This Chapter was not written by me, it was written by Vindicated Skies.
"...I fucked up, didn't I?"
If there was anyone in the universe who could make the impossible task of tearing a hologram limb from limb possible, it was the SPARTAN-II sitting right there, the one whose buttons Church had unrelentingly pushed because he had thought he'd never actually see the guy again, let alone be stuck with him for an unforeseeable amount of time.
And the Chief—saviour of the fuckin' galaxy—was currently looking at him like he'd rather be partnered with a pet rock.
Yeah, he had definitely fucked up.
Even so, the Chief's vaguely constipated expression faded back into stoicism as though it had never been there. But he said nothing, and the silence stretched on.
Lord Hood merely leaned back and watched, and Church knew this just had to be the man's petty revenge for all the stressful shit Church had put him through in the last three years. Bastard was probably wishing he had popcorn.
Church scratched at the back of his helmet and cleared his non-existent throat. "So...uh, sorry...y'know, 'bout the door...and the password thing...we cool?"
The Chief said nothing, just stared for a moment before he turned back to Lord Hood.
"Why him?"
Wait...what? Oh that asshole! What, was Church not good enough for him? No, wait—that was a legitimate question. He could be mad about it later if it meant it got him out of this shit-show.
"Yeah...uh, why me again? Can't you get him a perfectly new AI or somethin'? Y'know, one that doesn't have a bunch of other shit to do?"
"It doesn't necessarily need to be you," Hood admitted, "but it should be you."
The Fleet Admiral leaned forward, dragging a file across the glass and settling it in front of the both of them. Church recognized it instantly. It was the article he'd found a month back about the Reds and Blues bringing down Project Freelancer. "Colourful Space Marines Stop Corruption."
"I'm sure you remember them, of course," Hood said, and tapped another file open. This one had the image of a ship, right next to a cargo and passenger manifest.
Lavernius Tucker Sr., Michael J. Caboose, Richard Simmons, Dexter Griff...the list went on.
But why show him this? What did it—
Oh. Oh no.
Right there, right under the ship's name was it's status in bold, uppercase letters that seemed to be screaming at him:
MISSING.
He could only stare at it. "How long?"
"They left Revenant Two nearly four months ago. They were supposed to stop at New Carthage for refuelling a week ago."
A week? He spun around to face Hood, feeling a sensation he could only describe as heat despite the fact he couldn't actually feel the temperature of the room, "And you didn't tell me?"
"An investigation was only officially opened this morning," Lord Hood said.
"You should have told me!"
"I'm telling you now." There was an edge of steel in Lord Hood's words. Church knew that tone, and it was only three years worth of watching Hood fight to make stupid people see reason that convinced Church to take a figurative deep breath and let the matter go. Even if it did mean a whole week of scouring Waypoint and hacking any useful databases had gone unused.
So the Hand of Merope was missing. Not destroyed though. He...he could work with this.
Church crossed his arms over his chest and rocked back on his holographic heels, gaze turning back to the news article. They looked so...happy. Even with helmets on.
"Y'know," he said, "Normally you aren't supposed to give a guy a mission he's personally invested in."
"You know them?" The Chief asked. Church turned to him briefly, then looked back at the article. He felt something in his code shifting unpleasantly and squashed it.
"Yeah..." he began, then kicked the file out of existence and turned away from both of them, "They're a bunch of dipshits."
They were a bunch of missing dipshits. He should've contacted them before they left Revenant II. Not because he cared or any stupid shit like that—because he didn't—but because he had questions left, and now...now they were the only ones who had the answers he was looking for. That was it. It was just that simple.
...and fuck Hood for staring at him like he knew otherwise. Bastard.
"Sir," the Chief said, "I'd have to agree that Alpha's...personal investment...could make him a liability."
Church's hologram whipped around again, and he jabbed a finger in the Chief's direction, "Hey! I never said it would make me a liability asshole! And my name is Church, god damn it!"
"Church," Hood said, lifting a hand to silence both of them, "is the best option Chief. His personal...experience...with the Sim Troopers and Project Freelancer in general may prove useful should you encounter them."
