Lieutenant Commander Jacob Keyes had plenty of experience with professionally blank expressions by now.
He kept his ‘mask’ on at all times while at work. It was primarily for his own sanity, but it was also to make sure that none of the ambitious cadets starting thinking they could breach the chain of command and get special favors. Thank God, none of them were sexual in nature. Keyes knew that he could handle the pressure, but he had a twelve-year-old daughter, and the idea of an eighteen or nineteen year old cadet trying to flirt with him just made him think of Miranda trying that on an older man, and that disturbed him.
More commonly, every now and then someone dug up the old rumors about Keyes’s own time at the academy, and thought they could use the scandal against him.
It never worked, of course. He’d already been punished for his silence by the Luna OCS, and rewarded for it by Doctor Halsey and HIGHCOM. Trying to blackmail him with that info was a fast way to get reported and blacklisted from UNSC service – which was probably why Luna OCS had allowed him to return as an instructor, to catch those kinds of idiots.As his first class of the semester ended, Keyes kept that professionally blank mask on. Some of the students were walking out of the room quickly, perhaps hurrying to their next classes. Others were taking their time, and he didn’t want them to see a chance expression on his face, and make assumptions.One cadet, however, was clearly waiting for Keyes. That wasn’t a good sign, especially on the very first class. Since his next class would start in twenty minutes in this same room, leaving was not an option; and even if it hadn’t been, Lieutenant Commanders do not run from Cadets.The rest of the cadets filed out, until finally there was just the one cadet standing by his own desk. “May I help you?” Keyes asked, inspecting the lingerer, and spotting the name on his uniform jacket. “Cadet… Khan, is it?”
The young man looked familiar, very much so. He was shorter than most of the other cadets, and his . During Keyes’s lecture on the Battle of Salamis, he had spotted the boy out of the corner of his eye a couple times, and that familiarity had bothered him a little.
Keyes had been here at Lunas OCS for the past two years, so he wondered if maybe this was the younger brother of a different cadet from a previous class. It didn’t seem to fit, though. The boy was too familiar. As if Keyes had taught him before.“Yes sir,” the cadet replied, as he approached the stage. “I have a problem with homework, and I thought it would be best to ask you directly.”Jacob Keyes raised an eyebrow, the only emotion that he allowed himself when he was wearing his game face. This was not an appropriate question for the first day of classes, and the small show of disapproval should remind the cadet of it. If you had to ask for accommodations the first time you encountered difficulty, then you were not cut out for a Navy life.“On what grounds?” Keyes asked.
There was no acceptable excuse here, something that the cadet should have known, but at least this way he could force the teenager to say his excuse out loud. “I have already done this homework, sir,” Cadet Khan said with a very proper voice, his face unblinking. “In fact, you could say that I’ve already completed this course before.”Keyes frowned, his brow furrowing. This wasn’t a civvie college, and there was no such thing as ‘repeating a course’ if you failed it. If you failed to make the grade, you were encouraged to take a break from OCS and come back once you were prepared – in a different class. There was no time for slowdowns in the training pipeline. Especially not with the recent news.
Simply put, it wasn’t possible for this Cadet to have done Keyes’s Intro to Tactics before. If he had flunked OCS at a later date, then he would have already been put back into more advanced training, not sent back to first-year classes. There was something strange about this. His feeling of familiarity was growing as he looked at the cadet. He glanced down at his datapad, and went back to the class roster with the flick of his thumb.
There he was. Cadet Fhajad Khan.
A buzzing rang in Keyes’s ears as he spotted the name. Like a hypersonic whistle, the kind of thing that Miranda liked playing with a couple years ago, just to mess with him.
Jacob Keyes knew that name. The first name, that was. It was very distinct, not at all common. He had only met a single person in his entire life with a name like that…“Cadet… Fhajad,” Keyes said, looking up and staring the cadet in the eyes. “Have we met before?”The teenager smiled. Just a small smirk, really, but that was more than enough. The cadet didn’t reply – which was actually good, because if he had, then Keyes would have just broken half a dozen security regulations.Keyes closed his eyes and let out a sigh. “What are you doing here, Fhajad?” he asked one of his favorite Spartan-II cadets, a boy that he had last seen over two years before on Reach.“Attending Luna OCS, sir,” Fhajad-084 replied smartly. Even with his eyes closed, Keyes could tell that the boy was still smirking. Which, well. Of course he was smirking. Jacob Keyes had taught every single one of those Spartans for three years. He knew that Fhajad, as one of the stand-out students in a class of incredibly high performers, would find many of his classes very, very boring.
