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0910 Hours, September 9th, 2525 (Military Calendar) / Epsilon Eridani System, Planet Circumstance, New Baltimore Airfield
Dr. Halsey pushed her glasses a little further up her nose as she stood in the entryway of the landing shuttle. After a moment, their automatic polarization kicked in, and the yellow glare of Epsilon Eridani became at least bearable as she stepped outside. She knew that Eridani wasn’t actually that bright. It was nominally less luminescent than Earth’s star Sol, which, like everything Earth-related, remained the benchmark for all stars. However, spending so much time aboard starships while not resting in cryosleep always tended to have adverse effects on one’s senses over a long enough period. Unfortunately for Halsey, she had chosen to spend most of her traveling time these last few months working instead of resting, in order to catch up on her ever-increasing workload.
Then again, it wasn’t very common for the sun to be out on Circumstance to begin with. Its skies were perpetually filled with gray clouds, always looking like a snow storm was about to come down any minute. Ironically, it never snowed on Circumstance outside of the poles, but it was nonetheless very cold; its equator region was barely warmer than the northern Reach Military Complex, due to the planet's further distance from its star. Halsey could just barely see her own breath in the air as she stood outside.
Looking out across the many landing pads, Halsey spotted dozens of Vancouver and Dublin-class shuttles, Egret-class spaceliners, and various other transports in the midst of landing, taking off, or being repaired and refueled. One thing all of the ships had in common, however, was the prominent eagle logo on their sides - each one was affiliated with the military in some way. Halsey’s current transport, the Ecbatana, was a considerably older ship in comparison to those around her, with few of the luxuries provided by the newer shuttles. Halsey generally wasn’t picky about comforts, however. As long as the ship was available when she needed it, and could run her mobile lab equipment, she would take whatever ONI provided her.
“Catherine!” a voice bellowed in the distance. Halsey turned to see a large older man approaching, looking to be in his upper sixties with subtly balding hair. Like her, he wore a thick parka with the UNSC logo on it, intended to protect from the cold and windy climate. “You’re still wearing those bifocal glasses I gave you?”
“Indeed I am, Dr. Hemsworth,” Halsey responded. “They’ve proven quite useful these last fifteen years.”
Hemsworth scoffed. “I told you, Cathy, they're antiques! They’re older than this colony! They should be sitting on a desk for show, not being worn in this kind of weather! Surely you could afford a newer pair by now?”
After a moment of gauging her annoyed reaction (moreso at being called “Cathy” than his tirade about the glasses), he laughed and stuck out his hand to shake hers. She took it. “I’m kidding. I’m glad you’re enjoying them. Welcome home, Catherine.”
Over twenty years earlier, Anthony Hemsworth had been Halsey’s graduate advisor while she had attended Koletre-Browning University, one of the many prominent centers of learning on Circumstance that continued to attract scholars and academics from all across human space. He hadn’t been her advisor for very long - Halsey had brisked through her graduate thesis paper, which studied the prospect of using biological augmentations to eradicate certain diseases, and promptly moved on to her first doctorate. However, they had retained a close working relationship for years afterward, out of a mutual fascination for science if not for proper friendship.
That had all changed abruptly when Halsey decided to join ONI and moved to Reach in 2510, leaving Hemsworth and all her other acquaintances behind on Circumstance. He had given her the glasses as a going-away gift, calling her “the brightest student he’d ever had the pleasure of teaching.”
Of course, that last goodbye hadn’t exactly been one of mutual understanding.
“It’s always good to be back here,” Halsey responded with new warmth. She gestured behind her towards the shuttle. “Hopefully these Air Force guards will finish with their search soon. I would have requested to land at the civilian spaceport, but you know how slow they move.”
“Oh, you don’t know how bad it's gotten,” Hemsworth said, his voice suddenly lowered. “They caught somebody trying to smuggle a bomb through the Mira spaceport last year, so now even the civil airfields have to conduct these kinds of extensive searches. Anyone not affiliated with the UNSC has to wait practically all-day for landing and take-off approval.”
“Was it Insurrection-related?” Halsey asked.
“No, not from what I heard. Sounded like it was just some pissed-off professor from UMC. Of course, that didn’t stop the UNSC brass from treating it like it was an attempted Innie attack.”
