Let the Galaxy Forget Your Name - icameherejusttosaythis (2024)

Chapter 1

Chapter Text

Prologue

24 August, 2401

The pretty quarian folds her hands in her lap, while the interviewer gives her a moment to compose herself. Behind the interviewer, a turian, about forty, with dark facial markings and leathery gray skin, two panels of lights and a recording drone. Behind that, a female turian, and a male, named Varian, standing by the window, where the waning crescent of Menae cast a dim blue glow over the trees and hills lopes beyond.

“I understand this is hard,” the interviewer says. His name is Recto. Now he leans in. The Quarian folds her hands again, and looks up at him. There, in the camera light, you can read a feeling. Anguish, resignation, anger, maybe. She’s young and old all at once. Life has asked too much of her, and likely that won’t stop. Ever.

She gives a nod, and Recto asks, “Can you tell me what happened to you on Lorek?”

“We were sent there,” the quarian says. “Only the message we got didn’t call it Lorek. They called it Esan.”

#

Pictures of ruins. Of a camera drifting across a city called Daybreak, first seen from orbit, then the upper atmosphere, and stitched together finally with footage shot by a drone at low altitude. In the lens: ruins. Crashed ships. Circular avenues imposed over a square grid, an urban plan commonly known as asari colonial. Then, up close, shots from the street of reaper husks and cannibals, the flesh stripped away, and only the mechanical parts remaining.

Esan, the narrator says. The old asari name, before the batarians gave it a new one. Before the reapers came, we knew it as Lorek. Now, no one mentions it at all. The batarians are gone, the asari are gone. In 2186, the reapers left no one on the surface alive. Anyone who survived, escaped—if you can call it that—to Omega.

#

“Why were you there?” the interviewer asks.

“We were looking for an object,” she says. Her hands twist in her lap. Her geth show the image on screen, the characters 303. “This was supposed to mark the spot. Someone had left something there, and we were to retrieve it.”

“And what was this object?”

“Our captain never told us.”

“Your captain—Shen vas Vesta, correct?”

“That’s right,” the quarian says. “We didn’t usually do surface work. Our ship was better suited to orbital and deep system work, not scavenging for things on the ground.”

“And so what happened when you landed?”

#

More pictures of ruins, buildings burst open, furrows in the ground, filled with solidified nazarite. Wasteground. Old vehicles rusted and burned so that little but a vague shape remains. Then: newer vehicles, shot up, weathered, but clearly newer arrivals. All around the vehicles, dark stains on the ground, where bodies had lain, then been moved. A shot of an old structure: a mound of prefabricated housing units, covered in dirt and then in vegetation. More dark stains. An entryway partially destroyed by a blast.

The interviewer and the pretty quarian are there now. Now you can see how the look in her eyes has worked on the rest of her body. She’s leaning on a cane like an old woman, though she isn’t old. There she is in the blasted-out hole of the entryway, standing on a heap of rubble and gesturing.

“This is where it happened,” she said. “We were inside, looking for the marker. I was in one of the central galleries off the main corridor. There were about twenty of us searching the lower level.”

“Were you armed?”

“We had a few pistols,” the quarian says. “Some explosives.” A shudder runs through her and she looks again at the doorway.

“One of your crewmates was found with a rifle. Up on the top level.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” the quarian says. “Anyhow, the only other weapons we had were blasting charges.”

“Why explosives?” the interviewer asks.

“We’d been asked to destroy the location where we found the object.”

Now they’re climbing onto the upper level, looking out over the perpetual night to the east, the perpetual daylight to the west. They stand in a twilight, while the wind blows dust from the rubble between them and the camera.

“You were wounded,” the interviewer says.

“I ran. One of the attackers shot me. I kept running and somehow I got away.”

“Somehow?”

The quarian shakes her head. “I still don’t understand. Someone else was here. Not with us, but looking for the same thing. She and her crew saved my life.”

#

Ashana nar Vesta, EVA operator, had served two years on the Vesta, a deep system salvage tug, first near Palaven, then later in the area surrounding Omega. Her name is listed on the “lost with all hands” declaration issued by the joint investigation launched by the Citadel and the quarian government.

Records of her arrival on the Citadel are spotty at best. Her admission to Huerta Memorial is logged, but subsequently scrubbed from any other databases. Nonetheless, her DNA matches the numbered samples remaining from the lab-grown organs fashioned for her at the hospital’s trauma and recovery center. When asked for comment, neither Council, nor the quarian legation had any comment.

But let us be clear. Ashana nar Vesta was supposed to have died that day.

“Can you tell the galaxy,” the interviewer asks, “what you have to say?”

“I’m alive,” the quarian says. “My name is Ashana nar Vesta, and I am still alive.”

Chapter 2: Maroon

Chapter Text

Maroon
3497, asari common calendar (Approximately three thousand years ago)

Essa was squatting by a forest trail, her eyes fixed on a gap between two bushes that in the waning daylight looked like the mouth of a small cave. In one hand, she clutched a spear, in the other, the handset of her radio. Nothing stirred. Essa held still, waiting, denying herself the pleasure of picking away the scabs of mud on her face.

The creature she was waiting for wouldn’t come. This was an old trail, she knew, and the animals she was hunting were most active at dawn, and when the planet’s largest was particularly bright during this part of the month. Still, a commander led by example, and here she had to let everyone know she was not above doing her part to keep the crew fed. Another hour, she told herself, and she could return to camp. Before it was full night, and it began to get cold.

She squinted, and then dozed perhaps. Half an hour went by, and the sun, traveling fast overhead, was less than a fist over the treetops.

There was a rustle in the brush, and before Essa could ready her spear, the creature she’d been waiting for, an animal covered in defensive scales, and with broad forepaws meant for digging burst through the break and with a grunt of surprise, then terror, tore past her down the path.

Without thinking, Essa leapt to her feet, and gave chase. She keyed her handset twice, signal for game afoot, hoping someone nearby might be in a better position to strike a blow, but the forest was quiet, but for her footfalls, and the creature, and the beating of her heart.

Just like that it was gone, into a burrow in the roots of a nearby tree, into the undergrowth, under the leaves. She couldn’t tell. Essa stopped, held her breath, and listened for the sound that wasn’t the wind in the branches, or the blood pumping in her ears, or the water in the streambed, half a kilometer away.

There it was, a low growl of breath, it was close by, winded from the sprint. She swiveled her head to look as far behind her as she could, but there was nothing. The forest floor was damp, and smelled of sweet rot, like a forest should, the air cooler than out in the daylight, a thin fog of mist and dust, making leaning shafts of light. No signs of a burrow, no tracks, none that she could see anyhow. There was a rise in the ground, the rise itself apparently the result of a massive root system belonging to one of the thick-trunked trees.

There was a sudden squeal of surprise, and then a yowl. Essa scrambled over the rise , and then stepped around the tree, where she found herself standing face to face with an altogether different sort of animal.

There was Liss, holding the creature impaled on the point of her spear, its legs still jerking in death, as she set it down, and with a sharp, flinty rock, began to cut at its skin.

“You flushed it for me,” she said, not looking up, and also not addressing Essa by her proper title of Captain. They were ashore, perhaps she wasn’t captain any longer.

#

Back to camp, now, where their makeshift shelters were taking on an ever more permanent and homelike feel. The footpaths that ran between them and that were once scarcely visible, were now worn and hard packed by thousands of individual footfalls. It would rain soon, the way it seemed to nearly every evening on this continent, of this planet, named after one of Athame’s earliest bondmates, Ferisan. The one that didn’t work out. The one that turned on her.

Ferisan was a low-gravity world, two thirds as massive as Thessia, but with a hot core that spun fast, and produced massive magnetic fields that created amazing green and red auroras every night. The atmosphere was thinner than Thessia, perhaps cooler, but only at night, and the low gravity made for odd geoforms: steep hillslopes and gullies that filled with roaring water in a downpour; for strange plants, too: trees that stretched their branches nearly a hundred meters into the sky, for creatures with fragile bones, and soft muscles, that in a few cases made for good eating.

It was beautiful in its way, Essa thought, though sometimes she had to force herself to stop and look. She stopped now, slowing her pace, as she passed through the knot of shelters that bounded both sides of the main path.

Evening was coming on. It always arrived as a surprise, the day seeming barely to have started, given that Ferisan’s day-night cycle was just short of fourteen hours. Mostly the crew was awake for a full rotation, then slept during the second “night,” only to start over again, with the coming dawn. At the communal fire, pots boiled over bundles of dried rushes. Members of the crew were piling more rushes to the side of the fire, where they would dry well enough to serve as fuel the following morning.

Liss bounded on ahead. Already she and two others were dressing the scaly creature to add to whatever was already cooking. Orie sang. Someone else joined in. As the sun fell toward the horizon, Essa felt a sense of calm come over her.
Everything seemed in order, except that nothing about this was right. Two years ago, these women had been among the most highly trained scientists of their generation. Or the most highly specialized killers. Now here they were, hunting and gathering, like the asari had done fifty thousand years ago, when Athame was said to have walked among them.

Twenty-five souls, Essa thought, as she surveyed the campsite. Off in the distance, the launch sat in the open, under the now darkened sky. The stars were out. The same ones, she realized that flickered over Thessia, and yet their arrangement and order not the same. Low on the horizon, a blue orange dot wobbled in the last of the day’s heat, a gas giant they’d named Puria, after Essa’s home district.

#

They had planned on staying for a month, to refuel, and to gather food. That had been two years ago. Now they were scraping an existence out of the landscape, hunting what meat they could, picking tubers and nuts and berries. Their first winter planetside, they might as well have stripped the forest bare. Now we know hunger, Liss had told her, The way the mothers did, before Athame taught us to make records of our history. Liss had been a commando once, was one still, and was putting her dangerous skills to good use as a hunter. As were the others.

The scientists, meanwhile, left off their gathering every few rotations to study the local flora and fauna. What they were finding was more than a bit troubling to Essa, though she said nothing about it, except they should go on with their mission, which, after all, was research.

The mission. They’d been sent to recover an FTL probe, and so they’d been waiting, in the orbit of Parnitha’s outermost gas giant, waiting for it to return, where they would use the planet’s gravity to decelerate the probe enough that they could grapple it and pull it on board.

But that had been before they found it. The installation, an automated space station, big as an asteroid, and built by only the goddess knew.

Their mission, she thought again, as she approached the firepit. She and the crew had departed High Rock with sixty days of food, additional fuel cells, and extra supplies, all meant for an expedition that was intended to last for forty days at most. That mission, it may as well have been in a past life, or a dream. Two years—well, now it was approaching three—it wasn’t just the time they’d been gone, but the distance they had traveled.

Everything after that, the commandos attempting mutiny, the death of the Nixia’s original captain, the interaction with the installation that had flung them thousands of light years across the galaxy, half a dozen more jumps, using similar installations, each one taking them farther and farther from Thessia, until it looked as though their ship was set to make a full circle around the galactic core, before wheeling back around for a return to Parnitha. After their second jump, one of the navigators had killed herself with a long sharp piece of metal. After their fifth relay jump, one of the engineers had disappeared out the airlock. After their seventh, Essa had found Orie in the airlock, inner door sealed and the outer armed and ready to open.

The system they had entered contained a habitable-looking planet, and so they had decided to park the ship in orbit, and set down planetside to search for food, water, fuel.

They’d found the Farisan climate reasonably suitable, with a variety of edible plants, and a even few animals. The area surrounding their first campsite seemed reasonably secure. They’d never meant to put down roots, but they’d hit a run of bad luck. Their launch had never been intended for quick transatmospheric turnaround, and the strain on the little ship’s reactor and engines required a week’s worth of maintenance, every three or four trips from the Nixia to the ground. Even this wouldn’t have held them up for very long, if it hadn’t been for a micrometeoroid strike on one of the Nixia’s solar arrays that had blown a fist-sized hole in the main power conduit, exactly the wrong place for such a thing to happen. Fortunately the ship’s acting XO had been able to steer the ship out of further trouble, but parking the Nixia in an even higher orbit meant greater strain on the launch’s thrusters, with few spare parts to help make up the difference.

After a lengthy stretch of repairs, Essa and the acting XO had decided to split up the crew, to send the Nixia back to the installation, where the navigator could study any data she could get from installation’s chart room. From there, with other data they had already collected, they might be able to predict or even control their destination before executing their jump.

It seemed like the most desperate of measures, but Commandant Razia, leader of the commandos, had suggested it might possible, and Nerai agreed. Each of them had access to knowledge that Essa couldn’t even begin to guess at.

All right. They’d gone through with the plan. It was that or face losing everyone, either to starvation, or illness; or perhaps a lifetime from now another expedition, or another sufficiently advanced civilization would find their withered bones, and the remnants of their camp, buried under several millennia of dust.

She’d promised Orie they would never stop looking for a way home. But in the meantime, they would settle here for as long as they needed to. They would get by, while they figured out how to make the installations fling them homeward, instead of on a circular course around the galactic core. They would survive.

Essa stood by the fire, letting it warm her face and hands. Two of the other hunting parties had taken animals. Buoyed with the knowledge that she might eat that evening after all, Essa headed up the path in the direction of the launch. Neela was waiting for her by the landing gear, and she seemed in a good mood, given the circ*mstances. Perhaps she’d smelled the cooking meat, too.

“We’ve found four more specimens,” she said. “Not the same ones, but separate individual species.” Essa nodded for her to continue. “Three kinds of microbe and another plant.”

It didn’t make any sense, and yet here it was. They had positively matched nearly three-dozen species, mostly microbial, but also seven plants and one animal, that were identical, or evolutionary relatives of species found on Thessia. Years ago, when they had boarded the installation orbiting beyond Tevura, they had found a garden filled with plants that grew on the asari homeworld. Since then, on one other planet, they had found a bush that bore a long-lasting fruit that they had collected in bushels and that had sustained them for two more months of spaceflight, also native to Thessia.

Someone had been seeding these plants throughout the galaxy. They were all a little different. The trees that grew on Thessia—some of them had since gone extinct. On Farisen, they had adapted to the low gravity and the somewhat dimmer light of the parent star. They grew to well over a hundred meters here, in thick forests that allowed individual trees to prop their branches against another, to avoid from falling in high winds.

Elsewhere, the crew had found the same bushes that grew the same berries they’d encountered earlier. Here they were bigger, the size of a fist, and their flesh denser, it had to be cut and cooked before it could be eaten, but otherwise it was the same plant. And growing along with the fruit-bearing bushes they a kind of ground cover native to the coastal regions on Thessia that bound nitrogen in the soil. The smaller plants were sustaining the bushes, as though they’d been planted together, eons ago, one put in place to feed the other.

“What,” Neela had asked Essa one evening, when camp was quiet, and they were alone, “—what if these plants are native, not to Thessia, but to here, or some other planet we’ve yet to find?”

“What are you saying?”

Neela was quiet for a long time. “I’m saying a lot of things. All of them are pretty terrible to have to confront.” She spread out her hands and lay them flat on the grass matting that made up the floor of their tent. “These plants didn’t travel on their own, right?”

“I’m with you so far.”

“So someone brought them. Planted them. Tended them, even.” Neela worked her thumb against the tips of her other fingers, a sure sign that she was trying to slow down so she would explain properly. “Those ruins we found on Denni. You said they’d been built as a hiding place, a kind of bunker.” She paused again. Her thumb moved from the index to the middle finger. “But they had built the bunker under another set of ruins, older ones. Who were they? Some day we may find out, but what if it was them? What if they came to Thessia when we were still—“ Neela stopped and looked around, gesturing vaguely at the camp surrounding them, “—when we were living like this? Think about the old stories—about Janiri, who brought us seeds and taught us to settle and farm. Lucen who gave us pottery, and our biotic abilities, and finally Athame herself, who taught us numbers. What if it wasn’t just a story?”

Essa shook her head. “But that’s all it is. A story.” Wasn’t it?

#

Neela was small for an asari, half a head shorter than most of the crew. When she wanted to—and she often did— she could just rest her chin on Essa’s shoulder. Circ*mstances of life aboard the Nixia had flung them together, and now they were as close to bondmates as anyone could get without a proper ceremony.

She gave Essa a boost onto the ladder and then the dreamlike look in her eye went away, and she seemed to return from a long way off.

“We’ll need to test the samples,” she said, “In the lab, I mean.”

Essa nodded. She knew what that meant. Back onboard the ship. It implied the question of when the Nixia would return.

When the Nixia got underway, carrying a skeleton crew, the XO, the chief navigator, and two commandos and one engineer, it had been planned that they would be gone for about six weeks: two weeks outbound, a week to examine its data, and a two week trip inbound. They had enough food to last nearly twice that long, and it was turning out they’d need it because they had been gone for nearly two months. While simultaneous communication from the edge of the solar system was impractical, they maintained daily burst transmissions.

The trip out had gone well. They had succeeded in boarding the installation and they had managed to get some good data from the chartroom. A few days later they reported having found machines that dispensed some kind of food. They were busy collecting and storing it for the return trip, just in case.

Their next message stated that they were preparing for departure. Then two days of silence. Then another message stating they’d had trouble with the ship’s drive system. They would find a workaround solution and begin their burn on their next rotation.

Then a cryptic message: New discovery aboard installation. Investigating.

Then silence, three solid days of no contact, aside from the steady ping of the ship’s transponder.

Neela didn’t know. Razia didn’t know. Essa had vowed to tell no one about it. Not until she’d figured it out on her own.

#

In the co*ckpit, she flipped the comms panel from standby to active, and as the equipment began humming and waking up, she waited for the brief, shrill tone that would indicate that the system had received a new transmission. When all the panels were green, there was nothing—nothing aside from the Nixia’s transponder tone that told Essa very little. Except that the ship had, as of nine hours earlier, still been in the system. She examined the telemetry data and tried to see if she could get a fix on the ship’s exact position. The engines were working, the ship still had fuel and air pressure, and it had electrical power. While she waited for the data to compile, she uploaded the message she’d coded that morning, as she had the mornings before.

***Planetside Actual: situation unchanged [STOP] Crew and camp in good order [STOP] Advise immediately on status and position [STOP] Can’t keep your silence quiet forever [OUT]***

Can’t keep your silence quiet forever. She’d added that line since yesterday. Truth was, she could phrase it however she wanted; there was nothing she could do. The ship would respond, or it wouldn’t. It would return, or it wouldn’t. They would be stranded forever, or they wouldn’t.

Essa looked over the panel again, thinking she’d seen something on the display. She stared, thought there was nothing, and then looked away. But then there it was at the edge of her vision. One of the bands, not their usual channel, was spiking. She turned the dial and put the headset back on.

For a moment it seemed the channel was empty, with nothing but background radiation ticking off their antennae. But then there it was, a low growl, irregular, but with a pattern to it, like an engine running at idle, or the sound a factory might make, singing itself to sleep. Essa ran the sound through their filters to see if there was any discernable meaning to the noise, and finding nothing, noted its angle, then made a recording, transferred it to a storage device, and put the device in her pocket. The computers had finished their computations in finding the Nixia’s transponder beacon and calculated a rough position, which had only changed relative to theirs in ways consistent with an orbiting object. Certainly there was no sign they’d started burning starward, as she had hoped they would. Essa stepped down through the main hatch, descended the ladder, and stepped onto the hard-packed dirt.

Neela was waiting under the ladder. “What is it?” she asked.

“They need another day,” Essa said.

#

Back during her first few tours in the science corps, Essa had never had trouble feeling a sense of wonder. Space travel is full of boredom and terror, but in between the body-crushing stresses a burn, and the giddy weightlessness of the drift, she could have spent hours watching storms bloom in Thessia’s tropics, or following the irregular roll of an asteroid pacing alongside her ship, or watching Parnitha rise above the cloudtops of Janiri. Space had always filled Essa with a sense of real awe, one that sometimes made her not only believe that Athame had once walked among them, but that she had meant for the asari to rise up and step off their homeworld, if for no other reason to behold the universe she had made.

Planetside, though, Essa sometimes forgot to look at anything at wasn’t directly in front of her. It was too easy to see only the jumble of tents, or feel the smoke from the common fire pit sting her eyes, or smell the reek of the latrine pits that should have been dug farther from camp. The nights were filled with coughing, or sometimes the joyful gasps from this or that crewmate bonding with another. Several on the science team had fallen madly in love with counterparts on the commando squad. Liss and Meria were practically bonded. Even Orie, young little mouse that she was, was always in Nerai’s tent, seeing to her every need.

And Nerai needed. A year earlier, she’d given birth to a healthy child that she held at her breast, even as she slept. Orie watched over them both, pleading concern for the little one, Norinna.

Returning to camp, Essa found the three of them sitting on the floor of their tent, on a scrap of what had once been tarpaulin, the two adults weaving a grass mat, while Norinna rolled a ball woven from rushes across the ground to her mother.

Essa sat with them, sitting quietly on the ground, while the family played and worked in companionable silence. She should tell them, Essa thought, that the Nixia had dropped out of contact, and that there was nothing that they could do, that they were all going to be stranded here, for the rest of their lives, and that she, their captain had failed them, and that she was sorry.

Norinna pushed the ball across the floor at her, and Essa, taking it in her hand, nearly burst into tears, but then Neela appeared in the opening to the tent, looking pale. Behind her there was a swell of noise. A terrible shriek, like an instrument out of tune, and then a scream. Then a dozen voices shouting all at once.

It wasn’t until she had stepped into the light that Essa realized Neela was hurt. Her hand was covering a gash on her shoulder, a slick of blood that went down to her wais, and stuck into the flesh between the folds of flesh and the cloth of her uniform was an object that might have been a claw or tooth.

“Something just took Aneris,” she said. “Get the weapons.” And then she collapsed to the floor.

Chapter 3: All Blue is Blue

Chapter Text

23 October 2401

The column of vehicles was moving up a muddy dirt track through a forest that had been clearcut in the last decade, and was now beginning to grow up again. Thin-stemmed pines brought in from earth, the kind that grew in any kind of soil. After algae and sawgrass, they were the third stage of terraforming.

Every so often there was a bomb crater, sometimes in the road itself, forcing the convoy to drive around, into the woods, knocking down trees. The mat of pine needles burned in places, but the atmosphere was still thin, and fires generally didn’t last long or grow very large. Every now and then the lead vehicle stopped with a jolt that slammed the helmets and shoulders and weapons of their occupants together. The man across from her, a human, not particularly young with dark stubble on his chin, leaned forward to spit on the flatbed between them. He’d been doing it for better than an hour, and the no-slip coating looked slick and greasy.

Across from her, beside her, up and down both rows, a squad of soldiers, most of them humans, most of them male, all of them wearing the same mobile armor that would stop a fast moving projectile, or shrapnel, all powder coated in the black-on-gray pattern worn by Kano Security.

Ten vehicles in the column. So many more efficient ways to move around a planet, but this was the cheapest, and Kano was an outfit with its eyes on maximizing its take.

The truck had stopped again.

“Dead on the road,” their gunner whispered. His turret swiveled, and he stared down the sights for a good long while, before he relaxed. The vehicles sat quiet, their fuel cells letting out a nearly imperceptible hum. In the distance, they heard the roar of a gunship holding station near the front line. Chatter said to watch the trees to the northeast, where the enemy had broken through the encircleent and was retreating en masse, in poor order through the woods. Desperate troops looking for safety somewhere, Kessia thought, and understood that they might find it down by the river, five kilometers to the east. A place to regroup and bind their wounds before slipping away our mounting a counterattack.

Broken troops were unpredictable. Desperation did that, made large scale units surrender en masse, or fight to the death. It was always hard to know which one it was going to be, before the shooting started. Best to stay clear of them, if they could. The gunner swiveled again, then relaxed. With a jerk the column began moving again.
#
The asari known to her comrades in arms as Tech Corporal Kessia Thalomis, riding in the fourth vehicle from the front dropped in and out of sleep, in spite of the stim cap she’d crushed between her teeth an hour earlier. Did she know then, that her luck was running out? Or did she see the trap closing around her, and simply not know the way out?

She had been in Echo company for about three years now, never their best operator, but reliable, and only one of two biotics in the entire operation. She kept to herself, but not enough to not fit in. She trained, she assisted, she was a good field medic, and every now and then let slip a little about her life before becoming a mercenary. Usually it came out when a new squadmate saw the scar across her belly for the first time.

“How did you get that?” they would ask.

“During the reaper invasion.” The new squaddie would nod, processing, realizing their history books weren’t just books.

“But where?” they would ask

And she would answer, “Earth.”

That usually ended the conversation. Humans felt a reverence toward the homeworld, even though most she’d met had never set foot there, and likely never would. If they kept pressing, she would say in London, but never add following Commander Shepard, the best your species had to offer.

Kessia rarely felt anything but pity for the former Alliance Marines who came out to the traverse to be maimed or wounded or killed for no other reason than the need to make a living. She tried not to listen to their conversations home with their families, asking if they’d received the last payment, or promising to send money that she knew they had already gambled away, or spent in bars or brothels. Kessia tried not to judge, because she sometimes did the same. She was, after all, not made of stone.
#
Kanus Security, optimal outcomes in uncertain times. On any given day they numbered little more than two reinforced battalions. They were good at training local police, or pulling VIP and high value cargo security duty, with the occasional search and rescue or grab operation or hostage exchange, all of which were in high demand across the traverse. She’d put her name on the line, taken her uniform and pay chit, and, so it appeared, had sealed her fate, even then, though she couldn’t have known that. Not yet.

And so it went. Horizon. Taetrus. Benning. Security. Picket. Hostage negotiation. In between loads of downtime, soldiers trading stories during idle hours in their bunks, lies, true tales. Hers were all lies, wrapped in the vellum of truth. Kessia was a forged identity, taken from an asari who had died in an accident on a struggling colony world where record keeping was poor. Everyone in her unit thought she’d come from Illium, the lower levels of Nos Astra, and, having come from similar places themselves, understood the impulse to get out.

In any case, most of her comrades had never met an asari who wasn’t a mercenary or a dancer or a prostitute, so the story fit, as far as they knew, and Kessia spent most of her time confined on ship, or in barracks, or busy in the field. And with altered fingerprints, retinas, and genetic markers—all thanks to several rounds of illegal stem cell treatments— the alias had, over the years become an identity.

And so it went. Ontarom. Noveria. Ismair Frontier. Security. Ambush and grab. Secure cargo transport.
#
Two months earlier, during transport from Horizon to Ilium, the Central Hierarchy News Agency had broken a story about a young quarian who claimed to have survived a massacre on an abandoned colony planet. Liara’s squadmates had gathered around the screen. Humans, she had learned, were suckers for stories about disasters. She listened in but she knew the broad strokes of the story already. The turians had dredged up a figure from Liara T’Soni’s past. Given the level of highly sensitive information the news agency had, it was likely they were working in conjunction with the Hierarchy Information Services. The person they’d found was a young quarian named Ashana nar Vesta, last survivor of her crew, killed on Esan, sent to look for something Matriarch Benezia had hidden in the old colony. Kessia remembered having saved her, remembered the quarian’s blood on her tunic, as she carried her to the med bay on her ship. The lump of clotted blood that had slid to the floor with a wet slap, like something alife, when she’d taken off her clothes to clean herself.

There she was, still alive, still suffering the effects of her decade old wounds. Kessia, though, couldn’t quite fathom why they’d decided to trot her out in front of the galaxy. Even in turian custody, the poor girl would be marked forever. She would never again travel unguarded. And even then, it was likely that Matriarch Deniri could still reach her.

The turians were whipping things up to suggest that there was a vast conspiracy on the part of the asari government and that in particular their chosen delegate to the council, Matriarch Deniri, had, among her many other crimes, paid Aria T’Loak to massacre crew of the Vesta who had landed on Esan, and to kill Liara T’Soni.

There were other claims, too, some backed up by evidence some not, that Deniri had commissioned a Krogan mercenary, who went by the name of Arclight, to release a parasitic symbiote of the leviathan on the human colony Pirin. Arclight had ties to the High Council on Tuchanka, was in fact, married to one of its more important members.

What wasn’t clear was why the asari government would want to cause such trouble with its closest allies. Here the report faltered, suggesting simply, that turian naval power was a perceived threat to the asari and human governments, and that each Council race had been wary with one another since the reaper invasion.

Deniri had responded before the broadcast was even over, calling the accusations “inflammatory,” thought what they were seeking to inflame, exactly wasn’t clear. Except that the turians and the asari and the humans had become locked in an arms race, each seeing who could build more warships per year. The turians were winning that race, but their edge was decreasing steadily as Arcturus station had been rebuilt, and human industrial production had increased. But up until now, the race had seemed to have no point, other than as a means of artificially stimulating each race’s respective economies. Gathering weapons only declares intent to use them, the old saying went, and now this little spark had come along.

But there was more to the turian broadcast. After the young quarian had explained herself, the report had shifted to another series of events, namely Liara T’Soni’s death on Omega. They produced documentation that two separate organizations had been hired to capture or kill T’Soni on a colony world, Tiptree, that prior to the attack, had served as a refuge of sorts for non-geth AI platforms. Recent exploration of the former colony world showed that the planet’s capital had suffered a direct nuclear strike, and had subsequently been stripped of all former signs of habitation. The world was now effectively abandoned, save for small enclaves of homesteaders that were carving a life out of the equatorial forests.

The final section of the report showed several grainy still images of Dr. T’Soni making her way across an open street in the port complex of Omega. This last bit of information aroused particular interest in her barracks room.

What had it all meant? The news had hid Kessia’s barracks room with particular force. Tensions between council races meant large-scale instability, and that made for profitable business. Kessia stayed quiet and listened.

“Do you think it’s her?” one of her comrades said.

“All blue is blue if you ask me,” said another. They leaned in and stared, then half of them jumped on the extranet and began searching for more information.

“It’s a good conspiracy,” Kessia said. She rolled on her side and tried to sleep, but found she couldn’t. Or the next day, or the next. She lost focus on duty and nearly shot a squadmate during a live fire drill. Her sergeant docked her two weeks’ pay as a penalty and called it a gift. Most troopers, he said, would have been sent off with their final pay chit and swift kick in the ass. Or spaced.

Kessia thanked him, and got herself under control, using some of her saved up bench time to sit out an op and think things through off base.
#
The still images troubled her. The face troubled her, because, after all it was hers. She had a different face now, rounder, fuller, her eyes narrower, her skin a few shades darker. Still the resemblance was there. She could be a distant relative, one of the T’Soni clan who had grown up downcoast from Armali.

But she wouldn’t be identified so easily now. She quite literally was no longer Liara T’Soni. Even the scanners on the Citadel would find that she was a distinct individual, ever square centimeter of her body having been changed. Only a brain or a bone biopsy would show the real her.

During her time away, Kessia studied the images again. The fact that they existed at all was bad enough. It meant two things, the first being that Aria hadn’t been careful and had all the data scrubbed from Omega’s surveillance network, or that she had saved the images on purpose, for reasons Kessia couldn’t explain. Worse, it meant that others might have found news of her escape as well. The turians knew. It was the Hierarchy Intelligence Service that had furnished the images—as the broadcast itself made clear. How long had they been sitting on them? And how had they come into Hierarchy possession anyhow. And whatever else was true, Councilor Deniri, if she hadn’t known before, she knew now that Liara was alive, and now she would be looking. Her trail would be hard to follow, but not impossible. Nothing ever was. And Deniri had access to everything, including the Serrice Guards and the whole of the Information Services at her disposal, and their hooks ran far and wide and deep. What did Liara have, aside from an alias and a bad, dangerous job? The Councilor wouldn’t even need to acknowledge that Liara had survived her trip to afterlife, but just manufacture an incident to have her killed.

Well, now Deniri had her incident.
#
When Kessia returned to active duty, she immediately boarded a transport with her unit. There were two raw recruits in with the old hands. Replacements for a wounded sniper, and a dead tech specialist. The ship ran dark out of Illium, no communications in or out, and no indication of the assignment until they had entered the Vunia system, where volus—and by extension turian—mining interests had come into conflict with asari claims to land rights on the system’s only habitable world.

No one wanted a shooting war between the major powers. If it came to that, it could potentially split the Council apart, leaving Citadel space without an effective government. Clearly someone wanted that as an end result, but that wasn’t the aim, at least not yet. And so the turians had been careful in dealing with the conflict, nearly gentle, sending nothing bigger than a frigate, and using mostly contractors to do the fighting, claiming at least that this was a business dispute gone awry.

Canus had signed on with the Hierarchy as low-cost logistics and flank guards for the bulk of the assault force of two reinforced brigades, armor, and their attendant air cover and infantry, hired from the . Kessia had seen them unloading and drilling at the staging area.

They had their objective. Cover the flank of Minos as they advanced toward the capital. Hit a small city along the way. Extract a high-value entity from said city and get them off world without Minos finding out. That last bit was going to be a problem, Kessia was sure.
#
The column of vehicles had stopped again, and the order was going out to ready gear. This was it.

The attack was one of those anticlimactic affairs that starts with a lot of shooting—suppressing fire, breathless scrambling from cover to cover, an airstrike—followed by silence that stretches on into the early afternoon, while you hunt through the rubble looking for signs of an enemy that maybe hadn’t ever been there. Kessia’s team advanced into their sector, finding nothing but low buildings shattered by rockets and heavy weapons, and perhaps the occasional body. The air smelled like burnt plastic, and high explosive. The underground levels of the buildings were crawling with volus civilians. There was nothing she could do for them, Kessia knew, and moved on, avoiding looking too deeply.

Now and then, small arms fire broke the silence, but it was the exploratory kind, troops advancing under covering fire, or just making sure a burnt-out window frame wasn’t hiding a sniper. As the day wore on, even that ended. The enemy, it seemed, really had fallen back to the river. Kessia took no comfort in it.

“A counterattack is coming,” she said.

“You always say that.”

“I’m usually right,” she said. “Be ready.”

“Sure thing, boss.”

They had set up for the night in a corner room of a third-story building, a pre-cast concrete structure that would provide better blast and bullet shelter than the prefabricated housing down the street. Out below them lay a market square that was empty except for shell holes and a vehicle that had been overturned during the initial bombardment. Beyond the open zone of the square, lay their objective. The other section of the encirclement was meant to push the target out into the open, where their target’s security detail could be neutralized and the VIP could be taken into custody. Her platoon had orders to wait until things started moving, likely in the morning.
#
Night came and she didn’t sleep. It was easy to stay awake, thinking about Matriarch Deniri, who had done much more than this to try and kill her before, back when her name had been Liara T’Soni.

