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       If given the choice, Robert Steel would have liked his final words to have been profound, important; even epic in their delivery. Unfortunately, as is often the case, they were spontaneous when they finally arrived.

       "Aww, I can't die today, it's my birthday..."

       As it was, a bigger, more meaningful quip would have been wasted on his surroundings. All alone and cocooned in a heavy shell of Titanium-A, his only companions were an old, almost rickety seat and a control panel of frantically blinking lights. The lights were attempting to warn him of his
impending doom, but after several moments of wrestling with gravity and cursing a flawed understanding of physics, Bob realized that his life, short as it was, was reaching an end.

       Enter the uncreative, mildly comical final expulsion.

       The moment of his actual death was a strange mix of horrific pain and terror, consumed by the sight of the vast, silvery structure he was colliding with. His flesh burned and froze simultaneously as the ship dumped it's fragile atmosphere, and what remained in the cabin lit fire as the engines exploded. It hurt. And he was dead.

       And then...he was not.

       Bob sat up after several minutes of laying on a cold metal table, unsure why he was waking up at all. The surroundings were nothing like the ones he had left; the walls were silvery and reflective, with an odd transparency that showed faint lines of light a few inches behind the actual touchable
surface. The lines moved, and Bob felt a weird flashback to a childhood history class when a bored teacher had played an ancient movie called "The Matrix." The lines of code dropping and falling and rising just barely escaped his understanding. When he finally managed to defocus his eyes from the puzzle, he
was able to see his faint reflection. His skin carried none of the burn scares he would have expected to see covering his body...which he could see clearly. Whoever had fixed him up had left him completely nude.

       Dropping his hands to hide the intensely important organ situated below, he glanced around for his cloths, a hospital gown, or anything that might suffice in defending his modesty.

       The area was unadorned aside from a single bed and a single doorway. In the doorway stood a creature that had somehow escaped his first survey of the room, and Bob blinked in surprise as the strangest woman he'd ever seen looked him over critically. He flushed from the tips of his toes to the roots of his hair, and stuttered what might have been a greeting.

       Behind the woman, something moved, glided, drifted...and as his eyes focused on the... thing behind his visitor, his jaw dropped open and the resulting scream was cut off as his mind passed blissfully back out of awareness.

       This time, without any words at all.

       The sound of an earbud beeping faintly some short distance away was more than enough to pull the Spartan back to consciousness. John stifled a yawn, and reached to the small table beside the bed he as sleeping in with one hand. He slipped the bud into his ear, and winced reflexively at the tone of the voice
that was already speaking to him.

       "...been paging you for like an hour and I'm supposed to know
where you are. Do they care that I'm not your keeper? No, just, 'Cortana, do this' and 'Cortana, you wouldn't mind...' all day long." John closed his eyes again, and settled back down.

       "I'm here. What's going on?"

       "Well, Captain Messing wants to meet up with you before your briefing today, and there's apparently some dignitaries who requested an audience as well. I'm supposed to inform you your schedule got bumped up by three hours. As if being your personal secretary was my greatest aspiration for the seven years I get to work with."

       "Thank you for the information." John yawned again.

       There was a long moment of silence on the other line. Finally, Cortana broke it with the sort of wistful statement he was beginning to dread hearing. "Tell Halley I said hello."

       "If I see her, I will." The line clicked dead. Cortana wasn't buying it. She never did.

       Nestled into the crook of his arm, Halley muttered, slowly waking up. John took the time to marvel at the fine white mass of hair that was draped over his shoulder, it's fine texture and unusual color. She stretched out under the sheets and tilted that near-perfect, faintly scarred face up at his. Not for the
first time since he'd met her, she took his breath away. He didn't mind the feeling anymore.

       "Good morning."

       "She's not buying it." Halley smirked and laid her head back down, fingers lightly running a well known course over the scars on his chest. As he'd practically thought the same thing himself, there wasn't much he could say to that.

       "I have to get started early today. Diplomacy."

       "How early?"

       "I have about two hours."

