Forerunner Slipspace 2

The displays tracked our course. We were moving outward along the great spiral arm that held both the Orion complex and Erde-Tyrene—just a few tens of thousands of light-years.
Hours at most would pass for us.
(Halo:Cryptum; Ch.9)

The atmosphere on the surface was cold, thin, poor in oxygen—the sky above thick with clouds of stars in one direction, almost empty in the other. Out there, beyond the diffuse edge of the galaxy, was the emptiness of intergalactic space, a void that Forerunners found unattractive—a vastness of few or no resources between far-flung islands of great wealth and energy.
(Halo:Cryptum; Ch.12)