DT 2022: Spartan-Three Governance

Rear Admiral Jazmine Utah remembered joining the Beta-5 Division’s senior staff and benefactors of the SPARTAN-III program for a graduation of Beta Company. They were the program’s second class of supersoldiers forged from Covenant War orphans and hardened over the course of a little more than four years of training. The ceremony was an enlightening affair, but also a brutalist one as the methodology for their creation and deployment truly dawned on her. Despite the checkered culture of Naval Intelligence, her imagination couldn't comprehend the inhumanity until she saw the results firsthand. She realized then, the long procedure far more appropriate for dogs than children.
Pumped with chemical augmentations and likely cocktails of growth hormones, the faceless graduates, now commandos, were on their way to battlefields light years away to stem the invasion by the alien Covenant empire into interstellar human territory.  Humanity was losing. A fact twenty years in the making as Utah recalled at the time.
By turning their hopes of salvation onto children, the human government’s desperation was clear as they took such lost souls and molded them into biological machines of war. They were no longer children to the Office of Naval Intelligence. They were Spartans, and they would do their duty or die trying to slow the Covenant advance.
At least, then-Captain Utah felt this sense of dehumanization as she stood under the volatile weather on the secret colony world of Onyx. Camp Currahee where Beta Company trained and would now graduate from was a lonely military installation settled between sharp limestone mesas and unforgiving jungle. Such terrain was perfect for honing the uncompromising characters of the supersoldiers but it brought the equally unforgiving and unpredictable weather too.
Rain rushed down in an equatorial downpour as lighting and thunder bombed the sky above. Utah shivered to herself, wrapping her cloaked arms around her ribcage. Despite the all-weather ponchos Currahee’s staff lent out to the military visitors, Utah felt she now knew a glimpse of what Spartans faced in training.
If Utah struggled to stay warm under torrential rain for even a few minutes, what could she say for the three hundred Spartans who stood like statues at parade rest? Beta Company stood stock still when she first stepped off the Pelican dropship that brought her and other observers to Camp Currahee thirty minutes prior.
Utah saw under-dressed drill instructors in mere wind breakers, jump pants, and caps walk the columns under the extreme weather without care. She couldn’t hear them over the pounding water but she figured they yelled with whatever heart and anger they had left before their former trainees shipped out for the last time. A final show of superiority before their victims disappeared into dropships never to return to the training facility. After all, the trainers knew the Spartans best after spending time with them, and knowing what it meant to be in the Spartans’ place. Or rather not, for every instructor was a washout from the previous Alpha Company graduating class.
The trainers never left the planet. The storm, the jungle, and the mesas was all they knew. A life of bitter terror and hatred. To UNSC Army Colonel James Ackerson, founder of the SPARTAN-IIIs, he responded to Utah’s concerning inquiry on the trainers’ motivations with a blunt an equally unforgiving rebuttal.
“You can’t coddle Spartans. They need to learn to hate, and nobody hates better than losers. This is the washouts’ punishment and they will spend the rest of their time at Currahee regretting and hating those that will pass. They hate Spartans and the recruits will hate them back. They are finest cadre in the entire UNSC for that very fact.”
The hateful cadre eventually fell back into formation opposite of Beta Company as Utah and the entourage gathered at one end of the parade field to watch the final send off. She could still see the drill instructors baring their teeth at the kids they trained. The hate didn’t end even in the final moments. Utah couldn’t help feeling like she was in attendance for a sterile christening ceremony for a new ONI stealth corvette rather than the prideful graduation of an elite special forces’ unit. Between ONI warships and ONI child-soldiers, there was no fanfare.
Colonel Ackerson broke from the cadre and staff to walk the long formation of Beta Company, equally underdressed as if to also make an impression. A hat, an Army combat uniform, and a long officer’s trench coat. He mentioned he never came to Camp Currahee to personally train the Spartans. This would be the only time his graduates and their founder would meet.
Ackerson was further meticulous. Over a radio before arriving, he told the camp training lead, reserve Spartan-II and senior officer, Lieutenant Commander Kurt Ambrose, to line the graduates up in a three by one hundred formation. They stood off-center along each line allowing the colonel to inspect every single helmet with his own eyes.Scene inspired by: DeviantArt: Inspection, The-Chronotaur/Tacit Axiom
The Spartans unlike the rest of the attendees were dressed in uniform Semi-Powered Infiltration (SPI) armor with deactivated reactive camo plates, revealing their uniform and inhuman forms of matte gray figures as dark and bleak as the gray sky above them. They didn’t budge at a single distraction. Neither did the cadre nor Colonel Ackerson. Where the entourage of ONI officers flinched at lightning, thunder, wind, and the cold rain – those of Camp Currahee refused to budge.
Utah wondered how the Spartans struggled to remain rigid for so long. Not one fell over or shifted their posture. Maybe their armor helped adjust blood flow or supported their form. Maybe some slept while the officers’ and cadre couldn’t see their faces. The captain had no way of knowing but she felt thoroughly intimidated by the display. Some officers whispered amongst themselves in their huddle of feeling impressed and others voiced their disbelief that these Spartan could be children.
Utah didn’t speak because she had a different, heretical thought. She knew the United Nations Space Command needed Spartans, but bad enough to turn them into little more than robots? Colonel Ackerson was known throughout the UNSC Army for his ruthlessness and determination, particularly among Reavian and Martian training garrisons. But wasn’t this more than much?
It bothered her further as Ackerson addressed the Spartans, raising his barking call just over the storm like a distant whisper. He was not an officer known for speeches, and he made it very clear that he didn’t seek their respect or loyalty. He wanted only to make something clear. Their mission, and absolute duty. The stranger Colonel who rarely set foot in Camp Currahee only sought obedience.
“You’ve graduated. You’re no longer children, you’re Spartans. You know your job and your mission. Defeat the enemy at any cost. No matter the cost. That is all. Prepare to fall out at your cadre’s order and head to the Pelicans. This is the last time you will see Camp Currahee. Say goodbye.”
Utah watched the Spartans salute, grasping their MA5K carbines and setting them along their chests at the ready to go to battle. This didn’t feel human. She didn’t feel comfortable among this cold and heartbeats drumming in her ears to the sound of war. She wanted to disagree with Ackerson’s methods, but at the end of the day, she understood. Spartans were a necessary evil and no one understood necessary evil better than him.
The captain glanced in the direction of Colonel Ackerson and imagined a pair of horns erupting from his hat shadow under a fork of lightning. He really was a devil.
Utah’s imagination stuck with her even years later as she attended to her own SPARTAN-III program training class. Spartan-III Delta Company, and like Ackerson before her, she rarely set foot on the ground on which they trained.
But she wasn’t Ackerson. She didn’t want to be their devil. At least for herself, just once she wanted to see their faces and know the child warriors behind the mask.