[Thread] Old Friends
Characters: OU! Dr. Catherine Elizabeth Halsey, OU! Captain Jacob Keyes
Where: Vri-Enas
When: After this
Summary: After his arrival in Econtra, Keyes requests information from his closest friend.
Warnings: Possible Old!Shipping, and tea.
( Halsey had read the reports of a strange, mysterious, yet the most delicious tea in Econtra... )
Where: Vri-Enas
When: After this
Summary: After his arrival in Econtra, Keyes requests information from his closest friend.
Warnings: Possible Old!Shipping, and tea.
( Halsey had read the reports of a strange, mysterious, yet the most delicious tea in Econtra... )
From the day she first met Keyes to interview the children for the Spartan-II project, he had always been this way. So formal. So stoic. So disciplined. Some traits Halsey herself possessed and shared with the Captain, and others that weren't hers, but that she found attractive nonetheless -- The sudden moments of shyness he showed a few times that nearly broke his military stoicism, especially.
She wondered why were those thoughts coming in right now. She knew how to keep her emotions under control, as strong as they were, but right now, those traits surfaced not only with the Captain's return to the land of the living, but something else from this place.
That aside...
"Now, may we talk? I assume you've had time to think about some of the answers of the past day." Halsey thought best to go straight to the point, as she walked into the dorm.
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He stood for a moment and crossed his arms over his chest as he decided on which subject to broach first. He was tempted to reach for the constant pipe in his pocket, but that could be viewed as a sign of weakness on his part and he refused to give the doctor any advantages over their working relationship this time around. He was too old and too experienced to be beneath her anymore.
"Yes," he replied, starting with an answer before going on. "Let's start with a relatively chronological order. I'd like to know more about what happened to the Chief--and humanity--after..." he trailed off. Accepting it was the truth was one thing; saying it out loud was an entirely other. "Then we can move on to this war."
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"After what happened there," Halsey was tempted to trail off when she remembered the footage, but she didn't want to dwell on the moment he died, "John discovered the Flood, and wanted to fire the ring with the advice of the caretaker of the ring, a Forerunner AI called 343 Guilty Spark."
No matter how many times had she viewed John's recordings from the battle of the first Halo, she shivered on the inside by thinking how close everything was to be lost because of the half-truths and omissions of the Rampant AI.
"But when Cortana told him the truth, he escaped. Spark wanted to activate the ring, and with the Flood having been released and the Covenant being so nice to give them the means to escape, John destroyed the ring by overloading the engines of the Pillar of Autumn." She paused for a moment. "Everything that was near the ring when it exploded -Human, Covenant, Forerunner, Flood- was annihilated."
"He escaped, and found four more survivors -Johnson included-. They had been away from Halo when it was destroyed. With Cortana still on their hands, they boarded and and hijacked a Covenant Ship, the Ascendant Justice."
The entire tale sounded as fantastical to Dr. Halsey as the entire concept of Econtra. She knew the combat prowess of the Spartans, and Cortana was the most powerful AI they had created, but she had the feeling it was part of John's luck what had helped them survive after Reach had been burned.
"Their next stop, while looking for help, and knowing they couldn't risk the location of Earth according to the Cole Protocol, was Reach. Which... was where they found me, a handful of the Spartans, and a crystal that could bend time and space."
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He hesitated over the information that John overloaded the Pillar of Autumn's engines to blow the ship--and with it the Forerunner structure--to smithereens. It would have been a job hard-pressed for a noncom--but perhaps not a smart AI, he mused. Still--
But he had other things to distract him from his initial question as Halsey continued. That last part in particular really boggled the mind. And the fact that Halsey said it so calmly, completely accepting of its truth. That figuratively knocked the wind out of him. He swallowed a breath he realized he had been holding and let it out slowly.
"That's quite the story, doctor," the captain said after a moment. "And before we get on to that whole bending time and space nonsense... I have to ask: how did John get the Autumn's engines to overload?"
