Halo: Glasslands Read Free

use.”
    “Ah.” ‘Telcam made a little sound like a horse puffing through its lips. A fine spray rained on her again and she tried not to recoil. She picked up a whiff of something far too much like dog food. “ Kingmaker. This is your policy. You help us take control so that you know your enemy and think you can then control us. ”
    “Look, we’re never going to be friends, Field Master. But we can agree to stay out of one another’s way and lead separate existences. Too many lives have been lost. It has to stop.”
    ‘Telcam leaned closer again as if he was doing a uniform inspection. “You have colonies here. This is part of the war. This is the cause of our enmity.”
    “Some of our colonies don’t like us very much either. Humans kill humans too.”
    “How tangled your lives are.”
    “My, you do speak good English.”
    “I was a translator once. I interpreted your communications for my old shipmaster. I speak several human languages.”
    Well, that explained a hell of a lot. Phillips obviously didn’t know, or at least he hadn’t said, but Osman decided to cut him some slack because he’d only been tasked to do one thing: to get her an audience with dissident Sangheili who were likely to disrupt any peace deals. He was lucky to get that far without having his head ripped off.
    “Well, Field Master, I think we can help one another keep our troublesome factions in line.” Osman turned slightly to keep Phillips in her peripheral vision, just in case he wandered back and heard too much. “It might require some discretion, because we can’t be seen to ally with you. But an unstable Sangheili empire doesn’t help us, and an unstable human one is a threat to you. Yes?”
    “And some of my brethren might not understand my willingness to talk to infidels. So we do favors, you and I.”
    “Indeed. For the greater good.” Osman paused a beat and made sure she didn’t blink. Sangheili had a military sense of honor, and the truth she was about to drop into the deceit went some way toward satisfying her own. “If I thought ‘Vadam would survive as leader, I would be doing deals with him instead.”
    She wasn’t sure if Sangheili ever smiled. If they did, she had no idea what it looked like, not with that four-way jaw. But ‘Telcam’s expression shifted a little. The muscles in his dog-reptile face relaxed for a moment.
    “I have a condition,” he said.
    “I thought you might.”
    “You blaspheme about the gods. You spread vile lies about them. This must stop.”
    “We just showed you what the Halo was.” Oh shit. Come on, think. There’s a way through this. “We didn’t set out to insult your beliefs.”
    “So the Halos are machines of destruction. So you say the gods themselves were killed by them.” ‘Telcam leaned over her, almost nose to nose. He was so close that she couldn’t focus on those doglike teeth. They were just cream blurs in a purplish haze of gum. “ Your god chose to die for you and that is precisely why you revere him, yes? And why you say he also lives. This so-called proof about the Halos means nothing. Not even to you. ”
    And he uses the plural. Halos.
    Osman suspected that he wanted her to agree with him, to reassure him that gods could be both dead and eternal at the same time like some divine Schrödinger’s cat, to put some certainty back in his life. She knew that feeling. But the last thing she wanted was a theological argument with a heavily armed alien four or five times her weight. She bit back a comment that her name was Osman and that he was thinking of someone else’s religion.
    “We’ve had scientists who claim they’ve disproved the existence of God, and others who argue you can’t prove anything,” she said carefully. “But it hasn’t made any difference to any of our religions. Faith is quite separate.”
    “Then you understand.” ‘Telcam drew back. “If you arm us … if you stay away from our worlds … then when we take power and