Doctor Cynthia Thompson waited outside the ship’s communal shower room.
She was cold, and still naked, but her daughter was currently showering and changing, and she was very firm about her mother staying outside until she was done.It was hard. Doctor Thompson still remembered the outgoing and energetic days of her daughter’s youth… before the diagnosis had come in. Sudden organ failure. The light of her life, the greatest thing that had ever happened to her, had nearly died in her arms in the span of a week.Thompson refused to allow that to happen. It was sheer luck that they lived right next to the hospital where she worked. Her husband had bodily carried their sluggish daughter to the operating room, while she barked orders.
If her precious girl’s organs were failing, then they would just replace them. It was possible. They had the technology. Flash-cloned organs were expensive, and that alone normally kept them far out of reach for the average person. But the Thompsons had never been average. They had the money, and neither Cynthia nor Jim had hesitated to immediately order replacement organs grown. And it worked! Three surgeries later, and her beloved daughter was healthy once more.…for about two months, and then those replacement organs started going downhill.It had been eight years since that fateful day. Eight years of daily medical checkups, of scans. Her daughter had been confined to a wheelchair from the knock-on effects ever since her tenth birthday. Her body was determined to fail.But Daisy Thompson was not a quitter, and Cynthia was so proud of her daughter.Up until the illness had started, the UNSC record for the most organ transplants in the same person was fourteen. That record had been shattered. Blown into a million pieces and scattered into the wind. Daisy had passed fourteen transplant surgeries before she was eight years old. She passed forty before she was ten. Right now, her record was sitting at just under a hundred transplants. Kidneys. Liver. Pancreas. Intestines. Lungs. Heart. Daisy had replaced them all, time and time again. Cynthia had handled most of the surgeries herself. Jim, the love of her life, had paid for all of it. The hospital in Belisk had become a second home to her daughter, and the nurses and anesthesiologists there had become some of the greatest in the whole UNSC for organ transplants.It wasn’t enough. Cynthia knew that. For whatever reason, even the cloned organs inevitably failed. The longest that Daisy had ever had one was six months. Sooner or later, they would botch a transplant, or the flash-cloning process would fail more subtly than normal, and they wouldn’t notice until the internal bleeding had already started.The only solution was more research and development of the flash cloning technology, so they could fix whatever was going wrong in the process. But there was no chance of that on Sargasso. Even the University in the capital wasn’t focused on such a niche area of medicine. That kind of tech was studied only in the inner-most of Colonies, and on Earth itself. Cynthia had almost given up hope on a permanent solution to the problem… and then, out of nowhere, a man in a UNSC uniform had arrived on their doorstep.
The Office of Naval Intelligence was interested in her research. It felt like a joke at first. Cynthia didn’t have research. She had piles and piles of data and notes on the specific medical situation for her daughter. That didn’t qualify as research! She had no cross-compatible samples, no other peers working on the same issue, and no control group! This was a personal crusade, not a medical study. But ONI apparently didn’t know that. They had heard about the madwoman of Belisk, and they wanted to hire her. A salary that was almost as good as her husband’s. Protection details for every member of her family. A fully staffed laboratory with dozens of employees at her discretion – and, most importantly of all, complete coverage of all health conditions, including anything and everything that Cynthia needed to do to keep Daisy alive.She hadn’t just accepted the offer as is, of course. She demanded more, and more, until the overwhelmed ONI officer had simply retreated back behind his professionalism, and told her that she could discuss all of that with his superiors back on Reach. He assured her that they’d be willing to listen to almost any request.Cynthia had pushed harder. She wasn’t going to Reach without her daughter, and they’d better have a medical facility standing by in case one of those spiteful organs decided to fail the moment they came out of Slipspace. The ONI courier had agreed, and within three days, the mother and daughter pair had packed up their rooms, and left. Jim had to stay, of course. Sargasso was the central node in their shipping business, and honestly, his business was expanding so rapidly that he was often gone on month-long business trips to other systems. It was a terrible thing to be away from him… but both of them agreed: Daisy was the most important part of their lives, and anything that would help her was worth it.“Mom?” came a quiet, soft voice from around the corner. “Help?”Cynthia walked around the corner, and saw her beautiful daughter ducking her head shyly. She had managed to shower with the aid of a folding seat, and dry herself, but now it was time to dress, and she always needed help with that. Even after so many times, the same sad and amused smile grew on Cynthia’s face. Daisy was so embarrassed at needing help getting dressed, but honestly, it was barely any different than when she had been a baby, and Cynthia had told her that many times. She helped her daughter to a chair in the nearby room, and then went through her own shower, cleaning all that gunk from her skin after the cryosleep process. The intercom rang as she was toweling off.“Now docking at UNSC Hopeful,” the ship’s commander reported, his voice echoing in the shower room. “Welcome to Reach, Doctor Thompson.”
