The conference room had a very beautiful view. The rows of snowcapped mountains in the distance, the carpet of evergreen trees along the slopes, the rushing rivers in between. It was a shame that as the meeting began, the privacy screens came down, blocking out the windows as the room sealed itself so tightly that not even air would escape it. They would see black walls in their cube, and nothing more.
The table was pristine mahogany from Earth, and large enough to seat a dozen, but today it held only three people. Himself and his boss, both in plain, black dress uniforms, and a young, brunette scientist wrapped up in a puffy parka.
Benefits and drawbacks to working for ONI. You got more power than the rest of the galaxy, but you were too busy working to enjoy it. It wasn't a huge imposition to him, he'd always been austere, but even the simplest pleasure of a good view was robbed from him.
Lieutenant Commander Hieronymus Michael Stanforth was still unsure about his stint in ONI. Oh, he wasn't foolish enough to admit it publicly, but the longer he served as a gloried personal aid to Vice Admiral Keeler, the more he felt like this deployment had been a mistake. He was one step up from running coffee, and nothing he'd seen had convinced him that this was doing any actual good.
His father was pleased, because of course he was. The Stanforth family had contributed many officers to the UNSC over the years, and Admiral Harold Stanforth was one of the Navy's best. His father's political mind saw the future of the USNC not in fleet maneuvers, but in the back alleys of Intelligence, and he'd encouraged Michael to take the posting.
Certainly, that political influence had been a huge benefit to Michael's career already. He was already a Lieutenant Commander at 31, and he'd been trusted with a Top Secret classification on his first ever stint in ONI. Michael knew that if he wanted it, he could climb the ranks in ONI as easily as he could in the Navy.
But Michael Stanforth wasn't chasing a rank. He was chasing service. He wanted to make a real difference in the galaxy.
He just didn't think that ONI was the place to do it.
Today's meeting was a good example. He was to sit quietly behind Admiral Keeler, listen like a human robot, and let Keeler know his thoughts after the meeting was over. He was a glorified shadow, completely unnecessary. And for what? A monthly report on some scientist's R&D project. Yes, it was likely something that would help the UNSC more than any naval patrol, but someone else could have handled the bureaucracy vastly better than him. It wasn't the best use of his talents.
"Doctor Halsey," his boss acknowledged. "How's the first month going?"
"Well enough," the brunette scientist replied, with a clipped tone. "Training is proceeding excellently. The research projects are starting more slowly, but initial prognosis is excellent on all of them. The only hiccups are small, inconsequential ones."
"Small problems grow, Doctor," Keeler said, his hands clasped in front of his chin. "Tell me more about these problems."
"The first problem is administrative," Halsey said, shrugging. "It appears that at least part of the budget for this program is being routed through HIGHCOM's discretionary funding, and that has led to a curious incident. It is amusing, but we should correct it quickly."
"That's a very serious statement," Keeler noted, his eyes narrowing. "The budget for your project is classified at the highest levels, and I'm very interested in how you were able to discern that much."
Michael stiffened a little in his seat. Yes, budgeting was hardly the most interesting topic, but Keeler clearly wasn't happy that this scientist had managed to uncover anything. Was she disloyal, to go digging into unrelated topics like that? Or an idiot, to admit it to her superior?
"Our daily meal shipments, Admiral," Halsey said, looking unruffled by the Admiral's gaze. "I was wondering why every dinner was steak and calamari. I took a look at the crates, and found them still stamped HIGHCOM."
Keeler stared at her for a long moment, and then released a long, slow exhale through his nose. Michael bit down on his cheek, and tried not to show any emotion. He knew his poker face couldn't hold a candle to Keeler's, but at the least, he should do better than Halsey, who already made it plainly obvious that she was a focused woman who didn't want distractions.
He couldn't imagine getting HIGHCOM's food and reporting it to his superiors. If that had happened to his ship, those crates would have vanished into deep storage faster than a sailor's sobriety on shore week. What a cold fish this Doctor Halsey was.
