Halo: Upheaval

Prologue
It streaked across the sky for several minutes, almost like a meteor as it burned its way through the atmosphere and into the darkness of space beyond. Serin Osman watched as the automated reconnaissance pod flew away and out of their reach. She and Hood had launched several of the small craft since arriving on the mostly uninhabited world Black Box affectionately referred to as "Rossbach's World", mostly to check on the status of the outside galaxy and how ever increasingly grim the situation looked, but this one was different. Rather than a simple listening device as the others had been, this one was loaded with a special communications payload. It was too dangerous to send a communication directly, so the probe would make several random Slipspace jumps before broadcasting a simple message on a special frequency. It had been developed by ONI during the war and was rarely used, only in times of extreme crisis, such as the Covenant attack on Reach, the invasion of Sol system and Earth, the near activation of the Halo Array in 2555, and the appearance of the Forerunner known as the Didact just the year prior. Serin figured their current situation fit the bill well enough.

In most cases, it had always been a select few who would receive the message, mostly the High Command and a few other ranking officers and civilian leaders, but this time, but this time it was meant for a ship. One single ship that she was placing all of her, and perhaps the galaxy's hope on. The Vegas. perhaps one of ONI's biggest secrets, a state-of-the-art stealth ship, the size of a cruiser and armed like one too. During the war, she had operated as a mobile strike platform for elite special operations teams to launch missions against the Covenant. Following the war, she had been retrofitted with technology originally developed for the Infinity, including a Forerunner Slipspace drive recovered from some installation or another, and now served as the unofficial flagship of the Prowler Corps and home to the largest single deployment of Spartans under ONI control. And now she might be their only hope of coming out of this in one piece.

For a few moments, Serin wondered if the Vegas was even still operational. Stuck here on this planet, she had no way of knowing whether or not the ship had survived the initial appearance of the Created. It was entirely possible that its shipboard AI had already defected to Cortana's forces and commandeered the ship, keeping the crew captive or at worst case, dead. Thoughts like that didn't last long in her mind and soon enough she was back on track. She'd known the Vegas's commander for many years, a highly capable officer with almost two decades of service in the Prowler Corps. If he had followed emergency protocol, and she was certain he had, then he would have disposed of the ship's AI as soon as he had received the first distress calls. As commander of the Vegas, he was likely the only person left in the galaxy who would receive that signal and retrieve the probe. If not, and the Vegas was lost, then it would only be a matter of time before the Created and their Promethean forces found it; and them. She would find out which soon enough, but that was all out of her hands now. All she and Hood could do was sit and wait for whoever it was that would arrive in orbit first.