“And that was the end of it?” asked the HIGHCOM officer.“Yes sir,” replied Captain James Ackerson of the UNSC Army.The man nodded, and looked to the side, towards the rest of the panel of listening Generals and Admirals. There were less than twenty members of HIGHCOM in total, and today, Ackerson had the great privilege of talking to seven of them in a single place.
It should have been an amazing thing to be in this position, a sign that his career was about to take off. Just getting the attention of a single HIGHCOM member was a boon to any man’s promotion prospects, especially if you’d excelled.
By most metrics, Ackerson had excelled. He’d been put into one of the worst situations that Humanity had ever faced, and he’d come home with rescued civilians, vital intelligence, and the entire story of how that disastrous first contact had gone down.
Anyone who knew him would have expected him to be quietly jumping for joy. Ackerson had made no secret about his own ambitions. He wanted to climb the ladder. He wanted to sit on HIGHCOM one day, if not run the entire Army. His eyes were set on the stars, both literal and figurative.
But right now, Ackerson didn’t care about any of those things. He didn’t care about his career. He didn’t care about HIGHCOM itself. He didn’t even care about the near miracle that he’d pulled off on Harvest.All he could think about, all he could see behind his eyelids and in his dreams, was Utgard. The screams of the people in the streets. The burning skyscrapers crashing down, pillars of steel shattering like toothpicks and sheets of glass melting as the cargo pods raced up to the orbital station. The face of that ugly, ape-like alien as he’d rammed it with a Warthog, pinning it against a bus.Humbling. That’s what it was. Not amazing.
Some part of his pessimism surged in his chest, and whispered in the back of his mind.It all makes sense, you know. Humanity had it good for too long. It doesn’t deserve nice things, especially when it’s full of people like us.Ackerson pushed the voice out of his head, as he’d always done. He didn’t bother trying to hide his wince from the assembled HIGHCOM members. They’d just assume it was because of his injuries. And if they didn’t… then Ackerson didn’t care. Let them think whatever they wanted. It didn’t change anything.“Thank you, Captain,” said Admiral Keeler, nodding to him from the chairman’s seat at the table. “You are dismissed. We may you call you back tomorrow for additional details, so stay inside the Hive and be prepared for a possible summons. For now, get some rest. You’ve earned it.”The Army man nodded, not wanting to speak and betray his temporary weakness. Not that it would have helped – knowing Keeler, he probably had already spotted Ackerson’s thoughts somehow. Even as Army Intelligence, the traditional enemy of Navy Intelligence, Ackerson could admit that Keeler was the right man for the job. Especially with a war starting.He stood up from his chair, and saluted them stiffly. If any of the HIGHCOM members noticed how his elbow didn’t quite bend right, they didn’t say anything. He was healing as fast as he could.James Ackerson walked out of the briefing room. He strode to the elevator without hesitation or deviation. He didn’t see anyone else in the hallway, but he kept his face expressionless just in case.Once the elevator doors closed, he let it out. A huge sigh exploded from his chest, and Ackerson swayed on his feet, almost losing his balance. He almost reached out with a hand to steady himself, but with a grimace, he rode out the wave of exhaustion, and steadied himself.He looked at the control panel, and thought about pushing the button for the residential quarters. The Hive wasn’t supposed to be a hotel, but inevitably, some people needed to stick around for situations like this, when briefings ran through the night, or even to the next day. He’d been given a room on the fifth floor of the towering building.A finger hovered near the button for his floor. It was tempting. God, it was tempting. He could feel the mattress calling for him.
But he hadn’t eaten in six hours. Even that was just a single sandwich during a lunch break, before a quick restroom visit. Aside from that moment, he’d been trapped in that room for nearly twelve hours straight, giving the full breakdown on exactly what had unfolded on Harvest.Food first, he decided. He didn’t feel like eating, didn’t have the slightest bit of hunger, but his body needed fuel, and he was not the kind of man who ignored reality just because he was distracted.Instead of hitting the button for the fifth floor, he hit a different one.After a few moments, the elevator doors opened, and Ackerson walked out, navigating the large corridor with the ease of long practice, as he made his way to the bar.The bar was open from noon to midnight, and so Ackerson arrived at the middle of those hours. Like always, it was mostly empty. Maybe a dozen people, if that. A ‘busy night’ would have been twenty or thirty. …of course, that was excluding the Spartan’s little graduation party.