On the far edge of the square, about four or five hundred meters away, a group of infrared targets had appeared, volus civilians by the look of it, though they were arrayed like they were forming up for an attack. Kessia gave the platoon leader a kick and woke him up. He squinted out through the scope.

“If you’re so worried, why don’t you hit one of ‘em? See what happens.”

“Not until we’re sure,” Kessia said.

“And here I was, thinking you wanted to live long enough to get paid again.”

Kessia didn’t answer, but shouldered the rifle, took aim, and missed one of the targets by a few millimeters. As it dove for cover a wave of shooting erupted, unfocused, but generally on her position. Some of it came from the rooftops far beyond the square. Whatever else was true, the force in the neighborhood beyond the open ground wouldn’t be easily subdued by the second battallion that should have been moving into flanking position.

Kessia shot again, blindly, until the rifle overheated, before retreating toward the back wall, which was now disappearing under a more concentrated barrage. There was a blast, and the wall facing the street shattered and fell into the room. The platoon leader was dead. So was the new tech specialist. Liara rolled down the stairs, clutching her SMG, and struggling to clear the debris from her mouth and eyes.

Rounds struck the building on the second level, coming in at a flatter trajectory. Nearly all of the troops who had been camped here were dead. She grabbed a rifle from the ground and put the facemask on her helmet down. No sense in shooting back. A projectile zipped off her shields. Another rocket hit the building and threw her to the floor, but a hole opened up, and she crawled through it, falling to ground level, and reaching the street just as the house collapsed into a cloud of dust, broken glass and jagged blocks of concrete. Three others had made it out, and they took shelter behind their gun truck, which was shooting, blindly perhaps, at the enemy positions on the far side of the square.

Kessia was dizzy and half deaf from the blast. The rest of the company, arrayed along the edge of the square, was returning fire, though as she watched from underneath the truck, she watched the number of positions that were shooting begin to dwindle. Either the platoons were withdrawing, or they were being picked off one by one.

One of the other soldiers who had taken cover with her had been shot, the bullet coming in through his side, splitting through a seam in his armor, and making a fist-sized exit wound in his chestplate. By the time she got to him, he was dead. The other two were in bad shape, one with a broken leg, the other with a crushed hand and foot.

“We need to get out of here,” she said.

They stared at her blankly. A sniper had taken out the gunner on the truck. The one with the crushed hand climbed up and manned the gun, while the other pulled off his helmet.

“We have to move!” she shouted, but he only shook his head. He was bleeding from his ears. Kessia got up and ran, watching her sensors as she went. Behind her the gun truck exploded in a ball of white flame. The comms were roaring with chatter about dropships coming in from the west. The ground moved like a rug being shaken out, and Kessia fell flat on her stomach as the low buildings around her groaned and fell in on themselves. The comms had gone dead. All channels gone, even their transports, still in orbit, were nothing but static. The entire neighborhood was black with dust.

The blast had destroyed the company command post, and most of the neighborhood around it. All of the civilians were buried under the rubble. Who was it? Kessia wondered, that would be willing to spill so much blood, and why? She wondered if the asari and turians had decided to enter a full-on shooting war. With destruction like this, one couldn’t be far behind.

She was hurt now, something jagged had pierced her armor and was wedged between her skin and her left side, and it dug a little deeper with every step she took. Her infrared scopes were dead, and so was her motion tracker. She stayed low and moved on, aiming her SMG at the imagined enemies that stood before her.

Two transports roared overhead, braking hard, and stopping to dump their troops not far away. Kessia turned left, her west, and ran hard, ignoring the pain in her side. She found a ditch, and rolled in there, then found that the ditch broke through into the basem*nt of a house, and from there into a tunnel that ran a hundred meters in a fortunate direction. She hurried down it, scanning the channels again.

There was new chatter now, orders going out, reports coming in on how the attack was proceeding. So far the orbital strike and flanking maneuver had been effective. It was possible that the Kessia’s entire unit had been wiped out.

So much the better for her, they wouldn’t be looking for a wounded straggler, not unless she were really unfortunate.

The tunnel ended. Kessia found a broken flight of stairs and picked her way up to street level. Troops were moving parallel to her position, northward, and just out of sensor range, apparently.

When they had moved away, she hurried to the next open area, where their dropship had landed, its engines at idle thrust. She slipped around toward the ramp, and finding it guarded by a single soldier, pulled him close with her biotics and shot him in the head.

Inside she found the pilots busy, and pulling one out, she trained her weapon on the other. The one she’d pulled, she threw out the back gate and crushed him with her biotics.

To the other, a young female, she said, “What’s your unit, human?”

The woman stared at her, her mouth gaping like a fish, but she said, “116th Marines.”

“You’re Alliance?” Kessia said.

The woman nodded.

“Your ship’s unmarked,” said. “That’s a violation of Citadel code.”

“The f*ck do you care, mercenary?” the human said, finding some of her ingrained toughness.

“Today I care a great deal. Now tell me why. Your life depends on it.”

The woman gaped again, looking like she was about to pass out. “Haven’t you heard?”

“Heard what?”

“We’re at war.”

“War? The Alliance?”

“Everyone,” the human said. “Asari, salarians, turians, us.”

Kessia lifted her out of her seat, her biotics snapping the straps of her seatbelt, then dropped her down. She fired a round into the chair between the woman’s legs. “Next one’s in your stomach, human. You’re going to fly me out of here.”

The human nodded, and then touched the controls.

“You’re going to report a mechanical failure and that you need to return to base.”

“They’ll catch you,” the human said.

Kessia risked a glance out through the viewport. “Your friends are dying out there,” she said. “A lot more of them will die. In part that’s because of me.” She pulled off her helmet and threw it to the deck. “My name is Dr. Liara T’Soni. Now fly me to your betters.”

Chapter 4: Sword at Night

Chapter Text

Liss was first out of camp, following the trail, while behind her calls went out. She had been on watch, and so had been wearing her starlight gear when the call had gone out. Out ahead, in the darkness of the forest, there was something, a gray shape on her scope, something that might have been Aneris, or the thing that had taken her. In her hand, she carried a spear, about as effective a weapon as they could make, given the tools they had. Really it was all anyone would ever need, a long shaft and a sharp point. She could work with that. She knew how to fight, she told herself. She was as dangerous with a knife as she was with a sniper rifle.

Voices gathered in the darkness, noise everywhere. Liss put out the call over the radio to keep silent as best they could. Animals spook. Liss ran again until the lights and the voices faded back into the trees, then stopped to listen.

Whatever had taken Aneris was big. It didn’t stop to dodge around the wrist-thick stems of the undergrowth, but simply ran through them, splitting some, tearing others up at the roots. There was blood. Enough that Liss didn’t hope to find Aneris alive. Here and there, she found bits of pale feather-like material stuck in crevices in the bark, or caught on splinters. She ran again.

#

Nerai reached her, just as she caught up with the thing. It had stopped in a defile just beyond the stream that passed close by their camp. Liss realized now that they’d been running more or less parallel to it for the past hour. She was tired, but could still keep going, the creature, on the other hand, looked like it was done in by the chase. So much the better. There was no sign of Aneris.

Nerai had stopped about twenty meters away, to her left. The two felt each other at range, Nerai gave two short whistles and they began their attack.

Liss came head on, with a leap across the stream, making no noise, but drawing the creatre’s attention. The thing raised what might have been its head to examine her, and got a sharp, probing jab from her spear for it.

The thing reared, standing on its two legs, and a thick tail, braced against the ground. Under its body were two rows of appendages, two grasping arms that ended in claw-hook hands, and a dozen more stumpy claws and arms for clutching that ran in pairs down the creature’s chest. These held Aneris. She was most likely dead, or well on her way to being dead. Nerai jabbed again, into the belly this time, enough to draw blood, but not enough for the point to get hung up in the skin or pinched between the creature’s bones.

It lunged at her now, its mouth an open circle, a dark ring, ranked with ranks of inward-hooking teeth, not for biting, so much as simply pulling prey inward. Above and below the maw were what might have been eyes. Liss probed for them, while the thing reared back again.

She saw all of this in the time it took for Nerai to fall upon the creature from a rise in the ground on the animal’s other flank. Driving hard, she rammed the spear down into a soft part. The animal screeched and lashed out with one of its appendages, dropping Aneris as it did, and wheeling on Nerai, yet somehow still careful not to tread on its prey, but keeping Aneris’s body protected between its two thick legs.

Liss saw her moment and dashed forward, grabbing Aneris by the collar of her uniform, dragging her her limp body clear. Lifting with her legs, she hoisted Aneris onto her shoulder and ran, keeping her spear cradled in her other hand. Behind her the predator bellowed, and then there was another sound, a loud roaring, like a river over the falls, and a bony crack. A flash of light, and something shuddered through the air, staggering Liss, so that she nearly dropped Aneris’s body.

She turned to see the animal raised up off the ground, its body bent into an odd shape, its legs clutching at the ground but touching only air.

It made a sound, a frail distress call, and a weak intake of breath, then landed with a hard, wet shock at the bottom of the streambed. Silence.

Liss reshouldered her burden and chanced another look behind her. Nerai was standing over the creature, covered in its green-black blood. Whatever she’d done had bent the animal in half, then ripped it open and spilled its entrails. Its powerful legs still jerked and its bird-claw feet twitched in the light—light that came from Nerai’s balled fist that she held aloft and then cast down upon what looked to be the animal’s head. There was another terrible boom, blinding light, and a blast that shook the ground and showered Liss and her burden with pebbles and fragments of vegetation and drops of the animal’s blood.
#
It was going to be a long night. There were more of those things out in the forest. Razia had counted at least three distinct voices, and she and the rest of the commandos on lookout were keeping watch with their infrared gear. There might have been more.

Essa took this information in as she washed Neela’s blood from her hands in a basin of water Orie had brought her. They had rushed her out of the tent, once the medical team had arrived. Nothing there for her to do but watch and get in the way.

She looked down at her hands and realized they were shaking. Razia was saying something to her, and she shook her head. “Say again, Commandant.”

“I was just saying it’s too bad you jettisoned our weapons.”

Essa fixed Razia with her gaze until the commando looked away, then said, “Agreed.” After a moment she asked, “Have Liss and Nerai reported in?”

Razia shook her head. “Liss called for radio silence.” About twenty minutes earlier, a terrible noise and explosion had lit up the forest several kilometers away, so bright it had temporarily overwhelmed Razia’s night scope.

A swell of noise passed through the camp, shouting and a roar, then more shouting. Essa rolled through her options. None of them were good.

They could stay and fight, and risk losing more of the crew than just Aneris. Even if they got her back, there was no sense pretending that they could save her with what medical supplies they had on hand. And the same went for Neela. Even aboard the Nixia, a wound like hers would have been—she stopped herself from thinking the word.

They could run. There was a high rock outcrop fifteen kilometers south, not difficult to scale, but the approaches would be difficult for more than one large animal to attack at once. But doings so would leave them exposed to the weather, and to attack throughout the duration of their retreat through heavily forested terrain.

They could burn the forest. It hadn’t rained all week. The underbrush was dry. It might work. Or it would only blind them to already nearby creatures.

If things got very dire, their last resort was to retreat to the shuttle with as many of the crew as could reach it, light the engines and hope that the noise and heat scared off the creatures. If necessary they could take off and hover for nearly an hour, fully loaded with all twenty-three of the crew currently on hand. In truth their numbers would be lower. Not everyone would make it. Liss and Nerai were missing. And Aneris, who was surely—Essa stopped herself from thinking the thought to the end.

Essa thought again about Neela and considered going back to the tent to check on her, but stopped herself. They had the perimeter to check.

No matter what they did they were going to lose people, it was only a question of who. But Liss and Nerai were survivors. They would come back.

Essa again shook away the idea, and stepped out of the lab tent, where she had gone to wash up. Together she and Razia jogged the perimeter, checking in with the guard posts who were watching over small groups of two or three members of the science team, who had been tasked with making palings and spears from what wood they could gather without venturing too far into the dark; meanwhile others were digging pits in a zigzag pattern, as instructed by one of the commandos.

Essa examined her watches, the one that kept the mission clock (two years and counting), and the other that kept local time. Three more hours of darkness, about two and a half before twilight. She wondered if Neela would live until dawn. Three paces ahead of her, Razia stopped dead and then crouched, bracing the butt of her spear against the ground, as though she expected an attack. A moment later the brush parted and Neela and Liss emerged, Liss blood-slick and carrying a ragged shape that turned out to be Aneris. Razia and Neela exchanged a nod. Razia turned to Liss and said, “Nerai and I can hold the perimeter for now. Make sure Aneris is tended to.”
#
Liss was relieved as she hurried alone through the camp to the medical tent. When she arrived, she was surprised to see Neela sitting up on the mat they’d arranged for her on the floor of the tent. Her clothes were soaked with her own blood, but a line of sutures and a pressure dressing that ran along her collarbone appeared to have stopped the bleeding. Even more surprising was that Aneris was still breathing.

They lay her down and examined her wounds: clawhook punctures, in her chest, and in her back. All of the ribs on her left side were broken; the lung had collapsed; abrasions, bruising, other trauma that would be hard to gauge without proper diagnostic equipment. One of the creature’s teeth had broken off inside her body and was caught in the layers of flesh.

Liss hurried back outside to find Razia and the Captain.
#
A little before dawn, Essa returned to the medical tent.

She knelt beside Neela, who closed her eyes against the pain and bit hard on a little rubber cube. The crewmate kneeling on the other side of Neela saw Essa’s nod, and got up. Behind them, the rest were still working quietly on Aneris, who gasped in pain, and then went quiet.

“Neela,” Essa said. “Can you tell me what happened?”

Neela blinked, and then turned her head. “It was my fault,” she said. “I had stopped to ask Aneris a question. She turned away from the woods, and when she did, it came for her. I thought it would take me, too.” There was a swell of noise that rose from the edge of camp. Neela bit her rubber block again, and said, “It had me, then let me go.” She blinked her eyes and then let her head droop against her chest. “There’s still a part of its claw inside me. Can’t get it out because it melted into the flesh, they said.”

Essa took her hand and gave it a squeeze and they sat in silence for a minute, until Liss came into the tent, looking for someone. Essa went over to her. She and whispered, “Captain.” Essa turned and stood. “A word? Outside.”

Essa followed her through the flap out into the oncoming light of day. “We found the thing that took Aneris,” she said. We killed it. Well, Neela did. I helped.”

“That’s fortunate,” Essa said, but Liss shook her head.

“Nerai,” she said. “What she did last night, I’ve never seen anything like it.” Essa started to speak, but Liss stopped her. “I’ve seen commandos pull a fighter out of cover, or knock a few soldiers back, when they were being swarmed on the battlefield, but nothing like this. She lifted that thing off the ground. Ripped it open. Made it explode from the inside.”

Essa shook her head. “You’re trained in biotics. You’re sure you’ve never seen anything like it?”

“Not even close. That thing must weigh several tons, at least. She raised it up off the ground and bent it in half. Broke its spine, then hit it again to tear it open.”

“What are you saying?”

“That she’s dangerous, Liss said. “Maybe not just dangerous. There was something in her eyes last night, more animal than anything else. I don’t know if we can trust her.”

“Dangerous is a handy skill right now.”

“And when we need to put the sword back in the scabbard?” Liss said.

“Let’s survive the night,” she said, “Before we worry about what our sword might do in the light of day.”

The air had gone cold. Essa’s eyes had finally adjusted to the near dark, when a patch of light appeared on the ground beside her. One of the medical team stepped out, wiping her hands on a rag. “Captain,” she said. Essa turned, and saw the anquish in her face. “Captain,” she said again.

“Aneris—” Essa begain.

“No, ma’am,” she said. “Neela. The claw that lodged in her wound has triggered some kind of toxic reaction in her body. She had a seizure.”

“I don’t understand,” Essa said.

“She’s—. I’m so sorry. She’s gone.”

Chapter 5: Whitman

Chapter Text

Whitman
30 October, 2401

Why are you here?

Liara heard the voice through a fog of drugs. She should have known things were going wrong when the pilot she’d taken hostage requested containment for a reactor breech just before docking. By then she’d lost nearly enough blood to be better than half dead, so perhaps she shouldn’t blame herself for the surprise she’d felt, seeing a dozen rifles leveled at her chest in the airlock. Liara had nearly fainted as the rough hands had taken her, strapped her to a board and put a bag over her head. The bag had stayed firmly in place as medics unbuckled her armor and tried to dress her wounds, and transfused her directly from the fabricator that made a decent approximation of asari blood.

The interior of the ship was nearly quiet as being underwater. From somewhere she heard the voices still trying to reach her. There were people in the room. One, no, two.

“Give her another shot,” someone said. A hand grabbed her head from behind, and a burning mist sprayed into her left nostril. After a brief respite, the nozzle went into the right side, and the burn repeated there. For a moment the room went all bright colors and the edges of the table seemed impossibly sharp, and then returned to something like normal, except that the body of the woman sitting across the table from her seemed to tremble between where she was and where she would be momentarily. Liara felt dizzy, like she wanted to vomit. She resisted the urge and grasped the edge of the table, realizing just now, for the first time since she’d entered Alliance captivity, that she wasn’t shackled.

It had been days, perhaps as much as a week since her she’d arrived here. Now she was in a little room, not quite a cell, so not quite the brig, of a ship called the Whitman, judging by the name stenciled on to an emergency gear locker in the far corner of the room. A bench for a bed, a table, two chairs bolted to the floor. An interrogation room, then. Going by Systems Alliance naming conventions, it was an Assault Carrier, and as the Whitman wasn’t on any recent list of available hulls, it meant that this was one of a new class of front-line ships the humans had designed and constructed in what they believed to be near total secrecy. The existence of these vessels, if not their individual names, was widely known, and part of the reason the turians were building dreadnoughts at an alarming rate. It took Liara a moment to realize that she had no one to whom she could report this new intelligence. What good is a spy without a network?

The woman across the table had on a crisp, clean alliance uniform, updated to reflect two hundred years of changing fashion and advances in materials science. It reminded her of Shepard, all those years ago: creases like blades, polished buttons and zips, no wrinkles, not even when seated. The human seated across from her was female, with dark skin, stubble-short hair, yellow eyes. Her left ear was partially fused with the side of her head, the result of a nasty burn that hadn’t healed well.

“Dr. T’Soni,” the woman said. “My name is Lieutenant Palmyra Vance, Alliance Intelligence Directorate. My associate, Chief Petty Officer Wilkes has just given you a stimulant to bring you out of prolonged anesthesia. The discomfort should go away shortly.” There was a cough in the corner of the room, and Liara turned to see a third person, who had perhaps just entered the compartment, or possibly had been standing there forever. “This is Mr. Turner,” Vance said. Liara suspected that Turner was not his real name. Dressed in a gray suit and dark tie, hair slicked to the side, he was the sort of man who even in a tiny space, was almost utterly invisible. He smiled at Liara, a surprisingly friendly gesture, from behind thick-rimmed glasses that Liara suspected were augmented to provide live biometric data.

“What do you want with me?” she asked.

Lieutenant Vance looked a little puzzled. “You turned yourself over to us. You may not quite remember the details, but you claimed you were seeking asylum. Of course this was after you’d killed the crew chief and copilot of one of our drop ships.”

“They weren’t properly secured,” Liara said. “I only exploited their weakness.”

“Yes, but what was your purpose?”

“You’re aware what’s happening planetside, aren’t you?”

Vance only stared. “It’s been a while since I’ve been boots-down,” she said after a long pause. “Tell me.”

“I was traveling with a company of mercenaries. They’ve since been wiped out, by a combination of ground forces and orbital strikes, the latter which, I may add, is in direct contravention of Council law.”

“You’re aware that, at present, there is no council.” This was Mr. Turner speaking. “And, I’m sure you’re aware that we’re in the Traverse. Citadel law, such as it is, does not apply.”

“Your pilot told me about the war. It doesn’t make sense. And laws are laws, council or no council.”

Vance narrowed her eyes. She projected images of Ashana nar Vesta, taken from the turian broadcast. “I gather you saw this?” Liara agreed that she had. “Then you know what a ton of sh*t it stirred up.”

Vance carefully walked Liara through the information they had. The parasitic outbreak on Pirin, engineered by Deniri and executed by Arclight. Publicly, the Alliance was accusing the leviathan of establishing on a presence beyond the regions afforded to them by the Dekkuna Treaty, which they had signed after the reaper invasion. Spreading leviathan parasites certainly made it look like the leviathan had been there, and Deniri benefitted by creating tension between the Alliance and the leviathan.

Meanwhile, Pirin was uninhabitable, and the Alliance had had no recourse but to destroy all existing infrastructure on the surface in order to guarantee containment. “Deniri’s motives are unknown, but they could not go unanswered. The Alliance demanded sanctions and the removal of Deniri. Meanwhile, during the very session when the Alliance ambassador was arguing our case, a group of commandos blew up the fuel depot at Arcturus, which effectively trapped the bulk of the sixth fleet on station until necessary repairs can be completed. The commandos slipped away, but they had help, most likely from the SPECTREs or STG. They used a stealth ship not listed in the asari inventory.” Vance showed a picture, little more than a black shape against a field of stars.

“And the turians?”

“Are paying the price for stirring up the sh*t,” Vance said. “At first they claimed neutrality in the matter, but since then, their Second Fleet suffered major losses after an attack by the salarians, who took the main battlegroup by surprise in a hit and run raid through the Jarva relay.”

“Have the salarians struck the Alliance, too?”

Turner shook his head. “Their fleet is small, and stretched thin. Sustained warfare is a numbers game, and they know it. Right now our main problem is with the turians.”

“The Heirarchy and the Alliance,” Vance said, “have always been this close to cutting each others’ throats. We’ve been in an arms race for better than two decades, and they’ve decided that this is a good opportunity to test our strength and our resolve in defending our colony worlds. They will learn, as they have here on this little bullsh*t backwater, that we are very determined to hold what is ours, and more than happy to take away what is theirs.” Vance gestured at the wall. “You may not have noticed, but an hour ago we began accelerating away. This was a small operation. We’re on our way somewhere else.”

“You don’t mean to hold the territory,” Liara said, her voice a whisper. It meant that this was a burn and bounce operation: destroy any orbital infrastructure, blow the spaceports and communications relays, destroy the colony’s ability to call for help and at the same time cut it off from its supply lines. The ultimate goal was to create chaos and terror and ultimately instability and unrest on other colony worlds. It was just short of what the reapers had done during the invasion, with planet after planet disappearing from the comms.

Vance shook her head. “It’s—unfortunate,” she said.

“It’s a war crime,” Liara said.

“Call it whatever you like, but it’s effective strategy.” This was from Turner. Liara turned. She could, she realized, crush his chest with her biotics, make all his soft organs pop out through his ribs. But it would be a short-lived satisfaction. She let him grin as he stepped out of his corner.

Turner stepped out of his corner. He was taller than Liara had expected. He put up several images of Matriarch Deniri, some of them quite old. One of them showed the Councilor and Beneizia, both wearing their commando gear, standing in front of a wrecked armored vehicle. Their faces were smeared with soot and grease and maybe blood, and they both smiled the impossibly joyful grins only ever worn by soldiers who have just survived a decisive battle. There were more recent images, too, of Deniri on the Citadel. None of them appeared to show anything untoward. “Deniri and your mother,” Turner said. “They knew each other in their commando days. Our sources in your various government agencies tell us that they were quite close at one time. Your mother was her command officer, when they were both attached to Gray Squadron.”

Liara knew her mother’s military record, of course. Gray Squadron, the Fog of War, as they were sometimes known, were the asari equivalent of the salarians’ STG. They’d been around in one form or another since the krogan rebellions, had, in fact, toward the end of the rebellions, nearly been wiped out. They’d been all but disbanded before being reformed with recruits drawn from across the armed forces. It was rumored, though there was no hard evidence of it, that the decimation of Gray Squadron during an operation on Tuchanka had forced the decision to release the Genophage. That was well before Benezia and Deniri’s time. The image of the two of them would have been taken on a border world—Mitos Beta, by the look of it—a colony world shared between asari, salarian and krogan interests and hotbed of interspecies fighting. It was located at what was now the intersection of the old krogan DMZ and the salarian and asari bubbles. It had been the site of dozens of proxy conflicts over the centuries.

“You asari take a long view,” Turner said. “Deniri has been working on something for a very long time. Centuries perhaps, and it has something to do with your mother.”

“You think I know what it is?” Liara asked. “I don’t. Even so, Deniri turned my trusted advisors against me, destroyed my network, killed my closest associates, and dozens of innocents, and nearly killed me, all for the sake of keeping it quiet.”

“That’s the least of it, Doctor,” Vance said. “She condemned nearly a million people to die on Pirin, in the worst possible way—”

“I was there, Lieutenant,” Liara spat. “You don’t need to remind me.”

“That she tried to kill you meant that you were onto something,” Turner said. “You’ve been looking for this, haven’t you?” He showed her the 303 symbol, the same mark she’d seen on the Citadel, at the Anthill on Lorek—or Esan, as it had been called then, and on Tiptree. “What did you find?”

Liara shook her head. “At one site, old data storage devices, a one-time cipher at another that allowed me to decrypt the drives. There were old images of planets that we couldn’t possibly have visited without the mass relays. There was some sort of connection between the images and an old research vessel, listed as lost with all hands, the Nixia.”

“The ‘Little Wing’ of the Armali coast,” Turner said. “Your mother called you that, didn’t she?”

Liara shut her eyes. “Those were the last words she said to me. When I killed her.”

“It is our belief that she deliberately scattered these materials, but left a trail that someone could follow, and reassemble.”

“Why the secrecy, though?” Liara asked.

“We don’t know, but whatever it is, Deniri is involved.”

Vance and Turner exchanged a look. Turner sat down on the edge of the table. “Dr. T’Soni,” he said, as he sat down on the edge of the table. “May I call you Liara? Okay, good.” He spread his hands. “You’re not quite—yourself—are you?” He smiled and went on, “You’ve been through a dozen courses of gene therapy—highly illegal. Your face is different. Your genetic material, some of it anyhow, is different. I’m guessing that’s how you disguised who you are when you joined up with your mercenary friends? Yes? Look, it took us a while to figure out that you were, in fact, who you said you were. It involved contacting some people in the know, and it’s may be that those contacts have been compromised.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean to say is that the turians merely suggested that you were alive. But we, somewhat foolishly trusting our sources not to betray our trust, have potentially leaked that information to others, also in your government, and those others happen to be aligned with Matriarch Deniri. We have to assume that the fact that you are not dead, as was widely reported, is known by parties who mean to harm you. In fact, we’re quite certain that asari intelligence circles are aware that you are alive.”

“Deniri knows that you have me,” Liara said. “If she finds out I’m here, she will strike directly at the battlegroup. Now that you’re at war, she’ll have no reason to be subtle.”

“It’s very likely that she does,” Turner said.

“We’ve broadcast several false locations and manufactured sightings to mitigate the risk,” Vance said. “Your Intelligence Services won’t be fooled forever.”

Turner got up and looked into the corner of the room, where, Liara suspected, a device was recording their conversation. “We have two options.” He said. Liara held her breath. She knew what was coming. “We can hide you. But you asari live for a long time. You can, anyhow, and that can get exhausting—and expensive—shuttling you from safe house to safe house until your body gives out or they catch up with you. The coward dies a thousand deaths, as they say.” He sat down again, and looked at her, his expression so relaxed and so friendly that it terrified her. “Or, he said, we can put you back on the board.”

Liara’s blood ran cold. She had, directly or through intermediaries, run this same gambit a thousand times. Offer the false binary: flee and be a coward, or step out into the daylight for one brief, glorious moment that will make all the difference. Cowardice was a slippery thing, though, and bravery fleeting. It’s the rare person who doesn’t cower from time to time. And Liara had been brave enough for one lifetime, hadn’t she? She had the semicircular scar across her belly to remind everyone that she had toed the line with Shepard, had faced death standing beside the legend, and had, in fact, very nearly died, had it not been for a surgeon’s skill.

But then, like the fingers that tug at the loose thread that causes the entire cloth to unravel, she thought, Why not? Cowardice was a temptation, but so was the potential for taking action. And if she could oust Deniri, maybe she could—No, she told herself, Hope is a false goddess.

Liara said, “And how do you plan to put me on the board?”

“We’ll use you as bait,” Turner said. “Establish a safe house somewhere within Deniri’s reach, put you there, and wait for her to strike.”

“Please don’t insult me,” Liara said. “You could do that just as easily with a body double.”

“We’re a little short on access to asari, much less ones that look like you.”

“Too bad you just killed a few hundred of them planetside. Poor planning on your part. In any case, Deniri wouldn’t come herself. She would work through layers of intermediaries. She’d use someone in the SPECTRE corps, or Gray Squadron, or any of allies she has among the many mercenary companies that she has on retainer.”

“It’s just a starting point,” Vance said.

“And and end,” Liara said. “I’ve survived nearly three dozen separate attempts on my life. You might understand that I’ve grown cautious, and also weary of fending them off.”

“I suppose you have a better idea?” Turner asked.

Liara glared, a sudden burst of rage getting the better of her. She balled her fist and said, “As a matter of fact, I do.” Before anyone could move, Liara had pulled him across the room to her. She locked one arm around his throat and with the other hand freed his omnitool, sending out a burst of static energy that stunned Petty Officer Wilkes and would likely disable the feeds from any devices monitoring the room. Dropping the omnitool, she slammed Vance against the wall, while she choked Turner into unconsciousness, and cuffed his hand to Wilkes’s foot. Vance was staggering back to her feet, looking dazed, but ready to fight. Liara pushed her, not too hard, against the wall again, and then took her by the throat. “Open the door.”

“There’s a dozen armed men waiting for you out there. You’ll be dead before you take a step.”

Liara flashed the pistol she’d lifted from Petty Officer Wilkes’s holster. “Let’s find out.” Vance reached out and unlatched the door with passkey. Liara gestured for her to open it, while she stood to the side. All was quiet, and so she glanced out. Clear. Grabbing Vance by the collar, she pushed her out into the corridor, past three sealed hatches.

“I am sorry for the rough treatment,” Liara said. “You’re just a convenient means to an end.”

“You’ll never get away.”

“So you tell me,” Liara said. She had stopped in front of an emergency gear locker and gestured for Vance to open it.

“What are you doing?”

“Blue skin stands out, don’t you think? Grab some rescue gear and put it on.” Vance did as she was told. Liara did the same, pulling on the flashover hood, and the blast shield to cover her face. “Right,” she said. “Now all we need is a fire.” And with that she fired three rounds from the pistol into one of the electrical conduits, that exploded into a shower of sparks. Without waiting to see the results, she shouted at Vance, “Flight deck. You’re going to get me a ship.”

Chapter 6: Fires

Chapter Text

Fires

They had five more in need of funeral rites by morning.

At first light, the attacks had stopped, and the commandos disappeared into the forest to pursue. Nerai had killed two more, in the manner Liss had described. And now the remainder of the crew, what few of them there were, stood over the half-dozen dead, looking unsure whether they should be more troubled by the danger that had retreated into the forest, or by the danger that had followed the first, and that was certain to return.

Six bodies, laid out on a tarpaulin, cleaned now, but each with horrible wounds that couldn’t be hidden. Minna, who’d lost a hand, and nearly her head. Beside her, Neela, whose spectacles had been broken, and now were tucked into the thigh pocket of her uniform. Crenna, one of Razia’s scientists, flung to the ground and then trampled. Iliara, who’d been dragged over half the camp and shaken until her neck snapped. Aneris, who’d died of injuries during the attack.

Then there was Alina, from the engineering deck, who had fought brave as any of the commandos, and who had refused to abandon her spear when it had become caught between one of the creature’s ribs, even as Nerai hit the animal with a power that ripped through the air and exploded with a force that had thrown everyone standing within twenty paces to the ground.

“Sister-wounds,” Razia said, under her breath, as she’d helped lay out the bodies. “Unavoidable sometimes.” Now she was gone, too, and the camp was very quiet. There were only twelve of them left now, not counting those who had departed on the Nixia itself, still out there, apparently abandoned as it floated alongside the object stationed at the edge of the system.

Essa wanted only to retreat within herself, feel grief only for Neela, mourn only the one she had loved. But it wasn’t that simple. She was Captian, and that mourning would have to come later, in the dark, away from camp, where no one could hear. Maybe she could abscond to the launch after dark, close the hatches so she could shout her heart’s content.

But now, Orie was shouting for her. She would weep later.

At least it was passably good news. The commandos had returned from the forest, after having run the creatures down. They’d managed to kill two more by driving them over a cliff and into a large body of water below.

“That’s the good news,” Liss told her. The end of her spear was stained black with something that looked like tar, and was likely congealed blood. She had already stripped off her uniform, and was scrubbing at a nasty looking scrape that went from her collar bone to her left breast. “I’m fine,” she said, when she caught Orie staring. “It was a broken branch that snapped back and caught me. It’s not deep.”

All the same, Orie eased her into a seated position, and began dabbing at the wound herself with a clean rag. She had been boiling scraps of cloth all day, just in case.

“You said there was bad news,” Essa said, as the commando hissed her breath between her teeth.

“They’re not stupid creatures,” she said. “Far from it, in fact. We found a burrow, but if I had to call it anything, it would be a campsite. Might explain why they’re attacking us.”

“Explain.”

“They might think we’re trying to turf them out.”

“Or,” Orie said, quietly, “it’s breeding season.”

Liss rinsed her mouth out with a palmful of water and spat out a little blo. Spitting it into the fire, where it boiled away with an audible sizzle, she said, “As I told you. These things—they’re smart. Not tactically, like we are. They don’t know about flanking or weapons, but their lair, their village—it was laid out like a five pronged star, burrows at the point of each prong. A fire pit. Things that looked like they might be tools. Neela would have—” Liss stopped herself, a moment too late.

Essa straightened up. “Shall I gather the science crew to go observe?”

