Halo: Contact Harvest (18 page)

“For speed,” Mack said. As usual, he wore dust-caked denim jeans and a sun-bleached work shirt rolled to the elbows. But he carried his cowboy hat in his hands, an affectation that made his usually dashing smile seem altogether sheepish. “I want to show you something. Well two things actually.” Sif opened her mouth to speak, but Mack cut her off with an apologetic shrug. “Ask away. But I guarantee you’re gonna have plenty more questions pretty darn quick.” Sif raised her chin and gave Mack a curt nod.

Then he opened the cluster’s linked arrays.

For almost ten seconds, Sif’s core did nothing but gape at the flood of data that her fragment sent racing up the maser: ARGUS scans of the alien vessel taken at close range; recordings of radio chatter between Staff Sergeants Johnson and Byrne during a firefight inside
Bulk Discount;
both marines’ debriefs in which they talked in detail about the biology of the aliens they had killed; a copy of al-Cygni’s request to her ONI superiors at FLEETCOM to send reinforcements in anticipation of additional hostile contact.

Byte by byte, Sif answered all her questions. But while her algorithms allowed her core logic a moment of satisfaction, it soon imposed a firm suspicion. “How did you get access to this data?”

“Well, that would be thing number two.” Mack put on his hat, pulled off one of his grease-stained leather work gloves, and extended his hand. “But for that, you’re gonna have to come all the way in.”

Sif stared down at Mack’s cracked and calloused palm.
What he was suggesting simply
wasn’t
done.
Memory leaks, code corruption—there were a million very good reasons why an AI never accessed another’s core logic.

“Don’t worry,” Mack said. “It’s safe.”

“No,” Sif said flatly.

“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,” Mack smiled. A line from Shakespeare’s
Hamlet—a
call to action. “Harvest is in a heap of trouble,” Mack continued. “I have a plan. But I’m gonna need your help.”

Sif’s now thoroughly alerted code screamed at her logic to abandon the fragment. Almost without thinking, Sif reached out and took Mack’s hand.

The two avatar’s edges blurred and shifted as the already overburdened projector calculated proper physics for their contact. Bright motes of light pulsed around them, like a swarm of fireflies. As the projector stabilized, Mack’s processor gently pushed Sif’s fragment into his core.

Or rather, into
one
of Mack’s cores,
Sif thought. For she now saw that his nano-assemblage contained
two
matrices-two pieces of core logic, separate from each other yet both connected to the surrounding hardware of the data center.

One was active, radiating heat. The other was dark, and very cold.

“Who are you?” Sif’s whispered, her blue eyes wide to Mack’s gray.

“Right now? Same fella I’ve always been.” Mack smiled. “Real question is: who am I
about
to be?”

Quickly, Sif took a nervous step backward. Her avatar flickered as the hardware struggled to keep in her focus. Now her core logic
did
try to extract her fragment. But Mack had raised a firewall, locking her inside his core.

“Let me go!” Sif demanded, her voice quavering with fear.

“Whoa there, darlin’!” Mack raised his hand in a calming gesture. “Come on. Think. You
know
me.” He swept his hand around the data center.

Sif’s eyes darted back and forth: titanium beams, rubberized flooring—more a closet than a room. Quickly, she rescanned the DCS database she’d used to analyze the alien vessel’s design, and found her answer: Mack’s data center looked familiar because it was the electronics closet of an old UNSC colony-vessel.

“You’re… a ship AI.”

“Used to be,” Mack said, “a long time ago.”

“
Skidbladnir.
Phoenix-class.” Sif’s fragment mouthed the words offered up by her arrays. “It brought the first group of colonists to Harvest.”

Mack nodded and released Sif’s hand. “Kept her in orbit for more than a year while I oversaw construction of all the basic infrastructure. Then we brought her down, scrapped her for parts. Her engines came in real handy.” Mack pointed a finger toward the floor, indicating the reactor below the data center. “CA said they couldn’t handle power for the colony when the population got bigger, not as long as we were still relying on a mass driver for uplift—”

“You’re lying,” Sif snapped. She read verbatim from the DCS database.
“Skidbladnir
was captained with the assistance of the artificial intelligence, Loki.”

Mack sighed. “This is why I wanted you to
see
them—the two cores.” He removed his hat, and ran a hand through his unruly hair. “I’m Loki, and he’s me. Just not at the same time. Not in the same place.”

To appease her algorithms, Sif folded her arms across her chest and skeptically cocked her head. But deep inside, she was desperate for Mack to continue—to help her understand.

“ONI calls Loki a Planetary Security Intelligence, PSI for short.”