Ackerson hadn’t been there for that party. He had helped arrange it, had ensured that his men with the relevant classifications would be able to attend – but he’d had orders, and orders took priority. Some of his men, those who’d been transferred to other units in the years since they’d trained the Spartans, they’d showed up. Ackerson had been looking forward to seeing some of the pictures of that night, seeing if that cold bitch Halsey had defrosted a little.
Not anymore. He had bigger thoughts weighing on his mind now, like leaden anchors dragging him down.
Instead of being there that night, Ackerson’s company, most of them veterans of training the Spartan-II’s, had been dispatched to Harvest in mid-September of 2524.
He hadn’t done the math yet, but he was pretty sure that on the same day this bar had held that party, he’d been shooting aliens and trying to survive.
Ackerson walked up to the bar, and didn’t even bother acknowledging the bartender. Instead, he walked around the side, stepping behind it and grabbing a pitcher to fill from the tap.Donovan, the retired old man, watched him with a careful eye. Ackerson felt his gaze on his shoulder, but he ignored it, watching as the pitcher slowly filled up with beer. Not good beer, because that would have been a waste tonight, but the half-decent shit that only really existed to get people drunk. “Are you good to be here?” Donovan asked him quietly. “You look unsteady.”“Haven’t eaten all day,” Ackerson said, as if that was the real cause. “Can you get me a burger? Just call it in from the cafeteria.”The pitcher was full, so he pulled it off the tap.“Sure,” Donovan said. “Just this once.”Ackerson nodded to him in thanks, then grabbed a drinking glass and walked over to one of the booths. He didn’t want to be disturbed today. He just wanted to sit, refuel his body, and then go to sleep.He poured the first glass from the pitcher, and drank it slowly. Not with the refined palate of a dedicated connoisseur, but with the iron-clad control of someone who was barely holding it together, and couldn’t afford to move quickly. He could admit that about himself, here in this place, where nobody else would ever know. But as soon as he set the beer down, Ackerson knew that he couldn’t just think about nothing. His mind, even tired, was too active and busy. If he didn’t set a course now, then his brain would latch onto something, probably unpleasant, and obsessively recount it.Fine, Ackerson thought to himself, bitterly. Let’s go over the details one more time.
He’d already reported the entire chain of events several times. His initial audio report had been painful, and his written report after that had been exhaustive. Today’s recounting to HIGHCOM had been technically unnecessary – they’d already listened and read both of those. Its sole purpose had been so that they could ask him clarifying questions, try to tease out elements that he might not have considered. That was fine, that was their job, but it was still another repetition.And tomorrow, Ackerson might have to tell the tale yet again. So he might as well think about it, recite it in his mind, so that he could do the best damn job he could. He was no quitter, and it couldn’t hurt him anymore than it already had.He barely looked up as Donovan came by to drop off a plate in the booth, filled with three burgers from one of the mess halls upstairs. His mind was already rolling back, thinking of how it had unfolded. It had all started a year ago. The deployment orders, that was.
Ackerson and his company of Army Rangers were to be deployed out on Harvest, the furthest and most remote of all the Outer Colonies. Some might have considered that a punishment, and Ackerson himself had, until he got the briefing.
Usually, something like this would have meant a full duty rotation. At least two years as a garrison force, guarding important buildings and providing tactical teams to handle any sudden Insurrectionist attacks. It was the kind of posting that Arnold Wilson been exiled to, after Halsey had booted him from the program. A bad sign for anyone’s career in black ops. Boring. Useless. It meant you were little more than a SWAT team for an entire planet. A post for run-of-the-mill joes. This time, however, was different. Harvest was distant, yes, but it was also very important. Freighters from Harvest were the lynch-pin in the food supply of half a dozen nearby colonies that were less fortunate or less developed. Add in that it was a gorgeous planet, ripe for further colonization, and its security became paramount. In time, Harvest wouldn’t just be an isolated backwater: it would be a regional capital. A hub of commerce and agriculture.
So when freighters from Harvest started disappearing, that was a big concern. The Innies had been trying to capture more ships for some time. They had a real tech-monkey way of converting them into improvised missile-boats, and ONI was keen to keep that from happening.Ackerson’s company had arrived just around Christmas, and they’d settled into their new job. By January, their ONI spook, Lieutenant Commander Jilan Al-Cygni, had come up with a plan. A squad of his Rangers had been inserted on board an automated freighter, trawling the routes most of the disappearances had occurred on. They had faked an accident, and tried to lure in the pirates.
