Insubordination 2

1008 Hours March 9th, 2455 (Military Calendar)/

Corridor B16, outside Briefing Room 4, Sub-vessel 7, in orbit over Stavros, Frontier Space

Erin Coney's night had dragged on so long even the patter of her shoes became a soft rhythm, lulling her long, black lashes lower as she paced the empty corridor. Catching them in the act, she trained her eyes on the next approaching ceiling light to burn the association with day and wakefulness into her retinas. Too much could fall behind if she allowed herself the luxury of exhaustion, let alone rest.

As soon as the shock of the Stavros operation going wrong had worn off, she'd run ragged. As the mission's handler, there'd been so much to document, , file, and authorize for the inevitable Commonwealth investigation. And as the operative who for years had interceded on Team Machete's behalf—falsifying military records to keep the young Marine from becoming the pawns of some ambitious political ingrate—so much to erase, edit, and gather for blackmailing silence from those involved. All to fit a cover story invented on the spot, all without the notice of the powers that be by sweeping everything under the rug before the investigation began. Nothing like penciling time in on her list of enemies, right under the nightmare of bureaucratic malevolence that was parliament.

Neither she nor the young Marines of Machete should have been involved with the CNFS Sydney and its operations⁠; officially, they weren't supposed to be anywhere at all. As of Alpha Company, the last class of conscripts illicitly recruited as children by the Commonwealth, Machete should all have been retired, living out full lives to make up for the terrible mistake committed in taking them—or secretly under the Governments direct control—carrying out exactly missions so many resources had been spent preparing them for, on behalf of a department too powerful and inscrutable to hold able. Their involvement in a mission entailing a single casualty—one inflicted by their own, no less—risked shedding light on figures who very much disliked their dark disturbed.

And as for Erin herself, the life imprisonment for so many counts of falsifying military records and appropriation of classified assets would be a slap on the wrist compared to the real fate awaiting her if they were discovered. She'd played the role of weary, coffee-subsisting mission handler long enough to make it comfortable, to really live the daily rituals of finding the comfortable adjustment of her headset and making sarcastic banter with the captain while waiting for the next order to come down. Sometimes, she could almost allow herself to forget despite having biologically just half a dozen years on the captain, she'd been born half a century before, and spent most of that time between long intervals in cryo-sleep undertaking wet work that would've made an upright, noble Navy officer's uniform crawl.

Contrary to the service record she'd fabricated with the rest of her identity, for most of her life Erin had been a spook, an agent in the myriad shadow-wars for power and position within the parliament—one of the best, in fact. And getting out of it alive had made enemies of practically every power-that-be under its veil of secrecy. Her cover identity had been as carefully tailored as any she'd used for infiltration, back when she crumbled the anthill empires of over-ambitious division heads practically for her patron over-ambitious officer's pleasure, but no cover could withstand the scrutiny desertion would bring down. If all—if any of—those enemies learned what corner of the galaxy she'd hidden in, a quick assassination, or made a living example of with some everlasting torture devised by the sick mind of a pet scientist with nothing better to do, were some of the rosier visions of the future prodding Erin further to haste.

One angle had sprung to mind as soon as Erin knew she had a coverup to arrange: Fireteam Machete hadn't existed in the first place, ergo no casualty had occurred at all. The paper trail would be easy: most of the reports were hers to file anyway, and those outside her control were easy to intercept and redact. Send a few replies in centux name swearing those aware of the incident to secrecy on pain of treason, and there would be no recordings for the investigators to find. The CTX personnel already involved with the Stavros mission were a bit trickier; blackmailing them was the easy option, but a clumsy method and not always successful—peoples' righteous instinct to come clean when threatened could be frustratingly unpredictable—apart from which she hadn't any convenient dirt on hand. Thus, she'd been up overnight arranging to conduct all the operation's debriefings herself, after which she could falsify what she needed and reassign the personnel before an CTX investigatory team's ship had time to arrive through slipspace. For a guilty moment, she recalled the satisfaction a well-orchestrated coverup could afford.

