Hieronymus Michael Stanforth stepped into Vice Admiral Keeler’s office and let the door click shut behind him. “Captain,” said the glowing blue hologram that flashed to life above the empty secretary’s desk. “You are precisely on time. Efficient. I am informing the Admiral of your arrival. Please wait there.”“Of course,” Michael replied to the Smart A.I., nodding and standing exactly where he was. Lucian, Keeler’s previous A.I. assistant, wouldn’t have bothered with this degree of security procedure. The Smart A.I. had explained it to him once, upon his request. In order to get to this door in the first place, Captain Michael Stanforth had walked through multiple scanners and security checkpoints, including on the elevator ride down to the sub-basement where the Vice Admiral kept his suite of rooms. At most, he had a twenty-eight second window to retrieve a weapon or bomb, and he was on camera the entire time, making it impossible.But Lucian was gone now. He’d crossed his seven-year limit some time back, and had gone through final dispensation.
Alexander was the new personal assistant to Keeler, and he was far more suspicious. Lucian had been trying to prolong his life, well aware that the more processing cycles he ran, the closer he came to death. The new A.I. had seven years, and he seemed blissfully unaware of that, sometimes coming close to showing off his processing speed.“Come in, Michael,” came Vice Admiral Keeler’s voice from deeper in the suite. Michael glanced at Alexander before moving a step, and received a reluctant nod from the A.I.“Thank you,” he said to the A.I. respectfully. He was well aware that Alexander was only doing his job, and that it wouldn’t help anything to annoy the personal secretary of a Vice Admiral. The living room beyond was very familiar to Captain Michael Stanforth. He’d come here several times in the past to talk about the Spartan-II Program. Briefings, budget forms, even the occasional quiet request for personal advice.
Of all those meetings, right now he was thinking about one of the very first ones. When he had been a Lieutenant Commander, and he had been being briefed on the Orion-II program by the Vice Admiral. Leadership, defections, the fundamental issue of how you stop an insurrection without feeding the fire. It was a topic that Michael had considered quite a lot, as he’d climbed the ranks. The question of their times, as it were.
How much force was enough to demoralize would-be terrorists, so that they didn’t think it was possible to topple the UNSC? How much was too much, and would only encourage more of them to bomb innocents and blow up spaceports? Did that line even exist, at any moment in space or time, variable as it might be?
Or did the line not exist, and instead, everything was always up to the individual Insurrectionist, and their mindset? Were they deciding it of their own free will, instead of being influenced by society and deterministic outcome?
There was no answer. Perhaps it dependent on the individual, or perhaps it was too small of a distinction for any one UNSC officer to make… but for Michael, there was no answer because he had a greater concern on his mind.The success of the Spartan-II Program.The funny thing was that he wanted the same thing as he had eight years ago, but for a very different reason. Where once, Lieutenant Commander Stanforth had been motivated by professional duty, now Captain Stanforth was motivated by the goal of saving as many lives as possible.
He had been promoted two ranks in those eight years, which was a very fast pace. O-6 was where most good Navy officers plateaued, and with Halsey’s program coming to an end, that concern would have been foremost on the mind of Lieutenant Commander Stanforth… but it wasn’t even a blip on Captain Stanforth’s priorities. Promotion didn’t matter to him. He’d sacrificed that possibility when he’d decided to stay with Halsey and her conspiracy, rather than obtain a ship command. HIGHCOM didn’t like making people admirals unless they’d helmed a ship, and it was far too late now for Michael to do that.What mattered was that Halsey got more influence. That Halsey’s ideas and solutions became the new face of ONI. Whether it be her optimistic, high-minded goal of gaining enough power to broker a peace deal between the Insurrection and the UNSC, or whether it be the pessimistic, resigned choice to deploy the Spartans for their original purpose of eliminating Innie leadership.
Either way, it would minimize the bloodshed, hopefully preventing the wildcat destabilization that every UNSC officer feared.He walked into Keeler’s living room, those heavy thoughts on his mind.
