The Shadow of Old Transgressions (Homeworld/Mass Effect Crossover Quest)

Sector 17
The Garden of Kadesh
The Sphere of Contemplation

It worries you to leave this corruption unaddressed, but you are literally about to go into battle. You can't afford to deal with it yourself. You swiftly examine your available mental resources and begin partitioning them out.

Your first and obvious choice is your security submind. In a perfect world it would have prevented this infection in the first place, but you can at least use it now. You take the spiky orb that symbolizes it in your mind space and feed it some extra memory, then task it with watching the corrupted portions of your mind.

Next is your hyperspace navigation core. You can't jump to hyperspace while the carrier is still intact anyway so you might as well reassign it. It takes a bit more fiddling to align its wavy symbolism with the need to watch and contain an infection, but you eventually move it to the infected region and draw a link with the security submind so they can check each other.

The next one is hard. You don't have that many subminds just lying around and you aren't sure which one is going to be the least useful in the coming fight. Probably the least useful would be your archival submind. But it's too close to the infection itself, and you're worried it might have been compromised. Finally you decide on your damage control core. Your defensive field is powerful, and you won't be directly fighting the carrier. As long as everything goes smoothly you won't take any damage. And even if it does you can handle the repair systems manually. You take the whirling orb of machinery and connect it to the other two by the infected area. Hopefully it'll even be able to make some repairs.

You take a mental step back and survey your work. Satisfied you initiate the redundancy and check the subminds. "Security Core: Online" "Navigation Core: Online" "Repair Core: Online"

You frown in confusion. Something seemed strange there. You double check the submind logs, but everything is reporting nominal. You want to dig deeper, but you're out of time. You'll just have to hope the containment works

---

Your mind rises to the surface and you focus your attention back on the physical world around you. The battle continues and fortunately the Kadeshi are still holding their own. Making sure your defensive fields are at maximum you dive towards the fight.

Of course you broadcast your identification codes in the clear, but as you expect the Kadeshi aren't really interested. You soon have a pack of swarmers hammering at your field, and then a pack of pirate interceptors. And then it's a three way as they switch from shooting at you, to shooting at each other, and back to you again.

Fortunately these are just fighters, and you are in a Bentusi destroyer optimized for defensive engagements. They can't actually hurt you unless one of them rammed you at full speed, and neither side is willing to go that far yet. So you make your way to the fuel pods, and extend your defensive fields towards it.

Suddenly your sensors blare that something is off and you abruptly stop just before the "fuel pod" lights you up with a quartet of ion cannons. So that's where the multibeam frigates were. That would have seriously hurt if you had taken it inside your defensive field. As it is, your field strength is dropping alarmingly.

This is quite the dilemma. You can't take the fuel pods into your defensive field while you aren't sure which ones are real or not. There are ways to tell the difference. They're fairly involved, but you suppose you'll just need to get to it. You begin scanning each fuel pod and tracking the swarmer activity to find pods that are not getting as many refueling attempts.

Fortunately before you can go too far down that tedious task your decryption protocols signal a success. They were able to find an unexpected partial match with one of the encryption schemes you once used with Limmu and extrapolate from there. What fortuitous timing. You plug the new key into your communications channel and suddenly the battle chatter of the Kadeshi is audible to you.

"He's on my six. I can't shake him."

"I've got you."

"Sector eight needs reinforcement."

"These are some tough bastards."

"I'm at 15%. Heading back."

"For the Garden!"

"Bogey Theta is approaching squadron nine."

"Its shields are holding. I need backup."

Oh, that must be the frigate shooting at you. You're the only one with a shield in the battle right now. You open a channel before things escalate. "This is the Bentusi warship, Valerius. I have been tracking these pirates and am here to assist. Please hold your fire." A small lie, but it quickly explains your presence here.

"Acknowledged Valerius, but your presence is interfering in our battlespace. Please exit the Garden."

Yeah, you expected something like that. The Kadeshi can be predictable. "These pirates are more dangerous than regular raiders. You should be able to tell that just from this battle. I'm transmitting my data on them now. Please allow me to assist with the battle, and we can talk in more detail afterwards." You send over your data on the pirates and include the old ID you used with Limmu. If they're using encryption based on hers, then maybe it will help.

And maybe it did because the frigate and swarmers stop shooting at you. The relief of not having your fields constantly degraded is palpable. A different voice comes on the line, "Valerius, This is the Sharbei. We are willing to provisionally accept your assistance in this battle. A squadron is assembling for an assault on the carrier. Can you cover them?"

