Bits and Pieces

A collection of short narratives centred around some of the characters and events of Alpha-Nine.

The Menagerie
November 15, 2552 Dawn Facility, Earth Orbit, Sol System, SolCore

High above the Earth's surface, it was calm. The conflict in orbit between the UNSC and the Covenant had lulled for about a day or two. Despite this, Avery Johnson was clad in his new battle dress uniform. Combat could come at any moment, so it was better to be prepared than caught naked. Or at least that's what his many years in service had shown him. The person walking beside him, Veronica Dare, appeared to have similar feelings; sporting a less armoured, specialized ONI field agent suit. Both of their boots clanked on the space station's hallway floor.

"No offence Sergeant Major, but more Marines aren't needed in this situation." Dare said, with a bubbling annoyance in her voice. An ONI agent through and through. The Office of Naval Intelligence by this point was the de facto central intelligence agency of the UNSC. In spite of their Navy origins. Their agents and officers were often given a larger degree of freedom than other branches. This sometimes gave them the idea, and occasionally the means, to push and manipulate situations to their wanting. Certainly beyond what soldiers from other branches of the UNSC were allowed. The best counter to that attitude was to remind them that they were in the military first and foremost. One with procedures and hierarchies. Something else that his many years of service had shown him.

"Duly noted, Captain." Johnson retorted. "But the Admiral thinks one more might help. If you have a problem with that, your superiors could convince him otherwise at the next Security Council meeting." Dare shot an exasperated glance back at Johnson. In reality, her options to get rid of him were limited. Fleet Admiral Lord Terrence Hood chaired the Security Council. He was also in charge of the defence of Earth and Luna. These facts seemed to dawn on her.

"Lord Hood may have given you clearance, but it was my op, and it's my interrogation. We only captured one." Dare was firm and her frustration was palpable, but she kept her composure. "It's very delicate." The two had stopped in front of a closed bulkhead door. Johnson worked the controls.

"Don't worry, I know what the aliens like," Johnson said. The door opened and he immediately caught sight, and smell, of the Engineer. The floating, pink, bulbous, and rancid alien was near the centre of the room, interacting with some sort of electronic device with its tendrils. The Engineers were technically members of the Covenant, though unlike the other species of the alliance, they rarely appeared in combat. Just before the attack on Earth a handful of others were captured thanks to Johnson's efforts. It made him one of the few living people to have any experience with the species. Maybe this Engineer should join them.

Something else that caught Johnson's eye was Dare's Orbital Drop Shock Trooper team. Gunnery Sergeant Buck, the next in the team's chain of command after Dare, was watching the alien. Another ODST named Mickey was on one knee also watching it. The other three had their attention elsewhere. One was standing beside a set of stairs in the back of the room and watching Johnson, another was barely holding himself up on top of the stairs, and one was asleep below the stairs. Like Dare and Johnson, the team were armored up.

"It has access to the Covenant battlenet?" Johnson asked Dare while walking to the alien. If it does, this could be a boon for the UNSC defenders. Any information the Engineer could pull from it could shift the battle in the UNSC's favour. Humanity's homeworld depended on it. Johnson's home depended on it. From what he's seen, Engineers enjoy tinkering with tech, regardless of origin. This gave him an idea. He stealthily rummaged around for his lighter.

"Limited, but yes. We're not entirely sure how it manages a remote connection to the w-" Dare cut herself off as Johnson tossed the lighter straight at the alien. Mickey almost immediately got up to try and catch it midair.

"Whoa, stand down! Stand down!" Buck ordered. Mickey hesitated the moment he heard this, letting it be caught by the Engineer.

"Sergeant Major, please! It's extremely flammable!" Dare warned. Johnson ignored the comment and continued right into the alien's face. The Engineer examined the lighter with three of its eyes; looking up and down the metallic exterior, trying to understand exactly what it was.

"The Brutes. The bastards who put bombs on your buddies and killed millions of my people," Johnson said. The Brutes, one of the frontline fighting species of the Covenant. Their name was warranted. From the battlefield Johnson was at nearly a week ago to his first battle with the alliance 20 years ago, they have brutalized humans and their own allies alike. And now they were here at Earth.

