Zeta Halo
Rion guided the Ace of Spades beneath the curve of the Halo ring. How bizarre it was to see mountain ranges and forests, lakes and rivers, and blue skies and clouds clinging near vertically or completely upside down. The sheer size and complexity left her dumbstruck. Zeta clocked in at three hundred and eighteen kilometers wide and ten thousand kilometers in diameter—nearly the same breadth as Earth. The knowledge and means to create on this colossal scale seemed the stuff of fantasy, of divinity and magic.
How could a civilization capable of building something of such magnitude have been so utterly defeated by the Flood? She would never forget first hearing about them from Spark, and even now a slight chill ran up her spine. If these builders, with all their technological mastery and knowledge, were left wanting, what did that mean for humanity should a threat like that ever appear in vast numbers again?
As Ace descended into the artificially maintained atmosphere, the landscape became clearer. It was a stunning and pristine world, and, until recently, untouched and forgotten. She could see why, according to Spark, the Librarian had lobbied the Forerunner Council to balance the rings’ destructive force with conservation measures, to give them some other redeeming purpose. What better place to house her collections, to keep thousands upon thousands of races and species and flora and fauna content for millennia in their new environment, safe and sound from the Flood?
Only on this ring, that vision of utopia hadn’t gone so well.
The ship went in quiet, though with a construct this enormous and the small contingent present, Rion was pretty sure they could’ve snuck in with an old Kig-Yar junker.
“Captain?”
Spark was waiting expectantly over the holotable. “I will need to take over controls now.”
“The helm is yours.”
Spark directed the ship along a snowcapped mountain range, then lower toward the foothills. As they glided toward a valley of deep gorges and high gray cliffs, a few moving specks caught her eye—what appeared to be rams with wide horns curling behind their necks navigated the low peaks. Ace swept down quickly and smoothly, then leveled off to ride the open space of the dry riverbed between the cliffs. On the plateau atop the cliff, a herd of small deerlike creatures, startled by their approach, sprinted in a great unified arc across the blanket of green.
At the end of the valley, Ace’s thrusters pushed the ship up and over the sheer cliff and across the flat lake basin. Millions of tangled vines with thick, glossy, heart-shaped leaves, some as long as two meters, created a dense carpet over the former lake bed. In the center, the leaves dipped in a perfect circle, an emerald bowl in the middle of the basin.
Ace slowed and came to a hover above the depression. “The vine cover is about four and a half meters thick. There’s nothing under that, just a whole lot of empty space,” Niko said. LIDAR scans built a rendition over the holotable, giving a startling sense of just how vast the substructure below them was. The lake bed rested like a tiny lily pad over a deep, dark ocean.
“Not picking up any hostiles or life signs in range,” Ram added.
“Niko, you getting any chatter nearby?”
“No, Cap, nothing.”
“Should we use guns to break through the vines?” Lessa asked.
“No. I don’t want to attract attention,” Rion answered. “And we can’t risk plowing through and bringing those vines down over us. We’ll turn the burners on them.”
“Good idea,” Ram said.
A look of unbridled glee crossed Niko’s face. “The pyro in me approves. Nothing like a little tri-hy burn to start the day.” He accessed Ace’s outboard cameras and pulled up a feed of the basin from the edge of one of the ship’s aft thrusters as she maneuvered into position.
Rion aimed for a controlled accretion on the throttle, just enough to light up a little triamino hydrazine fuel and torch a small hole—anything bigger might send up smoke signals and alert the curious. Ignite burners, two-second burst, and she was done, easing up on controls and then checking the feeds, pleased to see it was working like a charm. The intense heat fried the vines clean through, leaving embers to eat up a radiating path outward before dying out to the moisture content in the vines and leaves.
“Excellently done, Captain,” Spark said. “We are clear to proceed if you’re ready.”