The Vice Admiral wasn’t sitting in his preferred couch, a single button of his dressed uniform popped off in the tiniest degree of impropriety. Instead, he was standing up, and for once, he was wearing a dress uniform, rather than the unranked service uniform he preferred. Rank insignia were pinned on the space-black ONI uniform, medals were across his chest, and Michael even saw the man’s headgear tucked under one arm.Michael stiffened, and came to a full stop. He’d seen Keeler this way only once before, at the funeral of General Hauser, three years back. Everyone there had been in full mess dress.Who the hell died? He thought to himself, as he snapped to attention and saluted the Vice Admiral with picture-picture form.Keeler returned the salute sharply, and then, unexpectedly, didn’t give Michael an order to relax.“Captain Hieronymus Michael Stanforth,” the Vice Admiral said, his voice formal. “Due to unforeseen circumstances, the full formality of this affair has been curtailed by the needs of the service. Despite that, I feel that you are deserving of as much respect as I can add.”Michael tried to lock his jaw in place, to freeze his eyes. Was he being reprimanded? Was he being fired? Keeler reached into a pocket of his dress uniform and pulled out a small box. “By the authority vested in me by the United Nations Space Command,” the Vice Admiral said, his gaze locked on Michael Stanforth. “And in recognition of your accomplishments and performance over the last several years, I am pleased to inform you of your promotion.”The box snapped open in Keeler’s hand, revealing shining golden stars.“Congratulations, Rear Admiral Stanforth,” Keeler said.
Michael stared, and it was only the years of having to match poker-faces against Catherine Halsey that kept him from flinching or gasping or otherwise making a fool of himself.“Thank you, sir,” he managed to say.
He reached out and accepted the opened box. He couldn’t look away from it. That was the limit of his discipline.Rear Admiral. The lowest of all flag ranks, but still something that was lightyears beyond most officers. Michael hadn’t seriously thought about becoming an admiral in years now. He’d accepted that it was nearly impossible. He was a paper-pusher, and when there’s a war on, the fighting captain always gets promoted over the paper-pushing staff flunky.“At ease, Admiral,” Keeler said, relaxing his own posture. “Take a seat, please.”Michael followed the request on automatic, moving over to the familiar black couch and sinking into it without protest. The gold stars seemed almost too shiny. Unrealistically so. Were they actually gold? God, he didn’t even know. He’d never asked his father about his – he was too impressed to do so as a kid, and too scared to demonstrate his lack of knowledge as a teenager.
He would have stared at them for longer, but Vice Admiral Keeler sat down on the couch across from him, and tapped a finger on a manilla folder of hardcopy documents that was sitting on the coffee table.
“Your new posting,” Keeler told him, pushing the folder his way. It was hard to put the box down, but Michael snapped the case shut and picked up the folder. Posting. His posting.Michael’s fear came rushing back to him swiftly. Was he being reassigned out of ONI? Perhaps to a different Section? Either way, he wouldn’t be able to protect Halsey at a new position. A Rear Admiral, a one-star Admiral, was too senior to manage just a single science project for the Office of Naval Intelligence. There was no way that he’d get a chance to finish it out, even though he’d been here almost from the beginning.True, the Spartan-II Program was almost over, but that was only officially. Not truly. He had been meeting with Halsey, Meyer, Wu, Sullivan, Mendez, and Johnson at the regular time in their regular conference room, even though officially they were ‘awaiting assignment’. They’d continued to push budget requests through Stanforth and directly up to Keeler, and to his amazement, Keeler had continued to sign off on them.But now… now it truly had to come to an end.He opened the folder carefully, and pulled out the papers concealed within. The first set was his promotion paperwork, and Michael’s eyes lingered on that for a long moment before he set it aside, and started reading the second set.“This can’t be right,” he said.Keeler didn’t reply. Michael glanced up at him and saw the man looking at him emotionlessly, so he took the hint and looked back down to his new orders.Head of Special Projects, read the posting.
Michael scanned the details on instinct, even though it had been so long since he’d gotten a new one, the habits drilled into him back in his OCS days. Effective date was today. New office, new staff, still located here in the Hive… but down in the sub-annex, the basement, where the real power-players lived, rather than up in the loft where the kids played. Just having a ‘staff’ was going to be strange. He’d spent the past eight years serving as Halsey’s paperwork monkey without help from anyone. Now, he’d have dozens of people reporting directly to him. All just to manage the hundreds of scientists that were now his responsibility. Special Projects was Section III’s name for their research and development branch. It was formerly commanded by Rear Admiral Richards, a man that Michael had done his best to not annoy. He’d failed at that, largely because it was inevitable as soon as Richards learned about Catherine Halsey’s project.