Liss shook her head, and pointed. Out over the treetops, nearly ten kilometers out, a column of black smoke was rising into the oncoming wind. “We didn’t leave anything standing. Nerai said she was going to see to that herself.”

“Did you have to—” Orie had begun to say before Essa put up a hand.

“I can’t command them to unkill, can I?” she said when Orie protested.

“Was it necessary?” she asked, “You can’t just kill—”

“That’s enough, steward,” Essa said, and dismissed Orie with a wave.

Liss smiled. “Necessary has too many meanings to be useful in my line of work,” she said. “We found where they live, burned their dens, killed two of the fighters, and chased off more. It’s what was necessary for living through the night.”

Orie had gone pale. She stepped away from them, looking horrified. Not much later, the smell of burning flesh, diffuse but still unpleasant, reached the campsite.
#
Meanwhile there was a pyre to be built. Neela was Siari, and they preferred cremation to burial. Two of the others were members of the faith, and the rest had no religious preference listed in their records. Cremation would do for them all.

Essa was supposed to speak, and this weighed on her more than the lumps of woody material they were harvesting from the edge of the forest, than the worry about whether the slender trunks would burn long and hot enough to transform a body into ashes. What was she going to say, given that some of the other crew followed the new religion?

Siari broke with the orthodoxy of the cult of Athame. One is all, they said, stating no preference for the goddess, over the priestesses who professed their religion on high and low altars across Thessia. She had their scriptures stored on a datapad in the tent she had, until this past night, shared with Neela, and when the short trajectory of the sun reached midday, she found herself digging through its various volumes, trying to sort some meaning from the words. She spent an hour watching the bodies being lifted onto the communal pyre, each, wrapped in a sheath made of grass, the pyre itself heaped with logs and bales of dry brush.

And then it was time to light the pyre. The remaining dozen stood in a ring around the mound, all of them looking at Essa like she should know what to say, and she, still unsure of her words, quoted instead from the Siari’s third book of chants, the traditional funeral blessing:

In the dark, said the Prophet, is when the universe was born from single drop of light. It grew, and grew, and grows still, twisting and branching through the dark, like a tree.

And yet like the tree that would not recognize the seed from whence it sprung, the seed is everywhere in the tree, as the tree is everywhere in the seed.

So we are of that first drop of light, and yet we do not know it. A life comes and goes, the light continues. From our weak and mortal flesh, we must return the light to its source, the thing that is us, and that the body cannot hold forever.

Lighting the fires, we mark the division of light and of flesh, each goes to its appointed place, at the appointed time.

Yes, it was all very comforting wasn’t it, the idea that some part of us endures, beyond the body. But what solace was there, really, in knowing that the fire that was lit before we came, would be there to embrace us again, in the end? It seemed like folly, to Essa, like a boldfaced lie, to say that in this moment when everything was so clearly falling apart, that it would all somehow still come out all right. But then she’d stopped speaking for too long, and so, she turned to light the fire from the torch Orie had made for this purpose just an hour earlier. The flames started slowly, then took hold in the bundles of dry brush, rising so high it seemed the fire would leap out and take hold in the trees to the west. Then it nearly gave out, and the heat, dying away, left the sweat that had beaded on Essa’s back and shoulders a moment earlier running cold, in the night wind.

For a moment she thought the fire was about to die, when she saw, relieved, new threads of white flame licking between the cracks of the larger blocks of wood.

She stood back and surveyed the mound of logs, topped with its platform, with six pairs of callused and discolored feet protruding from their simple wrappings. Neela, having died first, was on the far right of the group. Soon the flames had reached the platform, and in the heat it seemed to shift under its burden. Essa fought the urge to jump away, and instead stood to watch for a good long while. When the bodies were no longer visible behind a wall of flames, she gestured for the first watch to take their positions, while everyone else moved back into camp to take on the last of their evening duties.

It was sunset by the time Essa had managed to free herself from the last of the questions before disappearing down the trail toward the meadow where the launch sat, parked out in the open.

She jogged from the edge of camp to the woods. There, in Athame’s twilight she thought she saw a body moving. Essa stopped, and glanced around her. Nothing but shadows. She waited a moment longer, then pressed on, hopping over a few fallen logs, and over a patch of wet ground, where, in the low light she saw the shape of Neela’s foot pressed into the mud. It had to be hers—she’d stopped wearing her boots after only a few days, realizing it was easier to go barefoot, and there, Essa saw the imprint, heel, arch, ball and toes, the ground holding the memory of the body that had stepped there once just a day earlier.

Essa, almost without realizing it, had crouched down to touch it, but as she did, the weight of her own body made the ground begin to slip and change shape. How could Neela be gone, when the world still held a trace of her? There must be more, and indeed there were half a dozen other prints where the wet ground had taken on the shape of her foot.

And still, what was left was the sign only, the negative space Neela’s body had made passing by, not the body, but something that would hold her for a while, just the way Essa would hold her in her memory, and would eventually disappear herself. It would rain tomorrow, or the next day—thundershowers had been coming at predictable intervals—and then the footprints would be gone, too. Essa felt the pressure of Neela’s head on her chest, of her hands touching her, of her voice, the little bit of her scent that still clung to Essa’s dirty uniform.

Essa forced herself to move on, finding the edge of the forest, where the launch sat on its tall landing gear in the center of broad gap in the forest. There was no shelter, not even tall grass, and any creature that wanted to attack her, if something were lurking, this is where it would wait. The launch was still nearly three hundred meters away. A long and hard sprint, and from what she’d seen of the creatures that were attacking them, she’d be easily overtaken, long before she reached the launch, and anyhow there was too much space between its belly, and the ground for there to be adequate shelter for her to hide, while she waited for the hatch to open, and the entry ladder to drop down.

So she lingered at the edge of the trees, in a hole in the hacked-away undergrowth, listening, though she wasn’t sure for what. There was her own breathing, her own heart, beating hard, then slowing, slowing. The breeze shifted, and something whistled in the night, the call of a creature that thus far no one had been able to identify. In the distance she heard her crew singing, and the crackle of the fire burning down. The heap of logs slumped, and the sound of the fire changed. She looked out into the starlight and saw the dark shape of the launch, against the darker far edge of the woods. Then something seemed to move behind the launch, and all of Essa’s muscles clenched.

She kept still and listened, and then she heard a snort, like something trying to stifle a sneeze, and a heavy foot stomping the ground. She thought she saw movement again, and crouching low, she moved out of the undergrowth, checking her flanks for an ambush. Seeing nothing, she continued on.

There was another snort and stamping, and then the ground shook. Something had bumped against the launch, causing it to lurch on its landing gear. Essa was running now. The launch had a dry weight of nearly fifty thousand kilograms, and at present it was fully fueled. Whatever had made it move was big. She was moving steadily toward the craft now, was only fifty meters away when the launch shook again, listing hard on its landing gear, so that one of the struts sounded as though it might snap off.

No time to go back to camp. No time to do anything, not even care that she was unarmed and that there were two of those creatures on the far side of the launch, working at its starboard winglet, getting their heads under it and lifting with all their strength, trying to flip it on its side.

What would she do when she got there? They hadn’t seen her yet. They might not until the last possible moment, and that surprise might allow Essa to—she didn’t know. Just get to the ship, she thought, get the hatch open. Get inside. After that, you can think.

The ship lurched again, though, not quite as hard as the last time, but the creatures, between their bouts of grunting and snorting, seemed to be engaged in discussing what to do. Their talk sounded like long purrs, its pitch higher than Essa would have thought.

She had reached the nose gear, where the entry controls were located. It was a miracle that the creatures hadn’t spotted her yet, but by some trick of luck, they were both facing in the opposite direction, looking up at the starboard winglet. Essa pulled the lever and the hatch dropped, and along with it came the entry ladder. It took a full five seconds to descend. It would take five more to retract, but she’d have to worry about that part later, after she survived the climb.

There was the ladder, still not all the way down, but with a jump she’d caught her elbow around the third rung and was pulling herself up.

But the things had seen her now. It didn’t matter, she was moving, up, up, even as the ladder was still working against her for another moment. Something slammed against the launch and threw her sideways, and the noise of the creatures and their awful groans were all around her. She lost her grip and nearly fell.

Then the launch dropped back to level, and she climbed again. Something grazed her foot, and in a panic she heaved the top half of her body on the co*ckpit floor, leaving her legs dangling still exposed, while her hands searched on the floor for a handhold, something, to pull herself aboard, pushing with the one foot that was still touching a ladder rung, pushing still, and another lurch moved the ship so that it pivoted a degree or two around the nose gear, and then her hand closed on a cargo loop and she was all the way through, her legs under her on the flight deck.

Essa was in the left chair before she could even remember standing up, was flipping switches and buckling her belts, listening for the sound of the little reactor powering up, watching the fuel indicators, watching the avionics, the different panels all showing boot screens or static, then each coming to life. She flipped another switch, and the ladder retracted and the hatch flipped shut. For the moment she was safe, until the creatures found a way to break through the pressure vessel.

The ship rattled and took a hard turn this time, one that sent a terrible noise through the frame, the sound of something creaking, bending even, maybe almost to the breaking point. But Essa’s hands were on the controls now, and she felt the ship respond. The thrusters were ready, and she dialed one open, then a second, and then hit the throttles, and the ship lifted itself up into a cloud of dirt and smoke and burning debris.

She lifted off fifteen meters, and spun the craft slowly through a circle, looking for the creatures, sure she would have scared them off, or that the force of the liftoff would have killed them, or caused them some other harm.

And there they were. They’d retreated a bit, but not far as she had hoped. She slipped the launch closer to them, hoping the engine noise would bother them enough that they would run. The two creatures shuffled backward, but seemed more bewildered than anything else.

Essa increased the throttle incrementally, and evened out her hover at twenty meters. As she spun the launch around, she suddenly spotted a third, and then a fourth creature approaching from the treeline. While she watched, something struck the side of the ship, and caused it to swerve toward the trees. Essa hit the forward braking thrusters, which were pointed directly at one of the onrushing creatures. It had been close enough to the flare that its fur had caught fire. Now it lay rolling around in the dirt, legs flailing ineffectively in the air. As Essa looked on in disbelief, something else struck the top of the ship, and debris, tree bark and leaves, rolled down over the pilot’s windscreen. Essa rotatated back toward the first two attackers, who were grabbing fallen tree trunks and throwing them at the ship.

She aimed the launch’s nose at them and at the last moment hit them both with a blast from the thrusters. She leveled out, set the ship to hover, and saw that she’d killed the one outright. Contact with the hot exhaust had cut the creature into pieces that lay sprawled here and there across a triangle of grass that she’d scorched bare. The other was hurt, and trying to run away. It didn’t get far, before it, too, had suffered the same fate.

Essa turned to face the last one, the one that stood at the edge of the trees, as though waiting for her to come for it. She obliged.

She was going to kill every last one of them now. Every last one.

She realized a moment too late her mistake. There were more hiding just beyond the edge of the forest, and this group was armed with rocks that they flung—how, she didn’t understand—with terrible accuracy, striking the windscreen, made of a polymer that would scratch, but was too thick to break, and then, less fortunately, one of the starboard thrusters.

The thruster stuck in the on position and nearly flipped the launch onto its back before Essa could get it shut off. With that thruster gone, she couldn’t hold the ship in a hover for more than a few seconds at a time. She gunned the throttle, just clearing the trees, then circled back to where the creatures continued to launch stones at her from beneath the canopy. She took two more hits before she’d positioned the ship, then she lit her main engines, propelling her over the clearing and skyward and forcing her body into the padding of her seat. She nearly blacked out as the maneuver forced all her blood into her legs, then as she regained her faculties, she realized there was an alarm going off inside the co*ckpit.

During the confusion of the attack, Essa had remembered to put up the landing gear, but hadn’t checked to see if they’d properly retracted. Now she saw that the nose pylon had remained stuck in the down position, and, worse, that with the strain that the animals had put on it, along with the force of acceleration when—she hoped—she had killed the last of them, it was now leaking hydraulic fluid. She could land, but it might buckle under the weight of the ship.

But it was worse than that. The leak had drained enough fluid that Essa couldn’t lower the rear landing struts.

There wasn’t anything she could do about it. She had to put the ship down. It was either that or run for orbit, because the maneuvering thruster was behaving more and more erratically. So she eased up on the throttles. The launch veered and slowed, but there was a crosswind and the ship lurched into the ground, landing hard on the damaged starboard winglet, and skidding in a fifty meter-long semicircle, before coming to rest against a rock.

The hard landing had jarred Essa, but she wasn’t hurt, except for friction burns where the seatbelts had rubbed bare skin. The floor hatch wouldn’t open, with the ship belly-down on the deck, but the main airlock was still operable. She could get out. At least there was that, she thought.

Off in the distance, the creature that she’d set on fire had staggered into a pile of dry brush and set it alight. Beyond that, the a few dozen trees at the edge of the forest were on fire. The engines powered down, and as they did, Essa realized that she’d managed to beat the animals back, but all she could do was sit at the controls and sob.
#
Later—it was dawn and a light rain was falling—Liss came up behind her, where Essa sat slumped at the controls. The hand on her shoulder was so gentle it felt more like a warm breath of air. Liss’s uniform was wet, and her face was streaked with soot. She looked pale in the dim light. The main airlock was open, and one of the commandos and Orie were inside the ship, inspecting it for damage.

“Captain,” Liss said. “Captain?”

“I’m here,” Essa said. “I’m awake.”

“What did you do?” she asked.

“I killed them,” she said. “I killed every last one of them. Didn’t I?” Liss recoiled a little. It took Essa a moment to realize that she’d been smiling as she’d said this.

“You may have,” she said. “Nerai and Commandant Razia are out there now. They’ve counted seventeen corpses so far. “Large and small,” Liss said. “Adults. Juveniles.” She seemed less sanguine about the killing than she had the day before.

“I had to,” Essa said.

Liss shook her head. “You wanted to.” She let out a long breath, then said, “For what it’s worth, sometimes you can’t tell the difference.” She put her hand back on Essa’s shoulder. “The hull’s all beat to hell, by the way. Lots of dents and scratches on the forward heat shield.”

Essa was quiet. “She’s gone,” she said, her voice just a whisper. “Neela’s gone.”

Liss squeezed her shoulder, but said nothing.

Essa put her head back in her hands and leaned forward in the pilot’s seat. Liss let her sob for a long time. The rain fell hard for a while then tapered off, until the burnt and torn-open corpses of the creatures Essa had killed became easily visible in the distance. Little black and gray creatures, no bigger than fists that flew on pairs of stubby leather wings, were feeding on the dead flesh.

Suddenly Liss let go of Essa’s shoulder. She asked, “What’s that?”

Essa raised her head and wiped her eyes, looking through the forward windscreen. “Where?” she said. “I don’t see anything.”

But Liss was pointing at the comms panel. There was a transmission from the Nixia. Flash message, Nixia actual. It read. Departing present station in zero zero zero on return vector encoded in this message. Repeat, departing immediately on return vector encoded with this message. Transmission ends.

“Oh, thank the goddess,” Essa said. “They’re coming to get us.”

Chapter 7: After Action Report, Part I

Chapter Text

After Action Report, Part I

Everyone dies.

Asari can live many centuries, Benezia once told Liara, but that doesn’t mean they will. When we do, the hardest thing is to face the silence that was once filled by old friends. The longer you go on, the quieter the world becomes.

Kaden on Virmire.

About half of the Normandy’s Cerberus crew, on the Collector Base. Kelly Chambers and Mess Sargent Gardner.

Mordin on Tuchanka. Grunt in the caverns on Utukku. Legion on Rannoch. Thane in Huerta Memorial after being stabbed through the chest.

Cortez, shot down over London. Anderson disappeared into the ruins and was never found. Shepard on the Citadel.

Ashley Williams, in a training accident. Garrus, killed in action on Taetrus. Kasumi, captured during a heist, put in prison on Horizon, and disappeared from custody shortly thereafter. Never heard from again.

Admiral Hackett, in a chaise, overlooking the beach on Horizon, two decades into his retirement.

Joker, from injuries after a fall. Lawson, disappeared on Tortuga. Vega, shot to death during a suspected robbery near San Diego on Earth.

Jack, metastatic tumors in the brain and lungs, likely a result of Cerberus experimentation. Zaeed, killed serving as bodyguard to the Alliance Councilor. Jacob Taylor, suicide.

Wrex, beaten in single combat by a challenger.

Samantha Traynor, radiation exposure, on an orbital of Eden Prime. Chakwas, natural causes. Tali’Zorah vas Normandy, complications from a condition known as Rannoch Lung.

And Samara, killed while chasing a rogue SPECTRE on Ilium.

And before them all, the protheans, wiped out, but for one, who still lived in the jungles of a sparsely inhabited world in the Terminus. Aside from Javik, there was only EDI, who was one contained within many, instead of many within one, unlike Legion who had been many within one.

The quiet bothered Liara, but there it was. And in it, she had sometimes suspected, though was never able to prove, that there might have been a pattern.

Chapter 8: Counterstrike

Chapter Text

The ruse held, Vance saw. With her hood up, and with a human body ahead of her, the damage control teams they passed didn’t notice the pistol, or her blue hands. In a quarter hour, they’d ascended toward the exterior hull, where the Whitman’s ships were stored in their launch tubes.

Below decks, all hell was breaking loose. The small fire had damaged a plasma line, and soon there were calls for a medic on deck sixteen.

They had made it as far as the launch deck, where the prisoner stopped and pushed her against the wall.

“Move and I will kill you,” she said. Vance did not doubt it. She suspected that Chief Wilkes or Turner, or both, had been mortally wounded. As though she’d understood Vance’s thoughts, the asari said, “I didn’t kill them. I don’t, if I don’t have to. Now put this on.”

She thrust a lightly armored flight suit at Vance. They would need it for the launch deck. The crew there wore the suits in case there was an atmosphere breech. While Vance put on her suit, the prisoner pulled up a schematic of the launch deck on a nearby screen. “Here,” she said, pointing at a particular ship. “This one.”

“I can’t unlock it.”

“You won’t have to,” the asari said. The direction of the ship changed. She felt it under her boots. “We’re maneuvering,” the prisoner told her. And in an instant, the floor rumbled. Vance looked up at the screen.

“They’re scrambling the ready fighters,” she said.

The asari studied the screen again, and smiled. Somehow she had put on her own flight suit without Vance seeing. “Helmets,” she said. “Visors down, understood?”

Vance nodded. “Combat operations,” she said. “It would look suspicious if we did otherwise.”

Out they went, through the airlock and onto the main deck. Another wing of ready fighters launched, as they turned right out of the lock, and made their way across the deck, using weapons racks and other equipment to screen their movement. They turned right again, and were soon walking toward midships, a busy location right now. Pilots ran to meet the prep crews. Auto-loaders fed weapons into internal launch bays, while semi-autonomous loader mechs lifted empty loading racks clear.

The asari hurried skillfully through the controlled chaos, until she had reached a hatch that stood open on the deck. “Here,” she said.

Vance looked down into the interior of the ship, a Phantom. An odd, but interesting choice, she realized. It was a picket ship, a low-energy stealth craft that didn’t look like much from the outside, but that were often deployed in screening orbits, where they would patrol on the drift for days or weeks. They were known for running cold for a long time, then powering up and taking out the screening ships of a flotilla. A single squadron of fighters like these could decide a battle before it even began, though with the galaxy at relative peace, they’d never had to. Not yet. Unlike most fighters, they could interact with a Mass Relay.

The asari saw Vance hesitate as she worked through all this information. “I’m not going to kill you,” she said. “I need you to get us launch clearance.” She gestured toward an interphone console bolted to the deck. “Plug in and see if you can get us free.”

Vance hesitated again. Helping the prisoner was treason. And then suddenly the ship jolted sideways, not much, but Vance knew what it was.

“We just took a hit.”

“It went off the barriers. We need to get free before one penetrates. Understood?”

Vance did, but still didn’t want to believe it. The ship moved again and she was suddenly on her knees by the panel. A flash of light passed over her, and somewhere just beyond the curve of the deck, a hole had opened up. The link cable was in her hand, and in an instant she’d plugged it into the port on the chest of her suit. The ship’s serial number and the callsign for the day appeared on the display. She punched the button for the deck chief’s station. “Hitman 3-1 to Deck Command, over.”

When the answer came, the chief sounded busy. There was an alarm going off in the background, and voices shouting over each other. “This is Deck actual. Make it quick, Hitman 3-1.”

Vance said, calm as she could, “Hit man 3-1 requesting immediate launch clearance and release.”

“Your squadron isn’t tasked, Hitman 3-1. Wait on orders.”

Vance cleared her throat. “We were just tasked. Fire mission in sector 819.”

“Not on my board, Hitman 3-1. Stand down until—” There was a loud sound on the other end, and the deck shook hard enough that Vance was thrown flat against the console.

“Say again, Deck Actual.”

There was no answer but for static. Vance cycled through the channels, but in the outermost hull there was a circle nearly ten meters across. Its edges glowed hot orange, and through it, she saw a patch of stars. She switched the comms to the co*ckpit feed. “Deck Command just got taken out. We’re going to have to blow the clamps manually.”

“Understood,” came the reply, and an instant later, the asari appeared in the hatchway.

Vance pointed at the hardpoints. “There’s three of them, there, there, and there. We’ll need to blow them simultaneously.

“Right,” the asari said. “We’ll set a timer for the first, and blow the second two. Regroup in the airlock.”

Vance shook her head and reached for the asari’s pistol. In an instant she was in a wrist lock, and a knee had forced all the air from her lungs. Her faceplate was spattered with a roundel of saliva and mucus. The asari grabbed her and threw her into the ship. An instant later, she heard the clamps being armed and then a loud clap as all three separated at nearly the same instant. The fighter began drifting away from its mooring in the interior hull, and bounced against the hard surface of exterior hull, five meters below. As Vance struggled to gain a foothold, the asari appeared in the opening of the airlock. Vance tried to force herself up toward the interior hatch. The asari threw her back against the hard flooring of the fighter, and Vance blacked out for a moment.

When she came to, the hatches were sealed and locked, and she was halfway buckled into the copilot’s chair, her writs tied to the armrests to prevent her from interfering.

“Are you quite done?” the asari said. Vance didn’t say anything, but was quickly regaining consciousness. Vance nodded as best she could inside the helmet. The co*ckpit spun a little when she did. “Good,” the asari said. She got into the pilot’s seat and steadied the fighter inside the hull. Using maneuvering jets, she found a hole in the outer hull large enough for their ship to fit through, and then blasted out into the dark of space.

#

Out ahead, a chaos of drive plumes, debris, weapons and detonations. She watched as the HUD tracked MAC rounds, and torpedoes. Fighter squadrons darted in and out of view, and out in front of them, the massive propulsion flare of an asari dreadnought.

“They’re coming from out of the ecliptic,” the asari said. “Common attack maneuver in the fleet. Slash from above or below, and then burn hard as you pass straight through the enemy formation.”

“High risk,” Vance said. “In simulation we regularly inflicted losses of thirty percent.”

“High reward,” the asari said. “And this isn’t a simulation.” She studied the situation on the display, and glanced upward through the fighter’s canopy. When she’d finished, she put the blast shield down. “We’ll be clear of the body of your fleet. We may slip by unnoticed.”

Vance looked through the canopy. One of the troop ships had split open, the edges of the rent in its hull, still hot to glowing, and a cloud of debris expanding outward from its interior. Two other ships had been crippled, but the attack had cost the asari fleet, too. A cruiser had plunged through the battlegroup, and exited with its drivecone damaged, a massive jet of gas was venting out through a giant hole in the near side of the ship’s hull. The hot plume was nearly a hundred kilometers across. A reactor breech had probably killed the crew already, Vance thought, but as she watched, the cruiser’s hull began to glow, red, then orange-yellow, then white. It began to stretch, and then tear, and finally failed completely, ripping the ship apart, stern to bow, sending out a bright flash of light, followed by two rapidly expanding plumes of gas and wreckage, spreading along the axis where the hull had split.

The attack had been meant to scatter the Alliance force, but the fleet had maintained discipline, and though about a third of the ships had taken damage, the bulk of the fleet held together. They were already regrouped around the Whitman, and had executed a hard turn and burn maneuver in pursuit.

Vance took all of this in just a few seconds. Almost as quickly, she understood that the debris field from the battle was concentrated right now, but was rapidly expanding. If they accelerated hard and didn’t maneuver too much, they might be taken for a bit of wreckage, or maybe a fighter that had been jettisoned after suffering irrecoverable damage on the flight deck.

No one was going to come looking for her, she realized. At least not for a while, until someone reviewed all the security feeds on the Whitman, provided that the ship survived the coming battle.

By then, they would be long gone.

The asari said, “I thought we might have to wait for them to leave the system, but it appears we’re in luck.” She began programming the Phantom’s VI to direct them to the mass relay.

“You think no one will notice we’re missing.”

The asari shook her head and unsealed her helmet. “We’re out of danger for the moment.” The mechanical way that she said this, given their circ*mstances, suddenly filled Vance with dread. She wanted to run, but there was nowhere to go, except out the airlock.

She kept quiet, but her vision grew blurry. The asari handed her a rag.

“Tears don’t run out of your eyes in microgravity,” she said, breaking the silence. “Do you have family?” she asked.

“Why are you asking me that?”

“It’s a simple question. Do you?”

Vance didn’t answer.

The asari said, “It was just me and my mother. She was—let’s say she was distant. Yes? That’s something humans say, don’t they?” Vance agreed that they did. “And you know who I am. My mother—she’s been somewhat forgotten by your historians. With them it’s always Commander Shepard this and reapers that. Well, I knew them both, and my mother was right there with them. On the wrong side, of course, which is perhaps why they forget her more often than not.” She paused and studied the threat board again. The two fleets were ready to clash again. The asari cruisers had turned on their axis, and were firing while their momentum carried them away from the body of the Alliance battlegroup. “They’re firing interdiction rounds. I suspect your comrades will break their pursuit.”

The asari went quiet, as though she’d lost the thread of their conversation, and Vance said, “I’ve read about your mother. She was a hero to your people.”

“For a time,” the asari said. “Then she was a blight on the asari name. In any case, you know the story about Saren, and Sovereign, and the rest.”

“I don’t remember it in detail.”

“Likely you didn’t hear that it was I who killed her. On Noveria.” Vance shook her head. The asari went on, “I hadn’t seen her in a decade. She’d been working on joint projects between the Intelligence Directorate and the SPECTRE program. I didn’t know what that meant at the time. I do now—she’d been chasing leads across the galaxy about rumors of a powerful starship that turned out to be a reaper. Much later, not until minutes before I shot her twice in the chest, did I realize she’d been suffering from the long-term effects of indoctrination. As she died, she said something to me that I didn’t understand for a long time. She called me ‘Little Wing,’ right at the end. It’s an old nickname, but she hadn’t used it since I was very small.” The asari was quiet again for a moment. She said, “A little over ten years ago, I began tracking down leads related to information my mother left behind.”

“For you?”

“No—” the asari said. “She began hiding information centuries before I was born, but even then, she knew someone was working against her, trying to sideline her, or silence her, if they could, and she left behind what she knew in caches scattered all over the galaxy. In the end, I was the one who silenced her. Now Matirarch Deniri has effectively silenced me with this war of hers.”

“You think the asari went to war to keep your story quiet?”

“Perhaps not directly. There are other forces at work. The krogan are again expanding into the asari and salarian bubbles. The Citadel Council was fragmented and likely to fall apart. The leviathan may have broken their section of the Dekkuna Accords. Not to mention the arms race between your Alliance and the Turian Hierarchy. Somehow you must have known that would work against you.”

Vance ignored the jab, and instead asked, “But what do you know that’s worth keeping quiet.”

The asari looked at the threat board again. Nothing there had changed. “I’m honestly not sure, but I know this. My mother and Deniri were friends. For a time. They were part of a commando unit known as The Lovers—I’ll leave you to speculate as to why they called themselves that. After my mother left to join the Intelligence Directorate, the friendship broke, and was never repaired. I suspect there was more to it than just a quarrel. Now that I know what I know, I think Deniri might be concealing something worse than just governmental intrigue.”

“Indoctrination?” Vance said. “But how? The reapers are gone.”

“Are they?” the asari said. “They’re not all accounted for.”

The cramped space of the co*ckpit suddenly felt close and impossibly hot. She pushed open the faceplate on her helmet and tried to slow her breathing.

The asari put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s a great deal to take in,” she said. “I can’t quite fathom it yet either. I’d like you to know,” she said, as she pulled the pistol from her thigh holster, “I did mean it when I said I wouldn’t kill you.” She stripped out the ammunition block and handed it to Vance. “I would set you free, but I can’t just yet. You’re useful to me, and I need you. Call me Liara if you like.”

Vance sat in stunned silence. When the asari didn’t speak again, Vance slipped the ammo block into a loop in her belt. She would work on getting the pistol later.

Meanwhile, for nearly an hour, Liara sat quietly while Vance dozed. Liara said again, “You have family back on Earth, don’t you?”

Vance nodded. “My mother and a sister. Back on Earth.”

“Good,” the asari said. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Vance shook her head. All of a sudden her burned ear was throbbing, and she pulled off her helmet to rub it. “Why are you in the Alliance?”

Vance looked up at the asari. The hard look, the fearless look she’d seen in the interrogation room, on the flight deck, and as they maneuvered out of the battle—it was gone. She seemed genuinely curious. Still, Vance held her tongue.

“Let me guess, you were running away from your drab little hometown.” After a pause, she said, “Or maybe you were good at school, and wanted to do more, but there was no money. Maybe both. You’re from Glasgow, aren’t you?”

Vance shook her head. “How—?”

“We live a long time. Some of us are curious and, since we have nothing but time, we absorb a lot.” The threat board showed both groups of ships arcing away from each other, though the Alliance ships seemed to be repositioning for a counter attack. She stared at the two fleets for a while, then whispered something to herself.

“You’re wondering why they’re here, aren’t you?”

Vance nodded, but didn’t answer.

“How many aboard that troop ship? Three thousand? Five thousand?”

“About that?”

“And the heavy cruiser?”

“Two hundred,” Vance said, “not counting shipboard marines.”

“About twice as many aboard the Rumaila, the asari ship that just foundered.” She was quiet for a moment. “The asari battlegroup will likely be torn to pieces by your fleet.”

“That’s a lot of lives wasted on bad strategy.”

“It’s not bad strategy if it works. They were sent to kill me, as I suspected when your intelligence man told me you’d broadcast my name to the galaxy.”

“We didn’t—” Vance started to say, but the asari interrupted.

“You might as well have. Something tells me your colleague might have done it on purpose.”

“And that’s why they’re here? To kill you?”

“I guarantee it.”

Vance was quiet. Turner was a prick, and she wasn’t going to miss him. Still.

The asari tugged at her straps, making sure they were secure. “Seven hours, give or take. Sensors aren’t showing pickets at the relay, so we may not have anything to worry about.”

“And from there?”

“I’ll let you know soon enough.”

“Yes, but where are we going?”

“Have you ever been to Omega?”

Vance nodded. The memory was not a pleasant one.

“Well,” the asari said. “Prepare yourself. Tortuga is a good deal worse.”

Chapter 9: Radio/Silence

Chapter Text

There it was, in the telescope’s viewfinder on the launch’s navigation console. Half the instruments were broken, their panels cracked and showing nothing but static or a few lines of error code. But the telescope, as simple as it was, worked as intended and there was the Nixia, a little flare of light, just beyond invisible. Its engines had cut out already, and the ship was coasting until its next timed burn, but its glowing orange and blue beacons showed where it was, and it was moving. It was coming to get them.

That was about all they knew. After the initial message, there was no further communication for several days. And then, a databurst, transmitted by a secondary low gain antenna that said only, Main array damaged. Attempting repairs. Along with it came a basic readout of the ship’s system status, life support, and fuel stores. Essa looked it over, and stored the information on a card to analyze later.

Meanwhile on the ground, there was so much to do. So much that for three days she nearly forgot that Neela was dead, so much so that she more than once caught herself looking for her other half in the dwindling group of scientists and commandos who remained in the camp. All were covered in dirt, their uniforms in tatters after almost three years on this planet that had taken so much from them. The creatures had assaulted their camp, and taken six of their number had let off in their attacks, but there was still a group out there in the forest. The commandos heard their clicks and whistles, as they called to one another, and found footprints at the edge of the four kilometer-wide clearing where they had set down the launch.

The launch. There was their only hope, and on that morning, the day after the Nixia had transmitted its imminent arrival, Essa had taken stock of it, and all that had to be done to make it fly again. The list was long. The nose gear had cracked and would no longer bear the ship’s weight. Getting proper clearance between ship and ground to eliminate blowback damage would be a challenge. Essa set the commandos to building a cradle out of wood that would hold the launch aloft as it powered up and lifted off. The cradle would double as a means of egress and entry. The ventral landing gear had suffered damage as well, and would need to be jettisoned once the ship was airborne, which was just as well, because they would need to shed the weight, in order to make orbit.

The heat shield was irreparably damaged, but they wouldn’t be needing that, at least not for the ascent phase. The forward windscreen was cracked, and the aft wall of the pressure vessel had bent, and may have had a microscopic fracture that could blow out in the vacuum of space. The copilot’s instrumentation was mostly fried, as were most of the controls. The starboard maneuvering thruster was stuck in the on position, and best case would likely begin leaking fuel when turned on, and worst case, flip the launch over and send it careening into the ground at worst.

But Essa knew the Nixia, every meter of wire, every deck tile, every switch and button and foam padded acceleration chair. And to know the Nixia was to know the launch just as well. If she had a year, she’d have stripped it herself. She didn’t have a year. The Nixia was coming to get them. Neither the ship, nor the camp had an unlimited supply of food. They had to get ready.

#

Next time she looked, the Nixia had streaked nearly seven degrees across the night sky, the lights on its bow and stern beacons were visibly separate from one another. By then, the launch’s starboard thruster had been removed, disassembled, and, Goddess willing, would soon fit together again in the unstuck position.

The camp, meanwhile, had moved from its earlier location by the stream, to an area just a hundred meters away from the launch itself, which sat in its wooden cradle like an animal with three broken and splinted legs. The commandos had, in almost no time at all, rigged a pipe made of wrist-thick reeds that delivered enough water for drinking and other basic needs, but little more than that.

