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| - Felix had to give Rosch credit: the man was utterly unflappable. He had called in a full-scale occupation of a colonial province, recruited elements from the Marines, Navy, and even the local militia, assembled a small fleet of air elements, all to catch a single man. And now, after the city had practically been leveled and countless lives lost in the process, that man had slipped away. The target this entire operation had been focused on had just vanished without a trace, and all they had to show for it was one washed-up deserter they hadn't even been looking for. Any other officer would have been calling in every favor in the book, clutching at whatever straws drifted within reach to save their career. But Rosch hadn't so much as batted an eye as he transmitted his report to whoever his higher-ups were on ONI's twisting stairs of cloak-and-dagger. All he'd done was order Jian--Felix included--to wait for him in the waiting room of the brig on the frigate they'd been flown up to. The Mother of Invention was just as cramped as the dozens of other frigates Felix had ever been on, and he was glad that some effort had been put into making the waiting room at least as spacious as one of the eating areas enjoyed by the crew. At Rosch's orders the entire section had been cleared of crew; he'd even had one crewman doing brig time for drunkenness transferred to another ship to serve his sentence. Felix couldn't say that he liked or even agreed with Rosch's brutally rigid way of doing things, but he had to admire the man's dogged efficiency. He was also glad the waiting area had been cleared because it had made room--and removed witnesses--for the strange scene unfolding in front of him. Ralph, still in armor minus his helmet, was throwing punch after punch at Jake's face. Jian's former leader had also taken off his helmet and was busy one clumsy swing after another with his forearm. "Why, damn it?" Ralph snarled, red hair sticking to his dripping forehead like bedraggled vines. "Why'd it have to be her?" "I wasn't expecting it either," Jake said calmly, turning yet another blow aside. "It sucks, but that doesn't help us or her." "She made it out!" The shorter Spartan's next punch went low and Jake only barely blocked it. "She got out, and she was happy! Why'd she have to show up like that!" Jake opened his mouth to respond, but just that moment he let a punch slip through his guard. He staggered back, a purple welt forming on his cheek. Felix stepped forward, ready to get between the two of them. He was still in his full MJOLNIR, helmet included and he was fully prepared to physically force them apart. But Jake waved him off, stopping Felix in his tracks. Ralph might be over the edge, but Jake had proven back on New Madrigal that he knew how to handle his unpredictable teammate. Felix didn't come any closer and waited to see how Jake's experience played out. "Cut it out, Ralph," Jake warned, backing up against a table. "She has info the commander needs. Info on Simon. You want to catch him, don't you?" "Not with her!" Ralph pulled his arm back for a bone-shattering blow. "Not like this!" The fist shot forward, but this time Jake was waiting. He caught it and yanked his teammate forward, sidestepped, then pinned him bodily to the table. "That's enough, Ralph," he warned. "You've had enough. Take a deep breath and snap out of it, buddy." And, to Felix's surprise, Ralph actually slumped, the fight draining out of him. "Damn it," he muttered. "Damn it!" "We'll put in a good word for her with the commander," Jake assured him. "We'll be there for her. Like we always were. She'll be alright." Ralph nodded slowly. Jake released him, and the fiery Spartan stumbled off to sit in a corner of the deserted waiting room. He kept running his hands through his hair and muttering inaudibly to himself. Felix fixed Jake with his visor's faceless gaze. "That's a way of working off stress I haven't seen before. Does he always hit you?" Jake shrugged, throwing himself down on another bench. "Ralph is Ralph, sir. Stick with us long enough and you'll get used to him as well. He's been my buddy since I was seven, before we even got put on a team together. I know how he works." "I believe you," Felix assured him. "But I want to know more about SPARTAN-G006." It felt odd to refer to the young woman they'd brought up to the brig with them so impersonally, but the name "Cassandra" felt strange coming out of his mouth. It didn't suit a deserter, much less a traitor. "What's there to know?" Jake's words were casual, but his tone was guarded. He was holding back, hoping Felix would give up. But this wasn't something he could just walk away from. "Why she's here. What she knows about G294. What happened with you all." Jake gave him a wry smile. "If you want her whole life story, ONI's got a file on her. I'm betting