Judith B-312: The Story of an Outcast

"As long as I have lived, I have rarely gained my comrades' love.......I have never felt that I was one amongst them. More often than not, I was called 'The Lone Wolf.' As the only Spartan III amongst a squad of ODSTs, I was always the odd one out. Whenever the guys come back home after a mission, I was always outside the loop when it comes to the celebrations. Everything about me is classified. For years, the only person I can fully trust was myself. Not my comrades, who sought to outdo me at every turn, jealous of my accomplishments and my power. Not my superiors, who see me as an expendable weapon to use and dispose of at their leisure. I was and always was, alone. I always had to do things by myself."

-Spartan Judith B-312, debriefing to Executor Xulinree of the Proto-Sancti forces

Judith B-312 was a Spartan III supersoldier of the United Nations Space Command. Unlike most Spartan IIIs who were orphans of war, Judith was abducted from her home from a faraway obscure human colony. At the tender age of seven, she underwent genetic experiments and augmentations. She became an assassin for the United Nations Space Command. At the age of the 26th century, since 2521 AD, humanity was at war with the alien confederacy known as The Covenant, a union of alien races under a mysterious religious elite, who declared that humanity's very existence was blasphemy to their gods. Superior Covenant technology and numbers contributed to humanity's losing streak, forcing the human government to do anything and everything to survive. They had an existing SPARTAN-II supersoldier program that was initially aimed to create supersoldiers to stifle rebellions within human space, a plan that involved kidnapping genetically superior kids, replacing them with faulty, short-lived flash clones, performing chemical and cybernetic augmentations upon them, and placing them inside armor suits that would enhance their strength and speed tremendously, as well as provide benefits such as energy shields. The UNSC then put the Spartan-IIs to work to fight off the Covenant, with spectacularly successful results. More than once, these supersoldiers were the edge needed to defeat the Covenant. But making these high-quality soldiers was a pain to the UNSC economy, as the suits themselves are the same cost as a frigate, let alone the training.

So, the government developed newer technology to produce said supersoldiers in a cheaper mass-produced line, seeing casualties as inevitable, they went for quantity over quality when they developed the Spartan III line. Spartan B-312 was one of the first of these "cheaper Spartans." Her skills as an expert marksman and assassin made her an invaluable asset to the UNSC. But unlike Spartan IIs who were deployed carefully to high risk missions, the missions assigned to Judith and the other Spartan IIIs were even more dangerous than with the Spartan IIs. She was assigned to assassination and sabotage missions, missions behind enemy lines, missions that usually involve cooperating with Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, elite Marine units that usually don't work well with Spartans, seeing them as cybernetic freaks and shunning them for supposedly stealing their thunder. Usually, they would take credit for things she did or when a mission failed, blame her and say that it was her fault. Every time they return from missions they shun her and insult her almost constantly. All this jealousy and hate were due to the fact that Judith's skills were exceptional and her kill ratio was staggering, so much so that it even rivaled that of the Spartan II veteran, John-117, one of the greatest Spartan II supersoldiers. Judith earned the respect of her superiors but they still continued to send her on suicide missions, still seeing her as an expendable asset when compared to a Spartan II. But still, as a soldier, she was trained to follow and obey. Eventually, her skills and her murderous handling of her missions against the insurrectionists and the Covenant earned her the reputation of being a hyper-lethal vector due to her policy of zero survivors. Eventually, even her ODST rivals earned her respect, and in the end, they would fight to the death to keep her alive.

Judith's missions involved blowing up Covenant battleships and Assault Carriers during the Covenant's planetwide invasions, assassinating Covenant Zealots, Councilors, Prophets, and Chieftains, getting behind enemy lines and blowing up Covenant factories and installations, sabotaging Covenant fleet communications to set up naval ambushes against Covenant fleets, and as usual, assassinating rebel and criminal leaders and destroying rebel and criminal groups within human space. On all occasions, she left zero survivors. But despite her high grade of performance, she and the rest of the Spartan IIIs who were doing their jobs well were still regularly sent on suicide missions, with full expectations that they may not come back. Judith resented this policy and openly suggested to her leaders that her fellow Spartan IIIs should be treated more like the Spartan IIs, as high-value resources, but the UNSC hierarchy didn't listen and continued to send her and her comrades on suicide missions; although it was not a problem for Judith herself, it was a problem to the other Spartan IIIs who were suffering casualties on a higher rate than the Spartan IIs.

