It was all falling apart.
Six years, cutting through the red tape. Six years of irritation. Six years of back-room deals and promised favors.
And now… everything was being torn to pieces by that bitch, Halsey.
Major Arnold Wilson was getting very tired of that woman and her impossibilities. He'd done his best to burn every bridge that she could use to run away, tear down every house she could have sheltered under, and cut every rope she could use to escape the pit.
Yet the first day of the committee's investigation had been a shit-show from the start. Section Zero had their own agenda, they always did, but Wilson had thought that his own backers would have made it clear that only one outcome was acceptable.
Halsey had been interrogated for four hours, and in that time, she'd said lie after lie. It was plain that she was making up numbers out of her head, trying to bamboozle Section Zero in the hopes that they'd simply never check them.
Project Orion-II had always been an impossible dream. The idea that Halsey had improved those odds, had made it actually practical, was just ludicrous. But it was exactly the kind of play that she would do, disagreeing with the best minds in ONI as if they were children compared to her intellect.
That was the core problem with Halsey: her arrogance. Years ago, he'd thought that Halsey just wanted to match her brain against God, throwing money and lives at the wall in a desperate attempt to write her name in the history books as some kind of scientific pioneer like Newton or Galileo.
Wilson still believed that, but it had been a long time since then, and in that time, Halsey had run face-first into the brick wall of reality. Rather than admitting defeat, she had instead chosen to double down.
Now Halsey was claiming that she had improved the augmentations so much that only four kids would die in total. Complete bullshit, but Section Zero was eating it up, not realizing that she was simply lying. It was delusional. No scientist could refine something that much in so short a time. Never mind that she was directly contradicting her own original figures.
He didn't know exactly what happened, but his best guess was that she had snapped under the realization that she couldn't actually achieve Orion-II. So she'd simply made up a new project and called it Project Spartan-II. The new name was like a fresh coat of paint over a decaying building, a pretense of normality that allowed Halsey to pretend that she was still a genius, rather than a complete fraud.
She had built a web of lies, all mutually supporting, weaving together to form a tapestry of falsehood. She'd even convinced the rest of the research team to support her delusions, probably with threats of violence. They all supported her, insisted that yes, the improvements were real. Not just to the augmentations, but also in creating powered armor, a dream that the UNSC had been chasing for centuries without ever managing to achieve it.
It was total crap… and Section Zero was blind to it.
There was no magical solution here. You couldn't just pour infinite money into a computer until it spat out a physically impossible result. This was the real world, and there were trade-offs, compromises, acceptable losses. There was no such thing as a perfect outcome. Even if there had been, soldiers died. You needed to account for the inevitable casualties in the line of duty.
The only way you could get seventy successful augmentations was if you put far more children through the surgeries. Hundreds, maybe thousands. It would be horrifically immoral, and Wilson hated the very idea of it, but that was the honest truth. The surgeries were flawed, and the only way through was bulk numbers. When you discarded all ethics, that was the only solution, inefficient though it was.
But that would have required Halsey to admit that she had set the bar too high. That she'd written a check she couldn't actually cash. There was no way that she would ever admit that she'd made a mistake.
If Wilson had been in her shoes… well, for starters, he would have canned this entire project from the start, not gleefully dove in headfirst. But if he had been forced to do the Orion-II Project, then he would have started out by cutting the fat. No power armor team, fewer psychologists, one team for the augmentations and use the auto-surgeons for the actual surgeries.
Pie in the sky dreams belonged in hypothetical papers, not actual scientific study. He was no scientist, and even he knew that!
Efficiency was the guiding principle of the military, and it was very clear that Halsey had no idea what real efficiency actually was. Making the hard decisions that tightened the belt, scrimping now so you could stay alive longer. Reducing the budget for fancy toys so that you could get one more rifle, one more bullet, one more ship. Expensive gizmos inevitably broke, and they had to be replaceable.
Half-measures were the worst of all worlds. Better to have never done the Orion-II program, or better to have committed fully to the idea. Conscript as many children as you needed, so you'd have enough survivors. Set up a training compound on some wayward colony where it could be done in total secrecy, not on Reach, goddammit. Train the candidates hard, and keep them lean and hungry to give them the vital edge of aggression they'd need to survive – don't give them beach vacations and ice cream every meal and birthday cakes!
