Derek-142

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Derek-142, also known by his alias of Control, was a SPARTAN-II supersoldier trained under the SIGMA detachment. An orphan before his recruitment into the program, Derek was quickly singled out for his high intelligence and brilliant strategic thinking during training and was to be fast-tracked to an officer's position within ONI before he 'washed out' during his . In spite of this, he would eventually undergo successful rehabilitation and was assigned to the highly secretive Red Cell unit by 2528. 
The Spartan would soon become the counter-terrorism unit's key to success as it staged mock attacks on numerous military installations and provided invaluable information for important facilities to defend themselves against Insurrectionist attack. Though Red Cell's importance would begin to dwindle as the Human-Covenant War raged across the Outer Colonies, Derek would serve diligently until 2532, when shortly after gaining control of an experimental and dangerous program known as Project OVERSIGHT the Red Cell unit's home base was destroyed as the colony world of was glassed. Leading the survivors of the attack offworld, Derek would not return to the UNSC and instead chose to fight the Covenant on his own terms, utilising OVERSIGHT to procure resources as Red Cell went rogue.
Derek would retain tight control of Red Cell for the entirety of the Human-Covenant War, though his tactics became more dubious as his subordinates attacked not only Covenant military targets, but UNSC facilities in the name of keeping their vessel running. His illicit actions would reach a high point in 2552 when Derek orchestrated the kidnapping of four Spartans, including a fellow Sigma member, during the . Continuing Red Cell's covert actions even after the war's end, Derek would eventually become disillusioned with the Office of Naval Intelligence's leadership and formulated a plan to place himself in a position of power by making it seem as though he had saved the organisation from disaster after years of working in the shadows.
Ultimately, Derek's attempted coup in May of 2558 would end in failure. In spite of his control of the OVERSIGHT system, after the actions of several ONI agents, Sigma Team and treachery from within Red Cell itself led to his defeat. With everyone else in Red Cell dead, Derek was captured by his fellow Spartans and handed over to the authorities. ONI would sentence him to life imprisonment within the Midnight Facility, where he was set to languish for the rest of his days. However, an attack on Midnight during the opening hours of the and the intervention of his AI partner, Merope, gave Derek an opportunity to escape the ONI prison. Rather than go into hiding, Derek would use his second chance to rejoin the UNSC and fight against the Created.
==Biography==
===Early Life===
Derek Strepp was born in the town of , on the colony world of Sargasso. Shortly after his birth, his parents put him up for adoption, leaving him in state care for his early years. Due to the world's affluence compared to many other colonies, Derek and the other children in the orphanage enjoyed a fairly stable, happy environment and had few troubles. An innately curious child, Derek was noted for developing quicker than many of his peers, both physically and mentally. His carers noted his ability to read and write by the age of five, which attracted some attention from local schools looking for gifted children and promised a bright future for the young boy. 
In 2517, Derek was among those who underwent the widespread , and was visited shortly after by agents from the Office of Naval Intelligence. Pretending to be a couple looking to potentially adopt Derek, the pair asked him numerous questions about his life before leaving. While their abrupt departure surprised him, Derek was overjoyed at the prospect of adoption and eagerly awaited their return. That day would never come, however, as shortly after the interview he was sedated and kidnapped from the orphanage and replaced with a disposable . When he awoke, Derek was on a military transport ship en-route to humanity's homeworld, Earth.
===Training===
Absolutely terrified, Derek did nothing to resist his captors as he was taken to a secret facility located in the United Republic of North America, where he met with nineteen other children of a similar age. There, they were formally inducted into the as part of its offshoot: Project SIGMA. While most of the children understood little of their introductory speech, given by a man named Calvin Roe, Derek was quicker on the uptake than most and understood that he had been recruited into the military. After meeting their head trainer, Richard Mack, Derek - now Derek-142 - and the others were thrust into an utterly brutal training regime that pushed their minds and bodies to the absolute limit.
Unlike some of the others, it took Derek some time to properly adapt to the physical part of their military training. He would often lag behind and found himself unable to continue, often accepting help from his peers when he could. As their exercises changed into team games, Derek discovered a fondness for tactics and would often attempt to outsmart the other trainees and their drill instructors during team games. However, he lacked charisma and rarely found himself in a leader's role, finding cooperation difficult. With a preference for giving precise orders for others to follow than working alongside his peers, Derek found himself struggling in exercises that involved others.
