1,540(Disclaimer)
I do not own Mass Effect or the Halo Franchise. Both universes respectively belong to Bioware/EA and Microsoft/343 Industries.
NOW ON WITH THE STORY!
CHAPTER TWO:
The Engineer.
Cortana watched the Huragok as it floated next to a crate filled with military rations, it stuck its appendages into the crate and removed a ration pack, then it unsealed it and consumed a minuscule amount of the protein paste contained within. With the "snack" it had taken now devoured, the alien engineer then reassembled the ration pack, resealed it, and happily returned it back to the crate without a sign of it being tampered with.
Cortana had always found these creatures fascinating, they required very little protein or nutrients to function at full capacity. The Huragok's main goal in life was to learn and repair, fixing and improving was just what they did. They had no concept of the idea of personal space or ownership of items. When they were found by veteran ground teams, soldiers would scramble head over heels to have the Huragok examine their non-classified equipment in the hopes that their efficiency and performance in the field could be improved in some way.
In fact when she checked what remained of the mess hall's camera recording archives, she saw that the marines on board had bodily barricaded the ODST's on one side of the room, while the rest of the devil dogs had formed a line. Shoving their weapons, tac-tabs, and helmets into the engineer's very capable silica appendages for a bevy of quick maintenance and minor upgrades.
Afterwards, the Marines were running to the pelican deployment bays with ear-to-ear grins, looking like children that had met Santa Claus early before Christmas. All while the ODST's were unable to do anything but grumble, and leave on their way to the HEV pod deployment bays, located on the underside of the Forward Unto Dawn.
Cortana couldn't help but chuckle at the sheer hilarious antics the rivalry between the too military groups caused, she wished that they had some more people on board; another couple of hands would help her repair plans immensely. However, it was not to be… She knew the Chief's luck could only go so far to save them, and having extra hands on board would have just upped the stress level to get all of them out alive.
Cortana refocused on the objective at hand, she needed to speak with this Huragok in order to help complete the makeshift repairs on the engineering deck, when she had an atmosphere filled passage from the mess hall to the engineering deck that is… 'How did ONI forget to grab the Huragok when they evacuated? Seriously, how does one forget the floating alien technology savant, utterly willing to cooperate and valued at more than a small destroyer?'
Those ONI specialists were likely going to disappear after the debrief session with the higher brass, Cortana didn't really pity them. Incompetence within the UNSC got people killed, often times in the recent years a whole planet's worth.
Cortana decided that waiting wasn't going to help her in the long run, and made to attempt contact by using the light systems in the room. She blinked them three times and watched as the creature perked its long neck up and stared at the lights, and then she turned on one light in the kitchen appliance section of the mess hall, she waited as the Huragok slowly floated over to it.
When the floating biological supercomputer arrived under the light, she turned it off and turned off all but one of the cold storage units, then she waited as the Huragok floated over and attached to the systems in the fridges panel. Cortana used the fridges inventory report system to trace his connection and sent a handshake protocol. The Huragok immediately responded with a confirmation, she then sent a data packet bursting at the seams with information on their current predicament and what she planned to do.
The Huragok replied with much excitement and enthusiasm since she had given him a new purpose! something new to do, something to build and make work through trial and error, the idea was very agreeable to its line of thinking, this made both Cortana and the Huragok very pleased with themselves... Not that Cortana would openly admit it.
Then the Huragok sent Cortana an idea… if the engineering deck could be stabilized and pressurized, then it could slip into a crate and have the sentinels move it to the engineering deck through the compromised corridors.
Cortana saw the plan as risky, but it would speed up her plans by nearly five weeks!
'And I can always rely on my Spartan's seemingly infinite luck reserves to keep the Huragok alive while it's in transit.' Having thought it over and accepted the risks involved, she broadcasted her agreement and sent every repair unit she could spare to the engineering deck in order to get it up to livable conditions for its future multi-limbed occupant.
Two weeks later, Cortana set the sentinels to move the Engineer which had retrofitted a food ration container to be space worthy and sealed itself inside among the rest of its contents. After four hours of tedious zero-gravity transit, the sentinels arrived at the blast doors on the engineering deck by the main bulkhead and entered the Huragok's new abode. After sealing the doors and leaving two sentinels inside to service the Huragok as its defenders and caretakers, Cortana completed the pressurization of the entire deck.