You hesitate. You had wanted to cover the fuel pods, but it sounds like you are needed elsewhere. If they're making an attack run they'll need cover from the carrier's guns. This might also be the Kadeshi's way of keeping you away from those same fuel pods without actually saying it.
The idea of fighting one of these carriers again brings up some unpleasant memories, but you suppress them. "Acknowledged Sharbei, send me the coordinates. I'll form up with your attack force."

There is a quick exchange of data. The Sharbei, which by the point you have pinned as the Kadeshi mothership, sends the coordinates of the attacking frigates as well as the IFF codes. You link into the Kadeshi tactical net and suddenly everything becomes a lot easier to make sense of. You can track the swarmers individually now instead of as a gestalt. And there are the multi beam frigates in question, six of them hanging back inside a screen of advanced swarmers.

You approach the gathering attack formation, and the frigates maneuver into the coverage of your field. Then the seven of you begin the attack run. The swarmers stay in position to try and and screen your approach, but once your group clears the main battle the carrier is quick to respond. It turns and fires one of its monstrous railgun rounds at you.

Just one shot wiped out our field and fried the generators last time, but you're in a larger more robust body now. Deflecting the shot costs you a substantial amount of power from your capacitors, but the fields hold. A second shot comes and is deflected. Your capacitors are at critical levels now. You can't keep up with this rate of fire, and you can't dodge with your fields extended to cover the others. But you're almost within the frigates range now so you hold steady.

The carrier starts emitting a lot of exotic readings and then hits you with its strange energy weapon. Something about it didn't react like you expected any kind of normal weapon too, and it almost punches through your field. Frantically you scramble your fields to try and disrupt the beam, and fortunately it works. The beam is deflected at the last second, and now the frigates are in their own firing range.

They open up with a massive barrage of ion cannons. None of them individually are as powerful as your old one, but there are twenty four of them. The massive barrage punches into the carrier. It's tough enough that this isn't enough to kill it, but the Kadeshi picked their targets with care. They melt through the railguns and the energy weapon emitters. The carrier is still a threat, but it won't be shooting back until it makes repairs, which hopefully it won't have time to do. The frigates fire a second salvo that scours away armor. Then you're all taken by surprise when the carrier turns to flee. For some reason you thought it would stay until the bitter end. And then you're taken even more by surprise as the carrier retreats at speeds you thought were impossible. Is it going FTL in real space?

How? What? Your mind boggles as you try to think of an explanation. The Kadeshi frigates are in an uproar as well, but soon discipline reasserts itself and you all turn back to the battle. Without reinforcements from the carrier the interceptors and frigates are quickly destroyed. They do fight to the bitter end, which is interesting. Are they drones? They fight far better than any Bentusi drone, and as far as you knew you had the best drone technology in the galaxy. These pirates are raising so many questions.

---

Finally you get a chance to talk with the Kadeshi without the pressure of combat. "I'm looking for Limmu'Zefal nar Gubra. I have information on these pirates, and I want to meet with the elders."

It takes a little while for the Sharbei to get back to you. They probably had to manually search their databases for Limmu. You've always wondered why the Bound go through such hassles. It's not that complicated to build a neuro link. "If you're the same Valerius from forty years ago you must mean Limmu'Zefal vas Menoa. You can't see her. She's in the Sphere of Repentance."

That's not good. The Sphere of Repentance is where the Kadeshi muster battle fleets to chase down intruders. They repent for the sin of allowing others to defile the garden. "Who are they fighting? More of these pirates? That only makes it more imperative that I deliver my information."

"We don't know. We only got word that there had been intruders sighted when we spotted traces of this group. It does seem likely though. We'll deliver your information. And we do thank you for your assistance and warnings. Now if you would please exit the garden."

Ah the Kadeshi, ever fixated on the purity of their Garden. It's a Nebula. It's not going anywhere because of a few ship engines. Sometimes their insistence on the purity of the Garden gives you a headache. No wait. That's not just frustration speaking. You actually are in some mental pain right now. You just hadn't noticed in the excitement of the battle.

"I will consider it." You give the Kadeshi a perfunctory farewell and dive into your mental space. Quickly you navigate to the corruption, and things are not looking good. Your Hyperspace Submind is spewing error messages and you can see a thorny vine of corruption leading from it into the main mass. The Security and Repair minds are doing their best to keep it contained as well as the corruption, but they are clearly straining.

