Charles Langford leaned back in his chair in the Highland Military Complex, in the depths of ONI's headquarters on Reach.
He listened as one of his fellow ONI officers briefed the room on the most idiotic and immoral project that he'd ever heard of – one that in a few days, would be investigated by Section Zero.
Oh, sure, the project seemed simple at first. Socio-political analysis by some super-genius that basically meant the Colonies were going to continue to rebel until the UNSC beat them. Fine. Sometimes the higher ups demanded that the civilian sector provide independent verification of what the military had known for years.
But this? This was their solution? The Orion-II Project?
Were they insane?
Did all of HIGHCOM spontaneously start doing lines of blow? Were they all eating poorly-prepared fugu on that day? Did someone propose it as a joke, and nobody else felt brave enough to point out that this was obviously bullshit?
And what, in God's name, was the malfunction of Doctor Catherine Halsey, to ever come up with such a project in the first place? What kind of sociopath gets her PhD, and immediately decides to write the galaxy's definitive guide to War Crimes 101?
Crazy ideas happened in Section Three. It was the mad scientist division for a reason. His own Section One, focused on proper intelligence gathering, had kicked R&D out of their purview nearly two hundred years ago for this exact reason. Too many eggheads that got a wild hair up their butt and decided to make it everybody's problem.
Halsey was the perfect example. Just another alchemist claiming that they could turn lead into gold, that they could pull rabbits out of a hat, if only their projects were funded.
If those crazy ideas had stayed confined to Section Three, then it would have been fine. Give the gifted child a couple bucks to buy some erector sets and put together a MAC cannon, keep him entertained.
Yet this Project hadn't stayed confined to Section Three. It had spread like a virus. Like a child with grabby hands, trying to rip chunks of the budget from every other part of ONI, so it could gobble them down like candy.
The lecturer couldn't give them an estimate of how much money had been wasted by Doctor Halsey thus far. Classifications and the like. Charles didn't need that, though. He knew exactly how much money had been stolen from his budget to make this abomination work: one hundred million credits. More than enough to pay for thousands of additional informants, or listening taps, or surveillance drones.
Why the hell Section Three thought that solution to the Insurrection was super-soldiers worth as much as a destroyer, Charles didn't have a clue. Trigger-pullers, good at their job or not, needed to find the damn Innies before they could shoot them, and with how much Halsey was stealing from other people's pies, she was damaging the entire intelligence apparatus.
Charles glanced over at the other officers in the briefing room, all sitting and listening as attentively as he was. There were nearly two dozen, each one a representative from their respective slivers of the UNSC's intelligence community, and they all had a reason to dislike Halsey.
That woman had managed to singlehandedly become the most polarizing figure in ONI in just six years, eclipsing even Parangosky. Everywhere Halsey went, she enriched and destroyed, befriended and offended in equal measure. Nearly everyone had heard of her, and nearly everyone had an opinion on her.
And this room was filled with some of Halsey's most alienated rivals.
This entire investigation was the result of Halsey's graceless stomping through all the carefully cultivated gardens in ONI. She'd raised up an entire coalition against her, creating her own worst enemies, and in such numbers that they'd managed to force even Section Zero to pay attention.
Some, like Charles's boss, who had sent him in his stead, had lost budget requests to Section Three's mysterious black hole. No word, no explanation, just 'budget reallocation'. They'd had to spy on their own organization just to figure out where the money had gone!
Some, like Whitaker from Signals Intel, had suffered a loss of trust after Halsey had committed a few weeks to helping their rivals in Artificial Intelligence Analysis – replacing humans with Smart and Dumb A.I.s coded to do the same job. Section One liked it so much that they'd shuffled the entire ecosystem around, and now Whitaker's department was looking at downsizing.
Some, like the big burly bruiser from Army, were facing the institutional threat of the Navy once again trying to subsume the Army into the Marines, just as the Air Force had been cannibalized over the years. Army Rangers, Airborne, even the damn Green Berets had been declared 'redundant' by the Navy at various points, though HIGHCOM had thankfully never listened.
But none of them hated Doctor Catherine Halsey as much as Major Arnold Wilson, the man giving them the briefing.
According to his own admission, Wilson had once been a member of the program – the military head of it, even – before Halsey had flexed her mysterious influence. She'd gotten him ejected so hard that he'd wound up in the lowest possible position for an ONI officer: overseeing an intervention battalion in the Outer Colonies.
