Shannon Hambleton

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

History
"What do you do?"
 * "Me? Well, I, uh, help your parents back in, um... the city. Before that... I guess you could say I was in the Army."
 * "''You don't look strong enough to be there."

- Keyes reveals his undercover background to Shannon

Shannon was born as the eldest child of Tushar and Pernilla Kaur, a couple who worked for a small mining group as a miner and doctor, respectively. They lived on the outskirts of the Labog Province, where their homestead was one of the few places not protected by the terraforming shields common to the inhabited regions of the planet. For what little of her previous life she remembered, she was worked hard by her parents, often giving her a large amount of chores to fulfill around the farm. Although they were a distant, overbearing presence of her life, Shannon nevertheless tried to earn their affection through her hard work. Over time, she would undertake the responsibility of looking after her younger sibling, and would be trusted to run messages between the homestead and her uncles and aunts, where her information would be used to coordinate insurgent activities on the colony. It was during these runs that she would befriend a street-urchin known as Claude Boyd, a twelve-year-old boy who protected Shannon and later taught her how to defend herself.

During schooltime, Shannon was identified as being visibly more mature than the other kids, often building better friendships with the much older teachers than the other children. She would usually keep to herself, doing what she could to quietly move through the paths not often frequented, a quality that would see her being mocked as the 'ghost girl'. However, she was rarely bullied, as her larger figure from years of manual labor and her capability to fend off attackers was already well-known. On one occasion, Shannon had been ambushed by seven older boys, yet she was able to beat off three of them before she was able to flee. However, in part because of Boyd's influence, she was strongly determined to protect others, often stepping in help those that were unable to defend themselves.

It were these incidents, along with her above-average scores in schoolwork, that would see her be identified as a candidate for the SPARTAN-II Program. In mid-2517, Shannon would discover an unfamiliar couple, who both made a beeline for her. Wrongly-assuming they meant her harm, Shannon would evade the pair for a four and a half weeks, taking different paths home through previously-hostile parts of the city to get home. Unfortunately, on at least three occasions she was forced to either fight-off or escape from some of the city's aggressive urchin gangs, unknowingly being watched by the pair of strangers. It was not until she came home that she learned why they were here; the pair were supposedly friends of her parents who had recently arrived on the planet. Still not trusting the new strangers, the woman would try and open her up, but it was the man's somewhat awkward phrasing and posture would actually draw her into a conversation. Convinced he was hiding something, she would learn that the man's name was "Jon Davidson" and he had a background in the military. While pestering him, he would eventually decide to play her a game with a deck of cards, and asked her to guess which ones he would pull out. She managed to guess all of them correctly, which appeared to only slightly impress him. Over the coming week, he would continue to test her with games intended to assess her intelligence and physical development, the purpose being completely lost on the young girl. She would come to enjoy his company, although she would be haunted by the last words she heard him say: "you are everything she is looking for."

Eventually, while walking home from school less than a month later, Shannon would be intercepted by a pair of ONI agents. Noticing a pair of strangers following her, she took off running through the alleyways of the city, although she would make it home. While she was drugged and taken off-world, her confused flash-clone would go missing for eight days before the local police department found the mutilated body of the six-year-old girl - a discovery that would send her grieving family off-world, unable to comprehend why someone would murder their child.

SPARTAN-II Training
"Sir... please tell me I can still serve."

- Shannon-150, after washing out of the program.

Now identified as simply 'Shannon-150' or 'SPARTAN-150,' Shannon was sorted into Silver Team with Sheila-065 and Maddison-140. Alienated by the environment she found herself in, she initially tried to navigate her way out of the compound, only to be quickly sent by a swift jab with a stun baton, where she was guided back into the meeting hall to witness a speak from the project's progenitor, Dr. Catherine Halsey. Just as soon as they were all dragged in, they were immediately subjected to gruelling exercise regime. This wasn't helped by the fact that Maddison's tendency to wander made it difficult for Silver Team to work together. Regardless, the three were able to work well enough together to complete their first day of training, coming in 18th in the Ring the Bell exercise that ended it.

As training continued for the next eight years, Shannon was slowly transformed into the formidable warriors Halsey envisioned. The increasing strain of physical training made her stronger, faster, better than she ever was, while the university-level education guaranteed made her far more intelligent than she would have been had she remained on Green Hills. While the competitive of training might have created rivalries, Shannon turned into a very cooperative teammate, where her discipline, obedience, and willingness to help made her something of a role model among her peers. This also included a fiercely-protective side that saw her step in on several occasions to defend a peer being attacked by an instructor, which marked the only times she did not listen to orders. Regardless, these traits seemed to mark Shannon out as a developing team leader by Halsey, alongside John-117, Jerome-092, and Kurt-051. However, while the latter three would grow into exemplary field commanders, Shannon never did due to a mix of lack of ambition, and lack of confidence in the position. Instead, she further developed her skills in every other field, a jack-of-all-trades which could adapt between different roles. Between Shannon's adaptability, Sheila's skill alone, and Maddison's often explosive actions, Silver Team was a formidable force whose only failing was the lack of a strong leader, and this achilles heel enabled better skilled teams to isolate and defeat them. To overcome this, they spent a lot of time with councillor and team cohesion specialist, a young Petty Officer 3rd Class Thaksin Metharom. Later into training, both he and Shannon secretly developed feelings for each other. However, neither would pursue it, both because she believed it was an unnecessary diversion to her duty, and the recent attack on Black Team made it clear how relationships were perceived by her peers.

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 Project MJOLNIR.

ONI and naval career
Given the surname Hambleton and a cover backstory to hide her connections to the SPARTAN-IIs, and promoted to the rank of Lieutenant, Junior Grade, Shannon's first task in the Material's Group was to assist in work on specialized variants for the Mark IV MJOLNIR line. She worked with the Misriah Armory in order to design what would become known as the Security variant for the platform, where she provided her expertise on classified components. Later, she provided some assistance in a small number of programs that were concerned with advancing starship development, where she provided interface programs for experimental components. She was rarely satisfied with this role, and she made repeated requests to be granted the option to participate more directly in the war.

In 2531, Shannon participated in a number of simulated wargames against other officers. Her ability to defeat veterans far older than herself with unusually-creative tactics quickly drew the eye 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 an engineering officer on the UNSC Firefox. It was here that she truly witnessed how badly the war was going for humanity, as she was forced to watch entire battle groups get annihilated in order to avoid exposing the starship's presence. 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 noticed the disturbance and attacked the prowler. She 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. 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 Endeavour 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 Endeavour 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.