We put Ash and Mark into cryo not long after we entered slipspace. To them, the months-long journey was nearly instantaneous. They went to sleep and awoke not much later, with nothing but the stinging itch of cryosleep to mark the elapsed time. For us, it was a different story. Three humans, one engineer. On a ship meant to house thousands.
Halsey still didn't like me. That much I knew. I may have been mute, but I wasn't stupid. I could hear the whispered arguments with Mendez on Onyx. The ways she looked at us when she thought we couldn't tell. Whether it was because we were Ackerson's brainchild, or because of my condition, I could never quite pin down. She would end up spending most of her time in the medical bay anyways, and I was more than happy to leave her there. Linda told me that Halsey's daughter was killed. I didn't know how to feel after that.
With the Halsey in the med-bay, I spent most of my time prowling the decks of Triumph, especially the ones the Turians didn't roam. Linda tried, but even I could tell that her heart wasn't in it. She was withdrawn, even more than she had been on Onyx. The fire was back in her eyes, but her monk-like attitude didn't make for good conversation. Not that I'm one to talk. She spent much of her time in meetings with Victus and the staff of Triumph, coordinating with Tibril and Kilware about Halo. Her orders to me were always short and succinct. I'm not sure a wasted word passed between us for the length of the journey.
As a result, I spent nearly all my time wandering the halls with Tends to List. It was nice, in a way, to have a companion that didn't judge. Who didn't pity me for my voice. With Tends to List I didn't have to worry about any of it. He would click and chirp at me, occasionally writing something on my PDA with a wave of a tentacle. It was nice. Tom and I could take on the world together. But in his absence, it was nice to have a distraction. I grew close to List, at least as close as one can come to a biological supercomputer. If Tom was a brother, List would become a friend.
Williams, Lucy. Words Unspoken. Translated by Aurelia Savo, Thessia Diplomatic Press, 2255, pp. 261.
It had been days since Osh'Leih nar Teslaya had met the strange creature. Since, she had returned to the surface only a couple of times, each time to try and track down food and water for herself. The creature, after she had made clear her intentions, had revealed an elevator to her, and when she stepped on it, it rocketed her towards the surface. As a fugitive, she knew it was dangerous. The city was littered with cameras. It seemed the humas had taken their city policing seriously. But every time she passed one, it would turn away. It seemed the creature had a greater influence on the city than she could even imagine.
It also became apparent to her why the creature had lured her down into the underbelly of the city to begin with. Or at least, what it wanted her to do. She couldn't initially piece together exactly why it had chosen her. But either way, on that first day, after she had gently put down the human pistol, it had gingerly taken her hand in one of its slimy tentacles. And then it started to move, drifting through the air much like Hanar. Still, it always looked curious, peeking its slender head around every corner and into every crevice.
The pair navigated the corridors of the data center, until they came into a massive bank of servers. Some kind of network, clearly, but she couldn't tell anymore. Huge conduits of data cabling snaked out of the banks, feeding back into the central hub where she had first met the creature. Unlike much of the facility, the equipment here hadn't escaped whatever battle had occurred here. Plasma scoring marred many of the banks, deep gouges scored into the complicated equipment. Next to the entrance was the destroyed wreck of even more electrical equipment, ruined when it crashed to the floor from racks on the roof.
As quickly as the creature had led her here, it turned to her omni-tool, and with a wave if its tentacles, words suddenly appeared on her helmet's display. Osh jumped back, startled at the speed with which the creature interacted with her display. In a second, she realized something even more startling: the words weren't being run through her translators.
The words the creature wrote through her omni-tool weren't in human. It was Khelish.
(Greetings Osh'Leih nar Teslaya.)
Her mouth hung open as she put together the gravity of the situation. The creature looked back at her expectantly, and every couple of seconds one of the six eyes would blink slowly. This creature, which she had found, no, had led her in the depths of the New Mombasa underbelly, who could control everything from cell doors to traffic signs and security cameras, knew how to speak Khelish.
They were on Earth, many hundreds of light years from the nearest far-flung colonies, and this creature had figured out how to interface with her omni-tool. And it could speak Khelish. And it knew her name.
Confused, the creature prodded at her chest with a tentacle and then gestured down to the omni-tool and then at her display. Its head cocked, as it went to inspect the omni-tool once more, as if it was worried it had made a mistake. Quickly, she realized what it wanted.
"Hello?"
The creature perked up immediately and started nodding enthusiastically. Her eyes met with the creature's. Well, two of them.
"What…What are you?"
The creature tapped at her wrist again, this time with one of its frilly ended tentacles. A new block of text appeared on her helmet.
(Quick to Adjust)
A surge of pride rushed through her. Had the alien just complimented her? A broad smile reached her face, as she nearly squealed in excitement, "thank you! But I can't hack into an omni-tool in seconds. How do you speak Khelish?"
The creature stared at her dumbly. Its eyes blinked at her, mirroring her dumbstruck expression from earlier. After a moment, it seemed to shake its head at her, in response to what she couldn't say. With a downward tailing whisper, it reached for her omni-tool once more.
(Help fix, Find entity: Sadie.)
Before she could even begin to formulate a response, the creature turned away and drifted over to a damaged bank of electronics. One of its frilled tentacles reached down into the tangled and melted mess of wiring, and started to pick them apart, rearranging and sorting through the mess of electronics in the ruined bank. As Osh moved besides the creature, she noticed how it was working, moving quickly over large segments of the circuitry. But there were areas that it avoided touching. Nothing seemed remarkable to Osh about them, and as she activated her omni-tool to help her path the electrical connections through the area, nothing important stood out to her.
She had seen countless broken systems on board Teslaya. It wasn't anything new to her. More importantly, she understood how to identify dangerous components that should be avoided at all costs. And this wasn't one of them. She couldn't figure out why the creature avoided certain areas on each rack of electronics. Each time it finished work on the surrounding areas, it would pause and look at her, expectantly. Eventually, she asked the question.
"Why are you avoiding these areas?"
The alien rolled its head in some form of acknowledgement and reached again for her arm.
(Unstable, unknown variables. Quarian must fix)
Osh nearly snorted in surprise, and said, "you can't expect me to know how to fix that! I don't know anything about these systems."
She barely knew anything about their humans, much less how their vast city sized network worked. She wanted to help the alien; she really did. But she had no way of knowing anything about this human tech. She didn't know what the alien was expecting, but in a sense, she was disappointed to let it down. Still, since she was down here, she figured she could at least try and help the creature; learn what she could about the complicated system.
So, day after day, night after night, she watched the alien work. While she slept, the alien worked diligently, and when she awoke, it was always still working away. Still, the enormity of the complex meant that they never seemed to make any kind of significant progress. After a few weeks, she got to the point where she could begin to understand many of the more rudimentary repairs the alien was making. The area in each bank where power surges blew out power supplies, for instance, was both an easy fix with an omni-tool, and one of the most common failures the pair encountered. Eventually, she started working on these simple fixes ahead of the alien, repairing what she could before the alien had to take over for the more complicated repairs.