"Yes," the Vice Admiral said, his voice betraying no emotion. "We should correct that quickly. Next?"
"A simple list of logistical requirements," Halsey said, passing over a datapad. "The initial stocking of the compound was decent, but with the year's training schedule finalized, we need a large supply of several items. Rifles of several calibers, starting from the smallest and gradually working upwards. Standard UNSC Marine kit for familiarization and standardization training. Several dozen sets of clothing for each candidate for the winter months, as well as projected growth patterns, so that we don't need to keep receiving children's clothing every year, which would obviously be suspicious, whereas a single bulk order is more easily hidden. All in all, the list is minor items, but even supply orders can reveal much, so I did not trust it to remote communications."
Children's clothes? The odd request stuck in Michael's head. Why would an ONI researcher need children's clothes? There wasn't many potential reasons for that, and very few of them were good. Still, Michael crammed that thought into the back of his mind, trusting on his father's lessons on compartmentalization. He was here to listen and learn, and he had no doubt that Keeler had intended this meeting to be a lesson for him.
"I'll ensure you receive the entire list," Keeler replied, taking the datapad and setting it aside. "Anything else?"
"No further issues at this time," Halsey said with a shake of her head, her shoulder-length brunette hair flicking about her ears. "Overall, the science teams have settled into their new quarters well. In terms of space requirements, we have prioritized Exoskeleton, then Augmentation, then Surgery, and finally Artificial Intelligence, in descending order."
"And the progress of each team?" Keeler asked, laying his hands down on the table and folding them together, as he listened.
"We are already seeing great strides in both Artificial Intelligence and Augmentation," Halsey told them. "Both topics have been traditionally limited by extreme expense and moral issues. With both set aside, there are clearly pathways to improvement and refinement. Still, we are in the hypothetical stages for each, deciding which avenues to pursue, and which can be set aside for later experiments."
The doctor took a breath, and her expression twisted into a small frown.
"Unfortunately, both the Exoskeleton and Surgery teams are progressing more slowly," she continued. "We knew this was inevitable, as both of their works are dependent upon the Augmentation team's creations. Without a clearer picture of the future pathways for each, their work thus far has been… less focused."
"We've given you some of the greatest minds in the UNSC, Doctor," Keeler said, with a measured calm. "If you're having trouble keeping them busy, then we can redeploy them."
"For now, I've kept them plenty busy," Halsey replied, something flashing in her eyes – probably at the thought of losing assets, Michael thought. "True, the Exoskeleton team will need to tailor their final products to the precise augmentations of the cadets to fully achieve the performance we desire. Yet our exoskeleton research is still very primitive, and I've tasked Doctor Sullivan's team with solving that issue. We're currently calculating a need for at least three prototype generations of powered armor before we can hit a field-deployable suit, but there is no need for those prototypes to be limited purely to a laboratory."
"And how will they achieve that?" Keeler asked. "Exoskeleton research is expensive, as you know. Even if your team manages a successful one, why should it take precedence over a simpler, cheaper vehicle?"
"The main expense in exoskeletons are the control mechanism," Doctor Halsey said, leaning forward slightly as she began to explain, her expression growing more dynamic, more excited. "Thus far, the mistake has been focusing on an excellent performing unit, without developing the underlying methodologies. Instead, Doctor Sullivan's team will be upsizing their exoskeleton prototypes, to create suits that can be used as testbeds by unaugmented individuals. Once we have the first generation suits, we will be able to quickly reconfigure them between experiments to gauge the relative effectiveness of each new innovation. After we identify the ideal methods, Doctor Sullivan can then focus on refining those specific avenues of research, but the original testbeds would still remain useful. The advantages for lifting capacity in improvised locations, such as colonization efforts, tight cargo bays, and danger close logistics would be immeasurable."
