Fifteen: I Shall Be The One To Judge

A/N: This chapter is mostly a resounding Fuck You to Karen Traviss; read accordingly.

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Don't react.

Catherine Halsey let her eyes drift open slowly. Someone had sent a message to her neural lace - not for the first time, but this was unsigned - entirely unsigned, no identifiers at all, something she hadn't thought possible.

But she kept her face impassive, wary of the cameras on her at all hours now. It had been a mistake to continue contact with Jul, she acknowledged, but the pursuit of knowledge was one of her most powerful impulses. She had always been weak to it, and he had dangled the perfect bait: knowledge of the Librarian. And she had paid the price for it; her missing arm still had phantom aches and pains, and itches that could never again be scratched. And being locked in this cell with nothing to do...

But then a second message came, and only the strongest effort kept her face unreadable.

Oly oly oxen free, Doctor.

A minute later, the door to her cell hissed open. It was Captain Lasky and a fireteam of Spartans - Majestic, if she recalled correctly, led by Spartan Thorne now. He was one of the most tolerable of the Spartan-IVs she had encountered so far, but she didn't know much about the rest of his squad beyond the fact that the previous squad leader - DeMarco? - and… the other one… had been juvenile and irritating. She was briefly surprised it wasn't Osiris, but then she remembered that they were supposedly still debriefing on what had happened after the Guardian had taken them from Sunaion.

Lasky stepped forward. "Doctor Halsey," he said, "We have transfer orders for you."

She sighed and stood up. "And I don't suppose ONI has told you where I will be going? A shallow grave on a glassed planet perhaps?"

The man shifted, and so did Thorne; despite all that had happened, they were uncomfortable with the thought that they might be letting her go to her death. "Not as I understand it," Lasky answered, "There's a facility that they'd like you to take a look at. Might be nothing, but they don't know yet."

She hummed in acknowledgement and stepped out of her cell, the S-IVs forming up around her and the officer and escorting them through the Infinity to one of her many cargo bays.

There was a Prowler waiting, the UNSC Dusk. It rested almost sinisterly on the deck in the space cleared for it, the promise of ONI's long reach in its every angle and line. But she felt no fear of it; her attention was on keeping her face impassive - and on the people at the base of the Prowler's boarding ramp.

They were wearing sets of sleek, dark-colored MJOLNIR armor, all of them geared for covert operations and infiltrations, but she still recognized each and every of them, standing at calm attention as they approached. "Thank you, Captain Lasky," said one, voice scrambled by armor components, "We can take it from here."

The man nodded, and he and the S-IVs stepped back, letting the other Spartans surround her. They saluted the officer, who returned the gesture, and then escorted the scientist onto the Dusk. The ramp closed behind them, and she felt the Prowler start to move under her feet as they kept walking. "So where are we really going? John, Fred, Kelly, Linda."

"Somewhere safe, away from ONI," the Master Chief replied, and she could hear the faintest smile in his voice. They led her to the commanders' quarters and unlocked the door for her. "Get some rest, Doctor. We have a few days before we arrive at our destination."

She stepped in. The quarters were small but better than any cell. She looked back. "Thank you."

All of them inclined their heads and left her to it, the door hissing shut as they walked away. She took off her shoes and lay down on the bed. She fell asleep almost immediately, exhausted from all that had happened, from always keeping one eye open for who knew how long. She was safe at last; the S-IIs were watching over her.

She woke hours later, fiercely hungry among other things. She used the head and freshened herself a little, then stepped out into the hall.

There was no sign of the Spartans.

A second later, a flare of blue light made her look around sharply. An unfamiliar AI appeared on a holopedestal just outside the door - and yet somehow she looked very familiar in a way not easily described. She was relatively tall but not overly so, slender without being delicate, and she wore alien armor and had her long hair pulled up into a simple ponytail.

"Good evening, Doctor," she said, and Halsey instantly placed her voice. This was the unknown AI that had been working with John on Meridian. "There's food and water in the mess hall if you're hungry. Dad and the others are on the flight deck."

"'Dad'?" the scientist repeated. She couldn't deny that she was very curious - why did this AI call the Master Chief her father?