Ready to take her ship inside a Forerunner megastructure. She almost laughed. The idea seemed absurd, and yet here they were about to do just that. Ready was relative. That old excitement was there, though, lurking under the caution and wariness, that touch of recklessness and drive to explore the unknown. “Ready as I’ll ever be,” she quipped. “All eyes on consoles and reporting please.”
The Ace of Spades leveled off and Rion continued VTOL procedures to the ship’s main thrusters, maintaining a full vertical pivot to ease the ship straight down into the belly of the ring. Niko leaned over to hit a command, and four smaller bridge screens, in addition to the main viewscreen, flickered to life, Ace’s outboard cams feeding in the scenes one meter at a time. First came the burnt entrails and singed edges of the vine cover, and then… darkness.
Rion tensed. Every screen was pitch-black. Their only visual reference was the blueprint hovering over the tactical table. As sensors provided detail, the holograph continually revised itself, revealing a network of latticed superstructure, several hundred meters thick, supported by massive pillars beneath the lake bed. The only break in the structure was the twenty-six-meter hole, which appeared to be by design.
Zeta’s substructure was reading an incredible fifteen kilometers in depth and growing.
On the blueprint, the pillars supporting the undercarriage of the ring’s latticework and girders continued into the depths, their size breathtaking. Still the camera feeds brought back blackness. They were in a pocket of nothing, in a controlled vertical descent at about twenty meters per second. Rion’s attention stayed on the ever-changing blueprint as it attempted to find any proximal points of reference, but they were just a tiny vessel sinking to the bottom of the darkest pit.
At eight minutes and ten kilometers, the scene began to change. Ace’s exterior lights finally revealed a world of giant cross sections, linking pillars larger than any skyscraper she had ever seen. Immense pathways stretched beyond their scanners’ ability to detect. There were segments within cross sections, creating open spaces and tunnels some six stories tall and sixty meters wide, and fully walled chambers of enormous size.
And there they were, a speck of dust floating down into a mega city. It was disconcerting and intensely humbling.
“There’s a pathway below us in another kilometer,” Spark said.
Evidence of destruction came into view, flash burns, pathways pocked with craters or severed like twigs, buckled supports, and smaller things—vessels, transports, exposed conduits and cabling, and other indefinable refuse—littering passages and tunnels.
“All this damage… it happened before the firing of the ring?” Rion asked. She remembered everything Spark had told her about his time on Zeta as a human, including the civil war, ongoing since before his arrival, and the near destruction of the Halo as the wolf planet passed through its ring. But she had to hear it out loud, to know there was nothing else she had to worry about, nothing left over or lurking in the darkness.
“Most certainly,” Spark replied.
“Anyone else find it odd, though?” Niko shared a concerned glance with her before moving on to Spark. “The surface is obviously in good shape, and that doesn’t happen on its own; it takes a hell of a lot of maintenance and power to run atmosphere and artificial gravity. So why is this area abandoned? There’s not even power down here.”
“Perhaps it is a little odd,” Spark admitted, though his tone was untroubled.
“I’m gonna need a little more than ‘perhaps’ to push forward,” Rion said. “Spark, is there a reason sections like this would be in disrepair?”
“There is nothing to suggest the reason is nefarious or dangerous in nature, Captain. I am detecting no such indicators. It is far more likely this section has simply been abandoned. As for the lack of power, there could be many reasons. A prescheduled dormancy cycle for conservation purposes, a complete shutoff of systems and rerouting of power…”
So far things had gone relatively easy, and Rion wanted to keep it that way. The entire mission relied on trust, on putting her faith in Spark, in his knowledge, his suggestions, and his assumptions. But in the end, no matter what he might do or say or cause, the responsibility for whatever might happen was squarely on her shoulders.
“I am simply cautious, like the rest of you,” Spark added. “This ring has existed one hundred thousand years beyond my involvement. Accounting for every conceivable danger at the present time is impossible. I will temper your fears, however, and say I do not believe the caretakers here are a threat.”
Call it a sixth sense or trust or whatever, but Rion believed it too, given the facts so far.
