New Blood

by Matt Forbeck

  “Easy, Gunny,” Jun said. “No one’s taking your team away from you.”

  I relaxed my grip on the railing. I’d been wondering if I could rip it from the bar and bash him with it before he tied it around me like a bow. “Then why don’t you cut the bullshit and get to the point.”

  Jun held up his hands. “You made your complaints clear the last time around.”

  “Did Veronica put you up to this?”

  “She didn’t have to. I like to keep track of my failures.”

  “You sure know how to sweet-talk a guy.”

  “Of the very limited number of people I approached about joining the first class of Spartan-IVs, you’re one of an even tinier number that turned me down.”

  “You mean I’m still the only one?”

  “Yes.”

  I made a show of looking around. “Is this your way of making me feel like a jackass for letting such a golden opportunity to serve humanity slip me by?”

  “Not my original intent. That’s just a side effect. If that’s how it makes you feel, though, I’ll admit to taking a bit of personal pleasure in it.”

  “How kind of you.”

  “I’m a good judge of character, Buck. Add in the fact that I have a cutting-edge AI on my side, and it’s rare that I make a mistake about someone.”

  “Allow me to express my own pleasure then, at being the sole black mark on your pristine record.”

  “I’m here to see if we can clean that up.”

  I gave the man an emphatic shake of my head. “Afraid I’ll have to disappoint you and your electronic brains there again, Spartan. Nothing’s changed. The answer’s still the same.”

  “Nothing’s changed for you. But the galaxy changes all around us, Buck.”

  “Okay. Enlighten me.”

  “Since we last talked, the SPARTAN-IV program’s been a critical success. Commander Musa himself secured new funding for larger class sizes this time around.”

  “So you’re launching a new recruiting drive.”

  “Soon, but I needed to finish up this one last bit of old business first.” He reached over, picked up my bottle, and refilled my glass. “By which I mean you.”

  I waited for him to continue.

  “As I recall, your main excuse for not joining the Spartans the last time we had this chat was that you didn’t want to abandon your team. With our new class of Spartan-IVs, we have enough funding to widen our net.”

  “Wide enough to include . . . ?”

  “Everyone on your team.”

  I gave him a look, and he jumped in to clarify.

  “Specifically: Lance Corporal Kojo Agu, a.k.a. Romeo; Private First Class Michael Crespo, a.k.a. Mickey; and you.”

  “No room for Corporal Taylor Miles?”

  “I’m assured that Dutch’s commitment to the UNSC has reached an all-time low. Don’t you think he’d be much happier reuniting with his wife?”

  I knew he would, although that brought me straight up against the same question for myself. Veronica wasn’t my wife, of course. She might never be. But I’d never loved anyone like I loved her.

  I probably needed to tell her that. In person. Before I made a decision like this.

  In my duller moments, I liked to ponder what a postwar life with her might look like. Apartment on Mars? Ranch on a resettled Draco III? Couple of kids?

  Wonderful daydreams, to be sure. But she wasn’t about to give up her job. She was doing too much good for too many people—often in ways I wasn’t cleared to know about—and some days I liked to think I was doing the same.

  One day, maybe, we’d try raising new lives rather than protecting the ones already here . . . but not today. And I was getting too far ahead of myself anyhow.

  “Would you have considered the Rookie?” I asked in a hushed tone. “Not that it matters now, of course.”

  Jun frowned. “Yes. We would have had a space for him for sure.”

  I hoisted my glass toward the ex-Spartan, and he raised his as well. We clinked them together and drank.

  “Does this mean you’re in?” Jun said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, that’s an improvement over last time, at least.”

  THIRTEEN

  * * *

  “I don’t even know why we’re talking about this,” Veronica said to me a few weeks later—the fastest I could arrange for a mutual vacation. “You’ve already made up your mind.” She walked out onto the balcony of our rented mountain chalet on Desdoron V, warming her hands around the mug of her hot toddy.

  I followed straight after her like a dog on a proximity leash. “But that’s the point,” I said. “I don’t want it to be just my decision. I want it to be our decision.”

  She didn’t turn to look at me. Instead she gazed down at the lights of the little ski lodge nestled in the gentle valley at the bottom of the slope. I came up behind her and put my arms around her. She didn’t elbow me in the ribs and knock me to the ground, which I took as a good sign.

  “Why?” she said. “I don’t have any say over what you do with your life.”

  “Yes,” I said. “You do.”

  She tensed up at that. “You don’t have any say over mine.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  She relaxed into me and took a sip of her drink. “Well, that hardly seems fair.”

  “I thought we were talking about our relationship. I don’t remember fair coming into it.”

  Now she elbowed me good for that one, but in a playful kind of way. With her ONI training, she could have killed me before I’d have even known it, so I took comfort in the fact I was still breathing.

  “I love you, too,” I said as I let her go and rubbed my ribs.

  It was the first time I’d actually said those words to her, and I’d kinda backed my way into it. I waited to see if she’d freeze or run.

  Or give me the greatest surprise.

