The New Alexandria Hospital was one of the most prestigious and respected medical institutions in the Inner Colonies. It housed some of the best surgeons, the most modern equipment, and the highest reputation. The sprawling complex took up a dozen floors of a skyscraper in the heart of the city's downtown, allowing direct access for emergency airlifts and stunning views of Reach's most iconic city.
Today, the surgeons were escorted out of their operating rooms. The equipment was calibrated to a new specification. A media blackout went into effect. To everyone in the lower floors, and outside the building, there was no noticeable change. Nobody had noticed the trucks that had rolled up to the loading docks, the cargo elevators that had carried the new auto-surgeons to the top floors, or the black-clad soldiers that guarded them with silenced weapons.
Today, the Office of Naval Intelligence was in control of the hospital.
Paul Wu tried not to squirm in unease as the dropship came in for a landing on the highest helipad. He had tried to settle his stomach by looking out over the skyline of glass and steel, the soaring heights. It hadn't worked, because those same buildings were racing past, and it reminded Paul of how fast he was going. He'd never liked vigorous motion, and the Pelican wasn't designed for comfortable flights.
As soon as they touched down, Catherine Halsey was already stepping off the loading ramp. Paul followed her, with David Meyer by his side, and a half dozen other doctors trailed behind them, along with their guards. A second Pelican was landing at another helipad, unloading the second surgical team and their guards. A team of soldiers in black armor and silver visors were already waiting for them.
"Report," Catherine barked, her clipped voice contrasting with her appearance.
Today, unlike most days, she was dressed like a normal human being. Paul couldn't decide if this counted as Catherine shedding the camouflage she normally wore, when she pretended to be a cold, heartless ONI researcher – or if it counted as putting on a second layer, by pretending to be a heartless ONI spook that was pretending to be a kind, caring woman in a khaki sweater and blue-jeans.
"Top two floors are cleared and locked down, doctor," one of the soldiers said. "We've got the VIPs in separate waiting rooms."
"Excellent. Take us to the first subject," Catherine said, showing no awkwardness or hesitation as she ordered around the soldiers.
"Right this way," the man replied, holding out a hand towards the open door to the tower's warm interior.
They walked inside, out of the howling wind from the heights. The interior was luxurious, with wood paneling and vibrant green plant life contrasting with the bright white floor and glass walls allowing the sunlight through. It was a large space, and Paul saw benches and tables set up, perhaps so that the hospital's employees and patients could eat up here with the beautiful view.
The entire area was empty now, of course. The sound of a dozen people walking sounded very loud in comparison. The lead soldier and Catherine Halsey marched ahead like they owned the entire tower, and Paul could only follow behind them with David and the rest of the science teams.
Down the stairs they went, around a corner, and through a long hallway filled with surgical awards, shift rosters, and photographs of smiling doctors.
Catherine waved towards the operation room with negligent care, and David nodded without speaking, and headed off with the rest of his team, leaving Paul and Catherine to continue alone.
At the end the hall, was a set of double-doors guarded by another pair of soldiers in black body armor, their faces completely concealed by gleaming silver visors. Beyond that, a waiting room decorated in soft pastel colors – occupied by a man and a woman, and a young adolescent, perhaps thirteen years old.
"You must be Mister and Missus Sorvad," Catherine said warmly as the occupants stood up at her entrance. It was distinctly different to how she'd just ordered around the ONI soldiers. "I'm very pleased to meet you. Thank you for volunteering for this experimental procedure."
"Thank you for offering it," Mrs. Sorvad said, smiling weakly. She didn't say anything about Catherine's failure to introduce herself. "Uhm… we've read the primer a couple times, and we'd like to ask some questions."
"Of course, of course," Catherine replied, nodding encouragingly.
"They said you invented this," said the man, Mr. Sorvad, with a thick Hungarian accent that marked him as one of Reach's sizable Hungarian population. "This procedure."
He wasn't looking at Catherine. His gaze was fixed on Paul, which was fair, given that Catherine was dressed like a housewife today, while Paul was still wearing his usual labcoat over a set of smart, professional clothing.
They hadn't told the Sorvads who had invented these surgeries, but the man had guessed – correctly, even – that it was Paul.
"I did," Paul said, nodding, hoping that none of his own nervous fears were visible to the man.
"I read your documents, the explanations," Mr. Sorvad said, speaking slowly. "But… you will make my son invincible?"
