Cal-287

Cal-287 is a supersoldier of the branch. He has served with distinction in the and in post-war conflicts with many operations to his name across many branches of the UNSC.
== Biography ==
=== Early Life ===
Cal-287 was born on , the son of two high-ranking agents in the . His father died in an attack soon after his birth, and his mother, still an active agent, left him in an orphanage on in the megacity New Dallas, in the . 
=== Recruitment into SPARTAN-II Program ===
In 2537, Cal was visited at school by Commander Colton Vieira and Dr. Johan Hansson, the creators of the SPARTAN-II Program, Class II. The two spoke with Cal and determined that despite his age, he was physically stronger than his peers, and they confirmed that Cal had the genetic markers they were looking for in candidates for the second class of SPARTAN-IIs. A month later, Cal was "adopted" by ONI operatives posing as a childless couple looking to adopt a son, thus eliminating the need for Cal to be replaced with a flash-clone. He was then drugged and taken to aboard the UNSC Prevalence, an Impulse-class stealth frigate along with other recruits. On July 7, 2537, the recruits were taken to Reach's FLEETCOM Military Complex's auditorium, where they were debriefed by Dr. Hansson and Dr. Schmidt about the program, in simpler words such as "being offered a different, better life", "protectors of humanity" and other phrases. Cal was eager to be a part of something, having lived a downtrodden life before his conscription into the SPARTAN Program, but was scared nonetheless. After the debriefing, he and the other recruits were immediately sent to bed, to prepare them for the big day ahead.
==== Training and Team Assignment ====
The next day, Cal and the other recruits were woken up sharply at 0500 hours; those who hesitated were immediately attacked with shock batons, waking them up. They were taken outside, where they were made to do continuous sit-ups, jumping jacks, push-ups, and other calisthenic exercises. After they were done with that, Master Sergeant Bryant Wilmer took them on a hike around the complex and the hills nearby, covering two miles in total. Finishing the hike, the recruits were allowed to relax for five minutes, before being sent to a class, taught to them by a 'Dumb' AI known as 'Virat', whom everyone simply called 'CB' at the AI's request. Williams taught the recruits about the Insurrection and following it, the Human-Covenant war. The classes were followed by a competition of the classic 'Ring the bell'. The recruits were divided into teams of three, forming thirty teams. They were instructed to reach the bell on the top of a huge pole and ring it. The team to ring the bell last would not be given dinner, and had to go on another hike. Cal's team, called Turquoise and comprising of Samantha-245 and Theresa-348, was the sixth team to finish and avoided the punishment that fell on another team, Oak Team. Cal, his team, and the recruits who finished ahead of Oak Team enjoyed a feast of roast turkey, gravy and mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, brownies, and ice cream.
The next day was a similar routine, albeit tougher and longer than the previous day's regimen. The topic of the lesson that day was the ancient . At evening, all the recruits were taken on two Albatrosses and were given parachutes. They were supposed to jump from the , in order to test their bravery. Cal, his team, and every one of the recruits made the jump; no one had gotten scared and opted not to jump. Impressed by this, Wilmer decided to qualify all the teams for dinner. The next six months included the same schedule with some minor changes, in order to toughen the recruits' will to fight and win. 
After the six months, the recruits started learning about basics of the military. They were taught how to handle a rifle, how to prime a grenade, and how to heal a wound using bio-foam. Training courses were set up, where the recruits were forced to crawl under barbed wires, while the DIs continuously shot at them using Narq-dart rounds, which caused numbness and pain when hit. More training methods included passing over the , and agility training, such as ringing the bell in the middle of a booby-trapped field. Aside from military knowledge, human history too was taught with high importance, specifically the and the . Such training continued for two years, after which their training drastically changed. 
==== Competitions and Exercises ====
Unlike their Class I counterparts, whose training was simply focused on how to improve and how to adapt while on the battlefield, all while assisting and protecting those on their side, Class II had a radically different approach. Similar to the training of the top-secret and contemporary SPARTAN-III program, Class II had a bigger emphasis on teamwork and the competitive spirit. The teams were continuously made to fight with each other, which strengthened their bond and the will to beat everyone else and win. For certain events, the recruits were also issued with , otherwise called simply as SPI Mark II. Their suits were a modified variant called the KNIGHT-class, which featured a different design to allow for more agile-tactics.
