DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT OWN HALO
|CHAPTER ONE|
Sam never wanted to be a clone.
They didn't even exist when he was growing up during his first life. Not unless you counted Dolly the sheep and the other animals humans could clone, he supposed, but that was one hell of a stretch.
The Flash Clones from the Spartan-II program, like the ones Dr. Halsey and ONI used to replace Master Chief and the other Spartans? Back in his old world, technology like that was a pipe dream.
Hell, it wasn't even viable now. 500 years in the future.
While flash cloning an entire human was technically possible, the procedure was by no means perfect. That was why ONI used them to replace the children they kidnapped for the Spartan-II program. Most of the flash clones died quickly of natural deaths, which were explained as preexisting genetic disorders, drawing suspicion away from the Office of Naval Intelligence.
I'm probably the only one that's normal.
Far above him, a billboard spewed government lies and Sam pretended to listen while he watched the crowd in Utgard.
"Final casualty estimates from what has already become known colloquially as the National Holiday Tragedy are as high as fifteen hundred. The National Holiday, a luxury liner starship was destroyed when it malfunctioned and burned up in the atmosphere of Reach, killing all crew, personnel, and passengers aboard."
The talking head was narrow-faced, short-haired, and androgynous—a computer simulation meant to come across as pleasant and non-threatening while it told the masses the "official" story about the National Holiday that had killed over a thousand people. Did the UEG think people were stupid? Did they think they could hide how bad the Insurrection was getting forever?
Watching the crowd shuffling along through the city, heads down over their data pads, Sam decided the government was probably right. It wouldn't be hard to hide a war no one wanted to believe was being fought. Sometimes it seemed no one cared about anything past the end of their nose.
The inoffensive face was replaced with images of the passengers and crew of the National Holiday.
There he is, Sam tuned out the billboard stream and the other dozens of advertisements and locked his focus on the woman in a red leather jacket.
He didn't care what the lady was wearing, even if the jacket was cheap and flashy. Sam was only interested in her backpack. She was trying to wear it casually as if it was a change of clothes or her virtual reality gaming headset, but the fingers of her right hand were curled around one of the shoulder straps, gripping it as if her life depended on it.
Sam knew the woman's face. He knew her route. He knew where she liked to stop for lunch. He'd been watching her for two weeks, from the minute she got off the shuttle until she reached the far end of the plaza and emerged from one particular shop without her backpack.
And the very next day, if you knew the right way to ask, that shop suddenly had plenty of pharmaceuticals to sell. Incredibly addictive and illegal as hell—which meant they were big business on the street.
Sam needed that business. He had to get off Harvest and to one of the Inner Colonies. Preferably all the way to Earth—where'd he be safe all the way until the end of the war.
Most people never left the planet they were born on. Not unless they joined the military or were rich enough to pay.
Sam wasn't rich. His parents had been in the military which didn't exactly pay six figures. And he didn't want to join the military either. That'd put him on the frontlines of the war he was trying to avoid.
He needed money and fast. Drugs were the only way he knew how.
Ms. Leather Jacket passed Sam's position without giving him a glance and he fell her, blending into the crowd. He touched the control on his data pad and it posted a pre-arranged ad on a public personal-meeting site, where anyone could see it.
No direct connection between him and Jen. Ten meters away, a slender, leggie girl with bobbed dark hair and calf-high boots shifted her course just a step or two. Jen's eyes were down like everyone else's, a data pad in her hand playing something only she could hear on her earbud.
Sam slipped a hand into his jacket pocket and felt the cold ceramic and plastic of his stolen police shock baton and flicked off the safety with his thumb. Jen gasped an apology as she bumped into the courier and the woman cursed at her in a patois of English and Hungarian.
She'd pay for it two seconds later.
Sam jammed the business end of the shock baton into the lady's side and held down the trigger.
Ugly Jacket Lady stiffened, every muscle in her body tensing up as the shock coursed through her. This close, Sam could smell the cheap perfume the woman used way too much of, the sickeningly sweet stench filling the air between them and making him want to gag. He grabbed the right shoulder of the jacket just as he let off the trigger, stripping it off the woman with practiced smoothness as the courier collapsed to the floor, slipping it onto his own back, and kept walking as if nothing happened.
