"Alright, now take it slow!" one of the scientists said into his radio, as he stared down at the floor of the old mining chamber, below the gantry where he stood.
The primitive power armor was wide and hulking. Its surface was patchy, with steel body-plates welded along visible 'bones' of internal structure. Someone, perhaps in a fit of ironic humor, had spray-painted it in the UNSC's ubiquitous olive green. The operator's head protruded from the half-opened chest compartment, between two enormous shoulder blades. The Exoskeleton Team hadn't yet managed to make a functional helmet for the suit's anticipated electronics suite, so the operator was doing it all via manual controls.
Today was a simple test of motor function. The exoskeleton had already walked, but today, we were asking it to do basic tasks. The knees and arms would bend, the internal structural bones would take the weight, and the muscle layers would lift a steel beam.
I watched from above, standing on the observation gantry alongside Doctor Steve Sullivan. My own feelings were conflicted – I'd cautioned Steve to proceed carefully and slowly, to minimize any possible damage that could happen to either the prototypes, or to the operators. Steve, however, had been firm that the math all worked, the governors were properly installed, and that it was time for a proper test.
Originally, we had intended to use strands of myomers for the final product; artificial muscles that extended and contracted with electrical impulses. Unfortunately, the strands were more of a gimmick than anything else. They were an immature technology. They had a power-to-weight ratio that worked for this larger prototype, but they'd never work for a slimmer shape.
Due to lack of better options, we were still using myomers in the Mark One anyway. But for the future, we needed something more powerful, more compact. We had some decent leads with some of the more exotic materials involved in, of all things, Slipspace engines, but it needed more work.
Still, it was the best we had for now. Thankfully, I had told Keeler and Stanforth that this would be an incremental process, so they shouldn't be too aggravated with our slow progress.
"Henry, you there?" Doctor Steve Sullivan asked, speaking into his own radio. "How does it feel? Movement good? Any issues?"
"Feels like I'm wearing a frigate," the operator called back, as he took a shuffling step forward with a clang of metal on concrete. "It's a bit sluggish, but I'm not getting any snags or blocks."
"Don't trip!" I warned the operator, wincing as the Mark One took another step, scraping the concrete with a foot-fall just a hair too short.
"It'll be fine," Steve dismissed, completely ignoring the signs of bad balance in his chosen operator.
The operator took another couple shuffling steps as he walked a circuit around the room. A robotic arm tracked his movements from above, holding onto the most temporary measure of them all – a thick power line that connected the Mark One directly to the fusion reactor buried underneath Menachite Mountain.
We had no final armor composite, no actual muscular system, hadn't made any progress on the neural lace reflex enhancement, and had to plug the damn thing in just to get it to walk.
But other than that, it wasn't a bad first effort.
"Walk cycle looks fine," one of the scientists muttered. "Henry, let's try out the lifting motion. Bend down and act like you're picking up the beam."
"Got it," the operator said.
The clanking motions of the green behemoth came to a stop, and he slowly bent down at the knees. The Mark One looked like it was trying to get rid of a particularly troublesome issue of constipation, but it was getting lower, so it didn't matter what it looked like.
"Carefully, carefully," Steve muttered, staring down with an intense expression.
The Mark One squatted down, 'knees' bent wide. Its arms were too high, still two feet above the ground. The prototype was starting to wobble, and I grit my teeth, gripping the gantry's safety rail.
"It's losing balance," I hissed to Steve. "Abort the test. He's going to fall!"
"No, he's got it," Steve replied, not looking away. "Just a little bit more…"
There was a loud screech as the Mark One's claw-footed boots dug into the concrete, but it wasn't enough. The suit of power armor teetered on a knife's edge for a long moment, and then it fell forward.
"Woah!" one of the scientists cried out, as the prototype crashed into the ground with a thunderous, deep rumble that nearly deafened us.
It hadn't fallen far, just a few feet, but the prototype weighed nearly two tons, and all that weight made for a colossal racket as it cracked the floor beneath it. It looked like those flightless birds from Australia – the ostrich, I think – having buried its head in the sand.
The Mark One's shoulders were pressed to the ground, and it had finally regained its balance as a tripod, the head on one of the points and the two knees forming the other two points, with its rear end sticking high up in the air.