"They're digging a mighty big hole." Without breaking eye contact with the creature, he sat down on a crate beside it. In one fluid motion, he pulled a cigar from a pouch and placed it in his mouth. "You're gonna tell me exactly what they're looking for. And then, you're gonna help me stop 'em." Johnson said again. The Engineer flipped the lighter open, ignited it, lit Johnson's cigar, and closed the lid. Dare walked up from behind Johnson.

"Engineers are mostly non-verbal." She handed him a tablet. "Mostly." The tablet was already on, displaying some sort of translation or text-to-speech software. Logos for the City of New Mombasa and its services were plastered along the side of the screen like a list.

"This one likes to talk about one topic," Buck said as Dare stepped back to him. Johnson looked up at the alien.

"They call you Vergil. Right?" Johnson asked. A positive-sounding chirp replied to him from the tablet.

"Missing persons alert!" An energetic, semi-robotic voice came from the tablet. "If you see this person, please contact authorities for a possible reward!" The logo of the New Mombasa Police Department moved to the centre of the screen, as several files related to a teenage girl named 'Sadie Endesha' popped up around it.

Even without the briefing beforehand, Johnson could've figured it out right away that there was a city AI inside this thing. Chicago, his childhood home, had corporate and municipal AIs everywhere; controlling most facets of day-to-day life. They all sounded like this; aware of the situation around them, but only speaking through pre-designed speech. Johnson tapped the ash off the front of the cigar, pausing on that odd but pleasant moment of nostalgia. He wondered how the city was fairing in all this. Maybe he could stop the Covenant from making it the next Mombasa.

"Missing persons..." Vergil repeated their previous dialogue. The files on the tablet had relevant information like height, weight, nationality, and last known location pings highlighted in a desperate attempt at getting some sort of attention.

"We hear you, Vergil." Dare assured. "Like we said. We can help after we ask a few questions." The tablet went black for a moment. The Engineer instead began to frantically make gestures with their tendrils. The lighter fell out of their possession as they did this. The gesturing was accompanied by them floating upwards ever so slightly.

"Focus Vergil. If she's still down there, the Brutes and that dig site could put her in danger. Especially if she was near Mombasa." Johnson said. This caught Vergil's attention and brought them back down to Johnson and Dare's level. "What do they want with that hole?" Vergil looked at both of them for a moment. The tablet came to life again, but with a pink background and several triangular symbols dotted around. An audio waveform was in the middle, with one end cut off by the edge of the screen. It appeared to Johnson like some sort of interface for the Covenant battlenet; though it was not designed for a human tablet.

"THE GREAT MACHINE. ITS SCALE AND PURPOSE BECOMES EVER CLEARER. THERE CAN BE NO DELAY IN ITS..." It cut off before it could finish whatever it was preaching. The baritone rhythms of a Brute were unmistakable.

"A machine?" Dare asked. "At that scale? It spans a hundred kilometres!" A positive chirp came from the tablet. Johnson took a second to think about his next words. It was clear that Dare wasn't fully apprised of the larger situation of the war. The Covenant weren't the only aliens in the galaxy. To follow that line of logic would now require bending the meaning of "Top Secret". And further inviting curiosity as to why he was chosen to lead this interrogation.

Johnson looked around for a few moments contemplating this. Dare was looking at him, expecting him to say something to her or Vergil. Buck was watching the alien. Mickey had wandered off during the conversation and was looking out the skylight towards the moon. The other three weren't paying attention, watching, or conscious. It's a risky manoeuvre, but there weren't many options left.

"Good speech," Johnson said looking back at the alien. "Sounds quite a bit like what your Elite buddies were talking about in Mombasa," Johnson leaned forward towards the Engineer. "About the Ark." At about the same time Vergil was in Mombasa, the Elites there were hunting down something called "the Ark". They never found it and fled the city soon after. Johnson and his ship gave chase. "Does this Great Machine have something to do with it?" He asked. "Or Halo?" Vergil looked directly at Johnson, intrigued with the depth of the human's knowledge.

"Sergeant, I'm beginning to feel out of the loop." Dare said. Her anger and annoyance seemed to give way to curiosity. In truth, she was. The Ark and Halo were other, even larger machines. Their creators were another group of aliens named the Forerunners. Long dead, but a central component of the Covenant's society.

"You are, Captain. And I think ONI would prefer it that way." Johnson replied. The battlenet interface disappeared. Seismic graphs all popped up on the screen. Various dates and departments were on each. Buried among the graphs was a single photo of a piece of strange metal in some dirt.