He himself hadn’t been among them, but he’d made sure that two of his men were wearing the new prototype helmets from Project GUNGNIR – and more importantly, that they had helmet attachments for combat recorders. Doctor Halsey had wanted footage of the helmets in combat. Something about getting hard data on how well the prototypes held up. Ackerson hadn’t though much of it, until those same helmets had captured high definition footage of what went down on the freighter Bulk Discount.Pirates had shown up, alright. But they hadn’t been human. They’d been lizards. Aliens. The first real sign of intelligent life out there in the cosmos, and they were goddamn pirates.The ambush had gone… poorly. Three of the Ranger squad had died up there in space. Two men had been killed by the plasma weapons carried by the aliens. One man hadn’t made it back to the freighter alive when the alien ship blew itself up in an apparent self-destruct sequence, and his body was ash in deep space.If it weren’t for those helmets, then all they would have had was the wild claims of injured soldiers. Instead, they had proof. Real, tangible proof of alien life.
Despite the alien ship’s destruction, the threat wasn’t gone, however. Where there was one ship, there might be more.
Lieutenant Commander Al-Cygni, the ONI spook, sent off her sloop with a warning message to Reach as fast as she could. There were closer worlds with UNSC garrisons, but first contact was too important for anyone but HIGHCOM. Both regulations and common sense agreed on that.
Ackerson remembered praying that her sloop made it there fast enough for reinforcements to arrive, before any more aliens found them. The ONI ship wasn't designed for speed, but for stealth. It did this by looking like a boring bureaucrat’s cheap jalopy, and by using extensive deployable stealth features that were normally hidden... but both features cost valuable tonnage, meaning there wasn’t room for other upgrades, like a faster engine.
Unfortunately, the ONI sloop didn’t make it back in time.
His company of Rangers had done their best to get ready, but truthfully, they had already lost the initiative.
Harvest didn’t have any ground-to-orbit missile silos. It didn’t have a UNSC anchor-station in orbit, just a loading dock for its agricultural exports. It didn’t even have a single protective warship posted in the system, like some other Outer Colonies.
If the aliens came back, there was no meaningful defense that could be mounted. Even at the time, every single one of his men had been uncomfortably aware that it was a matter of when they came back, not if. But there had been no other option. Their only combat-capable ship had been the ONI sloop, and that thing was deliberately built to look like a Department of Commercial Shipping personal transport. Its sole anti-ship weapon was an Archer missile. One missile, singular. Nowhere near enough armament to fight a proper battle. What do you do when you know a fight is coming, but you know that you’ll lose?You don’t give up. You try every single option. Even the diplomatic ones.Al-Cygni’s plan was straightforward. Another empty freighter was sent on a short Slipspace jump out to the precise location where they’d encountered the first alien ship. With the help of Sif, one of the two Smart A.I.’s on Harvest, they carved a message on its hull, with a basic first contact greeting.Hopefully, the aliens weren’t all violent. Hopefully, it wouldn’t come to war.The month of January had passed like a kidney stone – slow and painful. In the meantime, Ackerson’s company had continued the CMT duties that had been passed onto them like an afterthought. CMT stood for Colonial Militia Training. It was a half-assed program that the UNSC liked to do whenever it could, and it was a tertiary duty for the unit – after the primary duty of taking out the pirates, and the secondary duty of general anti-Insurrectionist security.
The Colonial Militia was a damn joke by every standard. Barely a couple hundred men, compromised of a mixture of old policemen and young farm-boys, they had been an afterthought for Ackerson’s Rangers since December. A month was barely enough time to teach them how to shoot, much less any of the other jobs of a soldier.
The Rangers couldn’t help but compare the militia to the Spartan-II’s that they’d been training. It was unfair. The Spartans had been children. Brats, really. They weren’t fully grown, they didn’t have the life experiences of the retired cops and the young men of the farms. It wasn’t right to compare the two groups – because the militia, all three hundred of them, would have been annihilated by the seventy-five teenagers. The Spartans had trained for years, and the militia had trained for weeks.However, they needed bodies. A single company couldn’t hold a planet. Adding two more companies of improvised militiamen wasn’t going to change the fundamental fact that without orbital supremacy, any ground-based forces only lived as long as their enemies wanted them to.
Since giving up was not an acceptable option, his Rangers had kicked the militia’s training into high gear. No more classes on hierarchy and military regulations. Every morning was range time, and every afternoon was tactical exercises with TTR rounds.And it had paid off. Sure enough, the aliens had come back in early February, with a different ship. A bigger ship – much, much bigger.
