The alarm buzzed, and he weakly flopped an arm over to turn it off. He fumbled, missing the button once, twice, and then finally got it on the third time.
Groaning, Hieronymus Michael Stanforth sat up in his bed, and reached for the light switch.
It took him a few minutes to get his brain started for the day. He’d been up late the night before, and he hadn’t gotten as much sleep as he should have.
The spray of the shower woke him up. It wasn’t a good thing. The memory of one of the surgeries gone wrong came roaring back into his mind. Blood on the table. The doctor’s frantic shouts as she aborted the procedure.
Most of the Spartans had gone through the augmentations. Not all of them had succeeded.
It was a miracle that none of them had died yet. Statistically, the first of them should have died yesterday – but thus far, they had a clean record. Even the failures were still breathing.
Stanforth knew the credit rightly belonged to Catherine Halsey, and to David Meyer’s surgical teams, but he couldn’t say that to them. They were all far too busy, focused on their jobs. The most Stanforth could do was watch from a distance, so that he didn’t distract them.
Weeks had flown by aboard the UNSC Hopeful, and today was the final day. Seventy-two cadets had entered the operating rooms. Only three remained.
He dressed quickly, and left his quarters to hit the mess hall. The cafeteria was silent these days, very different from earlier, when dozens of Spartan cadets had been eating at the same time, their utensils clattering.
Each day, fewer and fewer of the Spartans had joined him for meals, as they were plucked away, one by one. After the augmentations, they couldn’t just go back to their daily routines. They were elsewhere aboard the Hopeful, under medical observation by Paul Wu’s Augmentation Team. A precaution to make sure there were no hidden problems waiting to emerge after a few days.
“Last ones, huh?” came a voice as another tray was set down on his table.
Stanforth glanced at Gunnery Sergeant Johnson, and nodded quietly. The enlisted man was gruff, and not someone that Stanforth had thought he would socialize with outside of their jobs. They were too different – he was more formal, Johnson more casual. But they were both professionals, and they both cared about the cadets. That was all that mattered.
Chief Mendez joined them a few minutes later, not saying a word.
“Did either of you get her to sleep?” Stanforth asked quietly, as he picked at his hashbrowns.
Both NCO’s shook their heads.
“At least it’s only one more day,” Johnson muttered, letting out a long sigh. “She’ll sleep tonight. She has to. Can’t go much longer without.”
Mendez raised an eyebrow in reply, as if to ask if Johnson was sure about that. Johnson huffed, acknowledging the man’s silent rebuttal.
At the start of the augmentations, Michael Stanforth wouldn’t have picked up on that interaction. Even after years of monthly meetings with the man, he wouldn’t say he was close to Franklin Mendez.
However, the past several weeks had forced all three of them to work together on an unexpected project: supporting Doctor Catherine Halsey.
The mastermind behind the Spartan-II program had drastically changed over the last few days. Before now, Stanforth had known her as a cold, calculating figure that was behind the conspiracy to usurp control of the Office of Naval Intelligence. Even when she was warm and soft to the cadets, it was always in service of her goal. Each kind word offered to a Spartan was simply her way of securing an asset for the future, strengthening her hand and building her arsenal.
As soon as the augmentations had started, however, Catherine Halsey had abruptly become an emotional wreck. She spent her days sitting on the circular couch in the viewing gallery, looking from one operating room to another, unable to look away. She rarely ate, or slept, or bathed, and only when Stanforth, Johnson, or Mendez could cajole or convince her.
If it wasn’t for the fact that the surgical teams needed rest themselves, and the surgeries had to stop for the night, then Halsey probably would have sat in that couch for three weeks straight, until her body collapsed out from under her. As it was… it was a minor miracle that she hadn’t been hospitalized in a different section of Hopeful.
After the first week, Stanforth had angrily confronted Rear Admiral Jeromi about it.
He demanded to know why Jeromi had put those couches in the gallery, allowing the brunette civilian to sit there for entire days. Why Jeromi hadn’t had the couches taken away when it became clear that Halsey intended to watch every second of every single Spartan’s suffering, refusing to leave until the day’s work was over.