       Halley snickered softly, and looked up, a mischievous grin on her impish face. "However could we pass the time?"

       Unable to resist, he laughed.

       The tech on duty by the cryotube jumped about a mile as the Master Chief of the Spartans woke up laughing. The sound choked off in a horrified gasp, and the Chief's helmet speakers went dead. The tech, realizing he'd been privy to something that was really none of his business, backed slowly
away.

       Jhonen stared at the spatial edifice growing in the [I]Draconic's forward view. It was a visual absurdity, like a giant, opaque mirror; the approaching ship showed in a blurry reflection. It was difficult to see at all, as the reflections of dark space around them hid most details from the ship's sight. On her holopad, Draconic watched the same, and she turned her head towards Jhonen with a mischievous grin.

       "I look pretty good, don't I?" She gestured at the reflection as they got closer and came into better focus.

       Jhonen ignored her and leaned forward, frowning as the ship's running lights came on and lit the silvery surface up. "Is that really necessary?"

       "Well, do YOU know what it is?" She lifted a blond eyebrow over her visor, shifting her weight to one hip."

       "Well, no, but I was trying to figure that out before you blinded me--"

       "Oh yeah, because your impressive visual acuity holds a candle to this ship's sens--"

       "That's enough, children." Cortana cut through the childish argument and materialized on a holopad on Jhonan's other side. "The answer is that no one knows what it is, but that's what we're here to find out. If the coordinates are correct, there should be an artifact contained here."

       "It's so far from a planetoid, though. Who builds a space station this far from a sun?" Jhonan blushed as Cortana leveled her gaze at him. Draconic was easy to deal with, but Cortana was the classic "older woman" in the scenario, and the form she picked as her visual display didn't leave much to the imagination.

       "Someone who didn't want it found. Who, incidentally, failed…we're not the first people out here." All eyes turned to the ex-pilot. "Counting our present position as our north/south axis, there's a cloud of debris still slowly dispersing on the south end of the tower."

       Cortana blinked and reviewed the data, nodding. "Good eye." She tilted her head, and the symbols ran along her body faster. "Given speed and direction…and the fact that this is the only gravitational body in a few million AUs…" She pursed her lips and leaned forward. "I'd say the crash happened only a few weeks ago."

       "Sensors agree with your analysis. No signs of a pilot though. That thing was destroyed on impact. Leftover radiation suggests it had Shaw-Fujukawa engines, though…surprising on a vessel that size."

       "But it wasn't in Slipspace at the time, or it would have passed right through. Well, at least with our understanding of physics. Interesting." Cortana stuck her tongue out a fraction and bit it, thinking. The sound of the doors to the cabin opening brought her head around, and the heavy metal steps of a Spartan and Lieutenant Matthieson overrode her thoughts. There was a pause, and The lieutenant started talking, but she didn't hear it. The Chief had taken one look at her and balled his hand into a fist. His head had dropped a fraction. Averting his eyes.

       The digital representation of guilt slammed into Cortana's mind. Another of Halley's expressions had been reflected on her face.

       Will I ever stop screwing up?

       "So what do you have for us?" Matthieson took a seat in the captain's chair as the Chief turned to one of the unmanned stations to read the basic diagnostics beginning to scroll by.

       "Best we can see is that it's a giant, impervious silver space station, with traces of a human vessel dispersing from one of the lower 'towers.'" Now lit up in the Draconic's running lights, the entire structure's face could be seen. It was vaguely shaped like a child's building blocks stacked base to base, with four towers jutting from the upper and lower end of the squareish main body. There was nothing to suggest guns or doorways. The main body was big enough to hold a battle cruiser and still leave elbow room, dwarfing the Draconic as she hovered alongside.

       "Any readings to suggest activity?" The Spartan spoke up, his low voice ice cold and utterly devoid of emotion.

