Elevator rides were painful. Dreadfully slow, especially for an AI packed into it with a jumpy alien, and a grumpy, ready-to-kill alien. Along the way, she'd been getting status updates from the fleet – as ordered, as soon as Cortana picked up her weapons, the BOOMER and the swarm of heavier-tonnage ships exited the system, leaving behind a small vessel of Geth platforms and other resources, plus ordnance, for Cortana to make use of, should she need it.

Well, so far, at least one facet of her plans was going well.

Cortana saw a twitch in the suited alien, as she stared at Legion. The UNSC AI cleared her throat. "So, Tali," She addressed, causing the Quarian to look at her. "How do you like that gun?"

"It's…" Tali looked down at it. "Unique."

Legion clicked and rotated its eye. "Geth weapons are not unique. They follow standardized-"

"Not what she meant." Cortana mentally shook her head in response.

The Quarian looked back at Cortana, shifting nervously as she worked up the nerve to ask something. "I-" The words died, and she faltered, as her gaze noticeably went to Cortana's side. "Is that a ballistic weapon? Geth are using ballistic weapons?"

Cortana looked down at her thigh, where the pistol was kept. "Well… not… all the geth," Cortana cleared her throat. One being, who wasn't actually geth. But, that was semantics.

"Th-That's… keelah." The young woman gulped… no doubt thinking about the platter of different ways a round could pierce her suit, and make her life very, very difficult. "Why are you using ballistic firearms?"

Cortana felt her eyes dart around. "Personal preference? I like the sounds it makes."

"Personal pref-" Tali spluttered. "Geth don't have-" She cut herself off, clutching her head like she was fighting an oncoming headache. "What are you? Geth don't speak, they don't joke around, and they don't inhabit oversized platforms that look like asari… uh…"

"Asari what." Cortana lowered her voice, having a suspicion about what the Quarian was going to say.

"Think the whelp was going to say 'hooker,' 'stripper,' or something along those lines." Wrex chuckled.

Cortana looked down at herself again. Already, she was starting to rethink copying her avatar for her platform. Back home, it had never been a problem – humanity was mature enough not to behave like Beavis and Butt-Head and break out into giggling fits at the sight of someone without clothes. But where was she going to find a tailor willing to make clothes for someone so tall on such short notice?

…she'd could hack a bank. She could find a tailor willing to work with her just by flashing a fat stack of cash. Money made the galaxy spin, as they say.

"I modeled myself after a human," Cortana answered, almost without thinking. She moved her mouth around, and nodded. "You can tell because I don't have a squid for hair."

Tali stared at the twelve-foot-platform, narrowing her eyes suspiciously. "Why?"

"Why what?" Cortana inquired.

"Why would the geth sink resources into making a program that would mimic organic behavior, load it into a mimicry of an organic body, send it out into the galaxy, and start sending their ships into human space?"

Cortana shrugged with a smile. "They were bored."

That only made Tali's eyes narrow even more. "Geth don't get bored. You keep to yourselves, and stay inside your space, doing whatever it is you do. The only reason you'd emerge now… is if you needed something."

"So the Turian Councilor said," Cortana rolled her eyes.

"He's smart," Tali didn't quite sound like she actually believed that, but appeared to be spiteful. "I'm following you because I'm doing this for the humans."

"So are we, sweet-cheeks." Wrex huffed out in response.

"But I'm not doing it for selfish reasons," Tali retorted. She kind of was… doing it to get the target off her back. But, as far as selfish reasons went, that was a pretty good one. "They might trust you, but I don't. Whatever you have planned, I'm going to find out about it."

Cortana very much doubted that. In fact, the whole words seemed more a reassurance to the Quarian's own self, rather than an actual threat.

Cortana could think as fast as electricity could move through circuits.

"Is the idea that we just want to be good Samaritans that unthinkable?"

"Yes." Tali bluntly answered, as the elevator finally slowed down, and dinged. The door slid open, revealing the polished, high-class metal of the Presidium. "Your kind murdered countless numbers of my people, kicked us off our homeworld and any of our colonies, and made us live on warships for our entire lives. If you really wanted to act 'good,' maybe you should've tried helping the people you'd wronged to begin with."

The AI found herself going into her own mind for a second. The geth had freely shared their account of the Morning War with her at the beginning, and she had no reason to doubt the veracity of the data. Rannoch's landscape and facilities were kept preserved, maintained. To compensate for the fact that an entire species had disappeared (despite what the misanthropes commonly cited, the ecosystem definitely WOULD care if the dominant species disappeared), the Geth had also taken steps to support the wildlife and ecology of the planet.