The more and more she worked, the more and more familiar she became with the basic outlay of the circuits. She slowly began to understand the basic function of many of the sections. Power. Networking. Data processing. She began to understand more of human that one area in every bank, and sometimes entire racks of electronics different from all the rest, the engineer never touched. She still couldn't understand why. The alien refused to give any more information beyond its simple warning, and the urging that she must be the one to fix it. What really perplexed her, is that as she became more familiar with the rest of the system, those areas that the engineer avoided remained a mystery.
And yet, months in, she began to get a tingling in the back of her head. With each bank she helped to repair, that mysterious area called to her. An inkling of an idea, a ghost of a memory, slowly started to form in her mind. She had learned much of the human system. But this region the alien wouldn't dare touch, her ultimate task?
She had a horrific feeling that she had seen it before.
Mordin Solus had a sense of grim curiosity as he watched the starry sky of the outer reaches of the Sol system pass. He was excited to finally arrive in the new system, but the lack of information he had left him unsettled. The operation was cloaked in even more secrecy than Mordin was used to, and that was saying something for the young STG operative. Like many things in the STG, the first he ever heard of was when his team lead informed the unit that they would be leaving for the Sol system in the morning.
When the team arrived at their transport the next day, a small Salarian cruiser, on the surface armed for anti-piracy actions, they found the cargo bay packed with supplies, they knew something big was happening. They had nine months of rations, and all the ammunition and supplies the unit could ask for. The cargo bay was filled with heavy multi-ton crates. On the manifest, the crates contained sensor arrays that would be used to monitor coms traffic for pirates. In reality, inside the crates were several excavation vehicles, some of the finest models fresh off Sur'Kesh Heavy Industries' supply line. In other crates, were complex hostile environment habitation modules, the kind the STG set down somewhere they intended to stay a while.
Mordin had seen quartermasters stowing high-temperature gear, full body exosuits designed for low oxygen environments. The STG didn't throw around these kinds of resources on a whim. This was big, something bigger than the usual counter-terrorist ops his team had been running.
They weren't the only team here. A small squad from the STG cyberwarfare division had arrived at the cruiser before them. The two teams exchanged courtesies, and it was quickly revealed that the cyberwarfare division didn't know anything about their mission either. With the mission presumably being in UEG space, the cryptologists thought it could only possibly be something to do with the UNSC's AI.
The AI were the dark secret that none of the rank-and-file STG members like Mordin were technically supposed to know about. But STG command, seeing the involvement of both Turian and Asari forces in the coverup, felt it would be wrong to leave their operatives in the dark. If asked, they all knew nothing. But they all knew the UEG was a ship without a pilot, so to speak. Still, the cryptologists' speculation didn't satisfy Mordin. It didn't explain the excavation gear or high temperature gear. Nothing did, not yet at least. They were STG, not a construction unit.
And that only left his brain racing at hundreds of kilometers an hour. When the cruiser departed the system, and they still didn't get any updates, Mordin had a burgeoning thrill. He had a simple rule of thumb: the longer you were left in the dark, the more exciting the truth.
And so, when their ship arrived in the Sol system with a shudder days later, and the two teams still hadn't been briefed, he was ecstatic. They were told they would be heading for the outer reaches of the system; they would never get close enough to glimpse the remains of the powerful UNSC fleet, even with the long-range sensors. Still, cruising at FTL, Mordin was excited at the very prospect of being in human space. It was a new domain for him, and for Salarian kind. He thinks of the number of things he would do if he wasn't on a mission: genetically cataloguing Earth's surviving species, postulating about the evolutionary history of Earth, and answering the question that had been in the back of every Asari's mind. There was so much to explore in this system, and it would be a shame that he was likely to experience so little of it.
Shortly, they were given orders to board the dropships they had brought with them. Some were already loaded with the thousands of tons of supplies they brought with them; others quickly became packed with Salarian agents. As the dropships departed from the hangar of the small cruisers, the viewports and the viewscreens were blacked. The claustrophobia didn't bother the seasoned STG teams, but it did add even more intrigue for Mordin. The cruiser's farewell transmission was broadcast to the teams, wishing them luck as they returned to the core of UNSC space to patrol for pirates as a cover.
It was odd. Mordin couldn't remember in any operation that had maintained quite this level of secrecy. Normally, they had to hide their operations from the terrorist group and occasional Krogan cell. Normally it didn't take nearly this much. Whatever they were hiding from this time, must have much longer reach. Exciting!
Mordin's ears detected the change before he did, the gentle hum of the engines became a whine, as they entered some kind of atmosphere. His gut did a dance as the dropship wheeled around and entered a landing sequence. Once the ship hit the deck, there was a quick murmur from the crew. But, for minutes, nothing happened. They could hear the external doors of the cockpit open, but the crew compartment remained sealed. A huge rumble and metallic snuck into the bay.
The minutes ticked by. After what felt like an eternity to Mordin's racing mind, there was a hiss. The door at the rear of the bay slowly lowered.
And the Mordin Solus stepped into the shining lights of the largest hangar he had ever seen. The doors of the dropship were facing massive doors, by their sheen, steel or titanium. Each door was dozens of meters wide, and as he looked to his left and his right, he could see door after door extending into the distance, massive support ribs between each climbing into the soaring ceiling above them.
He made his way around the Salarian dropships, where the cockpits were already empty, and the pilots were nowhere to be found. Behind them, the hangar was even more expansive. They were on the lowest level of 3 steps, with the outlines of massive elevators running up to the next step. On their level, was what felt like acres of flat decking, obviously to land craft on. Around them were dozens of storage tanks, each one labeled with its own distinct markings and colors. The step above them had what looked like a road running its length, with guard posts and monitoring stations tucked in behind it. Under the top tier, Mordin could see the windows and protruding nests of flight control centers.
As he looked to his left and his right, the titanic open space was enough to stun him. He held his arm out in front of him, measuring the distances between the ceiling and the floor in segments of his long fingers. His results? The hanger was massive, no other way about it. He was confident a brave enough frigate captain could park his vessel in this hangar here without much trouble at all.
But despite the hangar's titanic size, it was empty. In some sections, plastic construction sheets fluttered in the wind. Wind. The hangar is so big it has wind. Convection currents likely, although could be an effect of high-volume conditioning.
But, outside of the Salarian dropships, there was not a single craft in the hangar. Odd. And, the more the Salarian looked, the more it became apparent just how unfinished the space was. Some of the screens and consoles still had protective film on them, in other spots, there were just empty holes where the consoles were supposed to be. Some portions of the hangar had extensive markings, as was becoming increasingly clear to Mordin, UNSC markings. Others were still bare, either with a protective primer coat, or none at all, titanium exposed to the world.
He had seen the reports on the UNSC dreadnoughts. They were big, but not this big. Which meant that this was some kind of a space station, perhaps an emergency headquarters on the outskirts of the system, temporarily safe from the Covenant assault. It still didn't explain the lack of, well, anything properly UNSC. None of the "pelican" class dropships. No "longsword" fighter-bombers (and how he had wished to see one of the giant vehicles in action). The hangar looked abandoned. No, never used.
Was the facility, presumably a massive station, still under construction when the Covenant attacked? Likely.
Mordin was confident in his assertion until the deck beneath him began to rumble, and he felt the slight shift of his body before the inertial dampers kicked in.
