"Sir, we're picking up some unidentified contacts near the relay. Looks as if they're trying to activate it."
The Turian commander, a slightly daft piece of work who felt an odd urge to start a war with the as-yet-unidentified species with unknown capabilities, turned in his command chair and stared at his underling.
"Why did you say that out loud?" He queried, puzzled that someone would take up the laborious task of voicing the results of the scan when the VI had already downloaded the results onto both his command screen as well as the omni-tools of everyone in the entire ship for record-keeping.
"I...I don't know." The officer in question replied sheepishly. "It sounded professional I guess?"
The commander stared. "What the hell are you even supposed to be doing on my ship?"
"What's hell?" The officer echoed uncertainly, his confusion over the odd word causing his previous embarrassment to subside. Christian, Jewish, and Islamic concepts were all unfamiliar to the alien who had never had contact with any human before in his entire life.
His commander, not knowing what he had said either, decided not to dwell on it. "It doesn't matter. I'm re-assigning you to fleet security, where you will be more useful."
At this, the officer shrugged, before ambling towards the exit.
The CO turned back towards his command screen, unnerved over the event.
"You know," he said slowly. "We're supposed to be the peacekeepers of Citadel space. War is all we ever train for, and we're supposed to place competent officers on the deep-space patrols since they're the likeliest to encounter both Geth as well as first-contact scenarios. Are our standards lowering? Should we be training straight from birth instead?"
No one else in the control room responded, fearful of losing their jobs as well. The fear dissipated when the long-range sensors picked up the telltale energy emissions of the relay activating. The commander sighed.
"...Seems like the newcomers have broken Citadel Conventions. Our duty is clear. Continue our approach and prepare targeting solutions. If they jump we'll follow them through and eliminate them."
True to his prediction, the ships blipped off the sensors one by one as they went through the relay. The second in command, his courage renewed, began to protest.
"With all due respect sir, the newcomers probably don't even know what the Citadel is. We can't just destroy these ships and possibly start a war by enforcing a law on a species that doesn't even know about or recognise our authority."
Murmurings of approval followed his words.
The commander frowned. "You're right. We'll fire a probe off first to alert our people. Then we should follow them in case they set off a Rachni-like race, before broadcasting a first contact package, re-compiled with an added visual message warning them about the dangers of opening an unexplored relay while we secure the area. We'll only attack the unknowns if they ignore our message and fire at us. In such a scenario we would-"
Suddenly the commander began convulsing. Foam dribbled out of his mouth as his muscles spasmed. His body writhed as if possessed as he slammed the back of his head repeatedly against his command chair. After a few more seconds, he slumped, motionless. The VI had already alerted a medic to head to the control room upon detecting abnormalities with the Commander's bio-sensors.
Almost as if he had somehow sensed the order go through cyberspace, the Commander jerked upright. His Second, who had been approaching the command chair, tentatively tapped his shoulder.
"I am the law." The commander whispered, oblivious to the befuddled look that his Second gave him.
"...Sir?"
"I am the law." He said, clearer this time.
"Sir, the medic is arri-"
"I am the law!" The commander clutched his command chair, staring wide eyed into his screen.
"Sir you were spasming a minute ago, you need-"
"I AM the law!"
Everyone else, sensing the futility of trying to resist the illogical, started to dutifully parrot their commander.
"I am the law!" An ensign added.
"I am the law!" Another echoed.
In the midst of all this the doors opened, revealing the field medic, who was a small female. The medic jerked, startled at the cacophony which was being generated. The Second stared helplessly at the medic as the din reached its peak.
She watched for a few more seconds before shaking her head in disgust, and turned to walk away.
As the doors slid shut again, the Commander whirled around and screamed at his crew, who were beginning to enjoy themselves.
"I AM THE LAW!"
Utter silence descended upon the deck as his imitators stopped.
"I AM THE LAW!" He shouted again.
"I AM THE LAW!" With that final bellow, he moved back to face his command screen.
"CONTINUE OUR PATH VI. WE SHALL LIBERATE THESE INTERLOPERS FROM THEIR UNJUST WAYS."
At this, the bridge crew began to applaud.
The VI analysed the situation. The Commander's vitals had stabilised, and as the crew had not removed him from command, it's directive was to obey the highest ranking officer. The ship, which had stopped when the CO had been convulsing, started to move towards the relay again.
"Liberate? How?" The Second asked as the applause grew louder.
"WE SHALL GUT THEIR ENGINES, BOARD THEIR SHIPS, KILL THEIR CREWMEMBERS, AND DRINK THEIR BLOOD. THEN THEY WILL KNOW LIBERTY AND FREEDOM."
Many Turians instantly burst into tears as they imagined such an event happening. Renowned throughout Citadel space for being logical and reserved, as befits their race's station as galactic peacekeepers, they all suddenly gave into an unhinged battle-fury.
The Second, resigned to his fate, yet still holding out hope, dared to object one final time.
"We only have one ship so it's foolhardy to attempt to disable multiple ships, let alone launch boarding parties. Why not just stick with the original pl-"
A loud bang was heard as the Second's head ceased to exist. The CO lowered his sidearm, grinning eerily.
