Files

Erin stepped into the briefing room to find Vinh standing with her back to the table. On it lay the data pad Erin had left with her—screen on, but blank. All the files she’d loaded, Vinh had closed. The tall, broad-shouldered woman was staring less at anything through the briefing room’s window than at the window itself. Just feeding her brain junk data to keep from processing anything else.
“So you’ve read it,” Erin stated rather than asked. She took a seat at the table’s head, setting her own tablet down. “What do you think?”
“What am I supposed to think?” Vinh’s reply was quiet and cold. Erin's question had sent Vinh down a path she hadn’t meant. “That’s why it was sent now, not any time in the last twenty-seven years, right? Someone wants to see how I react.”
“They might have wanted you to know what you could have had. Or have.” Erin offered, hoping Vinh would take the fork in the road she provided.
“A lot of good that did them.” Vinh replied. “My mother died before I was recruited, that much I remembered. My father died when the Covenant glassed Jericho VII. Along with any relatives I had closer than cousins of cousins. They’d all just be strangers to me.”
There were words Erin might have used instead of ‘recruited’. But Vinh was talking, that was the important thing.
Vinh finally spun around. “Do you know who sent these files?”
For as long as she’d known Vinh, the SPARTAN-II had always kept her expression tightly controlled. Being raised from children to become the UNSC’s most elite soldiers, one had to guess at times whether they had excellent facial discipline, or simply no idea how to express themselves. But Erin knew the tells of someone consciously hiding their own reactions. Vinh read like someone trying to balance a dozen spinning emotional plates.
“I can’t be certain without relying on some risky contacts,” Erin admitted, “but their release was authorized by ONI’s Commander-in-Chief herself.”
Vinh exhaled. “Unbelievable. The Spartans accomplished half the most critical missions of the war, and before the treaty with the Elites is even ratified, they’re turning on us. Telling us it’s wrong for us to even exist.”
“They aren’t attacking you, Vinh. Or the other Spartans.” Erin contradicted. “Just the people who turned you into what you are.”
“It’s the same thing, isn’t it?” Vinh protested. She leaned forward to place her hands on the table, bringing herself closer to Erin. “If leaving me with my family was the right thing to do, then I’m not supposed to be here. I should just be some dead girl, like twenty-three billion other people.”
“Maybe you would be.” Erin met her stare. “But we didn’t know that at the time.”
“Erin,” Vinh tried admirably not to squirm. A personal plea meant Vinh desperately wanted an ally, someone to see it her way. “You know exactly what reasons they had for taking us. They weren’t common criminals.”
Yes, we were. “Not according to those records. And for what it’s worth, they aren’t fabricated.” Erin wouldn’t coddle her, not on this. Erin had fought a good portion of her life to accept what she’d become as an ONI agent, and wasn’t going to take a step back on it. But she could help Vinh see it the other way around. “When you made it back to Earth, and found out I took Dyne for the SPARTAN-IIIs, didn’t you think the same thing?”
“That was—” Vinh stiffened, cutting herself short of saying ‘different.’ The titanium boot was on the other augmented foot, now—and looking for something to kick. If she started throwing chairs around, Erin worried none of the walls would be left standing, nevermind herself.
“I was angry with you. I might still be, a little. But I said then, I have you to thank for him still being here.” She said, her jawline tight. Her frustration with the wider situation was starting to fixate on Erin’s refusal to agree with her. “Our training was brutal, but they put us through it so we could handle what we’d be asked to do. Mendez wanted us to survive, he cared about us. Doctor Halsey was like our mother.”
“Well, you have to admit, you have a strange idea of what family is.” Erin said without thinking. She realized she was falling back on sarcasm, a comfortably familiar defense after years training pre-teens on Onyx. But to hear Vinh call the woman who’d ordered her kidnapping mother… she had to try another tack. Unnatural as it came to her, she tried honesty. “Vinh, right now this isn’t about whether Halsey’s rivals are trying to sabotage her, even if they are. It’s about you.”
The suggestion made Vinh drop her gaze, as if aware of how hard the look in her green eyes had become. “They’ve tried before, you know. Like Colonel Ackerson did with the Mark V test. He could’ve killed John.”
“I do know.” Erin agreed, maneuvering herself to seem sympathetic to Vinh’s perspective. She didn’t always like how easily she could consciously manipulate a conversation, especially when it came to someone she wanted to consider a friend. But for all their strengths, the SPARTAN-IIs and -IIIs’ upbringing had left some exploitable blind spots. At least this time Erin wasn’t lying, not that she was supposed to know about the skullduggery between ONI’s project leads. It just happened to be how an ONI agent on burn notice stayed alive. “But I’m asking if you are okay with what happened to you, not how it might reflect on the program.”
Vinh slowly straightened up, eyes drifting. She pulled back the chair she’d been leaning over and sat down at the corner next to Erin. “I want to say I am. It let me do so much, and looking at my file, I know I wouldn’t be here otherwise. I’m proud of being a Spartan.”
“You have every right to be proud of what you’ve done with what was given to you. But,” Erin reached out to place a comforting hand on Vinh’s arm. She couldn’t help but feel conscious of the sympathetic gesture. Erin decided to keep her arm in Vinh’s convenient snapping range and forged ahead with something she couldn’t be sure of Vinh’s reaction to. “You do have to understand, you were a normal six-year-old when they abducted you. Too young to consent meaningfully to what was asked of you. You were a victim.”
“Victim.” Vinh grimaced, chewing over the word. “I’m still alive because of what they did. It’s hard to feel like a victim of it.”
“It’s not easy to admit, even to ourselves.” Erin replied gently. “You’re used to feeling powerful, in control of yourself. To think of yourself as being helpless… well, the ego doesn’t want to accept it.”
