I smiled to myself as I walked into the large amphitheater deep underneath the ONI headquarters on Reach.The last two times I had been in this room, it had been an unpleasant experience. My initial hiring and Section Zero’s trial had both taken place here. However, the third time would be the exception.
Much of the room was already filled with people. Scientists, trainers, and cadets. This was a gathering of the entire Spartan-II Program, even the research teams that had never properly met the children. The newly promoted Rear Admiral Stanforth hadn’t told me why he was gathering all of us together, but I thought it was fairly obvious: an award ceremony of some kind. It was a good time for it, even though Steve Sullivan’s team was still grinding away at the final teething issues of the power armor system.
Most of the project was wrapped up, and my old HR instincts were telling me that this was the perfect time to reward the high-performers individually, and give a generalized note of appreciation to the rest of my employees.
Perhaps it was even a formal graduation ceremony for the cadets, giving them enlisted ranks before most of them were soon shipped off to OCS on Luna and Annapolis, with a handful remaining here on Reach. It was an excellent step towards ensuring that the Spartans gained agency and influence, since not only would they become officers, but they would attend Officer Candidate School at the three best naval academies in the UNSC. The networking opportunities were excellent, and as I had re-discovered with Michael Stanforth, sometimes it’s not about what you know, but who you know.Overall, I was in a… content mood. I wouldn’t say I was happy. Not with seven of my children, including my dear Visha, still frozen away in cryopods, still waiting on Paul and David’s teams to finish up their individualized surgeries. But given that lingering worry, I was in the happiest mood that was possible for me. There was no assigned seating, and I noticed that several of the science teams had intermingled off on the left side of the amphitheater, while the cadets, Chief Mendez’s trainers, Sergeant Wentworth’s support staff, and Sergeant Swanson’s chefs were all seated in neat blocks on the right side. Still, there were a couple open seats on the long riser benches, and given that I was not a vital part of this briefing, I decided to join my cadets. I walked into their formation, nodding to individual Spartans as they met my eyes, and I took a seat in the center of the pack, with the inseparable trio of John, Kelly, and Samuel on one side, and with William, Frederic, and Jorge on the other. My Spartans accepted my presence without comment, and I settled in to wait for the start of the event.
While I waited, I found it amusing to notice the delineation of the sides. All of the civilians were on the left side of the amphitheater, and all of the military personnel were on the right side – save for me. Perhaps I should have completed the pattern by sitting next to David, Paul, and Steve, but I had already made my decision.
I would be seeing all of my scientists regularly for the next few weeks, giving me plenty of time to bid them farewell if they were choosing to join another ONI department or research team after the completion of the final personalized surgeries. I had only a few days left with my Spartans, and this briefing had already interrupted my original plan to give them one last grasp of summer down at the Verdant Vale resort. “Admiral on deck!” barked out one of the trainers.
The entire military section stood up and snapped to attention as one. I joined them on the first part, but refrained from that second one, since I could not allow any ONI personnel to learn that I, myself, had former military experience.
They were still under the delusion that I was merely a gifted amateur, and I had no desire to let them realize the truth – for the truth was far, far more impossible than they could accept. More likely, they would come to a much more reasonable assumption, and accuse me of being a former Insurrectionist. Obviously, that would spell the end of my ONI career and possibly the end of my life, so I did not want to give them any reason to look deeper.Rear Admiral Michael Stanforth, one of my closest allies, walked onto the stage. Without a word, he waved for the rest of us to return to our seats. He moved to the podium and tapped on it, before speaking quietly to the building’s A.I. Only after he was satisfied with his conversation did he turn to the filled amphitheater and speak.“Good morning,” Stanforth said, his voice echoing through the room without need for any mechanical or electronic amplification, just the natural acoustics of the amphitheater itself. “As many of you know, I am Rear Admiral Stanforth. Today’s briefing is classified, but this will not last. Details will spread soon, but this information is Eyes-Only for now.”He gestured towards the empty stage, and the hologram projectors came to life. It looked for a moment like a miniature dust-bowl tornado had sprang up. The whirling pixels came together, slowing down until a grassy planet was spinning in the center of the stage, large enough to be visible from the furthest back row. “This is Harvest,” Stanforth said. “One of the furthest colonies from Earth. Population is three million, and the primary industry is agricultural export.”The rotating planet dimmed, as if the entire planet was being enshrouded in darkness.“In early March, we lost contact with the planet,” Stanforth informed the room. “Scheduled container-ships failed to arrive. After backdating their normal departure times, no traffic had left Harvest after early February. The UNSC Argo was sent to investigate, and similarly fell out of contact. CENTCOM Four responded aggressively. A small squadron of three warships were sent to follow up with Argo and re-establish contact with the colony. One destroyer, two frigates. Captain Veredi took Heracles, Arabia, and Vostok, and entered the system.”
The Rear Admiral looked through the crowd as he spoke, and after a moment, his eyes locked onto mine, sitting in the middle of the Spartans.
For once, I didn’t know what this was about. My expectations of an award ceremony were obviously and completely incorrect.
Was this a mission briefing? Surely not.
No matter his promotion, Michael Stanforth agreed with the rest of us in the Spartan-II leadership group. The Spartans would not be deployed until after they had finished OCS and had their power armor. No sooner than that. Even if Stanforth had changed his mind upon receiving that star on his shoulders, it still didn’t make sense. Why brief Staff Sergeant Swanson’s cooks, or the science teams?
