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Kwassass waddled along the dim corridors of subdeck K, admiring its cavernlike expanses and the warmth of the place. Even after seven years of service to the Covenant he could not
help marveling at their copious wealth of heat. After freezing every day of his childhood, watching his family one by one succumb to the blue death, heat was something he never took for granted.
He spotted a group of laborers playing a game with rocks, jumping them over one another on a grid scratched upon the floor. They laughed and gambled for tiny tanks of compressed organics and audio crystals.
Kwassass joined them, lost a few cartridges of formaldehyde, won a file of old BBC, and then wished them well and moved along on his morning patrol. Today it would be best to keep up appearances.
He meandered toward Storage Sector Three, making sure no one noticed.
Kwassass had overheard one Sangheili speak of pods of benzene that required disposal in that sector. Lovely lung gold! He sighed, reliving the pleasure of his last inhale of the sacred aromatic.
He slowed his place, though; Storage Sector Three was a shadowy realm where only Huragok5 ventured, as it was full of active plasma conducts.
The tentacled podlike Huragok never spoke to his kind. Sometimes they fixed things for them… but just as often they took things apart and left them that way. He had learned it was best to avoid them, as the Sangheili valued their services.
Kwassass ventured into the dim section of the ship.
Only the glow from the occasional plasma coil provided an eerie blue light, and the shadows were full of the floating Huragok that whispered to one another in ultrasonic chitters.
Tonight they seemed to move with a greater purpose, floating in pods of three farther into the storage sector.
5 Huragok: the Forerunner name for the Engineer race
He followed one of these pods and emerged in a round chamber, lit by an overhead heat exchanger that dripped fluorescing green coolant. A machine towered in the chamber. It was five times his squat height, and it would take thirty Unggoy to circumscribe its curved surface.
Dozens of Huragok clustered about the thing, their tentacles gently probing its surface in reverence.
The device was bare silver metal, which was a rare thing in Covenant alloys. Kwassass was drawn to the shiny material. He wanted to touch it, take it with him.
There were alien pictograms on the side and he ran his hand over them. Although his tribe had been trained to listen and transcribe alien transmissions as part of their duties, they were forbidden to read.
There were four pictograms. The first was three connected lines. The second was a hollow dot. The third was an angle of two lines. The last icon was the same angle inverted with a line horizontal midway between them.
…N…O…V…A.
Many of the Huragok clustered on the far side, and Kwassass gently pushed through them to see what was so interesting.
A black box lay on the deck.
The Huragok had obliviously removed a panel from the cylinder: a tangle of wires and cabling stretched from a cavity in the cylinder to this box.