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Part: 5 Hatred Within
2536, March 10, Military calendar, Location unconfirmed within downed Covenant Cruiser; surface of planet Euripides.
The darkened interior of the crushed ship bent around him like a surreal claustrophobic nightmare, but Scott continued on. He was fifty meters from the entrance breech now, and he had found a host of dead alien bodies along his way, but nothing of use. The halls were bent and burnt here, as if still shuddering under the massive pull of a star's gravity, caught between the heavens and earth. Lights flickered ahead, the power plants must not have all been destroyed in the conflict, although gutted from it's prow to its aft, the beast refused to die.
Descending into the bowels of the felled Covenant cruiser caused his mind to race, his heart to quicken. He felt the rush of danger and unknown threats overcoming him, his adrenal glands pulsing, filling his body with chemicals, his thyroid implant fully accelerating his body. This was the addiction he felt in the cagey metal frame of his MJOLNIR armor, enveloped completely by the peak of human technology he was the perfect weapon, and here, alone on the battlefield his humanity escaped him. Here in the collapsed and ruined corridors of an alien battle craft as he trudged ever closer to an inevitable conflict he forgot the distractions of his life, the complications and disturbing elements of his training and the failing war against the covenant. Scott felt enthralled as his mind shut down and his instincts took over. In a few hours though, he knew he would be extracted, and he would remember, his mind would begin to analyze his service again.
Hidden amongst the other SPARTAN IIs in their private quarters, he would remember the faces of all they had killed. The alien tongues screaming their defiance as the butt of his rifle jumped back into his shoulder, the way their thick purple fluids exploded from their bodies. He was a killer; in his mind he knew nothing else. He knew they had been trained, shaped, honed to be killers. John believed in their missions, their leaders looked to be the saviors of humanity. Scott didn't know what he was, but he remembered killing both humans and covenant alike in his short life. It was hard to reconcile in his mind, despite the mindless slaughter he had seen the covenant troops direct upon a hundred different human settlements. Their massive fleets burning civilians and military personnel alike, letting their plasma cannons bombard and burn whole worlds away.
Scott hated those brief moments of contemplation respite, wishing to understand his life, at one moment completely enveloped in the world he had been raised in, a loyal soldier born to fight to protect humanity and earth. And in the next moment the SPARTAN II, the pinnacle of human bio technology, but cursed to endlessly analyze and reevaluate his life, knowing that everything that had been done to him had been done to make him a perpetual slave to the Navy. He slept because he was ordered to sleep, he ate because he was ordered to, and he lived because he was given the opportunity to be a hero. Scott knew he had been a number in a program; his mind wasn't what Dr.Halsey had wanted. He was her least favorite son, because he was her deviation from her perfect results, and no matter what he knew that she had wished he had died in the procedures like so many of the other SPARTAN II candidates. Project MJOLNIR was supposed to have weeded him out, so that only those who were perfect survived, only the desired results would be there.
The truth hurt his mind, dulled his senses, and lowered his morale. The truth was that he could see just how different his brothers and sisters had become from those who they followed. They had lost something inside themselves; something intrinsic to every regular soldier he ever followed or saved. His brothers and sisters were his family, those who had bled, and fought, and suffered with him, but done so gladly as if it was the only true path they could have ever taken. But they weren't human, not like their mother, not like their commanding officers. Scott could see it in those painful moments of clarity, how the grim prospect of political schism had born them to this life, but how they had enslaved their own minds to the service and protection of humanity.
He would kill. He would always be fighting and killing, not because he was commanded to do so, but because he could never choose otherwise. "We were born twice," he silently mused staring at those dark bulkheads before forcing himself to sleep, "once to be given form, and again to be given purpose." Scott felt the obsession within himself though, the raw addiction to their greater good, to their purpose that certainly damned them to a life of fighting. Perfect soldiers were specialized. Specialized humans could only do one thing.
Yet still in the face of this knowledge, his mind would return to the myriad of experiences and desires that had shaped him since he was six years old. The rewards, the challenges, the combat, the fear, and all the things he had been taught to excel at and surpass. He was so much more than human, but he lacked the basic ability to choose after all those years. Everything was their missions. Everything was their duty. Their life was to serve humanity, which was why the grunts feared them, that was why the ONI brass called them automatons, because Halsey had discovered a greater secret in her work with those children so many years ago.
They had never had a choice; they would have always served and fought, and fought well. They would never give in, never let fear take them away. Scott would never turn from whatever was asked of him, because in their minds conflict and war were the only way to live. Though some would believe in the veil of the "choice" offered to them by Mendez so many years ago, it was clear to Scott there was no way any of them could have ever declined their superior's offer. This was their life, and they would never leave it, captivated by their own obsessive combative personalities. This was Halsey's doing, her perfection of her experiment, and Scott's knowledge of this made her hate him. His mother hated him so, and would never look him in the eye, ordering him to look around instead, and then punishing him for breaking protocol.
She hated that boy, but to his credit, Scott 079 had survived and lived, and served well. But he was not Halsey's son, not like John, or Vincent, or Errol. She knew he was different, but she never knew how much of a deviant he was. His deviance was his self awareness, he knew what he was doing, letting her shape him into a killer, be tortured by hideous experimentation that would kill so many of his brothers and sisters, her children, her experiments. She hated him because he let her do this to him, and the guilt clearly ebbed at her personality when they were alone. But back on the field, as he raced through the corridor, killing the last few survivors before finding his goal, the control deck, he forgot all that. "Kill or be killed..." were his only thoughts.
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