Maybe if Halsey had actually managed to improve the odds, she wouldn't have been so distracted by trying to appease the children. But she'd failed, and now she had to bribe everyone to keep from spilling the secret.
The only question was… how the hell had she managed to bribe all of them? Not just the candidates, not just the trainers or the research staff.
Four hours into the first day, Catherine Halsey was dismissed. She was removed from the room, taken away to solitary confinement.
Then Section Zero started calling up other people for their testimony.
Even though the tribunal had pressed Halsey on a wide variety of subjects, they narrowed their focus as they started interviewing everyone else. An entire day was just spent on the joint-training sessions.
Five ODST officers had been called up, one at a time, and asked to explain their participation in the first joint-exercise Halsey had ever conducted with the cadets. They'd had nothing but praise for the candidates, talking about reflexes and accuracy as good as UNSC Army troopers at only eight years old.
They'd even been so bold as to claim that Halsey herself had participated in room-clearing exercises in the later parts of the exercise, and had out-performed most of them – which was total garbage. If they were going to make up lies, they could at least make up credible, believable ones. A civilian researcher being a better trigger-puller than black ops ODSTs? Bullshit.
It wasn't hard for Wilson to see how Halsey had convinced them to repeat her story. Budget promises. Using slivers of Vice Admiral Keeler's generous allocations as naked bribes. She paid the 105th Shock Troops Division like a college football team paying off some cupcake school to take a loss, to puff their record up before the playoffs.
But then Section Zero had asked that exact question, demanding to know why the 105th had become involved in the Orion-II Project.
"Repaying a favor," said one of the Captains, a man by the name of Silva. "One of the conditions of Project GUNGNIR was our involvement in a classified training operation."
It felt like a truck had hit Wilson at those words.
Project GUNGNIR? Had Halsey influenced that, as well?
A flash of anger had poured into him, sitting on that seat, staring down. GUNGNIR was one of the few bright sparks to come out of Section Three's R&D in the recent years. Direct, tangible improvements to the quality of gear that was issued to the fighting man of the UNSC. Some of that gear – the improved BDU Rev. 2519, just issued last year – had literallysaved the lives of his men from Innie bullets.
Wilson sat there and listened, grinding his teeth, as Section Zero asked more questions, peeling back more layers, and revealing the awful, horrible truth:
Halsey had created Project GUNGNIR.
That couldn't be true. It was ridiculous to even suggest it. Halsey was a prima donna, a charlatan. She wanted to be the smartest person in the room, wanted the prestige from working on complex problems. Halsey didn't care about the armor worn by the grunt infantryman. She didn't think about improved survivability for troopers. That couldn't be right.
But it was. Section Zero confirmed the details, and dismissed the ODSTs back to their chairs.
Then they'd called up the Army Rangers, and done the same, interrogating a Captain Ackerson about a hunter-killer operation.
The Air Force was summoned to explain their little pilot training, and the officer in charge had stumbled over his words, claiming that he'd been told that the children were fifteen-year-olds. A couple of the ODST and Army Rangers had chuckled at that, barely audible in that huge amphitheater.
How much money had Halsey used? Wilson had grown numb over that day – listening to liaison officers describing how much money Halsey had thrown at them, all to get an outsider's fingerprints all over the Orions.
Why? It was so… wasteful. For the money she'd spent on the Air Force alone, she could have simply paid for the flight hours from the on-base Pelicans.
And that pattern repeated, over and over again. Halsey would spend millions on bribes to some department, then they'd give her a little less money, supposedly from their budget, when it was clearly the same money. By the end of the first day, Section Zero had revealed over a hundred transactions, across dozens of departments.
Money was being thrown around so freely that there was only one plausible explanation: fraud.
The basic rule of bureaucracy was that the more paperwork, the easier it was to hide something. Budget transfers back and forth between two departments wasn't so bad… but Halsey had involved dozens of different research groups, combat divisions, and military installations. Nearly a hundred, over the past five years, making it a complete mystery as to how much she'd actually spent – and how much had been quietly pocketed.
This should have been enough to doom Halsey, to cut short the rest of the tribunal and lock her away forever, if not execute her! There was no reason to continue. Hell, it was probably the kind thing to do for Halsey, even Wilson could see that!
