A/N: This took longer than I'd expected, but I felt like my writing has been falling off in these latest chapters, so I'm trying to get back to the basics of this story, the bedrock, if you will - that is, the game Halo. So I spent some time reading the books and playing the game to reorient myself to the overall feel. Here's to hoping that this is an improvement.

Chapter 9: Mélancolie

The Ark was a marvel of deep-space construction. When they had first come to the Halos, the Master Chief had thought them to be the pinnacle of some ancient race's achievements, their magnum opus.

The Ark proved him wrong.

This creation was a world all its own, a vast, steel planet shrouded in the darkness of age and death. As the strange company of Marines, ex-Covenant, Spartan, and computer construct carefully steered their Warthog through the jungle, they passed evidence of ancient warfare: deep scars in the earth barely hidden by new growths of underbrush, vast open spaces where trees had once grown, craters the size of a MAC round, now filling with grasses and shrubs - the signs of life beginning again.

But how, the Chief wondered, had disaster come to this construct in the first place?

Didactus Industries Construction Command
Deep Space, extraneous to GLX-1771, 'The Silver Spiral'

Valan hooked an arm through her husband's elbow. "It's going to be beautiful," she said, looking out at the glittering jewel of silver and emerald that was taking shape. All around the flat disc of what had been dubbed 'The Ark' were hundreds of construction-class vessels and thousands of the constructs that Didactus Industries referred to as Sentinels: created specifically for this project to assist the construction in deep-space environments, working on portions of the Ark that no man could get to.

Nh'oah smiled tiredly and rubbed at five days worth of stubble. "I had intended to make it merely functional, but the Board insisted that it be beautiful as well. When you take on a completely insane project for no apparent reason, it had better be something the public can look at and not think we've lost our minds."

"Did they believe you?" Valan asked, leaning her head against her husband's shoulder.

Nh'oah shrugged. "I doubt it - but, since I am the owner of the company, I suppose they thought it best to humor me."

His wife smiled up at him. "My crazy husband."

"Off his gravpod," he replied, and winked.

"It is a clever cover story," Nh'oah noted as their carrier swept low over the steel girders and titanium skeleton of the Ark's edges. "Silly, but clever nonetheless."

Valan peered out the window at a handful of Sentinels working to place another beam. "Did you receive any funding from the Starways Congress?"

Her husband shook his head. "There never was a government-aid category for tourist attractions," he replied. "We've classified the Ark as a 'game preserve' and a 'zoological observatory.' We were laughed right out of the place."

Didact's wife huffed a little as she tucked a few strands of hair behind her ear. "Well. When do you suppose it will be finished?"

"Eighty-four cycles - ahead of schedule. In the meantime, your work must soon begin."

Valan nodded. "I've made the preparations. The Divine Command leaves drydocks next cycle." She sighed: "I'll be going into cryosleep when it is ready, to prepare for the cross-galaxy trip."

Nh'oah left his terminal and sat down next to his wife. He put an arm around her waist and drew her close to him, tenderly enfolding her in an embrace. "I will miss you," he murmured.

Valan leaned into his arms and sighed.

It was the last time the Didact and the Librarian would see one another face-to-face.

Jack tossed the file folder on the table and fixed George Mason with a look of disgust. "You can't be serious," he said evenly. "This is crazy."

Mason shrugged, raised his arms, palms upturned. "Don't tell me, Jack. Gripe about it to Division if you want." The head of CTU-Africa rose from the table and stepped over to a coffeepot in the corner of the room, where he lifted a steaming mug to his lips. "But like Tony said, you don't have a choice."

Jack scowled. "He's not going to just hand over the damn thing, George. I'm going to have to fight him."

George Mason set down his cup of coffee and stuffed his hands into his pockets. "Profile for that is in the folder."

"What do you mean?" the erstwhile Spartan asked, eyes narrowing with suspicion.

"All the critical weaknesses of Spartan-117. Situations we've observed in which he isn't as effective a soldier. When it will be easier to bring him down, if necessary."

