Finagle007
[Verified Great Old One]
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Yeah, but the fact that he sincerely thanks Shepard for actually saving him and admits he was wrong about humans... that's more than worth the time and effort to save him.
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Shepard Commander
- Thread starter JennyDracos
- Start date
Yeah, but the fact that he sincerely thanks Shepard for actually saving him and admits he was wrong about humans... that's more than worth the time and effort to save him.
zhuull
SB still lying to protect Racists what else is new
There are a huge number of ways you could use to bring in characters from ME2.
You easily could have had Zaheed show up at any time they were on Omega, Mornith too could have been picked up there.
Who knows maybe Geth!Shepard has enough reinforced brainmeats to be able to successful romance her?
I'm continually disappointed that more authors don't play around with her in particular and the Ardat-Yakshi in general. And I swear it's not just because I despise the arrogance of the Justicars and love seeing them taken down a peg. Honest.
Also I believe there is a certain "Biotic God" out there that is criminally underutilized in stories. Just because he isn't that impressive during the three seconds after his apotheosis that you meet him, doesn't mean he couldn't be a force to be reckoned with.
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JennyDracos
Eccentric Hugging Lady
- Location
- Chicago
Niftu Cal certainly could be amazing. I just don't want to describe what will happen the first time a bullet penetrates his environment suit. Quarians have it bad enough, and they can just disinfect everything, drown it with antibiotics and most of the time that works.
Volus...well.
Volus...well.
By all, sane accounts, the volus should have dead, messily. Heavily pressurized methane and oxygen rich environment isn't exactly best bud with each other, except if you consider uncontrollable exothermic reaction as 'friendship'. And that's before considering the meaty bits.
By sane accounts.
The volus, already experimented and implanted with implants, drugs, strange objects and whatsnot, should not even survive. And yet, he survive.
And his luck wasn't depleted yet, if any.
"I... am... Niftu Cal."
The barrier flicker, but slowly, it's going stronger.
"I had.... survived the... Unforgiving Void. I... punch open... The Hounds of Hell... and... makes them... cry Uncle."
All the projectiles had been spitted up, somehow, by his biotic. And no sign of any bodily fluids, either.
"I... am... Niftu Cal."
"And... today... I am... your God."
zhuull
SB still lying to protect Racists what else is new
Indeed, one does not just try to shoot a God and call it a day.
Niftu Cal laughs at your puny atmospheric pressure!
Leeanderthal
Derp Dragon
Niftu Cal uses his godly biotics to keep the atmosphere in! Like a Volus-sized version of the atmosphere barriers.
What's that? There's not possible way that a single person has the focus and power necessary to maintain that, a barrier, and powers all at the same time? Fool. You underestimate his power. UNLIMITED POWER
What's that? There's not possible way that a single person has the focus and power necessary to maintain that, a barrier, and powers all at the same time? Fool. You underestimate his power. UNLIMITED POWER
- Location
- Somewhere, Maybe
Ok, somehow I missed this. Interesting premise, and I like where it's going. ^^ Watched.
TimeDiver
Herald of Dis Lev
- Location
- In-between the parallel worlds...
Only one worth mentioning (and not an OC) is Bray, and he's likely in Aria's pocket, even at this point.
JennyDracos
Eccentric Hugging Lady
- Location
- Chicago
Thanks to @Mirriam Grave, I have an OC batarian that I think will work, and will also add to the Cerberus and Shadow Broker plots.
Damn, I need to add more on the Shadow Broker side.
Damn, I need to add more on the Shadow Broker side.
JennyDracos
Eccentric Hugging Lady
- Location
- Chicago
Well. Having written the first scene from Chapter 6 a while ago, and then the *last* scene from Chapter 6, and then going through and filling in the middle...first pass on that is done as of five minutes ago.
Still need to do a third pass on Chapter 5, but that will be going up tomorrow.
Still need to do a third pass on Chapter 5, but that will be going up tomorrow.
- Location
- Somewhere, Maybe
Yeeeee!! *happydance!* Thank you so much! ^.^
Chapter 5: Recruiting
JennyDracos
Eccentric Hugging Lady
- Location
- Chicago
Sorry about the delay on this. Chapter 6 just would NOT let me come back and clean this up. It now has. I'm still not 100% happy with the fight, I don't know if it does what I want it to, but certain things had to happen in a certain order and I was committed to the layout involved. Ah, well.
Chapter 5: Recruiting
I don't know how we wound up in Flux, to be honest. It started with me offering to buy Ash a late drink for making Spectre, I think. She countered by offering to buy me a drink for retaining Spectre. Somehow things escalated.
The next thing I knew, me and Ash were both at a table, glaring at each other over another row of overturned shot glasses, while an Asari bartender poured another row.
"And this one's for you, Joker!" Ash said, then downed the shot. She looked around. "Where is Joker? He was here just a second ago."
I downed my own shot, set the glass down as carefully as I had the rest, and said, "Off in the corner with Liara."
"Are they making out?" she asked. She looked around the club, trying to see if she could catch them in the act.
"Nah," I said. "They're just talking and giggling. You know, saying all the stuff that you know is too cheesy to say when you're sober."
"Is that right?" Ash poured another shot down her throat. "Like 'I think your eyes are pretty?'"
I waited for her to flip the glass, then drank mine. "Sure, if you're a hardass with no sense of poetry."
Huh. The tequila hadn't seemed to be having an effect on me, but it took until a few seconds after I said that for me to realize it was entirely the wrong thing to say to Ashley Williams.
"No sense of poetry? No sense of poetry. I'll show you a sense of poetry, Shepard." She pounded a shot, then set the glass down, leaned forward, and focused on my eyes. "Okay, yeah, your eyes are exactly the shade I remember, the color of the sand at the bottom of Lake Itasca, like I could sink into them and drift forever..."
I blushed and looked away, putting away a shot, setting the glass down. "Okay, yeah, you know poetry." Tali and Garrus were over at a booth, Garrus gesticulating wildly, Tali shaking her head. Kal'Reegor was in the booth with them, actually. Yeah, that was definitely something I could think about. Not how it felt when Ash said-
"Also you're really cute when you blush."
That dragged my attention right to Ashley, who immediately burst into laughter, collapsing against the table. Then she grabbed the next glass and downed it. "And you owe me a shot."
"Oh, shit, right." I pounded my own. "I'm still perfectly good over here, Ash. How you holding up?"
Ash closed her eyes and shook her head slowly. Those lips widened slightly nope not going there. "I'm still fine," she said eventually.
"Come on, Ash."
"Why does walking have to be so hard," she whined. "I'm just trying to move my foot, and it doesn't go where I want it to."
"We're almost there. Door's opening, and there's your bed, right there."
"You don't have to go, you know. I trust you."
I sighed. "The bartender said that we finished three bottles, Ash. That's the tequila talking."
"Oh." She basically collapsed onto her bunk. "Are you sure?"
"Yes, Ash."
I stepped away, and she grabbed my hand. "Shepard."
"Yes, Ash?" I stopped.
"I'm glad you're back. Haley. I'm glad you're not dead." She was looking up at me.
I smiled slightly. "Me, too."
"And I'm glad you're not my commanding officer any more."
"Gee, thanks. Good night, Ashley Williams."
"Good night, Haley..."
The door hissed closed behind me, and I walked the short few meters to my own room. Trouble was, I felt neither drunk, nor tired. Sighing, I picked up a datapad. May as well do some research on the enemy...
The lights came on, burning holes into my eyelids. "Go 'way," I managed to slur out.
"Come on, Spectre. Rise and shine." Ash's voice was bright, cheerful, and boomed through the headache.
"What the fuck is up with this. You were drunk as a skunk, and you're fine now. I was sober as a loon, and now I have a hangover."
"Blame the geth. What's this datapad?"
"I wasn't tired, so I started reading."
She blinked. "You started reading 'The Alien Menace?'"
I nodded, my eyes still screwed up tight. "Yeah. The author vanished the same day Cerberus went rogue, so it seemed a safe bet he was involved."
"...And you took notes?"
"It needed annotation. Badly."
There was a pause. "That's a lot of red."
"It needed correction. Very badly."
"Shepard, this whole page is red."
"That whole page was wrong." I levered myself upright. "That, if I recall, was the page where they said Turians lay eggs." I pushed my blankets aside, stood, made my way slowly to the locker where I had the few articles of clothing I'd managed to acquire.
Oh, right. I hadn't managed to acquire any.
"Ah, Shepard?"
The fact that there were no clothes in my locker made me realize I had nothing on but my underwear. I looked over at Ash, a blush burning on my cheeks. There was an odd sort of grin on her face. "Yes?"
"The Council called. You have a doctor's appointment in forty minutes for a 'second opinion.' Much as it breaks my heart to do so," she said, tossing a hefty duffel by my feet, "I strongly recommend you wear pants."
