Where had everyone gone?
Typically, in normal Huragok fashion, Bobs Occasionally would not have even spared a thought no matter if the corridor it was floating through was empty or packed wall-to-wall. However, today was not a typical day.
Bobs Occasionally had spent some very happy time repairing the main dorsal doors of the Ardent Prayer, which had somehow managed to seal themselves shut semi-permanently, and had been almost busy enough with the job to miss the fact that the ship seemed to have gone into slipspace. While this had been odd, Bobs Occasionally had assumed that the event had nothing to do with it unless something broke, and had successfully completed the repair of the doors. While it would have liked to continue forward and repair the numerous Starfighters that were parked on the upper deck of the corvette, it had no desire to face a vacuum, so it had gone to find someone to move the ships into the corvette's hangar.
Bobs Occasionally chirruped to itself softly as it moved down the worryingly empty corridor, looking into rooms it passed as it did so and searching for familiar faces. Most often, it would find Cyko 'Salkam in the weapons room, and the Sangheili had been one of the few crew members that had been quite happy to assist the Huragok whenever it had needed him. However, Cyko 'Salkam had not been there, and a half-disassembled plasma pistol had been left lying on the work bench.
Almost absent-mindedly, Bobs Occasionally had reassembled the weapon, recharging the pistol's internal batteries as it did so. Cyko 'Salkam had always been pleased when the Huragok had done that, as every recharged plasma pistol was one fewer replacement that the weaponsmaster Sangheili had to order from the Covenant's armories. Placing the now-whole weapon into a cradle specifically designed for it, the Huragok floated gently out of the room, determined to search for another who might be receptive to its queries.
Unfortunately, this was not a search that the universe planned to allow the poor Huragok to complete: Bobs Occasionally shrieked in distress as the Ardent Prayer began to shake violently, the aimless slipspace jump beginning to fray and collapse at the edges. In a near-blind panic, the Huragok accessed the ship's systems, the huge amount of information routed from the sensor arrays through the ship's systems and straight into the organic AI's head -in a metaphorical sense, if not a literal one.
Realizing quite quickly that there would be no more repairing for it if the ship shook itself apart or ripped up in slipspace, the creature processed the sensor and damage data in a rapid-fire succession that would have made most UNSC AI blush with envy. Bobs Occasionally, desperate for anything that might keep the abused corvette together, threw its mind around for an answer that fit the problem: then, as if an invisible switch had been flipped, it went deathly calm.
Quite suddenly, the situation did not seem so desperate as it appeared to be: it knew exactly what to do, exactly which actions to take. A pre-programmed series of responses, burned into the genetic code of every Huragok the day it was created in a Forerunner lab, a process that the Forerunners themselves had long destroyed for fear the Flood, or even the Reclaimers, might find it. One of the greater secrets of that lost species, and Bobs Occasionally knew exactly how to enact it.
It spun up the corvette's own slipspace drive, and oscillated the signature until it matched that of the device in the hangar bay: the foreign drive was human in make, and created a hole into slipspace differently. Unlike most jumps, however, the drive had continued to run after the initial rip in space-time that had allowed the passage of the vessel into slipspace, causing destabilization within their local bubble. Normally, this would result in the complete atomization of the vessel and everything on board: however, by matching and boosting the signal of the first drive, the second prevented further bubble entropy and instead made it punch through, instead of falling apart.
Bobs Occasionally assembled the correct series of actions that the ship and its devices must take to initiate the process, then created what amounted to a coded activation button. The huragok hesitated before pressing it, reconsidering it for just a moment: this was, if it had its math right, quite possibly the riskiest thing that anyone or anything in control of a slipspace drive had ever attempted to do, and the chance of complete failure was astronomical.
Then, the AI remembered, to its chagrin, that while the process MIGHT kill it, not initiating the protocol WOULD kill it. Hesitation gone, the Huragok pressed the button, and everything went white.