Halo: Contact Harvest (20 page)

Before taking control
of Rapid Conversion,
the Chieftain had been obliged to give a Sangheili delegation a tour so they could verify he hadn’t repaired any of the proscribed systems. But the delegation had another item on their agenda. Immediately after the two Commanders and their Helios guards had come aboard, they began to call out all the reasons why the cruiser was “no longer worthy of a
Sangheili
commission.” Starting with the size of the hangar bay where the tour began, one Commander emphasized how small the space was—how it could only hold a “handful of craft” and even then “only those of lesser type.”

As the list of flaws grew, Maccabeus had nodded in polite agreement, slowly leading the party toward the shaft. The second Commander had boasted that gravity lifts were now ubiquitous on even the smallest Sangheili ships, and the first sniped that only on a vessel such as this—a thing best used for target practice—would one find a device as obsolete as a
mechanical
lift.

“Indeed,” the Sangheili Commander had disdained, delivering the next line in a rehearsed critique. “Given the
limitations
of its crew, I wonder how long even such a simple system will remain functional.”

“You are right, my Lords.” Maccabeus had replied, his deep voice earnest. “In truth, the elevator proved so beyond our capabilities that we were forced to
remove
it.”

The Sangheili Commanders had shared a confused glance. But before either of them could ask how Maccabeus intended them to inspect the upper decks, the Chieftain had used his powerful arms to pull himself up onto a ladder, leaving the Sangheili staring dumfounded up the shaft.

In his lifetime, Maccabeus had humbled many foes. But few victories were as satisfying as hearing those pompous Sangheili struggle up and down the ladders. Unlike the Jiralhanae (and all other Covenant bipedal species), Sangheili’s knees bent
forward
not backwards. This unusual hinging didn’t impede their motion on the ground, but it made climbing difficult. By the end of their inspection, the Sangheili were exhausted, mortified, and more than happy to have the crippled cruiser and its cunning barbarian of a Shipmaster out of their fleet.

This pleasant memory kept Maccabeus in reasonably good spirits even as he leapt past a passage marked with flashing triangular symbols. These indicated portions of the ship that had fallen into disrepair—in some cases dangerously so—and the Chieftain had been forced to lock them for his crew’s own safety.

In this respect, Maccabeus knew, it was the Sangheili who had the last laugh. His crew
did
have limited technical ability. They had struggled just to keep
Rapid Conversion
’s limited systems from falling apart, and the once-mighty vessel really was nothing more than the Ministry of Tranquility survey tug the Sangheili allowed it to be.

The Chieftain’s mood had dampened by the time he reached the bottom of the shaft. But as he swung into the passage that led to the hangar’s airlock, his gloom quickly became unease. There was death in the hangar. Maccabeus could
smell
it.

When the airlock cycled open, the first thing the Chieftain saw was a scorch mark that stretched the length of the hangar floor. On either side of the mark were the charred carapaces of at least a dozen Yanme’e: large, intelligent insects responsible for
Rapid Conversion
’s upkeep. More of the winged, hard-shelled creatures were perched on the forked hulls of one of the cruiser’s four Spirit dropships. The Yanme’e’s luminous compound eyes were all locked on the cause of the carnage: a Kig-Yar escape pod that had blasted across the hangar.

The dead insects didn’t faze Maccabeus; more than one hundred Yanme’e infested the warmer decks around
Rapid Conversion
’s jump-drive, and while it was true they would not reproduce without a queen, their loss paled in comparison to the pod’s other victim: one of the Spirit dropships. The craft’s low-slung cockpit had stopped the pod’s progress, saving another Spirit beside it. But the pod had severed the cockpit from its two elongated troop bays, crushing it against the far wall to one side of the hangar’s flickering energy-field exit.

The Spirit was a total loss. The damage caused by the pod was well beyond the Yanme’e's skills.

Maccabeus’ temper flared. A few angry strides later and he was across the hangar to where his nephew stood beside the battered pod. The younger Jiralhanae was like an anvil, heavy and broad. He was covered in wiry, black hair—from the close-cropped Mohawk on his head to the tufts on his wide, two-toed feet. But his coat was already showing flecks of his uncle’s more mature silver. If one were to judge by color alone, the youth was marked for greatness.

Though judging by
this
mess,
Maccabeus growled to himself,
he still has much to learn.

“I am sorry to have disturbed the feast, Uncle.”

“My meat will keep, Tartarus.” The Chieftain glared at his nephew. “My patience will not. What is it you would have me see?”

Tartarus barked an order to the tenth and final member of Maccabeus’ pack, a dun-colored monster by the name of Vorenus who stood directly beside the pod. Vorenus raised a fist and rapped loudly on the pod’s topside hatch. A moment passed, there was the muffled sound of pneumatics as the hatch unlatched, and then the masked face of an Unggoy popped into view.

