Fourteen: The Rise and Fall of the Ark
The Librarian had left them the Audacity, with the intention that someday they would pass the ship on to humanity "when they were ready". Her imprint left it up to them to decide when that would be, but in the meantime, the ship was available for their use. While everyone else was hunting down materials for the reconstruction of the Greater Ark, John and a few Builders and Warrior-Servants took Audacity to its last known location to see what was left of the facility.
It was so much worse than they imagined.
The Spartan heard moans of grief in the back of his mind, even as he himself nearly choked on his own tongue, fists tight on the hard light displays.
The Greater Ark was a ruin.
What had once been a magnificent installation, a much more massive six-petal version of the Lesser Ark, was now just twisted wreckage and debris. The Flood-controlled star roads had done their destructive work so well that he couldn't tell what it had originally looked like, or even what was the Ark and what was Omega Halo.
And the bodies.
Silver-Moon-of-Fortitude crouched in a corner of the bridge, huddled up and weeping; even her ancilla was unable to soothe her. She had lost two blood-siblings and her last imprint mentor in the destruction, but it was one thing to know they were dead. It was another thing entirely to see the wreckage the Flood had made of their lives' work - and their actual lives.
Audacity steered carefully around the edges of the debris field, shields shimmering as micro particles hit them. "Nothing at all active," said Relentless Pursuit - formerly Offensive Bias. Since he would not be installed as the Monitor of the Lesser Ark, he had elected to join the Fleet and had taken on a new name in reflection of his new life.
"Nothing?" John repeated, "Not even just a sensor array?"
"Nothing," Relentless repeated, "or nothing that Audacity can detect."
There were no star roads either. Whether for good or ill, most of them had likely been destroyed with the Firing.
John pressed the heels of his palms into his eye sockets and cursed as fiercely and as foully as he knew how. He'd hoped that there would have been something to work with, to build off of, but no. Nothing.
just dust and echoes
"Scan for anything we can salvage as raw materials - and analyze the local field lines, if there are any. If the Omega Halo firing did any significant damage, we'll need to move. We probably should anyway; no sense giving the Flood a free pass if by chance the Gravemind remembers where the Greater Ark was."
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Strangely enough, with the ecumene gone and no other faster-than-light travel anywhere else in the galaxy, the Fleet's Slipspace budget was essentially unlimited.
Nice.
Even so, without the might of the ecumene, it took a long time for them all to choose a suitable replacement location for the new Greater Ark (briefly designated Installation Eat My Ass by an extremely sleep-deprived Silver-Moon when asked about the numbering sequence). It took longer still for them to revamp and modify the design of the old Greater Ark, both to incorporate new advancements in technology and to shrink the size of the Foundry so that it could produce newer Halos of its own, if necessary.
(They hoped it wouldn't be.)
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John ducked as a Retriever Sentinel swooped overhead, carrying a segment of Forerunner metal the size of a UNSC frigate. It had only taken a thousand years to get everything in position, but now they were laying in the framework of the Greater Ark, thousands of Retrievers built specifically to construct and maintain the new Ark. Work was progressing quickly; the Foundry was already complete, with the rest of the skeleton fanning out from its central hub.
This Ark was massive, even bigger than the last; if it had been built while the ecumene was whole, it really would have beggared the entire empire from one end to the other - save the Builders who made it.
John kept walking along the frame of one of the petals. It was thin and narrow, but only in comparison to the rest of the superstructure; the band was really miles wide. He reached the very tip of it, then turned back to look at the rest of it.
The bare framework looked almost like a knot of star roads, like a spider web spread out around something like a Halo ring with a planetoid in the center of it. [We'll need to capture another soon. This one's starting to look thin.]
'Already on it, Commander. Also, is it okay if we swing by Maethrillian? I don't like the thought of the Organon just sitting there in the open where anyone could find it.'
[I'd hardly call Maethrillian "the open", but go ahead and scout out the situation. And I want to know if moving the Organon here would affect the Domain within the Milky Way. If it does, we'll just have to post a permanent guard rotation or seal it up where it can't be found easily.]
