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blog|public, element|oni, element|where's grif?, narrative|conversation, npc|colonel holbrook, npc|colonel mcbride, people|mack sumner, place|new reach, plot|health, plot|ice hellions

will you meet your mind where the night collides
Five Days Ago:

Okay, folks. ONI's offering me a health-care two-for-one: Get the couple of scrapes I picked up fighting Ice Hellions patched up, and finally do the brain thing. So, yeah, that's where I'll be for the next... few days, something like that, they're not being very specific. Probably won't be online or anything. A little nervous, but generally okay with it. Wish me luck.

--Grif

[locked to Mack]
P.S.: Remember that discussion we had last year, when we got in trouble for that Plan we don't talk about? I got it all taken care of, just in case. If, by some chance, it happens to become relevant, you'll get automated mail about what needs to be done.

---

Now:

Halsey Medical Center
New Reach

"Guys. What the hell."

Grif had more or less gotten used to having to meet with his handlers at the end of any visit to the UNSC's more central facilities, before he'd be allowed to return to Blood Gulch and his usual life. This particular meeting, however, was different from the norm in a couple of ways. For one thing, rather than on one base or another, it was being held in a hospital, where Grif had been staying for the last few days. For another, Colonels McBride and Holbrook were, at the moment that Grif walked into the conference room he was told had been reserved, busy blacking out all of the windows and sweeping the room with electronic devices whose purposes he was unable to determine at a glance.

"Come inside and shut the door, Grif," McBride said, his gaze intent on the display of the device in his hands.

Holbrook, at least, took a moment to look up at him and add, "What, no backless hospital gown?"

Grif rolled his eyes, entered fully into the room, and closed the door. "Nah. After the first full day, they figured it was safe enough to go with something closer to actual clothes." He looked down at the pale blue scrubs and white bathrobe and slippers. "Be nice to do something about the color scheme, but it's not like I should be here much longer, anyway."

"I thought you were above the whole 'Red vs. Blue' civil war thing." Something on Holbrook's device beeped, and he looked over at his partner and said, "We're clean." McBride nodded and moved to the door, shooing Grif off to a chair so he could lock the door and attach some other piece of equipment to the handle.

Settling into his seat, Grif continued to look at the agents bustling about and replied, "It's not that. I've just gotten used to orange and black, is all. Seriously, what the fuck are you guys doing, anyway?"

Holbrook had taken up a position in front of one of the interior walls, and with his business at the door completed, McBride moved to the other. They shared one last nod, then each put the device he was carrying on the nearest side table. Only now, as he heard four beeps in sequence around the room, did Grif notice that another had been stuck to one of the blacked-out windows of the exterior wall.

"Had to make sure the room was fully secure," McBride said. "There's a fairly good chance we might end up discussing something classified at some point; you'll see what we mean if it becomes relevant. But first, the simple stuff: How're you feeling?"

Grif thought that explanation was a bit weird, but at the question, he merely gave a sigh and a shrug. "Eh. Okay, I guess. Clearer, certainly, than I have in a long time. Also, utterly fucking bored." He rolled his eyes. "The doctors insisted that I try to do as little thinking as possible while things settled -- and you can keep the jokes to yourselves -- but with no books or vids or Chatter or anything else, and my neural implant turned off, that meant that I slept a lot and spent the rest of my time staring into space and trying to avoid watching the clock."

"Well," Holbrook said as the agents sat down as well, "the doctors say everything went pretty much as well as they could've hoped for. They'll want you to come back at some point for a follow-up, but they're done with you for now. They did want us to pass along, so you're ready for it before they turn it back on, that your implant may feel a bit different. 'S a little trick they came up with, a while back. Rather than try and recover the nano-surgeons or make them break down and pass out of you, which is apparently more trouble than it's worth, they instead instruct the little buggers to go and use each other for parts to upgrade the patient's implants to whatever the current spec is. Shouldn't be anything too drastic, I think... Mostly increased storage, maybe some speed improvement. Stuff like that."

"Um. Okay, cool. That's... not the big classified stuff, right?"

McBride let out a puff of laughter. "No. Like I said, that was the simple stuff. This is where things get a little trickier. Let's start with this." He reached into the pocket of his jacket and slid something small across the table.

Grif caught it and picked it up, looking it over. It was a box, spring-hinged and covered in black velvet, as boxes for rings and other jewelry have been for centuries. He looked from the box to the agents. "Look, guys, I know we've been working well together, and I'm sure that 34th century laws allow for it, but I just don't feel that way about either of you. I'm sorry and I hope we can still be friends."