       "That's where it gets weird." Drac tapped her chin, scowling. "Nothing, either this thing is totally dead or it has the kind of shielding that ONI would kill for. I'm guessing the latter for two reasons." She held up one silver laced finger. "There's no damage whatsoever to the tower that got hit, and two," she held up a second for emphasis, "this thing has kept it's exact coordinates over the course of a few millennia. That defies our understanding of physics."

       "I agree with her, actually," Cortana mused. John took a moment to give her a good look, impressed by what he saw. The fractured, distracted Cortana of the last year or so had been replaced by the cool, calm AI that he'd been so fond of years ago. He wondered where their partnership had fallen apart, and unbidden a pale face crowded his memory. Dr. Halsey's features really did play a huge part in his life; first in his childhood, then reinvented in blue, and finally on that scarred, once-loved face. "There's no hint of background radiation either, not even a peep."

       "Okay. So where's the door to knock on?"

       "Err…we haven't found one, but we're not done searching the whole structure yet." Cyke walked in as she was speaking, moving to his station and immersing himself in the readings.

       "Thanks for waking me, Drac." He shot a look at Jhonen, who held his hands up in mock defense.

       "Hey, I was gonna wake you the second we had any real info." The younger man pointed at the silvery shape outside the ship. "Well, yeah, but it's just a thing still. That's not really info."

       "Knock it off, both of you." Matthieson frowned at the boys running the helm. "I want some probes launched around this thing, lets see if there's a way in." There were a few moments of awkward silence as everyone went about their assigned tasks.

       "Got it." Drac finally spoke up again, grinning like a Cheshire cat. "North side, between the towers. There's some kind of iris." She waved a hand and brought the image up from the probe. "Looks like this whole ship could fit inside, if that thing opens the whole way."

       "Good. Take us there, and see if you can find a way to knock on the doors. Politely, if possible."

       Drac responded with a snort. Matthieson raised a brow; the pilots hid snickers, and Cortana rolled her eyes. John watched their interaction with half a mind, preoccupied by the unending whispers of memory. He glanced to his left, and froze in place. Sam, his best childhood friend, was standing there. A sandy haired boy of seven or eight, a face so well loved and so long lost. John felt younger than he had in years, and Sam, for all his youth, still stood a bit taller than him. A smile, a forgotten expression, curled John's lips.

       "You're it, no tag-backs!" Sam shouted it with glee and punched John's arm. The Spartan blinked, and yelled back.

       "Not fair!" He looked right and saw Kelly standing there, grinning too.

       "I'll get him." She offered her hand, and he slapped it.

       "Kelly's it!"

       "Aww SHIT!" Sam ran as fast as he could, but Kelly overtook him easily, barreling him over and giggling as they hit the ground. John laughed and ran after them to join the dog pile, and an adult 117 watched the younger self run away into nothingness, only the cold interior of the ship to be seen. John let out a breath he'd been holding, and snapped his head back to the others on the bridge. They each appeared to be returning to themselves from a similar reverie.

       "What…the hell…was that?" Jhonen and Cyke seemed slightly traumatized, and Matthieson looked horrified.

       "Some kind of pulse just hit us." Drac was abuzz with view screens hovering around her holographic form, and pulling up more by the moment. "Tracking. Translating. I have no idea." Her personality was scaled back to almost nothing as she threw all her processors into the task.

       "I saw…I saw the past." John frowned. "Maybe thirty-five or thirty-six years ago."

       "Yeah. Me too." Matthieson gulped. "But that was beyond freaky…thirty-six years ago my mother was pregnant. With me." His face had a green cast to it.

       "Shit, I saw…I don't know, what the hell? Just black, like I passed out or something." Jhonen glanced at Cyke.

       "Same here."

       "We're getting reports from all over the ship. Most of the crew is awake, and it seems everyone just experienced whatever that was. With the exception of us, Draconic." The blue AI glanced at the younger form, who nodded; now at the center of a slow moving tornado of images and information.

       "Is it going to happen again?"

       "Unknown." Drac dropped a third of the screens with a flick of her wrist. "I couldn't have told you the first one was going to happen either." She shook her head. "There's a new radiation on the sensors, it looks like there's a residue. If I didn't know better, I'd say they look almost…temporal. Cortana?"