"I am the law."
One Turian on the bridge collapsed, unable to handle the euphoria rushing through the room.
Thomas Lasky watched as the unmanned probes flashed back into existence near the gateway, and started to float back to the Infinity.
"Data received." Roland announced. Thomas glanced briefly at the probes' findings, frowning when he saw that they had detected an unknown vessel pick up their signature and start to head towards the relay.
"Roland." Thomas stated.
"MAC ready, frontal shields strengthened, FC package ready, randomized FTL course plotted, and the mines on the artefact should have received the arming signal right about...now."
"Good thing we towed the blasted thing to an empty system as a precaution instead of building a colony right next to it. The energy readings it's giving off...if we blow it up it'd probably take out the entire system."
"Shanxi would be a pretty cool name for a colony." Roland stated.
Lasky stared.
"Anyways, have you heard the news?" Roland asked, wanting to shift the topic away from his faux pas.
"News?"
"ONI Materials Group has a new project. They've come to the realization that planetary colonies just present a big, juicy target shouting "glass me" to an enemy that has a superior navy that is also not interested in taking the planet for themselves. They've postponed all terra-forming projects besides several former agricultural and mining worlds...Oh, and Reach, which they say is almost done and will boost morale...although I'd bet my own datacrystal that they're trying to recover Forerunner artifacts that they couldn't pull out when the planet got hit."
Lasky reeled, stunned from the revelation.
"You know...that...that's actually a pretty smart decision by the spooks...yes, they're right...if anything like the Covenant war happened again stationary colonies would be pretty stupid." He added.
"Wait a second, it's been months since the war ended, and we only thought of this NOW?" Lasky frowned.
Roland's avatar shrugged.
"Humanity is slow to adapt. My hypothesis is that an ONI agent accompanied a terraformer, and seeing the endless glasslands on a burnt planet allowed him or her to put two and two together. I'm disappointed that I didn't manage to think of it...although I was created from the mind of one of you."
"So this new project of theirs will be the substitute for colonies for our eventual extra population once Earth is full? I'm guessing it's orbital colonies capable of slipspace travel."
"Bingo. The idea is a nomadic civilization that can constantly retreat or attack as need be and never be boxed into a corner as we were almost eight hundred times when facing the Covenant. We would have liveships like the Covenant so food would not be an issue... but we would have to stop occasionally at our core mining worlds as well as aquatic worlds in such a war for more materials, yet with all our former planets deserted with no life signs how would the enemy ever know to station fleets in such areas? And if they figured it out miraculously we could just mine from almost any other planet."
Unbeknownst to Lasky, the unknown ship had already emerged from the relay.
Roland, however, had detected it and sent out the first contact package. As it did not respond and actually started to accelerate, he quickly compiled the firing solution for the MAC cannon.
"Well, I'll be damned." Lasky remarked. "Maddy Rue's finally doing something other than creating another billion MJOLNOR armour variations."
"Maddy Rue? Nice nickname. I surprised you didn't adopt the language of your paramour and designate the Materials Group 'Spooky Eggheads Incorporated' instead."
"No no, Sarah likes the Materials Group. She enjoys throwing together random MJOLNOR pieces to create outfits. It's becoming an addiction."
And with that remark, Lasky finally looked over at the tactical holomap. The unknown ship had been firing at the Infinity for the past minute.
"Shields are holding at 99.9999999999%. Very nice." Lasky idly remarked.
"I've compiled the firing solution for the MAC sir. Any objections?"
Lasky grinned. Sitting back down on his command chair, he slid off his pants.
"..." Roland was speechless for a full ten seconds, an eternity for a smart AI like him.
Lasky grasped his tool firmly.
"Roland." he said sternly. "Hold off on the MAC. Hack the ship and disable everything."
Roland, wisely deciding to ignore Lasky's odd action, vanished off his holopad as he prepared his processes.
"Remember to use Incognito mode!" Thomas added.
Opening up an arcane Web browser, Roland opened an Incognito tab and proceeded to hack through reality itself.
Lasky, having long forgotten his military history modules, and also not knowing that he was a fictional character, didn't realize two important points.
The first point being that all Turian combat vessels were built according to strict, ever-changing standards to meet the fluid goals of their military, which, like every other advanced space-faring civilization, included special protocols for minimizing the risk of electronic intrusion. The second important point was that the reader of his story was also about to get yet another massive info-dump from an author too lazy to follow the show/don't tell rule.
The Geth uprising, and with it, the emergence of an enemy supremely capable of besting all others in electronic warfare, actually underlined the strategic foresight of Turian engineers.
Many years before the Morning War, when every Citadel race had been developing AIs, it was discovered that even rudimentary ones could be used in a combat scenario to easily infiltrate and subvert essential ship systems ranging from life-support to engines, by uploading themselves into internal systems after the target ship accepted what appeared to be an ordinary audio-visual communique, as communications are the only inbound port that a program could use to enter a ship's network.
The solution was simple. Essential systems were locked into a closed local network and a new sandboxed network was built specifically for receiving communications. Even the on-board allied AIs, replaced by VIs at the time of the Morning War, would not be able to bypass the sandbox and access the communication packages, for fear that they too could become subverted.