you've got a classification level high enough to read it." "I've read the file on her," Felix admitted. "But there's a lot missing. The report your team submitted on her disappearance was somewhat, well, vague." Jake glanced over at Ralph, who didn't meet his eye. When he turned back to Felix, he slumped down low against the table as if weighed down by some invisible boulder. His face looked as if it had aged ten years in the past few seconds. He let out a low sigh; to Felix, it sounded like a groan. "You've gotta understand," he said quietly. "None of us thought... none of us imagined things would turn out the way they did. With Simon." Felix nodded, sitting down across from the Headhunter. The bench groaned under the weight of his armor. "You discovered him during a raid on an Insurrectionist base. The Actinia asteroid belt, right?" That sector had been a hotbed of rebel activity in the years after the Great War. "Yeah." Jake nodded back, licking his lips. "We were targeting the Humanity Liberation Front. You know about them, right?" If he hadn't read G294's file a dozen times after Beta-14, the name wouldn't have rung a bell. The HLF was indistinguishable from the dozens of other URF splinter-factions that had jumped up to the plate after the war. Their only real claim to fame was the penchant for brutality their soldiers had displayed on fronts like Mamore. "Redmond Venter, right?" "Yeah, yeah," Jake said slowly, nodding. "That psycho. We were going in with the ODSTs to clear out the HLF and nail him if we could. It was a textbook hit, right up until we ran into Simon." "And you'd thought he was dead before that." "He was dead," Jake growled, a fire kindling in his eyes. "He died on Mamore, with Mary and Terrence. Whatever we met, whatever we found on that asteroid, well, I've got no clue who that was." "And so you fought." It wasn't a question. That part of the report had been clear. "Not at first," Jake said grimly. "We thought he was still on our side right up until he started running. The three of us--Ralph, Cassandra, and I--went after him. Later we figured Venter had hung him out to dry to cover his escape, but right then we just wanted to catch him. He sighed again, looking down at his clasped hands. The knuckles were white and getting even paler. "Some rebels hit us from the side and took down Ralph, so I had Cassandra stay back to patch him up while I went after Simon." Felix leaned back against the straining table. "So how did she manage to disappear?" "When I caught up with Simon in one of the hangars, it really was like he was a different person. Mamore changed him, twisted him into something... else. He didn't tell me anything, but I could tell. He hated the UNSC. Still hates it, I guess. All those years we spent together in Jian meant nothing to him. Absolutely nothing." "So you fought." Jake nodded, his eyes off in some other place. "We fought. We tried to kill each other. He was better than I'd ever seen him. Another thing Mamore changed I guess. Or maybe it was Venter that did it. I don't even know anymore. We were hacking each other apart when Cassandra showed up and tried to get between us." So that was it. It made sense, now that Felix thought of it. G006 was the only survivor of another team, Kopis, and if her psyche profile was anything to go by, she wouldn't have just stood aside when two of her teammates were going at it. It was that same attitude that had landed her in Rosch's custody. "She was injured?" "My fault," Ralph muttered from across the room. "If my stupid ass hadn't gotten shot, none of this would have happened." "I don't know who hit her, but when the smoke cleared, she was hurt bad. Real bad. That's all I remember, because Simon hit me even harder with a grenade. Next thing I know, I'm waking up in the infirmary and they were both just gone." "And today was the first you'd seen of her since then." "It was. I thought... I don't know what I thought. I never thought either of them were dead. Simon survives everything, it's the one thing he's good at and he always..." A shadow passed over Jake's face; his lips twitched in a grimace and he didn't finish the sentence. "He always had a thing for Cassandra," Ralph interjected coldly. "The asshole thought no one was on to him, but she was the only person in the whole company who couldn't figure it out. We knew he didn't kill her. That two-faced bastard hauled her along with him. Probably convinced himself he was doing a good deed, the backstabbing fuck." So there was Jian's dirty history laid out on the cracked table-top. Felix could only imagine the things its last members had gone through, what their fellow Gamma Spartans had accused them of when the business with Simon came to light. Even after all he'd been through with other Gamma teams, Felix had never heard more than distasteful grumblings about the stripped-down team. No wonder they had