Two years of being away from Doctor Halsey’s program, and now here he was again, having to deal with Spartans and their shenanigans. Wonderful.
God, but he was not prepared for this. This kid was smart enough that Mendez’s trainers had been joking about him writing papers on Slipspace Physics if he hadn’t been conscripted. He absolutely did not have the time or the patience to deal with a bored Fhajad.Still, there was more to being a Navy Officer than just being smart or motivated. If that was all it took, then Doctor Catherine Halsey would have been Fleet Admiral of the whole damn UNSC.Case in point, Keyes had a simple solution for this problem: force the kid to come up with an answer to his own question, and then evaluate his response. It was an old teaching trick, but still just as useful in the modern day when you needed to buy time to get your own thoughts in order.
“What solution do you have in mind for this problem, Cadet Fhajad?” Keyes asked, opening his eyes and giving the boy an unimpressed look.“Perhaps I could take more advanced classes,” Fhajad suggested. “The second year curriculum, perhaps?”That sounded like a great idea to Keyes, but he doubted it would be that simple. If the Spartan-II had been meant to be in second year Tactics classes, then he would have been there already. The fact he wasn’t meant that either the Academy didn’t know about him – which Keyes highly doubted – or that they had some ulterior motivation for putting him in the basics with all the unprepared kids. Kids, Keyes repeated in his head. Those ‘kids’ are two years older than Fhajad, at a minimum! But it was still true. The Spartan-II had been trained far beyond his classmates already, and strange or not, Keyes very much felt as if Fhajad was much older than the others, chronological age be damned.He mulled over the solution for a moment, and then discarded it. If the Commandant didn’t already know about this, then Keyes wasn’t going to risk his neck by blowing the security regulations. The cadet was in his class, and in his class he would remain.“That won’t work,” Keyes told him. “Try again.”Fhajad hesitated, his eyes glancing at the holo-projector at the center of the classroom. It was smaller than the one Keyes had used back at Halsey’s Compound, but it was still a place deeply familiar to both of them.“I could take private coursework?” Fhajad said, more hesitantly. “Harder tasks. Whatever you think would challenge me.”“Not on your life,” Keyes said, shutting that down. “I have several separate classes to teach this semester, Cadet. There isn’t enough time in the day for me to handle an extra workload just to handle your personal issue.”The Spartan-II froze for a moment, then nodded. It was a good show of professionalism, good enough to fool almost anyone else – but Keyes had watched this young man grow over the years, and he’d seen the gradual evolution of his poker face. Worse still for Fhajad, then-Lieutenant Keyes had met both the individuals that Fhajad was trying to trying to imitate with that expression; Mendez and Halsey.
“In fact, that gives me an idea,” Keyes said. “I’m too busy, and you’re not busy enough. Do you know what we call that in the Navy, son?”Fhajad’s face tightened for moment, and then he nodded.“A learning opportunity, sir?” he guessed.“Exactly,” Keyes said, smiling at the boy. “Since you’re so insistent that you’ve already done this coursework, you can be my teacher’s assistant for this semester. I’ll send the request off to the Commandant’s office tonight. Your duties will include leading study sessions, answering questions, and helping me grade low-level coursework. From now on, you report to class ten minutes early, minimum. Understood?”“Aye aye, sir!” Fhajad barked out, stiffening to attention. Jacob Keyes eyed him for a moment, then nodded. “Dismissed, sailor,” he said. Fhajad saluted, and Keyes returned it. The boy stepped back once, then turned on his heel with parade-ground precision, picked up his bag, and quick-stepped out of the room.Lieutenant Commander Jacob Keyes waited for the door to click shut, then placed his hand over his eyes and let out an enormous sigh.What a mess, he thought to himself, as he ran his hand down his face and shook it once.He hadn’t exactly been the most trusted man in the Spartan-II Program, but he had been there long enough to know the basics of the idea. Fhajad was fourteen, nearing fifteen, which meant that he had undoubtedly already gone through the biological augmentations.
