It was the second day of the mission, and Visha had never been happier.
Her five-man team, designated Omega Team, was herself, Grace, Leon, Robert, and August. Their target was the motor pool. Primary focus was on the fuel tank farm, the towering stacks of empty cylinders that could hold millions of gallons. Secondary would be the vehicles themselves, much more distributed and harder to destroy.
Ideally, the entire operation would be performed under stealth. A quiet insertion through the tall grass fields that ringed around the base for a kilometer in every direction, then perform their sabotage, and slip out, back to the hill where their observation post was set up.
Of course, 'ideal' didn't always happen in military operations. Visha knew that from long experience, but her squadmates were learning that today. Chief Petty Officer Mendez had done his best, but he had a tendency to go for simple, one-step increments with his surprise additions to training.
As of yesterday, the base had been relatively well defended with machine guns, searchlights, and watchtowers. That hadn't stopped Blue and Red Teams, led by John and Fred, from successfully taking out their command post and armory yesterday. The base defenders had only barely kept the satellite communications uplink intact, when Gold Team hadn't met the deadline and had been caught in the open during the frenzy after John blew the charges.
But the men of the 105th Shock Troops Division were a little more intense than the Chief and his trainers.
They'd responded to their drubbing by intensifying their perimeter security. The walls of the base were now ringed with razor-wire. Patrols of ODST's were roaming through the fields with loaded rifles. There were snipers in the watchtowers. Some of the vehicles were loaded up for fast response, with fireteams sitting inside the troop transport automobiles, ready to roll out.
All in all, it was a practical and effective display of reactive defensive thinking, adjusting to the tactics of the Spartan teams and ensuring those specific vulnerabilities were patched.
Which was exactly why the grown soldiers were going to lose today.
"You sure about this?" Leon whispered from a dozen meters away, his voice carried by the fiber-optic line that August had laid last night. "I mean, I get the theory, but…"
"It's the last thing they'll expect," Visha replied, not bothering to lower her voice as she spoke into her helmet's microphone. It was a little oversized, but apparently the UNSC had enough early training programs that Tanya had actually managed to scrounge up helmets that could fit their pre-teen bodies.
That was one of the reasons why Visha was so happy. Sure, it was good to get back into the field for a proper operation, and she'd been enjoying this refresher course on advanced tactics and infiltration… but it was the first time that she'd been able to do it in comfort.
UNSC issued armor was sinfully comfortable, molding to their bodies like silk, yet boasting armor plated protection far superior to the Sappenpanzer suits that some had been forced to use in Visha's last life. Even better, the helmet had more amenities than an entire communications bunker! She had a wireless radio transmitter and receiver, auto-dimming eye protection, and even the ability to jack into fiber optic lines for truly undetectable communications.
And this was standard issue gear! What an amazing world Visha lived in. She'd been picking up the new technology of the twenty-sixth century about as fast as the other Spartan cadets, but so much of it was beyond her ability to rationalize. She simply had no context for artificial intelligences, or robotic surgeons, or faster than light travel. But when she saw something that was directly comparable to her first life, she marveled at how much more advanced it was.
Her weapon, for instance. A lightweight automatic rifle, less than eighty centimeters long, with thirty rounds in a magazine! Full sized cartridges, not the pistol-caliber rounds of the submachine guns, or the intermediate rounds that had been hypothesized in the later stages of the Great War. And this was a second-line weapon, issued to tank crews and truck drivers, because it was small enough to fit in tight spaces.
Granted, the gear that the 105th Division was using was supposedly even better. Their guns had sixty round magazines, with an integrated electronic sight. Their armor was both more durable and stealthier – though Tanya had already ranted to Visha once before about how overpriced it was for a fairly mild amount of improved protection. But unfortunately for them, the stealth properties of the black-suited, silver-helmeted men wouldn't help them detect the Spartan cadets in their 'inferior' gear.
It was just so… fascinating. Visha loved her time with the new equipment, and she couldn't wait for the trainers to start letting them use the real things with live rounds.