Vinh squinted without meeting Erin’s eyes. “I just don’t want there to be anything… wrong with me feeling that way.”
Erin squeezed her arm. “There’s no wrong way to feel. Take all the time you need to think about it. I’m here if you want to talk.”
Vinh just nodded, and Erin drew back her hand. It found the tablet she’d set down, and Erin took a breath, returning to a less intimate volume. “Well, as if that’s not enough to think about today, we have five other people to put through the same thing. Or rather, four. And one twice as complicated.”
Erin tapped the tablet’s screen, and lists flicked into being. They contained the names and Spartan tag numbers of five individuals: the members of Gamma Company, Team Machete. Among them, Dyne-G217. The son Vinh had carried, whom Erin had helped hide.
“Do we… have to do this?” Already in the midst of emotional turmoil, Vinh let worry tug the corners of her mouth into a grimace. “Can’t it wait until… I don’t know.”
Erin adopted a sympathetic frown. “Whether you’re ready or not, he has as much right to know as any of them. Or you, for that matter.”
“And if he does read it, what will he find?”
“Not very much. He was left alone at an orphanage in New Alexandria. No identified relatives. Letting them admit they didn’t look into it was more convincing than planting any fake data. And easier.” Erin admitted. “But if he does want to know, it’s up to us to tell him.” She let a moment pass before adding, “If you think it wouldn't hurt.”
Vinh’s face was a storm of apprehension, tossing her thoughts back and forth like a ship at sea. But her eyes clamped down, she exhaled, and locked her jaw into stony resolve. “It’s his right. If he wants to know, I’ll tell him.”
----
“They're accessible with just a fingerprint scan,” Erin finished once the Spartans of Team Machete—Kodiak, Morgan, Amber, Dyne, and Tara—had joined them, seated in a half-circle at the table's end. The data pad lay on the table between them. “All you have to decide is whether you want to see them.”
A pale hand came up hesitantly from the end of the table, its wrist wrapped in the black body glove each of the teenagers wore. “So, we don't have to view them?” the dark-haired girl attached to it asked. “It's not required?”
“No, Amber," Erin shook her head. “If you don't want to, that's just fine.”
Before Erin could think much about why that would be Amber-G330's first question, another hand came up.
“Uh, what if, just hypothetically, we've already seen our records?” asked Kodiak-G114, the broad-shouldered team leader. "We wouldn't be in trouble with ONI anymore now that we can read them, right?”
“Yeah," Dyne-G217, smaller and leaner than his team leader, chimed in, “we had the password to Commander Ambrose's terminal by age ten. We've been through everyone's files. Not much there.”
“Those were your personnel records.” Erin said, trying not to roll her eyes. “Birthplaces, dates, blood types. Data about you. These are more like… personal history. They contain information on who your families were, where they came from, and—if they survived the war—where they might be now.”
A silence followed as the idea sank in. Each of the teenage Spartans was thinking about what that meant—and by the darting glances each gave the others, Erin could tell they all felt uncertain. The implication of surviving family begged the next question: what to do about it? Were they supposed to reach out? Should they want to? Would it even matter? What if they weren't wanted back? What if they were?
Erin doubted she could imagine what all the questions washing over them felt like, but she did know how to stem the tide. “We aren't saying you need to look at them now. ONI has authorized their release to you, so they'll be on-hand whenever you—”
The words stuck in her throat as a bronzed hand snatched the data pad from the table. Surprised glances from all around fixed on Tara-G112 as she buried her face in the screen, thumb planted on the scanner. A word document opened, and the white glow flickered in her dark, hungry eyes.
Chairs scraped as Amber, Dyne, and Kodiak pushed to her side of the table, looking eagerly over her shoulder as the document loaded.
“Sequoia,” Tara's voice cracked as she read aloud, though her face was blank. Erin couldn't tell if the cause was emotional distress or merely a symptom of her twelve-year-old voicebox, especially given how little she used it. Tara rarely spoke without prompting, and when she did, her teammates were sure to listen. “That's the planet where I was born. I could never remember the name.”
Her teammates crowded around her, eager to share in her discoveries—without risking the uncertainties of their own files. Only Morgana-G018 remained on the far side of the table, her icy blues fixed on Tara's face. Morgan was detached, logical—appearing most days to feel as little as Tara spoke—but she sometimes showed keen intuition. The worry in her knitted blonde brows seemed to say jumping in like this was asking for trouble.
“My father,” Tara continued, her words halting every few words, “was a computer scientist. He worked for Sequoia's government. Mother… my mother. Stayed at home with my brothers and I.”
She swiped her finger to scroll down the page, and bit her lip. She had to know what would come next, but seemed powerless to stop.
“The Covenant came when I was four. The nearest evacuation point was Abzen, we had to drive into town. I…” the tablet's glow in her eyes flickered, though her grip hadn't allowed it so much as a twitch. "I remember this. The road was blocked by empty cars, so we got out and ran. I was youngest, so mother carried me. When we got to the spaceport, there was a crowd. Not everyone could fit on the transport, and the Covenant were coming. There were screams. Mummy lifted me up and begged them to take me. A Marine took me and ran to the ship with me over his shoulder. I was looking back when they started firing, and no one else came over that wall. My brothers, my cousins, none of them made it. I was the last one, because she picked me up…”
The shine in Tara's eyes had swelled to tears, streaming down her face, by the time her voice gave out. But her hand still gripped the tablet, keeping the record of her family's death just inches from her unblinking eyes. She only broke contact when Morgan stood, reached across the table, and gingerly set the tablet down for her. Her other teammates put comforting hands on her shoulders, but kept their own eyes down and away, as if ashamed of seeing her distress.