"Um. Sure. Alright." And now I had to figure out what that odd smile on her face meant, and if any of what she'd put in the duffel was wearable or if it was just another joke at my expense.
"Agent Williams, good to see you. Commander Haley Shepard. Systems Alliance, also Council Special Tactics." The salarian gazed at me, blinking occasionally as he evaluated me. Finally he continued. "Pleased to make your acquaintance. Mordin Solus, Salarian STG."
"Should I be worried that a doc from the STG is looking over me?"
"Don't worry, Shepard," Ash said. "Mordin's good people."
"Understandable concern," Mordin said, shaking his head at her. Then he looked back at me. "Have killed many. Bombs, poison, gun, electricity. Never killed with medicine. Never will."
"I suppose I don't have any choice, anyway. Where do you want me, doctor?"
Mordin pointed me towards a diagnostic bed. "Have read reports by Karin Chakwas and Tali'Zorah vas Neema. Do not expect to learn anything new. Council asks..."
"We dance," Ash sighed. "Have you heard from Major Kirrahe?"
"Not since last operation. Was well, but deployed again immediately."
"That's too bad. He was good to work with."
I watched the hologram of the scanner as it ran a pass, then another, more slowly. "Operation?" I asked.
"The Council sent me on a mission under another Spectre, Jondim Bau. We were working with the STG, targeting pirates in the Krogan DMZ. Mordin was there, and Kirrahe."
"How's he been? I haven't seen him since Virmire."
Mordin smiled down at me. "He is...'holding the line,' as he would put it. Hold still, doing third pass. Try not to move."
The third pass seemed to take forever.
"Done. Shepard, you may sit up."
I did, and glanced over at Ash. "Is...that when the Council made you a Spectre?"
"More or less. I found out later that Major Kirrahe was the one who recommended me, after Virmire, and the DMZ was a trial by fire." She grinned. "Valorn nominated me, but Udina really went to bat for me."
"Oh?"
"He was in a meeting with the Council when it came up, and he started swearing up and down that I was no good, and a disgrace to humanity, and that the reason I was only Gunnery Chief was because of my family history, and that it would tell..."
"Weren't you sidelined because of supposed pro-alien sympathies?"
She grinned. "He told me later that the only thing better than a trusted friend is a reliable enemy, and that he though Sparatus might have voted yes because Udina said they shouldn't."
Even Mordin was smiling at that, but the smile vanished off his face as quickly as it returned. "Will need tissue samples. Will try to minimize pain."
"After my hangover this morning I won't really mind," I said. "Let's just get this over with- holy shit that hurt."
"And will take significant amount of time for culture and tissue analysis." Mordin looked up.
"I think the Council wanted an immediate answer," Ash said drily.
"Then they should have asked someone else." He shook his head slowly. "Glad they didn't. Someone else would have gotten it wrong."
"Any idea how long it will take?" I asked him.
"Days for culture, hours for analysis, then need repeat tests. Scans." He closed his eyes. "May need space on your ship."
I looked at Ash. She looked at me. "It's Liara's ship," I said slowly. "But no one's using the port berthing on Systems Deck. We can check with her, and if she's good with it, convert that into a lab?"
"Sounds like a plan. You can come back with us, we have to talk about what we're going to do."
We met in the conference room. I was at the head of the table, Ash at the foot. At least by my perspective. Garrus was on my left, Joker on my right. Liara was next to Joker. Tali was at Ash's right, Kal'Reegor next to Tali. Mordin took Ash's left.
"So, we have a mission," I said. I tapped my omnitool, and an image of Leviathan sprung into life over the table.
"Sovereign," Liara whispered.
"No," Tali said. "It's not." That was right; she'd been in the med bay when I'd briefed Ash.
"Correct. The batarians called this ship 'Leviathan;' they discovered it in a crater on Jartar, in the Dis system."
"The Leviathan of Dis." Garrus frowned. "I always thought it was an urban myth."
"Incorrect," Mordin said. "Have spoken with salarian scientist on survey ship."
Ash nodded. "I was able to pull that data from the Council library; salarian researchers documented it but it disappeared, and the Hegemony denied it had ever existed."
"They moved it to a facility in the Indris system; I don't know if it's the first place they held it, but it was the last place. For some reason they decided to move it to elsewhere in the Kite's Nest, but it was intercepted." I pulled up the damning email. "The cruiser and frigates escorting the vessel were disabled as the Leviathan was moved into the Relay; when they scrubbed their drives, they found human encryption codes. Alliance codes."
Joker jerked his head over. "No way, Commander. The Alliance wouldn't do something like that. It's too..." His face twisted into a bitter mask. "Decisive."
I traded a worried look with Ash, but shook my head. "They included samples of the code, so that the operative could try to find matches. I checked. It's an Alliance code, alright, but one that was flagged as having been compromised by Cerberus."
"So it's true, then." Tali looked at me. "Cerberus has a dead Reaper."
"Every indication points that way," I said. "Did you have a chance to talk to our guest, Spectre Williams?"
Ash grimaced while Joker, Liara, and Garrus all whipped their heads to stare at Williams. Apparently they'd missed that part of last night's program. "You'll pay for that one, Spectre Shepard. But no, I didn't have time. I was too busy putting together reports to tell the Council whether you were an insane triple agent waiting to go rogue, or if the geth changed you."
"Nicely done. So we don't know what she knows, or if she knows anything about this. She did seem to imply she knew who the Illusive Man was; he would know where Leviathan was if anyone did."
"Still, the Alliance has been hunting the Illusive Man since we found Admiral Kohoku." Ash raised an eyebrow at me. "Do you really think she's a good enough lead that we'll be able to find him in time?"
I grimaced and shook my head. "No, not really. Still, we can hope to get something. We'll need to do a more concerted interrogation. Does anyone else have any other leads?"
Tali looked at Kal'Reegor, then looked at me. "No one spends as much time in uninhabited worlds as the Migrant Fleet, Shepard," she said. She sounded reluctant, but at least she was offering something. "I can ask them for any patrol ships that have gone missing, or any recorded distress calls."
"So, if Cerberus has a dead reaper, they're probably going to want xenoarchaelogists." Joker leaned back, and I exchanged a scowl with Ash. Both of us knew which way this was going. "I happen to be dating a hot lady with a doctorate in that. Perhaps they're recruiting."
Liara flushed. "I'm not sure if a human supremacist group would care about a doctorate from the University of Thessia, but I suppose I haven't checked my academic email since..." The flush faded rapidly and her smile fell. "...for a while."
Instantly Joker's hand was on hers. She put her other hand over his, smiled at him, and color returned to her face. Huh. That was actually really cute.
"So we have a few destinations." Then I blanched. "Sorry, Liara, assuming you're willing to take us on your ship."
Liara frowned at me. "It's not my ship, Shepard. It can't be. It's a captured pirate ship, and I can't just take it. If the Council auctioned it off, I could maybe buy it, if someone else didn't beat me, which they would. The only way to keep this ship is if a Spectre takes it. That means you. Err, or Agent Williams."
I looked at Ash.
She looked at me.
I held up on hand, palm up, spread out, and put my other fist on it. Then I raised my eyebrows.
She scowled at me, then did the same.
We each pounded our hands once, twice, three times - I went scissors. She went paper.
"Dr. T'Soni," I said, my tone formal, "the Office of Special Tactics would like to thank you for bringing this ship to our attention. We apologize for any inconvenience, but it's needed for Galactic Security."
"What was that?" Garrus asked, even while Joker leaned forward, a grin forming on his face.
"Did you two just play rock-paper-scissors for a spaceship?" he asked.
I stood at the command console in CIC. It was still empty except for Joker's compartment up front. I keyed my omnitool. "Tali, how we doing back there?"
She sounded a little hesitent. "Terrible design, Shepard, but well implemented. I can work with this, as long as you'll have me."
"I know you have responsibilities to the Migrant Flotilla." I grimaced.
"Shepard, between the geth on board, the fact that we're checking on missing quarian ships, the possibility that Cerberus might have a dead Reaper to study..." Her voice was stronger now. "I'd say what's happening on the Oddysey is important to the Flotilla. And I'm glad to have you back."
"Thank you, Tali."
"And I have a destination for you. Uploading now."
I tapped the console, looked at the display. "A bit off the beaten path," I said.
"The Flotilla doesn't go where things are too crowded. We have to go where we're not likely to be shot at."
I pursed my lips. "Right. What's up with this one?"
"Two scout ships went there, never heard from them again. Could be Cerberus, could be something else. The Flotilla thinks it's worth checking out, though."
"Alright," I said. "Joker, take us out."
"Aye-aye, Skipper."
The CIC hatch door hissed open behind me. I turned to see Ash walking in, wearing those dark gray civvies. "Ash."
"Haley." She nodded. "We have a destination?"
I stepped aside, let her look at the display. "It's not much, but it's somewhere to start."