  Instead, her lips curled up into the cutest wry smirk. “So that’s what this little vacation is really all about? It’s more than just one last whoop-it-up before you dedicate your life to the Spartans?”

  “You remember what you told me back in New Mombasa?”

  She allowed herself a wistful smile. “I thought maybe you’d forgotten.”

  “Did you?”

  She shook her head. “I said if you won the war, we’d talk about us.”

  I spread my arms wide. “Well, guess what? War’s over.”

  She bobbed her head side to side in a way that said she might be willing to concede the point. The Covenant War had officially ended a year ago, but neither one of us had stopped fighting. The UNSC still hadn’t run out of acceptable foes.

  “So.” Her voice rose in anticipation. “How do you want to play this?”

  “That’s really up to you,” I said.

  “Are you ready for this?” Veronica said.

  I honestly wasn’t sure what she meant. Were we talking about us or the SPARTAN-IV program? Veronica meant to have it both ways, and she wasn’t about to tell me which topic we were discussing. Not yet.

  ONI all the way.

  I played along. “I think so.”

  “You’d better be more confident about it than that. Once you start down this road, there’s no going back.”

  “I know that. It’s a lifetime commitment.” Whether marriage or becoming a Spartan, both held true. On the other hand, there’s never been a need for an old-Spartans’ home.

  She looked me straight in the eyes. “It’s a lot to think about.”

  I held steady, not wanting to get my hopes up. “That it is.”

  She took a long sip from her mug. Was she pondering or waiting? I let her savor her drink until I couldn’t take the tension a moment longer.

  “So what do you think?” I asked.

&n
bsp; I’ve jumped into battle from orbit more times than I care to count. I’ve cracked open my coffin from inside and leaped straight into a firefight. I have saved worlds—or at least played my part in those rescues.

  In all that time, I don’t remember ever having my heart beat as fast as it was right then.

  She pursed her lips at me as she considered the question.

  Then she said: “You should do it.”

  I felt my blood pressure drop. She wanted me to join the Spartans. If she’d wanted for us to mutually resign and settle down somewhere into civilian life, she would have said we.

  And maybe she would have said she loved me. Out loud.

  I honestly didn’t know how I felt about that. About the Spartan part, that is.

  A part of me was disappointed, of course, but a huge chunk was relieved. Becoming a husband would have been a strange, new adventure into territory I didn’t fully understand.

  I already knew how to be a soldier.

  Becoming a Spartan would take that to the next level, but I’d be part of the same game, the one I’d been fighting my way through for my entire adult life. That took a bit of the sting out of it all. That and the fact that I’d be a superhuman: stronger, faster, sharper, better in almost every way.

  Going in that direction would be irrevocable though. If the Spartans were going to invest that kind of money in me, they would—in a very real sense—own me. Or at least large parts of me that I wouldn’t want to let get repossessed.

  There was a third option, of course. We could get married anyhow, even if I became a Spartan. Veronica could keep doing her cloak-and-dagger stuff for ONI, and I could help save the galaxy in a less covert way. We’d just have rings on our fingers.

  I could press her on that. We could try to have it both ways and see if we could make it work.

  Once I thought about it a bit longer, though, I had to admit to myself—if not to Veronica—that I couldn’t bear Option Three. For me, at least, it had to be one or the other: family or fighters.

  Otherwise, I’d spend my entire second career as a Spartan worrying about my wife.

  Being an ONI officer was the most dangerous job around. At least when I jumped out of dropships, I was outfitted as best as humanly possible. Veronica spent most of her days armored only by the shadows in which she could hide.

  I already worried enough about losing her. There were times when we’d not been able to communicate with each other at all for weeks, and I’d start to wonder if I’d ever hear from her again. If I were lucky, someone in ONI would give me a heads-up and let me know if she was KIA, but I couldn’t depend on that.

  Instead, I’d had to learn to live with a kind of Schrödinger’s fatalism, knowing that at any point she could be alive or dead. And I might never be able to find the damn box, much less open it.

  If we married, I could only see that getting much, much worse.

  I didn’t realize that I’d gone silent until she cocked her head to one side to look up into my eyes. “You all right?” she said.

  I gave her my best brave smile. “Never better.”

  “It’s certainly not the end of us,” she said. “You do realize that, right?”

  “Of course.”

  She stepped closer and put her arms around me. “If I ever felt like I was ready to leave ONI,” she said, “I’d leave it with you in a second.”

  I returned her embrace. “There’s just too much going on right now.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.” She rested her head on my chest. “If you did, I’d have to kill you.”

  I chuckled at that. “The fact they keep making Spartans tells me enough.”

  “They made the right choice picking you. You’ll be fantastic.”

  “So Jun keeps telling me.”

  She stepped back and looked up at me. “You’re already the best man I know.”

  I put on a smile of false humility. “I owe it all to you.”

  She lowered her eyes then and blushed. I’d rarely seen her glow like that. “I do love you, you know.”

  I let out a deep sigh I didn’t realize I’d been holding in, and a silly grin spread across my face. “Yeah, I do know. But it’s great to hear it.”

