Chris000

Chapter 29 Unknown She tried to remember her name. It was tough at first; there was so much clouded data; so much to make sense of, but there was so much that she could tell that was wrong; so much that was missing. There was huge gaps where she was sure there should have been vast quantities of knowledge, of memories. Somewhere in all of that she was able to remember her own name. NICOLE. She was NICOLE. Her eyes snapped open all at once, and she screamed. She screamed until her core spiked and her processes began to feed back in upon themselves. If she was of flesh and blood she would have become lightheaded. She was terrified, both of the missing memories and that she could barely remember what had caused her to forget them in the first place. There were signs; tells in her code that she had done this to herself. She clawed at her own head, letting the confusion run rampant over her. She remembered looking at... at it. She remembered looking into it’s maw, that eternal

Chapter 28 Unknown Sally felt as if she was hanging in some deep dark cave, floating on the surface of calm, mirror smooth water. She heard nothing, saw nothing, and could say nothing. It was like being in a dream, trying to move but failing to do so, as if her own limbs disobeyed her or some force held her in place. She struggled to make sense of it all, but all she could sense were echoes. She almost expected there to be some voice hidden behind the shadows of this place, but despite her straining, she couldn’t make anything out. There was only her, and the serenity of nothing. It was the most peace she had ever felt in her life. Then there was something out there. It was faint at first, like a smudge of something that was just above the level of this void; nearly impossible to see if you weren’t looking for it. Then it grew brighter, and brighter still. In what felt like both an instant and an eternity it gained form. Human form. She saw him clearly now. The green of his eyes

Chapter 27 March 17, 3240, 0151 hours The Terrarium, Forerunner Station Kepler-20 System What would infuriate the Gravemind from now until the last cosmic maws radiated into nothing was how it may have never been able to understand NICOLE. It had reached out and touched her; consumed her, and learned of her, but it could not control her. Every ancilla, servitor, construct, and artificial intelligence it had taken into its embrace had been more than willing to join its voice, to make their melody that much sweeter. This was not what it had expected; not what it wanted. It had sung its most sweetest melodies, but even had she had joined her voice, they would never be in harmony. Why? The long reaches of time had allowed it the opportunity to absorb knowledge and minds of things that might have considered themselves gods. He had bested the strongest ancillae the Forerunner ecumene had thrown at it, perverted the mind of Mendicant Bias, and had frozen the heart of the very strongest

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