Part I

Chapter 1: Hopeful's Hopeless

0730 HOURS, SEPTEMBER 10, 2552

ABOARD UNSC HOPEFUL

The last time I was on this ship, the wrist and ankle restraints pinned my convulsing limbs to a table, the doctors and specialists yelled at one another in a hysterical panic, and the echoes of my screams shattered medicine vials and ripped through the surgical bay, through the labs, through the hallways. Seizure after seizure reduced my body to nothing but torn muscles and fractured bones. Blood vessels popped, eardrums burst, fingernails dug bloody holes into my palms. Sometimes I entertain the thought that I screamed so loudly, even the unforgiving vacuum of interstellar space permitted a few cries to be heard.

I've survived two planetary glassings and six years of military training that would kill most people in a week, but never was I closer to death than I was on this ship. Even now, a year and half later, I imagine that the Hopeful recognizes me as the one that got away, and I eye the walls with a suspicion that they might just close in on me and finish the job.

Though, at the moment, I doubt this ship gives two craps about me.

"Hey, spook! Get your head out of your ass and move out of the way!"

I blink out of my reverie and spin to the side as doctors and nurses careen down the hall with a gurney. Anyone stupid enough to daydream in this chaos deserves to get run down, so I shake myself out of my memories, which are promptly replaced by the earsplitting din.

Hundreds of displaced civilians, from infants to the elderly, crowd this long hallway, jam-packed shoulder to shoulder. A woman to my left rocks through a coughing fit, a teen boy groans in pain as he presses a bloodstained rag to his arm, and EMTs shout vitals and instructions to one another as they push gurneys with crying patients. This hallway is just one of the station's countless arteries clotted with Reach refugees, and straggling evac ships just keep coming. Most people have been waiting hours, days, for the next available doctor. Even the Hopeful, the legendary mobile hospital where medical miracles are an everyday occurrence, can't accommodate an entire planet's worth of refugees.

I check for any more stampeding EMTs before squeezing my way through the crowd. As I head further down the hall, a burly man holding an oxygen mask to his face spies the iconic ONI pyramid emblem on my shirt.

"Hey," he calls. "Hey, phONI agent. Why didn't we have any warning, huh? What were you all doing while the Covies were planning Reach—playing darts and knocking a few back? Naval Intelligence my ass!"

He's not the only civilian asking for blood. These people are desperate for answers to impossible questions: Where are their loved ones? Why didn't the UNSC didn't personally escort each of the seven million citizens off the planet when the Covenant lay siege? Why wasn't there any forewarning? And: Who better to blame than the UNSC's Office of Naval Intelligence, the very department whose job it is to know?

I ignore the man and press on, past a mother with a screaming toddler in her arms, a doctor shouting desperate instructions to his staff, and a hothead teenager yelling at the military police trying to calm him.

I cringe against the noise, my temples aching.

But as deafening as the moans and cries and accusations are, they're not what make me press my fingers to my ears. The loudest sound in this hallway, an almost tangible sound that reverberates in my chest, is misery. The pain of the refugees' plasma burns doesn't compare to the pain of losing their home, their planet, their loved ones. It's a cacophony of mourning, desperation, confusion, and rage that claws at my eardrums and leaves my brain ringing.

I wade through the agony and fear, before I finally reach the office door at the end of the hall. By now, my headache splits across my skull and black spots dot my vision. I press my palm to the biometric panel on the side of the door. As I wait for the retina imager to scan my face, I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the opaque window in the door. Deep bags droop under my dull blue eyes, and my ash blonde hair, which could really use some shampoo right about now, falls limply to my shoulders. My collared ONI shirt, wrinkled and untucked over my black slacks, has proven itself to be the beacon of ridicule it always is.

The panel beeps and the door slides open. I cough to clear the lump of fear from my throat, and then glance around the hallway one more time, wondering if the Hopeful recognizes my voice, if it remembers the girl who filled these corridors with her screams a year and a half ago.

Dr. Skala waits with her needles, eager for the opportunity to jab something sharp in me.

This isn't the room, but it's equally formidable. Scanners and other diagnostic hardware extend from the ceiling and walls like a mechanical forest. The lights glare off the stark white floor, and a wave of acrid disinfectant burns my nose.

But for all that, it's the doctor's thin smile that causes the hairs on my neck to rise. I've gone through this dozens of times, but I'm still not quite used to it.

She stands over a tray next to the exam table, filling syringes with my various prescriptions. I tower over her thin figure—though at 6'2", I tend to do that to most people—but her severe features certainly compensate for her stature. She has a wide forehead, sharp nose, and small, humorless mouth. Her gray hair is restrained into a no-nonsense bun at the back of her head. I always thought she looked like a disgruntled Moa, a native bird of Reach, and the dumbest animal alive.

Fortunately (for the most part), the similarity is only physical. Behind her beady black eyes is one of the most brilliant medical minds in the whole UNSC. Her research has paved the way for humanity's advancement in medicine, and the top-secret projects she has under her belt put the most decorated generals' CSVs to shame. For the SPARTAN-III program, she helped evaluate and recruit each candidate and tracked their medical progress throughout training. In passing she's often called the Halsey of the SPARTAN-IIIs, though I'm sure if either of them heard that there would be blood. Lots of it.