“Is your companion well?” Tartarus asked.

“It is
better
,” Dadab replied.

The Chieftain’s mutton chops bristled. Did he detect a hint of obstinacy in the Unggoy’s voice? The creatures were hardly known for their courage. But then he noticed the Unggoy wore a Deacon’s orange tunic. Not a lofty rank, but it did mark the creature as an official Ministry representative.

“Then bring it out,” Tartarus growled. A lesser Jiralhanae would have torn the uppity Unggoy limb from limb. But Maccabeus smelled more excitement than anger in his nephew’s scent.

Jiralhanae exhibited their emotions via stark shifts in pungent pheromones. And while Tartarus would learn to control these shifts as he grew older, he couldn’t help but telegraph that there was something thrilling inside the pod. But the Chieftain had no idea just
how
thrilling until the Deacon, now standing with its stumpy feet astride the hatch, reached down into the pod and gently raised the Huragok into view.

It was an article of faith that the Prophets were uniquely qualified to handle the Forerunners’ holy relics—that the San’Shyuum, more than any other Covenant species, possessed the intelligence required to create practical technologies from the relics’ complex designs. But while it was blasphemy to admit it, everyone in the Covenant knew that the Prophets’ efforts were greatly aided by the Huragok. The creatures had an uncanny understanding of Forerunner objects, Maccabeus knew.
And they could fix almost
anything
they touched….

The Chieftain loosed a laugh so unexpectedly hearty that it caused the Yanme’e to take flight and disappear into the hangar’s exposed ductwork. Of all the Sangheili’s restrictions, not letting a Huragok join his crew had been the most crippling. But now here one was. And although it would be a serious crime to let the creature fix intentionally disabled systems, not even the Sangheili could complain if it made
necessary
repairs.

“An auspicious start to our hunt, Tartarus!” The Chieftain clapped a paw onto his nephew’s shoulder and gave him a joyful shake. “Come! Back to the beast while it still has flesh for us to choose!” Maccabeus turned to Dadab, who was now carefully handing the Huragok to Vorenus. “And if not,” the Chieftain boomed in the same cordial tone, “then our new Deacon shall bless a second platter!”

CHAPTER

THIRTEEN

HARVEST,

FEBRUARY 9, 2525

Avery lay on his belly, surrounded by ripening wheat. The green stalks were so tall and the kernels so plump that a day of blazing sun had failed to reach the ground. The clumped topsoil felt cool through his fatigues. Avery had traded his usual duty cap for a boonie: a soft, wide-brimmed hat with a strip of canvas sewn loosely around the crown. Earlier in the day, he’d woven wheat stalks into the strip, and even though the stalks were now bent and frayed—as long as Avery stayed low—he was well camouflaged.

Rifle-bag dragging along behind him, Avery had crawled almost three kilometers from his parked Warthog to Harvest’s reactor complex. Along the way, he’d crested a long, low rise that Lt. Commander al-Cygni had told him was actually the buried mass driver. If she hadn’t, Avery would never have known. To keep the device hidden from alien eyes, Mack’s JOTUNs had topped the rise with squares of soil and living wheat dug from other fields.

All told, the crawl took Avery more than two hours. But he had been focused on stealth, not speed. In fact, in the last ten minutes he hadn’t moved at all; his liveliest aspect was the reflection of the rustling wheat in his gold-tinted shooters glasses.

These had been part of the cache of equipment and weapons the Lt. Commander had given to the marines. Like the BR55 battle rifle Avery carried in his drag bag, the glasses were a prototype—a piece of hardware fresh from an ONI research lab. Refocusing his gaze, Avery checked a COM link in the upper corner of the glasses’ left lens where a tiny HUD confirmed his exact position on Harvest, a little less than five hundred meters west of the complex.

Directly ahead, the field began sloping downward. Avery knew all he had to do was crawl a few more meters and the wheat would start to thin. This would give him good line of sight to the recruits’ defenses and put him in position to execute his part of the assault he’d planned with Staff Sergeant Byrne. But the thinner cover would also give the militiamen the best chance they’d had all day to spot Avery, and he planned to stay put until he was sure of his advantage.

Slowly, Avery reached between his legs, undid his rifle bag’s plastic clasps, and withdrew his BR55. After the fight aboard the freighter, Avery had spent plenty of time with the weapon at the garrison range, assessing its strengths compared to the recruits’ standard-issue MA5 assault rifle. The BR55 shared the MA5's bullpup design (magazine slot and breech positioned behind the trigger), but it came with an optical scope and fired larger nine-point-five millimeter, semi armor-piercing rounds. Technically, the BR55 was a designated marksman’s rifle. But it was the closest thing to a sniping weapon in Lt. Commander al-Cygni’s arsenal, and Avery knew from his work on the range that it was deadly accurate out to nine hundred meters, much farther than the MA5.

