.

  On my fifteenth birthday, I walked into our teaching room and found her body hanging by the neck, strapped by a belt to an overhead beam.

  There was a note next to her that read “I can’t pretend anymore.” That was all.

  I screamed for my father and he came and cut her down, saying absolutely nothing as he did so. I stood there with tears pouring down my face and I kept asking why, why had she done it.

  “Her soul died on Verent. It just took her body a while to catch up.” And that was the only thing he ever said to me about her suicide.

  What other choice did I have except to return to school and say nothing about the Covenant or what had happened to my mother? I refused to be drawn into conversations about it.

  And eventually I turned out to be right about the Covenant anyway—humanity and the alien invaders settled their differences. Well, sort of. The saurian Elites left the Covenant because their Prophet leaders had lied to them all and had ultimately turned against them. Some of the Elites then allied with the humans and fought against what was left of the Covenant as part of a massive civil war that spilled over onto Earth, and the Covenant was eventually decimated. The enemy of your enemy becomes your friend.

  Part of me wished that I was still young and back in school when that happened. I would have loved to see the expressions on the faces of my classmates, those sons of bitches, when knowledge of the peace accord went public. But I had long since graduated by that time. Instead I was well into my planned field of study.

  The only real result of the peace accord was that it enabled me to explore the remaining things that I truly felt were worth my time.

  The Covenant . . . as well as the Forerunners, the ancient, powerful civilization that disappeared long ago, yet who were ultimately responsible for spawning humanity’s greatest of enemies.

  And last but certainly not least, the centerpiece of the Forerunners’ awe-inspiring technology . . . whose relatively recent discovery has led alien races and good men and women to fight over and die for.

  Halo.

  MARCH 2555

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  Luther Mann’s dreams were entrenched in that time when he had been a child, fleeing for his life from the only world he had known. He remembered his mother shouting at him and hurting him. His eventual reconciliation with his mother would run through his mind, only to be annihilated by her suicide.

  It wasn’t your fault that she did that went through his head, but even as a grown-up, he didn’t entirely believe that. To this day, so many years after her lifeless body had been discovered, he still told himself that he was somehow, in some way, responsible. That maybe if he had done more, been cleverer, a better son, a better man . . .

  . . . maybe she would have found something to live for.

  When he awoke, his body was shaking and covered in sweat. He sat up, rubbing his face and moaning softly. It had been a long while since he had dreamt of her, and he certainly hadn’t missed it.

  Luther could not recall the last time he slept in a normal room.

  It wasn’t as if he didn’t own one. He had perfectly vivid memories of his own rather sedate apartment. Actually, in retrospect, sedate might not have been the proper word to describe his facilities. His apartment back on Earth, situated on the third floor of an unremarkable building in an equally unremarkable section of Seattle, had the bare minimum of accoutrements that one would expect for a place that someone was actually living in. That was because Luther spent, at most, a grand total of eight weeks there during any given year.

  The rest of the time was spent out in the place where he was right now: the field. Luther Mann was a lifelong explorer. Throughout the galaxy was where he went, studying all manner of archaeology. The civilizations that he researched were hardly limited—every era in the history of man had been subjected to his scrutiny at one time or another.

  And yet it wasn’t the limits of humanity that engaged him. Because no matter where he was or what he was in the midst of exploring, Luther’s imagination always tended to turn toward the same direction: one that took him as far from the study of humankind as archaeology could go.

  Sooner or later, it always came back to the Forerunners.

  And there was no greater expert on their culture and their history than Luther Mann. None. Anything there was to know about them, that is, anything which could be known from the relatively little information available, was rattling around in his head. He had read every study and done quite a few of his own. When it came to the Forerunners, Luther was a walking database, and any major dig that related to them sooner or later requested his presence. Nor was anyone ever disappointed with the results.

  He was also noted for his command of alien languages—Luther had spent years of his life studying nearly every dialect that was spoken by the various races in the Covenant, with translation skills that were also second to none. And still, it was always returning to the Forerunners.

  “Doctor?” There was something akin to a knock at the front flap of his tent. “Doctor, are you up and around?”

  He certainly was, and had been for the past two hours. As was typical for him during this particular expedition, Luther once again found himself unable to sleep beyond minimal required hours to rest, and that kept shrinking. Other places, he needed seven, eight hours for his brain to be fully back up to snuff. But out here, in the field? Four, and he was ready to go. The only reason he was still in his tent was out of deference to the others on his team who might require something approaching a normal amount of slumber.

  “Yes, yes, hang on a moment, Henry,” he called out. Luther was also dressed, shaven, and wired for work. He was meticulous about keeping his beard stubble neat, especially since he had noticed the first shades of premature gray starting to seep in; he wanted to do everything he could to keep that away from observation. It reminded him too much of his father.