Stopping to survey the work on the fourth afternoon, Essa said to Nerai, who stood holding her daughter, “They’ll be here in a month. I’m concerned about the crack in the windscreen. It could blow out once we’re orbital.”

“So we wear enviro suits.”

“We don’t have enough to go around. Even if we did, we wouldn’t all fit in the launch. Not with all our gear.”

“Ditch the gear.”

“Even then.”

“Someone’s going to have to draw the short straw,” Nerai said.

“Themis is working with the fabricator now. She says she’s got a design for a kind of putty-mesh that should hold the screen together.”

“Should,” Nerai said, “Is not the same as will.” She set Orinna down, and looked at Essa, her meaning clear.

Essa nodded.

Nerai thought a moment. She seemed to be studying the launch. “I’ve taken some insane risks in my time,” she said. “A lot of them because I drew the short straw.” After a moment, she said, “I remember every one of them, every stupid thing I’ve ever done in the interest of getting the job done. I’ve got four pieces of metal in my body because of them, but—well I’m a survivor. That’s what Razia calls me. But today, I couldn’t look you in the eye and tell you that any of them were worth it.”

“What are you saying?”

“If you’re going to take me back up there, I’m going to need to know that pressure vessel will do better than just ‘probably’ hold together. If you can’t tell me that, I’d much rather take my chances dirtside.”

Essa shook her head. “We didn’t come with much extra material. The mesh is our best shot.”

Nerai shook her head. She spat out a wad of leaves that she and the other commandos sometimes chewed to stay alert.

“And Orinna?”

“I think she’ll do better dirtside, too.”

Essa looked up. Night was coming on, and soon it would be time to climb back into the launch to use its telescope array to track the Nixia. Before the ship had departed nearly a year ago, Essa and Clea, the third watch navigator, had worked out their position relative to Thessia and their path through the galaxy. After a dozen jumps, they had a good sense of where they were, and where they had been. From Thessia, they had traveled an irregular zigzag path from their home system across Demeter’s Staff. One long jump, their first, accounted for nearly sixty percent of the distance covered. They had launched themselves out, and were now—slowly but steadily—tracing a path back toward Thessia. The remainder of their jumps had been much shorter traverses of a few dozen light years each. The path hadn’t made much sense to Essa or to Clea, but Neela had been working on a hypothesis just before she’d died. She believed that there was a pattern to the path they had followed. Unable to sleep Essa turned to it one night, and having looked it over, hurried over to Clea’s lean-to.

The navigator, who had been asleep, rubbed her eyes and studied the panel. “What is it?”

“I wanted your opinion.” Clea looked up from her bedroll. She knew that wasn’t worth waking her in the middle of the night. “It’s important,” Essa said. “Tell me what you learn.” Clea nodded and promised she would.

A day later, she returned, looking nervous, nearly sick with worry.

“What is it, Ensign?” Essa said.

She took out Neela’s old panel and began scrolling through the data, with her own notes scrawled in the margins.

“Listen,” Clea said, “Any scientist would tell you that this doesn’t make any sense.”

“You’re in luck, Ensign. I’m a sailor.”

Clea looked like she were trying to force herself to smile, gave up, and then turned to her findings again. “Virtually every system we’ve visited had an inhabitable world,” she said. “Air, fresh water, in most cases edible food.” She drew a breath and another.

“Finish your thought,” Essa said. She’d been sharper with the crew since Neela died. Killing the creatures that had taken her away, there was a comfort in that, but now that they had retreated beyond the wall of the forest, there was nowhere else to put her rage.

“It’s like something knew we would need to resupply along the way.”

“You’re saying this was planned?”

Clea shook her head. “Those installations. How old do you think they are?” Before Essa could interject, she said, “Thousands of years? Maybe more? The biologists found evidence of plants that predate the modern epoch growing onboard the one in Parnitha.” Lately the crew, by some unspoken agreement, had been referring to home by the parent star, rather calling Thessia by name. Essa found it unsettling. She also noticed that Clea had skillfully avoided using Neela’s name, by saying biologists. Clea had returned to studying her star map. With her finger she circled the systems where they had landed to gather resources. “There were very old ruins here,” she said. Essa nodded, and had a brief memory of the horror she’d seen, when she touched the little blade-thin device when they had landed there, and that still lay hidden at the bottom of a storage compartment in the lab aboard the Nixia. “Everywhere else we’ve been, we’ve found these bushes with berries. The biologists—” again, the skillful avoidance “—told—tell—me that the plants have a very distinct life cycle. How is it that we always happen to find them when they’re bearing fruit? Has it been merely random that we should arrive on a handful of separate planets where it just happens to be early summer? Or are we being directed?”

Essa wondered long and hard about that. “Say that we are,” she said finally, “I need to know what that means.”

“There was a civilization,” Clea said. “That much we know for sure. It spanned—I don’t know if we can imagine how far across the galaxy. Perhaps all of Demeter’s staff, or beyond. Who knows?”

“And they’re the ones directing us?”

“Or something they left behind. It’s almost as if someone wanted us to see that there’s nothing left.”

“Meaning what? That it’s safe to go exploring?”

“Or as a warning.” Clea put her hand over her mouth, as though she hadn’t meant to say it. For a moment she looked to be on the verge of tears. She took a deep breath while pressing her hands together. “I don’t think this is over. I don’t think whatever our crewmates learned up there is going to get us home. Not right away.”

“I’ll take that under advisem*nt,” Essa said and patted Clea’s shoulder. “Get back to work, all right?”

#

Forget love, Essa thought, as she returned to her lean to at the edge of the clearing. It was after sunset, the end of a long day—as long as the days on this planet ever got. Forget the endless soft pleasures. Forget comfort in knowing that she didn’t have to meet this struggle alone. Forget the gentle spirit, the warm breath in the night, the intimacy of bonding in which some small part of Neela remained present, and always would. What was missing tonight was the raw intellect that could penetrate through the layers of conjecture and see a pattern, or that could meticulously pick her way through any of the dozen disciplines the rest of the science crew had mastered singly.

The love, yes, but there was something else missing, and it was that something else that Essa needed to keep herself and the crew alive. She didn’t realize it until two days after her conversation with Clea, as she climbed into the launch to look for the Nixia.

In the days since it had departed from the installation, Essa had been tracking it every night, noting its position, and charting its course.

It had been a week since their communications array had gone down for repairs. Essa had maintained visual contact, but since then strange things had been happening. For one, the Nixia had executed another burn that left the ship streaking across the sky by several more degrees every day than expected. Essa wasn’t sure what this meant, but Clea had projected a path, that showed where the Nixia should be, relative to its orbital insertion. It was not there, but instead well ahead of where it should have been.

Essa put the data on a card and brought it to Clea, whom she found sitting with Orie under the lean to that they shared nearby.

“Steward,” she said to Orie, “might I have a moment with our navigator?”

Orie only smiled and jumped to her feet, and with a sharp, Aye-aye hurried away to see that no one was in need of food or water.

“Captain?” Clea said. “Something you need?”

Essa held out the card, and when Clea reached for it, snatched it back into the palm of her hand. “I need you to work on something. But not here.”

“Where, then?” Clea said.

“I’d prefer you did it in the launch. No one can know what you’re doing.”

“And what am I doing?” Clea said.

“I need you to analyze what I have here. Let me know what you find.”

Clea stood, and with the data card in her hand, hurried off toward the launch.

#

In the morning, Essa found her still at the console, working over the plot. She looked up and squinted in the dawn light. “Captain,” she said. “I wasn’t sure your data was accurate, so I’ve been looking for the ship myself to take my own most recent measurement.”

“What have you found?”

Clea turned to the plot that drew itself on her console. She traced with her finger the path the Nixia had followed since departing the installation. “Here’s where they were when they left,” she said, tracing a path across the board. “Under a normal, five hour burn of three-gravitations, they would have ended up here.”

“What about with the new mass-transfer system?”

“I replotted it using what little data we have on that. If they’d followed that path, they should be here,” she said, and tapped the console with her finger. The Nixia wasn’t there either. In fact, it had moved a good bit farther than on either plot.

“They executed a secondary burn two days ago,” Essa said. “Does that account for the discrepancy?”

Clea nodded. “It was supposed to be a normal mid-course correction,” she said, “but they didn’t just alter their vector. They accelerated for nearly an hour.” She showed Essa several strophes worth of code that had been forwarded directly from the ship’s navigational computer. “They didn’t plan it, but instead it looks like they did it on the fly.”

“Do you think they were trying to avoid an obstacle?”

“There’s nothing in the visible spectrum, or in infra red or short wavelengths. If there’s something out there, we can’t see it. But there’s something else.” She pointed to a readout that indicated remaining fuel stores. “At their current velocity, they won’t be able to park the ship in orbit and escape again. It looks as though they’re planning to slingshot back out of the gravity well.”

Essa nodded and studied the plot. She knew what it meant. “We’ll have one attempt at rendezvous, and only one. I’ve done it before.” Not under these circ*mstances, of course, but still, she’d done it. “How long do we have?” she asked.

“A little under two days,” Clea said.

Chapter 10: The Second Rule of Field Work

Chapter Text

The Second Rule of Fieldwork

At first, the war was everywhere. In the Nubian Expanse, a group of turian supply ships had been destroyed in a raid, leaving a debris field that was hurling starward. They jettisoned their stores of torpedoes there, and moved on to find dozens of ships, some barely spaceworthy, were lined up at the relay in the Maroon Sea, ready to leave for safety. And in the Shadow Sea, a salarian battlegroup was forming up. Vance’s captor, the asari named Liara T’Soni, had disabled their transponder in the hopes they could slip by unnoticed, and in fact, they passed directly through the body of the fleet as it waited its turn. Listening to the few unencrypted transmissions, it sounded as though they were on their way to Taetrus, where the turians had sustained heavy losses in a battle that had lasted for three days.

“No one wants the turians to come out on top,” Liara said. “It only makes sense. The Hierarchy has the numbers.” She had crawled out of her seat, and in a crouch, with her arm braced on the overhead console and her feet on the pilot’s armrest, she leaned in to study Vance’s expression. For the first time in a long while, after years of thinking the asari weren’t so different from humans, Vance understood that she was looking at an alien, someone who was quite different from her, both in body and in understanding.

“What’s wrong?” Liara asked.

Vance shook her head. Liara leaned forward and cut Vance free of the straps that held her. From the holster on her hip, she took the pistol and handed it over, grip-first. “Here she said.”

“What are you doing?” Vance stared at the pistol like it were a venomous spider.

“You’re in the intelligence game, aren’t you?” Liara said. “Here. Take it.”

Vance shook her head, but slowly reached out and took the pistol. She wondered if Liara had forgot she’d already handed over the ammunition block a few hours earlier. Liara turned her back, and almost looked as though she were about to sit down, but Vance had put the gun back together, and was holding it out, pointing it at Liara’s head.

Liara turned, carefully. In the microgravity, she pushed herself back and landed softly against the back of the pilot’s seat. “I see you’re thinking about making a choice,” she said. “Kill me. Take me captive. Turn me over to—whom do you think would pay the most for me right now?”

“I have a duty to fulfill,” Vance said. “I’m not thinking about money.”

“You should be,” Liara said. They had reached the secondary relay by then, and she turned to the controls. “I suppose you should try to stop me from making the jump to Attican Beta, she said. But then, if you kill me, here you are deep in salarian territory, in an Alliance vessel, without armament.” After a pause, she added, “Apart from that pistol.”

Vance kept the weapon trained on Liara’s head. Her captor appeared not to care.

“So killing me isn’t an option.” She punched in a code, and the relay began to turn faster. Just like that the threat board lit up, but by then, it was too late. Their ship was in the grasp of the relay now, and in an instant they were somewhere else. “We’re deep in the Terminus now,” Liara said. “Fat lot of good that will do you. There’s nothing but turian and volus colonies nearby.” She unbuckled herself again, and said, “Or you could turn the weapon the other way. In a sense it may be your best option.” She crouched again on the center console, and again, her body, folded and coiled looking strange and alien, and a thousand times more dangerous than when she was in the pilot’s chair. “What’s your intelligence training,” her captor said, her face changing instantly from open menace to curiosity.

“What do you mean?”

“Did you train to work in the field?”

“I did,” Vance said. She didn’t realize it, but she had lowered the pistol, and her captor had placed her oddly warm hand over her own. “But I’ve been an analyst for nearly ten years now.”

“Then you’re forgetting your training,” Liara said. Gently she took the weapon, and disappeared below, to the crew area. After a moment Vance heard the waste chute cycle. Her captor returned empty handed. “There, she said. Much better.”

“What did you do?” Vance asked.

“I spaced the pistol, same as I jettisoned the torpedoes.”

“It doesn’t seem very wise,” Vance said, “going into the Traverse unarmed.”

“You’re forgetting the first rule of field work. Well, some say it’s the second rule. Never carry a weapon. It will only encourage the people you encounter to kill you.”

Vance nodded. She had heard something like that, not in those words, but the same sentiment. “What’s the first rule?”

“Your body is the only weapon no one can take away from you. Master it.”

Vance nodded again. She suddenly felt very ill at ease. She’d seen her captor fight. “Right,” she said.

Liara patted her on the shoulder. “Get some rest,” she said. “I think we’ll both sleep easier now, don’t you?”

Vance wasn’t sure, but she said, “Yes,” and went below.

#

Discovered by the turians while humans were still burning coal for power, Tortuga was an earth analogue, though covered in a global ocean nearly a hundred kilometers deep. Apart from those depths, and the vast wastes of saltwater, were two small continents, both the result of supervolcanoes that had hurled themselves upward higher than Olympus Mons on Mars. The larger of these had risen from the ocean and produced a small archipelago of atolls, the rims of its ancient caldera that had been eroded and partially drowned. The other landmass was a similar structure, only here the rim of the caldera had thus far remained intact, a protected little hole in the ocean, a circular range of mountains stood two thousand meters above the ocean, with the bottom of its caldera some four kilometers four kilometers below sea level. For now it was dry land, an inverted island. One day the sea would break through the circular wall that protected it, but for now, a city had sprung up around a freshwater lake in the haven formed by the vertical walls of the ancient volcanic mouth, and its hundred kilometer-wide valley floor.

Tamaconda, the city was called, and it was a beautiful place, and dangerous. One couldn’t land there. There was too much traffic, and with no one to organize it, the risk of crashing in or near the city, where it might spill its toxic contents into the streets or the adjacent farmland was too great. Ships calling at Tamaconda had to land in the shallows of the volcano’s southeastern flank, where the seafloor was less than three hundred meters deep. From there, one traveled first by submersible, then maglev into the city.

Situated at the far rim of the galaxy, nearly eighty thousand light years from the Citadel and its government, it was an ideal haven for pirates and outlaws.

#

The craft that glommed onto their airlock, and bid them board did not inspire confidence. Liara crawled through the opening first, water leaking into the interior of their ship, as she went, and Vance followed. There she met two grim-faced batarians, yellow eyed, green skinned, who stood staring at her, blinking one set of eyes, then the other.

“That one yours?” one of them said to Liara, who said, forcefully, As much as she belongs to anyone. Inside, the floor of the sub was damp, its floor panels and walls covered in rust, and stains. On entering, Vance saw rows of seats, where about a dozen people, asari, batarian, human, sat in two long rows of seats facing each other, each one held in place by a heavy metal bar that came down over the shoulders and locked in place between the passenger’s legs. The two batarians grabbed Liara and Vance and shoved them into seats, facing each other, and clamped them down, too.

Vance fought, realizing that the others on board were likely all slaves, and she shouted that she didn’t belong to anyone. The batarian who had clamped her into her seat growled, “Stop fighting, human. Rules are rules.”

When they had gone, and the sub rumbled to life, Liara said to her in a low voice, “These bars keep them from trying to kill the crew.”

Vance shut her eyes, and tried not to think about it. The slaves were quiet and didn’t fight against the restraint, but for a young woman at the far end of Vance’s row who sobbed, now loud, now quiet, as the sub’s hull groaned and creaked. One of the others shouted, likely not for the first time, for her to shut up.

#

The trip lasted hours. Vance forced herself to sleep, and woke to the interior of the sub smelling like sh*t and piss. The hull was pitching and rolling, meaning they likely were on the surface. The human was still sobbing. Worse now. Liara seemed to be in a trance, her eyes open and calm. Soon vomit was added to the symphony of odors that filled the cramped space.

The sub lurched, and there was a terrible noise, and in an instant there was an alarm blaring that the hatch had come open. Water poured in, spill from around the seal, Vance realized, but it kept coming so that a pond began to form underneath the hatch entrance. The batarian sailors had, after picking up Liara and Vance, locked themselves behind an armored door. A loophole opened, and then a second, big enough for Vance to see the barrels of a two assault rifles poking through. One of them shouted, “Master on deck! Restraints are coming off!”

And just like that the metal bar that had kept her down released and folded up into the space behind her.

The batarian sailors shouted, “On your feet!” and everyone rose as a unit. The other passengers looked to be in terrible shape. Each was dressed in the same kind of tattered uniform, baggy gray cloth that looked to have been used over and over again. Most were filthy, and had been before they came aboard. Their condition had only been made worse by the trip underwater. Vance looked at the woman she thought she’d heard sobbing, and began to speak, but the batarians shouted, “Shut up! No talking.” After a moment, the other said, “First word gets you a hot round in the knee. Now get out!”

Liara went up the ladder first, and Vance followed. They were out in the open, and it was pouring rain. The submersible they’d been in was tied up with two-dozen similar vessels, all of them in poor enough condition that Vance would have declined to board, had she first had the chance to see any of them from the outside. The one they’d been riding in was painted a flat green, and bore the symbol of a scorpion holding a diminutive human in each claw.

The next sub down was red, either from rust or a shabby coat of paint, and bore the symbol of a skull biting a fist. “Different pirate clans,” Liara said. “This one’s the Fortune’s Fools, that one is the Devil’s Hand. They’re the only way in or out of Tamaconda, unfortunately.”

Along the center of the pier, crates were stacked in uneven rows. About half of the crates were open metal cages, some empty, others holding four or five captives, exposed to the elements. Automated loaders, themselves in poor condition, hovered up and down the pier, picking up crates and cages and shuttling them here and there.

Six batarians, each armed with shock sticks and sidearms stood waiting with a series of empty cages behind them. They pointed at Liara and Vance, growling when he saw she had no collar. “Too bad,” he said with what looked like the batarian version of a smile. “Blue meat fetches the best price.” Seeing Vance, he added, I’d even throw in the one-eared human for an extra ten.”

Liara whispered, “Let it go. If you touch him, he’ll put you in a cage and sell you like the rest. We have to be careful here. Offend one of the clans, and even a freeman can end up in there.”

Vance zipped her uniform up to her throat, and hurried after Liara. “The other passengers,” she said. “Where do they come from?”

“Here and there,” Liara said. “The Devil’s Hand likes to take their captives in interstellar space. Fortune’s Fools prefer to raid colony worlds. Take your pick.”

“What’s going to happen to them?” Vance said.

“The new slave market is on the plateau up there,” Liara said. “Try not to think about it. The maglev is this way.”

#

The train was no cleaner or more pleasant than the sub. It groaned and creaked under the strain of climbing the rim of the caldera, and then descending again. From on high, the sea stretched out in every direction, and the rain that had been falling on the pier had long since moved out over the water, where the waves churned and swirled. Light broke through the clouds and fell in thick shafts on the blue water, and then looking down from the rim of the caldera into the crater, down the vertical wall onto the fields and farmland, and the little city by the lake, it seemed like a beautiful place.

Even in the old slave market, where the train deposited them an hour later, was warm and pleasant, with palm trees swaying in a gentle breeze, and old sail boats tacking against the wind.

The Old Market would have been quaint, an old square, cobbled, and surrounded by low wooden and stucco buildings painted a variety of colors, it looked like something from long ago on Earth. In a sense it was modeled after warm climate settlements that had once existed there. But even here, the calm was pierced by shouting, cries for help, and occasionally the sound of distant gunfire.

“Who keeps the peace here?” Vance asked.

“Nobody. The clans don’t officially fight each other here, for what it’s worth. All grudges on Tortuga are personal.” Liara was moving toward one of the streets that led out of the square. “Be careful,” she said. “One of my friends was taken here.” They hurried away from a trio of krogan, who had been shoving everyone out of their way as they crossed in the opposite direction. Here the street led up, toward the top of a low hill, and then bent again, into a shabby neighborhood of low buildings, some old prefab, some newer and made of stone. From there, half dozen or more alleyways led off into the shadows. Liara led the way down and then stopped at the mouth of an alley and looked in. “It happened right here, in fact.”

“What happened?”

“She was taken,” Liara said. “I looked for her for ten years, but never got close. She might have ended up like those people on the docks.” After a pause, she added, “I prefer to assume she was murdered. No body, but still, better than a life of captivity, especially for someone as pretty as she was.”

“When was this?”

“Before your time,” Liara said. “Eighty-three years ago, in fact. Have you ever heard of Miranda Lawson?”

“I know the name,” Vance said. “She was Cerberus, wasn’t she?”

“For a time,” Liara said. “I never quite trusted her, but during the war I saw a different side of her.”

“Do you think Cerberus came after her?”

“It was never clear who,” Liara said. “The conventional wisdom was that Cerberus was effectively destroyed during the Reaper Invasion. Some survived, though. Not their command structure, but the idea they embodied.” Liara was examining a spot on the wall, about waist high on the moss-crusted wall. “Whoever did it, wanted me to think it was one of the clans. But they had no reason, apart from money, and no one ever asked for a ransom.”

“Why here?”

“Miranda had contacts here in Tamaconda, and in Port Verdant to the east. But this time she said she had something for me.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t know. I was on my way here when she disappeared.” Liara was scraping at something on the wall. “From what I understand, she found out she was being followed, ducked in here, and then was taken—” she pointed down the alley “—about a dozen meters that way. Women like Miranda, like me, probably like you, we shouldn’t expect to die peacefully in our sleep.” Liara ran her hand over another section of the wall. What she might have been looking for, Vance couldn’t tell, but she began looking, too, just for something to do. All of a sudden, Liara whispered, “There!” and bent down. She scraped away some of the moss, where a series of lines had been scratched into the soft stone.

Vance bent down to look. “That looks like a map.”

“That’s because it is,” Liara said. “Whatever she left for me, it’s not far from here.” Liara turned and moved out of the alley. Where the passageway met the street, she stopped and looked out for a moment before retreating immediately back into the shadows. “It appears that we have picked up some friends.” She made a fist and it glowed blue. “It’s time I showed you about the second rule of field work.”

Chapter 11: Escape Velocity

Chapter Text

In the telescope, the Nixia had grown from a tiny speck, a single pixel of dim gray against the dark black of space, into an object whose outline was almost legible in the viewfinder. There was the yellow station light, and the blue one just visible on the far side. Two or three pixels of dim red represented the viewports of the command deck. And behind them small cylinders that made up the crew, science and engineering decks lay dwarfed by massive spheres clad in white ceramic tiles that held their fuel reserves. In less than six hours, Essa would be aboard again, captain of her ship once more, or she would be hurtling out into the void of interplanetary space. The navigator who was working with her said they stood a good chance of making it. Ninety-seven percent. But there was one problem that still needed to be resolved.

Essa climbed down out of the launch and into the tall grass. At one edge of the forest lay their encampment, where a bonfire was continually burning. From the other edge of the clearing, about three kilometers distant, there came a whistling hoot, like a bird maybe. It wasn't a bird, though. It was one of those creatures, hideous as a monster, but perhaps not so monstrous after all. She had killed a number of them a fortnight ago, and wrecked the launch in the process, forcing she and her crew to make hasty repairs and modifications, that now led to this last decision.

Damaged as it was, the launch could still easily reach low planetary orbit. But something had happened to the Nixia, an emergency vent of one of their four main fuel tanks had left them with only enough fuel for a single pass, not orbital insertion and then return to escape velocity. The launch would need to be traveling at escape velocity in order to rendezvous, and that meant that, even after they had dumped all but the most necessary gear, and even some of the food, even after they had removed all dead weight that would never be used again, including most of the heat shield, there wouldn't be enough lift capacity to carry all of them back to the ship. Out of the twenty-three who had landed on this goddessforsaken planet, and of the seventeen who were still alive, only twelve could return to the Nixia. Five more would remain stranded indefinitely, probably for the rest of their lives, on a planet that was already inhabited by a species of intelligent and hostile animals.

Essa looked across the clearing at the bonfire, and then in the other direction. There came another hoot, and this time it was answered by a chorus of voices. Were they preparing another attack? If they did, the mission was finished. She balled her fists and then checked her watch: five hours and twenty-three minutes. On this planet that meant one more sunset, and about half a night. They had to hold out that long.

Turning back to the bonfire, she saw figures moving across the pink-red light. They were waiting. She put her head down, put on her captain's face and strode through the tall grass to meet them.

Nerai was waiting for her at the edge of the camp. Her child, now nearly three, clung to her hip. She was out of uniform, having tanned some of the creatures' hides and turned their shaggy white pelts into a shift and leggings. Her daughter wore similar clothes. "Captain," she said. Something was on her mind. "Have you given any more thought to my proposal?"

"Huntress," Essa said. She would have said more, but Orie approached from by the fire.

"Captain," she said, "we are ready for you."

Essa found the rest of the crew arranged in a semicircle. At one end stood Commandant Razia, head of the detachment of commandos who had come with them. Beside her was Liss. Orie took her place at the other end, leaving the rest of the crew, science officers and technicians, none of them suited to the way the had spent their last three years, scraping their living out of the forest as best they could. Essa surveyed their faces. Razia and Liss both looked weary, but ready. Orie terrified. The rest of them appeared to be somewhere between defeated and broken. None of them met her gaze. Nerai approached with her daughter.

"Captain," she said again. "Before you do this at least consider my offer."

"I have, Huntress," Essa said. She examined her crew again, and then began to speak. "Twenty-three of us landed here three years ago. Sixteen of now stand before me. We have left the bones and ashes of our friends, and of our—" her voice caught "—our beloved here. But I am afraid we shall have to leave a few more behind. Five of you must stay. You have all worked to make our launch as ready to fly as possible, and you have all worked with the hope of returning once more to Thessia. I cannot ask you to sacrifice that hope—"

"Captain," Nerai said again. "I must—"

"I will not ask anyone to volunteer to remain, but in accordance with the law, I will ask you to draw your own fate." Essa produced a bag she had fashioned out of a scrap of tarpaulin. "Inside are metal bearings, each identical, but for their color. Blue lots give you a space on the launch. Red lots will remain. May the goddess smile upon you." She held up the bag, and bid the first crew member come forward. She drew her bearing and returned to her place, the marble sized bit of metal hidden in her hand. "Show us," Essa said. The crew member opened her fist to show a blue bearing. A murmur went through the rest of the crew. Essa watched them counting.

"Captain," Nerai said again. "I must insist."

Essa turned to Nerai. "Your opinion is noted," she said, "But I will not leave you here. Not with a child so young." Nerai shook her head and stormed off. Essa held out the bag once more. The next crew member came forward, took her bearing and returned to her spot. Blue again. Two more times with the bag, two more blues. Only five spots remaining now, one belonged to Essa herself, given that she was the only one who could fly the launch. So far, one from engineering, one from the science deck, Razia and one of the other commandos had drawn seats on the launch. Liss was next. Hers was red. As was the next, for one of the science officers.

Orie had slowly begun crumpling in on herself as the process had dragged on. Two days earlier she'd told the captain the same thing as Nerai, that she would stay, in the hopes of some day being rescued. That was not how things were done, Essa had told her. The choice must be left up to the Goddess.

Essa wondered why she was bothering with the formality, though, except that it was required by asari maritime law. It wasn't, she reasoned, likely she would ever face an inquiry, she thought now, as one crew member drew another red bearing, and her companion yet another—not because she was blameless. Far from it, but because she knew the likelihood of surviving even the next stage of their journey was incredibly unlikely.

Now. There were two bearings left in the bag. One red, one blue. Nerai had drawn a blue bearing for herself and her daughter, and now stood apart from the rest, looking furious. The crew who had drawn red, Essa saw, were not the fittest to survive for an extended period in the wilderness. An engineer, two scientists, and one huntress. They faced long odds.

The last two came forward to either receive their clearance to leave, or their orders to remain behind. Orie and Mennia, the final tech. Orie's hand trembled as it went into the bag, and she spent a good long while feeling each bearing, as though that would tell her which to choose. Essa kept her eyes steadfastly ahead of her, while the steward hesitated, and then finally drew out her lot. Red.

Mennia looked relieved, then as though she were about to be sick. Essa put down the bag and turned to the crew.

"The lots have been drawn," she said. The crew members who had drawn red had all gathered together, a little closer to the fire. "Fate has decided, but the orders are mine to give. If you have drawn a red lot, you will remain here to await rescue. I know that hard years await, and for that I am sorry, but we shall unlock the mystery of these installations and return to find you. That I promise. May the goddess be with you." She took a breath and clasped her hands behind her back. "All other crew are to say your farewells, and muster at the launch in one hour. Fall out."

Essa made her way through the camp. The commandos had foreseen the reality that lay ahead, and spent what time they could fashioning weapons and tools, and rigging a defensive perimeter around the rough shelters, one or two still patched together with old tarpaulins, most made of thatch. The fire was burning well, but fuel to keep it going for any length of time would be hard to sustain. Perhaps with fewer mouths to feed—but then, fewer arms to defend, as well, and only one huntress.

Essa found Orie, who was taking the news especially hard, crouched down at the tree line, holding her stomach. Seeing Essa, she stood, but looked only at the dirt in front of her feet.

"Captain," she said.

"Steward," Essa answered. She searched for something encouraging to say, but found only this: "I hate to leave you here, but safety is no more assured aboard the ship."

Orie was quite for a long time. At last she said, "Thank you. I wanted you to know that I've got family in Tenaris. If you get home before me, will you—" she stopped herself and then tried to go on. "Would you find them and tell them what happened to us? I mean, out here?" She gestured up at the stars, which were now just coming into view beyond the smoke of the bonfire. "Will you tell them for me?"

Essa nodded. She took Orie's hands in hers. Under normal circ*mstances she never would have allowed herself such familiarity with the crew, but this was an exceptional evening. "Orie," she said. Her voice was gentle, "Show them to me."

Orie nodded and stepped closer to place her forehead against her captain's. In an instant they were somewhere else, a group of asari were seated around a shared hearth, at one time a communal place, in farming communities they were nearly as important the well, and just as busy with activity. No longer strictly necessary, in modern times they remained an important place for gatherings. Looking through Orie's eyes, she saw several bondmates warming themselves at dusk.There was Orie's mother, dressed in the orange coverall worn by mechanics all over Thessia. She had a gap between her front teeth, and eyes that were an unusual shade of green. She spoke with a lisp. When she laughed, she clapped her hands, and in this particular memory, was dancing with four or five others. And there was Orie and one of her many aunts. She was only a few years old, and dressed in a coverall like her mother's, part of a toy set that came with little wrenches and drills that clipped to a belt. The temple of Athame rose in the background, but no one paid it much attention, even when the bells rang for evening.

It was wonderful, and Essa said so.

"Tell her about me, and all I did out here," Orie said. "She'll be happy to know. I know she will."

Then there was a flash of light, and the memory receded, and Essa and Orie were drifting in the calm, blue dark of their shared minds, a wonderful place to linger, but there simply wasn't time, and Orie knew it. She broke contact a little before Essa did, and the change in state left her feeling ill at ease.

Meanwhile the departing crew had gathered at the bottom of the ramp to the launch. Those who would be left behind, had arranged themselves to watch. Essa approached the crew and studied them, and it was only after having counted them twice that she realize that Nerai wasn't there.

She wheeled around, and looked behind her, only to spot her standing with the others. She had lifted her child up onto her shoulders. Essa checked the time. They would need to be underway in less than fifteen minutes. Nerai had made sure to orchestrate it this way, to avoid a lengthy conversation. All the same, Essa ran to where she was standing.

"You're disobeying a direct order, Huntress."

"I'm not under your chain of command," Nerai said.

"Did Razia order you to remain?"

Nerai shook her head. She gestured at her daughter, and said, "I only take orders from her now." After a moment she added, "Pray come back for us. In the meantime, though, I'll look out for this lot, and you look out for them. Good?"

Essa nodded. She had to go. She and Nerai shook hands, and then separated, one toward camp, one toward the launch.

#

Essa ran through her final preflight checks, while the navigator, who was presently her acting XO, saw to securing the remainder of the passengers. The copilot's viewport had a crack in it that they'd covered with an adhesive mesh that would probably hold once they were in the hard vacuum of space. Probably. Everyone was wearing EVA suits just to be sure, though there weren't enough to go around, so Commandant Razia had decided to forgo hers.

The Nixia's locator beacon was still pinging, good and strong, and was now only sixty-two minutes out. Essa had trained on maneuvers like this hundreds of times in the simulator, and done more than her share in real life. Only in all those cases, she had solid ground beneath her, or just a short distance away. In this case, the escape burn would expending nearly all of their fuel reserves. Not that it mattered. The heat shield was gone anyhow. Either this would work, or it wouldn't. She focused on the switches and dials in front of her. At least she could control them.

And then the last switch was done. She radioed the Nixia as she completed the main engine start sequence. The launch rose from its makeshift cradle. Essa pulled the lever that jettisoned the landing struts, then angled the ship upward. As she went, she rolled the launch onto its back, circling once over the camp at about a thousand meters, before she turned again, over a low mountain range, then passing over a narrow sea, before finally breaking through a dense layer of clouds near the dawn side of the planet. Atmospheric resistance dwindled. The viewport made an odd pop, but if anything there was only a slow leak. It only needed to hold for a little while longer.

The planet dropped away, and the ship came into view. A speck, but much larger on the telescopic eye. Now she could see what looked like figures in the co*ckpit. The ship was rolled on its back relative to them, and Essa took note of this as she planned her approach.

The launch's tracking beacon made contact with the Nixia again, and everything seemed to be going well, in spite of not receiving answers to the navigator's hails.