"If they're alive," The Chief pointed out, and Church couldn't help but simulate a disparaging bark of laughter at that. The Reds and Blues, dead? As if.
"Trust me," he said, "They are too goddamn stupid to know how to die." Not that it would be any skin off his back if they had kicked the bucket.
The Chief stared at him a moment, with only the barest pucker in his brow to suggest the shadow of a frown. He turned back to Lord Hood. "Sir, is there a reason we're assuming the ship wasn't torn apart in a Slipspace malfunction?"
"Well aren't you a bundle of fuckin' joy," Church said, and watched as they both ignored him.
"It's a possibility considering the Merope is one of the many ships still out-fitted with the old Shaw-Fujikawa Translight Engine," Lord Hood admitted, "but my gut's telling me otherwise, Chief. It was a vessel filled with classified, experimental technology that any number of groups would want to get their hands on. Insurrectionists, rogue agents, pirates—"
"Oh shit," Church said, "You think someone in the UNSC helped make that ship disappear, don't you?"
Lord Hood's expression was grim, "It's a possibility we must consider. The fact is that the Merope failed to transmit it's coordinates on the galactic positioning system at the time of its disappearance. If the Merope was in distress or in anyway damaged, then there are only two possible reasons why this would occur, either the ship was torn apart and never re-entered normal space, or…"
"Or the GPS was deactivated somehow," The Chief finished and leaned forward, scrolling through the cargo manifest.
"Exactly. Which means the ship could be anywhere between Revenant Two and New Carthage."
"That's a lot of space to cover," Church said, and tapped his foot once, pulling up a 3D map of the aforementioned area. He put a pin on Revenant II and then on New Carthage, and crossed his arms again.
Hmm, surely he could narrow this down. Well, if he was going to sabotage a ship in order to steal it's cargo, how would he do it? Physically messing with the engine was too risky, but the Hand of Merope wasn't equipped with a shipboard AI, so messing with the navigation program...virus? That could work. Just hand a data chip off to a willing member of the bridge crew in order to get past the firewalls, tell them to load it when no one's looking and bingo, messed up navigation.
Lifting one hand to hover in front of his chin, Church began to speak again, fingertips occasionally flicking towards the map and lighting up several systems between the two planets as he did so, "Okay, so, taking into account the fact it was one of the older translight engines, then our saboteur wouldn't have been able to alter the engine's slipspace coordinates too drastically, or else they would have been torn apart in Slipspace when whatever virus he might have used kicked in during transit. So there's a a couple dozen systems between Revenant and Carthage that fall within the 'safe-zone' I've calculated. They could've been forced out of Slipspace near one of them."
"Or in dead-space somewhere between systems," Chief said.
"Like I said, bundle of fuckin' joy dude," Church shook his head, "but it's a possibility. If we're assuming the Merope was sabotaged, possibly by UNSC personnel, then yeah, it could've dropped into deadspace where ships could've been waiting for it. But that presents too much risk for whoever's behind the scenes."
The Chief reached out and zoomed in on the map, analyzing it, "You're right. A Shaw-Fujikawa engine is too imprecise to predetermine exactly where the ship would end up if it was dumped out of slipspace. It could end up outside of their ship's long-range sensors. If their goal was to recover the tech before the ship personnel could fix the sabotage, then they'd need to drop the ship out of Slipspace within at least a two light-year radius of a system with a network of probes set to detect any Slipspace activity in or near it's space."
"Exactly," Church said, "and any time a network detects Slipspace activity, the probes scan for ships and send out a handshake to log the ship's classification, name, and it's captain. If the ship doesn't engage in or outright rejects this handshake, then the buoy sends an alert to the colony and to the nearest UNSC military base."
Most of the systems went dark, but several remained alight. Hmm, not a well-colonized sector of space then.
It only took a quick thought to bring up the network information for the last four months, and a quick key-word search for the Hand of Merope would narrow it down to—
Every single system went dark.
"What?" Church dropped his arms to his side and stomped his hologram towards the map, "That can't be right." Stupid map. There had to be at least one system that had detected the damn ship! Unless...if he included the comm buoys from the mining colonies owned by the corporations on New Carthage in the parameters…
A few more systems lit up, but another keyword search of their entries darkened them again.