By every single definition, the Spartan-II Program should have been firmly under the control of Special Projects. Michael should have been reporting to Rear Admiral Richards for years, instead of bypassing him to talk to Keeler directly. But he hadn’t, because Keeler had set it up that way. Of course, that defense wouldn’t change a man’s feelings. Michael didn’t know how Richards felt about the trespass on his authority, and part of him wished that Richards would have never found out… but it appeared it was too late for that.“If I may ask, where will Rear Admiral Richards be going?” Michael asked carefully, treading the invisible line between exceeding his authority, and cautiously checking out a potential problem.“He is Vice Admiral Richards now,” Keeler replied, his expression just as emotionless and flat as it had been for the entire conversation, even when he’d handed over Michael’s new stars. “And he will be taking over Section III.”Michael froze. Taking over Section III?He glanced at Vice Admiral Keeler’s uniform, and he swallowed hard. There should have been two stars on Keeler’s shoulders, but there weren’t.
There were three, the insignia of a full Admiral of the UNSC. It made Keeler an O-9, a rank so high that it was held by only a handful of people. For the regular Navy, the Army, Air Force, and the Marines, that meant HIGHCOM status. One of the rare men and women who commanded entire bureaus.
However, in the Official of Naval Intelligence, informally divorced from the Navy as a whole, there was only one full Admiral: the Commander-in-Chief. “Congratulations, sir,” Michael murmured, as he looked at the new head of ONI. “I wasn’t aware that Admiral Parangosky was retiring.”
“We don’t like to announce it,” Admiral Keeler replied.
Michael could believe it. Then something else struck him. A realization. A dreadful, horrible realization.
Paragonsky’s job was going to Keeler.
Keeler’s job was going to Richards.
Richards’s job was going to Michael.
Officially, there was no line of succession in ONI, but unofficially… this sure did look like it was setting a precedent – one that implied that Michael himself was now only two promotions away from running ONI.
Catherine’s going to be ecstatic, Michael thought to himself, numbly. This is the perfect opportunity to implement her plan.
Michael hadn’t been expecting this at all.
He’d made his decision to join Halsey’s conspiracy and limit his career when he’d chosen to stay with intelligence, rather than requesting a ship command. Yet now, after all that time, he had been promoted anyway, and he was past the dreaded O-6 barrier that stalled many careers.
The reason behind his promotion was obvious to him. It wasn’t patronage, both because Keeler had made it clear that patronage would absolutely not be allowed, and ONI would sooner kneel to the Army than allow a regular Navy officer like Michael’s father to dictate promotions within its ranks, no matter how high-ranking.
Spartan-II. The program that had been such a longshot, and had succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its own original authors. The project that Keeler had invested so much money into, and which had been the center of so much drama and trouble across all Sections of Naval Intelligence… as well as so many successes.
Looking at it objectively, the staff work required from Michael during those years was extraordinary. He had juggled nearly every aspect of bureaucracy that ONI had. He had formed working relationships and alliances with dozens of departments, special forces units, and even with Army and Air Force Intelligence.
Catherine Halsey had been carving out a kingdom, and Michael Stanforth had been her vizier, her chancellor, her majordomo, often stepping up when she couldn’t grease the palms and kiss the rings personally.
But… that was staff work. Not command duties.
Michael had not demonstrated the ability to make the important, life-or-death decisions that were required of ship CO’s and Admirals alike. The willingness to send one man to his death, in order to save all the others. The day-to-day snap decisions that came naturally with the difficulty of commanding a naval vessel, and which honed their CO’s instincts towards making the right decisions as fast as they needed to – rather than delaying them for days, weeks, even months, like a paper-pushing bureaucratic staff officer was incentivized to do.
And that was what bothered him.
He opened his mouth to ask the most important question to Keeler, but he hesitated. He couldn’t just outright ask why he’d been promoted, or say that he didn’t think he deserved a promotion. The Navy would fire any officer that it didn’t have confidence in, and an officer not having confidence in himself was even worse than that!
Yet he had to know.