And… why tell brief us separately, if this information was going to spread soon?
“This is what they found,” Stanforth said. He was still looking at me, and I thought I could see the tiniest amount of… regret in this eyes. The grassy orb changed in a split-second. The green light emitting from the hologram suddenly snapped into a harsh red, and the planet’s fields and forests were gone. I caught my gasp in my throat, before it could escape, but I might as well have not bothered. Several of the civilian researchers had allowed their own shocked reactions to echo through the amphitheater. Everyone else, no matter civilian or military, stiffened in their seats and stared at the floating image in stunned horror.Harvest was… blackened. Burned. The floating orb had been replaced with a set of two-dimensional images, reflected three times like a reverse triptych, so that everyone could see it, no matter where they were sitting in the amphitheater. Where there had once been gorgeous grasslands, now there was scarred, scorched lands slathered in what looked like lava.
It was as if the entire planet had somehow come too close to its local star, and been roasted from pole to pole by the solar radiation. As if it had somehow regressed millions of years of planetary development, back to the volcanic stage of its existence.
“At this time, we can only assume that all inhabitants have been killed,” Stanforth said.
He wasn’t looking at the images, I thought to myself. He’d clearly already seen them before, but he wasn’t even glancing at them. Perhaps… he couldn’t bear to do so.The thought was distant, not conscious. I wasn’t trying to look at Stanforth, but my eyes kept slipping towards him, not out of any interest, but simply so that they didn’t have to see the destruction of Harvest.I could barely look at the images myself. My last life had shown me the horrors of industrialized warfare, but this… this was so far beyond the Rhine front that I was as just horrified as anyone else in the room.
For all that artillery had flattened the fields and shredded the trees, and bathed the world in blood and mud and rats, the Rhine front had still resembled a place on Earth. Mud was ugly, but it was dirt, the nurturing soil of agriculture. The water had been filthy, but it had still been the water of life. There had been clear sunny days, not just a constant overcast gloom.This… this was not Earth. It was hell, brought to life. It looked like an artist’s representation of the devilish afterlife, complete with splotches of higher intensity, as if to reflect where the most tainted of sinners were taken. The image was as high-definition as it could be, but I was very grateful that it was clearly a distant shot from a warship approaching the planet, and not the high-intensity resolution of one that orbited it.
“Captain Veredi also discovered… this… in orbit,” Stanforth continued, his voice hitching as he waved again, and the images changed once more. The ship that appeared on the screens was a bluish purple, an enormous thing that looked like an aquatic lifeform, some strange merger of whale and turtle. It had an ethereal beauty and grace to its curving hull, looking as if it would swim in the sea of stars, rather than brutally force its way through space on dirty engines. It was still clearly artificial, with straight lines denoting the separating lines between the rounded plates of its hull… but it was undoubtedly not human.
Alien, I thought, eyes wide, as I stared at it.
There was no other word for it, no other explanation. It was clearly the product of a design philosophy that was completely unknown on Earth. Squared edges had been replaced by rounded surfaces. I was no shipwright, but I could tell that they were probably losing a lot of internal space to those designs… which made me wonder why they were that way.
“The unidentified ship opened fire immediately,” Stanforth said.
The screens changed. Now they were videos. I watched, confused, as red light began spooling in narrow channels along the ship’s exterior. It was like the red light was illuminating a glyph of some kind, running in circular paths like a hula-hoop, before lashing outwards in a pure, straight-line blaze of crimson light.Energy weapons! I thought, awestruck at the sight.
Yet more surprises followed it. Blueish purple bolts, much wider and slower, though still faster than the UNSC missiles that were returning fire. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was… plasma, perhaps? It clearly wasn’t a missile, but it was almost organic, alive, in a way that reminded me of fire despite the fact it was happening in the airless void of space.
Missiles raced back from the UNSC ships, aimed at the alien craft. Point-defense turrets of some kind opened up, firing both with reddish beams of light, and with the same blue-purple bolts of plasma, though much, much smaller, and at a far faster rate of fire.
The alien equivalent of point defense cannons cut down many missiles, but not all – and then, to my terror, the missiles struck home and did nothing.
The alien ship’s surface disappeared for but a moment under the torrent of missiles… and then re-emerged with a glistening, glowing semi-transparent silver-blue shimmer. I could make out hexagonal patterns on it for an instant, and then it faded away, leaving the ship completely unmarked.
Shields, I thought, my breath stolen from my lungs.
“Arabia and Vostok were lost with all hands,” Stanforth said, as the video continued to play. “Captain Veredi chose to retreat… but not before the unidentified ship broadcast a message.”The video paused, and a recorded voice boomed across the amphitheater, in clear English. “Your destruction is the will of the Gods,” the thunderous, rage-filled voice declared. “And we… are their instrument.”“From what little we intercepted, we believe that these aliens call themselves ‘the Covenant’,” Stanforth began to talk again.
I wasn’t listening, as he continued. Those words were repeating in my head, like a pendulum swinging back and forth… Your destruction is the will of the Gods… and we are their instrument.I laughed. The Admiral’s voice cut off, and he glanced over to me, surprised by the interruption. But I wasn’t done. Laughter spilled from my throat as I stared at the frozen image of the alien warship. I laughed like a madwoman, my eyes wide, and my head thrown back as I howled like a hyena.