Better to conclude the investigation and dismiss her quietly, than to waste more time recounting every single crime she'd committed, every single way that she had made fools of the Office of Naval Intelligence for half a dozen years.
But Section Zero didn't read Wilson's mind, and they were firm. Everyone was to meet back in the same room tomorrow, and continue the tribunal. More witnesses would be called, and more of Halsey's indiscretions would be counted.
Halsey wasn't present at all on the second day, still locked away in her confinement.
The first speaker was Doctor Meyer, her nominal second in command for the research teams, and the head of both the Psychology and Surgery teams. The tribunal was going to focus on Halsey's research today, it seemed.
Vice Admiral Caldwell asked question after question through her two mouthpieces, the Rear Admirals Darlan and Laborde. What the surgeries would do. Why they were necessary. What would happen if they failed. What contingencies they would have for the partial successes. If there were off-ramps in case a surgery started going bad, so they could stop before a candidate was killed.
Every potential angle was explored, and Wilson soothed his growing aggravation and filled the time by trying to mentally calculate how much this second day of questioning would cost ONI – the per diemcosts of all these officers.
Meyer was interrogated for two hours, then sent away.
Next came a smaller man, Doctor Wu, who was asked the same questions, but in more detail. Where the tall, broad-shouldered Meyer had described things in simple, plain language, Doctor Wu used the precise terminology. It made him more suspicious, in Wilson's eye. The more precise terminology became, the more easily misinterpreted – and easier to intentionally mislead.
On and on the questioning went. One hour, two hours, three hours, and more. It was as if Section Zero was trying to ensure that no stone went unturned. Sure, in theory it made sense, but they'd already proven Halsey's guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt when she kept making up outright lies.
After Doctor Wu left, they called up a third person, and here, Wilson sat up in his seat.
This was the endgame. This was where Halsey's façade would break.
"Rear Admiral Jeromi, thank you for coming today," Vice Admiral Caldwell said, taking the microphone for the first time in many hours.
"You're welcome," said Rear Admiral Ysionris Jeromi, commander of UNSC Hopeful.
The man was a legend across the colonies. He'd intervened during the Battle of Eridanus II to care for the wounded of both sides, Insurrectionist and UNSC. He'd rehabilitated miners from Victoria, after their gravity rings had malfunctioned and nearly killed everyone with wild swings in acceleration and deceleration. He'd even saved the colony of Madrigal from an outbreak of a protozoal virus by dragging the Hopeful into orbit and sending down medical teams like they were Marine strike units.
There might be better doctors than Jeromi, but there was no doctor more respected for their integrity and honesty. The perfect choice by Section Zero to debunk Halsey's lies before the entire crowd of her collaborators.
"We would like your professional opinion on the research conducted to improve the proposed augmentation surgeries," Caldwell informed the man.
"In my professional opinion, this entire program is a disgrace to the UNSC as a whole, and should be closed down immediately," Jeromi said calmly.
Caldwell sighed, and Wilson sympathized with both of them. Jeromi was right, of course, but Caldwell hadn't asked him that.
"And your opinion on the experimental surgeries and other research performed?" Caldwell rephrased her question.
"The research should never have happened," Jeromi replied, completely undeterred... before continuing after a pause. "And I can't speak to the classification statuses, or breach thereof, of course. However, setting those issues aside, the manner in which it was done satisfied all moral and ethical standards of the UNSC."
Wilson stared. That didn't make sense. That… Halsey was testing out these things on civilians.
"The risks of the experimental surgeries were explained clearly," the Rear Admiral continued. "They were performed on volunteers with the permission of their legal guardians. Follow up visits and checkups were performed and are still ongoing, at the expense of the Spartan-II Program rather than the Navy or the VA. Furthermore, while I must continue to stress my harshest disagreement with the goals of this augmentation research, I must admit that it has been handled appropriately."
"Are they lying about their chances of success?" Caldwell asked.
"…No," Jeromi admitted, with a huff. "I've not had the time to review every single aspect of the proposed surgeries, but from my brief review… it looks like it will work."
"Thank you, Rear Admiral," Caldwell said, nodding to him. "We have no further questions for you."
