Lieutenant Antonio Silva had some real complicated feeling about this mission.
At first, it had seemed like an easy rotation. His unit, the 7th Shock Troops Battalion within the 105th Shock Troops Division, had just been rotated back from a deployment in the Outer Colonies after two years of managing brushfires. It had been a bitch of a time, constantly being called up and stood down, and even the occasional firefights had been even more hectic, because of all the civilian hostages or bystanders.
Reach was a welcome home-port for an ODST. Cool, brisk air, nearly an entire continent for the UNSC's exclusive use, and vastly lower chance of Innie or civvie complications.
But apparently, ONI had decided to give them a new headache.
His company had been pulled out of the unit and sent off to Alföld, halfway down the continent. They were to play opposition force in a field exercise for some ONI project that was working up.
On one hand, the young Silva was more than happy to be further south, near Bars, Esztergom, Manassas, and Quezon. The four cities of Alföld were some of the largest and liveliest on Reach. Compared to New Alexandria, none of them were quite as big, but combined, they more than made up for it. The sports, the night life, the beaches… once this training mission was over, he'd be able to get some leave, and go party.
On the other hand, that was before the training mission had started. Before his company had been dropped onto a prefab base, told to defend it, and given almost no other information. Just… defend the primary targets, here's a list of secondary and tertiary targets. Not the weirdest mission brief, and the Captain had gotten more info, so Silva had trusted that ONI vaguely knew what they were doing.
And then, on the first day, they'd suffered an infiltration that 'blew up' the command post (thankfully while only a single LT was inside), as well as the armory, and nearly taken out their satellite uplink. They'd nearly lost the planned five-day exercise in just six hours.
But it was worse when they'd captured the perpetrators on their third target.
Kids. Their opponents were kids.
None of them had spoken when they'd been interrogated. Sure, nobody in the company had dared to do anything more than ask them questions in a harsh tone, because of how goddamn bizarre the situation was, but the kids hadn't said anything. Not even the old standby of name, rank, and serial number. They'd been silent as the grave.
The best they could figure, the five brats were nine years old. One of the team leaders had a niece about that age, and it was freaking him out to see children the same age running around in Marine combat gear and shooting MA5's at them.
It was messing with the men, and that was damn hard to do. They weren't fresh Marines out of Boot. Silva himself was one of the youngest in the unit, and he'd earned that after graduating OCS at eighteen, and putting six hard years in the Marines before he'd been offered the chance to join the Helljumpers. Fourteen combat teams of the best killers in the Marine Corps, and they were hesitating.
Fuck, it wasn't even the first time some of these guys had fought child soldiers. Sergeant Mahoney in the third team had a couple real horrifying stories about an Innie compound out on Etalan, and he'd said that having to take out kids was the worst damn part.
But those kids had been Innies. They were brainwashed by whatever sub-flavor of crazy separatist bullshit their parents had fed them in that horse-camp a thousand miles from civilization, cooking up chemical weapons. Products of a diseased people that insisted their cause was more important than not just their lives, or their kids' lives, but the lives of everyone and anyone that might inhale the gas from their WMDs.
To learn that the UNSC was doing something similar was…
Silva didn't have the words. He didn't want to go party in the four cities anymore. He wanted to find the nearest bar and go drink himself into a stupor. He wanted to drink until he couldn't remember anything, for any reason, at any damn time.
But then the kids had come back and kicked their asses on the second day, and the entire exercise had to be jettisoned.
Now he was stuck in a debriefing room, along with the entire rest of the company, and they were listening to Chief Petty Officer Mendez, a Navy puke that one of the older non-coms recognized. He was telling them the cover story, which was so blatantly bullshit that everyone could tell.
According to Mendez, the kids were trainees in an advanced training course for high-performing relatives of UNSC veterans. They were all twelve years old, in their first few months of training. Supposedly, they were aiming for early admission to OCS at fourteen.
Not a single one of the ODSTs was buying it. Hell, Mendez himself wasn't buying it. The man's voice was flat, and he was giving them all the look that every drill instructor had mastered. That yes, he knew it was bullshit too, but they were being told to shut up and swallow it, because this was the official story, and nothing else could be allowed.
