I got permission to adopt this story from it's original author drich147, so don't assume I stole it.
Disclaimer: I do not own Mass Effect or Halo.
Manipular: Manipular was the Forerunner title given to adolescent citizens. These young members of society typically followed their families' lineage going into their particular rate. As Manipulars had not yet made the mutation to a first-form, they were identified as "Form Zero" in their names.
Rate: The Forerunner society was divided in five social classes, known as rates. Each rate specialized in a particular field of work, and had varying function in society and cultural importance.
Mutation: Mutation was a Forerunner term referring to customized biological maturation to new forms or rates. The process was typically performed between two to five times over the course of a lifetime.
In society, a Forerunner's mutation determined the individual's place within their family, Maniple, or guild and was always patterned after the individual's mentor, typically but not always the parent.
Brevet mutation was a term used to refer to the undertaking of risky, ad hoc mutations that carried higher risk of complication.
Slipstream: Forerunner term for slipspace.
Strato-sentinel: A variant of existing sentinels, these are designed mainly for mining and helping out in construction.
Design Seed: Design seeds, also known as "ship-seeds" were pieces of technology used by Forerunner Builders to encode data that would be used to quickly assemble a machine at the appropriate time. A design seed was comprised of software which contained the schematics for the machine, as well as machinery, which would obtain construction materials on-site and turn them into several main components; a large octagonal platform surrounded by eight curved pillars, each rising a thousand meters from the ground. The machinery worked remarkably quickly; the mountain at the center of Djamonkin Crater was dismantled and reshaped into the core components within a single night.
When the machine was activated, these pillars would begin to rotate around the central platform. As they spun, they projected Hard light components, which used raw materials obtained on-site and reconstituted them into the alloys and components needed to build a ship or other machine. The construction process was extraordinarily rapid; the Didact's ship was approximately one kilometer long, and yet the entire vessel was materialized within a matter of minutes.
Domain: A vast Forerunner information sharing network. It contained the entirety of the knowledge that the Forerunners ever possessed
Disclaimer: I do not own Mass Effect, nor do I own Halo, this story was created for entertainment purposes only, and I am making no money from this.
(((H,ME)))
For most beings in the universe, 100,000 years was a very long time.
For him, 100,000 years was far too long.
His name was Bornstellar Makes Eternal Lasting.
He had gone through many things in his life time. Things that he never would have expected or had ever thought about.
He, in his search for Precursor artifacts, met the Didact, after freeing him from the suspended animation that he had laid in for 1000 years.
He had fought the flood, fought to destroy the monstrous all-consuming parasite that threatened his species.
He had killed the last of the precursors, trapping it in a reverse timelock, aging it millions of years within seconds.
He, with no options left, activated the installation array, killing all life forms in the galaxy, simultaneously causing the event that had sent him to a far different galaxy entirely.
He remembered those events well.
He remembered activating the Installation Array from the Ark, he remembered waiting, even as each installation charged and fired the oh-so terrible weapons mounted on each one. He remebered waiting, waiting for the pulse that would kill all life to spread throughout the galaxy. He had waited, even as the very last Forerunner had died. He remembered traveling to his flagship, all that remained of the once mighty Forerunner military, which had remained behind to give him the chance to fire these weapons.
The only reason he was capable of piloting the ship was because of a device made right near the end of the war, far too late to make any real change in the outcome in the war. The device, though it didn't have an official name, simply connected him to the ship, allowing the connected to act in a manner similar to that of an AI, which could be corrupted and turned against them by the flood. A precaution, as AI that was turned against them could be quite lethal.
He remembered reactivating the portal, preparing to travel through it and wanting to make sure that the Array had completely worked. He had wanted to make sure the automated reseeding process was going underway. To make sure that he had succeeded.
And then, right after entering the portal, the after effects of of the Arrays firing made itself known.
He never would have expected it. He didn't know that the firing the array would produce an anomaly in the slipstream. An anomaly that interfered with the slipstream.
And because of that anomaly, the slipstream portal had changed utterly.
Normally, a portal consisted of an incredibly large amount of slipstream fields spinning around each other while simultaneously compressing, forming a spatial phenomena similar to that of a wormhole, allowing more or less instantaneous travel between 2 points in space/time.
However, such a thing was only possible when the slipstream was calm and unmoving. When the array fired, the slipstream had been thrown in a temporary chaos, leaving any attempt at entering the slipstream dangerous at best, suicidal at worst.
With the chaos of the slipstream, it was almost impossible to establish a normal portal. So, when he attempted to travel through the portal, the location he was sent to was definitely nowhere near where he wanted to be. In fact, it wasn't even in the same galaxy as where he wanted to be.
He had been sent to a neighboring galaxy, completely un-prepared and unsure of what to do.
It was only through luck that his ship suffered no damage in the slipstream. Because his ship wasn't damaged, he had access to all the resources and technologies on the ship, allowing him to survive and slowly build up a base inside the system. And that was only possible because of the fact that it was a keyship, larger than other normal keyships, and refitted with various different technologies that gave it a great versatility.