So why was the boy here on Luna, attending OCS? Shouldn’t he have been out there on a Navy ship, wearing armor and carrying a gun, off to fight the Innies or the Covenant? Why was HIGHCOM wasting time with their Spartans like this?But the answer was obvious, and he didn’t need to be a genius like Fhajad to figure it out: Halsey. It always came back to Halsey. That woman… Keyes was still a little sore over how easily she’d deceived him into thinking she was just some harmless and doting mother-figure for the cadets to latch onto, rather than the mastermind of the whole thing. But after three years at her Compound, he knew that Halsey cared for her cadets as strongly as he himself cared for his daughter Miranda. Most likely, Doctor Halsey had managed to convince HIGHCOM to split off a couple of the Spartans from their destiny, and send them off to the Academy. The highest academic performers – which Fhajad fit to a T. He sighed once more, and prepared for his next class. Cadets started filing in, and Keyes busied himself for a moment, resetting the holoprojecter, sipping some water, and preparing for the next repetition of his opening lecture. It wasn’t until five minutes later, as he was going down the class roster, that he spotted the name Kelly Shaddock on the list.Jacob Keyes looked up, unamused, and stared at the poker face of Kelly-087 as she sat right in the center of his second class of the day.
Or maybe Halsey was her usual self, and insisted on overachieving everything, he thought to himself with a grumble, keeping his professionally blank mask fixed in place. God dammit, am I going to have a Spartan in every one of my classes?“Cadet Shaddock,” he said, as if he was merely continuing with the roll call.“Present,” Kelly-087 called back.“Stay behind after class, Cadet Shaddock,” Keyes told her.
Xxxx
The front door clicked shut behind him, and he kicked off his shoes.“I’m home!” Jacob Keyes called gently into the apartment.
He set down his briefcase on the side table, and sniffed the air. Something was cooking in the oven, and it smelled good. A little sweetness, a little tang… maple-ginger chicken thighs, he thought. “Welcome home!” Miranda Keyes called from the kitchen, her voice warm and welcoming, which reassured Jacob immensely.Jacob walked into the apartment’s kitchen and rested his hip against the counter as he did a damage inspection. There were no new dents in the walls, no shattered glass. Even the appliances looked clean and tidy – probably because the only one that Miranda had used was the pressure-cooker for the rice.“How was school?” he asked his daughter, as she looked up from the far end of the counter, studying a textbook.“Good,” she said, smiling up at him. “I don’t get why they won’t just give us digital copies, but it’s kinda cool. Is this what it was like when you were a kid, Dad?”He chuckled. Hardcopy textbooks had been out of fashion for hundreds of years, but trust a pre-teen to think her parent was a neanderthal.“No, no,” he said, reaching out and ruffling her hair. “I had a clay tablet. Much better than this printed paper stuff.”Miranda giggled, and batted his hand away.“You didn’t have to make dinner,” he said, nodding towards the oven, where the chicken was cooking. “I had it covered.”The pre-teen pursed her lips. Jacob could already tell that she didn’t want to talk about the last time she’d made dinner – she had overdone the chicken, and it was tough and hard to chew.But it was a good thing that she didn’t give up. That she had continued, even after that mess up a couple days ago.
Jacob couldn’t tell her that, of course. He was her father. Even if she was interested in hearing that specific compliment, she wouldn’t understand that he was proud of her for acknowledging her failure. Miranda was a good daughter, better than he deserved, but she was still a child in many ways, and he didn’t expect her to handle a serious talk about failure without feeling too embarrassed by failing in the first place.
Her success was nice, but if she had succeeded both times, then Jacob wouldn’t have gotten to see how his daughter reacted to failure – and that was what made him so proud. That she was brave enough to risk failing a second time, rather than just giving up all together on the idea.
“Why are you smiling?” Miranda asked, squinting at him with clear suspicion.“Don’t worry about it,” he said, before turning and heading to his room to change into more casual clothing.