slipped into the role of Rosch's attack dogs so easily. The commander might very well have been the first officer to ever see them as more than failures from a tainted squad. "Sir," Jake said, his voice low and quiet. "Cassandra's guilty of desertion. I can't deny that. The word on Simon when we got the kill order was that he'd been in cryo for over a decade since the asteroid, and I'm betting it was the same for her, but there's no reason she couldn't have reported back in after she ditched him." "Yes," Felix said thoughtfully. Desertion was desertion; it had always been a capital crime in every military since the dawn of time. There was no way a man like Rosch would let that slide, no matter what the circumstances or how young and well-meaning the perpetrator seemed. "She is a deserter." "But she doesn't deserve to die," Jake said urgently. "Or rot in jail or whatever they'll do to her. Sir, the commander will charge her with everything he can pin on her, that's just how he is. But you... they say you know everybody there is to know in HIGHCOM." Felix could see where this was going. "I wouldn't say everybody, lieutenant," he said cautiously. "And Commander Rosch outranks me. I don't have the authority to override his decisions." "But you know people who can." The look in the other Spartan's eyes bordered on desperate. "Ralph and I will back you up on whatever you can come up with to save--" The communicator on Jake's belt buzzed, momentarily saving Felix from the corner he'd been wedged into. "Lieutenant, send the Lieutenant Commander to the interrogation room," ordered Rosch's clipped, precise voice. "Yes, sir," Jake replied. He hesitated before adding, "Sir, maybe Ralph and I--" "Just the Lieutenant Commander, thank you." The comm clicked with an air of cold finality. "I'll do what I can," Felix assured the stricken Jake. He stood up from the table, leaving an unfortunate sag where he'd been sitting, and strode into the only room in the brig that bore a green "occupied" marker on its outline. As the door slid open to admit him, he was instantly surprised at how bright it was. The walls, floor, and even the lights on the ceiling were a pale shade of white that made the whole room seem somehow ethereal, as if Felix were walking into a meat locker rather than an interrogation room. He could even feel a slight chill through his armor, though that might have been at the sight of Rosch, who stood as still and firm as a statue before a metal table, the room's only occupant. There at the table sat the shackled, forlorn form of the unfortunate Cassandra-G006. Felix glanced at Rosch, locked in parade rest before the table as if he'd been standing like that the whole time. His arms didn't bulge, but they certainly seemed solid and powerful through the sleeves of his overcoat, and Felix was half surprised to see that Cassandra didn't sport bruises across her face. It seemed the commander hadn't lain a finger on her this whole time. "Sir," he said by way of greeting. Rosch met him with a slight nod, his eyes hard and unreadable under his pale bangs. "She certainly is willing to discuss what happened to her after she disappeared," Rosch said to the room at large. "Whether we can trust her word is another thing altogether." Cassandra said nothing, her gaze fixed on the tabletop. Her arms were locked in restraints welded to the table itself; the same was true of her feet. That at least explained why Rosch had been comfortable enough to stay in the room alone with her as long as he had. She'd been stripped of her SPI armor and given an ill-fitting crewman's jumpsuit to wear in its place. The uniform had been made to fit a man twice her size and hung limply off her body like a wet cloth. Her nut-brown hair fell about her face, masking her eyes and most of her expression. Felix had the feeling her bedraggled appearance would cut her absolutely no ice with Yuri Rosch. "What's her version of the story?" he asked carefully. "G294 treated her injuries following his fight with SPARTAN-G293. The slipspace drive on their ship failed and they were both forced into cryosleep. When they awoke, they landed on Hekate, where G294 vanished. She claims she took the shuttle and made a life for herself on the frontier." Rosch shrugged dismissively. "We can assume the last bit is true. The rest just makes her guilty of collaborating with a known traitor along with desertion. Dereliction of duty falls in there as well." "What was I supposed to do?" Felix's gut wrenched at the pain in Cassandra's voice. He wondered if Rosch felt any pity at all for the miserable girl sitting before them. "Kill him in his sleep?" "If that was the only way to do it, yes," Rosch told her, his voice dripping with disdain. "At no point during any of the events you recounted did you cease to be a soldier of the UNSC." "We were alone!" Cassandra pleaded. "I thought we were going to freeze