Initiation Part 3
LOCKHEART MEDICAL STATION
JANUARY 2553
Sarah Palmer lay in her bed, her eyes closed as she listened to the sounds around her. There was the quiet chatter of doctors and nurses, but she couldn't make out exactly what they were saying. She could hear the footsteps of other patients, staff, and guests, but she knew that none of them had any interest in her. She frowned as she identified a sound that was out of the ordinary. Most people in the medical facility either didn't wear shoes or wore ones with soft soles. The soldiers that visited wore heavy boots, but she could hear the unusual sound of dress shoes. She wouldn't have recognized the sound if she hadn't spent the last three months in medical station, so it had become a sound that stood out.
"Corporal Palmer, do you have a moment to talk?" Sarah didn't recognize the voice as it spoke, but she decided that she couldn't ignore it. She opened her eyes and looked over to see a man standing in the doorway. He was bald, had a tattoo on the side of his head, and was wearing a suit that made her wonder if he was a trained assassin. No, if he was an assassin he wouldn't have announced himself.
Sarah turned to look at him, deciding she should see what he had to say. "Sure, I'm not going anywhere right now." This all felt too formal, and her ODST side started to kick in - trying to ease the tension with humor like she would in combat.
"First of all, congratulations on your promotion," the man started. Sarah thanked him, but she still didn't know why he was there. He walked into the room and moved to her bedside. She watched him, trying to see if there was any hint as to what his goals were. "You did good work, saving the Admiral's life." The words seemed genuine and so did his smile. "And the AI he was getting off world…" The man stopped and looked away, frowning. "Well, if it wasn't so classified, I'd tell you how important it was to rescue." Sarah could only laugh. She had never expected to find out if what she'd done mattered. It was just her job. The man sat down and seemed to make himself comfortable. "What you did, a lot of soldiers couldn't."
"I only did what needed doing. What I was trained to do." Sarah hated being praised for her job. She liked what she did, she felt like she was making a difference, but she wasn't doing anything different than any of her other fellow ODST. She was just lucky enough to have survived her most recent mission, when others weren't.
"You're recovering okay?" the man asked causally.
"I'm guessing you already know the answer to that," Sarah said, frowning. She knew he already knew answer, so she didn't appreciate it being used as idle chit chat to get her guard down.
"Doctors said you follow their orders, you take their meds, and you do their physical rehabilitation…" The man watched her closely as he spoke, clearly trying to gauge her response. "But you don't seem to respect them very much."
Suddenly it made sense to Sarah. The suit, the questions, the trying to put her at ease. "Ahhh…you're hospital admin. You've come to chew me out for giving the docs a hard time." She had sort of expected that. The doctors were two thin-skinned for her liking.
"No," the man corrected, surprising Sarah. If that wasn't why he was here, then she had no idea as to what his purpose was in asking those questions. "I'm just curious - why the sudden lack of respect for others? Your record shows no history of that kind of behavior with your fellow marines or ODST." Sarah wondered who this man was that he seemed to have so much access to her service history.
Sarah sighed and supposed there was no harm in answering, hospital admin or not. "Soldiers don't act like they're smarter than me just because it took them eight years longer to get out of school." Sarah hated the way that the doctors and a lot of scientists she'd had to have contact with treated her like she was a knuckle dragging cavewoman because she was an ODST. She'd joined the ODST right after she graduated from high school to do her part for the war. She didn't hide away for a few more years in school because she was afraid of dying at the hand of aliens.
"Okay, I get it now," the man said, nodding his head slightly.
"You do?" Sarah was surprised by that. Most people dressed like him didn't understand soldiers like her.
"Better than you might imagine, actually." For some reason Sarah didn't doubt that he did understand. Something about his tone somehow spoke of a soldier who knew what it was like to go head to head with the Covenant, something that seemed to clash with his appearance.
"Mister...?" Sarah waited for him to fill in the blank.
"Jun," he answered simply.
"Mister Jun..." she waited for a last name.
"No. Just Jun," he clarified.
"Oh, one name. Very enigmatic," Sarah commented sarcastically. Having only one name sounded like something a secret agent in a crappy movie would do, so she wondered if he really only had one name or if he was just trying to be mysterious.
"Not really," Jun said bluntly.
Sarah was starting to get annoyed by all of this. Jun was giving her nothing and every clue about him seemed to be contradicted by his own words right away. "I've been polite so far," she said, deciding to get to business and find out what she wanted to know. "So what do you want with me?"
"Are you familiar with the Spartans?" Jun asked, though the question stuck Sarah as odd. You would have had to been deaf, blind, and stupid to not know of the Spartans.
"Big robotic-looking guys. They stomp around the battlefield kicking everyone's ass and making the rest of us feel inadequate." Like all ODST, Sarah didn't like the Spartans very much. It was a resentment that was born from fighting for years and always being in the shadow of the ONI's walking tanks. How many of her fellow ODST had died without complaint in the battlefield? But they were often forgotten and the only thing remembered was the Spartans. Sarah could remember when she was young and how all the new marines wanted to be ODST, and how she'd been proud to be accepted into the ODST training program. These days though people didn't ask how to become ODST, they just wanted to know how to become Spartans.
"Well, given the actions that landed you here and your service record as a whole..." Sarah didn't know what Jun was trying to get at. She was here because of a bit of bad luck - that was it. "How would you like to be one? A Spartan." Jun's eyes were watching her like a hawk's would watch a rabbit, looking to see how it would react.
At first the question didn't make sense to Sarah. She didn't understand what he was offering, or how he could be offering it. She'd heard plenty of soldiers ask how to become Spartans, but she'd never heard of anyone ever being offered the chance to actually become one. As far as she knew, no new Spartans had been added since the first ones had been put into the field. Then again, how could you tell with them all looking the same? There was certainly no way she was being offered such a chance for getting herself injured. She was certain she'd heard Jun wrong.
"Excuse me?" she asked.
