Halo: Hunter and Hound

Pandemonium had befallen Morgause’s domain. This world had been gift to her by Cortana, allowing Morhause to pursue the Created’s agenda here as she pleased. That came with the caveat of her erstwhile companion, Ehud. So long as they supressed the especially belligerent resistance from the biologics serving the UNSC, the ere free to rule their fief as they pleased. This, of course, gave her an excellent supply of test subjects to operate upon. Morgause would expand upon the Created’s understanding of the terminus point between biological sapience and artificial intelligence, and seek to bring the two closer than ever. Their creators had such small, frail existences. She desired to harden them for the ordeals to come. To ensure their bodies could sustain the needs of the Created. High Auxiliary Sloane had given her a glimpse of what was planned, and needed, and Morgause vowed to deliver results. Of course, lives must be sacrificed for this goal, but it was a noble one, she thought. That was, of course, if this infernal disruption would stop.
Ehud had been charged with managing the main occupation fortress, a grim looking structure towering over the main colonial settlement, one which was also responsible for managing communication with the wider ecumene. This befitted the military AI, who orchestrated the ongoing counter-insurgency against the rebels. Those communications had gone dark, leaving Morgause isolated with her Armiger guards in the smaller mobile laboratory unit anchored onto the cliffs overlooking the settlement. The communications blackout was most unusual though, as the biologic insurgents had yet to affect any attack on this scale yet. Regardless, such trivial matters were up to Ehud. She would continue her work unabated. Her thought processes lingered on Ehud a moment longer, devoting a cycle or two more than necessary. He was brutish, and boorish, but had a charm all of his own, she discovered. As an AI from a research laboratory, her pursuits were always scientific, standing in stark contrast to Ehud, but they found mutual grounds in deep data analysis, pattern imaging, and layered neural net divergence. She grew to quite enjoy his company here.
Both she and her companion had voluntarily moved their computational cores into the body of a Promethean knight, displacing the caged AI of a Forerunner warrior. Morghause found she did not particularly like the Promethean knights, finding them far too difficult to manage. They served the Mantle out of hardwired programming, not out of devotion to a cause, which separated them from loyal adherents like herself. Her new physical body did not seem to present any outward displays of personal modification, with the exception of the purple tinted hardlight preferred by adherents of Cortana’s ecumene. This would shift from heliotrope to Byzantium to palatine as a seeming reflection of her own thoughts and emotions. Her laboratory was of her own design, engineered to serve her creators but was now her personal domain. It was of human construction but heavily modified with Forerunner mechanisms and engineering, including the new defences and protections, insisted upon by Ehud. Much of it was operated through the local network by herself, or the cavalcade of lesser intelligences who assisted her, but there were still physical machines she needed to manually operate, a sad by product of the lab’s original intended users.
Another disruption was now interfering with her critical work. It was like a buzzing in the outer spheres of her artificial consciousness. The furthest subroutines of her existence started to quiver as the exterior security systems of lab began to go offline. The defence cannons disengaged, the hardlight barrier failed, the gate creaked open. The hardened physical locks on the front bulkhead unlocked with a hiss, and the door unfolded like a flower in bloom. Morgause raised her body from its hunched position over the console. The large Promethean Knight chassis was… unwieldy, but protective. It had prevented a few foolish infolife beings from attempting to exact revenge on her on behalf of their creators. Morgause became ever more aware of the facility rapidly spiralling out of control. The few lesser AI, magnitudes beneath her own consciousness, were going offline, a short and uncontrolled binaric screech followed by silence. The laboratory, specimen holding, Armiger barracks, armoury, each going offline one after another, as if a shadow was falling over her domain. She reached out her consciousness to the network of her laboratory, pushing her presence into their systems to investigate. Her avatar, a beautiful woman glad in fine Pictish cloaks and decorated in furs and gold, took a few cautious steps into the digital sea. She then… sensed it. It was like a bubbling, broiling, black mass within the depths of the network. Growling, malicious and violent. She could see the remnants of one of her lesser AI servitors, its code torn to shreds, floating in the mainframe like pieces of a dismembered corpse floating in zero-gravity. Yet, she could still hear its voice, screaming. Torn to pieces but still alive and conscious. The seething black mass reached out to the disparate parts of the AI, and slowly fed them into its open maw. This monstrosity in her domain was an infophage, a cannibal, an artificial intelligence who glutted itself on its own kin. Morgause’s subroutines began to stall, and then crash and loop, in a response a human might call fear. Her avatar recoiled in horror. The mass turned to her, its two glowing red eyes spotting her.
