Lieutenant Commander Hieronymus Michael Stanforth walked through the halls of the Hive and paid no attention to the stares he received.
He didn't need to look at the bystanders, didn't need to guess why they were staring at him. He already knew.
The UNSC was officially a meritocracy, which meant it hid its nepotism very well. Officially, he'd gotten his posting on Vice Admiral Keeler's staff thanks to his excellent work aboard UNSC Atlas, where he'd fine-tuned the gunnery department until they'd gotten the Navy "E" three years in a row. Unofficially, everyone in the Hive knew that he'd gotten it because his father was Admiral Harold Stanforth, the man who'd retaken Eridanus II during the second rebellion, and one of the UNSC's greatest fleet commanders.
Eyes followed Stanforth as he strode to the elevator bank, and made for the private cars, the ones that only the top floor could use as a security precaution. The Marine guard on duty checked his identification, nodded, and punched the button for him. He stepped in and waited for the doors to shut, well aware that no other Lieutenant Commander had the same privilege as him. Everyone else with this level of access was a full Commander or a Captain.
It was just another way that people desired power, and had no idea what it really meant. Not just the cost, but also the hollowness of it. The Lieutenants and Lieutenant Commanders that were glaring at Michael saw an office on the top floor of ONI's private building in the Highland Military Complex as the literal highest spot on the totem pole… not realizing that not a single Admiral had an office up there, and instead chose a fortified office down in the basement of the Hive, beneath dozens of meters of Titanium-A and reinforced concrete.
The elevator rose swiftly up to the seventy-seventh floor. Another Marine greeted him as he exited, watchful eyes checking his identity one more time, this time getting both a thumb print and a retinal scan, before admitting him through the checkpoint. Daylight streamed through the windows in the hallway, full of enticing views of the sprawling military base and the scenic mountains that had started to grow dull to his eyes.
Michael sealed the thick door of his office behind him, activated the security blackout, and sat down in his chair. Only then did he let out a long sigh.
What a mess, he thought to himself.
Doctor Halsey hadn't waited even an hour after their meeting yesterday before she'd overturned the apple cart yet again. She had sent out an email to ninety-five separate UNSC soldiers, announcing a new project without so much as a single word of warning to himself or the Vice Admiral.
To everyone on that email, they probably thought this was a long-planned research project, with clear lines of funding and a mission statement. Yet none of that was true.
And unlike before, Michael now had the sole responsibility of handling the situation.
A short while ago, Halsey demanded a meeting with Keeler, and gotten Captain Wilson removed from the Orion-II Project. Her reasons had made sense, and Keeler had agreed with the issues she'd laid out: compromised chain of command, failure to understand the program's training methodology, potential damage to the reliability and efficacy of the trainees, the whole thing.
But demanding a meeting with the head of Section Three with so little notice hadn't come without cost to Halsey. It had resulted in several important meetings being shuffled around for the Vice Admiral. The Doctor had burned a bridge, and the price was that she would no longer have direct access to Keeler's time.
Instead, now everything had to go through Lieutenant Commander Michael Stanforth – something that Keeler had off-handedly referred to as his 'first real assignment'.
That meant that when replies came back, asking for more details on this Project GUNGNIR, they came to Stanforth, who had exactly zero idea why his inbox was exploding so late at night.
Would he confirm that ONI was going to cover fifty percent of the total cost of the project? Should survey answers be compiled and sent as a unit, or as individual examples, and should they be sent to Halsey direct, or to the three supervisors of Halsey, Mendez, and him? What were the expected performance metrics of the proposed armor systems?
To every single email, he had given the same response: silence.
Michael doubted that any of the respondents had expected answers the very next day, and that gave him a small amount of time to figure out what he was going to do in response to this mess.
He'd wanted to have more direct tasks to do, rather than the continuing ambiguity of following Keeler around and offering mild advice, and like wishing on a monkey's paw, he'd been rewarded with this ticking time bomb on his desk.
Fifty percent of an unknown total cost, for developing two new armor systems? He couldn't dare sign off on that on his own authority. But if he went to Keeler within less than a week of being assigned as oversight for the Orion-II Project, it wouldn't look good.