  He clambered to the front of the tent and threw open the flap. The day was exactly what he expected; not surprising, really. In this wonderful, glorious location, one day was identical to the next. In the curved distance, he could see a series of puffy white clouds hanging against the bluest sky he had ever witnessed, and once again he had to do as he did every morning: shake himself, to believe that what he was staring at was completely artificial.

  He would never have guessed it if he’d been dropped into the middle of this environment with no hint of where he was. He even remembered clearly the first time he set foot upon one of these strange things about two years ago. He hadn’t been sure what to expect. Heaven knew he had seen the holo-vids before, of various military operations during the war with the Covenant. But simply watching a location vid, even for hours at a time, didn’t compare to the experience of actually walking around on it.

  Yet that was exactly what Luther was doing and precisely where he was.

  He was on a Halo. One that he himself had discovered.

  It wasn’t as if he had been looking for it. He had been exploring the Forerunner shield world of Onyx, which itself was an astounding place by any measure. After all, how many were there that were the size of an entire solar system? It wasn’t even called Onyx anymore; it had been rebranded into the human research outpost referred to as Trevelyan and currently played host to a number of research facilities. But he still tended to think of it with its original name, and while there, he had discovered records that were hidden deep within its vast information pathways . . . records that up until then had remained unfound and untranslated. Once Luther had come upon them, he’d labored over them for a year after the end of the
Covenant War before realizing the existence—and location—of Zeta Halo. It had been quite the way to usher in the new year of 2555.

  Discovering the Zeta Halo had catapulted Luther’s academic career. Before that, he had been a respected scientist, yes, and one of the top minds in his field, but his field included hundreds of men and women, many of whom were far more vocal and aggressive in achieving publicity than he was. But finding a Halo had put him front and center with many scientific publications and organizations, though even the existence of Halo was something of an urban myth on most human worlds. He had received invitations from numerous universities to come lecture and had also been summoned to the headquarters of the United Nations Space Command to provide them with a detailed report of the methods he had used to discover this Halo.

  Considering what they represented, finding another Halo was a big deal no matter when it was found. Yes, the Halo ringworlds were what many of the Covenant once believed was the final step on the Path, a culminating event they called the “Great Journey.” It was a central tenet of their religious beliefs. But this belied their true nature, which was revealed during the final days of the war. The Halo installations were designed, at their core, for various purposes, ranging from a nature preserve for life-forms found throughout the Milky Way to defensive outposts against the alien parasite called the Flood.

  Ultimately, though, it was also understood that the ancient installations possessed the capability of wiping out every sentient being in the entirety of the galaxy, and that was naturally of concern to pretty much every human being who breathed. That’s where the UNSC stepped in, specifically the Office of Naval Intelligence. The known installations needed to be quarantined and secured to alleviate risk.

  It was only recently that ONI had begun research on the vast interior world that composed the inner workings of the Zeta Halo. And Luther’s participation had naturally been not only welcomed, but insisted upon by top individuals at ONI, primarily due to his extensive history with both Delta Halo and Gamma Halo.

  He pushed his way out of his tent and Henry Lamb was waiting for him. Henry was an equivalent to Luther in another respect. Luther’s knowledge of the Forerunners’ background was unparalleled when it came to understanding their language, their culture, their entire way of life; Henry, on the other hand, was fascinated with them from a different perspective, having spent the entirety of his life studying Covenant and Forerunner engineering. He was part of ONI’s xeno-materials exploitation group and specialized in the recovery and reverse engineering of the incredible technology these advanced civilizations had taken for granted. Short of a Huragok, one of the creatures that the Forerunners had created to tend to their machinery, there was simply no human who was more conversant with or qualified to study and fix, if such a thing were possible, Forerunner technology. Luther and Henry made a rather formidable team, and Henry’s enthusiasm for the tasks that Luther handed him on any given day was relentless. “You had breakfast?” Luther asked.

  “Yup,” said Henry, who was lying, of course. Henry rarely, if ever, worried about taking care of himself—he could easily pass an entire day without eating anything of substance, which was probably why he was so insanely thin. Luther had once seen him shirtless and had actually been able to count his ribs. But Henry was a grown man, if one counted twenty-nine as that, and was fully capable of making his own decisions, for better or worse.

  Henry was busy scratching the head of a very familiar creature. “Hello, Vanessa!” Luther said with great cheer.

  Vanessa was the name he’d given to the small, deer-like animal that showed up every morning like clockwork and stared at him expectantly. Luther was ready for her, unslinging his knapsack and pulling out a handful of lettuce from a small bag. He extended it to her (he wasn’t sure it was a her; it was just what he imagined it to be) and she immediately snapped it off his palm and chowed down. Once satisfied, Vanessa took several steps forward and Luther obediently rubbed her under her chin. She made a noise that sounded vaguely like the equivalent of a purr and then headed off into the brush.

