User:RelentlessRecusant/Halo: Vector/Prologue

 PROLOGUE  RENDEZVOUS

Eighteen years before the present day

DECEMBER 2553 AZURE MERCANTILES HEADQUARTERS ASPHODEL MEADOWS, 47 URSAE MAJORIS SYSTEM The man sitting before him was framed by the severe alpine beauty of the desolating tempest of snow and ice beyond that was characteristic of the acerbic winter of Asphodel Meadows. His complexion was harrowed, with thinned cheekbones framed by graying hair at his temples, with brooding eyes that concealed a sly intelligence but also carried a faint weariness, finality that indicated he’d seen too much for a lifetime.

His name was Gibson. He was the Director of Section Three, UNSC Office of Naval Intelligence.

The man facing Gibson was of a different mannerism and occupation. He still held the vestiges of a patrician air, of a lost lineage of high class, long lost, distant. His face was placid, vacant, expressionless, as if carved by an artist to human proportions, but that the craftsman had forgotten to add in the humanity. His own eyes were absent, lost in the abstractions of some other reality, and his skin was gaunt, morbidly pale, his lips albino, matching the palette of the storm raging outside.

This one’s name was Beah. Beah Schore.

On the burnished metal table that separated the two figures were two untouched cups of cold cappuccino.

It was almost some removed, harlequin mirage. Two of the most influential men of the trillions of mankind—the masters over the yolks of humanity—removed on some vagrant, outlying colony that deserved little attention. And there they sat, silently biding each other’s time, with a pained interest at the snowy zephyr storming outside.

Finally, Gibson was roused. With a stir and a quiet vexative sigh, he turned to face Beah. His fingers drummed a staccato beat against the aluminum table.

Gibson himself, and for that matter, all his subordinates, were all interesting curiosities, exercises in loop holes in the military bureaucracy. While Gibson maintained the position of a two-star Rear Admiral of the UNSC Defense Force and a senior officer in the Office of Naval Intelligence, his name was absent for the Admiralty’s List. All the members of Section Three had similarly obfuscated paper trails, drawing their pays not as intelligence specialists, but as military chaplains, engineer’s mates, logistical assistants. The building that Schore and Gibson were currently in bore the name of “Azure Mercantiles” emblazoned on its side, and at all times, between three to six civilians strolling innocuously past it. Perhaps too innocuously.

These civilians were, in actuality undercover close-quarters combat specialists of UNSC Naval Special Warfare, and their parkas and jackets concealed folding-stock suppressed M7 submachine guns, and garrote wire tucked in their boots. On the surrounding roofs were half a dozen camouflaged sniper-spotter teams, and nearby was a reaction force of several Marine companies backed with VTOL air support and heavy-weapons squads, ready to respond with overwhelming force with a maximum response time of four minutes.

Gibson tossed a casual glance at Beah, his internal battle won.

With a synthetic, pompous smile he greeted, “Good to see you.”

Beah’s lips twisted into a cruel, demeaning, tight smile, reciprocating the sentiment. “And you too, Director. How’s Marge?”

The reference was to Margaret O. Parangosky, the former chief of Section Three, who’d taken over ONI after the War’s end, a gracious nod from the UNSC brass for her efforts during the war. Gibson reciprocated Beah’s smile, and his lips curled into a sarcastic mockery of a smile. “She’s a dead end. Heart attack. She was old.”

The two both knew well that Parangosky sustained her body despite her age because of various biotechnology accoutrements she acquired by careful ONI investments. Beah knew with an almost absolute certainty that this heart attack was induced by … the man canted his head slightly in thought. Yes, a special-operator team—SPARTAN-IIIs? Suppressed dart projectile rifle, tipped with high-load epinephrine and a dissolving injector tip. Induced cardiac tachycardia.

Beah waved away the obsfucating thoughts. These were useful intellectual exercises, but now was the time to business. It had taken him a significant amount of effort to slip away from Acumen’s orbital HQ over Earth, the Spirit of Progress, to this barren waste for a cloak-and-dagger codicil with Gibson. “So, to business, Director?”

The ONI officer’s eyes flashed dimly for a moment—perhaps with a touch of danger? Gibson’s tone was careful, controlled. “I’ve been able to arrange the package for you.”

