Halo: Contact Harvest (5 page)

Dadab decided to play it safe and cut to the chase. “The box is some sort of navigational device. And although it is damaged…” The Deacon gestured furtively at the Huragok, who bobbed to a wall-mounted control panel. “It still remembers its point of origin.”

Lighter Than Some
drummed the tips of its tentacles against the panel’s luminous switches. Soon, a three-dimensional holographic representation of the volume of space around
Minor Transgression
coalesced in a holo-tank before Chur’R-Yar’s chair. The tank was merely the space between two dark glass lenses: one built into a platinum pedestal, the other imbedded in the bridge’s ceiling. Like most surfaces on the Kig-Yar ship, the ceiling was covered with a purple metal sheeting that, catching the hologram’s light, displayed a darker hexagonal pattern—an underlying Beryllium grid.

“We were here,” Dadab began as a red triangle representing the Kig-Yar ship appeared in the projection. “When we registered the alien vessel’s radiation leak.” As he continued, the projection (controlled by
Lighter Than Some)
shifted and zoomed, presenting additional icons as required. “This is where we made contact. And this is where
Ligh
—where your Huragok believes the vessel initiated its journey.”

The Shipmistress angled one of her globose, ruby-red eyes at the highlighted system. It was outside the missionary allotment the Ministry had charged her with patrolling—beyond the boundary of Covenant space, though Chur’R-Yar knew it was heresy to suggest such a limit. The Prophets believed the Forerunners once had dominion over the entire galaxy, so every system was hallowed ground—a potential repository of important relics.

“And its destination?” Chur’R-Yar asked, her long tongue rattling against the top of her beak-like mouth.

Again the Deacon signed to the Huragok. The creature bleated from its sacs and flicked two of its limbs. “I’m afraid that data has been lost,” Dadab replied.

The Shipmistress curled her claws around the arms of her chair. She hated that the Unggoy had learned the Huragok’s language—that the Deacon now served as intermediary between her and a member of her crew. Not for the first time, she considered losing the Deacon out an airlock. But staring at the unexplored system, she realized the pious little gas-sucker had suddenly become a great deal more useful.

“Have I ever told you how much I appreciate your good counsel?” the Shipmistress asked, relaxing into her chair. “What do you suggest we tell the Ministry?”

Dadab’s harness began to chafe around his neck. He fought back the urge to scratch.

“As in all matters, I will follow the Shipmistress’ recommendation.” Dadab chose his words very carefully. It wasn’t often Chur’R-Yar asked him a question; and she had never asked for his
opinion.
“I am here to serve, and in so doing honor the will of the Prophets.”

“Perhaps we should wait to make our report until we have had a chance to survey the alien system?” Chur’R-Yar mused. “Give the Holy Ones as much information as we can?”

“I am sure the Ministry would…
appreciate
the Shipmistress’ desire to bear more complete witness to this important discovery.” Dadab hadn’t said “approve,” but if the female Kig-Yar wanted to take her ship out of the allotment, Dadab couldn’t stop her. She was, after all, Shipmistress.

But the Deacon had another, more personal reason for his compliance. If they did find something of value in the unexplored system, he knew this would only help speed his promotion. And to accomplish that, Dadab was willing to bend a few rules.
After all,
he thought,
communication delays happen all the time.

“An excellent recommendation.” Chur’R-Yar’s tongue flicked between her jagged teeth. “I will set a new course.” Then, with a cursory flip of her head, “May we follow in Their Footsteps.”

“And so better mind The Path.” The Deacon answered, completing the benediction.

The saying honored the Forerunner’s divination—the moment they activated their seven mysterious Halo rings and disappeared from the galaxy, leaving none of their kind behind. Indeed, this belief that one could become a God by following in the Forerunners’ footsteps was the crux of the Covenant religion.
One day,
the Prophets had long promised their faithful hordes,
we shall find the Holy Rings! Discover the very means of the Forerunners’ transcendence!

Dadab, and billions of his fellow Covenant, believed this absolutely.

The Deacon backed away from the Shipmistress’ command-chair, signaling
Lighter Than Some
to follow. He pivoted as smartly as his methane tank allowed then trotted through the bridge’s automatic sliding door.

