Halo_ Evolutions - Essential Tales of the Halo Universe - Eric Nylund [93]
Rebecca asked, imploring almost: “What do you mean you won’t come back? Come back from what? Come back from what?”
Benti looked through Rebecca to where Lopez knelt, staring wide-eyed at them both. Then realized a moment later, with a fading spike of sadness, that Mr. Doe had gone silent, had become Mr. DOA. Now they’d never learn his name, and all they had was “Mona Lisa,” which might be a ship, a painting, or nothing at all.
Rebecca made a sound close to exasperation, and winked out. This new AI wasn’t big on niceties like “Hello,” “Goodbye,” and “Incoming!” Not like Chauncey.
Benti stared down at Mr. Doe. Really, such a waste. Those nice eyes, that strong chin.
“Come on, all you big strong men,” Benti said. “Help me get him to forensics.” Which was in the infirmary, but Benti didn’t like saying that, since it seemed to mix the living and the dead a little too easily. She also didn’t like telling people she assisted with autopsies, which Mr. Doe definitely required to write the proper ending to his story.
A slow, sad shuffle then as they took the man’s body out of the landing bay. Mr. Doe seemed both heavier and lighter than before. Clarence seemed to take most of the weight, and didn’t seem to mind.
When Benti looked back, Lopez was giving a good, hard look to the space that had been occupied by Rebecca’s avatar, like the sarge had been trying not to see through her, but into her.
>Lopez 0932 hours
By the time she met with Commander Tobias Foucault and Rebecca, Lopez knew this much: nothing that might identify the dead man, not his prison brand, fingerprints, retina scan, DNA, came up on any of the databases aboard the Red Horse. Not that surprising. No way to check against the live databases back home. “Hush-hush,” as MacCraw said.
They met in one of those featureless rooms adjoining the bridge that smelled like disinfectant. Lopez had wanted Benti there, too, but she was more valuable sitting in on the postmortem.
Gray walls and plastic chairs that rocked back too far if you tried to slouch. A live image of the empty pod, with MacCraw and some other Marines cleaning up the blood, played across one screen. A video of the Halo artifact prior to Spartan-117 detonating the Pillar of Autumn’s reactor and destroying it played across the other. A blue-green place. Like a delicate, inverse cross-section of Earth. Now: a black-and-brown snake with orange cracks raging across its pieces, with the vast bulk of the gas giant Threshold looming behind it, inexorably pulling the debris into its gravity well.
Commander Foucault sat opposite her, as always immaculate. The smell of aftershave. Foucault looked haggard and thin and prematurely graying, not at all the robust man she remembered from before his promotion. When he’d been just another one of them. Something about that soured in her mouth. Now she had to call him “sir.” They all respected him, respected the extreme circumstances that such a field promotion called for, but still resented the division of rank.
At the far end of the table, Rebecca manifested in her more usual avatar of a flabby, middle-aged Mediterranean woman in a flower dress. She looked vaguely Italian. Benti had always clucked when she saw Rebecca that way, wondered aloud in their berths why she chose that avatar. But Lopez knew: the same reason off-ship, on leave, she would wear something feminine.
It made people comfortable around Rebecca, took the edge off of their fascination and slight fear of something so seemingly alive made out of motes of light, bits and bytes. But, then, Chauncey had never cared whether they were comfortable around him. His actions did the job instead. So why, exactly, did Rebecca want to be disarming?
“Anything new to report, Sergeant Lopez?” Foucault asked. Despite the worn look to his face, the commander’s light-blue eyes had a powerful effect. A gaze with a kind of grip to it.
“No, sir,” she said. Wondering when the shit was going to hit the fan. Because you didn’t waste the time of the two most important people on the Red Horse by sticking them in a room with