(Note)

Well, chapter two is here and I intend to write many more of them in the near future, anyways let's get the ball rolling and move the story on from its current standpoint. So many plotline decisions to make!

I do not own Mass Effect or the Halo Franchise. both universes respectively belong to Bioware/EA and Microsoft/343 Industries. Anyways ON WITH THE STORY!

(Chapter rework 04/28/2019)

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 past contained within, with the "Snack" it had taken consumed the Huragok reassembled the ration pack, resealed it, and returned it back to the crate, without any sign of it being tampered with.

Cortana found these creatures fascinating, they required very little protein or nutrients to function at full capacity, and the Huragok's main goal in life was to learn and repair, fixing was just what they did. The Huragok didn't understand the idea of personal space or ownership of items. When they were found by ground teams, soldiers scrambled head over heels to have the Huragok examine their favorite weapons and gear, hoping that they could be improved in some way.

In fact when she checked what remained of the mess hall's camera recording history, 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, Tacpads, and helmets into the Huragok's very capable silica coated appendages, for a bevy of repairs and upgrades.

Afterwards, the Marines were running to the pelican deployment bays with face-splitting grins, looking like they met Santa Claus early. While the ODST's were unable to do anything but grumble, and leave on their way to the HEV pod deployment sections, located on the underside of the Forward Unto Dawn.

Cortana couldn't help but laugh at the sheer hilarious antics the rivalry between the too military groups caused, she sighed and 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?'

Cortana decided that waiting wasn't going to help her in the long run, and decided 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 Spartans seemingly infinite luck reserves to keep the Huragok alive while it's in transit.' Having thought it over 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 spaceworthy and sealed itself inside among the rest of its contents. After four hours of tedious non-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 deck.

The Huragok slipped out of its crate and began to flit to and fro while using the sentinels to talk to Cortana, as it began to bring all the engineering deck's systems online while beginning the process of preparing all the spare parts for a basic slip-pace drive. Which coupled with forerunner mathematics and techniques would be easier to build and far more effective than even the most recently outdated covenant slip-space drive cores.

Cortana 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.

...

...

...

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, none had ruptured and she had enough to eventually fill the remains of the Dawn, after her repair drones fixed the front, were 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 or Covenant Separatists channels. Hoping it was just a signal dead zone, Cortana expanded her sensors to the best of her ability and found only static, laced with several unknown signals. Sighing in frustration and too afraid to broadcast, in case they were in Covenant space or some other hostile alien territory, Cortana checked the star charts and found that they wouldn't tell her where the Dawn 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, both by software and manually with the repair drones, in order to read the weak signal, 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 the data bursts, Humans were not independent of alien societies, being subservient and dependent on alien tech, and to some strange council of races that met on a ridiculously small space station, they called citadel, proudly claiming itself as the galactic government over the galaxy…when they hadn't even explored one percent of it...

Much of the laws and red tape she could see from picking up and analyzing the faint transmissions, weren't well thought out and usually were politically skewed, 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, where 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, or be faced with power-mad politicians and overeager scientists, who would 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.

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 galaxy 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, as well as better block scanners from other vessels. While not as effective without covenant camouflage tech, it sure was better than what the ship had left of her cyberwarfare suite. Cortana sent a request to the Huragok to update anything else it was able to update.

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 armors operating systems, improving its normal use and adding the beginnings of translation coding 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 upgrade 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.

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 Foward Unto Dawn was now completely sealed and air pressure was mostly stable throughout the ship, the Huragok was now almost done with the medical bay. It would then set up all the Spartan hardware packaged on board, the stuff was meant for the Master Chief's armor systems, they had everything required for proper service, upkeep, and repair.

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 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 slip-space corridor the ship's new slip-space drive core had stabilized, 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 core 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 un-inhabited garden 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 solar system and was thus very well hidden from the few sensors that the settlements basic communications systems 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 month and a half…

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.

(Note)

This was chapter two and I hope to add more in the future! Hope you all enjoyed reading this! See you all in chapter three! Until next time, this is Gabenator5 Signing OFF!