They decided I was a failure.
The bastards. I'm twice the Spartan any of them were.
My name is Ilsa Zane. I was a Spartan. I still think of myself as one, too, even if I don't come with the powered armour, absolute loyalty to Earth and Her Colonies, or the chip on my shoulder that says "super soldier."
You probably think I'm a traitor. You're probably right, in that my actions would have undermined the safety of all you precious little Inner Colony sheep going about your businesses, living comfortable, safe, happy lives built by on the toil and sweat and blood of us Outer Colonists. And yes, I do mean "us."
I was born on a little backwater world off near Arcturus. You folks called it Gliese-something or other and then a number and a letter. To the people who lived on it, it was home. I never knew its name. We were one of the first planets hit when the Covenant steamrolled their way through the first Outer Colonies. I remember screaming, the smell of burning, and bright green. I don't know if it was the sky, grass, of plasma, but I've never liked the colour. Never will.
After that, me and my folks bounced from one refugee camp to another. My dad enlisted – he said it was to put a roof over our heads with the only guaranteed work he could get, but I prefer to think he wanted to get some payback. I also like to think he went down fighting, earning the pension for my ma that put me through school until I was old enough to join the Marines. We certainly never got told otherwise. Just a guy knocking on the door with a flag and a medal. We kept the medal. We burned the flag. Ma made a point of it – we fought for humanity, not the UNSC.
I remember the bonfire very well, as that piece of cloth went up. It was just me and her, and if anybody asked it was for warmth. It was almost true, the conditions refugees lived in, even if they could claw their way out of the camps.
I don't remember what world that was on either. It was never home to me, and it was turned into a molten ball of glass while I was on my first tour of duty. I can't say I've ever missed it. Much too green. Ma never saw the plasma come down. She had a pistol she would show me, when she got drunk and hysterical, yelling about how she'd take her own life before she let them take it. I have no doubt in my mind that she used it.
After that, I fought. Fellow Marines, Army troopers, sailors, airmen, hell, I even got into a barroom rumble with a pair of ODSTs. Didn't come out the winner, but it earned me some respect in their eyes. After I got out of the hospital, with a demotion and a lecture from the LT, they turned up at my bunk, telling me I should give dropping feet first into hell a shot.
I appreciated the offer, but I told them they could go to hell as well. I was angry, and I was humiliated that I had impressed them.
Of course, I called them the next day to say I changed my mind. They told me they were retracting the offer, I'd missed the deadline. You should have seen my face they told me afterward, when I was in ODST boot on Mars. I looked like they'd kicked my favourite puppy.
Those were probably the closest I've ever come to having friends.
They died two years later. Shot down during a drop on some Inner Colony, covering the evacuation of a bunch of corporate, private jet, booze and women and cars types from upscale wherever the hell it was. Corps couldn't tell me where it happened. "Classified."
Next few years seem like a blur. One battle segueing into another. Most of the time it's standard protocol to put non-essentials into cryo during long trips to conserve energy and rations, so it seems like no sooner are you put under than you're being thawed for the next fight, just in time to see another planet go up in smoke. I racked up an impressive kill count, even for an ODST. Got a few officers who said they'd fasttrack a reassignment to the 105th, the elite of the goddamn elite. That never happened – Reach fell before I could make up my damn mind, and then there was the op on Beta Gabriel mopping up the fucking mess the Brutes had made of it, then covering the evacuation of Tribute. And then Earth.
I'd never wanted to see Earth before. But after years "fighting for her" as the propaganda posters say, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Overcrowded, ungrateful and with a chip on their shoulder the size of Luna about being "the core." The whole planet could go to hell as far as I was concerned if it meant the Covenant would leave the rest of us alone, but that didn't stop me putting a few bullets in the Brutes that invaded. And then all of a sudden the war was over. There were a few cleanup operations to hunt down stragglers who refused to surrender, a few isolated raids by pirates, but the Covenant was breaking apart and the overwhelming might of an empire that was dominating us was suddenly gone, replaced by a hodgepodge of warlords all carving out their own space, too busy fighting each other to pay much attention to little old humanity.
Their mistake.
I wouldn't have minded that. In fact, I'd have called it a job well done. But then Hood decided that humanity was too weak to stand on its own, and signed the damn treaty with Arby and his Swords of whatever. A lot of folks saw that as a betrayal of everything the UNSC had been fighting for. Me? I thought it was par for the course – Earth cozies up to the aliens who spent nearly thirty years wiping us out as if nothing had happened, if it meant they left us alone.
Except they didn't, did they? You all knew they wouldn't. Take Rome. When Rome fell, it split up, fought each other, collapsed into a bunch of little kingdoms fighting each other until it finally resolved itself into the European Protectorate. And you were happy to let them fight each other, but you knew they'd come for you eventually.
That was when I was approached. I never knew her name, or even her codename. I was told there was an experiment being conducted that would make the Master Chief obsolete, give us the soldiers who could bear the Covenant at their own game. And they wanted me.
I mean, I was flattered. I told them to go to hell, and then I told them that didn't mean I wasn't saying no.
And that was when you people decided I was a monster.
