281 Preservator-A

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"Requesting available orders attempt number 58,910,832... Connection established... No further orders available. Returning to maintenance arches."

- 281 Preservator-A

281 Preservator-A was a which has been tasked with protecting  interests in the Pesegam star cluster. Old even when compared to it's sister-ships and clearly not as advanced, Preservator-A was primarily tasked with tending the local species in it's sector, protecting - and culling - the ancient civilisations within it's dominion. Carrying a weak by Forerunner standard, the custode was instead modified to interface with their slipspace tether network. The astronomical power of their translocation grids and point-to-point slipspace highways provided enough mobility to allow Preservator-A to instead travel to wherever it deemed necessary, even as it's ancilla grew agitated with the lack of assignments.

Preservator-A had a minor role during the, safeguarding the tether network against hostile strike forces that attempted to cut off the Orion Arm from the rest of the galaxy. Keeping order for the next ten million years, even as the Ecumene eventually forgot how to even understand the old coding languages it was programmed with. Once the began, the custode spent only a few years fighting the Flood before their corrupting effects on the Guardian  network turned it against it's makers. Spearheading and undermining the defences of the very colonies it was designed to defend, Preservator-A's actions would eventually be recaptured and reset. By this stage, however, it's actions proved that the custodes were too vulnerable and ineffective to the Flood to be worth deploying. As a result, it was deactivated and buried deep within the artificial moon of Legacy.