Everything was falling apart, right at the end.
Steve Sullivan wanted to do nothing more than don one of his prototype suits and start ripping heads off, but unfortunately, he couldn’t. He should have been happy. He should have been overjoyed! But instead, here he was, angrily staring at the display case in the cafeteria, glaring at their trophies.
They’d almost finished up with their tests on the Mark II, and soon, they could stick it in one of these cases and smile when thinking of all the years they’d invested into its creation. It was light-years beyond the Mark I in nearly every single way. The biggest, of course, was that it was vastly slimmer than its enormous, bulky predecessor. No more tripping, no more weight distribution problems. The Mark II didn’t look as much like an ogre as the Mark I, but more like a knight in a plate armor, ready to go forth and defend the world.
Of course, there was still the power source issue. ONI swore to them that they’d almost finished the miniature fusion reactors that would be used in the final versions, but Steve wasn’t going to delay vital testing performance for years while they dithered. They had the physical dimensions, weight specifications, and power output, so they could make do for now.
Soon enough, the Mark III suit would be ready for fabrication. Steve hoped it would be the final prototype version before they could get to mass production. They were still using a stopgap power system, but this time it would be a wireless receiver, simply so that the operators could do tests without having to dangle that damn power cord throughout Menachite Mountain.Yet there were still problems that had to be solved. Very important ones. In theory, any person could wear the Mark I, II, or III suits, without any real issues. They were heavy and sluggish, but perfectly usable, once you ignored the power systems. But heavy and sluggish was bad on the battlefield. Slow soldiers got shot, and even if their armor could survive the bullets (which it could, because Steve and his team weren’t hacks) they’d still get exhausted by having to carry all that weight and push it around. That’s where the real trouble was developing: the strength and reflex enhancing systems. Strictly speaking, they knew exactly how to solve those issues. The Power Armor Team had taken ONI’s vague ideas about a liquid metal crystal piezoelectric layer (which was absolutely insane as a concept), fleshed them out, and hammered out a workable prototype system.And it worked! Near instantaneous doubling of a user’s strength, up to five times the reaction speed, all while helping carry the weight of the armor itself. They didn’t even have to mold it; Steve had worked out the plumbing required for the underlying Sierpinski capillary system, and they just poured the goop into the system like they were filling up the car at the gas station.There was only a single downside. Well, aside from actually producing and handling the stuff. It was so toxic and sensitive that it was best made in airless zero-G environments, and spilling it was a fast way to evacuate the entire room.The downside was that the liquid metal crystal was too sensitive. Not just by a little, but to an overwhelming degree. The first time they’d had a volunteer try out a very small section of the stuff, with an isolated section of plating from their wrist to their shoulder… the force had nearly shattered every bone in his arm.Catherine tried to hide it, but she was worried about the problem as well. When Steve had brought the issue up during the next of the Program’s monthly meetings, she’d gone quiet. Steve had been forced to show them the video of the incident, just so they’d understand the exact problem. An instantaneous blur of motion, faster than any human’s arm, and then… shock. Surprise. Pain.
In theory, they had known this might happen. All the way back to their original paper, David and Steve had speculated about the effects of ‘reflex enhancing systems’ that might be included in their theoretical power armor. But they’d been worried about things like hyper-extension, not… this.
The liquid metal crystals weren’t really liquid, and when they ‘moved’, they were deforming to create new crystal structures, linking and unlinking in mere milliseconds. If working properly, it meant that the entire suit would lock around the user to protect them from impacts, reinforce their movements, and more. But when it wasn’t working properly, the layers locked around the user’s own body, and crushed it. The isolated system had quite literally compressed the volunteer’s arm, squeezing it until everything shattered.
David had volunteered his Surgery Team to try to help the crippled scientist, but even he hadn’t been able to. They’d had to amputate. Now one of Steve’s people walked around with a prosthetic arm. A permanent reminder of Steve’s failure.
But they couldn’t give up now. They were so close. The system functioned. It granted unimaginable speed and precision! It just… needed some more work on the calibration issues.