The only part that made sense to any of them was that now, after all that bullshit, the 7th Shock Troops Battalion was supposed to teach the kids. The next three days would be joint exercises between the ODSTs, the Navy trainers, and the cadets. They would be focusing on stealth reconnaissance, counter-stealth security, simulated sabotage and demolitions, and C3 – command, control, and communications.
Frankly, that was what reeled Lieutenant Silva, UNSC Marine Corps, back to reality.
Of course the Navy had seen something shiny, and gotten too bogged down in a crazy plan. Of course they realized, eventually, that they couldn't pull it off on their own.
And of course, eventually, they had realized that they needed the Marines to bail them out of their mess.
After the first day of training, Silva had to admit that the kids knew their stuff.
Maybe he should have been willing to admit that after the field exercise, but luck played a part in those things, and you never really knew if your enemy had done everything right, or if you'd made some mistake that let them get away with a dumb strategy.
That had made his opening 'lesson' very easy.
Silva, per his rank and authority over a third of the company, had been in charge of about a third of the cadets. So he'd dragged the even mix of twenty-five cadets, twenty-five Navy trainers, and twenty-five ODST's, to a nearby field. Then he'd had them explain their reasoning and logic behind the suicidal assault they'd somehow pulled off yesterday.
Had it truly been a good plan, or had they just been dumb enough to think that they could charge and their enemies would fall over dead, and gotten lucky? He thought it was probably luck, but the more he asked, the more he realized that it wasn't.
The mastermind, a cadet named Visha, was with one of the other groups, but a snot-nosed brat named Jerome had explained the plan well enough to satisfy Silva. Their entire plan had hinged on the ODSTs being off-balance and unexpecting, both because they were kids, and because the UNSC didn't really play defense that much.
More specifically, Jerome explained, Silva's company had too limited numbers to properly patrol the entire field, and they'd stuck to repetitive patrol patterns – which the cadets had tracked and charted. Sneaking within those patrols only took time and patience. They'd already scouted out the base and made maps on the first day of the exercise. They'd laid fiber-optics the night before to ensure undetectable communications until the moment that they launched the operation.
They'd planned out exactly where each team would be at the start time, down to the square meter, and approached slowly enough to stay concealed under their sensor-blocking camouflage sheets. Once the cadets were in close, they had snipers take out the machineguns, and then blitzed through the gate.
Silva took turns asking the cadets questions, swapping between himself and his senior NCO's. They drilled the cadets on why they'd made each decision, what their timetable was, why they'd chosen specific targets, and more. They picked cadets at random to defend those decisions, and it quickly became clear that while not all of the cadets had the same degree of understanding of the entire plan, they were all very well-versed in their own assigned roles.
After the debriefing, Silva had decided to start the training sessions. He needed to see exactly how much of this was bluffing, and how much of it was actual truth.
But the cadets weren't bluffing. Hell, the cadets weren't nearly as inexperienced as Mendez had claimed. Silva had known he was just feeding them the cover story, but 'only a few months experience' had felt like the most plausible of those lies.
These kids only had the basics of stealth recon down, but they'd clearly been working on those basics for years. They made none of the rookie mistakes that the average ranger school trainee did. It didn't matter that they didn't have the more advanced techniques, not when the basic stuff was just as important now as it had been five hundred years ago.
The Navy trainers were hiding their pride well, but Silva still saw signs. The way the trainers looked over the cadets, the set of their shoulders, like they were parents at a soccer game. Eyes lingering on favored cadets, small nods exchanged, and plenty of thinly disguised knowing looks.
Cocky bastards. But maybe, just maybe, they had something to be cocky about. There was a few Marines among them, but most of the trainers were Navy special forces, and they'd still managed to train these kids to a pretty good standard. If it weren't for their ages, the kids would be good recruits for the Helljumpers. Give them a few more years, and they'd be real monsters.
Well, Silva reflected, as he stood back and watched a Sergeant explain a better way to hide from thermal optics to a pair of bright-eyed kids in drab jumpsuits… maybe it wasn't the worst thing that the 105th had been brought in to help with this situation.