There was only a single rank between them, since Stanforth was an O-6, and Jeromi was an O-7, but was still unacceptable behavior, especially since Hopeful was Jeromi’s ship, his private fief. Stanforth had been lucky that Jeromi hadn’t shoved his boot so far up Stanforth’s insubordinate ass that he could taste the laces.
“If I didn’t put those couches there, she’d be curled up on the floor, doing the exact same thing,” Jeromi had told Stanforth, pointedly. “She doesn’t care about comfort right now. She’d break her spine sitting on that metal, and she wouldn’t even notice.”
They’d debated sedating her, dragging her off and putting her in a medical coma. Stanforth had proposed it, after they’d realized that Halsey clearly wasn’t getting any sleep at night.
Mendez hadn’t approved or disapproved, merely hummed at the idea.
Johnson, however, had warned Stanforth that if he even thought about trying it, the Sergeant would personally kick him off the ship, space suit or no space suit.
“She’s hurting herself,” Stanforth had argued with the Sergeant.
“And you’re only gonna make it worse,” Johnson had shot back. “She’s watching them because it’s the only thing holding her together. She isn’t giving up on them. That’s what that means to her. You take that away, and you might as well kill her now.”
At least it’s almost over, Stanforth thought to himself wearily, sipping from his mug of steaming hot coffee without care for the scalding temperature. One more day, three more surgeries… and then we’ll be done.
Not that this day would be ‘easy’.
They’d saved the Spartans with the worst compatibility for the last. It had bought time, but that time was used up.
And, of course, Catherine would be single-mindedly focused on the least compatible Spartan: her personal protégé, Visha-016.
One by one, the three men finished their breakfasts. They returned to the serving line to stow their dirty dishes. Johnson grabbed another tray for Halsey, and started picking through the line for things she might eat.
“Don’t do the muffins,” Mendez said, shaking his head. “She didn’t eat them yesterday.”
“Bah,” Johnson scoffed – but he returned the muffins to the buffet. “What about crackers? Saltines? I’d give her salami slices, but I ain’t gotta lot of options, here. She needs more protein, not just carbs.”
“More coffee,” Stanforth said gloomily, adding a second mug of almost scalding coffee to Johnson’s tray. “That’s about the only thing she hasn’t refused yet.”
They filled the tray with food that would keep, knowing that Halsey might only take a single bite in the span of an hour. Coffee was the one exception. At this point, Stanforth would not have been surprised to learn that Halsey’s veins used the stimulant instead of blood.
“Well, it’s about that time,” Johnson grumbled. “Let’s get to it.”
Stanforth snorted. A Sergeant, giving a Captain orders. Truly, the impertinence of Marines knew no bounds.
They left the mess hall behind, and walked the short distance to the large rectangular block that contained the four operating rooms and the cross-shaped viewing gallery. The surgeries had not yet started when they entered, but the Spartans were on the tables, going through the last checks before they did.
Unusually, Catherine Halsey was not in her now-customary seat in the circular central couch, where she could monitor all of the surgeries simultaneously. Instead, perhaps unsurprisingly, she had dragged one of the couch’s quarter-circle sections away, breaking up the perfect circle. She’d placed it next to the operating room where Visha was laying on the table, and she was staring at the teenager silently.
Holding back a sigh, Stanforth moved closer, already knowing that there was no point in talking to her, but that they’d have to try. Johnson set the tray of food down on the small end-table next to the couch. Mendez walked down towards the other two operating rooms, inspecting the other cadets – Fhajad and Ralph.
One of Rear Admiral Jeromi’s staff officers was waiting at the end of the gallery, and Stanforth waved him over.
“When did she get here?” he asked the man quietly.
“Twenty minutes ago,” the staff officer replied, keeping his voice down. “I offered her refreshments, but…”
Stanforth nodded, commiserating with the man.
“Has she eaten? Showered?” he asked, knowing that it was unlikely, but if it had happened, that Jeromi’s staff would have known.
“No to the first, yes to the second,” the staff officer told him. “The Rear Admiral told her last night that if she didn’t, he’d ban her from the room.”