“Nor do I believe the Flood specimens that might still exist in substructure research facilities pose any threat either.”
Her optimism took a nosedive. “I’m sorry… what?”
“Wait a second—what are you saying?” Ram spun in his chair, brow furrowed in disbelief. “Those things are here?”
“It is possible.”
“Jesus, Spark.” The nice tan he’d gotten became several shades paler. They’d all heard Spark’s stories of the Flood; the horror of it was too great to ever forget. “Wouldn’t they have been destroyed a long time ago, considering how dangerous you’ve said they are?”
“It was precisely their danger that drove the Forerunners to keep specimens. All Halo installations—including my own—had heavily contained research facilities for the parasite, in hopes a cure might one day be discovered. Since the Flood’s origin lay outside the galaxy, finding a cure was the only way to prevent the end of all biodiversity, were the threat ever to return. The only way, apart from activation, that is.… But perhaps Bornstellar chose to annihilate the specimens before sending the ring to its firing position.” Spark shrugged, sounding totally unbothered. “I simply cannot say with any certainty what might or might not have happened.”
A moment of stunned silence greeted his pronouncement as the gravity of his revelation hit home. Then Lessa quietly asked, “Do we need to be worried?” And those big baby blues tugged hard on Rion’s protective instincts. “I mean, that’s a long time for something to stay contained.”
“I can assure you had any escaped containment, the state of this ring and the galaxy itself would be much different than it is right now.”
And that was a truth Rion couldn’t dispute.
“Approaching the pathway, Cap,” Niko cut in. “Should we land?”
Now that they were close enough, details of the path below became clear on-screen—an enormous highway, made of an alloy similar to the outer rim of the Halo, though the adornment of glowing blue lines and glyphs were nominal.
“Spark, this is your show,” Rion said, leaving it up to him. “What do you suggest?”
“The best and quickest course of action is to follow the pathway to achieve the closest subterranean proximity to the Cartographer.”
Rion gave him a subtle nod to go ahead. The turn of Ace’s thrusters echoed through the ship, and they began moving forward above the path.
“With all this damage, you think it’s still there?” Niko asked.
“The Cartographer always endures. In the event that one is destroyed, another is automatically created in some other part of the ring to serve in its place; it is too valuable to do otherwise. We will find it one way or another.”
The blueprint showed an obstacle in the pathway a few kilometers ahead. A large chunk of metal pillar, a girder or crossbeam, was buried in the pathway just as the path transitioned into a tunnel. The impact had created a crack that nearly severed the pathway in two. “We’ll land here,” Rion said, making adjustments. She didn’t want to land Ace anywhere near that crack. “And continue on foot.”
The landing gear engaged. Ace slowly settled onto the path, while Spark was already at work at the holotable, no doubt calibrating the scanners to achieve precise images, building an outline beyond the debris and tunnel.
Niko swiveled in his seat and pushed to his feet, stretching his arms high over his head and letting out a long yawn. “Should I warm up Michelle and Diane?”
“There is no need,” Spark told him. “I know where we are and where we need to go.”
“Well, air is good. Temps are pretty decent. I’d wear a jacket, Cap.”
Rion appreciated the suggestion. “Thanks, Niko. And the Cartographer?” she asked Spark as he manipulated the holo blueprint of Zeta Halo’s interior, moving parts away and zooming in on other areas closer to the surface. “Here—the location is beyond this tunnel, followed by a twenty-meter ascent.”
Niko leaned over the table. “That’s a five-story climb with no discernible way up.” He lifted his head to give Rion a pointed look, and she was pretty sure she knew what was coming next. “And who shot me down when I said we needed new jetpacks?”
“We have jetpacks.”
“No, we have antiquated jetpacks. Big difference.”
“We will not need them.” Spark zoomed in on a support pillar just outside the tunnel. “See the chambers in this wall?” The image was hazy, but it seemed there were definite outlines, rectangular pockets stacked vertically in rows. “These bays are meant to hold transport pods. There might be several inside still intact.”