"Not great," Steve remarked, slowly. "But it's not… too bad?"
I sighed, and shook my head.
A moment passed, and I noticed that one of the scientists was shouting into the radio. Others had started running down to the testing floor, their feet pounding the thin metal of the staircase, and panic clear on their faces. Someone was calling for the forklift that was kept a couple rooms away. The entire Exoskeleton Team was all reacting to something that neither Steve nor I understood.
My eyes fell on the Mark One, and I realized that I couldn't see the operator beneath all that metal.
"Henry!" Steve realized, his eyes widening in sudden horror.
"Shit!" I swore, doing the same.
We turned and ran down the gantry, heading for the stairway down as fast as we could. The Mark One's operator hadn't been wearing a helmet. There was a good chance that he'd just been smeared between the weight of his own exoskeleton and the concrete.
I practically flew down the stairs, barely resisting the urge to spin up the Type 97 in my pocket and just jump over the gantry. Perhaps, if the operator was still alive somehow, I could convince the other scientists to help me 'push him over', so that he wasn't being crushed under the suit's weight, and then use magecraft to augment my strength… but the thought was cold in my head.
It wasn't likely that Henry was injured. He was either dead, or alive. There was little in-between when you were in such a situation.
"Henry, can you hear us?!" one of the scientists was shouting as we came down the final steps. I jumped the last five, a tiny flutter of body augmentation ensuring that my knees didn't pop as I rushed over.
"Ssh, quiet!" another of Steve's team was snapping, as he pressed the side of his head against the suit, near the upper back, just a few inches below the thick rubbery cable that connected the Mark One to the fusion reactor. "I think I hear something!"
The words cut through the panic of the dozen or so members of the Exoskeleton Team. They gathered around, and I had to shove my way through just to get close enough to hear.
"He's… tapping!" the scientist announced, and a wave of relief crashed through the crowd. "I can't make it out. Does anybody know Morse Code?"
I was highly disappointed in the reaction that question drew. The Exoskeleton Team was the research team that I had privately considered to be the most practical of them all. They were, after all, the men and women that worked with metal and physics, the hard sciences!
Oh, that's not to say that the other teams were worthless. The combined Psych and Surgery Teams led by David Meyer were the most grounded, but they were still elitists that wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a wrench and a hammer. The Augmentation Team under Paul Wu was even worse, they were all glued to their microscopes and emerged from their offices only to refill the chemical concoction they preferred over regular coffee (to which I begrudgingly had to admit was a half-decent brew).
And don't even get me started on the Artificial Intelligence Team that I 'led' by dint of shooting the occasional memo at the bastards. They were such cloud-brained dunderheads that I strongly suspected were all high on hallucinogens half the time. Most of the work done by the A.I. Team was being done bythe A.I.'s – and as one of the leading A.I. researchers in the UNSC, let me tell you, that was not a good thing!
And yet none of the Exoskeleton Team jumped up to answer in the affirmative. They were shooting nervous looks at each other, vaguely aware of the inferiority that they were revealing, but nobody was stepping forward. Was I surrounded by complete morons, or hyper-specialized savants that couldn't brush their teeth and walk at the same time?
Who the hell didn't remember the practical things in life, like right-tighty lefty-loosey, or Morse Code, or the difference between incoming and outgoing artillery fire? They were working for the military, damn it!
"Out of the way," I said, swallowing my instinctive irritation as I kneeled down next to the man. "I know Morse Code."
I pressed my ear against the cool metal, and listened intently. One dot, one dash, then a pause. One dot, one dash, and then two more dots. Two dots. Three dots, and then a dash. Finally, a single dot. After a pause of seven seconds, the pattern started repeating. A-L-I-V-E, I translated in my head.
"Alive," I said out loud. "He's alive!"
Well, obviously, I thought after a moment, resisting the urge to smack myself. If he'd been dead, then who was tapping in Morse Code? But stress was funny like that. It made men stupid, and I was no exception, for all that I'd been complaining about the Exoskeleton Team.
Steve let out an explosive sigh, and there was a chorus of relieved chatter amongst the scientists. I saw one of them wipe stress-sweat from his forehead, and another was leaning against the nearest wall, her legs apparently locked stiff with fright. Apparently, all of us had been stupid enough to not think about it. Some scientists we were.