He had given one of al-Cygni’s three other BR55s to Jenkins. Byrne had kept one for himself, and awarded the final battle rifle to a balding, middle-aged recruit named Critchley, providing 2nd platoon with its own marksman capability. During their last session on the range, Avery had watched Jenkins and Critchley drill nice tight groups into five hundred meter targets. And he hoped—to his own disadvantage—they would be just as accurate in today’s live-fire exercise.

If only it was as simple as teaching them to shoot,
Avery frowned. He removed a magazine from his black, ballistic nylon assault-vest and quietly slid it into his rifle.
But being accurate didn’t make you a killer.
Which is what combat was all about: killing the enemy before it killed you.

Avery was sure the aliens understood that (he had the scar to prove it), but the recruits had no idea what combat was really like, and that was something he, Byrne, and Ponder knew they needed to fix ASAP.

The problem was there were too many things about the aliens the marines didn’t know. And in the end they agreed they would have to make a few basic assumptions—about their enemy and their men—if the militia was ever going to put up an effective resistance: first, the aliens would return with a larger and more capable force; second, combat would be terrestrial and defensive. Given enough time, Avery was hopeful the militia could be trained to sustain a guerilla campaign. But their third and final assumption was that time was a luxury they lacked. Avery and the others agreed: The aliens would be back long before the militiamen learned anything but the basics of small-unit combat.

Of course, the Captain and his Staff Sergeants told the recruits none of this. Instead they continued to promote the falsehood of a visiting CA delegation and a possible Insurrectionist attack. None of them liked lying to their men. But they calmed their consciences with the knowledge that the recruits would need to master the same basic skills of concealment, coordination, and communication if they were going to have a chance against their alien foe.

Avery heard the distant buzz of electric engines. He glanced over his shoulder. Epsilon Indi now hung so low in the sky that even wearing his glasses he could only stare at the star for a few seconds before shutting his eyes in a watery wince. Avery grimaced with satisfaction. As he’d planned, any recruits patrolling the complex’s western perimeter fence would have the exact same problem—and none of them were wearing glasses. Which might have been an unfair advantage if Avery and Byrne weren’t already outnumbered thirty-six to one.

As the buzzing engines drew close, Avery tensed and prepared to slither forward.
Keep your eyes open. Expect the unexpected,
he had warned his platoon. For their sake, he hoped they’d listened.
But if they hadn’t…

“Creeper, this is crawler,” Avery whispered into this throat mic. “Mow them down.”

They would learn a valuable lesson all the same.

“Smells pretty good.” Jenkins placed his cheek against his BR55's hard plastic stock, and shot Forsell a sideways glance. “What is it?”

The recruits lay side by side, facing the reactor complex’s only gate: a break in the southern run of the three-meter-high, chain-link fence that surrounded the facility.

Forsell took a sloppy bite from a foil-wrapped energy bar. “Honey hazelnut.” He chewed and swallowed without pulling his eyes from his spotting scope. “Want some?”

“Any part of it you haven’t licked?” Jenkins asked.

“No.”

“Nice.”

Forsell shrugged apologetically and stuffed the rest of the bar into his mouth.

It was his own fault he was hungry, Jenkins knew. He was so geared up about today’s exercise he’d barely eaten breakfast in the garrison mess.

In fact, he’d been so certain the Staff Sergeants would attack when the recruits had their heads buried in their lunches, he’d skipped that meal entirely—let the much larger Forsell take whatever he wanted from his meal ready to eat (MRE). Unfortunately, Forsell had taken
everything,
and now Jenkins had nothing in his stomach but anxious bile.

The two recruits wore helmets that covered their ears, swept low over their brows, and were painted to match their mottled, olive drab fatigues. The color would have served them well in the surrounding wheat, but wasn’t as useful in their current location: the roof of a two-story polycrete tower in the center of the complex that covered the reactor as well as Mack’s data center.

A high-pitched alert chimed from a speaker in Jenkins’ helmet. Under Captain Ponder’s supervision, the recruits had staked motion trackers all around the perimeter, switching the pole-mounted units to their highest sensitivity. While this gave them coverage beyond one thousand meters, the trackers kept pinging ghosts: swarms of honeybees, flocks of starlings—and now a flight of JOTUN dusters.

Squinting past Forsell, Jenkins watched a trio of the needle-nosed, thin-winged planes buzz the western wheat. The dusters had been making long, serpentine passes all day, spraying a top dressing of fungicide. But this was their closest pass yet.