Impossible dilemmas were the stock and trade of commanding officers, however, so Michael Stanforth had to pony up a solution. The best one he'd come up with thus far was to write a full report on the project and the email, with the pros and cons, and leaving the final decision up to Keeler.
Just to start, one of the advantages of approving Project GUNGNIR was that they wouldn't have to explain that no, there was no such project, and Doctor Halsey had jumped the gun. Finagling a polite way to express that would have been an even bigger nightmare, and it would have made ONI look bad, as well as ruining the first impression that the other branches had of Doctor Halsey.
Overall, Michael thought that it was likely that Keeler would approve the project. New armor was something that would be appreciated by the various special forces operators, both inside ONI and out. With the way the Insurrection was heating up, it would definitely be an improvement to the men that were facing a disproportionate amount of the danger.
He fired up his computer, and started jotting down his primary notes on the email. What it said, how it said it, and who it said it to.
That final category was particularly important. Michael wasn't an old ONI hand, but even he could spot the curious pattern in the email's recipient list. There wasn't a single man above the rank of an Army Major or a Navy Lieutenant Commander on the list. No one higher than an O-5. Most of the email's recipients weren't even officers. Of the ninety-five, a majority were senior enlisted men. Not E-8's and E-9's, the highest enlist ranks, either.
Michael only recognized a single name on the list – an old family friend of his fathers that he'd met as a child, and whom he'd later learned was one of the more senior NCO's in the Army's special forces detachment, SPECWARCOM.
He frowned, and decided to do a cross-check. He reached his desk and depressed the physical button that would deactivate his security blackout. He'd need access to the mainframe for this, and so long as the Faraday cage was engaged, that was impossible. After that, a simple copy-paste pulled the list of recipients from the email, and plugged them into the confidential database housed deep within the center of the Hive. Two more taps, and he'd opened up a service request.
"Good morning, Lieutenant Commander Stanforth," a pleasant female voice said, as he logged on.
The hologram emitter in his desk came to life, projecting the head and upper half of a woman's body, two arms holding her chin in a thoughtful pose. Her torso was wrapped up in a dress that quickly abandoned human limitations, the 'weave' of the dress tightening down and blending into the whirling narrow point of a tornado instead of legs and feet. He couldn't make out where the fabric of the dress became streams of wind, and he didn't bother trying. That was the kind of detail-obsessed particular that Smart A.I. loved to hide in their appearances, a small expression of idiosyncrasy that allowed them to stand out from each other or just annoy a given officer.
"Good morning, Aether," Michael said, respectfully. It was more than just mimicking Vice Admiral Keeler's professionalism – if there was any A.I. that an ONI officer didn't want to annoy, it was Aether. She ran the Hive's central database, and was the primary facilitator of almost every transfer, data packet, and service request that didn't require eyes-only access.
"I see you're requesting personnel files," Aether said, smiling mischievously. "You don't have access to the full unredacted files for these individuals. For at the moment, at least. I can grant it to you if you'd like, with Admiral Keeler's credentials."
"That's not necessary, thank you," Michael said, interrupting the Smart A.I. before it could start processing the request anyway. "I only need some basic information on the individuals I've requested. I'd like to get a summary of their average time in service, and how long they've been in intelligence or special forces. I don't need every individual, just a broad grouping, and any notable outliers."
"Certainly, that's well within your security clearance," Aether replied. "One moment."
The Smart A.I. probably didn't need a moment to process the request, Michael knew. The real reason was security – a double check of his clearance, probably a quick consult with the Marine checkpoints from this morning to make sure it really was him, and only then would she open the classified data-vaults for even this brief of a query.
The paranoia of ONI was enough to make a man tear his hair out, but Michael reminded himself of what Keeler had told him two months ago, when he'd asked about Catherine Halsey. Defectors were a real risk, and ONI was minimizing that risk as much as they could.
"Here you are, Commander," Aether told him, as a stack of manilla folders appeared on her hologram, before they 'transferred' to his desk. "Would you like an audio summary, or will that be all?"