Dr. Skala was also the one who administered the drugs for the SPARTAN-III augmentation procedures, and, consequently, she's the one who saw some of my darkest hours, right here on this ship a year and a half ago.

But if anyone asks my opinion of her, I'm going with the Moa comparison.

"Skala," I greet, my tone friendly and suggestive. I'm always able to ignore the piercing pains in my head to banter with her. I kick off my shoes, roll onto the table, and link my fingers on top of my stomach. "Let's drop the pretense of these bi-monthly checkups and admit our love. When are we eloping?"

She doesn't even blink. "Your planet is glassed, the Covenant is on the brink of extinguishing your race, hundreds of people have been waiting hours for a doctor while you are privileged with high-priority treatment—and still you carry on like a ten-year-old. What a shining example of resilience you are."

That's low. But that's Skala. We have what I call a love/hate/hate/hate relationship. I love that she gives me meds that keep my brain from exploding into a million pieces. I hate everything else about her. Dr. Skala hates that she has to give me meds to keep my brain exploding into a million pieces, and she hates absolutely every inch of me. The name Harper Coyne is nothing but a smudge on her otherwise immaculate record of my company's augmentations. The other 229 members of Gamma Company survived and passed their augmentations with flying colors, and the official record shows that all 330 of us are engaged in active duty. But that doesn't matter to Skala. She knows one of those candidates is a seizure-ridden washout and that "active duty" means working at tiny cubicle behind a mountain of paperwork in Section Three.

To add to her chagrin, I'm not only a failure, I'm an anomaly. The severity and frequency of my symptoms are unprecedented in the program. Usually disorders resulting from the procedures are diagnosable and treatable, but there's nothing but a big red question mark under my name. Skala doesn't know why migraines and seizures continue to plague me. She has poked, prodded, scanned, injected, analyzed. She has called me into her office and ungodly hours in the night claiming she found the remedy, the solution—which never worked.

On paper she's a dedicated doctor working to help her patient. But this isn't about healing me. It isn't even about proving herself to the SPARTAN program anymore. It's about her own obsession with perfection. I'm a living, breathing, baffling mistake of hers, and the longer I remain a mystery, the more I get the impression that she'd rather just push me out the station door for a one-way spacewalk.

I drum my fingers on my stomach as I watch her extract some pasty white medicine into a syringe.

Do I worry that she'll poison my meds and I'll die horribly asphyxiating on my own vomit? No. Despite her clashes with me, she governs herself with a rigid, career-centered ethics code. Dr. Debra Skala is a professional first, a human second.

Do I worry that she'll continue to undermine my position in ONI with her behind-the-back rumors of my ineptitude to restrict me to the lower ranks of Section Three and keep my name and history under the radar so no one realizes that Gamma Company really wasn't the perfect company and the single washed-out Spartan is a twitching mess of a girl laboring a seventy-hour workweek and it's all thanks to Dr. Debra Skala?

Yes. Professional first.

She turns to one of the diagnostic screens on the wall and punches in a code. A scanner in the ceiling hums to life, and a holographic rendering of my brain projects directly above the real deal.

"So. What's on the menu today?" I ask. "Fried insular cortex? Generalized anxiety disorder with an extra-large side of schizophrenia?"

She squints at the image and the data flickering to the side. "As always, your cortisol levels are unrealistically high."

The stress hormone. "No kidding? Gosh, just a shot in the dark here, but you don't think it has anything to do with being forced to come back to this ship? To the one place I vowed never to return?"

I can almost see the steam shooting from her ears. "Not to worry," she says sarcastically. She yanks the collar of my shirt down, brushes my neck once with antiseptic, and jams a needle in carelessly. The first time this happened, over a year ago, I reflexively backhanded her and knocked her unconscious. Now, I'm contemplating what I'll have for lunch.

The image of my brain glows a faint red. However the medicine affected it, Skala isn't pleased. She shakes her head, pulls out her data pad, and starts her standard bi-monthly interrogation.

"Fainting spells?

"Six."

"Migraines?"

"Twelve. Thirteen currently in progress."

"Bloody noses?"

"Ten."

"Seizures?"

This number is supposed to be fewer than five in order for me to meet the special regulations established for my employment in ONI. "Three," I say loftily. It's really eight—almost nine in the hallway just now.

She steps closer to the table to glare down at me square in the eye, but doesn't say anything. According to my contract, I'm to make these reports under oath, and who is she to argue with contract?

"Severity?"

A few were minor, everyday seizures—a little passing out here, a little uncontrollable convulsion there. Always with a side of drooling.

There were a couple bad ones, though. The ones that make Skala tear her hair out in frustration. The ones that have brought neuroscientists from far and wide to have a look at my noggin, only to end up scratching their own in bewilderment. I've been monitored and hooked up to the most state-of-the-art machines during these bad episodes, but even after all this time, no one can explain what happens in my brain during those seizures. Not even me.

