Page 10 (1/2)

And that was al the edge that ‘Telcaanized The Arbiter wasn’t, not yet

Phil ips realized that he was hoping for a draw, just like ONI So he didn’t trust ‘Telcam to keep his side of the deal after al , to leave Earth colonies alone if humans kept out of his way Wel , if he survived this, he’d have one hel of a lecture tour ahead of him, let alone the chat shows and books

Funnily enough, the last place he wanted to be right noas back in Sydney at the university, safe and planned out to retire what he’d co to check out ancient Forerunner inscriptions to see if there were clues to the locations of the re Halos

"‘Telcam," he said, "do you heili didn’t look up from his charts "You won’t find a way out"

"I s and relics Is that al right? I promise I’l treat it with respect"

"Very welYou’l knohen you’ve reached an unsafe area"

"Oh" Booby traps? "What’s unsafe?"

"Soes have been wal ed off," ‘Telcam said "That was carried out at the time the Forerunners built this teood reason The Servants of the Abiding Truth have never breached those wal s, nor shal we"

Phil ips had no taboos in his life and found it bizarre that a co hard decisions on a battlefield would accept that kind of n without question But then Phil ips didn’t fear the hand of so him around the ear BB had mentioned the slipspace bubbles in the Onyx Dyson sphere The Forerunners had contained them in soe of time inside them, so Phil ips wondered if they’d built that into other facilities He didn’t want to push his luck and end up in one He’d heard about the Spartan-I I who got lost in one and was lucky there were Huragok around to get her out

I wonder where Adj is now? I hope ONI aren’t vivisecting hily useful

Phil ips could have done with Adj right then, and BB, too He was real y on his o He walked slowly through theeach turn that he took on his datapad so that he could find his way out again, and was struck by the precision of the stone blocks The temple was thousands of years old but the stoneas crisp and immaculate, the joints perfectly square and alht-hand side of the wal as he walked The stone was peach-s of di, but that looked to be a Sangheili addition, not the work of aliens who could bend tihtbulbs spattered with dead insects just didn’t seem to be their style

And then he saw the panels on the wal , the shadows cast by inscriptions, and the anthropologist core of his being went into a feeding frenzy He speeded up to a trot and stood gazing at the first panel in academic ecstasy

He would have described it as a cartouche, but that raved on it hat he’d colyphs Suck on this, Howard Carter I’ve just becoods He decided to risk a thunderbolt and put his hand out to touch the sy that felt solid, a barrier that he could feel but not see He flattened his cheek against the wal in case he could see an actual sheet of transparentIt was one of their protective fields

Wo the hell did they build that into stone and keep it powered all this tiood stuff Come to that … why did they put that barrier there? To keep it clean?

The sy froin of the panel It reminded him of a touch panel on a kitchen appliance

Maybe those aren’t engravings Maybe they’re buttons Switches

Pressing theet past that protective screen anyway Huht have been the whole point--to stop people pressing them by accident He was so pureed to know about this thing, to understand it, had ious lunatic fade into the background

Oh, BB, you should see this

Phil ips took a few ie was low He didn’t knohen he’d get out of here to top it up again so he’d have to conserve power Da to repair the radio ca about how to fix it other than digging out the frag the needle and kil ing himself He stood there in the di himself to take out that lump of metal

The needle would eject from the back plate That hy he had to wear it clipped to his jacket Shit, lucky? You said it What if the iainst the stone wal so that he couldn’t fu the metal out with his stylus It started to bend the front cover out as welThe shrapnel suddenly flew out and pinged on the floor

Phil ips kept the radio flat against the wal , just in case, and pressed the switch on and off a few tiain

Ah well I tried No point wasting tiot Halos to find

He twisted the clip around on the radio and attached it to his top pocket with surgical care,out Then he carried on looking along the wal s for inscriptions, searching for repeating sye

This one was interesting It was an oval hat looked like a section through a vertebra in the middle of it, and it appeared in every cartouche several ti to think like aliens who could bend time when he put his hand on the invisible barrier and a voice suddenly spoke to him out of nowhere

He almost crapped hiod

"Please activate the video input," BB said "Continue when ready"

UNSC PORT STANLEY, EN ROUTE TO SANGHELIOS "Bloody hel , BB," Mal said, leaning on the chart table "There’s a lot of gaps in this schematic"

"In case you hadn’t noticed, Malcolm, " BB said acidly, "I was put out of action while I was doing the survey And since when did you ever have perfect recon data before insertion?"

"Justan observation, ht now Mal prided hi able to focus on the job at hand noon, but part of hiht to worry about Naomi’s reaction to the bombshel about her father Perhaps it didn’t hurt as ht: she said she couldn’t even remember her childhood before she’d been taken for Spartan training, so rown up without a father as welHe tried out the idea of being told that his dad had final y shown up and had a steady career as a serial kil er How did he feel about that? Nothing, nothing at alIt wasn’t real and he couldn’t make it feel that way Staffan Sentzke was definitely real, though And Mal didn’t have a mess of buried traumas like Naomi did