Halo: First Strike (29 page)

guerrillas.

"Well, then, let's be on our way.  Your aircraft is waiting

for you nowtime passes very quickly today, it seemsand you

should be going.  Would you mind if I joined you?"

"No," Gonzales said.  "Not at all.  If you don't mind almost

being killed."

"Oh, that's happened to me lately.  I don't mind.  Besides, I

need to experience these things.  Like you, I do wish to exist."

#

Gonzales sat in the plane's near-darkness, beside him the

young person with the shining face, both waiting for

"Kachin attack group, it looks like," the pilot said.

The miniatures on the screen moved toward them.

"Extremely small electronic image," the young person said. 

"Very good for air attack against superior technology.  Young

warriors ride them; they carry missiles on their own bodies, slung

like babies."

The pilot yelled, "Fuck, they launched!"

The plane began its air show leaps and dives and turns, and

at the instant of his terror, Gonzales felt the young person's

hand on his arm.  "They fire too quickly," the young person said. 

"Except for that one."  The young person pointed to one of the

miniature aircraft on their plane's display and said, "It comes

closest, and I think its pilot will wait until we are at point-

blank range."

"Won't that kill him, too?" Gonzales asked.

"Oh yes," the young person said.  "Let's look.  Better yet,

let's be."

The pilot was a young woman wearing a night-flying helmet

that enabled her to see in infra-red and carrying beneath her, as

the young person had said, a one-shot heat seeker in a sling. 

Gonzales and the young person looked through her eyes at the scene

of battle and thought her thoughts and felt her surge of adrenals.

In her glasses, the plane's image was clear, a white shape

outlined in red; she let her guidance system keep her with it,

closing the distance between them as it maneuvered and avoided the

missiles fired by those around her.

She felt excited, yet calm; she had been in combat before,

and things were going as their briefing had said.  Though this

plane could outfly them so easily, could accelerate up or away,

into the night, first it had to evade their missiles; just a few

seconds of straight flight would be all they needed.  She would

wait and grow closer; she would wait until the plane was so close

she could not miss, or until the others had failed.

Then all around her the others began to die, in explosions

that made white flowers in her overloaded night-glasses

The plane of her enemies stood before her, perhaps near

enough, perhaps not, but she knew there was no time left, that

there was another player in this game and it was killing them all. 

So she was ready, her fingers reaching for the launch trigger,

when she saw an object coming toward her, already too close and

growing closer with impossible quickness, the heat of its exhaust

another flower in her glasses, then it burst and she felt the

smallest imaginable moment of quite incredible pain

Back inside the plane, Gonzales and the young person died

with her, then Gonzales began sobbing, his body hunched over, as

this woman's death and his own survival fought inside him  grief

and terror and gratitude and joy and triumph and loss all mixed

and cycling through him.  He could also hear the young person next

to him weeping.  The light from a Burmese Air Force "Loup Garou"

played over the interior, over the two of them and the shocked

pilot, who looked back at them in amazement.

Time stopped all around them.  The pilot's strained face had

frozen,  all the instruments on the pilot's panel were locked onto

a single moment, and out the window, the dark river beneath them

had ceased to flow.  Gonzales and the young person sat in a cell

of life amid stasis.

"Don't worry," the young person said.  "This gives us a place

to talk without being bothered.  What do you think just happened?"

"The attack, you mean?"  The young person nodded, light from

its face giving off small shimmering waves of red and blue. 

"Grossback arranged it," Gonzales said.  "He wants to kill me."

"I don't think so.  However, assume that what you say is

true.  Is it important?"

"Yes, of course."

"Why?"

"Because " Gonzales halted, trying to think of all the ways

in which this was important:  to SenTrax, Traynor

"But not to you," the young person said.  "The young woman

died, and her comrades died with her:  that is important.  You and

the pilot lived:  that, too, is important.  The Burmese politics,

the multinat corporate intriguethese are makyo, tricks, nothing

more.  Life and death and their traces in the human heart, these

have meaning to you.  This woman's death lives in you, and your

life shows its meaning.  Forget Grossback, Traynor, SenTrax; fear,

ambition, greed."  The young person looked closely into his face

and said, "I am weaving words around your heart to guide it,

nothing more."

