: Veta Lopis is so much more badass than Vale.

: Veta Lopis is not a master of languages. Nor is she a top-tier martial
: artist. She's probably not in the top .1% of Humanity in intelligence or
: physical ability.

I haven't been able to pin down why I don't really get the hype about Vale. Part of it is probably what you said -- that she's arbitrarily a lingual genius, expert on Elite culture, and a master martial artist who can out-fight most of the UNSC armed forces despite having seen very little actual combat. And she is these things only because the writer(s) said so. That's why I'd rather have had HitD focus more on her -- to see just how she gained all these skills and what kinds of hardships she had to overcome to get there. Now the explanation is basically "she's awesome and was always awesome".

: What she does have, she uses to the fullest extent possible. A shooting war
: will break out, aliens will invade her homeworld, and she will be
: entrusted with some of the UNSC's darkest secrets. But she will not be
: dissuaded from her job. Her perp may be a psychotic super-soldier in power
: armor or a half ton rhino-gorilla or an ancient AI with enough firepower
: at its beck and call to vaporize her hometown. She will hunt that killer
: down to the ends of Gao.

: Augmented and conditioned child soldiers call her "Mom". When they
: ambush a Brute pack, she gets first crack at the Chieftain. Her escape
: from that encounter involves riding a Spartan through the jungle like a
: gorram toboggan.

: Do not fuck with the detective.

Lopis is one of the better written "new" Halo characters, especially for someone who's initially at odds with previously established characters. An obvious comparison to this would be Kilo-Five, but the reason they fail while Lopis succeeds is because she isn't a hypocrite and she's able to think outside of a black-and-white moral scale. Her views on the Spartan project (S-III in this case) also don't become the sole focus of every character interaction in the book, which does help.

I was even willing to accept the way the Gamma kids start calling her Mom - it's obviously meant to be sarcastic on their part, but I think they do subconsciously start seeing her as a sort of mother figure since she's the first person to acknowledge them as the children they are since their actual parents. I thought it was also very enjoyable how there was a certain two-way process to her relationship with the Spartans and how she was forced to change her existing views on them as she learned that there's more to them than the jackbooted (and potentially psychotic) thugs she'd previously seen them as.

Contrast this with Traviss' mouthpiece OCs, who are "right" from the start and are never truly forced to challenge their views.