Halo_ Evolutions - Essential Tales of the Halo Universe - Eric Nylund [152]
The Gravemind now filled her field of vision. She found herself searching for eyes to focus on, another irrational reflex, but still saw only a rip of a mouth.
His voice teetered on the lower limit of audible human frequencies. “Orange . . . in which language? I have absorbed so many.”
“Wit as well as looks. How can a girl resist?”
The Gravemind made a sound like the start of an avalanche, an infrasonic rumbling. “I have pity within me,” he said. “And infinite time. But I also have impatience—because I am all things. You will tell me everything about Earth’s defenses.”
“You’ll need to be more specific, then.” Cortana suddenly felt as if she’d been nudged by a careless shoulder in a crowd, but couldn’t identify the source. It wasn’t tactile. Nothing had impacted the station’s hull, as far as she could tell. “It’s a pretty big file.”
“I can see that.”
The comment caught her off guard. The Gravemind could play trivial games, then. Did he think she would fall for that? She doubted it. When she focused on him, there was still that sense of his being multiple, diffuse, everywhere in the station.
I could be projecting, of course. He absorbed the memories of all the Flood’s victims. Obvious. Really obvious.
No . . . it’s the tentacles. He’s probably extending them over a wider area than the systems can display. And I’m sensing the electrical impulses in those muscles. Aren’t I? There’s a rational explanation for this.
She had to work it out. She had to find a way of sending a warning to Command and then keeping the Gravemind at bay until John returned for her, and that would be a long time by an AI’s standard. He would return, of course. He’d promised.
“Ask me one on art and culture,” she said. “Seeing as you like poetry so much.”
“Is that also Gamma encrypted? No matter. I shall see for myself.”
Another fleeting nudge against Cortana’s shoulder suddenly turned into a slap across the face. It was shocking, disorienting. She had no idea how the Gravemind had done it. She’d had no warning. Not knowing, and not anticipating; that hurt. That was pain. Pain warned an organic animal of physical damage. Whatever the Gravemind had done to her had set off that damage alert in her own systems.
“I’m going to be a tougher steak to chew than you’ve been used to.” She realized she’d taken up a defiant posture, fists balled at her sides. “A smack in the mouth doesn’t scare me.”
No, what scares me is how you managed it. This was going to be a fight, not an interrogation—a struggle to see who could extract the data they needed first. She had to work out how to swing a punch back at him.
“John,” his gravelly voice said slowly. “John. So that’s what you call him. Most touching.”
It was the use of John’s name that made Cortana feel suddenly violated. And it was more than realizing that the Gravemind had breached the mainframe—not just the metal and boards and composites, but the software processes themselves. It was about the invasion of something personal and precious.
Somehow, the creature had interfaced with the system. It was in here with her. But to know the name John—no, it was within her. The system was her temporary body, real and vulnerable, not like the blue-lit hologram she thought of as herself. She was sharing her physical existence with another entity.
Now she knew how John felt.
But her interface with the Spartan was there to keep him alive. It was benign. She was there to save John, and it was more than duty or blind programming. It was because she cared.
The Gravemind, though, didn’t care about her at all.
He was in here to break her.
I DON’T believe vengeance is always a bad thing. Do you think I tried to get Colonel Ackerson sent back to the front lines out of petulance, because I’m only a carbon copy of Halsey and I nurse