Xxxx
The military dropship rumbled around her. Cynthia clutched her harness tighter, determined to show no fear, even though she was the only person on board the spacecraft.It hurt to be here. Not because of the looming potential of working for ONI, but because for the first time in eight years, Cynthia was more than a mile away from Daisy. Her daughter was still aboard the UNSC Hopeful, a hospital station that was run by an admiral named Jeromi. The man had introduced himself to the Thompsons when they came aboard, and he had the strangest look of apologetic sorrow that Cynthia had ever seen. It was ridiculous. Why should the man feel anything like that about her daughter’s situation? But it made a good first impression, and when Admiral Jeromi had requested permission to do a full medical workup on Daisy, to confirm her health after the Slipspace trip, it had been easy enough for Cynthia to agree.
Now she was heading down to the surface, and even though she wasn’t busy moving her daughter’s wheelchair around, she still felt like she was slower somehow.Cynthia grimaced, and then bit her own cheek. This was not the time for fear. This was the greatest opportunity that she had ever been given – even more than her initial scholarship to med school. That had been a good thing for her, personally. This was a good thing for her daughter, and that was far more important.
She wasn’t used to this kind of flying experience. Despite the dropship looking like a brick compared to the normal shuttles, it seemed far more rickety, and it rattled as they descended through the atmosphere. She thought about complaining, but to who? There was nobody else in the empty passenger bay.After a short while, the shaking stopped, and Cynthia looked out through the small transparent porthole on the back hatch. Outside, she saw mountains covered in tall trees, rising and falling regularly into valleys and peaks.
Then, suddenly, buildings raced into sight. Huge landing strips of concrete. Low-slung hangars and barracks buildings. There were rotating turrets along a cordon wall – and as the dropship slowed down and spun around, turning her view, she saw a set of tall, obsidian-black towers rising out of the military base. Like the downtown skyscrapers of a city, merged into a military base. It was a strange blend, and Cynthia didn’t like it.
Well, we must be here, she thought as the dropship landed, and the engines started spooling down. She took a moment to check that her briefcase was still sealed, and put on her most professional face as the hatch unsealed, and began to open.A UNSC serviceman was waiting for her as she departed the craft.“Doctor Thompson,” the man shouted, fighting to be heard over the engines. “Welcome to Reach! This way, please.”Cynthia nodded, and followed the man towards the nearest of the tall administrative buildings.
They walked into the lobby. Cynthia’s eyes glanced around, but she kept her face fixed forward as she did. There were dozens of UNSC personnel walking around with determined expressions, while guards in full armor carried rifles and watched over them all.An elevator awaited them. The young man waited for Cynthia to enter, and then the doors slid shut without any touch of a button. Rather than going up, her stomach lurched as instead, they started to descend.
Ten seconds passed. Twenty. Thirty. They stood in the elevator for nearly a full minute, until finally the doors opened, and the young man led Cynthia out into a hallway of identical rooms with no names on the doors. At the far end of the corridor, he stopped and gestured her through the final set of doors.A huge room was on the other side of the door. It looked like a theater, in that semi-circular fashion, and it had room for hundreds of people within its ranks of seats. But today there were only five people, down near the stage at the bottom.“Doctor Thompson,” said the man at the head, a middle-aged man with a black uniform and a gold star shining on his collar. “Welcome. I am Rear Admiral Stanforth.”“Nice to meet you, Admiral,” she said, accepting his extended hand and shaking it once.Cynthia glanced at the others. Three of them were other UNSC personnel, all wearing the same space-black uniform, but the fourth was different: a brunette woman wearing the same uniform, but with a doctor’s labcoat thrown over top, and looking comfortable in both. Was she a military doctor of some kind? A civilian contractor, like her? Cynthia couldn’t tell.
