It was past midnight when the phone at Steve Sullivan’s bedside rang. The scientist jolted, legs locking up, blankets falling away as he sat up in his bed in an instinctive reaction. Loud, shrill, piercing – it was a sound that he’d rarely ever heard over the last eight years, and never so late at night.
He shook his head and rubbed his eyes.
What the hell is going on? Steve wondered, as his sleepy brain slowly roused itself from the interrupted REM cycle. Are we under attack?No, no, that couldn’t be right, he realized a moment later. If they were under attack, the compound’s alarms would be going off, not his goddamn bedside phone.
He reached over and grabbed it quickly, cutting off the ear-shredding noise.“What is it?” Steve barked into the phone, unhappy and unwilling to hide it.
“This is Chief Mendez,” came the voice of Franklin Mendez. “We need you in the secondary mess hall, immediately.”Steve stared at the phone for a moment in confusion, then at his clock. This late? What the hell?“Why?” he asked, not bothering to hide his confusion. “What’s going on, Frank?”There was a pause. “I’d prefer to explain in person,” said the Chief Petty Officer, with a tone that Steve had never heard from the man: worry. “I apologize for the late call, but you need to get here as soon as possible. The others are calling David and Paul right now.”What the hell? This was making less sense by the minute
The only reason that Steve himself was even at the compound was because Catherine had scheduled a meeting for tomorrow, first thing in the morning. It had been easier for him and Paul to fly up last evening and spend the night in their rarely-used guest quarters, rather than make the morning flight. Why the hell would they be called in to this late-night meeting? David himself, sure. Maybe there was a medical issue or something. He was a doctor. But why drag in Steve and Paul?
A thought struck him. “What about Catherine?” Steve demanded.There was silence on the line for a moment, and then Franklin spoke with a very tight voice.“Catherine’s already here,” he said. “She’s fine, don’t worry.”Don’t worry? Steve thought to himself, even more alarmed. People didn’t say things like that, not about Catherine Halsey!
Clearly, something had gone horribly wrong.
“I’m on my way,” Steve told him, before putting the phone back on its hook and rushing to get dressed.
Xxxx
The secondary mess hall was brightly lit, with all its lights on, as Steve entered.
Unlike the primary mess hall, this secondary one was buried underground, as were many of the compound’s structures. For safety reasons, regulations kept all underground passages lit at all times, just at differing levels of illumination. At night, they were only lit by half the usual lights.
Steve winced at the intensity of the lights as he came in from the hallway, and he was immediately alarmed to see Catherine Halsey laying on the floor on her side, her head resting on a padded uniform jacket, and clearly unconscious. “What happened?” he asked, hurrying over. “Is she okay?”“We were drinking,” said Michael Stanforth, who was kneeling next to her in his undershirt. “She drank too much.”No shit, Steve thought to himself venomously, as he crouched down and checked her out. He wasn’t David, and he couldn’t wait for the man to arrive, but he did recognize that she was in the proper recovery position, so that she wouldn’t choke on her own vomit.
This was a new experience for him. He’d drank with Catherine before, of course, so he knew that the woman could handle alcohol.
He had never seen her so incapacitated like this. Even back on that horrible night, when they’d dreamed up their super-soldier project, Catherine had been awake and conscious for the whole thing! Drunk, sure. Slurring, a little. But not passed out, unconscious!
“Oh my God,” came Paul’s voice behind him.
“Move!” David Meyer barked, as the sound of stampeding feet approached them. Steve shuffled to the side, hurrying quickly out of the larger man’s way as David came in like a bull moose. If he hadn’t, he knew that David would have physically knocked him over. “How long ago did she pass out?” David demanded, checking Catherine’s pulse. “What else has she eaten? Any vomiting? Any sign of allergic reaction?”“She passed out two minutes ago,” Avery Johnson said. He was sitting at a table nearby that had several empty liquor bottles, and he was watching with a heavy gaze. “We had dinner a couple hours ago. No vomiting. No allergic reaction.”Steve stood up and got out of David’s way. He looked to Paul, who was wearing a set of threadbare pajamas that Steve hadn’t seen since their days in the Party House, fifteen years before. Steve himself was wearing his rumpled day clothing, since he didn’t like pajamas. The whole scene felt surreal. The bright lights of the underground mess hall. Catherine the unstoppable, laying down on the floor. The clash of rumpled clothing from the three civilian scientists, and the uniforms of the three military members, with Catherine as the awkward seventh member that mixed both worlds.“Will she be okay?” Michael Stanforth asked David. “Yes, she should be,” David replied after a moment. “Someone will need to monitor her throughout the night, though, to make sure nothing happens. We should take her to the med bay.”“She’d hate that,” Paul pointed out. “It would be an insult to her pride.”“We’re not taking her to the med bay,” Stanforth said, and the words landed like the boots of a MJOLNIR prototype, smashing right through Steve’s attention. “Not yet, anyway.”