She skimmed the scant available data. "Well, you know that part better than I do. So, whaddya say? Wanna double-team the puppy?"
Joker choked.
I turned towards the helm. "You okay up there, Joker?"
"I'm good, Skipper. Just...focusing on taking us out of the Citadel. Yes, thank you Alliance Control..."
I looked back at Ash. She met my gaze, rolled her eyes.
I sighed. "Right, let's see what our guest has to say."
"Well that was useless."
Ashley put her arm around my shoulders, gave me a quick squeeze. "Well, you didn't show it in there, so that's one thing we got going for us. Fucking Cerberus cheerleader, though. She's too loyal to those maniacs to spill anything."
"We're going to need some leverage if we want to crack her." I sighed. "And I don't have any idea where to find it."
"Well, it's not like we don't have plenty else to do on the trip. I picked up some replacement parts for my armor on the Citadel I need to work in. I could use some assistance, if you're up for it."
"Actually I want to see how Mordin's settling in. I know we didn't get a whole lot of time to overhaul the berths for him."
Ash grinned and pulled her arm back. "Sounds like you, Shepard. I guess I'll see you when you reach the armory on your rounds." With that, she headed down the ladder to the lower deck.
I rolled my eyes, but it's not like she wasn't right. Sighing, I headed towards the portside berth - rather, the lab.
The door hissed open as I approached, so I assumed Mordin was expecting visitors. Then I remembered what assumptions got you. "Dr Solus?"
"Ah. Shepard. Come in, cell culture proceeding."
I looked around the berth. We'd stripped out the berths, leaving one rack for Mordin, but all his equipment had come aboard in a few crates, and I hadn't seen it set up. It looked like a genetics lab; a few incubators, a freezer or two, the kind of stuff we'd covered in N3 training for research facilities and again in N5 for bioweapons. A part of me was uneasy, not entirely sure which this was, but then I remembered him telling me he never killed with medicine.
"Met Dr. Chakwas earlier. Broad knowledge. Respectable." He sniffed. "Lacks depth of study, but makes up for it with familiarity across multiple species. Is she typical of human doctors?"
I hesitated. "I mean, I always figured it was hard to be a doctor without at least some knowledge of xenomedicine. But the Normandy was always intended to have at least a few turians on board, so they picked one of the best docs in the Alliance, and then we wound up with..." I laughed softly, as I thought about the diversity poster we'd had on the crew.
"Have read reports. Fascinating reading." He hesitated. "Did not hear about 'Reapers' until read reports."
I sighed. "Yeah. I get it, there's not a whole lot of corroboration around. The beacon on Eden Prime blew up, and only Saren and I got the message from that. Then the Prothean VI on Ilos, but it used up the last of its power talking to us. Virmire had a bunch of research, some on the Reapers, but enough of that research was too dangerous for us to not blow it up."
Mordin blinked. "Leaves your reports. Accurate?"
I smiled sadly at him. "Tentative on the vision. It wasn't until multiple passes with Liara and we got the Prothean Cipher from the Thorian on Feros that it was anything other than a string of blur and colors and fear. Prothean memories, filtered through three sets of alien species - it's too clear now for me to think it's not true, but I don't know that for certain. Brains lie all the time. And I know perception plays a part in Virmire; I...wasn't able to put down a good record of what I saw there until I was able to....to come to grips with what happened when we left. But Vigil - Vigil was clear, and I wasn't the only one who saw Vigil."
The salarian nodded. "Fascinating." Then he blinked, and it was as if that conversation was over. "Have noticed, ship has limited crew."
"I know," I grimaced. "I'm just...I've always been an Alliance officer, and served on Alliance ships. I don't know how I'm supposed to crew this one. Joker and Liara are probably staying put, and Tali's been good enough to help. Garrus is handling ordnance. But there's still so many things the ship needs. VI maintenance droids can only do so much."
"Your Alliance work - the Alliance provides. STG same way. The Council does not. Spectres...their work too classified. Expected to provide for themselves."
I stared at him. "Really?"
Mordin gave me a quick smile back. "Agreed, Shepard. Council does not value risk. Documentation is risk."
"That's just great." I sighed. "Alright. Something else for my to-do list."
"In the meantime, am proficient with galactic sensor systems." He turned back to the incubator. "When reach destination, will man console."
"Thanks, Mordin," I said. Then I went to go bother everyone else.
"I really miss silent running," I told Ash.
She was standing next to me, fully armed and armored. "Agreed. But the good news is they probably won't realize who we are."
I nodded. "As long as they care who we are. Joker?" It felt like the right time.
"Dropping out of FTL in three, two..."
The displays rippled as the ship moved from massless quasi-space to low-mass normal space. "Tali, how we holding up back there?"
"All systems nominal, Shepard."
"Mordin?"
His hands were flying over the console. "Still updating. Sensor resolution now at 1 arc second, no major objects near us. Focusing on the three planets. Will have more data momentarily."
I was perusing the data we'd picked up, comparing it to what was in the databases. "Two rocks and a gas giant, decent Helium-3 concentration. No signs of a refinery near the giant. Tali, what would the missing ships have been here for?"
"They were survey vessels, Shepard. Prospectors. They would have set up a satellite network over the uninhabited world, made a few readings, taken some samples."
Mordin interrupted. "Shepard. Second planet."
I frowned. "Debris. Looks like they found something someone didn't want them to. Joker, take us in. Mordin, are you picking up any beacons?"
"Negative." His hands paused. "Have identified what may be life pods. No beacons or power signatures."
I felt sick. Then angry.
"We should be there in half an hour, Shepard."
"Thanks, Joker. Tali, notify the Migrant Flotilla. We'll tell them more when we have more. Ash-"
"Prepping our gear for EVA. I'm on it." With that, her presence left my side. I took a deep breath, then dove into the various analyses Mordin was pulling from the Oddysey's sensor systems.
The debris was fairly recent, some of the battle damage still hot, or at least warm. Whatever had happened here, it was within the last few days. We were also only seeing pieces of one ship. There was nothing orbiting the first planet, so either the other ship had landed without any beacon or it had gone somewhere other than its next rendezvous point. I pulled up a starchart, began going over a list of the possibilities.
Unfortunately, this was the Terminus. The possible attackers - the possible destinations - there were just too many.
It seemed like only seconds before we were on the gutted quarian frigate. I suppressed a shudder. This mission was bringing back far too many memories. Even the clank of my boots against the deck grid was just like it had been on the Normandy, heading to get Joker out of the cockpit before the whatever-it-was finished us off. The gaping holes in the hull, the sight of stars spinning past...
But this was different. The Normandy's attackers had used a beam weapon, like Sovereign's, or the new 'Thanix' cannon that the turians had reverse-engineered. It had only been glancing blows, with Joker throwing in every evasive maneuver the Normandy's enhanced drive core and overpowered thrusters could put out, but even that had been enough to punch through every shield and layer of armor the Normandy had.
Here, the attackers had used conventional mass accelerators, with rounds the size of basketballs, but still single, conventional rounds. They would hit a layer of armor, and the armor would shatter, spalling onto the next layer. The difference was dramatic, with places where the outer layers were intact, or a shotgun pattern indicated that the inner armor had been penetrated by fragments of the outer.
The lighting was also different. The emergency lighting on the quarian vessel - the Konesh, according to her hull plate - had lost all power, and we were working on suit lamps. Lots of the impacts were still warm, but none were glowing. And given that it was a quarian ship, all of its crew had been in environment suits when the ship was attacked, so there weren't as many bodies floating in the wreck.
"You alright, Shepard?" Ash asked. Of course she'd noticed.
"Yeah." I scanned the ID tags of the corpse floating in the cockpit. The angle the neck was at told me how he had died. "It just...reminds me of the Normandy. And when I...you know."
There was a pause. "Yeah. But we've got sensor buoys up, and Joker and your friends are still on the Oddysey. We're safe."
I jumped a little as her hand squeezed my shoulder. I guess she'd been closer than I thought - the downside to an EVA was you might hear your own feet, but you wouldn't hear anyone else's. "Yeah." I reached up, patted her hand. "Thanks, Ash."
"The ship's clear, and the quarians have been notified for recovery. Let's get back to the Oddysey. Everyone else is back aboard, and Tali and Mordin are running drones through the mess the lifepods are in."
That was an unpleasant sight. It hadn't been the quarians' sister ship that had recovered the lifepods - they wouldn't have needed to cut the lifepods open. Nor would they have left the corpses behind, either on the ship or in the dense field of lifepods and debris.
At least that ruled out a few possibilities; whoever had hit the Konesh had wanted captives. That meant slavers, pirates, or mad scientists, and that Cerberus hadn't accidentally resurrected a billion-years-dead Reaper.
Which would have been a relief, but that was honestly still a concern.
Fucking Cerberus.
"Tali? Mordin? How's it looking?"