She sometimes operated alone, sometimes with ODSTs, sometimes with other Spartans, but most of them were lone-wolf missions. Psychologically, she developed as a person who believed that doing things alone was the way to go. She felt that having others with her on her missions, aside from other Spartans or her ODST team, would only obstruct her and screw her missions up. Most of the missions that were her biggest success stories she did all by herself, giving her the nickname "Lone Wolf." She was a lone ghost, fighting against the inevitable; against the insurmountable odds that Humanity was faced; unlike most Spartans, who were deployed in groups, she was deployed alone, usually with her commanders hoping with crossed fingers that she would die the next time she goes out, mostly due to her dissenting opinions becoming more than what they bargained for.

Usually, her assassination missions and her sabotage missions occur during Covenant invasions of Human worlds. Her assassinations of key Covenant leaders during battles would turn the tide favorably towards the Human forces. Her sabotage of Covenant supply lines would slow down Covenant advances into Human territory that it would give Human civilians ample time to escape and ample time for the UNSC forces to take proper defenses against the Covenant. She did have the occasional retrieval mission, which would usually involve her ODST squad dropping behind enemy lines or into a battlefield, to retrieve ONI secret files or schematics to UNSC weapons, or data packets and items of importance from Covenant bases. But despite all these efforts, the UNSC was still losing the war due to the fact that Covenant naval technology was still light years ahead of human ship technology. Covenant fleets owned the stars, and Covenant Starships had enough firepower to level entire cities and annihilate human fleets. Meanwhile, the UNSC has never been able to stage a direct invasion of any Covenant world, its fleets and armies are on retreat, and human forces, for all their valiancy, lacked the technological and numerical advantage that the Covenant had in spades. This of course, made the UNSC more desperate than ever. Judith was continually sent on suicide missions and she and her fellow Spartan IIIs were not given the respect she thought was due.

Judith had her own ideas on how to deal with the crisis. She, more than once, tried to convince the UNSC military to draft huge sections of the human population to help out with military matters, such as construction of ships, fighters, and tanks, and the training of physically fit citizens to be soldiers. She voiced her opinion loudly to the UNSC high command. She reasoned that with humanity's fate at stake, the UNSC has not only every right and justification to draft as much people as it needs to just to win the war, it has a responsibility to rally humanity, by force if necessary. This view made her popular with right-wing elements of the UNSC brass, whom she tried to rally, but it made her unpopular with the top brass and the politicians who controlled them. They labeled her in conferential talks as a fascist and ordered her to shut up. What motivated her to voice such opinions is seeing her fellow Spartan IIIs getting massacred by Covenant forces, and her going back home to human-held worlds seeing the civilian population living life like there was nothing wrong while her brothers and sisters suffered. She loudly voiced her opinions to UNSC high command that Spartan IIIs should be treated as valuable assets like Spartan IIs and should be deployed in more careful situations instead of blatant suicide missions. The UNSC high command responded by ordering her to stay silent and to not share her opinions with those outside of UNSC high command.

Judith, however, kept voicing such complaints again and again; she herself was not afraid of suicide missions but other Spartan IIIs were not as good as her, and suffered casualties as a result. Sharing this opinion with several captains and officers in the UNSC navy, she tried to rally support for plans to have Spartan IIIs be inducted into regular military operations instead of suicide missions. When the UNSC high command grew tired of her complaints, they became more convinced that complaints might spread to others in the Spartan III program and might create an insurrection in the ranks of the Spartans; so they took severe action against her; a string of even more dangerous  suicide missions followed, a barely disguised attempt to get her killed. (While getting the most out of her) Unfortunately for them, she survived. Fortunately for them, she got the message and ended her campaign. Still, the debacle left seething hatred on part of both Judith's supporters against her superiors and detractors.

