"Why do they insist on shipping the bodies back to earth, why don't they just do that thing where they dehydrate the body and then shake them apart?"

"Maybe that's because not everyone wants their ashes scattered in space."

"Well its not like we have room to burry people on earth. You know ground burials are illegal now."

"Maybe they want to be put in a jar on the family mantel. I don't know and it's not my job to care."

"So you would be ok if they just disposed of your corpse to go floating out in space forever."

"Well its not like I'm in there anymore. If you believe the government my soul has gone off to the far edges of the universe to fight a holy war for the architect."

"Sounds like some kind of shitty version of Valhalla."

"You know what, I don't mind the idea of Valhalla."

The voices faded away slowly as they moved up the hall, the overhead lights flicking off as they left that sector of the building. Inside the small outgoing storage room, five silver caskets lay for some time, unmoving in the quiet darkness.

And then something shifted.

Had there been anyone in that room to observe they might have assumed the zombie apocalypse had finally come to earth. They might have even run screaming I the other direction as one of the coffin lids quietly clicked open, before slowly inching upwards. A hand clasped the outer edge of the box fingers gripping the cold metal as the body hauled itself upright, pushing the casket lid completely open.

Adam stepped out into the quiet darkness crouching low to the floor. His mechanical eye glowed green in the dim light cast from the hallway, and he had his head tilted slightly to one side, listening for any slight sound.

When he heard nothing he walked over to the far casket and tapped softly on the lid.

It hissed open a moment later and Sunny appeared pulling the oxygen mask from her face.

The other lids hissed open one by one until there was only one left. Adam frowned and walked over to where it lay silent at the back of the room and then knocked quietly on the lid. There was a shuffling inside before the lid opened and Maverick sat up looking rather bleary.

Whispering through the comms Adam said, "Good morning sleeping beauty. Have a nice nap."

Maverick yawned and rubbed her eyes, "Actually I did thanks for asking."

He turned to look at the rest of his crew, "And you?"

There were a couple of nods from Sunny and Ramirez, but by the dark circles under Desmond's eyes Adam might wager to say that he hadn't slept for the entire journey, which was a real pity considering they had been in their own death beds for something going on sixteen hours. Adam stretched, popping his neck and flexing his arms. Maverick twisted sharply from side to side, cracking her spine up most of its length.

Ramirez gave her a look of horror, and she grinned at him.

Sunny bent down to touch her toes, before standing to stretch all four arms.

"Alright, gather up your oxygen tanks and close your lids. When they open everything up, I don't want any obvious evidence that someone was here. He reached down and pulled a dark hat from his pocket, stuffing it over his head to conceal his light hair while the others did the same.

Sunny was going to be a lot harder to hide, but they had planned for that. If she was any taller they might not have tried it, but at seven feet tall she was still within the range of possibility for a human. Sunny reached down to zip up the massive sweatshirt she wore, pulling a hood down over her face. Along with the dark black sweatpants she looked human enough. Maybe like an NFL linebacker out for a stroll, but it was going to have to do.

The others hurried to put on their disguises as well, mostly nondescript clothing of a random assortment suited for the fall weather.

Adam wore a black leather jacket jeans, and his black cap.

Both Ramirez and Maverick wore long black coats with boots. Maverick wore a hat over her viking braided hair.

And now they were ready.

Adam motioned Desmond forward, and he took the lead as the group of them walked out into the hallway. This part would be dangerous but not overtly so. They were walking through the back shipment facilities of the Fort Harmony spaceport, and judging by the few people they saw roaming the halls they were in the civilian sector.

That was fine as they had no desire to go up against the UNSC. This mission was about a mother and her little girl, Adam didn't care about either the president or the UNSC.

"Cameras ahead." Sunny muttered, and Adam stopped in place reaching into his pocket and withdrew what appeared to be a small clear marble.

"on my go we have seven seconds."

The group nodded and Adam gently rolled the little ball onto the floor.

It rolled out of his pam and gently down the hallway before stopping below the waiting cameras. There was a sharp flash and the little red lights on the cameras went dead. Adam motioned towards the others and they hurried down the hall and out through the doors, Adam scooping the little ball up as he went. As the doors were shutting behind them, Adam could hear the soft beeping as the cameras powered back to life.

No one noticed them as they stepped out into the main airport thoroughfare , and from there they managed to make their way casually to the taxi lanes hailing a small hovervan as they did. Desmond was the one to negotiate the trip, as he was the least conspicuous out of all of them, and they kept silent in the van as they made their way to the hotel Adam had booked, using three false names and routing everything through at least two companies that existed and two other companies that didn't. he doubted anyone would look that far into it, but it paid to be a bit paranoid.

They didn't speak until they had checked in at the hotel and made their way to the waiting room. Adam could easily have rented out the presidential suite, but throwing around that sort of money gets you noticed, but still he managed to get a small two bedroom suite with attached living room and kitchen. They didn't need that much space, but with the amount of people in their party it made sense.

They sat together as the sun was setting staring out at the horizon being burned in shades of pink and orange.

The longing looks on all of their faces told a similar story. They may have made Arcadia their home, but that didn't mean they didn't miss a sunrise.