Some sort of joke along these lines was apparently expected, as the agents, in well-rehearsed but nonetheless eerie synchrony, rolled their eyes and said, "Just open it, jackass."

"Fine. Geez, I hate it when you guys do that." He lifted the lid and looked inside the box, his expression becoming markedly confused. "Uh. Why are you giving me Sergeant rank pins?"

McBride smiled an oddly impish little smile. "Staff Sergeant, actually. The regs technically say that that's the minimum rank for outpost commanding officers. Blood Gulch is far from the only place we've ever had with Privates in charge, but every so often, someone gets a hair up their ass about what it says in the book, leading to corps-wide reorganizations."

"Major pain in the ass," Holbrook interjected.

"Yeah. So, rather than deal with the inevitable troubles with either relocating you or making someone else relocate to Blood Gulch, we looked into getting you promoted instead. You've seen enough real action in the last couple years to have earned at least that much, anyway, especially with the latest bullshit."

"I find it more than a little disturbing that that's the easy solution. So does this mean you guys actually got my records fixed, since you can apparently change my rank?"

The shared look of discomfort between the two agents, though simultaneous, was neither synchronized nor identical, which went a long way towards convincing Grif that it was genuine. There was something about that question that actually bothered them, and Holbrook was clearly hesitant as he said, "Well, that's a bit---"

"Tricky, yeah, you've said. Come on, guys, spit it out, I'd rather not be here all day."

Holbrook sighed and tried again. "Okay, well, when we'd decided to get you promoted, we asked around about your records again. We got the whole spiel about their being corrupted and frozen and so on again, which had seemed okay the first time, but then we started to wonder about how that could be allowed to happen to the UNSC personnel system, the history of the corps, so on and so forth. So we started bugging the computer guys, and..." He took a moment to sigh. "It turns out they knew some shit we didn't about your civil war. Shit no one is really supposed to know, but which we had to find out once we started digging."

"And let's get this straight," McBride said. "The permission we finally got to find out this stuff, and to tell you about it, only came because it was classified 800 years ago now, and to be perfectly blunt, you're about the only person with anything more than the most distantly academic interest. To put it simply, Civil War personnel were stored on a separate system, because Red and Blue Armies were separate from the Army. Some of the more experienced troops, like your old Sergeant, were originally regular Army, but got quietly transferred over. The war wasn't Command going crazy..." Holbrook looked like he might've been about to say something, but grinned and kept his mouth shut at a warning glance from his partner. "At least, not the way the history books imply, anyway. I know you used to call it a 'fake' civil war, and that's really more accurate, because its declaration was actually carefully orchestrated, intended to accomplish two main goals. The secondary objective was to provide a simulation space for Project Freelancer."

Grif sighed. "I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised by that. We did end up with a lot of Freelancer shit in our faces, the last couple years before I was left on my own... Although, technically, now that I think about it, things actually started happening before that, when the rookies showed up." His eyes narrowed, disbelief and suspicion warring in his mind. "Wait, you're not suggesting that---"

"That Caboose and Donut were secretly undercover Freelancers?" Holbrook cut him off with a grin and a gently mocking tone. "No, and you should be ashamed of yourself for even thinking something that dumb."

That drew a nod and a self-deprecating chuckle. "You're right, what was I thinking." Grif rolled his eyes. "I can only suppose it's because I've been in the Army, Red or otherwise, too damned long."

The younger agent made a tiniest-violin gesture. His partner ignored it to continue his explanation. "Project Freelancer's mission statement was to continue advancing the state of the art in super-soldier development. It combined several different experiments into a single overall effort to test as many possibilities as they could think of. From the notes we have, it appears that they somehow expected that disrupting the steady state of things in Blood Gulch would cause someone to call for a Freelancer."

"My money says it somehow involved Caboose and team-killing. Anyway, okay, that was Reason Number Two for the war. What was Reason Number One?"

"The primary objective of the war was to be... a smokescreen, basically. By showing troops -- SPARTANs, even -- active on the ground throughout the galaxy, people would be reassured that they at least were there and could be counted on should another invasion erupt. In truth, however, the real Army, along with almost all of the Navy and Marine forces, were gathered and sent on a mission whose stakes were so high that revolt was feared if the public found out. The Master Chief's actions at the Halo did manage to wipe out most of the Covenant's armada... but 'most' is not 'all,' and that meant there was still quite a bit to do if humanity was to be sure that we were never bothered by them again. Thus, after a brief period to salvage as much technology as possible from the wreckage at the Halo and wring every last available drop of advancement from it, a counter-invasion was launched, aimed at ending the threat once and for all."

