(A/N) Hey guys, sorry about going AWOL recently, real life was just reared its ugly head over the last few days, and it didn't help that I came down with the 'flu at the same time. However, I'm on my way to recovery, and have begun the task of delegating more roles to members of the Freelancer Collaboration, which I probably should have done a long time back. We'll hopefully have the X-Ray and Vav and Grifball: Running Rampant fics back up and running soon, we're just currently suffering from deadline difficulties and a few drop-outs, but doing our best to fix things!

Just wanted to announce the fact that we've set up a group on the RT website, and you'll be able to find a link on our profile. Also, we've just set up a Twitter account, and a link will be on our profile for that as well. A few members have expressed interest in setting up a blog, so keep your eyes out for information about that in the future!

Finally, just wanted to let people know that, in about a week, on the 25th of November, we'll be opening our forum to new writers who wish to take part in this collaboration, taking on new applications for OCs, 479er, the Counselor and, this is the big one, Agent Washington, so keep your eyes peeled for more info on that too in the coming week.

Enjoy!

Chapter Eight – Half-Time Show

Arkansas

Written by NicKenny

"Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men."
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

Ark walked out into the light, his visor darkening slightly as it adjusted the amount of light coming through, but he was able to get a sense of how disorientating it must be for the away teams who travelled here to take on Team Rampancy. Whoever had designed this place had earned their paycheck, he mused, as the stadium slowly grew quiet, the loud chattering of panic that had taken over, once armed soldiers bearing the emblem of the Crimson Sun had made their way into the stadium, dying down instantly.

My reputation precedes me, he noted wryly, momentarily considering whether or not to wave to the assembled crowd. Evidently the UNSC had not been entirely successful in suppressing the video of our previous display.

His eyes scanned over the crowd, the hush reaming as he slowly turned the full three-hundred and sixty degrees, staring at each stand in turn. Behind him, Penn and Harper emerged from the tunnel, and Ark could sense the ripple of rage and restlessness that washed over the crowd. However, it seemed that he had judged them correctly. The armed men and women stationed at the various entrances and walkways were more than enough to deter any attempt at heroism from a member of the audience.

People were so damn predictable.

It had taken a lot of work to reach this point, earning the trust of the remnants of the URF and other such Insurrections, long crippled by the actions of the UNSC, but it had surprised Ark how many of them had survived in some shape or form, their leaders dead and their members scattered, but their various causes still burned deep, just waiting to be reforged into one whole, which Ark had done, labelling it: JUSTICE.

Pennsylvania had been only too happy to step aside and let Ark take the leading role, but Ark was never able to forget about the hostile presence of the former Freelancer, now bedecked in a bastardised version of his old armour and the Insurrectionist BEHEMOTH suits, of which they had managed to recover about a dozen, the first of which Harper had instantly claimed as his own.

Harper…Harper was a problem. While Ark knew that Penn would only move against him when he saw Ark as more of a liability than an asset, Harper was a true sociopath, and his whims changed like the weather. It had been Harper who had functioned as the intermediary between the remnants of the URF and the two Freelancers, convincing his own squad to join the cause, and through him they had managed to recruit many more, and more importantly, retrieve many of the assets that the URF had left behind.

In the months that had followed, Ark had made his own connections, recruited his own followers, teased more and more power his way, and it swiftly became evident that many of those who had flocked when Harper had called had done so not out of loyalty or respect, but out of fear of what would happen to them if they didn't.

When local Innie leaders had shown resistance, not wishing to align themselves with Ark and his ever-growing group of followers, he had taken particular care to ensure that either he or Penn led the movement against it, not Harper, determined to prevent the Lieutenant from gaining any further influence, forcing these pockets of resistance to make the decision between assimilation or annihilation. After Penn had physically snapped the leader of the first Insurrectionist movement that they had come across in two, most had chosen to assimilate.

