HALO: Contact Harvest by Joseph Staten

Author:Joseph Staten
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

CHAPTER 13

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Harvest, February 9, 2525

Avery lay on his belly, surrounded by ripening wheat. The green stalks were so tall and the kernels so plump that a day of blazing sun had failed to reach the ground. The clumped topsoil felt cool through his fatigues. Avery had traded his usual duty cap for a boonie: a soft, wide-brimmed hat with a strip of canvas sewn loosely around the crown. Earlier in the day, he’d woven wheat stalks into the strip, and even though the stalks were now bent and frayed—as long as Avery stayed low—he was well camouflaged.

Rifle-bag dragging along behind him, Avery had crawled almost three kilometers from his parked Warthog to Harvest’s reactor complex. Along the way, he’d crested a long, low rise that Lt. Commander al-Cygni had told him was actually the buried mass driver. If she hadn’t, Avery would never have known. To keep the device hidden from alien eyes, Mack’s JOTUNs had topped the rise with squares of soil and living wheat dug from other fields.

All told, the crawl took Avery more than two hours. But he had been focused on stealth, not speed. In fact, in the last ten minutes he hadn’t moved at all; his liveliest aspect was the reflection of the rustling wheat in his gold-tinted shooter’s glasses.

These had been part of the cache of equipment and weapons the Lt. Commander had given to the marines. Like the BR55 battle rifle Avery carried in his drag bag, the glasses were a prototype—a piece of hardware fresh from an ONI research lab. Refocusing his gaze, Avery checked a COM link in the upper corner of the glasses’ left lens where a tiny HUD confirmed his exact position on Harvest, a little less than five hundred meters west of the complex.

Directly ahead, the field began sloping downward. Avery knew all he had to do was crawl a few more meters and the wheat would start to thin. This would give him good line of sight to the recruits’ defenses and put him in position to execute his part of the assault he’d planned with Staff Sergeant Byrne. But the thinner cover would also give the militiamen the best chance they’d had all day to spot Avery, and he planned to stay put until he was sure of his advantage.

Slowly, Avery reached between his legs, undid his rifle bag’s plastic clasps, and withdrew his BR55. After the fight aboard the freighter, Avery had spent plenty of time with the weapon at the garrison range, assessing its strengths compared to the recruits’ standard-issue MA5 assault rifle. The BR55 shared the MA5’s bullpup design (magazine slot and breech positioned behind the trigger), but it came with an optical scope and fired larger nine-point-five-millimeter, semi armor-piercing rounds. Technically, the BR55 was a designated marksman’s rifle. But it was the closest thing to a sniping weapon in Lt. Commander al-Cygni’s arsenal, and Avery knew from his work on the range that it was deadly accurate out to nine hundred meters, much farther than the MA5.

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