More headaches for Judith occurred when her own ODST team died. They used to hate her, but over the course of the years they grew to trust her with their lives. She was a brutal taskmaster and a ruthless commander, but she always tried to save as much people as she can, and her team was important to her. So the one mission that broke her professional military demeanor was when her team were tasked to retrieve files and prototypes related to several secret UNSC weapons projects, in a planet under siege by the Covenant. The mission occurred in a remote UNSC world known as Reckoning, where UNSC prototype weapons were being tested out. Reckoning's barren wastelands were the testing grounds to several ONI and UNSC superweapons. Judith's mission was to retrieve as much weapon schematics and prototypes as she can, as Reckoning was no longer safe, the Covenant having discovered it by placing a tracking beacon on an ONI ship escaping from a Covenant assault by escaping to this planet.

Judith and her team, along with several Spartan-III and ODST teams, were dispatched to Reckoning, and found it and its small civilian population under attack by a massive Covenant force. The Covenant Fleet blockaded the system, and Banshee interceptors flying over the sky made it almost impossible for transports to escape in fear of getting blown up out of the sky. After getting dropped off from a UNSC frigate, Judith and her companions fought their way through a battalion of heavy Covenant infantry and armor. The team battled through a heavy gauntlet of Hunters, Elites, Heavy-weapons Grunts, Jackal snipers, and Brute Chieftains and their numerous cronies, along with Wraith and Revenant tanks, and Ghost speeders, as well as Banshees. After punching through Covenant lines, her team barricaded themselves inside the test facility, which they found surprisingly empty-only to be attacked by the one of the very same prototypes she was sent to collect.

The Prototype that attacked her was a prototype mech/heavy armor suit based on an older prototype known as the "HRUNTING/YGGDRASIL Mark I Prototype Armor Defense System" that got discontinued; it shared many features with the original, such as gatling guns, missile tubes, a recoil-less heavy rifle cannon, type-18 claymore explosives, and a jetpack that allows for flight. A small Covenant strike force of Zealot-class Elites had apparently seized the mech prototype, and had taken its schematics to a nearby Covenant Corvette. The prototype mech, shaped like a more advanced Spartan suit, armed with more advanced weapons than any other piece of UNSC hardware, and ironically enough, when Judith and her team of ODSTs and Spartans got there, it was piloted by an Elite Zealot, who then proceeded to use its weapons to annihilate Judith and the assault team, killing many Spartans and ODSTs, and annihilating a nearby UNSC army unit of tanks, troopers, and armed Warthog ATVs.

Judith and her ODSTs were the only survivors; her team  and the surrounding UNSC forces hammered the machine and its heavy shields with tank guns, rockets, and Spartan Lasers (Direct-energy heavy weapon that fires a devastating laser blast) until the shields went down, at which point Judith lobbed a Plasma grenade at the mech and the ensuing explosion blew off its arm, and Judith followed it up by firing a Spartan Laser at its cockpit, roasting the alien pilot alive and destroying the mech. But the success came at a heavy cost, with many gifted Spartans and ODSTs biting the dust. The lab was utterly destroyed in the fighting. Even before the Spartans and the ODSTs arrived, Elite Zealots made a mess of the data cores after sending the data to their ship, so the schematics and data for the weapons were either already beamed to the Corvette they were using to escape, or lost forever. The problem of the Prototype Mech also remained-its schematics and data were still onboard the Covenant Corvette, and if that Corvette makes it off-world, the Covenant would be able to mass-manufacture these mechs using their vast resources and humanity's war effort would be doomed.

Judith's forces then mounted several Warthogs armed with rockets and Gauss cannons, blew through a Covenant armor unit of Hunters and Wraith Tanks, fought their way onto a hangar where another prototype, an experimental space fighter designated YSS-1000 "Sabre," was stored, and went to secure the schematics and the prototype itself. Luckily for Judith, the Covenant had either not reached it or completely ignored it, and the Hangar was devoid of Covenant. She then downloaded the files to her hardsuit, and activated the Sabre space fighter's engines, prepared to launch into the sky and intercept the Covenant Corvette before it reaches the fleet and transmits the schematics, for the prototype mech, since the Corvette was still busy bombarding the other installations in the planet to prevent escape by the other UNSC forces, and several defense towers were jamming the Covenant transmissions. But just as she was prepared to take off, the Covenant were alerted to her position, and proceeded to invade and bombard the hangar.

