by Joan Jett
“Much obliged. See you at the extraction point.”
We drove back in the direction of Notanban, where it hung low over the horizon.
I caught a flicker of motion on the external view, a tiny flash of light in the space between us and the gas giant. Then another. Then a wave of motion, hundreds of flashes of light against the star-scattered backdrop.
Starships, dropping out of FTL in formation across thousands of kilometers of space, opening fire on the geth fleet.
“Look,” I suggested, and sent the image to everyone else’s panel.
Thus we saw Admiral Hackett, humanity’s hammer of vengeance for Eden Prime, as he fought the opening stages of the great Battle of the Armstrong Nebula. We watched in silence, even Ashley stealing glances as she drove, until Normandy swept us up and took us to join the fight.
Chapter 28 : Probe Down
3 May 2183, Interstellar Space
The Battle of the Armstrong Nebula counted as a tremendous victory for the Alliance. It didn’t hold the record as the largest battle fought by Alliance forces up to that time – that honor went to Second Shanxi in 2157. To this day it still stands as one of the most one-sided victories the Alliance has ever won.
Deprived of the control signal being broadcast from Solcrum, the geth failed to work together. They moved sluggishly, easy prey for a sudden ruthless attack. Admiral Hackett destroyed over a hundred enemy ships and sent the rest fleeing for the nearest mass relay, at the human cost of only three frigates and a cruiser. Any invasion the geth might have been planning withered on the vine.
When news of the battle spread back to the home worlds, humanity broke out in celebration.
I watched news reports over the extranet, wondering whether the Normandy and her commander would get due credit. In the end, the Alliance gave me a pleasant surprise. Admiral Hackett clearly stood as the hero of the day, but the Navy didn’t stint its praise of other officers who had done well. Shepard and Kaidan both received mention in a number of news stories, and I heard talk of decorations for both of them. I suspected Shepard would take that in stride, having already received some of the Alliance’s highest military honors, but the exposure would certainly do Kaidan’s career no harm.
Normandy stayed in the field and took no part in the festivities. Humans have an evocative metaphor for this stage of a military campaign: mopping up. Admiral Hackett sent us after stragglers and refugees, attempting to render his victory more secure and complete.
Once we rose into FTL, Shepard did stand down all but a skeleton crew, authorizing an on-board celebration. Then he “made the rounds,” and for once I toured the entire ship at his side, wanting to share this moment of triumph.
I also wanted to watch over him. Shepard had barely emerged from the medical bay in time to command the ship during our assault on Solcrum and the following battle. It was clear he had overridden Dr. Chakwas’s objections to do that much. His expression and posture projected confidence for his crew, but I saw him moving carefully, concealing a certain amount of pain. I didn’t say a word while he moved through the ship, but I determined that he would go to bed as soon as possible, even if I had to fight very unfairly to get him there.
The Navy crew set up a cheerful party on the crew deck, with plenty of beer, music, vids, and card games. The Marines held their own rowdy celebration in their ready room. In contrast, we found Tali almost alone in the engineering compartment, talking quietly over a game of chess with Lieutenant Adams.
“Shepard. Liara.” Tali rose and greeted us warmly.
Shepard smiled and nodded to her. “Good evening, Tali. I’m surprised to see you down here. You usually like crew gatherings.”
“I know. I’m just not in the mood tonight, and Engineer Adams needed someone to help him babysit the drive core.”
The engineer chuckled. “Not only that, I think I’m the only one on board still willing to play Tali without a handicap.”
“You’ve got me there,” Shepard agreed. “I’m no good at chess.”
Tali moved closer. “Shepard, I want to thank you for supporting Kaidan’s decision about the geth data. I hope you don’t get in trouble for letting me take a copy back to the Migrant Fleet.”
Shepard patted the quarian on one shoulder. “Don’t worry about that. We wouldn’t have had the data if you hadn’t discovered it and worked so hard to acquire it. I think I can convince the Admiralty that it was yours to begin with, and we should be thankful you let us have a copy.”
“If you say so,” she said, still uncertain. “My people will have years of work to do, analyzing and understanding all of what we discovered down there. I’ve already spoken to my father, and although he would never admit it, he’s very impressed.”
“Oh?”
Tali made her voice deep and gruff for a moment. “This is quite satisfactory, Tali. That’s Rael’Zorah for you did a wonderful job.”
“I suppose that means a successful Pilgrimage?”
“Better than I expected. Better than anyone expected.”
Shepard nodded. “Does that mean you’ll be going home soon?”
She cocked her head and looked up at him for a long moment. “No, Shepard. You won’t get rid of me that easily,” she said seriously. “Once Saren is defeated, I’ll think about returning to the Fleet, but for now there’s nothing more important.”
She hides it well, but she’s infatuated with him too, I realized. I glanced at him and saw nothing but friendly concern in his face. And he has no idea. Thank the Goddess for oblivious human males. Tali, I love you like a sister, but you are getting no help from me on this score.
As we returned to the lift I said lightly, “By my count you have now seen everyone on board the Normandy. Your next mission will be best carried out in your quarters.”
He gave me a speculative look.
