[Disclaimer thingy ma-giggy... yeah that thing: I do not own Halo or any of the Characters... But mainly Doctor Halsey in this case because the other I made up based on people in my life. But what the hay, as the URL at the top suggests this is Fan Fiction so enjoy =) Oh and if you want some more info on my book just head over to halo-mark-vii[dot]webs[dot]com where [dot] means . sorry for the inconvience... but thats FanFiction for you :)]
Halo: Return
By Graham Ogden
Chapter 1 1032 hours, October, 7th 2653/Military Calendar/Out There Alive (To Begin...)/Level 24, ONI Facility Branch 1, New Mombasa, Earth, Sol Star System
She had survived.
At least one of the Forerunner's technologies had come to some good use, she mused. The last ship inside of the "Shield World", Onyx, had helped her escape. The others, however, had not. Inside of the planet Onyx's containment field, the Flood roamed free, escaped from their prison. Chief Mendez and the Spartans were all lost in the process of trying to escape. They had all wasted their lives in trying to help her escape. She would make sure that their deaths would not go unheard of.
A hundred and one years since she had been imprisoned within Onyx, all of that time lost. Time inside the Micro-Dyson Sphere was separate from reality; she had only aged a couple of weeks meanwhile it had passed over a century.
The darkly lit room made it almost impossible to see anything. Three focused lights beamed down from above chairs at the opposing side of the table with one more above her. The table was a finely cut oval shaped slab of wood, about nine metres wide and six metres long from her. There was a screen embedded into the table, one before her and three at the other side, one before each chair. The chairs were covered in black, thick and hard leathery upholstery. The cubed room was entirely blanketed by darkness, until the wall opposite became brighter to a grey. On the side walls two doors were propped up against either side of the screen.
Both of the doors opened and a heavily armed Marine entered from both doors. They moved around the table and across to her. They drew their weapons; MA5R-M2P Assault Rifles, and aimed at her, requesting her to give any metal, sharp objects or weapons to them. After she handed the men her bracelet and silver-plated watch they walked across and stood by the two doors. They dropped their guns by their sides and saluted with their left hands while standing at attention.
She stood up, moving the chair back slightly as she did. Two figures came out of the room to her right and one more from the left. The three silhouettes moved across to the chairs and saluted her before sitting down.
The main centre person sighed before stating, "As part of the Navel Code of Conduct, Section 7-G, you are hereby sentenced to three years in the Earth State Prison on Haputo, of charged by the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). You are suspended on the account of child abduction, child abuse and almost every other rule we have a law for. How do you plead?" The individual spoke, a dark gravelled voice of an elderly male.
She sat silently, reencountering her memories as they bombarded her with pain and awe.
"...May we remind you, Doctor Catherine Halsey, that you are being sentenced at this moment? And failure to comply will result in a prolonged sentence!" The female agent said to Halsey's left.
Doctor Catherine Halsey sat on the opposite side of the desk to the three ONI Agents. Her grey hair was tightly knotted into a bun at the back of her head. The suit she wore consisted of a knee-length grey skirt, a white shirt with a grey over jacket that only reached to her elbows and a long black tie with a silver star situated at the base, just beneath her neck. Her once quirky face had started to become elderly; wrinkles had begun to form around her eyes and her forehead.
"I did what I had to do. My duty, as it were. The handful of lives that I may have ruined had saved the lives of every damned person throughout our pitiful empire." Halsey whispered, moving a stray hair away from her face.
"So how do you plead?" The main agent enquired again.
Halsey sat in silence looking across to the silhouetted faces as the lights reflected off of the foreheads and hair of the personnel. She sat perfectly still, staring directly into the darkened face of the main operative.
"Doctor Halsey, we must hear your reasoning behind this ghastly act." The final Spook said, on her right, in a male's deeper voice but still soothing as his dark skin flashed in the light from sweat.
"What do you want us to do Doctor?" The female asked, shifting in her chair.
"I need to do it again. I require that you grant me everything that I need and demand. I must create more Spartans. The Covenant is rising. They will bring back something unimaginable. They will have found Onyx, excavated its technologies and will rise again to wipe out humanity."
"I have two points to counter your argument. My first is; that you will never do such repulsive things ever again as long as I live and for as long as I live you will be locked away. My second point is that you're previous Spartan... John-177... my apologises... 117, destroyed the Covenant around a century ago and we have been cleaning the rest of the Covenant from this Galaxy since then. They shall not rise again." The third ONI agent countered.
"Supply some evidence for your ideas, and we shall reconsider." The main Spook said as the two either side glanced across at him. He leaned forward, glaring into Halsey's eyes, "give us evidence and then you might just not be thrown away into prison for the rest of eternity."