“Zealot,” the Shipmistress hissed as the two angled halves of the door slid shut. She tapped a holographic switch in the arm of her chair that controlled the ship’s signal gear. “Return at once. Bring only what you can carry.”

“But Shipmistress,” Zhar’s voice crackled from her chair, “all this food would—”

“Return to your stations!” Chur’R-Yar screeched, her patience exhausted on the Deacon. “Leave it
all
behind!” The Shipmistress gave the switch an angry smack. Then, with a rasp of her tongue only she could hear: “Soon we will find much, much more.”

CHAPTER

FOUR

UNSC COLONY WORLD HARVEST,
EPSILON INDI SYSTEM,
DECEMBER 21, 2524

During its slip from Earth, the computer in the cryo-bay of the UNSC fast-attack corvette
Two for Flinching
led Avery through a long, cyclical slumber. Per his request, the circuits let Avery enjoy stretches of anabolic rest, bringing him through dream-filled REM as quickly and as infrequently as possible. All of this was accomplished by careful adjustments to the near-freezing atmosphere of Avery’s cryo-pod and the judicious application of intravenous pharmaceuticals—drugs that both controlled the frequency and duration of cryo-subjects’ sleep cycles and influenced the content of their dreams.

But no matter what brand of meds Avery got before being iced, he always dreamed about the exact same thing: the worst of his missions against the Insurrectionists—a series of scorched snapshots culminating in whatever operation he’d just completed.

Even though the bloody specifics of these missions were things Avery would have preferred to experience only once, the true horror of his dreams was their suggestion that he had done much more harm than good. His aunt’s voice echoed inside his head….

Make me proud, do what’s right.

The cryo-computer observed a surge of activity in Avery’s brain—an effort to yank himself out of REM—and upped his dosage.
Two for Flinching
had just emerged from Slipspace and was vectoring toward its destination. It was time for the computer to initiate Avery’s thaw, and it was standard operating procedure to keep subjects dreaming throughout the sequence.

The meds took hold, and Avery sunk deep. And his mind’s-eye picture show continued to roll….

A hauler jack-knifed in a roadside ditch, smoke belching from its burning engine. An initial round of cheers from the other marines in a checkpoint tower, thinking Avery had just nailed an Innie bomber. Then the realization that their ARGUS units had malfunctioned
—
that the hauler’s dead civilian driver had done nothing but pick up the wrong load.

Avery had only been a few months out of boot camp. And already the war had soured.

If you listened to the carefully packaged UNSC propaganda, Innies were all the same sort of bad apple: after two centuries of common cause, isolated groups of ungrateful colonists began to agitate for greater autonomy—for the freedom to act in their individual worlds’ best interests, not those of the empire at large.

In the beginning, there were sizeable numbers of people who felt sympathy for the Innie cause. The rebels were understandably sick of being told how to run their lives—what jobs to take, how many children to make—by CA bureaucrats; the often heavy-handed proxies of an Earth-based government with an increasingly poor understanding of the colonies’ unique challenges. But that sympathy quickly evaporated when (after years of frustrating negotiations that went nowhere) the more radical Innie factions abandoned politics for violence. At first they hit military targets and known CA sympathizers. But as the UNSC began its counterinsurgency operations, more and more innocent people were caught in the crossfire.

As a raw recruit, Avery didn’t understand why the Insurrection hadn’t flared in outer systems such as Cygnus, where colonists were united by shared creed and ethnicity—one of the main reasons for the collapse of Earth’s old nation-state system and the rise of the UN as a unifying force. Instead, the fighting had broken out right where the UNSC was best equipped to stop it: Epsilon Eridanus, the most populous and carefully administered system outside of Sol.

With all the resources at its disposal in that system, Avery wondered why the UNSC hadn’t been able to pacify the Innies before things got out of hand. FLEETCOM on Reach, Circumstance’s universities and courts of justice, the industrial zones of Tribute—couldn’t these powerful institutions and engines of economic prosperity have come up with a plan palatable for both sides? As the war dragged on, Avery began to realize all these resources were exactly the problem: in Epsilon Eridanus, the UNSC just had too much to lose.

