The Halo-verse

CHAPTER ONE: THE SPARTAN II PROJECT


      In 2517, the SPARTAN II Project was born. Deep within the bowels of the ONI, or Office of Naval Intelligence, in a branch known as ONI Special Weapons Section III, a detachment of senior officers and officials had concluded that by 2525, instability in the outer colonies would cause widespread rebellion. Due to this assumption, ONI SpecWep thought it would be best to train a group of hand-selected and genetically augmented super-soldiers to fight against insurrection throughout the UNSC.
      Doctor Catherine Halsey was appointed for the lead facilitator of this project. Though Dr. Halsey was but a mere civilian, she held more sway in ONI than many other actual military personnel. With the aid of one Commander Jacob Keyes, Dr. Halsey visited many planets in UNSC-controlled space, looking for viable candidates between the ages of five and seven for the SPARTAN II project.
      After finding precisely one-hundred and fifty children that matched all the genetic and physical markers she was looking for, she reported back to SpecWep Section III, and the simultaneous kidnapping of all the children began. Though every one of them was replaced with a flash-clone, suspicions grew as they died off one by one, seeing as how the art of flash-cloning was never perfected, and genetic defects were bound to rise. Seventy-five were released from detainment, for there were only enough funds to conscript half of what Halsey had picked.
      The children were then taken to the fortress world of Reach, where they were told they would be trained to fight for the UNSC, and they would never see home again. After the initial phase of breaking the children in, they succumbed to the training and began to sharpen and hone their skills in hunting, killing, sabotage, and every other military operational specialty that any other elite group of special forces would endure, under the command of Chief Petty Officer Mendez.
      A few years passed, and the second phase of project SPARTAN was initiated. Aboard the research/medical vessel <i>Hopeful</i>, all seventy-five of the SPARTAN II trainees underwent physical augmentation, including carbide ceramic ossification, muscular enhancment injections, catalytic thyroid implants, occipital capillary reversal, and superconducting fabrication of neural dendrites. Many elevated risks were present, and CPO Mendez had stated that this would be the SPARTAN's hardest mission yet, and the only goal would be to survive.
      Sadly enough, not all of the SPARTAN II's pulled through. Many died, others were crippled to a point where they were combat ineffective, and only thirty-three survived without any major complications. These thirty-three SPARTAN II soldiers would go on to be the single most effective unit in the entire UNSC, with a casualty rate less than any other two UNSC special forces units combined.
      As time went on, the Spartans, as they became known, provided the UNSC with just the kind of unit they were looking for: a mobile, fast, and completely combat effective group of special forces soldiers, all of whom still weren't even the legal age to enlist.
      The year 2525 saw the fulfillment of the SPARTAN II program with the final phase, the addition of the MJOLNIR MK IV armor system.
      Although the earlier attempts at developing powered-armor produced designs that were impractical for battlefield deployment, that changed as soon as the directive came under Dr. Halsey's MJOLNIR Project. The MJOLNIR Mark IV was a radical redesign of the suit taking advantage of many technological leaps. This advanced battle suit was the first to fully integrate with the soldier's body. The suit plugs directly into the soldier's nervous system through a standard issue Neural Interface. The suit's many functions (communications, hydro-static gel levels, environmental systems, etc.) respond to commands issued by the soldier's thoughts.
      Unknown to the Spartans, their new armor system was designed for combat with the genocidal alien race known as the Covenant, who came into first contact with the UNSC in the same year. While the Spartans were introduced to the Covenant via a private military briefing, many other UNSC forces were forced into a baptism by fire, thus sparking the Human-Covenant War that would engulf the entire galaxy.