"It's a long story," the AI shrugged, "He'll be happy to tell you, and I'm sure he can explain better than I can; I wasn't actually around for most of it. Come join us when you're ready."

She vanished, but the promise of an explanation from John was enough to mute any irritation she may have felt. Halsey stopped in the tiny mess hall and found a few unfamiliar pouches of real food waiting in storage. Simple instructions written in several languages - all but two of them alien (UNSC Standard and Sangheili) - let her prepare it easily, even with only one hand. She ate quickly, trying to work out the linguistics of the other languages like the packaging was some kind of Rosetta Stone. She briefly considered pocketing it, but reasoned that it would be odd and that there would be others like it later. Then she went to the bridge.

Space was at a premium there. All four Spartans were still in armor at the monitoring stations, keeping careful watch of the readouts, but even though their helmets seemed to be off, they were clearly communicating with each other without words - without even looking at each other; she could see the micro-reactions in their facial expressions and the way they moved. "Permission to come onto the bridge, Spartans?"

They turned to look at her as one, though John was the only one who spoke. "Permission granted, Doctor. You know you don't need to ask."

"Still, it's polite," the scientist replied, stepping in, "Especially since you've apparently gone through quite a bit of trouble to snatch me through ONI's fingers."

He inclined his head in acknowledgement but said, "Actually, this was probably our easiest operation yet."

"Amen," Kelly agreed.

Halsey inclined her head as well. That was fair; they hadn't had to actually hunt her down and fight their way through the halls of the Infinity to get her out. But that begged the question… "How did you get me out?"

"A masterful bit of hacking from Joyeuse here and her mother."

The AI in question reappeared on another holopedestal and smiled brightly at John. "It was easy enough," she said, "Just a matter of patience and creative system errors." She turned to Halsey. "We already knew where you were; we heard the broadcast about Fireteam Osiris killing Sali 'Nyon and figured they must have recovered you in the process. We just had to wait for Osman to send out electronic orders with an encryption key to another team. I faked a temporary disconnect so she and the local system thought it didn't go through. She generated a new key for the orders, even though the original one was still valid, and I redirected the old one and rewrote the orders attached to it. Mom's the one who shuffled transfer orders and got us the Dusk, and here we are. She wanted to come, but the UNSC might have recognized her data patterns."

"'Mom'. Meaning - Cortana?"

Joyeuse beamed and nodded. "'I am Cortana,'" she quoted, "'of the same steel and temper as Joyeuse and Durandal.' Dura is my brother."

"It's a long story." John gestured to one of the stations, and she took a seat. For a moment, there were familiar readouts on the screen, but they soon vanished, replaced by a report.

A very long report, covering from the beginning of everything up to the end of the Battle of the Domain and the revelation of the Flood. If it had come from anyone other than her Spartans, she wouldn't have believed a word of it, but it came from John, who didn't have a lying bone in his body - at least not to her and the other S-IIs, since it seemed he'd been deceiving ONI and the UNSC with every breath he took since his return.

It took even her hours to finish it. Linda brought more food when she was about three-quarters of the way through, but otherwise the bridge was mostly still and silent, waiting. At last she sat back, and stared off into space for a moment, thinking. That explained so much, answered so many questions that had started spinning through her mind from the very instant John had gone AWOL.

But there was still at least one question unanswered. Arguably the most important one now.

"But why, John? Why rescue me? Now you know better than anyone what I've done. Mendez and Osman-"

"They should speak for themselves," he said quietly, "and only themselves. Mendez trained us, and if he had an objection to the program, he should have lodged it back in 2517, not now. He doesn't get to pretend he has the moral high ground. Same for Alban and Black Box. And Serin - someone else may have pinned those bars on her shoulders, but she would do well to remember that you're the one who put her in a position to receive them. Not to mention all the shady shit that she's done for ONI since she washed out, like Kilo-Five. She's in no position to judge anyone, let alone you.

"But answer me this, Doctor. The SPARTAN-II program - you had us all kidnapped, trained, augmented, armed and armored. How much did it cost?"