He knew the feeling. They were moving. And to his surprise, he could feel the difference between this ship and the Salarian cruiser they had just departed. The effects of no eezo, he supposed.
Which meant this wasn't a station. This hangar was too big to belong to one of the UNSC cruisers, which could only mean it was something else. Something that the citadel council didn't know about. It suddenly made sense to Mordin why the STG was running an operation with the UNSC, with so much care for secrecy. The citadel couldn't know. Mordin was sure he wasn't even supposed to know either; the segregation of the pilots, the blacked out viewscreens, were clearly all in an attempt to hide the approach to this ship from the STG squads.
Over the rumble of the ship, suddenly there was a sharp burst of rapid thumps, like an artillery barrage in the distance, muted by the thick titanium of the hull. The thumps quickly eased, and a gentle whine took its place. But, like a turbine spinning up, the whine rose in pitch and volume, and in moments, it transitioned into a howl, like wind blasting through a tunnel.
Mordin's stomach turned, like it was being pulled from the inside out. The howl reached a crescendo. There was one final jolt, and suddenly, there was silence. The deck became motionless beneath their feet. Some of the Salarians shouted in surprise. Their voices reached Mordin's ears, but no echo bounced off the metallic walls of the hangar. It seemed like the whole ship was motionless. Footsteps sounded soft and empty, a stark difference to just moments before.
Suddenly, a voice crackled through the air. A Salarian voice.
"Welcome to slipspace," the voice announced with an air of authority, "I'm Commander Rhosus. I will be overseeing this operation."
Mordin had heard of slipspace, the groundbreaking method of FTL employed by the eezo-less UNSC. He had always hoped to experience it, he had just never anticipated it feeling so…unpleasant.
"Its about time I tell you about our operation here. I appreciate your dedication to secrecy."
Mordin knew the commander's words were hollow. This is STG. Secrecy is status quo.
The commander continued over the intercom above them, "in time, I will be down to join you and meet you all personally. This will be a long mission, and I want to know my personnel. For now, I remain on the bridge."
"We are on route to a planet in the system Epsilon Eridani. The humans called it Reach. Six months ago, it was captured by the Covenant and glassed. The surface was turned to slag, and the oceans boiled."
The destruction was wasteful. Entire biospheres destroyed. Siege and targeted bombardment would be equally effective at eliminating human resistance. "Glassing" a message, not a means. Wasteful killing. Disgraceful.
"During the glassing of Reach, UNSC survivors sheltered in a secret military installation known as CASTLE base. We know parts of this facility survived based on these survivor accounts. The facility was host to irreplaceable top secret UNSC and ONI research. Our mission is to retrieve research and items from one of the labs inside of the base. This research is vital to the UNSC, and the Salarian Union is being rewarded in kind."
Quickly, it all began to make perfect sense. The excavation equipment, perfect for digging out structures buried in rubble. The heat resistant exo-suits would protect the agents from the harsh conditions of a recently glassed world. The habs would shelter the group during the long search for the lab and the facility.
"This existence of this ship is highly classified. Your teams will be confined to the hangar and will not be allowed to wander the decks of the ship. I am placing my trust in your professionalism. We will handle all our preparation in the hangar and launch missions from there."
And with that, the last puzzle piece slid into place. The concealed viewscreens. The disappearance of the pilots. No doubt they too were on this ship, likely kept away from the rest of the team. They have seen the vessel during their landing. Security threat. This level of paranoia was something that Mordin had never encountered in his years with the STG. And it only drove his curiosity.
Rhosus finished, "with that in mind, let me introduce our UNSC liaison for this mission, and the construct at the helm of this ship."
A woman's voice, tonality much like an Asari, replaced Rhosus on the intercom, "Good evening, STG. My name is Aine."
/
/FFG-336 'IRONCLAD SPIRIT', Date: 2553/3/11
***ALERT***
NEW TRAFFIC ON: UNSC/EMERGENCY/EARLYWARNING:
UNSCHEDULED SLIPSPACE CONTACT
BEARING: OUTBOUND
CLASS: E
TYPE: UNKNOWN
JOY 2610-9 (Acting CO, 7th Fleet (HomeFleet/7Fleet/QRF-1)): …
JOY 2610-9 (Acting CO, 7th Fleet (HomeFleet/7Fleet/QRF-1)): …the fuck?
JOY 2610-9 (Acting CO, 7th Fleet (HomeFleet/7Fleet/QRF-1)): I need a status update on all E class contacts in the Sol system.
AFFIRMATIVE
WAITING…
DONE
6 CONTACTS FOUND
CONTACT R4: DESTROYED 2552/10/20. TRACKING 3,713 FRAGMENTS IN LEO.
CONTACT R5: DEPARTED SYSTEM 2552/10/21.
CONTACT R61: LAST ACTIVE 2552/11/3. ADRIFT IN LEO.
CONTACT R64: LAST ACTIVE 2552/11/3. GROUNDED NORTH OF KOLKATTA.
CONTACT R137: DESTROYED 2552/10/29. TRACKING 16 FRAGMENTS IN LEO.
CONTACT R149: LAST ACTIVE 2552/11/3. ADRIFT IN LMO.
JOY 2610-9 (Acting CO, 7th Fleet (HomeFleet/7Fleet/QRF-1)): Cross check againsthome fleet after-action reports.
JOY 2610-9 (Acting CO, 7th Fleet (HomeFleet/7Fleet/QRF-1)): Are all E type vessels currently accounted for?
CHECKING…
AFFIRMATIVE
JOY 2610-9 (Acting CO, 7th Fleet (HomeFleet/7Fleet/QRF-1)): Compare inbound and outbound contacts for E class vessels from 2552/10/20 to 2553/3/11.
WAITING…
6 INBOUND CONTACTS, 2 OUTBOUND CONTACTS
JOY 2610-9 (Acting CO, 7th Fleet (HomeFleet/7Fleet/QRF-1)): With 5 destroyed or still in system? Those numbers don't work.
JOY 2610-9 (Acting CO, 7th Fleet (HomeFleet/7Fleet/QRF-1)): What the hell is going on?
JOY 2610-9 (Acting CO, 7th Fleet (HomeFleet/7Fleet/QRF-1)): List known E class vessels. All factions.
WAITING…
E CLASS SLIPSPACE SIGNATURES (EST. 3-6km)
CAS Class Carrier (Covenant)
Punic Class Supercarrier (UNSC)
DDS Class Carrier (Covenant)
ORS Class Cruiser (Covenant)
JOY 2610-9 (Acting CO, 7th Fleet (HomeFleet/7Fleet/QRF-1)): The last Punic went down at Reach, and all Covenant contacts are accounted for.
JOY 2610-9 (Acting CO, 7th Fleet (HomeFleet/7Fleet/QRF-1)): So, what the hell just left?
UNKNOWN
/
/
The entrance corridor to Earth was more congested than the freighter pilot had ever seen. It seemed like every day more people flocked towards the novel system. The pilot didn't even begin to imagine what traffic might look like in a few months, much less this time next year. Even now, the Asari still maintained a narrow corridor into controlled airspace over Earth, and it stretched back into empty space nearly 3 times further than it had just a week prior. Of course, an enterprising smuggler could probably break away from the slow-moving column and make landfall away from the prying eyes of the Asari police forces. He'd heard stories of people who had tried it in the early days of the repopulation of Earth. The stories never came from somebody who was there.