When he first arrived into this galaxy, he arrived in a solar system that had 3 gas giants, 2 of which had orbiting asteroid belts, and a 1 small planet, only 9000 kilometers in diameter. To him, there wasn't anything truly interesting in the system, but it did represent a considerable about of resources that he could use.
And use it he did. Part of the upgrades that came with the ship included a sentinel production facility, and a refinement facility to process raw resources. It included many other things, like a Design seed facility (which he hadn't stored the resources to build), but at the moment, that was all he needed to use.
In minutes, hundreds of on board, specialized strato-sentinels left the ship, floating through space to the asteroids, preparing to break them down and tow them back to the ship, where the resources could be put to good use.
Strato-sentinels worked in groups of 4, the mighty beams on each one allowing them to simply slice off pieces of an asteroid, slowly cutting them down into smaller, more manageable, forms, even as the pieces were collected by each strato-sentinel. When the sentinels reached full capacity, they delivered it to the ship, where it was processed and used in the creation of more sentinels.
Quickly, resources piled up, even as entire asteroids vanished into the sentinels, and when the number of sentinels reached 1000, he simply stored the resources on his ship, all in preparation to construct a Design Seed. This particular design seed would create a super large platform on the surface of the moon, and once that was done, he would have an effective base from which he could operate.
Time had passed since then. And his base had grown whenever he need it too.
100,000 years, and still, he was alive.
Forerunners could live for quite a long time, but the only reason he was still alive today was due to factors. The main factor being Nanotechnology. Nanotechnology was something the the Forerunners didn't pay all that much attention too, in favor of other technologies, however, it saw a large amount of development during the war with the flood. As the flood relied on infecting bodies, nanotechnology was thought to be a possible cure to the flood, not by reversing it, but by stopping it from ever happening in the first place. Unfortunately, it didn't work out as well as intended, as while it certainly slowed down the infection, it could not stop it, and there was no known way to remove the infection once it took hold.
There had only ever been one cure for the flood, and that had long since been destroyed by its creators in a final act of revenge against the forerunners.
But still, nanotechnology had allowed him to survive all this time, in combination with a mutation he had forced on himself.
He had spent much of this time learning from the Domain, which had suddenly re-opened only a few years. He could only guess why that happened, Mendicant Bias had done a good job in exhausting the domain, and had continued exhausting it to prevent it from making a recovery, right up until it had been captured by Offensive Bias. That was the likely reason, without Mendicant to damage it, it would recover.
He didn't actively attempt to expand from this solar system, which he had found existed right on the edge of the galaxy, far away from the galactic core. He only ordered his fleet to expand once every few thousand years, only after completely gathering all the resources in every system did he expand his little empire to a new solar system. Occasionally, he would utilize a small fraction of the incredible amount of resources at his disposure, and create an artificial world, where he could practice his knowledge gained from the Domain.
He was thankful for the Domain, with it, he had access to everything that the Forerunners ever developed, created, designed and knew about. It proved very useful in many different ways, especially when he found the data relevant to sub-atomic particle manipulators (which, while it was used on his ship and the design seeds, he didn't have the relevant data to build the technology on its own), with that one piece of technology, each and every particle in a system became a part of the potential resources he could collect.
And then after 20,000 years, he found something interesting in a solar system he a had recently expanded into.
An object of unknown make and purpose, hidden deep with an ice moon.
Bornstellar, intrigued by the find, immediately devoted a large amount of sentinels to remove the object from the moon, seeking to study it and learn of its purpose. He also ordered the sentinels to build a slipstream portal.
He wasted no effort in the study of the device, he studied the ice moon with several pieces of technology, mainly to see if there was anything different about the moon, and also to see the age of the moon, which might help in determining the objects age. The ice moon was 150,000 years old.
The objects design was rather strange. It resembled a gigantic dual pronged tuning-fork, with a set of gyroscopes at the center, surrounding an unknown element.
The object itself proved to be slightly enigmatic. The outside of it was made of a rather resilient, unknown material. The material was also encased some form of quantum shielding, locking the atoms in place at a sub-atomic level. That proved to be a setback in his study of the device, as he either had to find a way to remove the shielding, or bypass it. One way or the other, he was going to get past that shield.
He was Bornstellar Makes Eternal Lasting. He was a Forerunner. He was the Didact! He fired the halo array! He wouldn't let something so trivial as a quantum shield impede his study of the object. He was better than that.
After about 3 days of pondering, he decided to use a powerful laser with the object wrapped in a slipstream field. The slipstream field would allow the the laser to bypass the quantum field, simply because of the nature of the slipstream. The slipstream did not possess the same laws of physics as real space did, and thanks to the Forerunners near transcendent mastery of the slipstream, he could ensure that the atoms would become loose inside the field, allowing them to be moved again. It was simpler and would take far less time than setting up a reverse quantum field.
Had he done the same thing on anything that didn't have that quantum field, it would have instantly fallen apart, each atom completely unconnected in any way except for gravity, which was also subject to change in the slipstream.
To do this, he was going to drag the object back into a station that he had previously set up. The station, almost exactly the same as every other station he had constructed when he expanded to a new solar system, possessed all the appropriate technologies he required, and more.
