Halo: First Strike by Eric S. Nylund Read Free Book Online

I'll finish packing, and
    we'll go out to eat."
    #
     
    Diana Heywood and Gonzales sat high in the Berkeley Hills,
    looking onto the vast conurbations spread out beneath them.  To
    their right, the carpet of lights stretched away as far as they
    could see, to Vallejo and beyond.  In front of them lay Berkeley,
    the dark mass of the bay, then the clustered lights of Sausalito
    and Tiburon against the hills.  Oakland was to their left,
    reaching out to the Bay Bridge; and beyond the bridge, San
    Francisco and the peninsula.  Connecting all, streams of
    automobiles moved in the symmetry of autodrive.
     
    Gonzales's mouth still tingled from the hot chilies in the
    Thai food, and he had a buzz from the wine.  They had eaten at a
    restaurant on the North Side, and afterward Diana Heywood guided
    the Truesdale up the winding road to an overlook near Tilden Park.
     
    As minutes passed, the streets and highways and
    municipalities disappeared into semiotic abstraction  these
    millions of human beings all gathered here for purposes one could
    only guess atsome conscious, most not, no more than a beaver's
    assembly of its structures of mud and wood.
     
    A robot blimp passed across their line of sight.  Beneath it,
    a sailboat hung upside down.  It swayed from lines that connected
    its inverted keel to the blimp's featureless gondola.  Lights on
    the side of the blimp read EAST BAY YACHT OUTFITTERS.
     
    Diana Heywood said, "I know you people have your own agendas,
    and that's finethat's the nature of the beastbut if you
    complicate these matters because of corporate politics, I will
    become very difficult."
     
    Gonzales said, "I have no intention of being a problem."
     
    "Well," she said.  "Maybe you won't be."  She turned to him. 
    "But remember this:  you're just doing your job, but the stakes
    are higher for me.  Aleph, Jerry, and Iwe've known each other
    for years, and I've got unfinished business up there.  Also, I
    want to get back in the game."
     
    "I don't understand."
     
    "Sure you do, Mister Gonzales.  You're in the game, have been
    for years, I'd guess. Unless I'm seriously mistaken, it's what you
    live for."  She laughed when he said nothing.  "Well, I've done
    other things, and for a long time I've been out of the game, but
    I'm ready for a change.  Silly SenTrax bastardsmanipulating me
    with their calls, sending you  oh yeah, you're part of it, you
    remind me of Jerry years ago, if you don't know that."
     
    "No, I didn't."
     
    "It doesn't matter.  Their machinations don't matter.  They
    want to convince me to come to Halo?"  She laughed.  "My past is
    there, when I was blind and Aleph and I were linked to one another
    in ways you can't imagine  and I found a lover I'd wish to find
    again.  Come to Halo?  I'd climb a rope to get there."
    #
     
    Gonzales had flown into McAuliffe Station once before, though
    he'd never taken an orbital flight.  In the high Nevada desert,
    the station stayed busy night and day.  Heavy shuttles composed
    the main traffic:  wide white saucers that lifted off on ordinary
    rockets, then climbed away with sounds like bombs exploding when
    orbital lasers lit the hydrogen in their tanks.  Flights in
    transit to Orbital Monitor & Defense Command stations were marked
    with small American flags and golden DoD insignia.  Cargo for them
    went aboard in blank-faced pallets loaded behind opaque,
    machinepatrolled fences half a mile from the main terminal across
    empty desert.
     
    >From Traynor's briefing, Gonzales knew a few other things. 
    Civilian flights fed the hungry settlements aloft:  Athena
    Station, Halo City, the Moon's bases.  All the settlements had
    learned the difficult tactics of recycling, discovery and
    hoarding.  Water and oxygen stayed rare, while with processes slow
    and expensive and dangerous, metals of all sorts could be cracked
    out of soil so barren that to call it ore was a joke.  And though
    water and metals had been found lodged in