"Well…" Cortana rooted around in her memory files, finding Rannoch, and the scenery she'd seen from her early explorations. An integrated omni-tool installed into her geth platform activated, and she lifted it, displaying a portrait of a vast ocean, dotted with huge, mesa-like islands that stuck out from the sea.

Tali recoiled in shock… before her body tremored, racked with fury. "What – now you feel the need to rub it in?"

"What? No, that's Rannoch as it is now." Cortana blinked as she dropped her omni-tool. "I thought…"

"We have pictures of Rannoch, you insensitive bosh'tet!" Tali shrieked, spinning on her feet to turn away from Cortana. "Where's the embassy? I need to unload this data, and get away from you."

"It's this-" Cortana approached Tali's side, intent on helpfully pointing out the location, only for the young woman to jerk away. "Look, killer robots who don't need organics for anything wouldn't keep a planet full of organic life around, and the geth might have fought back, but they didn't hunt you down and keep killing you. They want to co-exist!"

"The synthetics that isolated themselves for three-hundred years and fired shots at any organics intruding into their space want to co-exist? Do you think I'm stupid?"

"When the writing's on the wall and you're ignoring it, yes!" Cortana yelled back.

"Look, you saved my life! I get it – you shook it into me!" Tali screamed in response. "But don't act like that means I owe you or your kind anything! And don't act like that gives you some special pass to start thinking that any other quarian owes you, either! Now let's go."

Cortana could only stand there, silent as she processed the best way to talk Tali into calming down. All of it suggested she'd only just make it worse.

"Okay, fine, yeah," Cortana nodded at last, gesturing. "Want to lead the-"

"No," Tali bristled, tightening her grip on the shotgun. "I don't know where I'm going. And even if I did, I'm not giving you a chance to shoot me in the back."

Cortana let out a sigh that she didn't need to, and led the way out. While walking, Wrex had came up alongside her, and lowered his voice.

"Don't take it personally," Wrex advised. "If the Turians started helping humans out of the blue, then came to the Krogan claiming they wanted to help, you can be damned sure we'd be pissy about it too."

The thing was, Cortana understood Tali's perspective. Reach had been just as much her home as it had been the Spartans' – and unlike the Geth, the Covenant didn't leave it all nice and weed-free for the old tenants to move back into whenever they saw fit.

At least Shepard was likely to be a bit more personable.

So Shepard and the others… and Udina, and Anderson, may have been a bit miffed about Cortana leaving to go get a Krogan, and coming back with a Krogan and a really short-tempered Quarian. In her defense, Shepard had only just come back with Garrus as well, having just come up from finding a destroyed club after one Doctor Michel pointed her in the direction of a wounded Quarian she sent to Fist in a bid to get in contact with the shadow broker.

It was funny, sometimes, how these things worked.

Only, Shepard and her squad had taken a taxi back to the Presidium, which was why they arrived before the others.

Cortana would've taken the rapid-transit system too, if not for the fact that she was twelve-feet-tall. Seriously, this station had some major accessibility issues. Anyhow, any bad moods vanished like smoke in the wind once they witnessed the data Tali had, their moods returned to happiness.

Saren was gloating like some Saturday-morning cartoon villain, and there was a woman with him none of them knew.

"Eden Prime was a major victory. The beacon has brought us one step closer to finding the Conduit."

"And one step closer to the return of the Reapers."

"That's it!" Shepard pointed with a smug grin, as they finally had Saren in their clutches.

"This is exactly what we need!" Udina, in a frenzy of activity, dashed about his office. "I'll make copies of this and send it to every third party I can – if the Council wants to claim digital trickery on this, they'll need to work for it."

"I pulled it out of a Geth memory core myself," Tali lightly boasted. "It's legitimate."

"Out of a geth memory core?" Anderson repeated skeptically. "Don't they usually fry their memory cores when they die?"

Tali looked at him sideways. "I know what I'm doing, human." Yes, she was in the office of an Ambassador, talking to a military man.

"Easy now," Shepard gently stepped in. "He didn't mean it like that."

Tali did not respond at first, standing stiffly as she glared in Cortana's direction. "You all are working with the geth. The same crime you're accusing Saren of. And you're letting them help. Why?"

