Nicoline lead the trainees and a few trainers on their last lap around the course. The dirt by the road was pounded down hard, having taken the abuse of over one hundred years of training. The trainees themselves were gasping and groaning, but they were children, not even a year into boot, so it was to be expected. She was looking forward to the lesson following the run. She had a degree in teaching, history specifically, and today she got to use it. Nicoline took a deep breath and relished the fresh air. It was a great day, with perfect weather. The seasons is Sparta were longer than the Earth standard, and right now, that meant that they got to enjoy a longer summer.

Ships flew through the air, nearly perfectly silent on their gravity pods. Many were heavy transports, carrying anything from food to raw materials to even exoskeleton wearing workers, but there were also small, personal ships and, of course, military drop ships. The wind kicked up pleasantly as they came to the end of their run.

"Form up," she said. The trainees stopped and sluggishly complied. A few more months and five miles won't even wind them, she thought. They were unusually resilient, but that was to be expected. Even though they were children, they were Spartans, products of their eugenics work.

Nicoline helped a few other trainers hand out water bottles to the squads that fully complied with the form up order. While they were barely a year into boot, their form was perfect. Many Spartan parents raised their children with at least rudimentary knowledge of military jargon and formations, but all were raised with the strict sense of discipline. There was no need to teach, or discipline, what was second nature.

"Does anyone know where we are?" Nicoline asked.

Most of the children—trainees, she mentally corrected herself—rose their hands. She picked one at random, the number 908 stenciled on his shirt.

"Ma'am, we're at one of the cryogenic banks, ma'am," he said.

"Very good, trainee. Do you know which one it is?" She asked.

"No, ma'am."

"You'd better learn, trainee. This is your history you're learning, and it's damn important," she said. She gestured to the squat building. "This is the first cryogenic bank in Spartan history."

A few of the children gasped.

"Do any of you know what that means?" She asked. All the children raised their arms. "You, 749."

"Ma'am, this is the bank where Generals Fredrick, Kelly, Linda and Naomi are kept, ma'am."

"Very good. I dare to assume that all of you know who they are. We're going to go in and take a look."

The children were very composed, but they were leaking excitement. Nicoline didn't blame them; everyone was giddy when they got to see Fredrick, Kelly, Linda and Naomi. Four of the surviving SPARTAN-II members, perhaps the last four, and the founders of Sparta and their lifestyle. If they were religious, it would be like getting to meet Buddha, or the Prophet Mohammad. She opened the door to the cryogenic facility and walked in. The staff was there, waiting for them.

"ID," Adrian, the desk attendant, said. It was a pure formality, Nicoline knew Adrian personally, but protocol had to be followed. She handed over her ID card and Adrian ran it through the scanner. It beeped, giving her clearance.

"Take the elevators to the first subterranean floor, and stay on the walkways," he said.

"Thank you." Nicoline turned to the trainees. "You heard the man, get to the elevators. No pushing."

"Yes, ma'am," the trainees said and obediently walked to the elevators. They could hardly contain themselves, though, and Nicoline didn't blame them. She was getting excited, too. Everyone, not just Spartans but civilians too, knew the legends of the three who founded Sparta. They were as famous as the Master Chief.

There were four freight elevators, and they were able to take everyone, trainees and trainers. There was muted talk in Nicoline's elevator, but she let it slide. The children were going to meet frozen legends, after all.

They got out at the first of several subfloors. An attendant was waiting to clear them to enter the main chamber. The air was cold, to be expected of a cryogenic facility.

"Form up, two lines," Nicoline ordered. The children quickly obeyed, and the attendant keyed the access code. The pneumatic doors slid open, and Nicoline lead the trainees in. Row upon rows of cryopods filled the space, each with a soldier lying in them and each clearly marked. They all wore moisture wicking undergarments, and many were showing their age. She lead them through the bank, the trainees gawking.

