James Ackerson - Spartan 3 program

The Spartan 3 program was a response to the... let us say moral excesses... of the Spartan 2 program but also to the steady influx of seized alien equipment from battlegrounds and a little something the Front made, called element Zero. Only place that makes it is the Star Forge. What this stuff does is when an electrical charge goes through it it can create a field that either raises or lowers the mass in the field it creates.

The Star Forge mass produces the shit, it's used to make guns, it's used in weapons, it's used to make shields and you would be surprised what else it can be used for. So we decided to experiment with the stuff and after all we had a pretty much unlimited number of death row inmates to experiment on and not that many qualms about using up their lives.

Most of them died, but some of them developed strange powers and abilities before they died horribly. We had pretty good scientists and AIs so we were able to figure out how the stuff mutated people. We ended up working on that and ended up creating biomechanical implants that used this substance to give our Spartans superpowers. Not as varied or as impressive as the stuff project Athens could pull out of their ass but it helped even the odds.

I'm going to be honest: we stole as much tech as we could from the Front and from the Covenant, whatever we could get and reverse engineer. Gained a lot of respect for Doctor Monk, god damned madman's tech was revolutionary. Omnigel and Omnitools? That stuff revolutionized the Spartan program.

Implants? Spartan Implants were a pain in the ass to make until we stole Omnigel from the Front and found we could now make better Spartan implants, for a fraction of the price. MJOLNIR armor? We were able to use Omnigel manufacturing to build the next gen of that stuff. It was one-tenth the weight, for one-tenth the price, with the same protection.

However, we didn't focus on mass effect weaponry. The Front was willing to sell element Zero to us but it was expensive, because we paid the asshole tax for the whole, you know, stealing children from their parents and replacing them with flash-grown clones thing. Yeah. One of the things I brought up was how that bit of fuckery helped cause the insurrection movement. I learned from that.

We used orphans and unwanted children, which created less bad feelings all around. We made enough progress that Halsey got off her high horse and worked with us to try to create better implants that wouldn't kill adults. We didn't pull it off during the war but we were able to raise the age to teenagers.

All of this combined to let us create Spartans, better Spartans, at a lower cost, both moral and economic.

So what did Spartans do? Pretty much everything. They were the face of the UNSC for the duration of the war. They helped recover tech from enemy wrecks, they did sabotage, they did boarding actions. Everything we could use them for we did and they did a damned fine job.

But, at the end of the day, the Covenant war was a fleet war. Our Spartans could chew through Covenant bastards like crazy but our fleet was the thing that needed to be improved the most, and our failures on that front would cost the most lives.

Ronaldo Perez - Athenian

People ask me who would win in a fight, an Athenian or a Spartan?

At long-range Spartans, hands down. Reaction speed five times faster, training at a young age, better long-range weapons? At range, we would lose every time. Medium range could go either way. Yes, the Spartan fanboys will say: "But Biotics!"

Their Zero implants could let them lift someone in the air, bring them in close, knock them back, blast them with energy that fucks them up, and cover themselves with a force field that lasts maybe a minute or so yeah? So what? An Aura tonic handles the forcefield, you have cold and heat blasts to fuck people up, and telekinesis lets you do everything else better. Still, they had 5 times human reaction speed and we had 3 times human reaction speed. So, in mid-range, it would come down to skill. Whoever knew how to use their equipment, powers, and kit better would win the day.

In close range, we would slaughter Spartans. You know why?

This baby, right here. It's called a Z-sword, made by the good doctor himself, and it cuts through Spartan armor like a knife through butter but even if it didn't? Spartan armor had a flaw. You see their armor, that armor which makes them stronger and faster and better? It was connected to them by an implant designed to react before the body reacted, so they could take advantage of Spartan's superior reaction speed.

Problem was if you disrupted that connection with a strong enough melee attack, their own armor would rip them apart. Saw it happen, bunch of times. It was however rare for us to actually go up against them. Mostly when we fought it was because the UNSC wanted to salvage some Covenant tech without asking permission first, or they were trying to steal our tech. It did not happen often, and 98 percent of the incidents happened in the first five years of the war.

You know that time period when the UNSC thought they could roll us and retake everything. As time passed they realized it was going to be a long war. With every year we defended our space we gained more legitimacy, every time a UNSC planet got glassed they lost face. Eventually, they just admitted that things had changed, and once the hardliners accepted that... well after that we could fight like allies.

I've fought side by side with Spartans more than I ever fought against them. I respect them. I think the whole process before the Spartan 4 project was fucked up but I respect them as people. I think, in some ways, I'm glad the war happened because it would have been a pain in the ass fighting the Spartans full time.