#

Lizzie crawled in darkness through a tunnel in the rock. 

Chill water ran down grooves in the floor and soaked her blouse

and pants.  She tried to stand but lifted her head only a few

inches when she bumped into the top of the chatire, the small

passage she crawled through.  She did not feel at all alarmed or

disoriented.  The low tunnel would lead somewhere, and they would

emerge.  This was a test of some kind, it seemed.

Light appeared, at first almost a pinpoint coming from some

undefinable distance, then a glow that she moved quickly toward,

following a twist in the passage that brought her to an opening in

the rock.

Framed by the mouth of the tunnel, an impossible scene:  a

balloon, its canopy an oblate sphere of green, blew as if in a

strong wind, and its top swung toward her so she could see a great

eye at its apex, wide open and peering up into the infinite sky. 

The iris was dark gold set with light gold flecks.  Around the

eye, a fringe of lashes flickered in the wind.

Hanging beneath the balloon from a dense nest of shrouds, a

platform held a metallic ball, a kind of bathysphere.  Two figures

crouched there, holding to the shrouds and each other, and peered

up into the sky.  By some trick of perspective, the distance

etween her and the balloon shrank until she saw Diana and Jerry,

young and fearful.  She crawled forward, and the balloon and Diana

and Jerry disappeared.

At one turn of the tunnel, red hand-prints on the wall

phosphoresced in the darkness.  At another, she heard the bellow

of a thousand animals, then saw them run toward a cliff and pass

over it, the entire herd of bison running screaming to a mass

death.  Below, she knew, men and women waited to butcher the dead

and carry their meat away.

The rock slanted sharply beneath her, and she began to slide

forward, then she rolled sideways and tumbled out of the chatire

and into a pool of icy water.

"Shit," she said, now soaked completely through, and crawled

out of the shallow pool onto the dry rock surrounding it.  In very

dim light she saw two pedestals with the figure of a bison atop

each, carved in bas-relief out of wet clay.

She looked up to see a figure emerge out of darkness at the

cave's other end.  He was at least eight feet tall, with antlered

head and a face made of light; the water seemed to dance around

him.  They stood facing each other, and she felt herself go weak

at the giant magical presence.

He said, "I'm waiting."

"For what?"

"For you to choose."

"Choose what?  What kind of test is this?"

"Not a test, just a fork in reality, where you will turn down

one road or another."

"Where do the roads go?"

"No one knows.  Each road is itself a product of the choices

you make while on it.  One choice leads to another, one choice

excludes another; one pattern of choices excludes an infinity of

patterns."

"I don't like such choices.  I don't want to exclude

infinity."

"Too bad."  The figure raised a stone knife; the dim light

glinted on its myriad chipped faces.  "You choose, I cut.  You

choose the right hand, I cut off the left; you choose the left, I

cut off the right."

"No!"

"Oh yes, and then your hands grow backboth left or both

right, the product of your choice.  And one choice leads to

another, so you choose again."

Lizzie found herself weeping.

He said, "Choose:  reach out a hand."

She looked at her hands, both precious, thought of all the

richness that would be lost with either one.  Then, puzzled, still

weeping, she asked, "Which is which?"

He laughed, his voice booming through miles of caverns and

tunnels in the rock, carrying across more than thirty thousand

years of human history; he whirled in a kind of dance, the waters

fountaining up around him, chanted in unknown syllables, then

leapt toward her and grabbed both wrists in his great hands and

said, "You will know in the choosing.  Which will it be?"

"I won't choose."

"Then I will take both hands."

"No!" she yelled out in the moment that she extended a hand,

having chosen, and saw the stone knife fall.

#

Diana stood in the living room of her apartment at Athena

Station.  She stood in two times at onceshe was a young, blind,

woman; she was an older, sighted one.

The sighted woman looked around; she had never seen this

place other than in holos, and she felt the touch of a peculiar

emotion for which she had no name:  the return of the almost-

familiar.  The blind woman was unmovedshe carried the apartment

in her head as a complex map of relations and movements, and the

visual patterns this other self saw had no relevance for her.