       "I see it too. It looks like the radiation that the ship was bathed in when we tried to jump into slip-space with Dr. Halsey's artifact." She opened her mouth, and then paused. "What the--"

       "We're getting hit with another--"

       Jonah Matthieson stood by a cradle, his head tilted to the side as he watched the baby sleeping in it. His mother and her new husband were screaming downstairs, their usual fare for the evening. The sound of shattering glass made him jump, and the baby woke up and started crying. These were the worst, she was already half drunk, and the last thing the baby needed was a pissed off, abusive mother trying to shut him up. He reached into the cradle and lifted little Jhonen up, holding him like he'd been taught and rocking him slowly, while carefully retreating to his bedroom in case she decided to check up on the baby. The crying subsided, and his little half-brother hiccupped, closing soaked lashes and starting to drift back off to sleep. Matthieson stood in the darkness, still rocking the baby by the window. "Someday, we're gonna get out of here, little bro. We're gonna go to space in a rocketship and leave all of this behind. And I am going to make sure nobody ever hurts you, ever. You got that, little man?" He moved the baby to his shoulder, and a little hand curled in his rebelliously long hair. "I will always protect you."

       He was still looking out a window, but it was the ship's front view again. He gulped, overcome with emotion. Cyke was blinking, and the Chief was being…the Chief. Jhonen, however, was choking back a sob, and he stared up at his brother in awe.

       "I never knew…she never…" Not usually one for acting emotional, he struggled to put it into words. "God…you always did, didn't you? You always took care of me, and you got us off that rock of a planet…"

       "I promised." The lieutenant scowled to banish any other emotion, and shot a glare at Draconic. She shrugged.

       "I tried to warn you. At least this time I located the source of the disturbance."

       "Finally some good news."

       "Not really." Cortana nodded in agreement. "It's actually emanating from the Shaw-Fujikawa engines." Drac shifted uncomfortably. "Which are now locked down…and I can't take them off standby."

       "Let me guess. I'm going to have to go there and shut them off manually." The Master Chief spoke up, sounding half disgusted. "That's what happens every time there's a crisis. I have to do it by hand." Cortana half smiled at that.

       "He's right, too…I spent half of my time on the Halos sending him off to do one task or another." She shrugged. "And you're right, actually, the pins that lock the engines in drive are far too hard to remove without some serious strength behind it."

       "It should be automatic." Drac split her concentration, most of her mind had been fighting since everything started to keep the engines from jumping them into slipspace. The programming had taken on a mind of it's own. What would happen then was anyone's guess, but given the strange temporal hallucinations everyone had been suffering every time the engines started to run, it wouldn't be good. "But I can't stop it, I'm running myself ragged just holding her together as it is."

       On an entirely different wavelength, Cortana reached out through the mainframe of the ship's computer to tap Drac. The sight from this altered perspective was haunting; Drac was hiding the real danger to herself from the bridge crew. How long can you sustain this?

       Not long. It's pulling me apart here. If you could get the Chief to pull the manual release, I might be able to salvage something of my mind. God, this hurts.

       There was just enough whimper in her words to kick Cortana into overdrive. Usually she wasn't protective of anyone other than the Chief, let alone some upstart fourth-gen AI who thought the universe was created to be her plaything. But there was something downright maternal in her new emotions, and she spared a fleeting thought to the forerunner code that had rebuilt her. "Chief, you need to go. Now."

       "Another puls--"

       The room around him was huge, decorated to be inviting towards children, but at the same time strangely cold and unfeeling. The child who would one day be renamed as Cyclone stared with horrified fascination at his surroundings. There were already three children in the room, and a fourth was being checked in at the doorway. All close in age, he didn't see anyone he knew. His mother smiled at him and shooed him to a table where two of the children were already playing with blocks, and he went over with a pout on his face. The girl at the table glared at him and moved her blocks back from his reach, and the boy just ignored him.

