And we're already at chapter 7, wow, this goes really fast! Hope you guys like it, its a shorter one again, but things will get better, I promise. Chapter 12 is basically done, and I really want to start writing 13, there's some really cool stuff coming up that I want to get on paper instead of as an idea in my head.

I've mostly been busy writing a HP in ME fic and a bunch of other ideas I have, but I don't have enough to post those yet. Maybe I will someday, we'll see.

Thanks to everyone for reading! (at 12,8K views and climbing!)

Chapter 7: Taking in the scenery

It took almost an entire day to fully map out the entire wreck I'd been deposited on. The ship was huge, and had most likely been very impressive, once. Now it was only good for scrap metal. Somehow asteroids had switched places with parts of the ship, taking out huge chunks of it. The back part where the engines had probably been was completely gone. What had once been thick hull armour was rent and torn. Weapon mounts were now gaping holes. Landing bays were strewn with debris from what used to be the ships' fighter compliment.

I had made a number of very troubling discoveries in my exploration of the ship.

From the amount of mummified corpses onboard, and their position, it looked like the crew had committed mass suicide for some reason. How and why I only figured out when I found what I first thought to be a vault but turned out to be a ridiculously over-guarded bedroom. There was only a single corpse inside the room, dressed in fancy clothes and perfectly preserved. The man looked like he only just died and could get right back up again. To be honest, if the sensors of the Drones I'd sent in hadn't been so good I'd have thought he was asleep.

To make a long story short, this guy had once been the captain of the ship. Something had gone wrong, the logs I'd discovered weren't clear on what, and they had lost their Navigator during a warpjump. Somehow, this event had also made them lose the entire bridge. Which the captain should have been on. But the captain was fine, hadn't been harmed at all. Yeah, I don't have much to say about how very captain-y that painted this guy. As they were now hopelessly lost in the Warp, the crew had done the sensible thing and gone to pray for salvation. The 'captain', who had locked himself into this refuge, had promptly gassed everyone on the ship but him with a deadly poison. With the system specifically installed to do just that. I had no idea what anyone was thinking about having something like that on a military ship, or what it was ever going to be useful for and spent quite a while staring at the lunatic's diligently kept logs in bafflement. Either way, it hadn't helped mister captain either. No more than a week later, the silence had all gotten too much for him and he'd committed suicide with a poison in his daily wineglass.

Seriously, the guy had enough food -high quality, most likely expensive food- tucked away that he could have lasted decades in there. I had no idea how he had ever gotten appointed as captain at all. Not that it mattered any more. He was dead, together with everyone else on board Piercing Courage, which was the name of the ship. Something else I had found in the numerous paper documents scattered around the captain's bolt hole.

More importantly, the captain had several interesting weapons. A plasma pistol being the simplest. A very fancy one, with enough gold filigree and gems to make the British crown jewels blush. It had to be said that despite how tacky it looked, the thing was in full working order and a lot more impressive than the other one I'd found. It nicely filled in a few questions I had about the plasma weapon technology for me. Enough that I felt certain that I could reproduce them.

A power sword was strapped to his side, the blade seeming very out of place for me for a moment before I remembered that this universe was completely insane and melee weapons were actually necessary even for a space-faring race. That it was a power sword and not just a normal sword I only learned when one of the Drones checking the thing out pressed one of the embellishments on the handle and activated the sword. A disruption field sprung into being around the blade in a flash of lightning, wrecked the scabbard holding the weapon in place and effortlessly sliced through a Drone and part of the corpse's leg on its way to the floor, where it got stuck. It was a rather stupid way for my first ever bot to be destroyed, but it was more than worth the find.

The disruption field around the blade was something the Forerunners had never seen before, which made it an invaluable treasure to me. The sword was very carefully brought back to me, a simple scabbard having been reconstructed around it before it was dragged through several kilometers of hallways. By now the area around me was transformed into a typical Forerunner base, if a very bare bones one. Thick plates of armour containing hardlight generators that slotted into each other like lego's formed the walls -basically smartmatter on a larger scale- around the ever expanding amount of fusion reactors, energy capacitors, fabrication vats and computer cores that formed my new home.

I stayed in the just completed command centre. It was full of holographic screens showing the views of the dozens of parties of bots mapping out the ship in detail. A large hologram dominated the middle of the room showing the whole ship, which shifted slightly all the time as more and more data came streaming in from my explorers. The reason I stayed in here was mostly because with the amount of armour and the newly installed laser and plasma cannons I was hopefully safe in here. Anything that wanted me dead was at least going to be slowed down by all that.

Feeling safe had also allowed me to relax and think better about how I was going to grow stronger.

The most important realisation I'd come to was that I was going to need more power. Fusion was a good start, but not nearly enough to really power some of the devices I was envisioning. Most of the Forerunners barely bothered with fusion reactors. They used anti-matter or an even more energetic system than matter annihilation; vacuum energy.

With both systems the Forerunners cheated. Getting anti-matter normally isn't all that easy, but I'd found a bunch of research papers in my database on how to flip normal matter into anti-matter. It wasn't all that difficult using some of the lesser known properties of slipspace to do exactly that. A fusion reactor could easily power the machine necessary for the matter to anti-matter conversion. Once I had anti-matter containing it was easy with hardlight, and getting power out of it again was equally easy. Plans for my first matter/anti-matter reactor were soon going to be complete. I just had to let my computer go over the details to make sure the thing wouldn't explode. That would not be fun.

Vacuum energy was the Forerunners cheating even more than they normally did. The energy inherent in the creation of alternate realities -something that happened an infinite amount of times in every infinitely small spot of space-time- was exploited, making virtual particles that normally blinked in and out of existence useable on a macro scale. Besides being a manner for generating massive amounts of energy, virtual particles were perfect for sublight drives. Similar to a fusion torch, a Forerunner sublight engine was basically a directed vacuum energy generator optimised for thrust instead of power. A very neat solution to propulsion, and one I couldn't wait to try out.

It would have to wait however. Vacuum reactors required even more energy to start up than the matter/anti-matter ones. A fusion reactor would still do, but it would have to be a pretty big one. As in, office building sized reactor. I didn't have the infrastructure, space or resources to even begin thinking about an energy source like that. Well, didn't have what I needed yet.

To get up to nice things like vacuum reactors, I was going to need more space than just the wreck I was on. Oh, it was plenty big; nearly six kilometres long, not counting a bunch of rock and rubble packed around it. There was even quite a lot of hydrogen to fuel my fusion reactors for a long while. With more space I meant open space. Getting me access to all the asteroids, planets, gas giants and stars my little body could imagine - and that I desperately needed if I wanted to build an armada capable of keeping me alive in this horrible, trigger-happy, insane universe.

And this is where my other troubling discovery was: there was a bit of a problem with getting into open space.

Namely, the wreck I was on wasn't drifting in space alone.

In every spot I had managed to get outside the hull there was a black wall of armour blocking my way. Unlike the alloy pretending to be armour for the Imperial ship which was about as much of a barrier to me as paper, the one cocooning my arrival spot was strong. Strong by Forerunner standards. Which was impressive. And worrying, too. I wasn't sure what was going on with that, but getting through that barrier would take some work. I'd still get through, but I would have to burn my way through, slowly and carefully.

There weren't many factions that could make something like that armour as far as I knew, and not knowing was a dangerous thing right about now. I would be going through that armour but not before I had a lot more things in place in case whoever was on the other side wasn't keen on me coming for a visit.