Morons, I thought to myself, as hysterical amusement filled me. We finally found alien life, and they’re morons.Zealous maniacs, followers of some hokey religion that insisted on destruction in some element. I knew so little about them, only this tiny fragment of their culture without context, without reference, and still, it was enough to know that these aliens were foolish, simplistic, brick-brained dullards!
The evidence was right in front of my face. The destruction of Harvest on a first contact. The attacks on UNSC ships before either communicating themselves or allowing the UNSC to atttempt it. It didn’t matter if these aliens, this ‘Covenant’ had been secretly observing Harvest since the first day humans had set foot on it, or if they had found it mere moments before deciding to blow it up!
Perhaps they’d tried to have a peaceful first contact. Perhaps the fault lay with humanity for some grievous cultural or religious offense. Perhaps the Governor of Harvest, despite being well-meaning, had done the equivalent of dropping his pants and mooning the Covenant, while flipping them off, while insulting their mothers!None of it changed the fact that the Covenant had attacked us. None of it changed that they had burned an entire world to a cinder. None of it changed that they had lost their temper like children.And this, when they were a spacefaring species! When they had clearly mastered enough technology to not only create their own spaceships and faster-than-light travel, but also to create laser weapons, plasma weapons, and even energy shields!Clearly, the Covenant were not simpletons. They were not dumb. But yet, they had just acted in the dumbest possible manner, demonstrating their idiocy!Tyrannies could not invent space travel, much less FTL. Those things, like all highly advanced science, required generations of cooperation and trust, building upon one another. When a great researcher dedicated their life to scientific study, they were doing so in part thanks to the knowledge that their labors would be celebrated, enjoyed, and faithfully acknowledged!
What was the point in becoming, say, an astronomer and studying the stars for decades – if you knew that as soon as you died, all of your notes would be destroyed, your telescope smashed, and your legacy burned to the ground? There was no point in that! A rare few would seek that knowledge so hard that they would do such a thing, but those men and women were one in a billion!
And why would their work be destroyed? Because tyrannies, oppressors, and authoritarian monsters of any political philosophy, cared for only one thing: themselves. They were selfish monsters, and while that did not automatically translate to an intolerance of science, it did result in egomania to such a degree that they would sooner declare war on the ocean than build a ship to cross it!Science required humility. To progress, you had to understand the immutable laws of nature, and adapt around them. You could not simply clap your hands and wish that the laws of thermodynamics did not exist! That was not science, that was insanity!It was an inevitability in any highly advanced scientific endeavor that a scientist would have to give bad news to a politician. I had done that years ago, when I had dropped the number of Spartan-II augmentations from seven to five! Vice Admiral Keeler was humble enough to understand that I understood the science better than him, and so he accepted my reasoning, rather than insisting that I was wrong, and firing me or executing me for my treasonous defeatism!Some worshippers of centralized authority loudly lauded the ability of a benevolent dictator or absolute monarch to take swift, decisive action to promote scientific advancements, but the flip side of that power was the ability to disseminate complete garbage. Just look at Lysenkoism!To put it succinctly, dictators tended to shoot messengers who brought them bad news, and alas, science is full of bad news! We fail a thousand times just to succeed once.And that, I guessed, was exactly what had happened to Harvest.I didn’t know if the Covenant had tried to talk to the local colonists and been offended by something, or if they had simply started shooting immediately – but clearly, they had become so furiously angry that their solution was to destroy the planet, rather than peacefully and calmly explain what the offense was, and negotiate for a remedy or relief. So clearly, the Covenant were not rational people, who could work together in humble cooperation, and invent such technologies.
But yet the fact remained: the Covenant clearly had a spaceship. An advanced one, so powerful and capable that it had not only annihilated Harvest, but also two-thirds of the UNSC squadron in less than a minute of combat! Three-to-one odds, and the UNSC Heracles had managed to retreat, with barely a scratch done to the enemy!
How could such inconsistencies exist together? Logic demanded simple answers! Alas for logic, reality was never simple. What we humans called logic was nothing more than constructed rules. It was our attempt to separate the messy nature of real life from our calculations. Filter out the noise, so to speak. It was possible that the Covenant was merely the name of their current government, not their species. One explanation was that they had indeed been humble and cooperative enough to achieve an interstellar civilization, but then after that stage, they had progressed through some kind of cultural decay, like modern-day Luddites. After all, the necessary actions to operate machinery and maintain their industry could have been reduced to rote memorization, reduced and reformed into some religious ritual.
There, of course, plenty of further explanations. More options, some of which were ludicrous, but which were entirely possible.
After all, just because something was unlikely didn’t mean that it was impossible. For centuries of the UNSC’s existence, humanity itself had been the proof of that: the Fermi Paradox showed that our own evolution was incredibly unlikely, yet it had indeed happened.
A societal decay, a culture shift, perhaps even some strange biological metamorphosis that altered their aggression. We knew nothing about them, and so the truth was unknowable to us.