Halsey frowned. Although Circumstance had always had its own UNSC garrison, with New Baltimore Airfield being its primary base, the colony wasn’t known for Insurrectionist activity, or much violence at all for that matter, and so the defenses around the airfield had always been fairly light. In the distance, Halsey could spot a handful of UNSC Army troopers patrolling outside the barbed wire fence that surrounded the landing area, though they didn’t look particularly on edge. Even the Airmen currently conducting a sweep of the Ecbatana to ensure it was clean of bombs, tracking beacons, or other dangers had been moving about quickly, looking more impatient than worried as they searched.
Even here, far away from the action, everyone has to be reminded of the dangers of civil war, Halsey reflected. Least we all forget…
As a short but powerful gust of wind blew through, Halsey started becoming more mindful of the cold weather. Just as she was wondering if it would be better to go back inside the shuttle, they were approached by an Airman wearing the single vertical bar of a Second Lieutenant. “It looks like we’re about done here, ma’am. You’re free to leave the terminal. Is there anything else you need from us?”
“Nothing beyond the standard,” Halsey replied, by which she meant providing lodgings for the small shuttle crew and making sure it was refueled before she returned in a day’s time.
“Understood, ma’am,” the Lieutenant replied, before turning away.
Hemsworth raised an eyebrow. “Woah. They never treat me with that kind of deference. Did you slip him a twenty?”
"I'm sure they read my personnel file before I arrived,” Halsey said, ignoring his joke. “They know who they’re dealing with. Come on, let’s get out of the wind.”
“I never congratulated you on that last promotion, by the way,” Hemsworth said as they moved towards the airfield terminal. “Civilian apprenticeship to the chief scientist at ONI, in less than fifteen years! I always knew you were meant for big things, but even I was shocked when I found out. I only made it half as far in twice the time.”
“I had wanted to reach out to you about it, since you're the Dean of Biology,” Halsey confided, “I figured you would probably know a thing or two about this kind of scientific leadership role. Unfortunately, and ironically, work has been keeping me busy.”
Hemsworth nodded. “I’m surprised you aren’t traveling with more staff," he continued, “or a bigger ship.”
“ONI’s been encouraging me to travel discretely,” Halsey explained. “Too many security threats in the Outer Colonies, as of late. Besides, I’m not technically here on military business. This stop is personal.”
“Right,” Hemsworth conceded, “I suppose a college reunion doesn’t rate very high on the UNSC’s list of concerns right now.”
The two mostly kept quiet as they worked their way through the various checkpoints of the base. Being a military site, there was a fair mix of Air Force, Army, and Navy uniforms moving about or standing guard, but a majority of the people that Halsey saw wore civilian clothing, indicating they were likely civilian contractors and consultants like she and Hemsworth were. If it wasn’t for the added security, Halsey might have been fooled into being this was the civilian airfield.
Just one of the ‘perks’ of military travel, I suppose, Halsey thought to herself.
The parking lot was nearly as big as the landing area they had just left. Hemsworth’s car, a red HuCiv Genet coupe, was located about two dozen rows from the front. It opened its doors automatically as they approached. “REGISTERD USER DETECTED," the car’s robotic autopilot said, “GREETINGS, ANTHONY. WHAT IS YOUR DESTINATION?"
That’s a bit flashy for his usual tastes, Halsey thought.
“Hand over manual control, please,” Hemsworth answered as they sat down in the car, his tone indicating that this was a phrase he was very used to repeating.
“DO YOU ASSUME ALL LIABIL-”
“Yes.”
The autopilot paused, then replied “ACKNOWLEDGED,” as the steering wheel extended, allowing Hemsworth to take control.
“I recall you not being a fan of self-driving cars. You are aware that the autopilot can be disabled, correct?” Halsey asked.
“I know,” Hemsworth sighed as he started navigating the car out of the lot, “but the wife bought the car for my birthday, and she really enjoys it, so I leave it on for her. Besides, it gets me to and from work well enough.”
Oh, he’s married again, Halsey silently realized.
“Speaking of which,” he continued, “How have you been? Have you… met anyone out at the Military Complex?”
“N-No, not at the RMC.” Halsey answered awkwardly. That was technically true, but her odd phrasing indicated that wasn’t the whole truth. She really didn’t want to discuss her family or love life right now with anyone. Not even with her old mentor.
Poor Jacob. Just one of my many secrets that should never see the light of day, she thought, even if it's far from the worst.
Thankfully, Hemsworth either didn’t notice or chose not to comment on her response as he moved the conversation on. “Have you gotten to go on any field trips for ONI? I’d hate for them to just lock you away down in the labs of Castle Base for fifteen years.”