"Bullshit! Where the hell else would these assholes drop it?"
"Any competent thief," the Chief began, voice sounding a little cold—oh great, what had he done to piss the big guy off now?—"Wouldn't leave behind any obvious traces."
"I know that jackass," Church said, and heaved the smallest of sighs, "The problem is that they wouldn't have had any way to detect the Merope either unless—"
He paused. Groaned. "Well, fuck."
"Care to fill us in?" Lord Hood asked.
Church gestured sharply at the map. "If there are any scum-bags on Carthage that wanted to turn an extra profit by keeping some of their mines off their list of taxable assets, then they could have deployed comm buoys illegally and kept their colonies off the official records."
And if the buoys were illegally deployed then there would be no record of them anywhere except in the guilty corporation's internal reports. So of course none of the registered probes and buoys had detected the Hand of Merope.
The same thought seemed to occur to the Chief and Lord Hood. The Chief leaned back in his seat, face set in a blank mask, and Lord Hood tapped his desk into darkness, the coloured holograms winking out of existence.
"Well, I suppose you're both heading to New Carthage then."
HIGHCOM's armory was an impressive one, but the only piece of equipment in the room that the Chief currently had eyes for was the MJOLNIR armour set waiting for him. It was Mark VII, but it looked nearly the same as the armour he'd worn on Requiem.
He flexed his fingers ever so slightly in anticipation. It would feel good to be armoured again, and he'd be lying if he said he didn't enjoy trying out new equipment.
On a display next to the MJOLNIR, Alpha's hologram popped into being. The AI looked the armour up and down appraisingly before he turned his head to Lord Hood and the Chief.
"Seriously," he said, "Why is it always green with you people? Cobalt would look so much better."
Cobalt? "It's for camouflage."
"Um...aren't you always getting shot at anyways? Might as well look good while you do it dude."
John-117 came to a stop before the MJOLNIR, and looked into his distorted reflection in the gold visor. Look good? What did "looking good" matter if you were dead?
"It stays green."
Alpha sighed over-dramatically—"Your loss dude."—and the Chief felt himself nearly frown. After the briefing, he'd thought there was a chance that the AI wasn't as immature as he first seemed, even if he did have a deplorable temper, but it appeared that wasn't the case.
Surely he didn't need another AI? He'd served for a long time without one before Cortana…
He didn't let his fingers curl. He kept his breathing the same. The ache was back, and he let himself feel it for only a moment.
He had work to do. Any AI would be an asset to him and Lord Hood seemed adamant that it should be Alpha, and as long as Alpha kept it professional on the battlefield, then the Chief could live with it for as long as necessary.
That decided, John turned to Lord Hood, "Anything I need to know?"
Lord Hood instead inclined his head to Alpha, "Church, why don't you give him a run through on the specs before we get started on the tutorial?"
Oddly enough, Alpha froze, head turning slowly to stare at Lord Hood for a long moment.
Lord Hood frowned slightly, "Church?"
"...Right," Alpha cleared his throat and turned back to the Chief, "Okay, Specs first, and then I'm gonna give you the best god-damn tutorial in the whole fuckin' galaxy. Which means, basically, that no one's going to get shot or blown up."
...What?
Chief looked to Lord Hood for an explanation of that inane statement, only to find that the Fleet Admiral looked just as confused. He turned back to Alpha, thought about asking for an explanation—because clearly there was a story there—then thought about it again and decided it really wasn't that important.
An inclination of his head was all he gave the AI instead.
"What?" Alpha asked, "No smart-ass comments, curious questions, or 'oooh, tell me how fast I can move in this bad-boy'? Nothing?"
John clasped his hands behind his back in a perfect parade rest and waited.
"Well fine. Oh, and the answer by the way? Super fuckin' fast," Alpha cleared his throat, "Okay, so the Mark Seven has several important upgrades compared to your old Mark Six. The most important one's gonna be the Nano-bots. Your old armour injected bio-foam when its internal sensors detected injury, this armour's still gonna inject you with bio-foam in combat, but, once you're out of a hot-zone, it's gonna add nano-bots that improve the bio-foam and accelerate the healing process. Also, the nano-bots will fix any damage to the armour itself over time, and any detected air leaks will be sealed pretty much instantaneously."
