As voted for, here is a new chapter for All the little lost boys and girls. A snippet below, full text in the link above and enjoy!
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This is not your home. Words she shouldn’t have known, a statement made into accusation and a repudiation of the presence – the very existence – of all humans not just on the station, but anywhere too close to the nebula. Jacob Hayes had been right about that, but he’d been wrong about something else. She was the right Hayes. She just wished she knew what that meant. They remembered Everett, but what did they think of him now? Was he still their beloved father, or something else? Had they spared Spartican’s navigator because of mercy or contempt?
What would they do to her if they found out who she was? Would she be kin to them, or a link to the past that they needed to cut? She didn’t know and couldn’t risk anyone else’s life to find out. They’d need to avoid the I-7s, but you didn’t need to be a Halo to realize seeking out one of the factions trying to kill you was a bad idea in general.
“Forget everything else,” she said. “Forget everything these people were working on, blast it all out into space like it never existed. If anyone knew that DROP 47 was still operational, it would start a war. Just the possibility of getting their hands on Imperial tech would be enough.” A hundred different nations would want the technology for themselves. A hundred more would want to destroy it. The entire galaxy would ignite over Earth’s last jewel and in all the chaos, R-3 or one of the other horrors on this station would get out. Someone out there would think that they could control it better than the people who’d discovered and created it. Someone would make a mistake and then the thing that Captain Ragnikov had sacrificed his crew for would come to pass. Typhon would spread across a hundred, two hundred or a hundred thousand worlds.
No one gets out. Captain Shelby’s orders to Godfrey. Duty Before Glory had been sabotaged to keep it here. No one gets out. No one but Father’s children.
“That has been my observation,” Red Actual put in. “I have seen survivor groups fracture over the very distant possibility of informing the rest of the galaxy.”
“Maybe they’re right,” she said after a moment. “Maybe we don’t deserve to live once we’ve seen this place.”The Masks and the other feral humans had no way of getting off this station and they’d resigned themselves to life here. The others, the people like her, still poisoned by the hope that they could get away, were the ones most in needing of being silenced.
“Other guests have had similar revelations,” the AI noted. “But I don’t think you believe this one.”
“How do you know?”
“Because the part of me that was Alexei Ragnikov knows what hope looks like, and you still have it.” Red Actual paused. “You didn’t tell them the other reason you don’t want to stay here.”
“I didn’t have to,” Shannon countered. “You already did. You were very clear about what you’d do.”
“That’s not what I mean.” The hologram’s head tilted, mimicking an affectation of the man it had once been. “You know who’s infected.”
~
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