by Matt Forbeck
Schein just shook his head.
O’Day snarled at him. “It means you’re not a goddamn Spartan until I say you’re a goddamn Spartan! You might feel like a superhero, but right now you’re as useless as a baby—and the UNSC doesn’t need any goddamn babies!”
I fought the temptation to beg for a bottle and struggled to my feet instead. “Yes, sir, Captain, sir!” I said as well as my lungs would allow.
Some of the others in our training class of twenty might have thought I was just sucking up to Captain O’Day, but the fact was I knew she was right. We all did. That’s what was really killing us.
“You see?” O’Day clapped me on the back. “Now that’s the kind of attitude I want! Get shot in the chest? Get your sorry ass back up and get moving. No screwing around. No self-pity, no jealousy, no wondering why you don’t have a proper Mjolnir set of rags yet. Just get your lazy ass up and go!”
She laughed at me then. “Of course, Gunny, you probably would have an even better attitude if you could keep from walking right into a shotgun blast like that, huh?”
I didn’t say a word. I just headed straight back for the starting gate of the training run. Jawing with the captain about my supposed credentials or my relative lack of happiness wasn’t going to make the day go any faster. Just get through this damn thing without getting shot. Again.
I couldn’t tell you know many times we charged through the run. I only know that, in the end, we finally made it.
I cried all the way to the infirmary, but they were tears of joy. That didn’t last long though.
I would have gone straight to my quarters rather than bother the medics about some bruised ribs that now hurt a good deal less than my wounded ego. But Captain O’Day had insisted that I follow regulations and get checked out. “We’ve put a lot of effort into you, Buck,” the captain said. “You may have only scratched your paint, but the docs deserve their chance to buff it out.”
With my Spartan blood working overtime, I was feeling pretty good within the hour. I was just about to leave, when they hauled in Wakahisa, my old pal from the transformation facility on Mars—or what was left of him.
The medics wheeled the kid in on an extra-long gurney that was covered with a white sheet, but the blood underneath it had already seeped through in several spots. One end was soaked crimson, and when a doc raced up and drew the sheet back, I saw why.
Wakahisa’s head had been all but torn from his body, and his amped-up arteries had bled out like a fire hose. His eyes hung open and lifeless, the whites shining through all the rest of that red.
“What the hell happened to him?” I said, sitting up in shock. I’d sat next to the kid at breakfast just that morning, shooting the shit about our neighboring home colonies. He was a lousy card player but a damn fine young soldier. In a lot of ways, he reminded me of the Rookie when he’d started out with Alpha-Nine. All raw talent with not nearly enough sense running through it—yet.
Now he’d never get the chance to use those talents, or all those Spartan enhancements ONI had engineered in him.
The doc who’d drawn back the sheet let it fall back down over Wakahisa’s face, and then reeled away in dismay and disgust. And this was one of the people who’d torn me apart and put me back together better than ever. She’d probably done the same for the dead man, and seeing him like that was more than she could bear.
I slipped out of my bed, yanking off the various feeds and lines running into me. The doc didn’t react at all. “Hey! What happened?” I asked.
“Found him out there in the training chamber like that,” one of the medics said. He sounded distant and vacant, still absorbing the horror of it all.
“He didn’t return from the field when the call went out,” said the other. “We couldn’t raise him on the comm. Commander Musa sent us out to find him.”
I looked to the doc. “Someone blocked all those electronic locators you stuck in us?”
The doc recovered a bit and shook her head. “No. Someone tore them out.” She pointed toward the blood-soaked end of the sheet covering Wakahisa. “They’re mostly up under the jaw, the ones that aren’t directly integrated into the armor.”
“Who did this?” I asked.
“We didn’t see anyone else out there,” the first medic said. “Whoever did this was long gone by the time we got there. It could have been anyone.”
“Sure,” I said. “Anyone who could overpower a combat-trained Spartan and rip his throat out.”
Other than Captain O’Day, the only other people who’d been out there in the training chamber during the exercise had been Spartans. Hard as it was to believe, the killer had to be a Spartan, too.
Why did Veronica always have to be so right?
Commander Musa’s voice rumbled over the station’s PA system then: “Attention all personnel. We have had an unfortunate incident during today’s combat training exercise. As a result of this, all junior personnel are ordered to return to their quarters immediately. You are hereby confined to your quarters until further notice.”
When it came to Spartans, I figured there weren’t many more junior than me. “Am I free to go yet, doc?”
She came over and put a gentle hand on my arm. “You checked out fine. You should be all right by now. Just get to your quarters as fast as you can.”
Although I wanted to run right down to the rec room—where most of the uninjured Spartans would have gone after our training—and interrogate everyone I could find, the doctor was right. I was no cop. If I ignored orders and did something that rash, I’d just muddle up the evidence, and the last thing Commander Musa or Captain O’Day needed was a bunch of charged-up Spartans trampling every bit of evidence around them—including maybe each other.
