Author's Note: Since to this point I have written exclusively for Halo, I should quickly reassure my readers that I am not abandoning any of my active stories. This story picks up where Series 2 left off, and will incorporate the new characters and some of the creatures which were speculated to appear in Series 3 prior to the release of the trailer. I will try to write this story so it can be understood without having seen the show; still, I should say up-front that there is no doubt in my mind I will not finish this story before the new series airs in February, so I won't be incorporating any new canon material which comes up. Now, without further delay...

Prologue: Exclusive Footage

"I don't know. I don't know what I saw. It was only there for a second. It just came up from beneath the sand, and it took him. Impaled him. Tore him to pieces. I ran without a second look, but I know one thing for sure. Whatever it was... it was alive."

-- Jeremy Hunt, survivor

BTN News Studio
Central Headquarters
Present Day

Mick Harper stopped the playback on the recording, rewound it, and played it again. What the traumatized tourist had said to him then had made little sense, but then, neither did the nature of the attack which had taken place. A pleasant summer day at a popular beach had been shattered by an unexplained animal attack which had left one man dead and a second one missing. Ordinarily such a strange incident would have been the night's lead story, but the attack at the beach paled in comparison to what had happened on the M25 the previous morning.

Stopping the playback on the tape recorder, Harper cracked his knuckles and took a drink of coffee, long since gone cold. Grimacing at the taste, he set the mug aside and returned his attention to the prints which lay scattered on his desk. Few of them had any discernible detail, and only one or two had been of enough quality to be published at the time. There had been no real cameras on site before the incident was contained, and a few quick shots from mobile phones had been all that the panicking rabble of motorists had managed to fire off as they fled their cars. But what they had recorded was unmistakable. A massive elephant, brown in color, had appeared seemingly out of thin air on the motorway and begun pitching cars about in a fury. The incident left five people dead and over a dozen others injured. For the next five days, his station had reported on the animal attack as a tragic freak accident; an escapee from a circus which had faced horrific abuse from its trainers and gone mad as a result. The animal was captured unharmed by wildlife professionals, shipped to a safari park in Africa, and would live out the rest of its life at peace in its natural habitat. At least, that was what officials had told the press. And having nothing else to run on, it was what his and every other news station had reported. The public loved the happy ending, and had been all too quick to let the incident fade from their memory. But for Harper, the explanation the government had given was not enough.

As an investigative journalist, he could not help but feel the incidents were somehow related. The elephant story had received more attention because the animal had caused more damage, but the herbivore had only attacked because it was panicking. Such was not the case with the other story. The creature which had been lurking under the sands of that pleasant beach, whatever it was, had killed those two men for food. But unlike the elephant, there were no pictures to prove anything and only a few traumatized witnesses who even saw it. Every other person who had been there that day had attested that a shark was responsible.

Harper swept the photos on his desk back into a somewhat tidier stack and looked back at the mug in distaste. He would need another cup of coffee. Reaching for the mug, his attention passed over the tape recorder once again and he stopped. There had been something else at the motorway that morning. Someone else. Furrowing his brow, he instead reached over and began to rewind the tape once more. Waiting a few seconds, he stopped the recording and pressed Play.

"I've never seen an elephant like that," a female witness began. "It was a monster. And there was that strange light..."

"What do you think it is, exactly?" Harper asked. But then another woman joined the conversation. She demanded to know who he was, bringing an abrupt end to the interview with the witness by sending her off to the hospital.

"I've seen the pictures," he had told her. "That thing... it's too big to be an elephant."

"You know what? You're right," the woman jokingly replied. "It's actually a mammoth."

"I could do without the wind-up."

"Then stop asking stupid questions."

"Something strange is going on here. And one way or another, I'm going to find out what it is."

He stopped the recording, looking up from his desk to the bustling newsroom around him. Dozens of journalists like him working away, each pursuing their own leads. Sports. Politics. The trivialities of pop culture. Recent crimes, or perhaps something lighter to follow after them. In the last three weeks, the news of the sensational animal attacks had been edged out by the most ordinary things, and it galled Harper deeply. Even he had since been reassigned, shifting from story to story on topics which he found he had little interest in.

Seven people dead. Did these attacks not deserve more attention?

If there were to be any follow-up, he would need to conduct a wider investigation. But he would have to break from his current assignment before he could possibly do anything else. Looking behind him to the executive offices at the top of the room, Harper saw his boss on the way back from the break room, and took his chance. Harper stood up from his desk and made his way to the staircase, just barely reaching the top in time to intercept him.

Nursing his danish, Leonard Burke sighed as he saw Harper worming his way towards the stairs. From the look on the man's face, he knew what was coming. The 36-year-old Harper had a reputation for grabbing hold of a story like a rottweiler; a trait which served special investigators very well, but Harper was one to take it a step further. The environment of the newsroom was highly competitive, but this man simply did not know when to give up. Burke tried to put on a receptive look when Harper stepped in front of him. He failed. Undeterred, Harper followed as Burke stepped around him and kept walking.

