The twenty-eighth to forty-third Cycles - The High Years

Once the stability of the Confederacy was assured by the invention of the "Gate to the Stars", and once the old sectors had been reincorporated, an unprecedented wave of expansion began. Within the next two hundred thousand years, the Confederacy expanded throughout the entire Milky Way Galaxy! Though, whenever they actually explored ALL the volume of our Galaxy, rather than just parts of it is not certain; in any case, the distribution of Forerunner artefacts on habitable worlds is known to be very sparse out there towards the Rim. This seem to indicate a more "spotty" settlement towards the edge of the Galaxy - presumably expansion or exploration towards the hub would reveal a more dense distribution of Forerunner sites; this will have to wait definitive moves along those lines, however.

The old communication problems seem to have been entirely cleared up - a few records indicate that communication between one of the outposts on the Rim of the Galaxy and Home (near the Core) - a distance of some 40000 LY - took, when using the "Gate to the Stars" linkups - a mere TWELVE MONTHS. The actual "jump" between the entry-point and the exit Gate was virtually simultaneous, only the travel time to the entry Gate and from the exit Gate was needed. If prior FTL technology had been in use, the same trip would have taken a MINIMUM of ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY to TWO HUNDRED YEARS, one way! A round trip of over around FOUR CENTURIES! Even if we allow for the fact that the travel time mentioned WAS unusually fast (it is evidently mentioned as a speed record of some sort), other sources confirm that FTL travel was speeded up by as much as a factor of TWENTY FIVE times normal on most trips (for details, see the section on "The development of Forerunner Technology: Starflight" later in this FM)!

With this sort of improvement in communications, the Phoenix Confederacy looked to be virtually immortal. In fact, for almost a quarter of million years, the Confederacy enjoyed a period of peace and safety, coupled with an as yet unparalleled degree of technological advancement, that can truly be referred to as a "Golden Age". During this time, the Forerunners reached a level of technology that seems to us today - at the brink of that we arbitrarily refer to as TL/11 - to be out and out "Magic" (using Clarke's Law - "Any sufficiently advanced Technology is indistinguishable from magic."), and which we equally arbitrarily rate as TL/20.

Yet, of course, once the had settled or explored (we presume) most of the Milky Way Galaxy, they began to look even further outwards. By the end of our period, we have reason to believe (though this is based on a rather conjectural translation of only three short passages in three unrelated works) that they had begun a programme to travel to a nearby Galaxy. The means to be used seems to have been related to the "Gate to the Stars", though a different series of Glyphs was used - translating literally as "Gate to the Infinity" - to refer to it.

It was the "success" of this project - if such a term can be used to describe such a horrific result as was obtained, that begins the last phase of Forerunner history, and brings to an end their glorious story - over half a million years after it began.