“I have to admit,” Michael admitted quietly. “I thought the Admiralty preferred to promote ship captains over staff officers.”
Keeler didn’t speak. He looked at Michael for a long moment, his face still flat. When he spoke, he didn’t confirm or deny Michael’s accusation.
“What qualities do you think might be learned when commanding a ship?” Keeler asked him, instead. “And where do you think that you might have acquired them?”
Michael bit his cheek. He knew damn well what those qualities were. Decisiveness, authority, and discipline. He liked to think that he possessed all three qualities, but ONI, last he checked, had not yet invented mind readers, so without actually demonstrating those traits…
The Admiral waited while Michael dug through his memories for any answer to the older man’s question. After about a minute, he took pity on Michael.
“The trial two years ago,” Keeler said.
Michael frowned. That didn’t make sense. Yes, he’d displayed his discipline under Section Zero’s questioning during that affair, but not decisiveness or authority. Neither of those things made sense there.
Then a worm-like thought in the back of his head poked up, and reminded him of something that he’d almost forgotten in the time since it happened.
One day before the trial, Vice Admiral Keeler had sent Michael a warning, and a list of potential escape routes, just before that blowhard Wilson had swept in to seize Halsey’s Compound. It had arrived on an ONI courier that raced in-system mere hours before the actual orders from Earth had come crashing down.
Just enough time for Michael Stanforth to have abandoned his post and jumped ship, saving his career from whatever unknown fate had prompted Keeler to send him those lifelines.
And he hadn’t done that. He had chosen to inform Halsey, and to stay by her side the entire way.
“Oh,” Michael whispered, the words barely louder than an exhale.
“Traditionally, a Captain goes down with his sinking ship,” Keeler remarked, as if they were talking about idle things, and not power politics. “It is more impressive when he instead manages to save the ship.”
It hadn’t been him who saved the Spartan-II program, though. It had been Catherine Halsey, working endlessly to ensure the program’s success. It had been David Meyer, Paul Wu, and Steve Sullivan, driving their research teams onwards to achieve results. It had been Chief Mendez, training the Spartans until they were able to handle the questioning from Section Zero at just twelve years old.
It had been all of Halsey’s allies who saved the Spartan-II program, painstakingly gained over years of diplomacy.
…but what was that diplomacy, but a demonstration of decisiveness? They’d come within millimeters of breaking their security classifications dozens of times, all to gain whatever slim advantage they could get. That was why Wilson even had a case to cause the trial in the first place.
And authority... well.
Michael Stanforth had been brokering deals with Captains and Rear Admirals when he was still just a Lieutenant Commander, two or three ranks below them. He’d kept up what he thought was his usual professional mannerisms, but from the outside, it had probably looked very different. An O-4 appearing out of nowhere, negotiating with O-7’s like they were equals.
Somehow, without realizing it, Michael had been acting like an Admiral long before he’d ever gotten the rank… and he simply hadn’t noticed. He’d been too busy doing his job as best as he possibly could.
Hell, even this promotion to Head of Special Projects made sense, when you thought of it like that.
Michael might have only been formally assigned to manage a single project, but then Catherine had made Project GUNGNIR, and Michael had been swept along into it. Then they’d both expanded GUNGNIR into a wide-reaching and extensive set of joint development projects and cooperation exercises.
He’d already been doing the job, just on a lesser scale!
“I see,” Michael said, with a slow nod of acceptance.
Keeler nodded, but said nothing.
The living room fell silent, and perhaps that should have been awkward, but Michael had long since gotten accustomed to this behavior down here. Keeler was not a man to speak expansively unless the topic was very important, and Michael had tried to mimic him in this, as he had with so much of his ONI career thus far.
As moments passed, Michael’s hesitations started to drain away, and he looked at the new opportunity with wide, hungry eyes.
A minute or two earlier, he’d thought that Catherine Halsey would be ecstatic about this. That was underselling it, if anything. Michael was her most valuable ally. He was her direct overseer, and he also had the most political connections out of any one of her allies, through his father on HIGHCOM.
Now, as the head of Special Projects, Michael would have even more leverage. Protecting Halsey and the Spartan-II program from back-biting politics had just become one of his official job responsibilities! Deciding which projects to fund, and which to starve, that was his decision, and his decision alone. He could shepherd Catherine’s career even more effectively, all while arguing that he was simply doing his job.