It should have been funny, but it wasn’t. Halsey’s clear obsession with the results of the augmentations had distracted her to the point where she simply wasn’t taking care of herself. It was similar, in some ways, to depression. Bathing was often one of the first habits to slip by the wayside.
They settled in to wait. Today was the first day that Stanforth was feeling even a tenth of the stress that Halsey was clearly displaying. This was the most dangerous time. The worst odds.
It felt like failure was inevitable, though he didn’t dare say the words out loud. That would jinx it, he thought.
But a jinx wouldn’t have mattered in the end.
Three hours into Visha’s surgery, it went wrong.
It wasn’t the first procedure, the brain surgery for the eye augmentations. That went smoothly enough, though Halsey had grabbed onto her couch’s cushions so tightly that Stanforth had thought it might tear. David Meyer was handling this surgery himself, as the best doctor in the program, perhaps the best in the UNSC as a whole, and he moved slowly and smoothly.
The second procedure was the problem. The carbide ceramic ossification. Not at first, but about twenty minutes after the auto-surgeon had started grafting the material to Visha’s ribcage.
One of the doctors abruptly stiffened, his spine straightening up from his stooped position. Halsey, Stanforth, Johnson, and Mendez – their heads all snapped to him. Stanforth inhaled sharply, already knowing what was coming.
“Abort, abort!” the doctor barked out, his voice hurried and panicked. “The bone’s not taking it! I’m seeing cascading cavitation!”
David Meyer slammed the emergency button on his control panel, and the auto-surgeon’s dozens of manipulator arms retracted backwards in a sudden burst of motion.
“Get the cryopod ready, now!” the head of the Surgery Team shouted, pointing his finger at the backup doctor, who’d been waiting by the door. “Andrew, help me get her on the stretcher!”
Halsey stood up, her jaw open, her eyes wide. Stanforth was doing the same, for the exact same reason.
Not the cryopod. Not that. Anything but that.
But there was no other option.
He had reviewed all of the emergency preparations that Halsey had created. They ranged from administering extra doses of anti-rejection drugs at the low end, to immediately throwing the cadet into a cryopod at the far end.
It was only for the worst case scenario – a situation where there was nothing the doctors could do except pray for time. The cryopod would slow down the patient’s biology long enough for the Augmentation and Surgery Teams to hopefully come up with a solution... but once they pulled the cadet out of the cryopod, they would have only a short amount of time before they died on the table.
That specific augmentation relied on the cadet’s ability to handle the internal pressure. Quite literally. The grafted material had a gaseous byproduct, which would spread the ceramic carbide across the entire structure of that bone. A Spartan’s genetic compatibility was needed to keep the gas from reacting too quickly, so that it diffused gradually over time. In a normal human, the bubbles would spread, rushing to escape and killing the subject painfully.Put another way, and it was decompression sickness. The bends, as it was commonly known. There was no medicine that could prevent the grafted materials from cavitating further – a death sentence.
There was no procedure that could save Visha on the table.
In time, they could salvage the procedure, but it would have to be a separate surgery. Something trained and prepared for.
Right now, there was only one solution: slow down the damage, as quickly as possible, before it could kill Visha.
Halsey took off running for the door, and Stanforth followed her. They burst out of the dimly lit viewing gallery into the brighter lights of the Hopeful’s ship corridors at the same time that the medical stretcher came barreling down the corridor, wheeled by a grim-faced David Meyer.
The nearest cryo bay was only a couple dozen meters away. It had been further away, but Halsey had insisted they move it closer, just in case of a situation like this, where seconds mattered. One of the doctors was already there, slamming his fingers into the keypad as he got the pod ready for a flash-freeze.
It was lucky that Visha had already been stripped naked for the procedure. You couldn’t go into a cryopod with clothes on, for fear of it sticking to your skin and ripping off lacerations when you unfroze. Freezerburn, as it was called.
By the time Halsey and Stanforth got close enough to help, David Meyer had grabbed the young female cadet by the shoulders, and Andrew had grabbed her legs, and they had already placed her inside the pod.