"It's looking bad, Shepard, but no worse than it did when we saw it. I've tagged the bodies for the Migrant Flotilla, but..."
"Agreed, Shepard. Not much more to do."
"We're heading back. Shepard ou-"
Then I grabbed Ash by the arm and yanked her out of sight of the airlock, as suddenly half the sky was filled with the brown of one of Oddysey's sister ships. "Joker! Fake comms trouble! Flash the lights if you have to respond. Going dark."
"Pride of Kar'Shan to Oddysey. We've already picked her over. What's your status, and what's up with the name change?"
Having crawled all over the Oddysey - for perfectly rational reasons - I had a pretty good idea where the Pride's airlocks would be, but this was going to be risky, at best. I looked at Ash, held my thumb up, then flipped it over a few times.
She held her thumb up. Okay, we were on.
Tapping a few keys on my omni-tool, I killed the display and the lights on my suit. Then I lined myself with the Pride of Kar'Shan and kicked off.
The trip over was a nightmare, knowing that at any second the Pride could fire up her weapons, turn on her GARDIAN lasers, and erase Williams - and me - from existence. But fast as I was moving, it wasn't fast enough for the Pride's barriers to think me a meteor, and I passed right through, and then my omni-tool flash-forged me a handhold only about ten feet away from the airlock I'd been aiming for.
Trying to keep my hold as light as I could, I pulled myself towards the hatch. Then I keyed my omni-tool, fired up the intrusion protocols and gave myself command access to the airlock, overriding the alarms. I glanced up to see Ash arrive in her jet-black custom armor. I nodded.
She nodded back.
I opened the airlock, and Ash pulled herself in, with me following. Then I cycled it.
About three meters away was a batarian in battered armor. He turned at the sound of the hatch, confusion evident in his four eyes; they widened as they took in our armor, including my distinctive red-and-white stripes, and he frantically grabbed the pistol at his hip.
Then Ash shot him.
From there we were in a very familiar passage; much dirtier than the Oddysey, but the same starboard passage from the hangar to the security checkpoint. With only the two of us on board, we would have to move fast and keep moving. I looked at Ash; she nodded aft. Good call - prisoners first.
We hit the catwalk hard and fast, me with my pistol, Ash with her assault rifle. I grabbed the guard standing at the hatch and counted four more in the hangar. Fifteen quarians were in cages racked to the upper deck as was one batarian in ragged clothing currently splinting a quarian's leg. I rolled the guard with me over the rail and rode him to the lower deck, putting a few rounds downrange towards the guard at the port hatch. Ash's rifle barked behind me, and the one at the end of her catwalk went down. I heard the crunch as I landed on mine.
Three.
A concerted leap took me up to the port side catwalk, and I put a round between the upper two eyes of the hatch guard while Ash got the one on the hangar floor. One. I raised my pistol, looking down my catwalk, when the slugs started digging into my shields and I spun through the hatch. Ash's rifle barked again. Zero.
I stepped back into the hangar, my shields already back to full, and jumped back down to the lower deck.
"Blowing engine," Ash said.
"On guns" was my response.
I hit the ventral corridor running. The armory was locked orange, but I just slapped my own encryption on it. A sweep of the med bay showed it empty. Then the gunnery compartment. It was empty, too, and not disguised like the one on the Oddysey had been. But Garrus's rants had told me where it was easy to break, and a few pistol rounds took care of that. Then I put my back to the hatch, next to the ladder up to the security checkpoint.
"Status?"
"Port engines down. Suppressing on two."
I hit my cloak, then jumped up the ladder at the same time as Ashley's assault rifle barked.
"One down," Ash said. "Fucking amateurs."
I counted six still up, but rather than participate, I threw myself back into the drive core room. One engineer - in battered armor like the rest of them, and with his worn shotgun in his hands - was creeping as quietly as he could towards the hatch. He looked a little confused at the ripple as I paused in front of him, then he was down, too. The Pride's scram switch was in the same position as the Oddysey's, and a light tap keyed it while I returned to the hatch, this time counting four.
"Core's shut down," I said. "Joker, you copy?"
"You got it, commander."
"I've got a feeling about this guy and I might need you to act. But let's see if we can get in the old fashioned way first."
Clenching my omni-tool fist, I gathered a load of plasma, then threw it at the four. It had barely hit my target when Ash slammed him with a concussive blast that threw incendiaries all over the compartment. I put a bullet in the last one standing.
Then the CIC door lock went from orange to red as they threw addional encryption on it, then vanished as they did something to totally disable the door.
"Alliance!" came a batarian voice from the ship's PA. "Drop your weapons and surrender or we vent the hangar. You have three seconds."
"Joker, shut him up. Ash, on me."
"Two."
Ash darted into the drive core chamber, and we stepped back from the hatch. No drive core meant no shields. No shields meant that -
"One-" and the commander's voice was cut off by a massive boom as Joker lined up the Oddysey's main guns with the Pride's bridge and fired.
"Good hit, Commander. I'm reading no activity."
"Tali, we're going to need a medic over here. I counted over a dozen quarian prisoners."
The prisoners got a little less tense when we overrode the doors on the cages. Ash and I both had our weapons, but stowed, and we had stowed our helmets, too. Then the quarian marines arrived, including their team medic, and the prisoners got excited.
I took the chance to talk to the batarian prisoner. He was tough-looking, like most batarians, but he had an odd look to his eyes. "This woman needs medical attention," he told me with the typical batarian rasp. "Her bones broke her suit."
"The medic will do what she can, and we have a very good doctor on our ship." It hit me that I knew that look. He was tired. Tired of caring. "She'll be alright. I'm Shepard. What's your name?"
He grinned at me, an unusual expression on a batarian in my experience. That said, my experience was limited to slavers, pirates, Hegemony officers, and assorted other nasty types. "Spartacus," he said.
I frowned at him. "Isn't that..."
"A human name? Yes." His smile widened. "Once you accept that your leaders are lying to you, you begin to ask what else they might be lying about. We smuggle books. Asari, turian, human. Our leader particularly liked the tale of Spartacus. If every rebel is named Spartacus, then they never know if they have the leader. They can't kill us without knowing if they need to keep hunting for us."
"The Batarian Resistance," I said softly. "I...wasn't sure there was one."
His face twisted. "There's not much of one. Most of our people don't question the fact of the hierarchy. They just try to get higher on it." He spat through the bars of the cage. "Like those on this ship. Since you cannot take from those stronger than you, find those who are weaker and take from them."
"And you?"
He sighed. "I worked for the Hegemony. Reading, ironically. I knew there was a high turnover in the position, I thought it was promotion to something more...direct. It didn't take me long to realize it was the kind of job where you learn state secrets you aren't allowed to know."
"Ah."
He smiled grimly. "Indeed. So I got myself sold into slavery."
I gaped, then it connected and I grimaced. "Better than dying in an unfortunate accident, I suppose."
"I thought so. Then I learned about the resistance." His smile went from grim to...soft, genuine. "You know, I'd never had a purpose before. I liked that."
"How'd you get out here?"
"Oh, I escaped, made it to Omega. They hired me. I told them I had medical training, you know. It wasn't technically a lie, did some time in the fleet. But they caught me smuggling supplies to the prisoners, threw me in with them, told me I'd 'find out what it was like to be a slave, if I liked them so much.' I wasn't too worried by it, but I am glad that you showed up."
"What will you do now?"
He sighed. "I don't know. I'm getting a little old for planning revolts. I speak Khelish pretty well, but it's hard enough for quarians in the Migrant Fleet and I don't see how throwing a dextro diet in with them would help."
That one caught me by surprise. "You speak Khelish?"
He nodded. "Khelish, English, Russian, Turian. Thessian is harder. I need a mechanical translation for the volus or elcor, but I know enough to augment a VI."
I hesitated. "Would you be willing to work on a Council ship?"
"A batarian, on a Council ship? Working for a Spectre?" Spartacus smiled again. "Perhaps it will give the Hegemony apoplexy. I'm in."
"Welcome aboard, Spartacus." I held out a hand. After a moment, he shook it.
Then I heard Liara's voice in my ear. "Shepard? I've just received an...unusual message. They wanted me to relay it to you. There's a facility on the world of 'Pragia.'"
Chapter 5: Recruiting
I don't know how we wound up in Flux, to be honest. It started with me offering to buy Ash a late drink for making Spectre, I think. She countered by offering to buy me a drink for retaining Spectre. Somehow things escalated.
The next thing I knew, me and Ash were both at a table, glaring at each other over another row of overturned shot glasses, while an Asari bartender poured another row.
"And this one's for you, Joker!" Ash said, then downed the shot. She looked around. "Where is Joker? He was here just a second ago."
I downed my own shot, set the glass down as carefully as I had the rest, and said, "Off in the corner with Liara."
"Are they making out?" she asked. She looked around the club, trying to see if she could catch them in the act.