His eyes closed, one finger upraised to call for silence, Grif cast his mind back to what he could remember from just before the civil war. "The attack on Reach was a cluster-fuck. Everyone started freaking out, 'cause with the last line of defense gone, the Covenant were totally just gonna find Earth and that'd be the ball game. The military told us about the Pillar of Autumn pulling the armada away mainly so we wouldn't start rioting in the streets... which just led to demands for the military to keep the public informed. The news of what happened at the Halo... it was like everyone's favorite teams had won all the championships ever." He opened his eyes. "Saying that no, they're not really all gone, and we have to go poke the hornet's nest to make sure... there'd have been chaos and outrage, so it was better to just lie and say that we'd already won. That about the right idea?"

Even though he'd been working with them for nearly a year, such incisive analysis from Grif always seemed to catch the agents by surprise. (His best guess was that he'd built his stupid lazy slacker reputation a little too well, and it was coming back to bite him in the ass.) They recovered, after a moment's stunned blinking, and Holbrook said, "Uh, yeah, that's pretty much it."

"Hm." Grif considered some more. "Well, obviously they ultimately won enough that we're still alive and not speaking blargh-honk-wurt. Did they..." He paused for a moment, trying to frame the question he wanted to ask, uncertain of just what answer he'd prefer. "The Covenant were gunning for total genocide. When the tables turned, did we return the favor, or just settle for making them run away?"

"Well, it wouldn't surprise me if we did go all the way," McBride said, "but to tell the truth, we don't know. The operational details of the counter-offensive were beyond our need to know about why the civil war happened."

"Not too surprising, I guess. I'm not entirely sure I like it, but I can understand it."

Holbrook's usual relaxed bonhomie was mildly strained as he suggested, "Well, if it helps, look at it this way: If the civil war was a cover story---"

"If you're about to say anything," Grif broke in, clamping down on his temper even as his expression hardened to show that it had been roused, "anything at all, about my conscription having secretly been a patriotic duty or any other sort of noble or virtuous thing, I recommend that you stop now. Otherwise, I will have to punch you in the face, and I may not be able to remember when to stop."

Strangely enough, that seemed to actually make Holbrook more comfortable, from the way that he genuinely relaxed and grinned. "No, you're right, it's still shitty," he admitted. "Sorry, we had orders to at least try using the line on you, see if it got you to play ball more easily." He shrugged. "Politics. Long story, don't worry about it."

That was good enough for Grif. Shrugging, he said, "Oooookay. So what now? I assume you didn't just promote me within the fake Red Army."

"As funny as that might've been, no," McBride said, finally able to relax a little himself, now that all of the troubling revelations had been taken care of. "We scraped as much of your file as we could out of the Civil War database, and transferred it into the main UNSC system, in the process transferring you to the real UNSC Army. That allowed us to first give you the promotion, and then have you seconded to ONI, Section One. That puts you officially under our command, by which authority we can assign you back to Blood Gulch with orders to just... keep doing what you've been doing all along. Sound good to you?"

"As nice as it would've been if you'd gotten those records into the civilian systems..." Grif sighed. "Yeah, sure, what the hell. It's not any worse, so I guess it's good enough for now. What's the pay raise on being a Staff Sergeant, anyway?"

The agents both gave him deadpan looks -- Given how much more his business made for him, what the hell did he care what the Army paid?! -- but he just grinned, and they rolled their eyes and stood up. McBride's face got a bit stern again as he asked, "Just so we're clear, the stuff we just discussed is still classified, so keep it under wraps, at least in our universe. Got it?"

Grif nodded and waved dismissively. "Yeah, yeah, no problem. Figured that much, anyway."

The agents shut down the anti-surveillance equipment, unblacked the windows and went to the door. Just as they were leaving, Holbrook paused and looked back, a conspiratorial grin on his face. "Oh. One last thing. You'll get a message with all the official language and coordinates and stuff, but clear your calendar... let's say you get a long weekend and make it three days from now. We've arranged a little field trip to Misriah; they've got some stuff to show us."

The grin got a little wider at Grif's surprised look, and he left. Grif took one more look at his new rank pins, then closed the box and went off to ask around about getting his implant switched back on and whatever else was necessary before he could check out.

Sergeant Grif, he thought to himself. I'd say that Sarge would have a conniption if he ever knew, but I'm not sure he'd be physically capable of comprehending it.