Steve knew that he was deluding himself, at least a little, but the core issue wasn’t his own optimism and drive to bring his dreams to life. It was the Office of Naval Intelligence, looming over them, waiting for their promised super soldiers wearing power armor.
And the worst goddamn part of it all was that ONI wouldn’t even let them finish the job, before they started trying to steal Steve’s success.He’d gotten an email a few weeks ago from the ONI Materials Group, informing him that Doctors Adams, Chen, and Morad would be transferred to their departments. No reason why, no argument, not even a courtesy thank you. Just… transferring them like they were pieces of equipment, and not team members. Steve had forwarded the email to both Catherine and Michael Stanforth. He hadn’t heard a word back from ONI Materials Group since then, but Catherine had been furious at their monthly meeting. Michael Stanforth, a man that Steve didn’t really know that well, had looked grim.
“The price of success, I’m afraid,” Michael Stanforth told the rest of the Project’s leadership. “They failed to shut us down, so they’ve learned to try other tactics. Now they’re trying to steal from us. They don’t really want your scientists, Doctor Sullivan, they want your glory. If they take your engineers, then they can claim all those achievements came under their aegis, and not ours.”“I will have a talk with some friends of mine,” Catherine had said, her lips pressed tight and her knuckles white under all that tension. “They’ll go discuss things with the Materials Group, and explain the error. Perhaps they simply believed that Steve is so good at his job that he had already finished his work.”The brunette had smiled, full of sharp teeth, and Steve had flinched at the sight. He could still remember the initial excitement and giddiness that had filled him when he’d gone to work for ONI… and now, all these years later, he couldn’t look back without shuddering. His team had been lucky to stay isolated from most of the political power-games that ran that intelligence service, but no more. Now, they were worse than fresh meat: they were valuable. Being valuable wasn’t a good thing. Just look at Catherine – the poor woman was so valuable that she’d been forced to survive by sharpening herself into a weapon. Not like a knife, or an axe, which were designed for a specific purpose, but still usable outside of it. Instead, Catherine Halsey had become a caltrop, a landmine, a spool of barbed wire. She was jagged and would stab the unwary the moment they tried to play around her.
Steve, Paul, and David were only safe by dint of their long association, whereas Mendez and Michael Stanforth had to be sharp enough to avoid Catherine’s edge.
He didn’t want to turn out like Catherine. He loved the woman like a sister, and what ONI had done to her was nothing less than abuse. The way she’d been forced to adapt herself into a twisted version of her old, free-spirited self.
But what other options did he have? He didn’t feel right about passing off all his burdens onto her and Michael Stanforth (no matter that it was Michael’s job to handle that stuff), because it was infantilizing. He wasn’t a child, damn it, and he should have been able to tell those ONI bastards to shove it all on his own… and he hadn’t.It was just another after-effect of Section Zero’s trial.
Sure, the Spartans might have been slowly growing in rumors around the ONI water-cooler, but that had almost entirely been the children themselves – not the research teams. Not David, Paul, and Steve himself, and their respective crews of doctors, biochemists, and engineers. That was no longer the case. Now, Steve was getting quiet offers slipped to him in emails, asking to collaborate and share notes. They offered additional funding from their discretionary budgets, or looks at their own in-house design teams. Thinly veiled bribes.
