by Eric Nylund
S-104:
OUR ONLY CONCERN AT THE TIME WAS THE MISSION AT HAND, NOTHING MORE AND NOTHING LESS.
DR. CLAYTON:
SPEAKING OF THE MISSION, ONCE RED FLAG WENT BELLY-UP, YOU WERE CHOSEN TO LEAD THE TEAM DEPLOYED TO THE PLANET SURFACE BY MASTER CHIEF PETTY OFFICER, JOHN-117, CORRECT?
S-104:
YES, MA’AM.
DR. CLAYTON:
BUT YOU DIDN’T WANT TO GO GROUNDSIDE, DID YOU? THE TRANSCRIPTS ABOARD THE AUTUMN SAY THAT YOU WANTED TO—
S-104:
I WAS, AND AM, FULLY PREPARED TO SERVE IN WHATEVER ROLE DEEMED NECESSARY TO WIN THIS WAR.
DR. CLAYTON:
I SEE. THEN, FOCUSING ON YOUR TEAM AND THE SPECIFIC OBJECTIVE PLACED UPON YOU AS FIELD LEADER OF RED TEAM, WHAT HAPPENED DURING YOUR TEAM’S DESCENT TOWARD REACH…WHAT WAS YOUR SPECIFIC MENTAL STATE AT THIS POINT? YOU SAY YOU WERE EAGER BEFORE THE ACTUAL DEPLOYMENT, HOW WERE YOU FEELING ONCE THE MISSION GOT UNDERWAY?
S-104:
FOCUSED. WE WERE DROPPING IN HOT AND THE FULL SQUAD HAD TO BE ALERT TO ANY AND ALL THREATS—
DR. CLAYTON:
AS TEAM LEADER YOU HAD THE LIVES OF YOUR FELLOW SPARTANS IN YOUR HANDS. A SINGLE MISTAKE COULD HAVE KILLED THEM ALL, INCLUDING YOU. YET IT SEEMS LIKE IT WAS ONE ERROR AFTER ANOTHER—
S-104:
I’M NOT QUITE SURE I UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU’RE SUGGESTING, DOCTOR.
DR. CLAYTON:
WHICH ONE? THE FACT THAT YOU WERE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE LIVES OF EVERYONE UNDER YOUR COMMAND? OR THAT YOUR MENTAL STATE WAS NOT IDEAL AND THAT YOUR DECISIONS DURING THE INITIAL PHASE OF YOUR DEPLOYMENT PUT LIVES, INCLUDING THE VERY VALUABLE, AND INCREDIBLY EXPENSIVE LIVES OF TWENTY-ONE OTHER SPARTANS, IN JEOPARDY.
S-104:
I’M NOT SURE YOU HAVE A FULL UNDERSTANDING OF THE—
DR. CLAYTON:
“BRACE YOURSELVES.”
S-104:
[SILENCE]
DR. CLAYTON:
DURING THE DROP YOU BROADCAST THOSE TWO WORDS—“BRACE YOURSELVES”—OVER FLEETCOM 7. THIRTY-NINE RECEIVERS PICKED UP THE TRANSMISSION—THIRTY-ONE BELONGING TO UNSC CRAFT, EIGHT ON CIVILIAN. AND THERE’S NO TELLING HOW MANY COVENANT VESSELS ACQUIRED THE SIGNAL, POTENTIALLY ALLOWING THEM TO BACKTRACK ITS SOURCE AND GAIN ACCESS TO OTHER FREQUENCIES AND DATA BEING TRANSMITTED DURING AND AFTER THE ENCOUNTER.
S-104:
IT WAS A—
DR. CLAYTON:
“COM MALFUNCTION.” I’M AWARE. S-087 HAS ALREADY CONFIRMED THAT ASSERTION. STILL—DOESN’T SEEM LIKE A MISTAKE A SPARTAN SHOULD, OR WOULD, MAKE. YET YOU MADE IT. MAKES ME WONDER WHAT OTHER MISTAKES YOU MAY HAVE MADE.
S-104:
MA’AM, IS THIS A PSYCH EVAL, OR AN INTERROGATION?