Aside from competitions, Cal and the others Class IIs also participated in a lot of exercises and events, which were added to give a feeling of an actual battle, to test how the recruits would react and fight back. The DIs and the various guards spent an incredibly high amount of time in designing realistic battlefield scenarios, such as safeguarding a base and infiltrating an enemy outpost. It was during this period that Cal began to stand out from the other recruits as a leader among them. He took on the role of lead strategist and was observed to be a brilliant tactician as well as recognized for his outside-the-box approach to combat situations. Cal excelled in piloting simulations, and was know to be one of the highest-rating marksmen of the class. On the range, Cal was recorded making bullseyes at double the effective ranges of any weapon handed to him. His only struggles were in close-quarter situations, where he would default to fisticuffs instead of using proper CQC-rated weapons. He also had a tendency to shoot anything that was not a trainee assigned to his team, causing Turquoise Team to fail many fog-of-war or hostage scenarios due to friendly fire or shooting a "hostage." This tendency was trained out of him, but he still preferred long-range or open-battlefield engagements to close-quarters combat.
After the general training ended, the DIs put the recruits into a huge exercise. One team comprised of the recruits, while the other team consisted of all three-dozen trainers. The recruits were posted on the and had to defend the complex and safeguard their flag, while the DIs had to infiltrate and retrieve it. The recruits were given general weapons such as assault rifles, battle rifles, pistols, marksman rifles, and flashbang grenades along with TTR-training ODST BDUs. On the other side, the DIs, to make up for the odds being against them, had a large arsenal of weapons, vehicles, and turrets, and wore KNIGHT SPI suits. After a long fight, the recruits won, but only by a slight margin, Cal being one of the casualties along with the rest of Turquoise Team. The DIs had used a lot of traps to take down the recruits, but nonetheless happy that their recruits had been taught well.
Just before the time for augmentations, eight years later, the DIs put two more large-scale tests for the recruits. Similar to the one Class I recruits were put to after two years of training, the first one, however, was vastly improved and modified to fit with Class II's training methodology. The 102 trainees were taken to and dropped individually the Veszprém Mountain Ranges, 150 kilometers away from the FLEETCOM Military Complex, on January 31, 2545, at 0730 hours UNSC Standard Time, with no survival gear, weapons, or even food given. Provided with only their general PT uniform, a map, and a digital compass, the trainees were given five days, or in Reach's time sense, 135 hours, to make it back to their base, or else they would wash out of the program, having wasted eight years of their life. Although the DIs were not being serious about the washing-out part, since they couldn't afford to lose any of the candidates, Cal and his fellow recruits took their job quite seriously.
Cal finally grouped together with his team and others, the recruits started collecting the essential things required for surviving the cold weather, such as food, fire, water, shelter, and weapons. After a few days, all the recruits who were heading in the same direction managed to gather together and all the 102 trainees successfully reached their destination four hours before their deadline. The second test was the same 'Capture the Flag' match and this time, the recruits won by a larger margin compared to their previous one. With all set, the recruits were sent to their riskiest part of their entire training.
==== Augmentations ====
While the real augmentations happened later, a year before in 2543, some of the top-performing recruits in the batch were taken for early augmentations, in order to try the newer chemicals and surgical methods to be introduced to the rest of Class II. For this task, a dozen such trainees were taken and they underwent the augmentation procedures in the medical bays of Reach's FLEETCOM Military Complex. Cal, Samantha, and Theresa narrowly missed out on being selected, but with the top recruits no longer in training, Turquoise Team became the top-performing group.
The rest of the batch continued their training, as usual, having no knowledge on the status or whereabouts of the twelve. The videos of the previous Class I's and the preliminary dozen Class IIs' augmentations were shown to the recruits in the final days before their augmentation procedures. While ONI did their best to convince that the new augmentation procedures would result in increased survival rates, the children were nonetheless scared, with Cal lashing out and refusing to go along with the augmentations. He blamed himself for the deaths of his fellow Class IIs, and Sergeant Wilmer, whom Cal had learned many lessons in leadership from, gave him one final lesson before augmentations: that there was a difference between spending lives, and wasting them. Cal asked Wilmer if the Class IIs' lives were wasted or spent, and Wilmer only replied that he would see Cal on the other side of augmentations.
On December 16, 2544, the 90 recruits were taken to the UNSC Trial By Fire, an Epoch-class heavy carrier known for its participation in Operation: TREBUCHET, in orbit to undergo their biochemical augmentation procedures, and if successfully made it through, become super-soldiers. At 0500 hours sharp, Cal and the other recruits were transported to the ship, where they would stay for three more hours in their respective medical bays, getting prepped and ready for the operations. Cal was shaved, and incision vectors and locations were precisely lasered onto his body, to avoid confusion during augmentations. After then, he was sedated with general anesthetic and painkillers inserted to make him unconscious
Cal and the other subjects would undergo all the procedures in a set order. First, the occipital reversal surgery was performed, in which the neurosurgeon carefully cut a small hole in the skull, revealing the left hemisphere of the cerebrum. Then, the neurosurgeon used specialized equipment to rearrange the capillaries present in the occipital lobe with surgical precision. The rearrangement allowed more blood flow beneath the rods and cones of the subject's retina, thus producing a visual perception increase. As this took place, the subject's bioelectrical nerve transduction was altered, causing approximately 300% increase in the reflexes, and also causing increased intelligence, creativity and memory recollection. Once completed, the removed part of the skull was reattached using certain chemicals that help in sealing it and the incised part is bandaged.