Stanforth stared at the raw gash that was Visha’s lower ribcage. He couldn’t see the damage, couldn’t tell without the advanced surgical implements, but he still saw the pale white of bone, and his heart shot up into his threat, choking him with fear, even though he knew exposed bone was a normal part of the procedure.
The cryopod’s alarm blared, and the hatch descended, moving just slowly enough for David and Andrew to get out of the way.
“Freezing in three, two, one!” the doctor at the controls cried out, as the hatch sealed with a hiss of pressurization.
Gasses shot into the pod like jets of white fog, super-cooled in advance. Stanforth felt the phantom sensations of cryo racing across his skin, even though it had been years since he’d needed to go under, and he knew that his memories were not accurate to what was happening right now. Standard procedure was to put someone into cryo sleep over the course of a minute or so. Visha was getting frozen in the span of mere seconds.
A moment passed. Two.
“Seal is good,” muttered the doctor at the controls. “Monitoring the casket… vital signs are normal. She’s good!”
The words should have been a relief – Visha was alive. The crash freeze hadn’t killed her.
But it wasn’t.
“Gottverdammte verfickte Scheiße!” Catherine Halsey screamed.
Her shriek echoed off the far walls and bounced back loudly enough to make everyone in the room jump.
Stanforth turned around slowly, his body instinctively shying away from the contact.
Catherine Halsey was glaring at the cryopod. Her face was a brilliant red, so bright that it looked like she’d been attacked and now had bruises all across her skin. Her fists were clenched to tightly that she’d punctured her skin with her own nails.
Blood dripped from her hands, down onto the deck.
Everyone was staring at her, and for a moment, Halsey stood there, panting for breath, still glaring at the cryopod as if it had singlehandedly killed Visha, instead of saving her life.
The next moment, Halsey’s eyes flicked to Stanforth, and then to David. Her red face cleared, the red flush draining away almost instantly into the shock white of mortification.
She turned on her heel and fled.
David Meyer shot Stanforth a look, and Stanforth looked back at him, stunned and bewildered.
“Keep Visha alive!” Stanforth ordered, for lack of anything better to say, before running out the cryobay as well, chasing after Halsey.
A flash of a white labcoat towards his right side was the only reason that Stanforth didn’t lose sight of her immediately.
He took off running, his shoes slapping down on the metal panel floor with loud thuds.
Which direction had she turned ? Right? Left? Stanforth couldn’t tell. The turns had come too quickly. It was sheer luck that this entire section of the Hopeful had been sealed off from the rest of the ship, limiting how far she could run.
There! he thought, spotting a bright red glimmer on the ground. It was blood, from her cut hands.
Stanforth took off again, following the trail, and within a minute, he finally found her.
Catherine Halsey was standing near the end of a dead end hallway by a sealed bulkhead, her fists still clenched, muttering to herself in anger. Stanforth couldn’t make out the words, but it didn’t sound like anything in English. She’d spoken in what he thought was German, earlier, with an older dialect that might have been a colonial mutation.
She was grabbing onto the bulkhead’s emergency grab-bar, he noticed idly. Both her hands were wrapped around it, as if she was going to pull it open. But that was impossible – the weight of that door could only have been moved in zero-gravity, and if the locks were disengaged.
He slowed down, and raised an arm. He opened his mouth to call out to her.
“AaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAGH!” Halsey screamed, so loudly that Stanforth grimaced and clapped his hands over his ears.
It was the tiniest shred of luck that he saw what happened next, that he didn’t close his eyes on instinct.
Halsey clenched her hands around the bulkhead’s emergency door handle, straining away as she twisted her hips and her shoulders, and wrenched it clean off the door.
Stanforth’s eyes widened, and he stared, dumbstruck, as Halsey turned on a heel and hurled the metal door handle at nearest wall. It bounced off with a thunderous CLANG! and ricocheted down the hallway, barely missing him.
The doctor hunched over, panting to herself as if she was completely out of breath, as if she’d just run a marathon… but not before she glanced in his direction.
Halsey’s eyes were different. They shined gold, and not her normal blue.
Stanforth flinched.
He couldn’t help it. It was automatic. No one’s eyes should be that color. No one could just rip off a door handle like that.
