"What defines a Spartan? Is it their strengths in combat? Their weaknesses? Do they solely express themselves by their actions on the battlefield, or is it in the quiet lull afterward where their personality, their individual self, truly becomes apparent?
Or is it the armour? The Gen 2 armour system allowed the post-war Spartan candidates unprecedented expression when it came to their hardware. Before, Spartans were only identifiable from one another by the scratches and dints on their armour. Changes truly began with the Spartan III program. Today, no two look alike.
Mjolnir represents their outer face to the world; a face which only they have the final say in selecting. Perhaps, combat form and technique aside, it's the closest thing to artistic expression you'll ever find in the post-humans of the 26th century.
I asked one of the candidates, Damien, about this once. He laughed it off. Said I was over thinking things.
Me? I'm not so sure."
- personal notes of Dr. R. Pearson, retrieved 2561
"Good morning Candidate. The time is 0500."
It was hard to argue with a clock. Harder still to argue with a clock that spoke in Kaizen's voice; a voice that was as inviting and as personable as a gleaming gun barrel. Spotless, precise, and very, very business like.
Damien sat up in his bunk, instantly alert. He swung his feet over onto the icy floor tiles. The cold didn't bother him. Few things did. He padded over to where his uniform lay folded on a side table. The sleeve suit was the unofficial term for it, but as a description it was adequate: a matte-black ribbed under-suit, with ribbed vertebrae running up the spine and accommodation hook ports and data entry plugs dotting the chest, arms and shoulder blades. Combat boots and BDU trousers were worn over the lower half of the form-fitting body skin, which clung to the figure like a wetsuit. Wearing the sleeve suit, his head and throat would be exposed, but little else.
He stepped out into the barracks corridor, uniform folded under the crook of his arm. The barracks was considerably more accommodating than his prison cell. It was styled in the manner of a cadet training facility; individual rooms accessing a single central walk-through with a shower block adjoining the end of the block. What distinguished it from a traditional UNSC facility was that the furniture was built on a Spartan's scale. The rooms were larger, because they had to be. Laconia didn't train just anyone.
Viktorya was already outside, looking toward the shower block, alert. Even standing perfectly upright in a sterile spot-lit corridor, there was a skittishness to her, as though ready to break into a sprint the moment the wind changed, or a branch cracked within earshot. She nodded at him once, face expressionless.
"Good morning to you too, V." Damien smiled. A half smile flitted on her face, then vanished just as quickly. She was scanning for security devices and exits; an old habit of hers.
The others appeared quickly. Chidinma and Rashid looked fresh, excited. Luke had a frown on his face. That was unusual. Luke was seldom one to dwell on anything. Probably still grumpy from the exercise yesterday, Damien decided.
Even so, as the others were filing for the shower block, sleeve suits under their arms. Damien dropped back in the group.
"You alright man?" he asked.
Luke looked up suddenly.
"Me?" Luke said, surprised "Yeah I'm solid, D-man. Solid."
"Listen, don't sweat it about yesterday's test. That's what the training's for. We'll get it next time."
"Yesterday? Oh right, yeah. Damn straight we will."
They bumped fists, and Damien moved his way back to the front of the group, nodding at Eric, who stood armoured and silent at the entrance to the shower blocks.
Luke shook himself. With a bit of effort, his frown faded, and his smiling demeanour returned once more.
"Armoury, Candidates." Eric's filtered voice grunted as they filed past him. "Ten minutes."
The dermal armour was the basic skin of a Gen2 Spartan. A thick, form fitting armoured body-glove; it had a scaled aspect to it, like a sleek blue lizard hide. The dermal armour was effectively sealed at the neck, and left only their faces exposed. Boots and BDU trousers had been discarded. The dermal layer would cover them almost entirely.
Damien ran his fingers over the surface of the chest piece. It felt cool to the touch. Solid as a tank hull, and yet it couldn't be more than an inch thick. The engineering of it was a marvel.
They'd dressed themselves in an anteroom appended to the main armoury, instructed and supervised by a swarm of white-coated scientists. They scientists would have appeared intimidating, with their reflective faceplates and static-free clean suits, were they not tutting and fretting like a swarm of worried parents. Eric had disappeared, leaving them to suit up.