"No, just… stronger," Paul said, wincing.
"My colleague is an amazing man," Catherine interjected, stepped up next to Paul's side. "But perhaps I can give you a better explanation. I have considerable experience translating the technobabble into normal terms."
"No, no, I can do it," Paul said, smiling weakly at his boss.
Catherine gave him a searching look, and Paul knew that she was probably thinking about the burden that she'd placed on him, the weight that he had to bear. An enormous burden, in truth. But that was fine. He'd had three years to get used to it, and he had to do his part… if only to take more weight from Catherine's own shoulders.
He regretted that he'd had so little faith in Catherine, when the program had started a few years ago. David was around her more often than Paul or Steve, since he lived at the compound with the Spartan candidates, the trainers and the Psych staff, and he'd filled Paul and Steve in on the truth. Their old friend was a miniature Hercules, bearing the weight of the world on her shoulders.
All those lies were so convincing that they'd tricked Paul into thinking of her as a monster, when she was the exact opposite.
"As I'm sure you're aware, osteogenesis imperfecta, otherwise known as brittle bones disease, is becoming more and more common," Paul explained, making sure to look both the husband and his wife in their eyes, to convey his sincerity. "Largely due to the effects of prolonged microgravity during space travel."
"We took a vacation up to an orbital hab," the wife said softly. "We didn't think there would be any problems. We would have gotten back to ground before there was any chance of… development."
"It was my fault," the husband interrupted her. "Not hers."
"It's alright," Catherine said, interjecting before an argument could start. "It's in the past now, and soon enough, it won't matter."
"Today's operation should strengthen your son's bones," Paul continued, nodding in thanks to Catherine. "The proper term is carbide ceramic ossification. In simple language, we're going to graft an incredibly strong material to the upper layers of his bones. This material will bond to the bones, and as he grows, the material will spread, and his bones will be virtually unbreakable."
"And there's a three percent chance that this… goes wrong," the husband said.
Paul couldn't hold back his wince. It wasn't new information. They'd had to inform both the patient and his parents before either he or Catherine had been willing to approve the experiment.
"Yes," he admitted. "Three point eight percent, so… basically four percent."
"It's fine, beloved," the wife said, patting her husband on the arm, though her own expression was just as worried as him. "We're very grateful. It's… it's a ninety-six percent chance for him to have a normal life. To be able to walk normally, to not be… fragile."
She sounds like she's trying to convince herself, Paul thought to himself.
"We're very happy that we could help you," Catherine said, giving the pair a nod so deep that it was like a small bow. "Why don't I show you where the operation will take place? It will… quite a long procedure, and I'm afraid you won't be allowed to watch it, but it won't hurt to show you where your son Laszlo will be."
"Of course," the husband said, nodding. "May I ask… what are you names? So that I know who to thank?"
"I'm sorry, we can't tell you that," Paul told him softly, feeling his chest clench in sorrow. "UNSC regulations."
"Yes, yes…" the husband replied with a sad, but understanding smile. "Thank you. Thank you all so much."
"This way," Catherine said gently, leading them out of the room, and leaving Paul Wu alone for a few moments.
Alone, if not for the black-clad ONI soldier that was lingering in the room with him. The man was standing in the back, unobtrusive, but his presence was impossible for Paul to ignore. He was both bodyguard and bagman, there to ensure their silence one way or another.
Paul waited for a few moments, and then followed Catherine out of the room, trailing a few dozen meters behind her, as she gregariously talked about something or other. He could probably make out her words if he cared to try, but his mind was whirling with too much, and he wasn't paying attention.
Four percent chance of failure. To a normal person, that might not have seemed like a lot. But for medical procedures, that was horrific odds, because medical procedures were never done once. They were repeated on other patients. Basic statistics meant that for every thousand patients who underwent the surgery, thirty-eight would die.
If Paul's team failed to refine this augmentation, then when the seventy-five Spartan cadets underwent it, there was an overwhelming chance that it would kill at least one of them. Even with David Meyer's collection of the best surgeons possible, even with Catherine frantically rigging the odds as much as possible… the specific odds were a terrifying ninety-four percent chance that at least one child would die.
Which meant that this experimental operation was, sadly, necessary.
Paul didn't like it. He hated it, in fact. It was a new unpleasant ugliness, distinct from the Spartan-II program. He'd made his peace with the fact that with a single drunken paper, he and his friends had probably gotten seventy-five children killed.
