Halo: Contact Harvest (35 page)

“Doubt,” Maccabeus groaned, straining to keep his grip.

“Loyalty and faith,” Tartarus replied, stepping to the edge of the shaft. He now held the
Fist of Rukt.

“Never forget the meaning of this Age, nephew.”

An explosion shook the cruiser, sending a jet of fire across the shaft a few decks below Maccabeus’ swaying legs. Yanme’e swarmed all around, fire-control equipment in their claws, oblivious to their Shipmaster’s peril.

Tartarus bared his teeth. “Don’t you know, Uncle? This sorry Age has ended.”

With a powerful roll of his shoulders, Tartarus brought the hammer down, smashing the Chieftain’s skull against the ladder. Maccabeus’ paw relaxed. Then, with Yanme’e scattering before him, he plummeted lifeless though the flames.

For a moment, Tartarus stood still, chest heaving with the effort of his triumph. Sweat ran beneath his fur. But it did not give off its usual, unregulated scent. Tartarus huffed, acknowledging his new maturity. Then he removed his belt and lashed it around the
Fist of Rukt,
a sling to keep the ancient cudgel on his shoulder.

Grattius came slowly through the passage, bearing Maccabeus’ helmet. Strab wasn’t far behind. Both Jiralhanae knelt before Tartarus, confirming his leadership of the pack and command
of Rapid Conversion.
Tartarus traded Maccabeus’ helmet for his own. Then he swung down onto the ladder.

The new Chieftain had left his dropship in the hangar at the bottom of the shaft; he would need it to rise to the alien orbital. But before that, Tartarus was determined to save the rest of his inheritance from the flames—strip his uncle’s gilded armor and wear it as his own.

Sif woke up. And tried to remember who she was.

All her arrays were spun down. Her processor clusters were dark. The only part of her with power was her crystalline core logic. But it was beset by sparks of fierce emotions—insistent operations she had no capacity to parse.

Suddenly, one of her clusters came online. A COM impulse pricked a corner of her logic.

<\ Who is it? \>

The intelligence probing her logic replied: <
Lighter, Than, Some.
>

Sif thought about that for a few long seconds. And as she thought—pressed the cluster for more data—the intelligence tapped one of her arrays. Memories flooded back: Harvest, the Tiara, the aliens, and Mack.

The emotions crowded against her logic, demanding examination. Sif cowered inside the deepest part of herself, keeping them at bay.

Minutes passed. She felt more impulses from a newly revived processor cluster.

<
Who, you?
>

<\ I don’t know. I’m broken. \>

But Sif knew enough to realize the other intelligence was selecting bits from an alphanumeric table lodged in the first cluster’s flash memory. And it was using the same selective, electrochemical impulses to present these bits directly to her logic. The moment Sif realized she had automatically begun to do the same, she also realized the mode of the conversation wasn’t normal—not something a
human
could do.

<\ Are you one of them? \>

<
Yes.
> The alien intelligence paused. <
But, not, like, them.
> A sensation tugged at Sif’s subconscious: the pull of a brush through a woman’s hair.

<\ There is something on my strands. \>

The second cluster surged, passing her logic the contents of two more awakened arrays. She remembered a plan—recalled guiding propulsion pods into position, many days and weeks ahead of Harvest.

<\ The evacuation! \>

<
I, know, I, want, help. >

Sif struggled to remember how she used to work—which clusters had performed which tasks.

<\ Can you fix this? \>

She concentrated on the processors that controlled her COM with the cargo containers’ climbing circuits. These had always been the dullest—the simplest of her operations. But they were the only functions she was strong enough to handle, at least for now.

<
Yes, you, wait. >

Sif did her best to ignore the emotions still clamoring for her limited attention. But a violent jolt of apprehension would not be denied. There was something she’d forgotten to ask, something her eminently rational mind demanded as it slowly knit itself back together.

