I know the truth, I know the whole shebang.
Grif couldn't help but start laughing, even as he saw how it only made the weedy, balding man on the other side of the table even angrier. Lieutenant Colonel Norcroft was, like Grif's handlers -- and, indirectly, Grif himself -- a member of the Office of Naval Intelligence. While Grif and his handlers were with the front-line, almost straightforward Section One, however, Norcroft was a member of Section Zero, whose purposes were cloaked in secrecy even beyond what ONI generally considered normal.
For the last few months, when Grif had found himself steeped in commitments in his universe, that reduced his visits to the Nexus to whatever time he could literally sneak away without someone spotting him and calling him back for one more thing. It was standard procedure for companies to be subjected to an audit every couple of years, and this was doubly true for companies that (as strange as this may seem for a toy wholesaler) had military contractor status. It was, however, unusual for both sets of audits to happen at the same time. It was downright suspicious for them to be happening at the same time that someone from Section Zero started conducting some nebulously-defined investigation of everything he could extract from the bit-rotted husk of Grif's 800-year-old service record.
Grif had been good, gritting his teeth and letting Norcroft run his investigation. For all he knew, maybe it'd end up unearthing something he didn't already know. His patience had started to run thin, though, especially as the treatment he was receiving got increasingly hostile. Finally he just up and asked Norcroft what his problem was.
The results were... surprising. Norcroft launched into a vitriolic screed about how Grif was a reckless, insubordinate disgrace to the service (not that Grif would disagree, but really, that's a bit rude to just say), and that he was going to ensure that Grif was taken down to nothing and put back into Basic Training until it either whipped him into shape or broke him utterly. Despite this, Grif was laughing, because although it wasn't plain at first, Norcroft revealed that he was being driven -- at least in part -- by jealousy of Grif being a SPARTAN, which Norcroft himself had volunteered for but failed the compatibility tests.
"You have got to be kidding me. For one thing, look at the parts of my file about how badly SPARTAN-II fucked me up, and count yourself lucky you were actually tested first. For another, I was augmented eight hundred years ago. It's not like I showed you up at the audition or anything like that. And, really, seriously, that's what this is about?! Some pissy little personal vendetta you've dreamed up all by yourself? You pathetic cockbite."
"Call me all the names you like," Norcroft said, picking up his data pad and making a few notations. The earlier conversation had gotten him a bit riled up, but now he was calm and collected, focused on his master stroke. "As soon as I finish this paperwork, it'll be done. Your superiors can't save you, we'll hunt you down if you run for that Nexus we know you've been sneaking off to, and the anti-surveillance measures in this room ensure that you have no proof to gainsay my version of the story. You're finished."
That was when the door opened, and Grif's handlers walked in. Colonel Holbrook, with his relatively younger looks and natural charm, grinned and asked, with an almost suspicious lack of apparent guile, "Hey, Norcroft, did I hear you say you were finished with him? 'Cause there's some stuff we've been meaning to talk about with him, but you keep monopolizing his time."
If Norcroft had seemed vindictive with Grif, he was downright gleeful as he looked at the two full-bird Colonels. "Sorry, sirs, but he's not yours anymore. Mister Grif here is due for a nice long trip back to Timberland Outpost. You'll be getting orders as to the disposition of his property."
"Hey, hang on, now." Holbrook's tone was almost natural, but as a trained con artist, Grif could smell a setup, and so he sat back and waited to see where his handlers were going with this. "Unless you got a couple of promotions we never heard about, you're not in any position to be giving us orders."
"It's true that you still outrank me, sir," Norcroft said, his glee tempering into a prideful, self-assured briskness, "but I'm with Section Zero these days. My word has greater weight than it used to, because I now answer to a higher authority." He tilted his chin up, as though he would be looking down his nose at them, if such a thing were possible for a man in a chair to do to people who were standing.
Grif knew that the trap was sprung when older, salt-and-pepper haired Colonel McBride stepped forward and said, in a tone that was just a shade more amused than his usual seriousness, "Yes, about that... It turns out that your investigation of Grif was actually our investigation of you. We'd shut down the jammers in the room and ghosted your chatter, so we heard every word that you said... and so did your superiors. You should be getting a call any minute now."
"Nice seeing you again, Norcroft." Holbrook flashed one of his bright smiles at the now apoplectic man from Section Zero, then clapped Grif on one shoulder and gestured to the door with his head. "Come on. Let's get out of here."