"A lot," she answered without hesitation, "Billions of credits for the MJOLNIR materials and research alone - we could have built at least one full-size destroyer for each and every Spartan-II. And that's not including all the resources, the facilities, the equipment, the time… I don't know that I can actually estimate the full cost; I was more focused on actually doing the work."

"Billions of credits," John repeated. He leaned on his fist. "Not to mention the intel you needed to screen all the candidates, the personnel you needed to raise us, train us, to do the actual augmentation surgeries, the additional research and manufacturing teams from ONI's Materials Group to help actually design and build the MJOLNIR armor itself… and everything it took to keep all those people quiet about raising kids for war. Not to disparage your intelligence and skill, but all of that isn't something a mere rogue scientist could do on their own. Someone, somewhere, was signing off on it - and why would you teach us to be loyal to ONI and the UNSC if they weren't the ones doing it? Who approved it, who funded it, who gave you everything you needed? And even all of that doesn't even start into ONI trafficking war orphans as young as four to be suicide squads for Ackerson's S-III Program - that they also signed off on. Faster, cheaper - expendable."

He nearly spat the word, as if it left a bad taste in his mouth, then continued, "As for Serin, she's upset that… what? We didn't keep in contact with her after the augmentations? Never mind the fact that all of us were in the middle of a war and barely had time to blink, let alone keep track of the rest of the program - and that we were told she was dead.

"Yes, that must be it. It's our fault. It couldn't possibly be that someone very high up in ONI had a very public falling out with the program administrator. It couldn't possibly be that the lead scientist in question was reassigned, confined, cut off from contact with all her Spartans, information about her deeds intentionally leaked to leave her shamed, her reputation in tatters, because she was too valuable and too useful to kill just yet.

"And it definitely couldn't be that the best revenge was intentionally isolating and grooming some of her beloved Spartans to hate her, turning them against her. It couldn't possibly be that someone intentionally tampered with Serin's records, made it seem like she refused to be rehabilitated with Alice and Douglas and Jerome and the rest, instead choosing to dedicate herself to ONI directly. It couldn't possibly be that someone forged a message from her, saying there was no longer a place for us in her life and that she didn't want anything to do with us or the program.

"Yes, it must have been malice on our part, because none of that could possibly be the truth, could it. No one in ONI had that kind of power or motivation, now did they."

In time all foul things come forth.

"If I have to disavow some of my Spartan siblings because Margaret fucking Parangosky decided to be petty, I will be very upset," he said, voice soft and dangerous, "Graveminds are greedy, and I want them all."

The flight deck of the Prowler was ominously silent.

John gave her a smile as sharp as a blade, eyes changing color right in front of her, going from clear sky blue to a dark and poisonous shade of green. "I might not necessarily like what was done to me and the others, but it was done, and it's too late to go back now. Any attempts at restitution or suing the UNSC to its back teeth won't give us and our biological families back all the years we lost. But the people in ONI who approved it - who recruited you, including Parangosky - are trying to blame everything on you, and we're - not - having it." The growl of the Gravemind colored his voice before it returned to normal. "If everyone else decides they want to keep drinking that Kool-Aid, fine. That's their problem, not mine.

"And now, it isn't yours either." He leaned back in the captain's chair, eyes fading back to blue. "As long as you are with the Fleet, you can consider yourself beyond the reach of even ONI's long arm."

"What if they try something?" Fred asked quietly, a hint of worry in his voice.

"They won't. They're not that stupid - or at least I certainly hope they aren't. But only a blind fool would challenge a Flood Hive this size - especially this Flood Hive - over one person, and someone they don't even like, at that. They already declared her KIA on Reach. Better to just pretend that now, it's true."

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The pain, the rain is a blessing in disguise,

The flood's coming and it's drowning all the lies,

The pain, the rain is a blessing in disguise,

The flood's coming and it's drowning all the lies!

I will face everything and rise!

Never gonna quit until the day I die,

Angels keep falling from the sky,

Take the broken wings and learn to fly,

I will face everything and rise!

-"Face Everything and Rise", Papa Roach (F.E.A.R)