Jeromi nodded, his mouth twisting in a bitter smile, and he stood and left the stage.
Wilson watched him go, an emptiness filling his chest, like someone had opened a ship's compartment to vacuum.
There was no chance that Halsey could have gotten to Rear Admiral Jeromi. The man didn't give so much as a gram of respect for any kind of medical malpractice. He'd nearly been court martialed out of the Navy twice for refusing to budge on those matters, including most memorably when he'd had a doctor physically removed from his ship before leaving on a deployment. About the only reason those court-martials hadn't succeeded is because he'd pigeon-holed himself into being just the commander of his hospital ship, and didn't get involved in the political games of HIGHCOM.
No one spoke as Jeromi walked back to his seat, crossing his arms and frowning up at Caldwell, Laborde, Darlan, and the two un-named Captains. But Wilson could see the glances being shared, the significant looks and thoughtful expressions.
This wasn't supposed to happen.
Section Zero was supposed to understand exactly what kind of scheming rat Halsey was. They weren't supposed to give her softballs, or, or…
…Wilson's thoughts sputtered, and he bit the inside of his cheek so hard that he tasted the copper-tinge of blood.
His fists clenched, his teeth grit together, and he didn't manage to lose that sinking feeling in his stomach until five hours later, after downing three fingers of whiskey in his temporary room.
The third day was hard. Wilson didn't want to think about the day before. He didn't want to acknowledge its existence. If he could, he would have drank himself into a stupor just to ensure that the memories weren't recorded – but he couldn't afford the risk when the investigation was still ongoing.
Franklin Mendez rose from his position along the side of the seated Orion candidates, and walked up the stairs. He took a seat in front of the tribunal, and they waited for a moment before continuing.
They questioned him for some time. The Chief Petty Officer spoke in short, quick sentences. He didn't cast blame in any direction, he didn't mention any names, he didn't offer any personal opinions. He was, in all ways the perfect model of professionalism that Wilson had known.
And it was still a disaster.
"Do the trainers physically lay hands on the cadets?" Rear Admiral Laborde asked, dozens of minutes into the questioning.
"It depends on the context," Mendez replied calmly.
"In the event of punishment, or discipline," Laborde clarified.
"No," Mendez said. "Discipline is handled through removal of privileges, not physical abuse."
"In what context would they lay hands on the cadets?" Rear Admiral Darlan asked, taking over the questioning.
"Physical sparring only," Mendez said, unruffled by the question. "Nothing else."
Wilson didn't look at his watch. He had no more desire to track the exact amount of time that anyone was questioned for. Section Zero talked to Mendez for what felt like minutes, with how short the questions and answers were, but was probably at least an hour. Beyond that, he didn't know.
Next came a new man, one that Wilson had never met. He wore the green uniform of a UNSC Marine, and a Staff Sergeant's insignia, but nothing more.
"Staff Sergeant," Rear Admiral Darlan said, pointedly not identifying the man. "Four months ago, you joined the cadet's compound as independent oversight, along with your unit. All factors in consideration, did you or any of your men witness anything that would constitute a violation of UNSC regulations?"
The hairs on the back of Wilson's neck stood up. This wasn't normal. Not identifying the man was strange enough on its own. Perhaps he was just a random Staff Sergeant, someone that didn't matter. But a random Sergeant would never have been picked for such a duty. That implied some manner of connection to the program, which would have been enough to identify him by name, as had happened for Mendez, or the other trainers who'd testified, or any of the Doctors.
But not this man. This man, alone out of all those who'd been summoned before the tribunal, was nameless.
Wilson craned his neck, and tried to look at the man's uniform. There was no nameplate. No medals. No unit details, no detachment affiliation. The man's uniform was incomplete – or, perhaps, classified. His mocha-brown skin and bristling mustache was the only way that he could be identified at all.
"Nothing," the Staff Sergeant replied, his voice a smooth growl, like a big cat of some kind, like a panther or a puma.
"Do you believe that the cadets have been trained to the standard claimed by the project's staff?" Darlan continued.
The Staff Sergeant rolled his jaw, as if chewing on the words.
"Franklin and his men are alright," he said, begrudgingly. "They've done the best they can, given the circumstances. Their word is good. Those kids will be a real terror on whatever poor fool pisses them off."
