Halo: Contact Harvest (33 page)

“Governor, are you sure?” Mack asked.

“Are you
deaf
?” Thune slammed his fists onto his desk with enough force to break a weaker man’s knuckles. His voice was full of venom. “Want me to say it again?”

Jilan straightened her arm. “No.”

Her pistol cracked three times and Thune staggered back, spraying red from the open collar of his shirt. In a flash, Avery was past the Lt. Commander and across Thune’s desk, sliding feet-first over the polished oak. Byrne dashed around the desk to meet him, and together they covered the Governor as he slumped to the floor.

“Healy!” Avery shouted into his throat-mic. “Get up here!”

“That won’t be necessary,” Jilan said.

Avery was about to remind the Lt. Commander that she’d just mortally wounded a colonial governor when his nostrils filled with a sweet, familiar scent.

“Clever,” Byrne snorted. He reached for Thune’s reddened shirt, and rubbed the sticky residue of TTR rounds between his fingers. “Out like a light.”

“And he’s going to stay that way.” Jilan safed her pistol and slid it back into her holster. “All the way to FLEETCOM HQ.”

Suddenly, Ponder began to sway. “Actually, ma’am? I think getting the doc might not be a bad idea…” Then he fell to the floor, his good arm clutched against his left side.

Avery sprinted back around the desk. By the time he reached Ponder, Jilan had already dropped to her knees and ripped open the Captain’s shirt. The biofoam cast covering his chest was soaked with bloody blotches. And unlike Thune, this was the real thing.

“Healy! Double-time!” Avery growled. Then, whipping his head around to face Jilan: “Ma’am, things are going sideways, and I don’t like it. I want to know what you’re planning, and I want to know now. Because I’m pretty sure—whatever it is—you’re counting on me and Byrne to get it done.”

Jilan took a deep breath. “Alright.” She stared at Avery, her deep green eyes narrowed halfway between respect and reservation. “Go ahead, Loki. Tell them.”

For a second, Avery wondered who Jilan was talking to. Then he heard Mack clear his throat.

“Yes.” The AI smiled as Avery turned to face the holo-projector. He looked a little embarrassed. “Yes, I guess I should start with
that
.”

Bapap jumped on one foot, then the other. He checked the fill-level on his methane tank. He scratched an itch in the scaly pit of one of his arms. Finally—though the Deacon had asked him repeatedly to be quiet—Bapap cocked his head at the Huragok and asked. “What you think it do now?”

Dadab really wished he knew. And this lack of understanding had made him even more exasperated than Bapap’s constant pestering.
Lighter Than Some
was completely still, his buoyancy perfectly neutral as he floated before the towers that made up the alien intelligence. “Just keep your eyes on the walkway,” Dadab said. “It shouldn’t be much longer.”

Bapap grumbled inside his mask and thrust his head back through the pried-open gap in the control room’s doors. The Deacon kept up his pacing behind the Huragok in the room’s shallow pit, stepping over the panels it had removed from the towers to access the alien circuits.

<
To begin a conversation.
> the Huragok had signed.

Again Dadab wondered if he had made the right decision in bringing the Huragok to the orbital
(who knew what sort of
conversation
it was having?).
But he had been desperate to get
Lighter Than Some
out of the hangar before it learned of his deception—before it discovered Dadab had ensured its plows would be turned into weapons by the Yanme’e.

Dadab felt terrible about betraying his friend’s trust, but he hadn’t had much choice. When the broken Spirit had come apart, revealing not one but
four
of the Huragok’s creations, the Deacon had almost soiled his tunic. He didn’t even want to think what Maccabeus would do if he learned the Huragok’s real motivation for constructing the plows. The Chieftain had just suffered a grievous injury at the aliens’ hands; he would have no patience for peace offerings, let alone the Deacon, who had failed to stop their construction.

Dadab stopped pacing and flashed his fingers before the Huragok’s sensory nodes. <
Is everything all right?
> But
Lighter Than Some
remained still.

All four of its tentacles were thrust deep into the center-most tower. Leaning closer, Dadab could see the limbs were in motion—twitching ever so slightly at the tips as their cilia made contact with multicolored knots of wires. Dadab traced some of the wires to one of the tower’s many black boxes and saw that two small lights in the box’s casing were blinking green and amber in response to the Huragok’s deft probes.

