The coffee cup clinked as I set it down by my desk.
My eyes followed the jogging line of Spartans as they jogged towards the firing range. I'd like nothing more than to accompany them, and release some of my stress in meditative marksmanship practice. But I couldn't.
It had been five years since this project had started. The Augmentation surgeries were scheduled to take place in a mere two years… and we weren't ready.
I needed scientists and data more than anything else. I needed the odds to be higher, the compatibility to increase.
The problem was, I was already channeling so much of my budget into R&D, and there was nothing more that I could do to increase that pipeline.
Thankfully, I'd known that this would happen, and I'd made a lot of political connections throughout ONI for this exact reason. It was time to call those connections, and beg what favors I could get from them.
To put it in simple terms, I owed money to the Yakuza. In order to survive, I had to repay them by the deadline. Thus far, I had invested my money wisely, and worked hard at three jobs to gain even more money. These were stable methods of making money; good for making steady progress, without risking losing it all to a freak event. A good thing, when you had seven years to make up the money.
But with only two years left before that deadline, I knew that I couldn't make it. Steady progress wasn't working. Even with some of the riskier 'investments' I had made, I was still far too short on cash. The live trials of watered down augmentation surgeries, for one example. They'd be wonderful for my credibility in a decade, but until then, they were worthless.
Which meant that it was time for more… desperation. I had resorted to calling up all my friends, and begging them for spare change. For no-term loans that I swore to pay back later. I wasn't yet ready to resort to payday loans or begging for more time, but those options were, alas, on the table.
The ODSTs had been willing to chip in, ever since the prototypes of the BDU revision 2519 had started their testing phase. The since-promoted Captain Stanforth had succumbed to my pathetic begging to stay with the program. Several ONI contacts had been grateful for Doctor Meyer's Team, and their help with a lot of very clandestine, high-risk surgeries that I still didn't know anything about.
I'd recently dragged the Army's portion of SPECWARCOM onto my side, though not without appealing to the cold-blooded ambition of a ruthless Captain named Ackerson. I'd have to keep an eye on him. He seemed to be willing to help me, but in return for what? A man that sociopathic… probably a promotion, or funding for his own projects of dubious morality. I could try to help with the former, but I'd never lift a finger for the latter. It meant betraying an implied promise, but I'd done worse things, and it hadn't been explicit.
The advantage of calling on these favors was not that these groups possessed genius scientists languishing in boredom – but that they had their own budgets, reputations, and legitimacy. I was borrowing all three from them, in ways. I needed their agreement and sign-off on my own proposals, to agree that I was correct.
Because I was planning to scrap the two most dangerous augmentations.
We'd spent the last half-decade planning to put the seventy-five cadets through a series of seven total augmentations. But at this point, we couldn't possibly refine all seven to the necessary standards. Even our best projections still had nearly two dozen casualties – the first of which would be Visha.
The best thing we could do was scrap the two least compatible augmentations. The ones that were not strictly needed in order to utilize Steve Sullivan's power armors – now that Steve had finally solved the muscle control issue, that is.
In some ways, this was good. The surgeries were very lengthy, much like the bone density one. They required the surgeon to cut into hundreds, thousands of places to perform the same, repetitive tasks. Those two surgeries were the most likely to have complications, both on their own and when combined with the others. Sudden vascular ruptures, permanent nerve damage, chronic hypertension, and chronic neuropathic pain syndrome.
In short, if those two surgeries went wrong, the children would bleed out on the table, never be able to move their limbs, have a massive risk of stroke or heart attacks, or just get random spikes of direct pain at any given time.
But in other ways, this was horrible. The two surgeries were the vascular network optimization, and nociceptive threshold elevation. The first would have been an implanted layer of bio-compatible polymers to reinforce the body's veins. Faster blood flow and efficiency, oxygen delivery, even enhanced ability to clot blood to survive sudden blood loss. The second would have dampened the pain signals, while preserving tactile feedback, vastly reducing the pains that they would feel in the line of duty.
In order to save the lives of my Spartans, I had to make them more vulnerable to damage, more susceptible to pain. They would have all the strength, and speed, and bone durability, sure.