Alas, since the UNSC didn't have mage orbs, and Tanya was still having some trouble with her attempts to scale up Visha's use of electronic orbs, both the cadets and the ODSTs were using 'training rounds', which had much less recoil.
Still, even the training rounds were so advanced that they would actually mimic a proper bullet's effects. No mere blanks, with painstaking effort to determine if you'd made a hit or not, and the constant annoyance of some soldiers lying about their shots. Not so with the 'tactical training round', which would deliver a splatter of paint to mark the hit visibly, an anesthetic to knock the target unconscious for a short period, and even an immobilizing effect on their specifically designed training armor.
There was no arguing with a TTR shot, no cheating it, and that was what made Visha's plan possible.
She'd learned well from her time under the Major, and now, it was time to apply those lessons to the real world. The enemy's biggest strength was also their biggest weakness: the minds and thoughts of the soldiers themselves.
The ODSTs' decision to deploy most of their men on patrols and overwatch was a great move to prevent silent infiltration, she would happily agree to that.
But when you thought about it another way, it also meant that they'd used up most of their manpower reserve, and far too many were exposed in the open, away from the protective walls.
That wasn't to say that the ODSTs were dumb enough to march out into a firing squad's sights.
As far as the Spartan observation posts could determine, there were about a hundred and fifty ODSTs in total, meaning a two-to-one outnumbering ratio against them. It was a larger group than the special forces normally deployed in, but they were just as well trained in larger operations as they were in combat teams of around a dozen.
Of that hundred and fifty enemies, perhaps a third of them were outside the base's walls. Most of them were patrolling in small fireteams of three, while the rest were manning the entrance gates. That wasn't a lot of men to patrol such a wide field, but it was more proactive than they'd been before.
Another third were on duty inside the base, either manning the emplaced machineguns, sitting in the all-terrain trucks as a mobile reserve, or moving between the buildings. Their superior firepower and mobility was the real deterrent to the cadets, not the patrolling sentinels.
The remaining third was missing, and their current speculation was that they were inside the base itself, eating, resting, and sleeping in the barracks as a final reserve. It wouldn't be nearly as comfortable as a proper garrison, but being able to sleep inside a climate-controlled barracks with running water was the height of luxury in Visha's mind, especially in a field exercise!
All of this meant that if the Spartans simply tried to open fire from the safety of the hill-line, they'd be doomed to failure. The closest enemy was still half a kilometer away. While Visha was confident that Linda, Fred, and she could make a few of those shots even with the MA5K not being designed for precision work, three snipers would never win the day against an enemy company.
But that was alright, because they couldn't have won the exercise via attrition anyway. Their orders were to neutralize specific targets within the base, and do so within a tight time window. They could start their sabotage whenever they wanted. But as soon as the Spartans were detected, they had only a half hour before the hypothetical enemy air support showed up, and every cadet outside their observation post was instantly declared to be KIA.
Which, as Visha had pointed out to the other Spartans the night before, didn't technically rule out eliminating the entire ODST company.
It just meant that they had to be fast about it.
History played a big part in human psychology, as Lieutenant Keyes kept reminding them. Patterns of behavior became ingrained routines that were ripe for exploitation. With the UNSC's special forces, that meant that they were used to being the aggressors against a guerilla resistance. They expected sabotage and snipers, isolated patrols being ambushed, and indirect bombardments via mortars or drones.
But those asymmetric warfare tactics were harassment, and little more. The few times that the Insurrection had managed to win up front battles like in Eridanus II, it was because they'd planted deep cover agents aboard UNSC warships months or years in advance, and used that orbital fire support to wipe out the Colonial Military Authority's bases. There was no defensive preparation that any infantry man could have against that kind of strike.
Additionally, after yesterday's partial success, the opposition knew that they were facing children. Gold Team was 'out' of the exercise, even though the enemy's casualties had been regenerated, bringing down the cadet's numbers. Children capable of sabotage was one thing, but sudden assaults? Out of the question. The amount of skill training they'd need, the physical conditioning, it was far beyond what a normal child could do.
