Amber-G330

"Everyone has a dark side, Simon. Why don't you like mine?"

- Amber-G330

A fearless combatant and skilled pyrotechnician, Amber-G330 had one failing as a Spartan—a conscience that came before her loyalty to the UNSC. Often questioning the ethics of what she and her friends in Team Machete were and what they were made to do, Amber reached a breaking point when they were dispatched to secure a Forerunner installation and discovered the location of a. Alone among her comrades in recognizing it was too much power for humanity to wield, she was confronted by her teammate Morgana-G018 while attempting to destroy the record of its coordinates and in their ensuing battle, killed her close friend. In grief and fear of reprisals by the UNSC for both denying them assets and the murder of a Spartan, she fled beyond the borders of human territory and was pursued by her team leader Kodiak-G114 on ONI's command, believed dead after their culminating encounter. She in fact survived, however, and after wandering the frontier for some time without the boosters needed to stabilize her mental condition nor success in her few attempted ventures, was imprisoned in the ruins of Forsaken Solitude by Kig-Yar pirates, where she was eventually found by her predecessor as a rogue, Simon-G294.

Early Life and Conscription
"We've taken everything from some people for this war. Wouldn't it be hypocritical not to give everything ourselves?"

- Amber's mother, 2544.

Late in 2537, amidst the chaos of an increasingly desperate Human-Covenant War, a young woman named was rapidly making a name for herself in the  as one of Section Three's most promising black ops agents, completing mission after mission with a perfect rate of success. Her remarkable career caught the attention of Captain, the black ops division's head, and soon after meeting, their interest in one another became more than professional. Although a romantic relationship entailed severe risks for people of their stations, the dangers only added to the excitement of their affair, until in October of the next year when Ilsa became pregnant. Though it had been unexpected, both found they wanted to have the child together, and Ilsa was hidden away aboard Aaron's personal in deep space while he covered up her disappearance by listing her on a classified operation.

Ilsa gave birth to their daughter Amber nine months later, on July 19th, 2539. Although Aaron came to stay with them as often as he could, his position within ONI demanded his presence both to handle major operations and thwart his enemies within the organization itself who might have used Ilsa and Amber against him, and his relationship with Ilsa became strained as a result. She longed to return to service, but in Aaron's absence needed to stay to take care of their daughter. Still, she was a loving parent, and Amber's childhood aboard the ship was spent playing and learning from her mother, including everything from academic subjects and the running of a ship to the exercises Ilsa practiced to keep her skills honed. Ilsa never dared, however, to tell her daughter of her career. Through her mother's careful instruction, Amber grew into an extraordinarily intelligent and physically able child.

Despite his best efforts to keep them safely hidden, Aaron's worst fears were realized in 2544 when one of his opponents, an agent codenamed THORN, acquired evidence of his tryst and the child it had produced, and threatened to send it all the way to Vice Admiral. THORN offered Gibson a choice: give up the child, who possessed near-ideal genetic traits for a SPARTAN-III, to the program which he had helped approve or let the commander-in-chief of ONI deal with his indiscretion as she saw fit. For once in his career not knowing what to do, Aaron went to them at once, breaking the news to Ilsa with a heavy heart. After a night to think it over, Ilsa convinced Aaron to take the former option, knowing humanity's losing battle with the Covenant would be best served if Amber were to take up her parents' fight. Putting Amber to sleep in a cryostasis pod, their ship met with a civilian freighter hired by THORN for the transfer, and relinquished custody of their daughter to the Beta-5 personnel onboard. Returning to their duties, Aaron and Ilsa found themselves painfully reminded of their daughter whenever they were together and drifted apart, eventually cutting ties to one another when Ilsa volunteered as a subject for the first phase of the. Amber, in the meantime, would be taken to begin her training as a SPARTAN-III on the ONI-classified world of.