  “It’s nice to have a friend,” said Henry.

  “I look for them wherever I can.” Both of them knew well enough that, while there was certainly a multitude of harmless creatures on the Halo installations, not all of the pet species the Forerunners had accumulated were as friendly as Vanessa.

  “So what’s up for today?”

  “I was figuring we’d take another stab at finding the control room.”

  “I think it’s insanely frustrating that it’s taking us this long,” said Henry. “With the previous installations, the control room has always been in pretty much the same place. It’s the largest uniform structure near the ring’s phase pulse generators.”

  “Absolutely true,” said Luther. “But it’s not just our inability to find it that’s puzzling me.”

  “It’s the lack of a monitor,” said Henry, referring to the artificial intelligence often attached to a Forerunner installation as a caretaker, ensuring the facility was being efficiently maintained through long epochs of time.

  “Correct.”

  Henry nodded. “Every Halo has had a monitor, right? Like 343 Guilty Spark on Alpha Halo, for instance. So why can’t we find one here? As much as we’ve searched this place, we’ve consistently come up empty. And it hasn’t found us, which is even more surprising, given the time we’ve spent here. It leaves me wondering whether there simply isn’t one here, or if it’s hiding for some reason.”

  “For some reason?” Luther actually allowed a small chuckle over that. “I would think the reason would be obvious, at least one of them. Human and Covenant interactions on these installations have not always been the best. If the monitor of this Halo is aware of that, it might be inclined to steer clear of us. I know I would.”

  It was an understatement, for sure. After the discovery of Alpha Halo in September of 2552, humans had been forced to destroy the ring to prevent its activation by the monitor. When Delta Halo was found several weeks later, rebel Elites glassed its surface to prevent the Flood parasite from escaping containment. And then, in December of that same year, the replacement for Alpha Halo was destroyed when humans prematurely fired it above an extragalactic superstructure the Forerunners referred to as the Ark. In Luther’s mind, there were plenty of reasons for the Forerunners’ artificial intelligences to doubt the beneficence of either human or Covenant activity.

  “That doesn’t sound consistent with how we’ve understood monitors historically,” said Henry.

  “There’s no reason to think consistency is mandatory.”

  “True enough.”

  “It’s possible that the Forerunners made this Halo differently for some reason.”

  “Any idea what that reason is?”

  Luther shook his head. There were clear differences between Zeta Halo, also known as Installation 07, and the other ringworlds that humanity had previously discovered. Some of the differences existed on a meta level, dealing with the installation’s physical infrastructure and material composition. Others were far subtler, involving things like the architectural aesthetics of its various building structures and machinery, or the machine language of the ring’s distributed systems. Zeta was not the kind of Halo that they or anyone else were familiar with.

  “There are two possible theories, when you get down to it. Either this place was constructed after all the others, with the Forerunners having learned things from the previous architecture. Or else it was made before all the others, serving as a sort of prototype. Whatever the truth,” and Luther clapped his hands together briskly, “one of these days, we need to find both the control room and also the Library, because that’s where we’ll find the activation key . . . the Index.”

  “Exactly. Isolate and contain,” said Henry. “And avert certain disaster. If the Index were to fall into the wrong hands, they could hypothetically activate the ring.”

  “See, now you’re thinking like an engineer again,
” said Luther with good humor. “Always contemplating how machinery could be used for the worst possible purposes.”

  “That’s because, in my experience, it always has.”

  Luther was about to toss a casual response, but then he realized that Henry was right, so he allowed the comment to pass. This had been the protocol on the former rings, and so Zeta Halo, in that respect, wasn’t being treated any differently. Ideally, they would be able to quickly locate and secure all of the important facilities on this Halo, but ultimately the control center could provide them with all of the information they needed, including some of the critical functions they sought.

  They set off, Luther still having difficulty wrapping his head around the concept that the area through which they were walking had been artificially constructed. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought he was traveling through campgrounds in Wyoming or some similar, perfectly pleasant, naturally existing region. Green plants stretched around him in all directions, while the dirt path they strode was indistinguishable from anything that they would see back on Earth. At one point he stopped, picked up a clod of dirt, and sniffed it. Yes, absolutely identical to back home. The sky above looked utterly normal and the hanging clouds likewise appeared natural. The only difference, which was certainly noteworthy, was the upward sloping horizon as the ring stretched out on two sides, in either direction rising to a nearly indistinguishable height thousands of kilometers directly above them.

  He would have given anything to have been alive back then, or perhaps to be transported somehow through time and space, so he could return to the era of the Forerunners. He wouldn’t ask a ton of questions or get in the way—he would simply stand to one side and observe how they did everything. The Forerunners had been an astounding civilization, and he could readily understand why the Covenant had regarded them as gods.