While his field scores were never the best, Derek greatly outstripped everyone else in SIGMA when it came to their education, attaining consistently high marks in all subjects taught to the Spartan trainees. He became rather fond of Leon, the artificial intelligence overseeing their tutoring, and developed a keen interest in AI as a result of their conversations. However, Derek never had any particularly close friendships with anyone else in SIGMA, and even harboured some private resentment towards a few of the other trainees. In particular, he found Marco-035's habit of questioning orders and Jack-085's ultra-competitiveness particularly infuriating, though he never spoke up about it. While he continued to excel mentally, Derek's lacklustre performance in combat had him stuck in the dead centre of SIGMA's leaderboard, which ranked the trainees according to test scores.
Towards the end of his training, Derek was privately informed by Mack that the Office of Naval Intelligence, impressed by his mental acumen, intended to make him an officer for a special counter-terrorism unit. While his trainer voiced his concerns and expressed an idea to keep Derek alongside his brethren, the young Spartan saw no problem with this, believing himself to be above the other trainees in many aspects. in 2525, Derek and the rest of SIGMA would undergo a that would physically improve their bodies in every conceivable way; the final step in becoming a Spartan. Looking forward to what seemed like a promising future working for ONI, Derek attended a brief party alongside his fellows shortly before the procedures were to take place, and found himself genuinely enjoying the company of his fellows for the first time.
===Failure===
All of Derek's dreams would seemingly be for naught when, in the midst of his augmentations, his body began to reject some skeletal modifications. This would elicit a fatal response from Derek, who died and was immediately resuscitated twice on the operating table before his condition was stabilised and the procedures halted. When he eventually awoke, Derek was greeted by Richard Mack, who informed him that he had been the only one in SIGMA to 'wash out' while receiving his augmentations. Utterly distraught by this, Derek pleaded with his trainer for them to try the procedure again, even if it killed him. While alternatives were offered to Derek, whose body was damaged but recovering, he did not relent and eventually convinced Mack to allow him to try again. After making a promise to the old soldier that he would do his best to save lives, Derek was left alone to recuperate. 
The recovery process was a difficult one for Derek, who resided in the mostly-empty SIGMA facility for months with very little contact with the outside world. Doctor Roe would visit him occasionally with updates on how his fellows were progressing, eventually informing him of Jack-085's sudden escape and the subsequent death of Ahmad-126. This shocked Derek, who in spite of his dislike of the other Spartans had never thought them capable of genuine desertion. While he asked Roe for permission to lead the hunt for Jack after his augmentations were successful, the scientist denied his request, stating that it was out of his hands. Four months later, Derek would undergo his augmentation procedures yet again only to meet the same near-fatal issues that forced doctors to abort the operation. While he was bedridden for weeks after, there had been some improvement compared to his first attempt, and Derek refused to give up on his goal of becoming a proper Spartan.
It would take nearly two years and three more attempts before Derek-142 fully received all of the mental and physical enhancements, with each failure leading to a much longer recovery time as he grew older and out of the prime augmentation age. In the downtime between each attempt he had been put to work by the Office of Naval Intelligence's Section One, analysing reports from Outer Colony worlds of rebel activity and helping to devise countermeasures against them. While young, Derek's impressive insight was valued by those he corresponded with, and by 2528 he was finally ready to leave Earth and begin work as a proper field agent. After being given the officer's rank of Lieutenant, Derek travelled to , where he first met with Captain Cynthia Hale. As someone interested in the young Spartan's intellect and capabilities, she would introduce him to a secretive counter-terrorism division, known as Red Cell. 
===Red Cell===
Over the course of a week, Derek would learn everything there was to know about Red Cell, whose role was to analyse and test the defences of important civilian and military facilities within the Inner Colonies in case of an actual Insurrectionist attack. While it began as a think tank, extra funding as rebel attacks increased allowed for field agents to exploit security weaknesses and improve their defences. Acting from Red Cell's base within an ONI-run bunker on , Derek and Captain Hale would plan over three dozen mock attacks within his first year with Red Cell, targeting buildings on Reach, Fargad, Miridem and even Mars as assignments were passed down from Naval Command. Derek would eventually begin leading these teams personally, not wanting his physical skills to go to waste. While some within the unit pointed out that the Spartan's enhanced physical prowess would allow for feats that no terrorist could feasibly accomplish as he planted fake bombs within Army bases and even stole classified materials from seemingly-impenetrable buildings, his undeniable success would give Red Cell more funding to expand their operations and led to genuine security improvements following their missions.