With some quick work you prune back the corruption and retrieve your Hyperspace submind. The pain lessens as the other two block off the corrupted portions again allowing you to take a closer look at the damaged mind. From the logs it appears as if the corruption followed a vector of your memories of the pirate carrier's strange hyperspace field into the Hyperspace sensors and then into the submind. You clean up the connection, plug the loophole with a new firewall, and triple check the submind.

You are now 99% sure it is clean and will function properly, but you definitely aren't going to use it to contain the corruption anymore. You're going to have to find something else. One of your minds that actually helps with your combat functions. Hopefully that will be enough. The corruption is proving to be disturbingly clever at exploiting vulnerabilities.

1. What Now?
[] Jump to the Sphere of Repentance:
You can't just leave Limmu to fight more pirates. Especially with their strange technology. You came to warn the Kadeshi, and you're going to see it through no matter what. It's a little rude, but you can bully the Sharbei into leading you in. You should probably should just warn Limmu and not do any actual fighting yourself though.

[] Jump Back to the Flotilla:
You actually aren't feeling well at all. You aren't going to be any help in this compromised state if it comes to actual combat. Time to head back to the flotilla so you can have Aurora check you over. It probably won't be enough to completely repair you, but she should be able to stabilize you at least. A second pair of eyes looking over all your subminds is probably a good idea as well.

[] Stay where you are:
Something weird is going on with your hyperspace submind. It might be better not to try and make any jumps until you can check it out more thoroughly. This will also give you a chance to run a full scan of all your systems. It might not be the safest thing to stay here by yourself, but you can hunker down on the Progenitor wreckage until you are satisfied that everything is working correctly.

---

You ask the Sharbei to send messengers to the places you don't go yourself, and take a look at the battlefield. After your warnings about the virus your friends found last time the Kadeshi are taking no chances and carefully vaporizing all the pirate wreckage. Honestly they would probably do that anyway. Nothing can defile the Garden after all.

You spot something interesting though. One of the carrier's armatures got blown off in the fight, and it looks practically intact. After everything you've seen these carriers do you are actually quite excited about the chance to take a look at part of one. You didn't get a chance to say anything last time, since you were in a coma, but this time you could ask the Kadeshi to leave it for you to examine.

2. Do you salvage the armature?

[] Salvage the Part:
There's a risk here, but after seeing that strange FTL the carrier pulled you really want to find out more about their technology. You can prep some containment fields and keep the armature quarantined until you can study it. After all, how are you going to figure out how to fight these pirates without studying them in more detail?

[] Let it get Blown Up:
You still remember the records your flotilla mates made of the creeping biomechanical virus that they found on all the parts of the first pirate frigate. Plus you remember what happened to Talus. You've already been infected by something from the first battle. Better not to risk anything else.

---

Quest Note: I have unashamedly stolen Geas's fuel pod tactic. I thought that was too good not to make use of. Also you can choose either salvage option regardless of the first vote. Even if you decide to hunker down you can just leave the armature floating in space until you're ready to look at it. It isn't emitting a beacon or active in any way.

Sector 17
The Garden of Kadesh
The Sphere of Contemplation

You feel a twinge of regret as the Sharbei's swarmers destroy the last of the carrier wreckage. What secrets might you have learned from it? No, no, it was far too dangerous to try and attempt something like that without being fully prepared. The Sharbei pings you with a final update and then jumps out. It feels a little odd to be just watching a quantum gate form without also feeling it through hyperspace, but as a precaution you have taken your hyperspace core completely offline.

It feels even more odd when you realize you are completely alone now. When was the last time you were completely alone? Never during your childhood. The elders were always watching. A few times during your pilgrimage, but usually you traveled with others, either Bentusi or alien convoys. And since you returned and joined the Talus's chorus you've only been alone in your dreams. Never in reality.

It is somewhat discomfiting actually. Bentusi always share low level network data with each other. A constant stream of status updates and low level alerts. Of course you didn't have that during the battle either, but you did have all the combat data to distract you. Now you float in silence. Just you and the wreckage of the progenitor artifact that has been here longer than all of galactic civilization.

You ponder it thoughtfully. It is just a huge slab of ancient alloys. All useful technology long since salvaged, and the remaining alloys far too durable to be worth mining. It will likely exist for eons to come. Even after the current residents are dust in the cosmic wind it will remain. You are used to looking at the other races as brief flickers of existence, but here is something to which you too will be gone in a blink.

Shaking off your melancholic thoughts you burn towards the wreckage. It may have philosophical implications, but today it will serve as your hiding spot. You find a shadowed nook, and tuck yourself away in the wreckage. Powering down all your external systems you only leave your passive sensors to alert you should someone jump in.

Then you bring up your diagnostic tools, and dive deep into your own mind.