Sif had never heard of that classification. “What does he do?”

“Bides his time for when I need him most—for when I need a clear mind, not one filled with crop cycles and soil tests.” Mack paused a moment. “And you.”

Sif’s fragment felt the firewall drop. She was free to go. But she chose to stand her ground.

“The aliens will be back,” Mack said. “I want to be ready.
He
wants to be ready. And when Loki moves in, I gotta move out.”

Indeed, asynchronous data had already begun to flow around Sif’s fragment toward the empty nano-assemblage; randomly sized packets from clusters overseeing Harvest’s JOTUNs. Her fragment was like a swimmer treading water, feet fluttering against the slick scales of unknown monsters from the deep.

“Ms. al-Cygni wasn’t all that keen on me telling you about Loki. She just wanted me to make the switch. No one is supposed to know about a PSI, not even a planet’s governor. And she didn’t want to risk Thune finding out—said she didn’t want to tick him off and give him another reason
not
to cooperate.” Mack now held his hat by the brim and ran it through his fingers. “But I told her I wasn’t going anywhere until you knew the truth.”

Sif stepped forward, and put her hands on Mack’s—stopped their nervous fumbling. She couldn’t actually feel the roughness of his skin, but she accessed her maker’s sense-memories lodged deep inside her core, and found ample fodder for her fancy. Though her algorithms raged, she completely tuned them out.
If this is rampancy,
she thought,
what was I afraid of?
“How can I help?” Sif asked. “What do you need?” The crags of Mack’s face stretched taut between extremes of joy and sorrow. He took one of Sif’s hands and curled it against his chest. A piece of data transferred to her fragment—a file containing various coordinates in the Epsilon Indi system where Mack wanted her to send the hundreds of propulsion pods currently keeping station around the Tiara.

“Can’t speak for my other half.” Mack smiled, squeezing Sif’s hand tight. “But this? This is all
I
need.”

CHAPTER

TWELVE

COVENANT LESSER MISSIONARY ALLOTMENT

Dadab had turned off all the escape pod’s noncritical systems to conserve power. That included the lights, but he could clearly see
Lighter Than Some,
resting against the ceiling. The Huragok glowed with faint pink light, not unlike the zap-jellies that filled the brackish seas of the Unggoy home world. But that’s where the similarity ended;
Lighter Than Some
looked pitiful, not predatory. The gas sacs on its back were almost completely deflated. And the multichambered organ that dangled from the bottom of its spine looked unusually long and shriveled—stretched out like a deflated balloon.

Lighter Than Some
’s cilia-covered tentacles barely moved as it suggested: <
Try.
>

Dadab tugged his mask away from his face with a wet pop. He took a cautious breath. The pod was full of cold, viscous methane that clung to the back of his throat—slunk down his larynx into his lungs. <
Good.
> Dadab signed, fighting the urge to cough. He clipped his mask to his shoulder harness so it wouldn’t float away in the pod’s zero gravity—but also to keep it handy in case he needed a supplementary drag from his tank.

Lighter Than Some
quivered, a gesture that was equal parts relief and exhaustion. As much as it had tinkered, the Huragok had been unable to coax the pod’s life-support system into generating the methane Dadab needed to survive. While the
Lighter Than Some
had been baffled by what it thought was a nonsensical hardware limitation, it made grim sense to Dadab: in the event of evacuation, the Kig-Yar Shipmistress had simply planned to leave her Unggoy Deacon behind.

So, with one of Dadab’s tanks fully drained and the second half empty, there had been only one solution:
Lighter Than Some
would have to produce the methane itself.

<
Best batch yet!
> Dadab signed encouragingly. The Huragok made no reply. Instead it plucked a passing food pouch from the air, jammed it in its snout, and began to eat.

Dadab watched the thick brown sludge surge up its snout and down its spine in tight, peristaltic knots. The Huragok’s worm-like stomach swelled, twisting and pinching its other innards. Just when Dadab thought
Lighter Than Some
couldn’t possibly eat any more, it removed its snout from the thoroughly vacuumed pouch, belched, and promptly fell asleep.

Huragok weren’t picky eaters. For them, any properly pulped substance was suitable for ingestion. Their stomachs passed the nastiest stuff—what other species would consider garbage or worse—to the anaerobic sacs that dangled from the bottom of their spinal column. These sacs were filled with bacteria that converted organic material to energy, giving off methane and trace amounts of hydrogen sulfide.