"Leo, all I'm going to ask is for three minutes of your time."

Burke did not turn. "Whatever you're going to ask, Mick, I don't want to hear it."

"Three weeks ago, an elephant appears on the M25 and starts pitching cars about," Harper said. "Five dead, sixteen wounded." He shoved his way past an intern without looking back. "A day later, a tourist is torn to shreds on a beach in broad daylight by God-only-knows what-"

"The shark, you mean?" Leo said.

"If it was a shark, then why the cover-up?"

Burke wordlessly pulled open the glass door of his office, ushering the reporter in and letting it fall shut behind him before speaking. "Cover-up?"

"You heard my eyewitness," Harper said, "and as I always understood it, sharks don't tend to pluck sunbathers off of dry land. Still, that's besides the point. The animal attacks are not what interest me. The official reaction we've seen to these attacks is."

"Where are you going with this?"

"Three weeks ago, we had two fatal animal attacks in as many days. I was on the scene following both of these attacks, Leo. Both times, authorities were present to cordon off the press-"

"That comes as no surprise, Mick. It is no different than the procedure at a typical crime scene."

"Is it standard practice to shut down the mobile network in the vicinity of a typical crime scene? Who has the authority to even do that? I was there. Both locations, zero bars. No calls in or out. No reporters allowed to enter the scene, no witnesses allowed to leave before being debriefed. Don't you think it strange that nobody has footage of that elephant being transported to or released at that preserve? And where are the people that it supposedly escaped from? Whatever is happening, someone is going to great lengths to keep it hidden. They knows what this is, and they don't want to tell us. What connects these dots? What are they hiding, and what should we expect next?"

"And what I'm saying is that this happened three weeks ago, Mick. It's old news. There is no new information, and no base of public interest. We've nothing to gain by digging into it any further. The story's all tied off. It's done. "

Mick slammed a fist on his boss' desk. "These people are dead, Burke! That hasn't changed. Their families probably want answers as much as I do. So let me look for them!"

"Will you listen to yourself?" Leo replied. "We are newsmen, not private detectives, and I will not let you put this network's reputation at risk by pursuing some wild conspiracy theory. Think about it. Take a few days off. I can't tell you what to do on your own time, Mick, and if you do find something, I'll listen. Find something big, and you might even get a raise out of it. But should you pursue this, I'll have you know that we will not vouch for you if you get yourself into trouble. If you do this, you will be on your own."

Harper took pause. So that was it. Burke would gladly take the story if it came together, but if he wound up in trouble, Burke would step back and let him twist. That's fine then, Harper thought, staring at his boss. I'll get an exclusive to put hair back on your head.

"Yes, sir," Mick said, stifling a grin. "I guess that might be the crux of it. I think I could use some time to unwind after these last few days, anyway."

"Then by all means, take a vacation. Go to the beach."

"I think I will."

"You've got three days."

Harper didn't need to be shown out. Letting the glass door of Burke's office fall shut behind him, he returned to his desk as quickly as he could, pausing only to steady a mug-wielding coworker he bumped into along the way. Upon reaching his desk, he immediately logged off of his computer and began gathering up all of the material he had on the story.

A painful experience from his early career had taught him that such a deadline was not as much time as it seemed. This undertaking would require his full attention for the next three days. But as he swept the messy stack of papers and photographs from his desk into a folder, second thoughts began to cut through his furor. Seven people dead, and possibly more that he did not yet know about. If these incidents were truly part of a cover-up, what kind of people was he dealing with? If the government had hidden these attacks from the public, what would they do to keep such knowledge secret? Exactly how much trouble could he find himself in? Certainly more than he wanted. And even if Harper got the story, the publicity it received might not be enough to protect him, especially if gathering the evidence he needed would require him to break the law.

There was also the matter of the story itself. Harper did not know where to begin. If the incidents were the subject of an ongoing cover-up, then there would certainly be nothing left at the scene of either incident which could be used to build his story. He would need an witness. He would need a witness with the motivation to learn more answers about the attacks, and who would be willing to search for them on his behalf. He would need someone with the skills to do so. And if the search went belly-up, he would need someone in his place to take the fall.

As he swept the papers from his desk into the folder, one fell to the floor. Setting the folder back on the desk, Harper bent down and picked it up. It was a profile of one of the victims of the attacks, a young man who had been bucked by the elephant on the M25 while trying to render aid to another motorist. Listed at the bottom of the page was the deceased victim's next of kin. To Harper's surprise, the victim's brother was an AFO from the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

A sergeant named Danny Quinn.

To be continued.