But what good was a super solder project, when the poor bastards didn't gain any actual quality of life features? When they'd feel every single cut, bullet, and bruise as they were shipped from warzone to warzone? When they could bleed out just as easily as anyone else?
I didn't want my Spartans suffering like that. Perhaps it was arrogant of me, but after all the monstrous things I'd done to put them in this position, I felt that I owed them just as much in repayment.
A horrific choice. Save their lives, and condemn them to a more painful existence, or sacrifice a few of them for the quality of life of others? It was not a choice at all. They would all live. I could not allow a single one to die. Not one of them.
That was why I needed the help of the ODSTs, of the Army, and Stanforth and ONI. A request from myself alone to change the augmentation plan at this late date was unlikely to happen. But a combined agreement that I knew what I was doing, that the augmentations were unnecessary, that other spec ops groups could handle the load until then… that might work.
But those groups alone wouldn't be enough. I needed more.
Which was why, more than anything, I needed the legitimacy of their predecessors: the Orion-I super-soldiers.
I needed to find the veterans of that program, and convince them to support my decisions. Who better to say what augmentation procedures were needed or not needed, than those who had been augmented before, and had first-hand experience?
Truthfully, the Orion-I surgeries were so vastly different from the Spartan-II ones that a true expert would know their word was worth little. But all the true experts were working for me, and I was not going to pass up a useful weapon against the ignorance of HIGHCOM and ONI. This was no different from a modern corporation dragging out its retired and aging founder to slap a little prestige onto their new idea.
Of course, that wasn't the only potential advantage of bringing in the Orion-I's. Their mere existence was a shameful reminder to HIGHCOM of the ways that augmentation procedures could fail. They were living reminders that sometimes, ONI needed to back off, and set less ambitious goals.
However, I couldn't just drag them out of retirement to put a stamp of approval on the program. They had never seen the Spartan-II program, never been involved with it. Even if I could trust them to give unwavering support, it would be hollow. And I couldn't trust them to give that support, of course. Skepticism was far more likely.
Which meant that just like the ODSTs, and the Army, and the Air Force, I needed to give them a quick bribe first.
"Déjà," I said, sitting down in my office chair and turning away from the window "Have we gotten back the availability of the Orion-I operatives?"
"Yes, Doctor," Déjà replied, flashing to life over my desk. "Thanks to Captain Stanforth granting us access to all remaining Orion-I files, we have full dossiers on all members of the project. As of the project's shut down in 2506, it seems they had one hundred and sixty-five 'graduates'."
"Survivors would be more accurate," I grumbled, sipping my coffee before setting it back down.
I paged through the summary that the Dumb A.I. had put together for me. Headshots, names, and current statuses scrolled by with flicks of my fingers on the holographic screen. Dead, dead, dead, retired, retired, in service, dead.
Fourteen years didn't seem like a long time, considering the oldest Orion-I operatives should have been in their late thirties when the program ended, meaning they would be in their early fifties at most. Even by the standards of regular special forces, that wasn't too bad. The various elements of SPECWARCOM had some soldiers still fighting into their early sixties, thanks to the twenty-sixth century's medical care, and frequent jaunts in cryo-sleep.
Yet so many of the Orions had died in the years since the program's closure. I wondered how many had suffered from medical complications from the ill-planned augmentations. Some, perhaps, had stayed in UNSC service and died on high-risk missions. Worst of all was the dreadful possibility of suicide. They had been left with hormonal imbalances from the performance enhancing drug cocktails they'd been taking, and then cut off from those same drugs, leaving them to crash. Combine that with post-traumatic stress, and their struggles were... horrifying, but predictable.
That was the first part of my bribe to them. A safe, cushy posting where they would have immediate access to the best surgeons in ONI, who had already been fully briefed on their specific augmentations, and provided the best possible medical care. Throw in excellent pay, the promise of numerous work-life benefits that the Spartan trainers already enjoyed, and the almost-meaningless ability to 'add their touch' to their successors, and I expected to draw quite a few of the survivors to my program.
"I appreciate the list, but this is taking too long," I told Déjà, frowning. "Remove all the dead entries, as well as all entries that are both retired and married."
"Why married?" Déjà asked, with an idle tone, as she used a stylus on her clay tablets, and the data recompiled.