So the ODSTs would never expect what the Spartans had planned for them. Not just a sabotage infiltration, not just isolated sniping, but a coordinated lightning assault to dismantle their defenses, destroy the targets, and retreat in good order before the ODSTs even realized what hit them.
In other words, the perfect situation for stormtrooper tactics.
"This is Blue Lead," John's voice said, coming in from hundreds of meters away through the same network of hardline fiber optics. "All team leaders, check in."
"Red Lead, we're ready for the rush," Fred reported. His team of twenty cadets had snuck in the closest to the base, inching their way forwards over the hours of the early morning hours. They were the largest concentrated force, and they were maybe a hundred meters from the front gate. Given the overlapping fields of fire from the four machine guns, they'd be dead meat if they jumped up too early. If everything went as planned, their job was to handle the enemy's numerical advantage – take out the mobile reserve, pin down everyone in the barracks, hunt down anyone hiding in a random building.
"Green Lead, in position. I got a good feeling about this," Kurt said. He was commanding the second assault force, around fifteen in number, and they were aiming for the side entrance on the other side of the base from the main gate. It would be a tighter squeeze to get past the smaller door, and was a bigger potential chokepoint as a result, but hitting the enemy from two sides at once would allow the Spartans to maximize their enemy's confusion.
"Gray Lead, overwatch in position," Joshua reported. His unit was barely a dozen in number, and the only reason he was in charge was because Linda was surprisingly bad at commanding a squad while still shooting, and pretty much everyone agreed that they wanted her shooting. It would be up to them to ensure that the turrets were out of action and the enemy marksmen suppressed, and without their success, this whole operation would turn into a meatgrinder in seconds.
The other team leaders continued the roll call. The smaller a team was, the more specific its target, all the way down to John's four-man Blue Team being assigned to eliminating the enemy CO and his staff at the base's fallback command post. Finally, it was Visha's turn.
"Omega Lead," she said, smiling underneath her helmet. "Ready and waiting."
"Alright," John said, now that everyone had reported in. "Enemy patrols are nearly perfect. Prepare to execute in thirty seconds."
Visha clicked off her microphone, and reached out with her mind towards her ace in the hole – the electronic watch on her wrist. It was brand-new and freshly issued, and based on previous examples, it would probably last a few weeks of infrequent use as a mage orb… but she'd never used one for long, continuous periods, and she didn't know how it would hold up to the strain.
"Open fire!" John barked.
Visha tensed, but stayed exactly where she was, lying down underneath the cover of the grass.
A moment later, gunshots rang out behind her. Visha and her Omega Team were maybe two hundred yards away from the base, and the shots came from maybe fifty meters further back. If they'd been standing, the bullets would have struck them in the back. Gray Team was firing semi-automatic, and after less than five seconds, their fire stopped.
"MG's down, snipers suppressed!" Joshua announced.
"Go, go, go!" John cried out.
Visha reached up and pulled out the connector to the fiber optic line, and scrambled to her feet. The nearest ODST patrol was barely ten meters away, and they were already turning around, instinctively re-orientating to face the gunfire to their north, away from Omega Team.
Time slowed down as Visha whispered in Germanian, reciting the necessary mathematical formula for a reflex enhancer. Her MA5K was already raised up.
She fired with her weapon on full auto, but controlled the trigger manually with just enough tension in finger. Her carbine spit out a burst of five or six shots at the lead man in the enemy squad, then shift to the second man and give him the same. The third followed suit. From her perspective, she could see their armor locking up in slow motion, one after the other, but she knew that to a normal person's eyes, it would have looked nearly instantaneous.
Visha twisted, rotating her hips and taking aim at the next squad, thirty meters away on their left flank. Leon and August were already firing, since they'd been facing in the right direction to start, but she chipped in, taking out the final man in that squad. She didn't have to look to know that Grace and Robert had done the same on their right flank.
