Shannon Hambleton

Captain Shannon Hambleton, born Shannon Kaur, was a distinguished naval captain and engineer who washed out of the SPARTAN-II Program.

Early life
Curated records on Hambleton claimed that she was born to a family of Far Islian refugees, who emigrated to a small town on Green Hills under the UEG's Civil Refugee Support Scheme. A noted star pupil in her school, Hambleton's interest with engineering had supposedly begun when she assisted in her father's automechanic shop. She was destined to take over, a future which was stolen from her when insurgents bombed a mall when she was twelve years old. The explosion caused severe nerve damage which led to her present issues with walking, breathing, and handling objects, along with taking the lives of people she personally knew. As a result, she threw herself into her studies, graduating from school with a scholarship and completed an engineering course with a university on Circumstance.

Although backed up by mountains of evidence, this retelling of her history was completely fabricated by ONI. Her surname was not Hambleton, as it had been assigned to her to further bury her past. Her surname was actually Kaur, something she never learned until later, and her family were frontier miners who lived on a property beyond Green Hills' terraformed zones, earning a living by selling crude, unrefined gases and minerals to the BXR Mining Corporation. So much work with so few hands meant that Shannon was already performing complex chores such as maintaining the air purifiers, cooking basic dinners, and looking after her younger brother by the time she was four years old. Her parents were also secret supporters of the local Insurrectionist movement, using their property as a safe haven for a number of known members of the Secessionist Union.

Unfortunately, this way of life for her eventually came to an end. Fights in school, acted as an unofficial older as well as her high test results and participation in the Outer Colonies Vaccination Program, saw ONI identify Shannon as a possible candidate for their upcoming SPARTAN-II Program. She was directly interviewed by an undercover Catherine Halsey and Jacob Keyes, where she was only receptive towards the latter because of his suspicious behavior. It was during their discussions that she unwittingly revealed her family's ties to Insurrectionists. This meant that rather than being flash-cloned and abducted, ONI instead passed on the information to the local law enforcement, who arrested her parents and took Shannon into protective custody. ONI then dispatched a team to recover her, where she was frozen and taken to Reach to begin her training.

SPARTAN-II Program
Organized into Silver Team, Shannon was one of the first to adapt to the project's strict training regimen, and she assisted a number of other candidates with doing the same. As a SPARTAN-II, she was pressed through an extremely comprehensive program that gave her the same level of education as a university graduate, combined with the toughest physical training yet conducted by the UNSC. Unusually, Shannon did not have any notable strengths and had few weaknesses, allowing her to easily swap between roles and make Silver Team one of the most unpredictable teams in the program, although far from the best. This gave her the nickname 'Fives' among the squadron, as her test results were always in the middle of the range. The only problem she had was that she grew unusually close, almost romantically so, with Anton-044, which was put to an end after Red Team badly beat another team for fraternization.

In 2525, Shannon and the other SPARTAN-IIs undertook the riskiest part of their training: the Project ASTER augmentation procedures. During the operation, she suffered a number of medical episodes that left her paralyzed from the waist-down and severely disfigured her left arm, and it was only because of the skill of the surgeons that she survived it. As a result, Shannon and eleven others were discharged from the program and instead trained to work as specialists within ONI. Because of her engineering talent, she was one of the chosen few who were directly incorporated into the Material's Group to continue design work for MJOLNIR. She worked with Misriah Armory designers to develop what eventually became the Security variant, and later branched out into slipspace research and even warship development. Unfortunately, she detested this passive position, and never went about her work in a particularly thrilled manner.

Naval career
In 2533, Shannon participated in a number of simulated wargames against other officers. Her ability to defeat veterans far older than herself with unusually-creative tactics drew the attention of the UNSC Navy, who pressed to assign her to a warship. After some interference from ONI, she agreed to serve in the Prowler Corps, where she started out as a slipspace drive team lead on the UNSC Ghost of Tsushima. It was here that she truly witnessed how badly the war was going for humanity, as she watched battle group after battle group get beaten down by the Covenant. They could not even participate in rescue efforts unless the alien ships departed, as any attempt to do so would likely reveal the prowler's location. After several successful missions, luck turned against them when a lucky pulse laser strike hit the portside engine, attracting the attention of a CRS-class frigate which then detected and attacked the prowler. Despite her efforts, she and the rest of the crew witnessed the first warship she served aboard detonate into hundreds of fragments from an escape, when the remaining nuclear arsenal was set off by the frigate's plasma cannons.

Shannon served in the Prowler Corps until 2541, and she ended up commanding a prowler of her own, the UNSC Alleyway Stroll. Although a talented tactician, her willingness to place herself in harms way to achieve her objectives meant that she often incurred unnecessary damage to her starship. In light of this, she was transferred to the destroyer in hopes that her aggression was more on an asset there. After an initial settling period in which she made the rookie mistake of running the ship too hard, she picked up the crew's morale with a number of escalating victories in the Newton Sector. This ended when her unusual applications of slipspace drives allowed her to destroy a with its own weapons in the LV-427g system. This success, unfortunately, did not continue into the Battle of Miridem, where she was wounded when the Southern Cross received some heavy fire during the Covenant's charge down the fleet's flank. This reflected a pattern, as while Shannon's tactics were unorthodox but effective, she was often restricted by fleet orders from up the chain of command. It was because of this that she almost lost her ship at Iota Persei, as the Southern Cross had to maintain aerial presence near the capital city's major spaceport. In contrast, at Heavensward she led an exceptional performance. Her suggested tactics, inspired by her time in the Prowler Corps, were adopted by the Commodore in charge of their six-ship flotilla, and their raids allowed them to hold the line for three weeks against the Covenant.

Shannon was promoted to the rank of Captain in 2545, and received command of the advanced battlecruiser, the. Because this warship excelled in isolated battles away from the front lines, the position granted her a great deal of freedom with how she could deploy her starship, with the main requirement being coordination with the sister-ship it was paired with. She primarily prowled the fortress-worlds that were centered at Paris IV, where she scored several dozen kills against vulnerable Covenant warships, and further developed tactics used for the class. However, as the war dragged on she and the Artemis found themselves increasingly deployed in support of combat fleets, where they focused their fire against the very heaviest capital ships deployed against them. This also came with a vastly increased risk of being directly attacked by Covenant armadas.