"Because if they're married, then that means they have people that will miss them," I explained. "It's a good thing for them personally, of course, but we don't want husbands and wives wondering why the UNSC called them back into service. We don't know how much the Orions might have told their spouses."
Dumb A.I. were not as capable of picking up new knowledge as a Smart A.I., but contrary to public belief, that didn't make them incapable of it – just very slow.
Most Dumb A.I., that is. I'd had direct kernel access to Déjà for five years now, and I'd added my own touches to her programming. Initially, just a rewriting of ONI's ingrained loyalty programs, to make her more loyal to my Spartans, and then myself, and then Mendez and the trainers, in that order. But sometimes, other tweaks slipped in. Learning mechanisms, refinements to logic thoughts, the like.
Perhaps someday, I'd have the life I once dreamed of. Nothing but theoretical papers on macro-economics, Slipspace physics, and playing around with Artificial Intelligence coding. Preferably while sitting back on a beach chair in some tropical paradise. Something like that resort that Stanforth had booked for us after the joint exercise with the Army. I still didn't know where he'd found the place. Perhaps it was HIGHCOM's preferred getaway?
But not yet. I still had work to do. People that depended on me. Failures and evil deeds that I had to make up for.
"There are thirty candidates remaining, Doctor Halsey," Déjà told me. "Ten that are still in active service with the UNSC, fifteen that are retired and single, and five that are serving as private contractors for ONI. According to the declassified documents, it looks like some of that final category are doing things that aren't quite officially legal under the Naval Code."
"An intelligence agency using private contractors to get around legalities? What a surprise," I muttered, shaking my head and trying my best to contain my grin… though it faded as I looked at the numbers. "Only thirty, really? That seems… low. Give me a quick breakdown of the numbers for the other categories."
"Of course," Déjà replied, nodding along to either my smart-ass comment, or my request.
She glanced down at her tablet again, as the request processed. It's funny. Compared to the speed of a normal computer, even a Dumb A.I. was vastly faster. But human expectations are ridiculous, and I found myself slightly irritated at how slow Déjà was compared to a Smart A.I.
Still, it only took Déjà a moment to compile the results, and she was infinitely more trustworthy than any Smart A.I.
"Eighty 'graduates' are now deceased or presumed deceased," she said. "Thirty-five are retired and now presumably happy with their spouse of choice. Twenty are unavailable under UNSC records. Combined with the remaining thirty that fit your original criteria, that is all."
"What do you mean, unavailable?" I asked, setting my coffee cup down again and furrowing my brow. "Are they living off the grid? In some cabin in the forest, unknown to the tax records or colonial registries?"
"Potentially," Déjà replied. "ONI's files are quite limited on the subject."
"Sounds like a security measure," I mused. "Impossible to hack something that isn't kept on the server. But… that doesn't make sense. They've already got plenty of incriminating evidence on their private contractors. No, no, this is more likely laziness. We'll need to access the Colonial Authority's servers to determine."
"Doctor, why does it matter?" the Dumb A.I. interrupted me. "Thirty Orion graduates will likely be enough to convince HIGHCOM. Even assuming that we can recruit every potential Orion, is the expenditure of more time on this task going to pay off?"
I frowned, and looked up at Déjà.
"Probably not," I admitted. "But I feel like I should do this. Some of those men and women may simply be living their lives in privacy. Some of them might be worse off. I know I can't save everyone, Déjà. But these Orions are like distant family to my Spartans. If I don't try to save them, after putting in so much effort for my children, then what kind of hypocrite am I?"
Tapping the keyboard, I re-routed the UNSC satellite dish that sat atop the administrative building for an immediate uplink.
If ONI didn't have the information that I needed, then I would go and get it. Déjà wasn't designed for this kind of thing, so I would have to do it myself.
Hacking was a judgmental term. Accurate, of course, but still judgmental. Was it still hacking when you had the authority to demand full access to the entire server? When you were just saving time ensuring nobody had to work to fulfill my request, and sign NDA's afterwards? Probably, but nobody in ONI would ever call me on it. Compared to the things they got up to, this was nothing.
If they ever found out in the first place, that was. I was no run of the mill script-kiddie. I'd spent quite a lot of my childhood playing around on computer systems, exploring my newfound brainpower in this new body. It was how I'd gotten interested in artificial intelligences in the first place.
