Halo_ First Strike - Eric S. Nylund [59]
"Here they are, Doctor."
Holographic file and folder icons filled the space over her desk.
"Filter by proper names," Dr. Halsey said. "Let's not waste our time with Ackerson's petty blackmails. Also remove any files dated before the SPARTAN-IIs went online, and any not accessed more than a dozen times. I want to see what black ops topped his list."
The folders and files winked away, and only two folders remained floating over Dr. Halsey's desk: s-ni and KING UNDER THE MOUNTAIN. She tapped on the first one and it opened, revealing hundreds of separate files. Dr. Halsey examined them—there were medical files on each of her Spartans: complete records from their preindoctrinated origins; their childhood vaccinations; their parents; their extensive injuries and treatments during their training; even the experimental procedures used to enhance their strength, agility, and mental resiliency.
"What the hell was he up to?" she muttered. She felt her pulse quicken as she scoured his records. There were DNA profiles on each Spartan, and there were extensive files on the old flash clone techniques that ONI had used to replace the originals. Ackerson seemed especially interested in this aspect of the program. He had followed the medical records of the replacements as they grew up, succumbed to congenital diseases, and inevitably died. He even had the bodies retrieved and autopsies performed.
Dr. Halsey's stomach soured. It was her fault, in part, that these replacement children had died so young. They had never perfected flash cloning for an entire human. They had done it anyway thirty years ago because the Earth government was on the verge of falling apart... collapsing into a hundred civil wars. They had desperately needed the SPARTAN program.
And of course, they had done it simply because they could. No matter the legitimacy of her reasons, she knew she had killed these children as sure as if she had shot them dead.
There was one last file in the S-III folder.
As Dr. Halsey tapped it open, Kalmiya said, "That is only a fragment. It had been erased, but I managed to reconstruct it from trace ionization in the memory crystal."
Dr. Halsey examined its contents. There was only CPOMZ followed by a 512-character alphanumeric string. "This longer portion is a star chart reference," she whispered.
"Yes, Doctor, but it's not a destination to any location in UNSC-controlled space."
What the hell had Ackerson been up to? "No good at all," she murmured and ran her finger over the first word in the file: CPOMZ.
"I'll have to deal with this later," she said. She downloaded the files to a nearby data pad. "Let's see what else the good Colonel was up to." She opened the folder marked KING UNDER THE MOUNTAIN.
There were only three files.
The first was the original construction blueprints of this base; it appeared on her desk. Dr. Halsey noted that this holographic representation of the base was much larger than she had been led to believe. While her security clearance was the highest possible for a civilian, she apparently had seen only a third of the facility she had worked in for the last decade.
Dr. Halsey tapped open the second file. It was the transcripts of the debriefing at Camp Hathcock, August 12,2552. That was the inquiry of John's destruction of the city on Cote d'Azur and the alien artifact the Covenant had tried to procure there. Curious.
A third file was an analysis of the symbols John had captured from the alien artifact. According to Ackerson's notes it, too, was a partial star map. Dr. Halsey returned to the stellar chart reference in the Spartans' files.
No good. This location had nothing to do with that reference.
The stellar reference in the alien artifact was ... she did the math in her head— "I'll be God damned," she muttered. She pulled up star charts and NAV records for confirmation, and checked her math one last time.
No question: It was the Epsilon Eridani system.
Here.
ERIC NYLUND 131
This was more than a curiosity, now. Ackerson had been sitting