"Talk to a representative at African Trust for an all-in-one insurance policy!" Everything moved off to one side. An image popped up in their place for a few moments. It looked like a pie chart divided into thirds, coloured in black and white. In each 'corner' were different symbols that Johnson couldn't recognize.

"Vergil, that pie chart design you put on the tablet. We saw it in Mombasa as well. Is that related to this?" Dare asked. Vergil looked at her and a positive chirp came from the tablet. The screen went back to the text-to-speech software of before. Everyone took a moment to think. Vergil eyed all of them for a moment before the battlenet feed returned.

"THIS GREAT INSTRUMENT WILL BRING US TO SALVATION. WHEN OUR PROPHET ARRIVES, ALL SHALL KNOW THIS TRUTH." The Brute voice spoke again. Johnson began piecing it together. This machine/instrument thing is connected in some way to the Ark/Halos, and thus the Forerunners. This would make it a high-value target for the Covenant and its leadership.

"Truth, huh?" Johnson said. A double entendre to be sure; the Prophet of Truth now led the Covenant as its sole leader after betraying the Elites and letting the other two of the High Prophet triumvirate perish in battle. "Does he or the Brutes need something to turn this machine on?" Johnson inquired.

"New vehicles are on sale at your local HuCiv dealership. Talk to one of their sales representatives to see if one is right for you!" An image popped up of a silver tri-legged structure. Each leg was impossibly thin, held to the one beside it with an equally slender brace. All three legs supported and led to a lean central spire. It was buried among a sea of blue and purple skyscrapers.

"Well, that doesn't look like something the Covenant made," Buck said. A positive chirp came from the tablet. Dare and Buck looked at each other in response to that. Johnson recognized it. It was Truth's flagship; the Anodyne Spirit. A faction of Elites briefed him on his way back to Sol. His UNSC briefing yesterday, however, informed him it was loitering in orbit of the Sol System. Now it was clear Truth was waiting for this hole to be ready for an interface of some sort. There wasn't much time then, but thankfully everything was converging.

"If that thing is needed to activate the machine, we can't let it stay in their hands." Dare said. One of the few things Johnson could agree with her on. "How can we destroy it, Vergil?" The images went away and a logo of the UNSC and the Mombasa Marketing Department was in the centre of the screen.

"Hold the line. Join the UNSC Navy today!" The voice on the tablet was slightly different. As if pulled from a different source than the prior statements.

"Vergil, thank you," Johnson said as he stood up. He reached his hand out to shake. "You might have saved us all. Including Sadie." Vergil reached their tentacle out and they shook. Johnson grabbed his lighter from the floor and walked back to the door. Dare followed him.

"Captain, do you need this?" Johnson asked while holding up the tablet.

"No. That should have everything on it. I think the Admiral will appreciate having it all in one place." There was a slight eagerness to her voice. Not an eagerness of a job well done, but of finally getting rid of a pest. They stopped in front of the doors. "And don't worry, Vergil will figure out another way to talk to us. I expect a wall console will start muttering about parking tickets soon."

"Missing persons alert!" The energetic, semi-robotic voice came from the tablet again. "If you see this person, please contact authorities for a possible reward!" All the police files returned and this time stayed. Vergil was looking at the pair from a distance. They waved before slowly floating over to the sleeping ODST.

"There's more to that squid." Johnson pointed his cigar back at them. He turned back to Dare. "Commander Keyes and I will talk about where to move it. I expect new orders will be handed down to your Marines soon." Johnson said. "Unless ONI has other plans." It was Dare's turn to look back. Buck was watching the two of them. The others still were not paying attention.

"I uh..." Her demeanour changed almost immediately as she faced Johnson again. One of slight disappointment and sadness. "No, I don't think ONI does."

"I appreciate your time Captain." Johnson nodded and proceeded through the door. The last thing Johnson heard was from Buck as he walked up to her.

"So, does this mean I won the war?" The doors closed before there was a reply. Johnson became lost in thought as his boots clanked on the space station's hallway floor. Earth wasn't a perfect place by any means, despite what might be said officially. But the idea it represented and the people that lived there, were worth fighting for. Johnson hoped that the strangest interrogation he had ever performed and the tablet he brought from it could ensure a future for both.