"You are about to see some of our most honored soldiers," she said. "You are all Spartans, and if you grow old enough, you are presented with two choices. The first is to continue to participate in police- and military- actions against the Covenant Nations, to safeguard Earth, the UNSC and Sparta from hostile aliens for the rest of your natural life. This is the course of action that Generals Tom and Ash took.

"The second is to agree to enter cryogenic stasis, as these soldiers have decided to do. You will be time travelers, of sorts. The choice is not made lightly, because as you know, Generals Fredrick, Kelly, Linda and Naomi have been in cryosleep for the past one hundred and seventy years. Do you know why they, as well as the hundreds of other Spartans in this and other cryobanks, chose this option?"

Trainees raised hands. Nicoline picked one.

"Ma'am, it's to be there in our hour of need, when the Covenant Nations finally unite and move to destroy humanity, ma'am."

"Very good, trainee. Can any of you tell just how big the Covenant Nations are? Trainee, you."

"Ma'am, we don't know for sure, but we believe them to occupy around four sectors of civilized space, ma'am."

"And just how big is a sector defined as?"

"Ma'am, two hundred thousand cubed astronomical units, which is the distance from Earth to the sun, ma'am."

"Very good. I'm glad to see you're using your head for something other than a helmet rack. And who else are threatened by the Covenant Nations?"

"Ma'am, the Eli—Sangheili that sided with us during the Battle of Earth, ma'am."

"You'd better watch your mouth, trainee. The Sangheili don't like being called 'Elites.' Understand?"

"Perfectly, ma'am."

"Damn right you do. Aside from that, you're right. The Sangheili that sided with us are known as traitors to their fanatical cousins. They have come to our aid, and we theirs, more times than we can count. Even a delegation came to Sparta to cement a peace treaty with us sixty-eight years ago. We are all in this together, because as far as our spies, as well as the UNSC's ONI can tell, they outnumber us by quite a bit. So if some charismatic San 'Shyuum or Sangheili was to unite every faction, we're all equally screwed, especially if they're able to get their hands on a Halo array.

"That's what they are here for, for when the shit gets real and we're in a right spot of trouble," Nicoline said, gesturing to the row upon row of cryogenic pods behind her.

"Every Spartan kept in a bank like this is a hero," she continued. "After all, our life expectancies aren't as long as a civilian's. I'm sure you all know the saying: 'there are old riders and there are bold riders, but there are never any old, bold riders…'"

"'But if you see one, holy shit, stay out of their way,'" the trainees said, finishing the old saying with gusto.

"Language, trainees," Nicoline chastised, although she still smiled. They walked down until they came to the end of the floor. Against the wall were four cryotubes. They were given their own wall, and had names engraved on them.

General Fredric – 104

General Kelly – 087

General Linda – 058

General Naomi – 010

The trainees gasped. Each of the Spartans were like any other Spartan in the bank, lying on their gel pads and completely inert, but they somehow seemed more majestic. These were the first ones who made Sparta, the last of the mythical SPARTAN-II project, the project that saved humanity.

"These, trainees, are the Generals," Nicoline said. She wasn't immune to the majesty; reverence filled her voice. "What are Fredric, Kelly and Linda known for?"

"Ma'am, for founding Sparta, ma'am" the trainees chorused.

"And General Naomi?"

"Ma'am, for solidifying a peace treaty with the marines and the civilians, ma'am."

"And who helped her?"

"Ma'm, Saint Lucy, ma'am."

"That's right. And if you're lucky and willing, you can be frozen with them."

"Excuse me, ma'am, but who is that?" A trainee asked. Nicoline looked to where the trainee was pointing. There, to the left of the Generals, was a cryotube like any other. A man lay inside, light scars covering his body, with a wicked grin on his face. There was a name engraved on it, again standard, but there was no rank or number.

Theodore.

"We don't know," Nicoline said. "I did my doctoral research on him, but there aren't many records on him. All we know is that he was the first Spartan to be frozen in a cryobank, beating the Generals by a full Earth-standard year. But we can't find any files, records or even a number for him. It's almost as if his information was purposely left blank."