Perhaps the Covenant hadn’t even invented ‘their’ technology! Perhaps they had been found and uplifted by some greater, more advanced species that had landed on their homeworld. If such an interstellar civilization made the mistake of assuming benevolence was the universal state of all life, it was entirely possible even for primitive cavemen or medieval warriors to overcome them, assuming that they had enough numbers and the more advanced species had been stupid enough to open the door of their spaceship. From there, they could clubbed their kindly benefactors to death, and then painstakingly discovered how to operate said ship, and spread across the galaxy as little more than up-jumped raiders and ravagers.Yet at the end of the day, it didn’t matter how these aliens had created or stolen their technological capability. What mattered was how they used it.And right now, they were using it like children! I was simultaneously scared out of my mind at the possibility of having to fight such powerful enemies… and disappointed beyond belief that such great powers were under the control of such morons!
It didn’t matter if they had invented their own technology as a peaceful civilization, and then mutated into this abomination, or if they had seized this technology by strength of arms. They were acting like spoiled, privileged brats, stealing daddy’s car for a joyride and crashing it, never knowing or valuing the cost of the automobile, nor the labor that had gone into its creation!
Uneducated, ill-tempered, and arrogant savages, tearing down ancient temples full of history and monuments to society, just so they could stand on the rubble and cheer at how powerful they were by comparison! Desecrators of not just the labors, properties, and knowledge that had existed on Harvest, but of the very concept of those things at all! You cannot negotiate with beings that believe both that the entire world is made of cardboard, and that therefore, it is theirs to smash and trample just for a momentary thrill!
Primitives, simpletons, barbarians!
They were brutes! The brutes did this, no one else! No other species! Only these brutes!
And that was perhaps what had aggravated me the most – the way that they were so damn similar to him!Being X… I still loathed the thought of that creature, that pathetic excuse for a higher being. No god was he, and so I named him as such. Right now, the comparison was unavoidable – the Covenant were highly powerful compared to us ‘mere’ humans, but they were so stupid, so idiotic, that I couldn’t help but wonder how they had ever managed to achieve that power in the first place… exactly like Being X!
Their actions made the comparison even more painful! When I had died in that first life, when I had been but a humble salaryman, doing my best to help my company… I had come before that monster, that daemon, that pathetic little worm that claimed godhood without any basis beyond pure brute strength. I had criticized him for his failures, I had pointed out his negligence and incompetence. I had given him offense! And what did Being X do, in response to my offense? He grew angry, defensive of his own pathetic nature, and he has lashed out with furious vengeance upon me!Exactly the same thing that the Covenant had done to Harvest. I still didn’t know what the offense was, but it clearly, there must have been something.Something about Harvest had enraged them, something had put them into such a foul mood that they did not simply kill the inhabitants of the planet, but tried to kill the planet itself! And then, when the UNSC squadron led by Heracles had arrived, they had continued their bloody-handed ways, and shattered two frigates like a petulant child smashing his toys!
And they had spoken.
Your destruction is the will of the Gods… and we are their instrument!
Egomania. Not because they believed in ‘the gods’, whatever gods those were. Yes, I myself had strong opinions about Being X, that arrogant little prick, but that did not mean that all religion, nor all religious peoples, were monsters.
No, the egomania was twofold: first, to presume that they could know the will of their gods, and secondly, to declare themselves as the instrument of said gods! It was like a backhanded slap from the biblical times; not just a strike, but a demonstration of status, an indicator that you stood above your victim, because he did not deserve to be stuck with a fist or an open palm.
These were not the actions of a people that questioned their purpose in life. Not the behaviors of those who wondered in curiosity. Not the steps of insightful and thoughtful debaters whose strove to define and classify the natural world, so that they might better understand its majesty!
No, these were the crimes of self-assured, confident monsters that believed without even the slightest hint of doubt that they were right, and God was on their side!
What need did they have for hesitance or questions? They were simple minds with complex technology, never appreciating the gifts that they had.With their unthinking aggression, they had just started a war! A war of extermination, of extinction, of existential survival.And that kind of arrogance just reeked of Being X. It smelled so strongly that I almost wanted to gag on the rancid stench. What better mimicry than to declare their superiority, and then pile on the false humility of insisting that their actions were in service of a greater, more universal power? I felt so many conflicting emotions, I was about ready to explode. Horror at the death of three million sentient beings. Anger at the justification spouted by the Covenant. Shame that I had been spending so many years fighting battles over paperwork and authorization, rather than genuinely helping out humanity, as I should have. Fear for the war to come, for surely this was only the beginning, and not the end.
But above all else… I felt sick, sadistic amusement at the pathetic nature of Being X, for his actions here.
Eight years ago, in my new bedroom in the Spartan-II compound, I had come face to face with the horrors of the program.
Back then I had stared at the mirror, at that damning ONI logo that was still engraved on my bathroom mirror, and I blamed myself for all of it.Oh, at first I was happy to blame Being X. I threw all the responsibility onto his feet, and renewed my hatred for that loathsome, insignificant worm, and his petty attempts at ironic revenge.
But after I had more time to think about the topic, I had changed my mind.