The questioning continued in that vein for a quarter hour, half an hour, three quarters, longer. At no point was the Staff Sergeant's name spoken. At no point were his credentials mentioned, his relative position noted. The Rear Admirals noted his words as if they'd come from some higher authority, as if the man sitting before them was the be-all, end-all adjudicator of all this relating to combat.
Who is he? Wilson wondered to himself, but no answers came. Whoever he was, he was from a pitch-black hole in the universe, some detachment or unit so secret that even here, when Section Zero was carelessly spilling hundreds of details about the Orion-II project, they did not breathe a single word about the identity of this man or his unit.
The Staff Sergeant was dismissed, and Captain Stanforth came up next. Wilson didn't want to even listen to his testimony. The man had bowed to Halsey's demand and fired him six years ago, he had no interest at all in what he was going to say.
But it would have been idiotic to let his emotions rule him, like Halsey did, so Wilson sat there, his anger building even higher as his coalition collapsed.
There was no public tribunal on the fourth day.
Every aspect of the Orion Project had been covered, and Halsey's allies had an answer for every single question.
I can't believe everyone here is buying her lies,Wilson thought to himself, as he waited. There's no way that she could have made a better product, when Orion was already nigh-impossible.
That didn't mean that the game was up, though. There was still one more card to play. His hidden ace, the one that he'd kept in reserve until the last moment. Truthfully, he'd only kept it in reserve because it was so unlikely to work out. Better to crush Halsey under the weight of evidence, but somehow, some way… she'd… gotten everyone else to lie for her.
He was waiting in a conference room, and there were four other people present. The last of his anti-Halsey coalition, the final few who were willing to give him a chance.
Rear Admiral Laborde was one of the deputy chiefs for Section Zero, and he was a stickler for the rules. After all those years slowly building connections to take down Halsey, he'd been advised to approach Laborde because of that focus on the written regulations. It was their best chance to nail her on a technical level, without having to rely on opinions or judgements calls. But Halsey jumped every hurdle.
Charles Langford was second in command of the Seventh Outer Colony Division. It was a central clearing house for intelligence operations across nearly fifty worlds. He'd been angry about Halsey stealing his budget, but with how quiet he was now, Wilson wondered if he'd already lost the man's support. Trust an intel weenie to squirm and flinch under some of the grisly details.
Howard Blunt was a propaganda man from Section Two. His loyalty was to the shining, squeaky-clean image that the UNSC presented, and Halsey's abominations were a major risk to that image. Yet now, he was biting his lip, and Wilson feared that Blunt had stopped thinking about killing the program, and instead on how to cover it up.
Finally, there was an Army Captain, James Ackerson. The man who didn't belong. A mere Captain in the Army or the Marines was an O-3 in the unified rank structure – equal to a Naval Lieutenant, and nothing more.
Ackerson was one of the lowest ranked individuals involved in this entire affair, and Wilson didn't know why the hell he was sitting in this room. During the investigation, he'd been part of Halsey's numerous joint-training exercises, and it made sense to make him testify to it, but why bring him here? It was Laborde's doing, Wilson knew, but he didn't know the reason why.
There was no doubt in Wilson's mind that this was do or die. Laborde had been very clear that if this last piece of evidence wasn't enough to overturn everything else, then this affair would be the end of his career.
The meeting began at 1000 hours sharp, as Victoria Pelham, Candidate 016, was brought into the room.
And then…
"What do you think that would have done to my loyalty? How on earth would it have helped make me into a super-soldier? You wanted a war? You nearly got one – and I would have been on the other side, because of you!"
Major Arnold Wilson glared back at the face of the twelve-year-old girl that had lied to him. He felt a desire to strike her, to beat her with the back of his hand, but he leashed it with brutal restraint – the girl did not deserve this.
No. No, she… she hadn't lied. She was refusing to lie. A small difference, but Wilson had to admit to himself that it did matter. It did change things.
"It would have taught you not to trust her!" he snarled, moving his hand across the air in a cutting motion. "It would have taught you caution, so that you could evaluate this situation with open eyes!"