Jen didn't slow down, didn't look back merging into the crowd as she headed off away from the plaza toward the train station. Sam arced around the kiosks, not wanting to look as if he were following her, but needing to get to the same place as quickly as possible. He tried to stick to the spots where the crowd was the thickest, but the group he'd fallen in with was heading for an entrance leading away from the station, and when he split off from them, he was suddenly alone and very, very obvious.
Sam had known there would be security. An outfit didn't send a shipment of drugs worth thousands of Credits to the plaza without having someone around to watch the courier's back. He'd been counting on speed and confusion to shield him and Jen from them, but he locked eyes with a tall, dark-eyed, raven-haired woman thirty meters away and Sam had a suspicion that he was screwed.
When the lady pulled a gun, he was certain of it.
The gangs in UtgarD always used women as couriers and bodyguards when moving product. Women were less likely to be stopped by the police and as long as they were armed it didn't matter who was moving the product. A bullet would kill anyone just as fast if it was a girl pulling the trigger.
Guns were the ultimate force multiplier.
Sam felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. I have to get to the shuttle station!
It wasn't too difficult to get your hands on a gun, but it was damn near impossible to get one past the security at the shuttle stations.
He ducked right, then cut left just as the first shot was fired. It wasn't loud, the sound of someone clapping their hands, and Sam wasn't sure if anyone except him noticed it. If it hit anything, the noise of the crowd covered the sound of the ricochet and before the lady could fire again, he was running.
Jen turned from her causal stride across the square and her eyes went wide. "Sam?" she blurted, and he was too scared to be mad at her for using his name.
"Go!" Sam urged her.
It was probably the wrong decision. If she'd stayed put and pretended she didn't know him, the shooter might have ignored her. But Sam didn't have time to sit around and debate, and the image of her standing there like a statue while some gangbanger shitbag put a bullet through her head seemed more pressing than second-guessing himself.
Jen ran, and Sam pushed her ahead of himself, heading for the shuttle station. There were detectors there, and even if the gun could beat those, there were live cops. The shooter wouldn't chance a run-in with the police.
Another hand clap came from somewhere behind them and someone screamed. Sam knew screams, knew their subtleties and varieties very well, and this one was pain, not fear. He grabbed Jen by the hand and ran faster, knowing how hard it would be for her to keep up in those dammed boots. He'd told her not to wear the boots, but she never listened.
"Have you got the bag?" he asked her, yelling breathlessly. She nodded, not speaking, either because she was already tired or too scared to talk. "We're going to duck into the restroom and make the transfer. Get ready."
Jen fumbled at her waist, unbuckling an expandable pack and pulling it open. Getting the pack had been the hardest part of the whole job. Not that it was impossible to find a signal jamming container, but most of the sources for them were the gangs, and the whole purpose of this was to pull it off without letting the gangs know who did it. That way, they'd all want to blame each other for it.
Sam pulled Jen behind a cluster of people who were finally looking up at the world, just noticing the screaming and commotion around whoever had caught the bullets meant for him, and used the concealment to duck into the restroom.
The first half a dozen stalls were occupied and panic surged in Sam's gut at the idea the shooter would walk in on them as they circled the curve of the restroom corridor searching for an open stall and killed them there in the bathroom.
A young woman with a little boy in tow was camped outside one of the doors, waiting for it to open and Sam groaned at the thought they must all be in use, but then a door popped open and a doughy-faced older man dressed in clothes two sizes too large for him stumbled out, waving a hand across his face.
"Might not want to go in there right away," he cautioned, but Sam ignored him and pulled Jen inside, pushing the door shit.
"Oh, fuck!" Jen exclaimed, covering her mouth with her hand at the smell. "Hurry up, Sam!"
Sam held his breath as he pulled the backpack off and ripped it open. The drug patches were sealed in individual plastic cases and the whole thing was sealed a second time in a large bag. The tracker would be planted somewhere in all that shit, and there was no time to dig it out now.
He stuffed the plastic bag into the waist pack and shoved it at Jen, then slipped the backpack onto his shoulders. "Wait thirty seconds," he told her, "then get on the train and get to the safehouse. If I don't show up in two hours, your best bet is to dump it and run."
Jen nodded, but Sam knew she wouldn't do it. If he didn't show up, she'd take it to the broker and try to sell it herself. She braved the smell in the toilet to kiss him, and then he was out the door.
The bathroom corridor curved in a half-circle and Sam followed it out the other entrance, walking fast rather than running, not wanting to rush into the path of a bullet. He saw the shooter almost immediately, towering over most of the crowd only twenty meters away.
