Well, Giraud really screwed up with that unsecured call. He knows that ONI probably knows about the conversation, but it wasn't until the second time I listened that I realized that neither him nor ONI know who else might have been listening. He didn't just reveal to ONI that he's not buying their story, he might have accidentally blown the whistle before he was ready.

-"This is how Mshak talks. For a while, I actually thought maybe there was an actual group of people, somewhere, who use these terms. But there's not. It's just Mshak."

That got a belly laugh out of me.

-"You've got to consider the underlying question. MC is the precedent for free reign in the military. He's the one responsible for protecting a galaxy. A job that big requires absolute mobility."

Since when did the Master Chief sign up with Starlord and Rocket?

More seriously, since when has the Chief been solely responsible for the defense of the whole galaxy? Let's make this clear: That's not a case of a man having too much power to be held accountable. It's a case of one man not having enough power to do the job. He doesn't have the mobility to check on distant reaches of space, he's outgunned by every single faction out there, and all he has in his favor is a divine mandate that few know about and even fewer believe is real.

-Ooh, I wondered when Petra would show up.
We need reporters like her in real life. She sounds like she wouldn't take waffle from any politician.

-Just an aside, I'm really growing fond of these. They remind me of the radio dramas I listened to when I was a teenager.

-On the one hand, it would be nice if all receptionists were as informed and prepared as the ones fielded by ONI. It's nice, convenient, and makes for a quick visit with minimal interaction.

On the other hand, that would be very creepy, and I'm glad they aren't.

-It's a nice villainous lair that ONI has. The sinister sidewalk of doom is nice touch. There's probably an AI tasked with the job of intimidating visitors with darkened rooms and suddenly-closed doors and ominous drops in temperature.

ONI HQ shouldn't be like this all the time. Not only does a foreboding atmosphere cut down on productivity (Can you say "Hostile work environment"?) but employees are going to look around sooner and later and wonder "Why does our office look like a James Bond setpiece?"

-"Black Box, I've got a visitor arriving shortly. Could you deliver the clock to my office? That's right, the old-timey analog clock with the tick-tick-ticking straight out of an Edgar Allen Poe story."

-Franklin. Mendez.
=D

-I prefer this Mendez to the Glasslands Mendez.

-Hey, Grizzlei. That theory of yours about Sully is looking more likely by the episode.

-Conspiracy theories, tinfoil-hattery, wild-ass speculation...
And then Petra shows up. =D This is awesome.

-Mshak!

-So Mshak's the one who arranged Benjamin's encounter with Walker? That's an interesting wrinkle in the Sully theory.

-He did it at someone else's behest? So maybe...

-Ah. FERO. The talk of the town. The name that's been on everyone's lips.
No idea who they are, though. I've been avoiding pretty much all discussion on these audiodramas, but the theory I've come to from what little I've heard is that FERO is Halsey operating under the pseudonym "Fuck Everyone Remaining in ONI".

-I'm just spitballing here, but Benjamin only interviewed Dion over Waypoint, right? What if Dion is an ONI AI? It seems like something ONI should have done at the start of this interview; line up a number of identities for an AI to assume, and tell Benjamine that they can't be interviewed face-to-face because of remoteness or because they voiced concerns about their privacy. But an AI running an audio- or videochat has complete control over the information that Benjamin receives.

-Has anyone figured out what that scrambled audio is right at the end of #06? Is it a message, or FERO, or those deep space anomalies* that Mshak mentioned earlier?

*In the future, I will call these DESPANs, or maybe just Despans or despans.

-Mshak is gone, then. My guess is that interfering with the flight schedule brought the full brunt of ONI's wrath down upon him.

-Nope. FERO is definitely not Halsey. That doesn't sound like Jennifer Hale, and it doesn't sound like Halsey.

-"Speak truth to power." I'm liking FERO less already.
And any warm feelings I have for her are gone already. She's going to get senators and ONI leadership in the same room by causing panic? Fomenting a crisis? Even if we assume that she's a nice person with mankind's best interests at heart, and not a creepy amoral wannabe messiah who will order hundreds of thousands to die to see those best interests carried out, she's not the only one who can take advantage of a crisis. Heck, that's the sort of thing that creepy amoral wannabe messiahs excel at.

This doesn't bode well.