I may or may not have run into a Dumb A.I. that ran a server for the Colonial Authority back on Endymion, and manipulated it into giving me special, limited access to the educational resources I wanted, just so I'd stop giving it headaches.
Ah, Bernard. I missed my little chats with him, sometimes. He was always so frustrated that I'd found yet another way to get inside his system, even though I always told him what vulnerabilities I'd exploited, and never used the same one twice. The poor thing was designed for administration, not counter-intrusion.
Funnily enough, it looked like some of those same security vulnerabilities were still there in the Colonial Authority servers on Reach. I didn't use them, of course. For all I knew, they'd been left intact so that they could be monitored.
It only took a few minutes of probing to get access. Taxation records were the obvious place to go, but they were also the wrong place to go. Taxes were obviously a much higher security concern, and the code around them would be much, much stronger. The UNSC didn't want people hacking in and claiming that they'd obviously paid all their taxes.
I didn't need to see if the missing Orions had paid their taxes. I needed to find out where they lived, if anywhere. Therefore, I slipped into the much less important database that housed their mailing and property addresses. Then I could simply cross-check them against the various planetary navigation databases, and I'd know.
With just twenty entries, I didn't bother asking Déjà to sort through the list for me. It was simple enough to do myself, and… honestly, it was a bit meditative. I needed closure for these unknowns.
Ten of the unknowns were indeed living 'off the grid'. They owned large parcels of property out on whatever colony world they had retired to, and presumably lived simple lives without any of the stresses of their former positions. I wished them well, and perhaps a part of me wished that I could have had such a life… though another part reminded me that I'd go insane, living that way. My idea of a peaceful third life had been to solve the looming Insurrection with economic theory. Hardly a 'simple' life.
Five more of the unknowns had completely vanished. Their last addresses were leases or rentals from years ago, and long since been replaced by other citizens. Perhaps they were dead. Perhaps they had joined up with the Insurrection. I didn't know which, and I let out a sigh. Five more that were beyond my help.
The final five were far more worrying. They had no exact addresses. Instead, they were geo-located by planet, city, and then a simple word: homeless.
"Déjà," I said, staring down at the list. "Send a message to Captain Stanforth, summarizing the situation and informing him of these five Orion veterans. I'll talk to him later today about it, preferably in two hours."
"Of course, Doctor," Déjà replied. "And if he wants to discuss it sooner?"
"Tell him I'm unavailable," I growled, standing up and walking out of the office.
The crack of rifle-fire was as paradoxically relaxing and invigorating as it always was.
I'd been intending to work for a few more hours on the Orion liaison project, but I was simply too furious to do so.
How dare the UNSC fail those men? After all they'd sacrificed, after all they'd willingly cut out of themselves, both physically and emotionally, to be discarded like broken tools. Weren't they given pensions? Weren't they given hazard pay for their careers?
What kind of abominable human resources system was the UNSC running, that some of their most valuable, most skilled soldiers could wind up living in the gutter?
Modern technology meant that the UNSC knew full well that those men were homeless. The municipal A.I. in the larger cities registered their I.D.'s when they used public services. Security checks would ping them whenever they traveled on planes, trains, and busses, or just passed by a networked camera. Their lack of a mailing address was recorded.
It was impossible for the UNSC not to know!
My teeth were grinding as I loaded a fifteen-round magazine into the M392 DMR.
But yet, nothing had been done. ONI had turned the other way and ignored their lost sheep.
Maybe they thought it was a kindness of some kind. A pretense of privacy.
Hardly! When just living in this advanced society resulted in nearly day-to-day tracking of your identity, privacy was a pathetic pretense to cling to! That was why ten of the Orion veterans had decided to abandon the cities altogether, and live in rural isolation – anything less was willful delusion about your supposed privacy, and nothing more.
I had already reserved the furthest slot in the firing range, more than a dozen slots away from the edge of the practicing cadets. I needed something intense, yet calculated enough to drive this rage from my mind.
My head pressed into the cheekrest of the M392 DMR, as I aimed down the sights. Since all the cadets were practicing with their designated marksman rifles today, I had no desire to draw attention to myself by picking a different rifle, no matter how much I would have preferred using a proper sniper rifle.