A trailing white cloud billowed toward the complex, prompting the twelve recruits of 2nd platoon’s bravo squad (2/B) guarding the western fence to turn away from the drifting chemicals, cover their mouths, and cough. These weren’t indications of any real, physical distress (Jenkins had applied enough of the organic compounds to his family’s own crops to know it was perfectly safe to breathe), but rather expressions of the recruits’ fatigue and discontent.

“What time you got?” Jenkins asked.

Forsell squinted at Epsilon Indi. “Sixteen thirty. Give or take.”

Almost sunset,
Jenkins thought. “Where the hell are they?”

The rules of the exercise were simple: to win, either side needed to eliminate half the other. This meant Johnson and Byrne would have to drop thirty-six recruits while the recruits only had to neutralize one of them. With the odds stacked so heavily against the Staff Sergeants, it had seemed likely they would try to attack early, before the recruits got settled.

When the two of them had torn out of the complex’s gate in their Warthog a little after 0900, the recruits had quickly divided into their squads—three in each platoon—and rushed to secure different sectors of the complex.

Along with the rest of one-alpha squad (1/A), Jenkins and Forsell had hustled to the reactor tower. The weather-beaten structure looked a bit like a birthday cake: The second of its two circular stories had a smaller diameter than the first and was topped with a cluster of candlelike aerials for Mack’s maser and other COM devices. The tower was the only above ground building in the complex, and the only building for hundreds of kilometers in all directions.

Jenkins and Forsell had climbed up two flights of ladders to the second-story roof and gone prone—the most stable stance for shooting, if you could afford the loss of mobility. Resting his BR55 across his rucksack for additional support, Jenkins had eased into his rifle scope just in time to see the Staff Sergeants’ Warthog turn off the reactor complex’s paved access road and head South down the highway toward Utgard. Adrenaline pumping, Jenkins had immediately pulled his battle rifle’s charging handle, cycling a round into the chamber. He had thumbed the fire-select switch to single-shot, tensed his finger on the trigger, and then… nothing. Just hour after hour of blazing heat.

The recruits had quickly begun to grouse that the real purpose of the exercise was to see how long they could stand being suckers. An overweight and outspoken 1/A recruit named Osmo theorized that Johnson and Byrne had gone to Utgard for cold beer in an air-conditioned bar, leaving Epsilon Indi’s broiling light to win the exercise for them.

FCPO Healy had told them all to “shut it,” emphasizing that as long as they kept their helmets on and stayed hydrated they’d be safe from heat stroke. For his part, Captain Ponder had remained in his Warthog, parked in the shade of a portable triage tent near the front gate, quietly smoking his Sweet William cigars.

“A beer would be nice,” Jenkins murmured, listening to the JOTUN dusters’ engines fade. Even though he’d spent the day on his stomach hardly moving, sweat had poured out of him. There were at least ten empty water bottles scattered between his and Forsell’s boots. And Jenkins was still thirsty.

“Eyes on the big one,” Forsell announced, lazily sweeping his scope to the east. “Again.”

Turning to follow Forsell’s gaze, Jenkins saw a single JOTUN combine: a giant machine painted dark blue with yellow detail stripes. Its three pairs of oversized wheels bucked up and down as it rolled over a gentle ridge. Though the combine was at least a kilometer distant, Jenkins had no trouble hearing the low rumble of its three-thousand horsepower, ethanol-electric engine as it began devouring the wheat on the down-slope.

The combine had spent the day mowing the eastern fields in wide swaths perpendicular to the complex, shuddering the ground as it neared the perimeter fence. At first, this had unnerved some of the recruits. They’d all seen JOTUNs, of course, but what was essentially a fifty-meter tall and one-hundred-fifty-meter long lawn mower triggered a pretty basic urge to flee—even when you knew an AI as capable as Mack had control of its circuits.

But now, as the combine again bore down on the complex, the only thing that looked nervous was the wheat. Magnified in Jenkins’ rifle scope, the stalks trembled before the whirring tines of the combine’s rotary header, almost as if they had some knowledge of their imminent threshing.

“I’m telling you. That’s a series four,” Forsell said, continuing a debate they’d kept up all day.

“Nope,” Jenkins countered. “See the gondolas?”

Forsell peered through his scope at a line of angular metal bins on wheels that only looked small because they were trailing directly behind the JOTUN. “Yeah…”

“They’re collecting from the rear.”

“So?”

“So that’s a series
five
feature. Four’s dumped to the sides.”

Forsell thought about that for a second then gave up with an awkward admission, “It’s been a few seasons since we upgraded.”

Jenkins winced. He’d forgotten Forsell came from a modest family. Not only did Forsell’s parents own fewer acres, but their soy also sold for much less than the Jenkins’ corn and other grains. In all likelihood, Forsell’s parents were still getting by with a handful of used series twos.