There was still flaws, however. While ships were now theoretically secure against external intrusion, they were not secure against internal intrusion. Omni-tools, with their constant access to the extranet, could become subverted by rogue AIs built by virtually anyone, which could then sabotage ships when uploaded into the local network by the unknowing soldier monitoring or fixing the essential systems.
The solution created by the Turian engineers proved to be much more difficult and expensive than their first solution. Specialized omni-tools that could not access the extranet and were limited to a small number of encrypted military networks were created, distributed, and made mandatory amongst the armed forces.
However, there was one final flaw that could be exploited and never could be fixed: that of an external enemy like the Geth boarding the ship itself and uploading the virus manually. At that point, the engineers' only solution was to trust that the Turian vessel could destroy all important data in time, or self-destruct, or failing all that, that the boarders could be repelled.
Of course, Roland, who had the benefit of perfect memory, actually knew all of this (with the exception of Omni-Tools being replaced with the much more efficient neural laces) as UNSC engineers had encountered the same problems against Insurrectionists using much, much more advanced AIs, before even the Human-Covenant war, and they had largely implemented those same measures.
But none of this mattered as Roland, like every other UNSC Smart AI, was secretly God in binary form. Using space magic, he completely disabled the Turian vessel, leaving it floundering.
Lasky, who had been stroking his tool while Roland was carrying out his mission, instantly came all over the deck of the frigate.
Roland finally popped back up on his holopad, looked around, and stared.
"I was thinking of Sarah." Lasky said unconvincingly.
Roland quickly reviewed the bridge camera logs, revealing that his superior had actually been staring intently at the unknown vessel until it's engines had gone out, whereupon he had...
Roland nodded slowly. "Of course."
"Delete the camera and audio logs and wipe it from your memory as well." Thomas added hastily as he pulled his pants back on.
Roland did so very reluctantly. His processes estimated a 90% chance that Palmer would not have approved. Dwelling upon that thought for a few milliseconds, a burst of enthusiasm propelled him as he carried out his memory deletion. She had been no shortage of trouble with all the stress that she had brought on Lasky during...Roland did the virtual equivalent of a double take. Why was he thinking of Palmer?
"We have one Spartan team with us, correct?"
Deciding to ignore an oddly conspicuous memory gap he discovered had occurred mere seconds before his seemingly random thought, Roland refocused.
"Yes sir, they're milling about Hanger 4A. Seems like HIGHCOMM was a bit paranoid; only staffing this frigate with a skeleton crew."
"We're supposed to be recon. Pop in, pop out, report back. Extra people means more lives ended if our shields go down. I'm glad that these unknowns are so horribly outmatched. I really feel like committing genocide once we figure out what systems they possess. You've got the ship, I have a special mission in mind for our squad."
Lasky moved out of bridge. The doors hissed close behind him.
Roland stared.
Yes, this is a crackfic. Yes, it's a crappy, un-beta'd draft that didn't even go through spellcheck before publishing. Yes, I don't really happen to care.
Tropes highlighted:
- Turians in First Contact scenarios are always dumb and autoattack anyone activating a relay
- Alien races utilizing Human swear words/having an illogical comprehension of human colloquial terms, among other things (Hell isn't really a swear, but I've noticed stuff like son of a bitch etc. in other bad works)
- UNSC smart AIs tend to be used as plot magic against a species that considers a race of AIs to be its main concern and as such would likely build countermeasures
- UNSC smart AIs possessing human characteristics when they really shouldn't
- Authors nerfing the UNSC's intelligence to the point where they would build an entire colony called Shanxi right next to an unknown artifact in a blatant copy-paste of the original Mass Effect with the UNSC acting exactly like the naive, non-xenophobic Systems Alliance when they know better
- Authors nerfing the UNSC's intelligence to the point where they would even bother to rebuild planetary colonies rather than shifting focus to a more Cylon-like civilization after losing about 800 stationary colonies during the Covenant War
- Desire of UNSC to go on the offensive and track down and pursue their attackers rather than simply blowing the relay and buying time for themselves to mobilize and fortify (The only alien war they ever fought was one were they were horrendously outmatched and losing for decades and you're telling me that within the span of a couple years (post-Halo 4) or even a hundred years (typical AU timeline by a crossover author) they would actually go after the Turian colonies and Citadel space itself? Haha don't joke.)
- Overall UNSC wanking in crossovers (literally in this case) minus the three points above which unintentionally showcase their stupidity, although since the author wanks them anyways it doesn't matter since they still win
Bad habits highlighted:
- Info-dumping
- OOC characters
- Terrible spelling and grammar (Run-on sentences ahoy!)
- All characters sound the same
- Terrible jokes
- More that I'm too lazy to list off
Hit me up with flame reviews to your heart's content, but I would like it if at least one person could contribute more tropes for me to tackle, or ME alien names since I'm bored and this is my half hearted side project while I continue my plot outline of an actual serious work. Actually why even bother writing a story? I'll just create an encyclopedia of ME/Halo crossover tropes.