Team Boson

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"If I cannot bend the will of Heaven, I will move Hell."

- Unit Motto of Team Boson.

Team Boson, also known as Ferret Team Boson, is a generally five-member Spartan combat unit formed exclusively from graduates of SPARTAN-III Delta Company and previously commanded by Major Kyser Duceppe. The team's roster include and -qualified personnel.

Originally made up of Daniele-D003, Merlin-D032, Andra-D054, Roxanne-D107, and Zachariah-D111, the five children-turned-soldiers were sorted together during training. Since then, they have retained a family-like union that stands above their loyalties to their government and military, even when strained by abandonment and betrayal.

Orphaned by the, Team Boson was scouted originally as a Spartan unit for fighting the alien , however, their mission changed from conventional warfare to internal security affairs when the war ended. As part of a social reintegration program, Team Boson was among several Spartan units to experience lives beyond strict-military oversight.

Even when driven apart by outside forces, the friends share a wish to reunite once again. In time, their familial structure has grown to include new and old friends of Team Boson including Shizuko-D081 and, Althea.

Shared Origins
"You were selected for a reason, Andra. You may not believe yourself to be strong, but you are. I believe you are. You don't know it for yourself yet. Let us show you – join our program and become a Spartan."

- Doctor Reyna Zhou-Romero recruiting Andra-D054 into Delta Company.

With the Human-Covenant War still raging in late 2552, the fourth iteration of the, Delta Company was actively seeking recruits while the third iteration, SPARTAN-III Gamma Company, began to wind down. Then in November of that year, the colony world employed by the SPARTAN-III Program,, was destroyed in a between the Covenant, the , and the  that protected the  within.

Without a world and many resources lost, the SPARTAN-III program was jeopardized by a lack of funds and bureaucratic support within the, the program's sponsor and financier. Within months of Onyx's destruction, the Human-Covenant War began to approach its conclusion with the concurrent that was the United Nations Space Command triumph over Covenant forces on the Human homeworld. The need for the SPARTAN-III Program's continuation was trivialized by the Covenant War's end and Gamma Company never saw mass deployment during the conflict.

Following the death of, the SPARTAN-III Program's former director, in the , Rear Admiral Jazmine Utah saw to replace him and made a hard push to continue the activities and recruitment of SPARTAN-III Delta Company into 2553 and onward. The pitch was ultimately denied by her ONI superiors and funding was transferred to the new which was determined to be less morally-dubious since it used augmented adult volunteers rather than the SPARTAN-III program's illegal acquisition and conversion of war orphans into child-soldiers.

Through private donations and economic manipulation inside the fragile Post-War Era economy, the SPARTAN-III Program continued operations in secret, going against Utah's orders to begin shuttering the project entirely. Due to the final major battles of the Covenant War, the SPARTAN-III Program actually had a surplus of available children to recruit into Delta Company with as many as 475 detected prospects. Ultimately, only about three hundred of those orphaned children were recruited into the project and delivered to Argus V, the new Spartan-training-planet, in late 2553.

Among these new recruits were the five children that would become the foundation of Spartan Team Boson: Andra Bradford, Daniele Veracruz, Merlin Ljang Boyd, Roxanne Savage, and Zachariah Weaver. Similar to children that became Spartans in the other iterations of the SPARTAN-III Program, the Spartan-hopefuls of Delta Company were war orphans, the majority of which lost their families in Covenant attacks. A shared quality between the future members of Team Boson was their lack of direct exposure to the aliens that destroyed their lives. This was intriguingly noted by the recruiters who handled the five specific cases, Doctor Reyna Zhou-Romero and Lieutenant Commander Jefferson Korn. The minor commonalities between the children went on to inform Korn's decision to put them together as a Spartan training unit.

Andra Bradford was the daughter of an Army combat medic mother and a stay-at-home father employed by. Her mother was killed in combat during the, far from where Andra lived on. In January 2551, Andra's father killed himself after a bad winter of work suspension, drugs, insomnia, and rage attacks directed at his daughter. Andra was recruited out of the Jade Hope Youth Treatment Center in April 2552, just months before the Covenant arrived and bombarded Sigma Octanus IV. It took mild coaxing from Doctor Romero to embolden Andra to enter Spartan training, Andra's trauma regarding her deceased father would be a continued inhibition throughout her Spartan training.

In 2547, Daniele Veracruz and his father witnessed on their home colony of. Daniele's mother was at work when the invasion began and was presumed dead after a Covenant warship destroyed her office. In 2550, Daniele's father was killed by Earth police after becoming involved in a terror plot against the California Surveyor General. Daniele ended up at San Diego's Sunny Shores Foster Facilities. He joined the youth crime ring, Child Crusaders, to keep himself fed when the orphanage kept running out of food. Arrested in 2552 for a number of delinquent crimes, Daniele was offered the option of attending juvvy until he reached adult-age or become a ward of the Office of Naval Intelligence. Daniele ultimately chose ONI and joined the SPARTAN-III Program.

Merlin Ljang Boyd was the son of parents employed by the Office of Naval Intelligence. His mother worked with ONI's Section II department, Public Relations, while his father served as shipboard security detail for the. Within the course of 2549, Merlin's parents were killed during the and the  respectively. Merlin was marked as a orphan and transferred to a military orphanage. Following the first incursion by Covenant forces on Merlin's home planet of in 2552, Merlin encountered recruiters from the SPARTAN-III Program and was offered a place in Delta Company. While Merlin had little concept of the Covenant War and had spent most of his childhood relatively sheltered, he jumped at the chance to serve Humanity like his parents..

Roxanne Savage lived in the rural town of on  when the Covenant arrived. On June 23, 2552, Covenant advanced scouts assaulted Visegrád's farms one by one, killing the residents. Roxanne's parents were killed in the fields outside their home. Roxanne's older brother hid Roxanne in the family's cellar while he went to go their other sibling. He did not return. The alien incursion was eventually thwarted by a passing through Roxanne's home the next day. While the unit never discovered the girl, she was eventually found by an and evacuated to the city of  and later to an orbital settlement in the. At the temporary holding facility, Roxanne encountered recruiters for the SPARTAN-III Program and agreed to join Delta Company.

Zachariah Weaver was the son of a wealthy business tycoon and a long-since-divorced mother. Living on, Zachariah witnessed to the same that struck Reach.