No Gods, Nor Masters

Planetfall

The Office of Naval Intelligence had always been a strange organization. Their escapades into the technology of the Ancient Forerunners always turned up some strange result or another that no sane UNSC member could put their finger on. From the grandiose UNSC Infinity, to the highly-advanced weaponry and energy shielding the UNSC had developed over the course of the Human-Covenant War, there was no real tangible advanced tech that hadn't been touched by ONI's Materials Group.

Still, some of the shit the Archaeology Division also pulled out of their asses during the post-War period was terrifying, too. Those engines strapped to the biggest UNSC vessel currently in service? Some fucker dug them up from within the middle of bum-fuck nowhere, Space. It was the same with a lot of other things, including the reason there was a battle group of six warships sallying forth through Slipspace toward unknown coordinates.

A fleet formed of three frigates, two Autumn-class cruisers and a Punic-class Supercarrier that'd been pulled out of Mothball as specialized reinforcement after being given a thorough overhaul and modernization currently travelled Slipspace with a hefty complement of UNSC Marines, Army and Science Staff to the newly-discovered coordinates pulled out of the ass-end of some random archive that Doctor Halsey's 'Janus Key' opened.

The Doctor herself stood on the bridge, her tablet in hand as she regarded the whirlpool of Slipspace. She'd been lucky. Lucky that the UNSC found Cortana and John when they did and lucky that her testimony against the Office of Naval Intelligence had been accepted. It had helped her save herself and damn ONI's former leader, Margaret Parangosky, to the same cage at the bottom of a pit she would've been thrown in after that kangaroo court ONI tried to pull.

Cortana had helped Halsey damn half of the ONI Staff loyal to Parangosky, including one of her own, sadly. Serin, a former SPARTAN-II. That girl was, however, at Halsey's behest, charged with only sixty years in prison instead of Parangosky's 'For-Life' lease to some deep space mining colony at the ass-end of human controlled space. Halsey herself could've easily gone to that same pit...

Sighing, she pulled up the images on the datapad. While some of the symbols that they'd found were definitely Forerunner in origin, namely the coordinates that allowed them to find their way to this place, the main data itself was a combination of various ancient dialects, including a hefty amount of really thoroughly-confusing Latin that she was still trying to decipher before their arrival, to no avail.

"Doc," The Admiral approached. He was a younger man, in his mid-fifties, compared to most of the UNSC's staff. He'd been a Captain during the Fall of Reach almost six years ago, but he hadn't been too forthcoming about service prior to that. Halsey had had Cortana pull up his file before she and the Chief returned to the Infinity with the rest of Blue Team. Samuel Seegson, born Thatcher, had been a deserter, a fighter and officer in the Insurrection's budding naval force before the Covenant had boiled away the oceans of his homeworld and killed all those he had loved right in front of his eyes during their early genocidal campaign. Since then, he'd switched sides and has happily and unabashedly served the UNSC with an almost patriotic fervor.

"Admiral," She nodded, her voice impassive, "I presume we are on schedule."

"Affirmative, ma'am. We should be reaching the slipspace exit point within the next half-hour," He replied. Halsey narrowed her lips. Being called 'ma'am'. She scoffed at the idea. She wasn't Parangosky, despite what ONI would've put her up as. Apparently, someone named Terrence Hood, the sly old bastard, had decided it was a good idea to suggest that she be the interim Office Of Naval Intelligence Director while the entire mess was being sorted out, which meant she had the unofficial rank of Fleet Admiral.