“Maybe, uh,” Kodiak stammered, “maybe the rest of us will think about it for a while, if that's alright.”
“Of course.” Erin replied, taking the tablet back. “All you need to do is ask.”
----
“I didn't think she'd take it so hard,” said Dyne a few hours later, when four-fifths of Team Machete lounged in a secluded corner of Ryu Base's secondary hangar. Around the bay they'd taken over stood tool chests, empty crates, and a handful of shop hoists the Spartans had modified for their own purpose: hanging the MJOLNIR suits they'd saved from scrap to replace their Semi-Powered Infiltration armor.
Absent from their group was Tara, who without speaking much—as usual—had communicated she wanted to be alone for a while. The others vacated their shared quarters, and the suggestion came up to use the time working on their armor. The plates of each titanium suit dangled in roughly humanoid outlines like exploded diagrams.
“Of course she did.” said the only suit still assembled, the JFO-variant. Morgan's voice filtered through the helmet's external speakers. “She's always been sensitive about losing her family. Remember how she blew up when you and Kody talked about ways to make peace with the Covenant?”
“Yeah…” Dyne picked through a case of sockets and found one to fit his wrench. “Alright, hold still.”
Locked still as a statue inside inert power armor, anyone else might've made a joke, but Morgan waited patiently as Dyne began ratcheting free a bolt on her cuirass' back. Panels had already been removed from her shoulder and the side of her helmet, exposing circuitry and jacks the Spartans had already plugged diagnostic tools into.
“It's still just a surprise, you know?” he continued once the first bolt slid free. “After all the time we were on Onyx, running ragged with training, it hardly seems like anything before that matters.”
“That's easy for you to say.” Amber said, seated on a nearby crate. She tilted her head around a data pad covered in lines of feedback. “You grew up in an orphanage. You didn't leave anyone you really cared about behind. That's not typical for a SPARTAN-III.”
“Wait,” Morgan turned her helmet toward Amber, unaware it made Dyne flinch behind her. “He didn't lose his family to the Covenant? I thought we all did, part of ONI's psychological profile for producing more dedicated Spartans.”
“Nope,” Dyne crowed, despite the question not being aimed at him. He moved closer to carefully start on the next bolt. “Or, well, maybe not. All I know is someone dumped me on the orphanage doorstep. Now stay still, this armor could break my fingers.”
“I wasn't, either.” Amber glanced back at the data pad, then set it beside her on the crate. “I guess some of us just slipped through the cracks. Think you'll look at your files, Dyne?”
“Eh, probably. I figure whoever abandoned me owes thirteen years of child support. Plus, I became an armored hero of humankind, so y'know. Who wouldn't want to rub their faces in that?”
Kodiak snorted. He was hunched over a computer he'd rolled closer on a tool cart. “Truly, Dyne, you're a beacon of heroism and virtue. A shining example to us all.”
“Right?" Dyne laughed, and popped the next bolt out. “So what about you guys? Think there's anything in those files worth knowing about?”
There was a moment's awkward silence before Kodiak spoke up.
“I… I might take a look. My parents, er, the ones I knew, weren't really my parents. They adopted me. I overheard them talking one night, about how they'd have to tell me one day. I know they cared about me, but I can't help wondering who my real parents were, why they left. Maybe my file has something on them.”
Amber nodded sympathetically. "You want to know where you came from. Tara probably felt the same way. But… maybe she was better off not knowing.”
“Yeah. That's the dice I'd be rolling.”
“I doubt there's anything in mine I don't already know.” Morgan said, to Dyne's relief without turning her helmet this time. “I didn't have any siblings or cousins, just my parents. They didn't make it off of Miridem, so there's no point in reviewing it.”
“But if you already know about it,” asked Amber, “it can't hurt, right?”
Morgan missed a beat in answering. “Yeah.”
----
It was after midnight when the buzzer to Erin's quarters sounded. As usual, she hadn't thought of turning in yet. Too many forms to misfile and forge sat open in her terminal, mostly to do with the missing suits of MJOLNIR Mark V slated for recycling. With the initial and date boxes all starting to blend together, she was glad of the distraction.
“Come in!” she shouted, pushing away from her desk on the cheapest office chair the UNSC could buy in bulk. It carried her far enough to reach the cooler her coffee maker perched on.
The door slid open, letting a rectangle of blue-white fluorescence cut through the soft yellow of her lamp. The contrast turned the dark-haired girl stepping through into a silhouette, but one Erin knew on sight.
“Evening, ma'am.” Amber-G330 said, standing at attention in the center of the tiny room.
“Good morning, you mean.” Erin corrected as she dumped old grounds out of a filter and looked for her measuring cup. “What can I do for you, Amber?”
Her familiar tone made Amber's shoulders relax. Erin was an officer, and it was good of the teenage Spartan to try maintaining professional boundaries, but she'd known Amber from five years old. Erin taught the classes on Onyx where she learned military conduct. She knew it was unprofessional, but sometimes she couldn't help feeling like Machete's high school teacher instead of their mission handler. Aside from which, they were off duty—though 'off duty' was a tricky concept for Spartans. They couldn't take the carbide ceramic off their bones along with the uniform.
“I, um… I'd like to know about my parents.”
Erin paused halfway into stretching for her coffee cup. “Alright. Any reason this couldn't wait until morning? You know, you have access to the files on your—”
“I'd,” Amber broke in, “well, I don't want the others to be there when I read them.”
Erin sat up, brushing her dark bangs from her eyes. “I see. Do you want to talk about why that is?”
She gestured to the unmade cot she barely ever used, and Amber shifted over to sit on its foot. She hunched to rest her elbows on her knees, which kept her from meeting Erin's eyes.