DR. CLAYTON:
THAT’SUPTOYOU, LIEUTENANT, BUT THAT IS ACTUALLY A VERY GOOD QUESTION. YOUR ANSWER WILL SAY A LOT ABOUT YOU AND HOW YOU VIEW YOUR ROLE AS A LEADER AMONGST YOUR PEERS.
S-104:
I’M SECURE IN MY ROLE AND THE TACTICAL DECISIONS I MAKE BEFORE, DURING, AND FOLLOWING COMBAT, AND SO ARE MY PEERS.
DR. CLAYTON:
THE DECISION TO ABORT THE PELICAN WITH YOUR ENTIRE SQUAD: DO YOU FEEL THAT WAS THE RIGHT TACTICAL DECISION?
S-104:
ABSOLUTELY, AS I STATED IN MY REPORT TO CORTANA EN ROUTE TO SOL-YOU DID READ MY REPORT, DIDN’T YOU?
DR. CLAYTON:
THOROUGHLY.
S-104:
THEN YOU KNOW THAT THE PELICAN TASKED WITH DELIVERING US TO THE SURFACE WAS DAMAGED BEYOND USE—
DR. CLAYTON:
YOU LOST FOUR SPARTANS BY ABANDONING THAT CRAFT.
S-104:
I WOULD HAVE LOST THEM ALL IF WE’D TRIED TO RIDE IT OUT. LOOK AT THE CALCULATIONS ON OUR TRAJECTORY AND SPEED—AND THE SHIELD DAMAGE UPON ENTRY—THE REPORT IS CRYSTAL CLEAR. WE HAD NO CHOICE BUT TO EXIT THE VEHICLE AND USE THE TERRAIN AND OUR ARMOR TO SECURE RELATIVELY SAFE LANDINGS.
DR. CLAYTON:
UPON DESCENT, ALL TWENTY-ONE SPARTANS RESPONDED WITH AN “AFFIRMITIVE” AT YOUR ORDER TO “AIM FOR THE TREETOPS.” WHY THE TREETOPS? WAS THERE NOT A SAFER AREA TO LAND?
S-104:
ALL WE HAD BELOW US WAS GROUND. THE TREES HAD ENOUGH GIVE TO DAMPEN THE IMPACT AND SLOW THE FALL. BUT IF YOU’VE READ MY REPORT YOU KNOW ALL OF THIS ALREADY. I’VE BEEN THROUGH ENOUGH OF THESE SESSIONS TO KNOW WHEN ONI IS FISHING FOR SOMETHING ELSE, SO MAYBE WE CAN JUST—
DR. CLAYTON:
“CUT THE CRAP.” YOU LOST FOUR SPARTANS ON IMPACT. SIX INJURED TO THE POINT OF IN EFFECTIVE NESS. BEFORE YOUR MISSION EVEN TOOK OFF, YOU WERE ALREADY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE LARGEST CASUALTY RATE OF ANY PREVIOUS ENDEAVOR INVOLVING SPARTAN-II SOLDIERS. AT THIS POINT YOU’VE MADE WHAT SOME WOULD CONSIDER AN ILL-ADVISED JUMP, DAMAGED YOUR SQUAD’S EFFECTIVENESS SIGNIFICANTLY, AND NOW YOU’RE ON THE SURFACE OF A PLANET CONSIDERED OUR MOST PRECIOUS MILITARY ASSET AND HAVE BEEN TASKED TO DEFEND IT FROM AN INCOMING COVENANT INVASION WITH NO WEAPONS?
S-104:
AN UNARMED SPARTAN DOESN’T STAY THAT WAY FOR LONG—
DR. CLAYTON:
IN FACT, YOU COMMANDEERED COVENANT WEAPONRY EN ROUTE TO YOUR OBJECTIVE. DID YOU MAINTAIN POSSESSION OF THE WEAPONS FOR FUTURE INSPECTION AND EVALUATION? THAT IS A STANDING DIRECTIVE, CORRECT? TO COLLECT ANY COVENANT TECH THAT MAY PROVIDE ADDITIONAL DETAILS ABOUT THEIR WEAPON SYSTEMS AND THE LIKE.