She hadn't seen him, but Sam needed her to, so he ran.
The walkway between the plaza and the train station was packed with pedestrians, but Sam didn't try to weave through them, pushing them out of the way instead. Yells, curses, and obscene gestures followed after him, a signpost for the shooter.
She'd be coming after him, which was just what he wanted, but he needed to get inside the train station. He didn't think the shooter would follow him in there, not with police ready to swarm. That was what he kept telling himself.
The entrance to the station was a broad archway, and Sam was happy as hell to make it through the arch because that is where the weapons detectors were housed.
Come on, just stay out there. It's not worth the risk for you to come in here. Sam slowed his pace and risked a look behind him. "Shit," he muttered.
The shooter hadn't even hesitated, just followed him right through the detectors. Maybe she'd ditched the gun, but Sam couldn't take that chance. He didn't have time to wait for a shuttle and if she followed him onto one, he'd be just as dead.
He took off for the north terminal at a jog. There were four tracks running parallel from south to north, each reachable by a series of escalators arcing over the intervening shuttles.
They weren't the evacuated bullet trains running on magnetic suspensions between cities, thank God, just regular monorails. If the tracks had been sealed, there would be now way he could get away with this.
Sam ran up the escalators three steps at a time, wriggling around other travelers where he could, pushing them out of the way when he had to, and not sticking around to hear them curse him out. He slid down the handrail on the other side, earning a few dirty looks and nearly falling off the edge and busting his ass, then he was up the next one to do it all over again.
He didn't see any police officers and damn it, for once Sam wanted to. If an officer was running patrol, they'd stop him or the shooter, and either one would work. Jen had the contraband and while sliding down the escalator might get him a ticket, or a three-day ban from the station, he could live with that.
There's never a cop around when you need one, Sam stopped at the bottom of the last escalator, panting in exhaustion, his adrenalin running low, sweat soaking the small of his back and dripping down into his face. He wiped it away, deciding he needed a haircut, and checked behind him.
The shooter was coming over the top of the last arch...and her gun was still in her hand.
Sam bolted for the tracks. The yellow lights were flashing that a shuttle was coming, but he wasn't going to wait for it. He vaulted over the railing and bent his knees to absorb the impact of the two-meter drop.
The lights were flashing red now, and an alarm was sounding, but the shuttle was going too fast to stop this close. Sam hopped over the rail assembly in the center of the tunnel, trying to get up a running start before he hit the opposite wall. He could see the maintenance door, just fifteen meters or so down the tunnel along the walkway. It was locked, but he'd paid a worker to get the key a couple of months ago.
Sam jumped and snagged the edge of the walkway with his fingertips. The toes of his boots scraped against the surface of the wall as he pulled himself up straight. He kicked his legs like he was running in mid-air, putting every last bit of energy he had into getting his center of gravity over the wall.
There was a roaring in his ears, and as much as Sam wanted to think it was the adrenalin rush hitting again, he knew it was the shuttle coming.
A bullet smack into the wall beside him as he rolled over the top of the walkway and fell flat.
The shooter had climbed over the railing on the other side and jumped down after him. She was vaulting over the monorail assembly, still shooting one-handed as she came, the rounds hitting the wall behind him.
She was a meter away from clearing the track when the shuttle hit her.
Blood sprayed across the wall a few centimeters over Sam's head and he closed his eyes out of instinct, even though it was too late. The shuttle rumbled past, slowing to a gradual halt with a screech of breaks as the first cars reached the other end of the station a hundred meters away.
Sam pushed himself up onto his knees, then to his feet. The door. He had to get to the door. What was the code?
Dammit, I can't remember, Sam pulled his data pad off his belt and pulled up the note he'd made himself. He tapped it into the keypad on the door's security plate and was rewarded with a solid green light across the top of the plate and the welcoming click of an electromagnetic lock releasing.
He laughed and pulled open the door.
A police officer was waiting on the other side, the end of a shock baton pointed right at his head.
Sam didn't even have time to curse before the officer hit him.
I've read a few Halo Self-Insert and the SI is almost always a Spartan!
And I know most of the Flash Clones died, but there is a reason for Sam being normal despite being a clone. It's the same reason Samuel-034 is the tallest and strongest Spartan-II.
I don't have a lot of time to write and would like to write a story people will read so chapter 3 will be posted if the story hits 20 Favs and Follows.
Thanks for reading!