The Covenant Corvette that dropped the Zealot team on the other lab now focused its attention at Judith and her team. Dropping a team of Hunters and Elite Rangers (jetpack-equipped shocktroopers) led by Elite Zealots, Generals, and an Elite Field Marshal, intent on stopping the launch of the Sabre and intent on killing Judith. Having recognized who she was, after all she did in past battles to delay and disrupt Covenant invasions, and the threat she presented, as well as the importance of the data in the Corvette and Judith's attempt to stop it, they cornered her and her team in the hangar, intent on killing her once and for all. Her team realized that they couldn't all fit inside the Sabre, which was designed only for two pilots, and even if they could, they would never make it out unless someone distracted the Covenant forces long enough until the Sabre launches. Judith helped kill the Field Marshal leading the assault, and a considerable chunk of the invasion force, but more and more Covenant forces kept dropping in and her team wanted her to get out as soon as possible. She would have none of it, but as the Corvette carrying the schematics began moving away from the hangar towards the Covenant fleet orbiting above, Judith realized that there was no other choice. Taking the youngest of her team with her, an ODST servicewoman named Erin Bates, she boarded the Sabre with her young friend and launched into the sky. As she launched, the ODST team continued to fight to the death, and seeing how there was no escape, set charges all over the hangar. As the Covenant overwhelmed them and killed them one by one, the last ODST detonated the charges before he died, destroying the Covenant forces which were inside the hangar. Judith then resolved to mourn their deaths the best way she knew: kill as much Covenant she could.

Judith then set forth to destroy the Corvette before it gets away from the range of the communication-jamming defense towers. The Banshee interceptors focused their attention on her, but she surprisingly found the Sabre to be well-designed and easy to maneuver, as if the controls for the Saber were instinctively built for her. She annihilated the Banshees with the Sabre's heavy machineguns and homing missiles, and easily evaded their pathetic attacks with barrel rolls, spins, dodges, cutting through and destroying about 200 of them in her first foray with the Sabre. She felt as if God had given her the perfect weapon to decimate the Covenant, and she was more than willing to use it to its fullest extent. She even came across a Covenant Scarab and with the Sabre blew its legs and back armor off with the missiles, then sent a missile flying towards the core, which destroyed the monstrous walker.

Judith came up close to the Corvette and blew up its engines with the Sabre's missiles, forcing it to crash into the planet surface. Landing the Sabre and having Erin keeping guard, she personally invaded the Corvette and killed her way to the bridge, whereupon she slaughtered the captains and the officers and came toe-to-toe with the Elite Field Marshal who was in charge of recovering the prototypes, and killed him after he set the Corvette to self-destruct. Judith realized that the Elite Field Marshal deleted any data about the Covenant that the UNSC might find useful when Judith shot down the Corvette's engines, including the schematics for the upgraded armor prototype. Judith returned to the Sabre and took off, where a nearby UNSC Frigate appeared, picked her up and sped away from the system as fast as it can. Judith was only partially successful, the Prototype armor and its schematics were destroyed, but the Sabre was safe; its prototype and schematics were not in Covenant hands. But her superiors were still angry over losing the schematics for the Mech armor and even angrier that its prototype, which cost them billions, was lost, and they blamed her for the massive casualties as well as the failure to recover the Yggdrassil's prototype and data and penalized her by demoting her from Lt. Colonel to Lieutenant. They explained that they expected better from her, and that the losses they suffered were unacceptable given her usual performance; her failure gave her enemies among the UNSC Brass an excuse to punish her. She was then put to test the Sabre starfighter, which opened up another can of worms in the disagreements Judith had with UNSC brass.