Suddenly, the energy core
Lighter Than Some
had rigged to power the towers began to flicker. They had already used up three cores, and Dadab wasn’t eager to take any more from the nearby encampments. The other Unggoy were starting to get curious about the Deacon’s activities, especially after he returned to the orbital with the Huragok in tow. The last thing Dadab needed was a proliferation of witnesses to his latest sinful effort at intelligence association.

“Deacon!” Bapap whispered. “Flim and two others!”

Dadab waved his gnarled hands, hastening Bapap onto the walkway. “Go! Delay them!”

As Bapap pushed through door, Dadab tugged at one of
Lighter Than Some’s
lower tentacles. The Huragok loosed a surprised bleat from one of its sacs and jerked free of the tower.

<
Put panels back!
> Dadab flashed.

The Huragok’s response came slowly, as if it was having difficulty transitioning back to a normal conversational mode. <
Do you know what they have done?
>

<
What? Who?
>

<
The Chieftain and his pack.
>

Dadab could hear Flim’s gruff voice on the walkway, the clang of methane tanks as he knocked Bapap aside. <
Explain later!
> he picked up a panel and thrust it toward the Huragok.
Lighter Than Some
wrapped the thin metal plate in its tentacles as Dadab trotted to the door.

“I gave no permission to leave your post!” he said, stepping onto the walkway, directly in Flim’s path.

“You walk and explore,” Flim replied with glum suspicion. “Why can’t I do same?”

“Because I am Deacon! My explorations have Ministerial endorsement!”

Flim cocked his head, making it clear he had no idea what this meant and wouldn’t much care even if he did. “You find food?”

“No.”

“Relic?”

“Certainly not!”

“Then what?”

“Nothing,” Dadab said, feigning great exasperation. “And wasting time talking with you won’t help my work go any fas—” The Deacon doubled over as Flim shoved past, not-so-accidentally thrusting one of his barnacle-pitted forearms into Dadab’s shrunken stomach.

“Then we no talk.” Flim waddled into the control room.

Dadab reached up weakly and tried to stop Flim’s companions: a bow-legged Unggoy named Guff and another called Tukduk, who was missing one of his eyes. But these two toadies slipped past as well, and all the Deacon could do was hunch after them, taking shallow breaths to refill his lungs.

Flim looked at the towers and snorted inside his mask. “I see nothing.”

Dadab raised his head. To his great surprise, he saw that all the panels were back in place.
Lighter Than Some
floated innocently in the shallow pit, as if it had spent the time since its arrival doing nothing but.

“And soon that’s
all
you’ll see,” Dadab said as the energy core flickered again. “Fetch me another core and I’ll let you help me with my work.”

But Flim was shrewder than he looked. “You come with me to get core.”

Dadab sighed. “Very well.”

As he ushered Flim and the others back to the walkway, he signed subtly to
Lighter Than Some: < Keep panels on! >
He wanted to hear the Huragok’s explanation—what it had learned about the Jiralhanae—but any lengthy conversation would have to wait until they were alone.

Lighter Than Some
waited for the Unggoy’s footfalls to fade. The energy core began to blink rapidly, threatening to cut out. The Huragok vented one of its sacs and sunk low. It also did not want to betray its friend’s trust, but it had no choice.

Quickly, it removed the central tower’s highest panel, and flicked one of its tentacles against the panel’s bare metal inner surface. Then it turned to face one of the image-recording devices it had discovered in the corners of the room.

<
Safe, come, out.
>
Lighter Than Some
’s signs were slow and deliberate—as they had been when it first taught the Deacon the intricacies of its speech.

A moment later, a little representation of an alien in a wide-brimmed hat appeared on the room’s holo-projector.

Lighter Than Some
held out the protective panel. It waited a few moments then signed: <
Now, you, show. >
The representation nodded its head and disappeared. The Covenant glyph representing “Oracle” appeared in its place.
Lighter Than Some
released a contented bleat. <
When, show, others? >

The alien appeared again. It raised its right hand and flexed four of its fingers: <
Morning.
>

<
Good!
> The Huragok’s sacs swelled and it rose a little higher. <
Soon, come, peace!
>

The energy core was fading now, and the little alien with it.