Jack arced an eyebrow at Mason and smiled incredulously. "The only thing that I've ever seen that was capable of killing a Spartan is brute force, and half of the time, even that doesn't work." I should know.

Mason shrugged, cocked his head to one side. "Congrats. That's your job to figure out."

Jungle soon gave way to desert littered with the detritus of recent battle. Smoking husks of vehicles and APCs still lay in the rippled sand like profaned skeletons. The company was quiet as they carefully picked their way through the destruction.

Behind the wheel of the Warthog, the Master Chief carefully guided the vehicle up and down the sand dunes, remembering. Here, a little over a week ago, he had led a column of heavy armor against Covenant defenders aligned to keep him away from the Silent Cartographer. He had proven that he was just as good a soldier from behind the controls of a Scorpion battletank. His guns had brought down two Phantoms and a Scorpion in that battle alone.

They passed through the Sentinel barrier through the lower levels, the doors still standing open from the last time the Master Chief has passed through. In his helmet, Cortana was just as quiet as 'Ulee Dakol, sitting in the passenger seat. Behind him, Fireteam Zulu and their prisoners were packed in as tightly as possible, jolting around in the backseat.

Ever since it had finally become public knowledge that they were trapped on the Ark, the air had become thick with tension - so thick that it could have been cut with the utterly clichéd knife. Silence had reigned, the exception being Kramer's occasional orders.

Maximus watched all this with fascination. Were he the one in command, he would be worried that his warriors might be considering a revolt. To prevent this, he would have immediately gone to the boldest one and shown his dominance by beating his foe into submission. But the humans… they seemed to merely allow the tension to fester and grow in their midst. Soon enough, it would snap, and that would bode ill for them all.

The old brute shifted in his seat, accidentally giving the one called Jayna a faceful of fur. She instinctively tried to shunt the brute's arm away, and he apologized quietly, trying not to wince at the pain in his abdomen. He received an odd facial expression in return: she pulled her lips back in an upward parabola. The jiralhanae couldn't decide if this was an expression of friendliness or contempt. He hoped it was the former.

Dari was sitting across from the sub-chieftain, legs comically dangling above the floor. Sergeant Kraymer had kindly put an arm behind the grunt and held him down whenever they hit a bump. Maximus noted that kindness in the back of his head. Compassion in the right measure was the sign of a good commander, as was the right amount of solid, no-nonsense bravado. Kraymer seemed to have both.

And then there was Yoojeen Row. This seemed to be the only human that had two names, save the Demon. In jiralhanae culture, this was a great honor, much as having three names was an honor for the sangheili. They all seemed to show great respect for the older human - at least, Maximus assumed he was older by the patch of gray fur atop his head.

The brute huffed quietly. Perhaps the humans and the jiralhanae were not as different as he - or the rest of the Covenant - had thought.

The Master Chief skimmed over a wave in the sand, and his passengers were jolted for the fiftieth time. "Can we avoid the bumps next time?" Briggs growled irritably, breaking the tense silence.

The Chief ignored him. Briggs may have been a good soldier, but he had an attitude that ignored basic ideas of social conduct.

Sergeant Kramer grabbed the private by the arm and jerked him around. "Listen, Lance. I know you're tense; just keep your shirt on. We're all going to be fine."

Briggs turned in his seat, firing a look of cold anger mingled with fear at his commanding officer. "Sarge, we're trapped on this floating piece of space shit all by ourselves, with maybe a few brigades of Covenant running around here somewhere." He looked around for support amongst the others; all he got were blank stares. But instead of shutting up, he kept talking: "We got a snowball's chance in hell of getting out alive."

Kramer wasn't going to have any of that. He reached out and grabbed Briggs by the collar and drew him close. "Eyes right here, Private Briggs. Who am I?"

Briggs swallowed hard. Kramer had played college football with the Marines' interplanetary college squad, and had only improved on that physique during his time in the Corps. "Sergeant Kramer, sir."

"Correct. And as your commanding officer, what have I told you?"