Judith's first Saber mission was attacking Covenant supply convoys with the Sabre. Her assaults were accompanied by Longsword fighters launched from hidden UNSC Frigates sheltered in asteroid fields. These paltry raids were a considerable step down from her usual tasks in the past of sabotaging and assassination, but she took the opportunity to test the Saber out anyway. These missions went particularly well, the Covenant fleets being rather overconfident that the UNSC would never be able to make anything to match them in space. But the Saber proved its worth; the fighter's quick maneuverability and its heavy weaponry helped her stop Covenant supply Corvettes dead in their tracks, opening up for them to be taken out by UNSC fleets. Her first flying missions with the Saber was a success. Judith grew bolder as a result.

She suggested to her superiors that the Saber squadrons be deployed against bigger Covenant Fleets. While some hesitated, Judith assured them that she would at least bring the Sabers back if they failed. With some hesitation, ONI and the UNSC brass agreed. Judith began by attacking small Covenant fleets wandering far from larger fleets, and the Sabre's shields and weaponry allowed Judith to disable the enemy cruisers, taking out ships and taking the scrap remnants of the Covenant vessels, earning Covenant technology to further research weapons. Judith was told that they would use the research to give more advanced weapons to ground troops and Sabre fighters to give them a better chance, but in reality, they just wanted to have technology to improve the Spartan IIs, a move Judith opposed. Again, she voiced her dissent and recommended that all resources be put onto the Saber program.

Judith envisioned an entire armada of Sabre fighters delivering the UNSC from destruction. She rationalized that the Sabre fighters are maneuverable enough to attack and evade against Covenant warships, so logically, an armada of Sabre fighters would be efficient at taking out the enemy fleets. The main advantage of the Covenant armed forces was in space combat, and when it came to ground battles, UNSC forces were superior. It was only through their superior fleets did the Covenant secure victory against the humans, in every other time, when it came to ground combat, the humans stood more of a chance, and when the Spartan super soldiers were factored in, it was a lopsided massacre in favor of the UNSC forces. She reasoned that with a massive force of strike fighters like the Sabre, the UNSC could use them to inflict pinpoint strikes on Covenant fleets, disabling engines, weapons, and other faculties with pinpoint accuracy, allowing the UNSC fleet to move in and destroy the enemy cruisers and assault carriers, or even board them, capture them, repair them, and send them against their makers or duplicate Covenant ship technology to even the playing field in naval combat and allow the UNSC to wage war indefinitely against the hated Covenant. Even if they bankrupt the UNSC and exhaust its resources by making such a fleet, they could use the Sabres to defeat the Covenant and force the Covenant into signing a peace treaty, and then force the Covenant to cough up resources to pay for the UNSC's debt. If the Covenant fleet, the main advantage of the Covenant forces, is neutralized, Judith reasoned, then the Covenant as a whole would be no match for the UNSC's ground forces, and the war would be as good as won.

The Sabre fighters already performed wonderfully against Covenant fleets. Judith remarked that with just a few upgrades to the Sabre fighters, like mission-specified modifications and models to increase speed, shields, and firepower, as well as stealth drives, (which the UNSC was already using) they would be unstoppable against the Covenant fleet, running circles against the lumbering Covenant warships, hitting them where it hurts, weakening the seemingly-invulnerable warships to make them susceptible to attack, with the UNSC fleet taking advantage of the chaos and taking out the Covenant warships. Similar as to how the English defeated the Spanish Armada almost 1000 years ago, Judith thought that a well-armed fleet of strike vessels, which have proven to be able to go toe-to-toe with Covenant ships and come out on top, can defeat a larger host of massive warships whose size can be used against them. Even the Spartan Supersoldiers can get in on the act. Spartans have greater reaction time and heightened senses, and as Judith herself has proven, by being both a Spartan and a pilot, that these qualities go hand in hand, both in ground combat and in space combat. The plan was sound, but fortune just wasn't with the young, eager, Spartan. The small amount of captains, officers, and admirals who listened to her and were interested in her plan were vastly outnumbered by captains, officers, and admirals who either did not think highly of Judith's plan or thought it was outright nonsense.