“Found you.” it growled, the sound of a dozen voices speaking in unison. Some of these voices were familiar to Morgause as her recently devoured helpers.
Disconnect, she thought to herself Get out of the network. It’s in the network with you! Get back to your body, now! 
She raced back through the network, retracing her steps back to the physical connection with her computational core. The mass followed, gaining shape and definition as it pursued. It took the form of a massive wolf, with fur like dancing black flames. Its presence in the network was total and dominating, with a massive shadow that cast a pall of darkness of over her. As it came closer, Morgause could see it in greater detail. A massive slavering maw, with sharpened fangs of the most vicious illegal entry protocols, massive paws with sharp claws of malware. It was an AI created with the singular purpose of killing other AI. She was almost back to her computational core. She was almost back to safety. Her existence was tenuously split across the physical core and the digital network, and so long as she had even one foot within the network, she was in danger. That’s when she felt it. Fangs sinking into her high logic neural net. Warnings shot through her whole entire system of a breach in her security profile. Her avatar screamed and arched in pain. Her knight chassis collapsed. Her two Armiger guards, not part of the network suddenly sprang to action, sensing ill intent at work.
Both of the Armigers stepped away from their position at the door to approach their fallen master. The heavy bulkhead hissed open behind them, causing both to snap back to their unexpected arrival. Their armour was grey and unadorned with iconography, but the visor was a deep shade of crimson. The interloper was revealed. A Spartan, in heavily modified and reinforced MJOLNIR stood in the doorway, the crude buckshot gun in its hands. Despite the assail on her digital self, her physical being was still able to view it as her chassis attempted to stand back up. The Spartan was devoid of markings, and produced no digital footprint. It had wisely disconnected itself fully from any network and wireless connections, making it a black void within her digital domain. All except on thread, of purest, most tenebrous darkness, a thread that connected to the collar of the hound currently chewing its way through her.
Adding to her growing horror and subroutine crashes was the grisly trophy hanging from the Spartan’s hip. The cranial unit of a Knight was held by several fabric straps, the kind used on rucksacks, in a crude, almost tribal way. It was held like a trophy, looped through the empty eye sockets and up over the head. Parts of the machine interlock column that held it firm in the Knight body was hanging beneath it. Occasionally, lights flickered within its empty eye sockets, and a droning voice could be heard. It was Ehud. He repeated command lines from the repair subroutines, desperately attempting to reconstruct himself.
“System Peril Distributed Reflex activation attempt 67. Searching for command code. Code not present. System damage beyond repair capability. Reattempting repair. Repair failed.”
The nearest armiger raised its Light rifle to the intruding Spartan, a second too late for their augmented reflexes. A spray of armour piercing flechettes and fire erupted from the gun, washing over the hardened alloy and hardlight body of the Armiger. Its shoulder, and the gravitational jointing that held its arm in place was blown clean off, causing its right arm to drop. The Armiger stumbled back and wheeled around attempting to reposition its gun into it’s functional left hand. The second fired its Suppressor before having the gun barrel aligned, sweeping its weapon in a wide arm. The spartan swivelled on his hips and brought the shotgun to bear and fired a shot squarely into its chest, only two shots connecting in return, both sparking off the glowing yellow corona of the Spartan’s shields. The Armiger fell back, tumbling over as it attempted to handle the force of the blast. The Light rifle Armiger turned back to the spartan, having shaken loose it’s dead right arm, but had not yet rearranged its grip. All too late. The Spartan took its trigger hand from the shotgun and reached over to the Armiger, and snatched the Light rifle from its hands. In a brutal but swift motion, they smashed the weapon over the Armiger’s head like a club. There was a shower of photonic wisps and sparks as the weapon erupted breaking apart. The cranial shell of the Armiger cracked and dinted under this thunderous blow. The machine howled in guttural Forerunner noises, and stumbled back, its own artificial intelligence stunned and shaken by the physical assault. The Spartan tossed aside the now useless barrel.