"Why aren't they answering?"

"We'll ask them when we see them," Essa said.

The rest of the maneuver went smoothly. In ten minutes they had pulled alongside the ship. Essa did a slow pass of the exterior. The crew's earlier report was true. One of their main fuel cells had ruptured, a small meteoroid impact, by the look of it, that had smashed right through the shielding and burst a hole big enough to crawl through in the upper quadrant of the vessel. It was a miracle that there hadn't been more damage. The rest of the ship looked to be intact. All the lights were working, and the main and secondary airlocks were all in good condition. The flight deck still wasn't responding to hails.

"Their comms seem to be working," the navigator said. "I have tone on all major and backup frequencies. They're just not using them."

"Let's find out what's going on."

Essa coupled the launch to the ship's main airlock, and began powering it down. The passengers unstrapped. Some of them gasped when they were set free of their harness. After three years on solid ground, they had lost their feeling for weightlessness. One of them vomited, while Razia worked the airlock.

Perhaps that was why Essa didn't notice anything amiss until the navigator came to fetch her.

"Captain," you need to come right away.

"What is it?"

The navigator didn't speak, but only took Essa's arm. Essa allowed herself to be dragged out of her restraints and through the airlock. It was then that she noticed the smell.

All long-endurance space vessels have a certain smell. So many bodies, with so little opportunity to wash, the scents of work, of cooking, of digestion, all the other smells associated with being alive, mixed together to produce an odor that often made the uninitiated recoil. Entering the Nixia was different. The pungent stink of life was gone, and in its place was the fungal, odor of death. Essa covered her mouth and nearly vomited. After a moment, in the companionway to the flight deck, her mind somehow took control of her stomach, and forced the urge away. "What happened?" she said.

The navigator only covered her face with her hands, and gestured. As Essa emerged onto the flight deck, she saw first her XO, two navigators, and a comms operator, buckled into their seats. By the look of it, they'd been dead for a long time.

"They're all like this," the navigator said. "The entire crew is dead."

Chapter 12: Ancon

Chapter Text

Beyond the slum was a quiet lakeside neighborhood. Liara had described it to her, before they’d split up. Vance was to go there and find her, once the danger had passed them by. Beyond the slum, Liara had told her, you’ll come to narrow arroyo. On the other side, you’ll find a neighborhood that fronts onto the lake. Liara had warned her about going near the lakeshore, but had instead advised her to hang back, find a red house with a big garden that faces a quiet street. We’ll find a friend there.

Vance had found the arroyo just fine, and with a little luck she’d left the men who had been chasing her well behind, or so she’d thought, until at a junction between two alleyways, she and one of her pursuers had nearly crashed into each other. She’d reached for his weapon, just as he’d tried to raise its against her, and there had been a struggle over the rifle that Vance might have won, if the man hadn’t pulled the trigger.

Vance had left part of her left palm on the hot metal, but it was likely that her right elbow had broken the man’s jaw. An even trade, she thought, but the gunfire had drawn the others in her direction.

The slum ran right up to the edge of the arroyo. The slumside bank had burned in the last few years, stripping it bare of all but weeds and patches of grass. The rest was strewn with garbage, and debris from a few houses that had collapsed as the bank widened over time. At the bottom, a slow-moving thread of green water tumbled over loose rocks. Up above, on the far bank, trees and tall grass grew in abundance, and provided better concealment, if not cover, from her pursuers. Something whizzed past her head, a bug or a bullet. Whatever it was Vance kept moving.

She had to climb a tree to get out of the canyon. Over the edge, and back onto level ground again, she found herself in an open area. A vacant lot, that had grown up around the hulk of an ancient human freighter that had crash landed here. Use it as a landmark, Liara had told her, but stay away. Too much open ground.

Easily said, harder to do when you walked right up on it. There was almost no cover beyond the edge of the canyon, apart from a mound of red earth, and a few tufts of waist high grass. Beyond that, fifty meters of more red dirt, packed hard, and rutted by decades of rainfall. The ship would provide good cover, but beyond it, was another hundred meters or more of open ground. Just above the ship’s drive cone, Vance saw the name of the ship, Ancon, on one of the few ceramic panels that had not been looted from the ship’s outer skin.

She remembered the story of the Ancon. Spacefaring had always been a dangerous, lonely business. But the Ancon was a bit of a special case, in that it had disappeared from orbit over Mars, after having dropped off its load of supplies at the Schiaparelli base. Schiaparelli was a secondary prothean site that had only recently been unearthed. Vance had followed the news as a young girl along with her older sister. They’d had an entire wall of their cubicle inside the housing allotment devoted to the newest discoveries—even if most of them weren’t necessarily technologically significant. Then the Ancon had vanished, no debris, no cryptic transmissions. Just one day, it was departing Mars orbit, and the next it had not failed to call at Benning, where it was supposed to begin its next run.

The extranet had abounded with conspiracy theories, of course. The most enduring one was that the ship had been carrying some sort of top secret artifact, a beacon or maybe a new type of unstable power source that was to be studied at a black site. Even Vance and her sister, Alyssa, had been quite taken with the idea for a time. But none of the stories ever made sense. The Schiaparelli base was already under Alliance control, and Mars remained largely uninhabited. Anything they’d found, even something hazardous, could just as easily have been studied onsite. Or simply moved a few hundred kilometers away, to a new section of the sandy waste that was Mars. A competing idea was that the freighter had collided with a stray bit of debris from the Shield cloud, the orbiting debris field left behind after the combined fleets had met the full reaper strength over earth. But even, then, it didn’t really make sense. The Shield Cloud had a predictable orbital period—every April, its orbit crossed that of the Earth, and most of the field was well inside Mars orbit.

The third, and possibly the most frightening, and subsequently the theory that had caused the greatest amount of Alliance activity in the Sol system, was the possibility that the ship had been taken by force somewhere in transit between Mars and the Charon relay. The idea that pirates were operating within the heart of Alliance territory had been enough to guarantee that Vance would apply for officer candidate school on her eighteenth birthday, and that her sister, too frightened to join, would never leave the surface of the planet where she had been born.

Seeing the Ancon, perched on two of its landing skids, both of them partially crumpled and its spars bent and cracked amidships, made Vance stop dead in her tracks. It might have been that moment of hesitation that saved her life, as one of her pursuers emerged from the brush, about ten meters to her right. Almost immediately he began to trot across the red dirt, his rifle aimed at the far end of the clearing. He’d crossed about half the distance to the ship, when she fell upon him, kicking his right knee out and wrapping her arm around his neck. The man grunted and struggled, his hands letting go of the rifle to claw at her arms and face, but she held on. In another instant he was unconscious. She held on, still, and shuffled her feet to drag him toward the shadows where the Ancon had crumpled into the dirt. He fought her, fingernails clawing into the flesh of her forearms, but then perhaps realizing he couldn’t get free, he whispered, No...wait—

By the time she’d reached the ship, the man was probably dead, but from concealment, she counted to thirty, while her arms stayed clamped down on his throat. Best to be sure, her instructors had told her. When she finally dropped him, she was panting and dizzy, nearly on the point of passing out from the effort.

One last look at the man. One eye was open, its pupil so dilated it was nearly black, the sclera a pink blur of burst blood vessels, the other was nearly closed, his mouth slack, a terrifying little void of black beyond his lips. Vance scanned the edge of the arroyo for more pursuers, and realized the rifle lay where he’d dropped it. Vance hesitated, wondering if she should sprint to grab it, or leave, when a bullet struck the metal directly in front of her. She fell onto her back and scrambled away, pushing with her legs and feet, until she had become entangled in the dead man’s limbs. Still she pushed, finally rolling over as another burst of rounds struck the dirt beside her.

Vance ran. She’d killed one of them. It wouldn’t stop the others from coming. Maybe it would only make them angry. She ran left as she passed the hulk of the freighter, trying to keep it between her and the shooter for as long as she could. There were still nearly a hundred meters of open ground to cover, and beyond that the path was uncertain. Up ahead, the nearest way out might be blocked by a wall made of scrap metal.

Her burned hand throbbed and bled. She wasn’t getting enough air. More shots whipped past. One burst a fist-sized hole in the wall of the building in front of her. She ran right now. More ground to cover but would throw off her attacker’s aim. Another shot, and she turned again, and again, until she’d reached the fence, just high enough that she would need to clamber over it. Which she did. As she went over, she saw a turian aiming his rifle at her and then a hand grabbed her shoulder and pulled her over the edge of the fence into the dark alleyway behind. Bullets raked the top of the fence.

The hand was still on her shoulder. Someone was shouting, and there was more shooting, this time from a nearby window. Quietly someone said, “They’re down.” Liara helped Vance to her feet, and the two of them followed the alley into a market square that had grown up around a small inlet from the lake that filled the center of the caldera.

“We’re safer here,” Liara said. “This area is controlled by the Hound’s Children.”

“Doesn’t sound safe,” Vance said. They walked in silence for a moment, then Vance stopped and pretended to examine an array of fruit, piled high on a cart at the edge of the market. “The ship—“ she began. “Have you heard of the Ancon?”

“Enough to know the rumors on the extranet are mostly false.”

“Nothing to do with stolen prothean artifacts, then?”

“Oh, no,” Liara said. “That part is entirely true. I arranged the theft myself.”

“But what about the crew?”

“It was my crew,” Liara said. “When I say I made all the arrangements, I mean just that.”

“And where are the artifacts?”

“Here and there,” Liara said. Vance shook her head. “This way,” Liara whispered. Taking Vance by the elbow, she directed her companion toward an open doorway, and then into the dark within. Inside was a krogan, so big he nearly filled the entire room they’d entered. Without a word, he searched them for weapons, and pulling a length of scrap metal that could have been used as a knife from Liara’s waistband. “I’ll keep this here for you,” he said, folding the makeshift blade in half and tossing it into a bin.

“She’s inside,” the krogan said, and stepped out of the way. “Good to see you again, Liara.” Vance made to follow, but the krogan stopped her. “Not you.”

“Come on, Kadkech,” Liara said. “She’s with me. I’ll vouch for her.”

“Your funeral,” Kadkech said.

Vance followed Liara through a doorway, past rooms where bodies lay draped out on couches, as though sleeping, though some were swaying their arms to and fro, as though conducting music that only they could hear. Down a flight of stairs they came to another doorway, and here a young woman holding some kind of fighting stick stood aside to let them pass. Beyond the threshold was a parlor, of sorts, with ancient furniture from earth arranged around an elaborate rug and low table. The room overlooked the lake, but most of its windows were shuttered, the slats only partially open, leaving the figure who stood opposite them hidden in shadow.

“How did you know to find me here?” the voice asked. It was a human, a woman, Vance realized, and likely earthborn.

“I had a suspicion that Ilium would turn its back on you,” Liara said. “The way it did me.” She touched one of the long sofas. “Your grandfather’s furniture?” Liara asked. “He was a collector, was he not?”

The woman nodded. She stepped forward, into a shaft of light. Dark hair, blue eyes, dressed in a close-fitting, formal outfit with soft-soled boots made for moving fast and quiet. She placed her hand on the back of one the couches, and bid the two of them sit.

“You’ll forgive me for the dust,” the woman said. “We’ve only just arrived.”

A servant brought in a tray with tea. Watching her go, Vance wondered if the little stoop-shouldered woman was a slave, like the ones she’d seen on the pier.

“You don’t mean to stay permanently, do you Kiera?”

“No, just until this whole thing with Deniri blows over. Not that I’m stupid enough to think I’m beyond her grasp, even here.” The woman, Kiera, had seated herself across from them, and now, placing her forearms on her knees and leaning forward, she said, “Tell me what you know. I’ll see if I can fill in the gaps.”

Liara began, “About ten years ago, Deniri summoned me to the Citadel. They were tearing down some old buildings on Tayseri Ward, and happened to come across a data cache that my mother had left behind. It had been tampered with, of course Deniri’s scarcely even tried to hide that from me, but still I looked. And it led me to an old asari colony world, not so far from here.” Liara went on, telling this woman everything, about the turian intelligence officer, Varian, she’d collected on Omega, and about the wounded quarian they’d saved, about the human colony world called Pirin, and more files that Benezia had stashed all over the galaxy, including one in an old prothean colony that had somehow survived the initial reaper invasion, about Aria and about Afterlife, and the death of the rest of her team, and about the years she had spent, hiding in plain sight, fighting with different operations as a mercenary grunt, here and there, across the Traverse.

“And your friend?” Kiera asked.

“A hostage, and now an ally. I took her off a human carrier, after they’d tried to interrogate me.” Liara paused to sip her tea. “Now, what do you know?”

Kiera seemed to weigh her answer carefully before she answered. “There’s a war on. It’s bad, and it’s everywhere. The entire council is at each other’s throats. The entire citadel government has fallen apart, as far as we can tell, asari fighting humans, humans fighting turians, turians fighting salarians. It’s been brewing since I was born, but now everyone got the spark they wanted.”

“The fall of Pirin was all it took,” Liara said. “It’s excellent for Deniri, because it makes her appear innocent”

“And, of course, to top it all off, all the council races are hunting everywhere for the leviathan. They all think they’ve broken the Dekkuna accords, in the midst of everything.”

“They’re a distraction in all this,” Liara said. “Deniri wanted a war, and now she has it.”

“Over what, though?”

Liara shook her head. “I was hoping you could help with that.” She put down her cup and leaned forward. “The last time I spoke to your mother, she was here. She said she had something for me, but disappeared before I could find her.”

“That was before my time.”

“She told me so much about you, your mother.”

“She’d been gone for half a century before I was even born.”

“Yes, but you’d already been conceived,” Liara said. “In a sense that was part of her plan. Miranda wanted you to have a chance at a clean life, clear of all the people like—”

“Like you? Yes, I suspect that that’s the case.” Kiera shook her head. “Still. It would have been nice to know her. She was my mother, after all, even if I was grown in a tank.” After a pause, she rose and said, “Come. Let’s get you cleaned up.” A servant led them into adjoining rooms, where she told Vance and Liara to wash. By the time they were done, fresh clothing was laid out for each of them. When they were dressed once more, Kiera came to find them. “I have something to show you,” she said.

She led them out of the parlor, and into a study. Against one wall, biometric storage boxes were stacked floor to ceiling, the other wall was a giant picture window looking out over the lake. In the center of the room stood an old wooden desk. Kiera pulled out the center drawer and flipped it over on top of the desk.

Vance stepped closer to have a look, but didn’t see anything. Liara pulled out her omnitool and played the ultraviolet beam across the ancient wood. A set of flickering numbers‚—303— appeared in the beam, as the light hit them.

Liara touched the numbers, and then felt around with her fingertips, until something—a bit of transparent film came away into her hand.

“The desk arrived at Ilium a few weeks after she disappeared. The story was always that she’d come here to buy it. I never noticed the numbers until about a year ago.”

“Did your mother write this?” Liara asked.

Kiera shook her head. “I never knew. She must have though—” she gestured toward what Liara had in her hand “—perhaps that might tell you.”

“Let’s have a look,” Liara said. But having a look took some doing. The transparent foil contained a decryption key, and an extranet address that linked to a number of small files embedded in an otherwise innocuous-looking site. What were they seeing though? The first ten or so pages were all reports from the front lines of the reaper invasion, all but one of them produced by field commanders who hadn’t lived long enough to file the data themselves. They were chilling, Vance thought, the stories of desperate fighting and sacrifice, all just to hold on long enough to evacuate one or two more civilians, most of whom wouldn’t survive any longer than the soldiers who were helping them. There were a hundred more, each one worse than one before it. Until Vance came across something entirely different, a strange looking photograph embedded in the middle of one of the reports. On closer examination, it wasn’t a photograph at all, but a mosaic of black and white dots, arranged to form a coded message.

“Look at this,” she said to Liara, handing over the data pad. “I think this is a message.”

Liara held up the image. “So it is.” They studied the image for a long time. The image was composed of dots of varying size, and from that they deduced there was a code. Liara ran it through a half a dozen programs before she began to see the system. “Grid coordinates,” she said, after a time, “Most of the data is junk, meant to throw someone off, but—” she paused to highlight a string of digits near the bottom left corner, “—these map to a place that I know. It’s an old Blue Suns mercenary base on Korlus. The asari military had set up a listening post there centuries earlier, before they turned the place into a ship breaking ground.”

Soon enough, Liara and Kiera were poring over a holographic display of the planet, pinpointing the location’s exact coordinates. “Does it match?” Kiera was asking.

“It’s close. Not perfect. We will have our work cut out for us, that’s for sure.” She got up and went over to the windows, open now. The sun had long ago set over the edge fo the volcano’s rim, but far above on the peaks, light still flared on the long tails of snow that blew eastward on the storm winds. She went out onto the terrace, and Vance made to follow her, but Kiera stopped her.

“Let her go,” she said. “She needs to think.”

But Vance was feeling nervous. The morning that began in danger, followed by a peaceful afternoon of tea and cakes and gossip between veteran intelligence professionals. It didn’t quite fit, like someone had let them slip away, and were now closing in again. You get a feeling, her training officer had told her, you damn well better listen to it. Walk away, even if it means giving up on a potentially big win. Kiera seemed to understand what Vance was thinking.

“Palmyra,” she said. “What’s eating you?”

Vance shook her head. “Have you ever killed anyone?”

Kiera smiled. “No,” she said. It was a lie.

“I choked a man to death this morning,” she said. “It wasn’t what I thought it would be.”

Kiera was quiet. For all Vance knew, those could have been men that she’d sent. You can’t really trust anyone, after all. They could have been sent just to push Vance and Liara in Kiera’s direction. There was a breath of wind that stirred the trees all along the lakeshore. All along the water it was black as night, with lights coming on in the homes all along the water, and on boats that lay at anchor a few hundred meters offshore.

Vance stepped outside. “Liara,” she said. “We should get some rest. We’ve a long way to go to get to Korlus.”

Liara seemed to wake from a dream. Her body shivered, and she stepped away from the stone balustrade. Vance went out to meet her halfway, and Kiera hurried out with them too. The three met in the middle of the terrace and then they all had begun to turn. Just then, the wind died, and all was still, impossibly quiet. Then waves were lapping against the shore, and the wind was again in the trees. A hydrofoil raced along, far out on the horizon. None of them heard the shot.

Not until Kiera slumped to her knees. The projectile had taken her just below the shoulder, and taken off her arm so that it dangled by little more than a thread of skin and flesh. There was a second shot as they dragged her inside and threw her down on the couch, but Liara had put up a barrier, and it glanced off into the night. A medical drone came to work on Kiera’s arm almost as soon as they were inside, while Vance put out the lights and scanned for the sniper. Another bullet struck nearby. Whoever it was shooting wasn’t experienced enough to pull off a shot from this far away, or—or perhaps—Vance looked up and saw the hydrofoil that had been far out had turned and was now racing hard across the water straight at Kiera’s compound, firing rockets as it came. The first two missed high, and struck one of the upper levels of the building. Everything shook, and the power went off.

Liara was standing over Kiera as the drone worked, muttering, no, no, no, and then something about the wind, that it wasn’t her fault, Kiera, it had been the wind, otherwise it would be me, lying in your place.

“We’ve got to get you out of here,” Liara was saying now, and Kiera had her hand on Liara’s face, and was saying something about an escape plan. A way out. “Not far,” Kiera said. “Through the passageway to your right, and down the stairs.”

Kiera’s hand dropped from Liara’s face. When she spoke her voice was only a whisper. “Go,” she said. Her skin was already white and it had the slack, clammy look of someone who had already bled out. She was dead, her heart just didn’t know it yet, and so it kept pumping.

“We have to go,” Vance said. Liara lingered.

She rose just as a rocket passed directly over them and burst in one of the upper floors. Kiera’s people had taken up positions in the windows and were returning fire now, but there was the sound of small arms from the street, too. Her men couldn’t fight in every direction, what few of them there must have been.

Vance grabbed Liara, and pulled her into the corridor. They found the stairs and ran down and down while the building shook with more rocket strikes, until they came to a blast door, made of concrete and steel. Liara spun the crank and hauled it open, and the two of them pulled it shut once they were both through. Inside, blue light reflected off walls that had been painted yellow, giving everything a greenish cast. The room stretched out long in front of them, a number beds, stacked like shelves, and the beds themselves stacked with supplies. Liara shone a light toward the far end of the room, where the corridor dead ended against a blank wall. Electronics stood stacked nearby, but none of it looked useful. There were weapons, too, none brand new, but all well kept, and ready for use, what little the two of them could do to fight off what might very well be a company-strength unit, deploying this very second from the hydrofoil.

“You’re hurt,” Liara said. Vance looked down. There was blood all over the blue tunic that Kiera had given them just hours earlier, though she hadn’t felt anything at the time. Now there was an odd burning sensation in her cheek and chin. “Here,” Liara said. She pressed the locking mechanism on the bunker door before overloading the panel with her omnitool. She produced a medkit from one of the shelves and plucked a fragment of bone from Vance’s chin. And another from her cheek. The wounds didn’t bother her, but the bone made her think of the man she’d killed, and Vance suddenly collapsed to her knees to vomit. Liara waited patiently, even handed Vance a bottle of water from the stash they’d found. But at last she said, “Listen, they’ll already have found the door.” It was quiet outside, but that didn’t mean anything. The building shook again, but that was far away. “In ten minutes they’ll be here with a frame charge to blow it open. Likely they won’t even need to kill us. The blast alone in this tiny compartment turn our bodies to jelly. We need to get out of here.”

Vance collected herself. “How?”

“We look for a way out,” Liara said. “We’re still alive. I aim to stay that way.” The look in her eye was wild, and, not for the first time, Vance realized she was locked in a small room with a dangerous alien, one who could crush her with little more than a thought.

They began by examining the far wall, then the floor, pulling up the mats that covered the bare concrete, then by shoving aside anything that wasn’t bolted to the floor. Outside there was the distinct sound of someone pounding on the concrete. “There they are,” Liara said. “Five minutes before they blow the door.”

Vance grabbed a pistol and readied it, just in case. Then she had a thought. Searching through the supplies, she found something that looked like it would burn. With Liara’s omnitool, they set it on fire. A current of air pulled the smoke under one of the rows of beds. “There,” she said. Liara grabbed the stack of beds with her biotics and ripped them from the floor. Another moment of concentration and she had heaved them clean across the room. She fell to her knees. At first Vance thought she was looking for the way out, but soon realized that Liara was dazed. Outside, there was the howl of a drill. They were already screwing the frame charges in place.

Vance felt around on the floor. There was a clear seam at the base of the wall, and after a minute of hunting, she found a cavity. When she shoved her finger inside, there was a mechanical button that released a heavy panel of concrete that swung out to reveal a passageway big enough for the two of them to fit through. Liara was still dazed. Vance grabbed her by the collar and shoved her through the opening before following Liara through. On her way out, she grabbed a handful of ration packs and shoved them into her pocket. The drilling stopped as she pulled the hatch shut and spun the locking bar closed. Vance tore open the ration pack and thrust it at Liara, then she held her breath and covered her ears as the whole island seemed to shake, and concrete dust rained down on them from above, but the door held.

“On your feet, Liara,” she said. Her former captor staggered, but stood. Where they were, there was hardly room to be fully upright. They were in the interior of some sort of geothermal exchange’s spillway. A torrent of scalding water ran through a deep channel just to their right, while the two of them stood on a narrow platform that ran alongside the water, all the way to where the channel bent to the left. The water stank of sulfur. There were yellow stains everywhere, on the concrete, on the ceiling of the cavern, on the metal railings.

They progressed as best they could, Liara staggering and holding her side as thought she had a cramp, while she stuffed another ration bar into her mouth. The path rounded a bend, and the spillway widened, and again, at another turn. The island shook again.

“Sounds like they found our way out,” Liara said. She was putting a brave face on things, but her skin gray and scaly in a way it hadn’t before she’d used her biotics.

“How is it you can even use your biotics?” Vance asked, after they’d gone another kilometer, and made it around another turn in the cavern. “When we took you captive, we made sure to pull your wetware.”

Liara smiled. “You only took the external amp,” she said. “There’s a second, surgically implanted at the base of my spine.”

“Those are illegal,” Vance said.

“I work in intelligence,” Liara said. “Just about everything I do is illegal.” Vance smiled, but Liara’s look was dead serious. “If you’d left me with both amps,” she said, “I’d have torn a hole in your ship and there’d have been nothing you or the rest of the Alliance could have done to stop me.” Vance didn’t doubt her. They went on in silence, Liara’s limp was getting better, but it was still slowing her down. The cavern they had entered was broad, nearly a thousand meters across, and the raging torrent of water had slowed as it had grown deeper and wider. Still it was moving quickly, a seemingly still sheet, its surface rough and pitted with intermingling eddies and currents that filled the air with a low hum.

But over the sound of the water, the sound of voices and footsteps carried on the wind.

“Do you hear them?” Vance said.

Liara nodded. “There’s no cover here,” she said, “Up ahead I see an opening. Looks like as good a place as any to make a stand.” Vance nodded in agreement, but they had to make it there first.

They ran, Liara half-limping as she went, toward the opening. It was a tall arch, cut into the wall of the cavern, and behind it there looked like there might be something they could use as cover. As they drew closer, half running, half limping, they saw something else. Beyond the archway, the open area was a landing pad, and sitting in the middle of it was a ship, a newer model private transport, fast and inconspicuous, even if it was likely unarmed. The ship’s name, painted in bold red and gold lettering across the bow, read Ancon II.

“Well,” Liara said with a smile. “Our luck seems to be turning, doesn’t it?” She flipped a power coupling on the ground console. The ship’s running and co*ckpit lights came on, and the ramp slowly dropped down for them to enter. Liara hurried inside. Vance followed, and watched from the entrance to the co*ckpit while Liara was warming up the reactor. After a moment, Liara asked, “Do you still have that pistol?” Liara asked, without turning around. Vance did. “It seems we’re unarmed, so I’m going to need you to guard the ramp.”

“Right,” Vance said. She hurried back out to the ramp, into the main cabin, where one of them had stained one of the white leather seats with a bloody handprint. The ramp was slung under the bow of the ship, so Vance had good cover from the ship itself, and from the nose gear that also blocked part of her view of the entrance. She took up position at the base of the ramp, right behind where the landing gear was thickest, and waited. Over the comms, Liara said, Three minutes. Enough time, Vance realized, for anything to happen. She might as well have said forever. She waited. The footsteps drew near and then seemed to stop. Two minutes, Liara told her. Still enough time for the world to fall apart. A head popped out beyond the side of the arch, and Vance fired twice. The head disappeared. Just on the other side of the opening, a deep voice was shouting orders. A group ran across the opening, and she shot at them—too late—as they took up positions on the other side. One minute, Liara said. Get ready.

Seconds passed, as Vance waited. Maybe the troops had paused for a heavy weapon to be brought up. A single rocket would more than ruin any hopes of getting away. Or perhaps they were wary of her. Never doubt the determination of the desperate.

Anyone who fights for a living knows one thing to be true. To attack is to be vulnerable. Sharks roll their eyes back in their head, cats toy with their prey, advancing troops may suddenly stop and start digging in, refusing to advance any further, and all for the same reason. Because what you hurt can hurt you back. Even a mouse has teeth and claws. And so there is the fear that make the finger hesitate on the trigger, that delays the charge for a moment too long. It has always been this way, the dreadful balance between attack and counterattack, since the first blow was struck.

But then something landed on the ground twenty meters away, and they were coming. The world stood still for a moment, and Vance’s ears rang with silence. Six men were charging at her, while their comrades fired from cover behind the wall. She shot wildly at the afterimage of one of her attackers, and the man behind her target fell, his chest a giant wound. She fired again and again, and that sent them scrambling in all directions. She kept firing until her weapon overheated.

Liara was screaming for her to come on board, and so she ran, dropping the pistol as she went. The ramp was nearly a meter above the ground when she reached it, but she barely stopped to climb on, bounding upward, still running as the ramp lifted her to safety. The ship was already aloft, and lurching to one side, and Vance paused to look down at the landing pad, where two of the attackers had been killed by the downblast from the ship’s maneuvering jets, and that made her happy but the ramp was still closing and then there she was on her knees, and Liara was telling her to hold on to something, and the ship seemed fall into a dark hole in the center of the world, while gravity, and some other incomprehensible force pinned her to the floor and all she could see was a mix of warring dark and light, until the darkness finally won and overwhelmed the universe.

Chapter 13: Widow

Chapter Text

Widow

So many dead, and so few hands to mourn them. The ship was near silent now, with only eleven crew. Ahead of them lay nothing but the long weeks that would bring them back to the installation that would again launch them to another star, somewhere else, in some other part of the galaxy.

In the meantime there was work. The main gyroscopes weren’t syncing, which meant that as the Nixia left the planet behind, it had begun to a subtle libration that would grow worse, and potentially dangerous, as the ship’s maneuvering thrusters worked too hard to keep the ship in line if they didn’t fix it in the next few days.

Essa had ordered autopsies on all of the dead. What little of the science team that remained weren’t especially skilled in medicine, but promised to do their best. Within the first few hours, they’d ruled out sudden decompression or radiation sickness, though poison, or even mass suicide might still have been possibilities. They were still running diagnostics on any possible toxins the crew might have ingested. The microgravity environment made autopsies more complicated, with fluids leaking and drifting in currents of air from the ship’s ventilation systems. During her next watch, Shari called Essa down to the lab to show her imagery she’d taken during the XO’s autopsy. Her brain showed signs of swelling, though that was consistent with microgravity. Even so, though the effects had been severe enough that they may have caused lapses in judgement. In death, her eyes had become engorged with blood, the vessels had ruptured. Her cause of death had been sudden heart failure and internal bleeding. Several of the others died similarly, especially the handful of crew who had been on lower decks.

“They were all strapped in,” the officer was telling Essa.

“So they must have died during the correction burn, or perhaps immediately after,” Essa said. Flight deck crew usually remained secured during their duty hours, but the rest of the crew usually slipped their restraints as soon as acceleration ended. Meanwhile, there was no sign of blunt-force trauma to their bodies, so there hadn’t been a violent deceleration, and if there had, the ship would likely have been vaporized anyhow.

Essa studied the pictures. “What else can you tell me?” She asked.

“Only that the cause of death was not a natural. One person in a hundred thousand may rupture like this under acceleration, but six of eight crew all at once? Never. Especially not ones this young, or this physically fit.”

Essa looked up from the console. There had to be an answer, but at the moment, she couldn’t see it.

“There’s another problem, though,” Shari said. “There were nine aboard when the Nixia left. So far we’ve only found eight bodies.”

“Who’s missing?”

“Corella,” Shari said.

#

Corella had been the youngest of the commandos. When Essa told her, Razia had personally searched the ship stern to cargo bay twice, and then the exterior hull, before she admitted that Corella was simply gone.

“Inventory our gear,” Essa told her. “Perhaps she was ejected during an EVA, and the crew couldn’t recover her.” It seemed at least a possibility, given that the ship had suffered an impact that had cost them over a quarter of their fuel. Though it was odd that they had found the main and secondary airlocks both shut and cycled, so if Corella had drifted away from the ship, she had somehow been able to shut the exterior hatch before she left.

But then, if Corella had somehow been ejected, even at a relatively high rate of speed, she likely had been thrown from the ship less than eight weeks earlier. Which meant she might have followed a similar trajectory. Essa calculated that if that had been the case, Corella might have remained within a volume with a radius of roughly fifty thousand kilometers, a massive space, but still searchable with their radar. It was also possible that Corella’s body had fallen into the planetary gravity well, or been pulled off track or any number of other things. Small as it was, her EVA suit should provide enough of a radar return for them to locate. But that would have to wait, because in order to aim the radar array properly, the gyroscopes needed to be working, and at the moment they weren’t.

#

“I doubt we’ll find her that way,” Razia told Essa, as they hovered in the space just outside the astronomy lab. They were waiting for the navigator to finish her analysis of their position. Before they had died, the Nixia’s crew had left behind a wealth of data that they had gathered from an archive onboard the installation. They had only succeeded in translating part of it, but after their deaths, the ship’s computer had continued working on the information, and come up with a crib for the remainder. The navigator looked up from her terminal signaled Essa.

“Captain,” she said, her breath coming in short gasps. “I can plot where our next jump will take us.”

“Show me,” Essa said. The navigator turned to the controls on the telescope array, and dialed in a set of coordinates. After a moment, the view shifted, and something came into focus. A yellow star, not unlike Parnitha, but partially veiled by a nebula of gas and dust. “Good work, Ensign,” Essa said. “What will we find there?”

“As far as I can tell, not much. But from there, the pathway appears to connect to this.” Again she adjusted the controls so the telescope focused on another star, this one a main phase star that appeared to have at least one large planet orbiting it. The planet was too big to be habitable, the navigator told Essa, but then went on, “From there, we go to here.” One last adjustment, and the telescope had moved to focus on another yellow star.

“This is all well and good, Ensign, but I don’t follow.”

The navigator selected the spectral analysis tool on the array, and showed it to Essa. Then she searched through the catalog of indexed stars—somme eight hundred million of them, stored in the ship’s data cluster. But before she had completed her work, as the database sorted through all the possibilities, narrowing it down to the two most likely candidates, Essa knew what it would show.

“It’s home,” she whispered. The navigator only nodded and wiped a hand over her eyes.

“Are you telling me you know how to tell the installations where to send us?”

The navigator looked up and said, “I’m almost certain I can.” She gestured toward another panel, where one of her now dead crewmates had worked out an algorithm. “We use that, along with that black box the commandos brought on board back—back at home—and we should be able to jump to the right place.”

“I hope you’re right, Ensign.”

The navigator nodded. She put her hands to her face again.

Razia appeared in the hatchway. In the reflected glow of the astronomy console, the cold, brutish look on her face startled Essa. “Ensign,” she said. “I’d recommend the three of us keep this information among us for the time being. Understood?”

#

They were still eight days away from the installation, so they would need to wait to test the navigator’s confidence. Unfortunately the gyroscopes couldn’t wait that long, and so Essa made her way below to work with the engineer on clearing error messages on the diagnostic panel. She was three hours into that task when a bit of coding looked familiar. She got on the interphone and called up to the comms officer, who came down with a tablet loaded with comm data from the launch.