"Nah," I said. "They're just talking and giggling. You know, saying all the stuff that you know is too cheesy to say when you're sober."
"Is that right?" Ash poured another shot down her throat. "Like 'I think your eyes are pretty?'"
I waited for her to flip the glass, then drank mine. "Sure, if you're a hardass with no sense of poetry."
Huh. The tequila hadn't seemed to be having an effect on me, but it took until a few seconds after I said that for me to realize it was entirely the wrong thing to say to Ashley Williams.
"No sense of poetry? No sense of poetry. I'll show you a sense of poetry, Shepard." She pounded a shot, then set the glass down, leaned forward, and focused on my eyes. "Okay, yeah, your eyes are exactly the shade I remember, the color of the sand at the bottom of Lake Itasca, like I could sink into them and drift forever..."
I blushed and looked away, putting away a shot, setting the glass down. "Okay, yeah, you know poetry." Tali and Garrus were over at a booth, Garrus gesticulating wildly, Tali shaking her head. Kal'Reegor was in the booth with them, actually. Yeah, that was definitely something I could think about. Not how it felt when Ash said-
"Also you're really cute when you blush."
That dragged my attention right to Ashley, who immediately burst into laughter, collapsing against the table. Then she grabbed the next glass and downed it. "And you owe me a shot."
"Oh, shit, right." I pounded my own. "I'm still perfectly good over here, Ash. How you holding up?"
Ash closed her eyes and shook her head slowly. Those lips widened slightly nope not going there. "I'm still fine," she said eventually.
"Come on, Ash."
"Why does walking have to be so hard," she whined. "I'm just trying to move my foot, and it doesn't go where I want it to."
"We're almost there. Door's opening, and there's your bed, right there."
"You don't have to go, you know. I trust you."
I sighed. "The bartender said that we finished three bottles, Ash. That's the tequila talking."
"Oh." She basically collapsed onto her bunk. "Are you sure?"
"Yes, Ash."
I stepped away, and she grabbed my hand. "Shepard."
"Yes, Ash?" I stopped.
"I'm glad you're back. Haley. I'm glad you're not dead." She was looking up at me.
I smiled slightly. "Me, too."
"And I'm glad you're not my commanding officer any more."
"Gee, thanks. Good night, Ashley Williams."
"Good night, Haley..."
The door hissed closed behind me, and I walked the short few meters to my own room. Trouble was, I felt neither drunk, nor tired. Sighing, I picked up a datapad. May as well do some research on the enemy...
The lights came on, burning holes into my eyelids. "Go 'way," I managed to slur out.
"Come on, Spectre. Rise and shine." Ash's voice was bright, cheerful, and boomed through the headache.
"What the fuck is up with this. You were drunk as a skunk, and you're fine now. I was sober as a loon, and now I have a hangover."
"Blame the geth. What's this datapad?"
"I wasn't tired, so I started reading."
She blinked. "You started reading 'The Alien Menace?'"
I nodded, my eyes still screwed up tight. "Yeah. The author vanished the same day Cerberus went rogue, so it seemed a safe bet he was involved."
"...And you took notes?"
"It needed annotation. Badly."
There was a pause. "That's a lot of red."
"It needed correction. Very badly."
"Shepard, this whole page is red."
"That whole page was wrong." I levered myself upright. "That, if I recall, was the page where they said Turians lay eggs." I pushed my blankets aside, stood, made my way slowly to the locker where I had the few articles of clothing I'd managed to acquire.
Oh, right. I hadn't managed to acquire any.
"Ah, Shepard?"
The fact that there were no clothes in my locker made me realize I had nothing on but my underwear. I looked over at Ash, a blush burning on my cheeks. There was an odd sort of grin on her face. "Yes?"
"The Council called. You have a doctor's appointment in forty minutes for a 'second opinion.' Much as it breaks my heart to do so," she said, tossing a hefty duffel by my feet, "I strongly recommend you wear pants."
"Um. Sure. Alright." And now I had to figure out what that odd smile on her face meant, and if any of what she'd put in the duffel was wearable or if it was just another joke at my expense.
"Agent Williams, good to see you. Commander Haley Shepard. Systems Alliance, also Council Special Tactics." The salarian gazed at me, blinking occasionally as he evaluated me. Finally he continued. "Pleased to make your acquaintance. Mordin Solus, Salarian STG."
"Should I be worried that a doc from the STG is looking over me?"
"Don't worry, Shepard," Ash said. "Mordin's good people."
"Understandable concern," Mordin said, shaking his head at her. Then he looked back at me. "Have killed many. Bombs, poison, gun, electricity. Never killed with medicine. Never will."
"I suppose I don't have any choice, anyway. Where do you want me, doctor?"
Mordin pointed me towards a diagnostic bed. "Have read reports by Karin Chakwas and Tali'Zorah vas Neema. Do not expect to learn anything new. Council asks..."
"We dance," Ash sighed. "Have you heard from Major Kirrahe?"
"Not since last operation. Was well, but deployed again immediately."
"That's too bad. He was good to work with."
I watched the hologram of the scanner as it ran a pass, then another, more slowly. "Operation?" I asked.
"The Council sent me on a mission under another Spectre, Jondim Bau. We were working with the STG, targeting pirates in the Krogan DMZ. Mordin was there, and Kirrahe."
"How's he been? I haven't seen him since Virmire."
Mordin smiled down at me. "He is...'holding the line,' as he would put it. Hold still, doing third pass. Try not to move."
The third pass seemed to take forever.
"Done. Shepard, you may sit up."
I did, and glanced over at Ash. "Is...that when the Council made you a Spectre?"
"More or less. I found out later that Major Kirrahe was the one who recommended me, after Virmire, and the DMZ was a trial by fire." She grinned. "Valorn nominated me, but Udina really went to bat for me."
"Oh?"
"He was in a meeting with the Council when it came up, and he started swearing up and down that I was no good, and a disgrace to humanity, and that the reason I was only Gunnery Chief was because of my family history, and that it would tell..."
"Weren't you sidelined because of supposed pro-alien sympathies?"
She grinned. "He told me later that the only thing better than a trusted friend is a reliable enemy, and that he though Sparatus might have voted yes because Udina said they shouldn't."
Even Mordin was smiling at that, but the smile vanished off his face as quickly as it returned. "Will need tissue samples. Will try to minimize pain."
"After my hangover this morning I won't really mind," I said. "Let's just get this over with- holy shit that hurt."
"And will take significant amount of time for culture and tissue analysis." Mordin looked up.
"I think the Council wanted an immediate answer," Ash said drily.
"Then they should have asked someone else." He shook his head slowly. "Glad they didn't. Someone else would have gotten it wrong."
"Any idea how long it will take?" I asked him.
"Days for culture, hours for analysis, then need repeat tests. Scans." He closed his eyes. "May need space on your ship."
I looked at Ash. She looked at me. "It's Liara's ship," I said slowly. "But no one's using the port berthing on Systems Deck. We can check with her, and if she's good with it, convert that into a lab?"
"Sounds like a plan. You can come back with us, we have to talk about what we're going to do."
We met in the conference room. I was at the head of the table, Ash at the foot. At least by my perspective. Garrus was on my left, Joker on my right. Liara was next to Joker. Tali was at Ash's right, Kal'Reegor next to Tali. Mordin took Ash's left.
"So, we have a mission," I said. I tapped my omnitool, and an image of Leviathan sprung into life over the table.
"Sovereign," Liara whispered.
"No," Tali said. "It's not." That was right; she'd been in the med bay when I'd briefed Ash.
"Correct. The batarians called this ship 'Leviathan;' they discovered it in a crater on Jartar, in the Dis system."
"The Leviathan of Dis." Garrus frowned. "I always thought it was an urban myth."
"Incorrect," Mordin said. "Have spoken with salarian scientist on survey ship."
Ash nodded. "I was able to pull that data from the Council library; salarian researchers documented it but it disappeared, and the Hegemony denied it had ever existed."
"They moved it to a facility in the Indris system; I don't know if it's the first place they held it, but it was the last place. For some reason they decided to move it to elsewhere in the Kite's Nest, but it was intercepted." I pulled up the damning email. "The cruiser and frigates escorting the vessel were disabled as the Leviathan was moved into the Relay; when they scrubbed their drives, they found human encryption codes. Alliance codes."
Joker jerked his head over. "No way, Commander. The Alliance wouldn't do something like that. It's too..." His face twisted into a bitter mask. "Decisive."
I traded a worried look with Ash, but shook my head. "They included samples of the code, so that the operative could try to find matches. I checked. It's an Alliance code, alright, but one that was flagged as having been compromised by Cerberus."
"So it's true, then." Tali looked at me. "Cerberus has a dead Reaper."
"Every indication points that way," I said. "Did you have a chance to talk to our guest, Spectre Williams?"