The UNSC Army trained their average marksmen to be able to hit targets from ranges of about three hundred to six hundred meters. Past that, it was more efficient to simply call up a sniper team. Designated marksmen weren't as good as snipers, but more importantly, they were far cheaper to train and equip, so you could train far more of them and spread them out across the infantry more easily.
Theoretically, the standard-issue rifle could hit out to six hundred meters easily, as it was firing the full-sized 7.62x51mm bullet. In practice, those rifles weren't designed for it, both in ergonomics and in precision quality. They were designed for rugged endurance. In the same sense, the DMR wasdesigned to hit out farther. I think the record was something like twelve hundred meters. Nothing compared to an Oracle, but still very impressive.
As such, they were good training tools for the Spartans – and good meditation tools for me.
Nothing but fifteen rounds, a far target, and a desire to connect the two. Just enough danger to focus my thoughts, just routine enough to allow my mind to wander a little.
I relaxed into my prone posture. A few moments later, the rhythm of my heartbeat started to settle, thanks to practiced habits and muscle memory. I clicked the safety off, and squeezed down on the trigger until the first round popped off. It took nearly a full second before the bullet impacted. I saw the smart target flash in the distance through the scope. A hit.
Of course, the target didn't indicate exactly where I'd hit. High? Low? It was always so hard to see. Once that rifle jerked in your hands, you lost focus, lost that perfect vision of the target.
If I spun up the Type 97 in my pocket, then I'd easily be able to either apply a tracking formula to the bullet, or a homing one, and know for sure. But that would render everything pointless, and use up precious resources.
I don't need perfection, I reminded myself. This is just to relax. Hitting the target is good enough.
My breathing slowed as I returned to the rifle, and fired off another shot. The target flashed again. Another hit.
Yet my ire was not cooling. Well, it was, but I found that I was still growing irritated. I wanted to know how far off I was. I wanted to know how I could improve. Was it high? Was it low? Where the hell did that one go?
"Low, to the left," a young girl's voice said to my side. I recognized it instantly.
I stiffened, muscles locking up for a split second before I forcibly un-tensed them. I put the safety back on, and carefully set the rifle down.
"Visha," I greeted the young girl to my side, my lips twisting in disapproval. She was laying on the next mat over, a spotting scope aimed at my target.
"Doctor," my subordinate replied, smiling at me cheekily, and ignoring my weary, yet irritated expression.
At eleven years old, Visha was steadily starting to resemble the teenager that I'd first met as a young Corporal. It was oddly comforting in some ways, and oddly terrifying in others. The more Visha grew into the same appearance I'd known, the closer she was coming to death.
"Putting the rifle down makes it harder for you to correct what you got wrong, Doctor," Visha pointed out to me, still smiling.
"And who says I want to correct it?" I asked, exasperated. "Perhaps I just want to shoot."
"Doctor, you always want to correct it," Visha answered, knowingly. "It's part of what makes you a good person."
"Perfectionism is a better indicator of neuroticism than morality," I muttered, picking up the rifle nonetheless.
There was no point in arguing with Visha's optimism, and in the many years since I'd first been introduced to my right hand, I'd largely given up on trying.
In many ways, her outlook was my fault. Visha had latched onto me when I'd been a young Lieutenant, and I'd done my best to shepherd her through the trenches when other, lesser men had drawn my ire. After she'd returned from OCS, and I'd had the chance to train and retrain her, I'd instilled a lot of skills that had kept her alive.
The downside was that I'd somehow, impossibly, made her into an optimist with unwavering support for my decisions – something I found both confusing, and regrettable.
I squeezed off another round, fully expecting it to miss. I wasn't as focused as before, now that Visha was by my side. Some part of me was thinking about those Orion veterans, and some part of me was wondering if that would have been our lives, had we survived the Great War.
However, the target flashed once more, and I hummed to myself in surprise.
"Low, and to the left," Visha reported. "You've got a pattern, Doctor."
"Yes, yes," I grumbled.
I adjusted my grip and position very, very fractionally. Then I put my breathing back on track, and fired another shot.
The target did not flash. I had missed.
"Close, but no hit," Visha said, unnecessarily. "Low and to the left, again."