None of the other captains in his circle had ever seen a human. He sure hadn't. And he'd been all over the Sol system, their supposed home system. Right now, he was hauling hundreds of thousands of metric tons of titanium-A battle plate from the human shipyards over Mars. From what the resource officer had told him, the armor that clad the human ships. Strapped in his hull was a not insignificant portion of the UNSC wartime stockpile, originally destined to expanding the UNSC fleet. Processed resources could be worth more than gold in instances like this. Repairing and adjusting the infrastructure of mega cities on Earth took far more than the citadel species could ship in through the portal. So, the decision had been made, presumably with human permission, to dip into the UNSC's massive titanium reserves. Swords to ploughshares and all that.
The captain tried not to think about what the survivors of the UNSC Navy might feel. The Navy was the single most frequent point of discussion for the freighters that congregated in the New Mombasa dive bars. Like the humans, the supposedly mighty vessels of the human fleet remained remarkably absent. In fact, beyond the shattered debris drifting in orbit, which he had only ever viewed from an appreciable distance, he hadn't so much as glimpsed a human vessel larger than a atmospheric transport.
Some of his friends claimed they had, but he wasn't sure that he believed them. It was obvious to the pilot that the situation was far worse than the citadel council made it sound. Politicians lying. What else is new? Still, he couldn't understand the reason for the lie. There were obviously still humans somewhere. The functions of the city were still running flawlessly. There seemed to be a complete understanding of the resources in the system.
But still, the stories of the humans enchanted the pilot. He found himself staring into the debris field on most of his journeys, searching for the slightest hint of movement on his ship's sensors. So far, it had been weeks. And nothing. His friend's description still echoed in his mind. Dark gray shapes that slowly stalked the debris field. The occasional flash of a thruster firing where there should be none. The thought sent a shiver down his spine. The humans were out there all right. He wondered if any of them were watching him now, if there were any eyes staring back from the vast debris field.
Then, there was a sudden feeling in his gut. A whisper of nausea wrapped its way around his throat. And then, off his starboard bow, he saw it. It started with a singular flash of lighting that arced across the black of space. It seemed to appear from nowhere, and for a moment, it appeared to disappear into the void from which it came. Almost as quickly as it had disappeared, a raging torrent of blinding blue light appeared, and started expanding at a precipitous rate prom a pinprick to a brightness that threatened to overwhelm the auto-tint on his freighter's viewscreens. In the center of the storm was a black darker than anything the pilot had ever seen. No light. No reflections. No glow. Just black. As the blue anomaly began to expand, others started to open nearby it, looking very much the same, just on a smaller scale.
And then, from the black at the center of the larger portal, emerged a gunmetal gray, twin-muzzled prow. The shape charged from the void, stretching longer, and wider, and taller as it went. The ship seemed to fill the pilot's viewscreen as it leaped from the portal. It was truly titanic, longer than anything the pilot had ever seen. And he'd seen Destiny Asencion, at least in his early days, on a route to the Citadel. But the ship didn't seem to stop growing, even as the portal closed with a flash behind it. And it was then the pilot realized. He and his hundreds of thousands of tons of titanium were in the way.
The pilot froze, his hands tightening on the controls. He knows he should maneuver, give way. His body wouldn't respond, locked in a deep panic. The bow of the massive warship angled upward as it bore down on the diminutive freighter. Down the length of the hull, bright orange rocket plumes suddenly exploded, as for a split second, the bottom of the ship seemed alight. The ship seemed to jump upwards, a sudden massive impulse that the pilot had never seen outside of an eezo vessel.
And still, even with the emergency course correction, it was too close. The UNSC ship rushed overhead only a few hundred meters from the freighter. The pilot could count the barrels on the point defense stations, see the sealed hangar doors, and the long sensor antennas projecting forwards from the prow. When the ship passed it passed silently, and the pilot could only breathe a sigh of relief as the furious glow of the ship's twin engines faded from the cockpit. Then, for a moment, there was peace.
And then, the vessel shook like it was caught in a giant's grasp. The warship's powerful ion wash slammed into the freighter, nearly jostling the pilot out of his seat.
And when the pilot looked back out of the window; at the space where the portals had appeared, he saw the Turian expeditionary fleet.
It's the middle of the nightshift on Triumph, and Aurelia's eyes are heavy with the promise of sleep. She doesn't know what's keeping her awake, she knows she needs to be up early in the morning. But for now, she was cuddled up in her cabin bunk watching data feed past her monitor. She wasn't working, not really. She wasn't looking for anything or trying to discover anything new in the data. Like always in subspace, the readings had been the same for nearly a week. Still, she couldn't peel her tired eyes away from the screen. The hours ticked away as she watched in a disinterested trance.
And then, in one instant, the fusion yield surged. In a flash, Triumph's automatic control systems adjusted the throttles to match, and to the rest of the ship, nothing had ever happened. But Aurelia noticed. The gentle thrum of the fusion torches had pitched for a few seconds, and in the overwhelming homogeneity of slipspace transit, she noticed.
She blinked the sleep from her eyes and this time, actually paid attention to the readouts. And sure enough, her ears didn't lie. There it was, 30 seconds ago, a 9 percent increase in the fusion power output. It didn't come from an injection of fuel, nor a reduction in demand or load. Everything remained constant besides the yield and the automatic throttle response. But how?
She slinked out of bed and slipped a long coat over her night garments from her locker. She slid on her boots without bothering to secure the straps. Grabbing her data pad, she ambled to the door. When the door to her cabin slid open, the harsh electric lighting of Triumph's corridor nearly blinded her. After all, the cruiser never slept, even if her crew did. As her eyes readjusted, she slowly walked down the deserted corridors. In slipspace, the needs of Triumphs crew was minimal. Halliday said that she would have put most of them into cryo-sleep by now if she had any idea how it would affect their alien physiology.
So, especially during the nightshift (according to Earth time), the decks were empty. And now, in the middle of the 'night', Aurelia was alone. Her mind still wasn't exactly sure where her feet were taking her. Engineering, somewhere surely. The walk wasn't a short one, despite her lodging's proximity to the massive fusion drives. It was a nest of elevators and staircases, snaking through dozens of floors, and around the massive bulk of the reactor. Eventually she found herself in the long corridor that led into reactor control.
She had been here before, obviously, during the dozens of familiarization briefings she had with Halliday, and again to conduct her own research. The reactor was louder here, and she felt the cruiser's rapid pulse echoing off the walls around her.
A faint chuffing sound echoed from the control room ahead of her. She snuck closer to the open door, peering her head around the corner. It was the huragok the humans had brought on board. The beast's pink fleshy skin and tentacles dangled beneath the bulbous gas bag as it fiddled with the reactor console.