Though this work satisfied Derek for a time, giving him extensive experience as an infiltrator, news of the far-off war against the Covenant continued to eat away at the Spartan, who was well-aware that Red Cell's purpose only allowed for improved defences against human terrorists. With most of the military fully engaged with the war effort, the group were confined to a few Inner Colony systems as local leaders believed that an influx of refugees from the Outer Colonies would bring a wave of anti-government Insurrectionists with them. Derek continued his work with Red Cell for several more years, until the entire unit was recalled to their base on Sansar following a successful operation. It was here that Derek first learned of OVERSIGHT, an experimental project designed as a 'key' of sorts to ONI's central database and assigned to only a handful highest-ranking personnel. Due to its nature as a unit that staged false terror attacks, Red Cell was to be given full access to OVERSIGHT on a temporary basis to test the program's effectiveness. While budget cuts meant that Red Cell would not expand as a unit, it would give Derek and his fellows more bases to target and ensure that even ONI's more secure facilities had top-notch security.
While Derek saw OVERSIGHT as an amazing piece of technology in the right hands, he soon voiced his concerns over the possibility of it being exploited in the future if it were ever compromised. After weeks of arguing with Captain Hale, orders soon arrived from Naval Intelligence to scrap OVERSIGHT, which had been ruled as too risky after it was rushed into field testing. Glad to have been proven right, Derek was to oversee the program's final dispensation when an alert sounded across their base: Sansar was being attacked by the Covenant. With few defences, the rural colony world's population centres were quickly overwhelmed and destroyed by a fleet of alien invaders, who proceeded to glass large portions of the planet. Trapped within their remote bunker with no chance of escape, Derek and the rest of Red Cell cowered beneath the earth as plasma fire rained overhead. The bombardment was so fierce that large portions of the bunker were destroyed, killing not only Captain Hale but most of her command staff. When the glassing finally subsided, Derek was the highest-ranking military officer still alive on the planet, and still in possession of the OVERSIGHT program. 
At first, Derek did his best to attend to the wounded in their bunker, and was left with only a few dozen able personnel to run things as they waited for the orbiting Covenant fleet to leave. With their destroyer - the UNSC Kuwabara - sitting unscathed in a hangar deep underground, the survivors began to load up everything they had onto the ship and quietly left Sansar weeks later. Still in command, Derek's first instinct was to have the ship return to Reach or another colony world, but the Spartan neglected to give such an order. Now operating without any handlers and presumed dead by the UNSC after the Covenant's brutal assault on Sansar, Derek felt truly free for the first time in his life, and instead used OVERSIGHT to locate an unmanned supply base used by ONI as their next stop. With the crew looking to him for leadership, Derek informed his subordinates that ONI had reassigned Red Cell, ordering the group to act as an independent long-range reconnaissance vessel, operating under the highest levels of secrecy. While there were some doubts, most of the crew believed Derek's story, and gladly accompanied the Spartan as he began to operate without any form of military oversight, intent on somehow making his mark on the war.
===Rogue===
Derek would lead the surviving Red Cell members without issue for close to a year, travelling from system to system as he tested the limits of what he could get away with using OVERSIGHT and his own credentials as an ONI officer to access military facilities without issue. While he expected ONI to eventually realise what he was doing and confront the rogue vessel, not once was the Kuwabara ever picked up by the rest of the organisation; most UNSC units they came across believed Derek's cover story that they were an intelligence vessel on a top-secret mission and left the ship alone. The Spartan soon made good use of the ship's status as a ghost within the system to have the destroyer retrofitted at a military shipyard before journeying out towards the frontlines, monitoring military communications channels and trailing fleets as an unofficial ONI attaché into combat. The various upgrades to the Kuwabara had turned the destroyer into a prowler, able to skirt the edges of the battlefield unnoticed and intervene only when necessary, which Derek sometimes did. In 2533 the ship was responsible for saving the lives of over a hundred servicemen from a crippled frigate following a military defeat over a colony world, providing Derek with the resource he needed more than anything: replacement personnel. 
Eventually, some of Derek's subordinates began to question the Spartan's decisions, openly wondering if their leader intended to allow the crew some kind of shore leave. Unlike the Spartan, who had no family or civilian background to speak of, many of the crew had families and homes to return to, and even Derek's oratory skills could not quell a rising tide of dissent. Fearing a mutiny, he took swift action and deployed the Kuwabara to a risky groundside operation in 2534, deploying those he deemed most troublesome to a data sanitation operation on a besieged colony world in the name of upholding the . While the mission was genuine, it also took a heavy toll on the team, most of whom died to destroy a half-ruined military facility's databanks before the Covenant could plunder them. Those few who survived returned to the ship afterwards, unaware that Derek had sent them to die. 