Ark himself had taken particular care to ensure that he had come across as both fair and even-handed to the men and women that had joined his movement, determined to set himself in a positive contrast next to the maniacal and psychopathic Harper. He had chosen a few individuals to form part of his own specialised squad, under his command and his alone. Two, in particular, had come to prominence under his tutelage, and had become, essentially, the only people that he felt he could actually trust within the movement.

The first, Athena, had been amongst the first people to have joined the Crimson Sun, having been one of the soldiers who had fled with Harper's second, Falcon – another man that he had his reservations about, but beggars couldn't be choosers - when the war on Byzantium had gone south. It had been with a shock that he had recognised her, flashing back to the day when he had pulled a Magnum in Cal, ordering him to stand down.

He and his squad - himself, California, Georgia and the Dakotas - had been searching a small, isolated village for URF Insurrectionists, after the Freelancers had put an attempted ambush to rout, when he had entered a small, unobtrusive building alone, their numbers already thin-spread enough without him requesting back-up for what looked like another dead-end.

He had no sooner entered, the door closing slowly behind him as he entered the darkened hovel, when a fist had lashed out at him, catching him on the side of the head with a ringing blow. He had staggered, almost dropping his shotgun, ducking before the next blow had landed, tripping his attacker up as their momentum caused them to pass by.

Straightening, he activated the flashlight feature on his helmet, illuminating the room, his shotgun primed to fire. Before him, lying on the ground and breathing heavily, was a young woman with long blond hair and sharp green eyes, her left arm tucked, obviously broken. Ark looked around the room and a dozen faces stared back at him, all sullenly clad in URF attire. What had caused him to pause, however, was not their numbers, or the dull hate in their eyes as they glared at him, but how young they all were, the young woman who had attacked him looking by far the oldest there, and she herself couldn't have been much over eighteen.

The youngest soldier, at the far back, his puffy face and bloodshot eyes betraying the fact that he had recently been crying, couldn't have been more than fourteen, and looked the spitting image of how Ark himself had at that age. Ark had looked at each of them in turn, noticing the weariness on all of their faces, the injuries and blood-stained bandages that adorned the majority, and something stirred within him, an emotion that he had not felt in a long time.

Pity.

Raising a hand to his lips, or at least where his lips would have been, had his helmet not been in the way, he attached his shotgun to his back with his free hand, then slowly left the place, his eyes slightly moist beneath his helmet.

Walking back into the sunlight, he had been greeted by the evidently worried form of North Dakota, who had promptly asked "Hey, is everything alright?", confused by the noises he had heard coming from within.

Ark had tensed imperceptibly, then nodded to his teammate, not quite able to meet his gaze, nodding.

"Yeah, everything's fine."

Athena had been the codename the woman had chosen, and Ark knew that she triumphantly crowed about managing to land a punch on him while nursing a broken arm to the other soldiers, but he forgave her this minor transgression, as Ark and Penn had quickly served to prove themselves to be untouchable in the field, and regularly tested themselves against their own recruits in simulated fights.

Hell, the Director had some good ideas. It gave them a chance to prove themselves superior to the men and women under them, and the quickest way to gain a man's respect was by not only beating him up, but also everyone he disliked, and doing so in such a comprehensive manner that no one felt too hard done by.

Athena had quickly proved herself and adept disciple, picking up everything that he imparted as fast as he could explain each separate piece of knowledge, and, other than York and Georgia, Ark hadn't yet come across a more accomplished hacker. He had given her more and more important roles up until their assassination of Colonel Grant, and it had been Athena that had managed the live-stream of the event.

Goliath had been the man assisting her, the second of the two, and had caught Ark's eye due to his immense size and impressive physical strength, reminding Ark of the first time he had seen Maine. Like the Freelancer, he wasn't much of a talker, but he had remained fiercely loyal to Ark ever since he had joined, and when a small group of dissatisfied Innies, seeking a means of gaining a pardon from the UNSC, had snuck into his quarters at night, intent on killing him, Goliath, the lone guard, killed all four of them before Ark had enough time to wake and register what was going on.