"An industrial method," Keeler observed. "Expensive."
"To any other project, yes," Halsey answered, daringly. "To this one… only the Surgery team has a smaller budget. You knew this already, Admiral."
Keeler said nothing in reply. Michael watched silently, as the scientist challenged the head of Section Three, apparently oblivious to the relative difference between them.
My God, Michael thought to himself, amazed. She has no idea that she's tugging on the tiger's tail.
"And the Surgery team?" Vice Admiral Keeler asked, moving on without replying to Halsey's last statement.
"Doctor Meyer's team has two tasks, and only two tasks," Halsey stated, holding up fingers as she explained. "The first is to aid the Sullivan's team in the augmentations, and the second is to perform the augmentations themselves. However, until the Augmentation team narrows down their approach, they have no work to perform, and they'll inevitably suffer skill decay, and grow rusty. Given the value of these surgeons, I'm raising the issue to propose a solution: cross utilization. I believe that until the current state of our research changes, the Surgery team should be on whatever rotation or availability list that ONI uses. My only request is that their official position remains the Orion-II program, so that they are not 'poached' from under me."
Keeler mused on it for a few moments. Michael didn't bother looking at his boss – he already knew that Keeler's expressions wouldn't have changed an iota. Instead, he considered the request himself. What did it gain Halsey, what did it lose her?
The obvious thought was the Halsey was cutting her losses. If she'd tried to lie about her surgery team still being busy, then it would have been discovered anyway, and those resources removed from her control. By admitting the problem early, and offering a partial solution, Halsey could be trying to minimize the damage. In some ways, that was an admirable trait. If a crewman had come to Michael aboard the Trieste, admitted some fault and offered a partial solution like this, Michael might have praised the man.
But that obvious thought was… too obvious, in Michael's opinion. This wasn't the Navy proper, and Doctor Halsey was a cold woman who was running some kind of Top Secret program revolving around surgical augmentation for the Office of Naval Intelligence. She couldn't be this simple and straightforward. There had to be another reason, a deeper reason behind it. Honest people didn't wind up in ONI, himself as the exception, and it made logical sense that the brunette civilian was far more devious and cunning than she might first appear.
Perhaps, Michael considered, it was an influence play. The trick there would be how Halsey was offering the team's services, while making sure that they were still associated with her program. The team's actions would reflect well on her, and other ONI personnel would know that Doctor Halsey was a team leader who had improved their lives. Yes, that seemed most likely, Michael thought to himself.
A thought struck him. Halsey had just a minute ago admitted to figuring out that some of her budget was routing through HIGHCOM, and acted as if she didn't care. Hell, she'd even convinced him that she was a focused, direct woman who didn't care for distractions in the process. Oblivious, even.
But that didn't mesh with his current thought on her. Had even that been a clever maneuver on her part? A way of showing that she was reliable or trustworthy, so that her request to seed her team's surgeons around ONI would appear to be similarly innocuous? Or had it been an overt maneuver?
Like that jab about the budget… Michael realized now that that wasn't an oblivious scientist blindly walking into a minefield. That was Halsey laying a card down on the table. A semi-polite way of reminding Keeler that she was well aware of her bargaining position, that she wasn't some unimportant flunky to be set aside.
But which assumption was correct? They couldn't both be true. Doctor Halsey could not simultaneously be a devious planner, laying out secret snares to grow her web of influence, and a frank politician openly playing the game of favors, matching wits with Admirals, and making no secret of her ambitions. You simply couldn't swap between those two leadership styles, for lack of a better term.
Perhaps Vice Admiral Keeler was aware of this. He had far more experience with the murky backrooms of ONI than Michael did, after all. Still, Michael resolved to bring the topic up with Keeler when he had a chance, if only to be sure.
Unaware of Michael's thoughts, his boss nodded, and gestured silently for Doctor Halsey to continue her presentation, forcing the young officer to direct his attention back to the doctor. Keeler hadn't agreed, Michael noticed. He'd moved the conversation onwards without making a commitment to Halsey's proposal.