For a moment, Grif considered saying something nasty to the man who'd been causing him so much grief. One look at his dumbstruck face, however, showed that he was already utterly crushed, and probably wouldn't hear a word. Grif settled for a pleasant little finger-waggling wave, as he stood up and followed his handlers out of the room.
"Well, that was... weird," Grif said as the three of them navigated the corridors of the ONI installation. "Shit, I never even thought to ask him why me specifically. I mean, there's got to be shitloads of SPARTANs out there, and I never met the guy before this."
Holbrook made a noise that might've been a clearing of his throat. With a brief and subtle stink-eye at his partner, McBride said ruefully, "You never met him, but he knew you. Before he got himself transferred into Section Zero, he was part of the Section One unit assigned to monitoring the surveillance we used to covertly keep on you. From what our investigation turned up, we suspect he was harboring some resentment towards the level of... enthusiasm some of the staff had for following your adventures."
There was something in the way the elder spook emphasized that word that gave Grif pause. He squinted at McBride for a moment, then also at Holbrook, but they had apparently moved past it already. Instead, he just asked, "Where the hell are we going, anyway? I never bother to memorize what's where in this place."
"Tech Division," Holbrook said. "They've got some new stuff they've been wanting to have you try out, but it had to wait for all of this to get settled."
The three arrived at the Tech Division armor labs, and Grif was almost immediately swept up by the enthusiastic scientists who urged him to get suited up. This he did, with the familiarity born of many years' practice. The armor didn't feel particularly different, and he told them so. The glee he got in return was unexpected.
"We haven't turned any of the new stuff on yet," said the technician -- "CONDE," according to the name tape on her jumpsuit -- who was hooking his armor up to a diagnostic console. "Actually, that's not quite true: The fusion reactor you're running on is new. It's also about a third of the size of the old one, but puts out the same amount of power. A little smaller, actually; we put three in where the old one used to be and had a little room left over for some other stuff."
Grif looked at her incredulously. "Was this just for kicks, or do you have some reason for why I'm going to need three reactors?!"
"Originally, it was just to see if we could. It didn't quite seem enough to just put in some long-overdue efficiency improvements. Now, though, there're a couple of uses." She called up a diagram on her terminal's holoprojector. "For one thing, redundancy: If, for some reason, one of them fails, hopefully it'll only be the one, and you can reroute from the others. Otherwise, they have other jobs. Reactor One is your basic suit power, mobility, computers, body shield, and so on. Reactor Two supplies power for external devices, like that Gluon Gun of yours."
"We're considering just giving that thing a reactor of its own," one of her colleagues chipped in. "Even if we still haven't managed to replicate it, we should at least be able to shrink that extra backpack you end up carrying around for it."
Grif considered that for a moment, then shrugged and nodded, admitting that that would be helpful. "And Reactor Three?"
Conde flashed a wide smile, bright teeth against dark skin, that reminded him of a friend he hadn't seen in some time. "That one's for the special systems. All of the armor plates are now grav and mag capable. The main focus is still your boot soles for EVA work, of course, but you never know, and it should help with your thruster-pack boosts. We may have another development on that sometime soon. The real new toy, though, is this: Hold your arm in front of you, like you were showing off that crowbar you've got there."
Grif complied, and was surprised when a disc of white light, tinged in blue and purple, manifested in front of his forearm, on top of the clamp-mounted crowbar. "Secondary shield emitter array," Conde explained. "Back in your time, we reverse-engineered the shields carried by the Covenant 'Jackals,' stretching them into a weaker but all-over protective barrier. Now, we're bringing back the original. They're sturdy and solid, though enough hits will still collapse them. You can put them anywhere on your body, but only in a couple of spots at a time and they don't extend very far."
"Hm." Grif pondered a moment, then asked, "Programmable shape?" Conde nodded. Using the holodisplay in place of his helmet, he accessed the controls for the shield, collapsing the one Conda had created. He then turned his attention to his hand, clenching it into a fist. In the spaces between his knuckles, three blade-shaped shields sprang forward. He looked momentarily dismayed when the blades stopped at six inches, but got over it quickly and grinned. "Heh. Snikt."
"Beg pardon?"
