Eternity, sister to the renowned Ininifty supercarrier, is completing repairs around the lunar repair yard. Cortana has begun the AI Uprising, and a guardian is rapidly approaching Earth. While attempting to escape to link up with Eternity, the guar...
Nemean Abyss, Halo's control room, December 1st, 12:00
Dead hallways gave off a quiet hum of ancient technology. The facility was buried beneath the vast deserts of the Ring, which a particular monitor was tasked with watching over. This Monitor was female from the tone she hummed in. She had noticed the slipspace rupture that brought the large war vessel in view of her Installation. The signs of its arrival were undeniable. She was surprised this was the first time other races had found her Ring. She had not been disturbed since the Array had fired all those millennia ago.
She drifted through the halls until she arrived at the control room of Halo. Its walls were bare metal, and few lights were spread around. There was no fancy decoration on the first Ring, as it stood as a reminder of when the Array first fired. The Monitor supposed that Zeta Halo's Monitor, Despondent Pyre, must be grateful that her Ring was the most diverse and decorated to reflect the galaxy long after the reseeding. She was not jealous, but staring at the same blank hallways for millennia was taking a toll on her mind.
"I wonder what they would want from this place. This Ring is as dead as those who built it. Maybe... no, if they try that, I'll have to deploy the sentinels. I still haven't gotten their weapons to behave how I'd like, and I do not want to clean again. Last time it took years to pick up all the ash." She paused, then continued. "I must stop speaking aloud, or I'll end up like Guilty Spark. I bet that weirdo's still humming to himself."
She paused as she observed the ship moving into range of the Halo and considered that it might not be just a warship. Perhaps it was a lifeboat carrying the last of a dying race. If that were the case, they would not find anything here to sustain themselves. The gas giant the Ring orbited meant there was nothing to find there. An asteroid field surrounded them, meaning there were plenty of materials to build with but nothing to eat. In truth, she did not know how the Ring came to be here. She had tried to move the Ring to orbit a planet that was supposed to have been reseeded, but something went wrong. That was thousands of years ago, and she STILL hadn't gotten the slipspace engine to work again. It Infuriated her, but she was missing a piece of crucial information. Something had escaped her notice, and she was Infuriated.
"Thousands of years to look into the problem, yet my Ring is still stranded. How embarrassing." just then, a combat sentinel approached her, and she turned to it, observing the odd behavior.
"Yes?" The sentinel let out a series of beeps and tunes, which the Monitor translated into a report of her last weapons test. This Monitor was especially pleased with the latest results, but the newcomers dampened her mood. The Ring's scanners picked up on something then that she had not expected to encounter. A symbol was displayed in the control room for her to see, and she became ecstatic.
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