[217] From Rudyard Kipling's "With Drake in the Tropics", a poem about Sir Francis Drake's 1577-1580 circumnavigation of the Earth:

South and far south below the Line,
 Our Admiral leads us on,
Above, undreamed-of planets shine -
 The stars we know are gone.
Around, our clustered seamen mark
 The silent deep ablaze
With fires, through which the far-down shark
 Shoots glimmering on his ways.

The sultry tropic breezes fail
 That plagued us all day through;
Like molten silver hangs our sail,
 Our decks are dark with dew.
Now the rank moon commands the sky.
 Ho! Bid the watch beware
And rouse all sleeping men that lie
 Unsheltered in her glare.

How long the time 'twixt bell and bell!
 How still our lanthorns burn!
How strange our whispered words that tell
 Of England and return!
Old towns, old streets, old friends, old loves,
 We name them each to each,
While the lit face of Heaven removes
 Them farther from our reach.

Now is the utmost ebb of night
 When mind and body sink,
And loneliness and gathering fright
 O'erwhelm us, if we think -
Yet, look, where in his room apart,
 All windows opened wide,
Our Admiral thrusts away the chart
 And comes to walk outside.

Kindly, from man to man he goes,
 With comfort, praise or jest,
Quick to suspect our childish woes,
 Our terror and unrest.
It is as though the sun should shine -
 Our midnight fears are gone!
South and far south below the Line,
 Our Admiral leads us on!

[219] If she had said "How long the time 'twixt bell and bell! How still our lanthorns burn! / How strange our whispered words that tell of England and return!" instead, the patrol craft would have destroyed the 25 or 6 to 4. The quarians take their fleet security very seriously.

[233] I can't find "leviathine" in my dictionary, so it's possible I've made it up. It's an adjectival form of "leviathan" (by analogy with "elephantine").

[292] The events leading up to the quarian acquisition of the Avenger (and its renaming) are slated to be the subject of a Forum mini-serial entitled, naturally, Operation Archangel.

[491] The rough information on Halo's dimensions and habitable surface area were acquired here, from a page found by the studio's own Rob Shannon during development. I make no warranty as to the canonical accuracy of Dr. Grazier's figure for Halo's width, but it feels about right, and I'm hardly interested in getting into a "how big is a Star Destroyer" style fandom flap about it, so I went with it and that's how big they are in UF.

[644] A half-century later, certain characters of our acquaintance would have to chuckle and shake their heads watching the vid of this moment and ask each other, "Sound like anyone we know?"

[674] Particle-beam variant of the GU-11 gunpod. Inexhaustible ammunition, but doesn't handle quite as well; a lot of the WDF's really old-timey VF-1 pilots never cottoned to it, Gryphon included.

[690] This is probably my favorite line in Star-Crossed, even as pleased as I am with some of the Gryphon-Tali interactions.

[755] Like the Dakota-class dropship, the Thunderking isn't based on any particular spacecraft from sci-fi. Based on its name and number, you can tell that I was thinking of the F-105 Thunderchief when I made it up, though it's not actually derived from the F-105; if it were, it certainly wouldn't be slower than a Valkyrie. Hell, in FI there's probably a RetroTech SF-105 out there.