He blinked, and the gold was gone. Halsey’s blue eyes were back.
The woman stared at him, tears running freely down her face like a dripping faucet. She opened her mouth, perhaps to say something, to excuse the impossible.
No words came out of her mouth. Just a quiet animal noise, a sob drawn out into a single long, low sob. It sounded like pain. It sounded like she was dying.
Halsey slumped, and her knees gave out. She collapsed to the ground in front of Stanforth, crumpling into a ball. Her legs sprawled out around her awkwardly, and Catherine Halsey, the woman so fierce that she scared most of ONI… cried and wept openly.
The sound of her sobs shook Stanforth out of his stupor, just in time to hear the pounding of feet behind him.
“Here she is!” someone called out, back down the corridor.
It was Paul Wu, followed by Sergeant Johnson and Chief Mendez. The slim scientist had never given Stanforth the impression that he had any real stomach for conflict or challenge, but he apparently had hidden depths. Paul walked right up to Halsey, kneeling down beside her, and wrapped his arms around her tightly in a hug.
“She’s going to be fine,” he told her, his words just barely audible to Stanforth. “Come on. Come here. Let’s go.”
The Head of the Augmentation Team tugged on Halsey’s arms, pulling her to her feet, and throwing her arms around his shoulders. They slipped off, but Paul kept going. In a movement that surprised Stanforth, he bent down and swept her legs up, carrying her limp body in his arms.
“I’ll take care of her,” Paul said, his voice firm as he looked back at Stanforth and the other two military men. “I’ve got it.”
Stanforth nodded, and he stepped aside, letting the doctor go past him. Johnson and Mendez did likewise, and they watched as Paul carried Halsey off down the corridors, her head hanging bonelessly to the side.
Halsey looked for all the world like she was dead. Like the augmentations had killed her, instead of the cadets.
The silence lasted for only a moment, and then it was broken.
“What in God’s name happened here?” Sergeant Johnson whispered, staring down the corridor to the emergency hatch.
Stanforth looked, and winced. Halsey had apparently tried to open the door, and she had smeared bloody hand-prints across the keypad before she had resorted to – to her actions.
He tried not to look at the torn off door handle, but he couldn’t help it. The object had scored a ding into the wall where Halsey had thrown it, chipping the white strip of paint and revealing the metal underneath.
“Catherine did that,” Stanforth said softly, gesturing helpless at the bulkhead. “She… she ripped it right off.”
“That shouldn’t be possible,” Chief Mendez said, his voice unperturbed. But he even looked doubtful about it, and he was staring at the detached door handle.
“The bolts must have been loose,” Stanforth said, shrugging as he reluctantly stepped closer. “That’s the only explanation.”
Johnson walked past him, almost gliding on silent feet, and he inspected the bulkhead carefully, crouching down to get a closer look.
“No,” the Sergeant said, shaking his head as he looked back up at them. “The bolts are still there. What’s left of ‘em, anyway. They’re sheared straight off.”
“That shouldn’t…” Mendez started to say again, then he looked closer, and stopped.
A confused look flashed across his face. It was the first time that Stanforth had ever seen the man have any kind of emotion, and he could sympathize with it.
“She ripped it off?” Johnson said, repeating Stanforth’s earlier words with a questioning tone as he turned to look at him.
“Right in front of me,” he said, confirming it. “Screamed, ripped it off, threw it at the wall.”
He pointed at where the door handle had struck the wall and chipped the paint. Mendez drifted over to look at it, still clearly confused and lost.
Stanforth took a deep breath, and tried to calm his racing heart.
For all the doubts that he had, the lingering thoughts of this shouldn’t be possible, he could not deny what he had seen. Halsey had displayed superhuman strength. The door handles were auxiliary components, sure, but they were still aboard a UNSC warship, and that meant they had to be able to withstand plenty of stress.
To shear the bolts off of the handle… that was beyond any human strength.
It was the kind of thing that you’d need to be a Spartan to do.
Stanforth froze.
No. That was absurd.
He remembered what Keeler had said all those years ago when he’d first briefed Stanforth on Doctor Catherine Halsey.