Sure, running a forward combat posting sounded great, until you realized that you've never see any action, since ONI black ops teams didn't deploy in units larger than a company, and you'd never have any political influence, since all the movers and shakers lived on Reach or Earth.
So yeah, the man probably had a grudge that was influencing his briefing… but it was hard for anyone to remain truly objective about a topic this controversial. Even if that standard could be achieved, the facts alone, devoid of their emotional influence, were a horrifying enough that would worry anybody with a lick of political sense.
If this ever came out, then the UNSC was finished as an organization. It didn't matter if they won the war, if they crushed the Innies and convinced everyone that it was best to live by Earth's rules. The entire command structure would be gutted, disassembled, and reforged in some entirely new form, just to avoid the shame from the Orion-II Project.
Forget the Innies, they'd be lucky if there weren't outright rebellions by ship captains if this came out! Garrisons revolting and creating their own splinter governments!
And it was all because the dumbest smart woman alive, Doctor Catherine Halsey, had decided she wanted to play God with the lives of seventy-five children.
What a disaster.
Charles looked down at the briefing packet in his hand. He'd already memorized it, of course. What kind of intelligence operative would he be, if he couldn't memorize a single page of organization history?
The Orion-II Program should not exist. It was that simple.
He felt almost offended to even be in the same organization as this abomination.
And in just a few hours, when the formal investigation started, he'd have to pretend like he didn't know. He'd have to act like he was just angry about the loss of his boss's budget, and not the kidnapping and brainwashing of seventy-five children.
Wilson probably shouldn't be giving this briefing, given his prior involvement. But that didn't matter to Vice Admiral Evelyn Caldwell, who had ordered Wilson to give this briefing as a preliminary for the investigation itself.
Not that anyone was going to protest. When you played the stakes this high, the rules and regulations started to bend under pressure.
In this case, Caldwell was throwing them a bone. Trying to defang their complaints by giving them a morsel, and hoping that would calm their ire before they had to see Halsey in person. It was stupid, but the Vice Admiral was sitting on top of a nuclear bomb, and it was clear to Charles Langford that she was just trying to buy a few more minutes to disarm the device before it detonated.
Frankly, he wanted to burn the program down anyway. The other members of this anti-Halsey coalition might get their prestige back if she was disgraced, but that budget money was gone, spent, and no matter how much Charles exerted himself, he couldn't get it back. The only hope for his intel gathering operations was to annihilate Orion-II so that the reallocation might swing back his way in the next financial year. Preparing for the future, rather than moaning about the past.
A hundred million credits. The amount of Innies that he could have caught, the amount of signals he could have gathered, the amount of intel he could have forwarded onto troopers on the ground and saved their lives.
Even discarding the knock-on effects, the unknowable ripples of any one piece of intelligence revealing the motherlode, it was a horrific waste of lives. Forget the prestige of being a spy – Charles just didn't want his fellow men to die to more Innie booby traps.
Waste. It just kept coming back to that. A waste of money, a waste of lives, a waste of time!
Major Wilson was telling them that the initial expectations of success were a pathetic eleven percent. From the original seventy-five children, they'd kill off sixty-seven, and have only eight total survivors.
Ignore the immorality of kidnapping all those children and the scandal, and you'd still be left wondering why the hell anybody would have ever pulled the trigger on this program.
What was the point of wasting seven years training all those kids, and just to throw away almost all of them in the randomness of the surgical augmentations?
And sure, the program claimed that they'd be improving the odds before the surgeries, but even if they weren't lying openly about that, how much improvement could they actually do? How much could science advance in a field so unexplored? How could anyone give an honest assessment, when the map lay empty and there was no scale, no distances, no basis for any kind of analysis or comparison?
Charles Langford had done a lot of things that he wasn't proud of, over the years of serving the UNSC… but this? This was almost unimaginably bad. If Major Wilson hadn't been directly involved in it, he wouldn't have believed the briefing.
Hell, if Section Zero hadn't begrudgingly bent to the anti-Halsey coalition, and admitted the program's existence, then Charles still wouldn't have believed this briefing!
What was the true cost? Classified. If Halsey had only stolen as much money from all the departments represented in this briefing as she had from Langford's, that was still enough money to train an entire Corps of infantry! Whatever the true budget of Orion-II was, it was surely much, much higher than that.
It was enraging, infuriating, maddening. Charles was fuming that this was what his budget had been wasted on.