Luke flexed an arm, watching as the suit's gel layer auto-responded, hardening around his bicep. The arm didn't feel like an arm at all. It was rock solid, with all the give of Titanium-A. It was perfect mimicry of his natural arm, only accelerated. With it, he could move faster, punch harder, kill quicker.
"Awesome." he breathed.
They stepped out of the anteroom onto a gantry overlooking a vast, cavernous space. It was a considerable drop to the training deck below. The entire room was brightly lit with industrial strength floor lights. Above them, an observation deck peered down. It too had an external gantry, which served as a balcony for any additional supervising parties. Eric stood on it, one hand resting on the guard rail as he watched them.
The gantry on their level spread across the entire chamber, with the walkway feeding into a series of smaller ones, all of which terminated in a single alcove.
"Candidates," Kaizen's calm voice piped through the PA system, "Please move to your appointed stations."
The candidates had been assigned a trio of personnel each for the armouring process: a two scientists, and a mechanical engineer, who was dressed in a high-vis yellow jacket and matching hardhat. Damien was led to the first side-gantry exiting the main spine.
Toward an alcove which contained the most curious machine he'd ever seen in his life.
The Armour Assistant was suspended from the ceiling in a wide, circular ring, from which a secondary arching frame hung vertically in a gentle sloping inverted U. It looked like an elaborate medical device. It was a sterile, clean thing, encased in white plastic alloy. At the foot of the inverted arch were two foot stirrups, and hanging from the wider framework were a dizzying array of mechanical hands, soldering lasers, industrial-clamps and plasma fitters.
Damien was led forward. There was an anticipatory whine as the Armour Assistant powered up, like the keening of a drill. It reminded him of dental appointments, back when he was a child on Hibernia. The manifold arms locked back with a whirr, shrinking back like a rearing spider. The foot stirrups popped open with an inviting mechanical clack.
Damien hated dental appointments.
He stepped up into the stirrups, facing the wall with his back to the central chamber. The stirrups locked, the sealing restraints bolting from the back, before the heel slid in and clicked shut. Armoured boots locked over the boot of the dermal armour, snapping into place.
Mechanical arms, long-limbed and spindly, reached down and plucked up Damien's arms, holding them up and to the side. Damien grasped a handlebar, doing his best not to flinch as the Armour Assistant screwed a twinned set of thick-plated bracers into the wrist mounts of his dermal plate. Suddenly the entire apparatus tipped Damien over onto his back. He exclaimed in panic.
"Relax," one of the technicians said. He was as slight man, whose face was largely hidden beneath the dust mask and clean suit, but his voice identified him as an American. "All part of the procedure."
"Yeah, procedure." Damien muttered, squinting into the spotlights overhead as the torso plate was lowered onto it. "Got it."
"Your first time?"
"Yeah. Be gentle."
The technician laughed. The chest armour interlocked with the back plating with a jolt. Damien was swung upright again, and watched as the shoulder guards were lowered and snapped into place.
"You got a name?" Damien asked the technician.
"Park."
"American?"
"Close. Korean. American-educated on one of the Saturn stations. I'll be your assigned armour technician, Spartan 451 ."
A helmet was lowered over Damien's head. He felt the neck seal hiss as the suit's internal systems pressurised and sealed itself shut from the outside world. Recruit helmet, standard pattern. Shield system nominal, radar system engaged.
With a final frantic litany of clacking clicks and releasing restraints, the auto-locks released him, setting him down on his feet.
The world looked different. He had felt tall before, certainly taller than any non-augmented human, but now he felt giant. His footfalls clanked on the decking with stomping authority. Threat identification markers began scanning their way over the technicians; flitting amber, then green lighting a microsecond later.
What astounded him was the sensation of wearing the armour. A heady combination of raw power and weightlessness. His muscles, already keenly honed, felt three times larger. He was a tank. A living, breathing tank. The entire experience was intoxicating.
"Looking good, 451." Park grinned.
He looked down at Park through his opal blue visor.
"Call me Damien."
