Admonition

{|style="width:100%; color:#FFF;" "Tell me why you refused to cooperate with the rest of your team to complete the objective."
 * valign="top" style="padding:5px;"|

The Lieutenant Commander's voice was stern, but oddly paternal. Yet it did nothing to sway the young girl; instead of responding, she just set her jaw and remained silent. Kurt resisted the urge to sigh. Her reticence to explain herself was one of the reasons why she endured so much discipline from the drill instructors, yet she refused to correct the problem. He respected her toughness, but disapproved of its rebellious nature.

From day one he had known B312 would be different. The initiation test had gone well for her; she landed her Falcon Wing, extricated herself, and sneaked all the way back to the airfield where Kurt waited in his MJOLNIR armor. She had been the first to approach him half-limping and bloodied and he had congratulated her for the effort. But what he perceived as determination was merely raw stubbornness; Theresa-B312, or "Tess" as she demanded to be called, had to be literally clobbered by the DI's if they were going to make her do anything.

Worst of all... she absolutely did not want to be part of a team.

Kurt knew that Alpha Company's unfortunate demise had been a result of their lack of cohesion. He wanted to instill in Beta Company a better understanding of teamwork, so they wouldn't lose their effectiveness in a fight. A pack of lone wolves wouldn't get Beta anywhere. If they were going to fare any better than Alpha, they needed to work together to survive. But Tess didn't understand that. Didn't want to. She just looked at him in that slightly disturbing way she had and kept her mouth shut.

"I know you won the exercise," Kurt said, and at this the young Spartan's posture stiffened somewhat; she was proud of her exploits. "You certainly made record timing getting that flag. But what if it wasn't just a training round? What if it was an actual fight? What if you left your team behind, and then all of you got killed as a result?"

Silence.

"Mendez recommended denying your dinner rations and making you run the perimeter of the compound," Kurt tried again, this time injecting a threatening tone in his voice. "A few of the Alpha instructors had similar ideas. Is that what you want?"

He thought she wasn't going to answer, but after an awkward pause, she whispered "No."

''Aha. At last we're getting somewhere.'' "Then what do you want?"

She thought it over for a few seconds. "My team is stupid," she finally said, and it sounded like she really meant it. "They always send others to do the hard stuff and we end up losing. So I went by myself. It's their fault. They think it's just a game. If that's what they think then they deserve to get killed. 'Cause it's not a game."

Kurt was used to such statements from Tess by now. From what he knew of her past, her parents had been killed not by Covenant forces, but by Insurrectionist rioters on Charybdis IX. Her time spent in an orphanage had been quite colorful; she was damn near psychotic among "normal" children. Anyone who tried messing with her usually ended up getting hurt. She stabbed a kid for hurting a kitten she'd adopted, too. Where she had acquired the knife was irrelevant; the point was, Tess was one of the ideal children for the Spartan-III Program, an orphan head case with a thirst to kill. It nearly broke Kurt's heart because he knew many such kids needed nurturing therapy instead of rifle training, but what else could he do? The UNSC needed super-soldiers, and he had his orders.

"I'm glad you know it's not a game," he told her. "But you can't keep doing this. It's detrimental to your team and to the rest of the Company. I need everyone to work together, not go off by themselves. Your team is your family. If you're going to succeed, you must succeed as a group, or everyone suffers."

"They're not my family!" Tess shot back.

Kurt masked his frustration as he had been trained to do. He hadn't seen such an ornery little kid since the infamous Emile-A239, who liked to plant stun bombs in rival teams' bunks for kicks and torment the drill instructors with their own stub batons. Oddly enough, Emile had risen to be one of the few Alphas to leave the company early and receive real MJOLNIR armor, avoiding the suicide mission. Would Tess be so lucky? Kurt wasn't sure.

"Perhaps not by blood, but as long as you're here, you will think of them as your family and act accordingly," he said. "Only those who fulfill certain requirements will make it to augmentation, and if you can't perform properly with your team, you will not make it. Is that clear?"

Her eyes widened slightly. It would figure that the one thing to instill fear in her would be removal from the program. "Sir! Yes sir!" She saluted.

Kurt stood. He towered over the rangy ten-year-old by at least two feet. She looked up at him with a worried expression, a slight crinkle in her brow. Kurt sighed. She reminded him of John, except John had been well-established within his squad at this age. Tess still had a long way to go if she was going to accomplish that. But, then again, she seemed able to do anything she set her mind to. Perhaps now that she was motivated, it wouldn't be long.

He returned the salute, then let his arm drop to his side. "At ease," he told her, and she relaxed somewhat. "You will be punished for your lack of teamwork; I have no say in what Mendez chooses to do with you." In reality, he did, but it would be good for Tess to endure a little hardship at the Chief's hands. "I expect nothing less than perfection from you in the future, recruit. You have talent. You have heart. But it's not enough. Not when everything depends on the mission's success... and your team's survival."

In reality he knew the mission's success far outweighed team survival. But watching Alpha get massacred had changed his perception of such things, if only minutely. These weren't machines, weren't totally expendable. They were just kids. He couldn't resign himself to simply training up children to die before they were even teenagers. There had to be something more, some sort of hope for them.

After she left his office, escorted by three DI's, he sat back down and went back to the mountain of paperwork that sat before him. Curiously enough, there were several files that Mendez had singled out for Kurt to study. Children who, Mendez claimed, were worth pulling from Beta before Ackerson could come up with another meat grinder like PROMETHEUS. He picked up one of the manila folders and opened it, and was surprised by the number he saw at the top-right hand corner of the first page:

B312.

At first Kurt was tempted to wonder what on earth Mendez was thinking, but then he stopped himself. Maybe the Chief was still human enough to see past Tess's flaws; Kurt had been trained to tolerate only perfection, and that hindered him in these situations. He read through the dossier and closed it, setting it aside. Time would tell if such a thing would ever come to pass.