It was finally time.Franklin Mendez leaned back in the comfy leather chair that had become his regular seat at these meetings. Across from him, Captain Michael Stanforth sighed. There were bitter expressions on the faces of everyone else in the room – David Meyer, Steve Sullivan, and Paul Wu. Catherine Halsey had done her best. She’d managed to convince HIGHCOM to delay the augmentations for another year… and that year had come and gone.Spring of 2525 was around the corner. In just a short time, the cadets would be put under the knife. Mendez turned his head, and looked to where Catherine was standing. She’d pushed her chair away, and she was pacing back and forth in front of the blackout shutter of their usual conference room in the Hive. The tension was eating at her, and everyone knew it. Even Doctor Sullivan, who wasn’t the most socially observant person. “…Admiral Jeromi’s already secured the new auto-surgeons on board UNSC Hopeful,” David said. “Brand new, straight from the factories. There will be no stress failures, no mechanical fatigue.”“New devices are not calibrated properly,” Catherine snapped back, though her heart wasn’t in it, given how little bite was in the reprimand. “Tell Admiral Jeromi that his staff need to run extensive calibrations on the machines – no, no, I’ll do it myself.”David glanced over at Paul, and the shorter doctor took a sharp breath, before throwing himself on the live grenade.“Ysionris knows what he’s doing, Catherine,” the head of the Augmentation Team said, drawing Catherine’s eyes. “He knows how to run his ship, and we know he cares about the cadets. He’ll do the best job possible. Both my team and David’s are already onboard to get acclimatized, and they’ll be familiarizing themselves with the auto-surgeons every day. They’ll get the auto-surgeons calibrated.”Catherine sucked in a quick breath, but she didn’t argue back. She paced back and forth again, clearly lost in her own thoughts.That was how most of the meeting had gone, thus far. It was inevitable. Nothing new was going to come up with the augmentations looming so close. Everything had been arranged well over a year ago, and the last few months had seen a constant barrage of new ideas, suggestions, and preparations from Catherine. Anything to increase the odds, or create another safety cutoff that might save a life.
All that was left was the jitters, the pre-drop fears and excitements that chased every soldier on every mission. It was good, in a way, to remind Mendez that civilians got the same itch as he did. Soon enough, Mendez himself might have those jitters again. He’d be sitting in a Pelican, armored up, and waiting to jump out the back and into a firefight with the Insurrection.There was a six month evaluation period scheduled for after the augmentations. Six months where Mendez and his trainers would help their cadets adapt to their bodies, and rehabilitate any injuries that might occur. After that… they would go their separate ways. Seven years without active combat duty was practically impossible for men of their status. Nobody in the elite realms of special forces got that much time off, not without retiring. Even with all the practice and training that he and his men had done over that time, cross-training with so many different units… it wasn’t equivalent to the real thing. Knowing that the next bullet might be the end was a grindstone that could never be replicated in training. TTR bullets just weren’t the same.Would he hold up? Mendez believed he would, but there was no real way to know until he’d gone through a mission. Had he gotten soft? Had he lost his edge? Would he hesitate when he couldn’t afford to? Those kinds of questions would linger until he could dispel them with the truth. But if he couldn’t… then the risk wasn’t just to him, but to his men as well.Mendez didn’t know how it would turn out in the end, but he was already planning to fix it.
He and the other trainers would be running through an intense course of combat trials, as soon as the last Spartan-II left the compound. Once the last Pelican headed up to orbit to start their surgeries, every single one of his men would be dropping by the Killing House in the Highland Military Complex. There would be a handful of recent veterans there to run them through the course, until they were up to the grade. Unfortunately, Mendez himself wouldn’t be able to attend until after the augmentations were over. He had no role in the surgeries, but he was reluctant to stand by and leave the children alone on board that ship – no matter that Doctor Halsey and Captain Stanforth would be there. He was their head instructor, and it was his responsibility to see them through, no matter what. In some ways, he had the harder task. The trainers felt the same anxiousness that Mendez did. It was hard not to feel that way, after seven years of getting to know the cadets.
