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Being a Spartan, an alive one, meant having near perfect situational awareness. It was beaten into you at a young age. Like a lot of other things.
You and your siblings were the last of your unit. Your pack, your family after the one that borne you died in fire and plasma, were clinging to life by the skin of your teeth.
You looked out for each other. You learned from your elders. And you always knew where the exits were and who held the keys. You and your siblings watched the docs and nurses and orderlies. You watched your mom sleep heavily under the drugs keeping her from feeling the skull fracture. You watched the IIs with open curiosity - how could they be so similar and different from Blue Team. You all knew it was time, but seeing it in person was strange. They were rough around the edges, eerily similar to you and your siblings, not fully tempered like Blue Team. Not yet.
You heal fast. The doctors whisper. You try their synthesized smoothers, under observation, and feel the world slip into focus a little more with every adjusted dose. You feel their eyes on you. You hear their fascination muddled by fear and discomfort. They’re not a green crew but they only had 3 Spartans before and now they have 6.
And you’re not like other Spartans. Not even like the rest of your generation. Gammas were something else. IIIs aren’t as polite as IIs, there wasn’t time in the suicide trainings for manners or etiquette or scholarly discussions.
Your team has specialists in stealth and information so it’s only a matter of time before you heard it all. Gross devaluation of human life, ethics violations, just kids with scarred tissue aged at least a decade. Ticking time bombs, drain on resources, maybe not in so many words but hearing what they didn’t mean to say, reading between the lines, knowing who on staff would break first was important to keep them alive. None of them were in top fighting form.
But not for long.
Still when you are welcome and abhorred by the same doctors that had one of your own under observation you had to play it safe.
The fighting was never done. Playing for time and breathing room was standard operating procedure at this point. ONI had made them see enemies in allies and vice versa.
All they could do now was wait. Time would iron out the rest of the details.