"Charge!" Visha called out, her helmet's communicator switched back to regular encrypted radio waves. Adrenaline filled her veins in a poor substitute for the already fading magical enhancement, and she quickly reloaded, stashing the partially depleted magazine in her combat webbing.
Red Team was already at the gates, rushing past the five immobilized ODSTs, rifles held at shoulder height as they split apart like a flower and swept out to cover all angles. There was a rattle of gunfire back at them, but the cadets dove into cover and fired back. Omega Team stacked up by the gate, ready to join in, but there was no need.
One of the large, emplaced machineguns roared to life – but it was firing inwards, not outwards. A fireteam from Red Team had peeled off as soon they'd breached the gate, ascending the nearby staircase to the wall's emplaced positions. They'd needed several of the cadets to drag the hefty, ten kilogram GPMG and the additional weight of its tripod mount over to the other side of the wall, but it was well worth it.
The M247, unlike many of the other machineguns of the UNSC, was chambered in the same 7.62x51mm cartridge as the MA5K's that the Spartan cadets were using, meaning that it could safely be used with TTR rounds for training. It also meant that there was no real downside to spraying fire around the base liberally, and suppressing the enemy with brutal efficiency. It was a good element of realism. Being careful with your shots for safety reasons only trained hesitation and other bad habits, when a real soldier might just mag-dump and call it good.
"Clear!" Fred announced, as Red Team resumed their storming assault on the base.
They threw stun grenades around the corners, and rather than charge after them, a flanking team went onwards from another direction. Sometimes this was around the side, sometimes they went through a building, and a couple times Visha saw her fellow cadets scrambling up and over a building to attack from above.
The essential idea behind a storm assault was speed and aggression. The objective was not to use overwhelming firepower. That would be better suited for artillery or aerial bombardment. Instead, it was to strike fast enough that your enemy was confused and disorganized. An army's cohesion and morale were amongst the most important elements of its performance, alongside training, equipment, and logistics. Unlike the other factors, however, cohesion and morale could be altered on the battlefield.
When you attacked without warning, and moved fast enough to give your opponent no time to rally or organize, they would be stuck in a panicked state, without a clear chain of command to give orders, or the intelligence to devise a counter-attack. It was a doctrine that the Major had heartily endorsed and demonstrated with the 203rd on numerous occasions, and Visha was determined to live up to her standards.
There were easily a dozen ODSTs laying on the ground as Omega Team followed her into the base. She hung a left immediately, darting into the small alleyway between the base walls and the nearest building.
Something had bothered her about the incapacitated men. It niggled away like a skin tag. There was something… wrong about them.
It took a moment, and then it clicked. The TTR rounds had locked up the downed men's limbs in whatever position they'd been in. Real corpses didn't look like that – they had no muscle control, and they were limp and floppy.
Visha shrugged as she braced herself at the edge of the alleyway. You couldn't simulate everythingperfectly, not even with the UNSC's technology.
Omega Team swept out from the alleyway, carbines raised, and advanced to the motor pool in a star formation, one cadet covering roughly seventy degrees of their arc. It wasn't a long way to the motor pool, but enemies could appear from anywhere. They had to make it quickly, before their window of opportunity ran out.
All around her, Spartan teams raced through their missions. Red Team was bombarding the barracks with stun grenades and shooting at anything that so much as twitched, while Blue, Gray, Black, and Yellow Teams were breaking into buildings and hosing down their targets.
Yet of all the cadets, it was her Omega Team that was the most important.
They had half an hour before they had to be safely back in their observation posts, or they would automatically fail. That meant crossing a kilometer of grass and a kilometer of hillside. They could do that in ten minutes at the most, and in theory, twenty minutes was enough time to fulfill all their objectives and bug out on foot.