And next to the huragok was one of the Spartans. The Spartan's back was turned to her, so all she could see is the back of the woman's fatigues. The Spartan was short, not much taller than Aurelia herself. The huragok reached over to a data-pad at the Spartan's wrist, and with a sharp trill, seemed to motion to the Spartan. The Spartan turned to face the huragok, and with an enthusiastic nod, a broad smile broke out across her face. Aurelia could see her face now. The Spartan had short black hair, and dark, wide set eyes. A scattering of freckles stretched across the bridge of her nose. When she smiled, she had a look of youthful innocence, a smile that reminded Aurelia of warm nights at her childhood home. When she signed something back to the huragok with her hands, the grin on her face spread even wider. There seemed to be no barrier between the Spartan and the huragok, and they exchanged messages and gestures with a glee that Aurelia hadn't seen since she was a child.
And then, the Spartan spotted Aurelia's face out of the corner of her eye, and the moment shattered. The Spartan whipped around, the happy glow in her eyes vanished as her eyes narrowed into a killer's gaze. The Spartan moved to the side, placing herself between Aurelia and the engineer. To the Spartan's credit, she didn't reach for the holstered M6 at her hip, and instead settled for a questioning glare at the Asari in the doorway.
Heart racing, Aurelia stepped away from the bulkhead, her hands raised slightly in a show of non-aggression.
"Sorry, I didn't know you would be down here," she explained carefully. The Spartan stared back blankly.
"I do a lot of work with Halliday on Triumph's propulsion system. I was monitoring the telemetry when I saw a power surge."
At this, the Spartan's eyebrows rose, and her expression shifted. Aurelia continued, "and, uh, I came down to check it out. Did you do something?"
The Spartan glanced back at the huragok before stepping aside and turning to Aurelia. She lifted a single petit hand, and with a wave of her pale fingers, beckoned the Asari over towards the huragok. As she approached, the huragok spared her a single curious glance, before turning back to the control console. The Spartan gestured to the console, and they both leaned in.
The huragok's hands flew across the interface, manipulating fuel ratios and cooling loops in ways that Aurelia didn't even know Triumph had the capacity to do. It suddenly dawned on her, this huragok was what caused the power boost. UNSC engineers had spent years refining their reactor's operating conditions. To improve the capacity of a plant 9 percent in just a few minutes, well, was incredible. An astonished grin blossomed on her face, and she turned to her left, where the Spartan was watching her reaction with rapt attention. The Spartan looked back at her with an amused expression.
"H…how?" she managed to stammer out. The Spartan shrugged at first, but quickly something flashed across her face, and she started typing a word on the data pad on her arm. Aurelia's translator made quick work of the words, as she took a moment to question why the Spartan didn't tell her.
(We called them engineers)
"The huragok?" Aurelia asked, and the Spartan gave a single nod. Aurelia looked back at the engineer. Two of its six eyes stared back at her, blinking lazily. It was hard to believe a creature so, well, bizarre, could have such an incredible grasp of human technology. Aurelia supposed the Spartan might be thinking the same thing about her.
She turned to take another look at the Spartan, who was now watching the engineer with a fascinated expression. Now that she was closer, she could make out a faint scar running down her right cheek. The blemishes of war on an otherwise youthful face. A thought raced through her mind.
"I've met some of your allies, but not you," Aurelia asked, "do you have a name?"
The Spartan stared at her like she was stupid. Of course she does, idiot. Aurelia looked down in shame, "I'm sorry, you don't have to tell me if you don't want to."
A touch of hurt danced across the Spartan's eyes. She looked off into the distance for a moment, her expression indecipherable. Aurelia looked away, turning to look not at anything, but instead to avoid the Spartan's judgmental stares.
Then, she felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned to see the Spartan holding her data pad out so that Aurelia could see.
(Lucy)
The smile reappeared on the Spartan's, no, Lucy's, face, and Aurelia found a wellspring of excitement fill her heart. Still, Aurelia's curiosity was further peaked by the data pad.
"Why do you use that? Can you speak?"
Lucy shrugs briefly, before shaking her head quickly. Aurelia's heart sinks.
"Did you get injured during the war?" Aurelia asks delicately, not wanting to damage the fragile rapport between herself and Lucy. The Spartan seems to think for a moment, head gently swaying side to side, before shaking her head once more.
"Were you born like this?"
A nostalgic smile flashed across Lucy's face, before she once again shook her head. The Spartan's expression was still cryptic, and Lucy seemed to almost be humoring Aurelia.
"When did it happen then?"
Lucy counted on her fingers. On her right hand, she held up all five fingers, and on her left, she held up two more.
"When you were 25?" Lucy shook her head and smirked, at what Aurelia couldn't tell.
"When you were 7?" Lucy nodded at first, before shaking her head no. She twirled a finger in the air.
"7 years ago?" Aurelia finally asked. Lucy nodded with a solemn smile.
Aurelia wondered what had happened, but she wisely decided to let the subject lie. Seven years ago, the Spartan was probably at war with the Covenant. Aurelia wasn't sure she wanted to know what happened then to make her like this. Now, for the first time, she had a Spartan that seemed interested in talking to her. In their first meetings on the bridge, Aurelia existed as a bystander, not a participant. The Spartans didn't engage with her. In later encounters, where she came into contact with Linda after the departure of the lieutenant, she had been given the cold shoulder. And she hadn't even tried to talk to the mythical Halsey that Halliday had warned her about.
So she wanted to make sure she handled Lucy carefully, as paradoxical as that seemed for somebody of Lucy's strength. Because Aurelia desperately wanted to connect with a human. To learn their stories. Asking too much too early could jeopardize all of that. Especially with a golden opportunity in her hands.
Because, in front of her was a human, that unlike most of the others on this ship, seemed friendly to her, willing to open up her heart just a bit, despite the stings of war. It was a welcome change.
"You seem different from the others. In a good way, I mean," she said, stumbling over the possible misinterpretations, "…if you don't mind me saying."
The traces of a smile crept into Lucy's eyes, and she gave a nonchalant shrug. She typed something else on her data pad, and then reached it out so that Aurelia could see.
(They're old.)
Aurelia was taken aback at first, but Lucy's failing attempt to hide the mischievous grin crossing her face gave the Spartan away. She was joking. Aurelia couldn't believe it. A joke. Still, the joke, as innocent as it seemed, burrowed its way into her mind. Lucy looked much younger than the other Spartans. If they were Asari, she would have guessed they were hundreds of years older than Lucy. But she really had no idea how humans aged. Once again, her curiosity drove her to ask more.
"How old?"
Lucy seemed to pause and think for a second, brows furrowed, before flashing 4-0 and 4-5 on her right hand. She shrugged, and not satisfied with her own answer, reached down to her data pad again. She typed some, paused for a moment, and then deleted her message and retyping it.
(Born before the war. Not sure exactly.)
The implication made Aurelia's stomach turn. She had expected, for a species that looked so similar to the Asari, a similar lifespan. Instead, the grizzled Spartans she had met on Triumph's bridge, who she had guessed to be somewhere between 500 and 700 years old, were merely in their 40s. The ramifications of a nearly 30 year war suddenly became all too real. If human lifespans were more like the Turians than the Asari, 30 years could practically be an eternity, a large portion of a human's life.
As her mind processed, she suddenly realized the other implication of Lucy's words. If the others were different because they were born before the war, what did that make Lucy? Just how young was the Spartan in front of her? Had she ever known peace?
"Lucy… how old are you?" she asked, a feeling of dread creeping into her system.