Steve refused to reply to a single one of them. None of the vultures had authorization to enter Menachite Mountain’s underground zones, so they could sit there and write as many emails as they wanted, they wouldn’t get inside his foundry. More attempts rolled in, day after day. Some of them were nice enough that Steve genuinely wondered if they’d been tricks or not. That was one of the worst parts about this – the paranoia that built up. How could he tell the difference between a cruel infiltration and a genuinely well-meaning offer? The answer shouldn’t have been to just assume that they were all guilty, all evil. Steve didn’t want to live like that. He didn’t want to believe those things… but he had to, so long as he ran a Team for the Spartan Project.High profile scientists were a joke. A really old joke, back from the Party House days. Every one of them had agreed that the kind of scientists that wound up on the newsreels were all either wack-jobs that got airtime because they were funny enough to mock, or the celebrity windbags that were little more than children’s education with the thinnest appearance of actual chops. David used to lovingly talk about what kind of ego you needed to chase the cameras like that. Tanya used to diagnose them with narcissistic personality disorders from behind David’s back, before running away from his irritation. Paul and Steve had used to roll their eyes and laugh.Yet now, they were high profile scientists. Not to the public, but within ONI. The emails weren’t just coming to Steve anymore, but to everyone on the Power Armor Team. He’d been forced to call an all-hands meeting just to remind people that if they didn’t recognize the email address, just report it to IT and Internal Affairs and move on, instantly.It was pretty terrifying. Steve had never seen it coming, and now he wondered what else would be coming in the near future. The most concerning thing for some of his people was the deadline that loomed closer with every day. Not because of any issues with delivery, but because of something much simpler: what happened after the Project ended?Some of his people wanted out. Steve himself was perfectly OK with staying in ONI for the rest of his life, working away on power armor designs until the day came when every soldier was wearing one… but not everyone on his team was like that. The Spartan Project had drained a lot of them of every drop of creativity, and some of them wanted nothing more than to retire.
They wanted to take the near-decade of incredible paychecks and just live on a cruise ship for a couple years, or in some beach resort, until they could pretend that they were just normal people. That they didn’t know what kind of horrors lurked within the Office of Naval Intelligence, and what price the UNSC was willing to pay to keep the galaxy from imploding into chaos and death.
But was that even an option?
Steve could still remember Catherine’s words, so long ago in that first meeting.
After our work is over, you will be accompanied by that security detail for the rest of your lives. Any attempt to violate these measures will be met with either lifetime imprisonment or summary execution.
Even if the UNSC didn’t grab onto the newest, latest, greatest military technology with both hands and demand that Steve’s team continue their work, his people still wouldn’t be free. They’d have ‘professional bodyguards’ from the government shadowing their every step, checking their every meal, testing the water in their bathtubs before they’d let the scientists enjoy a moment of life. Why? Because the Insurrection might kidnap them for their knowledge? No.
Because the scientists might defect, and take all that blackmail to the Innies of their own free will. Not because they were natural traitors, but because after the things that had happened in this Project, anyone would feel like defecting. None of them were patriots anymore, none of them believed wholeheartedly in the UNSC. The most any of Steve’s team could say is that it was better than the alternative… and even then, they weren’t happy about that fact.Steve could barely imagine it, himself, but even just that tiny word – barely – was a huge change from his old life. If someone had told him a decade ago that he’d have an unlimited budget and the best damn team of experts, just to make toys for the military… and that he’d want to quit…. he’d have punched that man. It was like getting tired of the best drinks and the best women and the best parties, all stacked together and rolled into one. It was like getting tired of life itself. Now he could see it. Now he understood why someone of the others were like that. For all the fire and vigor that he’d had back then, now he was an older man, and he knew that the price was not worth it.
The torture of watching your greatest dream turn into ash. No, not ash – ash was just ruins, the leftovers after everything you loved was burned in a fire. This was worse! This was poison, toxin, radiation. His greatest dream wasn’t just gone, it was actively hurting other people in a way that he never would have imagined. Like hell was Steve going to give up now. Like hell was he going to bow under that weight, snap under that pressure. He was going to set the entire galaxy on its damn pinhead, and bring about a future so goddamn bright that they needed sunglasses just to walk to their front doors!But he couldn’t blame the others. He couldn’t blame Sarah Tressen for wanting to never set foot on Reach ever again, even though it was where she’d met her husband, while working on this project. He couldn’t blame Mark Sykes for wanting to work on combine harvesters instead of combined armor composites.
There was a joy in the simple life that they’d never be able to have again, because the security teams would follow them until the day they died. It was a death more permanent than anything he’d ever thought possible: the death of their dreams.Sacrifice. That’s what it was about, in the end.