"Does that conclude your report?" Keeler asked.
"It does," Halsey said. "I left some time on the meeting schedule for any questions you may have."
Another open political move, Michael noted. Anticipation of a superior's questions wasn't a big thing normally, but the subtler implication was that Halsey had prepared for any of Keeler's questions. A devious planner would have allowed Keeler to ask his questions as a surprise, to potentially lull him into a false sense of security by ceding the conversational initiative.
"Do you predict any potential problems with the program's future?" Keeler asked, his steady voice betraying no emotion in the loaded question.
Because boy, what a loaded question. Michael was supposed to be learning from Keeler here at ONI, and the Vice Admiral's move was so good that Michael was hard-pressed to not whistle. Asking an open-ended question like that was an old trick for a leadership position, giving your subordinate just enough rope to hang himself with, and Michael himself had done it often enough. But this time, the question wasn't testing Halsey's basic competence – it was a wedge, forcing her to pick an answer that would reveal more about her personality.
If Halsey truly was an open and frank politician, then just as she'd admitted the HIGHCOM budget trick, she'd point out some of the obvious things with any research program, like it potentially not panning out, or the need for potentially increased budgets in the future. It was honest, and would demonstrate that Keeler could trust her to be a straight shooter even when it hurt her. That approach worked for the long game, where her reputation would be an invaluable tool for her future advancement.
But if she was the devious planner type, trying to weave a web of influence in ONI, then she wouldn't admit to any problems. Those kinds of people knew that they couldn't rely on their reputation, and that sooner or later, they'd make enemies, which meant that they needed to appear as bulletproof as possible. Admitting to fault was admitting to weakness, and sooner or later, they'd make an enemy with a grudge, and any admitted weakness would be remembered and used against them.
"No," Doctor Halsey said, matching Keeler's steady tone perfectly, her eyes matching his gaze. "There will be no problems with this project."
Keeler held her gaze for a few moments, and then nodded.
"Thank you Doctor Halsey," he said, rising to his feet, as Michael quickly followed suit. "I look forward to your next report."
"As do I," the brunette replied, standing up with a datapad clutched to her chest.
With a press of Vice Admiral Keeler's thumb, the security bubble retracted, breaking the Faraday cage. The window covers retracted, and light from the Highland Mountains poured into the room from behind Doctor Halsey. The light spread through her shoulder-length brunette hair, like a halo around her, and Michael instinctively half-squinted at the sudden glare. Keeler showed no such reaction, and Halsey didn't even appear to notice the sudden jump in light levels.
Keeler walked out of the room, Michael following immediately behind. They headed straight for a double-sided elevator in the hallway. Keeler didn't look back, but Michael did. His quick glance showed him Doctor Halsey already hard at work, jotting a note down on her datapad as she walked down the hallway towards the elevator bank.
In that split second, Doctor Halsey glanced up, and for the first time, Michael met her gaze directly. Her eyes were like lasers, like a target lock. Michael couldn't suppress a slight flinch at her intensity, and he instantly knew that Halsey had seem him flinch.
The elevator doors closed, cutting off Halsey's eyes. The elevator gave the smallest jolt as it began moving – down, always down, towards the sub-basements where Keeler's real office was, safely buried under twenty meters of concrete and Titanium-A.
"Enjoying the work, Michael?" Vice Admiral Keeler asked him, the sudden words startling him. Michael turned forward, and saw Keeler watching him in the reflection of the opposing elevator doors. He'd watched the entire time, without giving away that he had been.
"I'm starting to see the difficulty," Michael Stanforth admitted, knowing that it was useless to lie to Keeler.
"Mm, I thought you would," the Vice Admiral replied, with a low hum. "It's time I fill you in on the good doctor's project."
