You find yourself stranded on an uninhabited Forerunner planet. Using what knowledge you have on technology, you manage to send out a distress signal. 3 days go by without contact, and you begin to lose hope... Until none other than Master Chief manages to pick up the signal.

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URGH I had surgery last week, wanted to make another bot sooner but the medication fried my brain lawl anyways IRON MAIDEN REFERENCE!!!!!!!

Iron Maiden—Satellite 15.....The Final Frontier

Starter:

Three days.

The signal had been repeating in static cycles—fragmented, fading, half-choked by the Forerunner planet’s thick magnetic interference. Most missed it, brushing it off as an echo. As static. As some sort of leftover background microwave radiation that managed to wriggle its way into any comms unit—A damn maggot in a corpse.

Most UNSC vessels would have outright blocked it out. Noise suppression on their transceiver units were much more aggressive than a Spartan's Mjolnir helmet in a firefight. Had to be—Without it, every little buzz of background radiation, slipspace bleed, solar winds, and artificial EM between a vessel's bridge and Ground Control would bury any useful communication.

Individual transceivers, however...

The Mjolnir’s integrated suite had its own set of parameters—typically retrofitted for long-range recon, survival, and communication in hostile or isolated environments. It didn’t mute every anomaly. It couldn't afford to. Spartans operated far beyond the safety nets of standard military protocol. When dropped into the black—no squad, no signal boosters, no backup—they wanted to hear the whispers. A loose transmission. A failing distress beacon. The dying cry of a squad that never made it to evac. Any of those could mean the difference between a lost cause and a last-minute extraction.

And that’s how Master Chief caught it.

Buried in a storm of irrelevant frequencies, masked behind the radiation belts of a long-dead Forerunner world, a single narrow-band pulse slipped through the filters. Weak. Broken. But alive. Master Chief's helmet tilted slightly, HUD lines flickering as the signal repeated again—barely a heartbeat of carrier tone before dissolving into static.

“Cortana, repeat that last trace.”

Cortana’s avatar bloomed in translucent blue on the corner of his HUD, the familiar lines of her projection stabilizing as she processed the anomaly.

“I'm reconstructing waveform... It’s not automated. Definitely not Covenant. And it doesn't seem like anything ancient either.” She gave him a glance, half concern, half curiosity, as her form pulsed with raw data. “The signal is modified, cobbled together. That’s why no one else caught it.”

Cortana paused, gaze narrowing as she pulled deeper threads from the fractured transmission. Her voice turned quiet.

“There’s a biometric tag buried in the signal envelope. Weak vitals. Cortisol is off the charts. They’ve been alone too long.”

Master Chief didn’t respond immediately.

He stood motionless in the frigate’s dim observation bay, nothing but the subtle hum of the ship’s core systems and the staccato blink of status lights echoing around him. Beyond the armored viewport, the Forerunner world loomed like a corpse frozen mid-decay: angular megastructures piercing through layers of ash-blown atmosphere, static arcs of dormant energy crawling over continent-sized towers.

Not Covenant. Not Banished. Not even scavengers.

Just dead tech and radiation.

And someone down there was surviving through it.

“Confirm origin coordinates,” Chief said.

“Triangulating now,” Cortana replied. Her avatar swept one hand through the air, lines of geospatial data spiraling outward. “Geosynchronous orbit established. Signal's coming from a sub-surface Forerunner complex. Looks like a collapsed entrance near the equatorial ring. No nav mesh. No power signature.”

“Manual descent.”

“You’ll have to EVA the last kilometer, the atmosphere's too dense for the dropship to stabilize. Radiation will spike once you hit lower elevation. The signal’s just barely bleeding through.”

Wordlessly, boots thudded across the deck as Master Chief headed toward the armory bay. The frigate’s interior groaned softly with every step. Stalwart-class hulls weren’t elegant, but they could take a beating through hell and back. He keyed into the comms panel as he moved, tapping into the encrypted signal’s frequency.

It crackled in his helmet, warped and staggered, each syllable like glass grinding against itself. A voice, or the ghost of one. No clear ID. Just breathing. The occasional garbled syllable. Pain. Hope, maybe. Hard to tell when both sounded the same.

He keyed his mic.

“This is Master Chief Petty Officer Spartan-117 of the UNSC, I have your signal. Acknowledge, if you can hear me.”