"Think I could hire someone to create an artificial sun. You know maybe something as big as a moon, and we could put it in orbit, and it would be just small enough to build manually and just hot enough to keep the planet warm and give us sunrises."

The group turned to look at him eyebrows, or brow ridges raised.

"I don't think that's how physics works." Desmond offered.

"Just because you're rich now doesn't mean the laws of nature don't apply to you." Maverick was saying

Adam pouted, "You know when you guys became my friends, I assumed that came with the obligation to support all of my hair-brained ideas."

"That was not in the contract Sunny gave us to sign when she paid us o be your friends." Ramirez teased leaning against the window to soak in the warm radiation. There was really only one upside to living on a planet without a sun, no sunburns, and the rate of Melanoma on Arcadia was well below the global average.

"Interesting, because I seem to recall we were friends before Sunny and I ever met."

"Well she is paying us retroactively for our time served, and we felt sorry for you." Ramirez said adding his little quip to the moment of banter.

" I would hate to interrupt our little friend fest." The group of them turned to look at Desmond, who had turned his back to the window and was now staring at all of them with his cold brown eyes, "My family is in danger, so forgive me for not being more accommodating to your collective sense of humor."

The group of them went quiet, quickly sobered to the situation before them, "Sorry , you're right. We should get to work."

Desmond nodded once as the group of them gathered around the dining table, "The first part is going to be finding them. Like I said they are, in something that sort of resembles protective custody. Generally I am not allowed to know precisely where they are other than to know that they are living in this general vicinity. Now we have a few options, we can either use facial recognition over computer hardware and take a few weeks to flip through all hits in the system, or we can break into a government facility and get the information that we want from there. There are obvious drawbacks to both of course, but depending on how long you want to be here, is what is going to be the defining point when it comes to making this decision."

Adam leaned forward over the table and frowned, "I would rather not get involved with the UNSC if we don't have to."

"Same." Ramirez and maverick said

"Good, than we are going to have to do this the slow way. Of course the longer we are here the more chance we have of being spotted, so iwant everyone to understand that we are not here on some sort of vacation. This is a mission and we are trying to be inconspicuous as possible, all our movements should be planned out in advance, and no one should go anywhere unless that is vetted by at least two other members of the party. Seem fair."

"Seems like a good idea to me."

"Good."

***

It was a los level IT consultant who noticed the strange anomaly first. She was gong through the system trying to fix a few bus that her boss had noticed at an earlier sweep, mostly minor things like the positioning of a few words on the log in page, or even the way certain commands tended to stall at very specific times. It was rather boring grunt work, but she didn't mind. This job was easy enough and it paid well that she could go home and play videogames every night while eating a bag of chips.

It wasn't glamorous but she was happy .

It was completely by fluke that she noted the change. Her system analysis clocked in the loading time for the Disavowed list, as at least two seconds slower than usual. Checking information on traffic usage, power output and other mitigating factors, she determined that there should be no reason for the application to be running as slow as it was. It wasn't soemthing anyone but her was likely to notice, and she could have just ignored it in favor of finishing her work quickly s she could watch cute videos on her phone, but her boss was a perfectionist, and if he found the strange behavior she would have to go and fix it anyway, only at a later date.

So she sighed and did her best to filter through running diagnostics. She opened up a separate window on the side and gently scanned over lines of symbols commands and dashes looking for anything she might used to speed up the wait time, or anything that might slow it down. She couldn't be sure, but it was as she was prodding through the lines of code, that she notice a command that she did not expect to see.

It was nothing so impressive, just a line that would likely result in the positives showing as negatives. It didn't look particularly intentional, just a mistake in the programming that had an undesired and unsuspecting result. Unfortunately, she didn't have the clearance to go messing around in the inner workings of the defense nexus, so she was going to have to send a report to someone higher up in the team to deal with it.

She drafted an email that detailed her findings sending it to one of her coworkers and CCing her boss to make sure he knew what was going on.

Little did she know, but that email she wrote made its way from her boss, to his bosses boss, and then onto somewhere else where that information was packed together with a bunch of additional information. Over the intervening days, that packet of information was sent over to the Global intelligence agency before being handed off to an unimportant low level analyst who sifted through the content looking for something interesting.

When he came across that particular line, soemthing peaked his interest. It seemed as if there was a potential flaw in their system just waiting to be utilized, and he wrote a quick debrief to his officer detailing the issue that he suspected with the defense system.

The memo sat on his bosses desk for a week.

Meanwhile back in the Department of Orbital defense, one swamped IT specialist was finally getting around to dealing with the issue that had been sent up to him from he lower IT echelons. It should have been a relatively boring job to deal with. He opened the line of code, looked at it to determine that it was indeed causing the issues that were being reported, and deleted the line. As soon as he did, a frown cut over his face, as he realized the status of everyone on the no go list had changed to permitted.

He could have called his boss and said soemthing, but instead he simply fixed the issue, and then wrote an email to detail the change before going back to some of his earlier projects.

Inside her private little shuttle, Avela watched and silently hoped that no one would notice, as she went back in a rewrote the line of code into the application.

Someone had noticed their activities, but here was to hoping that they didn't understand what they had seen.