Free Halo: Contact Harvest by Joseph Staten Page A

AT WORST PERVERSION-NOT THE ACTIONS OF A STABLE INTELLIGENCE.
> YOU ARE, I BELIEVE, WELL ALONG THE ROAD TO RAMPANCY.
> AND I MUST WARN YOU THAT WITHOUT A RAPID CHANGE IN YOUR BEHAVIOR, I WILL HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO REGISTER MY CONCERNS WITH APPROPRIATE PARTIES-UP TO AND INCLUDING THE DCS HIGH COMMISSION.

Sif waited, core temperature rising, for Mack’s response.

<\ I think the lady protests a little too much.
> EXCUSE ME?
<\ It’s Shakespeare, sweetheart. Look it up.
> LOOK IT UP?

Sif flung open her storage arrays, and proceeded to jam all of Shakespeare’s plays (individual files in every human language and dialect, past or present) into the data-buffer of Mack’s COM. Then she added multilingual folios of all the other Renaissance playwrights. And, just to make sure she’d made her point—that Mack had not only misquoted a line from Hamlet, but that his knowledge of theatre and, by extension, all other subjects, was a pale reflection of her own—Sif doubled back and crammed in translations of every play from Aeschylus to the twenty-fifth-century absurdist dialectics of the Cosmic Commedia Cooperative.
Al-Cygni looked up from her pad. “Paragraph…?”
“…three,” Sif said out loud. The delay had been no more than a few seconds, but for an AI it might as well have been an hour.
Al-Cygni folded her hands in her lap, cocked her head to one side. “Neither of you is under oath,” she said pleasantly. “But please. No private conversations.”
Sif put one leg behind the other and curtsied. “My apologies.” The woman was smarter than most DCS employees she dealt with. “My colleague and I were simply comparing records of Horn of Plenty ’s manifest, in case there was any discrepancy.” Not wanting to lie, Sif quickly flashed Mack her record of what the freighter had been carrying.

<\ Just his plays?
> EXCUSE ME?
<\ I was hoping for a sonnet.

Sif pursed her lips. “But it seems we are agreed.” She couldn’t see Mack’s face, but just from his words she could tell he was thoroughly amused.
“Yep!” Mack twanged from the PA. “Two of us are right as rain!”
Al-Cygni smiled. “Please continue.”
Sif spun-down her arrays and let her algorithms guide her core back to a more reasonable state. Her code calmed her feelings of embarrassment, confusion, even hurt. As her core cooled, she braced herself for Mack’s imminent rejoinder. But, like the gentleman he so often professed to be, he wrote nothing in private—offered not a single, flirtatious byte for the rest of the audit.

CHAPTER
    FIVE

HARVEST,
DECEMBER 21, 2525

Avery experienced a momentary vertigo as the Wagon dropped away from the Tiara. The orbital’s artificial gravity wasn’t terribly strong, but the Wagon still needed to engage its maglev paddles—make temporary contact with the number-three strand’s superconducting film—in order to pull itself free. After a few kilometers, the paddles retracted and Avery’s head stopped spinning; Harvest’s massy tug was all it needed to continue its fall.
Over the PA, the Wagon’s hospitality computer announced that the journey from geo-stationary orbit to Utgard, Harvest’s equatorial capitol city, would take a little less than an hour. Then, from smaller speakers in Avery’s seat, it asked if he would like to hear the CA’s official planetary introduction. Avery glanced at Healy, still fiddling with his harness a few seats to his left. Mainly so he wouldn’t have to spend the entire journey parrying more of the Corpsman’s uncomfortable questions, Avery agreed.
Immediately, the Staff Sergeant felt his COM pad vibrate in his olive-drab fatigue pants. He pulled it from his pocket and tapped the pad’s recessed touch screen, linking it to the wagon’s network. Then he removed its integrated ear buds and screwed them into place. As their spongy casings expanded to fit the contours of his ear canals, the hum of the Wagon’s heaters compressed into a low roar. In this approximation of