How much would you give up, for a potential win? Would you give up your life? Your dreams? Your own personality? Was the death of your identity worth more than the merely dying? Would you allow yourself to be changed into something so different, you wouldn’t recognize yourself in the mirror? Catherine would. She had a will of iron. She’d cut off her own fingers, one by one, if it saved the lives of those children, especially her favorite pupil, Visha.Steve wasn’t as disciplined as that. It was a good thing that his burdens were so much lighter – he could never have carried the weight on Catherine’s shoulders. He could never order the things she’d ordered, make the enemies she made, all to save the lives of those children.But that didn’t make this any easier.He looked at the trophy case in the back wall of the cafeteria. It was fairly full, and each and every part of it was a history lesson of his team. There was a shard of the original armor composite they’d come up with, shattered after the first stress test. It wasn’t good enough for the armor, but it was good enough to penetrate the standard-issue safety-barrier and nearly kill Werner. Missed him by a meter, but scared the shit out of him. There was one of the shoulder-plates from the Mark I, with the olive green paint scraped off of it, when Henry had tripped during one of the tests and wound up trapped inside of it.And there, right at the bottom of the trophy case, was a row of helmets.
They were the prototypes for the mass production models, and they were some of the most well-loved items in the entire trophy case – no matter that the oldest of them had only been there for a year, and the youngest only a few months.Steve had agreed with Catherine’s logic when she’d originally proposed new helmet designs as a way to entice more cooperation out of the special forces and intelligence community. It was a good plan.
He’d also believed, perhaps wrongly, that these prototypes would stay with them, here in Menachite Mountain. Perhaps, in the distant future, if the Spartan Project somehow became famous in the centuries to come, these prototypes would have wound up in a museum of some kind.
But Steve had never believed that they might actually be issued to other UNSC units. Handed out like the eventual mass production versions, into the hands of people that would damage them, bang them up, test them to within an inch of their destruction.
Otherwise, he never would have painted them.
His eye caught on the Scout helmet, designed for the best snipers in the UNSC, as it always did. It was the first one that they’d designed, with only a few tweaks from the standard-issue. Molly had been up late one night, working on the final trim details on her CAD program, when Steve had come back from the monthly meeting with Spartan Project leadership. He’d been laughing when he walked in – still thinking about Catherine’s story of how one of her cadets, Linda, had hunted down five Army Rangers in some field exercise, and stolen their dog-tags.So he’d told the story to Molly when she asked, and she’d laughed as well – and then they’d painted a chain onto the side of the Scout helmet, with five dog-tags dangling from it, and the number 058 in the center.
Linda’s helmet. That’s how they all thought of that prototype now.
Nearly all the prototypes were like that. They weren’t destined for the Spartans. They were models, not actually built out of the proper armor-composites, just materials of similar weights. They were supposed to be stashed in some warehouse afterwards, locked away forever. Reference materials, little more. That’s why it was acceptable to paint them in the first place – because they didn’t matter.But putting a name on each helmet had helped his team focus. The unplanned change had drawn people’s eyes and imaginations. Steve had been forced to explain the little graffiti tag so many times over the next few days afterwards.
Soon enough, he realized why – because it was one of the only ways that his Power Armor team actually got to know the cadets.They weren’t like David’s Psychology team, spending so many hours with the kids that they could identify them by name. They weren’t like the Surgery team, doing monthly check-ups on the health and well-being of the cadets. They weren’t even like the Augmentation team, which at least got to look at diagrams and medical reports of each of the children as they tried to figure out how best to help them.The Power Armor team was the most isolated of all the elements in the Spartan Program. Even the Artificial Intelligence team got to see the kids more than them, since the entire group had essentially become Catherine’s personalized research aides rather than an actual research team.Pretending that the helmets were destined for individual cadets was the first time that Steve’s people got to know the children as children. It was the first time they’d heard stories that belonged to human beings, rather than product numbers. Tales of mischief and common practices. Bits of character that made those lumps of metal and polymer seem more like living, breathing things.Each of the helmets was named now.