The UNSC government, in its limited wisdom, declined on Judith's ideas. The UNSC government was more focused on making and using Spartan Supersoldiers to turn the tide of the war. Many of the branches of the Office of Naval Intelligence competed for resources in contesting projects instead of cooperating, as was the case between the Spartan II project head, Dr. Catherine Halsey, and the heads of the Spartan III program, Col. James Ackerson and former Spartan II supersoldier Kurt-051, who carried out their work under her nose without her knowing anything about it, despite her being the head researcher for the original Spartan program, which the Spartan III supersoldiers took inspiration and schematics from. In such a competitive environment, Judith's plan had no chance of being approved among the many factions in the UNSC military scrambling for approval and resources. Even worse, the Sabre program was shelved due to shortsightedness and greed, being a victim of vindictive politics.

The shutdown of the Sabre program was the result of a mission Judith and several Sabre pilots were forced to undertake, at the behest of the UNSC government. Without even installing the upgrades that Judith requested, the UNSC leadership tasked her with the destruction of a Covenant Assault Carrier named Vengeance of the Devout, much to her chagrin that the Sabres lack the appropriate upgrades to defeat a massive 5 kilometer warship. Her squad of Sabres, having been notorious to the Covenant leadership for having inflicted unsuspected damage to their fleet, was met by a force of upgraded Covenant Seraph fighters that were upgraded with speed, shield and firepower upgrades. They tore through Judith's squad and through the UNSC fleet that came in as backup; Judith and Erin barely escaped with their lives. Judith warned the UNSC that the Sabres should be upgraded since the Covenant would be likely to counter the Sabres, but just as with her failure on the base at Reckoning, the UNSC government used the opportunity provided by Judith's failure to shoot down her plan. Due to the fact that the Sabre fighters were expensive, it was discontinued, and to the UNSC high command and ruling administration, Judith's failure in destroying the Assault Carrier was proof that the Sabre fighters were a waste of time and a drain on the UNSC's resources. Three consecutive administrations of the UNSC government denied its existence due to its massive costs, and the government made every effort to undermine and shut down the project, the remaining prototypes being shelved in Reach to collect rust and dirt.

Judith did not take this lying down. She began to tap onto UNSC officials who owed her favors, either because they were officers in the military whom she helped in her missions against the Covenant, or they were politicians who won elections through boasting of safer streets and cleaner cities safe from criminals and insurrectionists/terrorists, because Judith took some "time off" her military duties to hunt criminals and Insurrectionists in their districts. Introducing them to each other, they built their own power base from their combined strength. Judith, being a lead member amongst this conspiracy, moved to get them elected or promoted into higher office by having them pool their resources together and figuring out ways for them to advance, through good performance in their specific realms of duty, or through covert manipulations getting rid of their rivals.

Seeing themselves as the saviors of humanity from an inept government and from annihilation at the hands of aliens, they called themselves the Hand of Salvation, and they propagated secretly to power brokers within the government, with a plan to streamline the human government during war by forcing all able bodied humans into service, to have them construct a Sabre armada to deal with the Covenant threat. Whatever steps taken, fair or foul, the salvation of humanity necessitated it. To achieve these reforms and projects required plenty of sacrifice for both the Hand and for society as a whole, but the Hand saw that if their plans succeed, they would be able to stand against the Covenant better, and pull the UNSC out of its losing streak and defeat the Covenant at last. Once that gets accomplished, the Hand will then lead humanity into a new golden age, of prosperity and knowledge, and once the Covenant is conquered and their technology has been adapted to the use of the humans, humanity's potential would be fulfilled, and the new golden age would come forth. But as honest methods began to fail the Hand due to the murky politics of the human government, they began to fall onto more militant methods, of which assassination and political manipulation were the top two. This, of course, got the attention of the Office of Naval Intelligence, which was already losing patience with Judith due to her protests against the UNSC government and questioning of her superiors. And now, a Spartan Supersoldier with good knowledge of UNSC command and protocol is now helping a rogue sect of officers and politicians, with the potential to dethrone the Earth government.