The worm that was Being X had not forced a pen into my hand on that fateful night in the Party House. He had not given me the idea through ‘divine’ inspiration, for I would have recognized his odious voice in my brain. He had not tricked me into the sheer unbridled stupidity that was my conscious, willing, and deliberate choice to submit our joke of a research paper to the University of Circumstance.No, those actions belonged to me, and David, and Paul, and Steve. They belonged to us, as humans with agency and choice and free will! I refused to diminish our responsibility for our actions, like a child pleading that he hadn’t intended to smash that window with his baseball. We had created that abomination, and we would destroy it. Both the evil and the good were ours, and I would not blame Being X for it.But at this very moment, eight years after that first day as an ONI employee… I doubted that conclusion.My ultimate conclusion was based on a simple, emotional premise: Being X was not competent enough to have created the bitter irony of the Spartan-II program. He was not clever enough to have trapped me in such a way! Therefore, it could not have been him, for he was not capable of it!The Spartan-II program was almost perfectly designed to puncture my ego and force me into a Morton’s Fork of suffering.
In my second life, I had been thrust into the horrors of World War One. From the earliest days, I had realized Being X’s plan was to force me through torment and suffering so that I would be humiliated and desperate enough to worship him. As far as traps go, it was basic and simple, but still effective.
As a perfectly logical response, I had turned the trap against Being X by volunteering to join the military, so that I might gain a safe rear-line posting that would avoid all the horrors to come. Even when he continued to interfere, arranging events such that I was thrust into the front lines anyway, I was still determined to survive, and so I begin to swim in the sea, rather than be drowned by it.
This third life, in contrast, had started slowly, safely. I hadn’t had the greatest childhood, but I had been warm, fed, and I had a family, even if they were distant. It was only well into my third decade of life that I had discovered the ‘trap’.
Being X had learned. The thought was almost painful to me, to admit that such an imbecile could learn, but he had.
Unlike the Great War, the Spartan-II Program had not been obvious, robbing me of the ability to prepare for it. Unlike the Great War, I did not have the ability to serve on the front lines, alongside my soldiers, trying to bring them all back alive. And most importantly, unlike the Great War, I was unable to dodge the moral complexities by simply falling back on international laws regarding warfare.
Every single failure of Being X, which I had navigated like an elite lawyer through the loopholes of a contract, had been painstakingly patched… until I was left in this position.
The tactics that I had used to survive both physically and morally had been removed. I was unable to simply dive in headfirst, shouldering all the burdens, and carrying the day through my own stubborn determination. I could not single-handedly research the augmentations, and the surgeries, and the psychology, and the power armor – forcing me into a situation where I would have to watch one of the Spartan cadets die!
And worst of all, the cherry on top of the sundae, was Visha.
Being X, that bastard, had tossed her soul into my own torment of reincarnation, and guaranteed that she was the least compatible cadet, the single person most likely to die! Just to twist the knife that little bit further. Just to ensure that I had a personal stake in the matter, that I would have to watch her die on the table.
My friends had saved me from that fate. I held no illusions about that.
If I had simply had three ONI scientists heading up the Augmentation, Surgery, and Power Armor Teams, then many of the children would have died, including Visha. If they had not been moral and caring souls, who were just as motivated to save the lives of the innocent as I was, then they would not have worked as hard, as long, as diligently as they had.
These labors had been complex and difficult, like a game of chess against the greatest of grandmasters. I had been pushed to my limits, trying to juggle ONI’s expectations with my own private desires to ensure the survival of all of the children.
Of course I had not seriously considered that Being X was my opponent. Being X was an idiot! He was not capable of such clever trickery! Instead, I believed that I was playing against human psychology, a much more intelligent and capable challenge.
Yet now, a moment after I had put my opponent into check, with only seven remaining Spartans in cryogenic stasis awaiting their personalized surgeries… my opponent flipped the board! All those clever political games, wasted! All those half-truthful conversations and promised favors, down the drain! All of my efforts to build a spider-web of silk to support my Spartans success! Smashed aside not by slick and studious schemes, but by the application of overwhelming blunt force trauma!
I had been playing this game for so long, and now, right before I ended it, my opponent threw away all standards and began to cheat! That, more than anything else, convinced me of the truth: this was Being X.Just like that bastard, I thought to myself. When he cannot win, he drowns the whole world in a Flood!
This angry response to my success, this reaction to his own failure, the aliens disclaimer of their religious extremism. Even the fact that this monstrous species that called itself the ‘Covenant’ – as if making their connection to Being X as obvious as possible! All these things cemented the belief in my mind.Being X had learned from my actions in that last life, but he had learned only the most superficial of things. He came up with counters to my specific actions, and had not changed his tactics, his methodology, his theory of mind! When he failed, Being X resorted to the same childish tantrum, and that was how I knew it was him! Not only were the Covenant practically a copy-past of his own personality and psychology, but his petulant resort to brute force was practically a hallmark for the so-called divine.
Just like when he had failed to kill me with overwhelming numbers of normal aerial mages. Just like when he had ‘adapted’ by saddling me with an insanely unbalanced mage orb. Just like when he had finally resorted to simply empowering up another girl and filling her with his borrowed power.
When Being X couldn’t fix a problem, his solution was always to grab a bigger hammer!
He could not cope with his own failures. Not like me! Not like David, Paul, and Steve, all of us who had seen exactly what our hands had wrought, and accepted our culpability in the Spartan-II program… and then done our best to fix that mistake.What bigger example of this inability of Being X existed, than my continuing torment at his hands? Yes, I had insulted him to his face. He deserved it! I do not deny that I spat in the face of a would-be god.