It did not take long to get the object to the station, it was inside the solar system after all, and the station could be towed quite easily thanks to all the strato-sentinels around it.
As the object was settled into place, a large platform appeared. The platform, which was actually a specialized sentinel, attached itself to the object, even as slipstream fields began to warp around the object. The sentinel's 'eye' began to glow, and a thin laser erupted from it to the object, beginning to work away at the material of the hull.
The material, while it did prove to be strong, was eventually cut away by the continuous beam, which finally sliced through it after 10 seconds, allowing access to the inside of the object. The sentinel shut off its beam once it breached the hull, and lifted the piece off the hull and took it away for study. In its absence, another sentinel floated up, and began to let loose nanobots.
The inside of the hull was not nearly as resilient, and was made from some normal materials, because of that, the nanobots had no difficulty in going through the inside, simultaneously scanning the object and its makeup, documenting the design for study. As the nanobots slowly finished their work, another sentinel floated up, this time to the gyroscopes that contained the unknown element. The sentinel floated close, and began to extract a small amount of the material that laid in the core of the object. Its job completed, it hovered away to submit the material to the laboratories within the station.
Having attained all they need from the object at the moment, the sentinels floated away, and the slipstream fields vanished.
Now, it was time for study.
Some 3 weeks later, when he finished examining the object, he began to document everything he know about it.
The object proved interesting in a number of ways. The first, and most notable, was its age. The object was at least 2.15 million years old, infinitely older than anything the Forerunners knew about, baring perhaps the Precursors.
Second, was the material that had been extracted from the core of the device. The material was very interesting to him, mainly because of the makeup and properties of the material. At first, he couldn't make sense of the element, simply because of the radiation it emitted, that lasted until he decided to run an electric current through it, at which point, the purpose and properties of the material was revealed. When subjected to an electric current, the element released dark energy, which effected the mass in the local area. After a bit of experimentation, he found that a negative current decreased the mass in a local area, while a positive current increased it.
He was very interested in learning where this element came from, its study would prove very enlightening.
Third, the unknown material that was used as the hull for the object. The material, while quite resistant, was not really anything special. Scans revealed that it wasn't a natural material, and also show the markings of synthesized elements. Considering the material was used as armor, it was likely that the species that had created it was around 1.7 on the technological achievement scale, as species of higher achievement almost always had more resistant materials. That said, the material itself had probably only survived for this long because of the quantum field, which would easily stop any form of damage and decay, baring an impact of a large asteroid.
The fourth point of interest was the quantum field. That field would easily allow it too survive practically anything. It had a very high threshold, but he calculated that an object of significant mass would be able to destroy it, but only if it collided with it when it was moving at a fast speed. Due to the nature of the quantum field that surrounded the object, anything that didn't have enough mass wouldn't be able to destroy it. It would likely survive even a star going supernova.
The fifth point of interest was the purpose of the device. He hadn't managed to figure out what the device was for, nor why somebody would build such a thing. The easiest way to figure out what this device did was simply to activate it, which he was quite sure he could do. Of course, he had no intention of being in the same system as the object when it activated, he had no idea on what it would do. It could even explode, considering that he had taken a few parts away from it. Of course, he was going to put those back when he was prepared to activate it.
(((H,ME)))
He had ordered the sentinel to replace the materials he had taken away from the object, and then too drag it back to where it had initially been located.
'Well, this is it. Time to activate this thing.'
Once the object was back in place, he turned his ship around, ordering the sentinels to open a slipspace portal through which he could travel. When the portal opened, he wasted no time in going through it, straight into the next solar system, a distance of a mere 46 light years. From the other system, he ordered the sentinels to activate the object.
(((H,ME))) In the system where the mass relay is.
Sentinels moved to and fro, beginning to leave the surrounding space of the object, one sentinel, however, remained and began to broadcast a signal that the Didact had determined would activate the object.
Slowly, the object activated. The dual prongs of the object beginning to turn in another direction, pointing at some far away star, even as the gyroscopes in the core of the device began to spin around the element that lied in the core. As the gyro scopes began to rotate faster and faster, the element began to glow brighter and brighter, leading a shining blue/purple light in the center, a glow that illuminated the rest of the device. Finally, it seemed to stabilize, the gyroscopes no longer speeding up, the element in the center remaining at the same light level.
A probe approached the object intending to scan the object now that it was completely activated. As the sentinel approached, the object began to start doing something that he couldn't figure out. Finally, the sentinel got close enough, and then the object sent out a stream of what appeared to be blue lightning, latching on too the ship, and then flinging it forward faster than the speed of light.
Bornstellar blinked, not expecting that at all. And then, the slipspace communication system mounted on the probe sent a signal that reached back to the star system where it was launched from.
The Didact was intrigued, according to the signals, the probe had been launched almost 500 light years almost instantly, to an exact replica of the object found in the previous system.
He sent a signal that ordered the probe to come back, also ordering it to focus its sensors on what was happening during the time when the object sent the probe to the other system.
In only a minute, the probe arrived again, completely undamaged in any way.
He ordered it to go back too the science facility, he wanted to know what the object had done.
(((H,ME)))