But this? This was not one of the Spartan cadets. This was a child of two normal people, who had jumped at the chance that the UNSC's 'experimental new operation' might be able to help their son. If this failed, then the death toll of the program would rise.
Seventy-six deaths.
Over in the second operation room, another child with a rare form of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome would undergo the injection of a cocktail of protein complexes that should, in theory, treat the issue of his muscular dystrophy. It was a lesser version of the cocktail that would be injected into the Spartan cadets in order to enhance their strength.
This was even riskier, with a five percent chance of failure, which translated into almost a ninety-eight percent chance of at least one Spartan death.
Seventy-seven deaths.
The combined odds of those two operations alone meant that there was a ninety-nine point eight eight chance of at least one Spartan cadet dying on the surgical table.
And that was the odds for just two out of the seventotal augmentations.
Over the last three years of endless hours, they had made enormous progress, taking the odds of success from a paltry eleven percent success rate all the way up to a much less terrifying forty percent chance. That meant that they'd have thirty survivors instead of eight.
That was unacceptable to Catherine Halsey. Paul didn't like it either, but he was weaker. He didn't have the will that Catherine did, to insist on perfection. His Augmentation Team was still working hard on coming up with medical conditions that could be treated by the individual augmentation procedures, so that they could conduct more tests.
How many additional children would have to be exposed to these horrors? How many times would they have to repeat each test, how many additional deaths did they have to pile on top of the existing ones?
If Paul Wu had been a better man – a smarter, more driven, more moral man – those children would never have been subjected to those terrible odds.
But he wasn't a better man.
Paul and his team had been slamming their heads into the augmentation procedures for three years now. They had finalized the seven augmentation surgeries, charted out the cascading effects as each augmentation affected all the others, and plotted out tens of thousands of hypothetical scenarios.
They had compiled and analyzed so much data that two of the Smart A.I.'s assigned to the Surgery Team – Demetrian and Isolde – had become increasingly morose about the topic themselves, which was supposed to be impossible for an A.I. in the first place. Everyone on the team, human or artificial intelligence, had known that there was only one potential avenue left that had a meaningful chance of improving the odds.
Human trials. Live experiments.
There had been a fierce debate on the subject, including the possibility of doing trials on bonobo chimps, instead of humans. That had been quashed by Catherine, who pointed out that the compatibility index of these augmentations were so slim that ONI had already eliminated most of the human race from the selection pool, much less a different species.
She'd tried to lessen the blow by hypothesizing about the potential use of these surgeries outside of the Spartan program, but it hadn't helped much.
Yeah, sure, theoretically some of these procedures would be amazing cures for a huge swath of those suffering from muscular dystrophy, and the rising amount of osteogenesis imperfecta cases from space travel, or other medical conditions, but that was a distant mountaintop to Paul.
Creating medical techniques that could treat thousands of people was a nice thought to think about… but it hardly affected the load on Paul's shoulders, the day-to-day stress of trying to ensure that not a single Spartan died. It would be a nice fringe benefit, at most. Little more.
They said that pressure made diamonds, but Paul disagreed. Pressure made bombs, and this one was ticking steadily closer to its end.
It wasn't the first time that he'd had that kind of pressure focused on him. He was supposed to be an engineer, a practical man that designed buildings for the family architecture firm. His mother and father were both architects, and they had been clear that he and his siblings were going to follow in their footsteps.
His parents had drilled exacting perfection into him. They said that everything had to be precisely calibrated in proper architecture. Every variable accounted for, every load carried, every angle precise. When it wasn't, buildings collapsed, and people died.
Only once Paul got to college had he learned that none of that was true. Yes, calibrations were important. Loads had to be distributed, variables accounted for, but buildings were not made from playing cards! They had to handle storms, earthquakes, and more!
And the solution for all of those problems was simple – make the walls thicker, made the foundation deeper, and over-build the entire damn thing. Make a healthy cushion of extra engineering, and walk away with a whistle and a smile. You could call it future-proofing and even sell the damn thing for extra!
Paul had snapped under all the stress. He'd rebelled. Civil engineering went out the window, and he had dedicated his life to biochemistry instead. Not because he was told to, not because he had to, but because he wanted to.
Now he was under the same kind of pressure. In a mere three years, he felt worse than he had in eighteen years of that household. There were real lives resting on his performance, and he didn't dare fight back, didn't dare try to buck the system and chart his own path.