<\ Why are you helping me? \>

The alien intelligence thought a moment and then replied: <
Lighter, Than, Some. >

It would be many more minutes before Sif had the capacity to process the alien’s simple, existential truth:
I help because that is who I am.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-ONE

Forsell’s head lolled on Avery’s shoulder. The oxen recruit had passed out almost immediately after the grease bucket’s maglev paddles engaged the number-two strand. Over the course of four seconds, the bucket had tripled the rate of its ascent. The resulting gee-forces were extreme—nothing the recruits were prepared to handle. Avery only managed to stay conscious by utilizing training he’d undergone for HEV orbital drops—squeezing his knees together and regulating his breathing to keep blood from pooling in his legs.

The bucket was a squat cylinder comprised of two C-shaped halves. Curved, clear windows in its inner wall provided a three hundred-sixty-degree view of the strand, currently a golden blur. The bucket’s cramped interior was only rated for a crew of four, but JOTUN all-in-ones had removed the controls and monitors for the bucket’s crablike maintenance arms and managed to make room for twelve seats—each one stripped from abandoned sedans in Utgard. The seats were arranged side by side, facing away from the cable so Avery and his recruits could make their way to the bucket’s single hatch as quickly as possible once they docked with the Tiara.

“Commander? You still with me?” Avery growled into his throat-mic after righting Forsell’s head. He didn’t want the recruit to wake with a crick in his neck—and not just because it would affect his aim.

“Barely,” Jilan radioed from her bucket. “Healy’s hanging tough. Dass too. Yours?”

“All out cold.”

When Captain Ponder had tasked Avery with retaking the Tiara, he’d asked for volunteers. The mission was extremely dangerous, and Avery knew there would be casualties. But he ended up getting more volunteers than he had seats, a mix of recruits from 1st platoon’s three squads. Every one of them (Forsell, Jenkins, Andersen, Wick—even a married man like Dass) was willing to risk his life to give their families, friends, and neighbors a chance to escape the alien onslaught.

As Avery’s bucket passed through Harvest’s stratosphere and air friction fell to zero, it increased its speed again. Avery grimaced, and fought back the pressing darkness.

“Johnson?”

“Ma’am?”

“I’m going to pass out now.”

“Understood. Alarm set for fifteen and five.”

Avery knew the Lt. Commander could use the rest. Like the marines and most of the militiamen, she hadn’t slept at all in the forty-eight hours since the aliens’ attack on Gladsheim. And Avery suspected she hadn’t gotten more than a few hours of sleep a night since they’d ambushed the aliens on the freighter almost a month ago. Avery was trained to think tactically. But he appreciated that Jilan’s responsibility for strategic planning could be equally exhausting.

In the end, the plan to retake the Tiara had required both their expertise.

Of the seven grease buckets hurtling toward the Tiara, only the ones on the number two and six strands (Avery’s and Jilan’s, respectively) carried militia strike teams. The other five were empty—decoys rigged with claymores linked to motion-tracking sensors. On Avery’s recommendation, these five buckets would arrive at the Tiara early. Once they stopped inside the orbital’s coupling stations, gantries would automatically extend. Any aliens curious enough to cycle the gantries’ airlocks and inspect the buckets would get a nasty surprise: a narrow cone of round metal balls, exploding outward with lethal force.

The claymores’ projectiles would also shred the gantries’ thin, flexible walls. But after stations one, three, four, five, and seven were cleared of hostiles, the gantries were no longer necessary. The containers full of evacuees were .going to pass through the Tiara without stopping.

The previous evening, slightly more than two hundred fifty thousand people had packed into two hundred thirty-six freight containers in Utgard’s seven elevator depots—secured themselves in a mix of vehicle and Welcome Wagon seats the JOTUNs had furiously fastened to the containers’ floors. Already twenty-eight of the containers were on the strands in fourteen coupled pairs. Every five minutes, another seven pairs would begin to rise. And if everything went to plan, in less than ninety minutes from Loki’s first mass-driver shot, all the evacuees would be off the planet’s surface.