Every time Jacob Keyes came home, he was reminded of exactly why he had willingly returned to Luna OCS. It wasn’t for the career opportunities. An academy posting wasn’t prestigious for anyone involved. The best and brightest were deployed out to the Fleet, and everyone knew it. He had earned the nickname of the ‘Schoolmaster’ almost entirely because he’d been a teacher for six years, coming up on seven. His prior service was classified, but there was no blank spot on his record – instead, he’d been given a cover story that fit his skills. As far as anyone else knew, Jacob Keyes had been teaching at one OCS or another for half a decade, and he was apparently content to stay in the rear, teaching teenagers how to separate their hands from their heinies.
And he didn’t regret it. Not one minute of it. Because every time he came home, he got to see his daughter. She was a brilliant little girl, smart and kind in equal measure, and he wouldn’t give that up for a half-dozen promotions and a seat on HIGHCOM.Nonetheless, as he pulled on a part of old Navy-blue sweat pants, Jacob Keyes wondered if this would be his final year teaching. Not because he was tired of it, or because he wanted some distance from his daughter… but because there was a greater need in the UNSC.The Insurrection, as bad as it was, hadn’t required much in the way of naval combat. That was fine – Keyes was more of a naval tactician than he was a situation manager, so even if he had been commanding a warship stationed over a troublesome planet, he might have made the wrong call. But there was a shooting war going on, now. A naval war. The kind of war that needed men like Keyes. Miranda was twelve years old, now. That was old enough for her to go to a boarding school until she was eighteen. After that, well… Keyes hoped that the war would be over by then, but he knew that was a pipe dream. Not against firepower like they’d shown on the evening news. Miranda would want to join the Navy as soon as she was old enough, and Jacob didn’t have the heart to stop her. Is this what it felt like for Halsey? he wondered. To prepare those kids for the augmentations, knowing that they’d probably die in the process? Or in the fighting? Probably not, he decided after a moment. Doctor Halsey had been many things, and sentimental was one of them… but she was, above all else, a rational and logical human being. She had probably felt the same emotions as him, but she’d decided that the risk-benefit assessment favored this outcome, and that was all there was to it.The annoying part was that Keyes didn’t know if Halsey was right about that or not. It was easy to believe that his own gut instinct was correct, and that Miranda should be sheltered from the war for as long as possible…
…but if Harvest was any indication, then humanity needed all the help it could get. Trying to stop young men and women from fighting in the war was arrogance, and little more than that.
Xxxx
The mega-plex mall was bustling with people, and Jacob Keyes sighed as he once again lost sight of Miranda. He considered calling after her and asking her to slow down, but that wasn’t needed. She’d notice soon enough, and Asimov Center was a perfectly safe area for children like her. Some might say that was a side-benefit of all the military personnel. The mall itself was still a wondrous thing to see, and Keyes couldn’t stop himself from glancing up to the ‘skylight’. The panels weren’t mere glass, but photo-sensitive panels that helped absorb some of Sol’s harmful radiation. On Earth, the atmosphere would have handled that, but Luna’s atmosphere might as well not exist in comparison. It did, however, have the most miraculous view. Stars hung above his head in a vast black field. The central canyon of the mall, flanked by three tiers, seemed to rise straight up towards space. It was a gorgeous view that reminded Jacob of exactly why he’d joined the Navy in the first place. Luna was practically ideal for spacers like him because of it. You were never too far away from a good view of space, never far away from a ship.“Dad, hurry up!” Miranda called back, waving at him and grinning cheekily.Jacob shook his head, and kept walking at exactly the same unhurried pace. He wasn’t falling for that trick. If he hurried along, she’d just speed up, like a dog on a retractable leash. If he stayed steady, she’d stay close enough to see.By the time he caught up with Miranda, however, his daughter wasn’t running along. Instead, she had stopped in place, and was staring at another person in the mall. It was a young woman, like many others, but she was different somehow. She was standing completely still in the middle of the walkway, forcing the crowd to walk around her. Her clothes were casual, but they weren’t the kind of thing you wore on Luna. She looked like a tourist from one of the Colonies, and she was staring straight up at one of the shops in the mall like she’d never seen it before.Keyes paused. The girl looked familiar. Her hair was chin-length at most, per UNSC regulations, and her face was looking away from him, but he still felt that he knew her. The young woman turned, and Jacob recognized Kelly-087 instantly. “Sir,” Kelly said, her eyes locking onto Jacob. She stiffened up as if to stand at attention, but she didn’t salute – which was the proper thing to do.“Cadet,” Jacob nodded. “Enjoying the weekend?” “Yes sir,” she replied, nodding very slightly. “Just… taking in the sights.”Jacob glanced at the store she’d been looking at, and suppressed a wince. It was, charitably speaking, a store for alternative fashions. Not the kind of thing that the Spartan-II cadets would have seen much of. He had seen them in civvies during his time as their instructor, back on Reach, but even then, their clothes had clearly been bought by someone else, and provided as options, rather than something they’d chosen for themselves. This kind of… personal liberty in fashion was probably a shock to her.“You look familiar,” Miranda said, by Jacob’s side.He froze. He had forgotten that Miranda was there. Kelly turned her head, and looked at his daughter. Her brow furrowed for a moment, and then recognition sparked in her gaze.“Is that little Miranda?” Kelly asked, a slow smile spreading across her face.