But more than four decades had passed since that original insult, three of those decades in this life alone! Even with a legitimate insult and grievance, plenty of humans would have moved on from the insult long ago. There was no point in holding a grudge over a mere conversation for that length of time, and it only resulted in one’s pain festering and fermenting inside the skin, worsening over time!If Being X had done the same thing to me that I had done to him, I would have carried a grudge for a few years. Perhaps a decade, certainly, I could admit that I was no ideal human. Two at the absolute worst. But by the third decade, I would have moved on! My job, my social activities, my life, those things would have been my primary focus! Not avenging some insult from years and year before!For a human, it was a matter of emotional stability. It was optimal, in some ways, to forgive and forget – not solely because it made you a more moral person as many religions insisted, but because it made you a calmer, less stressed person! You were letting go of emotional baggage that was holding you back!For a god?! For even the lowest of divine spirits, the equivalent of a psychopomp who moved souls from one life to another? That failure was atrocious!
How many souls had been missorted because Being X was still focused on me? How many lives had not gone to heaven, or to reincarnation, or to whatever was supposed to happen to them? How many people had been accidentally tossed into similar torments as my second life, not because of Being X’s deliberate malice, but instead his complete inability to perform his duties up to the most basic standard without getting distracted by his attempts to torture me?
How many had suffered because of Being X, that arrogant, birdbrained, conceited, doltish, egotistical, fatuous, grumpy, haughty, imbecilic, jeopardizing, knuckleheaded, loutish, moronic, nonsensical, oafish, pompous, querulous, rash, self-centered, thoughtless, unintelligent, vacuous, witless, xenophobic, yammering, zestless failure!
I was nothing like him. I perhaps had a partial habit of rationalizing my own faulty decisions, sure, but when I came face to face with my own failures, I owned up to it! I admitted my fault, confessed my sins, and fixed the damn things!
And the terrifying possibility existed that I had summoned the Covenant.
That I was responsible, if very distantly, for the destruction of Harvest.
I had prayed to him, after all.
I had prayed to that monster months ago, when the augmentations had just started and I faced the horrible realization that I was powerless to do anything more to help my Spartans. The moment when I realized why people pray: they felt the same powerlessness as I did, and they longed to do something, anything, to tilt the scales just a little more. That moment of weakness…
Yes, I had stopped myself before I had pleaded with that monster for his aid. That did not change the fact that for one moment, one precious moment of failure, I had genuinely prayed to him… before cursing him and all his failures.
It was possible that Being X had planned all of this from the start, and my prayer meant nothing more than spitting in his eye while he watched my struggles for his own sick pleasures.
But it was also possible that he had not planned any of it. That only my prayer had brought about this situation, alerting him somehow, and causing him to send the Covenant as punishment for my refusal to bend to his will.
The ambiguity was painful. Had it all been some grand plan that I had defeated, causing this pathetic response? Or had the entire Spartan-II program been my own fault, yet my thoughtless prayer to Being X?
I didn’t know. I couldn’t know! Not unless that bastard decided to speak to me again, and he had been silent for decades.
All those thoughts swirled together in my head, as they had been since the moment Stanforth started this breath. All of them, at once! The stupidity of the Covenant, the primitive culture that their actions implied, Being X flipping the table in a rage, the possibility that I had prompted him to create the Covenant, all of it combined in the back of my head.
I laughed, and I cried, because what else could I do in response to such things?The amphitheater swam back into my vision as my laughter finally started to die down. The ceiling’s overhead lights stabbed into my retinas as I reopened my eyes. As I slowly lowered my head, I realized abruptly that the entire room was silent, and everyone was staring at me.
Every person. Every face. Every set of eyes.
The six other members of the program’s leadership. The assembled military trainers. The civilian scientists. The newly augmented, yet still teenaged Spartans.
I was holding the entire room’s attention as my laughter echoed off the far walls and returned back to me. Their faces were pale, their eyes wide. My behavior had shocked them, and they looked like they were unable to tear their gaze from me.
Self-conscious surged in my veins. Embarrassment.
How long had I been laughing? Was it only seconds? Minutes? Surely no longer than a few minutes, or someone would had grabbed me and tried to shake me out of it! The Spartans were trained in first aid, including what to do in the event of a psychological breakdown. Surely, if it had been too long, they would have used that training!I didn’t know how long my little mental breakdown had lasted, and as I came back to my senses, I knew that there was no salvaging this.
Eight years of carefully building my own reputation as a serious professional, balancing my morality against my effectiveness, and I had blown it all up by laughing like a madwoman.The laughs were fading, but they were not yet entirely gone. I was hiccupping and snorting and still letting out a laugh every few seconds. I had to stop this! I had to do something to ensure that I didn’t wind up consigned to the looney bin! If I wasn’t around, then I couldn’t protect my Spartans!“M-morons,” I said out loud, my giggles interrupting the word.
The silence was enough that my voice reached everyone in the room. Rear Admiral Stanforth, still standing on the stage in the middle of giving the briefing that I had interrupted, opened his mouth to say something. No words came out, and he worked his jaw for a moment, and tried again.“What?” Stanforth asked with a loud and demanding voice.
Some of the assembled trainers shook themselves as Stanforth spoke, presumably as they remembered his presence and realized that not only had I gone mad, but I had done so in front of an Admiral.
“Morons,” I said again, trying to force the words out, past the hysterical, panicking amusement and sorrow that clogged my chest. “They’re – they’re morons!”