“I just… don't want to hurt them. Tara and Morgan and Kody all know their parents died. But I'm not sure about mine.”
“You think they're alive, you mean?”
“Maybe. Well, my mother, anyway.” Amber's lips tightened into a grimace. “I don't really remember my father, but my mother and I lived on our own ship. Not a colony world.”
“And you hope that would make it harder for her to be caught.”
“I… maybe? I guess so.” Amber's frown deepened. “It's not like I want her to be dead. But if she is alive, I just—”
“Don't know what it would mean for you and the team.” Erin finished as she faltered.
“Right.” Amber bit her lip. “Have you read them?”
“No.” Erin lied. “They're not mine to read.”
Well, half-lied. She hadn't read the documents sent by ONI. But she'd been part of abducting every member of Team Machete for the SPARTAN-III program, and many more besides. She knew where each came from, and had a good idea of what their files contained.
Amber looked up at last. “Do you think I should?”
Erin felt her cheeks press in on her eyes, making her squint as she thought it over. She tilted her head back to stare at the ceiling. “I don't know if I can answer that for you. I can't imagine how you'll feel about what you learn, or what you might choose because of it. But I can tell you your friends won't stop being your friends, whatever you decide.”
A grateful smile came to Amber's lips. “Okay. I'll look at them.”
Erin leaned back to reach the tablet on her desk, then sat up to offer it to Amber. The young Spartan shivered free of the urge to tear it from Erin's grasp and accepted it cautiously, pressing her thumb to the scanner. Her grey irises contracted as the blazing white light of a text file came up.
“Woah,” she breathed as her eyes flicked along lines of text. “My parents were both Naval Intelligence. There are service records, but… most of them are redacted. My dad was a career officer, mom… was special forces?”
Erin nodded along, putting a minimum of effort into feigning surprise. Amber was too focused on the tablet to notice any lack of sincerity. She knew this story. The head of Section III's black ops division and its rising star agent, a cloak-and-dagger Cinderella story for the interstellar age. In flagrant violation of fraternization policies, but understandable when humanity's extinction was a few glassed planet-throws away. It'd almost been too charming a story for Erin to threaten bringing to light—almost. But the SPARTAN-III program had gotten another near-perfect genetic candidate out of it in Amber.
“They're not together anymore. Dad still works in Section III,” The light on Amber's face flickered as she closed a file, evidently disinterested in it. “Mom took an extended leave… there's no reason given, but I think this is when I was born. There's nothing after it, though. Just a restriction level. What's November Black?”
“What?” Erin's eyes snapped open. “Let me see.”
She rolled her chair closer as Amber held out the tablet. The statements from ONI she'd received implied the Spartans' access to their own files would be unlimited. It was a gesture of good faith, a start to making amends for the damage done to their lives and relationships. Holding anything back defeated the point of releasing them at all, making their promises feel disingenuous.
Sure enough, however, a black bar covered the links to any documentation past 2549, complete with an ONI sigil and the words NOVEMBER BLACK displayed large. Erin couldn't help feeling irked—both by ONI's pretense of magnanimity while giving away nothing, and her own curiosity about someone she'd once dug through encryption to learn everything about. It was like finding an open square in a puzzle she'd thought completed. And the puzzle wasn't even Erin's to see completed.
“This doesn't make sense,” she told Amber. “You're supposed to have access to everything. Your mother must still be working for ONI, on something as secret as the SPARTAN-III program.” Or more…
“Is there anything you can do?” Amber asked. “I was… kind of hoping I could get to see her again.”
Erin hesitated, but looking up to find Amber's face ashen—even more than usual for her sun-starved skin—she smiled encouragingly. “Legally? No. But I do have my ways.”
The smile proved contagious, lighting up the thirteen-year-old's face. “Thanks, Erin. Kody and Dyne are right, you're the best spook ever.”
Erin rolled her eyes. “Right. Well, try not to let it get around.”
----
Kody always felt awkward around Morgan.
She was excruciatingly serious—something which, as leader of a Spartan team, he should have been. He just wasn't. He didn't sweat protocol when a task needed completing, he took what he could get and made it work.
Morgan minded every P and Q of a requisition form. She wouldn't commandeer even a derelict vehicle in case it was part of some plan she wasn't privy to. She respected the chain of command, including her team leader. But it was Kody's rank, not him, she respected.
Kody chalked that up as his failing, not hers. Respect like that had to be earned, and Machete hadn't been given many chances yet. It would come with time, he hoped, but it didn't make conversations any easier yet. 
Morgan woke early that morning—not long after Amber came back from wherever she'd gone—and by now was suited up and trying to work out the problem with her MJOLNIR again. The team's exploratory disassembly yesterday hadn't found any defective components.
She hadn't bothered bolting together the titanium outer shell, just donned the white helmet and nanocomposite bodysuit. All the gantries and tool chests were shoved toward the walls of Machete's private bay, giving her room in the center to flow through a sequence of martial arts stances. As Kody walked up, he caught the small hitches in her movement—the reactive circuits fought her at random points, and Morgan was using the exercises to try and narrow down what motions triggered the problem.
She would have seen him approach in her motion tracker, and her lack of response told Kody she was irritated. Probably not having much luck. He gave her a wide berth and stepped up to a computer cart, grabbing his own helmet on the way from the gantry holding his armor. Since getting accustomed to Semi-Powered Infiltration armor on Onyx, data seemed so much easier to process in a Heads-Up Display.
Booting a diagnostic program, he slipped the helmet on and opened a TEAMCOM channel. “Any consistency yet?”
“None,” Morgan exhaled tiredly. “I'll trigger it, then do the same thing and nothing.”