He glanced at Paul, who was just as lost as he was, and over at David, whose expression was slowly tightening in that angry, determined way.“Why not?” David asked, firmly.“Because before she passed out, Doctor Halsey told us that this program shouldn’t exist,” Rear Admiral Stanforth said, his eyes locked on them. “She said that it was merely a thought experiment, and that she never thought anyone would actually make it. Perhaps one of you would care to explain.”
Steve froze. It was instinctive. The same animal behavior that hit little baby deer when they realized that a grizzly bear was staring at them.Eight years, they’d kept ONI from finding out that their original super-soldier paper was a joke. And now, only after they’d put most of the children through the program, the secret had finally come out – and because Catherine had gotten drunk once again! There was no worse sentence for them to hear in the entire world.Oh God, they were going to be killed. Their friends were military to the core, and it didn’t matter if they were on a first-name basis – this was Treason, and they’d coerced the UNSC into doing it to themselves!
His heart was already racing. Steve couldn’t hold back his shudders, and Rear Admiral Stanforth’s eyes spotted that, before flicking back to continue glaring at the others. “What did Catherine say?” David asked, his voice low and tense.“No,” Rear Admiral Stanforth replied, denying the man’s question. “Tell us about the original paper.”“It sounds like Catherine already told you plenty,” David said, his voice still tight.“Doctor Meyer, I have the highest respect for you,” Stanforth said, staring at the man with eyes like lasers. “But if you don’t stop stalling right now, I will be forced to ask less politely.”
Steve took a step back. He wanted to run for the doors, to try to escape the mountain that was about to crash down on them – but there was no escape. They were hundreds of miles deep in the Highland Mountains, surrounded on all sides by military personnel that had just learned, at long last, that they had kidnapped seventy-five children for someone’s college prank.“Well, since our fourth musketeer is unable to explain, then I guess I’ll have to do it,” David said slowly, his voice pitched a little oddly. Both Steve and Paul heard the emphasis on that word, and at the same moment, they looked at each other, eyes wide as they realized exactly what was about to happen.David Meyer was about to lie his ass off.
Catherine had never liked their argument about the Three Musketeers versus the four musketeers, and she’d made that painstakingly clear over their years of friendship at the University of Circumstance. Steve himself was the only person who actually insisted that there were four, and the rest of the Party House had always razzed him about there only being three.
It was a point of familiarity with them, a common refrain – Steve always insisted that there were four, and everyone else disagreed.So whenever Catherine, Paul, or David used the term ‘four musketeers’, that was their little code-word. They had used it when the campus police had caught the four of them dispersing that riot with the homemade foam grenades, and half a dozen other situations that they’d found themselves in.Across from Steve, Paul pressed his lips closed in a visible sigh of silence. Steve didn’t dare acknowledge that with a nod, but he got the message – shut the hell up, and let David talk our way out of this.But could David do that? When Michael was so angry, and Avery and Franklin looked like they were ready to grab steak knives from the kitchen and start torturing them for answers? “Originally, our paper was created as a thought experiment,” David said, repeating what Stanforth had already said. “It was not intended as a ready-to-ship proposal. Much of it was… theoretical. You’re all aware of how much work we had to do in order to get the augmentations into a usable state, compared to the original proposal.”Franklin nodded, his eyebrows pressed together in concentration. Steve knew that out of all of them, he had been there the longest, from the very first day. The science teams had been hired later, while Stanforth had been oversight, and hadn’t actually met Halsey until later on.“Importantly, Doctor Halsey didn’t plan for this project to be created,” David said cautiously, as if he was putting his weight on an ice sheet over a frozen lake. “She was only hired the day before they unfrosted the children.”“Say what?” Avery Johnson snapped, his mocha skin reddening in rage and he shot up from his seat. “That can’t be true!”