Training and Augmentation
When Amber awoke from suspended animation, she was terrified, surrounded by strangers on a strange ship. She'd been transferred aboard the UNSC Themistocles, one of several vessels making round-trip voyages across the colonies to collect the Spartan-III candidates for Gamma Company. It was one of the agents responsible for her abduction, Erin Coney, who calmed her down and explained her situation: she would likely never see her parents again, but she was where they wanted her to be. By becoming strong enough to protect others, Erin told her, they knew she would become strong enough to protect herself. Not wanting to let them down, Amber made the choice to take part in the program. As the last candidate collected, however, her fellow prospective Spartans had already had weeks to begin forming bonds, and as Amber joined them, she soon began to feel isolated and lonely. Others, fortunately, took an interest in her first. Hearing the last candidate had been collected, three boys named Carlos, Kodiak, and Dyne snuck out of their quarters during a sleep shift to meet her, and all quickly became friends.

When the Themistocles reached Onyx, the children were ferried to the planet's surface aboard Pelican dropships for introduction by their head trainer, Lieutenant Commander Kurt Ambrose, who would become a mentor and role model for the young Spartans in years to come. To begin on that path, however, the children had to pass an initial test: dropping from the Pelicans on aerial descent packs in the dead of night. Though she, like the other recruits on her Pelican, hesitated to make the jump, she found courage when Kodiak volunteered first and Dyne recklessly jumped out of turn after. Despite a few scrapes and bruises to call her own in landing, Amber survived her fall, as did all the other candidates who dared to jump. When those who'd passed were assembled the next day, Amber was given her G330 tag, but was shocked to learn Carlos hadn't found the courage to do the same and been cut from the program. Grieving for the loss of one of her few friends among the other trainees, Amber distanced herself from the others, even as Kodiak tried to reach out to her.

Having grown up alone on a starship to that point in her life, Amber quickly found solitude to her liking and would strike out on her own at any given opportunity. The company's early training, conditioning the trainees to get into optimal physical shape, provided plenty: miles-long runs through Onyx's woods meant all she had to do was run faster or slower in the strung-out pack, escaping from the ruthless exercise regime by hiding curled up in supply crates under packets of MREs, and breaking out of her locked barracks at night when she couldn't stand to hear the other candidates breathing in their sleep. This stubborn independence streak saw Amber marked as one of the first contenders for Gamma Company's potential crop of, but while she proved self-reliant in physical exercises, this same aversion to interacting prevented Amber from seeking help when she started falling behind in several of the candidates' many academic subjects, and she was soon dropped from the watch list. Sensing the change in the project overseers' interest in her, Amber's struggling with classes and inability to approach others for help led to more and more stress, and began effecting her performance in other studies until an unexpected connection with Shepard-G127 intervened.

A favorite game of the company's drill instructors was to fill a miles-wide stretch of demanding terrain with obstacles and traps, then give the trainees a short head start to reach the other side before hunting them down with VISRs and TTR. It was during one of these exercises that Amber came across a fellow trainee caught in one of their tormenters' snares, and instead of letting his error slow pursuit of herself, spent the time needed to cut the boy loose before running off again, though the delay meant they were both caught shortly after. Despite leaving him behind, the boy approached her after the exercise and offered to help her with a few of the classes they shared, having noticed her struggling before. Presented with an ongoing excuse, Amber found herself more at ease with accosting the other trainee, who introduced himself as Shepard, and both his guidance and his friendship contributed to the quick rebounding of her scores. Having made no shortage of friends himself, Shepard also became a means through which Amber connected with many of their classmates—though, to her embarrassment, among Shepard's closest cohorts were Kodiak and Dyne, whom she feared may have felt she'd rejected by withdrawing from earlier.