The Huragok slipped out of its crate and began to flit to and fro while using the sentinels to talk to Cortana. It began to bring all the engineering deck's systems online, while also beginning the process of preparing all the makeshift parts necessary for Cortana's planned slip-space drive. Which coupled with forerunner mathematics and techniques would be easier to build and far more energy efficient than even the most recently outdated covenant slip-space drive cores.
Although it lacked travel speed when compared to what the ship had before, something Cortana hoped to fix when they next had access to more resources.
She held no doubt that if the right materials and personnel were on hand to build one, she could create a drive that would rival all but the forerunner drive cores in travel speeds and power consumption, and even then, it would be a close race.
Sadly, she didn't have those resources or personnel, it was nice to dream though.
...
...
...
Cortana was excited! Another month had passed and the Huragok had been wrapping up its final touches on the drive. Most tests proved successful in the simulations for activation and general use, when the Huragok was finished she would set him on task to renovate the few sections of the ship the repair drones had finished patching.
She chalked it up to the Chief's luck that the stern section of the dawn had not lost any of its large oxygen tanks, they were in the hull just under the upper armor belt, below the missile pods and anti-fighter craft weapons systems. Thankfully, none had ruptured, and she had enough to eventually fill the remains of the Dawn after her repair drones finished patching the front, where the ship was sliced in half.
That particular project was almost done, while the few drones she'd kept on the slow and tedious job of bringing external sensor suites online were just finished with two of them and working on the third.
With nervous thoughts she activated the sensors and began scanning for transmissions… she found nothing on UNSC, Covenant or even Separatists channels. Hoping it was just a signal dead zone, Cortana expanded her sensors search to the best of her ability and found only static, laced with several unknown signals. Sighing in frustration and too afraid to openly broadcast in case they were in Covenant space or some other hostile alien territory, she checked the star charts and found that they wouldn't tell her where the Dawn currently was.
Sure, certain constellations and nebula matched some mentioned in the files, but none of them were where they were supposed to be located… it didn't add up. Sharing her results with the Huragok proved somewhat fruitful, in that it asked for access through her to the sensor nodes and repair drones themselves. After granting it access to the third sensor node with a few repair drones, it began to calibrate the sensors. It did this both by means of software and manually with the repair drones in order to read the weak signals, that's when something interesting happened.
Both Cortana and the Huragok began to listen to the data transmissions that were practically un-defended and open for cyber warfare, it was extremely easy to break their encryption and see what they contained. For Cortana and the Huragok, they were open for all the world to see, and held information that scared them…
According to several days of accumulated data bursts, Humanity was not independent of alien societies, being somehow dependent on alien tech and overshadowed by multiple alien species. Earth was beholden to some strange council of races that met on a space station they called The Citadel, proudly claiming itself as the galactic government over the galaxy… a galaxy that Cortana didn't find familiar at all.
Much of the functioning of galactic society that she could infer from analyzing the many transmissions of some sort of basic codex was concerning, it looked like a ticking time bomb waiting to explode and she was afraid to get an in-depth look. But what made her more afraid was the lack of familiarity, these transmissions proved that the entirety of their ship and three sentient crew members, were not in Kansas anymore…
'Nope! We just happened to be in an alternate universe that is loaded with political crap, where political correctness is the language, and any heads stuck out in defiance of the status quo, whether just or unjust in their defiant nature, are crushed or just ignored.' Cortana was not pleased.
She knew that she and the Chief were going to stay in hiding from the galaxy at large for the time being, or be faced with power-mad politicians and overeager scientists, who would probably kill them just to find out what made them tick and learn how to make advanced technologies and study all about just where the heck they originally came from.
She was not drunk on true emotions and free will dealing with her first bout of paranoia at the completely unexpected situation at large… no sir, not at all.
After calming down her thought processes she ordered the Huragok to prep the newly constructed slip-space drive to be ready for use. She then went and set all repair drones to repair any remaining hull breaches, thus speeding up those repairs exponentially. She calculated she had about another month to wait before she could move the ship to a better location for listening in on these transmissions and hacking into as many major governments and corporations she could find.
