DT 2024: Strandings of The Dark Sea

‘76 days at open sea, no hint of land. Not a seabird in sight. Some days the ocean waves were strong awash, and other days still as glass.’
Spartan Andra-D054 recalled the description Lieutenant Commander Derek Frendsen read from his antique Earth novels to her during downtime between his bureaucratic meetings and her simulation training matches on the Wargames deck of the UNSC Infinity. The number of days from the original text was somewhere else in her mind, but she substituted it with the day D+76 count since October 29, 2558. The days since the rogue human artificial intelligence Cortana declared herself and other human AI the stewards of a new galactic empire, her Created.
76 days since modern society ended, supplanted by a machine rule enforced by starships from the last ancient alien galactic power from 100,000 years ago. Since her Merlin disappeared into a Slipstream portal along with one of Cortana’s infernal owl-shaped warships.
People around her were quick to tell her he was dead. Slipspace was a manipulation of spacetime singularity science, imposing three-dimensional material reality onto higher dimensions in a semi-stable wormhole from one point in spacetime to another. That was the simplistic Spartan child-soldier explanation of the advanced physics phenomenon, otherwise it mattered little. Human voyagers used Slipspace as a conduit to connect spaceships (commerce and travel) across their interstellar civilization, and more recently, instantaneous laser light communications.
Fall outside the bounds of reality created by a spaceship’s Slipspace engine and the terminating waves of Slipstream dimensions should tear anything apart. Humans included. Andra closed her eyes, feeling a slight alien tug on her mind. A light, intimate migraine she came to call a friend aboard the UNSC Infinity. She wasn’t sure when she identified it as something ‘different,’ but the tug was only aboard the UNSC Infinity and in proximity to the Forerunner-adapted Slipspace drive.
Merlin realized the same at some point too the year before, and they connected quiet dots about some kind of Forerunner tech-interference with its integration into human ship networks, including, seemingly their cybernetic brain interfaces. It scared her then; it scared her still. This quiet tug pulled at Andra’s mind now, despite her being towards the forward, first-third of the Infinity’s superstructure and far from the Forerunner-human hybrid engine system.
But the tug came with a voice now—soft, reassuring. The whisper of someone more than a friend. Merlin. ‘I’m still out there. Trust I will return to you soon.’
Her heart burned and boomed in her chest, beating slowly in rhythm like a recoilless gun turret. She already cried her tears over Merlin’s disappearance, but the empty yearning remained, demanding to believe in the strange promise across lightyears. She was a fool. But better to be a fool than one without hope.
Better alive and still hoping, than abandoned on some desolate space rock to die forgotten in the cold vacuum. Or to disappear from reality altogether, smashed against the strange tidal waves between the metaphysical dimensions beyond comprehended spacetime. Better her dream, than the icicle pods hoisted by the UNSC Infinity’s Marine Corps and Navy crewmen over a trio of long, magnetic retaining wires six kilometers in length and hooked to an asteroid surface at the other end.
One by one, cryogenic pods took a slow ascent from the asteroid’s surface across the makeshift space elevator, passed through the atmosphere-sealed energy shielding of the Infinity’s cargo bays, and then lowered onto the open deck in simple rows. The transparent glass interiors of the numerous cryogenic bays obscured the frozen humans within. Among the containers, cryogenic and medical technicians wandered about pulling data and diagnostics off the pod internal computers. A quick estimate of the cryogenic pods rose to 493 souls, and maybe more.