S-104:
WELL, THERE ARE PLENTY OF THEM DOWN THERE RIGHT NOW. [POINTS TO EARTH THROUGH VIEWPORT] IF YOU REALLY WANT ONE, WHY DON’T YOU GO TAKE ONE FROM THEM?
DR. CLAYTON:
ON EARTH?
S-104:
YES, MA’AM, WHICH IS WHERE I SHOULD BE RIGHT NOW. THERE’S A WAR GOING ON AND THE LONGER MY TEAM AND I ARE STUCK UP HERE, THE MORE HELL THEY’RE GOING TO CAUSE DOWN THERE.
DR. CLAYTON:
SO YOU CONSIDER THIS A WASTE OF YOUR TIME?
S-104:
YOU’RE QUESTIONING MY LEADERSHIP ON REACH MORE THAN A MONTH AGO WHILE EARTH IS GOING TO HELL IN A HANDBASKET BELOW US, SO YES. I’D SAY THIS IS AN EGREGIOUS WASTE OF MY TIME. I’M CERTAIN THAT THE ADMIRAL WOULD FEEL THE SAME.
DR. CLAYTON:
OF COURSE HE WOULD. I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU THINK OF ME—OR WHAT HOOD THINKS OF ME—THIS PROCESS IS IMPORTANT BECAUSE YOU ARE TOO IMPORTANT AND IT’SMY JOB TO HELP MAKE SURE THAT YOU—ALL OF YOU—ARE IN PRIME WORKING ORDER AND THAT THERE ARE NO CRACKS IN YOUR ARMOR—METAPHORICALLY SPEAKING. [PAUSE] CAN WE CONTINUE?
S-104:
[SILENCE] [FLT ADM HOOD ENTERS ROOM]
FLT ADM HOOD:
WHO AUTHORIZED THIS?
DR. CLAYTON:
ADMIRAL, I WILL ASK THAT YOU PLEASE LEAVE THIS ROOM!
FLT ADM HOOD:
WHO AUTHORIZED THIS? WAS IT MARGARET?
DR. CLAYTON:
ADMIRAL, THAT IS NONE OF YOUR—YOU DO NOT HAVE JURISDICTION OVER BETA-5 PROTOCOL, I WAS SENT HERE TO—
FLT ADM HOOD:
MY JURISDICTION IS THE ENTIRE PLANET. WE’RE FIGHTING A WAR DOWN THERE AND IF ANYONE THINKS THAT KEEPING ONE OF OUR BEST UP HERE FOR A Q&A SESSION IS GOING TO WIN IT, THEN TELL THEM TO TAKE IT UP WITH ME. [TO MP ESCORT] GENTLEMEN, PLEASE ESCORT THE LADY TO HER SHIP. [DR. CLAYTON IS ESCORTED OUT OF ROOM]
FLT ADM HOOD:
SUIT UP, LIEUTENANT. WE’RE SENDING BLUE DOWNSTAIRS—YOU READY TO GET BACK TO WORK?
S-104:
EAGER, SIR. [TRANSCRIPT ENDS]
Petra
Petra Janecek was not a woman who could abide an undotted i.
The heavy cotton curtains drifted backward away from a decidedly pedestrian view of Forseti Northern Terminus 37, teasing the hotel room’s dark interior with shafts of the very daylight Petra had been hoping to escape. The Four Winds’s impeccable climate control and the spoils of her ample (if sadly short-lived) per diem should have provided Petra with a modicum of comfort in her few remaining hours on the ’burbworld without having to avail herself of the stale air perfumed by the aging spacedock nearby. But Petra felt compelled to open the room. She hadn’t planned to do much more than gra
b a quick shower, shuffle her things in a pretense of packing, and hit whatever sauce shop was walking distance from her ride home. This wasn’t supposed to be the kind of trip where Petra did much in the way of planning at all.