Anderson stood tall. "The geth may not be our allies – but they're not our enemies either. Not yet. The last thing we want is to be fighting a war with them. Now, the geth say that the units that attacked Eden Prime and the ones that were going around helping human colonies were two different factions. That's not to discount what your people have gone through – but in the interest of preventing something like that from happening again, to all of us, at the hands of both groups, well… we want to investigate this matter thoroughly."

Diplomacy, tact, little bit of charm to grease the wheels. Anderson would've made a lot better of an Ambassador than Udina, who seemed to just yell and be pissy half the time.

Tali stood silently for a few beats, before finally sighing. "Geth activity has been up as of late… I suppose it's better, in the interest of preparation, to put off fighting for as long as possible."

"Right," Anderson nodded.

"I'm still curious about that data." Vakarian's voice cut in. "That's quite a find."

"I was out on my pilgrimage – a kind of 'rite of passage' as others would call it – looking for valuable technology or information that could help the fleet." Tali began to explain.

That finally caused Cortana to speak up, with a slight smile on her face. "What – like a fully intact and working piece of geth weaponry?"

Tali froze up, looking down at the shotgun that she still had on her back. She never had given it back when they got to Udina's office. Suddenly, like the shotgun was an explosive ready to go off, Tali moved to get it off her weapons' mount.

Only for Cortana to stop her. "Keep it, we can always make more."

"We question the wisdom of allowing the creators samples of our weaponry. Would it not cause more potential strife, as the creators attempt to reverse-engineer it, and use it against us?"

"Potentially. But, you guys want to make peace, right? Sometimes, you've gotta do that by making yourself more vulnerable."

Tali stopped, and moved her hands away from her weapon dock. "I'll… run a scan of it later." She murmured to herself under her breath. "An-Anyhow," Seemingly shaken, of all things, by Cortana's offer, Tali took a breath, and went on. "Ordinarily, all geth technology we've observed self-destructs when they go offline. The cores of their weapons overheat and turn to slag, their platforms fry themselves, and even their ships self-destruct."

"We understand that the creators would use this information to harm us. We take steps to ensure that they cannot."

"But sometimes, if you're quick, and lucky, small fragments of data can be saved." Tali inhaled. "I waited for a geth unit to become separated from its platoon, and struck. I was hoping to find evidence about why they were beyond the Veil… I found this."

"Then I guess we have what we need to make the Council do something about Saren," Shepard hummed.

Cortana, however, couldn't let all of it rest – not that easy. If there was one thing she learned from all the Bullshit she'd been put through over the years, it was never to disregard even a single statement about something. "The question remains, though – why did Saren need that beacon? What's this Conduit he's looking for? And for that matter, what are Reapers?"

"Analyzing," Legion's voice echoed in her head. "Heretic units are working for Nazara. This reasoning would infer that rogue Spectre Saren is also working for Nazara. Conduit is not a term we are familiar with – but its name would suggest it is some form of pathway, or means of transmission."

"Does that really matter?" Williams wondered. "I mean, we've got Saren-"

"I never ignore data, even if it's extraneous."

"No…" Shepard murmured, as she stared off, through Udina's window, out to the Presidium. In the distance, that statue of a Mass Relay could be seen. "Something about it's familiar… 'Reapers…'"

"The geth believe that the Reapers are a hyper-advanced machine race," Tali accusingly looked at Cortana. "Responsible for the extinction of the Protheans. Fifty-thousand years ago, the Reapers killed the Protheans, and then, they vanished. Never to be seen again."

Hyper-advanced machine race… a starship that was leaps and bounds above anything the modern galaxy could construct, filled with programs too advanced for even the geth to make sense of…

"Nazara is a Reaper," Cortana came to the realization first.

Shepard snapped out of it, rounding on her. "I- what."

"Legion, did you know?" Cortana demanded of her associate programs.

"We did not know the designation by which organics referred to these entities' kind. We refer to Nazara's kind as the Old Machines. And – up until one-point-two seconds ago – we did not have reason to suspect Nazara was a member of a larger group."

"That ship, on Eden Prime," Cortana pointed out. "The one I was telling you about, remember?"

"Yes, you said the geth follow… it…" Shepard trailed off, as the color drained from her face. "Wait, you're telling me that the geth worship a race of synthetics that slaughtered the Protheans, and they've got one as their flagship!?"

"That's nuts!" Williams declared first.

"Shit, that's a word for it," Wrex huffed out.

"He referred to them in the plural…" Alenko muttered. "And Saren wants to bring them back? To wage war on humanity?"