Beah allowed himself a small smile—yes, ONI had indeed learned its place. It was in this moment of self-assured egotism that Gibson chose the moment to pounce. The man’s mobile features instantly shaped from their bitter smile to a scathing, abrasive stare, one fit to intimidate and coerce subordinates without a spine. His voice hardened, and outside the room, Beah could hear the Section Three guards shuffling uneasily.

The ONI flag officer said sharply, voice abruptly hard, “Let’s make this very clear. Everything comes to us first, not the market” Gibson’s eyes were intense, his expression set in a cold determination.

Beah’s eyes twinkled slightly as his mental gaze shifted to the thousands of biomedical research ethics protocols that were being invalidated with this covert meeting. What was ethics? He knew he’d subscribed to them a long time ago, when he’d been at Harvard. Ethics denoted proper conduct, adherence to morality. That the end never justified the means.

Perhaps this was ill academic curiosity. Some might dismiss him as an academician that just wanted to unravel nature, discover its workings.

No, that was subordinate. He was going to save lives. In the short term, it would be sickening to the heart. Schore knew the unspoken interests of the Office of Naval Intelligence. In the future, though—yes, he’d be a savior. The man who engineered the most significant paradigm shift in regenerative biology and clinical medicine.

He remembered that an admiral of the UNSC Defense Force was speaking to him. Beah nodded stoically at the ONI officer. “Of course, Director. I wouldn’t betray our confidence.”

Gibson’s lips curled with thinly-veiled contempt. This decision to proceed had evidently been a difficult one for him too.

“Walk carefully, Doctor Schore.”

ONI COVERT OPERATIONS STAGING HANGAR 3-C ASPHODEL MEADOWS, 47 URSAE MAJORIS SYSTEM

Beah was a lone, frostbitten man in a heavy parka, an older bachelor lost in the tempest of snow that acerbically lashed at Asphodel Meadows’s desolated streets. His face scarred from where shards of ice had etched their bloody marks upon his skin, he stalked up to a graffiti-defamed wall five blocks from the Azure Mercantiles building.

He rapped on the blank concrete wall, tapping a syncopated beat that he’d taken the pains to memorize.

With suppressed pneumatics, a door parted, revealing an unlit room. He reached its end, thumbed the control for the lift. When he reached the elevator’s foot and departed, he was within the spacious confines of a massive hangar with black tarps concealing experimental fighter designs, prototype weapons. From the metal girders that spanned the ceiling, there were the camouflaged forms of soldiers—snipers.

Schore caught two abbreviated hand motions to the pool of shadows to his right, and he was not disappointed when a fire team of the black-garbed commandoes greeted him. These would be NAVSPECWAR—special operations forces of UNSC Naval Special Warfare. Their leader, wearing the oak leaf insignia of a Lieutenant Commander rose a gloved hand at the hunchbacked, aging man, the dull black gleams of submachine guns protruding from the shadows.

“Arginine.”

A tight smile spread over Schore’s lips. Was Gibson so cautious? The positive emotion dissipated rapidly. Beah was careful to inject a flavor of contempt for the military as he answered with the counterresponse. “Tangerine.”

The soldiers stepped aside, sinking back into their secluded, camouflaged positions covering the ONI secure operations bay.

Ignoring the flurries of activities to either side—the knots of engineers and officers over the skeletal airframes of half-completed stealth craft, the sharp cadence of marching soldiers—he focused himself on the center of the hangar, where a small, piscine yacht stood, dwarfed by the predatory shapes of military ships to either side.

A man in similar attire, his expression innocuous, was standing in the center of the bay. He nodded stiffly towards Beah as he approached. It was Barr, Beah’s personal security chief, and his executor for times such as this. He’d been Schore’s friend longer than he’d been an Acumen employee.

Spread on the floor, under the careful watch of the ONI soldiers, were several dozen obsidian caskets. Electronic diodes winked on their polished surfaces. On one of the ovoid canisters, he caught a small bit of stray text printed—PROJECT: SUBTANK.

Beah looked at Barr. “Are they all in there?”

Barr nodded evenly. “As far as I can determine, Doctor.”

Schore knelt down towards one of the oblong objects, his fingers playing over the chilled nigrous metal. It was hyperborean to the touch, even more bitterly arctic to the snowstorm outside. He briefly eyed the LEDs with an innate fascination—he was a scientist-doctor, an MD/PhD. Such biological samples captured his interest, enthralled him. It was why he was doing what he was, the chief scientific officer of Acumen, and a department head and institute director in the biotechnology / paramilitary firm.