Alpha paused, and looked at him expectantly for a moment, "Come on, you've gotta admit that's pretty cool. I mean, hell, If I had this armour back in Blood Gulch, maybe I wouldn't have fuckin' died."
Died? Oh, right, the file had mentioned something about an organic body at one point. Still, the AI was whole and intact, and John didn't think that counted as being dead.
"Anything else, Alpha?"
"It's Church."
The AI fell silent, blank holographic visor staring him down. What was he waiting...oh. Rather immature, but it wasn't worth arguing over.
"Anything else, Church?"
"See, now was that so god-damn hard? No, didn't think so," The AI gestured to the armour, "Anyway, you've got some shaping ability with the shield in this bad-boy too, so if you ever need to bitch-slap a rocket or something bat-shit insane like that, you can concentrate the shield on point of contact. That's mostly gonna be up to me though. I'll be occupying the storage unit with full access to pretty much everything in here...nano-bots, shielding, air-supply..." Slowly Alpha turned back to Chief, putting his hands on his hips, "So don't go pissin' me off, okay?"
John turned to glare at the AI so quickly he felt the tendons in his neck twang.
"Alpha!" Hood barked before John could get a word out, and the AI held his hands up.
"Whoa, hey! I was just kidding! Sheesh!"
Cortana would never have joked about something like that. And John didn't like the fact the words were disturbingly close to the threats uttered by many a rampant AI.
"Sir," he began slowly, still staring down the hologram, "Is user override of AI controlled systems still standard for the MJOLNIR armour?"
"What? Dude, I said it was a joke."
"Yes Chief," Lord Hood said, "but I doubt you'll need to use it. Alpha is just an asshole." Not rampant. Spartan-117 heard the unspoken reassurance well enough. It did little to rid him of the itch to grab a gun though, no matter how useless it would be against a hologram.
"Okay, geez, I get it. No more joking about AI overlords," Alpha crossed his arms.
Beside him, Lord Hood gave the AI the driest of looks, and the Chief realized that the Admiral fully expected it to happen again.
So this really was Alpha's normal behaviour then? That would make things...complicated. But it was nothing he couldn't handle. He would just have to get this mission over with as quickly as possible so that Alpha could be returned to the Hive.
"So," Alpha crossed his arms, nodding his head in the direction of the undersuit that lay on a nearby table, "Do you want to take it for a spin?"
The War Games Simulator was a marvel of holographic technology, and though the one located at the Bravo-6 Facility was small in comparison to the model on the UNSC Infinity, it was nonetheless capable of simulating nearly any combat scenario imaginable.
So it made sense then to use it as a testing ground for the MJOLNIR Mark VII armour. Church knew that. He even agreed with the logic.
He did not however, agree to be slapped in the middle of this...this...insanity!
So, while in the midst of tagging countless hostile targets and flagging the ones that took priority, calculating weapons' trajectories, accelerating the data transfer rate from the Chief's motor cortex to the armour, and shaping a shield over-lap to increase the protection on the Chief's head for 0.1 of a second in order to defend him from a beam rifle shot that would've killed him in a real combat situation without the overlap, Church made damn sure the Chief knew about his misery.
"—you could've just taken a jog, or bench-pressed a tank, but nooo, 'the bad-ass super soldier' has to go show off and try to storm an entire fucking BASE!" His synthetic voice cracked slightly as he screamed over the comm. And then the Chief's shield failed with another beam rifle shot and his own perception of time slowed almost to a halt, he scanned the area, picked the smoking remains of a Wraith out as the closest cover, and highlighted it on the Chief's HUD. And then he noticed an anomaly on the sensors. Three unusual heat distortions that couldn't be accounted for in the cold, arctic weather of this particular simulation, originating from behind on the right. Cloaked Elites then.
Time sped back up.
"Frag five o'clock! Cover ten!"