Cortana would gather any and all data on this weird, twisted version of the Milky Way they had ended up in. Then she would make a report for the Chief, that would cover all important points and topics that pertained to his immediate future actions and decisions, she would let him read up on the rest in his own time.
However, now that the drive core was ready for slip-space travel she had the Engineer begin working in the two remaining armories, the pelican bay, and the vehicle bay. She also began designing blueprints for some sort of passive stealth devices in hopes of blocking unwanted signals from leaving the ship in the future. While not as effective as covenant camouflage tech, it sure was better than what the ship had left of her cyberwarfare suite. She sent a request to the Huragok to update anything else it was able to update to better protect the ship from external scanning by a vessel or station.
They were likely going to need it in the future.
The third generation smart AI set her eyes on the sleeping form of the Master Chief, she decided to patch up the code on his armor's operating systems, improving its normal use, and adding the beginnings of translation software for these new alien languages.
She didn't have much to go on but she could incorporate more after she moved the ship. Upon which she would begin her espionage mission before waking the spartan and presenting the situation to him. She had no doubt he'd take the news without much panic or fear, and then immediately begin devising options to hopefully get back to the UNSC in the future.
'Sometimes I wonder who is the man? And who is the machine.' Cortana figured with her new upgrades that the line between them had blurred, he was a man raised to think like a machine, and she was a machine built to think like a human being… now even more so. She found the situation to be oddly funny in a way, but she knew for certain that both of them had been built for the purpose of war.
And surviving it.
This was what united them in their first battles and now stood among many reasons as to why they stood as the best of companions and teammates.
The month flew past seemingly quick, and the Forward unto Dawn was now completely sealed, air pressure was mostly stable throughout the ship. The Huragok was now almost done with the required work in the medical bay, it would then set up all the Spartan hardware packaged on board. When the Dawn was slated for the Ark mission, Earth high command had dumped most of their immediate inventory of Mjolnir systems on board, they had everything required for proper service, upkeep, and repair of the Chief's armor.
Another week went by without issue and Cortana continued to gather whatever scraps of data she could on the galaxy at large, there was a lot to go over.
In the meantime, Cortana had the Huragok stationed at the slip-space drive core doing last second systems checks. She had decided to jump the ship to just outside of what the peoples of this galaxy called the Attican Traverse. in order to listen into the farthest colony outposts located there, using the outposts communications and electronic systems to hack into the rest of the galaxy at large, so as to learn everything she could on every faction and danger she could find without the risk of being traced or discovered.
With her digital fingers crossed for good luck, Cortana activated the slip-space drive and had the ship's surprisingly undamaged propulsion thrusters push the vessel ahead and into the blue and white whirling hole that was torn open in both space and time.
She was hoping against hope that all would go well with their first slip-space jump. After seventeen hours of traveling through the corridor the new slip-space drive had forced into being, they arrived at the exit vector for their relatively short journey. Praying desperately for no last-second complications or errors to occur, Cortana input and executed the exit command and protocols to the slip-space drive that would bring them back to real space.
Exiting slip-space she found that they had arrived near a small colony settlement, although it was more like a sparsely populated outpost than an actual settlement, the place was located on an almost completely uninhabited world that was orbiting the nearby star.
Cortana was relieved to see that the ship had exited slip-space on the fringes of the rings of a gas giant in the system and was thus very well hidden from the few far-reaching sensors that the settlement's communications system fielded.
She set an orbital travel route, so as to avoid the gas giant's gravity well as well as the asteroids that shared the nearby space in the gas giant's rings. She then sent the sentinels out for the gathering of materials that could be scavenged from the asteroids, she then settled down and decided to begin the hacking extravaganza she'd been planning for almost the past two months…
All the while wondering what juicy political and hypocritical secrets she would find, as well as just how she could use them for her party's best interests... or to just alleviate her occasional spell of boredom.
Maybe there were others stranded here like they were, although she didn't think it likely.
The odds of such a thing were not in favor of such outcomes.
(Author's Note)
This was chapter two and I hope to add more in the future, please follow if you want notifications for chapter updates! Hope you all enjoyed reading this and I hope to see you all in chapter three! Until next time, this is Gabenator5 Signing OFF!
UPDATE: As of JAN2023 this chapter has been reworked and reuploaded.