Ash grimaced while Joker, Liara, and Garrus all whipped their heads to stare at Williams. Apparently they'd missed that part of last night's program. "You'll pay for that one, Spectre Shepard. But no, I didn't have time. I was too busy putting together reports to tell the Council whether you were an insane triple agent waiting to go rogue, or if the geth changed you."
"Nicely done. So we don't know what she knows, or if she knows anything about this. She did seem to imply she knew who the Illusive Man was; he would know where Leviathan was if anyone did."
"Still, the Alliance has been hunting the Illusive Man since we found Admiral Kohoku." Ash raised an eyebrow at me. "Do you really think she's a good enough lead that we'll be able to find him in time?"
I grimaced and shook my head. "No, not really. Still, we can hope to get something. We'll need to do a more concerted interrogation. Does anyone else have any other leads?"
Tali looked at Kal'Reegor, then looked at me. "No one spends as much time in uninhabited worlds as the Migrant Fleet, Shepard," she said. She sounded reluctant, but at least she was offering something. "I can ask them for any patrol ships that have gone missing, or any recorded distress calls."
"So, if Cerberus has a dead reaper, they're probably going to want xenoarchaelogists." Joker leaned back, and I exchanged a scowl with Ash. Both of us knew which way this was going. "I happen to be dating a hot lady with a doctorate in that. Perhaps they're recruiting."
Liara flushed. "I'm not sure if a human supremacist group would care about a doctorate from the University of Thessia, but I suppose I haven't checked my academic email since..." The flush faded rapidly and her smile fell. "...for a while."
Instantly Joker's hand was on hers. She put her other hand over his, smiled at him, and color returned to her face. Huh. That was actually really cute.
"So we have a few destinations." Then I blanched. "Sorry, Liara, assuming you're willing to take us on your ship."
Liara frowned at me. "It's not my ship, Shepard. It can't be. It's a captured pirate ship, and I can't just take it. If the Council auctioned it off, I could maybe buy it, if someone else didn't beat me, which they would. The only way to keep this ship is if a Spectre takes it. That means you. Err, or Agent Williams."
I looked at Ash.
She looked at me.
I held up on hand, palm up, spread out, and put my other fist on it. Then I raised my eyebrows.
She scowled at me, then did the same.
We each pounded our hands once, twice, three times - I went scissors. She went paper.
"Dr. T'Soni," I said, my tone formal, "the Office of Special Tactics would like to thank you for bringing this ship to our attention. We apologize for any inconvenience, but it's needed for Galactic Security."
"What was that?" Garrus asked, even while Joker leaned forward, a grin forming on his face.
"Did you two just play rock-paper-scissors for a spaceship?" he asked.
I stood at the command console in CIC. It was still empty except for Joker's compartment up front. I keyed my omnitool. "Tali, how we doing back there?"
She sounded a little hesitent. "Terrible design, Shepard, but well implemented. I can work with this, as long as you'll have me."
"I know you have responsibilities to the Migrant Flotilla." I grimaced.
"Shepard, between the geth on board, the fact that we're checking on missing quarian ships, the possibility that Cerberus might have a dead Reaper to study..." Her voice was stronger now. "I'd say what's happening on the Oddysey is important to the Flotilla. And I'm glad to have you back."
"Thank you, Tali."
"And I have a destination for you. Uploading now."
I tapped the console, looked at the display. "A bit off the beaten path," I said.
"The Flotilla doesn't go where things are too crowded. We have to go where we're not likely to be shot at."
I pursed my lips. "Right. What's up with this one?"
"Two scout ships went there, never heard from them again. Could be Cerberus, could be something else. The Flotilla thinks it's worth checking out, though."
"Alright," I said. "Joker, take us out."
"Aye-aye, Skipper."
The CIC hatch door hissed open behind me. I turned to see Ash walking in, wearing those dark gray civvies. "Ash."
"Haley." She nodded. "We have a destination?"
I stepped aside, let her look at the display. "It's not much, but it's somewhere to start."
She skimmed the scant available data. "Well, you know that part better than I do. So, whaddya say? Wanna double-team the puppy?"
Joker choked.
I turned towards the helm. "You okay up there, Joker?"
"I'm good, Skipper. Just...focusing on taking us out of the Citadel. Yes, thank you Alliance Control..."
I looked back at Ash. She met my gaze, rolled her eyes.
I sighed. "Right, let's see what our guest has to say."
"Well that was useless."
Ashley put her arm around my shoulders, gave me a quick squeeze. "Well, you didn't show it in there, so that's one thing we got going for us. Fucking Cerberus cheerleader, though. She's too loyal to those maniacs to spill anything."
"We're going to need some leverage if we want to crack her." I sighed. "And I don't have any idea where to find it."
"Well, it's not like we don't have plenty else to do on the trip. I picked up some replacement parts for my armor on the Citadel I need to work in. I could use some assistance, if you're up for it."
"Actually I want to see how Mordin's settling in. I know we didn't get a whole lot of time to overhaul the berths for him."
Ash grinned and pulled her arm back. "Sounds like you, Shepard. I guess I'll see you when you reach the armory on your rounds." With that, she headed down the ladder to the lower deck.
I rolled my eyes, but it's not like she wasn't right. Sighing, I headed towards the portside berth - rather, the lab.
The door hissed open as I approached, so I assumed Mordin was expecting visitors. Then I remembered what assumptions got you. "Dr Solus?"
"Ah. Shepard. Come in, cell culture proceeding."
I looked around the berth. We'd stripped out the berths, leaving one rack for Mordin, but all his equipment had come aboard in a few crates, and I hadn't seen it set up. It looked like a genetics lab; a few incubators, a freezer or two, the kind of stuff we'd covered in N3 training for research facilities and again in N5 for bioweapons. A part of me was uneasy, not entirely sure which this was, but then I remembered him telling me he never killed with medicine.
"Met Dr. Chakwas earlier. Broad knowledge. Respectable." He sniffed. "Lacks depth of study, but makes up for it with familiarity across multiple species. Is she typical of human doctors?"
I hesitated. "I mean, I always figured it was hard to be a doctor without at least some knowledge of xenomedicine. But the Normandy was always intended to have at least a few turians on board, so they picked one of the best docs in the Alliance, and then we wound up with..." I laughed softly, as I thought about the diversity poster we'd had on the crew.
"Have read reports. Fascinating reading." He hesitated. "Did not hear about 'Reapers' until read reports."
I sighed. "Yeah. I get it, there's not a whole lot of corroboration around. The beacon on Eden Prime blew up, and only Saren and I got the message from that. Then the Prothean VI on Ilos, but it used up the last of its power talking to us. Virmire had a bunch of research, some on the Reapers, but enough of that research was too dangerous for us to not blow it up."
Mordin blinked. "Leaves your reports. Accurate?"
I smiled sadly at him. "Tentative on the vision. It wasn't until multiple passes with Liara and we got the Prothean Cipher from the Thorian on Feros that it was anything other than a string of blur and colors and fear. Prothean memories, filtered through three sets of alien species - it's too clear now for me to think it's not true, but I don't know that for certain. Brains lie all the time. And I know perception plays a part in Virmire; I...wasn't able to put down a good record of what I saw there until I was able to....to come to grips with what happened when we left. But Vigil - Vigil was clear, and I wasn't the only one who saw Vigil."
The salarian nodded. "Fascinating." Then he blinked, and it was as if that conversation was over. "Have noticed, ship has limited crew."
"I know," I grimaced. "I'm just...I've always been an Alliance officer, and served on Alliance ships. I don't know how I'm supposed to crew this one. Joker and Liara are probably staying put, and Tali's been good enough to help. Garrus is handling ordnance. But there's still so many things the ship needs. VI maintenance droids can only do so much."
"Your Alliance work - the Alliance provides. STG same way. The Council does not. Spectres...their work too classified. Expected to provide for themselves."
I stared at him. "Really?"
Mordin gave me a quick smile back. "Agreed, Shepard. Council does not value risk. Documentation is risk."
"That's just great." I sighed. "Alright. Something else for my to-do list."
"In the meantime, am proficient with galactic sensor systems." He turned back to the incubator. "When reach destination, will man console."
"Thanks, Mordin," I said. Then I went to go bother everyone else.
"I really miss silent running," I told Ash.
She was standing next to me, fully armed and armored. "Agreed. But the good news is they probably won't realize who we are."
I nodded. "As long as they care who we are. Joker?" It felt like the right time.
"Dropping out of FTL in three, two..."
The displays rippled as the ship moved from massless quasi-space to low-mass normal space. "Tali, how we holding up back there?"
"All systems nominal, Shepard."
"Mordin?"
His hands were flying over the console. "Still updating. Sensor resolution now at 1 arc second, no major objects near us. Focusing on the three planets. Will have more data momentarily."
I was perusing the data we'd picked up, comparing it to what was in the databases. "Two rocks and a gas giant, decent Helium-3 concentration. No signs of a refinery near the giant. Tali, what would the missing ships have been here for?"