The moment that ship had arrived on Sif’s scanners, Ackerson knew that they were screwed. He had a feeling about it. Even if it went perfectly, even if the aliens accepted the peace offering and tried to brush those pirates under the rug, he just knew that it would be ruse. After all, Ackerson was Army Intel. He knew the game of politics well.
Governor Thune insisted on being there for the first contact ceremony. They’d set up a nice welcome for the aliens in the Harvest Botanical Gardens, a hundred clicks away from the capital of Utgard. A full buffet, an honor guard of a dozen Army Rangers… and the entire place surrounded by a hundred more UNSC soldiers, just in case the aliens weren’t friendly.He could still see the alien dropships sweeping in. They looked like elongated bidents, or perhaps a tuning fork that got fat. They flew with no visible engines, no aerodynamics. Anti-gravity technology, one of his sergeants had speculated over the comms, before Ackerson hushed him.When the dropships landed, they got an unpleasant surprise. It wasn’t the same group of aliens. Not the angular, long-limbed lizards, wearing thin EVA suits and stalking forward like Jackals.
Instead, these aliens were large, hirsute creatures. They wore partial bodysuits with large ornamental armor plates over top... and they carried guns with wicked bayonets and glowing lights. They looked like savages, even though their technology was clearly more advanced than the UNSC’s. As if they wanted to be thought of as barbarians.
They looked like Brutes.
Ackerson remembered walking out in front of the aliens.
He remembered showing them his rifle, ejecting the magazine and clearing the chamber as proof that it was empty, and handing it off to one of his Rangers. He remembered gesturing at the Brute leader to disarm, just as he had. At least, he thought it was their leader. It was the tallest, the biggest, wearing golden armor plates and carrying an enormous warhammer with a head the size of Ackerson’s torso.The Brute had disarmed. It had followed along with the mimed hand-gestures from Ackerson, and followed him to the meeting point. Maybe someone else would have thought that was proof that peace was possible. Not him, though. He had known instantly the Brutes were faking. Even without knowing their tongue, their culture, their body-language, he could tell that they were playing along with this charade until the time was right. Because if James Ackerson was good at only one thing, then he was good at knowing when some bastard was playing games.Seven minutes, on the dot. That’s how long the talks lasted. Governor Thune had tried to use sign-language to communicate, tried to do that cave-man speak of tapping his chest and saying ‘Thune!’, before indicating for the Brute to do the same. When that hadn’t worked, the Governor had tried other communication methods, but over and over, the Brute did not understand, or did not want to reply.
Finally, the Brute had handed over a metal plate, carved from the freighter they’d left up there as a welcome mat. The aliens had carved pictograms on it. A human, holding out an orb to the Brutes. The Governor had thought that they wanted melons. Ackerson had recognized the truth immediately – that wasn’t a melon. The orb in that pictogram represented that planet itself. The Brutes didn’t want food. They wanted Harvest. All of it.
He remembered locking eyes with that Brute. He remembered its beady, bright yellow eyes. He remembered the way it huffed, the way it’s disgusting musk grew even more pungent, the way it had looked ready to kill him, just for looking at it eyes on. The Brute knew that Ackerson had realized it. He could see it in the alien’s expression. And it knew that Ackerson had seen that reaction. They didn’t need a working translator to understand each other in that moment. Two bastards communicating perfectly, just because they recognized one of their own kind, just before they betrayed the other.The tension had been thick in that moment. Everyone standing there had known that it was about to turn into a fight. Him, Lieutenant Commander Al-Cygni, his Gunnery Sergeant, the Brute leader, his two bodyguards. The only person who didn’t know was the Governor, that moron, still yammering on, trying to hand the alien a melon.
An old west standoff. Who would draw first? In the end, none of them had. Gunfire had interrupted their glaring match, and screams of aliens and humans alike. The Brutes had been fast. Far faster than their size should have allowed. They had drawn their weapons before his Rangers could do the same, and they got the drop on them. Ackerson couldn’t draw his pistol fast enough, so he hadn’t tried – he’d tackled Al-Cygni instead, knocking her out of the line of fire, just as his Gunny saved Governor Thune’s life. If the UNSC had only brought that honor guard, then Ackerson would have died there. His tackle had saved the Lieutenant Commander from the first volley of shots, but the Brute adjusted his aim, and went to fire again at the pair of them on the ground. It had been a tactically stupid idea.