“No, that’s true,” Michael Stanforth told him. “You knew?” Franklin Mendez asked, with a note of wonder in his voice. “All this time?”
“I thought it didn’t matter,” Michael replied wearily. “Keeler said that it was her plan. I trusted him. She seemed so… convinced. I’ve seen the recording of her interview. She was talking about how her work would solve the Insurrection – and the paper is about that. It didn’t seem to matter, whether she was hired prior to the children being kidnapped, or not. We were still following her master plan.”“But it wasn’t her plan,” David said softly. “It was… just an idea. When she was talking about her work solving the Insurrection, she meant her economics papers. Not the supersoldiers. We did treat it seriously, and we put our best work into it, but… it was just a hypothetical. A ‘what if’.”Steve’s face twisted into a frown, and he fought it, clenching his cheeks to keep them still and praying that none of the military men noticed.
That isn’t true at all, he thought to himself. We didn’t treat it seriously at all! We were drunk, and we were just making shit up. So why’s David pretending that we weren’t? Why lie about that, of all things?The realization hit him after a moment. Their original paper had been a drunken joke, yes. But the joke wasn’t that super-soldiers were ineffective wastes of money, or that science could be immoral. The former was complete speculation, and the later was well-known.
The joke had been that governments were stupid enough to spend trillions of dollars on pseudo-science, because they were so stupid. It was all about how much money they could waste, and still have dumb bureaucrats buy their snake-oil!
It was, as David had said at the time, A Modest Proposal – a satirical idea that mocked someone’s ideas with parody so strong that it was obviously insane. The original modest proposal had been a joking suggestion that poor Irish families should sell their children as food for the rich to solve their poverty woes, for crying out loud.
But the problem was, the UNSC hadn’t realized they were the target of the joke… and by actually making the Spartan-II Program, they’d accidentally proved the satire to be true!Yes, Michael, Avery, and Franklin knew that the Program was a thought experiment, but they didn’t know that second part; that it was a joke about them. And that distinction mattered. A hypothetical was harmless. Plenty of scientists made hypotheticals!
But a treasonous satire that had been executed in full seriousness… that looked a lot more like an conspiracy, and it made them all look guilty.
“We were all experts in some part of it, as you know,” David continued, in that calm, lion-tamer kind of a voice. “Combining our talents to make the super-soldier project was a natural extension of that.”“Because of Halsey’s past history,” Michael said, nodding along. David stopped. He looked confused. Steve was confused, himself. What was Michael saying?“We, uh… I’m sorry, what?” David started to say, before cutting himself off and looking at Michael Stanforth in complete befuddlement. “What do you mean, her past history?”“She’s an Insurrectionist,” Michael said, gesturing with one hand towards the unconscious form of Catherine Halsey. “That’s why she wrote the training and tactical doctrines, instead of any of you. She was already a soldier.”
What? Steve wondered, bewildered by how the conversation had just changed. Yeah, Catherine had been the one to write the training and tactical doctrine, but that didn’t mean anything. After all, pretty much all of that stuff had been generic outlines. There were no real details, no real specifics!
Once, after that horrible trial, she had told Steve and the other members of the Party House that she’d actually had to write the training plans day-by-day for the first couple months of the program. Since they’d never actually planned to make the paper a reality, it was a huge hole in the execution, and she’d been forced to frantically make it all up, before they realized what that hole meant – that it was all fake.