With that concluded, she could safely doctor Machete's own transfer orders and reassign them far from the scene of the crime. Perhaps off the CNFS Sydney altogether. And then...

And then figure out what to do next.

Kodiak and Dyne would have grieving to do, and so would Erin. Half the team... Morgana—the huffing little candidate she'd watched grow into a consummate soldier and play at her first brushes with a fuller life through an adorably awkward romance—dead, and all with Amber lost from that moment on. It hadn't been intentional, Erin was certain of that. The two had been friends practically their whole young lives. To just run away had to mean she was scared, and the boys would want to find her. Authorizing an assignment to search for her under some pretense or getting out from under Marine Corp entirely would be difficult, but nothing Erin couldn't manage with time. She'd sworn to those who trusted her most, and to herself besides, to look out for them—as much as she could while routinely sending them up against alien soldiers. If she'd failed one, she was determined not to fail another, as dire the straits as Amber had put them all in.

The door to the briefing room she'd set aside neared, an inlaid screen reading 'occupied'. Erin stopped only a moment, enough to glance down at the data pad in her hand and see herself reflected in the glass. Black fatigues tight around a figure she'd maintained despite the desk job, blue eyes alert in spite of the dark circles beneath, and high, slender brows reaching from a furrow at their center to her middle-parted bangs. They'd lost their raven sheen within the past few years. Months of cryogenic sleep at a time between quick assassinations in her old life had delayed, not slowed, her aging, she supposed. She brushed them back and allowed for one deep breath as her hand next found the door's control.

Erin stepped in as the door slid out of her way and surveyed the conference table, empty save a few of its dozen seats. On its far side sat Kodiak and Dyne, bulky Arosuit armor stripped down to black, diamond-weave body gloves, arms listless by their sides. Frazzled brown hair and bloodshot eyes attested to a night as restless as Erin's. They looked up from distant stares, bereft of the joy they normally radiated. From the near side, a young woman—girlish face at odds with her powerful frame, same as the boys—with a blonde bun twisted in her seat to glare green daggers at Erin. Oswynne Baines, apparently only Wynne before accepting a position in CTX, had commanded the Stavros operation, only for Amber to humiliate and leave her helpless when the fiasco began. Her evident fury made her an obstacle, but one Erin could deal with. And far at the head of the table sat...

Erin's lungs tightened painfully around the ice her breath became.

The chair had been drawn away, making room for a short-backed wheelchair. In it sat a woman so withered even the cotton of her black uniform should have pinned her down, yet it bent as if by force of will to allow her elbows on the table and veined claws to steeple before her soured face. With her head leaned forward, her cold gaze lurked beneath the last white strands of a pinched brow, her envious fury more alive than the near-centenarian body sustaining it could hope to be. Her decrepit form embodied every mythic figure ever to chase immortality too far.

"Ah, Lieutenant." said retired iral Margaret Lembasky. "Have a seat."

Erin hesitated, jaw slack along with every other conscious muscle. She couldn't be here. It was impossible, they were beyond even the frontier, and the operation had only gone wrong twelve hours ago. No ship could have made the slipspace jump from human space to them in anything less than a month. If she was here, every option and contingency gathered on the data pad in her hand had been dreamed up too late to help anything.

The door clicked shut behind her. No, Erin realized. Of course she could. Erin knew that better than anyone. Meekly, she walked to sit at the opposite end of the table, setting the useless tablet aside.

Lembasky's crinkled lips, so often in past pulled far below her nose in discontent, hosted an eerie smile as they rose above her meshed fingers. "Well then, with the debriefings over, let's sum up now that we're all here. Twenty-four hours ago, Agent Baines commanded a platoon dispatched from this vessel to Stavros' surface, with the objective of securing a Forerunner site pinpointed by intelligence gathered on Requiem. Kodiak's Fireteam Machete was part of this unit. Upon arrival, our force discovered the site was occupied by the Jiralhanae."