The Chief leapt to follow the directions, tossing a frag grenade with lightning speed while simultaneously sprinting to the Wraith. He dropped and slid through the snow the last ten feet just as the frag went off behind him, followed by the howl of a wounded Sangheili.
Only one went down. The other two had evaded. At least their camouflage was down now and—oh fuck they had swords.
It only took 0.00005 of a second for Church to take stock of the situation. The Chief was behind a burnt-out Wraith, already up on one knee from the slide and firing at the approaching Elites with his assault rifle. Two towers—guarding the entrance to the Covenant's icy cave-base—offered a pair of Jackal snipers a perfect view of the battlefield, which was already dotted with Covenant corpses, the burnt-out Wraith, and some demolished Ghosts. In other words, it was a wide open field with next to no cover, the Chief's shields were still recharging, those Elites would be on them in seconds, and a couple squads of Grunts and Jackals were flanking them.
Oh, and the Chief was out of grenades.
They were so screwed.
Unless...Church ran a quick scan of the MJOLNIR's onboard components. If he remembered right then there should be…
Yes! There it was! It wouldn't last long but it would buy them time. Sending activation code...now.
An orange light burst into existence, solidifying into a floating mass of Forerunner tech that Church promptly uploaded the Chief's friend or foe data to.
The Z-2500 Automated Protection Drone opened fire just as the group of Grunts and Jackals rounded the corner of the Wraith.
Their frontline of Grunt fodder was cut down instantly. Rounds punched through the shield of a Jackal and killed it, but the faster of the Jackals and a few lucky Grunts managed to duck out of sight on the other side of the Wraith with terrified squawks.
Meanwhile, the Chief leapt to engage the Elites that were now upon him. He dodged a swing, punched an elbow out of socket, twisted the arm and tore the plasma sword from its grasp before slamming it through the shields and into the Elite's heart.
A kick sent the dying body into the second Elite's path. The approaching warrior spun from the body's path, ducked a burst of rifle fire, and swung.
The Chief threw up his assault rifle to block. The sword cut it in half, and the Chief twisted sideways, dropped, and kicked at the Elite's legs. It jumped backwards to avoid it. The Chief drew his sidearm and fired six shots into its head before it even hit the ground again. The first five shattered its shield.
The sixth shredded its skull.
The Elite died just in time for the auto-sentry's time limit to run out, and it fizzled out of existence in a cloud of orange pixels.
"Hostiles six o'clock!"
The Chief spun just in time to be confronted with a needle-wielding Jackal. Fortunately, his shield was now fully charged once more.
He sprinted forward, and Church, perhaps a bit too giddily, watched the ensuing carnage as he ripped the Jackals and Grunts apart with a mixture of gun-fire and bone-crushing blows.
When the immediate threat was dealt with and the Chief had ducked back behind the Wraith to avoid more sniper fire, Church was just about to give the Chief a sit-rep when the Spartan in question very nearly growled:
"Why didn't you tell me about the drone?"
Hadn't he? He was sure...Church looked back over his memories of the spec rundown and following tutorial...oh. He hadn't mentioned it after all.
Oops.
"Um...I kinda...forgot about it?"
There was a moment of silence during which the Chief scavenged the most functional of the weapons from the Covenant's dead.
"Is there anything else you forgot to mention?"
Church might've quivered a little at the tone, and quickly ran through the list of features he hadn't mentioned.
"Well, huh, the suit's designed for orbital re-entry, it's optimized for remote AI transfer, and it'll shield you from slipspace radiation...y'know, just in case you ever feel the need to jump through a slipspace portal with no ship."
"...where'd the drone come from?"
Oh, come on. Really? All this cool tech and that's the question he decides to ask? Not 'how does that work' or anything else?
"You're the one who brought it back from Requiem dude."
"I thought that was turned over to the scientists."
"It was. But Hood figured you could probably use it more than the eggheads and had them install it. They've got all the scans they could possibly get off the thing anyway."
Church, however, was actually in charge of doing those eggheads the small favour of recording all readings from the drone while it was in use. He would also admit they weren't the only ones interested in figuring out how the hell a fully automated weapon could just materialize out of thin air, as solid and real as the person who summoned it. Someone in a memo somewhere speculated interdimensional storage. Church wasn't sure yet if he agreed.