to death down there!" "Even if that exonerates you from failing to kill G294 when you had the chance, you still had access to a shuttle after you parted ways. The date you've given for your awakening leaves over three years where you operated on the frontier outside of UNSC jurisdiction." "Sir," Felix interjected. "We might want to consider a medical examination before we go any further with this. The effects of long-term cryosleep--" "Are physical rather than mental," Rosch interrupted. "If G006 were suffering from any side-effects, we'd have known by now. You've read her mental report, Lieutenant Commander. I want a second opinion. I want to know why G006--" "My name is Cassandra." The protest was quiet, but the pain was gone from her tone. It had been replaced by a strange kind of firmness, one that didn't strike Felix as harsh but didn't leave room for argument either. Yes, she was a born medic, this one. "Why G006 abandoned her duties to the UNSC," Rosch plowed on, unmoved. "She won't give me a clear answer about that part of this situation." "Maybe we're looking at this the wrong way, sir." Felix had to gamble that if Rosch had put up with Ralph for all these years he wasn't the kind of officer to fly into a rage if his subordinates disagreed with him. Cassandra's very life might very well hinge on that gamble. "Can we prove that she ever did anything against the UNSC's best interests?" It was the wrong thing to say. Rosch's penciled eyebrows shot up, like a hunter that had spotted its prey. "Well, yes, I think we can. G294 is responsible for the current situation with the Path Walkers. If she'd killed or apprehended him when she had the chance, he wouldn't have been at large to get involved there." "Willingly," Felix amended quickly. "Sir, I've dealt with Spartans before. We're not machines, we can't just shut down our emotions and take every consequence into account. She couldn't have predicted what G294 would go and do." Rosch shrugged. "I see your point, but that doesn't excuse her crimes." "And what about your crimes, commander?" Both officers turned in surprise to see that the prisoner was no longer staring forlornly at the tabletop. Her eyes were fixed on Rosch, and though they were calm they gleamed with unabashed accusation. Her question carried the same passive force as the last assertion. Felix was immediately on his guard. She certainly wasn't as beaten as she had seemed when he had walked in. There was still some fight left in her. Rosch also seemed to have been caught off guard. "Pardon?" "You're accusing me of desertion," she continued. Her lips twitched at each word, as if they hurt to say. "Maybe I'm guilty of that. But you ordered a full-scale military occupation of a civilian town. I treated dozens of people down there, and most of them needed treatment because you turned New Madrigal into a war zone to kill one person." Rosch raised his eyebrows again, but he had already regained his composure. His hard, cold mask was still in place. "So I did." "I don't know if they rewrote the rules of engagement when I was gone, but when I was on the ground in that city, it seemed to be a bit like using excessive force against a civilian population." There was a steel edge to her voice now, and her lips weren't twitching anymore. Had she been working up the nerve to confront Rosch this whole time? But the commander simply treated her to a cold smile. "You're forgetting that we both work for the Office of Naval Intelligence. As far as humanity's security is concerned, there are no rules of engagement." "That's your idea of protecting us? Evicting people from their homes and shooting anyone who resists?" Rosch sighed and shook his head. "Don't try to paint New Madrigal as some idyllic colonial city," he told Cassandra. "The place was infested with rebels and criminals and every kind of scum we've found on the frontier since the Great War." Felix looked away, trying to ignore the heat that was rising inside his armor. Everything Rosch said made sense, especially as far as ONI was concerned. But he couldn't shake the memories. Fuzzy memories, but memories all the same. People screaming as air strikes leveled buildings, UNSC Marines advancing, rifles blazing. Yes, he had a very good idea of what Cassandra had seen "on the ground." Scum. Rosch's words echoed inside his helmet. In his mind's eye he saw a dark-haired man working to fix a Pelican dropship. He turned his head, as if distracted by something, and Felix could see, as if from a distance, a bit of himself in the man's rough features. The man jerked and twisted as bullets cut him down, and a whisper of a scream cried out in horror. It felt very hot inside his helmet. It was a constricting sort of heat that he'd never felt with it before, but he was suddenly very claustrophobic. He reached up and began undoing the seals keeping it in place. "So that justifies all the