I stare up at the image of the brain. It revolves slowly, and I imagine it cackling at me.

I start to answer Skala with another lie, but the announcement display near the door buzzes and flickers to life.

The screen shows a UNSC internal news report from the cruiser Trident, where a large briefing room has been reorganized into a courtroom.

Skala slams down her data pad. "These infernal broadcasts. Who cares about this trial anymore?"

The camera focuses on a murderous-looking Spartan-III shackled to a chair. The scowling face of Dom-A258 has been plastered on every UNSC announcement screen for two weeks. Even out of his Mjolnir armor in standard naval uniform, he stands at 6'10" and looks capable of ripping apart with his bare hands every prosecutor, juror, and spectator in the room. His dark hair is cut short, though slightly longer than regulation as he hasn't been in the field for weeks, and his eyes are hooded under that furrowed brow. In the ongoing broadcast of the trial, I don't think I've seen him move at all yet.

The scrolling marquee at the bottom of the screen summarizes: Dom-258 awaits verdict after being court-martialed for willful insubordination, among other charges, resulting in the catastrophic obliteration of Áldozat in Meleg Territory and the deaths of thousands of civilians. He faces imprisonment and possible execution.

I have to applaud my fellow spooks in Section Two, ONI's publicity hub, for this masterfully devious stunt of a trial. Propagating a Spartan's failure is absolutely unthinkable in the UNSC. Morale is priority. Soldiers hear about Spartan successes only. I'm living proof of that.

But with Reach, the "unsinkable" military stronghold, wiped off the map, morale can't get any lower. Evidently Section Two agreed when they chose to internally broadcast this trial to UNSC forces. I think about the civilians in the hallway, desperate for someone to blame. No doubt the same sentiments are spreading like a plague through the military forces as well. Section Two already has the shambles of public faith to worry about; they don't need restless soldiers to start questioning orders.

Having something, someone to blame would encourage unity against a common foe, and what better what to shift the fault from the UNSC brass than to publicly destroy the reputation of an insubordinate soldier, whose refusal to obey a lawful command from his superior resulted in the decimation of a city and thousands of lives lost?

The message is clear: It wasn't the higher-ups who failed Reach. It was the foot soldiers who didn't follow orders.

I study Dom-A258. To be on top-priority missions on Reach, he must've been the cream of the Alpha Company crop. The fall from superhuman Covenant-killing machine to convicted felon on death row is almost as tragic as the fall of Reach itself.

The shot switches to the mass of soldiers in the courtroom, waiting for the verdict, and I answer Skala's question: "Looks like a lot of people care."

She waves a needle dismissively. "You know as well as I do that this is just drummed up Section Two nonsense. This isn't an actual case. That Spartan is nothing more than a scapegoat. A cautionary tale for the uniforms."

"A wasted opportunity to be something better than what you are," I add absentmindedly, before pulling my eyes from the convicted Spartan. Well, that was probably an overshare.

She narrows her eyes, but before she can say anything, the door opens, and an ONI agent, dressed to the nines in armor, hurries in and stands at attention.

"Ma'am. Apologies for the interruption," he pants, before Skala can screech at him. "I have urgent orders to escort you to an emergency briefing."

Skala puffs up indignantly and brandishes a syringe. "Surely it can wait. I do have many patients to see, if that wasn't obvious enough."

"Yes, ma'm. But I'm afraid this cannot wait. And, I'm sorry for the confusion, but I meant both you and Miss Coyne."

"Whoa, hold on," I say, ignoring Skala's scandalized look. I swing my legs off the table and straighten my shirt. "Who wants us where now?"

"Ma'am, as I said—"

"Answer me."

He pauses only for a moment to look around the room, before tightens his lips impatiently and says, "Admiral Parangosky is requesting both of you report to Point of No Return immediately."

If there were anyone else in the vicinity, Skala and I would be required by law to throw our hands in the air and shout, "Whatever are you talking about, agent? I have absolutely no idea what you mean! Point of no what? Sorry, perhaps you should have a doctor take a look at your brain. Bye now!"

Instead, the energy in the room shifts instantaneously. Skala and I, sudden allies against massive confusion, share an incredulous glance. The elusive, omniscient Commander-in-Chief of the Office of Naval Intelligence, the most feared and respected name in the entire UNSC, wants to meet with us on the fleet's only stealth cruiser that officially, on paper, does not exist.

Skala composes herself quicker and looks down at the tray of syringes. "Well then. I'm sure it's in our best interests to leave straight away, so your meds will have to wait. After all," she adds, "you've had just three seizures in the past two weeks." She arches her eyebrows, daring me to admit the truth.

I shrug. "Yep. Just three." And I slip on my shoes and follow the ONI agent out the door.

Thanks for reading!

I started brewing this story after I read Ghosts of Onyx and became enamored with the SPARTAN-III program. I also wanted to write a story concurrent with the events of the original Halo trilogy, on the outskirts of what we see with Master Chief. I have a lot mapped out for this story and it will be a big project for me, so feedback of any kind is appreciated! Thanks!