The elevator doors opened, and they walked out, heading directly for the small annex of rooms dedicated to the head of ONI Section Three.
Michael's uniform shoes clicked on the brushed concrete of the hallway. Like many places in the labyrinthine underground bunkers, there were few signs or indicators on the doorways.
This wasn't Syndey, where politicians intermingled with admirals, tour groups visited the unclassified sections, and the food court had a dozen luxury restaurants contracted in. This was Reach, and to set foot within a hundred kilometers of this base, you had to have a Secret clearance, no exceptions.
He and Vice Admiral Keeler walked through the tunnels unaccompanied by guards, because guards themselves were a security risk. It was much safer to use the automated defenses run by the most capable Smart A.I.'s in the galaxy, and harshly partition the access zones. They didn't speak again until they'd entered Keeler's personal sub-annex in the building – a five room conglomeration that was designed to allow a busy head of Section Three to stay the night if needed. Keeler, having no outside attachments, had made it his primary residence.
The door hissed shut behind them. Keeler walked over to the perpetually empty secretary's desk and laid his hand on the scanner. A blue hologram lit up on its surface through embedded emitters. It was a hulking creature with an arched back, double-jointed legs, and a flared muzzle. Coarse hairs covered its body, and its small eyes were alight with animalistic, brutal cunning.
"Seal the room," Keeler said, enunciating loudly and clearly to the artificial intelligence. Unlike the briefing room above, there was no obvious signs of the Faraday cage going into effect. There were no windows to cover up, no gaps to seal. The cage was always ready to deploy.
"The room is sealed, sir," rumbled the voice of Lucian, the holographic werewolf nodding his head in obedience.
The UNSC ballparked the rough cost of a Smart A.I. as the equivalent of a Navy Frigate. Given that such an A.I. could live only seven years maximum, some called it a ferociously bad waste of money compared to a Frigate that could last upwards of a hundred years. Michael himself used to think the same thing, up until his stint as gunnery officer aboard the UNSC Atlas, where he'd finally interacted with one regularly. Keeler, as head of Section Three, had Lucian as his personal Smart A.I. butler, handling all the tasks that a secretary would have done with more vastly more efficiency and ironclad loyalty.
"Thank you," Keeler said, nodding back. He was always polite to the artificial intelligences, a standard of conduct that Michael himself tried to live up to. He turned back to Michael, and waved him further in.
Beyond the entry room was a living room with a few comfortable couches in black leather and an unused drinks cabinet in the corner. Smart screens were on each wall, but the low coffee table still held physical documents in pure hardcopy.
"Orion-II is the most important project I will ever oversee," Keeler said, undoing a single button from his uniform tunic as he sat down on one of the couches. He leaned over and picked up a file folder near the top and held it out for Michael to take. "This is for one single reason. Defections."
"Defections?" Michael repeated, opening the file folder as he sat down on the couch across from Keeler.
"We've always had rebels," Keeler said slowly, leaning back into his couch and folding his hands over his stomach. "The UNSC was created because of two groups of nuts trying to impose their views on the rest of humanity, back in the Interplanetary War in the 2100's. After we got the Slipspace drive, we started having the Inner Colony Wars in the 2300's. And now, five decades of peace have been shattered by two decades of Insurrection. There are many causes for rebellions, but many of those causes can be addressed non-violently. There is only one major cause that we cannot effectively address non-violently."
Michael chewed on that for a moment. He could see a few potential causes for rebellions – history was replete with examples – but for each one, he could see a non-violent solution.
"Leadership, sir?" Michael guessed.
"Leadership," Keeler agreed. "Famines get fed. Environments get terraformed. Angry workers get high-paying jobs. But once you get a truly radical, charismatic leader, they can drum up support to get past any of that. Rebellions are a fire, Commander, and the best way to fight a fire is early and often, dousing the embers before it can spread. There's no information control that can silence a firebrand. Not with how many freighters are smuggling data, knowing it's impossible for us to catch. But not all radical, charismatic leaders are competent at administration, tactics, or anything beyond pumping up a crowd, so even that isn't the real problem, compared to defections."