---

You slip inside the quarantine zone where you have secured the hyperspace submind. It is a featureless void with no way in or out except through a carefully monitored port. You have even set part of your mind to verifying every bit that passes back and forth. Nothing will interrupt your work or escape containment. Of course this is just the hyperspace submind. The main corrupted regions are too sprawling to quarantine like this. But you have your suspicions about the submind and this way you will be able to give it a completely clean bill of health.

With your assembled tools you consider the submind, and then get to work. You begin by partitioning it even further. The sensor protocols, the navigation databases, the quantum calculation registers. Some parts are easy to trace and clean. The registers are ultimately only math. The sensors are straightforward communication protocols with standard specifications.

But the databases are different. At a glance they look simple. Merely lists of coordinates specifying star systems and gravitational conditions. But they cover most of the galaxy, and there are appendixes listing every type of hyperspace anomaly known to the Bentusi. All in all the databases are immense. A significant fraction of your own mass goes towards the actual physical drives that house them. Checking them will be long and tedious, but it must be done.

It takes nearly a day of careful sifting. And after so many hours of repetive work sifting through nearly identical records your are little dazed. But ultimately it was fruitful. You managed to find quite a few spots where anomalies had crept in. Several places where the corruption had altered coordinates in a pattern that seemed to hint towards some broader purpose. One set of coordinates contained a clever little virus that would have unpacked should you have jumped there. You're pretty sure it was unrelated to the corruption. Not even the Bentusi are immune to every bit of electronic malfeasance in the galaxy and you just jumped through the busiest port there is. Besides that you also found and corrected a number of simple errors and out of date information.

You take a mental step back and survey your work with satisfaction. It was a long and arduous task, but now you probably have the cleanest most efficient hyperspace hypersapce submind among all the Bentusi. If only because no one likes performing the tedious task of cleaning all the minor errors and anomalies that tend to accumulate.

---

That was only the beginning though. You dissolve the quarantine and turn to the larger problem. The main mass of corruption that has spread through your memory databanks. Your submind are still valiantly keeping it contained, but the process of repairing it is a daunting one. You aren't even sure you want to devote the time to even attempting it while you are still alone. Spending that long with your attention turned fully inwards leaves you highly vulnerable.

After a few moments of contemplation you decide to at least try to get rid of the pieces that are actively infecting new regions. Repairs of the damaged areas can come later. You start setting up blocks and cleaning obviously malignant code while you look for the root of it all. Whatever vector the corruption originally used to infect you.

After a lot of fruitlessly searching you find it. It didn't start in the electronics at all, but in your physical hardware. There you a find one small patch of dead biomechanical parasites. Just a few cell equivalents that apparently died before they could complete their full cycle of infection. Which was quite fortunate for you. What they did manage was quite enough to deal with already. You aren't sure when exactly you got infected. Judging by their location in your core itself you likely floated into contact with them while you were unconscious after the battle with the pirate carrier as that was the only time you suffered enough damage to expose your own core. Though possibly it was during the battle itself. That energy weapon did come quite close to you.

Fortunately they are long dead. So while finding them has little impact on your actual fight with the corruption, at least you can rest a little easier knowing you won't be reinfected from some hidden source. With that out of the way you begin pruning away the parts of the corruption that are actively seeking to infect other parts of yourself, but before you can finish you get an alert from your passive sensors. Something is approaching the wreckage.

You rise fully to the surface and integrate yourself once more with your entire body. You glance out and are relieved to see that it is your friends at last. They appear to have jumped in and are approaching the wreckage. Probably checking for you as you asked the Sharbei to relay your intentions. You must have missed their hyperspace signature while the submind was still quarantined.

Then your relief turns to horror as another quantum gate opens. This time you can feel it, and you easily recognize the discordant hum of the pirate carrier. Your friends do as well and they quickly assume a battle formation.

---

What do you do?

[] Finish the Pruning:
Your friends can hold on for a little while by themselves, and you are right in the middle of pruning the corruption. It won't take very long and if you can just get it finished you'll be much more effective in the coming battle.

[] Carefully Power Up:
You don't have time to finish, but you can wrap up your work and power up your reactors in the proper sequence. It will still take a few minutes, and you are uneasy leaving the corruption's attack vectors intact, but you will avoid any potential accidents when you rendezvous with your friends.

[] Perform a Crash Start:
Slap a block on the corruption, do an emergency boot up of your reactors and most vital systems, then burn hard for your friends to get to them in the shortest possible time. You are the shield of the flotilla and your friends need you right now!