Jacob Keyes was unable to look away. He had almost forgotten the chewing out that he’d received all those years ago, after Miranda had managed to stumble into a Spartan training exercise. It had been a nearly impossible chance, but it had happened. Hell, it had nearly gotten him removed from the program entirely – which would have meant sending Miranda back to live with his own parents while he was reassigned to some distant Outer Colony as a punishment.He’d had to spend a lot of time teaching her what ‘classification’ meant before Doctor Halsey was satisfied. Thank God, he’d never had to actually test her ability to keep quiet. Since it had only happened once, Miranda had almost seemed to forget about it.But now, she was staring back at Kelly with a confused expression that was slowly shifting towards recognition. “Do I… know you?” Miranda asked, hesitantly. “We met years ago,” Kelly said. She glanced at Jacob, and said, “You were looking for your dad, and you got lost in the woods.”A light-bulb practically went off behind Miranda’s head, and her eyes and mouth went wide in a hurry.“You’re-” she started to say, before cutting herself off. “From-”She stopped talking abruptly, and looked back at Jacob with a horrified expression. “This is one of my students,” Jacob told her gently. “From OCS. She just started this week. Her name is Kelly.”Miranda nodded, quickly, and he nearly let out an audible sigh of relief as she understood his message.“Were, uh, were you going to go in there?” Miranda asked, gesturing towards the alternative fashion shop.Kelly opened her mouth, with a clear look of cautious disapproval – but she stopped. The Spartan-II looked at Jacob’s own face, which had finally let slip his own awkward fear at that idea. Then she turned and looked at Miranda. Jacob did the same, and to his horror, he saw the two girls sharing the same expression of dawning realization.Oh no, Jacob thought to himself.“Why, yes I was,” Kelly said, lying horribly, as she held out a hand for Miranda to grab. “Why don’t you show me around?”Jacob could already hear Doctor Halsey’s voice coming out of an audio message on a priority-courier from Reach. He could imagine her anger at seeing a picture of Kelly wearing something like a half-shredded pair of jeans, or a skirt shorter than her knees – or, God forbid, some of the neckwear!
The two girls smiled at him. Miranda had a teasing glint, but it was nothing compared to Kelly’s positively demonic grin, which looked so malicious that he almost expected her teeth to be pointed like a shark’s.They let him stare in shock for a few seconds, and then both of them broke at the same time, laughing at his shellshocked expression."Oh, that was good,” Miranda chortled, straightening up from where she’d been bent almost in half with laughter. “Hey, this is fun. Do you wanna hang out?”“…sure?” Kelly said, half-questioningly. “I’ve never really been to a mall like this before, so having a tour guide would be nice.”“Really?” Miranda said with a gasp. “You’re kidding. You’ve gotta see it all! Hey, Dad, do you think we should take her to the arcade first, or last?”Jacob Keyes was still trying to calm down his racing heart, and he couldn’t quite choke out the words to tell Miranda to go ahead, so he just waved at her casually, as if releasing her from an invisible leash.Miranda beamed at him. “Thanks, Dad!” she said, darting up to him and giving him a quick hug. “Come on, Kelly, I’ve got to teach you so much!”