"Our eyes were open!" Victoria argued back, growling at him. "Doctor Halsey told us on that very first day that we had been conscripted! That we could never go home! That we were there, by force, to do a job that nobody else could do! She never lied to us! And you weren't even there. You couldn't even stand to show up and look at our faces! You hid away in your office, like the coward you are!"
Wilson felt a surge of fire in his chest, racing up his spine.
How dare she accuse him of cowardice. Him, the only man who was trying to save her life!
"Watching children cry is not courage," he barked at her, barely keeping his voice from screaming. "It's sadism, and nothing more! There was no point to the briefing except for Halsey to stab that knife into your hearts, and twist it!"
"You hypocritical liar!" Victoria shrieked, her eyes wild and her fists clenched. "So your physical abuse was about honesty, but Doctor Halsey telling us the truth was to torture us? Which is it?! You can't even make up your mind about what is evil, and what isn't! It's all relative to you! Whatever helps you, and nothing more!"
Wilson opened his mouth, a roar ready in his throat, when another voice intruded.
"That's enough!"
He turned, glaring at whatever dumb bastard had interrupted them. A flash raced through his mind, and Wilson realized a moment too late that it was probably the Rear Admiral – the same man that Wilson had been trying to win over, and that he had certainly just poisoned against himself.
But it wasn't Rear Admiral Laborde who had spoken. It was Captain James Ackerson of the UNSC Army Rangers.
The dark-haired man had stood up from his seat. His face was flat, and cold, but his eyes were like lasers, stabbing into Wilson.
"I've heard enough," Ackerson said, his words dropping like ice from a windshield. "This matter should have been resolved days ago, but continuing it past this point is outright negligence. Army Intelligence is withdrawing any and all objections to the Spartan-II Program and Doctor Halsey, in whatever capacity she has acted over the last six years."
"Sit down," Rear Admiral Laborde said, his eyes narrowing. "This meeting is not over."
"Yes, it is," Ackerson replied, looking back at the Rear Admiral with a look of distaste. "The Doctor has proven her innocence more than enough times already. Despite the best attempts from a man that just lied to our faces repeatedly, she has done nothing wrong with the execution of her program."
"That is not your judgement to make, Captain," Laborde said.
"That is the independent judgement of Army Intelligence," Ackerson said, just as fiercely. There were four ranks between them, an O-3 to an O-7, but you couldn't tell it based on the man's confidence. "Section Zero is fully within their rights to stick their head in the sand, but if you don't kill this entire witch-hunt right now, then Army Intelligence will be taking this matter to the UNSC Security Council and HIGHCOM. And we will tell them every single detail from this gong-show of an investigation."
Laborde's mouth closed, and Wilson stared, dumbstruck at the sight.
Was that why Ackerson was here? Was he the representative from Army Intelligence? But why? Why him? Why would they pick someone of such low rank? It didn't make sense. No Army Captain should have ever felt so comfortable dictating terms to an Admiral, no matter that they were from separate chains of command.
"The Office of Naval Intelligence is wasting money and time on this little power struggle while the War is raging outside of this building," Ackerson snapped, pointing his finger at the nearest wall. "If you can't keep your own Marines from stirring up trouble out of their own petty jealousy, you shouldn't be running so much as a funeral detail. This man should have been complaining to himself in his bunk, not given an audience of a hundred officers by ONI."
"You're out of line, Captain," Laborde growled back at the man – but Ackerson didn't seem to care.
"Go on, then!" Ackerson shot back, taunting the man with a frozen tone. "Complain to my superiors. Tell them that I acted up. Make them ask me why I did this… and when that happens, you'd better get ready for the colonoscopy that the Office of Naval Intelligence is about to go through."
Laborde grimaced at the man, but didn't reply. A long few seconds passed, with Ackerson still glaring at the Admiral, and Wilson staring, stunned at what was happening.
It was all crashing down… because of petty, back-biting office politics. Because of the political games between the Army and the Navy. Because of the same political games that he had been trying to use against Halsey – and which he'd failed at.
Near a minute went by, before Rear Admiral Laborde spoke. He turned his gaze, no longer neutral and stone-faced, but angry, burning hot with emotion, and looked straight at Arnold Wilson.
"This investigation is over," Laborde said, the words like a tombstone falling on Wilson's grave.