His biggest theory at the moment--well, it didn't sit too well with him. But at the same time, he would have expected no less from the Spartan.
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"To detonate the engines of the Pillar of Autumn, it was necessary to override the failsafe codes that could only be done with your CNI Transponder." The Doctor managed to keep a tone as neutral as the one she had when describing the events of Halo.
"Something you must know, is that the Flood not only use their hosts as fighters or as means of production. As they evolve, they become smarter. They use the minds of those they take. They learn what their host knows. With time, they not only learn to use weapons, but to pilot starships, as well."
Then, she continued on the events of the ring. Her tone remained the same, but ONI training could do only so much against a personal matter.
"After the Flood was released, they had taken a greater whole of the Covenant Forces and from the crew of the Pillar of Autumn, and they were preparing to escape from the ringworld aboard the Truth and Reconciliation. When John found you aboard the ship..."
She trailed off. The memories of the video logs of John's return to the Covenant ship returned to her. She remembered the screams of pain of the Captain as the Flood slowly took him over, and finally being a witness of him being deformed beyond recognition.
Halsey only remained in silence, her head hanging low. The Captain was back, but she hoped she wouldn't have to remember these images with his draft into Econtra.
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He tried to think of something to say to get her back on track. His voice was soft, and surprisingly considerate. "He did what he had to do. That will be all, doctor; I understand enough now."
A deeper, profound silence fell over them then as Keyes thought about what it really meant. The Flood had swarmed his squad, and he had been right in the mix of things. It was easy to realize he had been taken over to be host to whatever it was the Flood truly was. About that--he could ask John later. For now, it simply meant he had been one of them, and surely the Spartan had ended his "life" and done what was needed to ensure the safety of humanity. No, of all life in the galaxy according to the new information he had on the ring-weapon.
Then the moment was over and the captain was prompting Halsey into continuing her story as if nothing had been spoken. "You mentioned a handful of human survivors made it off the Halo world... and they made it back to Reach. What happened next?"
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She rose her head when Keyes asked for the rest of the story, then continued her tale, her poker face returning.
"That crystal," The Doctor began, "Belonged to the Forerunner, maybe as a way of travel -- It made our ship go a hundred times faster than it would on normal slipspace. It was the reason Reach wasn't completely glassed. After we left, the Covenant pursued us relentlessly, looking for the Crystal for religious reasons." She momentarily smiled to herself, almost in amusement of the wild goose chase the Covenant just didn't win, "Fortunately, the fact they knew we had the crystal prevented them from outright destroying us."
"On our escape, we also picked the UNSC Gettysburg, because the Covenant ship John and the others hijacked was too damaged to jump in and out of slipspace using their own reactors."
"The catch of the Crystal, was that radiation it emitted was so strong, it was practically a beacon for the Covenant to follow. If we kept it, they would have followed us to no end, with no way of returning to Earth." Halsey then remembered Corporal Locklear, who acted the very way she predicted he would in his troubled state of mind, "Someone of the crew destroyed the Crystal, finally leaving the Covenant with nothing to track."
The Doctor paused for a moment, thinking quickly. If Keyes returned safely to his world, and with information about what would happen, her plan to save the Spartans from the coming storm would not only fail, but beside being charged with treason against the UNSC, more of her Spartans would have died at Earth.
She wasn't even sure if the John of Keyes' timeline would be lucky enough to end up winning the war as he did in his own universe and in the one of the Arbiter. Should Keyes ask about her own fate, Halsey would have no choice but to say the same lie. She decided to continue with what happened to John's crew after she left aboard Governor Jiles' ship.
"John and the others found a docking Station of the Covenant, which was the definite proof that not only did they know about Earth, but were ready to launch an assault against the planet: The Unyielding Hierophant. The Spartans destroyed it, and nearly all of the five hundred docked ships with it, giving the UNSC Forces in the Sol System more time to prepare for the Covenant Invasion."