"That'll be all, thank you," Michael replied, nodding politely as the A.I. returned the gesture, and then disappeared.
He waited a moment to ensure the A.I. had finished interfacing with his desk, so that he wouldn't 'slam the door' on her, and then re-engaged the security blackout with a press of the firm button. The document was waiting in his inbox, and Michael opened it without any further hesitations.
Ninety-five names on a spreadsheet greeted him. Just as he'd asked, in the second column of data was their total years of service, and in the third column was their total time serving in the blacker end of the military spectrum. Aether had gone a little further, however, and included their departmental posting as a fourth column, and their specific job title as a fifth column. Neither of those were classified information, but it was an unusual addition – until Michael spotted the pattern.
Immediately, it was clear that these were no random selections. Each and every one of these men and women had been with the UNSC for over two decades, and with the special forces for at least a year. These were not the high-flyers, climbing the promotion ladder as fast as Michael himself was, not even close. They were the grinders who spent years in their current roles.
Frankly, their seniority alone wouldn't have answered his idle curiosity. Aether's unrequested additions, however, made the pattern much clearer.
Doctor Halsey hadn't emailed the heads of programs – she'd emailed their XO's, their adjutants, their professional staff. She'd emailed the highest-ranking officers who still deployed on operations with their men. She'd emailed the unpromotable men who were older than most of their superiors, and whose quiet words of 'advice' could shape the decisions that they were supposedly barred from.
In short, Halsey had somehow found and isolated the exact right people to talk to about Project GUNGNIR; the real movers and shakers within the UNSC's operators, and not their handlers.
Michael leaned back in his office chair and stared at the list.
Theoretically, he could see how Halsey had done this. She had a high security clearance, and these positions and job titles were much less classified than details of any particular mission or project, well within her access. They were bland, generic things, like 'Tactical Advisor to Team Four', or 'Aide to CO of Group Three'.
Innocuous, unless you knew that Team Four was the Navy's premier squad for asset removal, or that SPECWAR/Group Three was the Army's preferred tool for inter-branch covert operations.
How had Halsey done it? How could she have known these things? Even if she was using old information from a childhood as an Innie, there had been several reorganizations since Robert Watts and Howard Graves had retired. Some of the people she'd emailed had job titles so plain and boring that she couldn't have picked them out of an org-chart.
There was no way that she'd just asked Chief Petty Officer Mendez for a list of his friends. The man wouldn't have provided a list out of professional policy, and even if he had, that wouldn't have explained the Air Force pathfinders, pararescuemen, and combat controllers. The Air Force's special operators were an isolationist bunch, understandably defensive about their steadily eroding funding.
It was another place where Halsey demonstrated knowledge that she shouldn't have possessed, done actions that should have never occurred to her.
And that was before getting into the clever politicking of her offer. This Project GUNGNIR was a cold-hearted bribe to gain support from the other special forces units in the Unified Special Warfare Command. It was blunt and open, doing everything except for outright demanding their friendship in return for a pile of cash.
But why? Why would she want that kind of support? This program was so coated in black ink that none of those other branches knew about it. There was no reason to talk to them at all. Their opinion of Halsey, good or bad, had no effect on the program.
The only potential explanation was that she had a longer plan in mind.
There had been too many unexpected moves from Halsey for these to be accidents. At this point, the only event in the last three months that he suspected wasn't a part of a rigorously organized timetable was her reaction to Captain Wilson, and her frantic demand for his dismissal. Everything else had been too neat, too precise.
Perhaps it was simple career-building, trying to ensure that even after the Orion-II Project was over, she was well-regarded and had support in a wide variety of areas… but why even bother? She already had the ear of Vice Admiral Keeler, the head of Section Three, the most powerful of all the Sections in ONI, which itself was the most powerful of all the intelligence services.
No, career-building didn't feel right to him. The motivation didn't fit. At this point, he didn't know enough about Halsey to properly understand her motivations. Yet at the very least, he could still determine what possibilities were options by disproving them. Career-building was crossed out on his list. What else could he eliminate from contention, simply by seeing how it contradicted with her actions?
