Episode 03: Safe House

Previous episode:	Episode 02: From Fire to Blood
Next episode:	Episode 04: Jackals
Episode 03: Safe House
Series overview
Series:	Hunt the Truth
Season:	Season 2
Episode specifications
Episode:	03
Air date:	October 6, 2015
Run time:	23:02

Episode 03: Safe House was the third episode released for the second season of the Hunt the Truth audio drama. The episode was originally released on Soundcloud on October 6, 2015.

Official summary

“

A friend returns from the dead, a safe house becomes a trap, and Maya is faced with a decision that will change her life forever.

”

Plot summary

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Audio transcript

• Maya (voiceover): My ears were still ringing from the bombs. ONI had sent me in on a recon mission, but then hit the base with everything they had, almost no warning, no attempt to protect me or Ari, certainly not civilians. I was just another data-point to them, disposable. I could feel all the hearts and minds I fought for slipping away. The UNSC would always bomb and the rebels would always take up arms and vengeance. Maybe both Sully and Ilsa were right – there was no room for anything else.

[Bostwick moaning in pain]

• Maya (voiceover): As I looked down at Bostwick, I couldn’t help but feel guilty. I had taken this lost, naive kid and turned her into a foot soldier for my cause. I became an expert at rationalizing my actions, telling myself that ultimately, I was working towards the greater good.

• Maya: Can I see the wounds?

• Bostwick [screaming]: Don’t touch me!

• BB: I’d recommend sedating her until we can effectively treat her injuries.

• Bostwick: I’d rather rot!

• Maya [whilst injecting Bostwick sedatives]: Just rest.

• Bostwick [fainting]: FERO…

• Maya (voiceover): As Bostwick drifted out of consciousness I looked over at the data chip. Ari secured prime intel on the anomalies and after that airstrike any shred of faith I had that ONI would do the right thing with it was gone. For all I knew they would just cover the whole thing up and let another colony fall. But in the right hands, this could help save lifes. I wasn’t gonna turn it over to them, I was gonna get real answers. And there was only one person who could give them to me.

The only problem was – he’d been dead for months.

[Transporter landing, door opening, Maya stepping out of it]

• Maya (voiceover): The safe house barely qualified as a…house. A crumbling old farm on the outskirts of Bintero, a dusty wasteland in the outer colonies. No one around for miles – except for the occasional alien traitor. Not a great place to live, but a perfect place to hide.

• BB: What it this place? It’s not in my database of safe houses.

• Maya: It’s off the grid.

• BB: There’s some sort of signal interference here.

• Maya: Yeah, that’s kind of the point.

• Maya (voiceover): The safe house was an old lesson from Ari. When ONI puts you undercover, you lose everything. Every trace of who you are is wiped away to protect the mission. Ari taught me, always keep a place just for me, a place to keep memories, to stay attached to the life ONI has erased, a place I could run away to when cover got to deep, somewhere to ground myself – or maybe stash a secret.

• Mshak [from behind a door]: Who’s this? Don’t come in! I’ve got guns! I’ve got…

[Maya opening the door, Mshak now speaking clearly]

• Mshak: …guns!

• Maya: Get away Mshak.

• Mshak: Maya! You’re back! I thought you’d never come back, I thought…nobody would ever come back.

• Maya (voiceover): He looked…rough. Greasy hair, a thin, patchy beard, the weight he’d lost in his face made his darding, blood shot eyes all the more unsettling.

• Maya: What have you been doing to my house?!

• Mshak: Oh you have no idea what it’s been like. Wait, why are you carrying a dead person?

• Maya: She’s not dead, here, help me get her into the bunk.

• BB: Mshak Maradi!

• Mshak: Woooooow,is that an AI?

• BB: Well, you’re rather energetic for a dead man.

• Mshak: You’ve got an AI?

• Maya: This is Black Box.

• BB: The official report indicated that you’ve been terminated – quite brutally if I record.

• Mshak: I wish I had been.

• BB: He does looked like he has been tortured.

• Maya: He hasn’t been tortured!

• Mshak: Oh, really?! Ok, then what would you call it? She left me here with no coms, no access to waypoint, no slush, I’ve been reading paper books. Pa-per books!

[Mshak ranting in the background]

• Maya (voiceover): I couldn’t go through it killing Mshak. He figured out my secret and he was gonna tell Ben, he had to be silenced but – when I’d broken into his house that night, he got so scared, he ran head first into a wall and knocked himself unconscious. He is a great hacker, but dangerous? Not even close. So I hit him, stuck him out in the middle of nowhere and put a blackout array cutting off communications for a kilo in every direction. But a few months cut off from the outside world had left him a little text-starved. In honest a goodness AI was the best toy I could have brought him.

• Mshak: You know, you’re really top of the line stuff. You live on this chip?

• BB: In a way, you see…

• Mshak: Ok, I have a question! I’m sure you get it all the time, but other AIs they look like people, right, but you just like a big, blue cube.

• BB: I am pure intellect, I feel no need to affect a façade in order to make myself more palatable to humans. I am what I am. I am Black Box.

• Mshak: Yeah, right… but the box is really blue, though.

• BB: Black is the absence of light, a hologram can’t display black.

• Mshak: I feel I’m gonna call you Blue Cube.

[Mshak getting electro-shocked]

• Mshak: Ahh! Did you just electrecute me?

• BB: No, oh, hang on…yes.

• Mshak: Listen, Blue Cube, I can stick this chip in a microcooker and…

• Maya: Mshak, stop it!

• Mshak: Hey, ehm, why did you bring him here? He’s ONI.

• Maya: Mshak, I’m ONI.

• Mshak: And how long is THAT going to last once he tells them you’re keeping me alive? [whispering] You can’t trust an AI, they want you to think they are these perfect synthetic beings, but you know how they make them? They take some dead guys brain and just rewire it, with new programming, they’re basically computer zombies!