Daisy’s helmet was the bulky, high-cheeked design that was intended for Close Quarters Battle. The rambunctious cadet that everyone knew was going to join the Marine Corps instead of the Navy. Someone had carefully stenciled in the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor on the helmet’s right side, in the little triangle that joined the cheek-guards and the back-strap to the top of the helmet itself. The opposite corner bore the flower that was her namesake.
Kelly’s helmet was the bright, almost naked gold of the EVA design, missing most of the armor plating that made up the rest. She was a speedster, and a troublemaker. After so many of Catherine’s stories, Steve knew that Kelly would have wanted the incredible vision offered by the space-focused design, so she could see all the obstacles in her way. He’d come in to paint it himself, after a late night, and carefully added the little rabbit to the side of the helmet, for the Spartan Program’s fastest soldier.Fred got the Commando helmet, as they called the design intended for the Army Rangers. Thicker armor, good for a frontal assault, but still multi-purpose, still useful for so many roles. A perfect choice for the man that even Catherine admitted was probably the most skilled Spartan of all… and marked with a bright white pound sign, and a number two. Because Frederick, despite being so skilled, always came in second.
James got the Explosive Ordinance Disposal helmet, a blocky looking thing designed to try to mitigate blast waves. It objectively didn’t work for that purpose, but EOD procurement still wanted it anyway, and it meant more budget, so sure, fine, they’d make it. The calm boy was intensely perceptive, and he had a good instinct for walking point, so he was a natural fit for one of the most durable helmets. His mark was a stylized human eye, peering out from behind the angular oval of its eyelids – and placed directly on the back of the helmet. Catherine had said the boy had eyes on the back of his head, so that’s where they put it.
Adrianna got the Pilot helmet that the Air Force was so insistent on. David had told Steve years ago about how she’d tried to steal a Pelican to escape, and how he’d redirected her to the idea of becoming a civilian pilot ‘after this was all over’. It was a good design, probably Steve’s favorite. The right mix of the EVA helmet’s broad visor, while still being armored. Just futuristic enough to satisfy his desire to build the future, one step at a time. A bright red plane had been marked on the side of the helmet’s jawline, representing Adrianna’s future.
Visha, Catherine’s favorite, got the JFO variant, standing for Joint Fires Observer. It was a strange thing, something that Catherine had been oddly bemused by. It was designed to be used by Army forward observers as well as Air Force combat controllers, and there wasn’t much apparent tie to any of the Spartans… but Catherine said that it was Visha’s, and so Steve had stenciled on a coffee cup, still steaming, for all the times that the cadet had brought Catherine a cup of their shared favorite beverage.
And now, despite all the love that the Power Armor team had poured into these helmets, as a ‘safe’ outlet for their frustrations… they’d be shipped off to men that didn’t care about them, to soldiers that didn’t know the history behind them.It felt like a betrayal from Catherine. Even though she’d never promised that the prototypes would stay in Menachite Mountain, it had been such a natural conclusion that everyone had started believing it.
Maybe this is how she feels about the Spartans, Steve thought to himself, staring at the display case, and the helmets within it. They’re just kids, and maybe Catherine wants to keep believing that they’ll never grow up or have to change… but that isn’t true. And she knows it.And she’ll sell off anything and everything, just to keep them alive.He sighed, and set a single hand on the glass screen between him and the trophies.
Selfish. That’s what it was. It was just selfish desire to keep at least one little trophy of the time he’d spent down in this mineshaft, working away on his dreams. This wasn’t the time for selfishness, and Steve knew that in abstract. Knowing it emotionally was harder.“Boss?” came a voice behind him. Steve turned, and saw Mitchell standing behind him, an awkward expression on his face.“What’s up, Mitch?” Steve asked, putting a smile on his face, no matter that he didn’t feel like it.
The other engineer was holding something. A camera.
Pictures were strictly monitored and regulated inside the ONI base, but it was inevitable that they needed to take pictures anyway, so Mitchell had gotten permission to have it down there for archival purposes – so long as nothing went in or out of the perimeter. When the amateur photographer wanted to take vacation pictures, he had to go get an entirely different camera, just to appease ONI’s security requirements.