After that, he had rose in prominence through the ranks of the Crimson Sun, frequently sparing with Penn, whom the giant looked upon with something close to admiration, and perhaps closer to worship, but Ark knew that the Insurrectionists loyalty still lay with him and him only, and slept somewhat safer at night with Goliath as the head of his personal guard of sixteen.

A green light flashed in the top-left corner of his helmet's HUD, waking Ark from his reflections, the signal that Goliath and Athena had taken the aptly named control room, and were now in complete control of all the audio and video transmissions from this stadium. Hopefully, given that the UNSC had no vested interest in this event, we would be able to reach a wider audience this time round, Ark mused silently. After all, Grifball was the most popular sport in the universe. If they couldn't reach out here, then people just clearly didn't watch sports any more, and wouldn't that just be tragic?

The players on the field were clearly baffled by the current events, and out of the corner of his eye he noticed one of them shift uncomfortably, his fingers tightening around his gravity hammer, as if entertaining the notion of trying something, his eyes locked on the soldiers attempting to usher him off the pitch. He was clearly struggling with his indecision, but Ark thought it wise to step in, before a decision was reached. After all, a gravity hammer could do serious damage to a man, and the bullet-riddled corpse of a young Grifball player wouldn't do much to help the cause.

Ark turned to him and shook his head, gesturing for him to stand down. "Don't try to be a hero, kid, it's not what it's cracked up to be, trust me." He let out a mirthless chuckle as he finished, before looking back up into the kid's visor. "It's Rothe, right? Jackson Rothe? You're Rampancy's new Runner. You've got a bright future ahead of you, so don't throw it all away here and now. Just leave the field with the rest of your team, and you'll be alright, I promise."

The kid seemed to wrestle with himself for a moment, struggling to come to a decision, before finally looking back up to meet Ark's gaze once more. Ark was impressed with the restraint the guy managed to show, clearly furious, but intelligent enough to know that this was a battle that he couldn't win. "How do I know you're not just lying to me?" the kid asked, his voice only slightly below the level of aggression that Ark would have categorized as a snarl.

Ark shrugged. "You don't. But if I am lying to you, what do I have to gain from it? We have guns, you don't, and it's as simple as that. I could give the word right now, and you'd be dead before I uttered the final syllable. As you can probably notice, I'm going out of my way to avoid having to kill you, and to be honest, that's pretty damn nice of me, and I think that leads credence to the idea that, in fact, I don't want to kill you."

Rothe appeared to have trouble keeping up with Ark's logic, but eventually he inclined his head and walked away, his grav hammer dropping to the floor with a clang, allowing the Crimson Sun soldiers to escort him off, only Ark, Penn, Harper and a handful of Insurrectionists remaining on the field.

Time to get to work.

He glanced back over at the crowd, his eyes searching for their target, already roughly knowing whereabouts he would find him, and knowing that the target himself would know exactly what was going on, given the fact that Ark had been kind enough to publish his list of targets during their last mission.

There.

The man was palpably sweating, his eyes darting from left to right, searching for a way out, but only finding Crimson Sun soldiers guarding every possible exit. His eyes turned back and met Ark's own, and he paled as he realised the significance of this action. Ark entered the seat number into his helmet's HUD, and sent it to his men in the building, the ones nearest to the target starting when they realised that this was addressed to them. They forced their way through the seated people, grabbing the target between two of them and dragging him back out onto the stairwell.

The crowd began to murmur in indignation and fear at this, as the man was half-shoved, half-dragged down onto the field, visibly shaking in terror as he was thrown down before Ark, pulling himself to his knees and looking up into the pitiless features of Ark's visor, its smooth, burnished surface reflecting the man's own stricken face.

"What is the meaning of this?" the man spluttered weakly, his shoulders shaking. "I'm just a microbiologist, not a soldier!"

Ark stared at him for a moment, and frowned beneath his helmet, remembering the various images of the atrocities that this man had committed, flashing through his memory with a vivid rapidity. Visions of wasted children, malformed individuals, the diseased and dying in their hundreds and thousands surrounded by those already dead and hundreds of other images flashed by, causing his stomach to turn and his fists to clench.