Eventually, these kids would be involved in special forces work. There was no way that ONI would invest this much time, money, and favors into training up a bunch of grunt infantry. When that day came, it was better that they'd been trained by the best, not just so that the adorable little munchkins would have a better chance of surviving, but so that the UNSC wouldn't lose more ground to the Innies.
It was entirely possible that was why the Navy had been willing to bring in the Marines on this in the first place – to ensure that the greater good of the UNSC would benefit. He could even see the logic behind it. The tip of the spear got the most use, and became blunt faster than any other part. Add in that everyone was uncomfortably aware of what that bastard Watts had done, and there was a plausible reason for training up child-soldiers that could be… convinced to be loyal above all else.
What the Navy might not have thought about, however, was that introducing the kids to the ODSTs was a good idea for more than just that reason. Administrators and pencil-pushers loved to think that military units were interchangeable, that people were nothing more than bricks in a wall, but esprit de corps was a real issue.
There was no telling how people would react if a group of highly skilled operators emerged from out of nowhere, pulling ops from other units and shoving them out of the way. Jealousy, envy, all sorts of 'communication issues' could come up.
There could be a real risk of friendly fire accidents, both for legitimate reasons and… not.
None of that changed how disturbing Silva found this whole situation. How it would be best if it had never happened.
Skills, mindset, tactics… the kids had it all, but it didn't change the fact that they were kids.
They could pull off a hundred operations and take out every single Insurrectionist in the Inner and Outer Colonies, and it would all be worthless the moment someone found out that the UNSC had resorted to using child-soldiers. It would be a legitimization of the bullshit lies that the Innies loved to spew. It would drive millions of people into their arms, give them actual industry to produce their own warships and weapons, rather than just stealing UNSC ones.
In short, ONI was trying to scratch an itch with a loaded shotgun. They might be able to pull it off, but why even take the risk? What could possibly worth the potential downsides? Why not just keep using ODST's like him, or Navy spec ops like Mendez, or hell, even the damn Army or the Air Force if they were getting desperate?
Silva found himself getting so angry that he needed to step away from the group. He told his senior NCO to handle the next lesson, how to properly use thermal optics to spot someone trying to hide, and walked off, through the trees, and down the hillside a little. He walked for about a minute, just far enough to be out of earshot.
In the distance, he could see the base that they'd used for the exercise. There was another group of cadets in the grass, being followed by another platoon of ODSTs. It looked like they were talking about the insertion yesterday.
One of his fellow Helljumpers was gesturing as he dropped down into a prone position, then jumped back up. Probably something about how jumping up had been a bad decision because it delayed their attack by a few critical seconds, when they could have shot through the grass right at the ODSTs.
The kids were nodding along. A couple of them had raised hands, and there was clearly a productive training session going on.
Silva bit his lip.
That was one of the worst damn parts of all of this. The cadets were good kids.
Yeah, they had all the right stuff to be good operators, but more importantly, they were nice. They were friendly. They didn't take offense to rude language, they listened well, they had suggestions. If this had been some other kind of career, the kids likely would have done just as well at it.
Hell, they were better than him, and his ODSTs, in one way – they didn't have any of the ingrained rivalry. Despite being trained by the Navy, they didn't care that they were learning from Marines. There wasn't any inbuilt prejudice, any of the good-natured teasing or the darker, more mean-spirited sneers.
Silva didn't want to like the cadets, but he was starting to. All his anger was at the situation, the program around them, and not the kids themselves. The kids were amazing.
And that's why it was a problem that he liked them – that he was getting attached to them.
Attachment was dangerous. Attachment to kids living in a fucked up situation like this was even worse. Silva knew that these kids would be on his mind for the next couple years, at least, and it would be a distraction that could slow him down at the wrong moment. It would be a source of tension between him and the higher ups. It was a potential reason to question his previously unquestionable loyalty to the UNSC as a whole.
That was the real nightmare, and that was why these kids were so damn dangerous. Lieutenant Antonio Silva was UNSC to the core. His family had been Marines since the Interplanetary War, three hundred years before – and even he was thinking twice about that loyalty right now, just because of these kids.
