Deep Space: An Epic Sci-Fi Romance

by Joan Jett

  “The energy rises within you. As it rises, the centers of awareness in your body and mind respond. It is your true self, your connection to the world around you, to the cosmos in which we all live. It rises past your heart and fills you with well-being.”

  I could feel his breathing now, his heartbeat. His mind was responding to my instruction, his body was relaxing, his pain and exhaustion were slipping away for the moment. My own rhythms fell into synchrony with his. My eyes slipped closed.

  * * *

  1530 Shipboard Time (SSV Normandy), 10 May 2186, Zhu’s Hope/Feros

  “Thank you, Liara.” Shiala now wore a spare overall, donated by one of the colonists. She threw her arms around me, a familiar embrace that I returned with interest. “Please thank Commander Shepard for me as well. To be free again is the most precious gift.”

  “Oh, Shiala,” I sighed. “Come with us!”

  “I can’t.” She looked down, ashamed. “Right now, if I saw Saren again, I would want to be as fierce as you might wish. But I can’t trust myself. What if he spoke the slightest word and I suddenly found that his indoctrination had only been deferred, not removed? What if he forced me to turn against you once more? I couldn’t bear to hurt any of you again.”

  “Then what will you do?”

  “I think I will stay here. I’ve never had many dealings with humans before. I find them intriguing. And there is much I could do to help the colonists. Perhaps it will make up for some of what Saren and the Thorian did to them.”

  I smiled, remembering Shiala before she followed my mother into bondage. She had always been fierce but thoughtful, a warrior with a poet’s soul. “That is very like you,” I told her. “I remember when I was very young, the stories you would tell me about the justicars and their adventures. You always wanted to join their order.”

  “I could never be a justicar. Certainly not now, after the things I’ve seen.” She sighed, and I could see pain in her eyes. It made her look older. “But if I can bring a little compassion and justice into this place, surely that will be a start?”

  “I agree. I think my mother would have agreed too.”

  She blinked away tears. “Thank you. She would have been so proud of you.”

  “I know. She broke free of the indoctrination before the end, just for a few moments. I had a chance to speak to her.”

  “That’s good to know. It means there might be hope for the rest of us.”

  I remembered my conversation with Shepard in his cabin. “I think so too.”

  * * *

  1800 Shipboard Time (SSV Normandy), 10 May 2186, Theseus System Space

  “The energy rises further,” I murmured, so softly that Shepard might not have heard me. It didn’t matter. I could feel him responding, his body and mind coming into consonance with mine. “It sits behind your eyes. You are illuminated by it, a light that stretches to the limits of your vision, bright as the sun.”

  “Yes,” he murmured.

  “Now it rises once again, to rest above your head like a crown.” My eyes snapped open, and I knew they had changed, become pitch-black. “Embrace eternity.”

  Suddenly no distance separated us at all. My mind and his came into contact, our surface thoughts merging, trembling at the verge of a more complete fusion.

  Shepard, I called to him.

  Liara? He felt . . . not frightened, exactly, but extremely apprehensive. He struggled a little, fighting the link.

  Relax, Shepard. There is nothing to fear.

  I’m not afraid, he thought, but it was untrue. Shepard, the most courageous person I had ever known, afraid? Yet it was so. His anxiety increased. I felt a moment’s discomfort, like the echo of pain.

  Think about the vision, I instructed him. Think about what you saw when Shiala joined with you, the things you learned, the Cipher. Concentrate on that. Don’t think about anything else.

  I . . . I can’t.

  Why? I looked more closely, drew him into a slightly deeper melding. What’s wrong?

  No! Don’t push! He struggled more intensely, and this time I felt real pain.

  Suddenly I saw the truth. He strove to conceal something from me, something so wide and deep-seated that his very identity rested upon it. He couldn’t separate out the vision or the Cipher because they were somehow connected to this thing, this memory or thought that he was desperate I not see.

  * * *

  1750 Shipboard Time (SSV Normandy), 10 May 2186, Theseus System Space

  Shepard seemed pensive after we returned to the ship. He sent all of the Marines off-duty, put away his armor and weapons, checked the ship’s status, ordered Pressley and Joker to make way for the nearest mass relay, and went to the medical bay to check on all of our wounded. All routine for him. It seemed clear that his mind was elsewhere.

  Finally, I cornered him as he turned to leave the medical bay. “You’ve been very silent since we left Feros.”

  He took a deep breath. “Since I melded with Shiala, you mean.”

  “Well, yes. Shepard, the joining can be many things, but it is never trivial. Just touching another’s mind for the first time can be a very profound experience, and you accepted an enormous amount of information through the link. It’s only natural that you should feel some dislocation.”

  “Dislocation. That’s an oddly appropriate way of putting it. I feel as if I’ve dislocated my mind.”

  “What is it like?” I asked, honestly curious.

  “It’s like . . . I look at something, and I want to call it by some word I’ve never heard before, but I don’t know what the word is. It’s on the tip of my tongue but I can’t quite get it out. I look at other people and they don’t look right, but I can’t say how they should look. I’ve been having emotional surges, elated one moment, enraged the next. None of it makes sense.”