The Spartan seemed non-plussed by her question and flashed a quick 2-0 on her hands. The wave of horror must have left an impression on Aurelia's face, because the Spartans nonchalant expression quickly turned into one of concern. She cocked her head at the Asari, a questioning gaze reflected in her dark eyes.
Aurelia didn't know how to explain herself. In Asari culture, the young Lucy would still be in the early years of childhood. And yet she was born in the middle of a war that had already been waged for nearly a decade. At some point between then and now, she joined the UNSC and was turned into a soldier. A Spartan. Aurelia still wasn't sure what that all meant. Just that what Halliday wouldn't tell her told a story of its own. Black ops, military secrets, and shaky ethical ground.
Somewhere, over the course of Lucy's entire lifetime, Aurelia was elsewhere in the galaxy. In what felt for her, a short albeit exciting period in her life, Lucy had underwent birth, childhood and rebirth into whatever she was today. It saddened her. Turians and especially Salarians aged fast. Much faster than she did. But for some reason the rapid pace of human life seemed to hurt Aurelia more. Maybe it was their resemblance, some kind of deep evolutionary connection to those that looked so much like her own. Perhaps they weren't as alien to her. Maybe somewhere deep in her subconscious, the other races of the Citadel were always others to her. Maybe the humans weren't.
She wondered what it would have been like to live in human space as an Asari. To watch generations of inspiring people be born, live, and die. To watch as a race struggled against an inevitable opponent. To see how they reacted. To see how many lives they were willing to sacrifice to give others a chance. Aurelia realized now was her opportunity, to finally get a human perspective on the war from more than just whispers and old recordings.
"Lucy, and you don't have to answer this," Aurelia prefaced, "what was it like? Your childhood during the war. The war itself."
Lucy's concerned face turned to a slight frown. She paused for a moment, her expression slightly pained. Eventually, she began to type.
(Don't remember my home. Glassed when I was 6. Remember a cat. Maybe a horse).
Aurelia's guilt creeped back into her face. It seemed the war touched everybody, some worse than most. She found herself imagining the war as a gradual tragedy, the collapse of a species in slow motion. She had forgotten that for most places, the war was also quick. That the UNSC's best disguise was secrecy. That when that secrecy failed, the war was far too quick.
As Lucy typed on, Aurelia watched her expressions closely. A twinge of fury first, and then a sort of saddened reminiscence. Aurelia quickly realized that Lucy's face was its own sort of language, her own expressive way of conveying how she was truly feeling.
(Parents were killed by elites. I hid.)
(Didn't understand what was happening. Somebody brought me to a shuttle.)
(Too many people. I was scared.)
Aurelia had tried to imagine what it must have been like on a world under siege. The rookie's recording helped, but it was different from a soldiers perspective. Having a weapon and the tools to fight back. To see a hardened soldier like Lucy recount such a time of helplessness was insightful; a time when even she couldn't fight back. Aurelia felt pity for the young Spartan. She knew Lucy wouldn't want it, but she felt it anyways.
"What then?" she asked in a softer tone.
(I was a ward of the UEG. Later, I chose to fight.)
The simplicity of Lucy's statement struck a chord with Aurelia. It was as if that simple truth was the world to the young girl. She could see now why the girl became a Spartan, whatever that entailed. There was a clarity to her mind, the way she thought about the world. A determination to keep on moving, of seizing agency of her situation. She was only broken from her thoughts by another tap on her shoulder. Lucy once again displaying a message on her data pad. Her face was curious, and there was no trace of the emotions that had clouded her face just moments earlier.
(How old?)
Beneath all of her reminiscence, Lucy's ability to transition from a story of war and tragedy to a simple questions about somebody's age almost made Aurelia chuckle.
"382"
The Spartan's slack jawed look of astonishment finally broke Aurelia into a fit of laughter. The two would spend the next three hours there in the reactor control room, all while the engineer worked away. By the end of the night, Aurelia wouldn't remember half the things they had talked about. But she would have a new understanding of the diminutive Spartan.
The pelican streaked across the frigid skies over Seoul, icy white condensation trailing out of its engines for miles behind it. The city hadn't yet been the focus of colonization efforts from the citadel, and for now, the only traces of non-human presence were the occasional week-long Asari patrols, designed to spot and deter any surface level looting. Of course, in a city as large as Seoul, the patrols would do little to deter determined looters. The same was true in nearby Seongnam, where the towering skyscrapers provided far too much space for even an entire battalion to secure. But, according to the briefing the Spartan team had received from the Asari administrators, the Korean metropolis' relative remoteness from colonized cities served in its favor; word of the city hadn't yet spread to the scavengers, although the administrator didn't expect that to last.
Olivia surveyed the city through the open door of the pelican. A mid-March snowstorm had recently blown through the city, and the Covenant raids on the city had disabled the city superintendent, leaving the streets thick with fresh snowfall. Where normally the snowfall would have been removed by a system of plows and blowers, without the superintendent, it stuck, leaving a white crisscrossed lattice across the entire city. The snow-capped skyscrapers were a majestic sight and reminded Olivia of the towering structures of her home city on Miridem. Unfortunately, the Covenant had left their mark on Seoul.
The signs of battle were light in the city, although even from high above the city surface, Olivia could see areas where UNSC artillery strikes had leveled buildings to halt Covenant advance. If she squinted, she could see the profiles of scorpions strewn across the streets, attempting to blockade routes into the city center. In certain districts, long burned lines carved into the earth, where Covenant vehicles had carved landing sights and cleared UNSC defenses. A Covenant corvette had crashed north of the city, and its purple hulk was clear even kilometers away.
It was eerie, so quiet. So empty. Like a war frozen in time.
The pelican crossed from the concrete jungle over a small pocket of dense forest before beginning to circle. The nondescript bunker-like angles of Seongnam Special Warfare Center were barely visible below the dense tree cover below them. Olivia could see the well-traveled paths cut into the snowy forest, complete with captured Covenant vehicles on which to test the UNSC's newest weapons. Through her com, Olivia could hear Kelly making the final pre-landing checks, as the broad tail of the pelican swung around, now just a dozen meters above the snow dusted treetops. As they lowered down onto the pad, the pelican's jetwash clouded the air with disturbed powder.
Coming from behind her, Fred vaulted out of the pelican with a well-practiced comfort. His MJOLNIR didn't sink far into the shallow snow before contacting the metallic pad just a few centimeters below the surface. He swept around the landing area, as the pelican's engines began the initial stages of their shutdown. Fred seemed to take a moment to himself. As the engines whined to a halt, Olivia was struck by the silence of the facility. The snow acted like a muffler, and everything seemed to act almost without a noise. She could hear the squeak of Fred's armored boots in the snow, but besides that, the hillside seemed to be almost perfectly at peace.
She looked down at the ground below the pelican's ramp. The pelican had shifted forwards slightly since Fred leaped out of it, and at the end of the ramp was nothing but unblemished snowfall. Something kept her from taking those two simple steps. She was frozen, taking in the majesty around her. The delicate beauty of the trees in the forest, devoid of their vibrant foliage. Towering skyscrapers in the distance, rising from the river plain. The cold nip in the air, and the earthy scent that filtered through her SPI. She looked down at the ground beneath the ramp once more. Fred saw it too, turning to see her motionless on the ramp.