Silva sighed, and fought to urge to grab a cigar. He was still on the clock, and there were kids nearby, so he couldn't just relax with a smoke, even if he'd had the time to properly appreciate a good Sweet Williams.
That's what he could focus on, he begrudgingly decided. The cadets.
Damn ONI, and damn the UNSC if need be, but the cadets didn't deserve to suffer under all that tension. Let them think they were going to be the best damn shooters in the whole galaxy. Even if Silva rejected the notion that they'd be better than his Helljumpers.
He was just a Lieutenant. Not a Captain, or a Colonel, or god forbid, a General. He had pretty much zero pull with the higher ups. He couldn't do anything to change this situation, not without something completely insane like trying to go public with it – and that would just blow it all up early, giving the Innies the biggest gift they'd ever received, and screwing over those kids in the process.
So, what could he do to actually help? In this quagmire of shit, what would be the best path to take? What action could he do, and still feel clean at the end of it?
He stood there, the wind whipping at his unhelmeted face, and thought about what their lives would be like. Bullets and bombs didn't care about moral quandaries. Lieutenant Silva could picture it. He could see a grown-ass man in UNSC armor, riddled with holes and bleeding out, with a childish face like Isaac, or Joshua. His stomach clenched at the mental image.
No, he decided. That wouldn't happen. He would make sure that didn't happen.
For starters, he could train the damn kids. Not because ONI wanted him to train them, but because Silva himself wanted to. The better trained those kids were, the less likely that he'd ever have to live with their deaths on his conscience. The better chance that they'd all be able to come home. It wasn't much, but it was the most that he could do for them, with how little power he had.
Silva tightened his fist, nodded once, and started walking back to his training group.
He'd make damn sure they'd be ready. Not just ready for the next couple days of joint training and low-level exercises, but for the lifestyle that they were in for, once they hit their adult years.
He stomped through the trees back to where his ODST's, the Navy's trainers, and the cadets were. They were standing around an improvised hide – one of the cadet's observation posts, which wasn't half bad, but definitely could have been improved.
It was the least he could do, as a big brother to them.
That's right, Silva reflected, as he rejoined the group.
Compared to the 105th, these kids weren't just physically young – they had no unit legend, no stories from previous veterans, no accumulated knowledge to draw on. Just the individual experiences of their trainers, which were probably useful, but it wasn't the same as having a proper legacy and history behind your unit. To have predecessors that you were pressured to live up to, standards based on real people so that you'd know it was possible to achieve those heights.
If these cadets didn't have anything like that, then the 105th Shock Troops Division would be happy to step up and take the job. They could tell them about unclassified ops, pass on the tales of retired or dead comrades, share the stories that should help them survive the shitshows.
And unlike the other stuff, he didn't need any 'pull' to do this. He just had to convince his men, and the other officers, that this was worth doing. That this was important.
Silva glanced over at one of his Sergeants, who was kneeling down to help one of cadets with their optic. The bulky visor didn't quite fit right on her smaller helmet, and the Sergeant was having a hard time keeping a grin from overcoming his professional reserve as he tried to adjust it.
Yeah, Antonio Silva thought to himself, holding in a snicker. That shouldn't be too hard. We've barely known these brats for an hour, and they're already wrapping us around their fingers.
The next couple days went by quickly for Silva.
He taught as fast as he could, teaching lessons to the squad leaders amongst the cadets: John, Kurt, Jerome, Frederic, Joshua, Visha, and more. How to utilize the optics that supplemented the Mark One Eyeball, how to incorporate their squad's intel for a larger picture. How to recognize the signs of a situation that was going bad, and how to react to it before it truly hit the fan.
Now, on the final day of the joint training sessions, it was time to test all those lessons. The cadets had been split into fifteen teams of five total, each one aided by a five-man squad of ODST's. Some would be led by cadets, some by ODSTs. Mendez himself was taking command of one team, as was the ODST company's Captain.
They were running the assault course that the Navy trainers had been setting up under an old Marine: Gunny Wentworth, who used to be in the 65th Shock Troops Division. One of his oldest men, a near thirty-year veteran that was only still in the game thanks to UNSC medical advances, had nearly broken down when he'd seen Wentworth, and the two had promised to meet back up later at the Highland Complex's bar after exchanging a long overdue hug.