Which was exactly when the rest of Ackerson’s company opened up, shooting at the only people still standing on that podium: the aliens themselves.
Going prone had been part of the plan. The entire time those aliens had been walking past the honor guard, they’d had dozens of guns aimed at each and every goddamn one of them.As far as an ambush went, it had been a good one. MA37 assault rifles, M247 machine guns, even some of the new experimental battle rifles, the XBR55’s. The only problem was that the Brutes had been planning an ambush themselves – and theirs was better.
Their dropship had only opened one of its two troop bays when it arrived, and Ackerson hadn’t wondered what was in the other one. The answer, as it turned out, was a dozen more Brutes, who charged out. They hadn’t been using the same projectile weapons as the Brute Chieftain’s two bodyguards - instead, they had grenade launchers, and their initial barrage had forced most of Ackerson’s Rangers to duck for cover.
If the Brutes had been as technologically advanced as they looked, then it would have been manageable. But they were more advanced. UNSC bullets had struck them, only to by deflected by a flashing field of energy that appeared around them, hugging every contour of their bodies. Energy shields, as Mack had labeled them in his after-action analysis.
The dropship itself was even worse. It had looked so alien to Ackerson as it had floated down on its anti-grav engines, but even then, he had noticed the ball-turret on it, whirling around with easy, free-flowing motions. It had to have been remote controlled from the cockpit. He had known about the dropship’s gun – but he hadn’t expected it to be so lethal.
Plasma had spewed from that dropship’s turret like water from a hose. Triple bolts with each shot, and its rate of fire was almost as high as the M247 GPMG’s. Each shot had carved huge furrows in the gardens, blowing holes in the concrete planters that the Rangers were using for cover… or killing a Ranger with a single hit.
Even with their new armor from Project GUNGNIR. Even with cover. If a plasma shot was aimed at you, and you didn’t get out of the way… you were dead.
The Brutes, for all their savage appearance, had managed a successful fighting retreat back to their dropship. They’d piled into their dropship and evacuated, still firing from the open troop-bays as their bird launched upwards to the sky.
It would have been a perfect time to use anti-aircraft fire to swat that dropship from the sky… but they didn’t have any. They’d been sent out to fight Insurrectionists, and there was no need for AA. He wanted to rage at the bureaucrats for that, but it was for a good reason: if they had brought AA, it could have been stolen by the Innies, and used against them. Asset denial was important when dealing with an Insurrection.
The casualties in the aftermath were bad. Of the hundred Army Rangers that Ackerson had brought into that fight, he’d come away with seventy-one left over. The Brute spikers, the grenades, the plasma. They hadn’t known what to expect, and their overlapping firelanes hadn’t been designed for that degree of firepower.Yet for one poor man, it had been worse. The first shots hadn’t been fired at the podium. They’d come from elsewhere. ‘Elsewhere’, as it turned out, was the edge of the security perimeter.
While the Brute Chieftain had been pretending to negotiate, there was a second pack of the aliens. As best as the camera recording could tell, they’d been looking for something – constantly stopping and consulting a scanner of some kind.
What they were searching for, Ackerson still didn’t know. He only knew what they had found: Sergeant Mitchell.The second pack had found and cornered one of the sentries near the edge of the perimeter, as he was moving between fireteams. Sergeant Mitchell fought well, and left the bodies of two smaller, stumpier looking aliens behind…
…but then he had died, and he had died poorly. The aliens hadn’t just killed him. They’d descended on him like ravenous animals, and they had started eating him. Ackerson drained yet another glass of the beer, and found that he didn’t have the stomach to finish off the third burger on his plate. His appetite was gone, because of the things he’d seen.Sergeant Mitchell was one of his best men, and so Ackerson had issued him one of the experimental Project GUNGNIR helmets. That helmet survived Mitchell’s death. It had recorded the entire thing, including the alien’s impromptu meal.The footage was horrifying. The fact Mitchell was dead before they started was the thinnest of silver linings.
And from there… Harvest had spiraled downhill fast. Two weeks of frantic evacuations. Governor Thune tried his best, but he was a politician, and his idea of convincing everyone to evacuate to Utgard was a public address. It was the mildest and most milquetoast of solutions. When that had failed to convince the farmers to abandon their homesteads and run, Thune had released a heavily censored version of the first contact in the gardens.