"Covenant civilians." Dyne spat, eyes not leaving the table. Baines fixed a stony look on him.

"Covenant all the same, whose warrior caste could have returned at any time, which they in fact did." Lembasky continued. "While the rest of the unit engaged them to delay, Lieutenant Baines and Staff Sergeant Ortiz entered the structure to recover any useful intelligence while it remained accessible to us. What they found was more valuable than anyone at the top could've imagined: the location of a "Gate" decommissioned and prepared for long-term storage, meaning it could be reactivated and salvaged. I don't need to spell out what a working example of a galaxy-spanning civilization's extradimensional technology could mean for Commonwealth research and development projects.

The last of her dwindling smile vanished. "Or what it could mean to Cornus Kingdom. Which is why Agent Baines made the prudent decision to call for orbital , and deny the enemy any remaining assets within the site after withdrawal. Which is when Staff Sergeant Ortiz made the unfortunate decision to commit insubordination, and incapacitated her superior with no more trouble than she might a third grader."

Oswynne, who'd brightened slightly at the ex-iral's validation, cast her eyes down in shame as she realized she too was a target of lembasky pleasantly-veiled ire.

No longer under Baines' glare, Kodiak opened his mouth. "It isn't insubordination if the order given is unlawful, ma'am. Any strike high-yield enough to destroy such structure would've wiped out the village around it, too, and Amber was preventing their murder. They were women and children, elderly. Innocents."

Erin winced. Kodiak's empathy was hard-wired, something that'd served him well reconciling with lost colonies and prospective allies on the frontier, but fighting the Covenanr over the last year had yet to sink into him that this was war. A war of expeditionary force-shows against gun-shy religious insurgents, but war all the same, not territorial scraps easily forgiven. Forgetting that in front of the woman who'd tasked herself with keeping the human worlds spinning through most of her lifetime was likely to get him disappeared. She could already see the biting answer, and judgements behind it, forming on lembasky lips and did the only thing she could to intervene.

"As aliens, they aren't subject to any Commonwealth-signed treaties or protections under wartime law." Erin sighed, keeping her head down. "And it's nothing they haven't already done to us a hundred times over. Some of those elderly were probably veterans."

All eyes turned to her. The boys looked between her and lembasky, stunned, while mild surprise ed somewhere in the crow's feet around the ex-iral's eyes. Erin didn't meet them, training instead on the discarded data pad. All that work...

How far she'd fallen. In her old life, a year's groundwork would be thrown away without second thought if it no longer served her purposes, already focused on the next contingency. Regret was wasted energy.

As Kodiak and Dyne lapsed into silence, lembasky again assumed command of the conversation. "If that was her goal, she wanted damn hard to save them. Not only did she strike and incapacitate her superior, Staff Sergeant Ortiz proceeded to run all the way up a mountainside to stop Sergeant Oliver from setting up laser guidance for the strike. It was at this point Ortiz attacked and killed her teammate, then fled the engagement zone, shortly after which we lost all trace of her."

Erin hadn't expected putting it so succinctly to hurt. Amber killed Morgan. As if that's all there was to it.

"Which brings us to our present circumstances." Lembasky leaned back, resting her arms on her chair. "We have a STOLEN GAUNTLET scenario. A rogue military assets is trouble enough—a stolen suit of multi-million credit armor, almost as much in Operations insight of our SOP, a wealth of top-secret Commonwealth operational and training intelligence. But Ortiz was also present in the map room before it was destroyed. She, in fact, was the one to point out Stavros was not a destination, but an origin point. And she may where the map pointed. You Marines have excellent memories, we saw to that."

Her fingers steepled once more in her lap. "We may only have days before Covenant reinforcements, allies of this little tribe, arrive to avenge their dead. We cannot allow Staff Sergeant Ortiz to fall into their hands. This little loose end needs wrapping up before they can arrive."

Kodiak and Dyne seemed to perk up at the news, and even Wynne's contrition dropped as the whites of her eyes swelled with interest.

