Delta Company

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"It's imperative that we maintain the secrecy that surrounds the project. Even though the DELTA Initiative has been greenlit by both ONI and the Spartan Branch, we must be reluctant to mention the program unless in reports of utmost importance. If the rest of ONI finds out we're using Spartans to train Spartans for ourselves, then we will pay the highest penalties for treason."

- Director Jazmine Utah, on the risks involved.

The ORION Generation-III, Class IV, more commonly known as the SPARTAN-III Delta Company, was a secret class of Spartan super-soldiers created by the to serve as their own elite force, unbeknownst to the rest of. Formed from the consenting candidates in late-, the trainees were raised in an isolated facility on for seven years of training. Due to the odd circumstances that influenced the program, Delta Company's training regime and candidate requirements were unrecognisable from previous generations; they were intended to be used as much as against human forces as well as soldiers, and many genetic requirements previously used were relaxed to maximize the number of possible recruits.

Origins and Selection
Though the selection process for the future members of Delta Company was in a process of rushing in 2551 to 2552, the origins of the selection could be found four years before. With Gamma Company's training well underway, agents from Section-II began analysing data from the recent 2545 Human Citizen Census and the on-going vaccination programs to find possible candidates who may fulfill the age range that was sort after in earlier companies. Those who met the genetic profile sought were then organised by the likelihood their planet would be invaded by the Covenant, then the risk of how likely their home cities or towns would be chosen as targets for the Covenant. As time went on, measures were put in place to ensure what as many potential candidates survived, including organising what few BRUTUS agents remained to guarantee their safety. To avoid losing track of the candidates in other orphanages across the remaining worlds, as what happened to previous companies in the past, they were injected with a newly-developed organic tracking solution into their bloodstream. This was all completed by 2549, when enough possible candidates had been surveyed that made the fourth company viable.

When 2551 came around, however, enough problems arose that required another validation of the remaining candidates on the list. This was caused by two main problems. Firstly, while ONI was successful at guaranteeing the safety of most of the candidates, a small portion were located on worlds that had not been attacked but bypassed by the Covenant fleets. This made those candidates harder to interview and retrieve, much less want to leave in the first place, resulting in them being cut from the list. Secondly and most significantly was Ambrose's research into augmentation failures. He released a new set of required genetic markers based on incompatible gene sequences which led to their bodies rejecting the drugs, resulting in a complete reevaluation of the candidates. When all this was finished, the amount of children compatible dropped from just over three hundred to half that number. With the future of his brainchild now in risk, it didn't take long for Ackerson to find out.

With pressure from even higher-ranking ONI officers such as Admiral, Ackerson authorised the creation of at least four hundred and seventy-five soldiers. To gain such vast amounts of soldiers, he made a number of changes to the selection criteria; many of which were based on those used by the older Gamma Company. Predictably, Ackerson's orders to downgrade the genetic code requirements to "recommended" infuriated Ambrose, who immediately and stubbornly demanded for those to be reinstated as mandatory. However, as Ambrose had no alternate ideas for how to get so many candidates, it stood for the rest of the selection process.

Lucky for Ambrose, these measures proved to be unnecessary when in 2552 a new wave of orphans resulted from the destruction of the colonies; a horrible price to allow the continuation of the SPARTAN-III program. Even while Section-II was still cataloging the possible candidates present in the refugee camps, both Ackerson and Ambrose reluctantly allowed them to begin evaluating and if possible recovering them. Because of this, by the right at the end of the war, about  candidates had been surveyed for possible proposal and at least three hundred and forty had already been recovered. However, at this time the candidate collection stopped; the deaths of both the administrators and many of the employees of the SPARTAN-III program left almost nobody to run it. With ONI supporting the, there was also little interest in reestablishing it.

Organisation and Personnel
 Recruits=Much like the SPARTAN-IIs, the trainees of Delta Company were allowed to keep their original numerical designations. For this reason, its possible to have SPARTAN-D497, the highest numbered Delta, even though there were only about three hundred Spartans who were recruited.

Teams=
 * Deryck-D096
 * Tor-D191
 * Daiki-D217
 * Joyce-D264
 * Dennis-D289
 * Avgust-D354
 * Morris-D428

Staff & Trainers= 
 * Team Neutron
 * Deryck-D096
 * Joyce-D264
 * Tor-D191
 * Avgust-D354
 * Dennis-D289
 * Kyle-B115
 * Ren-072