  “Is it getting worse?”

  “No, I think it’s slowly going away. Or at least it’s getting easier to filter out. Maybe if I just went to bed and slept for a dozen hours straight, I would be able to think properly when I got up.”

  I nodded. “That might not be a bad idea. We asari often find it useful to sleep after a deep joining.”

  “I can’t do it, though, not yet. Saren is too far ahead of us. I have to make sense of the vision. I feel as if the Cipher is the key, but I can’t quite bring it to bear.”

  I carefully said nothing. I knew if I joined with him, I might be able to help him put all the pieces together. I also knew I couldn’t trust my own motives. He would have to make the decision on his own.

  He did, but I could see that he was very reluctant. “Liara . . . I know you’re upset that Shiala melded with me before you did. Would you be willing to do it now?”

  “Oh, Shepard, I’m not angry with you over that, only a little jealous of Shiala. I’ll get over it. But are you certain it’s a good idea? None of us are at our best right now. A good meal, a few hours of rest . . .”

  “We can do all that after I know where to order Pressley to send the Normandy next. Liara. Are you willing to try?”

  I looked down, unable to meet his gaze. “Of course, Shepard.”

  He nodded decisively and turned. “Dr. Chakwas?”

  * * *

  1800 Shipboard Time (SSV Normandy), 10 May 2186, Theseus System Space

  It felt as if I struggled to save a panicking swimmer from drowning.

  Shepard. I promise not to look at anything you don’t wish to share. Nothing but the vision. Please.

  I’m sorry. This isn’t working.

  It can work. Focus on the vision. You stood in front of the beacon, and then?

  He almost succeeded. He concentrated, started to remember the beacon . . . and then it all fell apart again. I sensed some association, something tying the beacon’s message to other memories, and he had firmly walled off those other memories.

  He tried to break the link and flee.

  I felt a surge of anger. No, Shepard. You asked for this. You made the decision tha
t time is of the essence. We will succeed.

  You’re right.

  He made a supreme effort of will and held himself in place in the link.

  Together we found the thread we needed: his memories of standing on Eden Prime, facing the Prothean beacon. The ancient device activated. It swept us off the ground and held us motionless. The images began to flood into our conjoined mind.

  This time, together, we understood the images, the symbols, the meanings the message conveyed.

  Golden cities resplendent in the sunlight. Power. Majesty. Grandeur.

  We are the Protheans. Our empire once spanned the galaxy.

  Creatures huddled in the shadows. Deference. Submission.

  We ruled over many other species, all of whom served us willingly.

  A structure hanging in interstellar space, unmistakably the Citadel. Prosperity. Wealth.

  From this place we ruled ten thousand worlds. Our argosies carried their trade for the prosperity of all.

  The Citadel again, this time focusing on the Presidium. Uneasiness. Surprise. Vertigo.

  Yet all our power and wealth was founded upon a terrible trap.

  An enormous machine, somehow insectile in form. Fear. Horror. The urge to run.

  The Reapers came, and brushed all our power aside as if it meant nothing.

  Living beings, their shapes difficult to make out, falling and dying. Despair. Futility.

  They killed us by the billions. We could not stop them.

  More of the living creatures, trapped in postures of agony. Revulsion. Anger.

  They enslaved many of us, forced their slaves to betray our own people.

  Living flesh being invaded by mechanical components, torn and mangled in the process. Pain. Distress.

  The machines violated our very bodies, turned us into half-living monsters to serve them.

  Twisted creatures wandering through a devastated landscape. Emptiness. Mourning.

  Those who somehow survived the Reapers’ attack were left to die among the ruins.

  Living beings running through a burning city. Hatred. Determination.

  Flee the Reapers. Survive as long as you can. Fight them as best you are able . . .

  The vision ended abruptly.

  I opened my eyes and found myself kneeling on the deck, Shepard also kneeling inches away from me. My hands cradled his head, my fingers tense as if I had been trying to dig them into his skull. His own hands balled into fists at his sides. We both breathed hard. Dr. Chakwas hovered nearby, obviously on the point of intervening if she only knew how.

  I released Shepard and sat back on my heels, taking deep slow breaths to try to center myself.

  Shepard opened his eyes, wide and wild, searching blindly for a moment as if he remained buried in that terrible vision. Then he saw me, and the tension ebbed from his body. His head fell forward into a posture of despair.

  “Nothing about the Conduit,” he said, in a voice like dust and ashes. “A general warning, a call to arms, and nothing else. Nothing we can use.”

  “The Eden Prime beacon must have failed catastrophically just as it was reaching the point of any specifics.”

  “All this, and we’re no closer to finding Saren or the Conduit than we were before.”

  I couldn’t soften the blow for him. “No.”

  The last traces of the link told me what he felt at that moment, and it was like a lance in my heart. Despair. Frustration.

  Resentment.

  He pushed himself to his feet. He looked down at me and opened his mouth as if he wanted to say more, but then he shook his head in weary dejection and walked out of the medical bay.

  “Shepard . . .” I whispered, and tried to rise and follow him. My legs wouldn’t let me. They turned into rubber and very nearly dropped me full-length on the deck. Only Dr. Chakwas’s quick reflexes saved me. She lunged forward, caught me, and supported me until I could stand shakily on my own.

