Deep Space: An Epic Sci-Fi Romance

by Joan Jett

  I think the greatest gift Shepard received from me was . . . well, not stability as such, but perhaps the first idea that stability might be possible. His entire adult life had been nomadic, always moving from assignment to assignment within the Alliance, never having a home or a family in the traditional sense. His made his home on military bases and starships, he considered the Alliance his family, and for the most part that had been enough. He had once told me of his belief that he could never be “a civilized man in a peaceful profession.” Now he had learned better; he could dimly see an alternative way of life, with its own joys and compensations, as available to him. Neither of us was ready yet to consider settling down together, but the idea had been sown in his mind, ready to stir and grow with time.

  For the first time since Mindoir, he began to think of home as something other than the place I keep my footlocker. Slowly, home was becoming the place where Liara is.

  Goddess. If only we’d had the time . . . but of course we never did.

  * * *

  28 May 2183, Refuge System Space

  We dropped out of FTL on the outskirts of the Ilos system, light-hours away from the presumed location of the planet. Our drives went silent, the stealth systems engaged, and we began to explore the neighborhood with passive sensors.

  Finding planets in an uncharted star system is not easy. It’s true that survey vessels do it as a matter of routine, but they have specialized equipment and can afford to take days to finish the task. In our case it was several hours before we located an outlying gas giant. That gave us the probable ecliptic plane of the system, after which we could narrow down our search to the habitable zone.

  Finally we found a dim speck of reflected starlight in the right place. Normandy moved in on silent running. Several of us gathered on the bridge to watch, as Ilos grew in the distance.

  “Trouble, Commander,” said Joker softly as we approached.

  “Geth?” asked Shepard.

  “You got it. Picking up five . . . no, six sources in orbit around the planet. They’re running quiet too, but they have some inter-ship communications going.”

  “That doesn’t seem like very many. Where’s the rest of the geth fleet?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” said Joker. “No sign of Sovereign either. Maybe they’ve just found this place.”

  “We can hope,” I murmured.

  Joker nodded. “One piece of good news, though. There’s a secondary mass relay in wide orbit around the planet. If it’s active we might be able to use it to get back to civilization fast. You know. Just in case.”

  “Liara, what can you tell me about the planet?”

  I glanced across a scientific sensor display. “It’s large, but rather light for its size, probably metal-poor. Typical for a planet in a very old star system, as you might find in the galactic halo. The atmosphere is very thick and the surface temperature is too hot for comfort, so we’ll want to stay sealed up while we’re on the surface. The gas mix is . . . odd.” I touched controls, called up software to help me do further analysis. “Very high partial pressure of oxygen. There must be abundant plant life, but very little animal life. I imagine wildfires are common and very fierce.”

  “Any signs of civilization? Ruins?”

  I called up high-resolution cameras, used the ship’s VI to enhance the images. “Very much so. Vast abandoned cities, everywhere I look. Shepard, I would guess that this is a post-garden world. Perhaps when the Protheans or the inusannon lived here, it was more hospitable, but since then some tipping point has been reached and the planet is becoming completely uninhabitable.”

  “A planet-sized tomb,” Shepard observed. “Take us in, Joker.”

  Ilos loomed large in the forward viewports. We approached in from the night side, but we could see a wide crescent of day-lit surface: a painting in mottled green, red, and white.

  “Aha!” exclaimed Pressley. “Picking up gravity waves from a spot near the equator, very strong, very narrowly focused. Mass-effect technology.”

  “The Conduit?” asked Shepard.

  “Who knows, Commander? We still don’t know what the Conduit is.” Pressley continued to work with his panel. “It’s big, though . . . and it looks kind of familiar. If I didn’t know better, I’d say there was a mass relay on the surface.”

  “Maybe that’s exactly what it is,” I suggested. “Remember the message from the beacons? The Protheans hinted that they were going to be able to reach a place that was otherwise inaccessible. That doesn’t sound like a weapon, it sounds like a means of transportation.”

  “That would fit the name,” Shepard agreed. “That’s our target. Joker, lock in on those coordinates.”

  “Bad news, Commander,” said Pressley. “It’s in the middle of one of those enormous cities. Surrounded by built-up areas for kilometers in every direction . . . and it doesn’t look as if the Protheans went in for big parks or open plazas. There’s no landing zone.”

  “There has to be a landing zone.”

  “I’ve looked. There’s nothing closer than twenty kilometers away.”

  Ash broke in. “Through ruins? That could take hours. Saren could be there right now.”

  “Is there anything that could put us down close to that gravitic reading?” demanded Shepard.

  “The closest possibility is about twenty meters long, and has tall buildings on all sides. Normandy would have to come in slow, loiter over the drop point, and take fire from the geth. If even one enemy destroyer managed to intercept us . . .”

  “Suicide mission,” said Ash.

  “I can do it,” said Joker, very quietly.

  There was silence on the bridge for a long moment, and then Shepard spoke. “Joker?”

  “I can do it,” said the pilot, his voice utterly calm and serious.

