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This fanfiction article, Deserter, was written by Ahalosniper. Please do not edit this fiction without the writer's permission. |
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This article, Deserter, is currently under active construction. |
| May 21st, 2558 (Military Calendar)/ Stavros, Frontier Space |
It was sixty-five days since Amber had deserted the UNSC. Fifty-three since her brother had tried to take her back. And three since the drugs keeping her sane 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, by Amber's estimation. The SPARTAN-III Program had disciplined her in mathematics, among a hundred other subjects, until she could do such simple conversion rates in her head as easily as she worked out interstellar jump calculations. How useful it all was, 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 flat, endless beach, feeling sand shift underfoot day after day. Titanium boots no longer numbed her toes to the sensation, lost and buried with the rest of her traceable armor somewhere beneath the waves and silt. Only her slim, black bodysuit remained, molded to her like a glove, letting the blades of her feet sink in with every step.
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, sun-baked surface under the cloudless sky giving way to cool earth beneath, and she slept when she felt like it, unconcerned with the grains peppering her black hair and suit. Appearances mattered little to her, but she’d kept scrupulous track of the time. Agonized over it all the more when, in the middle of a Stavros afternoon, her final day had run out.
She’d been lucky, Amber supposed, her team had sprung for sub-dermal 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 smoothers, 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 their UNSC masters…
Amber 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 she 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 one of Infinity’s sub-vessels, 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 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 approached.
Eyes narrowing against the sun and blowing sand, she made out the unnaturally regular shapes of buildings—human buildings, even—jutting up from the rolling dunes like teeth against the sky. She froze.
To even find this furthest, faintest touch of civilization in the vastness of an empty planet meant she’d already beaten incredible odds, but the sight of those buildings gripped her with new fears. She wasn't going to slowly expire alone in the wilderness, succumbing to exposure or 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. Unobtrusively disappearing.
Instead, uncertain new threats awaited between those instacrete walls. Every human who even noticed her became another risk—another witness to a dark-haired young stranger walking into town, with loose lips and Chatternet phones linked to a galaxy-wide web Amber had the rare privilege of knowing the UNSC controlled to degrees the most unhinged conspiracy theorists could scarcely imagine. A Spartan gone rogue meant the Office of Naval Intelligence would be monitoring this world all the more intently, and casual mention of her arrival might be plucked by AI from trillions of bytes of data. A loose match for her description could be enough of a lead to bring down investigation, closing the net on any sign of her survival. And that assumed an agent wasn't already in place to watch for her, their time and talent wasted on nothing but the off chance she appeared. Those hunting her could spare such resources, and how much they'd committed to her recapture was unknowable.
Having crossed the greater part of a continent to reach it, Amber almost turned away on the next dune. The moment she was noticed could condemn her to a life ONI prolonged only to make her regret, literally and figuratively filed away in one of the unnamed facilities ONI denied any knowledge of, disappeared on their terms. Turning back to the beach meant another day of fishing, by calendar or sun.
But she was running out of "another days". The town might have a doctor, someone with medical supplies she could use to synthesize her smoothers.
More importantly, if she turned back now, could she do anything else the next time she found a settlement? Even if she didn't lose her mind, she'd spend the rest of her life on Stavros, trapped in all the wide open spaces between colonies as surely as cell bars. Out of sight and mind, ONI would never have to worry about their rogue supersoldier again. Amber certainly would've preferred worrying ONI just a little. If she was ever going to get off-world, she'd have to set foot in town.
She didn't have to be stupid about it, though. She'd wait for nightfall, when she could move more easily and figure out for herself how safe it really was. Turning inland, Amber hiked off the open beach to find cover in the dunes, where she could stake out the town and sleep though the remaining daylight.
Even with just five hours in the afternoon, the town was so small Amber knew all she needed long before sundown. In the hours she had to spare, sleep wouldn't find her. Comfortable as resting her back in the foot of a dune was, reclining drew her eyes up toward the emptiness of cloudless sky and let sunlight glare through her lashes. Closed, her mind's gears spun of their own accord, rolling forward thoughts of what jokes Kodiak and Dyne would make if they were here, or how Morgan would switch to private COM with her without anything to say, just so she could pretend she wasn't listening to them. Morgan... she didn't want to think about them right now. But she missed them. Not that it changed anything.
Dark crept over Stavros as its sun at last slipped behind the horizon, but Amber forced herself to linger in the dunes until only the faint, cold gleam of starlight lit the cream-colored sand. The dimness hardly made a difference to a Spartan's eyes, but the average human would have stumbled blind. Even if every colonist below lay asleep, Amber wanted that edge.
Rolling over the dune's crest to stay low, Amber let gravity carry her down the opposite slope and leapt straight into a run as she neared the bottom, quenching even her breath as she sprinted for the corner of the nearest building. A full second passed with her in the open, feet pounding the sand. Any colonial rube could've looked through some dark window and spotted the stranger run out of the desert. Another second—then she slid into the shadow of a wall with a short hiss as dust shook free of sand she displaced. Frozen, she breathed deeply to quell her hammering heart as she listened for any disturbance in the quiet night. Only after several extra seconds without change was she satisfied.
