"Commander, Admiral Hackett for you on the vid-com."
"Thank you, Traynor, I'm on my way."
Shepard splashed his face with water before leaving his cabin, having just got up from two hours sleep. It was only days after his crew took shore leave on the Citadel, and looking back at it now it was probably the longest vacation he ever took in a while. The Normandy barely had a chance to cool her engines since as her crew dragged themselves around the galaxy gathering resources for the liberation of Earth, and hopefully, all life as they know it. Not much different from before the R&R really, Shepard humored to himself there were no days off to begin with thanks to the clone nonsense.
"Commander," Admiral Hackett was in no better health. Were the vid any clearer, Shepard would see bags under the Admiral's eyes and years added to his features since their home world was taken by the Reapers.
"Admiral?" Shepard picked up a tension in Hackett's voice that he was all too familiar with and knew this conversation was going to lead into something he wouldn't like.
"What do you know about the Ward Expanse?"
The Commander held a quizzical look for a second before reaching the back of his mind, "Only that it's somewhere in the Nemean Abyss and has a reputation behind it; sort of like our Bermuda Triangle. Ships that happen to cross any of its systems get lost and are never heard from again, or so they say at least."
"They're right, Commander. Most believe that the area is a major hunting ground for raiders due to all the disappearances, but one of our scientists had another notion entirely. Five years ago, Dr. Uhe hypothesized that the Ward Expanse was littered with artificial gravity wells that couldn't be seen with the naked eye. He discovered the locations where vessels were last seen didn't match with black hole behavior and theorized that a very powerful technology was at work. Not to mention, pirates stayed away from most of those systems. Dr. Uhe was a colleague of the late Dr. Bryson."
Shepard still got headaches remembering his meeting with the Leviathan, the ancient race of massive hyper intelligent creatures who were responsible for the current Reaper threat. More than that, he remembered his brief meeting with Dr. Bryson and how his assistant took his life only minutes after shaking hands.
"Does this have something to do with the Reapers?"
"We never learned a thing from this venture, Dr. Uhe and his team went MIA after landing on a world he believed had evidence for his claim. He had Alliance brass think he might have stumbled upon some advanced technology left by the Protheans. Search parties were sent to their last known location, but couldn't find anything, not even the bodies. We only managed to recover the lab."
He couldn't see what any of this had to do with the current situation, and had Shepard slept one less hour he might have interjected with Hackett to get to the point. Without realizing it, he was leaning slightly against a wall and feeling the need to splash his burning eyes with water again.
"Are you getting enough sleep, Shepard," the Admiral suddenly asked. The Commander's somewhat lazy stance was evident enough through the hologram along with a vacant stare.
"I'm fit for duty, Admiral, whatever it is you need."
"I need you at your best, Commander. We all do, because I'm sending you to Cassern, where Dr. Uhe and his team were last seen. So get your eight hours and your team ready."
"Ready for what, Admiral?"
A report was already being sent to the war room terminal detailing all the mission specifics. Shepard was viewing the brief on his omni-tool and scrolled down to a picture that brought him back to attention.
"To find what on that world killed a Reaper."
The marauder and his cannibals were buffeted by sandy winds as they scaled a red mountain that would give them full view of the horizon. The Batarian mutants growled and clicked at each other when one bumped into another while climbing the sharp surface, their bulgy backs cushioning the stumbles. One of them thought it noticed a shadow along the cliff face and stopped in place to examine the dark parts. When it was being left behind, the marauder ordered it back into formation.
Their Reaper was still burning up in orbit after a crack of emerald lightning shot out of the world and hit it square on the face, tearing through its kinetic barrier as if it weren't even there. Two more such attacks followed and tore the capital ship apart, cutting limbs and piercing the main body. Though the Reaper infantry had long lost their organic emotions, watching the sapient vessel be destroyed like that from their drop ship revived a trickling sense of fear not felt since their ascension.
It didn't matter, more would come and the offenders of this world would be harvested like all the rest.
Red earth seemed to stretch as far as the marauder's machine sight could see. Clouds of sand brushed the landscape with a duller red to form a veil that blocked the view of a large crescent shape hidden in the background. The shadow of it would have intimidated any other mortal soul as its scope in size measured that of a rising sun, coming out of the ground from the far horizon. The marauder could make out a crystal shaped object protruding from the center of it, aimed toward the sky. He would give the newly arriving Reaper forces the location of this defense network and join a ground force to decommission it so the assimilation of this planet can begin in full.
Suddenly, a cry in the back ranks sounded and the marauder turned to witness a cannibal falling to the ground from an apparent back wound, yet no external injury could be seen. The cannibals nearest their commander began pointing their guns in all directions trying to find an attacker whilst two wasted no time launching themselves at their fallen comrade. A ribbon of red energy coiled around the marauder's arm before it lashed at several cannibals, raising them in the air as armor formed around their bodies.