“Please, take the stage,” Admiral Stanforth requested, gesturing towards the small stairs. “We are quite interested in your research, and we’re eager to begin the interview.”“Of course,” Cynthia said, ascending the stairs and moving up to the nearby podium. This is it, she reminded herself. This is your opportunity to get the funding you need to keep Daisy alive. Just sell them on the organs, Cynthia. Don’t get fancy. You have a solution to their problems, and they know it.
It was a bit of an over-statement, to be honest. Flash-cloning was a medical necessity in some situations, but there were very few problems that it could actually solve. The UNSC’s medical focuses were primarily on battlefield applications, and extreme trauma. When a soldier had some kind of long-term problem that needed a new organ, the military healthcare system often just paid the cost for a normal hospital to do the surgery. But that truth wouldn’t help her. She needed to sell herself, and her research, in order to save her daughter. That was the only thing that mattered.“We are specifically interested in how your research will benefit those with extreme burns,” said the Admiral. “Using flash-cloned organs not for accident recovery, but for battlefield medicine.”“I’m sorry?” Cynthia asked, taken aback. “I’m… not familiar with flash-cloning being used for that kind of recovery.”“Soon enough, you will be,” Admiral Stanforth said with a grim tone. “Tell me, Doctor, how much have you followed the news on the Covenant?”
Cynthia flinched.Everyone knew about the Covenant. The news had broken months ago, and it had taken every colony by storm. She remembered watching the television in horror. Claims of aliens were ridiculous, the kind of thing that belonged in the cheap and crappy midnight-and-later kinds of shows… but the UNSC had brought so much proof that it was impossible to doubt. Hundreds of images of Harvest, burned and blackened. Hours and hours of video feeds from security cameras in the cities that had been attacked. Even footage from soldiers, fighting the monsters face-to-face.It had been horrifying, and not just to Cynthia alone. There were some at her hospital in Belisk that had certain sympathies towards the Insurrection. No connections, God forbid, but a sad and bitter understanding of why someone might be driven towards terrorism. It was mostly a couple of the big male nurses, the kind of people that were helpful for subduing thrashing patients that came in from an ambulance and couldn’t stay still from their pain or their drugs.
She remembered one of her co-workers protesting, half-heartedly, that the footage might be a lie – before biting his tongue, knowing just as well as everyone else that it wasn’t. Some of the videos had been graphic. Some of them had shown the injured and the dead, and it was obvious that they hadn’t been faked. Those were real bodies. Real injuries in all their gory horror.“I’ve seen what most people have seen,” Cynthia said, her voice a bit shaky. “I don’t understand how that relates to my research, though.”“As you may know, some of Harvest’s population were evacuated before… the end,” Admiral Stanforth said, with a grimace. “There were a substantial number of injuries, including the usual bomb damage that our healthcare system has become adept at handling. However, there were also a wide variety of highly unusual injuries, which could have been treated better, and prevented many deaths.”Cynthia didn’t know what to say. She was a transplant specialist, not an ER doctor or someone who specialized in massive trauma. She kept her mouth closed, and waited for the Admiral to explain more.