"How the hell?" one of the other scientists muttered breathlessly.
"I think he ducked," Steve guessed. "Tucked his head right into the chest cavity. It's spacious enough."
"If only he'd had a helmet," I said, turning to glare up at Steve.
"If he'd had a helmet, he'd be dead," Steve replied, shrugging off my disdain without a care. "No matter how tough the helmet is, his spine would still snap or compress under that much weight. Better to just ditch the helmet entirely until we've lowered the suit's weight down to survivable levels."
"Or you could extend the shoulder frame higher, and let it act as a roll-cage," I shot back, standing back up, before glancing over at Steve's second in command and pointing a finger at her. "Lilah, go get the forklift operator. Let's get Henry out of this position before we do anything else."
Steve was annoyingly nonchalant for a man who'd just had one of his team nearly killed by his reckless disregard for safety measures. I had to suppress my urge to snap at him.
It is a bad habit to publicly reprimand your subordinates. It kills morale and unit cohesion by forcing observers to 'pick sides' between two superior officers, and by giving them a chance to listen and disagree with your criticisms. Praise in public, criticize in private – a long held maximum of human resources that I was well familiar with from my distant first life, and which was still valid in the modern day.
In the three years since this program had started, the other members of the old Circumstance Party House had gradually come to a détente with me, regarding my role in this monstrous program. None of them insulted me, or belittled me, or took out their frustrations on me any longer.
Perhaps, like me, they had come to the realization that it didn't matter if I was a monster, because the survival of the children mattered more than their hatred of me. Perhaps they were simply motivated by the fear of me, and of ONI.
But with Steve, I didn't have to wonder. Steve was motivated by one thing, and one thing alone – power armor.
Which is what made him so frustrating to deal with right now. The man's enthusiasm had overtaken everything else.
Back at the University of Circumstance, Steve Sullivan had dreamed of making the future come to life, and the future, to him, was powered armor. He had painted a picture to the old Party House, a mosaic image of a world of suits that could take a lumpy, slothful user, and allow him to run faster than cars, to dodge bullets, to leap tall buildings, and even to skydive without a parachute.
Steve was a firm believer that we had all of the necessary infrastructure and technology to make such a vision into reality, and that we simply needed to plumb the depths of materials science and wrestle with the math until it admitted defeat. He cited similar points in history, such as the first or second World Wars, where science had advanced by great leaps and bounds, but hadn't been properly harnessed by industry until warfare had created a need for it.
In other words, he had regressed into the worst kind of visionary – one that refused to accept anything that slowed down the inevitable victory of his dream over the naysayers. His armor (not ONI's) would be ready by the time the cadets had undergone the augmentations, so that its innate superiority could immediately be demonstrated to HIGHCOM and the universe.
Which was a real headache for me. Not only for the safety violations, not only for the budget requisitions, but because I didn't want the damn power armor to be ready for field use that fast!
In the most optimistic situation, the cadets would undergo their augmentations at the age of thirteen, as they underwent puberty. Seven years, that was what we'd told Vice Admiral Keeler. But it was possible that the procedures would not be sufficiently refined by that point.
We had two more years of 'stretch' time – augmenting the cadets at the ages of fourteen, or fifteen at the latest. It wasn't a simple trade-off, because the longer we delayed, the less compatible the cadets would be with the various growth enhancers.
Their bodies undergoing puberty were like chemical rockets, the kind we used to use to send men to the Moon back in the '60s and '70s. Once puberty started, the countdown clock had started, and they were leaking fuel. If we waited too long, the rocket's fuel would run out without ever launching. That fuel was the natural growth that puberty would grant the cadets – so the longer we delayed, and the less total fuel there was, the less likely we'd succeed.
But if the augmentation procedures weren't ready, and a cadet died, then the rocket would explode instantly, making it all pointless. In that situation, it was better to delay and waste part of the fuel during another year of frantic research.
Which meant that even if I managed to argue for a full year of post-augmentation physical evaluations and examinations to ensure they had worked properly, the Spartan-II's would start their combat deployments at the ages of fourteen to sixteen.