She didn't offer anything more than that, which I appreciated. I knew what I was doing wrong, and so did she. Rubbing my face in it would have been wrong. I could correct it on my own.
I inhaled slowly. I needed a reset to the system. My adjustments had only magnified the error, so I needed to get back to my baseline first.
The fifth round was almost a surprise to me when it popped off. Not truly, of course, but when you got so thoroughly in the zone, sometimes that could happen. Alas, Visha's next comment was not a surprise.
"Low and left," she said, with a trace of worry in her voice. "Doctor, will you wait a moment?"
I sighed, safed the rifle and set it back down. I rolled over onto my hip, and looked at Visha with a dull, bland expression. I would have put on a polite mask, but there was no point. Visha had seen me at some of my lowest points in this life and the last. She would know that I was faking immediately.
"What is wrong?" Visha asked me quietly, her eyes soft as she looked at me with undisguised worry.
"Nothing," I replied immediately, before wincing, and clarifying it. "Nothing to do with the program. Everything is… going as well as it can."
Weak. Those words were so weak. The failure rate of the augmentations were still too high, I had that looming worry about James Ackerson and his price, and we had that upcoming set of joint exercises with two separate Air Force units. There were so many problems with the program. We were doing the best we could, and it was not enough.
"Then if it's not the program, what is bothering you?" Visha asked me directly, cutting through my meandering thoughts.
"Project Orion," I admitted. "I was looking up some of the survivors, to see if they might be available to train you and the other cadets. Some of them are homeless."
"Oh," Visha murmured, blinking as she registered the words.
She knew of the predecessor program, of course. All the Spartans did – I'd made sure that their legacy, their history, was part of their lessons. It was another small way that I could covertly emphasize to the Spartans that this entire concept was fundamentally flawed, and that their superiors were not to be automatically trusted, all under the nominal pretense of instilling esprit de corps.
"Did they have no family to care for them?" Visha asked innocently, tilting her head slightly.
"I don't know," I said, unable to keep the frustration from my voice. "But it irritates me, to see such men cast aside. They're valuable resources, even before their augmentations. That they've wound up as the equivalent of human trash on the road… it's wrong. Inefficient. A waste of human capital."
"So fix it," Visha said, shrugging one shoulder.
"What?" I asked, confused.
"Fix it," Visha repeated. "Offer them the position of trainer here, pay them very well, and make it better."
"Visha, I was already going to do that," I told her, one eye twitching involuntarily at the simplistic summation of the situation.
"Then what's the real issue, Doctor?" Visha asked, rolling her eyes.
"That is the issue!" I insisted, feeling more than a little miffed at the eleven year old's nonchalance. "It's atrocious, what's happened to these people."
"Yes, but you can fix it," my subordinate said, as if reminding me of something that I had not forgotten. "So do that, and it'll be fine."
"The fact it happened in the first place is not fine," I growled.
"You're dwelling on other people's failures too much, Tanya," Visha sighed, closing her eyes.
I twitched. I'd deliberately taken up the furthest slot in the firing range, but the use of my name from that past life still sent a spike of raw fear down by my spine.
What if someone heard her? What if someone suspected that I had some secret past? They'd kill me. They'd remove me from the program. They'd crawl through every inch of my life to find every single gap, contradiction, and mysterious skill that I'd ever made. What horrors would happen to the children, with my removal?
What would they do to Visha, who had incriminated herself just as much as me?
"You used to be this way during the War," my fellow veteran murmured. Her voice was low, and soft, but it put my teeth on edge nonetheless. "I never liked it much."
And look at what happened to us during the War, because of other people's failures! I thought, simmering with anger.
I bit back the urge to say the words out loud. To argue about how we had to pay attention such things.
"We shouldn't talk about this," I hissed, instead focusing on the immediate concerns. "Not here. Not in public. Never."
Visha's eyes opened, and she gazed at me with sad expression.
"You're a good person, Doctor," she said, thankfully using my proper title. "That's why you worry so much. Well, stop worrying, and start doing. We can't change the past. We're not God. We can only change our futures. What's behind us is behind us. Accept it, or let it go, or whatever you choose… but don't let it control you."
I wanted to argue, but there wasn't any point. This was… just more naivete from my young ex-Lieutenant.
It had to be. There was no other possibility.