Which reminded him – her contract.
Catherine Halsey had a ten year contract with the Office of Naval Intelligence, and it was due to run out in two years. That might seem like a while to a normal person, but it was actually coming up quite quickly for a civilian contractor in such an important position. It was best practice to secure a new contract for those individuals well in advance.
Of course to do that, he would need to know how much he could actually offer the good Doctor. The maximum limit of the budget, so to speak
“If I may ask a question about a budgeting matter,” Michael said slowly, looking directly at the new Commander-in-Chief of ONI, the man who held the purse-strings.
“You may,” Keeler said, picking up his coffee and sipping from it.
“I believe it is in the best interest of the UNSC and ONI if we secure Doctor Halsey’s services for the future,” Michael said. “With the Spartan program having achieved a vastly greater outcome than any of us anticipated, it’s possible that her contract renewal will be a difficult negotiation. Perhaps she’ll ask for a larger remit, perhaps a larger budget. My inclination at the moment, presuming that nothing changes, is to give her what she wants. My question is this: what is the upper limit? How much will the ONI authorize in funding?”
“The same as her existing budget,” Keeler replied, setting the coffee cup down, and staring at Michael with that still unchanged, flat expression. “Unlimited. Money or projects. Whatever you need to keep her producing.”
“Generous,” Michael murmured, unable to keep the surprise out of his voice.
“Logical,” Keeler said, his firm tone making the strength of his opinion clear. “If Halsey was wasteful, or focused her efforts on niche, inefficient topics, she would not be getting this much slack. I trust that no matter what her next project is, it will undoubtedly be to the great benefit of ONI and the UNSC. The most she’s ever wasted is on those trips to Verdant Vale… and we already own the entire resort outright, so that isn’t an issue.”
“We do?” Michael asked, slightly taken aback by that revelation, before realization set in. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, since HIGHCOM meets there regularly. We could hardly trust their physical protection to private citizens on a regular basis.”
“Indeed,” Keeler said.
Michael wanted to wonder about why Keeler was still so damn emotionless. The Admiral had always held himself to a high standard of stoicism, but this was a new level entirely. Small smiles or frowns were normal for the man, not this blank, stone face.
But perhaps that was just Keeler’s way of trying to maintain the proper decorum, now that he was the new head of ONI. Maybe there was some lesson here that Michael would only discover days or weeks later, after he thought about it. It wouldn’t be the first time that Keeler had done that to him, trying to train him with a careful and light hand.
That was a matter for later, however. For now, it was hard for Michael to contain the swell of optimism that was building inside of him. After all those years, and all that stress, everything had turned out amazingly good!
Keeler and the regular Navy had already agreed with Catherine’s proposal to send the Spartans to naval academies until they either graduated, or their power armor was ready. Michael would soon have the discretionary control over most of the R&D projects in Section III. Catherine would be free to continue her wandering sage routine, helping out whoever she liked within ONI’s ranks.
All while they continued to build up the political support they would need to enact her plan for a peaceful resolution to this war. Even if that failed, they had the Spartans, able and ready to decapitate the Insurrection with minimal casualties.
Soon enough, the Insurrection would no longer be the UNSC’s biggest problem. What a thought that was!
He nearly laughed, and barely managed to catch it before it slipped out of his throat – just as he looked back at Keeler, and the man’s cold, emotionless expression punctured through his happiness.
“There is a second reason for our meeting today,” Admiral Keeler said, tapping a button on the combination coffee table and hologram projector, and speaking to the Smart A.I. “Alexander, bring up the images from the Heracles.”
Michael turned to the hologram projector, but it stayed silent. Instead, one of the flatscreens mounted on the wall hummed to life. It was probably for the better color-contrast, or because imagery from a ship’s cameras was always going to be 2d as opposed to 3d.
The image shocked him. Michael stiffened, his eyes widening as he looked upon a horrifying hellscape. It was a planet, and it looked like it had just come out of a volcanic period. The surface was scarred and blackened, and there were red, orange, and even bright white spots of burning heat so large that they were visible from orbit.
“You will now be briefed on the events that have unfolded at the Outer Colony world of Harvest.”