Stanforth hadn't been pushing me much in the last year – perhaps recognizing that he could only demand progress so often before his implied threats lost their power – but he didn't need to. I followed the general-issue press releases as well as the more classified memos that I had clearance for.
The Insurrection was growing in both intensity and competence. There were fewer terror bombings or mass shootings, but far more assassinations, booby-traps, and thefts of war-material. Not just rifles or grenades, but actual ships, which was far worse.
Worse, the Insurrection had been canny with their stolen ships. There were no warship engagements, despite confidential estimates that the Innies could muster a full fleet with upwards of fifty bulk-freighters converted into missile carriers, and over a hundred lighter freighters that could be retrofitted into fast attack frigates or torpedo boats.
Yet no sign of that fleet ever emerged, which led the cabal of Smart A.I. dedicated to predicting the enemy's movements to a single conclusion: the Innies were building a shipyard somewhere in deep space, or an abandoned system, or some undiscovered planet, in order to prepare for full-scale conventional warfare.
From ONI's perspective, the insanity of the Carver Findings were steadily being proven correct, and they need their super-soldiers to provide a solution as quickly as possible. Which meant exposing them to gunfire, to bombs, to depressurization, to the thousands of potential ways of dying in the wild frontier of the Outer Colonies.
I didn't want my Spartans dying in combat. I didn't want them to be left lifeless on some barren rock, their sacrifice only remembered by their brothers and sisters. I wanted them to be powerful. I wanted them to be leaders of men, to be the man or woman with a hand on the wheel of destiny. I wanted to give them back every single iota of agency that ONI and I had robbed from them!
Every single day, I labored away like a tiger-mom that scheduled her child's preschool enrollment as soon as she received a positive pregnancy test. I hovered over their future careers like a gunship doing hot-laps of the battlefield, looking for targets. Anything that would harm their careers needed to be either crushed or avoided. Anything that would aid their careers had to be pursued like the most precious gems.
My Spartans would need to be officers. No enlisted man, no matter how competent or professional or brilliant, would ever get enough respect from the aristocratic officer class. They would not have the pull or the power to prevent a third Spartan program, to ensure that nobody would ever be forced to undergo the same conscription as them.
So if I couldn't hold the Spartans back for medical evaluations for that long, then I needed another excuse to delay their deployment.
A lack of power armor was one of my foremost strategies.
After all, no matter how desperate ONI was, they wouldn't be insane enough to send out multi-billion dollar soldiers into combat in the same old gear as the dough-boy Army infantry, or even the slightly nicer gear of the ODSTs. Not when a lucky shot could end one of only seventy-five lives capable of wielding their futuristic, nigh-unstoppable power armor, and waste all those years of training.
The best option would be if I could delay the deployment of the Spartans for a full three or four years, and use that delay to insist that they attend Luna OCS, or the Reach Naval Academy. After that, I could similarly insist that because they'd graduated with honors – as I knew they inevitably would – that they must be made officers, or else the UNSC would shame the entire corpus of legal frameworks that made up its long institutional history.
In other words, Steve was racing forward, trying to overachieve, and I was trying to rein him back, to keep our goals reasonable. He didn't understand. How could he? He'd spent years longing to bring power armor to life, and I was holding him back from the pinnacle, from his crowning achievement.
Of course, I didn't agree that this was a crowning achievement.
These days, Steve Sullivan was reminding me more and more of my old supervisor, the zealous madman that was Doctor Schugel.
Oh, it was an unfair comparison in many ways, for Steve was not insane, nor religious, nor totally devoid of all desire for safety regulations, despite what this incident indicated.
His unfortunate similarity was limited to his desire for the most flawless design possible. To Steve, a suit of power armor should enhance every single aspect of a human's performance that it possibly could. It should have no trade-offs, no deficiencies. It wasn't enough for power armor to be strong, it also had to be fast. It was not enough for it to be durable, it also had to be nimble. I'd even seen a few of his notes pondering the possibility of making the damn thing fly!
Bluntly put, Steve had the soul of a perfectionist welded to the mind of a dreamer, always pushing forward and demanding more, yet also quick to dislike anything that delayed his vision.