Essa held the tablet up against the panel, and was shocked she hadn’t noticed it before. The coding on the messages showed that they had been sent from the engineer’s workstation, and not the flight deck.

“That’s odd, isn’t it?” she said to the comms officer, an Ensign named Kennas. “If you were to send a message that way, why would you do it?”

Kennas shook her head. “No good reason. Unless the main system is broken.”

“But it’s not, is it?”

“If you can’t get to the main panel,” Kennas said.

“Meaning?”

“What if someone was keeping the crew from using the comms?”

“And that’s why we only received these burst transmissions?”

“Right,” Kennas said. “But who —?”

Essa shook her head, but said only, “I think it’s got something to do with our missing commando.” She called Razia, meeting with her in the astronomy lab on the science deck. When Razia arrived, she told her to shut the hatch.

“I need you to gather any images from the onboard cameras we might have. I need you to do it quiet as you can, and I need you to not ask why until you’re done. Especially anything covering the bridge, and the crew decks.”

“Consider it done,” Razia said, and disappeared up the companionway.

#

Essa and the engineer had fixed the gyroscopes by the end of her watch, and she made her way to her bag, her body aching, and wanting nothing more than to change into a clean uniform, and lie down to sleep in full gravity. Razia was waiting for Essa in the galley. She made a vague gesture toward Essa’s bag, and then, pushed off from the floor, toward they companionway to the science deck, leaving Essa alone. In her bag, she found a scrap of paper with a message scrawled on it. Cargo bay, one hour.

Impossible to rest after that, even for a moment. Instead Essa went to the flight deck, where the navigator was in the command chair, using the secondary helm to steer the ship.

“The ship’s back in shape now that we’re not overtaxing the maneuvering jets,” she reported, as Essa came on deck. Essa motioned for her to keep her seat, as she went over to check on the comms terminal.

“Where’s Kennas?” Essa asked.

“She was due for some bag time,” said the helm operator. “We have a correction burn coming in a few hours, and I wanted her sharp.”

Essa nodded.

Essa said, “Do a sensor sweep of the bubble surrounding the ship. Tight resolution.”

“Roger that.” The helm operator paged the ship over the intercom. “All hands, all hands, secure for maneuver. One minute. One minute.”

Essa buckled in at the sensor panel, and waited as all stations, what few of them there were, reported in secure.

“All secure, aye,” helm said, then began to rotate the ship through a circular arc, pitching down the nose of the ship first, leveling out after they had gone through a full circle. Then she turned the ship on its side and rotated through another full circle. A full sensor sweep required five such maneuvers, and by the end, even Essa was starting to become dizzy from the movement.

“On your panel, Captain,” said helm. The scan data appeared, and Essa cycled through the different resolutions. Visible light, radar, infra red, radio, x-ray. The space around the ship out to fifty thousand kilometers was empty. Beyond, there were two small, unresolved contacts reflecting radar and visible light, but giving off very little heat and no radiation.

Essa circled them and said, “Point the main array at these two objects.”

“Roger, Captain.” Essa waited while the telescopes reoriented themselves.

The first was a rocky body asteroid, about seventy meters across, relatively high albedo, and covered in bright deposits of salt. It was pacing along with the ship, but its orbit would soon pull it out of the Nixia’s close proximity. The second object was much smaller, oblong and less than two meters across. It had low albedo, and was tumbling fast, nearly eight rotations per minute. As the image zoomed in, close as it could, the helm operator whispered, “What is that?”

They each squinted at their display, but the image was nothing but a grainy mass of a few dozen pixels, some bright, some dark. One or two might have been reflective patches on a uniform. There was no way to be sure, but Goddess if it didn’t look like a body.

“What do you think, Ensign?”

“I’d rather not say,” she said.

Essa nodded. She would say it, then. “It looks like our missing crew member. She must have jumped out an airlock.”

#

Razia was waiting in the cargo bay, down by the modified probe, presently operating to generate antimatter, and so emitting only a low hum. She gestured for Essa to come over to the workstation. She accepted the news about Corella with a sober look.

“If you knew her,” Razia said, “Knew her the way I did, then you’d know she’d never have killed herself. She was young, but she wasn’t reckless, and she very much enjoyed being alive.”

Essa nodded, and said, “What do you have for me?”

“Two things,” Razia said. “The first is this.” Underneath the workstation, someone had attached a strange device to the underside of the terminal. They’d gone to some length to hide it, too, having fashioned a small metal shield to protect the device from being easily seen. The object, whatever it was, would have fit in the palm of Essa’s hand, and it looked to be a solid ingot of metal that had—for want of a better expression—melted onto the main board of the secondary navigational computer that Razia’s team had brought to connect to the probe. Essa reached out to touch it, but Razia stopped her.

“I’d recommend you don’t do that,” she said. “It’s hot.” The lump of metal seemed to be both static, and constantly changing, its thready tendrils and dendrons reaching out to touch new parts of the nav computer’s circuitry.

“Well,” Essa said. “That’s odd. What’s the second thing?”

“Look.” Razia pointed at the screen of the workstation. New lines of code were appearing in one corner, while what looked like a route between two installations was being plotted in the other half of the window.

“It’s doing that?”

Razia nodded. “Seems to be some kind of automated hardware.” Then she took out a data pad. “But it gets stranger” she said. “Watch.” She showed Essa a recording of Corella reaching under the console. But then, she wasn’t alone. The two techs were hovering nearby, and they appeared to be working on fabricating the housing that had gone around the device. “Look as she puts in place.”

“It hardly looks like the same device,” Essa said. What Corella was holding in her hand was somewhat larger, and shaped like a cube, each edge as long as her thumb. Meanwhile, Essa watched as Corella reached underneath the console and when her hand returned, it was empty.

“She put it there?” Essa said, and in the meantime, it—what—it just molded itself to the console? It seems hard to believe.”

“And yet here we are,” Razia said. “It’s probably best we don’t remove it. What’s left of my team are afraid to touch the thing, and they don’t scare easily, as you’ve seen. Whatever it is, it’s beyond anything we can make, and it’s thinking for itself, so it’s not just a lump of metal, but some kind of technology. All we’ve been able to figure out is that it’s feeding the data your navigator has been using to plot our next few jumps.”

“Well,” Essa said. “Let’s find out what this thing can do.”

#

The installation was in their scopes when she returned to the flight deck for her next rotation. Already it looked big in the viewport, a glimmer bigger than anything in the field of stars surrounding it. In another two days it would launch them to a new position, and from there, the navigator thought, they could go home. Two days.

The wait would have been unbearable if the ship hadn’t been nearly empty, leaving every waking minute in need of an extra pair of hands. For the most part, when Essa wasn’t on the flight deck, she was in the machine shop, helping the engineer with an endlessly long list of repairs. It was a wonder the ship was running at all—they had been operating continuously for over three standard years. In that time, the ship should have been in dry dock twice already, for maintenance.

“We’ll either earn commendations for keeping the reactor running this long,” the engineer said, “or reprimands for breaking everything else.”

The mystery of why the crew had died still plagued her. Between rotations, Essa studied the logs again and again, and looked over the feeds. Very little seemed out of the ordinary, apart from meal times, which during the voyage back had become more and more scarce, as though the crew had running out of food. It began about three days in, when Essa saw an entry in the log that nearly all the food in the main storage compartment had spoiled. The XO detailed having to dispose of it, along with the steward. What was odd, was that the food seemed to have been deliberately contaminated by some kind of fast-growing mold.

According to the log, they’d begun eating the emergency rations that they had scavenged on the installation. Essa saw them in the silent video feeds, at mealtimes, eating the same small whitish blocks of tough material that Nerai had been forced to consume, after she’d been picked up by the ship that, for much of their journey, been both leading them and chasing them across the galaxy.

Day after day, she saw the crew eating the same thing. Each one of them sat chewing the dense little blocks of material.

That was bad enough, but even worse was a discernible change in the crew’s behavior over time. At the start of the return mission, the crew was, as is often the case, a bit giddy with the sense of purpose of finally being underway. The commandos and the science techs were conversing with their whole bodies. There were real friendships, and stronger bonds even, that had grown between some of them. One or two—there were always one or two—sat at the margins and looked less animated than the rest, but that, too was normal. Skipping ahead ten days, those two outliers had turned to four, and then five. After fifteen days, everyone at the mess sat rigidly eating their little light-colored block of food. Every so often, this one or that one would fidget, or clasp at the back of their neck, as though trying to slap an invisible bug. A few more days, the movements became more mechanical still, and finally, each crew member drifted through the compartment, skillfully avoiding contact with the others, but saying nothing, and acknowledging no one else’s presence.

Two days later they would all be dead. Essa watched it happen, as best she could, from the feed that came from the captain’s station. It was hard to tell anything had changed at all. At least at first, at least if she hadn’t known what to look for. But knowing that it must have happened during the mid-course burn, she zeroed into on those forty-five seconds. When the acceleration stopped, she watched the helm operator’s hands drift up off the controls, a common thing to see when the engines cut out. But her hands remained there, hovering. And after a moment, Essa could tell that her head was bobbing freely as well.

What poison kills on a schedule? It was as though whatever it was, knew that it needed the crew to plot the correction, and execute the burn, but that afterward it would have no further need of them.

And then, going through the log again, she saw that a few hours after the burn, the secondary airlock had cycled after being opened. The codes suggested it was a self diagnostic test. Corella must have triggered a systems check, and used the opportunity to launch herself out into space. Of all the moribund looking crew, she had been the only one who seemed to maintain some semblance of her personality until the end. And then she’d killed herself. It didn’t make sense, but finding an answer would have to wait. They were at the relay.

Up to the bridge. Buckle in. Hope for the best. Essa shut her eyes against the blast of light, and the horrible falling sensation that came when they reached the other side. They checked the ship’s clock and then began running through all their systems. The navigator ran a sweep of their local area. After a moment, she said, “That’s odd.”

“What is it?”

“There’s nothing else here,” she said. “Usually there’s a planet, or—something. Here, there’s—hold on, look there.” She sent an image to Essa’s screen. “Look,” she said.

“What am I seeing, Ensign?”

“I couldn’t begin to say,” the navigator said. “But look, it’s big. We’re seeing it end-on. I think it may be at least five kilometers in diameter, but possibly several times that long.”

“Range?”

“It’s close. Less than ten light seconds.”

“Is it a ship?”

“If it is, it’s not under thrust. It’s not moving relative to us at all.”

“Understood,” Essa said. She picked up the interphone and called for Razia to come have a look. “How long until contact?” Essa said.

“A few minutes. Less.”

Essa nodded, and picked up the interphone. “All hands, all hands. Remain secure for maneuver.” To the helm operator she said, “How fast can we stop?”

The helm operator was already working the problem, but as she did, the navigator called, out. “Contact is changing shape, Captain.” And it was. The object, set against the background of space, and the pale white of the remnants of a nebula that the neighboring star was tearing to pieces, Essa saw the tight circular shape expand, like a flower opening, deploying its petals and leaves.

“Slow us down, helm.”

“Aye, Captain.” The braking thrusters came on, and the straps pulled against Essa’s shoulders. The Nixia drifted nearer and nearer. In another minute they would pass into what looked to be the interior of the installation.

“It’s rotating, Captain,” the helm operator said. “You can see it there against the nebula.”

“How long until contact now?” Essa asked.

“Two minutes, Captain, but—”

“Yes, Ensign?”

“It’s aligning with us,” the navigator said. “We’re going to pass into its interior.”

Essa hesitated, then said, “All stop. Full brake. Now!”

Helm flipped the ship and did a hard burn, three times the gravitational force of Thessia pressing their bodies into the gel of their seats. It wasn’t enough. As they braked, Essa watched as one of the whirling arms of the gigantic structure passed overhead. By the time they were stopped relative to the structure, the Nixia was well within the structure, and all five of its broad, wheeling arms were passing in and out of view, as the structure continued to spin. But then the background of stars was beginning to darken.

“What’s going on?” Essa asked.

No one answered right away, but she heard the navigator whisper, No. She said, “Captain, the structure is closing on us.

“Emergency burn!” Essa shouted. “Get us out of here!”

The helm operator froze. “Captain, she said. “It’s too late.”

And it was. The last of the stars were already disappearing between the narrowing gaps of the individual arms. A few seconds more, the ship was trapped in darkness.

Chapter 14: After Action Report Part II/ Listening Post

Chapter Text

After Action Report, Part II

Everyone dies.

Accidents. Combat. Illness. Murder.

Everybody dies.

Except, perhaps for Commander Shepard, who had, achieved the sublime, legendary status of war hero over the course of the decade after the war ended, when all the star systems were still isolated from one another, beyond the few ships that could make the FTL run from a few light years away. Had Shepard died? Could Shepard have survived in some way? The memory of Shepard pursued Liara, at times even became a physical thing.

And she remembered the post-war years so vividly. There hadn’t been much news to keep people otherwise occupied. And so the farther out you went, beyond the reaches of Earth, the stranger the initial accounts of the final battle became. Some systems didn’t receive news of the war’s end until years later, some had come close to firing on friendly ships arriving from interstellar space. In Hierarchy territory, there was word of a minor engagement between a courier ship, and a ramshackle picket fleet that was still patrolling the Taetrus system.

Elsewhere, broadcast news accounts commingled with stories told by survivors, of battles, of Reaper attacks, the few who had somehow managed to slip away from the processing ships. Each of them had a story, their own truth to tell, and, because the war had been everywhere, and the distances involved were so vast, the tales grew taller with every passing year. The Citadel had glowed with an icy flame that burned or frozen the reapers, mid battle. The Crucible had emitted a signal, like indoctrination, but that only the Reapers could hear, and amidst the death and destruction of the final battle over earth, a mechanical scream had ripped through all the frequencies as the invaders had cried out—it varied by who was telling, and how drunk they were—in panic, or pain, or had called out to their makers and demanded forgiveness.

Maybe some of those stories were even true to the teller, if not true to what Liara had seen, for after all, what she had lived through was but a part. Liara didn’t remember it that way. But the reapers were gone. Everybody dies.

Blessings of the goddess upon the asari and their long lives, several of her colleagues from a different faculty at the University of Serrice had embarked upon an endeavor that took them better than twenty years to complete, the six volume Short Oral History of the Reaper Invasion. Each volume focused on one major race, turian, salarian, asari, human, quarian, krogan, and geth. Other, slimmer volumes from the Complete Oral History, dealt with voulus, elcor, hanar and a few other species that had not fully achieved spaceflight, like the Raloi. And each examined the stories that each race told themselves about the war. Turians favored stories of sacrifice for the greater good. Salarians preferred stories of cunning or strategic skill. Asari, preferred the love stories—mothers and grandmothers giving up their spaces on evacuation ships in order to save more children, lovers parting forever or finding one another again in the ruins.

Humans were different. Humans, it seemed, loved stories of conspiracy, deceit, and treason. Not all of them, perhaps, but a large enough contingent seemed to want to think that humanity had been played for fools. By the Council, by the other races, by the reapers themselves. Did it have something to do with Cerberus, and the need to believe that humans couldn’t have possibly been involved in their crimes?

Liara perhaps shouldn’t have been so surprised. During her information broker days, it was always the humans who came to her with the most bizarre tales of persecution by this person or that group, most often incorrect, or misinterpreted, and most often a revelation of their own desire to persecute those they believed guilty of the same crimes. So it went. Human history was a nearly unbroken chain violence, recrimination, and bloodshed.

Wasn’t it odd, then, that she had come to care so much for a handful of them? Commander Shepard she’d loved. Kaidan had been a good companion, for the short months she’d known him. Ashley Simpson, too, in spite of her innate mistrust of anything alien. And then there was James Vega, who had spent most of his shipboard days on the cargo deck, trading the most vulgar and kindly insults that she had ever heard with Cortez, their shuttle pilot.

Liara hadn’t seen Vega since the day he lifted her broken body onto the cargo deck of the Normandy, during the Battle of London. He’d survived that day, Goddess knew how, and the intervening years, but the invasion and that battle in particular had always lingered with him. He’d been sent to Sao Paolo to convalesce from his wounds—Nothing too bad, not like you, he’d told her, over extranet messages—and then dispatched to the platforms that were involved in repairing the Citadel and the Charon relay. In a later exchange, he’d joked that he thought the powers that be were trying to keep Shepard’s team apart from one another, and given the way they were separated after the Normandy returned to Earth, it didn’t seem so far fetched.

She hadn’t ever known Vega as well as she would have liked, but she had always known him to be a reliable soldier, steady in the field, daring but not reckless, he drank hard on shoreleave, and certainly had had more than a healthy dose of disregard for authority. And then there were details in his service record that kept him out of the command track, something to do with his involvement in an assault by the collectors on an outlying colony, where the bulk of his squad, and hundreds of civilians had died. Liara had never quite understood command’s reasoning for the decision to keep him off the command track, and she would never find out, because most of the people who had been involved in ensuring Vega would never rise beyond platoon leader had died the following year, during the invasion. Still it was one of the small outrages that an institution like the military can visit on its rank and file. After all, the collectors had slaughtered—by best estimates—several million humans over a period of about seven months in 2185, and there was little the Alliance had done about it on their own. Still, it was a stain on his record, and perhaps it would have made the troops question his decisions.

And so after the war was over, and his term was up, Vega had decided to demobilize. After a year or two of doing the grand tour of the galaxy and and spending the credits he’d banked during his service, he finally landed back home in San Diego, where he ran a small private security firm.

The war had changed him. It was hard to see all at once, but the battle for London, it seemed, wouldn’t leave him alone. In the last three years of his life, he, too, appeared to have fallen victim to the belief that there was another conspiracy at play. Some of what he believed was, in fact, true. Whatever Commander Shepard had done on the Citadel had broken the main reaper assault, but nonetheless, sensor data from all over Sol, data that Liara had stolen from the Alliance banks, showed some of their capital ships accelerating away from the battle and finally jumping to FTL as they approached Jovian orbit. What to make of that? Other parts of what Vega believed simply seemed irrelevant to Liara, though she still explored some of the leads for him. He seemed to think there were numerous highly placed officials in half the Council races’ governments who were still suffering from the effects of Indoctrination. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. Vega’s information was almost all conjecture, and involved believing that every individual action had a nefarious motivation. There was no merit to it, she told him half a dozen times. But Liara, he’d said, Look at what you’ve seen with your own eyes. Mind control, it’s everywhere. That much she could agree to: mind control that had evolved, so it seemed, numerous times across the galaxy, the leviathan, the thorian, the rachni, the reapers.

In his later years, what few of those he would have, James Vega had become more than a little obsessed with the leviathan. They had never arrived on Dekkuna to sign the accords, post invasion, but instead had sent an enthralled agent—his body already wasted to next to nothing, his eyes blank hollows—to negotiate on their behalf. Liara still remembered watching him, a human male, about forty, speaking when his turn came in a monotone that had given her chills. Wherever the leviathan might have gone after Dekkuna, no one knew, as the thrall had been found dead a few days after signing the treaty on behalf of his masters, his body already partially consumed by a parasite that appeared to have been living in his chest cavity.

Everybody dies, but some species endure. The leviathan had been out there in space, in their vacuum-hardened skin, immune to cosmic radiation, doing who knows what for better than a billion years. At least they claimed to be that old.

It’s what they’d told Shepard, after all, but Liara somehow had never quite believed all of what Shepard had reported, after returning from the bottom of the ocean. Interacting with them did funny things to a person’s perception of everything, time, space, memory, and though they had little reason to lie, they also received little in the way of reward for telling the whole truth. And over that sort of time scale, archaeological evidence tends to vanish, lost to simple erosion, or willful erasure. It was hard to come away from what she had seen, during the war, and then in later years as any attempts her spy network made to track or observe that elusive race of aliens ended in dead ends, thinking of the leviathan as anything but another enemy who had yet to declare open hostility.

Sometimes she wondered whether the release of the symbiotic parasite on Pirin a decade ago hadn’t been Councilor Deniri’s attempt at finally forcing the issue. It was possible, but parts of the story still didn’t line up with the rest. Deniri had got her war, finally, ten years later than she’d wanted it. It’s just that, if she had wanted the leviathan to reveal themselves, all the wrong parties were joining the fight instead. And who benefits from an internal struggle among the main Council races? Someone on the outside, for sure, but who? The leviathan were a possibility, but then, so was Aria. So were the reapers.

Last time, the reapers had fought a unified enemy. A reluctant enemy at first, to be sure. The Citadel races had lingered too long in denial over the inevitable, but they had come together as one, and in the skies over Earth, they had, once and for all defeated the reaper threat.

So went the story. But what if it wasn’t the end?

Everyone dies. But before he’d been murdered, James had passed along a note to Liara, that his company had been working with a network of ex-Alliance mercenaries who claimed they had some information on leviathan activity in the decades following the invasion. Whatever information they had offered never found its way to Vega. The only thing he’d got for his trouble was a bullet to the head, and a clumsy attempt afterward to make the killing look like a botched robbery. Whoever these mercenaries were—and Liara had her guesses, and even tortured and killed more than a few likely candidates—the important ones, had vanished into the San Diego night, and then into thin air, for all anyone could tell.

Probably they, too, had been killed off by whatever master they served. Everybody dies.

This is what Liara was thinking, as the machines in her little ship’s medbay worked to save the life of Palmyra Vance, former ranking military information officer aboard the Alliance Carrier Whitman, formerly reluctant shadow operative, and now dying person.

The projectile had struck low on her body. The ship’s barriers had come up to about half power, and this is possibly what had meant the wound had only blasted out a chunk of Vance’s thigh and buttock, instead of cutting her near in half. A medical drone had located her body and kept her alive long enough for Liara to pilot the ship down the throat of the long cavern, into orbit and out of danger. Liara thought of Ashana nar Vesta, the quarian girl she’d saved under similar circ*mstances, who the turians had trotted out. There would be no expert medical care on the Citadel for Vance. Citadel space was not an option. The traverse was barely an option. And, in any case, Liara’s money was beyond her reach now. Most of it.

No, there would be no lab-grown muscle and skin for poor Vance. Not today. She’d be lucky if she only lost her leg. Everybody dies, but Vance held on during the entire run to the Tortuga Primary Relay.

By then Liara had reprogrammed the transponder to squawk as a freighter on the Omega-Ilium route, and the ship, was now renamed Carlito’s Fortune—ships named fortune were invariably hard luck cases, she’d found, all of them a few microns of corrosion away from falling apart, their crews the worst possible of dispossessed and unwanted. The codes wouldn’t hold up to any real scrutiny, not a visual inspection, and certainly not a boarding party, but as long as she didn’t attempt to dock or land at a port, she wouldn’t need the codes for anything but interacting with automated traffic control as she passed through the Veil. Beyond that, lay the Terminus, in all its dangerous spiteful glory. She might survive long enough to reach a station with a sympathetic or at least corruptible harbormaster.

Vance would die from her wounds, or she would survive, provided the autosurgeon did its job, and the blood fabricators had enough feedstock to create enough human blood analogue. But if Liara didn’t find a place to lay up, in the next few days, both their chances of survival became vanishingly small.

Well, every body dies. But it was time to come up with a plan. Liara went belowdecks to inspect the rest of the ship and see what resources she might find. On the main deck was a small conference and dining area, along with an automated galley that would provide meals for ten, for up to a month, at its current levels of stockage. Behind that, a stateroom, with a comfortable bed, and a cabinet that had a false floor underneath which she found credits stored on disposable—and therefore untraceable—flash wands, a small square of metal with a seventy digit bank code embossed on its underside, an SMG loaded with inferno ammunition, three pistols and a shotgun. It was a start.

Liara locked away the weapons, put some of the money in her pocket, and began plotting a course through the heavy traffic at Rannoch secondary. From there her path would take her through the Veil, and back out into the Terminus, and then the Traverse, from the Phoenix Massing to Omega, and from there the Eagle Nebula and Korlus. Three jumps, forty-seven hours in transit, all to arrive at Korlus, where there would be no medical care for Vance, and only an uncertain path forward for Liara. Vance would have as good a shot at survival if Liara loaded her into the ship’s escape tube and dropped her near the relay at Omega. She would be sure to be picked up, but, in Omega that wouldn’t mean much. She’d be lucky to get a hasty amputation. And of course, Aria and Mason would know that she had passed through the relay, and then the hunt would be on in earnest.

#

Korlus.

She’d never been here before, though Liara had heard enough. Shepard had come looking for a clan chieftain, but left instead with a tank grown krogan named Grunt. That had been two hundred years ago, the place had been a garbage heap. Two continents had been set up as crash zones for ships that had outlived their usefulness. Orbitals stripped them of anything valuable, and then the hulls were deorbited and crashed to the surface below. Roving smelters the size small of cities crawled here and there, with teams cutting up the hulks, melting, separating the metals into their components, spitting pure ingots on one end, and mountains of slag on the other before moving on. Only the krogan and vorcha had ever really taken to living there, and their existence had been meager, especially during the time of the genophage. “It takes a lot to make Tuchanka look like a garden,” Wrex had told her once, “But Korlus makes a go of it.”

In the decades following the invasion the planet had become something of a backwater. Thanks to the reapers there were dozens and hundreds of systems that had enough metal to rearm half a colonial fleet drifting along their ecliptic planes. And these were real wrecks, without drives or functional navigation systems, and so couldn’t pass through a relay. It made no sense to send them to Korlus as scrap, when one could simply hire the quarians to strip the raw materials, when a mobile station could, for less, do roughly the same thing.

Three of the seven massive smelting stations was no longer in operation. But with the industrial onslaught gone, Korlus had started to sprout some signs of life. After reentry, Liara saw what looked like a small farming colony sprouting around a series of towns, on a mid-latitude continent.

Then she hit the rough equatorial weather, and the world disappeared until she was near ready to land. Using the storm as cover, Liara set the ship down about a four kilometer hike from her intended destination. Inside the stateroom, she found a cloak that had some active camouflage features, a long rifle and a shotgun. Harnessing these to her back, she went below for one last check on Vance, who by now had lost most of her leg. Biomechanical surgical devices that looked like maggots crawled over the wound, cleaning, cutting, cauterizing. Vance’s skin, though was looking better—darker now, not gray as it had been when Liara had first found her.

She might yet live, Liara thought as she clambered down a heap of rain-slick wreckage and onto solid ground. Twenty kilometers away, one of the city-sized furnaces lit the horizon orange below a thick layer of black that spread across the horizon.

The old Blue Suns listening post had been set up on a high mount, inside the wreckage of a freighter that had crash-landed on the topmost part of a ridge. Asari commandos centuries before the Blue Suns came along, had established a communications relay point there. The freighter’s old communication array had been modified with a dozen or so whip antennae, hard to pinpoint even from close visible range, and more obtrusive and much newer dish antennae that had been added after the asari abandoned the listening post. It probably shouldn’t have surprised Liara to encounter a colony of geth living on the southern slope below the post. Liara spent an hour, sitting in cover, the warm rain slashing over her, as she listened to their communications traffic, before she decided it was safe to go down.

They still knew she was coming. Half a dozen came down the slope to greet her. She was alone, and in all, there were nearly a thousand of discrete units moving here and there among the different structures. Not a weapon in sight. The unit in the lead stepped forward and offered its three-fingered hand, and tilted its head side to side, observing her as took its hand in hers.

“Asari,” it said, and tilted its head here and there and looked back up the hill. “We don’t have much for you here.”

Liara nodded. “I am not in need of assistance,” she said.

“Your friend is hurt,” it said. “The geth can see into many systems. We will see to her.”

The geth made a little rattle, and two of its comrades broke off from the pack, making directly for Liara’s ship. The apparent leader gestured up toward the settlement, which was laid out mostly in orderly rows. About half of the legged units were pulling scrap from a wrecked colony ship that had crash-landed a few kilometers to the east. A huge black rent, from where the craft had nearly split in two against a rocky projection in the hillslope was their main point of entry. Other groups stood sorting the materials, or smelting metal. At the western end of the settlement was a fabricator that was busy making new parts.

“How many of you are there?” Liara asked.

“This unit cannot tell. Our numbers must be held secret for now, with he war.”

“But the geth are not involved,” Liara said.

“Are we not?” The unit turned toward her and gestured vaguely upward. Liara followed his gaze. The system had been virtually empty when she had entered, but that had only made her easy to track, she supposed. The fighting, meanwhile, was elsewhere, thousands of light years away.

“It was my understanding that the geth had recalled any ships from potential combat areas, and that—”

“We are too far scattered to recall,” the geth said. “See us here.” It gestured again. “We are making bodies so that if it comes to fighting, we will be ready.”

“But why here?” Liara asked.

“We were already here,” the geth said. “The collective has used these relays for nearly two centuries as a stopover on the way to Citadel space. Many of our runtimes are now returning from your space.”

Liara wondered, momentarily, just how infiltrated every system in every organic species civilization might be infiltrated with geth. Perhaps it was best not to wonder.

“What news of the Citadel?” Liara asked instead.

“Untouched, thus far. Deniri has managed to maintain it as neutral ground, though at a price. The wards are now isolated domains. Kithoi is limited to humans. Tayseri to asari and so on. Some races are permitted access to many, others are confined to small areas of one ward. Others have been banned entirely. The hanar and drell are mistrusted, and have been exiled to Kahji.” The geth leader paused, then said, “Some officials are meeting on the Presidium, but there are no current plans for peace talks.”

Liara shook her head. “What have you heard about how the whole thing began?”

The geth looked at her. “The first act of war was the Alliance’s bombardment of Terreneo. It was ill-advised, even if Terreneo is a terraformed world, the attack may be considered a crime. The perpetrators would, of course, have to survive the war. The first major engagement, however, was when elements from the asari tenth raider squadron attacked the combined Alliance Sixth Fleet in the Traverse. The Alliance bombardment, of course, gave them good pretext to attack as punishment. But that is only one answer. Those attacks happened hardly a month ago, hardly time for four peacetime militaries to mobilize against each other in such force. Tension and struggles over influence have been raging for a century or more, but there have been other, more limited engagements that have been happening on the margins for the last two decades. We have observed secret attempts at military buildup among all the major Citadel states. It is no surprise to us that the Alliance and the Hierarchy are at war. The Alliance had violated the Farixen convention, when it began construction on the Africa II, twelve years ago.” The geth paused to let Liara through small gate, that marked the entrance to the compound proper. There were two small, drum-shaped stacks, each about as tall as Liara, and as wide as her outstretched arms. “We are billions of runtimes, a fraction of this station’s capacity, but an individual incorporates many. Some fear embodied existence, others wish for it. For the moment they are all contained here, either in these devices, or in the bodies we are producing.”

She took a deep breath and then unslung the weapons and handed them over. “I won’t be needing these.”

“This is dangerous terrain,” the geth said. “The varren do not trouble us, but they may trouble you.”

Liara only shook her head. Her biotics were more than enough to crush the skulls of a dozen varren at fifty meters. After a moment, she said to the leader, “You need a ship.” The geth made an affirmative sound. “There isn’t much room aboard,” Liara said.

“We take little space,” the geth said. Liara remembered how the indoctrinated geth used to rol themselves into balls, only unfold while airdropping. She’d seen it for the first time on Therum. “We wish to travel beyond the Veil. You would be welcome to join us there. You would be safe there, Doctor T’Soni.”

“I was wondering if you knew who I was.” The geth tilted its head again, a kind of geth shrug. It knew a great many things. Liara said, “Who else knows I am here? Things could become dangerous for you.”

“None but we,” the geth said. “For the moment. Time is short, however. Your ship is known by powers hostile to you. We must depart soon, in order to maintain your advantage.”

Liara nodded, but said, “I can’t fight this war from beyond the veil.”

“Nor should you,” the geth said. “You are alone.”

Liara had, as they’d been talking, also been counting the geth platforms that stood stacked and ready in the camp. She estimated at least two hundred. It would be a tight fit in her ship’s hold, she suspected, but perhaps worth it, if they were suitably armed.

“Would you come with us?”

“No,” Liara said. She had almost surprised herself.

“This unit does not understand. You can fight this war no better from here, than you can from beyond the Veil.”

“Don’t flee,” Liara said.

“The geth are not part of this war,” the leader said.

“Not yet. But you have helped me. My movements are being tracked. Perhaps there will be a delay, but before you know it, you will be involved. And your kind.”

The geth made a sound. “We do not regret helping you, Dr. T’Soni.”

“Thank you,” Liara said. “This war—there’s more to it than you or I know. This goes beyond tensions beyond rival allies. Come with me. There is much this side of the Veil that still needs to be done.”

The geth turned and surveyed the camp. “Your ship is not built for war.”

“No,” Liara said. “Not the kind of war the other races are fighting. But with your assistance it will be equipped to fight my kind of war.”

The geth seemed to think—possibly it was conferring with the remainder of the collective—before it extended its clawlike hand. “We will help you,” it said. “It may cost us dearly, but we fear the cost of not coming to your aid may yet be greater.”

“Thank you,” Liara said. “Strike your camp and meet me at my ship in four hours.” She gestured up at the old listening post. “There’s something of mine I need to retrieve before I go.”

Chapter 15: Fumbling in Darkness

Chapter Text

Fumbling in Darkness

Twenty hours with no stars to orient them. Essa watched from the flight deck, as her ship drifted within the void. The walls that enclosed them seemed perfectly sealed. Radar pings suggested that the structure continued to revolve around their ship, and maintained its position, keeping the Nixia perfectly in the center of the space, which was roughly five kilometers in diameter and fifteen in length.

The walls of the void were not uniform, though, at least not on their interior surfaces. The data so far—there was lots of scatter and interference—suggested there were structures there, and perhaps even an atmosphere, at the lowest levels.

At the start of their second rotation of watches, Essa, abruptly decided that she would go have a look. From the flight deck, she called for Razia to gather a team, two science crew, two commandos, for an exploratory mission, before unbuckling from her seat. To Helm, she said, “You have the ship.”

“Aye,” said Helm, who had taken on duties as XO, now that most of the rest of the crew was gone. Essa noted that she looked uneasy.

Essa hurried belowdecks and began preparing the launch. When they had left nearly half the crew behind on Neela’s World, they had expected it would be a one-way trip, and that the craft would no longer be useable. That was largely true, but given that the surface was just around three or four kilometers in any direction, they could spare what little reaction mass they might need to push themselves around the little volume. Essa planned on exploring the interior before finding a suitable landing ground for the shuttle.