Just then, the marauder stopped empowering his allies and trembled. There was the shock of having its internal systems suddenly being ripped apart by a blade and in the next moment it was gone. It coughed up a blue liquid before falling to its knees and clutched its abdomen as if the Reaper sergeant expected to catch its internal organs.
The cannibals turned to face what looked like a giant cobra rising above their fallen marauder, with its dark, metallic body wide and balancing on a coiling tail. It had a large virulent eye in the middle of its head staring down the Reaper unit with two bladed arms poised to attack. Without wasting a second more the cannibals opened fire.
Blasts of red shot straight through the creature as if it weren't there, a wraith in the desert. It was content to simply stand there and let the mutated infantry waste ammunition. Then out of the ground two more appeared, their bodies phasing through the rock and blades slashing into the cannibals. Even with their armor it mattered not to the automatons, their blades somehow found themselves cutting the cannibals' internal organs without so much as scratching the chitin that protected them.
The creatures danced in and out of reality as the Reapers continuously missed their mark, and one by one they fell to phantom blades. The battle didn't even last a minute.
When the last cannibal fell, the marauder, hanging on to flickering function, looked on as the automatons suddenly vanished within a green energy field, their work done. An ear splitting crack, like thunder, sounded in the distance and the Reaper looked to the sky to see shining balls of light flicker in and out of reality.
Was it another Reaper vessel, or simply a foolish mortal investigating the planet and the strong energy readings that emanated from deep within the surface? It mattered not in the end; the marauder failed to perform its mission and laid itself on ground facing the red sky above. An odd thing occurred before its vision went black; a dormant memory suddenly flashed a different sky above, a silver ceiling perforated by smoke and fire burning from ruined fortifications. It saw Turians dragging it back to a defense line before a Destroyer-Class Reaper plummeted on their location and rained destruction upon their heads. A hand rested on its chest before the light died out.
"If we weren't in the Normandy, you'd really be loco for wanting to head into the Abyss. I'd rather take on Sovereign than take a job there any day."
The Commander looked to Vega, slightly amused at his Lieutenant's remark about the mission location, "Really, James?"
"You wouldn't be saying that if you were there, we were within spitting distance of its main gun. Well, not that I could have-you know what I mean," Talli gestured with her hand.
Though the Alliance rarely ventured into Terminus space to begin with, the Nemean Abyss was especially avoided. Its reputation as the darkest part of the galaxy, in more ways than one, preceded it among the council races. Only a few human colonies exist within it, those desperate enough to avoid the rule of the Alliance Government.
"It is strange that the Reapers would want anything to do with any system in the Nemean Abyss, its population is mostly criminals and they're not exactly contributing to the war effort," said Liara.
Dr. T'soni was looking over the mission dossier displayed on the war room terminal and going over all the data Admiral Hackett sent about the Uhe expedition. "Do you think the Reapers found something on Cassern?
"If they did, I bet that one wasn't expecting a hole in the head. I'd go just to shake the hand of whoever pulled the trigger," Garrus chuckled.
Liara put up photos recovered from the Uhe expedition up on the holo-screen, and displayed the iconography found all along the ebony walls.
"I've never seen anything like these, not even during my Prothean studies. Were the mission not a failure, I would have liked to have been with Dr. Uhe during the venture. We might have confirmed his hypothesis that we were looking at an entirely different, advanced species apart from the Protheans."
The Alliance search parties only found the prefab lab that was set up just at the base of a red mountain, but there were no signs of the structure Dr. Uhe and his colleague, Dr. Sternin, had ventured in. Not wanting to risk an incident with the Terminus Systems, the Alliance quickly ended the investigation after collecting all research materials from the site.
"Wasn't there something about gravity wells? How are we supposed to navigate around those," Ashley asked, arms crossed.
"Oh, yes, that should be here somewhere," Talli took control of the dossier and flipped over to a data sheet compiled by Dr. Uhe. "You learn a thing or two about stars baking under one for a few days. See?"
She pointed toward a system map with circles and lines drawn straight through them, "By marking the location of all known ship disappearances, and measuring the distance from the star, Dr. Uhe was able to learn that these gravity wells were travelling on an orbit."
Shepard raised his brow, "But that's impossible, you telling me satellites are responsible for these incidents?"
"Yes, at least, that's what Uhe concluded. They must be massive in scope to be able to have a planetary orbit."
"And since they travelled around the star, you could never mark their locations unless you knew about the pattern. It's a shifting mine field," Liara concluded.
"So now all we have to do is apply the current date to the data and, voila!"
On a separate map, new locations for all the gravity wells were marked within the Ward Expanse and safe route was plotted toward the world of Cassern.