This time, Paul couldn't break under the stress. He couldn't rebel. The only way out was keeping all the children alive, no matter the cost.
An hour later, Paul found himself in the attached observation room, looking in as the surgery began.
"The patient is under now," said one of the doctors clad in sterile surgical scrubs. "Let me just check one more… yes. We're ready to proceed."
The woman was one of David Meyer's elite Surgical Team, many of whom Paul had worked with, and nearly all of whom had spent the past few years lending their skills to various UNSC military hospitals. There hadn't been much need for them in the Spartan program in those early stages, beyond the occasional consulting session with Paul's Augmentation Team to see what was practical and what was not.
But now, at long last, the Surgical Team was getting to work. In this room, David himself would handle the more difficult procedure, while in the next room over, the next best surgeon would handle the much simpler second procedure.
If all went well, this would be the first successful human augmentation in nearly twenty years… with hopefully better results than the last one.
"Thank you, Doctor Harnik," replied David Meyer, as he stepped up to the computer console set at the foot of the surgical bed. "I'm ready to begin."
The woman nodded, and stepped away from the bed. There was practically no sign of the glass barrier that separated David and the operation room from the viewing lounge that Paul was standing in, and it felt like he was standing right in the room with them.
Paul shook off the feeling of unease in his gut. This was earlier than he'd expected for any of the augmentation surgeries, but it was inevitable. He'd tried to analyze the data so many times. Hell, the two A.I. had done it a thousand times more than the rest of the Augmentation Team combined.
There was simply no other option. Someone had to be sacrificed on the slab.
"Alright," David said, nodding. "Let's do this."
Paul watched through the window to the operation room, as the auto-doc system began to move, start its bloody work. Under David's guiding hands at the controls, scalpels and spreaders approached. Nearly a hundred surgical tools were available at the smallest twitch of the computer console.
It was, Paul reflected, a very good thing that little Laszlo Sorvad could not see the enormous device hanging above him. The hundred-armed spider made of gleaming metal.
After I had escorted the worrying parents back to a waiting room, I checked in on the other surgery taking place today. It was a perfectly logical thing to do, and it had the neat side-benefit of allowing me to evade the searching gaze of the ONI 'bodyguard' that had been forced on me.
Yes, yes, I was outside the security perimeter, and therefore I needed a guard. The conditions of my contract, etc, yadda yadda yadda.
That didn't hold much water when ONI had locked down the hospital, sealed off the entire floor, and put three squads of ODST special forces in the employee cafeteria, just in case the Insurrection decided to hit New Alexandria Hospital today.
We would have to have the worst possible timing in the galaxy for the Innies to overcome that. Which was why ONI had an entire company of ODSTs in a nearby installation, their dropships already locked and stocked for a hostage situation. Because ONI did not do half-measures.
Honestly, I couldn't get so much as a single day away from ONI's watchful gaze. It was enough to make me long for a quiet vacation out by a lake, where I could lay back on a lounger and rest my eyes.
I shook my head as I entered the observation room. There was no time for such maudlin thoughts. I was not yet an old retiree. I had miles to go before I could rest.
These two surgeries were small steps towards keeping Visha safe. Towards keeping seventy-five children safe.
Yes, there were risks to the surgeries, but frankly, I didn't give a damn.
I wasn't heartless, of course. These children and their parents had all agreed to volunteer, and that made an enormous difference in the ethical comparison between the two situations.
My Spartan cadets had been conscripted and kidnapped, their families suffering as their child mysteriously disappeared. These patients had decided to roll the dice of their own volition, choosing to risk a possible death or permanent injury in return for the hope of a better life.
Of course, the chance of complications were vastly lesser for these patients, since they were only going through a single augmentation. A four or five percent chance of complications was pretty good.
Truthfully, the chance of complications was actually much lower than we'd told the patients and their parents. The reduced intensity of the augmentations was beneficial in that regard. The failure rates were for our projections on the full augmentation level, not these half-intensity surgeries to gain data.
The risk of the carbide ceramic ossification was that the grafted material would be too much for the bones to sustain, damaging them such that they fell apart. Obviously, reducing the amount of material would result in a safer procedure.
The risk of the muscular enhancement injections was an extremely energetic reaction from the blood vessels, risking a heart attack… and once again, reducing the intensity would mitigate that.
Both children would probably never be allowed in any professional sports league, but that was a considerably small downside to them and their parents, I suspected.