Her adjustment to being part of the group came none too soon; Gamma Company began being grouped into randomized, five-candidate teams expected to continuously work together for days or weeks at a time. Amber was relieved to find herself with familiar faces among her first two rotations, including Shepard both times, but in the third was surrounded only be strangers. She started to withdraw again, hurting her ability to work with her teammates, failure which only further encouraged her to shrink back. When the next rotation came, however, one other from the third team went with her: Morgana-G018. Though she could be haughty and unabashedly critical, Morgan and Amber naturally gravitated toward one another and quickly developed a close friendship. Their respect for one another's independence, Amber's born of apprehension for troubling others and Morgan's due to a lack of patience for them, enabled eachto keep out of the other's ways and often complement each other's strategies, if not work directly as a team. The pair were kept together for the remaining company rotations, but Amber still made a point of disappearing often for time to herself, and this very thing led her and Morgan both to an assignment neither could have expected.

"Stacker said we weren't allowed to race Mongooses... Mongeese in the yard or on the trails anymore, so we thought no one would mind if we cleared our own track in the woods, but we needed to clear the trees, and well, grenades were the fastest way to do that."

- Dyne-G217

Hiding in any area a trainee wasn't supposed to be, Amber would almost routinely run into Kodiak and Dyne, whom had long since earned a reputation as troublemakers even among the unruly children of Gamma Company. One particular night, Amber slipped into a storage shed to avoid the next morning's early reveille only to be jarred awake in the middle of the night by her crate moving. Afraid of being caught, Amber kept still and silent as the crate was carried outside, only for some kind of commotion to break out and end in the crate being dropped on its side and tumble open amid panicked shouting. Dazed and bleary-eyed, Amber was stunned to find herself surrounded by Kodiak, Dyne, and a half dozen armed drill instructors shining flashlights on the three of them. Marched to Commander Kurt Ambrose's office, the trio joined Morgan and another girl Amber didn't know to await punishment for breaking curfew, among other infractions. To their surprise, Ambrose seemed almost pleased; despite a warning there would be repercussions later, he congratulated the five on becoming the first permanent formation assigned in Gamma Company: Team Machete. Though she could have expressed as much displeasure with the arrangement as Morgan, at the time she was far too tired and simply fell asleep upon returning to their barracks.

The subsequent months proved a rocky start for the undisciplined and uncooperative team, but with a common enemy in Staff Sergeant Pete Stacker, their drill instructor, to unite them in plotting revenge, their first outside work together began to surface as teamwork in their actual training. Amber, however, remained stubbornly headstrong, feeling while Morgan came into her own as a coordinator and Kodiak developed the self-confidence to be a leader, she had yet to find her own place despite generally outpacing her teammates. Listening to Commander Ambrose's rhetoric about the role of Spartans in bringing an end to the war made her desperate to carve out a niche for herself, and she found it during one of the many brief phases familiarizing them with nearly all facets of warfare employed by the UNSC: incendiary weapons. The indiscriminate application of pyrosene-V for area denial and asset destruction by the M7057 flamethrower she learned to use was well suited to Machete's developing penchant for sabotage, and the former who instructed her helped Amber excel as she'd desired in her chosen specialization.

Finally, almost seven years after their abduction, the candidates were introduced to, the human augmentation procedures which would metamorphosize them from peak-condition humans to true, superhuman Spartans. Though Ambrose was transparent about the risks involved, showing the company archived footage from, it still marked the first time Amber found herself with doubts about the program. Unlike the majority of Gamma Company's trainees, Amber hadn't lost her family to the Covenant they would be deployed to fight, and wasn't sure she wanted to risk dying in a painful, failed augmentation for the chance to live to fight. Yet, knowing the stories of her teammates and friends who had lost their loved ones compelled her to join them in protecting the human race. Deeply conflicted, and having never asked before what she wanted for herself, Amber slipped out of her team's barracks that night in what would quietly mark Gamma Company's last escape attempt. For days, she evaded a full-scale search by VISR-equipped drill instructors, Pelican search patterns, and even her fellow trainees before voluntarily surrendering to Team Saber and immediately electing to take part in the augmentations. Erin Coney, one of Machete's overseeing instructors, raised concerns about her motivations for escaping, but Commander Ambrose took it as the trainee's way of dealing with her choice—and a demonstration of Gamma's capabilities—and accepted her volunteering without further question.