Her knuckles rapped against the inside of the autoserv, tugging at a Mokyshan Red Ale she couldn’t, in fact, remember ordering up. Petra sighed, her gaze creeping around the dim room as her mind idly fingered the weighty decision of whether to sit or stand. Shake it off, she snapped at herself, you’re acting like someone just sat on your cat or something. Whatever this is—if it is anything—this is an asterisk, Petra; this is not an exclamation point. Asterisk. It was a lovely sentiment. Sensible. Reassuring. But her gut said it was a half-truth. At best.
Forseti was one of the lucky worlds—not unlike her own home on Lenapi—which had been pretty much left off the guest list for the Great War, a blissful little bubble in space far from the senseless glassings and the kamikaze tactics that had pressed humanity within spitting distance of extinction. Petra could imagine the half billion occupants of this little residential slice o’ heaven buzzing to one another in remorseful indignation, the random scraps of carnage and atrocity downed from the news-feeds giving them something to kibitz about in between jetting their kids to football practice or scarfing down fusion sushi with their boyfriends. Their horror would be much discussed. But she was pretty sure the few folks who actually lost sleep over the war hadn’t exactly taxed Forseti’s energy grid by keeping the lights burning night after night.
She took a hit off the beer, which she realized hadn’t been touched since she opened it; the wash of hops was a little too bitter but at least it made her feel like she was doing something other than stewing. Petra knew it was ugly to be so dismissive of Forseti just because they’d never had to worry about the plasma ICUs or the tent cities or the salvage showers that rained chunks of UNSC battle fleet back down onto the planets they’d sacrificed themselves to protect. Unfair, sure—but Petra had spent the sunnier part of ten years shoveling those stories as a feed stringer. A kid’s puppet show would probably have been less distilled than some of her stories once they made their way downstream; to the citizens of the cozy little planets like Forseti, the Covenant were little more than the boogeyman under the bed, painted in Technicolor by reporters like her. Places like Forseti just made Petra uncomfortable. They made her either a liar, an incompetent, or an accomplice to a conspiracy no one had bothered to explain to her.
Petra finally took a deep breath and looked back at the small coffee table where she’d dumped her kit after she got back from meeting her contact, a retired major who’d settled here but had kept a few souvenirs of his time in the service. The cheap holopad idled silently, an island away from the rest of the clutter.
You can scratch all the phantom itches or fiddle with the light-to-dark ratio of the curtains all you want, Petra, old girl. This just smells like you doing that thing where you pretend there’s not a story when you obviously think there is, so can we please just get to the part of the show where we figure out if anyone’s flight itineraries gotta change, eh sister?
The assignment Petra had been working for the last few weeks was really a no-brainer. The Magellan, one of the bigger feeds Petra sold stories to, was looking for a memorial piece on the anniversary of the Battle of Voi. Even though the details of the extragalactic conflict undertaken by the human and Sangheili forces had become (mostly) public knowledge shortly after the return of what was left of the UNSC frigate Forward Unto Dawn, the action in Africa was celebrated by the masses as the turning point of the war—or at least that was the way it was spun to the Press Corps, and there didn’t seem like any good reason to fight the current on that one. The edit staff at The Magellan liked Petra—she made her deadlines and during the war had a habit of landing material that would usually have been accompanied by a next-of-kin announcement. She was the logical choice—the hatful of awards she’d scooped up for her coverage of the SPARTAN-IIs (once the flacks at Section Two had decided they wanted the Spartans covered) made her fodder for this kind of job, and she’d been ground zero at both New Mombasa and Voi, reporting those slugfests “all up-close and personal-like.” Mostly, though, Petra’s impressive sources within the UNSC establishment had made other war journos look like they were pounding the leisure beat, and The Magellan was hoping that through her deep ties, she’d find a way to outfluff all the other fluff pieces that were bound to hit the nets for the anniversary.
The gig was good, if a bit dusty for Petra’s tastes—she much preferred things that were happening to those that had happened. She dutifully scanned all the newsvids and shuffled through all the declassified docs (just like they taught me in Cub Reporter school all them years ago…). And within a couple days, she had pasted together what she imagined pretty much every other newsie would already be sitting on—something “nice.” Commemorative/thorough/boring/etc. A good first draft, but nothing to write home about. Then Petra started rolling some calls.
