Halo: Indelible Past/Chapter Nine

Now

The shuttle's common area was bare and featureless, sporting only a single table--a workbench, strewn with the fragments of several different weapons--and no chairs to speak of. Looking around, Simon scowled as he remembered his old shuttle, which had been strewn from end to end with scavenged junk.

I should have sold that stuff when I had the chance, he thought bitterly. Not kept it around to get blown to hell on Famul.

This shuttle's sparseness didn't come as too big of a shock. Covenant designs had always been minimalist, and he couldn't expect Ro'nin to be as big of a slob as he was. Even Kenpachus took up as little space as possible; after stripping off most of his armor, the big Jiralhanae had seated himself in an alcove and closed his eyes while cradling his sword. The alien's ape-like face assumed a contented expression, and Simon heard him muttering something that sounded like a chant under his breath.

Yeah, Kenpachus was weird.

Zoey had been quite willing to help with the boxes, though willing and able had turned out to be very different realities. In the end, Simon had wound up doing most of the work anyway though, as Diana had so helpfully pointed out, he was the one with the augmented body. Now the girl sat awkwardly atop the largest box, uncomfortably close to Simon's stolen MJOLNIR suit. Her eyes kept darting over to Kenpachus, hovering over him momentarily before darting away to look at something else.

Simon couldn't blame her for being a little unnerved by such an imposing Jiralhanae specimen. After all, Zoey had come very close to rotting out the rest of her life in one of their slave pits; it had taken Simon a while to get used to working with the creatures after seeing them rip apart his fellow SPARTAN-IIIs during the Human-Covenant War and experiencing their savage tendencies first hand as a slave himself. It really was a wonder that Zoey was willing to be in the same room with one at all.

Simon glanced down at another box, which he'd partially unpacked to unveil the computer gear stuffed inside. Diana's data chip was in that tangled mess of wires along with the disk they'd recovered. She'd been hard at work analyzing the thing since they'd taken off, a task that had kept her mercifully quiet for some time now.

"So," Ro'nin said, dropping into the common area through the small hatch that led up to the cockpit. "If you're as rich as Mordred says you are, girl, why turn to a maggot like him when you need to get home?"

Zoey didn't look at him. In his battered armor, stained with the blood of nearly a dozen different species, Ro'nin wasn't exactly a pretty sight. He'd removed his helmet to reveal a harsh face that was fierce even by Sangheili standards.

"I don't have any of the money with me," she said quietly as Ro'nin crossed over to lean against the work bench. "And even if I could get a message to my family, someone might intercept it."

Ro'nin nodded. Simon was one of only a handful of humans who could read Sangheili facial expressions, but even to him the mercenary's mandibled face was impassive. "Smart human," he commented. "Though relying on Mordred is like taking a swim in the rapids; he's just as likely to smash you against the rocks as he is to get you where you need to go."

Zoey pulled her legs up against her chest as if trying to minimizing Ro'nin's target. "I trust him."

"And I thought you were brighter than most." Ro'nin shook his head. "I've been around this galaxy since before the Schism and I've never known such a low, despicable person. Mordred's a cheap, cowardly, spiteful bottom feeder, and for some reason he manages to keep finding jobs out here."

"Oh, like you're any better," Simon retorted from the other side of the room. "You'd kill your own mother if the price was right."

Ro'nin just laughed. "Probably, yes." He turned back to Zoey. "My advice to you is to feed us well when we get you home, then hope we never set eyes on each other again."

Zoey looked away. "I know how things work out here," she muttered glumly. "It's awful."

"Yep," Simon said, lifting his battered helmet up and staring into its dented visor. "That's the frontier for you. The only way to survive out here is to be ruthless and cunning, or it'll chew you up and spit you out. Sucks, doesn't it?"

"I'm not ruthless," Zoey said, closing her eyes. "And I'm not cunning."

"You can surprise yourself," Simon muttered, still looking into his visor. He hadn't thought he could be ruthless even after all the training on Onyx and Kopis on the Ides of March. It had taken a hellhole like Mamore to show him just how brutal he could be. He'd learned his lesson well. Yeah, we all surprise ourselves, one way or another.

Slipping his helmet on, he opened a private channel to Diana. The A.I. wasn't linked into his prosthetic arm like she usually was; instead, he'd plugged her into the small nest of boxed computer gear where she was plugging away at the Path Walker data.

It had been hard enough formatting his equipment to match the Covenant-style hardware, and now the encryption data was so thick that it was taking Diana--little miss I'm the smartest A.I. in the galaxy Diana--hours just to get started on its contents.

"How we doing?" he asked. "Any idea what's up with the data yet?"

For once, she was late to answer. "Not yet," she said after several seconds. "Can't talk right now." Short as well. The limited functions of the computer hardware plus the task of decoding everything must have her completely tied up.

Simon shrugged and leaned back against the shuttle's smooth wall. With Zoey so worried about the aliens and Diana busy with the data disk, there wasn't much more to do but shut his eyes and wait it out.