"Ma'am, why would they do that?"

"When the cryobank program first started, it was not as a reputable organization as it is now," Nicoline said. "The Generals were famous for joking that it was their 'easy retirement plan.' Two years after they were interned in the bank, ONI found information on the Covenant Nation, and found that, should they unite, our existence was doomed. From there, the bank became more of a safety precaution, a worst-case scenario if you will.

"With more Spartans volunteering to be frozen, a better categorization system was needed. So for all the Spartans who were frozen previously, their information was added after the fact. For a few Spartans, including Theodore there, we lost some information."

"Ma'am, is it right to assume that Theodore might be a better soldier than the Generals?"

A few trainees hushed the speaker, but Nicoline stopped them.

"It's a good assumption. The only thing we could find is that, apparently, he was ranked 'hyper-lethal,' the first Spartan since the III program to gain that honorific."

"Ma'am, so he would be part of the One Man Army Corp?" One trainee said, voice full of wonder.

"Yes he would. He could even be considered the pre-cursor of the OMAC. There was no record of any other hyper-lethal Spartan at the time."

"Ma'am, can't we wake him, ma'am?"

"We don't want to do that. While we know that we can wake any frozen Spartan, we don't know if there might be complications. No human has ever been frozen as long as the Generals and Theodore, so we want to minimize the risk. Those are long odds, even for Spartans, but it is part of the risk you willingly take if you decide to be frozen."

"Ma'am, will you be frozen?"

Nicoline smiled.

"I think I would like that," she said. "One day, I'll be able to rub shoulders with the Generals, and maybe I can finally ask this Theodore who he really was."

The doors to the cryoroom opened and attendants walked in. Nicoline frowned. They were almost running, and had a hard look to their faces. Adrian walked, nearly ran, up to her.

"What is it?" She asked.

"Sorry Nicoline, but everyone has to leave," Adrian said.

"Why?"

"We got word from the OSI," he said. This got Nicoline's attention. Why would the Office of Spartan Intelligence contact the cryobank? Then her blood froze.

"You're serious."

"Sadly, yes. They've been talking with Sangheili Ministry of Counter-Intelligence. The Covenant Nation is finally making a move."

"The entire Nation?" She asked. "Not just a massive raiding party?"

"The entire Nation," he confirmed. "It's the Sky Fall contingency. We're waking everyone up."

Fred groaned. It felt like he jumped out of Slipspace without the benefit of being in his armor. The last time he did that it shook him like paint in a mixer, and that when he was still young and in his prime. Now it felt…he really didn't know what it made him feel like. He never felt this way before, and it couldn't change for the better fast enough. He still felt like something was missing.

"Sir? Can you sit up?" Someone said.

He moved, and suddenly he was coughing his lungs out. Right, the lung fluid. That's what was missing. How could he forget that?

"Just cough sir."

It was all that Fred could do. He coughed, spat and heaved, finally getting the vile stuff out of his throat. Then he heard others coughing, and he remembered that he wasn't alone.

"Linda?" He asked. He was surprised that he was able to talk at all. He half-expected that rust would shoot out of his mouth instead of words. "Kelly? Naomi?"

"They're here, sir. Just take it easy, you're all going to be fine."

Fred sat up and blinked. His eyes were slow to respond, so slow. It reminded him of his age. God, how could he get this old? He never would have expected to get that old. Never in his life.

The more he blinked, the more he could see. He was in a room. A medical room, from the looks of it, and he was getting out of his cryopod. Things were too bright, but slowly got better. He saw Kelly, Linda and Naomi on pods and were in the same process of waking up as he was. Then Kelly hopped off her bed and started to stretch, much to the horror of what looked like doctors. Dammit, how did she stay so fast?

"General, sir, can you look at me?"

Fred looked up and saw a doctor. He was holding a pen light in his hand.

"Just follow the light, sir. Thank you." The light moved left, right, up and down. Fred followed it. "Now look forward." The doctor shined the light into his eyes, than out, than back. "Reactions look good. How do you feel?"