While it wasn’t direct confirmation, it was as good a starting point as they were going to get, and Rion was itching to finally see what the Librarian’s key unlocked. “Spark and I will go, plus one. Two of you will need to stay behind to monitor things here.”
“If it’s all the same to you guys,” Lessa responded immediately, “I’ll stay on board.”
“I’ll stay with her.” Normally Niko was the first one off the ship, eager to mix it up with whatever adventures lay ahead. That he chimed in so quickly struck Rion as odd. “You three can go,” he added. “If that’s all right with you, Cap?”
She nodded and then watched him as he went back to his chair and sat, spinning around to chat with his sister. There was a tiredness about him that didn’t come from late nights immersed in all things tech. It was different, something deeper and cloudier, weighing on him. She’d been remiss in not noticing it earlier.
“I will be connected to and monitoring the ship at all times,” Spark assured her, taking her silence for hesitation.
“If there’s any trouble, Less and Niko are well practiced at what to do,” Rion said. Which wasn’t rocket science. They were to immediately take the ship out of harm’s way—par for the course in their line of work. And while Niko’s decision to hang back was highly out of character, Rion would have to leave it until after they were well away from Zeta Halo.
“All right then. Helm is yours. Keep us in the loop. As always, hightail it out of here if anything comes close to discovering your position, and we’ll rendezvous with you later.”
“Got it, Cap,” Niko said. “We’ll keep Ace on standby.”
“Looks like you’re with me then,” Rion told Ram as Spark’s avatar disappeared.
Ram gave the siblings a cocky grin as he got up. “Best let the adults handle it.”
The eye-rolls that ensued left Rion smiling as she exited the bridge with Ram and headed down the corridor. When they emerged on the catwalk overlooking the cargo hold two stories below, Spark’s armiger was there, assembling from a pile of silver alloy parts on the floor by his worktable. Blue hard light illuminated lines and connection points, pulling the pieces together like a magnet. Feet, legs, trunk, arms, hands, and head came into position, hovering close together but not quite touching, simply anchored in place with the light acting as the glue between them.
Spark straightened to his full three meters of Forerunner intimidation and intelligent design. He eased a slow glance over his shoulder, chin lifted and enigmatic blue eyes holding on to Rion’s before he dipped his angular head in acknowledgment.
Goose bumps tingled Rion’s arms, and she was pretty sure she’d never get used to seeing him rise from the floor. It was moments like this that drove home how alien much of him truly was.
The staging area and armory combo, dubbed the locker, occupied a long room off the cargo hold, close to the bottom of the stairs. Holding an array of all-terrain gear and weapons to accommodate a wide variety of environments and situations, it was one of Rion’s favorite places on the ship. Locker collections were built over years and years, decades even, and were prized commodities among salvagers, whose job it was to be prepared for any type of environment. On the rare occasion when collections went up for auction—usually upon a salvager’s retirement or death—it brought salvagers together from all parts of the galaxy and almost always ended up serving as a retirement party or memorial.
Ram retrieved a jacket from his cubby, and then a prepacked utility vest to wear over it. “You packing?”
“Yep. I don’t trust this place. It’s too quiet.”
A white smile peeked through Ram’s dark beard. “Don’t tell me you’re scared of the dark?” He held out another utility vest.
“Funny.” She snagged the vest. As he tied his hair back with a band, she grabbed two extra magazines, sliding them into the vest pockets before putting it on. “More like, I respect the dark. Big difference.”
“Well, it doesn’t get any more alien than this, that’s for sure.” He retrieved a sidearm, checked the clip, and then slipped an M6 into his side holster. “I didn’t think Triniel could be topped, but this… I’m not sure how we’re gonna top this one.”
“Oh, stick with me, Chalva, and I’m sure we’ll find something. Or it’ll find us.” As was usually the case. “Hand me a couple frags, would ya?”