But that was cutting it close. It assumed that no ODSTs survived to chase them back to their observation posts, and identify them – another instant fail condition. It assumed that they didn't have casualties that they'd have to carry, slowing them down. It assumed that they were all fresh and ready to run, instead of tired after twenty minutes of fighting.
They couldn't win under those conditions. It was impossible.
So the night before, when Visha had proposed her assault plan, she had changed those conditions.
What if they didn't have to run all the way back to the observation posts? What if they didn't have to carry any casualties? What if it didn't matter if they were rested or tired?
The ODST base had a motor pool that they were supposed to destroy, but technically, their objective was only to destroy the fuel tanks and the garages. There was nothing in there about the trucks themselves, and whether or not they could be reappropriated.
It helped that destroying the motor pool was one of the tertiary objectives on their mission briefing. Of the primary objectives, they still needed to take out the satellite uplink. Of the secondary, decapitating the enemy's chain of command and recovering a data drive from the 'server room'. The tertiary objectives weren't even required for to succeed in the mission at all; they were optional objectives that would help, but little more.
The cadets didn't know if the ODSTs were aware of their objective list, but cheating on exercises was a well-established tradition. After the debacle with Gold Team yesterday, Visha suspected that the enemy knew exactly what the Spartans were aiming for. Their rapid response team had moved so quickly to the exact target – they must have known.
Which was just another reason why the blitz assault had taken them off guard. There was no winning via attrition, so why would the cadets risk a pitched battle, with the inevitable danger of higher casualties, slowing them down too much to get back to base?
The answer was obvious to the cadets: because the enemy wouldn't see it coming, and because the cadets had another way of getting their casualties home.
"All clear," Visha reported, as her team slipped into the large pre-fabricated garage through a back door. "Robert, Leon, check the Warthogs. Make sure they're ready to go."
The gunfire outside the garage was loud, and nearly un-ending. Thankfully, the bay door was shut, hiding Omega Team from the running firefight outside, as elements of Red Team battled it out with the 105th's mobile reserve. It seemed like the detachment had dragged a couple of the GPMG's with them, because it sounded like a buzzsaw was roaring.
The troopers had been already loaded up into their trucks, ready to ride out to repel a push – but with the Spartans already inside the base, they had to dismount to engage, and they were still highly clustered in the wide open parking lot. Sitting ducks.
Grace knelt down by the side-door and started unloading the demolition charges. They were dummies made of harmless putty, so that nobody could improvise a detonator or accidentally ignite one with static electricity. August, meanwhile, was peeking out through a narrow slit in the bay door, on the lookout for any ODSTs.
"Barracks is down," Fred reported over the radio. "Jorge, how's the carpool?"
"Almost finished," the Reach native said, grunting over the line. "Just one more… got him!"
The gunfire outside died down.
"Go, go!" August urged the others.
"Omega Team coming out," Visha announced over the radio. "Jorge, stay on overwatch while we set the charges."
"Copy that," Jorge replied.
Grace and Leon picked up a pair of charges each and slipped them into their thigh-mounted pouches. Once they were ready, Visha launched herself out of the side-door, MA5K at the ready, and charged towards the towering fuel tanks at the other end of the carpool.
A half-dozen troop carriers occupied the parking lot, and they were nearly unrecognizable underneath all the bright red from the TTR rounds. There was also a lot of frozen bodies on the pavement. Almost every one of the 105th's men had managed to dismount and take cover behind their vehicles, but they hadn't lasted long.
Visha glanced up at the looming wall in the distance, and saw the bright blue identification pip of Jorge right next to the protruding barrel of one of the M247's. It was his cadet number, 052, the same as hers was 016. Another amazing piece of technology, overlaying a friend-or-foe tag over every ally without fail or delay.
They reached the fuel tanks, the long cylinders that reached nearly two stories up into the air. It was only a matter of moments for Grace to 'activate' the charges with the fake detonators, and stick them an arms-length into the crevices between the silos. That way, one charge would destroy both fuel tanks – though that didn't stop them from doubling up, ensuring that each tank was bracketed by charges on both sides.