• BB: We also have excellent hearing.

• Maya: FOCUS, Mshak! The anomalies, the same ones you were tracking? They’re here now and they’re real. They’ve already destroyed five colonies. Now I’ve got a data chip full of intel from one of the sites and zero context, I NEED information, the kind that isn’t sitting out there in the waypoint index, the kind that you can only find in the slush.

• Mshak: Wait, do you mean you’re going to give me back my compad?

• Maya: Hold on, hold on…

[Mshak celebrating]

• Mshak: Yes! Yes, yes yes!

• Maya: I’m opening up a limited channel, an encrypted frequency just for you so BB can’t use it to call ONI…

• BB: I’m not sensing a lot of trust between us, Maya…

• Maya: Find out what’s going on – fast!

• Mshak: Absolutely. One billion percent focused. Wow, I have a lot of unread messages. Oh no!

• Maya: What?!

• Mshak: The unthinkable has happened. I fell of the leaderboard in Unggoy farmer…

• Maya: Mshak!

• Mshak: One billion percent focused!

• Maya (voiceover): While Mshak tried to uncover the secrets of the slush I went in to check in on Bostwick’s wounds. Mshak had made a real mess of the place: clothes and ration wrappers on every surface. But I noticed Mshak had left one area untouched – my shelf. I picked up an old photo, me as a little girl holding up a trophy, spelling I think, was hard to remember the exact moment, but I remembered the place: my dad’s old cabin. When I was setting up the safe house I kept thinking back to that cabin with its wooden walls and a door my dad carved himself. Something about it always felt so real, so permanent. I was still lost in the past when I looked over and saw Bostwick, awake, staring at me, pure hatred in her eyes. The look on her face caught me completely off guard, she looked like she was ready to kill me. Before I could get a word out, Bostwick was coming at me with a scalpel. She was still weak though. It didn’t take much to restrain her. Eventually she gave in to the pain.

[Maya and Bostwick fighting]

• Maya: I know that you’re angry, I would be, too! If you just listen…

• Bostwick: Just do it!

• Maya: Do what?

• Bostwick: Kill me, torture me, I’d rather die than be in the custody of a traitor!

• Maya: What? I’m not a trai…

• Bostwick: You’re ONI, aren’t you?!

• Maya: Yes, but I’m trying to protect you, you’re my friend.

[Bostwick spitting]

• Bostwick: FERO and I were friends, I don’t know who you are.

• Maya: You’re right, you don’t know me. But we are not so different, you and I, ok? Just trust me.

• Bostwick: Trust you?! Were YOUR parents killed by ONI officers?!

• Maya: No… Bostwick.

• Bostwick: I’m nothing like you. You’re a liar!

• Maya: You’re right. But, believe it or not, you were the closest thing I have to a friend and I want you to know the truth – I at least owe you that. Come on, ask me whatever you want.

• Bostwick: What’s your real name?

• Maya: Maya Sankar.

• Bostwick: Mh, and how long have you been a rat traitor?!

• Maya: I joined ONI when I was around your age, but I didn’t get into spec-ops…

[Maya continues talking in the background]

• Maya (voiceover): As I opened up to Bostwick after YEARS of deceiving her I told myself that regaining her trust like this would protect her, but as the answers poured out of me I knew deep down why I was really doing it. I needed to finally start telling the truth.

• Maya: No, I had absolutely no idea they were gonna attack. They kept me strictly need to know.

• Bostwick: Are you going to try to turn me, make me into an ONI spy like you?

• Maya: No! It…it wasn’t like that.

• Bostwick: All that stuff you said as FERO about finding the truth, about beating them with ideas and lifting up the outer colonies as equals?

• Maya: I meant it! Every word. More than anything I just I wanted…*sighs*, I don’t know. After being undercover for so long I started to feel…sometimes I feel like I am FERO. It’s hard to explain and I want what she wants, you know, and in a lot of ways being FERO makes more sense to me now than any…

• Mshak: Maya!

• Maya (voiceover): I rushed in and found Mshak with his jaw on the floor.

• Mshak: You know, you could have led with: Hey Mshak, here is your compad and by the way: THE MASTER CHIEF IS DEAD!

• Maya: Yeah, I’ve been a little preoccupied. What does it say?

• Mshak: Well, the official news is that there is no news. Same speech on a loop: He died in the line of duty, protecting us all, bla, bla, bla, what a hero. BUT, lots of speculation on the slush. Theories, other theories debunking those theories, some people claiming the UNSC is using his death to cover up a bigger story, they think he’s still alive.

• BB: Reliable, I’m sure.

• Maya: What would the UNSC have to gain from presenting the chief as dead? Why destroy his legacy?

• Bostwick: It cements his legacy.

• Maya (voiceover): Bostwick had made a way to her feet and stumbled into the room.

• Bostwick: You once said that heroes are born out of sacrifice, but cemented in death.

• Maya: Yeah, but still: why? What, to cover up the anomalies? How does killing the Chief publically cover THAT up?

• Mshak: It doesn’t. UNLESS the truth is scarier than the cover up. What if the whole Beko story was a dry run? If the Chief isn’t following orders anymore and he’s proving to be more trouble than he’s worth. You’d have to get rid of him, right?

• Maya (voiceover): I was processing everything very slowly at that point. But what Mshak said had struck a chord. If the chief wasn’t following the rules and the ONI AI bots statistical analysis pointed to his death being more valuable than his life, they wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger – I should know, I’ve just been the victim to the same analysis.

• Maya: Ok, so is there anything specific about the anomalies?

• Mshak: I did find one theory, but it’s a little new, new, new testament. You know the tria