Avery flinched in reaction to his rising body temperature. But also to the quickening images in his head….

Pockmarked houses whipping past gun slits. An unexpected boom. Bodies strewn around the burning shell of the convoy’s lead armored transport. Muzzle flashes from rooftops. A run for cover through the carnage. Ricochets and radio chatter. Phosphorous plumes from ordnance dropped by drones. Women and children running from burning houses, leaving footprints in blood thick as caramel.

Eyes darting behind his lids, Avery remembered his aunt’s instructions:
Become the man I
know
you can be.

He struggled to move his doped-up limbs, but the computer increased his dose and kept him down. The nightmarish final act would not be stopped….

A crowded roadside restaurant. A desperate woman surrounded by determined men. The kicking feet of a choking child. A father’s lunge and the moment Avery let slip, reducing all to shock and heat that sent his Hornet spinning.

Avery woke and gasped, drawing in a mouthful of the freezing vapor that filled his cryo-tube. Quickly, the computer initiated an emergency purge. Somehow, despite more than three times the recommended amount of sleep-inducers, Avery had overridden the final stages of the thaw. The computer noted the anomaly, carefully withdrew Avery’s IV and catheter, and opened the tube’s curved, clear plastic lid.

Avery rolled onto an elbow, leaned over the edge of his tube, and coughed—a series of violent, wet heaves. As he caught his breath, he heard the slap of bare feet on the bay’s rubberized floor. A moment later a small, square towel appeared in his down-turned field of view.

“I got it,” Avery spat. “Back off.”

“Zero to jerk in less than five.” A man’s voice, not much older than Avery. “I’ve met grunts who are faster. But that’s pretty good.”

Avery looked up. Like him, the man was naked. But his flesh was alarmingly pale. Blond hair was just starting to burr from his recently shaved head—like the first tufts of silk from an ear of corn. The man’s chin was long and narrow. When he smiled, his gaunt cheeks puffed mischievously.

“Healy. Petty Officer First Class. Corpsman.”

All of which meant Healy was navy—not a marine. But he seemed friendly enough. Avery snatched the towel, wiped his clean-shaven face and chin. “Johnson. Staff Sergeant.”

Healy’s grin widened. “Well, at least I don’t have to salute you.”

Avery swung his legs out of the cryo-pod and let his feet settle onto the floor. His head felt swollen—ready to burst. He breathed deep and tried to speed the sensation’s passage.

Healy nodded toward a bulkhead door at the other end of the bay. “C’mon, lockers are this way. Don’t know what kind of dreams you had. But mine didn’t involve sitting around staring at another guy’s balls.”

Avery and Healy dressed, retrieved their duffels, and reported to
Two for Flinching
’s modest hangar bay. Corvettes were the smallest class of UNSC warships and didn’t carry any fighters. In fact, there was hardly enough room in the hangar for one SKT-13 shuttlecraft, a larger version of the bulbous Bumblebee lifeboats standard throughout the fleet.

“Sit down, strap in,” the shuttle’s pilot barked over his shoulder as Avery and Healy came aboard. “Only reason we’re stopped is to offload the two of you.”

Avery stowed his bags and slid into one of the SKT’s center-facing seats, pulling a U-shaped restraining bar down over his shoulders. The shuttle dropped through an airlock in the hangar floor and accelerated away from the corvette’s stern.

“You ever been to Harvest?” Healy shouted over the howl of the shuttle’s thrusters.

Avery craned his neck toward the cockpit. “No.”

But he had. It was hard to remember exactly when. You didn’t age in cryo-sleep, but time passed all the same. Avery figured he’d spent at least as much time asleep as awake since he’d joined the marines. But regardless, he’d only stayed on Harvest long enough to acquire his target, plan the hit, and reduce the number of corrupt CA officials by one. It was his graduation mission from Navy Special Warfare (NavSpecWar) sniper-school. And he’d passed with flying colors.

Avery squinted as the shuttle’s interior brightened. Beyond the clear partitions of the cockpit’s canopy, Harvest had come into view. Scattered clouds revealed a world where land was much more abundant than sea. A single large continent shone bright tan and green through the world’s unpolluted atmosphere.