"Like I jumped out of Slipspace in my birthday suit," Fred said.

"That's understandable, sir. Can you tell me who you are?"

"I'm Fred, Spartan-104."

"Can you tell me who your companions are? Point them out."

"Kelly, 087. Linda, 058. Naomi, 010."

"Good, it's all good. I'm Doctor Harris, and allow me to be the first to welcome you back to the land of the living, General Fredric." He offered Fred a hand.

"Just 'Fred,'" he said, shaking the hand.

"Sure thing, General Fred."

"I know my rank, don't need to remind me," Fred said. He slowly got to his feet. The room spun a little, and he gripped the bedside.

"Careful now, sir. You still must be pretty woozy."

"You have no idea."

"I'll make a note of that. Is the room spinning?"

"A little, but I've got a hold on it," he said. He blinked a little and felt better. "Is there any water?"

"We've got plenty of that," the doctor said, handing him a water bottle. Fred drained the entire thing in one go.

"So you're very thirsty," Dr. Harris said, scribbling notes on what looked like a data slate.

"Where are we?"

"You're in a medical facility on Sparta. You might want to sit down for this next part."

"If you're waking us up, that only meant one thing. How long has it been?"

"Are you sure you don't want to sit down?"

"I made my peace with this before I froze myself," he said. "Tell me."

"One hundred and seventy years."

"Seriously?"

"I am, sir."

"It took this long for a big emergency to pop up?" He asked. "I was banking on fifty years."

"I'm…sorry to disappoint you?"

Dammit, it looked like Naomi won the betting pool. And if compound interest was still a constant, she was getting a lot of money.

"That's fine," he said. He took a step and his leg almost immediately cramped up. He hissed and went to do some stretching.

"Cramp?"

"All over," he said as his back seized up when he tried to bend down.

"That's probably a side-effect of being asleep for such a long time," Harris said, taking more notes. "My apologies, sir, but you and the other Generals set a record for the longest humans to be woken up from cryosleep. This is all unfamiliar territory for us, so we need to take as many notes as we can."

"I understand," Fred said. He slowly eased himself down. Good, he could still touch his toes.

"If you'd like, we have masseuses ready for you."

"I'd like that," Fred groaned.

"Do you…need a hand up?"

"Could you?"

Harris offered him a hard and Fred eased himself up, just in time to see Kelly get helped up by two large nurses. They had to be Spartans, or else the staff picked from a pool of very large nurses.

"Bite off a little more than you can chew over there?" He said.

"Very funny," Kelly groaned.

"Linda?"

"Wishing I stayed in cryo," she said. She was barely on her feet.

"Hey, you guys get the news?" Naomi asked.

"What news?" Linda asked.

"About how long we were out for."

"Ma'am, I don't think you should be talking about that," Naomi's doctor said.

"One hundred and seventy years," Naomi said, ignoring the man. "Guess who won the pool?"

"Dammit," Kelly sighed.

"Yep, one hundred and fifty to two hundred," Naomi grinned. "That's all me."

"Why couldn't this wait for another thirty years?" Linda asked. She had the two hundred to two-fifty pool.

"Or twenty years ago," Kelly said. She had the one hundred to one-fifty pool.

"How is compound interest these days?" Naomi asked.

"Uh…decent?" Her doctor said.

"Good enough for me. I got a hundred and seventy years' worth of interest waiting for me."

"Massage now, money later," Kelly said. She hissed in pain as the nurses helped her to a wheelchair. "I feel like my bones are rusted."

"It's on me. I'm sure I can afford it," Naomi laughed.

"Don't you worry, Generals," a man said. Fred could tell that he was a Spartan. No one else could ever be that tall. He had brown/tan hair in the usual military cut, a crisply pressed uniform bare of medals, and a barely suppressed grin. "Your treatment bill is being footed by the state of Sparta."

"That's nice," Linda said.

"Please, we set up funds for this day," the man said. "My name is Madani, Spartan-772. I'm the current General of the Armies of Sparta, and I'd like to welcome you back."