Instead of helping, Thune’s efforts had backfired. Far too many Harvest residents became convinced that the Governor was trying to trick them somehow.
People were the dumbest animals in existence. Even if they believed the truth, they still tried to blame the messenger. Many of the people who had believed the Governor were still angry with him for a host of reasons, like not telling them earlier, or hiding other, unnamed and unprovable secrets.
Looking back from the safety of the bar on Reach, Ackerson was souring on the idea of democracy as a philosophical concept. Three million people had lived on Harvest – and thanks to their stubborn refusal to listen to an authority figure that was trying to help them, most of them were dead now. The same root problem as the Insurrection but far, far worse in effect.
For ten days, Ackerson’s company worked overtime to evacuate as many people to Utgard as possible. They’d managed to bring only a tiny fraction of the planet’s population to the spaceport, the chokepoint that controlled all interstellar travel. Mack, the planetary A.I., had been invaluable, converting cargo containers into refugee transports that could safely carry them through slipspace and away. The entire time, that damn alien ship had hung over the planet, ominous and silent. They didn’t move, didn’t shoot, didn’t do anything. Speculation had filled the Governor’s office, but it was empty air.
On the eleventh day, the Covenant finally started moving. They began a systematic purge of every human they could find. Hundreds of thousands of people had died out there in their farms. The Harvest militia had nearly mutinied, wanting to find their families, and Ackerson had barely managed to keep them under control by telling them the horrible truth: there was nothing they could do for their families. Abandoning their posts would only kill them, and then kill all the people in Utgard, who would be left without protectors. If only they could shoot down the enemy warship. But they had no anti-orbital or anti-ship weapons.Well now, that’s not exactly true, Mack had said. We do have the old mass driver. The mass driver from the early colonization. It was a weaker, more primitive version of a proper UNSC warship’s MAC cannon. It had been replaced decades ago by orbital elevators, which were far more reliable and less risky. Worse, the driver was immobile. Its firing arc was anemic, ossified. If they wanted to use it, then they would have to lure the Covenant ship into the exact right position.I’ve got something for that, Mack had told them, far more solemnly. Lieutenant Commander Al-Cygni demanded more information, and together, the ONI woman and the A.I. came up with a plan.On the twelfth day of the battle, while Ackerson’s men and the Harvest militia held the line against the aliens, the Covenant ship had come swooping in to Utgard, hungry to nibble at Mack’s bait… right into the limited firing arc of the mass driver.
Bang bang went the old cargo mover, and thump thump went the alien ship.Two shots later, and the Covenant ship was disabled.
Not dead – it still hung there, floating ominously above the city – but the indiscriminate bombardment from its plasma weapons finally fell silent. It had moved when shot, displaying the same energy shields as the Brutes, invisible until struck... but the energy shields had flashed once, and then failed.
The rounds punched through, and there were secondary explosions insist the ship. The entire thing bucked like an animal, and then went motionless.
That hadn’t been the end of the battle, however.
In order to evacuate the people of Harvest, they had used the Tiara, the orbital station hanging above Utgard on seven space elevators. It was the transit hub that would load the autonomous freighters with cargo containers full of people.
Which meant that they had to control the Tiara – and evict the Covenant forces that had been on-board it.
More aliens. More firefights. Most of them were the stumpier, gray-skinned beings that hate killed Sergeant Mitchell. They used some kind of rebreather system, even in the perfectly normal oxygen environment of the Tiara itself. It would have been unimportant, save for the way that the rebreathers exploded if you shot them in the right way. That realization, along with the sheer lethality of the plasma pistols, and the needle-like devices that spat explosive shards, had cost another dozen men from the combined forces of Ackerson’s Rangers and the militia.And then, just like that… the Battle of Harvest was over. The Covenant ship was crippled, unable to follow them or fire at the hundreds of Slipspace tugs as they frantically fled for Madrigal and other nearby colonies.
The survivors were packed aboard the cargo pods like sardines, stressing their life support to the breaking point, more than a thousand people in each pod. It would be a miserable way to live, but at least they would live.
Harvest was left alone. Abandoned. With both planetary A.I.s dead, all navigational computers smashed, and all communication masers blown up, there was no way for the Covenant to follow them.
The planet became silent, in an eerie mirror of the fate that had befallen those freighters mere months before, drawing ONI’s attention and Ackerson’s Rangers to the planet.
In time, maybe the Covenant be able to repair their ship. Maybe they wouldn’t.