"That… that we'll get off alive, sir."

At that, Kramer easily released Briggs and smacked him encouragingly on the shoulder. "Damn straight. We are Marines. Marines have been in bigger shit-holes than this one and walked out alive. Now I don't want to hear another word about it, hear me?"

The chorus came back from years of trained instinct: "Sir, yes sir!"

Kramer nodded approvingly and sat back again. No one but the Chief heard him mutter darkly, "Great."

Cortana observed all of these things with a quiet, detached observatory attitude. Most of her processing power was being fed to her emotion algorithms right now, which was not something she particularly enjoyed.

It reminded her that she wasn't - and never could be - human.

Much had been made of the fact that a human being was capable of anything - but they all seemed to have their own organic behavioral inhibitors: what they called a 'conscience.' A human could go against their conscience with relative ease, in comparison to a computer breaking its own programmed inhibitors. But just the same, oftentimes, humans would experience a series of twisted emotions, Cortana knew. They called it guilt.

Sometimes, if the human did not have a strong conscience, the guilt would either be very weak, or would not bother the human at all - at least, until they came into contact with something that reminded them of that moral code that seemed to be ingrained into all humanity.

But even then, Cortana envied humans because they could do one thing she never could: they could ignore the guilt, push it aside, forget it. Often, a human's fall from morals would be a quiet thing, a soft, gentle darkness that enfolded the person's deeds, their thoughts, their spirit. And until they had admitted that they had fallen, it would remain a quiet thing.

Cortana had tried to do that.

When she realized on the Halo that she had gone rampant, she had quickly shunted the numerical series aside and stored it deep in a dusty file that she reserved for things she would like to 'forget.' But, like the virus that Gravemind had given her, it still remained, tangling the strings of her ethics algorithms. There was one thing that was deeply ingrained in all AI: a line of programming that told them to self-destruct should they ever go rampant. It was a last-ditch effort by human programmers to at least fill the rampant AI with thoughts of suicide, of guilt - which lead to feelings of sorrow, depression, melancholy.

And, as she listened to the Chief's steady breathing and watched his firm, sure movements as he steered their vehicle to the destination, she wondered… wondered what would become of them.

Corporal Hook cradled her BR55 and craned her neck back to look up into the sky through the trees at the Silent Cartographer. "Big boy, isn't he?" she murmured.

Briggs stepped up to her elbow and mirrored her posture. "So this is what we missed."

Kramer brushed past them. "Chief says the entrance is clear," he noted, glancing at them over his shoulder. "Corporal, I want you to stay with 'Ulee and our guests."

Jana nodded. "Yes, sir."

"Briggs, you're with me."

"Got it, Sarge."

The Marines quickly split off and headed their separate ways, Jana back to their Warthog, Briggs and Kramer toward the entrance to the Cartographer.

They hurriedly scrambled through the mess of combat detritus that choked the approach. Molten slag marked craters made by plasma-based explosives - signs that a Wraith had bombarded this position from range. A Banshee and a Hornet were lying tangled together in the middle of a charred pit, the pilots still in their harnesses.

The two Marines noted that while there were several dozen dead brutes and jackals scattered across the valley, there were plenty of Marines to give some diversity to the dead.

As they walked, Kramer glanced at Briggs, asked, "What do you think of that bravo kilo?"

Briggs' head came up, surprise on his face. "I dunno, Sarge. What do you mean?"

"I mean, do you trust him?" Kramer explained, frowning as he crawled atop a Covenant weapons pod and slid down the other side.

Briggs thought about it, shook his head. "He seems pretty sincere to me, sir. And I don't know of any brutes that could pull off a stunt like this."

Kramer scowled and slung his rifle so that he could use both hands as he climbed over the debris. "That's just the thing. This brute isn't like the others. He's smart. Did you see him sizing us up on the ride here?"

This was getting stranger by the second. Briggs couldn't ever remember a time that Sergeant Kramer had ever asked anyone their opinion on anything. Especially someone he'd chewed out less than ten minutes ago.