Lighter Than Some
angled its snout toward the towers. The associated intelligence inside was amazingly efficient; it had only taken half a cycle to learn how to speak. The Huragok’s sacs quivered with excitement.
There were so many questions it wanted to ask!
But it knew it only had time for one before the energy core was sapped.

<
Want, me, fix?
>
Lighter Than Some
gestured toward the towers.

<
No.
> Loki’s fragment quickly verified its sabotage of Sif. <
Nothing, worth, save.
>

Then the energy core sputtered out, and the data center plunged into darkness.

CHAPTER

TWENTY

HARVEST,
FEBRUARY 23, 2525

Overnight, the mall had cleared. At dawn there were no refugees, no constables; all had moved in the night to the elevator sheds. As Captain Ponder strode eastward across the park, he saw half-drained drink cartons, unzipped luggage, and ransacked clothes; here and there were diapers, foul-smelling rags, and crumpled holo-stills. The once beautiful mall had become a trash heap—a dirty and disorganized monument to Harvest’s abandonment.

After placing a beacon at the center of the mall to mark a landing zone for the aliens, his Staff Sergeants had wanted to remain at the LZ to set up sniper hides and cover Ponder during the handoff. But the Captain had refused. Healy had insisted he at least drive Ponder from the Parliament across the mall. But the Captain had just ordered the Corpsman to wrap him in a new cast, give him some meds, and set him on his feet. This wasn’t stoic pride; Ponder was just eager for one last march.

Some marines hated marching, but Ponder loved it—even his first, grueling road hikes in basic training. Since his demotion, he’d sometimes joked how lucky he was to have his arm blown off. If the Innie grenade had taken one of his legs (his punch line went), he probably would have learned to walk on his hands. Not the best joke ever told, but even now it made him chuckle.

That made him wince and suck air through his teeth. Despite his new cast, one of his shattered ribs had shifted against his already ruptured spleen. There was nothing Healy could do for such a serious injury, and there wasn’t enough time for an operation at Utgard’s hospital, not that Ponder would have agreed to it.
Some missions were best handled by dying men,
the Captain knew. And giving the aliens their Oracle was one of them.

The knoll at the center of the mall was topped by a fountain and a bandstand, and surrounded by a ring of old, gray-barked oaks. As Ponder hunched past the trees, their heavy branches rose as if they were stretching up in anticipation of Epsilon Indi’s ascent. But Ponder also felt his abused organs rise inside his chest, and he realized the real cause of the oaks’ elation even before he cleared their canopy and could once again see the sky.

The alien warship was dropping toward Utgard, and its anti-gravity generators were cushioning its descent with an invisible, buoyant field.

Under different circumstances, the Captain might have felt fear as the massive vessel came to rest perpendicular across the mall, no more than a few hundred meters above Utgard’s highest towers. But the anti-grav field did a better job of managing his pain than any of the meds Healy had given him. As the warship came to a groaning stop, Ponder inhaled deeply. For a few glorious moments he breathed without effort, without feeling the steady throb of blood from his spleen.

But the relief dissipated as quickly as it came. As the alien ship stabilized and dialed its field generators back, the Captain was forced to trudge up the hill to the bandstand bearing the full weight of his trauma.

It didn’t help that he also carried the brass-bottomed holo-projector from the Governor’s office. Ponder still only had one arm, and couldn’t shift the object’s weight. To make matters worse, Lt. Commander al-Cygni had fitted a round, titanium-cased network relay to the bottom of the projector. She’d wanted to use a lighter model, but Loki—Harvest’s long-dormant PSI—had insisted that a more robust relay was required.

Ponder had been too weak in the Governor’s office to concentrate fully on Loki’s explanation of the plan. But he understood that the aliens were looking for a powerful, networked intelligence. Something they called an Oracle. And thanks to an apparent traitor in their ranks, Loki had learned he could fake the Oracle’s electronic signature by filling the relay with an excess of data traffic.

