Chris000

Sojourn’s End December 3240 What very few people understood about interstellar space was just how dark it was. The vast majority of those who bathed in the rays of the sun took it for granted. They had never known what a true abyss looked like. Here, light from the far distant star of Aurora had dimmed to the point where in practical terms it may as well have been a picture. It was this darkness that held in its embrace the UNSC Dawnrunner She was a small Calais-class corvette, crewed by one hundred and fifty sailors that had been given this unusual assignment by their equally perplexed superiors. These one hundred and fifty souls now regarded the abyss of starlight with a mixture of curiosity and a primal fear. It was highly unusual for a ship, any ship, to travel the distance they had on standard high-G thrust. Generally speaking there wasn’t much need to do so. An outer planet was one matter where a few days of thrust could bridge the gap in relative comfort.

Chapter 26 March 17, 3240, 0130 hours The Terrarium, Forerunner Station Kepler-20 System Sally's limp body hung from the clamps of the drone's limbs, Her arms swung in the breeze and her hair whipped over her face, almost like a veil. NICOLE, through her own Sentinel's sensors, tried to get sensors to scan her best friend, though she found that the Sentinel itself was inadequate to perform a full diagnostic on her body. From the instant they had entered the Terrarium, the survival of the princess had been completely written off. There was no telling where she could have ended up on the station. It would have been possible that she never left the core at all and that had been the reason why the Flood decided to work so hard to get to it. But NICOLE felt a blip of some sort. It was odd; she couldn't place it. Perhaps it had been a piece of electronics firing off in the darkness. with the station falling apart it wouldn't be an unusual thing. The last gasp of complex

Chapter 25 March 17, 3240, 0110 hours The Terrarium, Forerunner Station Kepler-20 System "I knew it wasn't you, you know. The way that it spoke; the way it just didn't answer the way you did. The way it just looked at me. It was all wrong. For a moment though, I didn't know it was wrong." Sally sat at the bank of a nearby river, looking into the slowly churning water with tired eyes. A gentle breeze lapped at the grass around her, gently raking it against one another with a gentle, almost sonorous, scratching noise. It wasn't unpleasant at all. In fact, it was the best thing she had ever heard. The sun had set only a few minutes ago, and the stars began to wheel overhead. Somewhere out there, slightly brighter than the others, were the planets of this system. One of them was Egarda. It seemed so very, very far away now, but she knew it had only been a skip of the portal away. She looked somewhere else, but realized she had no way of

Chapter 24 March 17, 3240, 0030 hours Sentinel Access Tunnel Designate 3401-1-Aleph-J, Forerunner Station Kepler-20 System They were forced to travel in single-file through the relatively small space. Despite this, the drones proceeded at nearly full speed, only slowing down when their mass of their passengers caused them to swing around to the sides. Several times Roberts' drone stalled and even made a noise that could have passed for a grumble. NICOLE's Sentinel was in the lead, shining bright magenta to signify that she had taken over the general function of the machine. The original intelligence was still in there with her but it was quiet, unsure of what to do now that its body had been taken from it. Its silence as it watched from the corners of the system unnerved NICOLE, not just because of how it watched her, but how it unfailingly seemed to still be waiting for commands knowing full well it wouldn't be able to carry them out as it was.