I tilted my head back and gave him my best aristocratic stare. “No, that was not a clumsy asari attempt to propose a liaison. You need rest.”
“I might have known. If an asari proposes a liaison, there’s not going to be anything clumsy about it.”
“It seems that the human can be taught.”
“All right. With both you and Dr. Chakwas on the warpath, I know to exercise the better part of valor.”
He got his revenge once the lift doors closed. Suddenly I found myself backed against the wall, with a very persistent human crowding into my personal space. The kiss was very comprehensive . . . but he also knew to the second exactly how long the lift took to move between decks. When the doors opened onto the crew deck, all the celebrants saw him standing straight, unruffled, and a good meter away from me. If anyone noticed the flush that turned my face a deep azure, they said nothing aloud.
* * *
6 May 2183, Blue Mountains/Eletania
The planet looked beautiful enough to break the heart: deep blue skies with fluffy white clouds, perfect golden-white sunlight, and rich green foliage. I wanted to emerge from the Mako and run free across the hills and meadows. No doubt the air would taste wonderful . . . aside from the spores and micro-organisms drifting in it, rapidly and painfully toxic to any non-native life.
I vowed to keep my hardsuit on and sealed.
“Shepard, I’m seeing some very strange readings,” I reported as the Mako descended out of the sky.
“How so?”
“There’s a signal emanating from the mountain range off to our left, about five kilometers from our LZ. High frequency, densely modulated. I don’t know why we didn’t notice it from orbit.”
“Is it geth?”
“I don’t think so. It’s not in a band we’ve ever seen the geth use. It’s also nowhere near the band used by the probe we’re here to recover.”
Admiral Hackett had sent us after an Alliance reconnaissance probe that had been observing geth movements and communications after the battle. When the probe turned back toward Alliance space, the geth detected and attacked it, forcing it to make an emergency landing on uninh
abited Eletania. The admiral wanted us to recover the probe’s data module, which might carry intelligence vital to the planning of our next campaign.
Meanwhile, Shepard had his own reasons for wanting more intelligence data. For far too long, we had heard nothing of either Saren or his flagship, Sovereign. Shepard worried that Saren had taken no part in the Armstrong Nebula campaign. Were the geth operating independently of Saren when they occupied the cluster? Or had Saren sent the geth there, eventually sacrificing them, in pursuit of some scheme of his own?
Shepard grew impatient to come to grips with his enemy. In truth, so did we all.
“Let’s put that down as worth investigating later,” Shepard decided. “We need to recover that data module first, before any geth beat us to it.”
“Agreed,” I said, but I marked the location of the other signal on our map for future reference.
The crashed probe was easy to locate. Unfortunately, when we emerged from the Mako and went to examine the wreckage, the data module was missing. Kaidan bent close to look at the housing where the module should have been, and grunted with surprise. “It didn’t fall out or get broken off. Looks like someone stole it.”
“Damn pyjaks,” said Wrex.
Shepard frowned at him. “What do you mean?”
“Pyjaks,” stated the krogan. “They’re little primates, curious, with sharp eyes and clever fingers. They breed like vermin, they poke into everything, they love stealing little pieces of technology, and they crap on anything they can’t eat or use. Kind of remind me of what your ancestors must have been like, Shepard.”
“Ha ha,” Shepard said without mirth. “I thought pyjaks came from Tuchanka.”
“No, they’ve just settled in and made themselves at home there. They originally come from this planet. About a century ago some turians tried to set up a mining colony here, and a few merchant ships came by occasionally. One of the merchant captains must have picked up a few breeding pairs of pyjaks as stowaways. He dropped them on Tuchanka by accident. Next time that captain came by, the clans drowned him in a barrel of pyjak dung.”
Shepard looked around. “I see what you mean,” he said, pointing.
In the soft earth, we all saw a row of little three-toed footprints.
“Guess we get to do this the hard way,” grumbled Wrex.
He was right. Over the next six hours we visited several pyjak colonies, growing very tired of the little primates. Finally we found a colony next to an old turian mining facility, where the pyjaks had developed the habit of adorning themselves with little pieces of metal and wire.
“Great,” growled Ashley. “They’ve already invented bling. Fifty thousand years from now these guys will be the galaxy’s dominant culture.”
“Well, they’ve got the necessary poo-flinging skills down already,” observed Garrus, dodging a small brown missile.
Finally, some distance inside the mine shaft, we found an enterprising little fellow still carrying the data module in one hand. He screeched and bit Shepard’s armored hand when we went to relieve him of it.
After that, the geth attack was almost a relief.
We emerged from the mine shaft to find the pyjaks all in full flight, and a squad of geth troopers charging up the hill at us. Shepard snapped into action, the rest of us only a fraction of a second behind.
I don’t think the geth expected to meet so much resistance. They stopped dead, their ocular petals spreading in surprise as they stared up the slope at Shepard, Ashley, Garrus, and Wrex. Our soldiers opened fire, three assault rifles and a massive shotgun tearing through their shields. Kaidan and I had plenty of targets to choose from, using biotic force to fling damaged geth far into the air. The battle barely lasted two minutes.