That was a second, unstated reason behind the training: it would keep their minds off the surgeries, and distract them from their thoughts. There would be no such distraction for him, or Michael, or Catherine.
None of the trainers had received their orders yet. Officially, the secrecy surrounding the Spartan-II Project was to last until Sullivan’s power armor was finished. Unofficially, their classified status would only last until they left the program… and as soon as the Spartans were finished with their post-surgery rehabilitation, the trainers would depart.
Would they be assigned to the front lines, to the intervention battalions? Would they serve as trainers yet again, for more conventional units? Nobody knew. Perhaps seven years was enough time that they were out of touch, behind the times. Had the nature of war changed, or had it not? The eternal question.
“Catherine, I think we’re good,” Michael Stanforth finally said, his voice gentle. “There’s nothing more we can do.”
The woman bristled defensively, and she reared up, spine stiffening… and then, after a moment, she deflated.“I know,” Catherine admitted quietly. “But I can’t give up.”“You’re not giving up,” David Meyer said. “Your standards are too high, and you have to recognize when they’re doing more harm than good.”“If I can help any one of the children just a little more-” Catherine started to argue, rising back up into her emotions.“To yourself,” David said, cutting her off. “You’re going to drive yourself into an early grave if you keep stressing this much, Catherine. Listen to me as your friend, or at least as your doctor. You have done enough.”The brunette woman slumped. With a boneless slouch, she sat down on her chair, and let out a shaking, rattling exhale that seemed to fill the room.“You’re right,” Catherine said, after a moment. “But if I try, then I can ignore my feelings.”Mendez shifted in his seat, just a tiny fraction. That was too close to his own thoughts. It was far from the first time that the Doctor had managed to somehow perfectly mimic his own mood. Sometimes he wondered if she was reading his mind, or if he was just too open with his emotions. The woman’s eyes jolted up at his minuscule motion. Even that was lesser, these days. Sometimes, when she was truly emotional, Catherine Halsey’s eyes had almost seemed to burn a brighter blue… but they hadn’t done that for well over a year now. It was like whatever fire had been driving her was being steadily exhausted, leaving only this shell behind.Everyone was silent for a while. Ten seconds became twenty, became thirty, became sixty. Nobody wanted to speak. They were all lost in their own thoughts, wondering what would happen next.
The jitters were getting to them.
Which meant they needed to break out of that mindset. A distraction, similar to what his trainers would be doing in a short while.
Mendez had known this would be coming, so he’d already planned a solution.
“We still have the next item on our schedule for today,” Mendez said, consciously interrupting the silence. “If there is nothing else for this meeting, then let’s conclude it, and continue with the day.”The four doctors all looked at the Chief Petty Officer with various forms of confusion. Furrowed foreheads, raised eyebrows, and a truly lost expression on Catherine Halsey’s face.“There’s nothing on the schedule after this, Chief Mendez,” Paul Wu said, glancing down at his datapad and scrolling through it. “I don’t see anything, anyway.”“With all respect, Doctor Wu, you are not invited to this event,” Mendez said politely. “It is a military tradition.”‘It’ was neither a tradition, nor a military exclusive event. But the Doctors, for all that they had done excellent work and were good people, did not belong in the bar. They did not have anyone vouching for them, and they would not have fit in. Catherine looked down at her own datapad, and frowned. “Very well, Chief,” she said, not voicing any objections, before she looked up, and looked to the rest of the crowd. “Gentlemen, as always, thank you for your hard work.”She paused, and coughed, clearing her throat.
“I know this is the final official meeting of our group,” she said, her voice strained. “There will be no need for further meetings of all of us after the augmentations have concluded. I want you all to know that… that without you, the success of this program would not have been possible.”The brunette gazed at them, meeting each of their eyes for a few seconds with her own emotional gaze.“Facit, omnia, voluntas,” she said, speaking in Latin, pausing between each word. “The will decides. Do not hide from this truth. Never forget it.”She took a long breath, nodded once, and stood up to walk out of the room. They watched her go in silence.