Taken aboard the on February 19th, 2551, Amber and her 329 comrades submitted to the augmentations which would forever change them. In addition to those which Alpha and Beta Companies had undergone before them, however, three drug compounds were illicitly added by Commander Ambrose which were kept secret even from the other staff: 009762-OO, a mind-altering mutagen which would intensify the candidates' aggression response and reduce their susceptibility to shock, and two counter-agents meant to stabilize the drastic effects of the first. While these additives would enable Gamma Company's Spartans to fight through wounds far beyond what even the SPARTAN-IIs could have endured, it would also damage their cognitive functions without steady supplements of the counter-agents. Unaware of these additions, Amber awoke late the following day to find her body unfamiliar and hardly responsive. She, like every other member of her company, had survived, but would now face nearly a year with them getting used to their new abilities, relearning everything from standing to combat drills with the augmentations accounted for. Amber welcomed these challenges and even the life of constant danger which lay beyond with relief, knowing if she were to die from here on, it would be for something.

Found
"I know, I know. What's a girl like me doing in a place like this?"

- Amber's imprisonment is discovered.

"You finally found something you're good at, and I barely know what I'm doing. You can help me. We can help each other."

- Amber appeals to Simon.

Weapons and Armor

 * Stealthier, lighter, and—most significantly—cheaper than MJOLNIR Powered Assault Armor, SPI formed the universal standard for SPARTAN-IIIs. Though lacking in its counterpart's legendary durability and resilient energy shielding, the SPI was covered in a complex lace of photoreactive texture panels which could camouflage the user nearly as well as Covenant active camouflage technology, and without its glaring heat signature. Gamma Company were deployed with the revised Mark II iteration, which featured additions meant by Commander Ambrose to improve the armor's lacking survivability. The effectiveness of these additions would be called into question as soon as Amber's first deployment in the Battle of Earth, when Amber unfortunately encountered an Elite in close combat and was impaled by its Energy Sword, requiring emergency medevac to Ryu Base. Acquiring MJOLNIR Armor shortly thereafter, Amber never looked back.


 * Developed by private armories on contract for the Materials Group, the initial production model of the first MJOLNIR iteration to include energy shielding had, for all its durability, a markedly short lifespan, being supplanted by an internally-produced mainline version within a year. Upon retirement, however, rather than be disassembled for scrap, a great many of these early predecessor suits were transferred to storage in ONI's Ryu Base in Japan, where they were found by Erin Coney and commandeered for Machete Team's use. Among those available, Amber found a complete suit of HAZOP-variant MJOLNIR, specially adapted to cope with extremely inhospitable environments which would come to suit her style of scorched earth combat. Resistant to heat beyond even normal MJOLNIR limits, the suit allowed Amber to make use of her chosen weapon with impunity, wading into the very flames she would unleash on her foes. Her suit also proved an asset during Machete's operations on Stratos, where its resistance to high pressure allowed Amber to operate on the planet's surface below a layer of toxic and ultra-dense atmosphere. It was eventually abandoned on Oasis when Amber fled the UNSC, lost sinking into the depths of a vast sea. Like the rest of Machete, Amber's suit bore the orange and white color scheme of a test suit, which became the team's standard.
 * Successor to the UNSC's earlier use of the by Hellbringer troops, the M7057 redesigned the human military's principle incendiary weapon as a self-contained unit, enabling its use by soldiers without the accompaniment of a dedicated suit. Flame weapons proved devastatingly effective against the Covenant due not only to their heavy emphasis on infantry, but because the raw heat such weapons created quickly shorted out Elite energy shielding and ruptured Grunts' pressurized methane tanks. Their use entailed extreme risk, given Covenant strength and desire for close quarters combat, but with their survivability, the weapon in a Spartan's hands was free to engulf whole lances of enemy troops. Amber was still one of the few to willingly favor such a weapon, as its emphasis on raw power over precision seldom matched the commando operations Spartans were tasked with, but Amber and her team were rarely so conventional or discriminating in their application of force.