  “Good enough for me. Landing party, to the Mako. Pressley, if you lose contact with us on the surface for any reason, you are to run for the Alliance and report.”

  “Sir . . .”

  “No arguments, Lieutenant. We’ve only got one shot at this and no way for you to extract us if we fail. Get back to civilization and sound the alarm.”

  Pressley’s face looked grim, but he saluted. “Aye-aye, sir.”

  * * *

  Six of us crowded into the Mako for the final mission: Shepard, Ash, Garrus, Tali, Wrex, and me. We made a final check of our weapons and equipment, took our seats, and waited. I took the EWS console as usual and turned on the external view to watch our approach.

  Joker had not chosen to come in slowly. Normandy hammered her way through the dense atmosphere of Ilos, a shockwave of air heated to plasma running in front of us. Kilometers below us I could see terrain features and the vast ruined cities, sweeping past at a frantic rate, barely visible before they vanished behind us.

  The ship shook. A deep booming crack tore through the hull, as we dropped below the local speed of sound. Suddenly the external view cleared, and I could see another ruin looming on the horizon ahead, growing with tremendous speed.

  “Deployment in fifteen seconds,” said Joker from the bridge, no inflection at all in his voice.

  Normandy swung into a screaming dive.

  Shepard’s fingers poised over the Mako’s controls.

  In the last moment I could see the drop zone. A trench, barely wide enough for the Normandy’s wings, tall buildings at either end. Deep shadows concealed the bottom.

  I took a still image from the ship’s forward cameras, and enhanced it. Shapes at the bottom of the trench: geth, including several of the big armatures, and a single massive turian.

  Saren.

  The Mako deployed. The instant we cleared the staging bay doors, Shepard slammed the thrusters to full and dialed the mass-effect core down. We plunged into the shadows of the trench.

  Normandy vanished above us. Since we heard no enormous collision, I assumed she threaded the needle and escaped back up into the sky. Later we learned that Joker had missed one of the ruined sky
scrapers by less than two meters, and that only by banking the ship hard the moment we were on our way.

  Ash pounced on her controls, bringing the turret to bear on some target even while we still fell, and then abandoned her effort just as quickly. “Damn it.”

  She had seen Saren, but only for a moment as he and his geth entered an underground bunker. An enormously thick door closed behind them before Ash could fire.

  We struck the surface. Shepard stood on the brakes and brought the Mako to a sudden stop just short of the closed door.

  All of us emerged from the vehicle to examine the barrier.

  While the others tried to find a way through the door, I took a few moments to look around at Ilos, or what little of it I could see from the bottom of a deep trench between ruined skyscrapers. After the first glance I felt amazement that any of the ruins could have survived. Vines and other growth overran everything, lush and green, covering the ground and clinging to the walls to a height far over our heads. Normally such lush plant life would have destroyed any abandoned structure over fifty thousand years. Whatever material made up these edifices, it had to be incredibly durable. The buildings themselves seemed typically Prothean, massive and soaring at the same time, mostly of late Third Age style. I didn’t see any smaller artifacts at first glance, but my fingers itched to dig and explore beneath the ground cover.

  Garrus brought me back to the present. “We have to get inside this bunker before Saren finds the Conduit.”

  “There’s no way to get past this door with brute force,” said Shepard. “It’s too thick, and the material is of Prothean make. We’d need a nuke. If even that would work.”

  “Saren found a way to open it,” Tali pointed out. “There must be a working security override somewhere nearby.”

  “Any idea where?” asked Shepard.

  Tali used her omni-tool, scanned in all directions. “There’s power being generated in a building about half a kilometer from here. That might be a good place to start looking.”

  “Heads up!” shouted Wrex.

  Geth poured into the trench behind us.

  I had never seen geth move so quickly. One moment we seemed safe, the next we saw a dozen geth advancing down on us, already firing their weapons, with a dozen more behind them and a flight of rocket drones soaring over our heads. Wrex’s warning probably saved all of us, by giving us the split second we needed to dive for cover.

  I discovered my reflexes had improved dramatically over the past few months. I had barely turned my head when I saw a geth rocket flying directly toward me. I didn’t have time to think. I simply flash-stepped to the side, placed myself behind the Mako, and drew my sidearm as the rocket flew past to explode against the bunker’s door.

  The geth had numbers, but they suffered a severe disadvantage due to the narrowness of the street leading down to the bunker’s entrance. I immediately saw an opportunity, reached down deep, and deployed the most powerful biotic singularity I could right among the front ranks of the geth. Then the others began to return fire.

  Is carnage the right word, when the enemy is synthetic?

  The rocket drones posed the real threat, rising to fire down behind our cover, but we saw only three of them. Shepard detailed Garrus and Tali to deal with them, while the rest of us worked to prevent the walking platforms from overrunning our position. This turned out to be not very difficult. Singularity to block the geth advance, lots of gunfire to cut down the front ranks of the geth, biotic warp to detonate the singularity and destroy any geth nearby, new singularity, repeat as needed.

