The frigate shook as it raced towards the shrinking slipspace portal, while the Ark and it's Flood horrors were preparing to be consumed by the cleansing light of the Halo. John strapped himself in for the dash to safety. The Arbiter headed to the front of the ship to do the last minute guidance arrangements.
The Forward Unto Dawn reached the portal just at the Halo radiation front was about to reach it. It entered and stood for a moment frozen in the twisted netherrealm created by Forerruner superscience, then as it's front part began to exit the slipspace anomaly, reality seemed to blink and the back of the ship vanished , cut apart by the collapse of the cosmic forces holding open the portal.
Many believed that this is were the saga of this superlative warrior ended . The Arbiter always felt, that perhaps this was not the last anyone heard of this valiant Demon.
Cortana guided the ship trough the slipspace corridor when the front half of the frigate disappeared without a trace. For a moment she experienced a disturbing form of electronic disorientation as most of the sensors were gone instantly and slipspace around her seemed to twist in an inordinate manner.
Suddenly the shaking stopped and she could see that the ship had returned to normal space. The ship, or what was left of it. She could only detect the back half of the Foward Unto Dawn, the front half missing in transit. Luckily she had the half with the main engines and she used what power the auxiliary reactors were producing to stop the wreck from spinning wildly. She began to look at two things after that. She was not above Africa and she could not recognize the planet they were falling towards. She immediately began to try and wake the Chief who was knocked out by the shock of the sudden slipspace transition.
"Chief, wake up! We have a problem." She monitored the Molnjir armour and it told her that he should be awake soon . Despite being bruised and battered, John was a Spartan and didn't let the wear and tear of battle slow him down. He groaned and shook his head.
"I thought we lost you there for a moment. " she said
"What happened. Did we escape the Ark?" said John getting a grip and pulling himself free of the clutter of objects dislodged during transit.
"We escaped the Ark, but the portal collapsed in mid transit. We only have half of the ship and were aren't even in the Solar system or any other known UNSC system. . We're on a crash course towards an unknown planet. The good news is that the planet appears to support life. "
"Cortana, can you determine our location in rapport with UNSC space? We need to know if we have a chance at rescue" said John.
Cortana's hologram appeared to think for a second then responded "Without the main sensor arrays in the front of the ship , my sensory data is severely limited. I'm flying the ship half blind as it is."
John swimed towards the entry to the other half of the ship and peered through the gaping corridor that used to lead forward. The ship seemed to end suddenly as if someone had cut it in half with a giant laser. The edges were still glowing a dull red where they were severed suddenly. They were lucky that the cut wasn't in a location that would have caused the ship to explode, like the ammo bays or the main fusion reactors. He looked at the damage for a while then turned back towards Cortana
"Can we land the ship in this condition? It looks like it's barely hanging together."
" We don't have the fuel to escape the planets gravity well. Some of the fuel tanks were damaged in transit and we lost much of our power supply for the engines. At beast I can put us on a decaying orbit for a few hours so we can asses our options. The antigravity generators are gone with the front of the ship so this is going to be a one way landing on whatever engine power we can squeeze out of this wreck. Good think these ships are built solid"
John seemed to ponder for a moment and said "Let's give this place a look-over. Put us into orbit and try to get a rough map before we select a landing site. We might be here for a long haul."
" I'll try and put us on a low orbit, but I must conserve fuel for the landing maneuvers. grab unto something, the artificial gravity has been knocked out and there's a lot of debris floating about."
John secured himself in a corner far from any dangerous debris and felt the ship shudder as Cortana started firing the engines in order to change it's course. Slowly the half wrecked UNSC frigate settled in a low orbit over the planet. Cortan began scanning the planet below with whatever sensors she still had.
" Any features of interests?" said John as he propelled himself back to Cortana's pedestal. A hologram of the planet with a slowly resolving map appeared from her emitter as she mapped the world below.
"Nothing , the planet appears totally empty. The atmosphere should be breathable but I can't tell for sure without a sample or the main spectrographer. Plenty of life, forests or jungles mostly. I can't detect any signs of civilization or intelligent life. I'll keep scanning but we only have 3 more hours before our orbit decays so much that we are forced to either do a forced landing or use the landing fuel to stabilize our orbit and wait for rescue. Thought if we do that, we won't have enough fuel to land on the planet and you will be stuck on a wreck with a slowly collapsing life support system. Our chances of rescue in this place are uncertain as I haven't been able to locate our position relative to UNSC space."
John seemed to sigh. "Let's finish a few more orbits and then select a landing site. I have feel we have better chance down there than floating in space in this wreck"
All of a sudden Cortana exclaimed "Wait a second, I think I just detected something down there."
A blurry image filled the hologram. It appeared to show a few buildings, no more than a small village worth near the beach in a gulf . More interesting were the two metallic objects sitting on beach. They appeared to be some sort of vehicles, possibly spaceships.
Cortana tried to enhance the image but it was stil a blurry mess. "Definitely unnatural and judging by the lack of any other traces of civilization I can only conclude that those must be some sort of spacecraft. I'm also detecting some thermal signatures. Something is definitively active down there though they don't seem to have detected us."
"Anyone we know?" said John a tinge of worry in his voice.
"They do not match any known UNSC or Covenant ship silhouettes. Plus they are fairly small. None are bigger than a Longsword. It appears we have another first contact situation. They must have advanced slipspace capabilities to put FTL drives in ships so small. Unless they were dropped of by a bigger ship that left"
John stood for a minute looking at the image of the ships on the beach. Then he said
"Looks like we have our landing location."