The Spy's Horror Story
"An ONI spy comes across some intelligence on post-war criminal elements that terrifies him. Despite attempting to disappear, he's already in the Syndicate's crosshairs."

UNSC Military Calendar: 0912 Hours, 23 April 2554
New Tyne
Venezia, Via Casilina Community

Codename: SEASPIRE gave a lifetime to the art of spy craft and the Department of Colonial Security. He took pride in being one of 'Madame Margret's men', an exclusive reputation for DCS agents after CINCONI Margret Parangosky salvaged the collapsing intelligence agency during the Insurrection.

She won the uncompromising loyalty of her subordinates as the queen spymaster. For her efforts, they paved her rise to the highest seat in Naval Intelligence where she saved humanity from alien genocide.

Parangosky inspired SEASPIRE, and her guidance even from the grave kept him motivated for many years in the field. For Madame Margret, he could go anywhere and do anything. She was the brain and heart of ONI, and he was her eyes.

SEASPIRE went many places, saw many things from the very day he left the academy. He watched planet surfaces scorched by Covenant hellfire. He witnessed human rebels attempt to appease or parlay alien crusaders. Aliens repented their religion at his feet when the Covenant War ended. He kept quiet and observed as humans and aliens together forged collaborative communities on the frontier.

Much of the experiences thrilled SEASPIRE. Many more experiences brought him fear, rage, and joy. But none of those experiences quite terrified him like the last; at least not to the degree that he would pull the plug on his deep cover operation and call for extraction. Not until now.

Windy gusts battered SEASPIRE's sixth-story apartment windows as the dark streets of New Tyne soaked up sheets of icy rain. Below at ground level, umbrellas shielded street goers from a temperate Venezian winter. Every single person below could be a hitman closing on his position as this was New Tyne, heart of modern Insurrectionist fervor. Everyone packed heat here, not just the human residents. Aliens too.

A hostile people surrounded SEASPIRE at every corner. Risky didn't begin to describe this desperate act to call for a ride home.

His living room was in a state of abrupt, rapid home makeover. The sofa lay on its side now with titanium plates grafted to its bottom to form makeshift cover. At the entrance way, a mounted and automated M247 machine gun turret stared down the structural chokepoint.

Other than the machine gun, the entire apartment was off-grid. Electronic appliances and smart devices, all forcibly disconnected from the power grid. Not even the front door camera was functioning anymore. SEASPIRE was thorough but he couldn't shake the feeling that his procedures would not be enough.

He glued cardboard sheets to the windows and locked the blinds tight. He put his one good white noise amplifier against the front door so no one could hear him from outside. SEASPIRE took every precaution he knew and still felt lacking.

Stale bathwater waited in the kitchen sink and bathroom tub in case he needed to reapply his water filter. He still had functioning gas to the apartment for maybe two days. Rations, his bugout bag, trays of ammunition, a raspberry muffin, and a half-finished case of New Tyne dark beer lay around his disheveled form. Without power, the room temperature dropped to an icy seven Celsius and left the ONI spy shivering in his grungy sleeping bag.

SEASPIRE peeked over the upturned sofa to view the crack beneath his front door. Light poured in as it had for hours. The shadows failed to warp to the whims of his paranoid imagination. He should feel safe, but he did not. His right arm shook subtlety, clasping onto his suppressed M6P handgun.

What put him into such a shaking mess?

His mission revealed impossible things to his ear and sight. Incredulous things.

They required SEASPIRE to extend himself, confirming his fears beyond a reasonable doubt.

The Iskander Syndicate was on the rise. Once a fledgling criminal gang on the impoverished world of Iskander, they were now interstellar titans. In every Insurrectionist cesspool and wrong-thinking hole in the wall, they established a chapter. Their efforts grew more ambitious, their operations bolder.

In a mere six years of societal power vacuums, they went from buying homecraft bolt guns to buying entire privateer navies. Were the frontier an untampered sandbox, their expansion would've been impossible—rather destroyed in the chaos of bloody, smalltime gang wars.

Instead, they were supplementing entire colonial economic sectors and doing business with state-sponsored defense contractors in broad daylight. They had AI, starships, and battle stations at their disposal.

Even isolated, small-picture ONI agents collaborated with the sudden upstarts to further remote agendas when they couldn't see the forest for the trees. SEASPIRE didn't see a remarkable criminal success story; this was far too organized – this was a society-threatening conspiracy. The Iskandar Syndicate was acting stately, dare he say.

Their reach was so well established, some individuals were cutting the name down to just 'the Syndicate.'

Free-reign AIs amassed at the Syndicate's call to arms and brought their operations into galaxy-class efficiency. A phantom state coming to challenge the Unified Earth Government brought back distant memories and horror stories from the Insurrection. A civil war waiting to happen. The agent was taking the ultimate risk now, dropping everything in hopes of preventing the mounting upheaval. His extraction had to come.