Stanforth stared at me, clearly not comprehending.
I tried to stand up. My legs weren’t working properly, so I grabbed onto the shoulder of the Spartan sitting in front of me – Anton, I think. He grabbed my arm to support me, inhaling sharply as he did, and I pulled myself upwards with the leverage, forcing my stiff legs to hold me up.
The lights in the amphitheater shifted to me, and a spotlight flashed on, singling me out. It was the automatic software, most likely.
“The Covenant,” I said, pointing one hand at the frozen image that still hovered next to Stanforth, where the Covenant warship was floating. “Their society, their culture, their technology. It doesn’t make sense. It – it can’t make sense!”
My giggles finally stopped, and I tried to clear my throat, but it was hard. The tears that had been streaming down my face were still coming, so strongly that I felt stings of pain from my tear ducts.
“Technological development,” I tried to explain. “To achieve spaceflight, and FTL, and all those things, you have to have cooperation. You have to… to work together!”
Get it together, Tanya! I thought to myself, as I winced at how jumbled and confusing my words were.
“Any society that unforgiving and fanatical could not create that ship!” I said, pointing at the ship itself. “Someone would mouth off. Someone would offend a priest. You can’t kill off all your scientists for heresy, and still create such things! And look at them! They burned an entire planet for a first contact! They’re not kind enough to make a ship like that!”
No one seemed to understand. The civilian research teams were staring at me in unabashed, open confusion, while the military trainers and personnel were barely holding onto their trained mannerisms.
Shit. It wasn’t working. They weren’t getting my point. I needed to change tactics.
“Their technology and their actions do not make sense,” I tried, simplifying my argument even further. “Which means one of those two things wasn’t always this way. Either they stole or copied the technology from another culture, or they weren’t always murderous barbarian idiots!”
“Doctor Halsey,” Rear Admiral Stanforth said slowly, as his brow furrowed. “You think the Covenant… are idiots?”
“Yes!” I exclaimed, raising my arms wide in incredulity. “Think of the Cold War, in the 20th century. The nuclear stalemate between two vastly different ideologies who hated each other, who could have ended all life on Earth with the press of a button! But they didn’t. For all their differences, they shared a common fear of annihilation and a mutual desire to live. They had the technology to do it, but their culture prevented it!”
I pointed that the ship again, and my voice rang out in the room as I spoke as clearly as I could.
“If the Covenant are so fanatical, yet have such powerful technology, they should have killed each other in a fratricidal purity spiral long before now!”
Rear Admiral Stanforth hesitated, seemingly taken aback by my insistence. He was staring at me, and something flashed across his face, some emotion that I was too far away to distinguish. He turned, and stared at the Covenant warship, biting his lip.
I looked around the room, my own eyes wide as I searched the faces of everyone I could see. They needed to understand. Not just because it would keep me from being imprisoned for insanity, but because this was important!
The Covenant’s fanaticism, their technology! One of those two things, maybe both, did not make sense! And the sooner we figured out which of them it was, the better our chances were of survival!
But nobody seemed to understand.
Not fully, anyway. I saw glimpses, here and there, of shock and horror spreading across individual expressions, as their heads whipped back and forth between the briefing holograms, and me, standing there and pointing.
I looked, first, to the six other members of the Spartan-II Program’s leadership cadre. Rear Admiral Stanforth, Gunnery Sergeant Johnson, Chief Petty Office Mendez, David Meyer, Paul Wu, and Steve Sullivan.
They were some of my closest friends and most trusted allies in the Office of Naval Intelligence. I prayed that they, above all other people in this room, would understand what I was getting at.
If the Covenant were fanatical, and had not invented the technology to create that ship, then perhaps they were small in number! Perhaps they only had a few extremely powerful ships, and we could swarm them under a tide of superior numbers!
If the Covenant were inventive, and had only recently become fanatical, then we might be able to negotiate with their less radical members! Even if it came to a war, we could stir up an internal revolution, a reformation of their religion, by successfully hammering at their cultural stress lines.
Yes, we had only encountered them once thus far, but this was a weakness. A failure point that we could strike at, and hammer home.
And I knew it well, because it was the exact weakness that came with so many of Being X’s simplistic schemes!
He gave Doctor Schugel the inspiration to make but a single Type 95 Computational Orb, in order to secure my loyalty. Had I disobeyed my orders and smashed the damn thing, there would be no replacement unless Being X descended to gift Schugel another.He pushed Mary Sioux, that poor deluded fool, into becoming his attack dog, and she had jumped willingly into the fray! Yet when she grew ever more distant from her comrades, slowly losing her mind to the madness, that same fanaticism had ruined her ability to coordinate with those comrades. She had the power to kill me, but she had never managed it because her emotions blinded her.
I hoped that my friends would see that… but as I looked to them, I saw only that they were staring at me in concern.