As the years went on, Derek continued this style of recruiting and liquidating new Red Cell operatives. Potential recruits were often rescued from dire battlefields or suddenly reassigned from dead-end positions by the Spartan, whose access to numerous psych profiles via OVERSIGHT allowed him to pick those he deemed worthy to join Red Cell and the Kuwabara's crew. These actions would slowly deplete the original Red Cell operatives until by 2540 Derek was the only one left. Utilising methods of indoctrination eerily similar to those used on him and his fellow Spartans as a child, Derek slowly cultivated a crew of hardcore followers whose loyalty to his 'cause' bordered on fanaticism. This was not a total success, leading to a steady attrition rate among disloyal or potentially problematic members of his crew, but Derek took pride in his ability to inspire those around him and even left the ship on occasion to lead groundside operations, confident that those under his command would await their leader's return. Even so, Red Cell had seen limited success in its years operating outside the military chain of command, with only a sparse string of covert victories against the ever-encroaching Covenant menace to show for it. 
Derek's rogue unit would have an incredible stroke of luck in 2543, when during a covert mission to the partly-glassed colony world of Boros Derek and his followers came across a functioning 'Smart' artificial intelligence in the ruins of one of the planet's urban centres. Eager to have a powerful AI under his control, Derek extracted the intelligence, only to find that its data core contained not one, but two AI. The first was a civic assistance AI named Merope, who quickly pledged herself to Derek's ship after a long conversation with the Spartan, and the second was Maia, a whose presence and seeming loyalty to the UNSC worried Derek greatly. While he considered disposing of the AI, who had functioned well past their designated operating time by sharing data and fragmenting themselves among local systems until needed, staving off the effects of rampancy. As such, Derek only spent a year with the more placatable Merope as a shipboard AI before she was forced to 'swap' with Maia, whose stronger personality came close to challenging his unquestioned authority.
While he feared Maia at first and the AI kept a professional distance from the Spartan, his fears that she would betray him and contact ONI proved to be totally unfounded. As a construct made for intelligence-gathering and planetary defence, Maia's tactical insight proved quite useful as Derek guided Red Cell through many more operations in the final decade of the Human-Covenant War. During this time Derek stopped going by his given name, taking up the moniker of 'Control'. While this was touted as a security measure that a high-ranking officer leading an unofficial deep-cover unit had to take, in reality Derek had grown even more paranoid over the years, believing that even his name being spoken aloud in an unsecured location by an unwary subordinate could attract ONI's attention and lead them back to him. Red Cell, whose numbers had waxed and waned over the years, had been pushed along with most human fleets to the Inner Colonies, forcing Derek to plunder remote supply caches whenever possible for fear of detection. Aware that the war was not going well, he began to devise plans for long-term survival, even considering commandeering and retrofitting a large civilian ship for the purpose of colonising a distant world were the Covenant ever to reach the Sol System and Earth. These plans would be put on hold in August of 2552, however, when a massive invasion force attacked the planet Reach. 
Unable to directly participate in the battle, Derek instead chose to act in the name of opportunism. Using OVERSIGHT and a number of forged credentials, he and a cadre of loyal personnel moved from base to base on the planet as the tide slowly turned in the Covenant's favour, securing supplies and technology and sending it back to the Kuwabara, which was holding position close to one of Reach's moons. His most incredible find during this period of looting came by complete accident, however. During the , Derek's unit gained access to a tunnel network built alongside the city's transport system that connected several military-affiliated locations, including the local ONI headquarters and the Reach HQ of the . 
===Insurgency===
===Atonement===
==Personality==
While undeniably intelligent even among his Spartan peers, Derek was regarded as something of an uptight pedant whose ultra-strict adherence to rule and protocol during training earned him the scorn of some of his more free-thinking peers, which he privately returned in kind. Derek found it difficult to properly connect with others, even his other Spartans, and neglected to take feelings into account in the face of what he regarded as logical decisions. While a talented soldier like all Spartans, these qualities made Derek an exceptionally poor leader as he expected his subordinates to follow his commands without question and negatively affected his scores throughout his years as a trainee, which constantly aggravated him. This would feed his determination to surpass his comrades and fuelled numerous one-sided rivalries, with Derek genuinely believing himself to be innately superior to his fellows despite rarely making it above tenth place in SIGMA's overall ranking. Derek nursed many of these rivalries for years as they coalesced into full-fledged hatred for some of the other Spartans, though his dislike of open confrontation meant that he would never resolve these conflicts. None of the other trainees, for their part, were ever aware that Derek despised them, seeing him as just another - if somewhat unremarkable - comrade.