Someone needed to warn Earth.

As stretched hours passed, the ONI officer began to make a pattern of this paranoid wonder-and-watch. He huddled in his fabric, nibbled on a stale ration cracker, glanced at the windows, built up his dread until he glanced over the makeshift cover only for his fears to be placated in the moment. Rinse and repeat.

He stared at the door in frustration. SEASPIRE dared to wonder at what point he would go from dread, to boredom, and then just demanding someone come and attack him. At least make things interesting, dammit.

He wasn't going to get up to use the bathroom just yet. He wasn't going to and try and boil water or brew some crap frontier coffee. He wasn't, he wasn't, he wouldn't!

SEASPIRE's hands squeezed against the cheap sofa and the grip of his gun as a low, frustrating growl escaped his lips. Come on…

He blinked when his front door simply swung open on its own. No shadows dancing beneath the door crack. No noise of turning, twisting gear locks. It just…slipped open.

The surprise turned to confusion as he glanced out into the condominium hallway and saw only the flickering glow of a cheap overhead light and the closed door of his neighbor's abode. The front door settled against the adjacent wall and SEASPIRE only saw the empty, ghostly space. His mind didn't have to wonder long—his eyes darted to the M247 that should have fired at the faintest sign of movement.

It was silent, dead. Scratch that. Two plasma bolts coughed from the empty air and struck the automated assembly. Two bolted legs melted without fail and the machine gun crumpled to the floor without discharging a shot. SEASPIRE jolted back and leveled his pistol at the doorway, retreating in a daze.

The stale room air shimmered as invisible shapes drew closer into the safehouse. One, maybe two? No. More than that.

SEASPIRE's fingers squeezed on his suppressed hand cannon, drawing a first shot that boomed like artillery in the enclosed space. The bullet flashed a brilliant bronze before disintegrating against an invisible target and its white-blue energy shields.

An attempt to fire again in his stunned state was met with giant invisible gloves seizing his magnum-clamped wrists and rolling under them. The closest invisible being—now apparent as a Stealth Sangheili of sorts—slunk under SEASPIRE's chest and effortlessly tossed the agent and pistol into the air.

The M6P went flying, crackling against drywall with a toy-like dink.

SEASPIRE hit the false-wood floor with a stiffening crack, pain cruising up his spine. "Fucking hell…"

The shimmering, invisible aliens decloaked to reveal weathered-black Special Operations harnesses of once-elite Sangheili Covenant units. They were mercenaries now most likely. The Syndicate had come after all.

Heavy footfalls echoed from the atrium as two Sangheili warriors dragged SEASPIRE into a living room corner. Another shimmering form rounded the corner and decloaked, and damn was he big.

A black-armored Jiralhanae 'brute' presented himself to the assorted six-Sangheili mercenary team as his head, wrapped in an oddly-placed human ballcap, nearly scrapped the ceiling.

"Clean work as always," the Jiralhanae assessed upon scanning the room and nodding to his alien subordinates. He glanced down at SEASPIRE. "And we've got our tick without much of a fight. Excellent."

Ignoring his aching 'everywhere', SEASPIRE groaned out. "Hah. You got me."

"Indeed. I have. My superior felt we should wrap this little spy game up quickly now that you've called for your Oni. A shame really, I enjoyed having my youngbloods trail you for weeks – it was good practice for them."

SEASPIRE didn't take much pleasure in the compliment. He dealt with more than enough tails in the recent weeks but he figured he was dealing with amateurs. By the Jiralhanae's notion, maybe not so much. "Your English is surprisingly natural."

"A cycles-conflict with your kind does that, human. But I have to give credit to your colonial universities for being so accommodating when professors are motivated at gunpoint."

SEASPIRE gave a dead chuckle. "Ah, a true salesman."

"I'm sure you know my superior to be quite a good one himself."

"And how a great Jiralhanae like you has fallen – going from upstaging Sangheili to leading them and taking orders from humans."

The Jiralhanae warrior gave a very human shrug. "He supports my hunting hobby. This Syndicate brings me great enjoyment, I could ask nothing less of a good corporation."

"Your English is maybe too good…"

Two humans in coveralls wandered behind the Jiralhanae, barely in view and only paid SEASPIRE a cursory glance. "Atticus, Min Ai wants you to wrap up. Said he's got some upstart on the other side of town needing some clean up as well. We've paid the complex owner his due and he said he'd put the room up for sale in three weeks as requested."

The Jiralhanae glanced back at his upspoken human subordinate. "Alright. Tell the vans to begin loading up, leave a carpenter team so they can clean up after us. We'll be done in five."

The two Syndicate support staffers wandered out of the apartment without another word. SEASPIRE didn't even get a second glance.

