Project PERSIAN (Labyrinth)

Attempts by the UNSC to create supersoldier-grade personnel are well documented - the original ORION Project, SPARTAN-II and SPARTAN-III, TROJAN, VOLSUNG, and a number of shadier projects that are of dubious authority. Less well-documented are Insurrectionist attempts to field their own counterparts, developing their own above-average personnel in their determined but misguided fight to liberate themselves from the only thing standing between them and the Covenant. During the early years of the Human-Covenant War, or Great War as it has since come to be known, various cells attempted to use prototype stimulants provided by corporate backers, the infamous "rumbledrugs", but while it provided an instant boost to cognitive function, muscular density, reflex action and pain tolerance, the effects were short-lived and came with lethal side-effects. Rumbledrugs would be used across a number of Insurrectionist fronts, either by soldiers who were not told about the aftereffects and were deemed disposable, or by soldiers who didn't care. Though they would become a major morale boost and propaganda coup, they would have little real effect on the war effort - there is little a dying man with super strength can do when a Covenant cruiser is pouring plasma onto a city.

Understanding their critical position, on the verge of collapse, a cabal of Insurrectionist leaders met in approximately 2529 to pool their resources and decide what would be done. Rumours had already spread of UNSC supermen clad in advanced armour, who could kill an entire army in their bunks, or turn the tide of battle against the Covenant. The Spartans by this time had already become a morale boost, even before their official disclosure by ONI. When Blue Team, lead by John-117, attacked an Insurrectionist missile base in 2531, this was all the proof needed to convince them that not only were the rumours true, but they could be replicated. These Insurrectionists would decide upon a radical course of action - the PERSIAN Initiative.

Infiltration
The project's leaders based their name on the ancient Persian empire for a number of reasons - the symmetry they had with the military history of Sparta, the namesake of the modern Spartans, and the sheer size of it, an exercise in egotism. If they had been more historically knowledgeable, they would have realised that the naming was ironic, since the original Spartans were famous for their pyrrhic victory against the Persian army. Nevertheless, the name was retained through its history, perhaps out of sentimentality, and perhaps because Doctor Eskander Bahram regarded it as a tribute to his homeland.

The first actions undertaken by PERSIAN were retroactive - personnel within Project SPARTAN-II, dissatisfied with their treatment or with ethical concerns over the work done, had already smuggled information out as best they could, but little more than basic details: that the augmentations that the SPARTAN-II candidates recieved would ideally take to prepubescent subjects - children. Though some balked at the idea of using their own children in the experiments, others proposed that the ends justified the means - that in order to further their efforts to liberate the colonies, they would need to employ dirty tactics. The decision was put off - without any information on exactly what augmentations were used, and how to implement them, they would have insufficient selection criteria. Genetic screening was begun, however, ironically using the same ruse the UNSC had - child vaccination.

The next action was more overt, and more problematic - the acquisition of one of these Spartan supermen, dead or alive. By studying their body, the project members hoped that they could deduce the processes used to augment them, and that with sufficient funding and secrecy, this process could be reproduced. Efforts to ambush UNSC forces, in the hopes of luring out Spartan operatives, continued to meet with failure until late 2532, during the Covenant's attack on New Venezuela. While participating in the planet's evacuation operations, SPARTAN-II Randall-037's dropship was shot down by Insurrectionist artillery. All personnel aboard the craft were killed by the crash except for Randall, who was nevertheless badly wounded. Posing as UNSC rescuers, rebel soldiers extracted him off the planet via cryonic suspension, smuggling him to a secret location. While the rebels initially kept up the pretence of a UNSC hospital base while Randall recovered from his wounds, he became suspicious, and attempted to escape in early 2531. He was recaptured, but only after thirty days of the Spartan waging a brutal guerilla war against his captors, acquiring weapons, suppies, and attempting to create a COM beacon to alert UNSC forces to his location. He was finally subdued while attempting to launch the beacon, though not before killing more than fifty of his captors. Abandoning any pretence of hospitality, his captors threw him into solitary confinement, keeping him under heavy security. Medical inspections were conducted by first pumping anaesthetic gas into the room - initial attempts vastly underestimated the dosage required, and resulted in Randall's second escape, this time captured after boarding a shuttle and attempting to make a slipspace jump - the ship's drive had been removed for repairs, a fact that Randall was not aware of, and his ship was boarded by an armed response team. Again, rebel forces took heavy casualties while trying to recapture one man. Returned to solitary confinement, Doctor Bahram would come to regard Randall with a mixture of admiration and pity - pity for his predicament, and admiration at his resilience.