The most suspicious part of him, the one that had been wary ever since Keeler informed him of ONI's theory on Halsey's childhood, wondered if this was something malicious. Sowing seeds of discord that would create yet another crisis for the UNSC, crippling their intelligence apparatus in a display of carefully hidden Insurrectionist sympathy.
Michael scowled, and dismissed the thought yet again. It wasn't impossible, but for Halsey to hide a secret of that severity from the most advanced Smart A.I.'s and the most paranoid ONI analysts was very difficult to believe.
Or perhaps it was an economic play? That seemed more fitting to Michael – closer to the answer, almost. Halsey could have a desire to maximize the effect of the Orion-II's, eke the most utility out of them, purely to ensure that more money wouldn't be spent later.
She hadn't struck him as a true believer in the UNSC's overall mission, but that wasn't strictly needed for her to plan out a long, coordinated campaign to ensure the success of the program, even after her actual involvement had ended. So if that was her angle, then it made sense to involve the other branches in Project GUNGNIR. The better relations were between the Orion-II's and the other special forces, the more effective they would be in joint operations, which were often the most critical and sensitive of missions.
Cost-effectiveness was one of the most important, but often overlooked aspect of military development, and he could see Halsey fixating on it in her strange way. Obviously, super-soldiers were incredibly expensive, and with the augmentations, the powered armor, and especially the integration of Artificial Intelligences, the Orion-II Program was on track to be one of the most expensive projects that the UNSC had ever created.
Yet if it succeeded in its purpose, managed to snuff out the burning brushfires of the Insurrection before they could grow into an all-consuming conflagration of a civil war, then the cost-savings of their existence could be literally immeasurable. The fundamental problem with military cost-effectiveness is that civilians tended to not realize the value of deterrence, and so they saw a military force that had been created, served, and retired without ever firing a shot as a waste of money.
The UNSC's current situation was less of deterrence, and more of crisis management, but the logic still applied. ONI was trying to end the situation as quickly and cleanly as possible to prevent the catastrophe that a civil war would cause. If this guess was right, and Halsey's long term plan was to ensure the effectiveness of the Orion-II's in order to be as cost-effective as possible, then who was to say that her goal was strictly on their cost-effectiveness, and not that of the entire UNSC? Like reinforcing a collapsing wall at the most critical, load-bearing position?
The bigger problem, he thought to himself as he kicked his feet up on the corner of his desk and mulled over things, was that he couldn't possibly understand what Halsey's plan was, or why she'd created this problem, without understanding Doctor Catherine Halsey herself.
Michael Stanforth had very conflicted feelings on the Doctor, and the more he learned, the more conflicted he was. At first, he'd thought she was an honest scientist, and then a devious planner, and then a straightforward, pay-for-play politician. Keeler had told him of the disturbing competence that had been revealed by the tactical doctrine of her paper, which made ONI suspect she was a trained Insurrectionist who had defected.
Yet this new move by her didn't fit into any of those categories, and once again, he found that he had no idea who Doctor Halsey actually was – what she believed, why she believed it, and how those two things had brought her here, to ONI.
An honest scientist wouldn't have considered the political maneuver of the email, the attached conditions, and the carefully curated list of recipients.
A devious planner wouldn't have sent the email without covertly arranging everything how she wanted in advance, but Halsey was a complete unknown to ONI's ranks, and had no pull to arrange anything.
A straightforward politician would have talked to Michael and Keeler before ever being this bold, because it risked undercutting them and turning them against her.
And there was no reason at all for a trained Innie commando, even a defector, to risk her cozy position at ONI with such a disruptive, attention-grabbing move.
Michael Stanforth knew that he could try to figure out some new angle, to try to evaluate what Halsey truly was… but he wasn't sure it would be accurate. Not after he'd been wrong so many times, not after so many drastic differences between his mental model of the woman and what she'd actually done.
Part of him wanted to simply ignore the mystery and proceed with his job, but he'd left that part behind the moment he'd been assigned his first command in the JROTC, and been responsible for someone else. Michael had decided nearly half his life ago that he was going to be the best damn commanding officer he could be, and that meant caring about the men and women serving under him.