Stanforth had turned away from the hologram, and he looked like he was going to say something to me, before swallowing the words. Gunnery Sergeant Johnson looked about a second away from standing up and walking over to me, his eyebrows nearly merging with his hairline as he stared with wide eyes. Chief Mendez, for all that his face looked professionally blank, had the glimmer in his eyes that meant he was holding back several questions.David, Paul, and Steve were no better. David was gaping at me openly, his heart worn on his sleeve, and his concerns evident. Paul was more despondent, sadder, but he too seemed to be on the verge of tears. And Steve, poor Steve, who had never been too involved in the training of the children or their augmentations, seemed confused and torn… but even he was looking at me with apprehension. They were too focused on me! They didn’t see the larger picture!I wanted to scoff, but I shouldn’t. I had spent most of my time in ONI believing that these people hated me, and I could not bear to criticize them for caring about me. This was a monumental event, a crucial turning point in human history… and yet, their first concern was my well-being. How could I disdain that love?My head turned, and I looked to the military soldiers. The trainers, the Orions, even the chefs from Sergeant Swanson’s section that had been included in this briefing room. They would be the ones to confront the Covenant first, and I could only hope that they, at least, understood what I was trying to convey!
But no. My heart sank as I scanned their faces.
The combined Navy and Marine Corps enlisted men looked highly conflicted. Not confused, precisely, not lost and bewildered… but worried all the same. Some of them were staring at the hologram screen, and some were staring at me with pinched expressions.They looked… scared. They looked like they understood my message about how powerful and dangerous this Covenant was.
But they had missed the second, and more important point – that the Covenant was fragile! Weak! That if we pressed them hard, kicked in the door of their undoubtedly rotten house, that the entire thing would collapse!The soldiers looked like they knew instinctively that they were going to lose this war, and they were fighting off that infectious fear with all the courage they could muster.Next, I looked to the scientists. Civilians they might be, but they were far more educated than the soldiers. They should have understood the sociological implications that I was trying to convey.At first, I felt relief when I saw the expressions on the Psychology Team, the men and women who had helped train my Spartans to be well-rounded, logical, emotionally stable individuals. They, out of everyone in the room, seemed to understand what I was getting at!But it wasn’t helping them. I watched as their expressions twisted into anguish. Some of them whispered to the other civilians, and understanding seems to spread across that half of the amphitheater like a wildfire – but it wasn’t encouraging them! It wasn’t lifting their spirits, but instead crushing them underfoot!The science teams did understand what I was getting at. They grasped the tiniest glimpse of what I meant… and it horrified them. Like an ant walking across a keyboard, only to realize exactly what they were walking across, and to become paralyzed, terrified, and dumbstruck by the realization. And last, but certainly not least, I looked to the Spartans.I was still standing among them, as I had decided to sit with the teenagers at the start of this briefing. I was closest to them, and I could see their expressions more clearly than any other group I had just been looking at.Among them, I saw mixtures of each of the previous sets. I saw their personal concern for my well-being that came from the leadership cadre. I saw the fear of the enemy that came from the soldiers. I saw the comprehension of the scale of the problem that came from the scientists.But most of all… I saw Samuel.
Samuel Westergaard. Spartan-034. One of the trio of troublemakers with John and Kelly. One of the biggest and strongest Spartans, a quiet listener who could nonetheless cheer up any of his fellow cadets if they were down in the dumps.He was sitting right next to me, and he was already growing swiftly thanks to the growth hormones. At fifteen, he was already as tall as many of the trainers, and his sandy blonde hair and green eyes stood out as he stared up at me in concern.A distant fact flickered in the back of my head. A memory from when I had taken the time to read through the personnel files of every single Spartan cadet, out of guilt for not recognizing Visha earlier. It was trivia. Unimportant at the time. But now, the fact took on a terrifying new edge.
Samuel was from Harvest.
That was his homeworld up on the image, burned into an ashen husk that glowed with pools of molten crust. Those were his people. That was his family, up there, dead on the screen!Alone out of all the Spartans from the first wave of augmentations, Samuel had chosen to stay behind on Reach. He’d said it was because he wanted to help the second wave of Spartans acclimatize to their augmentations, so that the Orions didn’t have to risk so much. When he’d come to me to ask that, I had thought that he might have had another, secondary reason, but I hadn’t pushed him on it, because I trusted the boy.Yet now… that meant that Sam was alive. Had he left on the fastest courier ship, he would have nonetheless arrived months after Harvest had fallen silent. He’d only been augmented in early March, and I’d released the children for their home visits in late May. He would have arrived in time to see his homeworld gone, and then the Covenant ship would have blown the courier out of the sky.“Sam,” I murmured, placing a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Are you okay?”The Spartan cadet looked at me in confusion for a moment – and then he flinched. A shudder ran through his spine, and he blinked, hard, as if suppressing a tear.“I’m… no,” Samuel replied, his voice tight. He swallowed, and then he met my gaze evenly, his grief fading. “I’m not okay, but I will be.”“Oh, my dear boy,” I whispered, the words barely loud enough for him to hear, private from all the others in this crowded amphitheater. “We are going to make this right, Sam. We are going to beat them.”The lies dripped from my tongue, but there was nothing else I could say. All I could do was hold up morale, and try to reassure the Spartan who had just lost every tie to his old life, mere weeks after I had tried to give it back to him.Samuel looked away from me. His head turned to the other Spartans, to the sea of faces that were looking at us from higher and lower rows, watching our interaction. I saw nods out of the corner of my eyes. Samuel was exchanging looks with them, as if checking for their approval or agreement on something.Then, after a long moment, all those Spartans turned their heads just a fraction, to look to me. Sam reached up and placed his own hand on top of mine, and squeezed gently.“I know, Doctor,” Samuel said, his voice firming up. “How can we help?”