Usually Huragok only resorted to anaerobic digestion as a last resort. Methane was a heavy gas relative to the helium that filled a good number of its dorsal sacs, and even minor weight shifts could cause dangerous changes in buoyancy. Plus, from a comfort point of view, Huragok just didn’t like the feeling of a bacteria-filled bag dangling between their lower tentacle pair. It stressed the limbs and decreased their mobility, making it much more difficult to talk.

Unfortunately, the amount of methane Dadab required far exceeded what any Huragok could safely produce.
Lighter Than Some
had to suck down tremendous amounts of food to keep the bacterial process going, which made it very heavy.

And to create sufficiently large batches, it had to force its anaerobic sac to swell, thinning out its walls. In short, keeping Dadab alive was a debilitating, painful process that would have been completely impossible in anything but a zero-gee environment. Had there been gravity inside the pod,
Lighter Than Some
would have soon collapsed onto the floor.

Mindful of his companion’s suffering, Dadab felt tremendous guilt as he watched the sludge leach from
Lighter Than Some
’s stomach into its anaerobic sac. Slowly its shriveled membranes began to inflate, turning a sickly yellow as the bacteria blooms inside got to work on another batch.

Much later, when the cycle was complete, the sac had tripled in size, making it the Huragok’s largest protuberance.
Lighter Than Some
shuddered, and Dadab grasped two of its tentacles—braced himself against the curved wall of the pod as the anaerobic sac blew its valve. The Huragok fluttered as it released a shimmering plume of methane. When its sac was spent, the chapped valve shut with a mournful squeak. Dadab gently pushed his companion back toward the ceiling (where he would be less likely to bump it) and released its quaking limbs.

Lighter Than Some
had now performed dozens of these exhalations, each more difficult than the last. The creature no longer had the energy to monitor the pressure in its other sacs. Soon—zero gravity or not—it would lose its essential turgor, collapse in upon itself, and suffocate. After that, Dadab knew his own life would depend on how long he could take very short, very shallow breaths. But he was actually more frightened by what would happen if he
lived.

Ruefully, he glanced at the three alien boxes
Lighter Than Some
had brought aboard the pod. Floating in the darkness, their intertwined circuits glinted in the Huragok’s dim light.

Connecting intelligent circuits was verboten—one of the Covenant’s major sins. The Deacon had only a layman’s understanding of why this was so, but he knew the taboo had its roots in the Forerunners’ long war against a prodigious parasite known as The Flood. In this war, the Forerunners had used high-order, distributed intelligences to contain and combat their enemy. But somehow their strategy had failed. The Flood had corrupted some of these artificial minds and turned them against their makers.

As Dadab understood the relevant Holy Scriptures, The Flood had perished in a final, cataclysmic event. The Forerunners activated their ultimate weapon: seven mythical ring artifacts known collectively as Halo. The Prophets preached that Halo not only destroyed The Flood, but somehow also initiated the Forerunners’ Great Journey.

Recently, the Prophets had begun downplaying the myth, promoting a more measured approach to divination that encouraged the gradual accumulation of lesser relics. But breaking Forerunner taboos remained a sin, and one of the great burdens of Dadab’s Deaconship was full knowledge of the punishment for every transgression. For the sin of so-called intelligence association: death in this life and damnation in the next. But Dadab also knew that connecting the alien boxes was essential if they were to have any hope of rescue.

The Kig-Yar pod lacked a long-range beacon, which would have been fine in Covenant space where ships regularly scanned for castaways. But out here in the middle of nowhere, a rescuer would only know to look two places:
Minor Transgression
’s point of contact with the first alien vessel, and the coordinates at which Dadab had re-enabled the Luminary—the last two places the Kig-Yar ship had made transmissions.

Given that the latter would probably soon be swarmed by more of the violent aliens, backtracking was the more prudent choice. But the pod had no record of
Minor Transgression
’s travels; it would need information from the alien boxes. Before the Huragok passed this information on, it had wanted the boxes to “come to agreement” on the proper coordinates. The pod only had enough fuel for one more jump, and even Dadab had agreed that they needed to get it right.

His first methane tank dwindling, the Deacon had watched with terrified resignation as the Huragok gently probed the interiors of the boxes with its tentacles, coaxing their circuits together—gradually understanding more of their simple, binary language and passing relevant information to the pod.

Eventually
Lighter Than Some
’s sinful efforts had paid off. The pod exited its jump smack in the middle of an expanding sphere of debris that a quick sensor-scan positively identified as the remains of the first alien vessel. For a moment, Dadab’s heart soared. Despite his litany of transgressions—conspiracy to commit false witness, accessory to the destruction of Ministry property, mutiny—might not the Prophets show him mercy? In the end, he had done the right thing—exposed Chur’R-Yar’s treachery and transmitted the location of the reliquary. He was hopeful that would count for something.