On the ground floor far beneath the gantry section. Park led Damien through a few basic warm up exercises. They started simple. Walking, lifting, crouching, squating, planking. Then they tested sprinting, jumping, and more elaborate forms of body balance exercises. There was some laugher as some of the candidates stumbled and tripped, unused to their new-found size and speed. A resounding clang rang out, and Rashid had to be helped to his feet by Luke when he fell over.
Eric moved from candidate to candidate, offering a quiet word here, a piece of advice there. Rebecca shadowed him, marveling at being surrounded by so many giants at once.
No two Spartans looked the same. Chimera's combat disposition had been the subject of almost ten years of analysis. While traditional inductees to the Laconia Academy would be automatically assigned Recruit pattern armour (as Damien had been), and then allowed to customise it as per their operational requirements, the Chimera candidates had been allocated armour configurations based entirely on predetermined skill sets.
Viktorya was clad in an angular, forward sloping helmet which Damien's HUD identified as Scout pattern reconnaissance armour. Fittingly, Chidinma's had been optimised for aviation, and her helmet mimicked those worn by UNSC pilots. Luke, as one of the more physically imposing members of the squad, was clad in the Warrior pattern, with a single golden slit visor peering out over a prominent faceplate. Rashid - Chimera's designated technical and cyber-warfare specialist - had been allocated the GUNGIR targeting suite; a boxy helm with a single crimson targeting lens.
Chimera were dressed in a uniform baby blue livery. They would remain so until the training program was complete and they were formally cleared for active duty.
They gathered in a huddle, examining one another like a pack of curious monkeys.
Their excited whispering was brought to an end when Eric had them form up in a straight line. He walked up and down the line, his blood red armour a stark contrast with their own.
"Each of you has taken to the Gen 2 system I see. Excellent. My next question is can you fight in it?"
Five nods answered him.
"You'll notice the targeting reticule in the centre of your Heads Up Display. Your armour system will adjust based on weapons to hand, and provide optimum assistance whenever and wherever it can. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. We'll start with the basics."
Eric took a step backward. The technicians stood out of the way, giving him a wide berth. Rebecca did likewise, recording the session through the camera lens of her data pad.
"Which of you has the stones to try and knock me down?"
Five hands went up.
"Ambitious." Eric nodded in approval. He raised his prosthetic arm, beckoning them on with a whirr of servos. "Let's see if there's any merit to it."
The candidates looked at one another, unsure.
It was Viktorya who struck first, bounding forward and throwing a punch almost too fast to see. The others were quick to follow. Say what you will about the Chimera candidates, Rebecca thought, when one committed, the others followed suit.
What happened next had to be replayed by Rebecca in retrospect. She blinked. Three of the candidates were already on the ground. Damien was laid out on the deck, nursing a wrist that had been wrenched from its socket. Luke lay on his back clutching at his throat. Chidinma was face down some two metres away, seemingly unconscious. A savage kick had planted Rashid on the ground, winded.
Only Viktorya was still engaging the crimson Spartan.
She had always seemed feral, and her fighting style reflected this. She lashed out in fits and starts, her limbs a frenzied blur. They exchanged a dizzying combination of punches, jabs and counter blows. Armour dented and sparked as they clashed.
Viktorya took an elbow to the side of her helmet, and stumbled back. Only by turning the stumble into a neat palm spring did she dodge Eric's following strike, a slicing roundhouse kick that split the air with a whistle. To her credit, she rallied quickly, grabbing his follow up jab by the wrist and twisting him into a shoulder throw. Eric used the momentum of the throw to roll over her shoulder, landing neatly on his feet. Still, Viktorya held onto his prosthetic arm in a vice-like grip. She hauled it backward, in a classic pressure hold. To an ordinary human, the pain would be excruciating.
Eric was no ordinary human.
With a feral snarl of his own, Eric twisted so hard the arm ripped clean from its socket in a fizzling spurt of sparks and twisted metal. Viktorya, shocked, had little time to react. She was still holding the severed arm, dumbfounded, when Eric smashing his remaining elbow into her visor and knocked her flat. Eric's boot materialised at her throat, pressing her into the ground, gurgling, and ending the fight.