Steve bit his own tongue, hard enough to draw the copper-taste of blood. If Stanforth already knew about the joke, then they were in deep trouble. But if he thought that they were all Insurrectionists, it was gonna be so much worse. They were going to be shot behind the schoolhouse and throw out the back of a Pelican into the deep mountains, where the wolves could eat their bodies and remove all traces. They were dead!“Uhh…” David mumbled, drawing the single syllable out in a combination of terror and confusion that Steve wholeheartedly shared with him.“Relax,” Avery said, nearly growling the word. “She’s a former Insurrectionist. We already know that she defected. We’re not gonna tell ONI.”You are ONI! Steve felt like blurting out, and it took a near mammoth effort for him to keep his mouth shut.“That doesn’t make any sense,” Paul muttered in disbelief. “Catherine’s not an Innie. We’ve known her for years.”“It was before you met her,” Franklin Mendez said quietly.“We met her when she was fourteen,” Steve protested. “She came to the University at the age of twelve! That’s not possible. Yeah, sure, the Innies do recruit children sometimes, but you guys are acting like she was some kind of military genius, and she wrote the Art of War!”Three heads turned to Steve, and then glanced amongst each other.“Catherine’s training doctrine was among the best we’ve ever seen,” Michael Stanforth said.“I know the training doctrine,” Steve reminded him. “I was there when she wrote it. It was – ” he cut himself off, making a conscious effort not to say that it was all a joke, because that would get them shot – “It was an outline. Like, basic stuff. She cribbed most of it from other people!”“She didn’t,” Franklin disagreed. “She must have,” Steve insisted. “And I’m telling you, she didn’t,” Franklin snapped, his voice rising abruptly as he glared at Steve. “Training special forces is a rare skill. Leading them in combat, describing their tactics, that’s just as rare. When you combine those skills, and you want the highest level? There were five people in the entire galaxy who can do that. Catherine Halsey is the sixth.”Steve stared at the man, stunned by how loud the normally stoic man was.“I would know,” Franklin said, gesturing at himself with his thumb. “I’m one of the best trainers in the UNSC, Steve. But I have my limits. I can’t lead men into combat like Avery could. But Catherine is better than me at training, and she’s better than Avery at commanding. We’ve seen it ourselves in the training exercises.”“Those were just exercises,” Paul protested. “They were like… drills. We know that Catherine participated, but weren’t you guys taking it easy on her?”“Easy on her?” Avery shot back, with a half-laugh of incredulity. “Doc, you know all those special forces units we brought in? The ODSTs, the Rangers, the PTG, the SEALS? They don’t know that she’s a civilian. They think she’s one of us. She’s good enough that she tricked almost every damn one of them into believing it! Hell, she’s got her name on the leaderboard, over in the Killing House!”“Huh?” Steve blurted out, wide-eyed. “But… that doesn’t make any sense!”“Even if she was an Insurrectionist, that was decades ago,” David argued, far more calmly than Steve or Paul. “We’re not disagreeing with you, or saying that Catherine didn’t do those things. We’re just confused. It’s hard to believe.”“Yes, exactly,” Paul agreed. “You really think that the Insurrection could train up a twelve-year-old to be as good as the best special forces in the UNSC? That’s insane.”David bit his lip, and gave Paul a quick look of disapproval, probably at his word choice. The whole situation was hard to believe, exactly as David said, but the psychologist was doing his best to manage the situation – and most importantly, keep the military servicemen from realizing that the paper hadn’t just been a mental exercise, but a sarcastic, mocking one.
Steve winced. He and Paul weren’t making it any easier on the big guy with their wild interjections.“It is insane,” Michael Stanforth agreed, quietly. “But we know it can be done. After all, we just did the same thing, seventy-five times.”
The words rang in Steve’s head for a moment. They didn’t connect, just bouncing around in his empty, exhausted, and uneasy mind.“No,” David said, quickly. His face had gone shock white. “You can’t mean that.”“Mean what?” Steve demanded.“We think Catherine was a super-soldier,” Avery Johnson said. Steve blinked. He opened his mouth to reply, but nothing came out. He was speechless.“Twelve-years-old is when your paper originally suggested the augmentations,” Michael added. “But Catherine delayed it for two years, at the risk of lesser effectiveness.”“Yeah, because she didn’t want them to die,” Paul snapped. “We needed more time, to increase the odds.”“Exactly,” Michael said, which made zero sense. Then he continued: “Why was the original age twelve? She went through it at the same age, so she knew it could be done. Why was she so devoted to having zero deaths? Because she was the only survivor.”“This is nonsense,” Steve exclaimed, finally finding his words. “You’re just as drunk as she is! Why the hell are you suddenly bringing this up? Why would you ever come up with this theory?”The three military men stared at Steve, but he didn’t give them a chance to interject.“This is just cruel!” he snapped, pointing to where Catherine was laying on the ground in the recovery position. “So she’s a good soldier. So maybe she’s an Innie. So what? Why would you think that she was augmented, just because of those two things?”Avery opened his mouth to reply, anger on his face, but Michael Stanforth stopped him with one hand.“She ripped a titanium grab bar off a bulkhead,” Michael told them. “Back on the Hopeful, right after Visha’s surgery went wrong. Paul was there. She screamed and ran off, and you carried her out of that hallway, remember?”“…yes,” Paul murmured, his brow scrunched. “Do you remember the door?” Michael pressed. “You came in just after she ripped it off, but do you remember the bar of metal on the ground?”Paul didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to – his eyes shot wide as Steve watched.“Maybe the door was loose,” Steve suggested, desperately. “She sheared the bolts right off,” Avery told them. “Just like some of the accidents that we saw after the Spartans got augmented. The shape of her fingers are crushed into that door handle. That door wasn’t loose, and that ain’t normal.”
