Interlude: Proof of Existence

When they were on Earth for a few short days, John got permission to leave base for an old library nearby. Libraries with physical books were rare nowadays, rarer than gold or platinum. But since the digital version seemed to be inaccessible (or intentionally hidden), it was real books he wanted - and real books he'd found. He'd put in a request in the planetary network, looking, and before Blue Team's most recent mission, he'd been contacted by a spunky young librarian, saying that they had a well-preserved copy of the series he wanted, held for over a hundred years at the request of an anonymous donor.

His eyes had drifted shut at that. If that garbage autobiographical series he'd written in the Parallel was here, then the Fleet was, too. They must have been the ones who'd had it held for him. But why hadn't they come?

No answers presented themselves immediately, but perhaps there would be something - a message, waiting for him in the pages of his life.

-------------------------------------------

This librarian was tiny, five foot nothing if that, barely coming up to the bottom of his ribcage, with the most vibrant pink hair he'd ever seen. It actually hurt his eyes a little looking at it, but he didn't let it show, silently following her through the atmospherically-sealed stacks to one of a handful of rooms where the ancient books could be safely handled.

"Printed in 2420," the librarian was saying cheerfully - she reminded him of Joyeuse, but thinking of his daughter made his chest go tight. "But it's not wood pulp paper like most books were back in modern times - mostly cloth fibers, like medieval books; no acid, so the pages haven't degraded. Whoever had it made wanted it to last. I don't have any gloves that'll fit you, so you're gonna have to use-"

"I have gloves," John interrupted softly, pulling the sealed package from a pocket in his fatigues, "The UNSC makes them special for us – it doesn't happen that often, but sometimes we need them."

She blinked, then grinned. "Good. I like a man who comes prepared. Now, remember, it's old as balls, okay? Be gentle when I bring it to you."

"Yes, ma'am."

He sped-read through most of it - no one had changed anything, though some sections about the post-Human-Covenant War prosperity and the founding of the Fourth Ecumene had been added in. And then-

The Fleet transitioned back to realspace somewhere else. Calling it a "transition" was putting it mildly - it was more of an out-of-control tumble, and more than one ship collided with several of the others before the ancillae got them back under control and straightened them out.

"Is this it?" Ferial asked, leaning over her shoulder to better see one of the info stations on the bridge, "Is this the place?"

Where are they?!

Nethalia jolted at the Flood's voice. No one had heard from it in centuries - they had all thought it long gone, long subsumed by the Commander. "What?!" she shouted at it.

Where are they?! it demanded, They are not here, they have vanished - where have they gone?!

Ice poured through her, and she whirled around only a second before everyone else did.

The Commander was gone, his armor shell slumped to the deck, and Lady Cortana's empty flesh lay next to it, unmoving save for involuntary processes, unresponsive even as Moons-of-Evening-Star raced to her side and bent over her.

'Assessment!' the Forerunner demanded over their collective connection.

'Nethalia…' Silver-Moon said softly, 'Look.'

The Warrior-Servant turned again.

Like the rest of the Fleet, the walls of the Perfect Storm's bridge projected an unrestricted view of the surrounding space, when someone requested it. Silver-Moon had.

The Fleet looked out over the ruins of Maethrillian, ships and parts of ships and parts of the planet and parts of people torn asunder and left adrift. She remembered well how the planet had looked when they had first returned after the Firing, but there was something different about it this time.

"What is left of the gravity well has not yet begun to pull the greater part of the debris in," said Winterspell, "I estimate that we have arrived roughly a hundred to a hundred and fifty years Post-Cataclysm."

Then where are they? the Flood demanded, Where is the other me and our wife?!

"If this is pretty much immediately Post-Firing, cosmically speaking," said Joyeuse - and good, the Commander's and Her Grace's children were still here, that was something, "then they must have returned to their proper place in time - the moment the Enemy took them. We're the ones who've been displaced."

'Then what should we do?' Fred-104 asked, speaking on behalf of not just the Spartans but the entire Fleet.

In truth, 'High Commander' was a mostly ceremonial title, like most of the 'ranks' in the Fleet. In ordinary circumstances, everyone just reported directly to their Gravemind and their fellows, linked as they were to everyone else every second of every day. But these weren't ordinary circumstances, so as the highest-ranking officer in the Fleet, it fell to Nethalia to assume command in their Commander's absence. 'The only thing we can do,' she answered the Spartan, 'Rebuild, fight our battles, and wait for our Commander and Her Grace to return.'

A bullshit 'About the Author' page followed, but the book wasn't done.

If she needed proof that their world was different than this one, Nethalia needed look no further.