"Omega Lead, job's done," Visha said into the radio. "Prepping our exit strategy now."
The detached element of Red Team was descending from the wall as Omega Team rushed back to the garage. Jorge was still carrying that GPMG, though he'd enlisted one of his fellow cadets to help him, and two more to carry the ammo. The rest of his squad slipped through the throngs of parked vehicles, grabbing up the weapons of the 'dead' men and tossing them up into the cargo beds of the trucks.
Over the next few minutes, Visha and her team made sure that all the vehicles would start, and ensured that a dozen of them were ready to drive. Mostly, this meant adjusting both the seats and the pedals to be much, much closer together. It would still be awkward, with none of the drivers having any actual back support, but it would be possible to actually drive the Warthogs.
The rest were quickly crammed into the garage, and a couple spare dummy charges were placed right in front of them. Leon had found a handy spray can of bright orange safety paint, and drew a couple arrows to the charges, so that any ODSTs would understand the message – these trucks were out of commission.
Cadets streamed into the carpool in fireteams of three or more, and soon enough, they had everyone there.
The operation had not been without casualties. Five cadets were completely unconscious or locked up through hits to their heads or chest, and another ten were walking wounded, with one limb or more unusable. The 'dead' were loaded into the back of the trucks and secured as much as possible, so they wouldn't get jostled too much, or risk falling out.
Twenty percent casualties. By the standards of the Great War, those were amazingly low casualty numbers. By the standards of the 203rd, they were horrendous. It was only the knowledge that this was training that kept Visha from fearing the Major's response to their lackluster performance, though she still shivered a little out of ingrained instinct.
Visha checked her watch, then remembered that was a mistake. Though she hadn't used her acceleration spell much, the watch's timer was off, like a gear had slipped. Visha knew it ran on 'chips' instead, even if she didn't fully understand the electrical circuitry that Tanya had tried to instruct her on.
Her HUD was still trustworthy, and said that it had been about eleven minutes. They had nineteen minutes left before they had to safely back in their individual observation posts, crammed inside like sardines, or they would be eliminated.
It seemed a little unfair that they could decisively stomp a base into the ground, achieve all objectives, and still lose if they weren't back in their own fortifications by the appointed hour. But she wasn't in the 203rd anymore, where their mere reputation had been enough to scare away a lot of enemy reinforcements.
And, if she was honest, the Major would have never allowed them to linger long enough for those reinforcements to regain their nerve, or gather in enough strength to overcome their fears. Getting out as soon as the mission was accomplished was extra effort, but it was also a safeguard, avoiding the extra risk that lingering would have provided.
"Got the package?" John asked Will, who nodded and held up a data drive, before tucking it back into his vest pocket. "Good."
"Load up!" Kelly cried out, climbing up the nearest truck and putting herself in the passenger seat. "Let's blow this popsicle stand!"
"What does that even mean?" Visha muttered, as she mounted the side-steps and pulled herself bodily into the driver's seat.
She didn't say it over the radio, however. There was no point, for there was so much new 'slang' that she didn't know. Fifty different homeworlds had meshed together in a strange stew of terms, and Visha was not the only one of the Spartan cadets to be befuddled by another. She could ask Kelly later, when they weren't on a mission.
The engines came to life with throaty roars. They were smoother and deeper than even the best airplane engines that Visha had seen during the Great War. They sounded almost like the purring of big cats from the holovids that Déjà showed them.
Grace climbed into the passenger seat, and the rest of Omega Team loaded up in the back, while Visha reminded herself of the controls. There was no clutch, no gear shifter, because it was all an 'automatic' that handled those things for the driver. Just another thing that seemed so wild to Visha.
Naomi hit the gate's control pad and sent the enormous metal plate sliding to the side, revealing the open grassland in front of them.
The convoy of Warthogs rolled out, huge wheels churning through dirt and grass as the teams immediately started splitting apart. None of them were headed directly to their own observation posts, of course. There could be trackers in the vehicles, or surviving ODSTs that saw them, or the enemy air support could spot their thermal signatures.