Staff Sergeants Johnson and Byrne had a hard time trusting intel from a hostile source, especially after what the aliens had done to Gladsheim. And in fact, when al-Cygni had revealed her and Loki’s complete plan, the marines had initially exhibited some of Governor’s Thune’s outrage. If they were going to try and sneak all of Harvest’s remaining citizens past the alien warship, why the hell would they want to lure it
closer
to Utgard?

Suddenly, one of the alien dropships emerged from a glowing portal in the warship’s stern. It swooped past the Tiara’s seven brilliant strands, like a tuning fork testing the pitch of an oversized piano’s wires.

As Ponder climbed the handstand’s wood-plank steps, he noticed the dropship held four objects in a wavering blue suspension field between its bays. When it slowed and the objects fell free, the Captain realized they were vehicles of some sort. The instant they touched the ground, their toothed wheels began to spin. Then, spewing clods of dirt and grass behind them, they began a rapid clockwise reconnoiter of the oaks around the knoll.

Each vehicle was driven by one of the armored aliens. Ponder recognized the tallest from the botanical gardens, its tan fur bristling from gaps in its blue armor. But the leader was a red-armored beast with shiny black fur who angled its vehicle up the knoll and came to a rumbling stop between the bandstand and the fountain.

Ponder noted two things as the alien dismounted: first, the vehicle’s seat remained elevated off the ground—evidence of some limited, anti-gravity capability; second, the vehicle was armed with a pair of the aliens’ spike-flinging rifles. These were crudely welded to the top of what the Captain assumed was the vehicle’s engine. Cables snaked from the rifles to the vehicle’s elevated steering handles—an arrangement that would allow the driver to fire and maneuver at the same time.

The red-armored alien leapt onto the bandstand and paced to Ponder, another spike rifle swinging from its belt. It stopped out of Ponder’s reach but well inside its own, yellow eyes gleaming from its angular helmet. The Captain smiled, held out the holo-pad and thumbed its activation switch. The circular symbol Loki had received from his alien informant flickered to life above its lens.

For a moment the towering beast leered down at Ponder—a predator assessing its weaker prey. Then it reached out its mighty paws, engulfed the projector, and brought it close. Its nostrils flared as it sniffed the crackling air around the symbol. It gave the projector a shake, like a suspicious child with a large but very light birthday present.

“What you see is what you get,” Ponder said, reaching inside his olive-drab fatigue shirt’s breast pocket. The alien pulled its weapon and barked at the Captain. “Sorry, only have the one,” Ponder said, extracting a Sweet William cigar. He put the cigar between his teeth and retrieved his silver lighter. “Adjust six hundred meters vertical. Fire for effect.”

Loki’s voice crackled in Ponder’s earpiece. “I can give you ten seconds.”

“Think I’ll stay put and watch the show.”

The alien snarled something that might have been a question. The Captain couldn’t tell. But he decided to answer anyway. “Someday we will win,” he said, lighting his cigar. “No matter what it takes.”

The alien warship shuddered as the first supersonic slug from Harvest’s mass driver smashed into its bulbous prow, crumpling the iridescent plating with a tremendous, metallic clang. At the same time, all the windows in all the towers around the mall shattered.

Even before the muzzle crack of the first shot rolled in from the east, a second slug arrived, penetrated the weakened hull, and gutted the warship, stem to stern. Purple running lights on the vessel’s belly flickered and died. It listed to port and began to sink—and would have crashed down onto the mall if not for its perpendicular orientation. The vessel came down between two pairs of towers on either side of the park and became wedged in the tapered gap between their upper floors. The warship screeched to a shuddering stop, creating avalanches of polycrete dust that followed the sparkling window glass to the boulevards below.

In direct contrast, the Captain suddenly found himself rising. He looked down and was surprised to see the alien’s bladed weapon jammed into his gut, straight through his cast. Ponder felt nothing as his boots began to twitch, and he knew his spine was severed. As he began to twist sideways on the blades, the alien grabbed him around the neck and pulled its weapon back.

Unfortunately, the blades hurt a lot more going out than they did going in. Ponder opened his mouth in silent torment and his cigar fell from his lips, its tip bouncing off one of the alien’s paws. Snarling, the creature released Ponder’s neck, and the Captain crashed to the bandstand into a widening pool of his own blood.