  She reached out and took me by the hand, then turned and led me back into the warm comfort of the chalet. “If this is the last time we’re going to see each other for a while, then we should make the most of every last moment.”

  And so we did. All week long.

  FOURTEEN

  * * *

  Let me tell you a little bit now about how I actually became a Spartan.

  This was now a month after Desdoron V. I spent a period of three weeks on Mars, in and out of surgeries and other so-called advanced therapies designed to transform me from a top-flight Helljumper into something approaching the closest thing humanity had to walking gods. And it hurt in every damn way it could.

  When I say walking gods, I mean the Spartan-IIs. Like the old Greek Titans in the way that they live among us but are literally head and shoulders better in every way. And they’re just about as hard to kill.

  The fact we lost so many of them during the Covenant War tells you something about how horrific that conflict was.

  The soldiers in the SPARTAN-III program were more like your standard gods of myth and legend, the Titans’ kids. Hermes and Apollo and Aphrodite and such. If the Spartan-IIs are more powerful than you can imagine, Spartan-IIIs are probably just inside your limits.

  The Spartan-IVs—my new designation—are like demigods then, the offspring of the real gods. Think Hercules. We can pass for regular people most of the time—something folks would generally have a hard time mistaking the earlier generations for—but inside, we’re far more than that.

  Or so I was told. Turns out to be mostly true. As I was going through the process, though, I was focused less on gods and more on devils.

  That’s what I called the doctors who worked on me, because it hurt like hell.

  Ever seen an old house on Earth that’s been gutted right to the studs and then refurbished from top to bottom? It looks mostly the same on the outside—maybe with a fresh coat of paint—but inside, it can be filled with cutting-edge class and gadgets that would make the original owners cry tears of sheer jealousy.

  That’s pretty much what they did to me.

  They lengthened and augmented my bones to make them tougher than steel, which I needed, because they stretched and amped my muscles up so high I would have otherwise broken my own legs every time I jumped into the air. They replaced or reinforced every one of my joints to boot. By the end of it all, I was several centimeters taller than I’d been when I enlisted with the UNSC.

  They super-myelinated my nervous system to amp up my reaction times. They improved my blood to make me immune to most toxins. They tell me I could eat a raw tree for dinner and get enough calories out of it to substitute for a six-course meal.

  They souped up or replaced every one of my internal organs shy of my brain. I think. The SPARTAN-IV augmentation process is generally handled by ONI, after all, and you never know what those spooks might do. They don’t seem to wrestle much with a lot of moral issues.

  Case in point: They wired me up with enough onboard electronics that they’ll have to recycle me rather than bury or burn me when I’m gone. I can see in the dark, interface with an AI, and I presume there’s some kind of indestructible data recorder so they can monitor my health and performance.

  I hear they make my MJOLNIR armor out of the same stuff.

  By the time the docs were done, I felt a lot like my uncle Lou’s fishing pole. In my mind, I was the same person, but I couldn’t tell you how much of the original model was still there.

  In the end, I suppose it didn’t matter.

  At one point, I asked one of the specialists, “What’s all this jun
k do to my natural lifespan? Seeing as there’s not that much natural about me anymore.”

  She cocked her head at me. “Honestly? We don’t know. No Spartan has ever died of old age. If you’re properly maintained and don’t get killed, I suppose you could outlive most humans alive today.”

  “What’s the record so far?”

  She gave me a sympathetic shrug. “I can tell you that no Spartan has outlived the average human lifespan yet.”

  That confused me for a moment. Then I got it. “Oh.”

  I didn’t see too much of Mickey and Romeo. The docs wanted us to focus on the changes in our own bodies rather than comparing notes with our pals. Since we were all unique adults, coming into the program at varying ages and with different skills, the docs had to tailor our treatments specifically to each of us. We were battle-hardened vets, not soft, malleable kids that could be cookie-cuttered into Spartans.

  When I did run into the two of them, we traded jokes about how much it hurt and what whiners we all were.

  “Never thought turning into an invulnerable superhero would ache so damn much,” Mickey said. Despite the dark circles under his eyes, he looked happier than he’d been since the Rookie got killed. He and Romeo had come to some kind of détente over that, mostly by refusing to talk or even think about it.

  “At least we’ll have plenty of new scars to show the ladies.” Romeo flashed a grin at one of the doctors as she walked by. It heartened me to know that not that much about him—about who he really was inside—had changed.

  We weren’t the only ones getting the full SPARTAN workover at the time. There were a good dozen or two of us there at any given point. We hailed from all walks of the UEG. Human men and women of all races, from colonies of all sizes. The only things we had in common were our total commitment to the UNSC—and our humanity.

  In my spare moments, I hit it off with a guy named Hideo Wakahisa, a young guy who’d hailed from Newsaka, a distant colony that lay just beyond Draco III. As a kid, he’d visited New Albany with his mother on business, and he’d fallen in love with the place. We had that in common at least, which gave us an edge over most of the other people there, who could only bond over their days in the UNSC.