Halo: Indelible Past/Chapter Two

Then

"Just wait in this room, sir, and I'll go find him."

That was what the nurse had told Victor Santiago nearly an hour ago, and he was starting to wonder if Constantinople's orphanage system was--for illusive reasons of their own--jerking his chain. Victor, his recruitment team, and the dozens of other recruitment teams scattered across UNSC space by the Office of Naval Intelligence in its search for candidates for the SPARTAN-III program's latest company had been presented with literally tens of thousands of dossiers pertaining to every human child matching the parameters set in place by the program's strict selection criteria. Victor had interviewed hundreds of young candidates, and to the best of his knowledge, most had been accepted by the program. By the time an officer like Victor came calling for an interview, the unwitting candidate had already passed nearly all of ONI's admittance markers.

Victor looked back down at the dossier displayed before him on his holo-tablet. This particular candidate--Subject G294--was one of the few that might actually be disqualified by his interview. Unlike most of the other children Victor had looked into, this one wasn't a war orphan, one who had lost everything to the Covenant fleets that were eating away at humanity's colonies on a daily basis. That marker--one that had been stressed during the selection of the Alpha and Beta batches--had been toned down as the Gamma search revealed less and less suitable candidates, but Victor's superiors still considered it important. The more hate the candidate could muster at an early age, the more they would be driven to excel in the grueling training process that was to come.

Subject G294 (Victor never thought of his subjects as anything but their numerical designations--it was best to be as impersonal as possible with them, especially since they were children) was an orphan, just not a war orphan. The kid had, if the orphanage's report was anything to go by, been pulled off the streets by Constantinople's police force after a feral dog had nearly ripped his throat out. They had determined that he'd been living as an urchin for nearly a year and had entered him into the orphanage system following a stint in the local emergency ward.

Victor frowned down at the dossier. The kid's--no, the subject's--injuries had come from more than just the dog attack. Included in the medical report were the findings of the doctors who had operated on him, which included badly healed fractures up and down his arms and legs, cracked ribs, and even an untreated cranial fracture that had thankfully not been life-threatening. Almost all of these injuries had been determined to have been inflicted over the course of the subject's entire life, which meant that he'd spent a good portion of his short life having the shit beaten out of him.

This could go both ways, Victor thought, running a finger down the report. Either the kid, sorry, the subject winds up motivated by all this crap, or he's a traumatized wreck who isn't good for anything.

Either way, Victor was getting impatient. He was just about to contact one of his subordinates to see if there actually was a Subject G294 to interview when the door to the meeting room slid open and the nurse escorted a small child in.

"I'm very sorry, sir," she said. "He goes off places by himself and it always takes us forever to find him."

"You should install a surveillance system..." Victor's mouth said, accompanied by a practiced, artificial laugh. In the meantime, Victor himself was looking over the subject he'd been waiting for.

The subject was small, even for a six year old. Although he wore the same kinds of well-fit clothing that Victor had seen all the other orphans wearing on his way in, Subject G294 bore patches of dirt on his skin and body that made him seem inherently grimy, as if the caretakers at the orphanage hadn't quite been able to rub the filth of the streets off of him. His tangled black hair was streaked with grime, and his gray eyes peered out of his head as if they belonged to some animal gazing out from its cave at an intruder. Apart from the dirt, his face bore at least two recent-looking bruises, along with some mild cuts and scrapes.

"I'll just leave you two alone then?" the nurse asked.

"Just wait outside," Victor told her. "This won't take long."

The filthy subject slid into a chair across from him, and Victor waited for him to say something. Most of the other children had been confused about his uniform, wondering why a navy man would want to talk to dregs like them. This one just stared at him for several moments before shrugging and resting his dirty sleeves on the polished conference table.

"You got any food?" he asked, gazing up at the tall adult with those narrowed, sunken eyes.

Victor hesitated. This was a strange way to open a conversation, even for a kid. He pulled a ration bar out of his pocket and slid it across the table. Subject G294 snatched it up and, to Victor's surprise, slipped it into his own pocket rather than eating it.

"What do you plan to do with it?" Victor asked, intrigued in spite of himself. G294 was the first of his subjects to truly surprise him right off the bat.

G294 simply shrugged and continued to stare at him with undisguised suspicion. Victor cleared his throat and launched into his well-rehearsed recruitment pitch.

"You don't really have much here, do you?" he asked, indicating the subject's threadbare hand-me-downs. "You're just a ward of this colony, and unless you've made some friends here, you don't have anyone who cares whether you're alive or dead. But the United Nations Space Command--the people I work for--can change all that." In a colony system filled with military propaganda messages, it was amazing how well small children responded to the package Victor was laying out.

Subject G294 just shrugged again, his face a study in bored indifference. "No one cares about me," he said with a startling lack of any sort of self pity or indignation. "No one's ever cared about me."

"We can change that," Victor assured him. "We can make you into someone who means something. Someone who protects people. Someone who kills monsters."

The subject's eyes narrowed even more as he absorbed this new information. It was all Victor gave most of his subjects--particularly the ones who weren't war orphans--but it was generally enough to hook them enough to sign on.

After nearly a full minute of contemplation, G294 jammed his fist up under his chin and cocked his head. "Will I get to leave here?" he asked.

"Yes. You won't be seeing this place ever again," Victor assured him, though a tiny part of him made him hate himself for not giving the reason why the subject would never be returning.

"Good." Something new flashed in G294's eyes, but Victor couldn't quite place what it was. "I hate this place."

Victor stood to go. His datapad had recorded everything: the conversation, the facial quirks, even the subject's vital signs. All he had to do now was turn in his report and wait for further instructions. What happened to Subject G294 now was no longer his concern.

"You'll hear from us soon," he said as he turned to leave.

Congratulations, kid, his mind whispered, unbidden. Looks like you've been recruited.