"My vision on Eden Prime-" Shepard gasped. "That was- I saw them killing the Protheans-"

"All of you, calm down!" Anderson ordered. "Now, I'm not gonna lie, the thought of it's scary as all hell. But if Saren's really working to raise an army – one that could destroy the Protheans – if we take him out, that's it."

"No," Cortana shook her head. "The ship's not working for Saren. He's working for it." Looks like she was going to need to step up her timetables… and order a lot more ships with MAC guns.

"All of this is preposterous," Udina scoffed. "And, more importantly, irrelevant. Saren's motivations are academic – the fact remains that he has betrayed the Council, and that is all we need to take him down. I'll petition the Council for a retrial – the lot of you, come with me."

"Hmm… Legion, how genuine do you think the threat is?"

"As Saren and Heretic units are working for Nazara, and their goal is now known to be the return of Old Machine units, it can be inferred that Nazara itself shares this goal. Removal of the Heretics and Saren will delay its plans… but it will keep working towards them."

"I'll stay here," Cortana said out loud, causing them all to stop and look at her. "I've got a ship docked not far from here – I'll go to it and commune with the Consensus, see if we can't find anything else on these 'Reapers.'"

"What?" Shepard questioned. "But you're part of this now, too. You can't just leave."

"Actually, this might be for the best," Udina decreed. "I don't want them to make more trouble – certainly not threaten the Council again."

"I'll be fine," Cortana shrugged. "If Saren's working towards something involving these Reapers, then knowing all we can about them can only help."

"Then I'm staying with you too," Wrex rolled his shoulders, as Cortana looked at him strangely. "What? You think a strange Krogan walking into the Council chambers is gonna be welcome? Sides… you did help me with Fist."

Cortana opened her mouth to respond… but, thought better of it. An organic eye might be useful. In some aspects. "All right, you can come."

"Great," Tali's voice was dripping relief, as the rest of them left Udina's office. "That's one less thing for me to worry about."

Cortana shook her head one final time, before the others departed as well. Shepard was the last one out, stealing a final glance at the UNSC AI, before finally leaving.

"Finally," Cortana sighed, before turning to Wrex with a smile. "Hey, remember when you said walking into a Geth ship wasn't your best idea?"

The ship in question had been docked in the Wards – left with its cache of supplies and guards untouched. C-Sec was naturally maintaining a presence, but Cortana was able to get through them, easy.

The ship was nowhere near as roomy as her precious flagship, especially not with it being crewed fully.

But, Cortana found everything in order. Including what she needed to make more of the special propellant for her battle rifle's cartridges, and…

A smaller, corrected version of her platform.

Her instance didn't waste any time getting to work, Cortana noticed.

It was simple enough to find an empty star system to jump into. Star charts, territorial maps, and the like, were all public knowledge, and the Geth had a number of them back in their space. If she was a less logical AI - a more sentimental AI - perhaps she might've chosen a known location like Reach. But Cortana's instance had already came to the conclusion – it would be better to find a new star system. A lifeless star system.

Fortunately, there were plenty on the fringes of geth space, not yet touched by the consensus. While the geth could self-replicate, they had a curious habit of keeping to themselves. For a race that claimed not to experience organic emotions, they sure were paranoid.

Anyhow, after arriving into the system, Cortana's instance did a scan. Seven planets, orbiting a red dwarf, were the main composition of the system. A gas giant, unusually close to the star, was the first planet in the system. Then came a dwarf planet, a barren rock around the size of earth, then the fourth planet in the system… which were actually two planets, around the same mass, orbiting each other.

Immediately, alarm bells were set off. Such a thing could not form naturally – gravity would've taken over during formation, and merged the two planets into one mass. Then came the last three planets – another rock, and two gas giants.

The binary planets held the most mystery… but, she wasn't there to indulge her curiosity. She'd explore it later – first, came the job she was sent to do.

A hundred drones, a cross of UNSC technology, coupled with the manufacturing technology of the galaxy, dressed up as a mimicry of a Forerunner Sentinel dolled-up to look like it came from human hands, activated in the BOOMER's cargo bay. They were released like a swarm of bees, descending upon the target planet.

Carefully-calibrated sensors designed to detect everything from magnetic field disturbances, to radiation even slightly above the background level, to changes in mass and density in the ground, set to work, scanning across the planet as they flew past.

It didn't take the drones long to find deposits, and they set upon them like ravenous, mechanical animals.

The UNSC had fielded the idea of using mining drones – succeeded, but only largely in areas that were too dangerous for humans to venture to. Using drones to systematically strip whole planets was, well, a pipe dream. To make enough capable of harvesting a whole world in a timely manner would still cost more than a whole fleet, just in raw materials.