Doctor Halsey

I woke up with a knife next to my head, with a note wrapped around it.

"Stop going after my people or I will finish the job. Doctor Mark Monk."

I had people look through the video feed but we didn't see anything. We did scale back the more violent methods used to gain tech in Front space. That was my only interaction with Doctor Monk in person, but I can say I am the closest thing that man has to a rival. I was able to lead the team that reverse-engineered Covenant tech, I helped with the initial Spartan program, and made the Spartan 3 program better.

My scientific research was groundbreaking and saved lives, so it's only natural that the single best scientist in the UNSC gets compared to the single best one in the Front.

Going to give credit where it is due, the man is a genius. Element Zero, Durasteel, interdiction fields, mass effect fields, and mass manufacture. This is the man who created the Front fleet, pioneered its defenses, and made it into a power. I personally think it was a waste of effort. If he had worked for us instead, with our greater industrial might, we could have taken the fight to the Covenant and crushed them. That's the difference between us by the way: ambition.

Dr. Monk was a man who was satisfied with the position of Quartermaster General, a man who was satisfied with the attention of a couple of hussies. He could have been wealthy beyond his wildest dreams but instead just took a generous paycheck. That man could have ruled the Front as an emperor scientist and yet was instead content to make kit for a bunch of yokles.

He constrained his science to doing simulations and only used willing volunteers, if he had expanded his reach think of what he could have created? Whatever genius he had was blunted, time and time, again by his lack of ambition and useless ethical concerns. I was willing to make the hard decisions that could make or break a society while Monk left those decisions to a bunch of elected idiots.

I had the boldness and the vision he lacked! While I think his decision to back the Front was a waste of potential I am ultimately glad he did so: the UNSC was better off without someone like that coddling people's delicate feelings rather than doing actual science.

Private Anil Kapoor

I sat under the glowing dome, feeling bored.

"Hate this."

"I Know, Anil."

Ted looked just as bored as me.

I looked up.

"When's the fucking salvage team getting here?"

"The UNSC is dealing with a lot of crap right now. That's why we have a refugee crisis, Anil."

"I know! Dear God, I know... I used to be in processing."

Ted grimaced.

"Wow, that had to be a shit show."

"It was."

I winced. The Front was taking in a lot of refugees. Granted most of our systems tended to be pretty empty but it wasn't helping our growing pains.

"How bad was it?"

"Lots of sad stories, saw a lot of desperate people... Couldn't take it after a while and I requested a transfer."

"Shit."

I patted my gun.

"Your home system, what color is it in?"

That's right: we had a color system for how secured a local system was. Blue was a hardened system, as safe as it got. Green meant you had planetary forcefields and interdiction fields. Yellow worlds had city-scale force fields and local fleet presence, Orange meant you just had fleet presence, and Red was undefended. No one wanted to live in a Red Zone, which made my current position here on the frontier in a red zone extra unfun.

I smiled.

"Star Forge got to my home system, we're being upgraded to a blue zone as we speak."

I felt my AK-120 and rubbed it.

"I remember when my system became a blue zone. We're still toying around with the Omnigel forges but we went from having no industry to expanding."

"Really?"

"Yeah. I live in Biko and the forcefield industry is really taking off there. Same thing will happen to your system, most likely. There's a ton of demand for pretty much everything, you know, because of the war."

I closed my eyes, tried to imagine my shit hole system having money.

"Thank God we joined up."

A ship lowered and I relaxed as the Uni's came out.

"You're late."

Their armor was pitted and rusted.

"Oh? I'm sorry some people can't hide behind Fuck off huge force fields!"

Ted motioned for me to take over, he hated the social stuff.

"You know the rules: we dump the Covenant craft we bodied onworld and your boys are allowed to cart them off, as a part of the treaty of Warsaw. Name of your ship?"

"UNSS Bizmark."

I typed it in.

"You have a week to take whatever you want. The more intact ships are in sector C right now, you might be able to get their fields working."

"Thanks."

He turned around and left. The sand blew and I leaned back, my neck cracking.

"I fucking hate sand."

"At least the air is breathable on this world."

"Yeah but it's mostly fucking desert."

I took a sip of water.

"Wish they would terraform this place, ted... Or at least do something about the sand."

"It's not going to be worth terraforming until the war's over."

I looked over in the direction of the UNSC ship.

"Anil... I know you feel bad for them."

"People are dying."

"Yeah, they are, but before we help the UNSC we have to secure our own systems first. Once we do that we can export city-wide and local forcefields, even the planetary stuff. If we spread ourselves too thin we are not going to be able to help anyone."

"It's a shit situation."

"Yeah... Can't disagree with that."