"Ma'am," Wynne snapped the hint of slouch from her posture. "I can put together a team within the hour and assemble—"

"That won't be necessary, Agent Baines." The old iral broke in, voice still firm enough to interrupt Wynne mid-checklist. "I mean to deploy Fireteam Machete on this task."

"Machete?" Wynne seemed to lose her place, her whole line of thought substituted for one which made no sense. "Ma'am... their force strength has been halved, and their combat performance were among the lowest to begin with, aside from which they have personal involvement—"

"As do you, Agent." Despite her tone, lembasky took on a friendly, onishing expression. "Though not of your own make. Yours was the order Staff Sergeant Ortiz revolted against, and your presence on this mission might discourage her. I want familiar faces to draw her out."

Uncertain glances ed across the table between the young warriors. Kodiak spoke up. "Does... that mean you want her brought back alive?"

"I'd certainly find it preferable." Lembasky sounded as if she hadn't given it much thought. "If she'd stolen or destroyed the data gathered at that site, it'd be an absolute necessity. As it stands, we have that data. Which means if there's any risk of it falling into Covenant hands..."

She leaned forward to stare very intently at Kodiak. "I expect your duty to the Commonwealth to come before all else. Understood?"

Kodiak looked pale, but didn't avert his gaze. "Understood, ma'am."

Erin knew what was being asked of him, and it went against everything Kodiak lived for—nothing was more important than his friends. The boy wasn't even out of his teens, keeping the pain out of his face must've been taking everything he had. She had to say something.

"Ma'am," Erin tried not to stammer. Every word she added could be her death sentence, "as a Marine Lancer, Staff Sergeant Ortiz is one of the Commonwealth most capable soldiers, and one of the few with the physical augmentations needed to operate its most advanced equipment. She's too valuable to consider—"

"Not as valuable as you think." Lembasky shut down her feeble protest with nothing more than a calm statement. "We have the next generation now, providing us thousands of such operatives. The loss of one Marine Lancer would be regrettable, but not to be avoided at any cost. Events like this prove, if anything, that their record is not unimpeachable."

Her gaze flicked back to the two boys. "Machete, for instance, failed to turn back the returning Covenant at the Stratos site. If they'd succeeded, perhaps we wouldn't have needed to bombard it for denial, and this meeting might never have happened. If another team was available to undertake this mission on such short notice, they may have been opted for in your place. You're being given a chance here to make up for your team's failure, do you understand?"

Kodiak couldn't meet her gaze that time. "Yes, ma'am."

As Erin expected, speaking up had only made it worse. That was the authority lembasky commanded. But Erin wasn't the person who could've just sat by anymore, not for them.

"Then it's decided." Lembasky announced, pretending to sound pleased. "Machete will put this matter to rest, and the—"

"No."

Surprise turned all attention to find Dyne the source of the growl. Lembasky blinked as though his chair had had the gall to speak. "I beg your pardon?"

"I won't do it." He said, holding not just her gaze, but shooting a scowl back at the ex-iral. "Amber tried to save lives, and you want us to kill her for it? Because you're afraid she won't come crawling back and apologize for doing the right thing?"

Erin trembled in her seat. Dyne wasn't given to anger, and making a spectacle of how poorly he handled it. And he had no idea what doing so could cost him. Too terrified to speak, all she could do was will him, Stop talking—please, for once, just stop talking!

Baines slammed her palm on the table. "The right thing wasn't hers to decide! She had a duty to all the people the Covenant could hurt with that information, and she chose a handful of aliens over them. And your duty should be correcting her mistake."

"She's my sister!" Dyne half-stood as if he were about to leap at her over the table. "Did you ask us just because spooks like you get off on seeing people twitch?"

"That's enough, Dyne!" Erin found the courage—or perhaps fear—to shout, but she'd already lost control. Dyne didn't even flinch.

Kodiak stood up beside him, expression calm. "I'll go."

Dyne's next tirade died before it could begin, looking up at him in shock. "Kodiak... ?"