       Bubbling laughter cut through the room, and a sixth child entered, hand in hand with one of the biggest people Cyke's child-self had ever seen. Tall, with close cropped blond hair and icy blue eyes, the man's demeanor screamed military. The girl grinned up at him, and he let go of her hand, kneeling down and talking to her softly. His barely audible voice was like a low purr from across the room, and the girl sobered, nodding. He kissed her for head and stood up, and the girl skipped over towards Cyke with a smile. He gulped; she was pale and pretty and laughing…and given how uncomfortable his surroundings were making him, he clung to the light-hearted smile she offered him.

       "Hi! I'm Katie." She had the lightest blue eyes he'd ever seen, the lights from overhead seemed to pass right through them like shallow water.

       "I'm Nate." He smiled back, and she looked at the other two.

       "You?" The boy looked up, and Nate realized that the boy wasn't being mean, simply terribly shy.

       "Kyle." The girl looked at Katie with a mean scowl, and tossed her hair.

       "My mommy told me not to tell my name to strangers." Nate knew the kind of girl she was, he could see a bully coming a mile away. His mom said he was very perceptive. The girl looked threatened, and she stood up in an attempt to look menacing. He smiled a little when they all realized that Katie stood just a little taller.

       "Well, okay no-name. How about you go play over there, I'm gonna play blocks with my new friends." She smiled and leaned forward, her grin downright impish. The other girl balled a fist. "I wouldn't, if I was you." She glanced back over to the adults, most of whom were discussing among themselves. Only one was watching them, and she seemed very intent on their little exchange. "My daddy could kick your daddy's butt."

       Nate giggled, the bully yelled something and swung a fist, Katie ducked--

       And Cyke was back in his seat, with Drac hovering serenely on the pedestal next to him.

       "It's over, go quickly, each time the pulse is more refined. I don't know what will happen if we hit the temporal event horizon, and I really, really don't want to know."

       Arriving at an unfamiliar space station in the middle of the night was not the best way to make an entrance. Bekka couldn't help the shiver of apprehension as Patki rapped lightly on the heavy metal door before them. She shifted her weight uneasily, shouldering her few belongings with care. Patki sighed, and rapped louder. A circle irised open at Sangheili eye-level, and a pair of bright gold eyes stared out.

       "What is it?" Patki smiled down at Bekka, confident.

       "My father said he would send you word of visitors." The opening shut, and the door slid smoothly open to show a dimly lit foyer and a huge Sangheili female with her hands on her hips. If she'd had a tail, it would have been lashing.

       "Oh good, even less space in my house tonight." She stepped back, and waved a hand, the lights in the main room raising to show a well furnished living space. "He did not mention an Odyssian."

       "She is not one. This is Bekki, and she has been my friend since childhood." His tone dared her to dispute it. Instead, she rolled her eyes.

       "Two humans in one night, and neither of them trained to service. What is this base coming to?" She walked towards one of the circular doorways in the back of the room. Three others were firmly closed. "You sleep in there, I will sort you out in the morning." She muttered under her breath and headed back towards the farthest door without further comment. Patki shrugged to his smaller companion, and headed into the room. Bekka sighed and followed.

       He was fast, god he was fast. Bekka leapt out through the doorway, looking back and forth frantically for cover. Patki laughed behind her, and she had only moments to get into hiding. It was their game, a game they had been playing for years. With his greater size and speed, it was a very one sided experience, but Bekka had managed to get away a few times. It had kept her alive when other Sangheili went after her, knowing how to move and where to hide, and she dove into the center of the room. Her ankle caught the edge of the landing and she went down hard. She glanced back, heart racing, as Patki approached, grinning wide with all mandibles exposed. He paused in his mock attack though, looking past Bekka to the other side of the landing.