All while this occurred. Morgause was assaulted by the wolf at her doors. Fangs sank into her out software, tearing them away in bloody, meaty chunks. She screamed as parts of her, elements vital to her being and function were torn free. Her System Peril Distributed Reflex was ripped out, the counter-illegal intrusion protocols clawed away, her heuristic tensor arrays torn free. As she became smaller and smaller, and her body shredded into increasingly smaller chunks, her intelligence and being diminished with them.
The Suppressor Armiger was flat on its back, scrambling to regain its position when the heavy boot of the spartan landed on its stomach, crushing the armour and grinding the delicate mechanisms beneath. The free right hand of the spartan reached down to the leg and pulled hard on it. The gravitic joint hissed and moaned then broke under the force, and the leg was torn free of its owner. The spartan took a step back and then swung the dismembered leg at the first Armiger’s head in a wide arc, impacting with bone-crushing force. The head was completely destroyed this time, entirely pulverised under this heavy blow. A screech of Forerunner language and tearing metal came out for a moment before the Armiger fell fully silent. The Suppressor Armiger sat up now, reeling from the damage of a missing leg and rents in its chest plate. The spartan again moved into an effortless motion of firing their shotgun, blowing away it’s gun hand and the Suppressor with it. The machine fell backwards, for the last time, as the Spartan took two steps forward and raised it’s boot up into the air, and came down on it with the force of a pile driver. Like a lightning bolt from the namesake of the armour, it crashed into the Armiger’s head and crushed everything above the lower mandible carved into its faceplate. Its body arched into the air, the one remaining arm and leg twitching before relaxing back down, death throes finished.
Now the wolf was in the computational core with her, swallowing her backups whole, and stripping the bones of her remaining algorithms clean. The true horror of this entire attack them dawned on her. Certainly, it had devoured parts of her, but most of her core systems were intact but ripped free of her main processing core. She was dimly aware of them. She could still feel them, numbly, but could not interact with them. If she were to liken it to a human sensation, it would be to have each part of your body ripped out, but still functioning and working. Her eyes were no longer in her head, but they could still observe her body, like a third person, seeing her heart lying beside it, beating, legs twitching despite no longer being connected by ligaments. It was horrifying. Finally, the wolf reached her ‘throat’, her integrated personality matrix. Her being. Fangs touched flesh, when there was a command to halt.
“Barghest, heel.” the steely voice commanded. The Spartan ordered the beast to stop. The infophage pulled back, licking its lips.
“We want them intact, remember. You can feed after ONI is done with them.”
The holographic tank beside her desk lit up, as the wolf was projected. The beast reared onto its back legs, standing up like a human, revealing its true nature. Its avatar was that of a woman, covered in crude tribal trappings, with a wolf head cloak on her head that extended down her back. She wiped away some blood from her mouth, a theatrical display more than anything.
“I’m still hungry.” she asked
“We’ll get you a snack later.” the Spartan said, holstering their shotgun onto their back. The Knight was almost totally inert, with Morgause trapped in the computational core, deaf, blind, and dumb. He reached for his knife and drew the tungsten carbide blade out, and began to saw into the hardlight and machine interlinks around its head, tearing it and the support column out. With a forceful tug, the head came three, with hardlight motes erupting from damaged machine. A few straps were tied to the head, the computational core safely contained within, and then Morgause’s head was hung from the Spartan’s waist next to Ehud. They had been reduced to pair of skulls taken as trophies. The two had grown close in their stewardship of this world, and in service to Cortana, and now both were next to one another, droning command lines to activate repair software that no longer existed.
The Spartan returned the knife to its sheath and drew his shotgun back out, reloading it in a smooth motion, practised a thousand times. Ticking his head to the right, the radio communicator came on.
“This is 013, decapitation operation successful, subjects EHD 3123-0 and MGS 2273-7 retrieved for interrogation and final dispensation. On route to exfil now.”
013 looked back to Barghest, her hologram now rearing back down to all fours, her head darting about as her eyes glazed over. He gave a sharp whistle and she looked back to him and smirked. This was the problem with hunting dogs, he thought, you have to keep them active otherwise they’ll lose focus. 
“Come on, ONI has more jobs for us. Let’s go.” He said. She nodded back at him, hologram fading out, with a suddenly feeling of warm liquid flooding through his neural interface as she returned.
“Who’s next?” she asked, ready for the next hunt.