Then came the moral implications that Charles had been dodging the entire time. Not just ruining the lives of seventy-five children, shattering seventy-five families like they were ice on a windshield, but actually teaching these kids that it was good to kill other people for the UNSC.
That was the real terror. Forget ONI having better assassins, or super-soldiers with crazy power armor. The most terrifying part of this entire freakshow was the purely mundane horror of brainwashing those kids into being die-hard, ultra-loyal members of the UNSC.
It was impossible for there to be any other outcome. You could not run a program like this without abuse being a daily occurrence. There was no other path. The amount of war crimes - crimes against humanity! - had to be astronomical.
Charles was no Innie. If he had been, then he obviously wouldn't have signed up to damn his own soul to keep the UNSC intact. But he'd made a willing and conscious choice to join the military, to serve the ideals that he genuinely believed in.
None of these kids would ever be able to say that. None of them! Not truly, not genuinely. If they tried, if they said they agreed, if they thought that yeah, their sacrifice was worth it, it would be a lie. Confirmation bias, belief perseverance, whatever psychological term there was for it. It was brainwashing, pure and simple.
They had been raised in a system completely obsessed with the Orion-II Program being utterly correct. Never once testing that belief, never once criticizing themselves, never once approaching their own beliefs from the outside to see if it made sense, or if it was total crap.
There were a lot of dark jokes in Section One about becoming radicalized after you'd read too much Innie propaganda while on the job. You'd drank the kool-aid. You'd flipped your switch. Your sleeper cell had been activated. You were crossing the floor, turning coat, jumping ship, so on and so forth.
Right now, he was stuck on game theory. The prisoner's dilemma, where you could either cooperate, or defect. The optimal strategy was to match your opponent. If he cooperated, you cooperated. But if he defected… then you'd better do the same, or else.
When was the right time to hoist the black flag and begin slitting throats? When programs this evil went unpunished. When good men became convinced that there was no use trying to follow the system, and resorted to anarchy.
Thank God for Major Wilson, Charles thought to himself. Thank God that Section Zero is listening to us.
It took Major Arnold Wilson about an hour to convince Charles Langford that Doctor Catherine Halsey was a psychotic megalomaniac who desired nothing more than to crush the laws of science under her heel.
It took Doctor Catherine Halsey and her team about three days to convince him otherwise.
Three days of Charles sitting in one of the amphitheater seats beneath the Hive, listening to Halsey defend her doctrine, her budget, her training schedule, her personnel choices, her joint training activities, her experimental surgeries, her division of labor, her design choices. Section Zero was reviewing anything and everything that the woman had ever laid a finger on.
He couldn't help but notice that the one time Halsey came close to cracking was when she talked about the survival odds of the cadets.
Not 'test subjects', Charles noted. People tended to slip up when it came to their descriptions. Were the Orion-II children test subjects, as Major Wilson insisted, or were they 'candidates', as Section Zero preferred, or were they 'cadets', as Halsey stubbornly clung to? Each deliberately chosen word displayed a different mindset.
Wilson thought of the kids as living human sacrifices to the scientific process, and it pissed him off. No wonder he harbored so much anger at Halsey.
Section Zero thought of them as potential super-soldiers, but only potentially. They were unimportant to the Admiralty until they'd been augmented.
But Halsey… Halsey called them cadets.
She treated them as if they were official members of the military, owed the same respect and protection as any student at one of the military academies. She acted as if the children were valuable additions to the UNSC even as is, at their young age.
It was a conscious choice – when someone used a different term, Halsey didn't mimic them. She always said 'cadets'.
After Halsey finished, and escorted away from the room so that she could not hear the rest of the testimony, Vice Admiral Caldwell dragged up other people to fill that lonely chair in front of three admirals and two captains. Perhaps it was desperation, as Wilson's promise that Halsey was little more than a paper-mache façade turned out to be wrong, and she revealed a skin of titanium.
Charles watched them all, on every day of the trial, and two of them stuck out beyond all the rest. He didn't know if the scientists were lying or not, that wasn't his field. But he knew soldiers, and there were two notable soldiers interviewed in those three days
The first memorable speaker came the Senior Chief Petty Officer who ran the training staff, an old Navy spec ops man named Franklin Mendez. They grilled him to a similar degree, but for far fewer hours. The NCO was, if anything, even more emotionless and reserved than Halsey. He explained minutia of basic training, drill instruction, and psychological conditioning with the same placid and thorough details that he gave to the tactical exercises.
