Halo_ Evolutions - Essential Tales of the Halo Universe - Eric Nylund [83]
Two turned on the horizontal lantern over her visor and peered through. The beam illuminated subway tracks, a stalled train, and several signs in Spanish in the human-hewn tunnel on the other side.
She flicked the light off and made her way up the rest of the tunnel in the green gloom of light-enhancement. The range counter in her HUD said she was within fifty meters of her anti-grav pylon. The tunnel emptied out into another with a level floor and a ceiling high enough for her to stand up all the way again.
As soon as she did so, a Jackal rounded a bend, his beak pointed downward at a translucent glowing cube in his hands.
Right before he walked into her, he looked up, sensing an obstruction, and Black-Two unloaded her assault rifle into his face and neck. The deafening digging sounds reverberating off every inch of the warren completely drowned out the burp of the AR and the Kig-Yar dropped without a cry.
Black-Two crouched behind the bend in the tunnel, but no companions of the dead Jackal emerged. Her motion sensor remained clear of red dots. The countdown on her HUD hadn’t quite reached eight minutes.
Near the floor, along one wall, she found a crevice big enough to stuff the Jackal’s corpse into in case any hostiles decided to come up the tunnel behind her. She scraped gravel to cover the purple bloodstains on the tunnel floor and accidentally kicked the smoky cube the Kig-Yar was holding. As the cube bounced across the floor she thought she could see three-dimensional images in the center of it. She picked it up and turned it over in her hands.
The sides of the cube were perfectly clear, and its interior was filled with a cloudy gel that churned and swirled as if it had its own internal air currents. In the center of the mist stood a slowly rotating three-dimensional image of a Yanme’e male, wings extended. A few Covenant characters floated near its feet. Black-Two had studied her Interrogator enough to recognize these characters as numbers—years, in fact. Two dates about a decade apart.
A trio of buttons appeared beneath Black-Two’s fingers on the surface of the cube. She tapped one, and the mist seethed, wiping away the large image of the Drone, and started cycling through a series of images inside an immaculate plasticine honeycomb marred by a spray of Drone legs, abdomens, heads, and splashes of their green-gray blood. Interspersed among these three-dimensional tableaus of slaughter were scenes of smashed eggs, presumably Yanme’e as well, shell shards hurled explosively against the luminescent hive walls, the not-quite-living insides scooped out and oozing across the floor. The same Kig-Yar character floated beside each image, every time.
The countdown on her HUD reached five minutes.
She removed the Interregator from her forearm and waved its optical scanner over the cube until it picked up the Jackal word.
While she waited for the Interrogator’s wheel icon to stop rotating, she played with the cube a little bit more, punching other buttons and seeing where they took her. In all cases, the mist wiped away the existing image and replaced it with another 360 degree three-dimensional image of an individual Drone, attached to various scenes of hive carnage, all accompanied by the same Kig-Yar character.
At last, the Interrogator flashed at her. “Untranslatable,” it claimed. “Word itself translation from Yanme’e language. Nearest analogue(s): ‘Unmutual’ (43% accuracy), ‘Incapable of Socialization’ (51% accuracy).”
Two shrugged, dropped the cube, and made her way to the mouth of the tunnel. One of the Beacon’s pylons passed a full story over her head as she peeked just over the ground level. An erupted heap of asphalt four or five paces away momentarily blocked her view from the pylon’s guard—three Jackals and two Hunters—but they soon marauded into view. They weren’t looking in the direction of the pylon at all, but were fixated on the Drone swarm as