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Halo - a parody: Prologue
Posted By: LegendaryMark<mark_likes_cake@hotmail.com>
Date: 30 August 2005, 3:58 pm
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Prologue
Captain Jacobs Biscuit stood on the bridge of his battered ship, waiting for the onslaught they had been told would come any minute now. He couldn't help thinking that his ship wouldn't be much help. The "Pillar of the Community" (or the "Rusty Bucket" as the motley crew had taken to calling it) was an ageing vessel that had had a MAK* gun whacked on the front of it and had been put out to fight.
'Damn the government and their targets', he mused.
He longed for the days when the PotC was just a freight carrier. The days when he had a wife and his friends weren't pestering him to visit "Alcoholics Anonymous". The days when collecting classic keys was just a hobby, and the crew hadn't given him that ridiculous nickname, "Keys". Trying to shake these thoughts (and the overpowering effect of 21 swigs of "Crewman Jack's extra strong grog") from his mind, he turned to the shipboard Artificial Intelligence.
'Cortonfire?'
'Fragment, consider revising' replied the shapely holographic figure that had suddenly materialised in front of him. He had almost come to like the ridiculously badly programmed "3.5" version of the AI. Produced by a huge software corporation, she took constant delight in correcting his grammar but rarely actually told him anything useful.
'Tell me again about the aliens coming to kill us' he mumbled, concentrating hard on the grammatical correctness of the sentence so he had a chance of getting a straight answer.
'Well sir, little is known about them'.
'Ok, then tell me what you do know' said Keys, his nostrils dilating in mild annoyance as he realised he'd finished the bottle.
'Very well sir. They are a religious collection of races known as the "Consonant". They believe that the gods gave them vowels to be used abundantly; they revere words such as "queue" and "archaeologist". Their technology is far superior to ours.'
'And why do they want to kill us?'
'The first of our planets to make contact with them showed them works of Shakespeare and Dickens and they were very amicable. They were especially impressed when presented with meals of alphabet spaghetti. Unfortunately, a certain slang expression exists on that planet, as soon as a slack jawed local had called one of their diplomats "my gypsy", they became instantly hostile, presumably offended by the lack of vowels in the phrase.'
Keys sighed heavily, his breath knocking Crewman Murray flat at 15 paces. He had seen it all before. Wars broke out for the most ridiculous reasons. Of course, the human race had endured. It always did. This time would be no different.
Warning claxons suddenly heralded the arrival of the enemy. The crewmen who were not stoned out of their minds sat bolt upright at their stations, ready for action. Ignoring the splitting headache those damn sirens were giving him, Keys heard through the ship's PA system that there were incoming hostiles, and that there was now a clearance sale in the onboard shop. Grabbing another bottle of sweet alcoholic relief from his personal cabinet, he turned to the AI's pedestal.
'Cortonfire, give me full helm control' he said, ignoring the "Don't drink and drive" signs plastered all over the bridge.
'I'm sorry sir, I'm not authorised to do that, level 2 clearance is required' came the reply.
Thinking back to a list he had seen of security flaws in this model, he knew the exact input in order to bypass any need for clearance. He offered the holograph a cookie.
Seconds later, with Cortonfire happily munching** away, the captain was weaving the ship in and out of the enemy ships with varying degrees of success. Crewmen winced as the horrible screech of ship on ship pierced their ears, like fingernails down a blackboard. Keys stared in the wing mirror, looking at the long, jagged scratch that now adorned the side of his vessel. Just as he was thinking how a set of classic 20th Century car keys could produce the same effect, and how he was missing such a set in his collection, the ship lurched violently. Adverts for claims companies flashed on his screen, informing him that their top teams of lawyers could sue whoever hit him for every bean they had. Keys however, was more concerned with the military's cost-cutting measure of not putting safety guards on the important buttons. He was concerned about this because he had just been thrown off balance and landed on the big red button marked "Hyperspace jump" with the words "Do not push" scrawled in Keys' own handwriting just below. As he felt his body turning to jelly and all the alcohol he'd recently consumed attempting to push its way out of his system via any path possible, he collapsed in a crumpled heap on the floor.
'Don't worry sir; things can't get much worse than this' opined Cortonfire. She was, as always, utterly wrong.
• • •
If John Smith looked lonely, that's because he was. He gazed up at the stars from the planet Crouch, where he had completed his training. He was a part of the "Roman" training program, an attempt by humanity to produce genetically enhanced super-soldiers for the war. Whilst it was universally acknowledged that the program had been a spectacular failure, John still looked on his fellow Romans with admiration. They had at least shown some signs of being battle-ready. John had preferred to spend the training time learning to cook, the one thing he actually did well. He couldn't kill so much as a lame chicken, but when someone killed it for him; he could make from it a meal that any cook would be proud of. It was his culinary skills that had earned him his nickname, and proud of it he was too. Master Chef.
He was currently kitted out in his brightly coloured "Majolica" armour; the latest version of which he had been told could withstand temperatures of up to 100 degrees Celsius and absorb impacts with forces slightly less than a high-velocity human fist could produce. The electronic cookbook had been one of his own custom modifications. As he marvelled at the technology currently encasing him, he finished paying the shifty character in the loading bay.
'Half now, half on delivery?' he said weakly.
'Just pay me the money' came the menacing reply.
John had heard the rumours of an alien fleet coming to annihilate the planet, and had the common sense to flee for his life any way he could. The freezer he was currently clambering into was scheduled for delivery to a distant planet by a local freighter, though he couldn't help thinking that the schedule looked a bit old. Suddenly, he spotted two of his fellow Romans coming round the corner into the cargo dock.
'Chef? Are you around here anywhere?' shouted the first.
'Yeah come on Chef, they're calling us out to fight' chipped in the second.
The Master Chef's knees knocked together violently from a combination of the cold of the freezer and the thought of actually fighting in a battle.
'Get rid of them!' he hissed to the nearest dockyard attendee, for whom he had whipped up a soufflé the previous day. The attendee knew exactly what he and his friends could do to get rid of the encroaching Romans.
'I'm Spartacus!' they chorused.
As the two Romans fled, covering their ears and wailing some gibberish about Kirk Douglas, the Chef did feel a little sorry for his "friends" in the laughing stock that was the Roman training programme. But it didn't matter; soon he would be off this doomed rock and on his way to a better life. As the freezer did its work and his teeth began to chatter, he felt his stomach go through the floor as the final cargo was hoisted up onto the waiting freight container. Claxons sounded some time later, and he felt the ship jump to hyperspace.
'Free and safe at last!' he whispered to himself, watching his breath mist up the window on the freezer door. The claxons stopped. The Chef, after tracing a rude image in the condensation, fell asleep.
* MAK stands for Magnetically Accelerated Kettle. The war effort had taken its toll on the populace, who had been encouraged to give up their kitchen items to help their brave forces. Popular myth suggests it really stands for 'Might Actually Kill'.
** Simulating munching anyway. That's what you get when you combine a bored programmer and a humorous streak.
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