Monk
I look at the desiccated specimen, long dead.
"Shit."
My company upgraded mind started going through scenarios, I blinked and got up. I turned on the video feed and made a call to the general.
"Doc. What's up?"
"A sample just came in, some kind of ancient bioweapon."
"You worried?"
"From what I was reading it was something called the Flood, the sample's dead but this stuff is nasty as in end civilizations nasty."
"Is that a problem?"
Oh, thank God for magical genius.
"No, just cracked what makes them work. The bioweapon uses energy from higher dimensions to make it immune to radiation attacks and give itself a hive mind. Normal attacks wouldn't work, the spores would work around it. You need exotics, I'm going to put in an update patch into our planetary fields, just in case, that should kill any infection that's used against those worlds."
"That isn't everything."
"It's the quickest solution. I will of course put the same patch into our other big forcefields but it's going to take me a while to create a vaccine for this shit. When I'm finished I need you to vaccinate everything and everyone."
"By 'everything', you mean?"
"It infects every living thing, biomass included. We will also need to share the vaccine with the UNSC."
"That bad?"
"Civilizational collapse, this is a 'rocks fall, everyone dies scenario' and the Covenant is fully stupid enough to play around with this shit. One living sample and we are all fucked."
"Do we tell the UNSC about it?"
I paused.
"Tell them we found out about a potential bioweapon and were able to steal a vaccine. The UNSC leadership is smart enough not to fuck with this, but ONI is um..."
"Full of fucking tryhard idiots."
The man always did cut right to the point.
"Yeah, so that's a problem. We can trust them with the cure but not with an actual sample. I just want to head this off now before it has the potential to become a problem."
"Good work, Doc. Keep it up."
With the video call over I looked at the sample.
"You used magic. The entire time, you used magic. That's why you were such a problem, you were an outside context problem. Not to me, buddy, not to me."