Shannon Hambleton

Captain Shannon Hambleton, born Shannon Kaur, is 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.