Razia appeared with Liss and one fo the other commandos, all three dressed in their drab gray armored vacuum suits. “Just in case,” Liss said.

“Right,” Essa said. “Remember the launch can’t bear pressurization any longer, so lids on, when we board. Understood?”

Everyone nodded, and soon enough they were all dressed in EVA gear as well. They entered the shuttle through the airlock, and began strapping in. Essa transferred a few hundred kilograms of fuel to the main tank, and slowly pulled away from the ship. The exterior of the ship was lit with floodlights, but all around them, the rest of the void was dark as the bottom of a well. Essa shifted the launch a hundred meters away from the Nixia and tried to let her eyes adjust. Far in the distance, she saw something that looked like a faint black-on-black crosshatching pattern that might have suggested buildings. She turned on their own landing lights and rotated the launch through a horizontal three hundred and sixty degree turn.

There. She was sure she’d seen something. The launch leapt forward under her hands, and behind her she felt her passengers bracing themselves. Essa slowed their movement to a drift and began studying the sensor data more closely. The visible and infrared telescopes were both showing a similar pattern of overlapping vertical and horizontal lines, though it was hard to grasp what they showed, because the structure surrounding their ship was rotating rapidly.

She dropped closer to the surface of the structure. The radar began producing more erratic results. Essa rolled the launch over on its back and stared directly down through the windscreen. At an altitude of eight hundred meters in their ground lights it still looked like a jumble of streets, all dark, surrounded by massive buildings, some of them collapsed. The radar suddenly shut off and she had to reboot the system.

“Nowhere to put down in this,” she said, to no one in particular, and rolling the launch around again, she began moving sternward relative to the Nixia. The darkness was so profound that it seemed a physical object. Anything could have been hiding in it. She pushed ahead bit by bit, slow as a glacier.

“It looks like there’s something up ahead, Captain.” That was Razia from the back of the cabin. She had impeccable vision, especially in low light, and as they moved forward, Essa could see that Razia was correct. From the darkness, a wide ring emerged, not quite as big around as the entire structure at its widest point, but near enough, and from this jutted a tower that extended almost all the way to the midpoint of the empty volume.

“What is that?” Razia said.

Essa held up her hands. The radar was working again, though the screen flickered. She pinged the object in front of them with a pulse from the radar, and it showed a narrow line surrounded by a void. It certainly looked like a tower.

“It’s a structure,” Razia said.

“Let’s find out.” As they advanced, the tower grew more distinct. It was needle-thin, perhaps no more than a hundred meters wide at the base.

A thousand meters out a dim circle of light—from their ground lights—appeared near the top of the tower. As they approached it widened. The radar was producing unreliable data—probably there wasn’t much room behind the tower, and Essa slowed the launch even more.

“Look,” a voice said. Razia had come up and was holding on to the back of Essa’s acceleration couch. Down below, by the base of the tower stretched a ring, but from the ring emerged a series of platforms. “What are those?”

Essa angled the launch nose-down for a better look. The ground lights made a dim gray circle below. Whatever was there seemed to be writhing around, because the entire structure was revolving around them. “There’s debris, and—there—open ground.” She adjusted the controls, trying to match her speed to the rotation of the surface, lowering the launch down meter by meter. The radar scattered again, and switched itself off, refusing to restart this time. Fine, she would land without assistance.

“Are you attempting to land?” Razia said. “Didn’t you jettison the landing struts?”

“We did,” Essa said. “We can still use the secondary hatch in the roof.” Razia made a sound—surprising in that it was the first time Essa had ever heard her express anything close to alarm. “The launch is rugged, as you’ve seen with your own eyes” she said. “It should tolerate a belly landing. Now, let me focus. Everyone brace for contact.”

There was a loud thud, and then a bit of lateral motion and the sound of metal grinding against something hard. Essa disarmed the thrusters and maneuvering jets and then shut down the main power.

“Everyone all right?” she said. In the back, the commandos and the science team had been thrown in a jumble of legs and arms against the rear bulkhead, but everyone shouted green to go. “Good,” Essa said. They threw open the top hatch and stepped out across the launch’s broad delta-shaped titanium wing. The ground was covered in nearly ankle-deep dust, and the landing had kicked up a cloud of it, that made for poor visibility for a hundred meters in every direction. There was a little gravity, that made for long, bouncy strides, or a careful shuffle. The six of them hopped down and onto a secondary platform. The dust was everywhere and in the low gravity it rose in blinding clouds. As they moved, they seemed to be going through a fog. Essa watched the suit-lights on the two science officers up ahead, and followed their tracks, as Razia came along beside her.

“There’s atmosphere,” one of the science officers said. “Not too different in composition from Thessia, but the pressure’s very low. Not enough to breathe.”

“That would explain the weathering of the dust,” her counterpart said. “You can see where it’s shifted here and there in the currents.”

“Everyone keep your lids on,” Essa said. The dust, more than the occasional bit of wreckage she spied through the dark, made her nervous. Everything about this place spoke of activity, and the silence that surrounded them made the dark that clutched and clawed at them wherever their lights didn’t touch. The lights from her own suit stretched Liss and Razia’s shadows into horrible figures.

Essa realized with a sudden start what this place was—an old port complex. Ships had docked here, likely by hundreds, or thousands. They were standing on but one tier—the innermost, in fact—of a multi level structure. And the trap that had snapped shut around the Nixia, Essa reckoned it had been a space station, big enough that all of the High Rock installation at Parnitha could have fit inside it half a dozen times or more. Her heart thundered in her chest and suddenly Liss had her by the arm.

“All right, captain?”

“I’m fine,” Essa said. She made a show of adjusting the mixture on her life support feed. “Mix was too thin, I think.”

Razia was beside her. Essa was looking upward again. The tower hovered above them. Its base wasn’t far, but what would they do when the got there? What had happened here? She wondered. Except that the answer was clear enough—it was the same as everywhere else they had gone. The same forces that had laid waste to entire planets had come here, too.

“Hold up,” the other commando said. Essa could hear her breathing hard. “Come take a look captain.”

Essa followed their tracks forward to where she was standing. They had come to the edge of a terrace, where about five meters below lay what looked like the wreckage of a large aircraft, vaguely disk-shaped, that had been nearly blown in half, and was covered in a layer of molten metal. But that wasn’t what was strange. On the ground near the edge of the ship were—

“Are those footprints?” Essa asked.

“Yes,” said Liss. “Well, tracks, anyhow.” She jumped down to the lower level and studied the markings, while the other commando dropped down and began examining the broken remains of the ship. “Not one of us, that’s for sure,” she said. Essa dropped down to look. “You can see it’s got more than two feet. Probably four, or six, is my guess—yeah, four. See, here, how these are all the same depth? It was standing here, then moved off that way.”

“Ship’s empty,” the other commando said. “No bodies anyhow. Interior is full of the same dust as outside. Nothing’s been inside it for ages.”

The edge of the ship’s nearer wing was covered in jagged dribbles of molten metal that in the thin atmosphere had weathered gray-green. One of the science officers took a sample, and after feeding it through her machine, said, “Same as we’ve seen before. Iron-tungsten-uranium mix, but the uranium is depleted. Only a little alpha and beta radiation.”

Liss had moved off. She and the other commando were following the tracks as they snaked a path between two large pieces of wreckage—a larger ship, cut fully in half this time, its contents burned, blackened and then strewn with ashes—and then down a ramp that led into a passageway.

Essa followed. The passageway was more clear than the landing platforms, though profoundly dark, apart from the commando’s suit lights which wavered and shifted up a head, and then suddenly shut off.

“Movement!” one of them shouted over the common line. “Lights off! Switch to infrared.”

Everyone stopped and switched. Essa’s helmet adjusted, and soon the commandos shapes came into focus in shades of blue and gray.

“There! Did you see it?”

“Got it!”

“Captain,” Liss said, “We have contact, front. Looks like the thing that made the tracks before.”

“There it is again.”

This time Essa saw it, too. It was maybe twenty meters farther down the corridor. A squat thing, like the crabs that scuttled along under the ice of the inland Polar Sea, though with only four legs, attached to a small articulated body that held four more appendages for grasping and a small head with large, black eyes. The back of its body was strangely squared off and mechanical looking.

“Is it wearing some kind of life support?” Razia said.

The creature, whatever it was had either not noticed them, was unable to see them, or paid them no mind. After a moment, having completed its task, it turned and moved off down the corridor, disappearing down one of the bends.

“What do you think?” Essa said.

“Maybe a scavenger?” One of the science officers said.

Essa radioed the ship. “Look for additional signs of heat or radiation leaks,” we may not be alone.”

“Will do, Captain,” Helm radioed back.

“It’s on the move again,” the lead commando said. They followed, and it led them downward into the interior of the ring structure. The spin of the rings made just enough gravity that extended periods of walking became unpleasant. Everyone, but the commandos, it seemed, needed to stop every few hundred steps to catch their breath. Down again, and this time they emerged onto a kind of ramp that led down to a gallery that appeared to be open to the void. Beyond the platforms, there was nothing but black. Long structures that could have been gantries stuck out into empty space, and one or two those nearby held wreckage that might have once been ships, through they had been so thoroughly slagged and burned that little more than twisted and blackened metal remained. Nearby there was ledge that had been covered in a long cascade of what had once been molten metal that had again frozen into a long thin column that ran all the way from the upper level to the floor of the gallery, thirty meters below. At the bottom of the gallery is where they saw the creature again. It appeared to be chopping away at the frozen metal with some kind of tool it had produced from the box on its back.

“I wonder how they got here,” Essa said.

Razia shot back, “All I want to know is how we’ll be able to fight them off, unarmed, if that thing isn’t alone.” She paused to let that information sink in, then said, “I’m not sure if you saw, but there were a lot of tracks in the ash in the corridor behind us.

They came down the ramp, which twisted and turned here and there. About halfway down, the creature looked up in their direction. Perhaps it saw them coming, because it scurried off, only to reappear at another position, somewhat farther from their lights. They progressed downward again, and found the platform empty. The creature’s tracks led off into the darkness, between two pieces of wreckage.

“Seems to be leading us somewhere,” Razia said. To the commandos, she said, “Take point. I don’t want any surprises.”

The path between the wreckage was narrow and dangerous. Whatever those scorched lumps of metal had been, they were now burnt wreckage, slagged and solidified once more into strange shapes, in some places like the lava floes of the Mineris Archipelago in the broad southern ocean on Thessia, and in others jagged, crystalline structures sharp enough to slice right through their EVA suits. They learned this the hard way when Saria, the younger of the two science officers scraped her thigh, and cut right through to the flesh of her leg as they slipped through the passage. Ulalla, the other science officer stopped to help her with the patch kit, while Essa and Razia continued onward.

“How’s the bleeding?” Essa asked.

“I’ll be all right,” Saria said. Essa remained concerned.

“Once the patch is on, I want you to return to the launch.”

“Aye,” Ulalla said without hesitation, and when Saria tried to protest, Ulalla put her hand on the faceplate of Saria’s helmet and said, “Please.”

Saria nodded. The two of them had been close friends for a while, but Essa had noticed after they departed Neela’s World, that they had become bonded to each other. She stayed to make sure the patch was in place, and that the two would return to the launch before continuing on.

“Best if we find a different way out of here,” Razia said. “Or we’ll all end up that way.”

“We’ll see what our oxygen reserves allow.”

They managed to get through the rest of the passageway without further injury, and found the two commandos standing either side of a narrow doorway, their suit lights still off, their visual set to infrared. They signaled for Essa and Razia to approach.

When they drew up, one of the commandos said, “Went in there about five minutes ago. It disappeared from the infrared scope but we think it’s still in there. Doesn’t seem to be any other way in or out.”

“Do we go in?” asked the other.

As she spoke there was a sudden burst of light from inside, a pleasantly warm glow, that spilled out onto the ash and made it seem to glisten, like newly fallen snow. Essa peered into the compartment, where something that looked like a terminal had appeared in the wall. The creature was gone. Perhaps there was a hatch somewhere that it had used to vanish.

“I’ll go,” Essa said.

She did. But took a deep breath first. The terminal was an odd thing, two nodules, each about the size of her fist, with little finger-like projections emerging from them, and from these, threads of light that seemed to swirl and come together in the space in front of her. The light strayed here and there, making shapes that might have been a body, or perhaps just a cloud. At other times, the fog seemed to take on regular geometric shapes, hexagonal and triangular planes, layered over each other in different colors that made the darkness shimmer. Essa put out her hand and was surprised to find that the shapes felt solid to the touch.

A voice reached her, not through the radio, nor was it muffled by her helmet. “Asari,” it said, and from the fog a face and shadowy body emerged, not unlike hers though nearly half again as tall. It looked down into her eyes, an asari face its head covered in a voluminous diadem similar to the ones seen in representations of Athame in temples all over Thessia. But there was something cruel and terrible about the head—the eyes—there were no irises or pupils, but just a white shimmer. It held its lips drawn back, and the eyeteeth were abnormally long. It stared at her in a way that made the back of her neck tingle.

“Goddess,” Essa said. It was a reflex, but her counterpart responded with a cruel grin. “Where are we?” she asked, but the goddess didn’t answer. “What is this place?” Essa asked again.

Athame spoke, her voice more like a roar in Essa’s ears. “When I was born, the universe trembled into existence. It trembles still in awe of my power!” The goddess smiled and her eyes went black. Suddenly Essa was somewhere far away, among the stars, trembling in the night’s dark ocean. “You stand before your beginning and your end! This galaxy turns over again, a new cycle. Asari you have discovered the heart of the ancients, their bones shall be the foundation of your great civilization!” An unseen hand seemed to pin her body flat—as though she were under a hard burn aboard the Nixia and then the world exploded into a rainbow of color that extended outward in every direction. She turned her head to the side and saw the goddess standing beside her, dressed as she was in the oldest scrolls, metal helm, reins in her left hand, in her right a cluster of javelins, and before them a team of raging, four-pawed raptors, their leathery wings thrashing and fire shooting from their nostrils as the goddess guided them downward, downward to where they landed with a thunderclap that shook the ground and stirred waves to life in a far distant ocean. They were in a forest. Essa was surprised to see the trees still standing. The goddess led her through the forest until they came to a cliff, looking out over a city built along the edge of a bay that was itself formed from the edge of an ancient impact crater.

Ineris. The first great asari capital. Ancient, and in its full glory. The harbor was full of sailing ships.

Essa shook her head in wonder. There at the center of the capital, rose a white stone tower, the first great temple of Athame. The site was still there, but little remains of the original temple, given that it was built near thirty generations ago.

“I taught you to plant seeds, raise animals, to hew stone. You thanked me with this temple.” Essa only stared in wonder. “Now you tread where once only my chariot could travel.” The goddess directed her gaze upward, and Essa did the same. They were rising again through he stars. “Build me another temple here, asari. In this fortress, this citadel” Athame was quiet for a moment, and then, in a voice that could have been a thought, said, “You will build an empire,” the goddess said, “But honor me, asari. Honor me, and remember.”

Essa was standing back in front of the terminal. It appeared to have shut itself off. In the air, there were still shimmers of the interface, but nothing that was still solid. The two knobs and finger-like struts of the object were retreating back into the wall. Something was different.

“Captain?” Razia said. “What did you do?”

“I—what do you mean?”

Essa realized suddenly that she was no longer in the little chamber. The room had moved or transformed. All around her, lights were emerging from the darkness. Somehow they had ascended back to the level where she had belly-landed the launch. Overhead there was the Nixia with its docking lights on, but behind it, all around, the walls that had shut around them lights were shining. Not many, but enough to show that this place had once been home to a massive city, abandoned now, and mostly in ruins.

But out beyond the enfolding walls, Essa could see gaps, and moving lights that must have been stars passing in and out of view as the whole structure revolved around its axis.

The structure, she realized, was opening.

Chapter 16: Listening Post

Chapter Text

The geth platform who had greeted Liara on arrival, made a gesture and detailed another geth platform to show Liara the path to the top of the cliff. It was smaller than most, its head reaching just up to Liara’s chin, its thick antenna array rising somewhat higher than that. It had almost no armoring on it, apart from thin pauldrons on its shoulders and a plate over its chest, each bearing yellow flashes above and below the pectoral actuators. It was hard not to think of the platform as anything but an eager young person, proud to have an important errand. It shifted from one foot to the other, as it waited for Liara to follow.

Once outside the compound, it fairly bounded up the steep and narrow trail, not fearing the danger of a fall or feeling the effort of the climb. Every so often, it would stop and, realizing that Liara had fallen behind, gesture shouting, “Come,” in its mechanical voice.

The listening post wasn’t hard to reach, once they had climbed to the top of the ridge, but it was near impossible to enter. The only way in was through a heavily rusted exterior airlock hatch that had been repurposed as a door. In space it would have been easy to move, but with its hinges corroded, and the thick metal weighing several hundred kilograms Liara strained her biotics to no avail. Eventually she and her counterpart resorted to blasting it open with a shaped charge.

The interior was near pitch black and snaked over with cables the geth had long ago laid out and connected here and there, most of them leading down from the dish arrays, that post-dated the place’s occupation by asari commandos. Her companion had lights all over its wiry body, and moved as though it knew its way around the subsurface, ducking under low-hanging cables and avoiding projections from the walls as though it came here often.

She had been silly to think of the platform as young. More likely the frame was purpose built for some function she couldn’t quite fathom—reconnaissance, close quarter fighting perhaps. Its short limbs concealed considerable strength. Liara showed it an image of the mark her mother had left for her in the past, and it set to looking. The interior of the post was laid out around an octagonal communal living area set up in what had been the crashed ship’s hold, where the three or four person team of commandos would rotate in ten hour shifts of watch and sleep. What they were listening for here wasn’t clear to Liara. She’d known about the post for some time, but all her records showed that it had never turned up much useful intelligence. Which, in hindsight was likely a sign that it had been very useful indeed.

Beneath the crashed ship, the commandos had bored tunnels into the rock and here and there, the passageways opened out into small observation areas, that provided good views and fields of fire on all the approaches.

One window looked down onto the opposite side of the valley, where the mountainside sloped more gently toward a valley floor. A little vegetation was growing there, waist tall weeds, and a few pollution resistant conifers stood along the edges of a watercourse that ran the color of rust, from all the corroded metal and other pollutants. About three kilometers distant, situated along a bend in the stream, stood a small settlement of vorcha. Sand and mud had piled up there, along the bank, creating a kind of beach, where a group of young whelps splashed and played in the water. Liara held her binoculars up and stared at them playing as the adults sat looking dejected around what appeared to be a communal hearth. Just as she was wondering how that group made their living, an answer came in the form of a gang of krogan, dressed in full riot armor. The team of seven pulled up in a vehicle and began tossing out rations onto the ground near the center of the camp. The vorcha gathered to eat, then allowed themselves to be loaded into the bed of the craft that rose into the air and disappeared over the far ridge.

“Nothing in this galaxy that I have fought so hard to preserve has changed,” Liara said, mostly to herself. Her companion made a sound—low whistling hum that suggested thinking. “Are those Blood Pack insignia?” Liara asked of the Krogan.

Her guide appeared in the doorway. “Unlikely,” it said. “The Pack do not stray this far north. One of their subcontractors, perhaps.”

“But they wear the skull.”

“They do. But only as tribute.”

“And they tend the vorcha as slaves,” Liara said.

The geth made an affirmative sound. “The captors are slaves, too. In one way or another most who live here are.” It paused and when Liara didn’t turn from the lookout, it said, “Come. What you seek is in the next lookout hole.”

Liara followed him, and there it was, in a hollow in the wall, hidden cleverly behind a loose rock that needed some work to pry free. The disk, no bigger than Liara’s thumbnail fell into her palm, and she pocketed it.

“Would the doctor care to visit the vorcha encampment before we return?”

“No,” she said and turned away. “Do you monitor their communications?” she asked.

“We do.”

“Was my arrival noted?”

“Yes,” her companion said. “But you need not worry. The Pack may take interest, but they are nearly five hundred kilometers to the south, and without sufficient transport to come in force. They stay close to their bases, especially in the bad weather. Our signals jam their communications.”

Liara nodded, but remained wary.

Something that looked like snow was falling as they made their way down from the listening post. Only it wasn’t snow, but flakes of ash blowing in from the smelter that stood like a mountain of flame on the horizon. Arriving at the geth village, they found that every trace of it was now gone, but for the two toed footprints that drew oddly regular patterns in the mud. They found the owners of those feet soon after, loading the last parts of their gear into Liara’s ship. The command platform approached her. Her smaller counterpart, the youthful platform she was already calling Flashes bounded up behind her. Flashes and the leader communed wordlessly for a time while Liara waited.

“Your search was successful?”

“It was.”

“Good, we have news of our own.” It gestured toward the deployed ramp. “Come.”

Vance was still in medbay, but sitting up now, and looking only half dead, her skin a brownish gray, rather than its usual healthy deep brown. Two geth were tending to her, and all in all she was taking it well. The two platforms looking after her were showing her how to flex the toe joints of the mechanical leg that they had fixed to the flesh and blood stump. Vance was crying and shaking her head. Seeing Liara, she rose up off her pillows and screamed, “You should have let me die, T’Soni!” The geth moved in and gently lowered her back down. One appeared to administer a sedative.

“Your crew member is faring better,” the leader said. “Her mental state is harder to explain.”

“Organics like to remain intact,” Liara said. “There are some religions that hold all inorganic implants must be removed after death for a smooth entry into the afterlife.” The leader made a sound, and Liara said, “It comes from the Invasion. There’s a real fear, in some circles about augmentation.”

“And perhaps she is one such?”

“I didn’t say that.” She turned to Flashes and said, “Is the loading complete?” Flashes indicated that it was. “Let’s be away then, before the Blood Pack decides they’re brave enough to rouse themselves from their base.”

“What is our destination?”

“For now,” Liara said, “make for Virmire. There’s someone there I need to see.”

#

The journey would be a little over two days. Meantime, the geth had made themselves at home, on the flight deck, in med bay, in the comms center. The only place where she could avoid them was in her stateroom, and so Liara retreated, and began analyzing her mother’s data. Unlike most of what Benezia had left behind in the past, large caches of data that were mostly junk to help disguise the real information, this one was more concise, and everything seemed to matter.

There was another video of her mother, much more recent, probably taken less than two hundred years before Benezia’s death. She had a haunted look about her, which was exactly how Liara remembered her mother, even when she wasn’t on duty, and when her mother began to speak, the image of her face disappeared and was replaced with more data. A row of ID images, asari faces, labeled as having been prosecuted for treason and subsequently incarcerated for hundreds of years on the now decommissioned fortress of High Rock. Liara scanned the pictures, while her VI worked through each using facial recognition. When the VI found none, Liara decided to share the images with her geth counterpart.

It disappeared below decks for half an hour before returning. “These faces match no known criminals who may have been imprisoned on High Rock,” Flashes told her. Liara put up her hands and was about to say something, but her counterpart continued, “some of them, however, do match crew from the asari science and research corps, roughly twenty-five hundred years ago. In the records, some of them are marked as having died during service. Others seem to have been cashiered after their separation was ordered.”

Twenty five hundred years ago—a long time, and not. It was right around then that High Rock had been transformed from a gateway station for the exploration and colonization of Parnitha to a heavily fortified military installation. It had always seemed odd to Liara that the militarization of near-Thessia space began nearly two centuries before discovery and activation of the mass relay.

Liara looked the faces over again, but made little sense of what they signified.

Similarly confounding were records for a Commandant from the Serrice Guards, who had disappeared while doing work with the science corps. The dates indicated it would have been long enough after the Serrice-Armali armistice that she would not have gone missing in combat. In any case, she was listed as missing, presumed dead or unrecoverable. But then Benezia had appended three flash news transmissions that had not been scrubbed from the records that marked the Commandant as a fugitive from justice. What, if anything, did that mean?

Beyond all this, was a massive document detailing several research and attempted first-contact expeditions Benezia had undertaken during the three hundred years that had elapsed between her last hidden cache of data.

It began with a long narrative that traced the rise and fall of an alien society, now long since vanished, that had once flourished on an arid planet in the Arcturus Stream. Their written records, primitive as they were, suggested a rapid shift from a loose agrarian society that had, in the span of a few hundred years, grown into an industrial civilization. These aliens who called themselves the tarenten, had stripped an entire continent of its metals and, rather than put them to use, forged them into some kind of monument.

The structure, Benezia wrote, is no longer to be found on Arema, though its foundations are still there. What writings we have indicate a tower that must have stood seven or eight kilometers tall, and that was nearly ten kilometers wide at its base. All this emerged from a society that had, thus far, failed to master atmospheric flight, much less space travel. The purpose of the structure remains unknown, though it is said to have been forged in tribute to a line of rulers that had overseen the rapid rise and abrupt collapse of the civilization. No trace of the monument itself remains. It is unclear what alloy the structure was made from, though the planet’s once mineral-rich crust is now depleted of iron, titanium, tungsten, copper, gold, and uranium. Drawings show a pyramid type structure, made of a latticework of metal bands or bars. It is unclear what inspired this rapid shift from agriculture to industry. No segment of the society, apart from their supreme leaders perhaps, seems to have benefitted from the work, in spite of the entire civilization pulling together in this singular purpose. Estimates suggest that the structure was built in less than two hundred years, using relatively simple technology, approximately ten thousand years ago. Imagining the society collapsed shortly after the structure was completed, leaving it untended, under normal atmospheric conditions parts of it should still remain, at least as wreckage. As it is, only its much softer stone pediments are present. No geological evidence suggests a major shift in climate, from wet to arid, during the period. If anything, data suggests conditions have remained unchanged. Further explanation for the structure’s disappearance must be sought elsewhere.

Liara searched for records of Arema. The planet was an ideal candidate for terraforming, and asari had sought to build a self-sustaining colony there. It appeared that those plans were rapidly abandoned shortly after Benezia presented her findings to the council of matriarchs, who had, nonetheless subsequently excluded Benezia from higher level operations.

Liara rose from the console she had set up on the bed and went to the flight deck. To her surprise, Vance was on her feet in the comms center. In one hand, she held a cane, and in the other, she was using a pen to gesture at different screens as Flashes scanned across the arrays, trying parse information as it came in.

“It’s good to see you on your feet,” Liara said to Vance. “You seem to be adjusting to the prosthetic much better now.”

Vance shook her head. “I can hear it,” she said, “in my mind, I can hear them singing.”

Liara studied the consoles.

There was a lot of news, and very little of it was good. The Alliance had taken the turian colony of Bardo, striking at the orbital defenses—which had been considerable—before landing a massive ground force. Bardo was a garden world, and this was an escalation far beyond the space battles that had been fought so far. This was turning into an honest to goodness war.

Meanwhile the salarians and asari had fought each other to a standstill in the systems bordering the Krogan DMZ.

Foragers in the Kite’s Nest had recently gone missing. Hard to connect that to anything. The Kite’s Nest had been a dangerous place since the Reaper Invasion, and the batarians had suffered the highest casualties in the war, becoming a virtually extinct race. Some estimates put their numbers as low as five hundred thousand, and Kashyyk was a blasted ruin scoured of everything but the most basic life forms. All the same, missing foragers could be a sign of trouble ahead.

“Any other news?” Liara said.

Flashes turned to her. “Your name has come up a few times in cross-galactic chatter. It seems that numerous authorities are still searching for you.”

“Where do they think I am?” Liara asked.

“The trail ended when you passed through Omega Prime.”

“I have since reprogrammed the transponder to squawk a different call sign and registry number. It’s for a ship that was lost at Fortuna. Their distress call was logged at a remote beacon that I’ve had tapped for a number of years. It is likely that someone will notice in the next few days that the ship called for help and put two and two together, so it’s best we swap ships, or reprogram again once we make our next jump.”

“Understood,” Flashes said. Then it added, “The SpeCTREs are after you as well. A new set of decrypts confirms that Deniri has been personally in contact with the corps, and at least two SpeCTREs loyal to her are now giving chase.”

That would make things more difficult, Liara thought, but decided it was best not to say anything. Flashes returned to its work, and Vance pulled Liara aside.

“I was wondering if you could—if you could tell me what happened at Tortuga.”

“You were defending the ship while I made it ready for departure. The barriers were coming up when you were hit. It’s unlikely you’d have survived otherwise. But the impact still caused a severe wound. I suspect you owe your life to the autosurgeon in med bay, and your leg to these geth.”

Vance looked down at her feet, one in a boot she must have found in a locker below decks, and the other a two-toed claw-like appendage. “I suppose I should say thanks.”

“Don’t,” Liara said. “I took you hostage. You don’t owe me anything.” After a moment, she said, “If we arrive at Virmire without incident, I could leave you in the care of my colleague. He will make sure you are safely returned to the Alliance.”

Vance’s entire face seemed to draw together into a mask of anguish. “You don’t understand, do you?” There were tears leaking out of the corners of her eyes. “You don’t—they’re part of me now. They touch my mind, and I touch theirs. There’s no going back from that.” She turned to show Liara a small incision that had been opened and then welded shut at the back of her head. “They installed a motor implant, to make it work. But they’re in there, whispering their little number songs. It’s beautiful, in its own way, but the military will never have me back.”

Liara thought. “I suppose not,” she said.

“I think I’m on this journey with you until the end.”

Liara, not knowing what else to say, given that their journey together, wherever it led them, was likely to be short. She reached out and embraced Vance, who was a good bit taller than she was, so she had to stand on her toes to put her chin on Vance’s shoulder. She let Vance go and returned to her stateroom. Where there were still more files to read, including a more detailed archaeological report on the strange structure built on Arema. About a century later, a second research team from the University at Serrice had surveyed the site and found evidence of even more structures, many nearly as large as the first. They had come to similar conclusions as Benezia, and here her mother quoted their conclusion directly in her notes.

The idea that an unsophisticated agrarian society would suddenly turn its attention to such a project is so preposterous that this team can only conclude that they were motivated to do so by artificial means. Whether this means an incomplete or mishandled uplift by an advanced alien race, such as what appears to have taken place on Tomeria (see Interis et al.), or of a species susceptible to telepathic or hypnopathic suggestion, as is the case with the recently extinct rachni, who appear to have been under the influence of a single queen. We cannot say for certain, as the evidence is incomplete (see appendix D, section 2 for plausible explanations of each case), or whether there is some similarly self-destructive phenomenon at play (such as generational mass psychosis or apocalyptic religious cult). What is abundantly clear is that the bulk of the population transitioned from one economy to another, casting aside all environmental concerns in the interest of extracting as much metal from Arema’s largest, and most agriculturally viable, continent, with the explicit purpose of building monuments of gigantic scale, whose purpose is unknown, and with no readily understood practical function. That such a society would collapse in such short order, in pursuit of such vanity, is of little surprise.

What remains to be explained is what has happened to the materials used for these monuments. Belerai’s study (see Chapter 4.6) suggests that precise isotopic measurements of the small quantities of the elements that do remain in the planetary, might lead to a definitive answer. Thus far, no samples of metals available on the surface of Arema match the known isotopic ratios indicated in Belerai’s study.

It went on like this for some time. Liara set that material aside again and began searching for information on the planet Temeria, where something similar had happened, and at about the same time, as well.

Benezia, in the meantime, had been pushed out of senior roles for a few decades, and reaching the age of eight hundred and fifty, had decided to settle down with her on again off again lover, Aethyta, and finally had a child. About fifty years later, though, Benezia had somehow got back into the council’s good graces, and been tasked with training new SpeCTRE candidates. It was hard work, but it allowed her to stay on Thessia, and be a mother to Liara, one who had done her best, but still remained cold and distant.

Meanwhile, the asari military had established a listening post on Korlus. What, Liara wondered had they been listening for?

Liara returned to her notes. What Benezia seemed to have pieced together, without realizing it, was that these two civilizations, one agrarian, one hunter-gatherer, appeared to have been enthralled by an unseen alien force that had treated both civilizations as an exploitable and expendable labor force that had been set to work and then abandoned once that work was complete. Such evidence pointed toward the leviathan. Or, possibly, to Sovereign, though what Sovereign would have done with such massive quantities of metal, Liara could only wonder. The pattern was more heavily suggestive of leviathan activity, and, what’s more, pointed directly at the lie they had told to Shepard all those years ago, that they had been in hiding ever since their slaughter at the hands of the Intelligence that would go on to construct the first reaper.

This war that was going on now—it had all been a pretext to blame the leviathan for expanding their territory beyond what was allowed by the Dekkuna accords. But that had backfired into open conflict between all the most powerful galactic races. That can’t have been Deniri’s plan, Liara thought.

She got up and paced as much as the tiny cabin would allow. She knew what she had to do, but could not admit it to herself.

Half an hour later, Flashes called to inform her that the ship was about to pass through the Eagle Nebula primary relay on their way to the Pangaea Expanse.

Liara went to the flight deck. Vance had gone back to med bay.

“She had been on her feet for six hours,” Flashes told her. “She needed the rest, so we told her to get some sleep.”

“Understood,” Liara said. “I need to ask something of you. You may confer with the others, and you may refuse.”

“What is it, Doctor?”

“I need to send a message.”

“Of course, Doctor. The comms array is ready for you at all times.”

“I need to send it via different channels. Through the geth consensus, to an addressee on the Citadel. Any other route would be too dangerous for—well, for all of us. For the moment we need to remain as untraceable as possible.”

Flashes made a sound. “Of course, Doctor. We will confer.” After a moment, it asked, “To whom is the message addressed?”

“Matriarch Deniri,” Liara said. “We need to talk.”

Chapter 17: Final Transit

Chapter Text

Final Transit

Essa’s hands were shaking. When was the last time she’d had anything to eat? No time for that now, with the ship underway and the relay directly before them. In half an hour they would transit again, and either they would be back at Parnitha, or they wouldn’t. Either way, this mission, this three year—or had it been four? She couldn’t remember—ordeal would be over.