Instead, they would drop off most of their fellow cadets at the edge of the treeline near the top of the hills, far enough from their true fallback positions to conceal them. Then the drivers would kick the cars into neutral and let them coast back down the hill, while the Spartans lugged their loot back out to their homes.
Visha suspected that the Doctor and the ODST commander would agree to call the exercise here. The joint training sessions were supposed to last an entire week, but in her opinion, there was no more value to be gained in this direct contest. The Spartans had sufficiently demonstrated their own skills, which would force the adults to take them seriously and treat them seriously.
Logically speaking, the next few days would likely be spent in workshops, with the ODSTs directly teaching the cadets alongside Chief Mendez's trainers. She was looking forward to it. The past few years of training hadn't really taught her any new skills. Unlike every other cadet, she'd been mostly focused on the more boring classroom lessons.
But now, Visha would be learning about the more advanced weapons and technologies that the UNSC had at its disposal. She was certain that once the cadets gave a debriefing to the veteran special forces soldiers, they could point out ways that it could have been faster, deadlier, more effective. The 105th Shock Troops Division had actually been out there, on the line, and those kinds of men were the most important resource that could be given to a training detachment.
Those skills would be incredibly valuable, not just for the fact that they were brand-new to Visha, but also because the Insurrection would know of them, with so many ex-UNSC defectors in their own ranks. Those tactics, tricks, and techniques would be the exact kind of thing that would be used against Visha, and therefore, she needed to know them innately.
Especially since Visha knew something that almost nobody else did, which made those skills even more valuable.
The Spartan-II program was going to be shut down.
Many of the cadets would probably be going back to their families, or choosing civilian lives, but Visha knew that would not happen to her. Magic was her great strength, and it couldn't be turned so easily to a civilian life. Yes, magical healers had been commonplace in the Empire, but Visha had never learned those skills, had never been anything more than a soldier.
It had been hard, keeping that knowledge in the back of her head. It had been more than two years since she'd first been approached by one of the trainers, just before she'd met Tanya von Degurechaff in this second life. The double-agent had made contact a couple times since then, just to remind Visha of her agreement to turn 'state's evidence' against the program.
Frankly, the worst part was keeping it secret from Tanya. But she had to.
Tanya despised the politicking of ONI, as she had told Visha several times in their rare private meetings. Her old CO wanted nothing more than to devote her life to studying Shaw-Fujikawa drives, to refining the creation of Artificial Intelligences, and to potentially discovering a true FTL communication method.
Tanya had lamented, so often, that Visha's life was a hostage to ensure her cooperation with the program.
But if the program was shut down, then Visha's life was not at risk from the augmentation process. None of the cadets would have to risk their deaths.
The problem was that Tanya was a horrible actor. She'd always been so open to Visha, and Visha wasn't the most observant of people! She had nothing on the trained spies and the A.I.'s of ONI. If Tanya knew, then those people might spot that she was faking, trying to stall things out, trying to get the program cancelled.
And that was intolerable, because if Tanya was caught malingering, then she might be punished, and that was something that Visha would not accept. For Tanya's own safety, she had to appear to be perfectly loyal, perfectly obedient to ONI's wishes. Which meant keeping Tanya in the dark.
Visha wasn't proud of it. She knew that the looming dread of the augmentations was still eating away at Tanya, even if the odds had gotten much better over the years.
But she knew that there was a safety valve, a stop-cord on the train, that she could use to preserve the lives of everyone in the program, including Tanya's.
Magecraft.
Visha couldn't trust the double-agent to keep Tanya safe. That man, and whatever cabal he represented, clearly wanted Tanya in trouble, potentially even dead. Similarly, she couldn't trust the truth – that the entire Spartan-II program had originally been a drunken joke on behalf of Tanya, and the Doctors Meyer, Wu, and Sullivan. She doubted that ONI would be any more accepting of the egg on their face than high command would have been back in Germania.