He pulled two from their cradles and passed them over one at a time, then lifted his rifle from the stocks, giving it a quick check. “Ready when you are.”
“We still need to grab a couple grav plates just in case, and then we’ll be all set.”
“No cart?”
She donned her comm piece, adjusting it in her ear. “No, might be too cumbersome to take where we’re going.” Plus she doubted whatever the key unlocked would be so large as to necessitate a gravity cart for transport. Plates were smaller, easier to carry, and only required a person to attach a pair to an object, activate, and then the plates would generate a small antigravity field, effectively allowing the object to carry itself. “We can come back for one if whatever we find is too big for the plates.”
“Roger that.” Ram left to collect the plates from one of the cargo bins.
Once Rion finished strapping on her left forearm gauntlet with its slim integrated datapad, she left the locker room to join him. But the sight of Spark facing the air-lock door, standing completely frozen, drew her to a halt. No sound, no head tilt at her arrival, just silence and stillness.
For the first time in one hundred thousand years he was about to step foot on Zeta Halo. She couldn’t begin to guess what was going on in that complicated mind of his.
In Africa, Rion had heard the Librarian’s voice in a flash of light telling her that Spark was special. Rare. More important than she’d ever know. But many times since that event, despite his extreme power and technological superiority, Rion had felt he needed her protection, her help, and most definitely her friendship and trust. Without it, he might be a very different version of himself—and that was a frightening thought indeed.
She was damn glad he was on their side.
Rion tugged her vest down and walked up next to the three-meter giant. “You doing okay?”
The air-lock door slid open and the ramp descended. “I am about to find out.”
The great maw of darkness that greeted them sent an unnerving chill through the cargo bay. The air was stale and cool. The lights on the ramp illuminated just a small area around the ship, but everything else was utter black. From what she could see of the pathway, it was at least familiar—same Forerunner metal she’d seen in other places before, with similar geometric lines running through the floor, though not as ornate as others she’d seen.
“Lights on.” She pressed the angled shoulder light built into the vest and headed down the ramp. “Comms, we good?”
“Five by five,” Ram said.
“Good luck out there,” Lessa’s voice echoed in Rion’s earpiece. “We’ll be monitoring you every step of the way. Oh, and bring back something amazing.”
Whatever the key unlocked, it wasn’t going to be something as simple as standard treasure. Rion was pretty sure the Librarian hadn’t set up an elaborate hunt like this without a very good, highly significant reason.
“Roger that,” Rion said. “Let’s get moving.”
A long stretch of darkness lay between Rion and her ship. From this distance, the Ace of Spades was nothing but a tiny black lump surrounded by a beacon of dim, distorted light. They’d gone a kilometer and a half, a good twenty minutes where each footstep, breath, and shuffle of clothing, or clink of gear, made a god-awful racket in the god-awful silence. Their combined lighting reached ahead of them by about eight meters, and even though it cast them in a cocoon of pseudo-comfort, the blackness around them held such an eerie quality that Rion had to keep reminding herself to stop clenching her teeth.
At this rate, she’d have a raging headache before reaching the Cartographer.
Finally their light hit on the crack in the pathway. A massive support beam had collapsed from somewhere overhead and pierced through the top of the tunnel entrance—a height of at least six stories—and landed with such driving force that it peeled away the top layer of the pathway, pushing mounds of rolled metal into their way and creating the crack in the structure itself. Not anything she’d want to set Ace near, but insignificant for tiny ants like them to traverse without causing a collapse.
The climb over metal and around debris slowed their progress some, but Spark seemed to have an innate sense for the most economical paths to take. Once they cleared the impact site of the beam and moved past it toward the tunnel, Rion was out of breath and sweating, but she was never more appreciative of the shoulder light on her vest and the stable blue light emitting from Spark as they entered the tunnel. Their lights reflecting off his silver alloy lent him a celestial glow, and made him a comforting beacon in the darkness. In this place of his godlike makers, he never appeared more otherworldly than he did now.
