A particular need had driven him here. The Spartan; seen as titanic, the symbol; seen as prolific. The person, the man, however, needed reconciliation. Reconciliation had chosen this, and nostalgia and loss was the result.
John unclenched his hands from where they'd momentarily frozen above his flight console, and he settled them back onto the controls. His right took the stick, and his left engaged the sensor suite. He only needed to wait a moment until a subtle 'ding' announced the expected finding, and a small waypoint flourished over a distant northern point of the planet below only just rotating into daylight.
He didn't look at the waypoint for several moments and instead scanned the planet's surface with his eyes. Caucasus, it was called, according to Alliance records dating back fifty years. It was a convenient ten and a half light-years from Earth, which was convenient by John's standards, but apparently not quite convenient enough by the standards of Alliance colonisers.
It was described as rugged and environmentally hostile. Initial Alliance colony seeding ships had arrived in the Epsilon Eridani system in Humanity's first push to colonise beyond Sol, and they had found the planet. In a fashion true to the exploration of any new system, when they discovered a habitable world, they gave it a name, above and beyond the typical astrometric naming convention which would have left it as Epsilon Eridani II.
The original name was lost, though. The colony ships had landed, according to the logs available, and they had started the most basic efforts of terraforming by way of spreading seeds from Earth. The records indicated that it all went well, for the first month. Apparently, the biospheres' from Earth and Epsilon Eridani II were hyper compatible.
Compatible to the point that the trees grew at a rate exponential to their Earth-bound counterparts and the introduced animals morphed and evolved within the eco-system at an alarming rate. Before any of the colonisers could study it, they were attacked.
Their bases were destroyed, half of their landing shuttles crushed, as territorial native mega-fauna descended upon them. The survivors had redacted whatever the original name had been and renamed it Caucasus; the mountain that Prometheus had been chained to, to be tortured day in and day out until Hercules freed him.
The name relayed the survivors' intentions clearly, and official files named the planet as inhospitable and unsuited to colonisation. Then, only seven years ago, the Alliance had revisited the planet as a planned military research and training outpost. They had set up a small complex to field test the idea, but had eventually chosen something closer to home and abandoned the facility.
John had left Mars and decided that he needed a base of operations to work from. Somewhere he could study his findings and work out where to go next. John might have decided to begrudgingly share specific data or technology with the Alliance if it were the only option truly available to survive. Still, he was not keen on doing his investigation surrounded by prying Alliance eyes.
Professor Cameron Harrison had been enough of a first experience with Alliance scientists for John to decide to keep certain aspects of this Humanity's military at arm's length, wherever possible, for now at least. So he'd searched through Alliance records for available military outposts.
He knew that the UNSC would set up outposts and stations and eventually discard them, but the rate that the Alliance did it was mystifying to the Spartan. It would be apparent that it was due to the sanctions imposed by the Citadel Council, and that the Alliance would often attempt to get away with quietly setting up new outposts which might avoid the Citadel's eyes.
The planet below him brought a wave of raw emotion John hadn't expected, it felt as though his stomach clenched. His body temperature spiked in excitement just as his eyes landed on the sunlight glinting off the ecologically wondrous Viery sea, formed by an asteroid impact long before the Humans of his nativity had ever even risen from the primordial muck.