But reality is not perfection, far from it. His stubborn refusal to understand the idea of necessary tradeoffs, of design compromises, was growing to be the biggest source of tension in our working relationship.
Take the Mark One prototype, for example. In my eyes, it only had three deficiencies.
Firstly, it didn't have proper armor, just an improvised stop-gap. Not the worst thing, easily fixable once we refined our current plans. Steve was betting on a titanium alloy, and I wasn't inclined to bet against him. Materials science was his area of expertise, not mine.
Secondly, it didn't have a helmet. Not just for the physical protection, but also to integrate all the electronic systems that we could cram into the spacious interior of the suit. Normal UNSC infantry went into battle with a helmet equipped with a holographical tactical eyepiece, helmet recorder, microphone, polarized goggles, flashlights, night vision goggles, and a gas-mask. But the Mark One's spacious carapace had enough room to fit in a portable ECM generator, enhanced communications gear, perhaps auto-targeting modules, or even a missile rack! All of which would need controlling, and thus, the helmet.
Thirdly, it still needed a solution to the power problem. Hooking the Mark One up to a fusion reactor was fine for now, but a death-knell for any hope of actual usefulness in a field deployment. Steve's team had a couple theories on solving it, but they pretty much all came down to either creating a smaller battery with more capacity than ever before – essentially requiring us to revolutionize an industry worth trillions of dollars – or even less likely, we'd need to shrink down a fusion or fission reactor into something small enough to fit on the suit's back.
But once we fixed those three things, the Mark One would be a marvel of engineering, an overnight success, an automatic inclusion in every single UNSC infantry unit. An armored suit able to squeeze inside tight places that a tank could not, able to survive gunfire and small explosions, and with the strength to carry heavy weapons or rip apart walls to get to its opponent.
And importantly, it would be much, much cheaper than Steve Sullivan's idealized suit, with all its extra bells and whistles. Even with the caveat of extreme speculation, I would comfortably estimate that we could make ten Mark Ones for every single Spartan-II suit (no matter what 'Mark' it wound up being). Perhaps even a hundred!
That kind of economic efficiency, the production numbers that we could churn out, would turn what Steve considered an ugly first step into the true powerhouse of the UNSC's power armored units. Heavy infantry that were survivable enough to be the first man into every breach, solving the issue that had plagued urban combat for the last six hundred years… without forcing my Spartans to be the sacrificial meat shield for every single house raid in the Outer Colonies.
Once we'd gotten the Mark One back on its feet safely, we immediately started disassembling it for inspection and repair. It didn't matter that we hadn't lifted up the steel beam for the experiment. Something had gone wrong, and proper scientific experimental procedure demanded that we determine what went wrong, and how to ensure it never went wrong again.
"Steve, let's go check the video footage," I said, stepping towards the exit and gesturing for us to leave. "Perhaps there's something that we can find that will prevent this from happening again."
He hesitated, but nodded after a moment.
We walked out of the testing chamber, through an airlock door that was a hundred years newer than most of the structural supports around us.
Menachite Mountain was an old UNSC property, dating back to the second wave of colonization efforts back at the dawn of the twenty-fifth century. Reach had been pivotal back in those days, not just because it was the metaphorical doorstep to Earth with its proximity, but also because of its intensely rich mines full of titanium, a boon for starship construction. Menachite Mountain had been one of the first mines, and unlike many of the others that were still in active operation, had run dry about fifty years ago.
When you think about it from a security perspective, a mine has very few entrances and exits, is almost entirely build up underground beneath hundreds or even thousands of meters of all-concealing earth and rock, and already comes with air conditioning and large, expansively excavated spaces.
Back when the UNSC was still dealing with the Hydra System Massacres and other pirate problems, they'd expanded their footprint massively, and the need for secure facilities like this one had become apparent.
Of course, in typical bureaucratic fashion, it was only after the engineers had painstakingly redeveloped the old titanium mines for use by FLEETCOM, someone pointed out that the mine itself was barely within the Highland Mountain range. Thus, it was actually pretty vulnerable to a siege, due to being on the outer edges of the security cordon. All those restrictive entrances would instantly become double-edged swords, and the FLEETCOM brass would be starving to death.