She had graduated highschool at the age of twelve, but she’d done it remotely. She lived off the grid, and participated in the colony of Endymion’s homeschooling system, scoring high enough to qualify for the Endymion Academy for the Gifted. After that, she’d gone off on a full-ride scholarship to the University of Circumstance. First PhD at eighteen.
Twelve years old. The exact same age that her original paper had suggested was ‘optimal’ for augmentation of the Spartan-II cadets, before she had insisted on revising it upwards to thirteen, and then fourteen. And why? For better survivability.
Hieronymus Michael Stanforth had always known that Halsey was strange, but this… this wasn’t possible.
“Franklin,” he said, low and quiet, drawing the attention of the two NCO’s. “Check the hallway for eavesdroppers, then seal the corridor.”
The Navy NCO nodded, his confused look fading away into his usual professional face, and quickly did as Stanforth had ordered.
Sergeant Johnson stared at him, but Stanforth didn’t speak until the door hissed shut behind them, enclosing all three men in the single section of hallway.
“Avery,” Stanforth said, turning to him. “In your experience… is this something that an Orion could have done?”
The Marine stiffened, his eyes flaring open wide.
“You don’t think that,” Johnson replied, disbelievingly. “Not the Doc. Not her.”
“It’s just a hypothetical,” Stanforth said, though they all knew he was lying.
Sergeant Johnson reached up and pulled off his uniform cap, then ran a hand through his close-cropped hair. He stared at the door handle, then at the bulkhead it had been ripped away from.
“I couldn’t do this,” he said slowly. “But…”
Pausing, he chewed on his lip for a moment, and then continued.
“The Orion augmentations weren’t standardized,” Johnson reminded them. “I joined near the end, and by that point, they were dialing everything down. Focusing on reaction speed, stamina, things that made better shooters… not raw strength.”
“But?” Stanforth said, repeating his earlier word.
“Some of the earlier guys might have been able to do this,” Johnson admitted, before continuing with a faster, more argumentative tone. “But they were obvious. Big bruisers, you couldn’t miss ‘em. Not skinny little girls, like the Doc. There were signs, damn it.”
“Her desk.”
Johnson and Stanforth turned to Chief Petty Officer Mendez, who had picked up the door handle carefully, and was inspecting it. The frame of the normally straight tube of steel had twisted, slightly, and bloody handprints from Halsey’s cuts stood out from the shiny metal.
Mendez looked up at them, and pointing at the twist marks, where you could very faintly make out individual divots. The places where her fingers had been, Stanforth realized. She had squeezed so hard that the metal had warped underneath her grip.
“Doctor Halsey’s desk has a dent in it,” Mendez said. “A fist shaped dent.”
“Yes,” Stanforth said, remembering it. He’d noticed it years ago, on his first visit to the compound, but he hadn’t thought much of it.
“What does that matter?” Johnson asked, shrugging. “Things get damaged. That was probably just something from Sullivan’s power armor, and they couldn’t get rid of it without too many people noticing, so it wound up in her office.”
“No,” Mendez said, shaking his head. “It’s the same desk she’s always had. One day, about six months into the program, the dent appeared.”
“And you didn’t ask any questions about it?” Stanforth asked.
Mendez gave him a flat look, as if he was questioning the Navy Captain’s sanity. Stanforth realized what he was asking of Franklin Mendez, of all people, and he closed his mouth, conceding the point.
“The Doctor saved the life of one of my trainers,” Mendez added. “One of the cadets, Carris, threw the man out of a sparring ring. He would landed neck-first on the dirt, but Doctor Halsey was there. She turned around faster than anyone I’d ever seen, and saved his life.”
The Chief’s voice faded, and he swallowed the rest of his words.
“She’s too good,” Stanforth said, moving on. “Not scientifically, but militarily. The joint exercises. She trained alongside the cadets, and she did far better than a civilian should have. The kill houses. The hunter-killer exercises. The sniper training.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Johnson tried to argue, though his tone wasn’t as firm as before. “She had years to get that good, training up.”
“Could you train a random civilian scientist to outshoot ODSTs?” Stanforth asked, staring at the man. “While she was working ten-hour days?”