Her caution wasn't totally overblown. She'd noticed the houses further out from the town's center were made of adobe, not the prefabricated structures' instacrete closer in. That probably meant this wasn't a UNSC-chartered colony, which was some relief. They wouldn't have an all-encompassing network of carefully-placed security cameras for the nominally benevolent purposes of safety and statistic-gathering. But it did mean much thinner walls here in the outskirts.
Amber slid along building sides and darted from shadow to shadow, avoiding the main roads for their few, scattered streetlights. Her first target lay along another side of the town's edge, but she'd intentionally entered far from it, at a point she'd been exposed between dunes and walls as briefly as possible. Infiltrating a sleepy colonial town might've been child's play for someone with her skills, but there was no reason to practice sloppily.
Soon, it became visible for more than a glimpse at a time over the single-story rooftops: a spindly, steel transmission tower, the hub all the colony's communications routed through. A chain-link fence surrounded its concrete base, which she cleanly vaulted with a running start, careful to only lay hands on the pipework frame and avoid rattling the links. She'd be at her most visible for this part, and could risk nothing that could draw attention. Getting a firm hold on the first rungs sprouting from one leg of the tower, she scaled the tower quick as she dared, despite wincing at the metal twang made by the spars each time she put her foot down.
At the top waited a gray cable box; Amber's fingers made short work of the lock, prying the cheap aluminum apart with just a few seconds of the force her bare hands were capable of. Inside, she didn't worry about masking her work. When they found the broken lock, it would be easy to tell what the problem was—just pulled all the cables free of their leads. Not irreparable damage, of course, she only wanted to delay any word from getting back to the UNSC if she were sighted. Not the cleanest sabotage she'd ever done, but then, it'd practically been one of Team Machete's few specialties.
Closing the box as best she could and climbing back down, letting go to plummet the last half of the descent, Amber leaped back over the guard fence and caught her breath only once she was back in the shaded alleyways. Just over thirty seconds—by her headcount, anyway. Might've been a little off on account of adrenaline—or whatever her gene-tampered glands produced—but her open lips curled into a smile around her gasping breath.
Soon as her breathing returned to normal, she set off again, this time toward the town's center. There was one other building she had keen interest in. Even at night, the cross of its sign stood tall over its single-story roof.
Skirting along the town's edge as far as she could, she finally turned inward and crossed from packed dirt to gravel mixed between the buildings on a beeline for her target. She was halfway down the last alley when the crunch of gravel under her feet developed an echo from dead ahead of her.
No doors provided shady alcoves in the walls on either side of her, and the end of the alley behind her was too far to reach in time. Fighting her flight response, Amber slowed her pace down to a stroll and ducked her head, continuing on her way as though her legs didn't itch to bolt for the safest, darkest corner she could find and wait out whoever might see her run.
The man who rounded the corner ahead was tall, with the fringe of a long coat swaying around his knees. Amber couldn't make out more than his silhouette, but the way his hat's brim tilted as he turned down the alley let her know he'd seen her.
"Evenin'," the man grunted without breaking stride.
"Mhm." Amber mumbled gruffly, as if masking her voice would make her sound more like someone he knew. But the man passed her by without even turning his head.
Amber didn't dare look back, in case her acquaintance watched her for the same. When she reached the end of the alley, however, she could look back as she turned. If he'd taken any interest, knowing would be her only defense. At last, when her body turned right, her head and eyes followed the movement just a bit more to throw back a glance—
The man hadn't stopped to watch or even changed his pace, still mid-way to the other end of the street. Putting the corner between them, Amber breathed out her jitters. Dyne was right, you could get away with a lot if you pretended you were supposed to be there. Hurrying across a road, Amber disappeared into the shadows behind the building she wanted.
A back door lock was easy to break, and the power lead to an alarm even simpler. Closing it behind her, Amber stepped slowly across a tile floor. Aisle after aisle of tiny boxes presented themselves to her in the muted glow of a streetlight coming in through far windows. This wasn't a colonial doctor's practice, in fact far better—a pharmacy. Every drug she'd memorized in any of Deep Winter's chemistry classes, and thousands more besides. And behind a counter, instruments to mix up a response to whatever knew bacterial or viral threat a colonist on a far-flung world might encounter. Everything she needed to mix up a new supply of smoothers.
She got to work at once. Only five or six hours before daybreak, and she couldn't be sure how early the owner came in. Finding the mental health aisle, she flipped boxes and speed-read through the ingredients fine-printed on the back of every box. Selected a handful with the lowest count of ingredients aside from what she needed, she swept full stocks of certain medications into her arms and dumped them onto the counter in the micro-lab.
She needed two compounds: cyclodexione-4 and miso-olanzapine. The first was easy enough, almost common as a bipolar integration drug. Several bipolar medications in her haul contained it, the only work to be done was separating it out. Miso-olanzapine was trickier, an anti-psychotic she'd have to mix herself. Olanzapine itself, as an atypical anti-psychotic available over counters like this one, was an easy enough base, but she'd have to induce the right chemical changes to make what she needed. Fortunately, after her team had rescued a decommissioned Deep Winter from ONI storage years ago, he'd told them all he'd learned of the drugs. And Erin insisted they learn how to make them, were they ever in such dire straights.
Gathering capsules, beakers, and the base for a tiny electric centrifuge, Amber tore open a bottle of pills and started grinding with mortar and pestle.