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There was one thing Keyes noted almost immediately and tagged with a yellow flag inside his mind. He didn't frown, but his eyebrows narrowed together slightly. He had to ask the inevitable question, "'John and the others'? Not 'we'?" Pause. "What happened to you?"
Not that he wasn't thankful for the act the Spartans managed to somehow pull off that ensured the temporary safety of Earth, but he needed to know everything. Or maybe he was simply being selfish; maybe he didn't need to know, but merely wanted the full fate of those he held dear in his mind, and (heaven forbid he admit he have one) heart.
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However, on the outside, she didn't even flinch. Still with a tone that did not betray her true intentions, she spoke. For her, this was another game of half-truths and omissions, and Keyes was not only a smart companion, but a worthy contender for that game of hers. She had to hide the truth of her plot.
"I had to to leave them to look for something that would've helped us in the war." Halsey spoke. Even if she was speaking to close friend that was able to keep many secrets, the repercussions of telling Keyes more than enough could compromise her plans.
"You are familiar with my most famous co-worker, Ackerson?" Halsey asked in a deadpan manner, naturally because 'co-worker' was the worst term anyone could use seriously. After Reach was burned, she wouldn't have been surprised if he had actually felt joy at the assumption that she could have been dead.... Even at the assumption that no Spartan remained.
"After taking cover in Reach for days, I found out he was hiding a few things that could've changed the tides of the war. He hid them from UNSC, and even from the rest of ONI. Had we known about that Crystal years earlier, we might have stood a chance."
Halsey naturally omitted a few things. She took Kelly with her, she called the Spartans from Earth to aid her at Onyx... and the discovery of the Spartan III project. If Keyes knew the truth about that project and he returned safe to their universe, his life would be in great danger.
"During my mission, I realized the reasons behind our war." The Doctor lifted her head to meet Keyes'. "The Great War -our entire war- was over the Forerunner Artifacts all along: The Halos, the Crystal. Everything."
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"And along the way--which, by the way, had no direction with what little information you've told me--you just happened to figure out what the Covenant were truly after, and why they decided to start an eradicating war with humanity. Why?"
As in: why not simply ignore us? Or, if that was impossible, why not invite us into the fold? Why bother with human-kind at all? Did they already know we had planets under our habitation with Forerunner technology on them? No, they didn't seem to know where humans were until after they'd discovered us bit by bit. Why start a lengthy war with a new alien race when they already had so many that obviously weren't from the same planet? (The Grunts confirmed that. They couldn't live on a planet with the other, oxygen breathing, species of the Covenant.) Why kill us all for seemingly no reason? Why not just ask? Did they fear our refusal so much? Why should they? They had far more advanced technology than we did. There just wasn't any logic to it all.
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"According to what John told me happened after the first Halo, the Covenant tried twice to fire the rings -without success-, and on both of these times, they had a human captive they tried to force to do it. They couldn't do it by themselves. They needed a human to do it."
Those very facts told a lot aboout their war. The words that had intrigued her the most, however, were the ones spoken by the first Halo's eccentric caretaker, 343 Guilty Spark, when John tried to fire the ring to destroy the Flood, once and for all:
You are the child of my makers, inheritor of all they left behind. You are Forerunner.
Halsey pondered the words: Child of it's makers -a long-standing relationship with the Forerunners, maybe?-; Inheritor of all they left behind -The Halos, the Ringworlds, the Ark, the Crystal, everything-; And that John was Forerunner. So many hypothesises. That AI could've been of use for humanity to reutilize Forerunner technology, had it not gone rampant... And yet, before they could learn anything else, John had no choice but to kill him, carrying the secrets of the Forerunner and of humanity with him.
"So, if the technology was meant for us, and the Covenant came to realize we could've gained as much power, if not more, than them, then our war could've been a preventive war." She thought out loud, then looked at Keyes again, "It's merely an hypothesis. However, their Leaders' desperation to fire the rings for religious purposes debunk it, but doesn't change the fact humanity's relationship with that technology has something to do with the Covenant wanting to hunt us."
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