But ONI wanted super-soldiers, and Visha and Tanya could give them to ONI. Not via surgical augmentations, but through magic. Soldiers that had all the enhanced reactions, strength, and training that the original paper had envisioned. Even the more science fiction elements, like the hypothesized energy shielding, could be performed practically with an orb's defensive shell.
Yet… even if Tanya could have been trusted to keep acting like she was a woman obsessed with ensuring the success of the Spartan-II program, Visha still would not have told her. She'd known her commanding officer for many years in their shared last life, and a few more in this life, and she knew Tanya's weakness – her eternal optimism.
Tanya believed, erroneously, that the rebellions in the Colonies could be subdued peacefully through methods of communication and cultural exchange, through bonds of brotherhood and friendship.
And Tanya was wrong.
Visha did not remember most of her childhood. Her true childhood, not her second life as Victoria Pelham. She had only the memories of fleeing the Empire of the Rus during the revolution. She didn't like to talk about it, and whenever the topic had come up and she was unable to dodge it, she told people that she had forgotten most of her memories, and only recalled the desperate journey to escape the communists.
It was true, she didn't remember anything before that. But just those memories were more than enough.
She had seen with her own eyes fathers fighting sons, brothers fighting brothers. The violence in the streets, the gunshots and the yells. The bodies left out overnight, the snow stained red. It had been early days for the coming civil war, but in the end there had been so many dead that it was comparable to the Great War. It was especially similar in those early days – she'd seen the same thing twice. The optimism, the belief that the killings would stop if only one side or the other was victorious… only to grind on, and on.
She remembered the fear. Not just of armed men with guns, but the lack of trust that had swept the nation like a plague of unbelief in their fellow man. Her parents hadn't dared go to any distant relatives, not knowing if those relatives were already dead, or if they were revolutionaries that would kill them, or if they were neither, but were still scared enough to turn them in, just to preserve their own lives.
The few meals they'd shared with other travelers had been silent things, even with cousins, because you couldn't trust a single person. Anyone might report you to the mob, and no one was innocent of suspicion.
That was what the UNSC was truly facing. Not just terrorist bombings, not just targeted assassinations, or uprisings. The Insurrection was a contagion, a virus that was spreading throughout the Colonies. Even people without any loyalty to either side would soon come to be silent bystanders, refusing to help their fellow man, hoping to ride out the chaos without being forced to choose a side.
One of the clearest memories of those days was her parents talking as they'd ridden a horse through a winding forest trail in the dim dusky light as the sun was setting. They'd spoken softly, perhaps thinking that Visha wouldn't be able to hear them in her sleep.
Visha had been on the back of the horse, nestled just above its hindquarters with their meager supplies of food and clothes, and she hadn't been able to sleep with all the jostling. She had heard every word.
Her mother, always so kind-hearted, had asked if it was possible for this revolution to end peacefully. If there was a compromise between the sweeping radicalism and the stodgy aristocracy of the Czar. A reform, a shift.
Albion had done it, after all – they'd gone from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional one, with the monarch being little more than a figurehead.
Her father said there was no compromise possible. His voice had been hard. He'd said more bloodshed was inevitable. They would not be stopped by compromise. They would only take it as a sign of weakness, an indication of their power. He'd reminded her mother of the reforms to the Duma in the years prior. The oppressive chains of the Czar had been curtailed, the people's rights had been strengthen. There were even land reforms!
But that hadn't satisfied the intelligentsia. They didn't want reform. They wanted revolution. Anything less than that was a betrayal of their ideal, and anyone who didn't agree was nothing but a Czarist puppet in their eyes. They had pushed for more, and more, and they would do the same if their revolution succeeded. They wouldn't stop until they had slowly choked the Russy people to death.
The only real option, her father had told her mother in a grim and hopeless voice, the best possible path for their countrymen, was to kill every single revolutionary.
Only then would there be peace.