Halo: Mortal Dictata by Traviss Karen

Author:Traviss, Karen [Traviss, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2014-01-21T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

NINE

I HAVE NOT HEARD FROM YOU IN SOME DAYS. WHERE ARE YOU? MORE TO THE POINT—WHERE IS MY SHIP? DO I HAVE TO COME AND HUNT YOU DOWN AS WELL?

—SIGNAL FROM AVU MED ‘TELCAM TO KIG-YAR VESSEL, INTERCEPTED BY EVAN PHILLIPS

STUTTGART ARMORY, NEW TYNE: THREE HOURS AFTER THE DISAPPEARANCE OF VASILY BELOI AND MALCOLM GEFFEN

It was a lot easier being captured by the Covenant.

Vaz waited for the door to slam shut, then spat the blood out of his mouth. He had no idea where he was, and—worse—he didn’t know what they’d done with Mal. He listened, eyes shut, but he couldn’t hear a thing.

If this had been a Sangheili cell, his choices would have been simple and limited. The Sangheili wouldn’t have captured him to check his credentials and let him go; they wouldn’t have taken him hostage for a prisoner swap; and they wouldn’t have held him as a prisoner of war in accordance with international laws on the humane treatment of enemy combatants. If they took him—and they generally didn’t bother with prisoners—then he was already dead. The only question was how long it would take and how much it would hurt. As the outcome was a foregone conclusion, the sane thing was to do something that would get you killed immediately—fight back, fling yourself off a ledge, or make a suicidal run for it, knowing they’d cut you down in seconds. It was worth trying anything to get it over with.

There was always the chance that your buddies would manage to rescue you. But the hinge-heads would only keep you alive to ask you questions, so if there was likely to be more than half an hour’s delay before you were extracted, death was probably the better option.

Vaz’s best guess was that he was being held in a warehouse or weapons store. When they’d bundled him out of the truck with Mal, the vehicle was already in a hangar. But when they were frog-marched through the passages, Vaz spotted the kind of blast doors usually installed in munitions depots. There were the familiar smells of a military establishment—fuel, lube oil, soap, sweat—but he drew more clues from the fact that there were so many lockable doors and yet it didn’t look like a prison. The other buildings where security would be paramount had to be defense-related, like the barracks, a computer center, or somewhere full of stuff that needed controlling even in a town where illegal possession and use of firearms was probably an essential qualification to be let in.

An armory. He was pretty sure that he was in an armory or munitions store.

Right now all he knew for certain was that he was in a small, dimly lit room with no windows—not shuttered, just absent, so maybe a basement—and tied to a metal-framed chair in the center of a painted concrete floor. There was no grimy, fly-spattered lightbulb hanging from a single cable from the ceiling, just a single overhead strip, the kind they used in offices.

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