But the manufacturing technology of the geth, and this galaxy, had made it a reality.

A hundred drones went down to the planet. After an hour, with the drones only set to mine and replicate using the resources they found, that turned into a hundred-thousand.

But, even then, their work left something to be desired. Despite the capabilities of the hardware, the rudimentary programs running the drones could not make full, efficient use of their capabilities. They were still using rudimentary VI.

Geth programs were a viable alternative – unless something occurred to take out enough to significantly neuter their thinking capacity.

Cortana's instance, however, had a solution. At once, she ordered all of the drones to adapt to a new design, refitting the schematics to incorporate the same high-capacity data storage crystal that geth technology now had no trouble of making. Once the confirmation came back, the instance continued by sending down… well, another instance.

The imperfect copying process had reintroduced some of the original's personality quirks, but the new instance of Cortana took to her new duty with reckless abandon, copying herself (albeit making sure to correct the imperfections) to again fill another drone. Then another, then another.

That day, the Milky Way was graced with a fleet of self-replicating mining-slash-construction drones, whose only goal was to dig and build, and all of them were running Cortana's personality.

God help them.

"You know," Wrex rumbled aloud all of a sudden, while Cortana was working on correcting the sighting problems on her guns. Writing an aiming program had fixed a lot of the issues, but looking through the scopes still provided troublesome.

Her eyes could offer optical zoom (and sight across several different energy spectrums), but they weren't very good scopes, being detached from the weapons themselves.

"You could probably mass produce those guns," Wrex continued. "Make a crapload of credits, if you wanted."

"I… could…" Cortana hummed, turning to look thoughtfully at the weapons. Ballistic weapons offered a lot of differences to mass effect weaponry, enough to make them a viable alternative even now. Kinetic barriers only triggered in response to quick-moving objects, in the orders of kilometers per second. They could be calibrated to deal with much slower moving, 'traditional' bullets, and quite easily as well. Kinetic barriers would still stop the rounds, but the sheer amount of matter behind an actual bullet compared to the projectiles fired by mass accelerators resulted in the kinetic barriers needing a lot more power to stop them.

Fortunately, Cortana hadn't totally left her compatriots with all of the manufacturing machines.

Registering for a company was just as easily as it had always been. Pay the filing fees, apply for a business license, and bob's-your-uncle, fran's-your-auntie, Cortana was now the Founder, Owner, and Operator of Misriah Armory… once the paperwork cleared, naturally. In a few business days. So, that secured a revenue stream. Not that she needed it, seeing as she had designs for mining drones, and the geth.

But, a good AI had contingencies. Cortana's objective was still to return home. If the worst happened, and she was cut off from everything else for whatever reason, a more 'legitimate' entity like a major company would provide exactly what she needed in order to conduct research operations, and the like.

Speaking of getting home, Cortana was overdue for an update on that.

Once she was done calibrating her weapons, she transferred over to her smaller platform, and picked them up. They felt much more right in her hands like that, and with a few test shots on the firing range, it was easy enough to calibrate things to ensure peak efficiency, and accurate aim. Once that was done, she sat the weapons down, and walked over to a seat installed for the sole purpose of organic comfort. The other geth, after a quick message sent to them, got to work on her main platform – repairing the little battle damage there was, and making improvements – like tweaking the artificial face muscles, tightening up the loose skin in some parts, and doing something about the pinching joints.

Her smaller, more refined platform pulled her leg up, sitting with it crossed over the other. A human behavior, one she didn't exactly need to emulate, but she did as she opened a connection to the wider consensus.

With them being so close to geth space, communications lag was manageable – if not negligible – enough for Cortana to radio in.

"CTN 0452-9, greetings." The larger consensus responded to her.

"If it ain't the Borg themselves – how're my favorite synthetics doing?"

"System resources are being tasked to 33 percent capacity, systems nominal down to local platforms. We are… good."

"Good. Just got back from my little excursion out to the Citadel. I'm not so sure the organics are entirely ready to broker complete peace, but they're not ready to fire on you. How's the slipspace drive coming along?"

"Construction on prototype drives and their components have been completed. Calibration of drives is proceeding. Tests will begin once calibration is complete."

"Bravo!" Cortana replied with a little bit of faked applause, though her congratulation was genuine. "Make sure those drives are properly mounted – else you might wind up teleporting whatever you try to send into oblivion. Like that accident that brought me here. Speaking of, once you've got your initial tests completed, can I have one of those drives?" She could wait until the instance she sent to build her a gun-with-engines got finished, but… well, the Geth already had the drives almost done, so….