“Keep at it. I'll monitor the live feed and see if I catch anything.”
She didn't acknowledge, only thrust herself into the next pose with a slight twitch in her left arm. Kodiak's eyes darted across lines of scrolling code.
“You didn't sleep well last night, did you?”
“If you're looking for the glitch, it won't be in my vitals.”
“I wasn't reading your vitals. I was up all night thinking about the same thing.”
“I doubt it.” Morgan followed through violently on a punch. The reactive circuit tic made her second-guess her balance for a moment.
Kodiak turned first to glance at her in his peripheral vision, then away to pretend he wasn't. He felt his helmet wobble without the seal of a muscle suit around his neck.
“Sergeant Stacker said it helps to talk about what bothers you. If you don't want to, that's okay. But maybe I want to talk.”
“Don't you usually talk about things with Dyne?” She suppressed a grunt as she threw another punch mid-sentence.
“Normally, yeah. But he wouldn't get it. He didn't lose anyone when he was recruited. He doesn't think his file has anything in it he'd care about. At least, not the way you and me do. And Tara, well, she's already found out.”
Morgan completed her sequence and returned to a resting pose. “Is there something specific you wanted to ask?”
Kodiak's lips popped as he opened them to speak, but words failed him. He wondered if the MJOLNIR's helmet mic was sensitive enough to pick it up. “Do you think reading our files is a good idea?”
“If there's something in them you want to know, it's the only way to find out.” 
“See, that's what I thought. I always wondered what my birth parents were like. Did they have to leave me because they were soldiers, going on a dangerous mission against the Covenant? Were they some kind of heroes?” A smile came and went under Kody's helmet. “But I know that's probably not what happened. They were probably just some nobodies who weren't fit to take care of a kid. So if that's the case… would it be better not knowing, just to be able to pretend?”
“If you think there's something in them you don't want to know, don't read them.” She took a step away from Kodiak, as if leaving her non-answer behind, and brought her leg up to begin a kickboxing exercise.
Kody's hurt grimace was hidden under the helmet, but he couldn't keep it out of his voice. “So why don't you want to read yours?”
The slam of Morgan's heel coming down to the metal deck resounded through the hangar. A few idling technicians and pilots glanced over in surprise—as if the Spartans' presence didn't give them enough reason to stare. Even in her layer of body armor, the way Morgan hung her head made her embarrassment obvious.
She answered only when Kody's silence made it clear he would wait. “Because I don't have anything in them I can pretend about. I was the only child of only children. My family are all dead, and I don't need the reminder.”
“Hold.”
Morgan froze on instinct. It was a response drilled into her through years of team scrimmages in the woods of Onyx, when listening to your teammates could mean the difference between jumping an enemy or getting tagged with TTR paint. As Kody's footsteps approached, however, she suspected Kody had used it just to shut her up. She wanted to round on him for an answer, but before she could the light press of his hands on the back of her helmet told her Kody was at work. She waited patiently until he snapped a panel back into place and stepped away.
“Alright, try it now.”
She did, slowly straightening up, and found the suit smoothly matched her movement. She curled her arms to her biceps, took up a fighting stance, and sprang into a kick, landing with her feet planted confidently for her next move. No tics. She glanced at Kodiak, and winked her status light in their HUDs green to indicate all was well. “What did you do?”
“Your helmet registered a false positive for carrying a data crystal chip. Since the suit assumes you're mentally integrated when you're carrying one, it was drawing the occasional signal from the superconductor layer like junk data. Seemed to mostly happen when you're under a lot of stress. Now, for instance.”
Morgan turned away. They may have only been able to see one another gold visor to gold visor, but it felt close enough to eye contact. “We missed that the whole afternoon yesterday. And you find it in five minutes?”
“Sometimes you come at it the next day with a clear head, and everything falls into place.” Kody shrugged, then wandered over to seat himself on one of their crate benches. “Maybe I just don't get it, but… if there's nothing that can surprise you about your file, it seems like it shouldn't upset you.”
“It doesn't.” Morgan winced. She couldn't even deny to herself how quick and clipped her answer came. She tilted her helmet back to stretch her neck. “The file doesn't. Thinking about what I lost does. So I'd just rather not think about it.”
“That's it?” Kody asked. “Just, don't think about it?”
“It's worked so far. We're Spartans. We'll always have a new mission to stay busy with.”
“Right. Not like we have hours alone in our bunks each night with nothing but our thoughts. Besides…” Kody made a show of glancing around the bay they'd taken over in all their free time, with the war over and all the search-and-rescue ops they could volunteer for complete. “Look, everyone has a past. It isn't something you can just forget about.”
“And what do you expect reading a few pages will change about it?”
“For you? Maybe nothing. But maybe there's something in there that'll change the way you feel about it.” Kody stood up, meeting her visored gaze as she approached him. “And if not, it can't make you feel any worse, right?”
Behind her helmet, Kody couldn't be sure if she was trying to study his own obscured face or staring through him in thought. “Alright. I'll think about it. For what it's worth, I think you should read yours, too.”
“Any reason you say that?”
“If you aren't happy with wondering forever, the only thing you can do is hope it'll change the way you feel.”
----
With the light off, deep in the center of Ryu Base, Machete's shared quarters felt like an empty janitor's closet. No windows, just the dark of an empty room where things could be forgotten about. Which was just the way Tara wanted it for the time being.
In the alcove of her bunk, little more than a human-sized shelf, she could pretend to be nothing more than a broom, or a box of paper rolls. Something that didn't have to have feelings. Just lying where she was left, waiting for the next time someone needed her.