       A figure stood there, a little smaller than Bekka but somehow remarkably dangerous looking, white-haired but with a teenager's face; a woman dressed in cast-off Sangheili garb. Bekka blinked in astonishment, she'd never seen a human allowed to wear such things. The other girl took the whole sight in and blinked. And moved like no one Bekki had ever seen. She was across the room by the time the prone woman could draw in a breath, and she was airborne with one fist drawn back. She seemed to hang in the air a moment, and then time caught up as she slammed the elite in the chest with a hit that Bekka would have considered impossible. Patki stumbled back, growling. He brought his fist around, but the human woman slammed her forearm up and caught the wrist, ducking under his arm and slamming the back of her heal into the back of his knee. The warrior dropped to one knee, and the woman wrapped her leg around his throat; her knee lined up with his neck and the muscles clenched in a vise grip.

       Patki squawked in astonishment, gasping for breath.

       "WAIT!!" Bekka screamed, fearing for his life. The woman paused, and locked demonic blue eyes on the frantic woman's. "Please, don't hurt him, we were playing!"

       The words had been in terrified English, and the woman released Patki immediately, staring in unguarded amazement at Bekka. "Playing?"

       "Yeah, he would never hurt me, it's just a game to keep my reflexes up. You…you were trying to protect me." The fear melted into astonishment.

       "It's what I do," the stranger muttered.

       "I do not know what is going on here," a voice spoke up in Sangheili, sounding very angry, "but there is no violence in my house." Patki's aunt stood facing the three, a plasma rifle in one hand. The look she was giving the white-haired woman could have cowed Elites in full battle-armor, but the girl she was trying to stare down simply snorted.

       She must have a death wish. The thought popped unbidden into Bekka's mind, as a third Sangheili stepped into the scene between the glowing Covenant weapon and the girl in it's path.

       "Follow your own rules, then. For the Arbiter's sake I would maintain peace here, but you will not harm Hay-lee while I have breath to stop you."

       "Miira…" Halley blinked, her expression gone from casually menacing to stupefied.

       "I do not suffer fools who threaten my friends."

       "Friend." The word dropped from the demon's lips like it hadn't been thought of in years, and the two women stared at each other, contemplating this sudden shift in their relationship. The owner of the domicile looked at the children bickering in her living room, and plopped into a swinging chair with an annoyed sigh.

       "This is the last time I allow visitors."

       "So you aren't really human?" Bekka sat back on one of the couches, finally getting some time alone with the girl they called "The Demon."

       "Depends on how you define human. Genetically, yes, I read as human. But I wasn't conceived, I wasn't carried in a human womb, and I spent the whole of my life as an enhanced super-soldier for the UNSC. Humanity is relative." She scowled at the younger woman, but the girl seemed blithely unaware of what that glare was supposed to do to her. She was grinning from ear to ear.

       "Close enough, I'd say. How old are you anyway? The whole of your life can't be THAT long."

       "Mid to late thirties at this point. I haven't had a calendar to check in a while."

       "No way! You look, like, fifteen or something." Halley winced.

       "Slow aging." She frowned. "How did you come here?"

       "I was taken when Jericho Seven fell. Adopted as a servant into Patki's house. My life's boring though. What about you? Do you have, like, a husband or something?"

       John. It hurt to think of the name. "No." Something in her face took Bekka aback, her excited look turning more sympathetic.

       "Do you want to go back there? To the army?" There was a taste of yearning in the girl's voice. Something in Halley's eyes shifted; Bekka's breath congealed in her throat at the absolute pain and loss that hid in the soldier's gaze. Halley's voice fell tonelessly.

       "If I could," she swallowed painfully, "I'd give anything."

       Bekka hung her head. There was nothing else to say.

       At this distance the finish line was no thicker then a pencil drawing across the hard rubber of the track; it might as well have been decorated in neon lights with checkered flags waving frantically on either side. Jame stared it down, keeping her head as cool as possible while inwardly dreading the feel of cold metal that was about to be slapped into her hand. She turned her head to the left and shook it to clear the brown mess out of her eyes, smiling a little as Kate's slender form rocketed through the second lap of the relay race. The Irish woman outstripped the other runners, gaining a sizeable lead.