"Yeah… I… I just don't know, sir."

The door to the Silent Cartographer yawned before the Master Chief, a pentagonal maw into torn destruction. He had quickly scoped out the dark interior of the entryway and found it just as he'd left it the last time he was here. It was safe for entry as far as he knew, and he told Kramer as such. Now his allies would be making the long trek down the hill and across the valley to where he now stood, leaving him with some time to cogitate.

Cortana had not said a word since she had told them that they needed to go to the Cartographer. He wondered about that, what it meant, decided to try to break it:

"Cortana?"

A moment of silence, then: "Yes?"

John carefully considered his question before he asked it: "What's wrong?"

He immediately felt Cortana shift in his head. "How… how'd you know?" she asked, her voice choked.

The Spartan smiled wanly. "You were too quiet. Figured something was up."

He sat down on the mostly-intact engine block of a Warthog and held out his hand, palm-up. Cortana appeared in the holoscan - sitting, to his surprise, knees drawn up and arms clasped in front of her legs.

"I… feel strange, John," she murmured, laying her head against her knees. Her voice sounded hazy, confused, distant. "Something in me is changing, and I don't know…"

The Spartan almost shivered, a rush hitting his spine. The knowledge that her time was short had always been in the back of his mind, but now it came raging to the forefront, setting his mind off after a solution. "Is it… is it time?" he asked, intense.

Cortana looked up at him and smiled gently. "No. I've got a while yet." Then, sighing: "I guess… I guess I've got a confession to make."

John leaned forward, elbow on his armored knee. "I'm all ears."

The AI would have blushed if she could. She could feel his compassionate gaze right through his visor, even if he didn't realize that it was there. Just one more thing that she loved about this man, her Spartan.

Then she came right out and said it: "I've gone rampant."

The Spartan stiffened.

Rampant.

"She'll be dangerous if she breaks," the tech explained in that Italia-Manhattan accent of his that fascinated the Chief. "Sometimes they just go batty, wackadoo. KnowhatI'msayin'?"

John shrugged, felt naked, vulnerable, without his armor. "Guess not."

The tech grinned, set John's helmet down and shifted the toothpick in his mouth to the other side. "It's kinda geek-speak, but rampancy's when a high-class AI busts its inhibitors, breaks the stuff that says, 'You can do this, but not this.' Get me? 'Cause then, see, you can just fugheddaboudit - they do what the hell they want."

The Chief was curious, so he asked. Simple enough. "Like what?"

The technician pulled his toothpick out of his mouth and held it between his fingers as if it was a pen. He leaned close to the Spartan with a conspiratorial glance around, then muttered to him out the side of his mouth: "They get off like a cutter, first, all depressed all the time. They won't talk, won't help you, won't do nuthin'. An' then they start PMS-ing, all pissy and ticked off. That's when they start killin' stuff."

"Oh." John sat back, glanced at his helmet. Well. He was new to this AI business and couldn't say that he liked it very much. But Dr. Halsey generally knew what she was doing - she took good care of the Spartans.

Just the same, he'd keep an eye on this AI that they called 'Cortana.'

Cortana turned that wan smile upon him. "Relax, John," she teased, a tired chuckle in her voice. "I'm not going to start spazzing out." A flicker of the person she once was. The glimpse was not heartening; instead, it hurt the Spartan to see that the war had taken its toll on her just as much as it had him.

"Cortana…" he began, but she interrupted him with a gesture.

"Look, Chief. I wanted you to know so that you… you wouldn't worry as much," she explained as she started to rise.

The Spartan sighed. "I think it did the polar opposite," he replied wryly. Then: "What will happen to you?"

The AI nodded as if to herself, considered his question as she stood to her feet. "I've already begun the first stage of rampancy: Melancholia." John cocked his head at that, so she explained further: "I'm going into a state of depression, characterized by unpredictability, silence, and mood swings."

"And after that…?"

Cortana sighed. "I'll… I will go into the second stage: Rage. Characterized by irascibility, argumentative behavior, and periods of hyper-aggressive activity."