“Damn, that was just enough to whet the appetite,” said Wrex. “Anyone mind if I shoot a few pyjaks as a cool-down?”
Shepard shook his head. “No shooting the native life, even if they are annoying.”
“Not like they wouldn’t replace the dead inside a week,” muttered the krogan. “Nothing you don’t need a microscope to see should breed that fast.”
We clambered back into the Mako, Kaidan securing the data module in a locked compartment.
“Do we have time to investigate that other signal?” I asked.
Shepard turned toward the distant mountains. “Sure, I think it’s worth the effort. It might be a distress call . . . or who knows what else?”
We found it a difficult drive. A clever driver could perform absurd feats of terrain-handling in the Mako. Even so, some of the slopes in those mountains almost surpassed even Shepard’s skill. The source of that signal hid in one of the most inaccessible locations for hundreds of kilometers around.
Finally, just as Elatania’s sun began to set, we came down into a narrow valley. Shepard stopped the Mako, and all of us simply stared at the external view for a moment.
We saw a broad circular platform, surrounded by six slender uprights of various heights, all apparently built of some pale stone. A mirror-surfaced sphere, not quite two meters in diameter, hovered over the center of the platform. If the sphere had any physical supports, we could not see them.
Shepard finally broke the silence. “Liara, is that . . .”
“A Prothean device? It certainly appears to be, but how could it possibly be intact after all this time?”
“Only one way to find out.”
We climbed out of the Mako and approached the platform. Everyone examined it in silence, even Wrex looking curious and intent.
The material of the platform and uprights seemed to be simple stone, but upon examination it turned out to be extraordinarily hard, harder even than diamond. Despite the probable age of the device, the platform and uprights showed almost no sign of weathering. Somehow they remained clean of dirt or organic debris. I saw no obvious way to estimate the date of the site. It could be Prothean, or it could predate the Protheans by millennia, there was no way to tell.
Kaidan approached the mirror-sphere and examined it on all sides, even getting down on the ground to look under it. “No supports, no wires. It’s just floating.”
“Liara, what do you think?” asked Shepard quietly.
“I think I want a year-long expedition and a team of a dozen specialists.”
“You can have that after the war. What do you think right now?”
“Best guess is that this is a Prothean data storage center, designed for truly long-term archival storage. It was placed here where it was likely to go undisturbed for thousands or even millions of years. Perhaps it’s a sort of time capsule.”
“It seems strange that this place wasn’t discovered a long time ago. Eletania has been explored before, and there was that turian mining facility for a while. Why didn’t anyone else detect that signal?”
I looked at him. “Perhaps there was no signal until recently.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Have you ever wondered why the device on Eden Prime was called a beacon?”
“I sure did,” said Ashley. “It’s not like it sent a signal out or anything.”
“None that you could easily detect,” I corrected her. “The other beacons recovered by the Council races have all been inoperative, but we have discovered they were once networked. They used quantum-entanglement technology to communicate with other devices, even across interstellar distances.”
Shepard nodded. “So you’re saying when Saren and I interacted with the device on Eden Prime, it might have triggered reactions in Prothean technology elsewhere. Even thousands of light-years away.”
“That would have been well within Prothean capabilities as we understand them,” I agreed.
“So that might have been what prompted this time capsule to open. What do you think it wants to tell us?”
“I’m not sure. Let me work for a little while.”
Shepard called the others away from the device, giving me room to investigate without interference. I walked all around the platfo
rm, carefully examining it and each of the uprights. I used my omni-tool to scan the area minutely.
There, I thought. The material of the platform is slightly different in that spot.
An elliptical region, roughly one meter long and half that deep, slightly darker than the rest of the stone, lay directly east of the floating sphere. After considering for a long moment, I simply stepped onto the darkened area, facing the sphere with my feet firmly planted on each focus of the ellipse.
We all heard a low humming sound. The sphere rose smoothly until it floated just above my height. A holographic control panel appeared in the air, within easy reach in front of me.
“Whoa,” said Kaidan.
“So far so good,” I murmured. “After fifty thousand years, it’s still responsive.”
Unfortunately I ran into a dead end. None of the control sequences I had worked out at other Prothean sites seemed to do anything. The control panel and sphere simply ignored me. None of my friends could suggest any way to proceed.
It grew dark, except for stars and the light of the planet’s rings high above. The others spoke in low tones, not wanting to disturb me. I could see Shepard preparing to break the bad news to me: we had to return to the Normandy and hope the site was still here later.
Then a set of characters on the control panel caught my eye. Fourth Age Prothean script, and it looked somehow familiar.
Suddenly I remembered where I had seen something similar. I opened my utility pouch and recovered an item I had been carrying for weeks, had almost forgotten about. A smooth cylinder, small enough to fit comfortably in my palm, made of a metallic material I could not identify, carrying a fine inscription along one side. A gift from Sha’ira.
I used my omni-tool to shine a bright light on the object, and then compared its inscription to the character sequence on the control panel. Sure enough, one character-group at the beginning of the inscription matched.
An interface area existed on the control panel, next to the characters I had spotted. I reached out and touched the cylinder to the control panel in just that spot.