Next, a small incision was made in the thyroid gland of the subject, in order to insert a platinum pellet, containing a few human growth hormones, targeting the skeletal and muscle tissues. It also targeted osteoblasts to boost bone tissue formation, effectively strengthening the bones and their structure. Around the same time, muscular injection enhancements were performed in addition to the catalytic hormone implant. The injections increase the density of the connecting muscles and fibers, making the tendons tighter and stronger. A side effect of this was the decrease in lactate recovery time, preventing muscle cramps largely, and thus being an advantage.
Being the most complicated procedure, the carbide ceramic ossification treatment was performed the last, in order to allow quick and necessary changes should any certain complications occur. In this, the skeletal framework was exposed, allowing for removal of roughly 3% of the bone's volume from a small layer and replacing it with the carbide ceramic shell. After the procedure was done, the ceramic then bonded with the rest of the bone material due to the body's natural tendency to reattach the removed part of the skeleton, while other stabilizing and therapeutic procedures were performed.
During the augmentations, the Cal felt intense amounts of pain, and as such, a lot of sedatives and painkillers are administered in order to make him lose consciousness and reduce the amount of pain experienced. Cal would later learn from a report by one of the survivors of the augmentations of the original Class I, the pain when the carbide ceramic was attached felt like "the [subject's] bones are breaking, and as if [their] marrow is made of glass and is being shattered."
Due to the augmentations, 38 subjects supposedly died during the augmentations. Although many of them were because of their body rejecting or unable to accept the changes, some listed as killed were actually alive, as Cal later learned, and secretly recruited by ONI for their own purposes, or in the case of Saran-197, to be put in the cross-branch team of Spartans known as GAUNTLET Team, which Cal served as an overseer when he was assigned to Special Warfre Group Three late in the Human-Covenant War. 14 more subjects 'washed out', either being crippled due to the augmentations, or not fully benefiting from the augmentations, and thus not able to handle MJOLNIR. Many of them underwent the rehabilitation process, which proved to be fruitful as it resulting in bringing some Spartans back to duty, such as Sarah-184. The deceased recruits were also preserved in cryogenic stasis, with hopes of being brought back to life using advanced medical technology in the future. Upon learning these details later in his career, Cal made it his life's mission to bring all of his friends and teammates back into service.
==== Recovery ====
After the augmentations, Cal and the candidates who successfully underwent them followed a recovery period, ranging anywhere from two to five weeks. Cal's recover was one of the longest, lasting a full month after first augmentations. He followed a strict timetable of stretches, exercises, and drills, in order to adapt and get used to his newer body. He consumed five high-protein meals every day, with even the meals containing growth hormones to make him stronger and fit, something that was introduced in Class II and not in Class I. Sometimes, he would go to the gym and train for hours on end in order to become fit.
Completing the recovery process, Cal and the recruits underwent approximately three more months of training. This time, there was more focus on adaptability, with every war situation the DIs could think of being thrown at them. The recruits participated in team-based competitions, target practice, running, and agility tests, and a whole other lot of such training exercises. Sometimes, the recruits would be pitted against a couple of toughened Marines and as thus practicing close-quarters combat again, with faster reflexes and increased speed. Some accidents occurred, with many Marines being seriously injured and in some instances even being killed, due to facing strong blows to their chests or heads by the Spartans reflexively. Theresa-348 was one of the few Class IIs to accidentally kill a Marine, and Cal spent the next week trying to get her to continue training, and succeeded in convincing Theresa that the Marine's life was spent in service to the UNSC and that he knew what he was getting into when he volunteered to help train the Spartans.
After then, the Spartans were issued with the new MJOLNIR Mark IV armors, with prototype fitted-modules which featured rudimentary energy shielding salvaged from Insurrectionist tech, hinting that the insurgents had access to Covenant technology, and might be violating the Cole Protocol. They were taken to the same Damascus Materials Testing Facility the original Spartan-IIs received their armor, located on Chi Ceti IV. They went on some obstacle courses and running fields to get used to the lightning-quick reflex-boosting abilities of the armor, and naturally taking a liking to the armor. Then, they trained for one final month on Reach and bonded with the armor's mechanism before being shipped off to be deployed in the Human-Covenant War.
=== Human-Covenant War ===
==== Operation: BIRTHDAY ====
===== Battle of Atlas =====
In February, the Class IIs were sent on their first real deployment against the Covenant; the colony world of Atlas. Atlas had been attacked roughly two weeks earlier by the Covenant, and then-Upper Rear Admiral Danforth Whitcomb had already engaged them in the Siege of the Atlas Moons. Arriving late to the battle, the SPARTANs wasted no time in taking the fight to the Covenant. Quickly suiting up in their MJOLNIR armors, the SPARTANs used SOEIVs onto the planet's surface, into a jungle. Some of the SPARTANs faced a few injuries on rough landing but no major ones, including Cal, the first of many SOEIV crash landings he would experience in his career. Gathering all their gear together, they proceeded to their objectives.