“Oh, plenty,” she answered, “Just on this latest roundtrip, I made stops at Chi Ceti, Algolis, and New Carthage to check up on… certain projects. Not very pretty worlds, I must say, but at least it's a change of scenery.”
“Hm,” Hemsworth murmured inquisitively, “New Carthage I get. Hannibal Industries has always been a big collaborator with ONI. But Chi Ceti and Algolis are pretty out-of-the-way colonies. What kinds of projects has Section 3 got you working on?”
Halsey straightened herself - she had known this question was coming eventually.
“More research into… biological enhancements. And robotics,” she answered sternly, “I can’t really say more than that… as you would know, doctor.”
“Of course, of course,” Hemsworth replied with his trademark cheeky smile, “Just testing you. Wouldn’t want scary ol’ ONI sending their goons after us for spilling state secrets, now would we?”
Halsey rolled her eyes while Hemsworth pulled the Genet out of the lot and onto the Belt, Circumstance’s main highway which ran most of the planet’s equator. Despite her outer annoyance, Halsey secretly felt great relief that he wasn’t pushing harder. She had long gotten used to lying to others around her about the nature of her work - even many of her ostensible subordinates. When faced with her old acquaintance, however, she found it difficult to bring herself to not at least give part of the truth.
What would he think of me if he knew what I was really doing? Halsey silently wondered. Part of her suspected that if he even learned half of it, he would have disowned her on the spot and never spoken to her again.
He wouldn’t be the first one…
“Do they at least let you go to the cities every now and again?” Hemsworth asked. “To do your own thing? It's not very healthy to be isolated out on military bases and starships for years at a time like that. I heard Manassas finally finished construction on their Science Academy. Maybe you could go make some friends on your off time for once…”
“I’m too busy with work,” Halsey interjected. She had heard versions of this conversation twenty years ago as a college student, and she didn’t want to repeat it now. “And besides, Manassas is on an entirely different continent. You forget that Reach isn’t like most colonies. All of their cities are spread out across the planet, not clustered in one area. The only major city even near the RMC is New Alexandria, and they’ve got nothing going on there that's worth the three hour flight time. I’ve been perfectly content to live on base.”
“I hope so,” Hemsworth responded with slight worry, “because I could never do that for so long. There’s a reason I never joined ONI full-time.”
Well, that, and you like teaching smartasses like me too much, Halsey thought while looking out the window.
The two sat in silence for a while as Hemsworth followed the Belt into New Baltimore proper, allowing Halsey to take in the view of the city. Not much had changed since she had last visited fifteen years earlier. Like most major cities in the colonies, it was a pre-planned grid pattern of metal grays and silvers. Dozens of skyscrapers reached dozens of stories high, though all were dwarfed by the space elevator in the far distance that stretched out of sight through the cloudy sky. The outskirts acted as suburbs for the city’s permanent residents, while the city center was home to the thousands of college students attending KBU. If she traveled there, Halsey would have found very similar layouts for Mira, Kuiper, and the other large cities on Circumstance.
As they exited off of the Belt and drove into the suburbs, she saw tons of people walking about in warm clothes, going about their everyday lives. Adults could be seen outside homes, talking with their neighbors. Teenagers were hanging out outside convenience stores, despite the city’s longstanding no vagrants policy. Even young children were playing at a local park, filled with playground equipment and cold weather plants imported from Earth. Everything from the clothes to the buildings looked relatively affluent and new.
This kind of Inner Colony lifestyle still felt strange to Halsey, despite having lived on Circumstance for nearly a decade. As much as she had perfected the educated Inner Colony accent and mannerisms, she had actually been born on a frontier world, Endymion. Her hometown Port Vernon had only housed a few thousand colonists, primarily self-sustaining farmers, despite being one of the larger settlements on the planet. Her community had never placed much stock in education or fine living, instead preferring the tough, rugged lifestyle, for reasons that Halsey herself had never quite understood. It was only thanks to her extraordinary natural brilliance that her town was willing to collectively pay for her undergraduate education at KBU, whereafter she received scholarship funding from the old Dean of Biological Science (before Hemsworth took the role years later). Even when she lived in New Baltimore, however, Halsey had been so focused on her thesis projects that she rarely ever left campus.
“Be honest, Catherine,” Hemsworth finally said, “Do you miss Circumstance? Or do you like Reach more?”
“I prefer the isolation of the RMC,” Halsey admitted, “At least, whenever the rest of Section 3 isn’t looking over my shoulder. The natural scenery is a lot prettier too. Somehow, though, it's often colder down inside Castle Base than it is here.”