As far as the Spartan-II program – and the overseeing eye of Commander Stanforth – was concerned, the only important part of today was the data gathered. We were recording as much as possible, and use that data to refine the process further. Then, if we needed another test in a few months, I would convince ONI to shop around for more medical volunteers. Given how easy it had been the first time, I wasn't worried.
There was no shortage of children in the UNSC with rare and exotic medical conditions. Even with how rare Ehler-Danlos Syndrome was, there were billions of people spread across the stars. There were far more with brittle bones, as unlike either of my previous lives, the UNSC's population often spent time in either microgravity or full on zero-G… and inevitably, there had been children born or raised in such conditions, greatly weakening their skeletal systems.
Many of them, statistically, would be from poorer households, and some of those would jump at the chance of a revolutionary new treatment that could improve the lives of their children, all expenses paid for. They would never know that their cost of their treatments was a negligible expense to ONI, compared to the reward of data and results from this human trial.
Who knows, maybe Paul will manage to create a viable surgery out of this, I thought to myself, as I looked over one of David's subordinates as she carefully guided the auto-doc into making the hundreds of injections needed to fully distribute the cocktail of muscle enhancers.
If Paul did, that would be a fairly nice silver lining. Sure, the number of cases weren't impressive, but it would help get ONI off my ass if the Spartan-II program could give them a chance for some good PR. Especially these days, as the Insurrection was slowly intensifying. It was a miracle that the UNSC had avoided a mass chemical attack thus far.
Personally, I would speculate that ONI was under pressure from both sides – the Insurrection obviously despised them as the government's men in black, while HIGHCOM was likely growing frustrated with the lack of results from the intelligence agency in stopping said Insurrection.
I had no proof of this, of course, because Commander Stanforth was one cold cookie. Still, he was clearly bothered by something. Even through his impressive poker face, I thought that I could detect some manner of dissatisfaction or worry that was bothering him. With the man's pedigree, it was likely the steadily deteriorating situation with the Insurrection. Nothing else could be as important to such a career-minded scion of such a prestigious dynasty.
Thusly, if these surgeries could treat some rare, painful medical conditions, it would be a massive PR coup at a much needed time. It would be natural for the Office of Naval Intelligence to be researching a method of healing those poor souls who were injured by space itself, or so they could loudly claim. The spooks of ONI could pretend to be humanitarians, not watchful spies. They were merely concerned for the health of all those poor children.
There's something repulsive about the idea, I mused as I left the observation room, and walked down the hallway towards the other one, where Paul and my 'bodyguard' were waiting. That they might claim such a noble reason for creating these surgeries, when the true origin is such a monstrous crime… of course, there's also something repulsive about abusing the good reputation from mass use of the surgeries to distract from their incompetence in their primary job.
I slipped back inside the observation lounge and nodded to Paul, who didn't notice. The poor man was distracted by the procedure, staring through the window to where David was carefully carving incisions into the anesthetized child.
Out of all the augmentation procedures, this one was the most visually barbaric.
To be fair, almost every kind of 'open' surgery looked that way, with patient cut open such that the surgeon had a full view of the entire operation… yet those were primarily focused on one specific area. The rest could be covered up with privacy screens so that one could pretend they were operating on a dummy, rather than a living person.
Grafting carbide ceramic material onto someone's bones, however, meant performing 'open' surgery in dozens of locations, and it was faster to simply do away with the screens entirely.
Without the best after-care possible, and some advanced anti-scarring treatments, it was likely that this boy would have a distant, superficial resemblance to Frankenstein's monster for the rest of his life – a pattern of scars embedded across every part of his body like miniature stitches that traced the path of his bones.
I made a mental note to ensure that the boy received those treatments, though Paul or David had likely already done so.
All in all, I was quite content with the events of today – even, dare I say it, happy.
Ten seconds passed before I realized what I had just done. But it was already too late.
The ONI spook in the corner began sweeping for bugs with a device from his pocket. It was not a normal, routine thing, and I tried to keep my eyes from widening as he finished, and then approached me, walking silently up to my side. Perhaps it would have startled someone else when he abruptly appeared at their elbow, but I kept one eye watching the man the entire time.
"Doctor Halsey," the agent murmured, lowering his head slightly to whisper in my ear. "I must admit to being very impressed by your work."
"Thank you," I muttered back, keeping my head pointed straight ahead, not turning to look at the man. "Forgive me, I'm… not accustomed to talking about it."