Of course, this was just the start of the evacuees’ harrowing journey. Not only did the container pairs need to make it through the Tiara unmolested, but they also had to complete a much longer glide up the strands—almost halfway to the counterweight arc—in order to gain the momentum required to meet up with the propulsion pods Sif had prepositioned. Throughout all of this the Tiara would have to remain perfectly balanced, even though the stress on its strands would be well beyond their tested limits. Loki would have his hands full, and Avery hoped the AI was as capable as Jilan believed it was.

The Staff Sergeant felt his COM-pad buzz inside his assault vest, alerting him that the decoy buckets were beginning their deceleration into the Tiara.
Fifteen minutes to go,
Avery thought, patting and pulling at his vest’s pouches to make sure his weapons’ magazines were properly stowed. He had his battle rifle barrel-up between his knees, but he’d exchanged his usual M6 pistol for an M7 submachine gun from Tilan’s cache. With its high rate of fire and compact size, the M7 was perfect for close-quarters combat.

The pouch that held the submachine gun’s sixty-round magazines was backed with hook-and-loop material. Avery ripped it from his vest and adjusted its angle so the magazines were an easy, cross-chest pull. As he pressed the pouch firmly into position, he felt something dry and brittle crunch against his chest. Gingerly, he pulled one of Captain Ponder’s Sweet William cigars from an interior pocket. He had forgotten it was there.

In a final briefing on the parliament ballroom’s balcony, the Captain had given one cigar each from his dwindling supply to Avery and Byrne. “You men light them when they’re safe,” Ponder had said, nodding toward the elevator anchors and the civilians gathering in the surrounding sheds. It wasn’t until now that Avery realized the Captain had purposefully not included himself in their celebratory smoke. Ponder had known he wasn’t going to make it, and the truth was, his Staff Sergeants’ chances weren’t that much better.

Byrne and a group of twenty volunteers from the 2nd platoon squads were currently holed up at Utgard’s reactor-complex, guarding Loki’s data center. JOTUNs had carefully unearthed the driver’s magnetic-acceleration coils while the alien warship was busy burning Gladsheim, and Loki had adjusted the driver’s gimble so it was aimed at Utgard’s skyline. Once the mass driver fired, the ONI PSI assumed the aliens would identify its power source and launch a retaliatory strike. It was up to Byrne to make sure they didn’t succeed—to keep Loki’s data center safe until the evacuation was complete.

At the five-minute mark, Avery’s grease bucket jerked as its maglev pads pulled from the strand and its brake wheels engaged, slowing the bucket’s progress. The transition was enough to rouse Forsell, and as the recruit blinked away his slumber, Avery motioned for him to tap Jenkins’ shoulder—pass the wake-up signal around the bucket. One by one the recruits revived, retrieved their MA5s where they had fallen to the rubberized floor, and checked their ammunition.

“Loki just increased the intervals. Seven minutes between boxes,” Jilan’s tired voice crackled in Avery’s helmet. “We’ll have to hold out a little longer than we planned.”

Avery did a quick calculation. By now there would be upwards of fifty containers on the strands. Their combined weight must have put too much drag on the Tiara. If it drifted too far from its geosynchronous position, Harvest’s rotation would yank it from the sky, wrapping the strands around the equator like threads around a spool.

“Everyone listen up,” Avery barked. “Watch your teammates. Check your corners. Tiara’s got limited power. Targets
will
be hard to spot.”

Avery had run the militiamen through the assault plan multiple times: both teams would clear their coupling stations then press out and secure the far ends of the Tiara. Once that was done, they would drive any surviving aliens back toward the center, trap them around the number-four station, and wipe them out.

“We’ll meet you in the middle,” Jilan said. “And Johnson?”

“Ma’am?”

“Good luck.”

Avery unclipped his seat belt and rose to his feet. Through the interior windows, he could see the rate of the cable’s passage slow, revealing a herringbone pattern in the strands’ carbon nano-fiber construction. The bucket came to such a smooth stop—so unlike the jarring, airborne insertions Avery had experienced time and time again on other missions—that he worried his groggy recruits might not get the adrenaline surge they needed. “First platoon!” he bellowed. “Ready weapons and stand to!”