Lembasky, who'd waited patiently, arched a thinning eyebrow toward him. "Do you believe yourself capable of this assignment as a solo operative?"

Kodiak bit his lip. "It... might be better that way, ma'am."

lembasky nodded appreciatively. "Very well. You will be dispatched back to Stavros' surface via orbital insertion pod, and be briefed on the movements of current Covenant occupants during the drop. After that, locating Ortiz will be his responsibility—at least until reinforcements can be arranged for. Don't disappoint us, Kodiak."

Kodiak nodded stiffly in turn, and her gaze ed to the rest of them. "The armory awaits you. Agent Baines, escort Dyne's to the brig. Dismissed."

Her mouth returning to tight-lipped scowling, Baines stood and planted herself to face Dyne, daring him to make the next move. Dyne only rolled his eyes. "I know the way."

The Marines filed out in silence, Baines waiting to keep Dyne needlessly in front of her. Erin tried to catch their eyes, convey some kind of comfort, but couldn't break through their inward looks of anger or resignation before their backs were turned. She wanted to go after them... but knew the dismissal hadn't included her.

The door slid closed again as they slipped out of its frame, and lembasky stared past it a moment even after the latch clicked.

"I think Calvin Volkov made an error with the Corp." She mused. "They propagandized them too much. Told them they'd be heroes, and now that the war's over, they find the dirty work of preserving peace distasteful."

Lembasky fingers met again, masking her face as she always did when deep in thought, stretching the webbings between with more stretch than they had left. "People like that are dangerous. They find some hill they think is worth dying on, and wheedle you with lofty ideals until you're worn down enough to martyr yourself beside them."

Peace. That was a hell of a thing for her to call the state of the galaxy. Every side lashing out at whatever they perceived as a threat, satisfied with nothing less than becoming the sole unassailable power in the universe. Erin knew what every side had at stake, that they didn't have the luxury of risking anything but the safest bet... but when so little was willing to aspire to more, didn't that make it that much more precious? She said, almost without meaning to, "Maybe what they find really is worth it."

"Nothing is worth dying for." Conviction sharpened the ex-iral's tone. "Die for one hill, and you're not there to defend the next. I never thought you were one to miss the forest for the trees."

Taking in her full measure as if for the first time, lembasky leaned into the padded back of her chair. "Erin this time, wasn't it? I like it. Simple, nondescript. Banal."

Erin could only nod, trying to suppress the surge of unpleasant thoughts about every possibility lembasky could sentence her to, and the uncertainty of which was going to play out. She almost overlooked the empty beat where her former patron expected a reply.

"You know, when most of my agents fall into displeasure," the ex-iral continued, hastening as though she'd never meant to pause, "they squirrel away assets, and either launch their own campaigns and projects to try and rival everything I made of CTX, or they sell it all off to live in luxury on stolen taxpayer dollars. It makes them easier to find. Not you, though. Why is that?"

"You taught me to travel light." Erin shrugged. "I did the finding of some of those agents for you, ?"

"Oh, certainly. Hard to forget someone who could find so well as that." There was something in the creases of her polite smile Erin had trouble placing. Amusement at the euphemism? "But I don't think it was fear keeping your hand out of the cookie jar. You didn't find some bolthole on the edge of the universe. You went back into service, and on a lowly expeditionary ship. So instead of all the things you could've done, seizing positions of power or taking the credits and running, you chose to keep giving of yourself in the service. I'm almost impressed."

"I... " Erin wouldn't have called that the truth. If anything, she'd gone so far from centers of power to keep her promises, sparing Machete from prying eyes and grasping clutches. She was lost for how lembasky could have seen it that way. So much of her past was filled with unconscionable deeds, skips in her step over the cleanliness of her latest assassination, that after leaving CTX's graces she never dared look back to see how anything since reflected on her. Surely there was some trap in it? "I wasn't totally empty-handed. I still had s, favors I could call in. I had enough of an ear open to stay out of the way."