"You are Dr Simon Eisenberg, are you not?" Ark asked calmly, emotionless as ever.

The man gave a slow nod, uncertainty reigning supreme over his decision making process, but clearly realising that Ark was simply asking a rhetorical question. "Yes…I…I am."

"The same Dr Simon Eisenberg responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people on the Outer Colony planet of Kantyr, when you released a biological weapon in the midst of a small city, in order to test its effects on a large population of human beings?"

The doctor paled at these words, licking his lips nervously, not noticing how the crowd suddenly grew quiet and somewhat hostile at Ark's words. "That leak was an accident. We had a research facility on that planet, and the site was compromised. People died, yes, I admit it, but it wasn't my fault!"

Arkansas only shook his head slowly, and gestured to the large screens above them, normally used to show replays of events in the Grifball game, along with the current time and score, but now was running images of the victims of Eisenberg's work, and Ark could feel the crowd reacting with the same revulsion that he had when he had first seen them.

Ark didn't even reply to the doctor, retaining his stony demeanour, as the images continued to appear up on the screens, until at last they were replaced by a video of Dr Eisenberg and several other white-coated scientists. The crowd grew even quieter as the volume on the video was raised, one of Eisenberg's companions very audibly murmuring his doubts on the morality of testing their weapons on humans.

"But sir, does the morality of this not concern you? Unleashing this virus on a human city could have disastrous effects. We simply cannot take this risk!"

The tele-Eisenberg simply shot this man a look of withering scorn, and shook his head slowly, a hologram behind him displaying the city in question, with a glowing red dot pulsing in its centre. "The UNSC have given us permission to go ahead. We cannot continue testing on isolated subjects if we are going to make use of this virus in the war. Losing a city is an acceptable loss in comparison to the loss of an army, should this virus prove to still affect humanity."

"Sir!" the scientists turned to face the unseen speaker, his voice issuing from behind the cameraman. "The device is in place, and our men on the ground are waiting for your order."

The camera focused in on tele-Eisenberg's features, which tightened, his eyes narrowing. "Activate it," he ordered, and the video ended, leaving the stadium in utter silence.

Ark turned to the stricken scientist, and despite the fact that his face was hidden behind his burnished visor, the aura of scorn that he was exuding was easily detectable. "So," he began, his voice cold and emotionless. "The leak was an accident, right? Forgive me if I find this a little difficult to believe."

The doctor opened and closed his mouth weakly, but Ark had nothing more to say to him. He turned back to the crowd, where he knew the cameras would be following his every move, if Athena was doing her job, and he had a lot of faith in her. This would be their greatest triumph yet.

"This man, the one here before you all, is a war criminal, and a murderer. Your fear of the Covenant has allowed you to blind yourself to the harsh reality of the actions of the UNSC, which should be feared just as much. It is said that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and I have little doubt that this will be used in later years when the UNSC are finally brought to justice, to justify their actions."

He paused, and surveyed the crowd once more, looking to all four stands. "This man has committed atrocities against our race, and yet, he has been proclaimed a hero. I stand here before you today, and have been branded a terrorist and a traitor and a criminal, but I have not murdered hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people! Let me ask you this, ladies and gentlemen: if this is the price of survival in times of war, is it worth paying?"

He took a deep breath and turned back to the now weeping scientist, his frail shoulders shaking tremendously in between each sob. Placing his hands lightly on either side of Eisenberg's neck, Ark's voice changed, becoming almost kind and benevolent, losing all traces of the rage and hostility that had reverberated through the stadium only moments earlier.

"Dr Simon Eisenberg, you are here today to serve as a lesson to the UNSC, and any other faction which would attempt to justify mass-murder. We will not stand idly by while genocide is carried out. We will not forgive transgressions carried out in the name of 'the greater good'. We will not allow you to silence the few, to thread on the minority, to oppress and murder without cause."

