Halo: Evolutions: Essential Tales of the Halo Universe by Karen Traviss

Author:Karen Traviss [Traviss, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Speculative Fiction
ISBN: 9780765315731
Publisher: Tor
Published: 2009-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

URBAN STRUCTURE, FORERUNNER DYSON SPHERE, ONYX: LOCAL DATE NOVEMBER 2552.

The Forerunners must have been pretty confident about their engineering skills, because there were no stairs here.

Mendez stood in the lobby and looked around for an alternative to stepping into a rectangular opening that looked exactly like an elevator. He already had one Spartan missing. He didn’t plan on adding any more.

Who’d build a tower block with no goddamn emergency stairs?

“Clear right, Chief,” Linda called. She backed out of a small side lobby, rifle raised, and rejoined the cluster of Spartans watching the main entrance and the doors leading onto the lobby. “I’m not picking up any movement on my HUD. And no EM. Nothing at all. It’s deserted.”

The lobby was built in the same pale gold stone as the towers, completely empty and with no sign of ever having been used or occupied. Mendez had cleared plenty of abandoned buildings in his time on colony worlds, kicking doors open and checking room by room for booby traps. The floors were usually scattered with the sad debris of normal lives that had been interrupted for one reason or another, even if it was just scraps of paper or broken glass. But he’d never seen anything as sterile as this. There wasn’t a single trace of dust or evidence of wear on anything. The place could have been constructed yesterday, except he’d never seen a new building quite this clean.

“Well, if we want a vantage point,” he said, “we have to get up top somehow.”

Mendez walked outside again and stood back to count the windows. There were seven openings top to bottom, but he had no way of telling if the spacing meant there were a few floors with very high ceilings, or if some floors just didn’t have any natural light. He went back in and paused at the entrance to the elevator.

I hope that’s what it is, anyway. Assumptions get you killed.

“Come on, Chief.” Fred put one boot on the floor of the elevator cage. “Nobody goes anywhere on their own until we figure out how this maze works. Everyone else—stay put.”

Mendez stepped in beside Fred. The two of them stood there for a moment, looking around for anything that resembled controls. Maybe it was a gravity lift: there were no signs on the walls at all, recognizable or otherwise. The ceiling of the elevator cage didn’t give Mendez any clues either, but then his stomach lurched and he realized he was moving. The entrance vanished below them.

“Okay, people, going up,” Fred said. “I don’t know what the Chief did, but it worked.”

“I just looked up,” Mendez said.

“Okay, so maybe it responds to that. Up for up, down for down…”

“And stop?”

They were now looking at a blank wall and it was hard to tell if they were still moving. Mendez shut his eyes for a moment to see if he could detect motion, but he wasn’t sure of it until he saw the opening onto another floor slide slowly past them.

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