The Chief said nothing in response, not even a grunt to acknowledge Church was even talking. It made Church miss Wash, actually. At the least the Freelancer would have said something, whether a disparaging remark or a sarcastic quip. Instead, he was stuck with the galaxy's most mobile stone wall. Wonderful.
A ping alerted Church to an incoming enemy, meandering slowly towards them from the base.
The Chief saw it on his radar too, and leaned his head around the Wraith just enough to see a Grunt trudging through the snow with a fuel rod cannon on it's shoulder.
It yelped at the sight of him, pulling the trigger, and the Chief ducked back into cover just as a green missile sailed on past and a duo of beam rifle shots hit the snow.
The missile itself kept sailing until it lost altitude, hit the ground, and bounced up, detonating against a canyon wall.
"It bounces?" Church said, "Who the hell designs a gun that bounces?"
If the Chief had any thoughts on the matter, he didn't share them. Instead, he knelt in the snow to inspect a carbine one of the dead Jackals had dropped.
Church promptly scanned it, registering it's amount of ammunition and casing integrity, and threw the information up on the Chief's HUD, making sure it was displayed in neat little cubes that sat just outside the centre field of vision.
And then, just for good measure, he said: "It's in pretty good shape."
"I can see that." Was it just his imagination, or did the Chief actually sound just the teensiest bit annoyed?
Hmph. Fine. He could go ahead and be ungrateful then.
The Chief stuck the carbine to his back, and then scavenged a plasma sword to attach to his thigh.
"How close is the Grunt?" He asked.
"Fifteen metres."
"And the towers?"
"Thirty."
That Grunt had to be taken out. It would be far too easy for it to grow a brain and circle around the Wraith to fire at them from a distance, forcing the Chief to dodge back out into the open where the Jackals would be all too eager to open fire. Even with the improved shields, there were only so many shots from a beam rifle that it would be able to take, and being caught anywhere within the blast radius of a fuel rod would reduce that number even further.
Of course, Church was more than capable of calculating the trajectories and blast radius', so all it would really take is the Chief following his orders exactly, and they'd be able to take down the Grunt and then deal with the snipers.
"Okay Chief, look, we're gonna have to—"
The Chief suddenly spun, slammed a fist into the Wraith, and tore off a large, charred panel.
What the hell was he—
And then he charged forward, and there was a fuel rod heading straight for them.
Alpha was squawking at him. That was nothing new. John-117 tuned him out, time slowing down as he held the panel up before him. In the space of a heartbeat, he took in the sight of the fuel rod screaming towards him as he charged to meet it, the beam rifle shots closing in right behind it, overtaking it…
The rifle shots sped past, struck the snow where he'd just been standing, and the fuel rod closed the distance, with a second shot now trailing behind it.
The SPARTAN-II spun, adjusted his grip on the panel to hit it just right and—
The fuel rod ricocheted off the panel at an angle. A twist of the wrists and the second bounced the other way. A burst of speed, a startled yelp and—
John slammed the panel down onto the Grunt, crushing every bone in it's body before the last shot could be fired.
And then the fuel rods he deflected slammed into the look-out towers and detonated, sending charred purple shrapnel in every direction.
The battlefield fell silent, but only for a moment.
"What the fuck was THAT!?"
The Chief gritted his teeth as the Alpha screamed right into his ear. Withdrawing the carbine from his back, he steadily made his way through the snow and into the cavern. "I eliminated the enemy."
"Eliminated?" Alpha replied, voice reaching such a high-pitch that the Chief briefly heard static, "That was...that was…"
The Alpha simulated taking a deep breath as he regained control of himself. "There is such a thing as a plan y'know. What's the point in me bein' around if you aren't even gonna listen—"
The Chief reached up and ripped the AI from his helmet.
For a moment, there was blissful silence, peace, and an aching relief from his neural interface as the persistent burning at the base of his skull finally subsided.
And then the Alpha's hologram promptly materialized from the data matrix he was currently housed in. Hands on his hips. Helmet tipped upwards in what was undoubtedly a glare.