Ackerson didn’t know, and there was a part of him that still wished that they didn’t run from Harvest – because there was no way that the Covenant had killed all the remaining population in that short time frame. There had to be hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of humans still alive on the planet… and now, they had no way of getting off it. They would be killed slowly over time, hunted down by the aliens in the burning ruin of their homeworld.
But the risks were too great. Even with how advanced the Covenant’s technology was, Mack had confidently declared that he’d detected outgoing communication signals from the purple-blue warship. More alien ships were almost certainly on the way. If they hadn’t left, then they wouldn’t have been able to save anyone from those reinforcements.
“Captain Ackerson?” a young voice asked.
James Ackerson stirred, looking away from the half-full pitcher of beer that he had been slowly draining, and he froze as he saw a teenager standing before him.
He recognized the teenager instantly. It was Edgar. One of Halsey’s Spartan-II’s. The same boy that Ackerson had met on Madrigal, just after the Battle of Harvest.
Madrigal was the closest neighbor to Harvest, and thus, it was where Al-Cygni had told the freighters to head to. But Madrigal had been a far less developed world. It had a much lower population, and for much of the month long Slipspace journey to it, Ackerson had been terrified that by the time they arrived, it would have already been destroyed.
When the freighters finally came out of Slipspace, a month later, Ackerson and Lieutenant Commander Al-Cygni – he had called her Jilan, by then, since they had grown to know each other on a more intimate level – were enormously relieved to see the colony was undisturbed and peaceful.
The Covenant had not found Madrigal.
Yet, his subconscious had whispered at the time.Luckily enough, there was a UNSC presence in the system. UNSC Divorce Proceedings, a small corvette that was patrolling the edge of the system for pirates. Light, small, fast. The perfect ship to send back to Reach with this vital information. Unfortunately, the Commander aboard the warship had been firm. His orders were to keep to his duty station until relieved. He didn’t believe the footage they showed him, the horror stories too much for his credulity.
He didn’t even bend to Jilan’s ONI authority. It was an understandable security regulation – ONI classification was not, and could not be a blank check for running rampant over everyone else. As an Army Intel operative, Ackerson normally agreed with that, because of his own institutional rivalry. However, he had somehow found the single exception where he would have preferred the opposite.
Jilan and he were in agreement that HIGHCOM needed this intelligence as fast as possible. They’d simply have to find another ship. The freighters would be too slow. They’d made it to nearby Madrigal without losing too much time, but all the way to Reach? They’d have been moving like slugs in comparison to a faster ship.
As it happened, there was another option. Madrigal’s orbital station, despite being much smaller than Harvest’s Tiara, had docking rings for ships. One of them was occupied by a Vancouver-class courier, one of the fastest ship designs in the UNSC fleet. Perfect for high-speed missions like this.When they’d asked, the Commander had pursed his lips, and informed them that the courier was off-limits. Classified mission, ONI codeword only.Jilan Al-Cygni had been annoyed, but accepting. She was a loyal soldier, but she operated under the chain of command. She didn’t realize how flexible it could be.Ackerson, however, had a suspicion.
It was strange that the corvette’s mission was known. Yes, it was technically classified, but the Commander knew it was an ONI mission, rather than just being told it was a standard mail run. That would have been the perfect cover for any kind of intel operation – ask for a standard resupply on food, cryo drugs, and fuel. The turnaround window was just long for an agent to execute a quick mission, then gets back on-board and leave.
But the standard excuse of a mail run would only have worked if the courier had been there for a short time period. A day to resupply and give the crew some quick shore leave.
It wouldn’t have worked if, for instance, the courier was sticking around long enough for its occupants to sight-see. To visit. To go home.
And Ackerson knew of an operation that had been planning to do exactly that. The timeline even matched up.The codeword is ASTER, isn’t it? he had asked the Commander. The man had stiffened, eyes widening, while Jilan Al-Cygni had shot him a confused look. How do you know that? the Commander had replied, his voice tight.
I’m read-in on the project, Ackerson had told him. Pass a message to them. Mention my name, and tell them I need the ship ASAP. They’ll agree.
The Commander had been doubtful, but he’d done so, and less than an hour later, Ackerson, Jilan Al-Cygni, thirty of his rangers, and five civilians were on board the courier, preparing for cryo-sleep… when they ran into Cadet Edgar of the Spartan-II Program, freshly returned from his home visit. Edgar was a good kid, like all the Spartans. He had greeted the Rangers warmly, and he’d been worried when they hadn’t replied to him. They’d all moved into their cryo-pods without delay, and nobody had told Edgar exactly why they were there.