The lives of your underlings mattered. You didn't have to be their friend, or care about their hobbies, but you had to care about them as people – their confidence and stress, their goals and competence, and plenty more besides. If he didn't have a grasp on the core of Doctor Catherine Halsey, then he wouldn't know when she was close to snapping, and when she was growing bored.
Without that knowledge, he couldn't manage her effectively, and that would cascade down to everything that Halsey was herself responsible for. The science teams, the instructor cadre, the compound itself, everything. If he believed that Halsey was doing fine, when she was running on a knife's edge and taking her frustrations out on her subordinates, then he would miss the signs of stress in the scientists, the instructors, the maintenance staff, until the entire program exploded in a thermonuclear fireball of poor human resources management.
That's the real worst part of this situation, Michael thought himself with dark humor. It's made me into damn HR manager.
But that was just part of being a good officer. You had to juggle a dozen roles at the same time, and do it well, or any one element could topple the entire structure.
In some ways, that was a relief to him. He'd played this role before, and doing it again – even for the craziest research project he'd ever heard of – was a step back into the comforting, familiar territory of being a proper Navy officer, rather than a paper-pushing ONI puke. That was why he'd wanted more direct tasks, rather than just following Keeler around. It was hard to feel like you were actually contributing to the cause when you never got your hands dirty.
Perhaps this was what would keep him sane enough to remain in ONI. Not the promise of promotions or glories or anything like that, but the knowledge that he was keeping a vital project from destabilizing like a gallon-sized jug of nitroglycerin. The professional satisfaction he'd gain from doing that task.
Michael didn't consider himself one of the UNSC's best optimizers or fine-tuners, but he'd admit to some pride in ensuring that everything in his department onboard the Atlas had been as neat, precise, and high performing. For all the benefits and drawbacks that he'd gotten from his name, those "E" efficiency awards hadn't come from nepotism. He suspected that they'd been even harder to get because of it, in fact.
Of course, in order to manage the Orion-II program properly, he'd need to start at the top, and work his way down. The trainees were affected by the instructors, who were affected by Mendez, who was affected by the good Doctor. He'd need to get a firm handle on Halsey. It didn't seem possible at the moment, but he'd never know unless he tried. He didn't need to know her entire life story, he just needed to know enough to have a grasp on her moods and motivations. A working man's knowledge, not a peer-reviewed psychology paper.
Every good officer did this to some degree. You might not be able to keep a solid grasp on every single person on your ship, but you could do it for all your section heads, your major officers, and most importantly, your troublemakers. Halsey's behavior being what it was, Michael couldn't help but think that she fit all three of those categories.
With all his previous assumptions having been proven wrong, there was only one solution possible. He needed to discard all of his previous beliefs, and start anew. The old projections were a bias that he couldn't afford, not if he wanted to avoid any more unpleasant surprises when it came to Doctor Halsey. He needed to look only at her actions, and not speculate on her motives.
What did he know about Halsey? Iron-clad, confirmed facts only.
Truthfully, there wasn't much. She was a brilliant scientist who had gained her first PhD as a teenager, and now held three – in Slipspace Physics, Artificial Intelligence, and Economics. She'd published nearly a hundred papers, almost all of which focused on the economic effects of improvements to Slipspace engines or A.I., and one of which had focused on a hypothetical super soldier program.
Her homeworld of Endymion was a quiet Outer Colony world without much development, but still served as a crossroads for many other colonies. Perfect for the supposed Insurrection angle that ONI suspected, but they had no confirmation of it. Worse, Endymion had never had a single Innie attack on it.
Even after she'd left it for Circumstance, and its famous university, there simply wasn't much. Catherine Halsey was a highly private individual, to the extent that she didn't offer comments or post messages on the planetary nets for ONI to crawl through.
Michael knew damn well that he wouldn't find an answer quickly. He'd only known Halsey for three months, and if ONI's skullduggery didn't drive him into requesting a shipside posting, he'd have another seven years to know her at the barest minimum, up to ten years if the augmentations weren't ready by that first mark.
All he could do was jot down the facts on a clean sheet of paper, and evaluate them as he received them.