I made my way back to the barracks and to the cramped quarters I shared with the rest of Alpha-Nine. Romeo and Mickey had beaten me there and were sitting on their bunks, which—along with mine—framed the small room’s walls. They’d busted out a deck of cards and were playing poker on top of Mickey’s footlocker, which they’d hauled into the center of our small patch of floor.
“Deal you in?” Romeo said with a hungry grin.
“Careful, Gunny,” Mickey said. “He’s about to clean me out.”
“Consider it yet another gentle lesson in why you’re such an awful player,” Romeo said to him.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You don’t really want to know.”
I shook my head at them and long-stepped over the footlocker to reach my bunk, opposite the door. “Romeo’s already taught me that lesson.”
Mickey squinted at me. “You know something.”
Romeo cocked his head my way. “This isn’t just a drill?”
I frowned. “You ever know Musa to just yank your chain for fun?”
“We haven’t been here all that long.”
“Captain O’Day might try something like that,” I said. “Not the commander. He’s a straight shooter.”
Mickey nodded. “Those Spartan-IIs don’t mess around.”
“Can you really call him a Spartan if he never wore the armor?” said Romeo.
“It’s not his fault his body rejected the transformation treatments,” I said. “Even in that wheelchair of his, I bet he could take you apart.”
“I can’t even imagine that,” said Mickey. “Get abducted by ONI at six years old and have a doomed-to-die clone put in your place—and then you get crippled long before you’re even the right size for the armor? Tragic, man.”
“Ah, that’s all bullshit,” Romeo said. “All that ‘kidnapped and cloned’ crap. You really will believe what anyone tells you, won’t you?”
Mickey shrugged off Romeo’s doubts.
“At least he didn’t wind up dead like some of the others in his SPARTAN class,” I said.
Mickey tossed in his car
ds. “Without him, there wouldn’t be a SPARTAN-IV program at all.”
As the Covenant War came to an end, Musa had seen the chance to restart the SPARTAN program, but to recruit volunteers from the ranks of the UNSC rather than plucking them out of their cribs, thin air, or wherever. It worked better than anyone—outside of maybe Musa himself—could have hoped.
He’d patterned the new program on the original SPARTAN-I program from back before the turn of the century, which had taken top soldiers and improved upon them as best they could with the technology of the day. They’d called it ORION back then, but when they rebooted the program for another shot, they changed the name and came up with SPARTAN-II instead.
That’s military logic for you. The original program had failed because it proved too costly for what the UNSC got out of it—even though I hear one of those first recruits was none other than Sergeant Johnson. They renamed it in order to distance themselves, but they retain the numbers to show the sequence. ORION as SPARTAN-I to spackle over it.
Anyhow, word was that Musa had used the incredible success of the first class of Spartan-IVs to divorce the program from the Navy and, more specifically, Naval Intelligence. While the SPARTAN program worked in concert with both of those groups—and recruited heavily from them—the Spartans became their own branch of the UNSC’s military. That gave them a lot more leeway with their missions, and it meant they weren’t under anyone’s thumb.
Honestly, that was one of the selling points for me. Working with ONI too long makes a soldier feel dirty. Much as I love Veronica, I was happy to wash my hands of that.
“What’s up, Gunny?” Mickey said. “Give it to us straight.”
I just spat it out. “Spartan Wakahisa got killed during the exercise today.”
Mickey paled, but Romeo just laughed. “I thought you were the one who caught the most buckshot,” he said.
“No, I mean killed dead,” I said. “Murdered actually.”
“Bullshit,” said Mickey.
“I was in the infirmary when they brought him in.”
Romeo threw in his cards, too. “What happened?”
I shrugged. “I wasn’t there. But whoever killed him ripped out his tracker implant.”
Romeo made a face. “Right out of his neck?”
I gave him a nod and then froze. Romeo and Mickey spotted that straightaway and spun around to see what had caught my attention.
Jun had appeared in our door. He looked as grim as an undertaker. “Gentlemen.”
We leaped to our feet and saluted. He responded in kind and then stepped aside.
“At ease,” said a voice just down the hall. An instant later, Commander Musa rolled through our door. Jun stepped up behind him and stood in the doorway once again.
“Spartans,” Musa said. “We have a situation.”
“How’s that, sir?” I said. Romeo and Mickey might have been the same rank as me now, but they deferred to me out of habit.
“Buck. I assume you’ve told Agu and Crespo what you witnessed in the infirmary.”
“Yes, sir. I hadn’t given them much in the way of details yet though.”
“Do you have much in the way of details?”
I frowned. “No, sir.”
“Then allow me to fill you in.” He glanced at the others, and we all gave him the go-ahead to continue.
“Spartan Wakahisa was murdered in the combat training chamber during today’s exercise. He was found in one of the tunnels. It seems the killer forcibly removed some of the circuitry under Wakahisa’s jaw to prevent our systems from being alerted to his status.
“We knew instantly that something had gone wrong, of course, but not the extent of it. When Wakahisa didn’t report in after the end of the training exercise, Jun here went looking for him.”