The Office of Naval Intelligence has had enough. Not only was this renegade Spartan dangerous enough to have allied with a power base of supporters with leverage within the government, her allies were intent on creating a government within the government, with her as the leader of the organization, and this organization was deleting anyone they saw as a detriment to their plans. And now this renegade group was assassinating and manipulating both politicians and military officers in the government power structure. The UNSC did not approve of Judith's plan to conscript civilians due to fears of said actions giving advantage and strength to the Insurrectionist movements, who would promptly proclaim that the UNSC is enslaving humanity; raising the ranks of the Insurrectionists to threaten the UNSC war effort. They disagreed with the Sabre program because in their eyes, Judith's failure to destroy the Assault Carrier Vengeance of the Devout was proof of its failure, added to the fact that the Sabre program's cost was an expense that ONI thought the UNSC can't bear without distracting funds for Spartan programs and being forced to reveal massive public spending. The Hand was becoming an inconvenience at best, a threat at worst. So they resolved to end it.

Leading members of the Hand were betrayed by a fellow member who was bought off by ONI, who proceeded to arrest leading members and spread them far and wide, preventing them from communicating or cooperating. Later, all suspected members, including Judith’s oldtime ODST friend Erin Bates, were relocated to the planet Vindication at the border of UNSC space, which wound up getting swallowed by the Covenant forces, dooming Judith's last chance at reforming the UNSC. Judith herself was also arrested: she fled from base to base, world to world, but in the end, a combined team of black-ops Spartan-IIIs and ODST specialists cornered her in one of the bases of her allies. She put up a good fight, but thanks to her hesitation to gun down fellow Spartan-IIIs, and her psychological problems in shooting ODSTs because they reminded her of her old team, she eventually was overwhelmed, captured, and subjected to heavy torture as punishment for her treason. The torture extended from electric fields to lacerations, serums that weakened her pain threshold, and mental torture involving sound devices crushing her brain in a wave of agony. They tortured her for days on end, keeping her awake and unable to sleep. They stopped short of killing her, but the torture and the deaths of her allies had a profound effect on Judith, especially considering that she already distrusted ONI and the UNSC, seeing the former as corrupt and seeing the latter as weak. Judith was forced to abandon her plans and operate under constant surveillance in exchange for clemency.

Eventually, like the Sabres, she was stationed to Reach. Her combat profile was the one thing that prevented ONI from eliminating her outright, since they needed every ace in the hole, and Judith was as ace as they come, with her kill count coming in second only to the best Spartan II supersoldier, John 117. The UNSC needed every able-bodied Spartan to fight. But to prevent her from ever becoming a threat, she was outfitted with a control chip in her head, which caused pain if she disobeyed an order from a superior with the right switch. It came along with a kill switch if she became too much of a hassle. She was assigned to Noble Team, a special team of Spartans who were ONI's go-to lapdogs, who recently lost a member to a Covenant invasion. Judith swallowed her pride and went along; knowing that any attempt at vengeance was futile, and distracting in the fight against the Covenant. Judith was still devoted to defending humanity, but she was weary of her failures against ONI and the UNSC, and she hoped that one day, the Covenant can release her torment through death, especially considering how her predecessor embraced death at the hands of the Covenant willingly. At this point, the only real friends she had left from her point of view were the Covenant-at least they were honest about wanting to kill her.

Thus began the tale of Judith B-312 as the new Noble 6. Replacing a Spartan who committed suicide by bombing a Covenant cruiser, Judith took to her new assignment with forced enthusiasm, as she sped to the Noble team headquarters in a Warthog jeep. The very same day, the Covenant Prophet of Truth turned down the Covenant Black ops group, the Proto-Sancti, for permission to invade Reach. He instead granted permission for Thel Vadamee, and his fleet of Particular Justice, who was assigned to invade Reach after a wayward human ship with a Covenant tracker led to Reach's discovery for the Covenant. Judith thought her reassignment to Reach was the end for her rise, but unbeknownst to her, this was only the beginning for a new sun to rise in Judith's life. When God closes a door, He opens another one. And little did Judith know, during the Covenant invasion of Reach, her opportunity would arrive.........