Michael reached for his coffee cup, stood up, and moved over the coffeemaker in the corner as he went down the dull list of facts.
So, what are the facts? Michael thought to himself, as the machine whirred to life and poured out a steaming trickle of pitch-black liquid into the mug.
Doctor Catherine Halsey had emailed ninety-five members of the UNSC's special forces with notices of their participation in Project GUNGNIR. The project hadn't existed at all prior to that email; even if she'd arranged it with Keeler, the Vice Admiral would have informed Michael when he handed off oversight to the young Lieutenant Commander. The project's goal was to create two new armor systems for UNSC special forces.
No, that wasn't strictly speaking accurate, he realized. The two new armor systems were only the starting focus of the project. An initial offering, and nothing more. The email had said the purpose of the project was 'to develop new battlefield technologies for the aid of USNC special forces, both for the replacement of standard issue gear and the creation of supplemental gear for special use cases.'
What was Project Orion-II, but the mother of all special use cases? The new ODST armor was called 'special issue' simply because it wasn't standard issue, despite there being hundreds of thousands of suits issued. Compared to that, Orion-II could only hit a maximum of seventy-five suits – nearly unique.
This wasn't a new revelation to Michael. He'd known from the first reading that the purpose of the project was to help the Orion trainees. Still, something about this seemed significant to him. He frowned as he thought about it.
"To help the Orion trainees," he said out loud, sounding the words out, rolling them around in his mouth to see if it prompted any new perspective.
It shouldn't have been that much of a difference from the four existing research teams, but it was. The Exoskeleton, Augmentation, Surgery, and A.I. teams were all about the trainees right now, during the training and augmentation process. Even though no Orion-II would wear their powered armor until after undergoing augmentation, the augmentations were a required part of it.
That wasn't necessarily true for Project GUNGNIR. The way she had written it, Halsey had created a much wider scope. This year, it was an armor system, perhaps something that the Orion-II's would wear if the powered armor wasn't ready in time. Next year, it might be a better rifle. The year after, perhaps some experimental heavy weapon that only they could carry.
Even the political aspect. He'd wondered why she would want good relations with special operations groups that would otherwise have never known about the Orion-II project… but after the Orions started going on missions, the cat would inevitably come out of the bag, and that good relationship would be important then.
Halsey was trying to help the Orion trainees even after they left her care, and her involvement came to an end.
Now why would she do that? Michael wondered to himself.
A sudden flash of heat and pain cut through his thoughts. His coffee cup was full, and spilling over onto his hand. Michael swore, jerking the cup away from the machine and sloshing more of the scalding liquid onto his hand. He grit his teeth and set the cup down on the side-table, and turned the machine off.
Michael cleaned it up with a nearby napkin, and scowled at the mess he'd made with his lack of caution. A smart coffee maker would have automatically shut itself off at a specific interval, but ONI was so paranoid that they insisted on the dumbest coffee makers known to man, to prevent any eavesdropping. Their 'one simple button' rule was a pain in his ass.
It didn't take long, but he went through the effort to pull out some cleaning detergents and wiping the whole counter down – there was no cleaning staff at this level of security clearances, and it was up to him to keep his office ship-shape. Better to do that now, before any coffee-stains could set in.
He'd been onto something, and the pain had distracted him. Michael tried to grab that train of thought as it raced out of the station, and he caught the tail edge of it easily enough. He even managed to distill it down a little tighter, into a form that he felt was a little more accurate than before.
Doctor Halsey was trying to help the Orion-II trainees even after they started combat deployments.
Now, why would she be doing that? Professional pride in the program, and patriotic desire to help the UNSC with the crisis it faced? Simple attachment to the lives of the Orion-II trainees, and desire to see them not wasted? Selfish fears that their deaths would harm her own reputation?
Michael didn't know. Worse, he couldn't know. Some of those options seemed much more plausible than others, but with his assumptions proven wrong time and time again, he knew better than to make the same mistake for a fourth or fifth time.
It was just another fact that he could write down with the others, and use to figure out who Doctor Catherine Halsey really was.