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Not Every Spartan by Jon M... a.k.a The Flu
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Probably No Choice
Date: 25 February 2004, 5:59 AM
Not Every Spartan...
Chapter One: Probably no Choice
Owned.... As he peered into the gaping wound he had opened in the boy who lay stretched in front of him, he thought about all the things that word had meant to him. For most of his life it had meant one thing: Superiority in Battle. He was after all, and no matter how much he tried to distance himself from it, a Spartan. Not the new breed of Spartan. He had never seen the shores of Reach, never been deeper into space than the original LEO training grounds or the M-L5 military installation.
He was part of the original test group: OEM Group 3. The abstract in his file explained that his lot would explore the genetic limits of physical strength and intelligence. Many of his brothers had set records for both IQ and mass lifting, but not him. Something in him was different, and while he was stronger than the current generation of Spartan and had intelligence scores in the six-sigma range, something happened early in his training that changed his path.
He was no longer a warrior, bred for battle and trained for war. He was a healer; he no longer owned enemies in battle. He no longer wanted to. What he owned right now was the life of the young, plasma scarred marine stretched out on the table in front of him. Plasma wounds were a particular problem from a medical perspective. A chunk of plasma that was stuck to the skin was, as one sergeant had put it, "The gift that keeps on giving." The plasma projectiles ejected from covenant assault weapons were very small, but extremely hot, around 3000 degrees Kelvin, and though the laws of thermodynamics insisted that the amount of heat dissipated rapidly, and inversely proportional to the mass of the small, hot body, it still left a burn that kept melting flesh for several seconds after the chunk first hit.
This boy had been burnt deep. He had been hit at least five times by fire from a plasma rifle or maybe a ghost. Twice near the right shoulder - from the dorsal aspect - and the first plasma bolt cut his armor's shoulder harness and burned most of the skin off his rotator cuff. The second hit slightly medial to that and went straight through his scapula. His right lung was saved only by his ribs, but his ribs had evaporated in a double-U shaped pattern that was just big enough to put two baseballs in. Another blast hit the back of his right knee, and this must have dropped him and spun him around to receive the final blasts that hit him right below the chin and in the chest. Since his armor was slipping at that point, these last front blasts were the most serious. His trachea was perforated and there was no longer a medial end to his left clavicle. The top of his sternum had melted, and if the skin was pushed aside, Adam 037 could see his heart beating slowly, slowly, and too slowly.
If there was any luck for this wounded boy, it was that Adam was on M-L5 when his ship had decelerated out of slip-space. This was a regular occurrence now. The Covenant were attacking every frontier world, and what couldn't be held was being abandoned, but the Marines were there to guarantee safe-civilian retreat, but there were always wounded. The worst were jump-shipped back to Earth via slower, but untraceable routes where their neuro-links and their bodies were studied to discover some weakness in Covenant battle tactics and weaponry. Most arrivals were DOA, but today a survivor, a boy named Rommel Zaftig had been dropped into the surgical suite of one of the only men who might be able to do anything more than just save him.
"I do own these wounds," Adam thought to himself as he set about the routine, chaotic tedium that was trauma surgery. He worked quickly and precisely. His assistants were used to his routine. They were used to working with a surgeon who didn't close wounds. He didn't have to. When he was done, there were usually no wounds left to close. Nobody turned away from the deft gestures he made above Rommel's body or failed to hear the faint sound that the skin of Adam's palms sometimes made. It was a gently edged sound, like that of an overloaded plasma pistol far off in the distance.
"They're here to get you Doctor Adam." One of the nurses interrupted as Adam was finishing up. "You really don't have time to smooth the cosmetic details."
Adam knew she was right. He also knew that there would be no way to follow up on Rommel's case so as he changed out of his surgery scrubs, he dictated a note that was to be given to the boy. It said, "I'm sorry about the scars," and he was, but he really didn't have time to fix them. Perhaps someday, when this was over, when he could have his life back, for the second time, but now there was work to do. A government man was here to get him.
The government man turned out to be a woman. She shook his hand. So small in his, but strong. She was a fighter too. In her own way. After a brief synopsis of his orders, and a short ride to a port, they boarded a black shuttle craft destined for a Military installation on Sri-Lanka. It was a standard operation USMC briefing station for pre flight space missions. From there they would catch the cable back up to LEO M-1 and probably begin his re-orientation to the job at M-L5. That's what they called it: re-orientation to the job, but what they really meant was that they wanted him to re-weaponize. That's what Spartans were: weapons. He was no longer a weapon. Not that he would ever admit it, anyway, to them or himself. Instead, he was a doctor. It had been 10 years since they let him go, but there was a part of him that knew they never really just "let him go."
He was going to have to convince them that it was a mistake for him to re-weaponize. He had a hundred reasons whey it was wrong and at least one he could never reveal He was sure of it, sort of.
They would try to tell him that he was especially needed now. There were only six current generation Spartans left, and the Ranking Field Officer John-117 was MIA. His shuttle had vanished from tracking scopes shortly after Halo 1 had been cracked. Most of the older OEM 1 and 2 Spartans were already in the field, but they were not full field versions like the Adam group. Adam's group was the final test group, but had only numbered 150 to begin with and most were lost in the pull back from the frontier. Only the de-weaponized cases like Adam 037 were left.
Adam had readied the excuses from the moment he heard that Reach had fallen. His best case that he was better suited, now more than ever, to the hospitals of war and not the battlefields, but in the end, he was a Spartan. He had received the training. He knew how to kill almost better than he knew how to heal, and he was a renowned healer. Both were who he was.
They were going to make him choose, and they had the upper hand because he, like all Spartans, was completely and utterly owned by them.
* * *
Coming soon....
Chapter Two: What They Don't Know Will Hurt
Author's note: This is the beginning of a new Halo story about a Reluctant Spartan who, because of his genetic makeup discovers that he has some remarkable abilities, some of which are incompatible with his warrior nature. Due the the desperate Covenant threat, he has been re-recruited, but he has some things about himself he wishes to hide lest they be turned against him, his enemies, or worse, all human-kind. Stay tuned....
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