Johnson bit his lip again, and didn’t speak.
“The original paper behind the program,” Stanforth continued, speaking his thoughts out loud. “She wrote the A.I. sections, but she also was the primary author for the training, tactical, and strategic doctrines. Admiral Keeler told me that she was one of the six best military minds in the galaxy. Her family didn’t have any military background. So where did she learn those things?”
“She wasn’t an Orion,” Mendez said, neutrally. “Which means…”
“The Insurrection,” Johnson finished, though he looked sick at the thought.
“Colonel Robert Watts and General Howard Graves were two of the other people on that list,” Stanforth told them. “They left the service long enough ago that they could have trained Halsey. Admiral Keeler suspected that from the beginning. But… what if it wasn’t just training?
“Halsey renamed the program into Spartan Two,” he continued, reminding them. “You both remember her justification about internal morale. But there wasn’t anything wrong with Orion as name. Orion was a great warrior. So what if she renamed it, because it was the second Spartan program - and she was a survivor of the first Spartan program? The Insurrection’s Spartan program?”
“I’ve been doing anti-Innie ops for the past thirty years,” Johnson said. “I’ve never seen any sign of Innie super-soldiers. None of the Orions have. It wasn’t even a rumor, like we were.”
“Of course not,” Stanforth said, his voice distant even to himself. “After all… how many survivors could they have had? They didn’t have an unlimited budget, or the greatest minds in the galaxy, or years and years to refine the surgeries... all of which Halsey insisted on.”
The Marine fell silent, his eyes widening as he realized what Stanforth was getting at.
“I always thought it was suspicious,” Stanforth said. “How Halsey managed to make friends with David Meyer, Paul Wu, and Steve Sullivan. Three of the best experts in the exact fields that you would need to make super soldiers. I thought she planned it, to be honest. I thought she befriended them well in advance, knowing she would need them for her plan. But… if she was an Innie supersoldier, then it makes even more sense.”
“The maintenance,” Mendez murmured. “Keeping the augmentations from killing her.”
Stanforth nodded. It was an unfortunate reality that even with the best technology and experts, the Spartan-II’s would not be able to live normal lives after their augmentation. They would need regular medical checkups to ensure that their augmentations were not just performing up to spec, but also to keep those same augs from slowly killing them.
“This is insane,” Johnson said, but his voice was weak. “This isn’t possible.”
“How else do you explain this?” Stanforth demanded, gesturing at the door handle in Mendez’s hands.
“I don’t know, maybe she was abducted by aliens!” the Marine snapped back at Stanforth. “Except that would be stupid, because aliens aren’t real.”
“But then why did she write the paper?” Mendez asked, cutting off the brewing argument before it could start. “Why would she risk her own cover?”
“She defected,” Stanforth said, surprised that Mendez hadn’t figured that out yet. “She’s not an Insurrectionist anymore, Chief.”
“Yes, but why write it?” Mendez pressed. “If ONI found out that it wasn’t hypothetical, that someone in the colonies actually managed it, we all know what would have happened to her.”
Stanforth hesitated. He was absolutely certain that Catherine Halsey had always planned to take over the Office of Naval Intelligence so that she could end the war… but how did this play into it? He’d thought the Spartan Program was simply to establish her name and give her loyal supersoldiers.
Was the Spartan program even intentional? He wondered. Or was it just Catherine Halsey’s way of warning the UNSC that augmented soldiers were possible, not knowing that we already created the Orions?
“This is crazy,” Johnson muttered, but his voice was no longer as doubtful. “Who the hell do we tell?”
“Nobody,” Stanforth said, quickly and firmly. “We tell nobody.”
If ONI found out that Catherine Halsey was a survivor from an Insurrectionist supersoldier program, the entire Spartan-II program would die a quick and quiet death. Every single cadet would be under a cloud of suspicion. Halsey herself would probably end up on a surgical table somewhere.
That, aside from being a horrendous crime, would also spell the end of Halsey’s conspiracy – her master plan to end the Insurrection with as few deaths as possible.
And Hieronymus Michael Stanforth would not allow that to happen.