“Just heard we’re shipping out the helmets,” Mitchell said, holding up the camera. “I got to thinking that we should take some pictures, before they leave. Reference photos. In case they get damaged. Y’know.”Steve nodded slowly, and looked over Mitchell’s shoulders, at the door to the cafeteria that was still open. There were no manual doors down here, so it should have closed by itself after Mitchell had walked in. That meant that someone was still standing there, around the corner, where Steve couldn’t see them.“No,” Steve said, looking at Mitchell straight on. “No reference photos. There’s no need. We’ve already got all the CAD files. We don’t need extra documentation of their design.”The older scientist swallowed, a lump working up and down his throat. He opened his mouth to argue, but he apparently couldn’t find the words.“We’ve put a lot of work into these things, boss,” Mitchell finally managed to say, after nearly a minute of awkward silence. “Doesn’t feel right to let them leave without some kind of… commemoration.”Steve closed his eyes, and exhaled slowly. He agreed with Mitchell, he really did. But he was also getting tired of the way that his team was slowly becoming more corporate, more circumspect in their language. This place was changing them, shifting them… and he didn’t like it. He didn’t want to reward that kind of half-true double-talk that obscured a person’s real beliefs and reasons.“The rest of you, get in here,” Steve called out, raising his voice.A few moments passed, and then footsteps reached Steve’s ears as the rest of the science team started walking in.
He’d known that they were standing in the hallway. Mitchell was a good guy, but he wasn’t the only person angry about this, and Steve knew that his team gossiped like schoolgirls. Hell, that gossipy nature was the main reason that these helmets had been such a morale booster in the first place.Steve opened his eyes, and gave the two dozen scientists a very dry, unamused look. Some of them looked sheepish and apologetic, while others looked bitter. Just another little sign of the gradual rift that had grown between his team and ONI.“First of all,” Steve said slowly, turning his head to look across the entire crowd. “This is a temporary disbursement of the prototypes for hands on testing. This was always a potential outcome of our research.”Molly was standing in the second row, her eyes fixated on Linda’s helmet. She frowned, and then she nodded, apparently resigned to the inevitable.“Second of all,” he continued. “There is always the possibility that these prototypes will return to us. They might be damaged, maybe even destroyed, but that is why we make prototypes. These helmets are not the point. Protecting the lives of the Spartans is the point. If I have the choice to throw each and every one of these things into an incinerator and save the lives of all those kids, I would do it without hesitation – and so should you all.”A few of the researchers looked away, a little nervously. “Third of all,” Steve continued, gesturing with one hand towards Mitchell and his camera. “There are strict regulations about unauthorized photography inside this base. I don’t want to have to remind you people about that in the future.”Someone sighed, and the entire group looked downcast. The anger had been wiped away by Steve’s steady voice.“Included among those regulations are team photos,” Steve continued, staring at them until they started blinking in confusion. “Team photos are explicitly allowed under UNSC regulations, and may include the subjects of a team’s work with authorization of the team lead.”Eyes began to widen, and mutters sprang up in the small crowd. Steve turned, sliding open the glass case with a practiced hand, and reached down for the closest helmet – Samuel’s, the blocky one with the blast visor that completely replaced the usual polarized screen for a straight up slab of armor composite, and a tiny little camera over the left eye.“Get yourselves into a nice, organized line, and we’ll figure out who gets to hold what,” Steve called out, hefting the helmet up. “No pushing, no shoving, people!”The members of his research team were in their forties, but that didn’t stop them from whooping and rushing forward like eager schoolchildren. Some of them even ran forward, just to grab a favorite helmet first. Elbows jostled as Steve and Mitchell fought to get them all into a nice order, but there were too many of them. Some of the cafeteria’s benches had to be pushed together so that people could stand on them, forming three neat rows. The camera was set up carefully on a tripod, and after a few more minutes of work to get everyone into the frame, Mitchell hit the time-delay on his camera and ran over to stand next to Steve at the corner of the bottom row.Steve held up the GUNGNIR helmet to the camera and smiled as the flash went off.