The discovery that he had washed out of SIGMA following his augmentation procedures utterly destroyed Derek's self-image, sending him spiralling into a pit of self-loathing that was only overcome by his desire to succeed at all costs and prove that he could surpass his brethren. While each failed attempt nearly destroyed Derek in mind and body, his determination only deepened and he refused all offers for redeployment elsewhere until his body finally accepted his SPARTAN-II enhancements. While his superiors saw Derek as a man of utter devotion to the UNSC and the perfect soldier to help lead the likes of Red Cell, his mind constantly focused on his long-gone Spartan peers, and even as he carried out his duties with extreme efficiency he privately longed for a chance to be like them - something that would eventually come to pass after the Covenant's attack on Sansar and Red Cell's supposed destruction.
After taking command of Red Cell in 2532, Derek had the position of power he had always wanted. Consumed by a sense of self-righteousness and a belief that he could help the war effort his own way, the Spartan's ego and sense of superiority grew exponentially, as did his sense of cruelty. Derek continued to expect absolute obedience from his crew, but as the years wore on he became paranoid, and began to discreetly replace those who quietly his authority. Believing that his status as a SPARTAN-II - the next step in human evolution, in his eyes - made him innately better than those around him, Derek began to have delusions of seizing power within the UNSC and putting his tactical brilliance to work by defeating the Covenant after years of supposedly incompetent commanders had tried and failed. While his megalomania worsened, Derek maintained an external air of calm and collectedness, appearing aloof but in command to his crew, who by this point knew him only by his self-appointed appellation of 'Control'.
With the Human-Covenant War's end - without his help - Derek slowly began to unravel, seeing his opportunity for heroism stolen from him. In his final years in command of Red Cell he tightened his grip on his subordinates, using his 'rescued' SPARTAN-III subordinates as enforcers to terrorise his crew as he now plotted to take control of the Office of Naval Intelligence. Now mired in desperation, Derek convinced himself that ONI needed a saviour after years of war had left it a bloated mess of competing divisions, still clinging to a belief that being a Spartan made him the best candidate to lead mankind's greatest intelligence organisation. By the time he finally took action in mid-2558, Derek saw each and every atrocity committed by Red Cell as a necessary evil, and it was not until his final defeat and capture by his old comrades that he finally snapped out of his delusion. What remained was a hollow, broken shell of a Spartan who had wasted decades pursuing selfish desires instead of actually helping humanity. When the Created conflict began and Derek escaped from the Midnight Facility, he became grimly determined to atone for his misdeeds and was more than willing to set aside his old rivalries for the sake of saving mankind.
==Skills and Abilities==
Like all SPARTAN-II's, Derek was trained from an early age to become one of the greatest soldiers ever produced. His combat scores during training were well beyond those of any normal human, though among his peers he was decidedly average in most fields. Derek's real talents lay in the realm of intelligence-gathering, infiltration, and long-term planning, which he used to his advantage to keep up with his more talented Spartan comrades. He possessed a superb memory and had an eye for detail that made him useful as a scout in the field, and could easily tell when others were lying to him. Derek soon became an apt manipulator, and under the alias of 'Control' became a charismatic schemer who turned dozens of military personnel into near-fanatical followers of his misguided goals.
Derek's years in charge of the renegade Red Cell group taught him many lessons about personnel management and leadership, though the false pretences under which he recruited most of the Kuwabara's replacement crew after forced him to adopt an increasingly authoritarian style of leadership, ruling partly through fear. Years in a position of command did cause Derek's combat skills to wane somewhat, as he did not enter the field as often and tried to avoid open conflict where possible. Though his augmented body gave him a tremendous advantage over most enemy combatants, Derek was nowhere near as capable as his battle-hardened Spartan peers, which he learned the hard way in his fight against Marco-035 during his failed power play. Having only briefly used a stolen MJOLNIR suit in 2558, Derek was a rarity among Spartans in that he never properly adapted to using the armour and had operated for decades without it.
==List of Appearances==
*Halo: Oversight (2558)
*Halo: SIGMA (2558)
Category:Sigmaverse
Category:Sigmaverse Spartans
Category:Sigmaverse PW
Category:Sigmaverse HCW
Category:Renegade Spartans