"You know ONI won't stand for this. They'll find out, my transceiver is still fired up and it's got my data dump. You guys are finished, regardless of what you do with me."

SEASPIRE knew it was the end. But at least he could get some words in. Best case scenario, they just offed him right here and now. Worst case, he goes under the knife for who knows how long. He heard the horror stories—forced quadriplegics left on life support. Agents put through brain surgery and left barely more than vegetables. The Syndicate was disgustingly creative with their punishments. But this was the job, Madame Maggie asked him and others to trade their lives for the best future for humanity. SEASPIRE left behind no ties and no loose ends to wrap up, or bury. He would go to the grave with only a name and the service he gave. That would be enough.

"Ah. Yes. About that," the Jiralhanae gave a dark smile, flashing inhumanly-human teeth. A grin that burned worlds.

The Jiralhanae disengaged a magnetized bag at his belt the size of a human toolbox. He got low and set it in SEASPIRE's lap.

"Thank you for reminding me. You can have your transponder back. I don't care much for it."

Confused and alarmed, SEASPIRE unwrapped the blanket-like cloth to reveal a Department of Colonial Security black box. The kind that absorbed all ONI frontier transmissions then went silent, only transmitting in the presence of an overhead ONI surveillance satellite or stealth prowler. His black box, his transmitter.

"How—"

The Jiralhanae's smile only broadened as he rose back up and took a few steps back. "Oh, it was quite easy to find really. Barely an inconvenience."

A pane of fear washed over SEASPIRE. His overclocked mouth spewed questions like gunfire. "Did you tamper with it? How much do you know? What do you want with me?"

The well-spoken Jiralhanae simply raised an outstretched palm to silence the trapped ONI agent. "I did not need your black box to know who you are, Eli McCormack. A digital birdie told me everything."

SEASPIRE shivered in his jumpsuit, his pistol far out of reach.

"What will you do with me? Send a message?"

The Jiralhanae hummed in such an off-putting, human manner. "I think not. Sometimes you need to send a message. Other times, no message at all is message enough."

A Sangheili enforcer stepped forward at the Jiralhanae's pointing finger gesture. The Jiralhanae continued, "Your Oni will arrive in a matter of days, maybe in that time—they will find a new apartment space on sale. Or a new family moving in. There will be no body. No transmitter. It will be as if you vanished. I find myself quite pleased with the thought of what your colleagues will think of you then, when you have disappeared from the universe itself. All that will remain of you is a brief hint of radiation."

The Sangheili enforcer drew a white-and-red-painted plasma pistol from its hip and charged up a green-colored overcharge shot.

The plasmatic ball glowed at the end of the weapon's magnetic emitter, growing ever bigger, and expanding at a chaotic rate. Its center seemed to grow black, no, dark. The darkest dark. The absence of light.

SEASPIRE had a suspicion on what followed. He wished he could close his eyes but he couldn't look away. They would charr his body, leaving nothing behind but ash. That was what he expected.

Reality was far less forgiving.

The weapon discharged and the plasma cooked off against SEASPIRE's skin. He screamed, but there was no noise. Time drew out and his concept of sight dilated. The ball expanded and warped, erupting into a sucking, storm-like singularity.

The miniature black hole sapped up man, black box, and parts of the wall – taking matter out of reality itself.

No noise, no light, nothing escaped the Void's Tear. It evaporated with a slight pop, then nothing more. As if no one once sat there at all. SEASPIRE was gone.

Atticus the Brute clapped his bear palms together, looking over his Sangheili kill team. "Excellent. One more job and we'll take a lunch break. I hear Tiny Birds is less crowded this time of day."

The Sangheili seemed to leer at their Jiralhanae superior through emotionless helmets before trudging out of the apartment. Before following, Atticus gave the spiraled indent where the man named Eli McCormack once lay. The Jiralhanae lowered his head and tipped his hat, as if in a gesture of respect.

He turned to leave as the Syndicate carpenter team entered the former ONI safehouse. They carried with them buckets of cheap paint, vacuum cleaners, and racks of ceramic cement. In a matter of hours, the dent remaining of the man called SEASPIRE would disappear as well.

Atticus exited the apartment. He and his team never spoke of SEASPIRE again.

A/N: This short story references a key faction in the works of my good friend and Halo Fanon veteran/admin, Actene. While our interpretations of his group, the Syndicate, vary slightly due to matters of scale, I find the group to be one of my favorite antagonist factions in Halo fanfiction that I've read about and wrote this sort of love letter to the early depictions of the Syndicate in Actene's work, particularly his Halo: Necessary Evil which is only readable on Halo Fanon but a crime world story that I think is rather unique in the Halo fanfiction scene. Give it a read.

On another note, I was told by friends that Atticus was an interesting Brute they'd like to see again in the future so I'll definitely put that into consideration.