"First time, Spartan?" he asked.
Olivia smiled to herself. She could only bring herself to nod to the Lieutenant, who stood watching her from behind his MJOLNIR.
He waved her forwards, "It's all just dirt, same as anywhere."
Olivia took a step towards the edge of the ramp, and then one more off it. The snow crunched beneath her feet before her feet planted firmly on the titanium pad beneath it. She took another step forwards, leaving her ridged boot prints behind in the snow. The snow felt, somewhat disappointingly, exactly like it had during winter training on Onyx. She didn't know what she was expecting.
Suddenly a hand pushed her shoulder, causing her to stagger another few steps forwards. As she turned to look, she quickly spotted the culprit. With her ODST helmet in her hands, Kelly grinned mischievously back at her and said, "congrats kid, your ancestors only beat you by a few hundred thousand years."
As Kelly strutted forwards and slid her helmet on, Olivia looked back at her uneven footsteps in the previously untouched snow. She barely heard Fred's voice.
"Welcome home."
Halsey's override codes got them inside of the facility easy enough. It seemed not even ONI was willing to lock MJOLNIR's mastermind out of one of her own facilities. The halls, were, as expected, deserted. All around them were telltale signs of compartmentalization. The early signs of a campaign of denial. Detonating charges had been set on the critical load bearing charges. Server racks were mined, and the facility's smart AI had, according to the station dumb AI he left, been transferred to another facility.
Defensive emplacements lined the hallways, turrets and modular fortifications preventing easy access to the facility HQ and power generation levels. The elevators were locked down, leaving the staircases as the only avenue down into the depths of the multileveled facility. Fred led them, following a map on his HUD provided by the dumb AI.
Olivia tried to ignore the piles of armor and uniforms that were tucked up against the fortifications.
The trio made their way down to the MJOLNIR lab, 12 floors below the surface. The dumb AI had advised them, much to Kelly's joy, that there were still a half dozen suits of MJOLNIR MK VI awaiting deployment. The woman moved with a joyful spring in her step, and the thought of Kelly as an overgrown, surgically enhanced child on her birthday nearly caused Olivia to chuckle.
The facility reminded Olivia of the orbital station above Onyx just a few years ago. She had mixed feelings about the operation. She remembered being proud that her labor was finally coming to fruition; that she would finally be set loose against the Covenant. She remembers the feeling of fire burning through her veins, the agonizing swelling of her body, deep, aching, inescapable pain in her bones.
She remembered the aftermath, before her first dose of smoothers, when her mind was clouded with paranoia and distrust, when she lashed out at the very scientists that had helped her become a Spartan. After the blissful release of her first dose, the clarity came quickly. And not long after, she shattered one of Camp Curahee's training dummies with a single kick. She never quite got over the feeling of power coursing through her blood. She felt invincible, like she could take on the world at a glance.
But she knew better. Because of Kurt. Because of Tom and Lucy. She knew how many Spartans overconfidence had killed. And so, when Kurt ordered team saber to stay on Onyx to finish their training, she was disappointed, but she understood. Because to defeat the Covenant, she had to be perfect.
She watched Kelly and Fred, walking side by side several paces ahead of her. To Olivia, her augmentations felt like a lifetime ago. Miridem, another lifetime more. She wondered what it must feel like to the two Spartans ahead of her. From what Kurt had told them, they had been thrown into combat against the Covenant shortly after Harvest. Before the UNSC knew what they were up against. She wondered about what it must have been like. To fight in the early years, when there was still some semblance of hope.
Their arrival in the MJOLNIR testing lab was greeted by a chime.
As Kelly and Fred entered the room, they froze.
Kelly let out a long, low, whistle.
Olivia, still behind them, moved to the side to see around the two Spartans. And it quickly became obvious. On the walls were multiple racks of green MJOLNIR in pieces on racks behind a single, large armor ring. In front of the ring was a terminal, and around the perimeter of the room, dozens of workstations where technicians had once worked diligently to fit the armor.
But, more importantly, the object that had garnered the two Spartans' attention, was the single Fury tactical nuke resting on a bench in the center of the room.
"They weren't kidding, were they?" Fred quipped, "when Materials Group wants something gone, they don't mess around."
Kelly who had slowly made her way over the bomb, peered over at its display, and responded, "well, they forgot to light the fuse. We're secure here, the codes haven't even been entered yet."
As Kelly continued to examine the fury in the center of the room, Fred moved to the terminal in front of the armor stand. Olivia, unsure of what to do, followed him. Fred moved around the room with familiarity. At the terminal, the GUI seemed to come easily, and although he had to hesitate every so often, he quickly began navigating through the various screens at rapid screens. He looked back at Olivia, who was watching him with a curious expression.
"I've seen the techs do this often enough that I should know what I'm doing by now," he smiled back at her.
"Of course, its harder than it looks…" he finished.
Olivia looked around him at the MJOLNIR in its racks. The armor looked just like Fred and Linda's, complete with broad visor and green coating. Olivia wondered what it would feel like to put the armor on, if only just once. When she had joined the Spartan III program, it had been with the hopes of one day becoming like the armored warriors she had seen in propaganda tapes, tearing the Covenant limb from limb.
When Tom and Lucy had first trained them on SPI, she had found it hard to hide her disappointment. However, she had quickly begun to appreciate SPI's advantages on the field of battle. But the ideal of the MJOLNIR clad Spartan had never escaped her mind. She picked a helmet up off the rack, removing her SPI helmet. It was heavy, much more so than her SPI. That would be the thick titanium alloy plating, much denser than SPI's photoreactive panels and heat ablators. She rapped her knuckles on the side of the helmet and listened to the clanking retort.
Kelly, still laboring over the fury, muttered under her breath, before saying, "one megaton just outside of Seongnam? Damn thing would have taken out six or seven districts."
Fred, still working at the terminal, replied, "I'm sure they would have waited until they were overrun."
"Uh huh."
Finally finding what he was looking for, Fred pointed over at a rack in a closed enclosure with a bodysuit on it.
"Kelly, we're in business. Olivia, grab that tech-suit for Kelly when it's done."
"Done, sir?" she replied, glancing back at the terminal. What she saw surprised her. At the top of the screen was Kelly's designation, her rank, and her UNSC ID number. Below that was a 3D scan of the woman's entire body, with the tech-suit molded over it. Dots and lines highlighted several areas of interest, sketching geometric shapes over the Spartan's body. What they meant, Olivia had little clue, but they complexity fascinated Olivia.
Behind her, from the enclosure where Fred had pointed, she heard a whirring. As she looked closer, she realized that what she had previously thought to be a rack was actually an intricate system of arms, flat pads, and needle-like protrusions, carefully suspending a full body suit. As the sound started, they began to work, poking and prodding at the suit, using the curved pads to shape the suit. Once supported, the needles danced in and out, poking and prodding at each perfect curve and contour.
Fred, noticing her fascination, explained, "the crystal layer in the tech-suit is where MJOLNIR's magic happens. Kurt might have explained it to you," Olivia shook her head as he continued, "it needs to fit the profile of the user exactly. Luckily for us, our scans are still on file."
He looked back at the terminal, "250, Kelly? You sure you haven't lost a few pounds? All that time sedated…"
Kelly, who was now stripping off her ODST gear, retorted, "why don't I hit you so you can tell me? …Sir."