The ship, which had been designed for in-system operations, for periods of six months or less before months of drydock for refit, was more than showing its age. On the flight deck, every seam in the cushioning of her acceleration couch was sprung open and chunks of its gel filling came loose every time she belted in. Everywhere, displays were cracked, instruments unresponsive. The lavatories were clogged with waste. Everyone aboard had resorted to buckets and bags, like in the old days. Several maneuvering thrusters were stuck open, an had to be shut down, meaning that every few days the ship had to rotate through a three-quarter circle to maintain proper attitude. The ship’s reactor sealed vessel was starting to spike and then flatline, a sign that it was near the end of its five-year service life. Even the viewport was coated with thin rime of ice that had been collecting around the ship for who knew how long. Belowdecks everything was worse. It was a wonder they hadn’t all died of some fungal infection, or drowned in their own filth or breath-gasses. It was a testament to the engineers and their skill that the ship was, only just now, truly starting to fall apart.

The transits between relays didn’t seem to put any strain on the ship’s structure, but normal acceleration was a different story, and the lattice that held the drive sequestered from the rest of the Nixia had cracked. Chances were the struts would soon fail entirely. If the ship had to do another hard burn, the spars would spall or shatter and the drive would either tear away from the ship, or plough through the cargo bay.

The had left the massive structure, that floating, dead city, behind them. As best as you can leave anything like that behind. Or anything of the other wonders and horrors they had seen these past years. What would they tell their rescuers, should they come through the relay on the other side? Oh, Essa couldn’t let herself think such thoughts. Not yet. For now she had to keep herself together. And the ship.
#
A day earlier, as they accelerated away from the dead city, Razia had come to find her. The drives burned at a low quarter force of gravity, but it was enough to pin them gently to the cushions on the science deck. No one was doing any science. All the machines were shut down, and the crew was all in their bags on the deck above, apart from Saria, who was sedated in med bay. The bleeding from her injury had stopped, and she seemed to be suffering no ill effects. The wound, in fact, was sealed shut, scarred a bit yes, but still closed, the flesh knit together. Essa had reviewed her helmet camera video, watching as Ullala had half carried her up toward the launch. The two had found themselves suddenly cut off from rescue by several dozen of the creatures Essa and the rest had seen on the levels below. Forcing Ullala away from Saria, they had held her down, pinned her arms to keep her from squirming, and sealed the injury, and then the hole in her vac suit.

Arguably they’d done a better job on the vac suit than the leg.

And then they’d let her go. The method they’d used to close the wound appeared to have been a small plasma torch. Gauging by Saria’s screams, it had been far from pleasant. And close contact with an alien creature had hadn’t done her any good either. Ullala, the closest thing they had to a ship’s doctor any more, had said it was probably best to let her dream out the experience for a few days.

And so there she was, arm hooked to a pump with the last of the ship’s hypnotics. Crying out—sounds, not so much words—every few hours or so, but otherwise harming no one, and causing none to herself.

Razia took Essa’s hand in hers.

“Captain,” she said.

“Commandant.”

The two exchanged a look, and Essa had found herself wishing beyond all else that Neela had been there with her instead.

“You didn’t bargain for this,” Razia said after a long while.

“What do you mean?”

“You didn’t know what you were getting into,” Razia said. “Your crew didn’t know, but we didn’t know either. Some of it.” After a sigh, she went on, “Virtually every part of the planning and preparation of our mission was secret. Every stage of the mission was high risk.” She gestured vaguely at the ship around them. “I don’t know if I told you this, but none of my team were on active duty. We had, in fact been demobilized collectively about ten years before mission start.” Razia was not speaking as carefully as she usually did, though she still seemed to be thinking everything through as she spoke.

“Was that all part of the planning for this?” Essa gestured around her, at the ship falling apart.

“I did,” Razia said. “The others, I don’t think so. It’s not important now.”

“So you knew about the probe.” It wasn’t a question. “What it could do.”

“We had an idea. The techs that set up the drive maybe more than the others, but they’re dead and we can’t ask them.”

Essa thought for a long time. Razia’s hand was still on hers. “So someone knew what would happen. Someone did this to us.”

“That’s right.” Razia seemed angry. Her hand felt tight on Essa’s.

“There were thirty-seven people on this ship when we departed. Twenty-five of them are dead or lost. Who would sacrifice so many, and for what purpose?” The ship rocked slightly, and then began to rotate in earnest, making its once-a-day attitude correction. Essa grabbed hold of a handrail, and Razia, finding nothing else to take, grasped Essa’s leg as the Nixia seemed to momentarily fall away from her. By and by the ship settled down and the gentle acceleration resumed.

When Razia spoke again, after having caught her breath, she said, “We should focus on getting home.” And then, “But when we do, I have a good idea which people to ask. I want to know why.”

Essa nodded. Her hands, too, had turned into fists on the padding. Suddenly the alarm sounded and the navigator called over the interphone that they would soon begin to coast on approach to the relay.

“I’d better go,” Essa said.

“Before you do,” Razia said. “I want to show you something. Will you allow me?” One hand was out, the other over her heart, signaling she wanted to meld. “Please?”
#
Essa didn’t like having been inside Razia’s mind, but it helped to have stood, for a moment, with the matriarch who had asked, “Would you sacrifice yourself for a greater good, Commandant?”

“You know the answer has always been yes.”

“And what of your team?”

“They are adjusting to civilian life,” Razia said. “Some better than others, but they’ll do what’s necessary.” Seeing the look on Razia’s face reminded Essa of the moment that Nerai had slipped overboard and had to be left behind. She remembered giving the order to abandon her as though she’d done it at the start of her last watch, and not three years ago. How many had Razia sacrificed like that?

The matriarch shifted uncomfortably on her feet. It was said that Falera, in her old age, was having problems with her lower back and with her hips, too. But then she regained her balance and spread a set of documents in the air before Razia. Even in the meld, there was something about the images that made Essa’s vision seem to slip from their surface, as though there were something drawn there that her mind couldn’t quite grasp. One image was clear, though, a high resolution telescopic image of the first installation. Razia paged forward and there were more images, these taken from closer up, likely by a drone, and that bore annotations. These, Essa could see. They were of the first relay they’d discovered near Tevura. The image was covered in circles and text, and there, at the base of the curved opening, someone had identified correctly the aperture where they had first docked. Someone had even noted that the shape was very similar to, but with key differences, the universal docking collar that asari spacecraft used. Essa recalled that the launch the Nixia carried had been modified shortly before their departure. They must have altered the collar, she thought, so that we could dock comfortably. It would have taken detailed scans, from much closer up than these images had been taken. Had someone already visited that installation, before the Nixia had come?

“You understand?” Falera said. “We need to know.”

“If your analysis is correct?”

“No,” Matriarch Falera said. She straightened up. “We need to know if it works.”

“You don’t need us,” Razia said. She straightened up and made a dismissive gesture. “Not for this.”

“We do,” Falera said, and shook her head. “The captain of the Nixia cannot know the true nature of the mission. If they know what is to happen, the crew may—hesitate. It will be your task to ensure they carry out their orders.”

“And if they don’t?”

“You will compel them.”

“Twelve commandos for a research vessel. It seems excessive.”

“You are touching the void, Commandant. No one knows what will happen when you attempt to use the installation.”

“And the others?”

“You may inform them as you feel necessary.”

Razia stood at attention. “Matriarch, we will not fail.”

Essa had suspected. That there was a second mission layered on top of hers—she’d known that for a long while. She’d made her peace with it. But that Falera, and by extension the whole of the asari government, saw her, the captain—three years dead—the crew, the ship, and finally some of its best operatives as entirely expendable, in pursuit of this knowledge, Essa had always wanted to believe that it couldn’t be true. And yet there it had been.

Still in the meld, Razia had said, “I’m sorry, captain.” And Essa had understood. She did. There had been a civilization that had built this network, had built cities, had built its floating, fortified capital out in the vacuum, and something had come along and—erased them. And whatever that that power had been. It was still out there. And yet the matriarch had sent them to open the gateways, to announce themselves to the galaxy. It was an incredibly short sighted and foolish thing to do, Essa thought.

“You think we were wrong to do it?”

“Is it worth all these lives?” Essa said.

“We had to find out.”

“And what of all the ruins?”

“When we make our report,” Razia said, “we will let them know.”

“Will they listen?”

Razia only smiled. “Let’s survive this first.”

#

Only two minutes to go now. The navigational computer was giving off the steady tone that signaled it was in contact with the installation. The process was mostly automatic, and there was nothing they could do. Essa opened the interphone.

“Shipmates,” she said, and when that didn’t sound right, she added, “Survivors. Listen now. We stand at the precipice. In less than two minutes we will take what will be our final jump. When we departed on this mission, three years ago, we did not now what lay before us. Now, our navigator believes that this final jump will take us home to Parnitha, to Thessia, to our homes. None of you asked to be taken on this great journey, and I am sorry for what you have endured. If it turns out that we were wrong, that our next transit does not take us home, may the Goddess Athame remember us and hold us close at her bosom as she carries us beyond, and below, like a stone in a pond. If, by some grace of fortune, we return home, let us remember always the ones we have lost or left behind. May the goddess be with you.”

She closed the interphone. Essa had never been especially religious, but if she had ever needed Athame to be real, it was now. The installation loomed tall before them, it like a headland, and they a rowboat.

There was a flash of light, and for a moment the world seemed to end. And then, in the dizzying sick of the moment after the transit, Essa looked through the viewport and saw a field of stars, and just before them, a dark space, lit by a curved edge of sunlight, Parnitha rising over Tevura’s horizon.

She’d never seen anything so beautiful. And in that moment of relief, even as she was undoing the buckles of her command chair, she realized, to her horror, and to her joy that she couldn’t stay here, that she would have to go back.

Chapter 18: Does This Unit Have a Soul?

Chapter Text

Does this Unit Have a Soul?

Alenko crater, the two kilometer-deep hole and two-hundred kilometer-wide blast zone that had once surrounded Saren’s secret labs, was still visible from low orbit, though no longer hot with radiation. The forests had returned in the decades following the blast, but the vegetation was younger, and the shorter, less stout trees made for a different shade of green from this altitude. Liara watched it appear on the dayside of the planet before they began their descent through the upper atmosphere. Flashes was piloting, and a second geth platform she had come to think of as Pinstripes, stood behind the copilot’s seat.

Out of orbit, the crater vanished behind a wall of rain, and the ship bounced around in the turbulence of the storm.

“Dr. T’Soni fought the geth here,” Flashes said.

“I did,” Liara said.

“The histories say those geth were heretics.”

“They had fallen under the influence of Sovereign,” Liara said. “It was unfortunate that their minds were so pliable to its influence. And some were able to resist indoctrination, though not many. It was Commander Shepard who decided to assist in reprogramming the heretics, rather than wiping them out. They joined us in the fight against the reapers, all those years ago.”

Pinstripes said, “We came to understand the logic of joining the cause of organic life.”

“And you made all the difference,” Liara said. The geth had lost much in the final battle over earth.

“Were you present at our liberation?” Flashes asked.

“Does this unit have a soul?” Liara asked. Some geth, she knew, considered the Morning War their true liberation, and called the second—when the quarians retook Rannoch—the Great Sacrifice, or sometimes the Compromise. Both times, the liberation was launched by the question, Does this unit have a soul.

“A very political answer,” Flashes said. It turned toward her and adjusted its head flaps in a way that might have indicated a questioning glance, before it turned again to the instruments. “Doctor T’Soni depends on us.”

“This unit was not present,” Pinstripes said. “Some of its constituent runtimes were in units that were part of the consensus at the time. They speak of as though veil had been lifted from their minds.”

“The truth,” Liara said, “Is that the quariuans made a mistake with the geth. There never should have been a war, but organic life is—complicated. We sometimes cling to the idea of our consciousness as special, even if it’s not. Their fear of artificial consciousness was understandable, but all the same it was wrong.”

“You speak as a captive,” Flashes said. “You destroyed many when you were free, and now, captive, you sing of peace.” Liara was surprised, if only because Flashes had always seemed to be friendly toward her. Friendly as a machine could be to an organic.

“People can change. Geth and asari alike.” Flashes made a sound. An electronic grunt perhaps. “It was a long time ago,” Liara said. “My friend Kaidan died down there, defending an improvised bomb.”

Pinstripes made an odd purring sound.

“Our landing site is on the night side. I will input coordinates. We should arrive just with the dawn.”

“Understood,” Flashes said, and griped the controls with two steady hands.

Pinstripes turned toward the companionway, and then back. To Liara it said, “I have a message for you. Matriarch Deniri has accepted your request.”

#

At the comms panel Liara turned on the monitor to see the matriarch sitting fiendishly close to the screen, as though by peering through it she might find out where Liara was. It wouldn’t matter soon, perhaps. The ship bucked again in the turbulence, and Liara switched her monitor to broadcast.

“Liara,” Deniri said. Her voice was sharp, and just a shade too loud, as though she were not entirely in control of herself. When she spoke, it revealed her eyeteeth, giving her an oddly feral look.

“Matriarch,” Liara said. “It’s good to see you again.”

Deniri withdrew to a more suitable distance, seating herself on the edge of her desk. She glared down at Liara as the geth’s visual field followed her. Silence, then, “So. You wanted to speak?”

“I did.” Liara considered her next words carefully. “You want me silenced,” she said. “I’d like to know why.”

“You don’t already know?” Deniri said.

“I’ve an idea,” Liara said. “My mother left something for me. But you knew about that. The data vaults on the Citadel. You’d been through them sufficiently by the time I arrived. There were unit patches in the capsule that had been removed. Don’t act surprised, I know you did it on purpose, to let me know. Two patches were gone—the chevrons of the Serrice Guards, and the half-heart of the Lovers—my mother was in the latter, and the former was involved in something you’d rather not have unearthed. Only I’ve unearthed it. One root of it, anyhow.”

Deniri was quiet. Liara went on.

“The outbreak on Pirin was no mistake. You intentionally released the parasite.” Liara took Deniri’s silence as confirmation and went on. “You wanted to create a flashpoint. The parasites are native to the leviathan, and Pirin is mostly water. Leviathan are known to inhabit planets with with deep and plentiful oceans, and so the parasite made it look as though they had expanded beyond the bounds of the territory afforded to them by the Dekkuna accords.”

“What are you driving at, doctor?”

“That you started this. You sent me to Pirin, hoping I would be consumed by the outbreak. I very nearly was. When I returned to the citadel anyhow, you’d had plenty of time to sort through the data cache my mother had left behind.”

“Wasn’t much there,” Deniri said. Those drives were more like artifacts than data storage devices.”

“And yet they led me to Omega, where a team of hired assassins made such a poor attempt on my life that I let one of them live. And from there to Esan.” Liara noted the look of slight shock on Deniri’s face when Liara said the word. “Where someone sent a team of Hornets from Omega to kill me. Again, they failed. Along the way, I acquired a turian operative playing some kind of double game with Aria and the Hierarchy’s Intelligence Directorate, and quarian who made a bit of a splash on the news not long ago, Ashana nar Vesta.”

Liara stopped to let all this sink in. Varian and Ashan were far out of Deniri’s reach at the moment, and she could see Deniri processing that information, the hatred swirling behind her eyes. And something else, too, as though she were fighting against competing thoughts. It add her seem desperate. Maybe things were unraveling faster than Liara thought.

“Both of those pieces are no longer in play,” Deniri finally said.

“Out of your control does not mean out of the game.”

“I control the game. I run the council!” Deniri shouted.

“One who asserts their power never has much actual power,” Liara said, quoting Joker’s favorite book.

“What of your discoveries?” Deniri said. “I won’t let you live just because of what you know.”

“I’ve compiled a number of documents. It appears that an asari research vessel went missing a few hundred years before our species made its first official mass relay jump. It seems that not only did they use Parnitha Prime, they seem to have somehow found their way home again. Not all of their data has been destroyed. My mother ensured that some of it was preserved. I can only imagine why you wouldn’t want these documents to circulate. Should I expire, those documents will become available to the wider galaxy. It may make a difference. And it may eventually see that you answer for your crimes.”

“What do you want?” Deniri said after a pause.

“I don’t want anything,” Liara said. “Not for myself. I don’t expect you to let me live. Even if you promised no further attempts on my life, I wouldn’t trust you. What I want is for you to admit that you’ve overstepped your own ambitions. This war—it’s madness, and it has to stop.”

“The war is—unfortunate. And a necessity.”

“To whom?”

“To the galaxy. It needed it.”

“You mean you needed it. Didn’t you? All to stay in power.”

Deniri smiled and tilted her head. “War isn’t about who benefits. No one benefits. It’s about who wants it most. And right now everyone seems to want it. But not me.”

“Yet you provided the spark.”

“The spark provided itself. You were right there in my sights. The Alliance wouldn’t hold to Fairixen, and the Turians knew it. Arms races signal intentions, not preparedness. A dreadnought can only deter for so long. After that you have to use it. The Hierarchy and the Alliance would’ve been at each other’s throats sooner or later. No sense pretending that galactic peace would have held.”

Liara said, “You knew I was with the mercenaries when you arranged for the bombardment on that goddess forsaken world in the traverse.”

“I did.” Deniri smiled again. “It’s a miracle you survived the bombardment, and what came after. But I had to finish what I started, when my proxy, Aria, wouldn’t. I always knew that she had a soft spot for you. Still it surprised me that she went against me and let you go. More than once, I’m told.”

It was Liara’s turn to smile. “Better luck next time,” she said. Deniri snarled over the connection. She reached out and grabbed the head assembly of the geth that was transmitting their conversation.

“You listen to me—” Deniri began, but Liara cut her off.

“You listen,” Liara said. “You killed my crew. I am going to find your network and take it apart, until no one is left standing. And then I will come for you, once you’re entirely helpless.” Liara cut the connection, and tried not to think of what would happen to the geth platform that had been sent to function as a transmitter. Pinstripes had said its memory core would reduce itself to individual atoms when Liara cut the connection. But she’d seen what a quarian could do with geth hardware, when push came to shove. And Deniri had a quarian in her orbit, vas Mesto, who had already done work for her, tampering with Benezia’s capsule, among other things. They would trace her soon enough, but she had time. Days perhaps, and she would need them.

Flashes indicated that they had come up on her drop zone. Liara was ready, a bush knife on her back, and over that a pack full of supplies. The climb up through the jungle would be arduous.

“We can come with you,” Pinstripes said.

Liara shook her head. “There is a spaceport on the other side of the planet, big enough that a ship full of geth won’t seem out of place. Land there and wait for my signal. If you don’t hear from me in forty-eight hours, abandon the planet and make for the Veil. Keep Vance safe. Find her a ship out of here, if you can. She may prove useful to us elsewhere in the galaxy. And thank you.”

“We are,” Pinstripes began, “unlikely allies.”

Liara smiled and put her hand on Pinstripe’s pauldron. “There’s much to say about that. Let us survive the next days and we can discuss more.”

She went down the ramp, strapped onto the cable, and lowered herself through the upper canopy of the forest just as dawn was rising over the far ridge.

Chapter 19: Night’s Ocean

Chapter Text

Night’s Ocean

It was not the welcome she’d hoped for. Within ninety seconds of their transition past the installation, they were being hailed by two massive ships, each one almost a kilometer long. From scans, each appeared to be little more than a massive rail gun with a crew compartment and drive attached near the base—and later observation, what little of that they could do—proved them right. A commanding voice barked at them to identify themselves. That done, Essa waited for their response.

“Shut down your drives while we verify,” said the voice.

Essa gave the order, though they were moving swiftly along, even on the coast. It took a quarter hour for the voice to verify. And by then they had already drifted well beyond the rail guns’ effective range.

What were they doing there? Evidently they’d been positioned in anticipation of something arriving via the installation, though it wasn’t clear whether they were there to keep ships away from it, or whether they were there to greet anything that might suddenly arrive through it. She was pondering these questions when the voice came again, ordering them to commence a braking burn and to prepare to be boarded. Essa gave the orders, and in another hour sensors had identified a launch that had deployed from one of the rail guns. Razia paged her, asking to speak on a closed channel, “Four ears only,” she said, and once Essa had switched her over, she’d said, “I have something for you. Come below before the party starts, hm?”

They met on the science deck, Razia was climbing the ladder, laboring against the force of their braking burn. Essa dropped to the padded deck, and waited while the commando climbed up to her. Razia pulled herself up, nearly leaping off the ladder, as though it were nothing at all, to move from deck to deck under more than the force of Thessia’s gravity.

“What couldn’t you say to me over the interphone, commandant?”

“You need to listen. We’re about to be boarded. They’re going to come on in force, and it’s very important that no one resist, or they may kill anyone who does.” She paused for Essa to process what she’d said, but went on almost immediately. “They’re going to be rough, force everyone away from their stations and probably tie us for transport. They will break things, destroy instrumentation, throw things around. It’s going to be horrible, but it’s standard procedure.”

Essa shut her eyes. She’d been dreaming of coming home, and with that, all the safety that came with it. She wanted, above all, to feel solid ground underneath her feet, to feel the Parnitha’s light on her skin, to walk out under the sky of Thessia, at sunset, at dawn, perhaps to throw herself into the sand on the Eolian coast. She wanted to visit Orie’s mother, tell her how brave her daughter had been in the end. How she had kept everyone together, more than once, kept them sane, and above all, saved the entire mission by figuring out ways to keep everyone fed.

“Standard procedure?” Essa said. “They teach you to do this?”

“They do,” Razia said. “Make a big show of aggression, scare everyone, and you have them submissive and under your control from the beginning. It’s effective, but you don’t have to like it. I never cared for it myself.” She watched Essa carefully. “You’d best prepare the crew for what’s coming.”

Essa moved to the interphone and pinged the entire ship. “All hands, all hands. Come to the crew deck and prepare to be boarded. Do not resist the marines when they come through the airlock. That is all.”

Her personal comm rang and she answered. It was the flight deck. “Captain, we’ve been ordered to cut thrust.”

“Understood. I’m returning to the flight deck now.”

A moment later there was a whistle and the navigator called out, “All hands, all hands, prepare for microgravity.” Essa and Razia both grabbed handholds by the hatch to the telescope array, and then force holding them to the deck stopped. The rebound from the soft padding was enough to push Essa toward the ceiling, albeit slowly. She used the push to maneuver toward the companionway, but Razia called her back.

“Hang on,” she said, and grabbing Essa’s left hand, pulled her into an embrace. “Whatever happens,” she said. It seemed like she was going to say something more, but her eyes looked wet. “This ordeal is not over,” she said. “Not by a long shot.” And with that, she patted Essa on the back, and let her go. It wasn’t until she was back in her seat on the command deck that she realized that Razia had tucked something under the cuff of her rolled up uniform sleeve—a data disk, no bigger than her thumbnail. No time now to wonder about what was on it, and instead, Essa merely slid the device into her pocket and strapped into the commander’s chair.

“Flight crew,” she said.

“Captain!” they answered as one.

“You are dismissed to the crew deck as well,” she said. “Do not resist the boarding party,” she said.

They nodded that they understood, and hurried below as the launch carrying the boarding party circled them once, and then again. Essa sat on the quiet bridge, monitoring the ship’s systems, all of which were behaving within operational norms. If one didn’t consider that they were almost out of fuel, and that the ship’s frame groaned and cracked and popped whenever they began a burn. She aimed the ship’s navigational telescope at Thessia, which from here was little more than a handful of pixels on her screen, and then at Tevura, which loomed as big as a coin through the viewport.

For several minutes, the ship was quiet, almost contemplative. Essa tapped the thrusters to keep them from falling into a slow rotation as the marines made their final approach. But otherwise, she might have believed herself the only person aboard, the final survivor of this cursed mission. And now she was coming back with the news that they were not alone in the universe, or at least that at one time they hadn’t been. That once there had been a galaxy spanning civilization and something had come along to wipe them out.

And then, there was that ship. She scanned through the old sensor data, where the navigator and sensors operator had been working to piece together trajectories for the ship, along with visual scans. At first there hadn’t been much to go on, but over the months and years, they’d found it, nearly a dozen times circling, as though watching them from a distance, both before and after Nerai had been left adrift. It had to have been the same ship. There couldn’t be more like it.

Except that after nearly four years in the light of other stars, it was dawning on her that just about anything was possible.

Essa thought of Neela, whose ashes they had scattered on that far away planet. She’d made it nearly all the way. It had scarcely been six months since she’d been killed. Essa thought of Nerai, who—she hoped—was going to take care of the rest of the crew they had marooned on that far away planet, until she could return to get them. Would they survive?

Would she?

The boarding party arrived with a horrible crash against the outer airlock that shook the ship, and sent them into a slow, but perceptible spin. Moments later she heard the marines in the airlock, their voices loud, coming over loudspeakers mounted to their suits. Hands! They were shouting, Show us your hands! There was a loud bang, not a gunshot, possible a stun device, or a shock stick, a scream, and the sounds of a commotion, rising up from below that slowly subsided. A voice shouted orders, and there was a moment of tension as she waited for their next move.

Essa sat quietly in her seat, kept her hands off the controls, and waited for them to come for her. They did, soon enough, three of them, wearing jet black EVA suits dressed in hard-shell composite armor, all of them armed with carbine-style weapons, and shouting for Essa to show her hands, and to stay away from the controls. She suspected she could have pinned the marines to the far bulkhead, or against the control panel by using the maneuvering thrusters to put the ship in an uncontrolled spin. But that would just mean death for her and everyone onboard once the rail guns were warmed up and ready to fire. So she held up her hands, easy to do in zero gravity, and switched off the panel, when she was instructed to do so.

The marines unclipped her harness and tied her up. And soon enough she was buckled to the floor of their boarding shuttle as their attackers made preparations to leave. Shifting this way and that, Essa tried to keep count of the crew coming in as the marines constantly moved in and out, hauling gear, or another body. Someone was moaning that she couldn’t see, and Essa thought that at least one of the science team was missing, but she couldn’t be certain. She thought about ordering everyone to sound off, but before she could, something pricked against her neck and the world blacked out.
#
She woke in an isolation room, narrow, padded, white, with pinholes in two corners that likely were observation cameras. Wherever she was, she was not under acceleration, a small blessing that made the compartment she was in feel bigger than it would have been under thrust. She languished there, a day, perhaps more. At intervals, a food pouch appeared in a slot by what may have been a door. At others, a mechanical voice asked her to present her forearm for blood and tissue samples.

That went on for a while. Another two days, or maybe three. Essa waited and watched. The lights in her isolation cell sometimes dimmed, giving her enough peace to sleep. She waited for that to happen again, but before they did, she heard a voice.

“Identify yourself, please.” It had an odd sound, until Essa realized that it was a composite voice, comprised of several recordings made at once. She said her name, and then demanded to know where she was.

The voice ignored her, but pressed on, saying, “Identify your ship.”

Essa did as instructed, and there was a long pause before the voice answered, “The Nixia was reported missing four years ago. In Jennur of last year, it was declared lost with all hands.”

“I guarantee you it was not,” Essa said. The voice went away for a long time. When it came back, it asked about various mundane things. The Nixia’s dry and loaded mass, its specific acceleration at full thrust, and how long it could accelerate before burning through its fuel reserves. What was the escape velocity from the surface of Thessia, from low orbit, to escape Parnitha entirely. What was the maximum power load of the ship’s BT-173 reactor. How many fuel pellets did the ship carry, and how long could they be reasonably expected to provide power? Essa answered dutifully.

More questions followed. How was it that the BT-177 reactor—173 Essa corrected—continued generating power beyond its rated overhaul period of two years? Essa explained that the reactor hadn’t been under full load for most of that time. They had conserved fuel whenever they could, and the ship had been parked in orbit and left with minimal crew for months at a time.

Parked in orbit where? Where had the rest of the crew been? The Nixia, the voice insisted, did not carry any gear for extended planetary EVA. Essa explained, dutifully at first, then growing more exasperated—and asked the voice to check the Nixia’s navigational logs.

The voice started again, different questions, or the same ones but in different order. Tell us about the reactor.

Over the next few hours, they began adding in others. Essa’s crew, the ones who had been on the ship but are presently unaccounted for. She chronicled everything dutifully. Captain Tenneya, killed during an unplanned acceleration when the commandos had briefly taken control of the ship. The science officer who had cut her own throat inside her sleep sack. Neela, the two commandos and three scientists who had all been killed in one night on the planet they had given a number, but not a name. The other crew that they had had to leave behind, for the sake of saving some part of the mission. Essa restrained the panic she felt, the desire she felt to pound on the walls and scream that they had to go back.

These conversations were punctuated by the voice cutting in, asking Essa who she really was, where she’d been, and what she was playing at, claiming to be someone who had been missing for four years, and legally dead for nearly two.

“By now you’ve checked my identity,” Essa said. “You’ll know I am who I say.”

The voice waited, then said, “And you know that this is not possible.”

“It is,” Essa said. “I’m here for you to ask me what happened.”

The questions came again. Who was she. What was the operational lifecycle of the BT-173 reactor, and how much fuel did it carry. How much fuel could the Nixia carry in its primary tanks. Who had dismantled and reconfigured the FTL probe. Why had its data core been wiped? Those last questions Essa couldn’t answer.

“Progress,” the voice said. “Are you aware that someone destroyed the guidance console attached to the probe?”

“No,” Essa said. “I was on the command deck during the boarding action.”

There were more questions, but none of consequence. When voice went away, Essa moved over to the narrow shelf that served as her bed and pulled the straps tight around her so she could rest. As she did, something in her pocket jabbed against her skin. She pretended to adjust the straps as she felt around in her breast pocket. There it was, not in the pocket, but wedged into a space in the lining, the bottom of the pocket having worn through in a place. Either the marines hadn’t been searching the crew for anything but objects that could be used as weapons, or they hadn’t been careful. Essa left the disk where it was, and tried to sleep.

When she woke, one of the padded panels to her little cell was open, and the ship was under acceleration strong enough that she could stand. She stepped toward the open panel. From the corridor, there was dim light, and beyond, the sound of voices. Essa instinctively went toward them, finding herself at the end of a circular corridor that bent away in both directions. There were hatches across the corridor from her. This was not a crew deck with cabins for crew—asari generally didn’t like to be alone anyhow—but it was a purpose-built ship, maybe a floating prison. The decking was made of a soft material that cradled her feet as she walked.

About ten meters on, she came to a junction with a corridor that ran straight to the left, a kind of diameter to the circle whose circumference she was now following. She went left toward where the light was brightest and the sound of voices loudest. There she found a communal area where a few of the science team and commandos were seated around a cluster of tables. Perhaps a galley or mess hall of some kind. The commandos and science team noticed her, gave a brief nod and went back to their conversations.

Razia emerged from behind her, a pouch of food in each hand, and taking Essa by the arm, led her to a seat at the one unoccupied table.

Essa looked around, taking in the scene. The interior was utilitarian. The decking was soft to the touch, and the chairs were comfortably padded, as were the bulkheads. Pipes and power conduits ran along the ceiling inside insulated tubes. On the far wall was a monitor showing what looked like sensor data and ship information. The ship’s name was Night’s Ocean.

“Here,” Razia said handing over the pouch. Essa sucked at the tube—it was good, hot, and spicy, protein and carbohydrates flavored to taste like Armali dumpling soup. Such a change, from the long years eating alien berries and what little meat they could gather. Even the food she’d been given in the cell had been nutritive paste, bland as uncooked flour. The flavors of Armali brought her back home, and for a moment, Essa couldn’t stop herself from letting out a sob. When she’d finished wiping her eyes, Razia said, “It looks like they’re done asking questions for a while.”

“Is that live sensor data?” Essa said. Razia nodded. “It looks like we’re on our way to High Rock,” she said. You can tell by where the planets are positioned. It’s in orbital resonance with Janiri, so we must be on a braking burn.”

“Glad to see you back in your element,” Razia said.

“You got the same treatment in the cells?”

“So far everyone has.”

“We’re missing a few,” Essa said. “From your team as well, it seems.”

Razia nodded. “From what I can tell, they split us up between two separate ships, but no one is telling us anything.”

“Have you seen the crew?”

“No. We’re isolated on this deck. No one’s come on or off, at least not since the cells opened.”

“And the Nixia?”

Razia looked at the table.

“Tell me,” Essa said, and took hold of her arm.

“We don’t know for sure. But Liss said the marines who came aboard had remote-operated navigational gear. It’s likely they scuttled the Nixia by crashing it into Tevura.” She took hold of Essa’s arm. Razia had her sleeves rolled up and the coil burn scar on her arm was prominent in the warm light of the galley. “Listen, from what we can piece together, we’re all dead. As far as anyone knows, you and I and everyone else in this compartment died in a collision with the FTL probe, or whatever story they’ve been circulating back home. Chances are, they’re trying to figure out what they want to do with us. The fact that they haven’t put us all out the airlock already is a good sign, but it doesn’t mean they’re not going to kill us later, or that they’re ever going to let us go.”

Essa sucked more soup fro her pouch. “I guess it makes sense. No one wants news of a galaxy-wide alien civilization getting out, especially one that’s long gone. At least without first being able to control the story.”

“That’s pretty well it,” Razia said. “I hope you weren’t expecting a hero’s welcome. Or even the chance to see your family again.”

Essa shook her head. “It was just me and my mother. She died in an accident while I was still at the academy.”

“A lot of stories like that on board the Nixia,” Razia said.

“Except for Orie,” Essa said. “She had people. I’d like to get the chance to speak to her mother.”

“You may yet, but we need to get out of this first.”

“So what do we do?”

Razia lowered her voice. “We have to be careful,” she said. “I’m sure they’re monitoring us now. Our conversations, our movements, our body language, any biotic activity.” Essa nodded. “We need to behave. If we give them reason to, they will kill us—not just you, or me, but everyone in this room.”

Essa felt her pocket. The little data tab was still there. Razia saw what she was doing, and smiled.

“Bunch of f*cking amateurs,” she said. “We’re lucky. How much time until we’re at High Rock do you think?”

“Depends on what this ship can do, but likely no more than a day or two. We’ll probably drift and burn a few more times before we dock, but looking at where the other planets are, I’d say we’re close.”

“Good,” she said. “At least we’ll know soon what they’re going to do with us. Chances are we’ll be separated again once we’re on solid ground. We need to figure out a way to get back together or at least to stay in contact. That thing I gave you needs airing. That’s our best way out of this.”

Essa nodded. “It’s probably our only way out,” she said.