The medical examinations would prove enormously helpful, allowing Insurrectionist doctors to pinpoint the exact augmentations and hazard rudimentary guesses as their implementation. Information bought from insiders at Project CHISEL would allow them to modify and improve these augmentations, in hopes of improving success rates. In 2538, the candidates were finally selected.

Recruitment
Convergent with SPARTAN-III, PERSIAN first visited those candidates in orphanages, posing as prospective adoptive parents, and interviewed candidates. Those who volunteered were "adopted", using fake names, and convenient "accidents" arranged to cover up their disappearance. Those who did not were simply abducted, and the orphages burnt to the ground to cover their disappearance as well, with wealthy corporations charitably stepping in to cover the cost of reconstruction - in reality, the benefactors of PERSIAN. A very few were abducted from families, but PERSIAN preferred candidates who had lost something to either the Covenant or the UNSC, which they hoped would provide a similar drive to the Spartans.

These children were trained with military discipline by former UNSC mercenaries, who paid less attention to the childrens' well being than they should have. A number of accidental fatalities resulted in the summary execution of one mercenary, who was discovered to be abusing the children. Further incidents would cause concern, especially among recruits abducted forcibly, and the project's psychologists noted a covert "resistance" group, a collection of individuals who actively tried to escape their captivity. Initially, this was ignored, or even encouraged, in the hopes that it would foster creativity and determination in the candidates. By 2540, the project was beginning to lose support from its wealthy backers, especially as rumours reached them about the miraculous properties of the Spartans miraculous MJOLNIR armour. Although PERSIAN had acquired the remnants of Randall's original suit, it had been damaged beyond salvage, and the backers began asking whether the traits they had hoped to achieve were more due to the armour than the wearer. Doctor Bahram reassured them that his best men were working on the development of parallel gear - in reality, he had simply contacted Codename: DRACULA and requested to be part of Project: ELERI, and hoped to acquire DRACULA's version of MJOLNIR. Exactly why DRACULA agreed to the request would remain a mystery until Operation: HARKER.

Operation: THERMOPYLAE
Rumours of Insurrectionist attempts at creating supersoldiers had circulated for years, but ONI had dismissed the majority of them, with good reason. The aforementioned rumbledrugs took a worse toll on the users than those who faced them, and other attempts to field powered armour had been laughable failures, especially in light of the UNSC's own covert deployments. VAJRA assets had come up against rebel powered armour in 2528, only to effortlessly overpower their rebel counterparts. Spartan-II teams had brought down a number of blackmarket networks trading in supposed "augmentations", most fake, and Spartan-III teams had destroyed a training camp on Cyprus VII. But as ONI looked at the larger picture, the pattern began to emerge, and was eventually handed over to Codename: SHOGUN, the agent responsible for sniffing out Project CHISEL, as part of his fledgling Operation: VORAUSSICHT.

At the time, funding for his operation was reticent, given ONI's reluctance to commit to uncovering its own dirty secrets. However, as SHOGUN assembled available data and pieced it together, he concluded that the sudden upsurge in demands for augments, combined with unusual civil activity among suspected Insurrectionist hotspots, was linked - an astronomical leap of deductive thinking, but an accurate one. With the assistance of an AI provided by ONI Section I, Tinuviel, VORAUSSICHT set up a sting, posing as back market dealers in augments and electronically infiltrating and tracking the ship of the buyers, leading to the PERSIAN base. Staying in the rebel base's systems covertly, careful not to trip any alarms, Tinuviel stumbled upon the continued existence of Randall-037, and details of PERSIAN. When the buyers next made port among the colonies, she contacted SHOGUN, reporting on events.

Reaction to this news was understandably alarmed. The Spartans had been propaganda coups, not to mention an enormous military asset, and the fear that the Insurrection could field its own equivalents in a few years time led many among ONI to the knee-jerk reaction of destroying the base with a nuclear weapon or MAC round. SHOGUN instead requested a Spartan-II team, a handful of VOLSUNG operatives, and a Black Cat stealth ship, and proposed Operation: OMNISCIENT - the rescue of Randall, the securing of all data on PERSIAN, and the destruction of the base. Hesitant at first, but convinced when the specifics of the situation were presented to her, ONI Director Parangosky agreed.

The base the Insurrectionist project had been based on was a former asteroid mining colony, a favourite rebel tactic given the maze-like network of tunnels that riddle such colonies. Designated "TEHRAN", the colony was part of a delicate network orbiting Cyprus VIII

Members

 * Doctor Eskander Bahram (Codename: CAMBRIDGE)

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