Captain Michael Stanforth stood up next, and with a final nod to the doctors, he left as well.
Mendez himself stood. The security blackout had been lifted the moment that Doctor Halsey exited the room, but it was still reasonably private. There were no recording devices in meeting rooms like this, even if the Faraday cage had been broken. He looked at each of the three remaining Team Leads, and saluted them sharply in a sign of respect. David Meyer nodded back, while Paul Wu shuddered, and Steve Sullivan clenched his jaw and nodded several times, his fist clenched on the table.Doctor Halsey was waiting for Mendez by the elevators. Stanforth had already taken a different one, and left. Neither of them spoke until they had entered the elevator, and the doors had closed. They both stared straight ahead at the door.
Catherine reached for the buttons, but rather than press the appropriate one, she instead pushed the Hold button, trapping them in place.
“You have ten seconds to explain why my cadets are in a bar,” Catherine said, her voice completely flat, but threatening nonetheless.“They’ve earned a drink,” Mendez said, without hesitation. “I owe them this much.”The woman didn’t say anything back. Mendez didn’t need to look at her to know that she was as tense as a bowstring. Finally, after a moment, she reached for the console, and selected the button for the sub-basement where Donovan’s bar resided, and the elevator started moving.Both of them waited patiently as the elevator dropped below the ground-level, past layers of Titanium-A plate and reinforcing concrete, and finally came to a stop twenty meters underground. Mendez led the way without a word. Halsey had never been here, to his knowledge, but even if she had, she wouldn’t have admitted it, so it was better for him to provide her with plausible deniability. Technically, she shouldn’t have been here at all. The rules were strict. Only the best were allowed inside the bar. The top ten thousand, and nothing more. No civilians, no matter what.
But tonight was an exception. One that the bar’s operator, as well as all of the guests, agreed with, much to Mendez’s surprise.
Over the course of the Spartan-II program, there had been twenty-four cross-training exercises. The various special forces units that had participated in Project GUNGNIR had been required to participate in two each, according to the deal. Some of them had willingly agreed to more after that point, inflating the number.Catherine Halsey had not participated in every single one of those exercises. Sometimes she had been busy, arguing with Admirals for more budget, or supervising the scientific research that made the program possible. Other times, she had supervised, watching from a distance, overseeing the exercise from either a command post or up close.
But over the years, she had gotten her hands dirty in many exercises. Half, at Mendez’s last estimate. Not the more technical ones, such as the piloting qualifications, or the boat operations. The more basic ones. The combat training with Silva’s ODSTs. The second set of hunter-killer exercises with Ackerson’s Army Rangers.
Halsey had become jump qualified alongside the cadets. She was a diver now, and trained in underwater demolitions. She had passed the unofficial qualifications to be a UNSC sniper. She had run through the Killing House on dozens of occasions as a rifleman, as a team leader, as a potential hostage, even as opposing force.
Officially, none of those events happened. No civilians were supposed to be involved in that level of training.
But unofficially, everyone knew that some ‘civilians’ in the employ of the Office of Naval Intelligence were only civilians by technicality, and they were active-duty military personnel in every single way that mattered.