Not that she was looking forward to when someone did need her. In fact, when the door slid open, reminding her the world all around had shape and form instead of being the void she wanted to escape into, she resented whoever had opened it without rolling over to look. By the weight of the footsteps, she could guess. The door closed, sealing out the light again, but Tara was still aware of the other presence. The space between them dictated how large the room around them had to be, denying her the fantasy of endless dark in all directions.
“Hey, Tara,” Dyne said hesitantly. The foam of his mattress crinkled as he sat on his bunk across the room. “You probably don't want to talk… I mean, you never do, really… but hey—you've always been great at listening, so…”
She wanted him to go away. Listening took mental energy, all of which she needed to keep herself from letting other mental gears turn.
“What happened to you, losing your family… sucks. And I'm sorry. I wish I was the kind of person who knew what to say. But I do know there's nothing I can do to make that better. So you take all the time you need to make it better.”
Blankets ruffled as Dyne rolled into the bunk.
“The others are going to be feeling down, too. Kody wants to read his, and who knows what Amber might find. Morgan might not, but those files are already making her think about life before the Spartans. Everyone is. Even me. And I didn't even have it that bad! No family, not even any close friends I remember on Reach. I didn't really lose anything. So it's weird I can't stop wondering what I did lose. ”
Several whumps came from a futile attempt at fluffing a thin pillow.
“My parents probably weren't good people if they basically abandoned me on a porch, but I do want to know why they did it. Maybe it's just so I can hate them for the right reason. If they hated me, I could hate them right back. If they gave me up so I'd be safe, well, I could show them I don't need protecting any more. But not knowing, I've got all these feelings and no idea what I'm supposed to do with them. Not having a target just feels like I'm kinda… lost, y'know?”
Sheets shifted again, and two taps came as Dyne's feet set down on the floor.
“The way you talk about your family, you have to know they cared about you. And that's not me trying to make it sound like you have it good. It's just, I bet if they knew you'd grow up to be a Spartan, they probably would've been really proud. People who cared about you like that should be remembered. So if you need, Kody'n me can spoof your FOF tag while command sends us out on a milk run or something. Just say the word—or the HUD signal.”
The bunk creaked without Dyne's weight, and his footsteps started towards the door. When it opened, the outside light cast Tara's prone shadow on the back of her alcove again.
“Dyne?”
The light persisted. Dyne was holding the door open, waiting.
She lifted her arm behind her back, extending it outside her bunk so he could see her thumbs-up.
She could practically hear the smile in his one word, “Cool.”
----
It took most of the day for Erin's contact to get back to her. With the war between humans and aliens nominally over, every channel of communication was flooded with damage reports, searches for lost loved ones, and questions about how humanity's military and government were to proceed. Nevermind what she needed was classified above what most mere mortals outside ONI were permitted to know and continue breathing. But restriction levels meant little to a respected officer wanting to keep a few indiscretions with subordinates from his wife. The best prison was only as good as the men guarding it, and in that respect, thank god, ONI was rotten to its most secret of hearts.
She sent Amber a message as soon as it arrived. But instead of coming alone, Amber sent a message to each of the other Spartans. That evening Erin, Vinh, and all five of Team Machete gathered again in the conference room. Tara's puffy eyelids were plain to see, but she sat quietly next her teammates and didn't seek eye contact with anyone, and Erin decided not to comment. Having her out and about was progress enough for now.
“I'm sorry to bother everyone with this,” Amber began, standing at the table's end, “but I had something to say. I looked at my own files last night, alone, because I didn't want to hurt anyone else since my parents might both still be alive. But it didn't feel right hiding it from you, either. My mom's whereabouts are classified, so I asked Erin to see what she could find. This time, I want everyone to know when I find out.”
Next to Erin at the far end, Vinh spoke up. “You made the right call. Trusting your team is important, and not only in the field. Having people around who you can trust kept us Twos from losing ourselves in one mission after another.”
Smiling and flushing slightly at the older Spartan's approval, Amber sat down and carefully glanced at her teammates' expressions. She lingered last on Tara, who responded with a barely-perceptible nod of confidence.
Kody turned from Amber to Morgan. “I've been thinking about reading mine, too. Maybe it's best if we all share them together.”
“Agreed,” said Morgan. Her lips were pursed and her eyes fixed on Kody, as if in a staring contest he seemed unaware of.
“So,” Dyne piped up, “who wants to go first?”
Deafening silence followed. The other Spartans suddenly became as still as Morgan, each afraid the slightest movement would drive attention their way. Eyes in frozen skulls darted pleadingly between their comrades.
Kody, as ever, stepped forward when no one else would. “Well, uh… I guess I can start.”
Erin slid the tablet down the table to him, and Kody pressed his finger to the scanner. The screen flashed white, and text appeared for him to read aloud.
“Let's see… born on Miridem, knew that. Parents, Alec and Lili Jacques. No familial relation found during genetic disease risk screening… no adoption record found,” his brows pinched together as he squinted at an attachment, “one probable genetic match found: Caleb F. Aagard. Present on Miridem in 2539, known associate of Alec Jacques, no further sightings after 2539. No further sightings?” he looked up at Erin. “What does that mean?”
Erin sucked air through her teeth, uncomfortable. “It probably means he was under UNSC surveillance, or an off-gridder. Or both. Off-gridders are colonists who don't like the UEG knowing where they are at all times, so they make a living independent of UNSC infrastructure. Of course, they can't synthesize every modern convenience themselves, so they'll make the occasional visit to civilization to trade. The analysts don't like how that throws off their estimates of every household's assets, so they get put on watch pretty often.”