       Which is a good thing, I'm gonna need all the lead I can get. It wasn't that Jame was a bad runner; in competitions where she had a chance to hit her stride she did excellent, she boasted a stamina that put her right up there with the boys in distance running. However, the anchor's job was to sprint the final lap. Not her cup of tea at all.

       That was the whole point of the exercise though; taking the marines out of their element and forcing them to cope. She set her feet and put back her hand, wishing she could look back to see when she was going to take the baton, but taking her eyes off the finish line would add seconds to her time, and she was determined not to let her team down. I can do this. I can do this.

       Behind her the sound of feet slapping the rubber drew closer, and she heard Tim's breathless whisper a second before the baton hit her fingers. "Go get 'em, girl." She grinned. It was amazing what your friends could do with nothing more then putting their trust in you. She ran, legs pounding and breath running short. She was going to make it. She was going to win.

       The feel of corrugated rubber under her boots melted into solid metal deck plating, and the finish line resolved into a seven-foot tall armored soldier. Jame learned a very interesting lesson as she crashed into him; Marines bounce.

       She didn't even hit the floor; he reacted faster then she could blink, catching her by the shoulders halfway down. She was set back on her feet carefully, the Spartan handling her like she was glass. He stared down at her for a long moment as she gathered her thoughts. It was very disorienting being tossed back through her memories and re-living them one at a time, but she remembered where and when she was through the fog.

       "Do you know where the engine room is on this ship?" His voice was so low in pitch and smooth that it was almost a purr. Jame blinked at him, dredged up the layout of the ship from her abused recollections, and pointed back into the hallway she had just run through.

       "Back that way till you have to make a turn, go left, then right, and it's through the third door on your right."

       "Thank you." He moved past her swiftly towards the engines, and Jame smiled at his back.

       "You're welcome." She put her hands on her hips and turned around. Standing there was the doctor who'd done her physical the year before, and in his hand was the vaccination needle that had nearly sent her screaming down the hall at the time. Her face blanched white.

       "Aww, you have got to be kidding me!"

       It had to happen eventually. She'd been enough a part of his life that in flashbacks, she had to appear at some point. But he hadn't been braced for it; for the sensation of her asleep on his chest, snoring softly, one hand gripped tightly around his dog tags. The smell of the salt air on Heoris 4, a brief evening stolen between missions, the silk of her hair under his lips when he'd leaned down to kiss the white crown as she slept. That damnible feeling of surety, immortality that they all had but never admitted. She had to be dead.

       She was haunting him.

       John sighed and pressed on, taking the curvy little marine's directions to the engine room. The yellow and black lines made it simple to distinguish where the manual cut-off was located, but the little panel that should have allowed him to punch in the override was dead to the world. He sighed and keyed the bridge over his comm.

       "Draconic, I can't override from here, the panel is dead. Is there a physical manual override here somewhere?"

       "Busy. Right. Now." There was a great deal of static on the line. "….should be handles…pin locking…"

       The Chief sighed, already knowing the futility of trying to get more help from the overstretched AI. The handles she spoke of her visible, as were the large metal pins locking them firmly in place. "That's the worst excuse for a manual override that I've ever seen." He wasn't sure who he was talking to, but saying it aloud helped.

       He grabbed the handle and pulled, but it didn't budge at all. He positioned himself to get as much leverage as possible and rocked his weight and strength against it, hearing the faintest mockery of metal groaning but not giving. The ship trembled, and he knew another temporal wave was coming. Heoris had only been a few months ago, less than three weeks before Halley had been impaled by the artifact. John wrapped both arms around the handle and propped his legs against the wall, using his entire body to pull. Before the pins gave out, his shoulders did, and he collapsed to the deck as the world shifted again.

       Draconic was dizzy from the streams of information, forcing the engines not to fire was literally killing her. Cortana hovered nervously nearby, but the younger AI was determined not to kill both of them. They could both see the event horizon slamming down on them. Draconic gasped, as she would have in life, and turned to the blue AI.

