Halo: Contact Harvest by Joseph Staten Read Free Book Online Page B

’s communications circuits.
Finding the alien vessel had been pure luck. The Kig-Yar ship had just happened to be between jumps, conducting one of its scheduled scans for relics, when it detected a burst of radiation less than a cycle from its position. At first the Kig-Yar’s leader, a female Shipmistress named Chur’R-Yar, had thought they might be under attack. But when they drew close to the vessel, even Dadab could see it had simply suffered some sort of drive failure.
Still, Chur’R-Yar had wanted to make certain they were in no danger. Unleashing a full barrage with Minor Transgression ’s point-lasers, she had fried the vessel’s drive then sent Zhar aboard to silence the box—make sure it could no longer cry for help. Dadab feared Zhar would be too aggressive and ruin the one item of salvage that might help his promotion off the Kig-Yar ship, but he could never admit this to Chur’R-Yar. He had known of many other Unggoy Deacons who had met with “unfortunate accidents” for similar disloyal acts.
Eventually, the Shipmistress had given him permission to collect the box—Dadab assumed because she, too, had realized the importance of the item to the Ministry of Conversion’s work. She could have gone herself, of course. But as Dadab watched the excrement slide off the box and onto his hands, he realized Chur’R-Yar had probably sent him because she knew exactly what the box’s collection would require. Holding his stinking prize at arm’s length, the Deacon retreated back down the passage.
After evading another barrage from the Kig-Yar in the hold, he scampered through an umbilical back onto Minor Transgression. He hurried into the ship’s methane suite (the only room constantly filled with the gas), and eagerly undid the chest-buckles of his harness. As he backed into a triangular depression in one of the square room’s walls, a hidden compressor sputtered and began to refill his tank.
Dadab slipped out of his harness and swung his oversized forearms across his chest. His jaw ached from his mask’s tight seal, and he tore it off and flung it away. But before the mask hit the floor, it was intercepted by a lighting-fast pearlescent swipe.
Floating in the center of the suite was a Huragok, a creature with a stooped head and elongated snout held aloft by a collection of translucent pink sacs filled with a variety of gasses. Four anterior limbs sprouted from its spine—tentacles, to be exact, one of which held Dadab’s mask. The Huragok brought the mask close to a row of dark, round sensory nodes along its snout and gave it a thorough inspection. Then it flexed two of its tentacles in a quick, inquisitive gesture.
Dadab contorted the digits of one of his hardened hands so they matched the default arrangement of the Huragok’s limbs: four fingertips, facing straight out from the Deacon’s chest. < No, damage, I, tired, wear. > His fingers splayed and contracted, bent and overlapped as they formed each word’s unique pose.
The Huragok released a disappointed bleat from a sphincterlike valve in one of its sacs. The emission propelled it past Dadab to the tank receptacle where it hung the mask on a hook that protruded from the wall.
< Did you find the device? > the Huragok asked, turning back to Dadab. The Deacon held up the box, and the Huragok’s tentacles trembled with excitement: < May I touch what I can see? >
< Touch, yes, smell, no. > Dadab replied.
But the Huragok either didn’t mind the box’s residual Kig-Yar stench, or it simply failed to get Dadab’s joke. It wrapped a tentacle around the alien plunder and eagerly lifted it to its snout.
Dadab flopped onto a cushioned pallet near the suite’s freestanding food-dispenser. He uncoiled a nipple connected to a spool of flexible tubing, put it in his mouth and began to suck. Soon, an unappetizing but nutritious sludge surged down the tube and into his gullet.
He watched the Huragok pore over the alien box, its sacs swelling and deflating in