The SPARTANS' mission was to take out the huge Covenant battalion stationed in the jungle, where they made a big clearing and set up their tents and artillery. In order to launch a surprise attack, the SPARTANS opted to climb a nearby mountain cliff and open fire on the unaware enemy. Doing that took an hour, after which they set up the turrets and launcher, and initiated the battle. It was a hailstorm of bullets, rockets, and shrapnel, as the Covenant soldiers were mowed down like grass on a lawn in a matter of minutes. The Elites tried to fire their plasma cannons but were obliterated. Cal seized the opportunity to lead his team and Jade Team in a skirmish in which they commandeered Covenant vehicles to aid in clearing the jungle and hunt down the remaining elements of the Covenant battalion.
With the mighty army destroyed, the Spartans were ordered to scout a large area to neutralize any remaining enemy forces. After nearly three hours, the Spartans intercepted and killed various Sangheili-led taskforces and squads who were retreating to their base, unknown of its fate. Then, the SPARTANs were told to return back to the UNSC Trial By Fire in-orbit by Whitcomb in a tense voice, suggestive that something had happened. Cal wanted to stay and fight, but obeyed the direct order from his superior. After boarding the Albatrosses, as the Spartans neared the ship, to their horror, it was heavily damaged.
On board, they were informed that while the SPARTANs had been successful in eliminating the Covenant groundside, the situation was the quite opposite in space. The human fleet was decimated. There were only a tenth of the ships left than before. Whitcomb then broadcasted to all the remaining ships and ordered them to retreat, stating that they had lost the colony. The ships soon departed, as the Covenant battlegroup neared the planet and began their orbital bombardment, destroying all life present. The first mission of Class II was a success but at the same time a defeat. Over the years, Cal learned to get over the guilt and adapted so he can fight harder and be equally harder to kill.
==== Battle of Actium ====
In 2545, Cal-287, now a Lieutenant, Junior Grade, and Turquoise Team deployed to Actium to support the UNSC Army's , rapidly being overrun by the Covenant. Turquoise Team deployed via drop pod from a prowler to engage in guerilla warfare against the Covenant and keep them distracted from completely destroying the 53rd. They eventually linked up with the 53rd to aid them in destroying three major Covenant staging areas with HAVOK tactical nuclear weapons. Each Spartan helped lead the assaults on each encampment, Cal leading a battalion of Troopers on his assigned target. Cal and the soldiers under his command made quick work of the defending Covenant and set their nuke when he received a call for backup from Chief Petty Officer Samantha-245. Cal redirected his troops and rushed to help, but by the time they arrived Samantha was the last soldier alive, her troops all killed during an ambush. Cal and his troops relieved Samantha and were setting the nuke when they were attacked again by a stronger force of Covenant set on disarming the bomb. All of the 53rd's troops were killed, leaving the two Spartans to hold off the Covenant. Samantha became heavily wounded after receiving a direct hit from a Wraith mortar, and forced Cal to leave her to defend the nuke, now counting down. Cal refused to leave his friend's side, but Samantha convinced him that it was better to have one mortally injured Spartan die to complete the mission than for a healthy Spartan die of stupidity and bravado. Reluctantly, Cal bid his friend farewell and retreated, drawing off some Covenant to buy Samantha time. He was still caught in the nuclear blast, but was far enough away the damage to his armor was moderate but still left him functional, though the EMP caused by the blast caused his armor to lock up temporarily. Getting back to the 53rd's holdout, he reported the losses of his and Samantha's troops, and that Samantha-245 was Missing In Action. Petty Officer, First Class Theresa-348, Turquoise Three, was distraught at the news, but only in private with Cal. Shortly thereafter they were ordered to pull out and managed to escape as the only human survivors of the battle, the 53rd being completely destroyed and Actium glassed. Later reports suggested that the loss of Turquoise Two, Samantha-245, and even the deployment of Spartan Team Turquoise was a waste of resources and negatively affected team effectiveness. Cal and Theresa were split up soon after and remained separated for the rest of the war.
==== Commander ====
In 2546, Cal had been promoted to Commander and assigned to UNSC Army's under Colonel as Spartan Liaison. Under Cal's command the Spartan was formed, consisting originally of Commander and Lieutenant Commander along with 3 other cat-2 class Spartan-IIIs. Cal was unofficially the XO of NOBLE, taking the call sign NOBLE Null, many times tasking the fireteam directly and occasionally leading them in engagements.
Category:Spartan-IIs
Category:UNSC
__INDEX__