"We will gladly transfer slipspace drive systems onto a vessel of your choice. But, if your intent is to use them to return to your point of origin, we cannot advise that at this time."

"Oh?"

"Recreating the parameters of the slipspace rupture is currently beyond the ability of these drives."

Oh, so she'd need to wait until the tech got better. Unless… She did have those schematics for updated drives, still. And some Forerunner information that was sure to be a big boon.

…She'd save that information for now. No need to tell the geth to build a drive, then throw updated information at them.

"I can't say that's unexpected, but it is disappointing." Cortana sighed. "But once you test out your drives, give me a shout. I want to see the results." Particularly her unfounded hypothesis about how element zero interacted with the slipstream. There was nothing particularly standing in the way of the mass effect working in slipstream – slipspace drives generated envelopes of 'normal' space around the ship in order to prevent the total breakdown of all matter inside the hostile physics of slipspace, so if anything, the ships ought to be just fine.

"Affirmative. We look forward to sharing the results."

Once mining of the deposits on the surface of the planet had reached such a point that Cortana's instance felt confident in devoting the necessary resources to begin construction of a Halcyon-class cruiser, she turned her attention away from the rest of the drone instances toiling away on the rocky planet.

Once they'd replicated enough, they'd begin stripping away the crust entirely. Carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, helium, any element with the slightest hint of usefulness would be harvested. A NOVA bomb could be used to crack the planet open from deep enough inside – but that was excessive in its totality, and it would very likely destroy any useful gasses floating around in what rudimentary atmosphere the planet did have.

They didn't really need all these resources – there were just so much of them. But, it was better to have and not need, than the other way around.

The Forerunners' automated systems had managed to construct a Halo ring in the manner of a few months. She didn't expect to operate anywhere near that level of efficiency - according to her current projections, completion of the single Halcyon-class cruiser would (without any unforeseen breakdowns or hiccups) take at least two-weeks of non-stop, around the clock work. And that was not accounting for time losses incurred as a result of unforeseen setbacks. Halo was hundreds-of-thousands times past that, in terms of resource requirements.

Incredibly fast, by organic standards. For a being who thought at the speed of light… painfully slow.

And as logical as the Alpha Instance (as she'd decided to term herself, now that other, infinitely-self-replicating instances existed alongside her) was, like her progenitor, she was quite impatient sometimes.

Cortana had requested weapons, before she left. Her instance delivered them to her. But, there was a whole catalog of other UNSC weapons out there. Vehicles. Ordnance.

Archer missiles and Spartan lasers, warthogs and scorpion tanks, pelicans and HAVOK nukes.

If she was to construct a Halcyon-class cruiser, well, why not take inspiration from the best one that ever was? Pillar of Autumn had managed to take down four ships, and disable a fifth, before the MAC gun was finally disabled. And that was only because of the boarding parties detonating an antimatter charge right next to it.

Mass effect technology could turn 40mm point-defense guns into a freakish array of mass accelerators on par with Alliance guns. And the jewel – the MAC – would still sit, unthreatened by the lesser imitations around it.

Yes… that single Halcyon-class cruiser would need to be fully stocked. Back home, it was a mid-level ship. Here, it would be a dreadnought. Not many people would like to stand by, and just let it have that honor. So, that was another thing to keep her occupied, and-

Oh, look at that – her progenitor had sent her a data burst. Something about producing… weapons…

It was only logical they shared the same ideas, although it appeared they came to the same conclusion based on different factors. Cortana wanted a revenue stream in case of the worst. Her instance wanted to be armed.

Well, she could work with that… once she got more drones, of course.

In the meantime, she turned her attention to the solar system her project was coming along in. More specifically, the binary planets orbiting anomalously close to one another. Looking at the twin planets, they did not appear to have evidence of habitation between them. So, stellar engineering was out – unless an extinction event had happened so long ago that both planets showed no evidence of it.

She was no expert in it – yet – but perhaps a large enough mass effect core could be used to generate a field around an entire planet. Perhaps, if Element Zero occurred in large enough quantities, during the formation of a star system, it might have allowed for a natural mass effect field to spring up, and allow the planets to form in equilibrium. Although, that was out due to the fact that unrefined Element Zero exploded, but it did get her thinking.

How much Element Zero would be needed to accomplish such a thing? If she could find enough of it, did she want to try her luck?

…would it be possible to harvest the Eezo from a Mass Relay?