"None of us are," the ONI agent replied.
What the hell is this? I wondered, my heart rate picking up. Air raid sirens were blaring in my head. This was not normal behavior for a member of the Office of Naval Intelligence, and that was a terrible sign.
If this was the prelude to some kind of assassination attempt, and this man was to be my murderer, then I was in terrible danger. Not from him, of course, because I was carrying my replica Type 97 in my pocket, as I always did… but it was impossible for me to survive the attention that neutralizing him would bring. No one was going to believe that a twenty-eight year old civilian woman with three PhD's had killed a trained special forces operator with nothing but her own muscles.
Regardless, I spun up my replica orb, and willed a weak defensive shell around myself, as well as kicking in my body enhancement formula. It wouldn't stop a bomb, if the man had brought one, but it would tank up to a fifty caliber round at least once – and that was a proper .50 BMG, not the much shorter 12.7x40mm rounds that the UNSC used in some of its more ridiculous pistols.
Any attack would spell the end of my involvement with the Spartan-II program, but it would also guarantee that I would be hunted like a fugitive. Even if I escaped, the bizarre circumstances would likely ensure that my replacement as head of the Spartan-II program would treat the cadets like juvenile soldiers rather than the prized pupils.
Years of work in convincing the trainers to be softer, kinder, wasted in an instant. All my work to ensure that the children gained agency, power, all the things that I had inadvertently stripped from them - gone in an instant.
"This work will help so many people," the ONI agent continued, without any sign of noticing my tense state. "And I'm certain that you and Doctor Wu will… refine it. Make it usable for more people. You're helping all of humanity, Doctor."
He sighed, and stepped back, and his voice lowered even more. Were it not for the body enhancement spell currently coursing through my veins, I would never have heard his next words, whispered more to himself than to me.
"Which is what ONI should be doing."
I froze. The tension in my body had felt like an itch, like a crackling fire trapped behind a grate – and with those words, the itch vanished instantly, and the fire was snuffed out.
What… what did this mean?
I didn't dare look back at the ONI spook as he resumed his place in the corner. Neither did I look to Paul, who was still staring forward at the surgery in progress, grimly following David's actions like a penitent staring up at a mosaic of his god.
The slimmest silver lining was that the man hadn't tried to kill me… but now I had a far larger problem.
For three years, I had avoided as much of the legendary ambiguity and confusion of the black ops and intelligence worlds. The Spartan-II program was siloed off in its own little world, completely isolated from the rest of ONI. Even with my attempts to puncture that barrier to gain political influence with the special forces of other branches, they'd been simple soldiers, and I could be blunt and straightforward with them.
But now, I didn't know what to do.
What did this mean? What did he want? I could not ask for clarification, not in this situation. To betray ignorance was to betray weakness in the darkness of ONI's world.
In such a wretched, confusing situation, I had to turn to the only reliable source of wisdom available to me: my own intelligence and logical understanding of the world.
Perhaps, I tried to convince myself, the ONI agent had simply been expressing a personal desire for what I had already been considering. To see a world where these augmentation surgeries could be repurposed in a way that would help thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, to live relatively normal lives. The thought felt sour in my mouth.
No, I thought to myself, hardening my will and setting my feet in stone. I will not be railroaded yet again by ONI. I refuse. Damn their requests. I don't care what they say, I've done enough favors for them.
But there was still too much… oddity to this event. I hesitated. Was I misreading things?
Surely, no self-respecting man-in-black from the infamous Office of Naval Intelligence would everwish for such a thing. Where was the advantage gained from it? Where was the lever to be applied to a larger problem, the favor banked for a rainy day, the contribution to the 'greater good'? It was too straightforward, and everyone knew that spooks reacted to blunt truthfulness like vampires did to holy water.
No, that was not possible, I decided. The man had broken professionalism, in a room full of cameras and microphones. There was no way that he had simply forgotten about them, nor that he would have made such a mistake on purpose.
Which meant… this was a message.
My lungs were burning from holding in my breath, and I was forced to let out a harsh exhale that sounded so loud in the observation room. My mind raced, and I sucked in another breath, both to fill my aching chest and in shock as I realized that I had fallen right into ONI's trap.
Earlier, when I had considered the possibility of ONI leveraging these surgeries to create a PR opportunity, I failed to consider an obvious possibility. I had wondered if ONI might take these successful surgeries as a neat bonus, a silver lining to spending the cash – but I hadn't thought for a moment that ONI had already planned on doing such a thing. That it had been their original intention.
