Margaret Parangosky

Admiral Margaret Orlenda Parangosky was the longtime head of the Office of Naval Intelligence, having most prominently held the position over much of the Human-Covenant War.

Biography
There are certain classes of stimulants that let a person operate on as little as two hours of sleep per night for a long time. They are popular with college students, workaholics, and government officials who simply don't have time to get a full night's sleep. Staying awake for twenty-two hours at a time takes a toll on the body, and so prolonged use of the stimulants exacerbates the effects of aging. Specifically, a person who uses it regularly for their entire adult life will have their lifespan cut by thirty to forty years, and display significant signs of old age by 60.

Parangosky was a well-known stimulant user, and it is said that she took them every day from the beginning of the Human-Covenant War to the very end. She became famous and infamous for her ceaseless management of ONI, and she continued into the last year of the war and a few months beyond in spite of her doctor's orders. It was only her titanic willpower that kept her going long enough to patch ONI into a working state and hand it over to her successor. A few days later, without the affairs of a vast intelligence organization to keep her busy, she passed away.

That's the official story, and to her credit, it's only slightly embellished.

Sealed away in hardcopy files that few in the UNSC have read are the testimony from her close assistants and her medical staff. These files paint a less rosy and rather terrifying picture of a capable but ailing leader who should have retired a year earlier. Starting in February 2552, Parangosky started suffering from psychotic breaks. These were innocuous enough at first. She would misremember the details of her briefings, or sometimes require prompting to remember her scheduled appointments. By June, her directives contained enough glaring errors that they were regularly 'massaged' before being sent out. One of her assistants recalled a meeting where she "wandered off into a surreal fantasy world where we still held Arcadia and the strikes into Covenant territory that we dreamed about fifteen years ago were a roaring success" before touching back down with reality a few minutes later as if nothing had happened.

Although incredibly hostile to the suggestion that she might be suffering from dementia-like symptoms, Parangosky was forced to acknowledge her own shortcomings after her spectacular mismanagement of Operation: RED FLAG cost the UNSC both Reach and a Covenant supercarrier. But she would not step down. She instead became more reliant on her AI assistants to handle her day-to-day activities and augment her deteriorating mental faculties. For a while, she appeared to improve.

Then the Covenant invaded Earth. Parangosky went to ground with her inner circle, communicating with the rest of the UNSC only by radio. Both her secretary and her doctor characterize her mental health as "Robust" during this time period, "As if she knew this was the end and she wasn't going to let her attention lapse, not now, not for one second."

Not long after the ceasefire, Parangosky had a relapse and her condition worsened rapidly. Directives that were archived yet never issued showed that she was giving orders to entire divisions of ONI that had either perished earlier in the war or had been planned but never formed in the first place. She would request updated intelligence on UEG officials who had retired decades ago. Her lucid periods were not much better. She sought to rebuild ONI's depleted forces by reassigning desk jockeys to field positions and fast-tracking promotions of officers who were originally passed over for promotion for very good reasons. Operational plans that had only a tenuous connection with reality were given the green-light.

After one such operation almost sparked a war between the UNSC and the Arbiter's forces, Parangosky was quietly hospitalized. In a secluded room in Luna General, Parangosky was convinced to step down. She spent the next four days reading her journal and writing letters to old friends, many of whom perished during the war. It is likely that she died not knowing the damage she'd done nor remembering the feats she achieved. Her last words, spoken to her nurse, were: "It has been a long time since I have heard good news. I am beginning to fear that this war cannot be won."