Sometimes, it was because political figures needed the optics of being protected by other civilians, rather than active-duty military. Sometimes, it was because those ‘civilians’ were legally allowed to enter gray zones that were more ‘difficult’ for servicemen to operate in.Nobody had ever asked Franklin Mendez if Catherine Halsey was one of those people. He was sure that they had quietly discussed it amongst themselves, but nobody had ever asked him. That was a good thing, because it meant that he didn’t have to lie to them… because he himself did not know. And he did not care.The entire event was Mendez’s idea, but inviting Catherine to the bar had not been part of his plan. It had been the suggestion of James Ackerson, the Army Intel man. He’d shared it with Mendez after their second set of joint exercises, two months after the Section Zero investigation had concluded. Mendez had pursed his lips, but he’d agreed to at least share the proposal with the other special forces units. When he’d met with the other CO’s from the various units, to inform them of the event, he’d mentioned the suggestion as a distant possibility – and each of them had agreed that it was acceptable.The bar was pretty full when they walked in. Mendez had never seen it with more than fifty people before. He had once guessed that it could comfortably hold three times that number. Tonight proved that guess to be wrong. Hundreds of people were inside, filling up nearly every table, bench, barstool, and booth. Still more were standing on the edges of the room, holding drinks, or patiently waiting in line for their own drink.Close to the bars entrance, sitting quietly at their tables and looking around with curious eyes, were the seventy-five cadets of the Spartan-II Program.As Mendez and Catherine entered the room, every cadet noticed them at the same time. They didn’t stand, or salute, or make any special notices – which was proper and correct for this situation, under UNSC regulations. The cadets weren’t the only ones to spot their entrance. Eyes turned in their direction from every angle, and the gentle roar of dozens of small conversations adding up started to dull as people looked their way.“Cadets!” Mendez barked over the remaining noise, cutting through it. Every one of the children stiffened in their seats, faces blank and attentive.“You will have at least two and no more than three drinks!” Mendez told them. “You may drink the first drink at whatever speed you choose, but you will not spill, regurgitate, or waste any of it! You will be limited to drinks under thirty percent alcohol by volume! The bartenders will not give you anything higher, do not ask!”Some of those blank, attentive faces twitched. Mendez caught them as they did, marking down names. They hadn’t done anything wrong, but they had clearly been looking forward to trying harder drinks than Mendez would allow them. It was the usual suspects, of course. Daisy, Adrianna, Jai, Michael, Arthur, Ralph, Sheila, Li, Randall, and Alice.
Where they’d heard about other drinks, Mendez didn’t know. If he had to guess, it was likely from the other special forces units, during their cross-training. At least, it had better be. If his trainers had been undisciplined enough to talk about booze where any of the cadets could eavesdrop, Mendez would yank them out of the Killing House and send them straight to the Crusher instead.
The cadet weren’t the only ones listening, of course. Nearly the entire bar had turned to pay attention to Mendez’s instructions, and he saw more than a few of the UNSC’s best killers suppressing their chuckles as he spoke.“You will consume your second drink slowly!” Mendez continued, ignoring the clowns in the back. “You will savor it! You will not consume it in less than twenty minutes! It is acceptable to sample other drinks! You will enjoy yourselves! Is that understood, cadets?!”“Sir yes sir!” the entire Spartan-II class shouted in response, loud enough to shake some of the various steins, pint glasses, and bottles on the other tables. Mendez waited a few moments, holding their gazes like a conductor held an orchestra in suspense, waiting for his command. “Dismissed!” Mendez thundered, releasing the cadets like wolves from their cages.
The Spartan cadets jumped out of their seats with whoops and cheers, and headed for the bar. It was a sudden explosion of exuberance that made Mendez want to smile. He didn’t, because that would have been unprofessional. So long as the cadets were under his authority, he needed to be a positive role model for them, an example that they lived up to.Someone in the crowd laughed, hard, at the noise, and soon enough the entire bar was full of laughter and smiles. All of the adults stepped back, clearing the main aisle towards the bar itself, as the Spartan cadets walked quickly but precisely down towards it, making sure not to bump into anyone else. They were very controlled in the movements, but Mendez could still spot the signs of their unbridled enthusiasm for being treated like proper adults, and being allowed to drink an adult’s drink.
Despite that, there was plenty of physical contact. Some of the men were slapping the backs of their favorite students as they marched past. High-fives were being handed out. One of the cadets was pulled into a playful headlock by an ODST, and extricated himself with mock elbow-strike. He spun on his feet and threw shadow-boxing strikes at the ODST’s gut, making all the surrounding ODST’s ooh and aah as he danced like a prize-fighter in the ring, feet flashing back and forth like Muhammad Ali.