“This entire place feels… off,” Ram muttered, picking up his pace to join Rion.
“I know what you mean.”
“We’re literally walking through Zeta’s underworld.” He turned in a slow arc to light the space behind them, before coming full circle. “The living above us… and down here, who knows what’s down here.…”
“Upping the creep factor, thanks for that.”
Ram cracked a half smile, laugh lines crinkling at the corners of his eyes. “What I’m here for.” He continually scanned the dark areas and after a long stretch of silence said, “It’s like how I imagined the Hall of Eternity.”
“What’s that?”
“Sangheili myth. ‘May your name echo the loudest through the Hall of Eternity,’ ” he intoned, wiggling his eyebrows at her. “A saying from their old mythology, long before the Covenant.” They stepped around some type of vessel debris, a small transport maybe, broken in chunks and scattered along the tunnel. “It’s about one aspect of their god, Fied, the dark star. They say he walks the Hall in worn sandals and carrying an ancient lantern lit with the flame of Urs. Fied never stops walking, never stops swinging his lantern, and never stops calling out the names of the dead. Imagine it, the voice of a dark god, calling out names for eternity in a hall like this. They say he’ll keep walking, keep calling out the names, until the last Sangheili in the universe breathes his last breath.”
It was no wonder Ram thought of the tale; the tunnel could very well serve as an eternal hall for some otherworldly deity.
“Only the names of those who died with honor were called. The Sangheili still see it as something to aspire to. Die with honor or your name will be lost forever.”
“How do you know all this?”
He shrugged. “When you’re the captive of a bunch of hinge-heads, you learn a thing or two.”
What happened to Ram and his crew was a story he might never tell, but Rion got the feeling if ever there was a time for him to finally talk and release some pressure, now might be it.
As it turned out, she didn’t have to ask.
“They liked to use it as an insult… when they tortured my crew. Saying they’d die without dignity, that their names would be lost, that no god of any species would ever call out the names of weaklings like us who screamed and cried and begged.” Ram’s speech came rough and grief-stricken. “ ‘Where is the honor in that?’ That’s what they said.”
A resurgent sect of what remained of the Covenant after the war had been targeting salvagers for months, waiting for them to do the heavy lifting before swooping in, stealing their finds and slaughtering entire crews. It was a quick way for the Covenant to acquire the ships and technology necessary to rebuild their fleet. Ram and his crew had been missing for several weeks before Rion showed up last year, hunting a find on Laconia, and discovered the notorious Gek ’Lhar and his crew, using Ram as target practice for laughs.
Ram was the last one alive, the sole survivor.
Spark had turned and was waiting for them to catch up, his head tilted ever so slightly. His voice was quiet and respectful, yet determined when he spoke. “What were their names?”
His question stole Rion’s breath because she knew immediately what he was really asking. And so did Ram. His gaze locked on Spark, his proud profile cast in sorrow and surprise.
They were in a place built by ancients, whom many had worshipped as divine, in a tunnel that could pass for any mythological hall. If there was ever a time to honor them…
Rion’s heart ached for what Ram had lost and what he had endured. And Spark… In that moment, she realized just how tenaciously his humanity ran. “We’ll call out their names, here and now,” she said. “So they won’t be forgotten.”
She and Spark shared a brief nod.
Anguish pooled in Ram’s dark eyes as he worked his way through his emotions, ending on a note of resolution. But, behind the resolution, Rion didn’t miss the simmering rage. Salvager crews were like family, and he hadn’t been able to put his to rest.
To see his tough exterior struggle to stay composed was difficult to watch. She wanted him to do this, felt it would help him heal—he had bottled up so much this last year—but she wasn’t going to push him. It was his choice.
“Okay. All right.” He drew in a slow, steady breath and released it. “Let’s do it.”
So they walked their own version of the Hall of Eternity, Spark leading the way, a point of light in the overwhelming darkness, as Ram uttered each name. And they in turn called them out, one by one, into the ether.