Cora Harper: Asari-Trained Vanguard of the Andromeda Initiative

Cora Harper was a human biotic of unusual power who served as operations specialist and second in command of the Pathfinder team during the Systems Alliance-backed Andromeda Initiative. Before crossing the void between galaxies she had trained for years among the asari commandos, and she carried their discipline, their fighting style, and much of their worldview with her into the Heleus Cluster.

Origins and family#

Cora was homeschooled and raised in poverty aboard an independent cargo freighter, with only her parents for company through most of her childhood. The cramped life left her with little sociability and no privacy, and she took to hiding in the ship's crawlspaces whenever she wanted solitude. Her family probe-mined for ore where they could, once working a piracy-prone field at Pamyat to pull a few thousand pounds of platinum from the rock while hoping their aging vessel would draw no attention.

Her biotic ability surfaced while she still lived with her parents. By the age of thirteen she could already warp a steel girder, and untrained biotics aboard a starship posed a grave accident risk. Her family could not afford to nurture the talent, and so at eighteen Cora enlisted in the Systems Alliance to obtain the training she needed. While she was away serving, her parents vanished, their battered freighter last known to be somewhere in the Attican Traverse. She searched for them whenever a posting carried her into the region but never found any trace.

Among Talein's Daughters#

Cora's biotics proved strong enough to rip an armored personnel carrier apart, and the Alliance moved to place her with an interspecies program suited to such power. Through the Valkyrie Program, run jointly by the Alliance and the Citadel Council, she was transferred to the asari commando unit Talein's Daughters. Their commanding officer, Nisira T'Kosh, gave her no preferential treatment, leaving Cora to measure up through relentless extra training and study.

She came to love the experience, and over her four years with the unit she developed an asari mindset. She grew to admire the literary works of the commando Sarissa Theris, committing many of her passages to memory. After serving two tours across asari space she resigned from the Alliance once her enlistment expired, though she continued to prefer the address of Lieutenant, a rank she felt she had earned even after it ceased to formally apply. It was on Nisira T'Kosh's recommendation that Cora joined the Andromeda Initiative.

Joining the Initiative#

Cora became the operations specialist of the Pathfinder team and served at Alec Ryder's side, in charge of ground missions and slated to succeed the Pathfinder should the need arise. She had felt that she never truly fit anywhere; her high-powered biotics tended to unsettle those around her, and she had felt rejected when her commanding officer urged her to leave Talein's Daughters. In Alec she found a mentor who valued her candor and welcomed her abilities, and she was drawn to his vision of a new civilization in which all kinds of people, including artificial intelligences and powerful human biotics, would have a place. She confided that she dreamed of one day keeping a rose garden in Heleus.

The Initiative's arks departed the Milky Way bound for the distant Andromeda galaxy, a journey of more than six hundred years in cryogenic sleep. The human ark Hyperion made the crossing and arrived in the Heleus Cluster, only to collide with a vast and unexplained energy cloud that disrupted the ship and its systems.

Habitat 7 and the new Pathfinder#

After the arrival, Cora helped restore failed artificial gravity in the cryo bay, then summoned one of Alec's children to the bridge as the team weighed its next move. Alec resolved to lead the Pathfinder team down to the surface of the world designated Habitat 7. Cora descended with him and others, and on the hostile, storm-wracked planet she shielded several of her companions from a lethal lightning strike behind a biotic barrier strong enough to absorb millions of joules of energy.

When Alec interfaced with an alien monolith at the heart of the planet's weather disturbances, the act cost him his life, and he transferred his Pathfinder authority not to Cora but to one of his children. Cora was shaken. Though she had trusted Alec's judgment, she privately believed herself the better suited candidate and was stunned that he had passed the mantle to an unprepared heir. Even so, she affirmed her commitment to the new Pathfinder and her role as second in command. The repeated loss of parental and mentor figures in her life left her without the guidance she craved, and she keenly missed Alec's counsel in the trials that followed.

Aboard the Tempest#

Cora made her place aboard the survey vessel Tempest in the bio lab, where she cultivated plants and nurtured the horticultural ambitions she had formed watching gardens only in vids as a child. She took her shipboard duties seriously, down to assigning new crew their bunks, and chafed when later recruits ignored her arrangements. She developed a prickly, adversarial rapport with the curious asari Peebee, who found her own culture stifling in contrast to Cora's fervent admiration of it.

She thought hard about the war against the kett, the cluster's invaders, and judged them the worst kind of enemy because they turned their victims into loyal members of their own ranks through a process called exaltation. She gathered ideas for fighting them and looked toward locating Sarissa Theris and the missing asari ark for an overall strategy, all the while wishing she still had Alec to follow.

The search for the Leusinia#

Cora made it her personal cause to find the asari ark, the Leusinia. Following a trail through asari refugees and a survey ship's recovered flight recorder, she located the ark under attack by the kett. Boarding it, she finally met her idol, Sarissa Theris, who had become the asari Pathfinder in place of Matriarch Ishara. Cora helped restore power to the ark and defeat the kett commander besieging it, then joined Sarissa in raising a biotic barrier that let the Leusinia escape.

The reunion soured when a recovered log revealed that Sarissa had abandoned Ishara to her death in order to secure tactical data on the kett. Cora was forced to confront the truth about the woman whose words she had memorized for years. Whether Sarissa's secret was kept or exposed, and whether she remained Pathfinder or yielded the title to Vederia Damali, came down to the choices of the Pathfinder she served beside. In the aftermath Cora wrestled with guilt over having idolized her, and slowly began to find her own footing rather than living by the example of others.

A possible bond#

For a Pathfinder who returned her interest, Cora's hard discipline could soften into something warmer. She spoke of turning a patch of land in Fairwinds Basin into the garden she had always wanted, and of one day going exploring together with no one else along, guided only by the stars. Whether such a relationship formed, and how far it went, depended entirely on the path the Pathfinder chose. In every account she remained the team's steady, exacting second, a soldier who had crossed the void between galaxies in search of a place where she finally belonged.