'We'll run simulations as best we can.'
John moved out of the way as another Retriever swooped by, fitting in the last segment to connect the bands of this petal and fusing it in place. Then he looked up through the superstructure overhead.
The Milky Way swirled beyond, glowing bright and warm in the void. Earth was somewhere in that tangle of light, humans and Gultanr and all the other species living, growing, learning again.
[Have all Halos but Zero-Four and Zero-Five sterilize themselves of the Flood. I don't want so much as a single cell left.]
'Understood.'
'Is that wise?' the Librarian's imprint whispered in his ear. She was hitching a ride in his armor for the time being. 'The installations could continue research…'
[We both know there's no cure, and we can search for resistant genetics ourselves better than they ever could. I don't want to risk someone stumbling across the ring and saying, "Hm. I wonder what this is?" and causing another Forerunner-Flood War.]
'Fair enough.'
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A moan of grief woke him, and he shoved himself upright, blinking. It sounded just like when they had arrived to see the ruins of the Greater Ark, and he turned his attention to the waves of distress propagating through the Hive. [Talk to me.]
'Commander… Maethrillian…'
He looked through their eyes.
Maethrillian was devastated as well. Much of the planet had been shattered by such a close-range firing of so many of the older Halos, their radiation tuned by Mendicant Bias to do heavy damage to the capital itself as well as its occupants. The wreckage was spread over thousands of kilometers, orbiting the star with what was left of the planet.
John fell back to the bed with a thump. [The Ark first,] he said, [We finish our home first. Then we can rebuild the Capital. For now, search for anything usable or valuable, culturally or just in general, and bring it here. If necessary, we can always put it back later, but we can't retrieve it if Maethrillian falls out of orbit into the sun.]
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It took two thousand years from start to finish to complete the Greater Ark. At nearly three hundred and fifty thousand kilometers in diameter and almost a thousand kilometers thick, it was the largest construct ever built by any part of the ecumene, even just their own little remnant.
John retracted the armor covering his hands to let his fingers run through the ends of the long grass as he walked. [Is this facility satisfactory?] he asked the Librarian, [You mentioned that you wouldn't mind working as this installation's Monitor.]
'More than satisfactory,' she answered, 'And with the entanglement beacons, I'll be able to watch over the home galaxy as well. You all have done magnificent work.'
The entanglement beacons were exactly what they sounded like: transmitters that used quantum entangled particles to instantly communicate information across the galaxy. One had been installed on the Lesser Ark to monitor it and the Halo Array, and one had been installed in what was known as the Absolute Record to monitor all other Forerunner installations. There were facilities on so many planets that now they essentially didn't need to return to the Milky Way to keep track of what was going on.
And of course, there was one with the Fleet, so they all could maintain contact at all times.
John climbed a high hill and sat down on a rock at the top to look back out over the steppe, grass stalks waving in ripples of wind. [We can transfer you in whenever you're ready.]
'The sooner the better. I watched you all construct this installation, but I will still need time to acclimate to it.'
[Easily done.] The Spartan tilted his head back and closed his eyes.
'What troubles you?'
[...my world. Whatever's left of it.] He opened his eyes again and stared up at the sky. It looked blue like Earth's, but he knew it was a lie, just the phase-shift of the light from the artificial star. [It's been almost three thousand years. I made the decision to stay here and help because I don't know how to reverse what the Gravemind did in order to go home. But I still miss what I lost in the Taking. Who I lost.]
'Your family, your allies. And your ancilla, Cortana.'
[Probably her most of all,] he said quietly, [She and I are the last survivors of the full Halo Campaign - or we were, at any rate. I'm here, and she's probably succumbed to rampancy by now.]
'"Probably"?'
[Cortana survived a month alone with a Gravemind, and came out the other side reasonably okay. I will never, ever underestimate her.]
'Even so, three thousand years is a long time for one of your ancillae.'
[Perhaps. But seeing as I'll most likely never know one way or another, I'd rather hold out hope.]
Even if I never go home, I hope she did.