Jun then took over. “I found him lying in the section of the tunnels farthest from the entrance. His body was still warm. I called in our medical team to remove him while I scoured the area for evidence. I also had our admin team scan the recordings of the training. By that, we were able to eliminate a number of Spartan trainees from suspicion.”
“You really think a Spartan would do something like this?” Mickey said.
Jun ignored the question. “The trainees who didn’t go down into the tunnels—or who emerged from them before Wakahisa went down into the tunnels—were eliminated. That leaves us with a short list of possible suspects.”
I felt a chill run through me as Jun gave us each a meaningful glance. I’d been down in the tunnels for a good part of the exercise.
“That list includes every Spartan in this room,” Jun said.
“We didn’t have anything to do with it,” I said.
“And you can speak for your two friends here?” Musa said.
“They can pipe up for themselves,” I said. “But I’ve worked with them for years now, and I’ve trusted them with my life on every operation. They’ve never let me down.”
“I didn’t even see Wakahisa,” Romeo said. “Not since the start of the exercise.”
Mickey shook his head in agreement. “I had no idea. None at all. I was too busy trying to not get shot myself.”
Jun reached into the breast pocket of his jacket then and pulled out a sealed plastic bag about the size of a fist. A broken chain and a circular medallion sat inside of it, and they were smeared with blood.
Even painted red as it was, I recognized the medallion instantly. It had been molded to resemble the surface of the Moon.
It belonged to Mickey.
“We found this clutched in Wakahisa’s hand,” Jun said. He kept any hint of accusation out of his tone, but we all knew what it meant.
Mickey’s eyes grew wide as the barrel of a grenade launcher. “That’s mine,” he said in a hollow voice. He glanced at me for support. “The Rookie and I bought them after the end of the war. Something to remember our common home. He lost most of his family there during the Battle for Earth.”
“And you?” asked Musa.
“I’m an orphan.” He swallowed hard. “Lived in foster homes most of my life.”
“Shuffled around a lot?”
He nodded. “Joined the UNSC the day I turned eighteen.”
“That’s mandatory for all wards of the state.”
“I’d have signed up either way.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Musa said. “Especially given how your parents died.”
Mickey flushed red, and I put a hand on his arm to make sure he wouldn’t launch himself at our commander. Mickey was as stable a guy as anyone I’d served with, but his family history tended to be a raw nerve.
“That’s not fair, sir,” I said to Musa. “Spartan Crespo has an exemplary record, and you cannot judge him by the actions of his parents.”
“What the hell is he babbling about?” Romeo batted Mickey in the chest with the back of his hand. “Your parents died in an accident.”
Mickey’s jaw bulged so hard from biting back his anger I thought the joints might crack.
“That’s not a lie,” Musa said. “But it’s not the entire truth either.”
“What?” Romeo wasn’t going to let this go.
Mickey spoke in a hoarse whisper. “They were part of the insurrection on Luna. They were trying to bomb a building.”
“Oh shit.”
Had there been space in the room, Romeo would have backed away. As it was, he could only squirm in his boots.
“What’s that got to do with today?” I said to Commander Musa.
He held up Mickey’s medallion.
“I haven’t worn that since I became a Spartan,” Mickey said. “It doesn’t fit around my neck anymore.”
“So how did it get into the training chamber?” asked Jun.
Mickey shrugged. “It should be in my footlocker.”
Romeo
groaned. “Which he never locks.”
“I don’t own anything worth stealing.” Mickey glanced at the bloody medallion. “At least, that’s what I thought.”
“Someone must have taken it and planted it on Wakahisa,” I said.
“Who would want to frame Mickey?” Romeo said.
The man shook his head in disbelief.
“When was the last time you saw it?” Jun said to Mickey.
“This morning,” he said. “I hung it on the inside of my footlocker’s lid so I could see it every time I opened it.”
Musa craned his neck around to speak to Jun. “Pull the records for the hallway cameras here for the past eight hours, as well as the movement logs for any of the trainees on the possible suspects list. If that doesn’t come up with any hits, widen that to cover the rest of the occupants of the station.”
“Right away, sir.”
He looked back at the three of us. “You’d better hope we find something, or we’re going to look at each of you under a microscope.”
Romeo shrugged his broadened shoulders. “I don’t know if I’d fit under a microscope anymore, sir.”
Musa arched an eyebrow at him. “Not in one piece, you won’t.”
Romeo shut his lips tight and gave Commander Musa a nod to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation.
Musa wheeled himself out of the room to continue the investigation of Wakahisa’s death on other fronts. Jun assigned us temporary quarters at the other end of the hall. “You’re all off duty until further notice. Stay in there, and don’t leave until I come for you,” he said. “I’ll have your meals brought in to you.”
“Are we under arrest?” Mickey asked. He was taking getting framed personally, and I didn’t see how I could blame him for it.
“Not at all,” Jun said. “But we’ll find it easier to catch whoever did this if you’re out of the way.”
“Maybe that’s just what this asshole who took Mickey’s medallion wants,” said Romeo.
“Maybe,” said Jun, “but it’s what Commander Musa wants, too. So keep your heads down and your noses clean. I’ll come check on you shortly.”