"Glad to be here," Fred said. "Fill us in while we're getting these muscles worked over."

"Would you like it if we waited until after the massages?" Madani asked.

"I don't know what kind of Spartan program you graduated from, but we were trained to hit the ground running," Fred said.

That got the man to straighten up a little.

"My apologies," Madani said, "I thought you would like a little time to adjust. You have been in cryo for a hundred and seventy years."

"And we were woken up because of dire circumstances," Linda said. "We can talk and get a massage at the same time."

"If you insist," Madani said. He nodded to the doctors and nurses. Wheelchairs were brought in and Fred eased himself into one.

"I'll have to accompany you," Harris said. "There are things I have to check out with you."

"Feel free," Fred said. They were wheeled out of the room and their cryopods and down a hallway, their entourage of doctors and nurses and other assistants following them.

"Start from the beginning," Fred said. "What happened when we were frozen?"

"Nothing out of the ordinary," Madani said, following. "There was some head-butting with the marines, but things quieted down when they started having children."

"Can't imagine marines having children," Kelly said.

"They can't imagine us having children," Naomi said. "Peacetime makes everyone strange."

"The biggest thing to happen was the formation of the Covenant Nation," Madani said. "After the First Battle of Circumstances, the fanatically religious sects retreated deep into space, and attempted to re-establish a Covenant empire. They failed, and they turned into bands of religious warriors, each attempting to gain control of the whole. They grew fast, and currently outnumber us and the Sanghaili empire."

"You mean the Elites?" Kelly asked.

Madani, the doctors and the nurses seemed to squirm.

"They're our allies now, and they prefer to be called Sanghaili," Madani said.

"So we're still allied with the fucking hinge-heads, huh?" Naomi said. Everyone gasped and stared at her. "What?"

"General Naomi, we greatly respect you," Madani started, "but could you please refrain from using that slur?"

"Slur? All I said was hinge-head."

"That's a slur now," Madani said, squirming. "It's the civilian equivalent of the 'N-word.'"

"Naomi, we've been at general peace for almost two centuries," Fred said. "We all have adjustments to make, habits to break. And if we're allied with them, we should avoid the slurs as much as possible."

"Understood, sir," Naomi said. "Still allied with—Sanghaili, after all these years. That's new."

"Well, we're allied with the faction that was under the control of the Arbiter," Madani said.

"We figured the Covenant wouldn't last," Linda said.

"It didn't. The writing was on the wall, even before you went into cryo. Even a blind man could see it. So the Arbiter did his best to set his little coalition up to work with humans, first the UNSC and eventually us."

"The Arbiter recognized us as a state?" Linda asked.

"The only one to do so," Madani said. They were wheeled into a room with massage tables waiting. Fred got up with minimal help and lay down on the table.

"Just going to attach some electrodes, sir," a woman said. "The electricity is low-voltage, should help unlock your muscles."

Fred felt plastic disks taped to his body. They were turned on, and it felt like every muscle was dancing. After all the seizing and cramping, it was heavenly. A hot blanket was gently placed on him to ensure that his muscles heated up properly.

"Ooh, where has this been my whole life?" Kelly groaned. "Sorry, you were saying?"

"After the Arbiter's death, things became quiet, if not sporadic," Madani continued. "There were nearly two other civilian uprisings, plenty of Covenant Nation raiding incursions and some rapid expansions by us."

"So we finally colonized other planets," Naomi said.

"That we did. Most were old Forerunner installations, like Onyx, but we even got an outpost on a Halo array."

"You're serious."

"Dead serious. It's lightly manned, because the UNSC could come knocking any day. Got plenty of people working on Forerunner tech. And, because we create our own budgets, we've been throwing more money at it than the UNSC has. Cumulatively, at least. They're still the bigger economy."

"Did Mjolnir get an upgrade?" Kelly asked.

Madani smiled.

"A tech demonstration would better show you. We'll wait until you're done."