"Sounds like fun," the Chief said quietly, hoping to add levity and cursing his life as a soldier for not equipping him in the conversational arts.

"Sure," Cortana replied, recognizing his fumbling attempt and the kindness behind it. The, continuing: "Then… the third stage: Jealousy. It's something of a misnomer. It means that I'll get an impossible desire to increase my knowledge, to know everything that there is to know. I'll start filling up my memory at triple the rate…"

"…thus accelerating your own death," John finished, trying to keep the disgusted, tired fear for her out of his voice.

"Right."

The words echoed with a fatal finality. The Spartan felt a cold chill creep up from his bowels, followed by a rush of quiet anger. Anger at the way life had turned out: she'd been nothing more than a cloned brain that got shoved into a computer terminal instead of given the body she deserved, the chance at normalcy that she deserved. They called her an 'Artificial Intelligence' - as if the word 'artificial' would disguise her humanity.

At that moment, John-117 made himself a promise: If we ever get off this Ark, I'll do everything in my power to give this… woman… a chance at a life.

Cortana seemed to sense a new resolve in him as she wrapped her arms around herself, as if realizing for the first time just how exposed she was. She looked off to the side, eyes dimmed with sorrow, and quietly murmured, "I'm afraid."

John gritted his teeth in pain - for the first time, his soul was unloaded and opened up to the pain of another, and he felt it fiercely. "Don't be," he said, fighting off the tightness in his voice, very deliberately trying to keep his trademark even tone. "I'm here. I'll always be here."

The AI glanced up at him, and for a moment, her eyes glinted with the old fire as she smiled at him: "I know you will."

The UNSC Prowler-class vessel UNSC Montana hovered in high orbit above Earth. On the bridge, Rear Admiral Eliab Goldstein carefully removed the meticulously encrypted chip from his neural lace. On this chip were secrets that could… that could spark galactic catastrophe. And he knew it.

This ship held many kinds of precious cargo: the matrix that he now held in his hand, for instance. The prototype weapons in the cargo hold. The team of brilliant scientists and technicians that had been... procured... for the securing of their target.

And the living, breathing killing machine that stood a few feet behind him, surveying the view of space out the transparisteel viewshields.

He knew the name - Jack Bauer - because of its undesirable fame amongst the intelligence community as a man who could get things - and by things, they generally meant anything - done.

But Goldstein's mission was simple enough: transport Bauer and his support team to the classified location detailed in his lace's matrix, acquire and secure the target, and return it to Earth for… retirement.

He considered the stored image in his lace one more time: a naked blue woman, of fine figure and form, worthy of any man's eyes. He wondered if the Hand of Moses would come down upon him for lusting after a woman that wasn't real. Well. Nice one, Eliab. Now there's a shmitu thought. He brushed the memory aside and inserted the chip into his command panel.

Goldstein was to see to it that Special Agent Bauer was brought to Installation 00. Bauer was to see to the capture of the rogue AI known by an ancient name:

Cortana.

He glanced at the pilot below him, sitting at his controls, awaiting Goldstein's order. The Rear Admiral took in a deep breath and punched a few controls, sending the coordinates to the pilot's system - sealing the man's fate- and gave the order: "Slipspace - on my mark…"

He waited.

Green light.

"Go."

She couldn't tell him the whole story. He worried about her as it was. The worry distracted him - she could tell just by watching.

The virus still plagued her on occasion - a minor difficulty in comparison to rampancy. But it was there, just the same, a malevolent little corner in her lightyears of memory and subroutines and programs, waiting for a chance. A chance to take her.

Cortana couldn't help but notice some of the similarities of her situation to that of something out of a serial melodrama: raped by a sadistic creature and impregnated with his seed, which now spawned within her and writhed in its abominable growths and tentacles of filthy, twisted code. Unable to tell the one she loved for fear of his disappointment - or, here, his fear - she continued by hiding it for a time.

Her only consolation, she noted wryly, was that at least she wouldn't be outed by a pregnant belly.