Grif looked over at Conde, then shook his head as the blades blinked out. "Don't worry about it. Thanks." They exchanged smiles, and she started unhooking him from the console. He, meanwhile, looked over at his handlers, who'd been watching the entire exchange with amused looks. "Hey, y'know, cockbite back there did have one mildly reasonable point in all his shouting: Why do you outfit a guy who cares little for orders and less for rank with all this cool shit? I know you say it's for testing, and there's presumably some risk for that, but you've got to have other guys doing this, too, and I spend all my time using this stuff to do wacky shit in other universes. Not that I'm complaining, but I am curious what the justification is, assuming you guys don't just do it for kicks."
McBride's smile became more of a rueful look as he considered how to answer the question. "The thing is, Grif... We've been at peace for centuries. We retain a fully staffed military, both SPARTANs and otherwise, just in case something should happen, but it spends most of its active time helping with disaster relief, organized crime investigations, that sort of thing."
Holbrook chimed in, "With no aliens attacking, no insurrections, not even any fake civil wars... Like you said, not that we're complaining, but part of why we've all enjoyed your crazy Nexus adventures is because they make you the closest thing we've got to an active front-line combatant that regularly goes into the field, these days."
While he knew, in the abstract, that the military couldn't have been especially busy during centuries of peace, having it laid out so plainly -- including the personal implications -- gave him a long, long moment of pause. The agents looked at each other. "We probably should've planned for that kind of question coming up someday," said McBride.
"Yeah, we should've. Sorry, Grif. Look, I know the idea is a bit weird and punches some of your buttons, but it is true. I mean, unless you want us to go charging into the Nexus like a gigantic pack of assholes... Oh, good. I like the death glare a lot better than the stunned silence."
"While we're busy apologizing for things," added McBride, "sorry about keeping you twisting in the wind for so long with this investigation ruse. Everything's already been cleared up; you won't have to worry about your company. We needed Norcroft occupied while we made our own inquiries, and it was convenient that he wanted us to stay away from you, in case we gave anything away."
"For a quality experience, my trouble had to be real, right?" The nods he received in reply confirmed what he'd pretty much suspected once he'd picked up on how they'd talked to Norcroft. They did, at least, look like they felt bad for having to do it, so he nodded as well with only a minorly aggrieved look at them for his trouble. "Well, I can't say that I like it, of course, but... I can understand it. Just, please, let's not do this bullshit again."
"You won't hear any arguments from us. That said, while we realize that this is possibly one of the worst sorts of times for this..." McBride sighed. "We've got a favor to ask. Something that's up your alley for several reasons."
"It's totally humanitarian, we swear!" Holbrook's grin was both intentionally cheesy and also mildly beseeching.
Grif sighed a deep, aggrieved sigh, placing one hand to his head. "Let's hear it."
For the last few months, when Grif had found himself steeped in commitments in his universe, that reduced his visits to the Nexus to whatever time he could literally sneak away without someone spotting him and calling him back for one more thing. It was standard procedure for companies to be subjected to an audit every couple of years, and this was doubly true for companies that (as strange as this may seem for a toy wholesaler) had military contractor status. It was, however, unusual for both sets of audits to happen at the same time. It was downright suspicious for them to be happening at the same time that someone from Section Zero started conducting some nebulously-defined investigation of everything he could extract from the bit-rotted husk of Grif's 800-year-old service record.
Grif had been good, gritting his teeth and letting Norcroft run his investigation. For all he knew, maybe it'd end up unearthing something he didn't already know. His patience had started to run thin, though, especially as the treatment he was receiving got increasingly hostile. Finally he just up and asked Norcroft what his problem was.
The results were... surprising. Norcroft launched into a vitriolic screed about how Grif was a reckless, insubordinate disgrace to the service (not that Grif would disagree, but really, that's a bit rude to just say), and that he was going to ensure that Grif was taken down to nothing and put back into Basic Training until it either whipped him into shape or broke him utterly. Despite this, Grif was laughing, because although it wasn't plain at first, Norcroft revealed that he was being driven -- at least in part -- by jealousy of Grif being a SPARTAN, which Norcroft himself had volunteered for but failed the compatibility tests.
"You have got to be kidding me. For one thing, look at the parts of my file about how badly SPARTAN-II fucked me up, and count yourself lucky you were actually tested first. For another, I was augmented eight hundred years ago. It's not like I showed you up at the audition or anything like that. And, really, seriously, that's what this is about?! Some pissy little personal vendetta you've dreamed up all by yourself? You pathetic cockbite."
"Call me all the names you like," Norcroft said, picking up his data pad and making a few notations. The earlier conversation had gotten him a bit riled up, but now he was calm and collected, focused on his master stroke. "As soon as I finish this paperwork, it'll be done. Your superiors can't save you, we'll hunt you down if you run for that Nexus we know you've been sneaking off to, and the anti-surveillance measures in this room ensure that you have no proof to gainsay my version of the story. You're finished."