  “Come on, Liara, let’s get you into a bed so I can have a look at you. That obviously didn’t go well.”

  I lay back onto a diagnostic bed, my eyes closed, and tried to ignore the fact that the entire ship seemed to be in a slow spin. “No. He is extremely strong-willed, and he was striving to keep something away from me. It was a great struggle, even to access the memories of the Prothean beacon that he wanted to share.”

  “Well, it clearly didn’t do you any good. Your blood pressure and blood sugars are terrible, and I’m reading abnormal surges of electrochemical energy in your brain. If you were a human I’d be terrified you were about to go into a grand mal seizure.”

  “I’m not human,” I told her. At the moment, I am very glad of that.

  Have I lost Shepard? Have we lost everything?

  Goddess, help us now.

  Chapter 36 : Night

  I would not say the next few days stand as the darkest I can remember. That dubious honor would have to go to the last few days of the Reaper War, and the empty years that followed our hollow victory. In those years, at times nothing but a stubborn sense of duty kept me alive and at work.

  The days after Feros were not that bad, but at the time they presented misery enough.

  I spent most of the time in my cubicle, using the extranet and Alliance military channels to work with Admiral Hackett’s Red Team. Shepard, Kaidan, and I had all been assigned to that working group, under David Anderson’s leadership. We hoped to produce a threat assessment – capabilities, objectives, possible strategy and tactics – for the Reapers.

  It wasn’t an easy task. We knew so little about the hypothetical enemy.

  At least we could guess at a lower bound for the Reapers’ capabilities. I provided data permitting the Red Team to reconstruct a picture of Prothean civilization at the end of the Third Age, just before the extinction cycle began. Populations, distribution of colonized worlds, economic and industrial output, technological capabilities, all of these could be estimated. Once we had a coherent mathematical model for the Protheans, we could build and test models for an enemy capable of completely destroying them in the time we knew the extinction had taken.

  The results were not encouraging. At their height the Protheans had a vast empire, larger and far more powerful than the combined polities of the Citadel Council. To carry out their destruction, the Reapers must have had capabilities at least two orders of magnitude greater than anything we could muster, even assuming we could cooperate smoothly and bring every last resource to bear. Of course, knowing the nature of Council politics, such smooth cooperation did not seem at all likely.

  If the Reapers returned, we were quite simply doomed.

  * * *

  13 May 2183, Ontarom Orbit

  Dr. T’Soni:

  You may not remember me. We met on Binthu but there was no time to make your acquaintance. I trust we will have the opportunity at some point in the future.

  I have been directed to share the attached files with you. The executive summary is that sightings of the Collectors and their activities have increased dramatically in the past six months. My principal does not believe it to be a coincidence that this is happening just as Saren Arterius has actively allied himself with the Reapers.

  Please let me know if there is any other way in which we can assist your research. I can be reached at any time at this data drop.

  Miranda Lawson

  The message came to me through Alliance military channels, which implied passage right through any number of milspec firewalls. None of which had detected the fact that the message originated from Cerberus.

  Impressive. Now do I dare look at the attached files?

  Finally I moved the message entirely off the Normandy’s internal network, placing it on a stand-alone computer I knew I could sacrifice. Then I used every tool I had to scan the message and its attached files for malware. Then I invited Tali into my cubicle and had her use every tool she had to scan for malware. We found nothing. Only then did I open the files and begin to read them.

>   The Collectors were a mysterious race, little more than rumor in Council space, although I knew they had been active in the Terminus Systems for centuries. No one knew anything about their world of origin, their culture, or their objectives. They simply appeared from time to time, somehow traveling through the otherwise-closed Omega-4 Relay in the Sahrabarik system. They had a reputation as traders in living flesh, with oddly specific interests. They would offer very advanced technology in exchange for unusual specimens of sentient life, and then vanish as quickly as they had arrived.

  Operative Lawson had told the truth. Beginning about three months before the attack on Eden Prime, the Collectors had quite suddenly become more active. Before, they had appeared somewhere in the Terminus Systems once every two to three years on the average. In the past six months they had sent at least four expeditions through the Omega-4 Relay.

  It might have been nothing but a simple statistical anomaly . . . but I doubted that. The Illusive Man was no fool.

  * * *

  14 May 2183, Interstellar Space

  One thing the Red Team found difficult was the question of where the Reapers had gone. Admittedly the Citadel races had only mapped out a small portion of the galaxy. For every charted and explored world, about twenty others remained completely unknown. Vast reaches of the galaxy hid behind closed mass relays, or simply had not attracted anyone’s interest. Could the Reaper civilization hide somewhere in those unexplored regions?

  A partial answer came from an officer at Alliance Naval Intelligence, a Lieutenant Commander Shelby. She proved that the Reapers were unlikely to be hiding anywhere in the galaxy’s spiral arms. Any civilization with their hypothetical capabilities would have to occupy at least a certain amount of space, using a certain number of star systems for energy and raw materials. The probability of such a civilization going completely unnoticed was negligible.

  Commander Shelby offered three conjectures.