"They were survey vessels, Shepard. Prospectors. They would have set up a satellite network over the uninhabited world, made a few readings, taken some samples."
Mordin interrupted. "Shepard. Second planet."
I frowned. "Debris. Looks like they found something someone didn't want them to. Joker, take us in. Mordin, are you picking up any beacons?"
"Negative." His hands paused. "Have identified what may be life pods. No beacons or power signatures."
I felt sick. Then angry.
"We should be there in half an hour, Shepard."
"Thanks, Joker. Tali, notify the Migrant Flotilla. We'll tell them more when we have more. Ash-"
"Prepping our gear for EVA. I'm on it." With that, her presence left my side. I took a deep breath, then dove into the various analyses Mordin was pulling from the Oddysey's sensor systems.
The debris was fairly recent, some of the battle damage still hot, or at least warm. Whatever had happened here, it was within the last few days. We were also only seeing pieces of one ship. There was nothing orbiting the first planet, so either the other ship had landed without any beacon or it had gone somewhere other than its next rendezvous point. I pulled up a starchart, began going over a list of the possibilities.
Unfortunately, this was the Terminus. The possible attackers - the possible destinations - there were just too many.
It seemed like only seconds before we were on the gutted quarian frigate. I suppressed a shudder. This mission was bringing back far too many memories. Even the clank of my boots against the deck grid was just like it had been on the Normandy, heading to get Joker out of the cockpit before the whatever-it-was finished us off. The gaping holes in the hull, the sight of stars spinning past...
But this was different. The Normandy's attackers had used a beam weapon, like Sovereign's, or the new 'Thanix' cannon that the turians had reverse-engineered. It had only been glancing blows, with Joker throwing in every evasive maneuver the Normandy's enhanced drive core and overpowered thrusters could put out, but even that had been enough to punch through every shield and layer of armor the Normandy had.
Here, the attackers had used conventional mass accelerators, with rounds the size of basketballs, but still single, conventional rounds. They would hit a layer of armor, and the armor would shatter, spalling onto the next layer. The difference was dramatic, with places where the outer layers were intact, or a shotgun pattern indicated that the inner armor had been penetrated by fragments of the outer.
The lighting was also different. The emergency lighting on the quarian vessel - the Konesh, according to her hull plate - had lost all power, and we were working on suit lamps. Lots of the impacts were still warm, but none were glowing. And given that it was a quarian ship, all of its crew had been in environment suits when the ship was attacked, so there weren't as many bodies floating in the wreck.
"You alright, Shepard?" Ash asked. Of course she'd noticed.
"Yeah." I scanned the ID tags of the corpse floating in the cockpit. The angle the neck was at told me how he had died. "It just...reminds me of the Normandy. And when I...you know."
There was a pause. "Yeah. But we've got sensor buoys up, and Joker and your friends are still on the Oddysey. We're safe."
I jumped a little as her hand squeezed my shoulder. I guess she'd been closer than I thought - the downside to an EVA was you might hear your own feet, but you wouldn't hear anyone else's. "Yeah." I reached up, patted her hand. "Thanks, Ash."
"The ship's clear, and the quarians have been notified for recovery. Let's get back to the Oddysey. Everyone else is back aboard, and Tali and Mordin are running drones through the mess the lifepods are in."
That was an unpleasant sight. It hadn't been the quarians' sister ship that had recovered the lifepods - they wouldn't have needed to cut the lifepods open. Nor would they have left the corpses behind, either on the ship or in the dense field of lifepods and debris.
At least that ruled out a few possibilities; whoever had hit the Konesh had wanted captives. That meant slavers, pirates, or mad scientists, and that Cerberus hadn't accidentally resurrected a billion-years-dead Reaper.
Which would have been a relief, but that was honestly still a concern.
Fucking Cerberus.
"Tali? Mordin? How's it looking?"
"It's looking bad, Shepard, but no worse than it did when we saw it. I've tagged the bodies for the Migrant Flotilla, but..."
"Agreed, Shepard. Not much more to do."
"We're heading back. Shepard ou-"
Then I grabbed Ash by the arm and yanked her out of sight of the airlock, as suddenly half the sky was filled with the brown of one of Oddysey's sister ships. "Joker! Fake comms trouble! Flash the lights if you have to respond. Going dark."
"Pride of Kar'Shan to Oddysey. We've already picked her over. What's your status, and what's up with the name change?"
Having crawled all over the Oddysey - for perfectly rational reasons - I had a pretty good idea where the Pride's airlocks would be, but this was going to be risky, at best. I looked at Ash, held my thumb up, then flipped it over a few times.
She held her thumb up. Okay, we were on.
Tapping a few keys on my omni-tool, I killed the display and the lights on my suit. Then I lined myself with the Pride of Kar'Shan and kicked off.
The trip over was a nightmare, knowing that at any second the Pride could fire up her weapons, turn on her GARDIAN lasers, and erase Williams - and me - from existence. But fast as I was moving, it wasn't fast enough for the Pride's barriers to think me a meteor, and I passed right through, and then my omni-tool flash-forged me a handhold only about ten feet away from the airlock I'd been aiming for.
Trying to keep my hold as light as I could, I pulled myself towards the hatch. Then I keyed my omni-tool, fired up the intrusion protocols and gave myself command access to the airlock, overriding the alarms. I glanced up to see Ash arrive in her jet-black custom armor. I nodded.
She nodded back.
I opened the airlock, and Ash pulled herself in, with me following. Then I cycled it.
About three meters away was a batarian in battered armor. He turned at the sound of the hatch, confusion evident in his four eyes; they widened as they took in our armor, including my distinctive red-and-white stripes, and he frantically grabbed the pistol at his hip.
Then Ash shot him.
From there we were in a very familiar passage; much dirtier than the Oddysey, but the same starboard passage from the hangar to the security checkpoint. With only the two of us on board, we would have to move fast and keep moving. I looked at Ash; she nodded aft. Good call - prisoners first.
We hit the catwalk hard and fast, me with my pistol, Ash with her assault rifle. I grabbed the guard standing at the hatch and counted four more in the hangar. Fifteen quarians were in cages racked to the upper deck as was one batarian in ragged clothing currently splinting a quarian's leg. I rolled the guard with me over the rail and rode him to the lower deck, putting a few rounds downrange towards the guard at the port hatch. Ash's rifle barked behind me, and the one at the end of her catwalk went down. I heard the crunch as I landed on mine.
Three.
A concerted leap took me up to the port side catwalk, and I put a round between the upper two eyes of the hatch guard while Ash got the one on the hangar floor. One. I raised my pistol, looking down my catwalk, when the slugs started digging into my shields and I spun through the hatch. Ash's rifle barked again. Zero.
I stepped back into the hangar, my shields already back to full, and jumped back down to the lower deck.
"Blowing engine," Ash said.
"On guns" was my response.
I hit the ventral corridor running. The armory was locked orange, but I just slapped my own encryption on it. A sweep of the med bay showed it empty. Then the gunnery compartment. It was empty, too, and not disguised like the one on the Oddysey had been. But Garrus's rants had told me where it was easy to break, and a few pistol rounds took care of that. Then I put my back to the hatch, next to the ladder up to the security checkpoint.
"Status?"
"Port engines down. Suppressing on two."
I hit my cloak, then jumped up the ladder at the same time as Ashley's assault rifle barked.
"One down," Ash said. "Fucking amateurs."
I counted six still up, but rather than participate, I threw myself back into the drive core room. One engineer - in battered armor like the rest of them, and with his worn shotgun in his hands - was creeping as quietly as he could towards the hatch. He looked a little confused at the ripple as I paused in front of him, then he was down, too. The Pride's scram switch was in the same position as the Oddysey's, and a light tap keyed it while I returned to the hatch, this time counting four.
"Core's shut down," I said. "Joker, you copy?"
"You got it, commander."
"I've got a feeling about this guy and I might need you to act. But let's see if we can get in the old fashioned way first."
Clenching my omni-tool fist, I gathered a load of plasma, then threw it at the four. It had barely hit my target when Ash slammed him with a concussive blast that threw incendiaries all over the compartment. I put a bullet in the last one standing.
Then the CIC door lock went from orange to red as they threw addional encryption on it, then vanished as they did something to totally disable the door.
"Alliance!" came a batarian voice from the ship's PA. "Drop your weapons and surrender or we vent the hangar. You have three seconds."
"Joker, shut him up. Ash, on me."
"Two."
Ash darted into the drive core chamber, and we stepped back from the hatch. No drive core meant no shields. No shields meant that -
"One-" and the commander's voice was cut off by a massive boom as Joker lined up the Oddysey's main guns with the Pride's bridge and fired.
"Good hit, Commander. I'm reading no activity."
"Tali, we're going to need a medic over here. I counted over a dozen quarian prisoners."