Ponder thought the alien would finish him off quickly—drive a spike through his chest or crush his skull with a swift stomp of his wide, flat feet. But just like him, the alien had become distracted by a new noise rising above the groan of the warship’s rough landing.

Seven small boxes were now streaking up the Tiara’s elevators, their maglev paddles crackling as they glided against the strands. Though the Captain lost sight of the boxes as they passed behind the cruiser, he knew exactly what they were: “grease buckets” used to perform regular maintenance on the strands’ superconducting film. But today they had a different job and carried a different load. As Ponder reached out a trembling hand to retrieve his cigar, he prayed the buckets made it swiftly to the top.

The red-armored alien roared and leapt down from the bandstand. The Captain watched as it rallied its companions and ordered them to the northeast—toward Harvest’s reactor complex and the mass driver. The three aliens in blue armor tore off on their bladed machines, engines coughing fiery exhaust. Then the red-armored alien raced back to its dropship and rose quickly to the warship.

By then the first cargo containers had begun their climbs. Each was packed with roughly one thousand evacuees. If everything continued to go as planned, in less than ninety minutes Harvest’s remaining citizens would be safely off their planet. But Ponder knew he had much less time than that.

“Loki,” Ponder grimaced. “Tell Byrne he’s gonna have company.”

The Captain thought of his marines and their recruits—of all the men and women he’d ever led. He thought of his demotion and was happy to realize he wasn’t one of those people who wasted their last precious moments debating how he would have done it different if he only had the chance. He blinked to clear his eyes of some of the polycrete dust now wafting across the mall, and at that moment, Epsilon Indi’s first bright yellow rays stretched over the eastern horizon. Enjoying the warmth, Ponder kept his eyelids closed. They remained forever shut.

“Watch fingers while I open,” Guff said as he inserted the handle of his wrench into the flimsy, mechanical lock of a tall metal cabinet.

Tukduk stopped scooping items from an adjacent cabinet long enough to say: “Next one mine.” He removed a clear bottle filled with a fragrant, viscous liquid, studied it with his one good eye, and then discarded it onto a pile of towels and cloth uniforms in the center of the white-walled room. “This one no good.”

“They
all
no good,” Guff grumbled, levering the wrench and snapping the lock.

“No complain!” Flim barked, picking through the pile. “Search!”

Dadab shook his head and sat down on a bench beside the pile. Even though he had insisted that
Rapid Conversion
’s Luminary hadn’t found any relics on the orbital, Flim was convinced the Deacon was lying—attempting to keep the orbital’s hidden treasures for himself. And as obvious as it was that they were rooting through a room where the aliens did nothing but wash and dress, Flim refused to give up until he got results.

“Watch step!” he growled as Guff accidentally stepped on one of the many flexible tubes littering the floor. The tube popped its top, spraying Flim’s shins with a sticky, ivory-colored cream. Flim cuffed Guff’s head as the bowlegged Unggoy kneeled and dabbed at the mess with one of the towels. Tukduk tried to take advantage of the distraction and slyly pulled a flat metal case from the top of the newly opened cabinet. But Flim caught him in the act. “Bring that to me!” he snapped.

Dadab guessed the case was just a signal unit or some basic thinking machine that belonged to one of orbital’s absent crew. Compared to the circuits in the control room the case was worthless. But as much as it pained Dadab to perpetuate the charade of their holy investigation, he effected a passably curious tone.

“May I see that when you’re finished?”

“Why?” Flim replied, snatching the case from Tukduk.

“I found one like it a few cycles ago. I believe they’re part of a set,” the Deacon lied. “If we could find
all
of them…”

Flim narrowed his eyes. “Yes?”

“Well, they would be a lot more valuable. The Ministry would reward us handsomely.”

“How reward?”

“Oh, anything you might desire.” Dadab shrugged. “Within reason, of course.”

Flim blinked his wide-set eyes and prioritized his desires—some more reasonable than others. Then he growled at Guff. “No clean! Search!” Guff gladly tossed the gummy towel aside, retrieved his wrench, and made ready to break open another cabinet.

Dadab drew a short breath and feigned a cough. “Running low,” he said, reaching around to rap his knuckles on his methane tank. “Need a refill.”