“Oh really?” Hemsworth chucked, “I’d very much like to test that one day. You never did get used to the cold here, did you?”
“I’m still just glad we’re not on Tantalus,” Halsey replied absentmindedly. It was an old saying among Circumstance colonists, referring to the outermost of the five Epsilon Eridani colonies, which was permanently frozen over and relied on closed-off habitats to survive.
“Damn right. That reminds me, did you ever see the colony diorama they made at KBU?” Hemsworth changed the subject as he made another turn. “You know, for the 150th anniversary of the colony’s founding?”
“No.”
“Oh, the STEM department went all in with their design,” said Hemsworth fondly. “The project lead was Susan Cummings - you remember her, right? It's a whole model of the Epsilon Eridani system, with an enlarged Circumstance the size of a car. It even moves too. I’ll have to show you before you leave. I think you’d like it.”
“We’ll see if we have time,” Halsey said, sounding only somewhat interested. She had always been a massive history buff when it came to knowing colonial history. Endymion had been colonized only a generation before her birth and had basically no local history to speak of, which ironically had cultivated her interest in other planets’ histories. Unfortunately, Halsey had a lot of other, more important things on her mind before she decided to visit KBU again - namely getting back to Reach and checking in on her Spartans, who she hadn’t seen for months now.
“Anyway… before we get to the reunion, Catherine,” Hemsworth started, his voice now suddenly a lot more serious as he glanced over at her. “I just want to establish one thing. I know you’re curious about what your old compatriots have been up to, and if they’re looking for new work, and that’s great and all… but I don’t want to hear anything about asking them to join ONI. Not a word. Got it?”
Halsey nodded silently, though internally she felt great annoyance. While there were certainly some individuals she wanted to catch up with for personal reasons, seeing if she could recruit any able scientists into ONI was in fact the main reason she had agreed to take time out of her busy traveling schedule and come to her graduate class reunion. Surely, once Hemsworth turned his back or got a little too drunk, as he often tended to do at these events, she would be able to have a private word with some of them.
You’re making a mistake you can’t undo, Hemsworth had said to her fifteen years ago, I don’t want to see any more bright scientists have their consciences destroyed. To see their innocence crushed.
Well, too bad, doctor, Halsey now thought to herself, I gave mine away a long time ago.
Halsey often reflected on the great double irony that not only had the part-time ONI consultant been adamantly against her joining ONI, but that her decision to do so had been indirectly caused by Hemsworth himself. In 2507, just after Halsey had finished her second doctorate, he had invited her along to a private meetup for UNSC academic leaders, hosted by the one and only Dr. Elias Carver.
Carver was either a renowned sociologist or a mad doomsayer, depending on who one asked. Back in 2491, he had used various simulations to determine the question that had long been on the minds of UNSC leaders: how long could they maintain hold over the colonies before something went wrong? The results were not optimistic: humanity had expanded too far, too quickly. He predicted mass breakdown in law and order in the Outer Colonies within the next generation, with potentially billions dead. His solution was an uncompromising and immediate crackdown using military force. Many initially wrote this off as pessimistic and alarmist, but within three years of his investigation, rebellions in the Capstone, 26 Draconis, and Eridanus systems had each rocked the UNSC military, one after the other. The Insurrectionary movement had begun in earnest.
Having grown up during the early days of the Insurrection, young Halsey had naturally taken scholarly interest in the Carver Findings. While at the meetup, Halsey got the opportunity to speak to Carver directly about his work. She remembered him being tall but thin, his eyes dark and tired, his face and hair aged beyond his years. He nonetheless still kept a professional smile on his face as he listened to the youth talk, and at first their conversation focused on basic career and scientific topics before veering into the Findings. Being the obsessive perfectionist that she was, Halsey had been unable to resist correcting his obsolete algorithm implementation of the socio-economic and politico-economic vectors of human expansion. She then outlined a corrective matrix calculation to him which revised his dimensional parameters so that sixteen dimensions were used rather than his original seven.
Dr. Carver had clearly not appreciated being challenged by a young upstart. While they had both remained polite during the conversation, the two never spoke again, despite repeated attempts by Halsey to reach out to him, and Carver evidently hadn’t said very nice things about her to Hemsworth. Of course, it wasn’t like Halsey would have much of a chance to work with him anyway. Just two years after the meetup, Carver was found unresponsive in his home, with the eventual cause of death being identified as self-inflicted poison.