Rebecca checked the time stamp on her data pad. Thirty seconds had elapsed.
"Impressive, Candidate. But there's one thing I'm going to teach you here at this Academy." Eric said, as he raised his voice to address the candidates, who were pulling themselves off the ground. Viktorya was still gurgling beneath his boot. Smoke curled up from the truncated stump of his severed prosthetic.
"Victory at any cost. An arm, a leg, a Spartan: We defeat the enemies of the UNSC because we are willing to commit to actions your opponent isn't capable of comprehending, let alone countering."
Eric released Viktorya from beneath his foot. He walked away, only stopping to retrieve his missing arm, which lay twitching and sparking on the deck.
"Technicians, see to this." He turned to Damien, "Candidate 451, bring your men to the infirmary. Get that wrist seen to. Then assemble your Spartans on the combat deck at 14:00. Weapons detail, standard assault pattern. We go again."
The technicians were leading Eric over to where an Armour Assistant was preparing to refit his prosthetic.
"And this time, I expect you to do better."
Viktorya held the MA5 up in a sweeping pattern. Damien's voice crackled in her ear.
"Clear?"
Viktorya panned the weapon back one last time. Before her, the warehouse was a dimly lit collection of dusty loading crates and mournfully hanging chains. There was a forklift truck ahead of her. A canvass sheet was half-draped over it, like an idle ghost. This part of the facility was seldom used. She blink-toggled her vision mode from standard to low-light, then switched over to heat-scan once again.
Nothing.
She raised a gauntleted fist and waved two fingers forward, before rising to a half-crouch and darting forward. The other members of Chimera picked forward in her wake, sliding into cover with startling quietness for beings of such immense scale. They moved quickly, sweeping for targets as they advanced.
Straight into the kill zone.
The concussion mine killed Viktorya and Rashid outright. Sniper rounds tore out of the darkness, punching clean through Luke's visor and dropping him instantly. Chidinma rose to return fire, her assault rifle blazing away toward where the wispy contrails of the rifle's hung in the air. Her fire was disciplined, textbook suppressive fire. Damien joined her, shoulder to shoulder, his rifle barking as it spat out into the gloom. No more return fire answered back.
Damien ducked over to a packing crate across from Chidi.
"Movement." She reported, ejecting the magazine and slapping a new one home. "100 metres, moving east."
Damien poked out of cover. The pulsing red dot was constant. He frowned. It seemed far too long to be a single radar contact.
"On it. Keep me covered."
A single green acknowledgement light lit up. Damien darted forward, rifle hunting.
He moved past the inert bodies of the rest of Chimera. His HUD was swimming with red-line status report icons, and his cheeks burned with shame. Damien braced against a packing container. The isolated radar contact was around the next corner. He was going to get this bastard. It was time for payback.
Damien lunged around the corner, his BR85 sighted and locked. Then he swore.
It was a cargo escalator, used for shipping heavy items from the gable end of the warehouse to the external roller shutter. The belt-feed carried enough residual heat to trigger the Gen2's sensor system.
"Three, One; it's clear."
There was no response.
"Chimera Three, respond." Damien frowned. "Chidi, respond."
A knife appeared at his throat, tickling the armoured skin with a gentle scrape.
"You're dead, Candidate."
The floodlights snapped on with a harsh jolt.
Eric released Damien from the hold, sheathing his combat knife. In the distance, the others were picking themselves up from the ground, their armour unlocking from where the stun rounds had frozen them in place. Luke groaned. The simulated stun rounds had caught him squarely in the forehead. His head was pounding from a blow which would have knocked a normal human out cold.
"One hundred percent casualties, Candidate. What did we learn?"
"That you alone can kick our arses handily, Sir?"
Eric gestured to where the concussion charge had kicked off the initial ambush, then to the elevated sniper perch he'd taken atop one of the racking decks, then finally to the loading belt he'd used to lure Damien away from Chidinma.
"Asymmetrical warfare. Even in the face of overwhelming numbers, a single determined irregular can wreak untold havoc with the proper combination of surprise, misdirection and timely application of direct force. Technological advancement? Availability of resources? Irrelevant. Control the battlefield, manage the conditions of where and when you engage your opponent, and the odds of your success become a certainty, rather than chance."