The prisoners got a little less tense when we overrode the doors on the cages. Ash and I both had our weapons, but stowed, and we had stowed our helmets, too. Then the quarian marines arrived, including their team medic, and the prisoners got excited.
I took the chance to talk to the batarian prisoner. He was tough-looking, like most batarians, but he had an odd look to his eyes. "This woman needs medical attention," he told me with the typical batarian rasp. "Her bones broke her suit."
"The medic will do what she can, and we have a very good doctor on our ship." It hit me that I knew that look. He was tired. Tired of caring. "She'll be alright. I'm Shepard. What's your name?"
He grinned at me, an unusual expression on a batarian in my experience. That said, my experience was limited to slavers, pirates, Hegemony officers, and assorted other nasty types. "Spartacus," he said.
I frowned at him. "Isn't that..."
"A human name? Yes." His smile widened. "Once you accept that your leaders are lying to you, you begin to ask what else they might be lying about. We smuggle books. Asari, turian, human. Our leader particularly liked the tale of Spartacus. If every rebel is named Spartacus, then they never know if they have the leader. They can't kill us without knowing if they need to keep hunting for us."
"The Batarian Resistance," I said softly. "I...wasn't sure there was one."
His face twisted. "There's not much of one. Most of our people don't question the fact of the hierarchy. They just try to get higher on it." He spat through the bars of the cage. "Like those on this ship. Since you cannot take from those stronger than you, find those who are weaker and take from them."
"And you?"
He sighed. "I worked for the Hegemony. Reading, ironically. I knew there was a high turnover in the position, I thought it was promotion to something more...direct. It didn't take me long to realize it was the kind of job where you learn state secrets you aren't allowed to know."
"Ah."
He smiled grimly. "Indeed. So I got myself sold into slavery."
I gaped, then it connected and I grimaced. "Better than dying in an unfortunate accident, I suppose."
"I thought so. Then I learned about the resistance." His smile went from grim to...soft, genuine. "You know, I'd never had a purpose before. I liked that."
"How'd you get out here?"
"Oh, I escaped, made it to Omega. They hired me. I told them I had medical training, you know. It wasn't technically a lie, did some time in the fleet. But they caught me smuggling supplies to the prisoners, threw me in with them, told me I'd 'find out what it was like to be a slave, if I liked them so much.' I wasn't too worried by it, but I am glad that you showed up."
"What will you do now?"
He sighed. "I don't know. I'm getting a little old for planning revolts. I speak Khelish pretty well, but it's hard enough for quarians in the Migrant Fleet and I don't see how throwing a dextro diet in with them would help."
That one caught me by surprise. "You speak Khelish?"
He nodded. "Khelish, English, Russian, Turian. Thessian is harder. I need a mechanical translation for the volus or elcor, but I know enough to augment a VI."
I hesitated. "Would you be willing to work on a Council ship?"
"A batarian, on a Council ship? Working for a Spectre?" Spartacus smiled again. "Perhaps it will give the Hegemony apoplexy. I'm in."
"Welcome aboard, Spartacus." I held out a hand. After a moment, he shook it.
Then I heard Liara's voice in my ear. "Shepard? I've just received an...unusual message. They wanted me to relay it to you. There's a facility on the world of 'Pragia.'"
- Location
- Somewhere, Maybe
oh. OH. I know that name. This is going to be ALL KINDS of interesting! ^.^ I wonder, is Jack headed -back-, or did she just break -out-....
JennyDracos
Eccentric Hugging Lady
- Location
- Chicago
Heh. Like I said, Chapter 6 grabbed me and wouldn't let me go. I wrote a silly scene, went back to Chapter 5. Then I realized I could write a sweet scene, but I was mad so I wrote an angry scene, and then later the sweet scene, and then I went in to fill in...
So, you remember how you can find evidence during Pragia and word afterwards that Pragia had crossed the Illusive Man's lines and he had ordered it shut down before the riot that let Jack escape?
So, you remember how you can find evidence during Pragia and word afterwards that Pragia had crossed the Illusive Man's lines and he had ordered it shut down before the riot that let Jack escape?
Finagle007
[Verified Great Old One]
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Yay, Mordin! And it looks like Jack will be showing up soon, too!
- Location
- Somewhere, Maybe
Yes, though I always thought that the shut-down order came almost simultaneously with the riot, giving the base personel almost no time to deal with either before Jack went all HULK SMASH on everything.
JennyDracos
Eccentric Hugging Lady
- Location
- Chicago
I still haven't written anything for Jack (she doesn't have any lines in Chapter 6 or the snips I've got after). It's going to be tricky.
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Few people do, honestly.
Chug chug chug!
D'aww..... Not nearly as sweet as Of Sheep and Battle Chicken setting up Tali and Joker, but still, kinda sweet.
Hoh yeah. I mean....
Hell yeah she is!
You've had like
3 bottles of tequila?
Assuming she's 160lb, frequent drinker, over a 3 hour period, with a alcohol content of 40% in shots
Woah, she might not be sober for DAYS. So either they got the weak stuff, genemods do wonders, or she's buzzed.
Thanks cybernetics!
"A copy of Flappy Bird."
Why? She'll just be in the traditional patient's paper gown.
Well, not directly...
That uh
Huh, thought it was longer ago in universe. My B.
Worth a try, but a waste otherwise.
Why not?
Not really, for all we know, they just found a planet filled with Geth and defected there on the spot.
"Ask Jeeves?"
Pretty long list at this point.
Which is really saying something.
Guess it wasn't Cerberus this time.
Weird, it went rogue some time ago....
JennyDracos
Eccentric Hugging Lady
- Location
- Chicago
Good catch! Threadmark applied, thank you.
I will stop making silly references to Joker/Liara when it stops being funny or when it stops being sweet. So far, it's mostly both. Joker was going to make some 'morning after' breakfast for everyone - he gets really happy in the mornings. Then I started wondering if that was insensitive when half the people on the ship are quarians who can't really pull off their helmets and eat.
So it got bumped to Chapter 7.
The main thing that Chapter 6 needs is for me to go back through the Pragia section and make sure it's as bad as I intend it to be.
I intend it to be bad.
- Location
- Canada
Mordin's here, yay! Kal'Reegor seems to have joined the party, too. I was kind of disappointed that he didn't stick around in ME2. Also, go Udina, for being an actually competent diplomat here.
It's very nice to see the consequences of ME1 coming up. Virmire leading to Ashley's Spectre status, and having Kirahhe showing up again for Ashley's Spectre testing, makes a ton of sense. Nice point about the surprisingly limited amount of hard evidence that Shepard can actually bring back about the Reapers.
Rock-paper-scissors for the ship just cracked me up. I don't know why. It shouldn't be that funny, but it was.
I look forward to the newcomer Spartacus. His introductory conversation felt a bit rushed for some reason. I can't quite put my finger on it. It might be the very rapid transition from an extended action scene to a conversation. It might be the relatively limited amount of description around the conversation, despite the knowledge that it's taking place in and around a busy scene (marines bustling prisoners to safety, medics looking over their injuries). It might be Shepard's lack of extended dialogue, being mostly rapid questions and short responses. And it might just be that I don't have a preconceived notion of how Spartacus would speak, and thus mentally default to a more rapid pace, combined with most of Shepard's dialogue being so fast.
It's very nice to see the consequences of ME1 coming up. Virmire leading to Ashley's Spectre status, and having Kirahhe showing up again for Ashley's Spectre testing, makes a ton of sense. Nice point about the surprisingly limited amount of hard evidence that Shepard can actually bring back about the Reapers.
Rock-paper-scissors for the ship just cracked me up. I don't know why. It shouldn't be that funny, but it was.
I look forward to the newcomer Spartacus. His introductory conversation felt a bit rushed for some reason. I can't quite put my finger on it. It might be the very rapid transition from an extended action scene to a conversation. It might be the relatively limited amount of description around the conversation, despite the knowledge that it's taking place in and around a busy scene (marines bustling prisoners to safety, medics looking over their injuries). It might be Shepard's lack of extended dialogue, being mostly rapid questions and short responses. And it might just be that I don't have a preconceived notion of how Spartacus would speak, and thus mentally default to a more rapid pace, combined with most of Shepard's dialogue being so fast.
JennyDracos
Eccentric Hugging Lady
- Location
- Chicago
I agree with you about Spartacus. He almost didn't get a speaking role in Chapter 6, either, which was foolish of me. (Shepard radios the ship for Joker - sure, always has, but you JUST GOT a comms guy!) I don't really have his voice down yet, either.
JennyDracos
Eccentric Hugging Lady
- Location
- Chicago
Jack is going to play a pivotal role in Chapter 6, but not an active one. Her first speaking line should hopefully be in Chapter 7, assuming I can figure out what it will be and how her personality can come through.
Happily, while her circumstances are different, 'angry and bitter' still work.
Happily, while her circumstances are different, 'angry and bitter' still work.