Keeler fell silent, and gestured towards the file in Michael's hands. He looked down and started reading, at least the first page summary. The title seemed to be straightforward, but as he read it, Michael felt a slowly growing feeling of unease in his gut.
Enhancing Humanity: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Development of Genetically Modified Super Soldiers with Integrated AI Neural Systems and Advanced Power Armor Technology, by Doctors Halsey, Meyer, Wu, and Sullivan.
A few minutes later, Michael put the file down, and swallowed.
"Children?" he asked, not bothering to hide the tension in his voice.
"Unfortunately," Keeler replied, an unusual trace of sympathy in his voice. "We tried with adult volunteers first, in Orion-I. It had some successes, but not enough. Worst of all, they had reliability issues, both for performance and for loyalty. Not a single one defected, but they suffered numerous stress casualties, and we pulled the plug before that stress could become something worse."
"How does that lead to children?" Michael asked, feeling lost. "Reliability issues, that I understand, but there are plenty of loyal soldiers; far more than you'd need for this."
"Because of chained requirements," Keeler said. "Reliable soldiers are possible. Augmented soldiers are possible. But no matter how reliable or augmented, a soldier eats a bullet from a confetti-maker, and he goes down. ONI has experimented with powered armor before, for this exact reason, but we could never get it working effectively. Halsey thinks she can crack it with integrated augmentations. But to get the power armor working, you need the augmentations. To get the augmentations, children work better. To ensure absolute loyalty, children are best."
"Better than adults?" Michael frowned, still not understanding. "But… why?"
"There are numerous physical reasons related to the augmentations themselves, but that's not why we're doing it," Keeler said. "Because what if an adult, highly trained supersoldier goes rogue, in a suit of power armor? Not in terms of physical damage, but in terms of messaging. What happens if they defect, and tell every Insurrectionist exactly what kind of things the UNSC is doing?"
"Doing to volunteers," Michael pointed out. "That's harder to spin than doing it to children."
"On Eridanus II, the Colonial Authority rolled out a major infrastructure project," Keeler said, his voice almost nostalgic, like he was recounting a nostalgic story. "The plan was a new major city, with a full-sized spaceport. A huge expansion in jobs, with substantial pay raises and benefits offered to existing colonists to help get the new city started. It was an unmitigated economic boom, at the Colonial Authority's paycheck. But instead, a man named Jeremy Jiles starting spreading rumors that the Colonial Authority was sending them to die, and would hand over the new city to a fresh batch of colonists who weren't from Eridanus II."
"The rebellion in '94," Michael identified.
"Correct," Keeler acknowledged. "One of the first rebellions in what we now call the Insurrection. It took us two years to retake the system, and it cost four Destroyers. All because one charismatic leader couldn't understand basic economics, and whipped up a crowd. That's what he could do with completely innocuous information, Commander. Imagine what a man like that could do with admissions from a human experiment from ONI's black sites."
Keeler sighed.
"We had no idea how they'd graduated from letter bombs to hijacking enough ships to form a small fleet," he continued. "Then, just four years ago, the Insurrectionists seized control of the planet again, and we discovered how they'd grown so capable."
Keeler nudged the coffee table with his foot.
"Lucian," he said, looking up at the ceiling. "Pull up the file on Colonel Robert Watts, please."
The coffee table's surface glittered like a starfield for a moment as the hologram projectors came to life, and then an image of a UNSC officer sprang into existence. To the side of the floating head was a brief resume detailing his accomplishments. Two Silver Stars, four Military Stars, a Purple Heart, and more. Colonel of the 21st Marine Division in the 2480's, before retiring. A harsh red stamp blinked at the bottom: DECEASED.