The machine in the enclosure continued to whir away, and the previously androgenous form of the suit was slowly starting to take on the much more feminine form of the broad-shouldered Spartan II. The process fascinated Olivia, as she watched previously unseen lasers dance across the suit, permanently fixing elements of the suit. SPI was adjusted with straps and buckles.
Behind Olivia, Kelly had removed most of her gear and was down to her underclothes. The woman's burns were already scarring, and the worst of the cracked and blistering skin had finally calmed enough to remove the bandages. Olivia knew that the Spartans IIs had surgical, rather than injection-based augmentations. They had all been taught the history of the program when they first enlisted.
As Kelly removed the rest of her clothing, Olivia couldn't help but to stare at the lines etched into her wide back. A long scar ran down the length of her spine, branching out to sides along her collarbone and up around her neck. A deep 'V' starting at the small of her back angled up towards her shoulder blades, giving access to her ribs. Olivia knew the procedures killed or crippled half of the class. Another started at the tailbone and cut upwards along the perimeter of her hips. The longer she looked the more she saw, the geometric patterns across the arms and legs, complemented by nearly 30 years of damage. Seeing the scars personally made her all that more grateful for the improvements in the procedure in the years since.
Kelly turned to catch the teen staring. Cracking into a grin, she winked at Olivia, flexing her muscles, and posed for the Spartan, and said, "not bad for an old timer, huh?"
The beeping of the machine behind her provided an excuse for Olivia to look away. The arms of the machine had finally stopped moving, and the doors of the enclosure slowly slid open. The smell was peculiar, a hint of rubber, laced with the pungent odor of ozone. As she lifted the suit, and slung it over her shoulder, the weight was unexpected. Looking at it, she had expected it to be much lighter than it was, like the under-suit she herself was wearing under her SPI. But, like Fred had said, there was more to MJOLNIR than met the eye, and apparently this suit was part of that.
It wasn't long after she handed the suit to Kelly that the Spartan was standing on the pedestal, the form-fitting suit covering her from toe to jaw. Olivia could only watch as Fred began manipulating the robotic arms of the pedestal in a ritual-like fashion, as slowly, he attached the heavy armor plates to Kelly's limbs. There was no fumbling or second pauses, the two Spartans moved with practiced precision. The chest-piece came last, as the two clamshell halves were clamped firmly to Kelly's chest. Cables trailed from the backpiece into the ceiling, and Fred left them attached.
Fred placed the helmet on Kelly's head, and suddenly, she was the Spartan from the propaganda; formless, emotionless, robotic. Lethal. The clamps on the ring released from the Spartan, and her limbs sagged under the immense weight of the MJOLNIR.
Fred moved to the terminal, and with a single press of a button, and a sudden flicker of the laboratory lights, suddenly, a hum emanated from the suit, and it seemed like the weight was released all at once from Kelly's limbs. Kelly's com channel flickered to life inside her SPI.
Looking up from the terminal, Fred extended his left arm out to the side, pointing with a finger straight out. Kelly's visor slowly turned to watch it. Fred then extended his arm to the right, and Kelly's head turned to follow that too. The procedure was arcane to Olivia, but to the two older Spartans, it seemed to make perfect sense. Fred pointed up, then down, and then back up again. Kelly followed his every move with her head. Fred silently extended a thumbs-up to the Spartan and pressed a button on the terminal. Golden lightning arced from ports on the armor for a few moments, and then suddenly, a golden flare traveled up the Spartan's body. When it ended, it seemed like nothing had changed, but Olivia knew it had. The Spartan's energy shielding was now active, the crowning achievement of MJOLNIR engineering; a feature that would have saved hundreds of Spartans if it had been introduced 20 years ago.
Kelly stepped down from the pedestal slowly, every movement precise and measured as she was careful to not overcompensate with the new, more powerful armor. Her voice cracked over the coms channel.
"Wow. You guys weren't kidding. It feels so much lighter. Much more free moving."
Fred nodded, and Olivia let her eyes wander the room. She landed on another suit of armor, and somewhere deep inside her, a voice spoke. What if?
Freds commanding voice broke her daze, as he turned and began to walk out of the room.
"Next stop, the requisitions office. I have a hunch we'll need something nicer to wear in the next couple of weeks."
Olivia turned to follow him, but stopped when Kelly didn't start to move. Her attention was fixed on the terminal, and as she scrolled through it, different profiles flashed by. Eventually, she came to stop at one, and for a moment, paused. She seemed frozen and made no move to follow Fred, stuck staring at the screen. Olivia peered at the screen, where another Spartan's scans filled the screen.
Fred's voice called out again from down the hallway. Kelly's voice, somber, answered back, "coming, sir."
The slow revelation sat like a lead weight in Osh's mind. It was close, she could tell, but she could make no headway. For now, she continued to work on the server banks with the engineer, and every time she glanced the strange circuitry at the heart of the machine, something deep inside of her would twang.
And still, the section didn't come to her like the others. She didn't gradually begin to understand its purpose. Just a sinking feeling that she had seen it all somewhere before. She constantly racked her brain trying to find the perfect, but the answer always seemed to be just out of reach. When she slept, she dreamed of the circuits, but no explanation ever came. The engineering would work through the night, while she was sleeping. When she took a break for food brought down from the surface, it worked. When her fingers began to cramp and she took a break, the engineer worked. And yet, the peculiar creature avoided that piece of circuitry like the plague, and whenever asked, insisted that the Quarian must be the one to repair those areas.
And then, one night, it finally happened. She remembered. From a young age, Quarians were encouraged to learn everything they could about their vessels. Often, when they were out of school, their parents would take them around their ship to their workstations, showing them how to keep the immensely complicated ships running. Osh's father was an electrician on board Teslaya, an ancient cruiser from before the fall of Rannoch. He used to take Osh with him on his duties, so that she could watch and learn how to fix the cruiser's often temperamental circuitry hubs.
She remembers one time well, because it was on her birthday, and her father decided to let her be the one to fix the circuit, under his supervision of course. It was a simple repair, the replacement of a capacitor in one of the ship's life support control systems. As simple as it was, the feeling when Osh first touched her omni-tool's soldering module to the complicated circuity was irreplaceable. The ships lives were entrusted to her and her repairs; she was a valued member of the ships crew for that one moment. The feeling never left her.
But, just now, she had finally remembered the second half of that story, forgotten until now. When she was finished, her father explained to her all the electronic boards in the electrical hub, their function, how important they were, and how often he had to repair them.
She realized that she had seen something like the strange UNSC circuitry somewhere before, oddly enough, in the very place where she grew up.
She remembered it because it was unused. And nothing on a Quarian ship was unused. While the circuits were far from identical, the logic loops and overall structure were eerily similar. The components and the exact framework may have been different, but Osh was certain that their function was the same. She had worked with enough electronics from the different species to know when two things did the same thing.
If only she could remember what her father had told her about that circuit.
And then she knew. And was filled with a horror that she had never felt before in her life.
"Papa? What does that do?"
"What, that? It's the old Geth mainframe uplink, ka'sed. Don't worry, it can't hurt us now esan, it's been disabled for centuries."