They tricked me into this, I realized, my eyes widening.
I had spent precious political capital arguing with Stanforth about the necessity of these surgeries. I had laid down card after card, leveraged my connections with the ODSTs of the 105th Shock Troops Division, and even been forced to accede to Stanforth's 'compromise' of having his own subordinates overseeing things.
Yet I hadn't needed to do any of it! ONI had masterminded the entire thing.
They must have suspected that we would need human trials. They had access to all of our data, and of course Stanforth sat in on the monthly meetings with myself, Chief Petty Officer Mendez, and the heads of the science teams. It was an inevitability.
And worse, those same briefings had mentioned the possibility of a commercially viable use for those surgeries.
Damn it! I'd shown my hand too early to Stanforth, and he'd just taken me to the damn cleaners! I'd given up my leverage all for something that Stanforth would have given me anyway, and now, the bastard had sprung his trap.
That whisper from his agent, that was a message directly from him, or perhaps his boss, Vice Admiral Keeler. They wanted the PR boon from a commercially viable surgery, and this was their way of informing me to get it done.
But why in this manner? Why not an official order?
Was it because this way, it was deniable? The Spartan-II project was already extremely expensive. I couldn't imagine them throwing up any fuss about further expenses on top of the dragon's hoard that we had already spent… but these were spies and assassins and worst of all, politicians.
Perhaps they wanted the deniability purely as a fallback option. Such that if anyone in the UNSC protested, they could carve off a chunk of the program and say 'Oh, we never told Halsey to do this! She went rogue, and did it on her own. See, now, we are innocent, we just wanted to help suffering children! She's the monster here, not us!'
I wanted to feel confident in that theory, but it still rang false to me. Creating commercially viable treatments out of the augmentation surgeries was perhaps the least morally ambiguous thing that I'd done in three years. They couldn't throw me to the wolves over that, not without revealing their own complicitly in the Spartan-II program.
Unless… they weren't going to blame me for the Spartan-II program, or the commercial surgeries, but instead, what it had taken to create those surgeries.
I stared out through the observation window at thirteen year old Laszlo Sorvad as David Meyer grafted ceramic carbide to his bones, through flesh that had been retracted and excised like a banana peel from his leg.
The human trials. The experimental surgeries. If we merely wanted to refine the augmentations for our seventy-five Spartans, then we only needed a few dozen trial surgeries, at most. But for viable commercial procedures, then we would have to conduct far, far more of them. Hundreds, maybe thousands of additional surgeries that were completely unnecessary for the Spartan-II program.
I could hear ONI's propagandists now, distracting the UNSC from the Spartan-II program by pining the commercial surgeries on me: 'Look at all the children she butchered!'
And who had been the one to argue so stridently for the trials? The extensive trails, the deaths of thousands of children. Why, Doctor Catherine Halsey, of course!
ONI could not reveal the Spartan-II program without implicating themselves, and that meant they had no real leverage over me. I had mutually assured destruction with them. So they had sought out a replacement. Some form of blackmail, a skeleton in my closet that they could whip out whenever they needed.
Those ONI bastards, I thought to myself, my blood as cold as deep winter in the Highland Mountains. They tricked me. I am creating their blackmail for them! I am forging my very own Sword of Damocles… and I never saw it coming.
I couldn't allow my raging emotions to betray me. I muttered some words of excuse, and slipped out of the room. Once I was in the hallway, I looked around for the signs to the nearest bathroom. I needed a quiet place, away from all of this.
The bathroom door clicked shut. I checked it for listening devices with an instinctive reflex, and I didn't see any. Still, I bit my tongue, and held in the words that I longed to scream out. I could be wrong, and this place was hardly soundproofed.
They had trapped me. Had it been Stanforth, or Keeler, or perhaps some other ONI agent that I had never met, a faceless paper-pusher that had was so successful in the halls of bureaucratic power-struggles that I didn't even know his name?
Fists clenching, I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror. Shoulder-length brunette hair, lightened by so much exposure to the sun. Healthy skin with a light tan. Cold blue eyes, glaring back at me like there was a darker doppelganger of myself, separated only by the thin glass of the mirror.
Well, if they want to play this game, then so be it, I decided. Fine. It's not enough to save seventy-five lives from them. I'll make their damn surgeries, and save more. I refuse to let ONI win.