“The Covenant’s infantry weapons are not conventional firearms,” Admiral Stanforth continued. “Some of these weapons had similar penetration as a bullet, but much larger mass and a superheated coating. Others are plasma weapons. You should be more familiar with the latter than the former – the injuries from those were… more palatable for PR purposes, and appeared on the news more commonly.”He paused, looking at Cynthia with an expectant expression. The man wanted something, but she didn’t know what. “If I may explain further, Rear Admiral?” asked the brunette doctor, speaking up after the silence had gone on for a few moments.“By all means, Doctor Halsey,” the Admiral said, nodding to her.“To put it simply, we expect to face a large growth in the number of injured personnel with extensive burns and massive trauma,” the now-named Doctor Halsey said to Cynthia. “At the moment, we don’t have the medical capability to handle it, as those cases are traditionally quite rare. Repairing the skin, bone, muscle… we can do all those things. But with the level of damage that we’ve seen from Covenant weapons, organ failure is almost certainly going to skyrocket, and that means there will soon be a large increase in the need for flash-cloned organs.”Cynthia nodded slowly, listening to the other Doctor’s words as she started to understand.“Financially, this will be ruinous,” Halsey continued. “We cannot afford to have ten rejected organs for every one viable transplant. Not at the rates we expect to be facing. As such, we need to bring the cost of flash-cloning down. Traditionally, this would be handled by increasing the scale of production so that it is easier to spot patterns and streamline the process, but as cloned organs are of course individualized to their donor body, this has not been possible… until your daughter’s situation.”It clicked in her head at those words.
She had thought that ONI wanted to advance the field as a whole, pushing their research further. Better capability, or more effectiveness. Something to enhance soldiers with hearts that could pump more blood, or lungs that could carry more oxygen. Cynthia didn’t really know how to achieve those kinds of results, but she’d been prepared to lie her ass off and throw herself headfirst into a completely new area of research to keep Daisy alive.
But that wasn’t it at all. ONI wanted cheaper flash-cloning, not better. Maybe that meant a lower rejection rate, or maybe just lowering the price for growing an organ in the first place. Speeding up the process, since if there were going to be a lot of injuries, you’d need a lot of replacement transplants.That… that was actually possible. She could do that! Hell, she had been doing that. How many transplants had she given Daisy by now? Ninety-one? Ninety-eight? Something like that.When Daisy’s organs had started failing, and Cynthia and her team had been forced to grow more replacements regularly, cost and time had been one of the first things they’d considered. Flash-cloning normally required a tissue sample from the organ in question, which meant a quick surgery before you could even start the first cloning process. But if you were doing the same subject, then you didn’t really need more samples. Their DNA wouldn’t change!
This wasn’t necessarily a scientific innovation, but it was still an improvement. Nobody had ever had to think about streamlining the process before Cynthia and Daisy… or until the Covenant had arrived. And since Cynthia had spent all those years working on this exact issue, intentionally or otherwise, now the Office of Naval Intelligence was willing to pay them for it.She had never really understood economics or finances as well as her husband, but right now, Cynthia could almost hear Jim’s voice in the back of her head, saying: First mover advantage, honey. You invested early, and now it’s all paying off.
All that she had to do now was sign on the dotted line, and everything would be better.
…except, that wasn’t true, was it?
Cynthia paused, staring at Doctor Halsey, and then at Admiral Stanforth.What did ONI want? They wanted cheaper flash clones. What did she, herself want? She wanted to be a good mother to Daisy.At first glance, those two things weren’t incompatible. It was theoretically possible for Cynthia to just openly demand that as a condition of her employment.
But she didn’t just want to prolong the life of her daughter. She wanted to give Daisy all the opportunities that her infirmity had stolen from her. She wanted her daughter to be able to enjoy her life without worry. To one day be free of that damn wheelchair. To live life to the fullest, the way that she would have, if it hadn’t been for her medical condition.
That was why they had never moved from Belisk, even after the medical condition would have made it better to move to the planetary capital in Velho – or any other world that would have been better for Jim’s business. Belisk was Daisy’s childhood home. It was the one place she loved most in the universe. Daisy loved the tropical heat, and the flower garden, and the sun and the surf and the birds, and her school friends.In some ways, Cynthia had already broken that dream, just by coming here. She had told her daughter that this was just to see if ONI had a good offer, and that if she didn’t like it, they’d be going back to Sargasso with no changes, but that was a lie. The truth was that Daisy was going downhill slowly, and Cynthia was almost out of tricks to keep her alive.