innocent people your soldiers killed?" Cassandra was demanding. Her words were faltering, as if she wasn't used to being this angry. Maybe it was just the fear doing the talking for her. Rosch could not have looked any more uninterested. "David Kahn, along with your friend G294, managed to plunge us into a new war against an enemy just as merciless as the Covenant. His actions have toppled more than one colonial regime, and he has ties to both the Insurrection and the Syndicate. I knew the consequences of ordering New Madrigal's evacuation, and decided that it was a sacrifice necessary to bringing a destructive force like Kahn to justice." "And look what happened. He got away." Cassandra looked back down at the table, but her shackled hands were balled into fists. "So much for the sacrifice. And you're wondering why I didn't come back to the UNSC." "Well, it wasn't a total loss." Rosch sounded almost amiable, as if they were debating a sporting event. "It got me you, didn't it? And with you, I have a way to get to G294. I'd have preferred Kahn's corpse, but I'll take what I can get." She looked back up, and this time her eyes truly were full of disgust. "So that's your plan. You'll use me to find Simon." "Yes, that's the idea." Felix pulled the helmet off his head and tucked it under his prosthetic right arm. The tightness in his armored chest hadn't gone away, but it felt good to have his face out in the open. He was taken aback when Cassandra caught a glimpse of his bare face. Her hands unclenched and she blinked as if shocked at what she saw. Felix frowned back at her. They'd never met before, had they? They couldn't have. If Rosch noticed it, he didn't care. "You seem to have a very skewed sense of right and wrong, G006. It's wrong for us to make the sacrifices needed to keep the rest of humanity safe, but you can sit by and protect a traitor like G294?" Cassandra didn't take her eyes off Felix. "I told you, my name's Cassandra. And his is Simon." "Call yourselves whatever you like. To me, you will always be SPARTANs G006 and G294, two defective operatives who, willingly or not, have managed to cause the military far more trouble than either of you are worth." Felix glanced at his superior. "Defective"? That was a new one, coming from Rosch, though it didn't surprise him. "He's not evil," Cassandra said, and this time she seemed to be talking to Felix rather than Rosch. Her desperate eyes bored into his and in a moment of shame, he looked away. He could practically hear Jake's voice in his ear: She doesn't deserve to die. "He's not evil," Cassandra repeated. "He's broken, he needs help! The UNSC helped make him like he is, you can't just pretend it's all his fault and put him down like an animal! Don't do this!" She lowered her gaze as if embarrassed by her outburst. "Please," she said softly. "Help him." The room was quiet for several moments before Rosch turned to Felix. "I think we've reached the heart of things, Lieutenant Commander." "Sir?" Felix was having a hard time believing anyone could be as cold and unfeeling as Rosch. Was the man a machine? "You had me thinking your dereliction of duty had something to do with a misguided sense of morality," Rosch told Cassandra. "But this is even more disappointing. I'd almost call it pathetic." She looked up at him, utterly stunned. "What?" "Beneath all the moralizing and ethics you've thrown at me, all you really care about is saving some damn traitor who cared more about money than he cared about the peace and security of his own species!" It was the first time outside the battlefield that Felix had heard Rosch raise his voice, and for a moment he wondered if he could step in and restrain his superior if the man lunged forward to hit the restrained prisoner. But the commander stayed where he was, rooted to the spot as he glared down at the ex-Spartan. "As far as I'm concerned, G294's entire body is the property of the UNSC," Rosch continued brutally. "The same goes for you, for the Lieutenant Commander, for Jian, and every other Spartan ONI has ever produced. When equipment malfunctions, we do our best to fix it. When it breaks and costs lives, we eliminate it and replace it. Right now I'm wondering if you can't be fixed, but G294?" The officer shook his head. "Like you said, he's broken. The only way to help him is a bullet through the head, and that's exactly what you'll help us do." Felix couldn't say he was surprised by Rosch's attitude. He'd seen it before in the eyes of dozens of other ONI officials when they looked at him and the other Spartans. Rosch was simply the first with the cold honesty to say it out loud. As despicable as the whole tirade sounded, Felix couldn't help but respect him for that. The sentiment was clearly not shared by Cassandra. For the first time she actually glared up at Rosch with genuine loathing. "It's so easy for you, isn't it?" she demanded. "Just