Michael knew of the man. His face had been plastered across the holoscreens four years ago. It was hard to miss the anger in his recorded speeches, when they'd been played in the Atlas's wardroom as a clear identification of their enemy.
"Watts was behind the first rebellion as well," Michael asked rhetorically, already knowing the answer.
"ONI has reluctantly concluded that the vast majority of the Insurrection leadership is run by UNSC defectors," Keeler explained, his tone bitingly harsh on the word 'reluctantly'. "They're effective not only because we've spent decades training them to be so, but also because they know our playbook inside and out. Watts in particular had a distinguished public career, and a very quietly infamous ONI one. He used to run an intervention battalion for Section Three in the '70's. He was one of the best officers that ONI's had in the last half-century. One of five, specifically."
"We need soldiers capable of finding and eliminating these leaders, who can stir up trouble ," Michael summarized. "And we need them to be completely loyal, or else we're just making the Insurrection even more deadly, because they'll learn our exact tactics and know how to counter them. Which means Halsey."
"Doctor Halsey is a very interesting individual," Keeler said, slowly. "We've have many proposals from scientists before about supersoldiers. It's an attractive notion. But those papers universally demanded funding for research, not for deployable forces. Few had a specific end goal in mind, and none proposed an effective change to our military doctrine that could utilize their innovations. Toys without an instruction manual. Until Halsey."
Michael frowned. He had been sure that Doctor Halsey was a straightforward, honest scientist, and then quickly discovered that she wasn't. At the moment, he was convinced that Halsey was either a devious planner, or an open and honest politician.
But a capable military mind on top of that, without having any training? That seemed too much of a stretch. No person could contain such multitudes.
"Her doctrine was that good?" Michael asked, still unsure. "That seems unlikely."
"Not just tactical doctrine," Keeler said, shaking his head. "Halsey wrote down exactly how she would train children into supersoldiers, even without any of the advanced technology. Then she explained how the technology would augment specific attributes, interlace with the power armor. Then she explained how those children would use her tactical doctrine to exploit those advantages. We'd seen any one of those ideas before, and Halsey's were the best of them all, even before she tied them together into a single package wrapped up with a bow on top."
Keeler paused, and his eyes grew distant for a moment.
"Even so, tactical doctrine for special forces is much more demanding and specific than any other area," he explained. "It's beyond me. The human psychology, the necessary trainings, the almost supernatural instinct you have to possess for when an operation goes bad. Split-second decision making that has to be razor-sharp the entire time. It's hard enough to learn it. It's harder to teach it. It is very, very rare for someone to be good at both. So I took the paper to one of our best minds. He asked me if Frank wrote it."
"Frank?" Michael repeated, furrowing his brow in confusion.
"I told him no," Keeler continued, ignoring Michael's interruption. "Then he said it must have been David. I told him no. And then the man got very quiet. He told me he knew a few dozen people who could have written either the training or tactical doctrines. But there were only five people, including him, in the entire galaxy who could have written both doctrines in that proposal. Three of them work for ONI. Robert Watts, before his defection and death, was the fourth. The fifth, Howard Graves, retired in the 80's, and we suspect he's working for the Insurrection now."
Keeler leaned forward, and laid his hands on the coffee table as he stared at Michael.
"Doctor Halsey has no military background," he told Michael. "She wrote this paper at the age of eighteen, and showed a better understanding of soldiering than all but five people in the galaxy. Our best guess, unconfirmed as of now, is that one of her more distant relations was a member of the Insurrection, trained by either Watts or Graves, and that she learned it from childhood. But instead of following that career path, she dedicated her life to academia, covered her tracks, and spoke out in favor of the UNSC repeatedly… and she only slipped up once."
Keeler paused, his expression making it clear that he was doing so to give Michael's whirling mind a moment to digest that information, to consider the implications.
"And in that one single mistake," Keeler said softly, "Catherine Halsey might have given the UNSC the solution to this war."