Then: the deafening peal of a great bell, followed by a smoky ozone stench. The bubble collapsed. All the years of pent-up time rushed in at once and singed my outer skin. That is the way of such bubbles; they are designed to contain and render harmless more than to delicately preserve.

Dropping to the floor in a heap, I wiped a thin layer of ash from around my eyes and tried to estimate, from my weakness, how long I had been in the bubble. My eyes would not focus. My arms and legs trembled. I could barely rise to my feet.

At least a year.

I was aboard a ship—not small, apparently deserted. The bubble had been abandoned in long-term stowage. The compartment had a physical hatch, not locked; lighting dim. Sounds not encouraging: ratcheting, ragged ticking, distant, mournful scraping. An old vessel in poor repair.

Still gathering my wits, I stumbled out of the compartment and down a curving hallway to a transit tube. The tube refused to work. Pressing against the tube’s sides, I twisted and wormed my way to the next open compartment—another stowage area.

Here I found four more military-grade stasis bubbles shoved into a corner. By the thin whine they made, and the flickering view of their contents, I judged they would soon collapse as mine had.

I pulled and shoved the bubbles apart and stood between them on the deck, watching their opacities flow like clouds in a sky. Gradually, I dimly made out a Builder, still wearing armor. The second, possibly a member of Builder Security, without armor—caught halfway between Warrior-Servant physiology and a newer pattern.

The third, in its carapace: Catalog. A Juridical gatherer of information. Of little use in the present circumstance. Juridicals and I have never gotten along. They dogged our every movement in the last phases of the human-Forerunner war.

No sign of the Manipular I had imprinted, nor of the two humans who had accompanied us. Given the Master Builder’s temper and his obsession with fighting the Flood, I suspect they were delivered to one of his research centers and met a bad end.

For the moment, I left the bubbles where they were and made my way to what I assumed was an inboard helm, a compartment ill-lit, bleak, and filthy with layers of organic debris.

Deserted.

Worse and worse. An unauthorized trading ship or some piece of confiscated junk. At least it was Forerunner. I climbed to the next level, the main bridge.

A restless unease in my gut warned me that gravity on these decks might fail at any moment. Very dangerous—gravity gradients are not to be ignored. I could be slammed up or thrown sideways, smashed to a pulp. As any warrior will tell you, unbalanced gravity is a [TT: expletive, possibly sacrilegious, untranslatable].