  The last of the rocket drones fell out of the sky and exploded.

  “By the numbers, advance,” Shepard ordered.

  “Moving!” shouted Wrex as he rushed forward, smashing broken geth along the way. Ashley followed, smaller but more precise in her attack. They took a position at the far end of the street and continued to lay down fire as the rest of us advanced.

  “I think we’re running out of geth,” remarked Garrus as the street opened out into a small plaza.

  A ball of white-hot plasma zoomed across the open space, and would have slammed directly into the turian had I not knocked him aside with a biotically assisted leap.

  Armatures. Two of them.

  “Never give the universe a chance to make a fool of you!” I told him.

  Shepard made a sound suspiciously like a chuckle. Without breaking the rhythm of his weapons fire, of course.

  “Spirits,” swore Garrus tiredly. “You’d think I would learn.”

  One armature posed a threat. Two proved more than twice as dangerous. They could alternate with their heavy plasma weapons, while maintaining steady fire with their conventional guns. It immediately became a fatal mistake to emerge from cover for long.

  “Flank them!” ordered Shepard. “Wrex, take the left. Ash, go right. The rest of you, concentrate on the one on the right.”

  Even I helped, ducking out of cover a few seconds at a time – with my strongest barrier up, to be sure – to fire my little SMG at the designated colossus. Then I had to cower down, both arms over my head, as a plasma bolt slammed into the fallen stone column behind which I was hiding.

  A wash of static in my helmet radio. My kinetic barrier flickered, then recovered. I shook my head, rather surprised that I remained in working order.

  I peeked out and saw our tactics begin to pay off. Even a pair of armatures couldn’t fire in all directions at once. So long as we remained careful not to expose ourselves to a plasma discharge, we could continue to wear them down.

  I aimed my Shuriken and continued firing, dit-dit-dit-dit-dit, wearing down the enemy’s shields. Suddenly they went down. Even before Shepard could bark an order, I hit the colossus with a heavy biotic lift. Helpless, it spun slowly in midair and then crumpled under our combined fire.

  The other colossus began to back slowly away.

  Carefully, we pursued it.

  A sudden image from Anar’s memories flashed through my mind: a band of primitive humans, armed only with bow and spear, fanning out to flank a mammoth which had been unwise enough to leave the safety of the herd. The colossus was far stronger than any of us individually, but faced with Shepard’s pack tactics it could not bring that strength to bear.

  We concentrated our fire, and before long the second colossus went down as well.

  We heard the sound of wind in the streets.

  “Keelah,” said Tali as she finally took a moment to look around. “The Protheans lived here?”

  I nodded. “Millions of them in this city alone, most likely.”

  The quarian shuddered. “And now they’re all gone, thousands of years ago. Is this what’s going to happen to us?”

  Ashley said:

  I met a traveller from an antique land

  Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

  Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

  Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

  And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

  Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

  The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

  And on the pedestal these words appear:

  “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

  Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

  The lone and level sands stretch far away.

  We walked through the empty city, and all around us we heard nothing but silence.

  Chapter 45 : Vigil

  28 May 2183, Ilos

  After that first ferocious battle in the plaza, the geth no longer posed so much of a threat. They occupied the city all around us, but only in small fire-teams and patrols, and we encountered no more armatures. We dealt with them as we found them.

  Eventually we located a working lift, which conveyed us do
wn into the depths far below the city. There we found another large detachment of geth: two squads of troopers with rocket platforms, led by a tall white prime. That presented more of a challenge, but we soon found plenty of cover along our line of approach. While most of us kept the geth occupied with gunfire and biotic work, Garrus and Shepard applied their sniper rifles at long range. Eventually the prime stood alone, and Shepard managed to destroy it with a pair of high-explosive grenades.

  We suspected these geth had been posted to watch over something important. Soon enough we found what we were looking for: the security console controlling the doors blocking our path to Saren.

  Override in place, we hurried back up to the surface, aided by another lift opening onto the plaza directly behind our landing zone. With the doors open, we could proceed down into the bunker. Shepard decided to take the Mako with us. Certainly the passage was large enough to accommodate the AFV, at least close to the surface.

  That turned out to be a very good decision. As it happened, the geth patrols we encountered would have been well within our ability to deal with on foot. However, the underground tunnels ran wide and straight, with smooth floors and plenty of light filtering in from far above. The Mako could maintain very good speed on such terrain. We began to think we might catch up with Saren.

  That is, until a kinetic barrier sprang up in front of us, completely blocking the passage. As Shepard slowed and stopped, a second barrier appeared just behind us.

  “Trapped!” said Wrex. “Saren must have set an ambush for us.”

  I glanced at the EWS console, called up readings on the barriers. “I’m not so sure. These barriers do not look like geth technology.”

  Shepard glanced over his shoulder at me. “Could they be Prothean?”

  “It’s possible. I suppose Saren could have tampered with some Prothean equipment he found still in working order, setting up a trap for us, but did he have the time?”

  “He wasn’t that far ahead of us. Let’s investigate.”