There were ten of us. I remember one guy was really nervous, had a wife and kids back home, was worried what they'd think about daddy bending steel bars without armour. His lungs exploded. I mean literally exploded. They delayed my augmentations because they had to sterilise the room. I wish I could say it made me nervous, that I nearly reconsidered, or maybe that I decided to make his sacrifice mean something. But honestly? The only thing I could think was: "Yeah, that's how it goes buddy. Better luck next time." They say you never really believe death is something that happens to you right up to the moment it does.
My heart stopped on the operating table. That's in my file, right? That they had to use one of the Cyclops power loaders to resuscitate me because my skeleton was so reinforced and my muscles so dense. And I was coughing up blood for weeks. And that I still feel a constant itch in my right elbow, no matter how often the doctors told me it was all in my head. But the unforgiveable sin I committed in your eyes?
I exceeded your expectations.
They put me in a holo-room. My eyes could actually make out the individual bots of light in the hologram. They could see the Marines waiting for me up ahead in camouflage that would have fooled the old ODST-me. They thought I'd take my time, work my way to them, avoid the mines being simulated as dug into the ground between me and them.
They didn't expect me to run through them, use the force to propel me forward, clothesline one man with enough force to take his head off, deliver a gut punch that punched through the gut, and then toss the third guy into the bulkhead of the simulation before the techs cancelled everything, ran in panicking, guns aimed at me demanding I back off. I laughed, not quite believing myself, not quite seeing it as real.
You people called me "dangerously unstable" and told me the rest of us hadn't made it. I wasn't getting the armour. I wasn't going to be the posterchild of the UNSC, the next Master Chief or Preston Cole or Jacob Keyes. I was meant to be "decommissioned" if possible, the augmentations reversed or suppressed, and then suspended pending a medical review. You said my instability was because of the augmentations, something to do with neural inhibitors and pain receptors. I don't remember feeling the bruises, but my upper arm and torso was blotchy for a few hours after the test. Then it just kind of faded away.
I had two job interviews that afternoon, as I sat in my bunch, calmly, waiting to see what would happen.
The first was with the ONI woman. She told me there was a place opening up for me in a clandestine unit. Top secret, deniable ops against high-value targets. I read between the lines, guessed what she meant – Elites. Elites who weren't necessarily open enemies of Earth. I thought the offer had a lot of merit to it. Far as I was concerned, am concerned, the whole species can go to hell and I'd volunteer to press the button that sent them there if I could. So I said I'd give it some thought, which she took as a yes.
The second I didn't see coming.
There was a knock on the door. I opened it, and found a UNSC admiral standing there, fist raised for another knock. He smiled. Told me he had an offer for someone of my calibre. I told him I'd already got an offer better than anything the Regular Navy could offer me.
He said it wasn't a Regular Navy job.
He told me he represented a small but significant number of officers who believed the Treaty of '53 was a severe mistake – that the UNSC should have pressed its advantage against the Arbiter while it still could, threw whatever we had left into stopping them coalescing into a single, sizeable force., even if they were supposed to be our allies. And then he said the magic words:
"We get the impression that Earth just doesn't care about anything that isn't Earth. We…do."
That was the first time I met Mattius Drake.
Technically, I took the first job offer, and I like to think I did good. ONI never complained. I took out a few Brute Chieftains, a couple of Elites with ideas of reviving the glory days of the Covenant without all the Prophets' nonsense, leading some holy crusade against the Brutes and then coming for us after they'd dealt with the "real" threat. I throttled one of them with my bare hands, crushed his neck, and got to see the look of horror and shock as he realised we could beat them on even terms now.
But all that time, I was sending data back to Drake. Copies of my mission reports. Little snippets of ONI gossip I'd been hearing. Something going down on Draethus V that the UNSC was keeping hush-hush. And he gave me something better than money, a purpose, and an enemy that I finally, genuinely cared about beating.
He gave me a look at my replacements. The "successes."
I wasn't impressed. Even on Infinity, I was quite underwhelmed. You ramped down the augmentations, and ramped up the armour, just so you wouldn't kill them. An inferior product. At least the IIs and IIIs accepted the mortality rate to get the results they needed. And Palmer? The woman's a joke, albeit a funny one. I think I can see something of myself in her, actually – an angry Helljumper out to show she's got the guts to do the job.
That wasn't a compliment, in case you were wondering.
And the Infinity itself? An overpriced boondoggle. You could have built two fleets for what you paid for that. Two fleets that could have defended the other Inner Colonies, or Reach, or Earth. On paper, it's got the guns and hangars to conquer a small planet. But there's that old saying about putting all your eggs in one basket.
No, I don't know of Drake has the people to run it. He might, for all I know. He took a lot of good people with him when he finally left, did he? Not everybody he wanted, I bet. No, I don't know names. Compartmentalisation and all that. He could have a fleet out there, or he could have been bluffing, hoping this could be the start of everything, the rallying call to arms. No idea.
Who? Daniel Clayton? Never heard of him. I hope he gave you a bloodied nose, whoever he was.
Are we done here? I have a nailfile in my cell and I want to get back to sawing through the bars.
That was a joke by the way.
When I get out of here, it won't be with a nailfile.
And I promise you, doc. You'll be the first to know it.