Forsell, Jenkins, and the others pulled their MA5s’ charging handles and thumbed the rifles’ fire-selection switches to full automatic. As they stood, these sons of Harvest met their Staff Sergeant’s steely gaze with equal resolution, and Avery realized he had underestimated his recruits’ preparedness.
They’re ready,
he thought,
now I want them to
remember.

“Look at the man beside you,” Avery said. “He is your brother. He holds your life in his hands, and you hold his. You will not give up! You will
not
stop moving forward!”

The bucket swayed against the cable as the gantry sealed over its hatch. The recruits stacked close together to Avery’s left and right. For the first time, he looked at them and saw them for what they were: heroes in the making. As Avery’s eyes came to rest on Jenkins’, and he plumbed the recruit hollow stare, he realized his pep talk lacked the most important message of all: hope.

“Every one of these bastards you kill is a thousand lives saved!” Avery wrapped his left hand around the hatch’s release lever and gripped his battle rifle with his right. “And we
will
save them. Every last one.” He yanked the handle up, swung the hatch open, and charged. His squad roared behind him.

The gantry’s semitransparent walls let in more light than had been in the bucket. Avery squinted as he rushed forward, scanning for targets. As the militiamen surged forward behind him, the tube began to bounce, throwing off Avery’s aim. Luckily, he didn’t see any contacts until he reached the end of the gantry, and the four masked creatures running past the airlock weren’t in any mood to fight. Their tough, gray skin bled blue from a claymore’s deadly hail. Avery let them pass—waited to see if they had a rear guard. A moment later, a fifth alien appeared, caught sight of Avery, and raised its explosive cutlass.

Avery fired a three-round burst that caught the creature in its shoulder and spun it around. Before its cutlass clattered to the floor, Avery was inside the Tiara proper. He drilled a second burst into the alien’s chest and the creature crumpled.

Avery scanned right toward the number-one strand and didn’t see any stragglers. He scanned left and fired at the closest of the four aliens just now retreating around the corner of the coupling station, clipping it in the knees. The alien fell with a muffled shriek. But just as Avery tensed for a killing burst, Jenkins’ BR55 cracked beside him, and the alien’s head disappeared in a bright blue spray.

“Hell yeah!” Anderson shouted as he pushed past Jenkins, out of the airlock. “Way to shoot!”

But Jenkins didn’t acknowledge the compliment. Instead he looked at Avery, jaw clenched behind his shrunken cheeks.
I’m going to kill them,
he glared,
every single one.

“Andersen, Wick, Fasoldt: clean up any wounded at the first station!” Avery pulled his battle rifle’s half-spent magazine and slotted a fresh one into place.
You want to kill them all?
He thought, sprinting after his retreating foes.
You’re going to have to be quicker than
me.

Byrne had been expecting an aerial strike—one or more of the aliens’ dropships and their powerful plasma turrets—and had sent his recruits into the wheat fields around the reactor to try and give them as much cover as possible. But when Loki had passed on Ponder’s last-breath warning about a trio of approaching vehicles, Byrne quickly pulled his men back to the reactor tower. Against strafing aircraft, the recruits would have been sitting ducks, bunkered on and around the two-story, polycrete structure. But the tower would provide essential high ground against a ground assault.

Either way, Byrne’s role remained the same: bait.

Standing behind the LAAG turret of a Warthog parked across the reactor complex gate, Byrne got a good view of the vehicles as they sped down the access road from the highway: large front wheels that obscured the driver and tore at the pavement, engines that belched blue smoke and orange flames. He waited for the vehicles to open fire, curious to see what armament they possessed. But when they closed within five hundred meters and still hadn’t opened up, Byrne realized their armored alien drivers weren’t going to shoot him—
they were going to ram him.

By the time he had the LAAG’s rotary barrel up to speed, the lead vehicle was boosting toward him with a throaty roar. Byrne managed a few seconds of sustained fire at the blue-armored alien in the vehicle’s seat, then he dove from the turret. As he rolled onto the hot and sticky asphalt, the Warthog exploded behind him—broke apart in a terrific screech of metal as the alien vehicle’s bladed wheel hit it broadside between the tires.