"I wouldn't be so eager to indulge false modesty." Lembasky smile widened. "That scrap of integrity's the only reason I'm keeping you alive. You could have done a lot more for the human race with all the talents I gave you, and you could still point fingers at me for a lot that should stay in the dark, so have no illusions about where this ends."

Keeping, she said. Present participle. Ongoing, but open to change. Lembasky had a knack for leaving her opponents in suspense even when making decisive moves. It was one reason she'd stayed on top of CTX infighting for half a century. Still, something else caught Erin's ear.

"You're keeping me alive? Not Osman, or whatever active-duty officer should be on this case?"

"You know I only speak for what those I put in power will decide." The ex-iral chided, but her eyes became distant. "Or would decide, anyway. You're one of my loose ends, Erin, and there are others. I can't keep them all off Osman's shoulders—shouldn't, matter of fact—but some go back as far as our time. Before the Covenant. Dealing with them in today's galaxy would only be a distraction for her, and those she can't afford. I need them tied up before I'm gone. And you and your misfiled comrades will do the tying, then go quietly back in your box until the next, because it will keep you useful for as long as the work lasts."

So that would be the shape of her purgatory. A knife, wielded until it was too blunt to be anything but disposed of. Not altogether much different from her life in CTX before, except then she'd willingly gone into cryostasis between missions to keep herself from dulling. Exactly the life she'd tried so hard to put distance from, and now the lancers she hadn't already failed were tied back in with her. The irony of it tugged a cynical smile from one corner of her mouth. "Still keeping secrets from your protégés, even now that one's succeeded you. Some things never change."

"I didn't keep any from you."

Erin's gaze snapped up, for all her dread needing to see the contemptuous lie in lembasky face... and found none. She was serious as she'd ever been when handing Erin her next target. She couldn't begin to form a reply.

"There were things you didn't need to bother with, but nothing I'd have kept if you asked. You helped me take power in CTX in the first place. I trusted you completely." The former iral, stuff of junior officers' nightmares, seemed small now even for her wheelchair. It sounded like something she'd wanted to say for a long time, and now that it was finally out, there was less in her. "That was my first mistake. When I thought you'd started keeping things from me, all the damage it could've done me if you turned, there was a personal sting to it. I let that affect my judgement."

It wasn't every day the queen of the spooks made a concession like that. Much less one that might have meant a very different life for Erin, had things been different so long ago. Erin averted her eyes, as if not looking would spare them both some pride. "I didn't, you know."

"I know. You did let one potentially crippling security risk live because you wanted to feel like you weren't so bad, letting one get away for once. But a lot of blood's gone under the bridge since then."

Lembasky deeply inhaled, enough for Erin to notice a faint wheeze. "I did think you would succeed me, once. You were smart, and didn't balk at what we had to do to take control. But just one time, you had to play the heroine. And it cost you everything you'd worked for. It wasn't worth it to you. It couldn't have been..."

Then the iral added two words Erin would never have thought to hear, "was it?"

There was something in those two words. Like cards tipped just a little too far, letting Erin see everything her former mentor held. Even as a young woman, lembasky had been determined to hold the whole Commonwealth together—by herself, if necessary—and carrying such a weight could never allow herself to choose a risk like the one Erin had taken. Not even once, no matter how much she wished she could. Now she faced someone who had made that choice, and curiosity ate at her like flames. It took Erin a long moment to answer.

"Maybe not, all told." Erin itted. A life at the right hand of CTX'S throne, its eventual succession—even usurpation, if she found it taking longer than she wanted—drifted like a wisp before her eyes. A life so far removed from the one she'd lived. From Kodiak's empathy, and Dyne's humor. From Morgan's guilty enjoyment of a more regular life. From the love of one Marine sergeant. "But there were good things I found because of it. Things I wouldn't otherwise have had."

If Erin had really seen the excess shine in the former iral's she thought she saw, it might've made a cruel joke. "I'm happy for you." Lembasky said, sliding a briefing packet onto the table. "It means you'll have something to hold onto for what comes next."