A great shame, Halsey reflected, he had a mind too observant for his own good. He couldn’t handle the pressure of watching everything slowly fall apart around him.
Despite her criticisms of his work, Halsey had never disagreed with his ultimate thesis. Her own attempts at replicating his simulations had pointed towards the same outcome, even if it now looked to be taking a few decades longer than Carver expected. Thus, when she was approached the following year by an ONI agent - the then-Captain Michael Stanforth, who was now the Vice Admiral in charge of ONI Section 3 - and asked if she wanted to join, Halsey didn’t hesitate. Here, she had thought at the time, is a way to finally put my talents to use - to make a difference for humanity.
And now, with the nearing-completion of Projects SPARTAN and MJOLNIR, it was looking like she had finally done so… although the road there hadn’t been quite as smooth as she had originally hoped.
“Good,” Hemsworth responded, “Now the meeting hall should be just around the next block here… no, wait, the next one. I heard that Jacobson was supposed to be bringing his old drinking concoction… what did he call it?”
“Dumster Daiquiri," Halsey responded with disgust. Alas, not all of KBU’s bright minds could be considered mature. “And I hope you’re not planning on drinking too-”
Suddenly, a loud alarm triggered from within Halsey’s small carry-bag. Quickly reaching in, she pulled out her COM pad. It displayed a red call message from ONI on the screen, marked as urgent emergency - something she’d rarely seen before.
“Oh shit,” Hemsworth muttered as he glanced over, “You better take that.”
He pulled over to the side of the road, and without a word, he opened the door and stepped outside into the cold air.
Halsey paused for another moment to consider what this could possibly be about - was it an Innie attack? Had something happened to the Spartans? - before she finally hit the answer button.
“Provide identification before proceeding,” an automated voice replied.
“Charlie Hotel, CC409871,” Halsey said, while also hitting the thumbprint button on the pad’s side to confirm her identity. After a moment's pause, a new male voice replied on the other end.
“Dr. Halsey, this is Commander Sulton of Circumstance ONI Listening Station Alpha.”
Halsey raised an eyebrow. She knew that ONI had hidden stations on all of the major colony worlds, both to monitor potential Insurrectionist broadcasts and to manage undercover operatives. Normally, however, they weren’t supposed to make contact with civilians - not even the chief scientist of ONI - unless it was a dire emergency.
“Go ahead.”
“As of 0900 Hours today,” Sulton continued, “UNSC HIGHCOM on Reach has issued code ‘Broken Horizon’. All FLEETCOM, UNICOM, and ONI members with top-secret access are to return to Reach ASAP for an immediate top-level brief. Do not inform anyone without proper codeword clearance of where you are going or why. How soon can you leave?”
“Right now, actually,” Halsey responded. “I’m less than an hour from the military spaceport.”
“Good. Head there immediately,” Sulton answered, before abruptly hanging up.
Halsey sat silently in the car seat for several long moments, processing the short conversation over again in her head. ‘Broken Horizon’ was the UNSC’s emergency code for an extreme, unprecedented disaster. As far as she was aware, it had only been used twice in UNSC history.
The first occasion had been the rebellion on Far Isle in 2492, before the Insurrectionary movement had become widespread. When the entire planet suddenly rose up in defiance, FLEETCOM panicked, and decided to nuke every major settlement rather than allow the rebellion to spread outside of the Capstone system. Naturally, this only led to further outrage towards the UNSC among the Outer Colonies, despite their vain attempt to cover up the incident as a nuclear accident. It also planted the first seed of doubt within Dr. Carver’s mind that eventually led him to take his own life.
The second was the New Haven bombing on Mamore in 2511, when an Insurrectionist suicide bomber detonated a commercial nuclear weapon meant for mining asteroids within the colony’s large arcology. Between the blast itself and the collapse of the megastructure, over two million people were killed or severely wounded. It was the first time that the Insurrectionists had deliberately carried out a mass-casualty event against civilians, and signaled a darker turn in humanity’s civil war. That event, more than any other, had been the inspiration for Halsey’s Spartan program. Many of the frantic news reports that she had read in the aftermath were still seared into her memory, as if she’d just read them last week.
To think that something like that could happen again, before her Spartans were ready…
Halsey flinched when she heard a knock on the driver-side door. Dr. Hemsworth was still standing outside in the cold. She gestured for him to get back in.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I need to go back to the space port. Now.” Halsey said.
Hemsworth paused for a moment, then swore under his breath. “Well, I guess I didn’t need the daiquiri after all.”