The task was simple. A raid on a mock building. The 'enemy' was pop-out targets with gun turrets, each one calibrated to simulate a human's reaction times. Everyone would run the course once, and then it would be modified for the next run. Maybe they'd be doing target elimination. Maybe they'd be doing hostage rescue. Maybe a bomb defusal.
Each team's times would be recorded, and compiled. There were bragging rights on the line. The kids were being promised something special for dessert if they won, and the ODSTs were quietly placing bets on their own performance – and, with begrudging pretensions of gruff disinterest, on the performance of their favorite cadets.
Silva's team was a real mixed bag of hellions. Daisy, Li, Randall, Sheila, and Alice. Three girls and two boys, and every single one of them was itching to prove themselves better than the rest. Silva hadn't needed three days to figure that out, just three minutes.
Toss in five of the most ice-cold ODSTs in the company, and the Captain's challenge to Silva was obvious. Keep the kids corralled, and channel their aggression into usefulness. The ODSTs were there for Silva to use however he saw fit – examples, disciplinarians, or partners in crime.
The obvious tactic would be to pair up one cadet with each ODST, and put the adult in charge. That way, somebody with a good head on their shoulders would make all the calls, and decide how fast things went.
But that wasn't what Silva did.
"Alright, pair off," he said, jerking his head at them. "One cadet, one Marine. Cadets will take point, so we can shoot right over your heads, and be twice as effective."
Daisy stuck out her tongue at him, and Silva ignored it. Aggression wasn't bad for a soldier. It just had to be tempered and channeled. Crushing it was out of the question. You'd either piss off the solder so much that they'd lash out, or you'd kill that aggression entirely, and lose out on the edge that it granted.
Best to let the kids go first. Either they'd live up to their egos, and prove that Silva was wrong to think about curbing them in the first place, or they'd have a crack driven in their armor that Silva could exploit. It was much easier to handle the arrogant trainees after they'd been taken down a peg.
After all, he didn't care if his team came in first in the rankings. Not for the first run, anyway. He cared that they came home at the end of their deployment. If that meant they took a loss here, and remembered it for the rest of their training, then so be it.
After they learned that lesson... then they could aim for first place.
Silva ran through the course with the team. It was a three story house located inside a large warehouse, with plenty of lighting, cameras, and gantries for the other teams to watch from, though only after they'd gone through their own runs. Estimated twenty hostiles inside, with overwatch assumed so that nobody had to care about covering the exits.
For training purposes, and because TTR rounds couldn't penetrate a sheet of balsa, the entire house was assumed to be located in a high density housing zone, had been reinforced by the Innies with armor plating, and had a secure 'escape route' in the basement. That way, the Air Force couldn't blow it up with from ten thousand meters without risking the Innies escaping, and the Army couldn't spray machinegun fire inside until they were confident everyone was a sloppy joe.
Which meant some poor bastards had to breach, sweep, and clear. The eternal bitch of being the infantry – doing the simple jobs that were still the most painful.
Daisy took point, the blonde-haired girl grinning in excitement or tension as she stacked up next to the door. She'd elected to 'ask' her escort, Staff Sergeant Carmichael, to kick the door in for her, and follow her in. A bold entrance, and one that might earn her a shot to the dome as soon as she did, but Silva was inclined to let her test it out.
The rest of the improvised squad would follow in behind her, with Li and Corporal Hardy taking the first side-door they came across, Randall and Sergeant Pocock taking the second, and the rest of the squad securing the interior stairs to the second floor. Silva wasn't dumb enough to split his squad more than he had to, though. They'd clear the first floor, then move up as a unit and clear the second, then the third.
Sure enough, right after Carmichael mule-kicked the door and spun to the side, a flurry of TTR rounds zipped right through the open door at chest height. They barely missed Daisy, who'd been crouching, and only stuck her head and her carbine through the lower left side. The girl flinched, minutely, but to her credit she returned fire, squeezing off a long ten-round burst back at something that Silva couldn't see.