The second was the ONI supervisor, which was an unexpected shock. A project's supervisor was a distant post, and usually kept clear of these kinds of investigations unless everyone's guilt had already been determined, and all that mattered was the public explanation so that nobody would ever follow the example of the guilty parties. Normally, they had multiple projects to supervise, so they were rarely ever involved with the actual failures.
Worse was the man's identity – Captain Michael Stanforth, son of Harold Stanforth, a goddamn Fleet Admiral. Everyone knew that ONI didn't give a damn about making power moves, but dragging up a HIGHCOM member's son and publicly interrogating him in front of nearly a hundred people was about as reckless as it got!
In a display of either supreme confidence or supreme arrogance, both Franklin Mendez and Michael Stanforth repeated the exact same things as Halsey and the NCO had. To their knowledge, there had been absolutely nothing wrong with the Spartan-II Program. Every requisition had been justified to the chain of command adequately, every variance from regulations was approved in advance, and every joint-cooperation venture was vetted and weighed before contact had been initiated.
They all called it the Spartan-II Program, Charles noticed. Not the Orion-II Program. They'd changed names at some point, and Charles wondered why Major Arnold Wilson was refusing to use the new name, and clinging to the old one.
Mendez and Stanforth weren't the first people were pulled from the audience and placed into that chair. The heads of the Psychology team and the Augmentation team had gone before them, on the first day of the investigation. Civilians, but clearly men of extreme intelligence, given how carefully they answered the questions, always erring on the side of caution and deferring back to each other with careful precision.
The picture was being built so thoroughly that Charles was starting to question if Section Zero was trying to execute Halsey… or exonerate her.
Every element that Major Arnold Wilson had declared with impious authority as a sign of inevitable failure had been changed in the years since. Every guaranteed failure had become a miraculous success.
The Spartan-II Program, by every single performance metric, was already achieving goals that had been considered impossible.
That eleven percent chance of success had become a ninety-five percent chance. Sixty-seven statistically guaranteed deaths had become four.
If ONI scrapped the augmentations today, then all they'd have to show for the program was three groundbreaking treatments for previously uncurable conditions, increased bonds of brotherhood between previously hostile black ops groups, and seventy-five of the smartest, deadliest, most capable children in the entire galaxy.
The Spartan cadets could outshoot almost every sniper in UNSC service and pass the entrance exams for any university in the colonies or on Earth. They were setting records for their ages in damn near every athletic competition that the military tested for. They were doing tactical exercises normally demanded of final-form midshipmen in OCS.
Halsey was an alchemist, and she had delivered gold. She'd turned seventy-five kids into potential legends. It would be a waste to use these children on door-breaches and bomb-squad duties.
Forget the West Point Class of 1915. If these kids were allowed to attend the academy, they'd become the new class that stars fell on. Seventy-five out of seventy-five were destined to be Generals and Admirals one day.
Vice Admiral Caldwell was no fool. She had to be seeing the same thing that Charles was. She had to be! The longer she drew this investigation out, the worse the result would be.
The anti-Halsey coalition was fracturing as the members of the Spartan-II Program presented fact after fact, improvement after improvement. Some of them were becoming uneasy with their original decision to attack Halsey in the first place; Charles was one of them. He didn't know how he'd break the news to his boss, but after what he'd seen…
But there was no way that Wilson, or some of the others, would accept any outcome other than Halsey being removed either from ONI, or from the mortal coil.
He'd assumed that Caldwell was on the side of the anti-Halsey coalition when he'd been initially briefed… but now, he couldn't understand what her plan possibly was. Neither opposing nor supporting Halsey made sense here.
If she supported Halsey, then surely it would have been easier to simply perform a quiet investigation, tell the complainers that there was nothing wrong, and smothering the spark of discontent before it could grow into a wildfire.
If she didn't support Halsey, then why even allow Halsey a chance to defend herself at all? Why not do the investigation without this dog-and-pony show, condemn her totally, and sweep it all under the rug?
This was just… the worst possible way to handle it. Caldwell was practically guaranteeing that there would be even more complaining, no matter what the outcome was. Section Zero was supposed to reduce complaints, not make them larger.
Yet… perhaps that was the idea?
Charles remembered that first day, before Halsey had been removed and locked away in some confinement cell. He'd watched as Doctor Halsey defended yet another one of her decisions involving Project GUNGNIR.
