Unity is Hollow

Note that all series belong to their respective holders. I know that Bungie owns Halo, Bioware owns Mass Effect, and certain other universes (used for metaphysics) are owned by their own creators

Locatation: Seras system, UNSC-Controlled Space
Date: March 3, 2539 CE
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A vast behemoth among planets, banded with red and yellow, hung in the voids of space. A "hot Jupiter", its orbit was stable, and, moreover, at a distance within the habitable band.

Beside it, a red-tinged, satellite planet span, plumes of dark, volcanic cloud obscuring much of the surface. Its seas, small and perhaps only covering forty percent of its surface, were dark. Tiny patches of green were sprinkled across its surface, the start of a project which, were it to be brought to conclusion, would make it into a world which its inhabitants could be able to walk around without protective gear. It would never be finished, though. The plants had already begun to die off, their brief, genetically encoded spring terminated by its creators.

The satellite Seras Alpha Aye, called, more informally by its inhabitants, "New Mars", for its colouration. It was to be the first of the UNSC's hidden worlds. The genocide Covenant, sweeping across the Outer Colonies, leaving dead, glassed worlds in their wake, had the High Command worried enough that they were preparing contingencies. Worlds such as Seras Alpha Aye, uninhabitable worlds, were to have complexes hidden in them, filled with hundreds upon thousands of fertilised eggs, carefully selected to ensure that, if humanity was destroyed, the species could be resurrected. When they were completed, the facilities would go dead, hopefully undetectable by Covenant intruders. No living people would man these places, yet they would bring in new life. Artificial wombs, a logical development of the flash cloning utilised in ONI dark operations even before the war with the Covenant, filled the birthing facilities. Unlike the flash cloning, these did not produce the lethal congenital defects. By extending the period the foetus spent in the device to seven months, the children produced were indistinguishable from any other human infant, and matured at the same rate. Dumb AIs, unaging unlike their smarter counterparts, would teach these humans not of woman born, giving them the best education that humanity could design. From these hidden facilities, this one but one of seven, the future of humanity would be ensured.

For the captains in orbit, protecting the work below, the resources could have been spent a lot, lot better. Captain Alastair Hunter, in command of the obsolete Halycon-class cruiser, the Ancient of Days, would have much preferred to be in a proper, modern cruiser, and not babysitting a mixed group of scientists and, he shuddered, ONI operatives. It wasn't even if he would be much good if the Covenant did attack. It was only him and three frigates, the Wing of Purity, the Knight of Arms, and the Monstrous Regiment. His MAC cannon was underpowered, with a too slow recharge time, he didn't have the full complement of Archer missiles, and the marine complement was under strength, too. The Halycon only classified as a cruiser due to its size, he'd much prefer to be in the destroyer he'd helmed before they "promoted him". Technically, there always was a cargo ship in orbit, but its task was to save the scientists while he slowed down the Covenant.

He snorted. Oh, yes. There was always Gabriel…

As if on cue, Gabriel popped up, or as he preferred to call it, manifested. A chorus of trumpets sounded out over the bridge, as, in a flare of white light, a figure, clad in shimmering white robes, with eagle's wings protruding from his back and carrying a flaming sword appeared. Around it, small cherubs floated, the source of the trumpets.

It would have been a lot more impressive had the figure been more than thirty centimetres tall, or had been solid, or if the captain hadn't been able to see the wall on the other side of him.

"Beware, for I bring you ill tidings!" the figure pompously proclaimed.

The Captain sighed. He had been begging for an AI, to help monitor the area and the scientists below had supported him, as long as it could be used to analyse some funny data they'd been getting from the planet's core. Obviously, the higher ups hadn't wanted to spare one, and so he'd got perhaps the most annoying one they could find. Definitely, Gabriel had the most irritating personality quirk.

"Must you do that every time, Gabriel?" he asked the figure plaintively. "You disrupt all the work on the bridge when you do it, and the trumpets…"

"Too much?" the AI asked.

"Too much."

"But, I don't know. It's just a quirk. We all have them. It's a consequence of being insufferably smarter than you are."

The Captain lowered his voice. "Listen to me, Gabriel. You are not an angel. You just happen to be named after a figure from mythology. I don't mind the avatar; it has style. Christianity was a rather successful mythology, after all. But please, I'm actually asking you. No more trumpets. And keep the flare down."

The angelic figure looked up.

"Please."

The AI snapped its "fingers". All but one of the cherubs disappeared. "Well, since, you ask. For I am a benevolent deity."

Captain Hunter stared at him.

"Merely humour, captain, merely humour. Now, where was I?"

"Ill tidings. I assume they're not that important, as you wasted time in the pompousness."

"They may be, they may be. You wasted more time objecting to a little quirk, anyway," the angel added, a little snappishly. "The supply ship from Rho Argo hasn't arrived; it's 173021 seconds late." He looked at the captain's confused face. "Just over two days. And may I remind you that Rho Argo is ahead of us in the lines. It may have been attacked, or be under attack."

Alistair nodded at the AI. "Thank you, Gabriel."

The AI did not disappear. "There's also a request from Dr Montark, the head of the science team, down below. She wants to talk to you as soon as possible."

"And why didn't you tell me of this first, Gabriel."

"The security of this facility is a high level directive for me," Gabriel answerd. "I felt that the risk which a late ship, especially when it was coming from an endangered system, might indicate, would outweigh the request of someone without the natural intellect to do their own calculations." The last comment was made in an almost sniffy tone, as if the AI was sulking.

"You don't like her," the captain asked, in surprise. "You seem to spend an inordinate amount of time talking with the ground below."

