Halo: Contact Harvest Read Online Free

the deepest blue-black—an absence of stars against the brilliant background stripe of the Milky Way.
As the contact drew within a few thousand meters of Horn of Plenty ’s port side, three crimson dots appeared in a divot in its prow. For a moment these lights seemed to gauge the freighter’s disposition. Then the dots flared like widening holes in the wall of a raging furnace, and a chorus of alarms from various damaged and dying systems overwhelmed the NAV computer.
If the NAV computer had been smarter, it might have recognized the dots for the lasers they were—fired its maneuvering rockets and tried to evade the barrage. But it could do nothing as the now clearly hostile vessel slagged Horn of Plenty ’s propulsion pod, burning away its rockets and boiling the delicate inner workings of its Shaw-Fujikawa drive.
Not knowing what else to do, the NAV computer changed its distress signal from “engine failure” to “willful harm,” and upped the frequency of the maser’s pulse. But this change must have alerted whatever was controlling the vessel’s lasers, because the weapons quickly swept the maser dish with kilowatts of infrared light that cooked its circuits and permanently muted Horn of Plenty ’s cries for help.
Without the ability to move or speak, the NAV computer only had one option: wait and see what happened next. Soon the lasers identified and eliminated all of Horn of Plenty ’s external cameras, and then the NAV computer was blind and deaf as well.
The laser fire stopped, and there was a long period of seeming inactivity until sensors inside the cargo container alerted the NAV computer to a hull breach. These sensors were even dumber than the NAV computer, and it was with a certain blithe inanity that they reported a number of bins of fruit had been opened, ruining their contents’ “freshness guarantees.”
But the NAV computer had no idea it was in any danger until a pair of clawed, reptilian hands grasped its boxy housing and began wrestling it from its rack.
A smarter machine might have spent the last few seconds of its operational life calculating the ridiculous odds of piracy at the very edge of UNSC space, or wondered at its attacker’s angry hisses and chirps. But the NAV computer simply saved its most important thoughts to flash memory—where its journey had started and where it had hoped to end up—as its assailant found purchase at the back of its housing and tore it away from Horn of Plenty ’s power grid.

Three hundred and twenty hours, fifty-one minutes, and seven-point-eight seconds later, Sif, the AI that facilitated Harvest’s shipping operations, registered Horn of Plenty ’s distress signal. And although it was just one of millions of COM bursts she dealt with on a daily basis, if she were to be honest with her simulated emotions, the freighter’s abortive distress signal absolutely ruined her day.
Until Sif could be sure there were no other freighters with similar, lurking faults in their propulsion pods, she would need to suspend all transfers through the Tiara: an orbital space station that was not only home to her data center, but also supported Harvest’s seven space-elevators.
Sif knew that even a brief suspension would cause a rippling delay throughout the planet’s shipping systems. As cargo containers backed up on the elevators, more would stall in depots at the bottom—the warehouses beside the towering, polycrete anchors that kept each elevator’s thousands of kilometers of carbon nano-fiber tethered to Harvest’s surface. Quite possibly it would take all day to get everything back on track. But the worst thing was, the suspension would immediately catch the attention of the last individual she wanted to talk to at a time like this….
“Morning, darlin’!” A man’s voice twanged from the PA speakers in Sif’s data center—a usually hushed room near the middle of the Tiara that contained the processor clusters and storage arrays that served her