There was a good mood in the room. Cheerful, happy. Exactly what the children deserved, before the augmentations, and the exact reason why Mendez had organized this gathering.For all the work that Catherine and the science teams had done, there was always the possibility that any one of the cadets could die on the surgical slab.
It felt wrong to Franklin Mendez to allow them to march into that unknown fate without any acknowledgement of their hard work in the last seven years.
This was their graduation from basic training. This was their celebration. Their reward for diligence and duty. He wished that they could have been proper adults before this had happened, but that wasn’t possible with the augmentations, and so this small taste was all he could give them. Mendez was also aware that it was an uncomfortably parental act, to allow them to experience alcohol under his supervision, with his explicit permission. Many of the trainers had quietly mentioned that Catherine Halsey was the surrogate mother of all the Cadets over the last few years. Though none of them had said the obvious corollary to Mendez, he knew that it was obvious that he was their surrogate father. He wished that they were older. He wished that he could have taught them how to smoke a cigar the proper way, not sucking down the smoke like it was a cigarette, but holding it in your mouth and inhaling through your nose. He wished, oddly enough, that he could have taught the boys how to shave. There was little reason for Mendez to feel like he had been cheated, when their parents had been robbed of their children – but he did feel that way, and he regretted that he couldn’t pass on those small little things to the Spartans. ONI had asked so much of these children. They had unwillingly sacrificed their chances at a normal life, at growing up slowly, in the arms of loved ones. It was strange that the smallest actions seemed so important to him, compared to those much larger losses… but they did.Mendez trailed after the stream of cadets, and made his way to the bar, where Henry Donovan was serving as fast as he could. The semi-retired black ops man had helpers today – half a dozen more people standing behind the bar. He recognized Terry McDowell, Nolan Byrne, Jack Kawalski, among others. The line moved swiftly as the cadets walked up. Someone had helpfully mounted a sign up above the bar, with bold-print names of several popular beers, ales, wines and more. If that hadn’t been there, it would have been difficult for the cadets to order. “Chief Mendez, sir,” one of the cadets asked, turning to him. It was John, the best team leader they had. “If I may… what will you be drinking?”Mendez raised an eyebrow, and looked over John’s head, at the other Spartans that were openly looking and listening for his response.“Octanis,” Mendez told John. “Not the most refined drink. Not the best tasting.”“Then… why drink it?” asked Isaac.“It’s from my homeworld,” Mendez told him. “I drink it because it’s familiar to me. It’s a grounding influence. Comfortable. Normal.”Thoughtful looks crossed many of the children’s faces. Some of them glanced at the large sign, where Octanis was not listed. Not surprising, given that it was a local beer from only a single system, rather than anything with an interstellar audience. A couple of them looked thoughtful, and Mendez immediately realized what was on their minds.“Don’t drink Octanis just because I do,” he said, looking at Kirk and Malcolm sternly. “It’s not bad to try out something based on a recommendation, but copying everything someone does is no way to live a life.”The handful of cadets nodded, and Mendez turned back to the bar, where he was met with the smiling, pearly white teeth and mocha colored skin of Staff Sergeant Avery J. Johnson, one of the Orion-I trainers that had stuck around the compound since the Section Zero investigation.“Octanis,” he told Johnson.“Coming right up,” Johnson replied, grabbing a pint glass and moving over to the appropriate tap. “Damn shame you won’t let the kids have anything hard.”“No alcohol in their system by next week,” Mendez told him. “Nothing too heavy, nothing that could cause permanent damage. Clean bodies for the procedures.”“Clean bodies,” the Sergeant nodded. “Shame about their dirty minds, though. Some crazy bastard went and put in all sorts of wild ideas in those.”Mendez looked at Johnson with a blank expression, fully aware of exactly who had put those wild ideas in his cadet’s brains.
The Orion laughed in response, unapologetic to the last.