"Go!" she barked into the radio, and the next fireteam entered, their carbine and rifle held up to their chins as they swept into the room.
In the end, they cleared the house in three minutes and thirteen seconds, thanks to the time penalties from their two casualties – Randall took a TTR shot to the calf and limped out of the house on his buddy's shoulder, and Corporal Langston took an unlucky shot to the jaw that dropped him flat, for a KIA penalty.
Silva chewed furiously on a piece of bubble gum – tobacco having been banned from the joint exercise by some wacko in the cadet's chain of command – and stared at the scoring screen back in the converted mess hall that was handling the overflow of cadets and Marines.
Team Silva was sitting in a solid fourth place, but the gap between them and fifth place was slim, barely five seconds, while the gap between them and the top three was a full goddamn minute, thanks to nobody in the top three having any penalties. Team John had pulled it off in two minutes and five seconds. Team Mendez had done it in one minute and fifty-seven seconds.
Sitting in first place, at an insane speed of one minute and thirty seconds flat, was a total unknown – Team Halsey.
"Who's Halsey?" Silva asked, gesturing up at the score board.
The rest of his team was sitting around him, chewing on light snacks and sipping recovery drinks before their next run. The ODSTs shrugged, none of them having an answer. But the cadets exchanged looks, and chuckled.
"That's the Doctor," Randall informed him, with the gruff English accent, working-class. "She's…"
Randall glanced at the other cadets, and they all descended into a flurry of strange looks and weird hand gestures.
"She's involved in the program," Daisy said, after about twenty seconds of bizarre, silent conversation. "More than that… I dunno, ask your boss if you're allowed to know."
"That's cute," Sergeant Pocock responded in his own Cockney accent, eyeing Daisy as he did. "You're pulling classification on us, you brat?"
"Everything I do is cute, old man," Daisy shot back, with an amused grin.
"One day, you're gonna be just as old and wrinkly as us," Pocock replied, reaching over and tussling the blonde girl's hair. "Now, focus. What could you do better? Unless you want to carry Langston out by yourself, next time."
"Screw you, English," Langston replied in his Australian drawl.
The Corporal went to make a hand-gesture, then abruptly stopped as he remembered the kids were there. All five of Team Silva's cadets were staring right at him, with big eyes that just highlighted how young the nine-year-olds were. The Corporal awkwardly started retracting his hand, just in time for all five of the cadets to raise their own closed fists and jerk them back and forth in perfect synchronization.
"Wan~ker!" Sheila sing-songed out, in her own Australian drawl.
Langston flushed red, and opened his mouth to call something back, probably an insult that had no business being said to a kid.
"Children," Silva cut in, before the table could descend into a food fight. "We're up again in a half hour. Listen up, then after I'm done talking, I want you to finish your juice boxes, hit the head, and get back here with your game faces on in ten minutes. I'm not walking away from this building without getting the first place prize, you hear me?"
"We can beat John," Li said softly, tilting his head as he spoke. "Maybe the Chief, if we do it all perfect. But the Doctor and Visha together? We'd need to be better than perfect for that. They're scary fast."
"Then we'll be scary mean, and scary smart," Silva replied, nodding to the boy. "First things first. What do you kids know about abseiling?"
"You mean, like, rappelling from the roof?" Alice asked, her eyebrows raising.
"Wicked," Daisy breathed, eyes shining bright as she stared at Silva.
That's it, Silva decided, as the most uncontrollable cadet grinned like a goddamn shark at him. I'm gonna give her a 105th unit patch, and I don't give a damn if the higher ups don't like it.
He glanced over to his second in command, Staff Sergeant Carmichael, and saw a similar look in the man's eyes. Carmichael noticed his gaze and turned to look. They exchanged a glance, and Carmichael slowly nodded.
Silva looked around the mess hall. His wasn't the only table with mixed units of ODSTs and cadets eating, talking, and planning out their next run on the combat course. The Lieutenant saw more than a few of his fellow Helljumpers smiling, showing exuberance, or otherwise acting like they were having a great time.
Hell, Silva realized, shaking his head slowly as he thought to himself. By the end of this, half the damn cadets are going to have a unit patch, no matter what higher says.