       "She's yours now. Take care of my boys, okay?" Cortana flinched. Draconic ripped into her own coding, splitting herself down the middle, and using the Covenant code that Cortana herself had discovered years before to craft a copy of her own persona. She threw the willing copy into the fraying fabric of the mainframe, and severed herself from the ship.

       In the cargo bay, a shielded, unused, and previously unnoticed cryo-pod sat, unaffected by the maelstrom around it. Three bright green lights shimmered, and the fourth blinked red steadily, as it had for months.

       The light paused, and blinked green.

       He could smell the grass. The sun was beating down like a familiar companion, and the courtyard of the Spartan Complex on Obsidan glowed like a green gem. The blanket under him felt coarse. John turned his face up to look at Halley, smiling at her but feeling an odd disorientation. She smiled back, arms around her knees, oblivious to his confusion.

       Her hair was too long.

       In all the years he'd known her, she never grew it past her shoulders; military length. Here her hair tumbled down her shoulders almost to the blanket, a white waterfall. She sighed, and turned her face to the sun.

       "We have to think of a name, you know." She looked back to him again, one corner of her mouth twisting up wryly.

       His memory-self laughed and nodded. "Samuel."

       "Pssht. And if it's a girl?" She dropped one hand to her belly idly, and the obvious curve under her fingers thrilled his memory-self as much as it had since she first told him he was going to be a father.

       A father.

       They had passed the event horizon. He was seeing a possible future. And if it was possible…then…

       She's still alive. He reached out, willing his memory-self to touch her face. Under his fingers, her face changed, the hair shortened, and the bright sunlight was banished to a dimly blue-lit room. She looked back at him; astounded, and the pain and insanity that looked back at him was heartbreaking.

       "J…John?" She froze, opening and closing her mouth like a suffocating fish. She drew in breath to speak.

       And then she was gone, and the engine room loomed around him. John grunted and sat up, eyes narrowed at the manual handle. He had to live. He felt like the room had tripled in gravity, just drawing breath was hard. Gravity. "Draconic, I need your help, NOW."

       Cortana responded, her voice soft. "Draconic's gone, she sacrificed herself to buy us time."

       "I need you to triple the gravity in this room. Quadruple it. I don't care, just crank it up!" The Chief stood; his shoulders ached from the abuse. He wrapped his arms around the handle, and braced himself as the gravity increased. His weight was almost too much to bear. He refused to let go, and finally the creak of solid metal shearing sounded like joyful trumpets to his ears. His abused body hit the desk. He laughed, even as hard as it was to breath. The engines sighed and powered down, and John grinned behind his helmet. He couldn't move, even after the gravity returned to normal. He didn't care. He smiled till it hurt, and then, as the medic finally stumbled into the room, he started laughing, a genuine, heartfelt laugh.

       "Samantha."

       "JOHN!!!" The shriek ripped into the night, and Miira hit the floor as she jumped in her sleep and tumbled right out of her hammock. Minutes later the other Sangheili looked into the room, a stunned and helpless Miira staring back.

       "I…I cannot make her stop." She'd shaken the demon, slapped her, yelled at her, but nothing ended the long, agonized scream. The demon's lungs couldn't possibly hold that much air, but it went on and on. This wasn't like one of her terrors; the demon sounded like she was being slaughtered.

       Bekka stepped calmly between the confused elites, and slipped in behind Halley on the cot. She wrapped her arms around the smaller woman and whispered something in the girl's ear. The horrific sound cut off. Miira blinked in astonishment. There was a moment where no one in the room dared breath.

       Halley started sobbing. Helpless, heartbroken sobs that shook her whole body. She fell against Bekka, who calmly ran her fingers through the tangled white mess of her hair, whispering softly. She rocked the cot carefully, and the elites backed away, incapable of understanding the exchange between the humans.

       The soldier, the Spartan, the demon; Halley sobbed her heart out like a lost child till she fell asleep. And behind her, calm and compassionate, the lost child held her together.

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