He commented on the frosty inclemency of the capsules. “Cryogenics?”

Barr gave another terse nod, and he caught peripheral motion.

Beah flicked a glance to the NAVSPECWAR team leader, whose eyes were unusually tight, his gloved fingers close to the catch of his BR55HB SR Battle Rifle. Around the hangar bay, the other commandoes were similarly terse with their weapons, their laser sights not quite lancing across the caskets. The academician turned to face the trooper leader, “Thank you, Commander. Please give my thanks to the Director.”

The seasoned commando looked at his men, and wordlessly, they resumed their positions.

Barr gave his superior a searching look.

Beah shook his head adamantly. “It would be natural of them. Load them onto the yacht. We leave in thirty.”

7 -  7  -  7

Thirty minutes later, an Acumen Science private yacht arced from the ONI hangar, its piscine prow angled for the distant stars. From the Azure Mercantiles building, Gibson and a knot of his officers observed the rapidly-diminishing spacecraft.

One of his advisors whispered, his eyes still tracking Beah’s yacht, “Are you sure, sir?”

Perhaps it was a testament to Gibson’s deflated demeanor that the flag officer didn’t challenge his subordinate. Wordlessly, the director walked back into the building’s confines, his mind somewhere else.

SECURE STAGED RESEARCH FACILITY MAGI SIX ACUMEN SCIENCE TECHNOLOGIES UNSPECIFIED SUBTERRANEAN LOCATION, EARTH

When Beah staged his elaborate entrance into the surreptitious high-containment Acumen biological research hot labs under Earth’s surface, he was flanked by a number of high-tier advisors and administrators from Acumen’s orbital headquarters, and he was reciprocatingly well-recieved by a number of MAGI SIX’s division heads. After the requisite formalities, Beah was left alone with Greenberg, one of the covert facility’s molecular biology investigators.

The atmosphere was laced with such tension and energy that even the normally vivid Greenberg didn’t mice words or time. As soon as the last of the officials had been politely ushered away and dispensed of, she looked at her director. “Doctor, we’ve received them. All seventy-three. They are all in good condition.”

“Are they secure?”

“They are at cryogenic hibernation.”

“What is the probability of reanimation or recombination?”

“Impossible, Doctor. Proteome and kinome activity is dependent on external temperature and kinetic activity—”

“Spare me the lecture. What are the contingency plans?”

“We have each corpse in an individual explosive rigged container, with fail-safe UV radiation charges that will neutralize all genetic material. Any movement more than a millimeter by the corpses will trigger the utter destruction of the corpse and the containing capsule. There will be no traces.”

“Excellent. What are your plans for the bodies?”

“We are beginning an acid phenol, chloroform, and ethanol DNA prep to extract nanogram-scale genetic material. We will use single-copy PCR to amplify the DNA and build a unified library. Afterwards, we can begin.”

Beah’s look was distant.

“Doctor?”

Beah flicked a brief glance at his subordinate. “Good work. Keep me informed.”

He stalked away, his voluminous robes enfolding him as he faded away in the pristine corridor.

Thirteen years before the present day

SEPTEMBER 2558 AZURE MERCANTILES HEADQUARTERS ASPHODEL MEADOWS, 47 URSAE MAJORIS SYSTEM

Two men amiably meet over chilled cups of coffee in a desolate building battered by an aggrieved snowstorm. One man’s face is haunted, framed by the pristine blanket lovely white of the slew of storm and hail that brews outside. The other’s man face is cold, sunken. The former is animated with some energy.

In the timespan of four years, ONI has devised seventeen novel biological warfare programs and eleven biotechnological augumentations and Acumen has received over two thousand new patents, and its stock has increased by over a thousand points.

Beah, however, will remember where the genesis of this all was—three years ago, at a covert ops hangar on Asphodel Meadows, at a high-security research laboratory underneath Earth’s crust, at a distant colony world now wreathed by fire. What they’d done. The keening pain, the shattering heartbreak. The grief, the guilt that would never wash away.

Gibson smiles politely. “Good work, Doctor.”

Perhaps it is a rare insight to Beah’s conscience and troubled mind that he doesn’t bother to reciprocate the ONI division chief, his mind elsewhere.

Finally, he turns to look at the admiral.

Beah murmurs softly, eyes unfocused and his expression vacant, “Yes. Good work indeed.”