That was when the door opened, and Grif's handlers walked in. Colonel Holbrook, with his relatively younger looks and natural charm, grinned and asked, with an almost suspicious lack of apparent guile, "Hey, Norcroft, did I hear you say you were finished with him? 'Cause there's some stuff we've been meaning to talk about with him, but you keep monopolizing his time."
If Norcroft had seemed vindictive with Grif, he was downright gleeful as he looked at the two full-bird Colonels. "Sorry, sirs, but he's not yours anymore. Mister Grif here is due for a nice long trip back to Timberland Outpost. You'll be getting orders as to the disposition of his property."
"Hey, hang on, now." Holbrook's tone was almost natural, but as a trained con artist, Grif could smell a setup, and so he sat back and waited to see where his handlers were going with this. "Unless you got a couple of promotions we never heard about, you're not in any position to be giving us orders."
"It's true that you still outrank me, sir," Norcroft said, his glee tempering into a prideful, self-assured briskness, "but I'm with Section Zero these days. My word has greater weight than it used to, because I now answer to a higher authority." He tilted his chin up, as though he would be looking down his nose at them, if such a thing were possible for a man in a chair to do to people who were standing.
Grif knew that the trap was sprung when older, salt-and-pepper haired Colonel McBride stepped forward and said, in a tone that was just a shade more amused than his usual seriousness, "Yes, about that... It turns out that your investigation of Grif was actually our investigation of you. We'd shut down the jammers in the room and ghosted your chatter, so we heard every word that you said... and so did your superiors. You should be getting a call any minute now."
"Nice seeing you again, Norcroft." Holbrook flashed one of his bright smiles at the now apoplectic man from Section Zero, then clapped Grif on one shoulder and gestured to the door with his head. "Come on. Let's get out of here."
For a moment, Grif considered saying something nasty to the man who'd been causing him so much grief. One look at his dumbstruck face, however, showed that he was already utterly crushed, and probably wouldn't hear a word. Grif settled for a pleasant little finger-waggling wave, as he stood up and followed his handlers out of the room.
"Well, that was... weird," Grif said as the three of them navigated the corridors of the ONI installation. "Shit, I never even thought to ask him why me specifically. I mean, there's got to be shitloads of SPARTANs out there, and I never met the guy before this."
Holbrook made a noise that might've been a clearing of his throat. With a brief and subtle stink-eye at his partner, McBride said ruefully, "You never met him, but he knew you. Before he got himself transferred into Section Zero, he was part of the Section One unit assigned to monitoring the surveillance we used to covertly keep on you. From what our investigation turned up, we suspect he was harboring some resentment towards the level of... enthusiasm some of the staff had for following your adventures."
There was something in the way the elder spook emphasized that word that gave Grif pause. He squinted at McBride for a moment, then also at Holbrook, but they had apparently moved past it already. Instead, he just asked, "Where the hell are we going, anyway? I never bother to memorize what's where in this place."
"Tech Division," Holbrook said. "They've got some new stuff they've been wanting to have you try out, but it had to wait for all of this to get settled."
The three arrived at the Tech Division armor labs, and Grif was almost immediately swept up by the enthusiastic scientists who urged him to get suited up. This he did, with the familiarity born of many years' practice. The armor didn't feel particularly different, and he told them so. The glee he got in return was unexpected.
"We haven't turned any of the new stuff on yet," said the technician -- "CONDE," according to the name tape on her jumpsuit -- who was hooking his armor up to a diagnostic console. "Actually, that's not quite true: The fusion reactor you're running on is new. It's also about a third of the size of the old one, but puts out the same amount of power. A little smaller, actually; we put three in where the old one used to be and had a little room left over for some other stuff."
Grif looked at her incredulously. "Was this just for kicks, or do you have some reason for why I'm going to need three reactors?!"
"Originally, it was just to see if we could. It didn't quite seem enough to just put in some long-overdue efficiency improvements. Now, though, there're a couple of uses." She called up a diagram on her terminal's holoprojector. "For one thing, redundancy: If, for some reason, one of them fails, hopefully it'll only be the one, and you can reroute from the others. Otherwise, they have other jobs. Reactor One is your basic suit power, mobility, computers, body shield, and so on. Reactor Two supplies power for external devices, like that Gluon Gun of yours."