For once, John allowed himself to glare right back.
"What the fuck are y—"
"This," the Alpha fell silent at the smallest trace of venom that even John heard in his own words, "is a partnership. You are here to provide me with tactical analyses, and to run the vital functions of my armour. You are not here to micro-manage my every move."
John took a deep, controlled breath, making sure the AI saw no sign of it. Not the slightest lifting of his shoulders or tilt of his helmet. He banished the simmering irritation to the back of his mind as he longed to see a different blue avatar before him.
"The decisions I make on the battlefield," he said, slowly loosening his grip on the data matrix, "are my own."
Even Cortana, despite all her quips and complaints and yes, even her arrogance, never tried to take that from him.
"Look man," Alpha said, "I can calculate angles faster than you can move, so I know where these shots are go—"
"This is not your body."
Alpha abruptly shut up, and the Chief could almost imagine hearing his jaw click shut.
He was silent a moment longer, "I...I'm not trying to control you…"
The Chief doubted that. Even if Alpha hadn't fully realized it himself, he'd been trying to dictate the Chief's every movement with all the barely-contained frustration of a backseat driver seconds away from grabbing the wheel.
It was just fortunate for John that only Project Freelancer had been stupid enough to give their soldiers implants that allowed an AI access to both their thoughts and motor-functions. His body was his and his alone to control. No AI would ever be able to take that from him, and even the thought of the possibility of that happening made his trigger finger itch.
"Do your job," John said, and slowly, with a bit of reluctance, lifted the data matrix back up to his helmet and slotted it in, bracing himself.
It burned. Where Cortana had been a pool of cold water that sent a momentary shiver down his spine before she settled in and became a soothing chill, the Alpha was an immediate heat that seemed to cook his brain for half an instant before it receded to a constant, burning itch.
But he had suffered worse. So he pushed the sensation aside and readied his carbine for the next phase of the simulation.
"...and I'll do mine."
"Are you sure about this Lord Hood?"
Guardian's question was not unwarranted, but Lord Hood didn't look away from the screen as the Master Chief ripped his way through the simulation with the same single-minded intensity that had destroyed the Flood.
The man never did do anything half-assed.
"I'm sure Guardian."
"But sir," the AI said, "I calculate only a fifteen percent compatibility between them."
"Numbers aren't everything."
The golem avatar was silent for a moment, and Lord Hood was certain he caught the barest signs of a red-shift from the corner of his eye.
Guardian's decommission date was coming up soon. It was a shame that whatever had led the Alpha to meta-stability didn't seem to have rubbed off on his fellow AI during their time together.
"If I may ask sir," Guardian said, "Why Alpha?"
Why? Well, he seemed to be getting that question a lot today, didn't he? There were many reasons, one of which being that it just felt...right. That day when the Chief decided to go rescue Cortana, trusting the words in her message implicitly, trusting that she knew how to stop the Flood and wasn't leading him into a trap that would doom their whole race...it had been this same feeling of rightness that told him to trust the Chief's judgment, to let him go to her. To risk everything on the words of a possibly rampant AI.
Considering the fact they hadn't been devoured by the Flood or killed by the Halo Array, it was probably the best decision he had ever made, so he certainly wasn't going to ignore that feeling now.
But Lord Hood hadn't reached the position of Fleet Admiral based on feelings alone. The Alpha's knowledge regarding Project Freelancer, it's Agents, and it's Sim Troopers made him the obvious choice for this mission. If someone in the UNSC had truly planned the disappearance of the The Hand of Merope in order to acquire the military assets onboard, then that made the Alpha the only choice. Not even the richest companies or most well-funded research groups and military arms could acquire an AI or firewall strong enough to keep Alpha from digging up all their dirty secrets.
It was mankind's most advanced AI, paired with humanity's greatest soldier. If they could just learn to work together—to see each other as true comrades—then they would be unstoppable.
And if pairing them together just so happened to put Alpha in the hands of a man who would never stand by and watch as someone tried to capture and dissect his comrade, AI or not, then, well…
ONI wouldn't know what hit them if they tried.