"I already have some. If you look at the screens beneath you, you can find all the information you would ever want about the Covenant's resurrection." Halsey said as, she herself, looked down towards the screens.
Documents enlarged and minimized, move about and opened. Pictures appeared of a massive sphere entering slipspace. Papers of unknown slipstream entrance and exit vectors of huge slipspace disruptions popped up and went away.
"And what are these supposed to mean to us, Halsey?" The female sighed.
"These documents show all the unknown slipspace events that have happened since my arrival. Those recorded did not have show any properties of materials made in the UNSC, meaning that they are not human." Halsey said as she scrolled down the list of unnamed measurements.
"...Which could also have been Insurrectionists." The main agent said, hasten to add.
"Wait a second, this objects size was over twenty-five thousand kilometres in diameter! There is no Naval ship that large, not that I am aware of anyway?" The second Spook exclaimed, rubbing the side of her face with her left hand.
"It could have even been asteroids! Those things pass in and out of Slipspace all of the time..." The Spook to her left countered.
"So I supposed that I should assume that these 'asteroids' are also to blame for the reports of three missing UNSC colonised planets?" Anger was starting to boil inside Halsey, but she suppressed it and continued. "Yes. I know about the missing worlds, and it's only a matter of time before every news team throughout space has it in their news reels. Something is happening to our colonies, and even you can't be that blind to the fact that no human has enough power to do that kind of damage."
"...Okay, Doctor Halsey, you have our attention." The third agent stated under his voice as he dabbed his damp brow with a tissue from his trouser pocket.
"We need to build up the defences around key planets and solar systems. More importantly, like I said earlier, we will need Spartans. The Covenant must be stronger than before if they can wipe out planets and we have hardly changed over the past one hundred years. They will crush us; bury us into the ground if we don't start thinking about protecting the Inner Colonies with more than just better luggage scanners. You are going to need my help." Halsey said as she shifted in her chair, remembering when she forced people to go through that unbearable amount of pain and suffering to become a Spartan.
The group sat in silence for six very long heart beats, until the three ONI officers began to quietly converse with one another about her sentence and whether she, or someone else, should be able to begin a new project.
"I would like to point out, if I may be so bold as to say, that I was allo... ordered to instruct the SPARTAN-I and –II Projects by Admiral Cole himself." Catherine said as a last minute thought to try and get herself out of the mess that had happened.
"Ma'am there is no record of you..." The female started until she stop, removed her glasses rubbing her eyes. When she replaced her spectacles she continued, "Well, so it is, I apologise."
The agents continued to mummer between themselves.
They eventually stopped and sat up straighter than they had already been, which was almost impossible to how straight they were sat to begin with, Halsey thought. They glared across the polished surface of wood into her cold eyes, "By the rights invested in us by the powers of the Office of Naval Intelligence, as of Admiral Cole's orders, 'Should Doctor Catherine E Halsey ever to return, she should be put under the immediate attention of any Office of Naval Intelligence personnel and to begin on any project she wishes.' You are hereby resigned of your sentence and are to be placed at the head of this project, which shall be named as, RESSURECTED FOSSIL. You are also from here on promoted and will be given an office to facilitate you until you begin your project funded by us here at the Office of Naval Intelligence. However, beware Halsey; other projects will be created to deal with this new threat, don't get to comfortable thinking that you will be invulnerable."
Doctor Catherine Halsey twitched a smile before tipping her head to them, "Thank you."
The three Navel officers stood in unison and bowed together, as did she. They took their leave and walked back out of the doors that they had entered from, meanwhile Halsey continued to stand at the table. She persistently starred into the grey screen without movement, thinking of the horrors she had caused, the suffering she was going to and the pain within herself. Twenty seconds passed before she finally broke free from the delusions, and looked down to the surface of the table.
On the screen was the face and torso of a slender female. Her face was very thin with large eyes. A small nose was raised from her face in a two dimensional paradox. The thin lips moved and a very pronounced and delicate voice murmured, "Do you like what I did with their screens? It was extremely difficult to scan all of Admiral Cole's documents, decrypt the highly classified coding, find an appropriate signature, imprint it onto a pretend file and push it onto their monitors in that kind of time limit."
"You are a Fifth Generation 'Dumb' AI; that should have been child's play." Halsey said as she pressed her PDA to the display.
"Hey, you made me force myself into these systems, anything larger than this little slither I've left in here and someone would have detected me. So I just wanted you to see how hard it was for me to do that." The AI said as the panel flashed when the AI transferred from the ONI systems into her PDA.
"Thank you, Cybil." Halsey said in a sarcastic tone, which the AI disapproved of by folding her arms.
She turned around, placed the PDA into her right pocket and walked out of the room through a set of double doors at the back of the room.