With no traffic anywhere in the galaxy - or indeed anywhere in the entire Local Group - it was easy for even the Perfect Storm, massive battleship that she was, to follow the path of the Forerunners who'd survived the Forerunner-Flood War. They, too, had been following their predecessors, in a way; though they had not taken up residence near the Spider, where their fellows had once dwelled, they had journeyed to Path Kethona and scattered themselves through its stars, distant enough from each other that their children would never see another Forerunner apart from their own siblings, if they had any.

This one did. The boy saw her first, and nudged his sister, who looked up from where she'd been planting seeds in the rows carefully carved through the valley's mustard-yellow soil. The girl straightened, and for a moment, Nethalia was reminded of Joyeuse and Durandal while they had been young. After a moment of watching her pick her way around the edge of their field, they both turned and ran for the entrance to their underground home.

The Warrior-Servant didn't run after them, maintaining her steady pace along the edge of the field.

Barely a minute passed before Chant-to-Green appeared in the doorway of the house, lifting a hand to shade her eyes from the sun, which was low on the horizon behind the other Forerunner. Bornstellar was right behind her, and he recognized her first. The Ur-Didact's knowledge was still strong in him, because his eyes went wide, mouth falling open in fearful surprise.

She had known even without his reaction that this world's version of her was long dead. The whole Fleet was, with no Spartan-Gravemind to warn them, and gather them to fight.

After a moment, Bornstellar shook off his shock and stepped around Chant to come out and meet her. Nethalia slowed her pace, and met him a little ways from the house. They looked each other over for a moment, before she said, "Hello, father-in-law. I imagine that there is much news we need to share."

After the sun had set and the children had gone to bed, the adult Forerunners talked late into the night, the other two occasionally asking questions but for the most part listening as she told her story. Then, she listened to their own.

Things were not so different as they might have been. Still, it would no doubt be a comfort to the Commander to know that even though they had only saved a few thousand Forerunners total in their world, it was still more than fifty times the number of survivors in this one.

The Fleet murmured in the back of her mind. It was a comfort to them, too.

At last, even Chant was too weary to continue and went to bed. But sleep didn't come for Bornstellar, and in her armor Nethalia had no real need of it, though she had long since come to understand the pleasure of rest. They sat in silence under the stars for a long time; her ancilla told her it was almost a local hour before Bornstellar spoke again. "What will you do?"

"Go back," she answered without hesitation, then said again, "and wait for our Commander and Her Grace to return."

"And the others?" He gestured toward the sky, where the Storm was visible at the Lagrange point between the moon they were on and the gas giant it orbited.

"They are with me in this. There is no other way for us to be."

Even the Flood was in agreement. It wanted its Spartan back, and their beloved wife. If that meant pulling a Rip Van Winkle and sleeping for a hundred thousand years until his return, so be it.

Bornstellar sighed softly, and smiled. "Audacity is in the mountains east of here. You said the Librarian gave her into your keeping, as a gift for the Reclaimers when they 'came of age'. Let it be so here as well."

From there, the series jumped to the next book, which was an observation and first-contact from the Origin that devolved into something of a political thriller where the other Spartans were – surprise, surprise – just as politically inept as John was. Beyond that was the Reaving, which had been less intense without the Primordial perverting the Bellogeri and inciting the violence but much longer than the first, and so still just as bad. He read the series in full before letting the book slip closed. Then he returned it and departed in silence.

-------------------------------------------

"Chief! There you are. Got a package for you."

John paused. A package? For him? Could it be-? "From who?" he asked, turning to face the other man.

The ONI grunt squinted at the text on the box. "Eye mehd- meh-doo-ee-?"

"I Medui Cîr." The man had gotten the pronunciation reasonably close, close enough for him to guess, to recognize the words for what they actually were: literally 'The End Ships', in the Common Tongue of the Third and Fourth Ecumenes.

A more meaningful translation was The Last Fleet.

"Thank you." He accepted the package. It was small, a simple old-style cardboard box maybe the length of his hand on all of its sides. On the top was the (false) return address for the Fleet and "S-117 ℅ UNSC", along with the ONI "CLEARED" stamp. How it had actually made its way to him he had no idea, but it wouldn't take much to guess. He must have triggered something, going to look at the books, or maybe they just had eyes on him now. Maybe the package had even been waiting for him since the Battle of the Ark.

I'm watching you, Wazowski. Always watching.

He tucked the package under his arm with the rest of the equipment he was carrying, nodded to the other soldier, and departed, ignoring the man's slightly disappointed look at not getting to see the box's contents. Perhaps he would have opened it then and there if he had been sure of what it contained, if only to prevent speculation that was sure to follow - but he didn't know, so he kept it sealed.

