Halo_ Evolutions - Essential Tales of the Halo Universe - Eric Nylund [32]
Mo Ye spoke in an almost gentle tone, her version of a bedside manner, Baird supposed.
“No thanks,” he said. “I’ll be seeing plenty of blood and guts where we’re going.”
“Let’s hope not,” replied Mo Ye. “Intelligence is rough, but we’re not expecting trouble, just a lot of rubble.”
“When will I be back on duty?” he asked. Baird was starting to worry that this surgery would keep him shipboard. He didn’t want to miss the ride when he and his squad were dropped in hot on Algolis’s night side. Quiet or not, he loved the thrill of the drop and the subsequent sweep. He wanted action.
“Two days, by rule,” she said, “but you’ll be happy and ambulatory in the morning. Now go to sleep.”
Baird heard the pop-hiss of a pneumatic syringe and the gentle beep of his vitals as he lay in the padded autosurgeon cot, even as the narcotic slowed his pulse. He never felt the injection itself. The soft yellow glow of the medbay became a warm, reassuring sepia.
The red-haired medical technician who’d given him the bad news earlier smiled through the yellowing haze and he was lulled by the slowing beat of his own heart. And then there was nothing.
The Heart of Midlothian scythed through slipspace with the silent precision of a scalpel.
TWO
___________
“Wake up.”
In his dream, the voice was of his mother in Scotland, telling him it was time to get up and go to school. It was freezing outside, he knew. A biting, bludgeoning cold that punished schoolchildren before they ever made it to class. An unforgiving, frigid wind that roared in from the gray North Sea and turned little hands into useless pink mittens, unable to type or scratch on datadesks until furious rubbing and cosseting heaters warmed the blood again.
He didn’t want to go to school. He wanted to stay here, wrapped up in these soft blankets.
“Wake up.” Insistent now. But hissed. Not his mother. Not Maud Baird’s pleasant singsong brogue. Nope, this was thick Mandarin-accented En glish.
The sepia glow had gone. The medbay was in near darkness, punctuated by the soft red pulse of the emergency floor lights. A dream. But goddamn if that cold wasn’t real.
“What the f—”
“Ssssh.” The hissed demand seemed to drill into Baird’s ear. He realized it was Mo Ye, using the directional acoustics of the medbay—ostensibly for patient privacy. But he knew, even through the groggy haze of narcotics and sleep, that something was wrong. The lights, for one thing, without even the pink glow of her avatar to show which plinth she stood on.
“What’s happening?” Now he whispered.
“I’ll tell you as you move, but right now if you don’t put on some clothes and do as I say you will be dead in a couple of minutes.” Mo Ye was using a tone he’d never heard before. He started moving.
In less than a minute, he was up, dressed, and fastening his boots. The confusion and torpor of the drugs were still softening the edges of everything. This still didn’t feel real. Mo Ye began to brief him. The news wasn’t good. But it certainly was real.
“They were waiting for us when we dropped out of slip-space,” she whispered.
“Covenant?” he blurted, embarrassed even as he spoke the obvious.
“Yes. A small group. Not a formation we’ve encountered before. At least according to my records. One Cruiser and four completely new ships escorting it. All dark gray, no surface features or lights and no weapons systems that I could discern. What they did have was a bellyful of boarding craft. And our ONI contact group was not there.”
“So we were boarded?”
“Almost as soon as we dropped out of slipspace. Perfect targeting. As if they knew exactly where we were going to exit. Inside the range of our weapons systems before I could react. Punctured the hull in two hundred different locations and swarmed us before we could sound a general alarm. It was like exiting in the middle of a meteor storm.”
“What about the crew? What about the men?”
“Dead.”
“All of them?!” There was a tremor of