"…is nearly unrecognizable from its initial scope," had said Rear Admiral Laborde. "Scope creep is always a risk, but it's hard to argue that Project GUNGNIR is focused on your cadets, when you have design teams working on tactical eyepieces for the Marine Corps. Particularly when that team is supposed to be working on artificial intelligences."
"That team is working on a component that is cross-compatible with the power armor designs," Halsey had said. "One that will be used by the integrated artificial intelligences to aid a Spartan in combat."
"And what component would that be?" Laborde had pressed.
"The heads up display," Halsey had replied. "Guiding a soldier's aim through a more accurate reticle, as well as allowing use of navigational waypoints, which will decrease the odds of miscommunications in the field. Thanks to the Army and Marine Corps contributing portions of their R&D budget to the task, we have made considerable progress. Once the Spartans are augmented and armored, this functionality will allow an onboard A.I. to guide them with visual cues in addition to verbal conversation."
Back then, Laborde had stared at Halsey, but she gave no ground to the man's expression. After a moment, Rear Admiral Darlan had spoke up, and conversation moved on, without any further attempt to question or criticize Halsey. Of the two Rear Admirals, Laborde was clearly the more hostile, while Darlan was more conciliatory.
Yet it didn't make sense.
The entire topic was allowed to end on Halsey's high-note, her triumphant explanation of how this was a part of her perfect vision and plan. It wasn't the first time that had happened. Not even tenth. It had kept happening over and over throughout the past three days.
As an intelligence man, he'd been trained how to spot patterns like that. Suspicious coincidences that only benefited one side.
That, right there, Charles thought to himself, raising a hand to his chin. Maybe I'm going crazy. But… that looked like a routine. Like they planned it.
But that would crazy. Section Zero (in)famously did not cooperate with the other departments of ONI. They were supposed to be completely invisible, and while practicality kept them from that ideal, they came as close as humanly possible. It was unusual for Section One, Two, or Three to collaborate, but it occasionally happened. It was outright unknown for Section Zero.
On any other day, Charles Langford would have laughed at the idea that anyone could have convinced old Caldwell to break the barrier of silence – much less a civilian contractor, some egghead.
Not today. Not after watching Halsey explain all the details of how she'd convinced all three Sections to work together. Not after she'd convinced the ODSTs to babysit the Spartans when they were eight years old. Not when she'd somehow talked Army Intelligence into willingly working with a project belonging to Navy Intelligence.
At this point, Halsey had already achieved the impossible by weaving that web. Perhaps it wasn't impossible that she could have done the same to Section Zero.
Charles still wasn't sure about his suspicion, but… what if it was all Caldwell's idea?
Not the investigation of Halsey, not dragging up the Spartan-II program. Not that. This huge public hearing, instead. The way that it was being publicly dissected in front of every complainer, every doubter, every single person that was clamoring about Halsey?
What if this was a sting?
What if Caldwell saw the anti-Halsey coalition's demands as the problem, rather than Halsey's program? What if they just wanted to get all the critics in one room, and then handle them all at once?
His eyes widened, and he had to clamp his mouth shut before his jaw dropped in front of all the other ONI spooks watching the current witness, one of the children, talking up on the stage.
Just telling Wilson to shut up wouldn't have actually fixed the problem. The man had an axe to grind, and he had been quietly gathering up people who disliked Halsey, Charles Langford and his boss among them. That kind of discontent would simmer and seethe, especially now that Wilson had connected all those disconnected groups together.
They couldn't just fire everyone who complained. This wasn't kindergarten, this was the military. Disliking a coworker was not a legitimate reason to fire someone. Even if you did, how could you trust them to keep their mouth shut, once they were no longer in the military, under your ability to observe them?
Charles's best guess was that Vice Admiral Caldwell had gathered the entire anti-Halsey coalition together, sat them down, and forced them to listen to Halsey defend herself. Caldwell had baited them with the promised investigation, then spent multiple days giving Halsey a dedicated platform to explain every single detail of her program, just to silence the critics.
No doubt that Section Zero told Halsey in advance, Charles thought, shaking his head in disbelief as he remembered how Halsey had responded to another softball from Rear Admiral Darlan with the equivalent of a grand slam. She was too smooth. She must have been practicing and preparing for a while, just for this performance.
The brunette Doctor had been explaining the modular armor systems, the way that she'd designed her Spartans armor with the ability to mount usable tactical devices on their thighs, their arms, their shoulders – and then, almost like an afterthought, decided that the same system could work for the standard UNSC infantryman.
God damn, Halsey really fooled us all, Charles thought to himself in awe.