“And there’s only one reasonable explanation for that strength,” Franklin added, finishing the thought for the other two men. “She was augmented. The timeline makes sense.”“Oh, God,” David whispered, as Steve’s head raced with this – this impossibility. “It… it would explain so much. Do you remember that riot, Steve? The one we broke up with the foam?”“With the mortar?” Steve said, remembering the incident vaguely. “Yeah. That doesn’t prove anything. Lots of kids make potato guns with hair-spray cans. It’s not hard to make a mortar. Paul did the real work with the chemistry. So Catherine made an improvised mortar, so what?”“How did she know how to aim the mortar?” David pointed out. “She didn’t calibrate it. She didn’t have any sights. But yet she hit the mob dead-center on the first round. She even got the fuse’s timer right!”Steve blinked. He didn’t remember that – but then, he had been further back during that incident. That’s why David and Catherine had been caught by the campus police, but not him and Steve, despite the fact that they’d been the ones to make the foam shells.“The Insurrection taught her how to handle mortars,” David insisted. “We taught the same thing to the Spartans, just in case they would need those skills. And do you remember when she wanted to fight all those football players? The party? When that jackass was hitting on some girl, and Catherine defended her? When she broke that guy’s thumb?”Steve did remember that one. He remembered how fast Catherine had moved to grab his hand, how loud the crack of the man’s bone snapping was.
Now that he thought about it, that motion had been almost inhumanly fast – as fast as some of the Spartans moved, during their rehabilitation. He’d seen Kelly move faster, but every other Spartan could react and attack just as fast as Catherine had on that night... and aside from Catherine, he had never seen anyone else move so fast in his life.“And she wasn’t scared,” David pointed out. “All those guys were ready to fight her, and she stood her ground – she didn’t know we were there, that we were backing her up! What the hell would give a woman so much confidence in that position? Augmentations. She knew that she was stronger, faster, and better trained.”“We think there’s a possibility that she deliberately made friends with you three,” Michael said softly. “Your areas of expertise… it all lined up far too well. Her tactical training, David’s medical and psychological skills, Paul’s biochem, Steve’s power armor. It was exactly what she needed to make a better program.”“Time-out,” Steve said, waving his hands in dismay. “You said it earlier – Catherine never intended to make the program. None of us did! And now you’re saying that she made friends with us just so she could? Listen to yourselves, that doesn’t make sense!”“She never wanted it to happen again,” Michael agreed. “But the Insurrection managed it once already. Writing the paper was a warning to the UNSC. She was the canary in the coal mine. She was trying to let us know about the possibility of super-soldiers. Without admitting that she’d been a part of it, because that would have put her in extreme danger.”“Regret, too” Avery Johnson added. “Can’t you think of something you regret? Something that you wish you’d never done? You can’t tell me that you haven’t thought back to something from long ago, and spent way too much time analyzing it, inspecting it – wishing that you could do it again, but better this time. That’s what she did! That’s what the paper was.”Yeah, I can think of something like that, Steve thought to himself. The paper. How many nights have I spent wishing we’d never written that damn paper? And… damn it, Avery’s right. How many times have I wished I could have just explained it better?Steve Sullivan looked down at Catherine Halsey, and his world shifted as he tried to fit this strange puzzle-piece into his mental image of her – and found that it fit almost perfectly.