A puzzled frown pulled at Kody's mouth. He glanced back down at the tablet. “There's nothing about him after. And nothing about my real mother. But if they weren't sighted when Miridem was evacuated, it probably means…”
“We don't know for sure,” Dyne said, spying on the tablet from the seat next to him. “Look earlier, it says he was on Mamore, and New Constantinople. I don't think he was just some paranoid who took shitting in the woods over accepting browser cookies.”
Kodiak hunched his shoulders slightly, suddenly aware of their closeness. “Maybe, but he could've just as easily decided he was finally staying on Miridem.”
Amber spoke up from across the table. “What's weird is you said there's no adoption record. Even if they were off the grid, shouldn't your foster parents have needed to fill out some paperwork?”
“Glassed planets have bad records,” Erin shook her head, “A lot of survey data was stored locally, so ONI might not have had anything to retrieve when they put these together. I can try to find out more, but… I doubt there's much left to turn up. I'm sorry, Kodiak.”
“Nah, that's okay.” Kody blew out a breath and sat back in his chair. “I'm kinda surprised there was even this much.”
“Did it make you feel any different?” asked Morgan. She'd watched Kody all the while without so much as shifting. “To know?”
Kody focused on the ceiling tiles with his head tilted back. “Not really, I guess. It just feels like another dead end.”
“But you explored it, at least,” said Dyne. “Now you've got one less place to look.”
“Right, now just the whole rest of the galaxy to check.” Kodiak smirked, rising to meet Dyne's level of energy. Vinh was right, Erin thought, it did help to have friends.
“So,” Kody set the tablet down and closed the file with a tap, then pushed it to the middle of the table. “I had my turn in the hot seat. Anyone else?”
From across the table, Morgan reached out and placed her hand on the tablet like a holy book to swear on. “I'll go.”
Kody swept an open palm invitingly, and Morgan drew the pad to her. Recognizing her fingerprint, the pad opened another document, and Morgan began reading in silence. Her teammates watched expectantly, beginning to fidget the longer Morgan took. After an awkward half-minute, she set the tablet down again and meshed her fingers in front of her, brow furrowed.
“Well?” asked Dyne.
“My parents worked for the colonial government,” Morgan announced. “Their families were part of the first generation of settlers, and before that their ancestors—my ancestors—lived in France. They were artists, mainly.”
Curiosity grew in the eyes of the other Spartans. “Do they have paintings in galleries anywhere now?” asked Amber.
“It wasn't art like that,” said Morgan. “They devised and choreographed performance art. Dances, laser light shows, public events. Apparently, my fourth-great grandmother was nearly arrested for embarrassing a security company by breaking in to perform on the roof of one of their charges.”
“Awesome,” Dyne laughed.
“As for my parents, there's no record of them on any evacuation ship from Miridem.” Morgan stared through the table to focus her eyes somewhere a few floors below. “They put me on a school bus taking children to the first vessels lifting off, and that's probably the last time anyone who knew who they were saw them.”
Her teammates, leaning forward with interest the moment before, shrank back into their seats with downcast eyes. Biting his lip, Kodiak asked, “Still… it's better to know, isn't it?”
Morgan exhaled and slowly nodded. “It is. It… I'm still angry I lost them. But now I know things about them I didn't before. I feel closer to them for it.”
Her blank eyes flicked up to meet the concern in Kody's. Morgan's lips folded unnaturally into a half-smile to reassure him. The result wasn't convincing, but the effort was. The ripple of a single, silent laugh ran from Kody's lungs to puff through his nose, and he broke the contact. “Right, well… you got next, Dyne?”
Down the table, Vinh shifted in her seat. The SPARTAN-II usually fidgeted less than an ambush predator in shade, which the others might've noticed had Dyne not replied quickly.
“Eh. Actually, I'm more interested in what ONI wanted to hide about Amber.” He slid the tablet past him and down to Amber's end of the table. “Call it payback for looking without us first.”
Replying with a good-natured kick to Dyne's shin which would've bruised anyone not augmented, Amber spun the tablet around and waited for her fingerprint to register.
“Restricted under classification level NOVEMBER BLACK, Career Service Vitae for Ilsa Zane,” she began aloud. “Whoa. There are a lot of ONI missions listed here. I'm pretty sure these are all wetwork assignments.”
“Your mom was a spook?” asked Dyne. He scooted closer, as did Tara on Amber's other side. “Hey Erin, think you might've met?”
“Not all ONI agents know one another,” Erin told him, omitting a personally from the statement. If two wetwork operatives met in the field, one of them usually didn't come back. Which would've made this conversation all the more awkward.
“The records I saw before cut off in 2549,” Amber said. Shadows thinned, then thickened as she closed one file to open another. “Augmented under project—holy shit! My mom was a Spartan?!”
There were several scrapes at once as chairs shifted, their occupants twisting in surprise. Not the least of these was Vinh, who turned her gaze sharply from Amber to Erin. Erin, whose eyes grew just as wide as the others', could only shake her head discreetly to attest to her ignorance. She hadn't known about this. After feeling guilty for lying to Amber, she'd decided not to read what her search turned up until Amber did.
“What class?” Vinh asked, keen to hear the answer. Erin didn't doubt she wondered if another S-II was guilty of her same indiscretion.
“It doesn't say. But the augmentations aren't ASTER, and they aren't CHRYSANTHEMUM, so not a Two or a Three. She's too young to be an ORION. So there's gotta be another SPARTAN program out there.” Amber had picked up the tablet and held it like parchment that could disintegrate at any moment. The other Spartans, even Vinh, seemed to reel at the news. Erin felt a bit unsteady herself. It was a hell of a thing for her not to be aware of. Reminders she wasn't privy to every secret in the UNSC made her feel like a rabbit in an open field unaware of the sky.