Voi was about more than just a pointy Covenant ship and some big metal crater appearing in the desert. Everybody knew that. The word “Forerunner” had become part of the lexicon of the late war regardless of whether 90 percent of the people out there knew what exactly it was referring to or even if it was a person, place, or thing. There were the Halo rings—those most of the human population did not know anything about—but in military circles, the whispers were just a little too loud to dismiss and a little too soft to publish. And that final battle—the place referenced in the Voi after-action reports and the debriefing statements from that Sangheili Arbiter. The Ark. There were seeds, all right. Petra was pretty sure she could get her contacts to slip her enough sugar to put together a real story; maybe not another award magnet, but at least a tale with a bit more kick than the sort of thing her mother would paw through on Sunday afternoons. As things turned out, though, Petra had been too modest in her thinking.
A picture started to form… Petra chuckled aloud as the phrase spun into her head, visions of some schticky old psychic waving a gloved hand over a much-abused crystal ball at one of the carnivals she and her buddy Tom went to as kids. Well, something formed, all right, she thought. Petra hadn’t expected her sources to serve up, piece by piece, a roadmap to the final months of the war, much less the interesting narrative they told about the Spartan Master Chief Petty Officer who had been at the center of it all.
Of course Petra had heard of the guy—was pretty sure he was part of one of the SPARTAN-II squads she’d seen in action, in fact. In the days following the return of the Forward Unto Dawn, Petra remembered random mentions of “Spartan-117” popping out of the ethereal chatter on numerous occasions. The Master Chief was obviously a “soldier of note” and as such a fairly well-protected asset by ONI, but this business with the Forerunner doomsday weapons and the parasitic Flood—this was something else entirely. This man’s actions deserved to be known. Others felt the same, and so Petra Janecek’s Voi segment was soon reframed in the context of how a single human soldier had single-handedly changed the entire course of the war.
And then she was on Forseti. The whole trip should have been a footnote. In order to appease the powers that be, she’d decided to use Voi as the wrapper around which the Master Chief story would be told. It made sense, but the way she saw it, that approach would necessitate intimacy—her audience needed to walk where the Chief had walked, see what the Chief had seen. Difficult considering the glassings carried out in the African basin by the Elites, but there was more than one way to put people in the Chief’s shoes. Which is how Petra had stumbled upon the message.
The message… Petra sank into the couch, letting her weight drag her down into the cushion depths that she prayed would protect her from her own inquisitiveness. She noodled the holopad with the toe of her sneaker, sighing. For God’s sakes, you’re such a friggin’ drama queen—THIS IS NOTHING! It’s not a smoking gun! It’s not going to blow the lid off anything! It’s…it’s…
It was an undotted i.
A thing unresolved.
A hint.
Most likely with a perfectly reasonable explanation.
Petra played the message back again.
“Chief! High Charity, the Prophets’ holy city, is on its way to Earth…with an army of Flood!” The blue-purple hologram’s impassioned plea tugged at Petra, even though she had always been vaguely creeped out by smart AIs.
“I can’t tell you everything—it’s not safe,” Cortana continued. “The Gravemind—it knows I’m in the system. But it doesn’t know about the portal…where it leads.”
Petra closed her eyes, as much to shut out whatever paths this message might lead to as to focus harder on the AI’s words.
“On the other side, there’s a solution. A way to stop the Flood—without firing the remaining Halo rings.”
Whatever approximated pain in an AI coursed through the tiny hologram’s features—something immediately unpleasant. “Unnh! Hurry, Chief—the Ark. There isn’t much time!”
The recording ended. Without hesitation, Petra leaned forward and scrubbed backward through it again, bluish light flickering over her furrowed brow.
“—side, there’s a solution. A way to stop the Flood—without firing the remaining Halo rings.”
Petra had already packed the Ark dossier she’d put together, but she didn’t really need it anymore; she’d memorized the big beats. The UNSC and the Elites had gotten lucky when the Flood had come to them en masse, and the Master Chief had used the replacement Halo ring the Ark was constructing to wipe them all out in one fell swoop.