writing people off, deciding their lives aren't worth anything. Who gave you the right to decide we're not human?" Rosch sighed. "Simple," he said, his mouth twisting with something strangely like regret. He reached down and grabbed the edge of his right sleeve, then pulled it up, exposing the bare flesh all the way down to his shoulder. Even Felix had to take a step back. The arm was covered with precise marks and stitches where someone had cut open and re-sealed the skin. Veins bulged where they shouldn't have been bulging, running all the way down the arm and into his hand. A small vial was strapped to his wrist, and below that a small, black series of numbers had been tattooed onto the skin. Felix had seen markings and deformities like that before. He'd met failures from Spartan augmentations before, as well as soldiers who had survived similar experiments. But he'd never have pegged Rosch as an augment survivor. The officer smiled at Felix and Cassandra's surprise. "It hurts," he explained, more to Felix than Cassandra. "The arm's in constant pain. I'm heavily medicated, to keep it from becoming too much of a distraction. But thanks to the experiments ONI ran on myself and fourteen other volunteers, I'll live twice as long as the average human." He turned back to Cassandra, sliding the sleeve back over his mangled arm. "I belong to ONI just as much as you and the other Spartans do. I gave my body over to them a long time ago. All that's left is for me to protect and serve humanity to the best of my abilities. "It's a given that G294 would not be where he is without the UNSC's meddling. But neither would the Lieutenant Commander, Jian, or every other Spartan that chose to serve humanity. He is still a traitor, one I intend to hunt down and execute. You can either help me find him or stand aside and let his crimes continue." Silence fell over the interrogation room. Cassandra's head was bowed once more, as if Rosch's words had forced it down. Felix couldn't see her face, but he wondered if she was fighting back tears. He could hardly imagine such helplessness, to want nothing more than to help someone only to be confronted with an implacable, unwavering force like Rosch. He'd never let authority get in the way of doing what he thought was right, but then again he'd never been the one chained to an interrogation table before. A quiet chirp cut through the stale air and Rosch reached down to activate the communicator on his belt. "Yes?" "Commander?" a woman's voice asked. "Sir, we have the footage." "Good. Patch it through to my location." He turned to face the back wall, motioning for Felix to do the same. "What we're about to see was captured at around 0400 this morning on Sanghelios. It was midday there at the time." "Sir, what does Sanghelios have to do with this?" Felix asked. "It seems they've suffered a recent slew of terror attacks from a group of well-equipped humans," Rosch replied. "Not that they thought to inform us, but we have our sources." A screen flashed up on the wall and images sprang to life before them. For a few seconds all Felix could make out was scenes of battle, Sangheili warriors howling and firing in the middle of what appeared to be a city. But then the scenes clarified and the computer zoomed in on one in particular: a Spartan in ragged SPI-armor dragging a girl through the carnage. His left arm was a skeletal prosthetic. "As you can see, we've located G294." Rosch wasn't looking at the screen. His gaze was fixed upon Cassandra, gauging and analyzing her reaction as only an ONI officer could. "We don't know if he's with the terror group or just an unfortunate bystander, but he's on Sanghelios and he won't be leaving anytime soon. Our squid-headed friends are just as interested in capturing him as we are." He glanced back at Felix. "We haven't identified the girl yet. The intelligence team ran a full facial scan on the image and ran it through every database we have without results. But judging from the way she's looking at them both, I'd say our guest may have some idea." "She's just a slave," Cassandra whispered. "We... I freed her a while back. I don't know what she's doing with him." "We," Rosch noted. "So you have had contact with him since Hekate." He waved his hand. "No matter. I couldn't care less who that one is. We need to get G294 before the Sangheili do. I don't want them probing him for information, not with the things he knows. And we can't forget about the armor he stole on Beta-14. That's sensitive military hardware." Rosch fixed Cassandra with a disdainful stare. "Didn't mention that, did I? On Beta-14 G294 killed another Spartan and took his armor. I don't know where that fits in with your theory about him needing a therapist, but right now it just shows me how dangerous he really is." Felix looked back at the image of G294 on the screen. Yes, he needed to answer for the Delta