But then came the revelation that the pod’s life-support system was fatally flawed. And after many cycles without any sign of rescue, Dadab had slunk into a deep depression.
I will die,
he moaned, adrift in a mess of crumpled food pouches and his own carefully bagged filth.
Without even having had a chance to beg the Prophets for forgiveness!

The Deacon had allowed himself to wallow this way for quite some time, until the stress of
Lighter Than Some
’s methane production became too difficult to ignore. And in that moment, Dadab’s self-pity evolved into something less reprehensible: shame. For while he might face terrible punishments in the future, the Huragok was in torment
now
—and entirely for the Deacon’s sake.

Dadab took a deep breath and held it—let the chill of his friend’s selfless effort sink deep into his chest. He turned to the pod’s control panel, brushed the alien boxes aside, and hit the holo-switch that would restore power to the pod’s limited sensor gear.
We will
both
survive this,
he vowed, listening to the creak of the Huragok’s exhausted sacs.
And whatever happens after.

As tired of sleep as any of the pod’s scarce distractions, Dadab kept his station before the panel—monitored the sensors, searching for any hint of an approaching ship. He tried to breathe as little as possible, and only broke his watch to help the Huragok feed. Many more cycles passed. All the while, the alien boxes hummed their petty blasphemies and
Lighter Than Some
’s sacs swelled and shrunk until—without warning—the pod detected a jump signature close at hand and Dadab at last allowed himself the indulgence of relief.

“Castaway vessel, this is the cruiser
Rapid Conversion
.” The hail boomed throughout the pod.
Lighter Than Some
released a pained whistle as Dadab fumbled for the switch that would reduce the transmission’s volume. “Respond if you are able,” the voice continued at a more reasonable level.

“We live,
Rapid Conversion
,” Dadab replied, voice cracking from lack of use. “But our situation is dire!”

In the last few cycles, the Huragok’s appetite had fallen off. Its anaerobic sac was now producing at a fraction of its previous capacity, and many of
Lighter Than Some
’s dorsal sacs had shut down entirely as their membranes dried out and folded in upon themselves.

“I beg you,” Dadab gasped. He reached for his mask, and took a halting drag from his almost empty second tank. “Please hurry!”

“Remain calm,” the voice growled. “You will soon be brought on board.”

Dadab did his best to comply. He inhaled the pod’s thinning methane in quick, shallow gulps, only resorting to his mask when the burning in his lungs became unbearable. But at some point he must have abstained too long because his world went black and he collapsed. When he awoke, he was belly-down on the floor, and he could hear the hiss of fresh methane bleeding into the pod.

Dadab’s nostrils flared. The gas had a bitter tang, but he thought he’d never tasted anything sweeter. With a happy grunt, he twisted his neck to look up at
Lighter Than Some
… and was shocked to see the creature crumpled on the floor beside him.

They were
inside
the cruiser,
Dadab realized,
and its artificial gravity had permeated the pod!

Suddenly, there was a furtive scratching at the pod’s hatch. Something was trying to force its way inside.

“Stop!” Dadab screamed. He leapt to his feet only to have them collapse beneath him. Floating in zero-gee, his muscles had atrophied, and the Deacon was forced to claw his way along the floor to the control panel. “Don’t open the hatch!” he shouted, hitting the switch to enable the pod’s stasis-field. Instantly, the air crackled and thickened. A moment too late he realized what
else
the switch would do.

The pod’s thrusters lit with an ear-splitting roar, and the craft leapt forward with a metal-on-metal screech, then stopped with a monumental clang. The pod’s nose crumpled down and in, crushing the three alien boxes against the control panel.

Restrained by the field, Dadab felt none of the acceleration or impact. But he did have a searing pain in his left arm. Pieces of the boxes had exploded outward, and while the field had quickly stopped the shrapnel, one razor-sharp fragment had sufficient velocity to slice past Dadab, cutting through his hardened skin just below the shoulder. Ignoring the pain, Dadab grasped the Huragok’s tentacles and hoisted the creature from the floor. Its usually clammy flesh felt dry. The Deacon knew this wasn’t a good sign.

As quickly as he thought safe, he puppeteered
Lighter Than Some
’s tentacles until it was in a natural pose: snout high, anaerobic sac dangling low. Suspended in the field, the least damaged of the Huragok’s sacs slowly began to inflate. But Dadab knew it would take time before his friend was ready to float unassisted. Quickly he reached for the control panel, and hit a switch to lock the hatch.