As a result, Menachite Mountain had sat disused for the last thirty years, and only the Spartan-II project had revitalized it as a location for secure military research that still required access to the all-important rail lines for material shipments. Regular off-site backups to the secure server-stack at the Hive, ONI's headquarters in the newer FLEETCOM complex, ensured that in the event of a hostile incursion, the scientists could wipe the hard drives to deny the enemy their research, without losing much more than their lives – and, of course, the bureaucracy would much rather lose the lives of some top scientists than some top admirals.
Needless to say, it was a surprisingly interesting place to walk through, as rather than bland, painted metal or concrete forming up the walls around you, you were instead surrounded by igneous rock, anorthosite in particular, bracketed by the old structural support beams keeping the mountain from crushing you. All of the corridors had been widened enough to allow free movement, but you also had plenty of wider spaces where deeper lodes of ilmenite had been found and mined out, allowing for unusually distinctive layouts, rather than the UNSC's usual boxy, identical grids of rooms and corridors.
I led Steve towards a secure meeting room a few dozen meters away from the large chamber that we'd been using for our testing 'warehouse'. The wall-mounted display was already displaying the live camera feed from the chamber. Only after I'd shut the door and engaged the lock did either of us speak.
"It's the balance," Steve said, as engineers on the screen started stripping the suit with power tools, unbolting the fasteners that had pinned the entire ramshackle suit together. "He leaned forward too fast, and the momentum combined with all that weight led to an unstoppable tilt."
"Most likely, but we have to rule out damage first," I reminded him. "One of the myomers could have snapped."
"If a myomer snapped, it would have been a sudden lurch," Steve replied with a shake of his head. "No, this is just the center of gravity being so high. We'll have better results once we slim it down to a more natural shape."
"The 'natural' shape is still predicted to be a literal ton," I said, rolling my eyes. "Face it, we have to put in some kind of balancing system. Why not one of those… gyroscopes?"
"Gyro stabilizer," Steve corrected me. "And it wouldn't work anyway. Even if we could find or build one small enough. A gyro has to have enough mass that its movements can counter any sudden impulses or shocks. But this wasn't a sudden shift, it was a slow, natural motion. This is just a bad design for squatting and lifting. The knees don't have enough range of motion, and the torso's practically a single piece. We need more flexibility in the core, like how the stomach bends, so once we slim it down-"
"Steve, if we can't solve these issues, there won't bea slimmer version!" I snapped at him. "The whole point of the Mark One is to refine the technologies so that we can make continual, incremental progress towards a final version. Part of how I got this budget past Stanforth was by promising that we'd be able to repurpose the prototypes for other uses, and save money that way. We're not skipping to a Mark Two without fixing something as important as the balance!"
Steve's face grew red, and I glared, before my hindbrain kicked me in the back and reminded me of something very important.
For all my annoyance at Steve, I needed his help to ensure this project was a success. Without the promised power armor, the Spartans were nothing more than exceptionally well-trained spec ops soldiers, and they would almost certainly be used that way – without any of the bullet proof armor plate between them and the Insurrection.
I sighed, and hung my head a little.
"I'm sorry," I said, loudly and clearly, as the unfamiliar words came out of my throat.
When I lifted my head, Steve had a bizarre expression on his face. Bewilderment, disbelief, and surprisingly… guilt? I didn't have clue what that last one was about, so I pressed on.
"Regardless of what the final product will be, we still need to resolve this issue," I said, slowly and as calmly as I could. "For now, why don't we re-design the torso section? What was it you said, make it more like a stomach? Let's do that."
Steve frowned. He stepped back from the camera and pulled up the schematics of the Mark One with a few taps on the keyboard built into the boardroom table. The hunchbacked design sprang to life, emerging in a white hologram that slowly rotated in place.
"I guess, but that will add vulnerability," he said, sounding unhappy about it, despite it having been his idea originally. "A grenade to the stomach, or a lucky bullet to one of the pinch points, and the operator would be dead."
"Yes, but that's a risk for every place where we need flexibility," I replied, softening my tone as I gestured at the knees, the elbows, and the neck. "We can't make a perfect armor. There's always going to be places of vulnerability. We just have to do our best to minimize them, and make the best of a bad situation."