Spartan he'd killed. He couldn't simply let that go, not if he ever wanted to be able to look the Deltas in the eye again. Cassandra gazed up at the screen unblinking, transfixed by the image of G294. "What's the next move, sir?" Felix asked Rosch. "We can't just occupy Sanghelios like you did here." "No, unfortunately we can't." Rosch inclined his head. "But G294 isn't Kahn. I think Jian and myself will be sufficient to bring him down." "I take it you're including me in Jian." "Of course. As long as you're part of this task force, I want you commanding the team. Helping them clean a black spot from their record seems like a fitting opening task for your new role." Rosch turned back to their prisoner. "And we have something with G294 that we didn't have with Kahn. Leverage." "I see." "With or without her direct cooperation, we can use her to draw him out. I'll need your help for this one, Lieutenant Commander. I'm told you have connections on Sanghelios?" Felix's guard shot up. "More along the lines of loose diplomatic ties, sir. I was involved in operations against the Fallen and--" "As was I, though I think your tour ended more pleasantly than mine did. We'll need those connections to get a fix of G294's position, and then we'll close in for the kill." "Are we even authorized to deploy on Sanghelios?" Felix asked. He wasn't sure he wanted to go near the place with Rosch, even if they were just a small commando team. "I have blanket authorization to do whatever it takes to bring down Kahn and G294. Kahn may have eluded us here, but if things go as planned, G294 won't have anywhere to run when we run him down." Kahn hadn't had anywhere to run either, but he'd still been snatched away at the last second. Felix didn't voice that concern, mostly because it wouldn't do him any good with Rosch. Even after all that had just transpired with Cassandra, he still couldn't decide whether the man was the most honest and devoted soldier he'd ever met or the most callous and despicable. "I don't think the others will like forcing Cassandra into this operation," he said cautiously. At least he could use her real name now; after all that had happened, a simple designation number didn't fit anymore. "You won't have to." For the third time her quiet voice cut into their conversation. "Oh?" Rosch asked, turning to face her. "I'll do it." She wouldn't meet his eyes. "I'll help you find Simon." "Excellent." Rosch turned on his heels and headed out the door. "Lieutenant Commander, have the lieutenant and warrant officer come escort her to my shuttle. It's being prepped in hangar bay 1A." Felix followed after him, leaving Cassandra alone in the cell. The door slid shut behind them. "She was lying, you know," Felix warned. "She'll help us as far as finding him goes, but she won't just stand by and let us kill him." "Of course she won't," Rosch replied calmly. "In whatever strange world G006 lives in, she's smitten with him. The trick will be to use those emotions to our advantage." "So you do believe in emotions." Felix couldn't keep it in any longer. "For a minute there, I thought you were saying we're all machines." Rosch turned and actually smiled at him. "I never said that. What I said was that we've given up the right to act on those emotions as we please. You can't cut out things like emotion, but you can suppress them when need be." "I still don't think manipulating her like this is the right way to go about things. She's clearly sincere." Rosch shrugged. "So was every Insurrectionist I've ever killed. Their sincerity didn't make them any less dangerous." "She's not a terrorist, sir." "No," Rosch agreed. "She is not. But she's still a trained and augmented commando who's lost her way. That alone is danger enough for me, even without the connections to G294." "Sir, with all due respect, you're splitting hairs over a matter of right and wrong." Rosch frowned, as if Felix had suddenly spoken a foreign language. Then he shook his head and turned to face him completely. "Was it the 'right thing to do'?" he repeated. "Right and wrong, Lieutenant Commander? Have you forgotten that we answer to the Office of Naval Intelligence? To the very same division that commissioned the kidnapping and brainwashing of thousands of children in the name of our continued existence as a species? For men like us, there can be no right and wrong, no good and evil. There is only the greater good for humanity, the things that will ensure that disasters like the Insurrection or the Great War never happen again. I am willing to sacrifice everything, including myself, in the name of that greater good. People like us aren't heroes, commander. We're shields." He nodded to Felix before turning away again. "I really need to thank you for your bluntness, Lieutenant Commander. You're nothing like what my colleagues described at all."
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