“First time for me too,” Healy said. “Out in the middle of nowhere. But not bad to look at.”

Avery just nodded his head. Like most of his missions, his hit on Harvest was classified. And he had no idea what sort of clearance the Corpsman had.

The shuttle veered toward a metallic glint in the deep blue aurora of Harvest’s thermosphere. An orbital structure, Avery realized as they approached—two silver arcs hanging high above the planet. They hadn’t been there on his previous visit.

As the shuttle drew closer, Avery saw that the arcs were separated by many thousands of kilometers of golden strands—space elevators that passed through the lower arc and dropped to Harvest’s surface. The points at which the elevators bisected the arc were open to vacuum—gaps filled with beamwork that, from a distance, looked like delicate filigree.

“Hang on,” the pilot shouted. “We’ve got traffic.”

With short, syncopated bursts of its maneuvering rockets, the shuttle finessed its way through one of many orderly formations of propulsion pods gathered around the orbital. Avery noted that the pods’ designers had made no effort to beautify their creations; they were engines, nothing more. Hoses, tanks, wires—most of the pod’s constituent parts were fully exposed. Only their expensive Shaw-Fujikawa drives were shrouded in protective cowlings.

As the shuttle closed on the orbital, it spun 180 degrees and backed into an airlock. After a few clanks and a hiss of air, an indicator light above the shuttle’s rear hatch changed from red to green. The pilot gave his passengers a thumbs-up. “Good luck. Watch out for those farmers’ daughters.” The shuttle detached as soon as Avery and Healy were safely inside the orbital.

“Welcome to the Tiara,” a very proper female voice echoed from an unseen PA system. “My name is Sif. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to make your transit more comfortable.”

Avery unzipped one of his duffel’s pockets and removed an olive drab duty-cap. “Just some directions please, ma’am.” He slung the hat over the back of his head and tugged it low on his brow.

“Of course,” the AI replied. “This airlock leads straight to the median. Take a right and proceed directly to coupling station three. I’ll let you know if you take a wrong turn.”

Strip lights in the airlock’s ceiling brightened as its interior door cycled open. In the cramped ready room the air was heavy and still, but in the unexpectedly open space beyond, the recycled atmosphere seemed less oppressive. It turned out the median was a wide platform suspended in the middle of the tubular orbital by thick metal cables. Avery guessed the Tiara was about four kilometers long and it’s interior close to three hundred meters in diameter. Six beveled titanium spars ran the length of the facility. These were equally spaced around the interior of the tube and were connected to one another with smaller beams perforated with oval holes to save weight without sacrificing strength. The floor of the median was covered with a diamond-pattern metal grid that, while perfectly sturdy, gave the impression of walking on air.

“You do a lot of CMT?” Healy asked as they marched toward the number three station.

Avery knew the acronym: Colonial Militia Training, one of the UNSC’s more controversial activities. Officially, CMT was all about helping the locals help themselves—training colonists to deal with natural disasters and basic internal security so the marines didn’t have to keep too many boots on the ground. Unofficially, it was designed to create paramilitary anti-Insurrectionist forces—though Avery had often wondered if it was really a good idea to give colonials on politically unstable worlds weapons, and train them to use them. In his experience, today’s ally was often tomorrow’s foe.

“Never.” Avery lied again.

“So… what?” Healy continued. “You looking for a change of pace?”

“Something like that.”

Healy laughed and shook his head. “Then you must have had one piss-poor billet.”

You don’t know the half of it.
Avery thought.

The median doglegged left, and as Avery passed a long window, he peered out at the station—one of the filigreed gaps he’d seen on approach. Two rectangular openings had been cut in the top and bottom of the orbital’s hull, leaving the upper and lower spars exposed. Through these spars ran the Tiara’s number-three elevator strand.

Avery watched as two back-to-back cargo containers rose into view, filling the station. It was hard to see through the window, but he caught a glimpse of two propulsion pods maneuvering toward the tops of the containers. Once the pods were attached, the containers raised clear of the Tiara. Then they reversed the polarity of their unifying magnets and the two newly made freighters drifted apart. Start to finish, the operation took less than thirty seconds.