(no subject)

[oplourgia]

Dr. Catherine Halsey was offended on a personal level, which for her was almost indistinguishable from being offended on a professional one, except for the somewhat higher ratio of spite to contempt involved. Fortunately, this had turned out to be one of the few times she and Margaret Parangosky had been in total agreement: they could not have mercenaries running around in Mjolnir knockoffs, however inferior the copies might be. When Blue Team had been sent after one of them, it had been driven home just how inferior--it took a lot to make a Spartan express more than a dispassionate tactical analysis, but Fred's disapproval had been palpable even to the Marines who'd taken custody of their rather battered prisoner. Halsey strongly suspected she'd spent the entire flight yelling at the Spartans, which would have put a dent in even their equanimity...especially given her vocabulary.

What kind of terrible code name was "South Dakota," anyway? Was every other state taken?

Well, the ONI interrogators would sort her out, one way or another, and the parts Halsey was interested in were laid out in her lab. The armor had been anodized garishly purple and green, and one of the bracers was crumpled where a Spartan had misjudged the armor's strength and grabbed too hard, misled by the counterfeit's superficial resemblance to the genuine article. None of Blue had seen fit to apologize for the rough handling, and given the preliminary reports from the interrogation team, Halsey wasn't inclined to hold it against them. If this Dakota woman wound up needing a prosthetic, that was her own fault for trying to fight multiple Spartans.

Halsey picked up the helmet, its visor cracked and its HUD dark. They could connect it to a secure server and power it on later; she doubted there was anything in the firmware that one of the installation's dumb AIs couldn't handle. Even if she were to be proven overconfident on that score, the ONI smart AIs present, whatever their personality defects in other areas, would cheerfully team up to stomp any viruses into their component bits. No, it wasn't security or armor programming that concerned her now. It was the neural interface inside the helmet. The design was very familiar...except whatever flaming idiot had come up with this system had been working from one of her much earlier, unrefined drafts. How that had gotten out was another question for ONI, but the question Halsey was had right now was how much damage had been done by the inadequate neurosurgery and primitive interface protocols.

"Come on out. You're not in trouble."