Another pause and the silence grew within the stadium to unbearable levels, until, at last, Ark spoke up once more, and it was broken.

"We are the Galactic Army of the Crimson Sun, and a new day is dawning across the universe. We will achieve justice for the dead, protect the most vulnerable members of humanity, and speak up for those who have no voices. We stand in opposition, not for ourselves, but for justice, for honour and for the dead."

A breath was taken, and he could feel the cameras zooming in on him as he finished: "Fear us."

With that, his hands tightened around Eisenberg's neck, and before the doctor could utter his squawk of protest, Ark's hands squeezed around his throat, wrenching his head to the side with a sickening snap, and the stadium was silent as he released the doctor's body, which collapsed to the ground, a lifeless corpse.

Ark stood back, a feeling of grim satisfaction in his heart, tempered somewhat with sadness that accompanied every one of his kills, for even when the kill was justified, or necessary, taking a human life was something that left its mark on the soul. Only a true psychopath could kill and not allow it to affect him or her on some basic level. He was many things, and not all of them good, but each kill that he had carried out, even those committed in self-defence, had left a bitter taste in his mouth.

One more than all of the others.

"ARK!" a voice bellowed from somewhere in the stadium, and Ark looked around, nonplussed, as the crowd began to stir restlessly at these words. He eyes followed these words to their source, and beneath his helmet his eyes widened slightly at this new revelation, his mouth curling in an unconscious sneer, the coincidence surprising him greatly, but it ultimately mattered little. His plans remained unchanged by this new development.

In the crowd, suddenly surrounded by Crimson Sun soldiers, were Carolina, York, Georgia, North, South, Florida and California. It was the latter who had screamed out Ark's name after he had executed the doctor, his face flushed with unrestrained rage, and Ark could tell that York and Carolina were attempting to restrain him, the wary looks that they were sending towards the Crimson Sun soldiers revealed their very real concerns at taking on this number of soldiers without their equipment, unarmed and unarmoured, perhaps explaining why they hadn't attempted to speak out until now, or to interfere in the proceedings.

How the mighty have fallen.

"Ah," Ark murmured, his voice picked up by the speakers within his helmet and amplified so that all could hear. "It's a small universe, is it not, my old friends?"

"You bastard!" Cal screamed in return, trying to fight off Carolina and York, while the other Freelancers simply looked wary and uncertain, tensing as they sized up the Crimson Sun soldiers nearest to them, attempting to plan their course of action. "I'm going to kill you, you piece of shit! I'll gut you like the dog you are, traitor! I'll…I'll…"

Ark didn't give Cal the chance to finish uttering exactly what he'd do to him, knowing full well that Carolina and York wouldn't be able to restrain the infuriated Freelancer for long, and at that point the others would be forced to make their move on his own forces. The hero complex was a bitch, he had to admit. If only cowardice had been drilled into soldiers. It would have made things so much easier.

"No, Cal, you won't," he replied smoothly, yet firmly, his voice echoing throughout the stadium. He wasn't ready for a confrontation with Project Freelancer, not just yet, at least. Not that he doubted his soldiers' ability at handling them. The Freelancers were outnumbered, outgunned, and simply at the extreme disadvantage in this fight. However, he needed this to be a clean mission. If bodies started to pile up, which they surely would if it came to a fight between his forces and the Freelancers, it would make it harder for people to view the Crimson Sun as a force for justice.

"Lights out," he murmured, as the stadium was plunged into darkness, and Cal's screams of impotent rage rang out behind him as he made his way back through the tunnels, his forces following suit, their night-vision goggles activated. Penn and Harper walked next to him, neither entirely happy at having been side-lined for this event, their presence inherently hostile, but Ark stood firm, knowing that neither would hesitate to destroy him if he ever showed any sign of weakness. He led the way through the winding tunnels, the escape route clear in his head, knowing that Athena and Goliath would be present at the rendezvous point with their squads at the designated time, for he had trained them.

By the time power was restored, the Crimson Sun would be long gone. Until then, chaos reigned.