“What does it tell you?” Morgan was first to ask as Amber kept reading.
“That—” Amber stopped short. “This doesn't make sense. Her augmentations are listed as unsuccessful, along with the project, but the record doesn't end there. If the augmentations didn't kill her, shouldn't she have been discharged?”
Erin felt dread twisting in her stomach. She remembered the recordings of Project: ASTER, the Twos' augmentations, that Lieutenant Commander Ambrose had shown the Gammas before their own procedure. The deaths, the mutilations of teenagers just a few years older than they all were. If that'd happened to Amber's mother, Erin feared what details the file might've included. Would she be able to watch a recording of Ilsa strapped to a gurney, bones wrenching themselves out of shape?
“Not… always,” Vinh answered while Erin was lost in thought. “There were a few of my teammates crippled by the procedures who could still serve in other roles. Strategists and scientists, mostly.”
It was hope Erin found she needed as much for her own sake as Amber's. She didn't want to find out what the poor girl's face would look like if curiosity demanded she watch her mother's gruesome end.
Amber scrolled further down the file. “Subject exhibited mental instability following procedures including heightened aggression, lack of empathy, paranoia… after failing to report for duty, it was found she had… murdered fellow servicemen and stolen military property to flee, in all likelihood aided by agents loyal to the New Colonial Alliance. Ilsa Zane is declared a defector in violation of STOLEN GAUNTLET protocols.” She swallowed hard, but read to the end of the page. “She is considered a high-value target to be killed or captured on sight by UNSC forces.”
She looked up and was met with silence and ashen faces. None of them could hope to process all they'd learned in a few scant seconds and find something in it all to comfort her with. Another Spartan program, failed augmentations, and Amber's mother a traitor? Any one in the three raised more questions than they could answer.
“Does this mean,” Amber's voice faltered, and she tried again, “does this mean if I ever see my mom again, I'll have to kill her?”
“No.” Erin replied, unsure where her conviction came from. “You won't be assigned that mission, I'll make sure of that.”
“So it will be someone else.” Amber said, crestfallen. It hurt Erin to look at her, powerless to make her feel any better in the face of such revelations.
A hand appeared on Amber's arm, helping her lower the pad to the table. She turned to find Tara staring at her, seated close. Tara communicated far more with silence than she ever did with words, not that it was a high bar. Amber turned her palm up and grasped her hand tightly in her own.
“Well,” Kodiak said after a minute, “one more to go.”
Heads turned to Dyne, sitting quietly for once and looking mistrustfully down at the pad between them. Becoming aware of the attention on him, his eyes shifted to each of his teammates in turn, then back down as he reached for the tablet. At the table's far end, Vinh held her breath.
“Thanks,” Dyne said as the pad was slid to him, “but nah.”
His fingers danced on the tablet's screen to turn it around, then jerked to send it skidding back to Erin. Vinh stared at the returned device with surprise.
“Hang on,” said Kody, “you can't back down just like that. We've all read ours.”
“I'm not 'backing down',” he replied. “I just don't care what's in it, is all.”
Morgan placed her hands on the table to glare at Dyne more closely. “That's not what you said in the hangar yesterday.”
“I can change my mind,” he hunched his shoulders more as a shrug than defensively, but sighed when he saw the look on her face. “Look… I know what I'll find in there. Or maybe I don't. But either way, whoever my parents were, they left me behind a long time ago. I don't care if their reasons were good or not. I grew up with you guys and three hundred other siblings, and drill instructors who beat us less than some outer colonial dads do. We've got Erin looking out for us, and Vinh to learn from. It all made me someone better than I would've been on Reach, or most other places in the galaxy. So forget however I got here. I've got all the family I need.”
Morgan sat back in her seat, still processing the sentiment. Beside him, Kody elbowed his shoulder and muttered, “Sap.”
Dyne snorted, then glanced timidly at Amber. She had a teary shimmer in her eyes, but a grin on her lips. Both jerked slightly as Amber kicked his shin under the table again. The kick was weaker this time, but Dyne still vocalized an, “Ow.”
----
Team Machete filed out shortly after, leaving Erin puzzling over what to say to Vinh. She shook her head as she wiped the files from the tablet. “Now I guess we'll have to find another way to break the ice with Dyne. Hell if I know how, though.”
Head tilted at a peculiar angle and leaning back in her chair, Vinh replied, “No. We'll leave it be. He's made it clear how he wants things.”
“What?” Erin looked at her incredulously. “You've been waiting weeks to tell him, and just worked up the courage to do it.”
“I know,” Vinh sat up, her brown ponytail brushing off her shoulder. “But the whole point of telling him was he deserves to make his own decision about it, and have it respected. If he's already decided, shouldn't we respect it?”
What he deserves is the shock of being told he's not adopted if he calls me Spook again, Erin thought with an annoyed huff. She'd been preparing for a lot of awkward questions the Spartans would have. But, admittedly… Dyne had used his moment in the spotlight to put the good of his team ahead of himself, and things would be a lot simpler this way. Vinh could still be there for her son, and move forward with the relationship they had now.
“Okay,” Erin agreed. “Just promise you won't keep awkwardly fence-sitting around him. I'm sure they'll all have a lot to work through, even after that little show of unity.”
“Promise.” Vinh replied, despite Erin knowing it would be practically impossible for her to keep. Vinh would keep walking the line of wanting to know Dyne better, yet holding back for fear of him or his team thinking it was some special treatment. Keeping the same secret while the Spartan-IIIs silently compartmentalized their new baggage.
And yet, that would make for its own kind of normal. One day same as the next at least let you know what to expect, and with half a lifetime of war ended, Erin had a feeling that would be hard to find in the galaxy for a while. They had to start somewhere.