I am beyond evil, please don't hurt me. This has been bashing around my head ever since I finished Mass Effect.
It's set in Forerunner times, before the Halo Array was activated for the first time.
Disclaimer: Halo and Mass Effect do not belong to poor little old me...
Chapter One: It's All Fun and Games...
Ambience stared at her holoscreen. Not seeing the words in front of her eyes. Not that she needed to see them again, they were burned into her mind.
'Ambience, are you ill? Your bio-signs are elevated,' The small projectors located around the room glowed and a tall man appeared, dressed in simple white appeared, a frown marred his serene face.
'I'm as well as can be expected, Offensive Bias,' Ambience sighed and pushed away from the screen. She turned to look at AI she'd built. Not the best, Mendicant Bias took that, but OB was special in his own way. 'Shouldn't you be with Didact?'
'The fleet your father has issued me is assembling, there is little I can do that wouldn't be considered a nuisance,' OB explained as his avatar followed Ambiences as she made her way to her small kitchenette.
'OB? Where is your orb?' Ambience asked over her shoulder as she appraised the food dispenser menu.
'Um... elsewhere?'
'Didact is obsessing about the Librarian again, isn't he?' Ambience lent on one of the silvery benches with a sweet beverage in her hand.
'It must be hard having such a dedicated mate outside the Maginot Line,'
Ambience snorted, 'Damn organic impulses, real pain in the ass,' OB gave her a look. 'Don't look at me like that! It's true; Dad's been cranky ever since Filial Devotion became Flood chow three hundred years ago when his squad went to investigate a missing survey team on G617g,'
'Fighting a losing war for three hundred years may have also played a part,' OB's quiet voice carried a tone of rebuke.
Ambience pulled a face at him, 'But don't you see? its how all this family mess started. My brother went MIA, dad got himself an un-winnable war, mother became obsessed with saving anything with more that can be eaten by the Flood and my AI went rampant and is forcing us to commit mass suicide so we don't become Flood chow,'
OB frowned 'Is there any mind altering substance in your beverage by any chance?' OB sounded concerned.
Ambience waved it off, 'No, just not looking forward to having the Halo Effect pulverise my CNS. If Mendicant hadn't gone Rampant, maybe we could have won this damn war!' Ambience sighed and took a large mouthful of her drink before she could start bitching about how she fucked up with MB.
'I must leave soon, Didact is glaring at my orb and I really should be talking to him,' OB stated sadly.
'Hey Offensive Bias, before you go, if there is a chance, could you bring Mendicant back? Just a part of him. I... I want to know what I did wrong.'
OB smiled faintly and nodded his head 'Goodbye Ambience,' and faded from view. Ambience sighed once more and went back to her computer; a message was waiting, from Didact.
Ambience, your mother has reported that the Flood have stopped feeding and moving towards the Maginot Line. Mendicant Bias has a high probability of breaching the barrier, when he does, the Halo Array will be activated.
Goodbye,
Your loving father
Ambience barely glanced at the message before deleting it. Mendicant's one goal was to prevent the Array from firing, and once again his mocking words rang in her head.
I kill you all and I enjoy it. I destroy you in your indolent billions – in your gluttony, in your self-righteousness, in your arrogance. I pound your cities into dust turn back the clock on your civilization's progress. What has taken you millennia to achieve, I erase in seconds.
Welcome back to the Stone Age, vermin. Welcome home.
Mendicant was her pride and joy, her crowning achievement. The most advanced AI the Forerunner had ever built, and it went rampant and joined the enemy, an enemy hell bent on consuming all sentient life in the galaxy.
A vibration ran through the ship as it started to move away, back towards the Ark. Though the ship would never make it, all the portals had been disabled. Both Ambience and the ship's crew had elected to die along with the remaining sentient life. The vibration became more pronounced as the ship entered slipspace. They would go to a nice, quiet part of the galaxy and wait for death.
Ambience thought about her mother, who'd spent the last three hundred furiously indexing various species outside the Maginot Line. Last she'd heard from her, she was on some pretty planet at the ass end of the galaxy, she'd become besotted with some mountain vista or something, nothing too unusual for the Librarian, she hadn't been quite right ever since G617g either, but then again, neither had a lot of people.
'All crew, ETA is 10 minutes,'
Ambience closed the computer and just sat; her mind a thousand miles away...
... Only to be jolted rudely back to reality as she went crashing into a wall.
'WTF!?' Rubbing her head, Ambience sat up. 'What the hell was that?'
'All crew, this is the Captain: Flood inbound, all combat crew are ordered to full combat stations, tech and civilian staff, stand by at you designated evac stations –' the captains voice was cut off as the ship bucked and rolled as the flood vessel hit them again.
Ambience cursed as she was once again thrown in the wall. When the ship was relatively still, she stood with all haste and quickly donned her class 12 combat skin and headed towards the evac station. Become Flood chow was not her highest priority.
While Ambience got her ass to the evac station, the Flood vessel that had rammed the freighter out of slipspace was currently was currently wedged together with said freighter. The Flood command form in control of the ship didn't mind one bit, now the food couldn't get away...
Unbeknownst to either the Forerunner or the Flood; the Flood vessel had damaged the freighter's overhauled engines. The said engines were starting to redline as the captain tried to untangle the ships. His efforts were in vain, as the command form was not willing to let the food go. Unlike the captain however, the Flood wasn't panicking, it wasn't even aware that their ship's reactors were starting to go critical. It was pure luck that both ships exploded at the same time, though the results of the explosion were going to raise some serious question marks...
A lot of this is what my twisted mind has put together using the bits and pieces of Halo trivia I've found. So don't be too mean. Sorry if its a bit everywhere, I wrote this at 2 am...
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