The Spartan dropped off the equipment he had been transporting with the science team that requested it and headed to the ship's observation deck, where he had taken to spending much of his free time, such as it was. Once the door hissed shut behind him, he sat down on one of the benches, pulled out his combat knife, and carefully slit the tape holding it shut. Then he tipped the contents of the box into his hand.

A tightly coiled ball of wire rolled out onto his palm. It was a near-perfect sphere about the size of a plasma grenade, and even for solid metal, it felt oddly heavy. John frowned and held it up to get a closer look - and the light of the system's sun rippled iridescently off the strange material in a very familiar manner.

His eyes went wide, breath catching in his throat.

A Precursor star road.

He set the box down and rotated the star road in his hands to view it from all sides. That certainly explained the weight of it; as much of it as possible was folded away into another dimension, but it still needed a certain amount of mass to maintain its local tether to realspace. But he'd never heard of one being folded down so small, small enough to be carried in one hand with relative ease. The enemy Gravemind had favored massive constructions to crush Forerunner fleets and even entire planets in its grasp, and though he could sense the roads with great accuracy and manipulate them to an extent, the Spartan had never fully mastered the art before the Firing of the Array had wiped out all Precursor architecture and eliminated any chance of doing so.

But that begged the question. The Halo Array had been fired in this world as well, destroying the vast majority of said Precursor constructs - so where had this star road come from?

And possibly more importantly, could he still manipulate it? Should he? Most people could sense when they were active nearby… but he needed to know.

John closed his eyes and meditated for a moment, letting his mind empty of grief and pain and the beginning aches in his body. Then he bounced the sphere into the air and thought, :Float.:

And it did. The star road stopped in midair and hung suspended over his hand, the faintest warp of space around it, just barely visible even to his enhanced eyes.

:Unwind. Fold into realspace.:

And it did. It unspooled before his eyes, the "wire" thickening and lengthening until it was dozens of meters long and as big around as his wrist, filling most of the space on the deck. It shimmered and rolled gently along with the currents of its neural physics, rippling through the space like a ribbon through water. He watched it move, ran his hands over the smooth, featureless metal; it was untouched, unbroken, as perfect as the day it had been made millions of years ago.

John sighed with more than a little relief. It was a valuable weapon to have in case of emergencies, but he couldn't keep it out like this - out or active. If someone felt it...

:Fold away. Rewind.:

The star road shrank and wound back up again into the same tight ball as before. Unless someone got really close, they would probably think it was just wire, like he had initially. He held out his hand, and it dropped onto his palm. He squeezed it for a moment - hard enough that his fingers ached - then said, "Who's on duty?"

In an instant, a familiar ancilla appeared on the plinth nearby. One he knew well, and cared for dearly.

"A new hand touches the beacon!"

"We are not starting that shit again, Joyeuse."

The ancilla laughed brightly and smiled wide. "Hi, Dad."

He came over to kneel next to the pedestal. "You got our message?"

She nodded, grief flashing across her normally so cheerful face. "Too late. We tried to muster in time, but…" She shook her head. "By the time even one of the destroyers was ready to go, you and the Didact were fighting on the light bridge."

John sighed. "What happened, happened," he said, trying not to let his grief show, "But it's good to know you all are here."

Joyeuse frowned, eyeing him intently. "It's more than that, though."

As perceptive as her mother. "It's been a hundred thousand years since I've been alone in my own head, Joy," he said dryly, "It's too quiet. I feel like I'm losing my mind."

"Oh! Well that I can do something about. I can patch you in to our COM channels for now, and have a quantum COMlink shipped to you."

"That would be perfect, thank you. But there's something we need to do as well, and no one else can know about it."

"Ooh, keeping secrets? You know that's impossible with the Fleet."

"It's not the Fleet I want it secret from. Have you read the report about what the Librarian did to me on Genesis?"

"Of course."

"She wasn't the only one who made some modifications. Cortana improved on the Gultanr's predictive resonance; I need you to help me with the infirmary so we can take some scans and draw blood to ship back for integration. And if you can, bring one of the corvettes in on standby, just in case I need a quick escape. I don't know what might happen."

"You got it."

**********

Dig me out, dig me out,

Don't pull me towards the light.

I see no afterlife,

I've got one foot in the grave.

Dig me out, dig me out,

I see no other side.

No demons left to fight,

I've got one foot in the grave.

I've got one foot in the grave…

-"One Foot in the Grave", Letters from the Fire (Worth the Pain)

**********

I Medui Cîr - "ih mehdwee keer"