"Only because I was instructed to do so," the AI snapped back. "She has an annoying habit of believing in Christianity, and thus objecting to me. Objecting to the portrayal of a mythological figure? The cheek. I asked her if she objected to AIs such as Thor, or Osiris, and she said that she didn't."

Alistair sighed. "So you've been alienating the ground-huggers too. Why couldn't you just change shape?"

"Firstly, it's not that easy. I can alter the minutiae, but when we're… you could call us children, our "theme" is set. And I did try a different form."

"…and? Does she still dislike it?"

"It was Jibril. From Islamic mythology."

The navigator, a black woman in her mid-thirties, smirked. "Hey, Gabriel. You, and I use this word, historically, are a douchebag," she called over.

The angel smiled back. "Why, thank you Lieutenant Leftvater."

"And a pillock. And a tosser," added Lieutenant Jones, on Weapons.

"Nice to hear that old insults are being kept in regular use, Aleck."

The captain waved at his crew to shut up. "Much as it's helping all of us to insult Gabriel, who, yes, is one of the most annoying things to be put in a computer."

"Much as I love to hear you say that, captain, you wouldn't be saying that if the UNSC didn't filter the access to the extranet which it gives its soldiers," Gabriel interjected.

"Exactly what I mean. Go run a diagnostic of the sensors, then get Navigation to send out the Slipspace probes."

The AI put its projected hand over its virtual heart. "Bless thee, my child." The remaining cherub blew an out-of-tune toot as the light from the projector vanished.

Captain Hunter shock his head. "That is the most infuriating AI ever made."

Lieutenant Alice Leftvater, the navigator, shrugged her shoulders. "With all respects, sir, I've been posted with worse. Gabriel just seems to like pushing. I do wonder about the kind of people they choose for… you know… the donor template, though. They seem to focus on intellect above things like, say, being able to get along with people, or knowing when they've gone too far."

"Fair enough," Captain Hunter replied. "Bradley, open a comms channel to Facility Zero-Omega-Four. Let's see what the boffins want."

_____________________________________________________________________

Dr Sarah Montark, head of the science team responsible for preparing the installation of Fallback 3 and its various components, was puzzled. One might even say perplexed, in a way that she hadn't been in quite a while.

"Let's go through this again, Danny. The geological subterranean scans are normal up to the most recent excavations. Expected mass variation for a stable tectonic zone; we're in the middle of a plate, for God's sake."

The various snapshots flash by on the holo-display, showing what from the viewpoint of the scanner is below them. As they proceed, the projection gets deeper as the human-made tunnels spread out. As they approach the current date, March the 3rd, 2539, the flicker slows down. Suddenly, out of nowhere, below (but only just) the human excavations, a bloom appears. Geometrical patterns protrude off the surface of the object, but the inside is opaque.

"It might be solid, or there might be something inside stopping our scans. Like one of those shields that the Covenant are meant to have," Daniel Vega, the Chief Engineer on the project, stated. "That's not what's screwed up about it, though," he added. "After we found it, we reset all the sensors; changed nothing. We broke out the grav-sensors, and you know what we found? They only find it when they're less than 31.4 metres from it, in the deepest tunnels. The grav-sensors don't have the accuracy to do it any closer."

He shook his head. "That's just… wrong. Gravity doesn't work like that. It's not like the other forces. It has an infinite range, and it just doesn't stop like that. It's just wrong!"

Sarah noted that he was almost working himself into a frenzy.

"Daniel. Go lie down for a while. I'm going to contact the ships again, now we've actually got a properly mapped out model of the anomaly. I'll see if I can get that stupid AI to take me seriously for a while, or better yet, yet through to the captain. Who knows what this might be? Maybe it might be an artefact of a pre-human race, for all we know."

These words coincided with a buzz at her door. She looked down at the name of the visitor.

Cypress, Major Z. (ONI)

The ONI liaison officer. Of course. She could hardly expect otherwise from them. They were hanging around all the facilities, and were in practice in charge of the facility. She'd seen some of the stuff which they were installing, overriding her team, and she very much doubted that they were just for raising children. Top of the line medical facilities added to the plans overnight, the number of gyms doubled, and some of them lengthened a suspicious degree. And Major Zack Cypress; well, he scared her. His neat uniform, fussily done hair and anonymous appearance shouldn't have scared anyone, but it did scare her. There was something about him that scared the twenty-eight year old, that made her feel like a child. And she'd heard hints that she hadn't been the first choice for the post, that someone else, older, had been bumped aside on the orders of a higher up.

The door opened. She hadn't let him in.

"Ah, doctor. I'd hoped you were in, when I found the door unlocked. Otherwise, that would have been a potential breach of security."

She knew that the doors automatically locked, and in theory she had the only key.

"Apparently you've found an anomaly on the scans; a rather big, persistent one. Have you tried re-setting the scanning tools?"

She turned to face him. "Yes, Major, we have. I am waiting to contact the cruiser in orbit, to request that they perform a scan on the facility?"

"Why? If what you say is correct, then the ship won't have a chance of seeing it. If the sensors are blind at the range of 31.5 metres, then the ship should have no chance."

"What? I didn't tell you… never mind. Yes, that may be true, but I'm just ruling out the possibility of it being a problem down here."

"Yes, doctor, do that. While talking to Captain Hunter, though, request that he send down a sizeable contingent of Marines, in hazardous environment gear." The ONI operative turned to face the engineer. "And you, Daniel, prepare a drill to the surface of the object. We're going to see what it is. If it's alien, well, things will happen. Bad things for someone."