Deserter

It was sixty-five days since Amber had deserted the UNSC. Fifty-three since her brother had tried to drag her back. And three since the drugs keeping her alive had run out.

By the rise and fall of this planet’s local star, anyway. Stavros’ days were seventeen hours each, making it forty-six, thirty-seven, and two by the Earth military calendar, respectively. They’d disciplined her in mathematics, among a hundred other subjects, until she could do such simple conversion rates in her head as she worked out interstellar jump calculations. How useful it all was to her, now that she had nothing to work with but sand and sea and ever-slipping time.

Since washing ashore, half-conscious, she’d done nothing but walk the beach, feeling sand shift underfoot. Titanium boots no longer numbed her toes to the sensation, lost and buried with the rest of her traceable armor somewhere beneath the silt and waves. Only her slim, black bodysuit remained, molded to her like a glove, letting the blades of her feet sink with every step in the piled grains.

Her cares had been few. What little she did need, the sea provided. To her left, its endless waves sloshed in and spread themselves thin across the earth, drowning each other out in a continual, crashing roar. Their waters were fresh, and the fish they swept in were slow. On her right grew tough, reedy plants which were easy to sharpen or burn for cooking what she speared with them. The sand was comfortable enough, with a hot, sunbaked surface giving way to cooler earth beneath, and she slept when she felt like it, unconcerned with how it peppered her black hair and uniform. Appearances mattered little to her anymore, but she’d kept scrupulous track of the time. Agonized over it all the more when, in the middle of an Stavros afternoon, her final day had run out.

She’d been lucky, Amber supposed, her team had sprung for the subdermal implants. They were uncomfortable, at first, but the team got used to the quick surgeries every six months. The plastic cartridges kept them supplied with the two obscure compounds all Gamma Spartan-IIIs needed to stave off paranoid delusions, thanks to Commander Ambrose’s own paranoia about their survival. Or maybe it’d been a way to keep them dependent on the UNSC…

She told herself the thought wasn’t paranoia setting in already—it had occurred to her years before, at moments she wasn’t overdue for a refill. But it wouldn’t go away, now that Amber was on her own and time had run out. What would happen, without her kind UNSC superiors to synthesize the drugs for her? Would she go feral, suspecting any human she met of being an ONI spook sent to kill her? Would she imagine assassins stalking her behind each bush and tree? Were they stalking her now…?

That, she knew, was just her own inherent paranoia. It wasn’t overwhelming yet. She’d bet there were a few days leeway with a cartridge designed to last six months… but it wouldn’t last forever.

When her team had come to Stavros on Infinity, they’d identified several settlements, human and non-human, already colonizing the planet. She needed to find one. Demography, another of those indispensable skills her training had covered, dictated coastlines were the most natural places for settlement, and Amber thought she remembered more than one blinking point along the lines defining continent from ocean on the map in her last briefing. Following them was her best chance of reaching someone with the resources she needed—a chemistry lab, or a ship to get her somewhere with one.

Night fell, she slept, awoke with the sunrise, and still it was the same calendar day. The way the concept didn’t match reality irritated her, and she set off at once to suppress the ever-underlying thought that no matter how she counted, she was running out of time. Against that, breakfast—especially when it would be the same as every meal she could remember by now—didn’t make much argument for lingering. In the few hours it took the local star to climb to mid-day, however, hunger started overtaking her will to spite stupid ways of tracking time. Amber had just begun to consider a break when she consciously registered the change she’d been staring at for minutes. The latest mirages flickering on the horizon hadn’t faded as she drew near.

Eyes narrowing against the sun and blowing sand, she made out the unnaturally regular shapes of buildings—human buildings, even—jutted up from the rolling dunes like teeth against the sky. She hesitated.

To even find this furthest, faintest touch of civilization in the vastness of an empty planet meant she’d already beaten incredible odds, but knowing it brought Amber nothing but fear. It meant she wouldn’t slowly expire, succumbing to exposure and deprivation, but in some ways, that had become a comforting idea of death. No witnesses, no mistakes to confront, only the certainty she couldn’t go on forever, and disappearing.

Instead, dangers just as lethal, but completely alien waited for her between those instacrete walls. Every human who even saw her became a risk—eyes like scanners, linked mouths and Chatternet phones in a galaxy-wide web Amber had the rare privilege of knowing ONI controlled to degrees the most unhinged conspiracy theorists scarcely imagine. A Spartan gone rogue meant the Office would be watching the little world all the more intently, listening to every errant signal. Casual mention of a dark-haired young stranger walking into town might be recorded, plucked by AI from trillions of bytes of data, and bring teams and investigations down to close the net on any sign of her survival. And that assumed there weren’t already people in place keeping watch for her, time and talent committed on nothing but off chance. The exact scale of these new threats to her were unknowable.

Having crossed the greater part of a continent to stand there, Amber almost turned away from the settlement on the next dune. The first moment she was noticed could mean the rest of her life would be spent in a cage, tortured and prodded for why she’d run before a quiet execution or indefinite imprisonment in one of the unnamed facilities ONI denied knowledge of, disappearing on their terms. The beach meant another day of fishing. But… she was running low on “another days.”

Its streets were filled with risks that would doom her the moment they noticed her, while the beach guaranteed her survival for at least another day. But. . . she was running low on “another days.” Their streets also held the promise of the only transport able to get her offworld and safely away from ONI’s concentration.