"We're considering just giving that thing a reactor of its own," one of her colleagues chipped in. "Even if we still haven't managed to replicate it, we should at least be able to shrink that extra backpack you end up carrying around for it."
Grif considered that for a moment, then shrugged and nodded, admitting that that would be helpful. "And Reactor Three?"
Conde flashed a wide smile, bright teeth against dark skin, that reminded him of a friend he hadn't seen in some time. "That one's for the special systems. All of the armor plates are now grav and mag capable. The main focus is still your boot soles for EVA work, of course, but you never know, and it should help with your thruster-pack boosts. We may have another development on that sometime soon. The real new toy, though, is this: Hold your arm in front of you, like you were showing off that crowbar you've got there."
Grif complied, and was surprised when a disc of white light, tinged in blue and purple, manifested in front of his forearm, on top of the clamp-mounted crowbar. "Secondary shield emitter array," Conde explained. "Back in your time, we reverse-engineered the shields carried by the Covenant 'Jackals,' stretching them into a weaker but all-over protective barrier. Now, we're bringing back the original. They're sturdy and solid, though enough hits will still collapse them. You can put them anywhere on your body, but only in a couple of spots at a time and they don't extend very far."
"Hm." Grif pondered a moment, then asked, "Programmable shape?" Conde nodded. Using the holodisplay in place of his helmet, he accessed the controls for the shield, collapsing the one Conda had created. He then turned his attention to his hand, clenching it into a fist. In the spaces between his knuckles, three blade-shaped shields sprang forward. He looked momentarily dismayed when the blades stopped at six inches, but got over it quickly and grinned. "Heh. Snikt."
"Beg pardon?"
Grif looked over at Conde, then shook his head as the blades blinked out. "Don't worry about it. Thanks." They exchanged smiles, and she started unhooking him from the console. He, meanwhile, looked over at his handlers, who'd been watching the entire exchange with amused looks. "Hey, y'know, cockbite back there did have one mildly reasonable point in all his shouting: Why do you outfit a guy who cares little for orders and less for rank with all this cool shit? I know you say it's for testing, and there's presumably some risk for that, but you've got to have other guys doing this, too, and I spend all my time using this stuff to do wacky shit in other universes. Not that I'm complaining, but I am curious what the justification is, assuming you guys don't just do it for kicks."
McBride's smile became more of a rueful look as he considered how to answer the question. "The thing is, Grif... We've been at peace for centuries. We retain a fully staffed military, both SPARTANs and otherwise, just in case something should happen, but it spends most of its active time helping with disaster relief, organized crime investigations, that sort of thing."
Holbrook chimed in, "With no aliens attacking, no insurrections, not even any fake civil wars... Like you said, not that we're complaining, but part of why we've all enjoyed your crazy Nexus adventures is because they make you the closest thing we've got to an active front-line combatant that regularly goes into the field, these days."
While he knew, in the abstract, that the military couldn't have been especially busy during centuries of peace, having it laid out so plainly -- including the personal implications -- gave him a long, long moment of pause. The agents looked at each other. "We probably should've planned for that kind of question coming up someday," said McBride.
"Yeah, we should've. Sorry, Grif. Look, I know the idea is a bit weird and punches some of your buttons, but it is true. I mean, unless you want us to go charging into the Nexus like a gigantic pack of assholes... Oh, good. I like the death glare a lot better than the stunned silence."
"While we're busy apologizing for things," added McBride, "sorry about keeping you twisting in the wind for so long with this investigation ruse. Everything's already been cleared up; you won't have to worry about your company. We needed Norcroft occupied while we made our own inquiries, and it was convenient that he wanted us to stay away from you, in case we gave anything away."
"For a quality experience, my trouble had to be real, right?" The nods he received in reply confirmed what he'd pretty much suspected once he'd picked up on how they'd talked to Norcroft. They did, at least, look like they felt bad for having to do it, so he nodded as well with only a minorly aggrieved look at them for his trouble. "Well, I can't say that I like it, of course, but... I can understand it. Just, please, let's not do this bullshit again."
"You won't hear any arguments from us. That said, while we realize that this is possibly one of the worst sorts of times for this..." McBride sighed. "We've got a favor to ask. Something that's up your alley for several reasons."
"It's totally humanitarian, we swear!" Holbrook's grin was both intentionally cheesy and also mildly beseeching.
Grif sighed a deep, aggrieved sigh, placing one hand to his head. "Let's hear it."