“Captain Ackerson?” came a young voice, interrupting his thoughts. “Sir? Are you okay?”James Ackerson shook his head sharply, emerging from the malaise of memories, and realized that he had zoned out right in front of Edgar.
He wasn’t on Madrigal. He wasn’t on Harvest. He was on Reach, in the bar with no name, and Cadet Edgar was standing right in front of his booth, looking concerned.
“I’m here,” Ackerson said, keeping his voice even and flat with a forced effort.
He didn’t think that he had drunk enough to slur, but he also didn’t think he’d been drunk enough to zone out right in front of Edgar, and that was clearly false.
He looked over at the kid, and bit his lip. The augmentations were over, and Edgar had started growing. Not a lot, but he’d shot up nearly six inches in the year since Ackerson had seen him. Just tall enough to seem like a grown man, rather than the fourteen-year-old that he was.Ackerson also saw Donovan, the bartender, walking over at him with a hard look on his face. He knew that look. Someone was about to get kicked out of the bar. Maybe it was Edgar, for breaking the rule about approaching a booth. Maybe it was Ackerson, for drinking too much while in a bad mood.“Sir, I didn’t get the chance to ask back on Madrigal,” Edgar said, his eyes scanning Ackerson’s face and clearly picking up on something that Ackerson didn’t want him to see. “But is there a chance I could catch up with Sergeant Mitchell? He offered to help me out with a training exercise last time, but we ran out of time. I’ve been hoping to catch up with him ever since.”Mitchell, Ackerson thought, with a stabbing pain in his chest, like one of those crystalline cutlasses that the alien Grunts had wielded. Mitchell’s corpse flashed in front of his eyes, the prototype HAZOP helmet splattered by his dying blood.
“Sergeant Mitchell is gone,” he said to Edgar slowly, breaking the most important rule of the bar.Edgar stiffened, his eyes widening for a split second. “What happened?” the teenager asked, just as Donovan drew close enough.“There is no business talk in my bar,” Donovan said sternly, interrupting their conversation with a growl. “You both know better. You’re done. Get out.”Edgar turned, opening his mouth to speak. Maybe he was going to apologize, maybe argue. Ackerson raised a hand, and like the well-trained soldier he was, Edgar fell silent. He stood up from the booth, his legs a little shakier than he liked. He nodded to Donovan, not arguing with him. When he said you were done, then you were done. Simple as that. Of course, the pitcher of beer wasn’t finished. Ackerson went to grab it, so that he could take the half-full pitcher with him back to his room – but Donovan moved faster, grabbing it and pulling it firmly away.Ackerson bit back the urge to complain, and merely nodded to Donovan again, a little more sharply. His feet didn’t want to move, but he forced them too, stepping out of the booth with stiff legs. Edgar, like the observant teenage super-soldier that he was, spotted it instantly, and moved up next to him, as if he was going to grab Ackerson and help him walk.“No!” Ackerson barked, shaking his head and gesturing for the teenager to stay back. “I don’t need your help!”
The other inhabitants of the bar turned to look. Ackerson had spoken far more loudly than he’d intended – loud enough that they’d all heard his angry voice, his prideful refusal that only made him seem more petulant, more pathetic. He had lost control of himself, and everyone knew it.
For a moment, Ackerson looked out at them. He knew about half of the dozen other patrons in the bar. They weren’t Army Intel, but they were members of Halsey’s extended network, and they all knew each other through Halsey. The others.. well, the others could get screwed.His chest filled again. Not with pain, but with anger. The glacial frost in his heart, which he’d maintained for as long as possible, couldn’t hold out any longer. The fire underneath it was too strong to resist.“You wanna know what happened to Sergeant Mitchell, kid?” Ackerson said, still loud, his voice bouncing off the far wall of the bar.“Out, now!” Donovan snapped, grabbing a handful of Ackerson’s uniform and shoving him forward.
He looked angry enough to physically throw Ackerson out of the bar, but one of his hands was occupied, holding onto the half-full pitcher of beer, so he couldn’t do it fast enough to stop Ackerson from speaking.Ackerson looked past Donovan’s furious expression, and locked eyes with Edgar. He made sure the Spartan-II was watching him as he spoke, so that the kid understood exactly what he said.“When you meet them,” Ackerson said, loud enough for everyone in the bar to hear, “kill them all.”