Cynthia needed ONI’s help to keep Daisy alive. If that meant making her daughter live on this colder planet, then so be it. If it meant a new school for her bright young scholar, so be it. They’d take frequent vacations to the tropical zones. She would enroll Daisy in the best schools on the planet.There was only one catch: ONI couldn’t find out. Not that Daisy was sick, of course. That was blindingly obvious. ONI couldn’t be allowed to find out that the only thing Cynthia wanted was to keep her daughter alive and well. That she and her husband would sell everything they owned and burn their lives to the ground just for Daisy.If ONI knew that, then Daisy was at risk. They didn’t care about Daisy. They cared about Cynthia and her research, and if they could get better results out of Cynthia by abusing their control of Daisy – withholding medicine, manipulating available surgery slots, even deliberately sabotaging her recovery – then they would happily do it.After all, it was only logical. ONI might not have been the monsters that Innie propaganda painted them as, but as Doctor Halsey had just pointed out, their job was to care for all of humanity. If Admiral Stanforth and Doctor Halsey could save thousands or millions of people with better flash-clone technology, at the cost of murdering one single sickly girl who they didn’t even know or care about, then Cynthia knew they’d do it in a heartbeat.So Cynthia couldn’t tell them that. Not without handing over total control of herself, and putting Daisy into harm’s way. It meant… it meant that she had to act callous and cruel. That she had to act like she was the ideal scientist, more concerned with her research than her daughter. That would be difficult. Both because she truly did love her daughter, and because she’d already insisted on dragging Daisy here, revealing that influence on her.She would need to play her hand very carefully.“I believe I understand now,” Cynthia Thompson said, choosing her words carefully. She didn’t trust herself to lie, not to ONI people like them. So she had to only speak the truth. “You’re right, of course. The amount of lives that this research can save… I hadn’t really thought about it before. I was just thinking about my daughter.”“Your work can save thousands,” Admiral Stanforth said.Halsey scoffed.“Millions,” the brunette doctor said, correcting the Admiral without any apparent care. “If you’re willing to work with us, of course.”“Yes,” Cynthia said, nodding. “I think it would be for the best.”“Excellent,” Admiral Stanforth said.Then the man hesitated, visibly. He looked almost… nervous. But that was impossible. UNSC Admirals were cold things of iron will, and ONI Admirals must have been even worse! “There is one additional factor,” Doctor Halsey said, with a glance towards Stanforth. “The matter of your daughter.”Cynthia’s heart tightened, as if Halsey had just wrapped her hand around it and squeezed.“What about her?” Cynthia asked, her voice distant to her own ears, as blood pounded in her head.“I believe Rear Admiral Stanforth has already offered to cover all of her medical expenses,” Halsey said. “I believe that is a bit presumptuous of a decision.”They’re going to cut her off, Cynthia thought.“How so?” she asked Halsey, trying to keep the quaver out of her voice, and almost certainly failing.“As a dependent, Daisy’s medical expenses-” Halsey started to say, before coughing abruptly, her eyes widening and then narrowing. “I’m sorry, I meant Miss Thompson’s medical expenses… well, they would be a matter of money flowing out of ONI to a civilian with no formal association with the organization. I believe we should rectify that.”“My daughter’s health is a condition of my employment,” Cynthia said, clenching her jaw. “Of course, of course!” Halsey said, waving a hand negligently. “It simply occurs to me that it would be wasteful to have her merely as a dependent. I propose that we bring young Miss Thompson onto your project fully, as a paid test subject.”Cynthia blinked, and then stared. That wasn’t what she’d expected Halsey to say!“We won’t force any extra procedures on her, naturally,” Halsey continued. “But if her current health condition continues, it is inevitable that we will be getting testing data anyway. So, in the interest of ensuring that she is properly paid for her work, I propose that she becomes a paid contractor, the same as yourself. Smaller payscale, of course, but a full ONI contractor, nonetheless. She’ll be eligible for bonuses, pensions, academic support, whatever she needs to succeed in life. We take care of our own, here in ONI.”“That’s… generous of you,” Cynthia managed to say.Halsey’s eyes locked onto her, and Cynthia shivered as the ONI doctor smiled with an animalistic, toothy grin.“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Halsey told her.