"Understood, Sir."
"Squad cohesion was good. You need to calibrate your armour software to dial back on the type of radar contacts it registers. A trick like that loading belt shouldn't have worked the way it did. Speak with your technician, and have your team do likewise."
"Will do, Sir."
Eric nodded and moved off toward the other members of Chimera. Chidinma was approaching him, her helmet in her hands. She looked sheepish as she nursed some of the bruising at her throat.
"How'd he get you?" Damien asked.
"Knife." she replied apologetically, "I didn't even hear him coming. I think he was toying with me."
"I think he was toying with all of us, Three."
They looked over to where Eric was pointing out to Viktorya where concussion mines had been embedded in the underlining of the floor plating. His hand movements were smooth, precise, but there was no disguising the man's passion. It was the most enthusiasm Damien had ever seen the older Spartan display.
"He lives for this." Chidinma marveled.
"I suspect he'll expect us to do the same." Damien replied. "Either that, or we're going to wind up with a hell of a lot more bruising by the end of the week."
"What did you think, Doctor?"
Rebecca looked up. Director Carter had appeared beside her in the observation lounge overlooking the test area. Once again he was stroking his goattee thoughtfully. Despite his comparatively advanced age and appreciable height, Director Carter had an unnerving knack for appearing seemingly out of nowhere. Not for the first time, Rebecca found herself realising that, for all his authority, she didn't know the first thing about the man known as Idris Carter.
"They got annihilated, Sir."
"To be expected. The Chimera candidates are augmented, and have considerable skills, but there's no substitute for field experience. Today was a timely demonstration."
"A demonstration of what?"
"That for all their promised talent, Chimera still have much to learn. They need this program."
They turned back to where Eric had assembled the candidates. He was pointing up at the racking, then gesturing to his sniper rifle. Discussing angles of attack, relocation and misdirection. The candidates huddled around, nodding as they listened and took notes.
"He scares me."
"Our resident instructor?"
"He's so… violent. So ruthless. Earlier today, he tore his own arm off just to win."
"Eric's one of our best. He wouldn't be part of this program otherwise."
"And when it becomes time for him to retire, what do we do with him then? How does a man like that fit back into society?"
Idris Carter didn't even blink.
"I think you'll find, Doctor, that few Spartans ever have the luxury of contemplating their retirement."
"I want to interview him. Assess him for signs of mental trauma. I've seen what happened to his face. The candidates may be combat certified and cleared for instruction, but him? I'm not so sure."
"I would not recommend this line of inquiry, Doctor. Spartan Three's were human... weaponised; a darker solution from a darker time. There are no happy memories down that path."
"So that's it then? Eric's to be used as a tool, and that's the end of it?"
"Your input to date has been both valuable and appreciated, Doctor, but Spartan 239's psych-record cannot and will not be made open to civilian inquiry. End of discussion."
"Understood, Sir."
The Director nodded, then turned and strode out of the room, leaving her alone.
It was the closest thing to anger Rebecca had ever seen from the Director. She knew full well that her continued hospitality on Laconia depended solely on Director Carter's continued favour. Not something she wanted to jeopardise. Not directly.
"Kaizen." Rebecca asked aloud.
"Yes Doctor?" the A.I.'s voice piped through her data-lace.
"You hear all that?"
"I did, Doctor. And I am sorry, but Director Carter is correct. I cannot provide assistance on this matter, in accordance with UNSC Regulation A-302-230-491, Article AE4, Subsection Two, which states that no civilian inter-"
"Got it, Kai. Thanks."
Rebecca frowned. That certainly closed that avenue of investigation.
Unless…
She saw Rashid through the reinforced observation glass. He was kneeling over one of the inert concussion mines. His helmet lay on the deck by his feet. Ever inquisitive, he had broken the mine down into its constituent parts, and was examining the wiring of his own GUNGIR sensor system. No doubt hoping to concoct some form of unorthodox early-warning system.
A smile crept across Rebecca's lips.
Bingo.