A Krogan misplaced: Chapter 2
Former Bicentennial Park - Sydney - Australia
Urdnot Wrex awoke to darkness. The lights had gone out at some point during the trip, truthfully between all the screaming and panicking sentients he hadn't noticed exactly when, and he couldn't hear anything either. It wasn't the feeling of dullness that occurred when he was deaf, there just wasn't anything moving. Wrex gave a small curse as he fumbled for his omni-tool, as his hand passed over the sensors they lit the room in a brief surge of light, before sputtering out and dying after a few seconds.
Those few seconds had been enough to give Wrex one piece of information though. Everyone else who had been on the freighter was dead.
Wrex gave another louder curse and reached into his armor for his backup omni-tool. The backup was hardly a artistic masterpiece nor was it the latest version, it was over a hundred years old and essentially useless in most situations. Nevertheless, the thing was hardy, easily capable of lasting centuries without recharge if the batarian he'd bought it from was correct.
After reaching into the wrong pocket twice, he finally found it. With a slight scowl Wrex scanned the newly lit up interior of the cargo pod.
His earlier glance was confirmed, no life but his was present. The quarian must have died first, possibly even before the ship had entered the atmosphere. The pilgrims broken body was nonetheless prostrated over an equally dead salarian, one of the crewmembers if Wrex's memory didn't fail him. The elcor was by far the most obvious, partially scorched from where it had rested against the wall during reentry the mercenary was nonetheless relatively intact. Wrex could remember the matriarch and matrons attempting to create a biotic shield over the majority of passengers, those few who hadn't been burnt to a crisp in freefall or been crushed as the pod landed instead had the misfortune to break their bodies against the harsh and unyielding barrier of an asari.
The salarians had attempted to reach the point of the pod Wrex was at, maybe they'd judged it to have the highest chance of survival on reentry. Their bodies were even more broken than that of the quarian, cartilage and flesh pulped by the sheer force of landing when it hadn't set afire from the heat.
The turians, if Wrex was looking at things right, had attempted to form a literal ball around the hatchlings and other young ones. Perhaps if they had been further away from the edge of the craft, and thus the scorching heat of reentry, they might of survived. As it was, Wrex could not smell a hint of life from the pile of charred corpses.
As he looked himself over Wrex found the only real injury he'd suffered was a metal bar which had forced itself through his left thigh. Giving a small sigh at the pain which was about to come, he grabbed the metal bar, focused on the old power deep within him, and used his biotics to pull. The pain was immense, and as the metal bar landed on the other side of the room, Wrex began to apply some of his combat salve to the wound. Once that was done he felt his armour to look for any breaches, but he couldn't find anything else beyond a few cuts from the jagged metal the interior of the pod had turned into on impact. Really it seemed the only loss was his omni-tool and his gear in luggage.
Ever since his father had attempted to strike him down Wrex had been dubious of the power of the ancestors. Yet to look at the scene before him? Over two hundred dead sentients, and he was the sole survivor. Perhaps later a proper prayer rite would have to be undertaken. It never did ill to thank those who had come before. But none of that would help him get out of this situation alive at the moment. As he waited for his legs to feel less like a varren had gnawed on them, Wrex shone the light of his omni-tool around the room, looking for the exit he knew was there.
It took ten standard minutes for his leg to heal to the point where he felt he could walk on it, and as an experienced mercenary Wrex knew to use what time he had well. He'd salvaged his Graal Spike thrower from his armour, fortunately his executioner pistol had also survived, but there ended the good news. He was completely lacking in anything approaching food, and one could only live on dead asari, salarians and elcor for so long before they rotted away. He had tried to get a signal on his omni-tool, and even though he knew his omni wasn't worth the metal in the credits used to buy it, it should have picked up something. But no, it didn't have a single kalros-damned signal.
That meant he was somewhere isolated...but habitable, if the fact that he was still alive was anything to go by. There wasn't any guarantee that there was anything sentient at all on the planet, and he certainly couldn't build the equipment required to change that. It took Wrex less than a minute to make his decision, he'd have to look outside.
Wrex slid the hatch aside, and raised his head out. Apparently the ship had made a canyon when it landed, the steaming and smoking rock covered his entire field of view. Still, he'd have to look around to learn exactly where he was, maybe find a hill or something. Heaving the rest of his body out took some effort, and right now Wrex was actually feeling 1300 years old, after he was completely out of the hatch he glanced up, trying to see how high the canyon the ship had created was.
Initially Wrex mistook the bobbing objects for rocks, maybe covered with a plant analogue. But then one of them moved, and then Wrex realised exactly what they were.
Heads.
Hundreds upon hundreds of faces peering down at him from the ledges above. His eyes were good enough to spot the difference between aliens even at distance, and these weren't batarian, wrong structure. In structure they looked similar to furred asari, or maybe a quilless and very fat quarian. Heh, fat quarians. Only a century on and you'd think the stick thin figures of the migrant fleet were simply how the race looked, yet Wrex could remember when the average quarian had started to look more like the average volus.
That particularly amusing fact didnt help Wrex right now though. Especially considering that there were an awful lot of faces looking down at him. The features didn't vary as much as a krogan's did, but that was to be expected. Nonetheless he did notice several different colours among the beings, and many seemed to have their fur styled into shapes and patterns. Social structure? Caste system like the batarians? Wrex wished he'd researched the various first contacts more.
What Wrex knew he should not do however, was draw his weapon. Just because he didn't see anything that could be a gun besides that strange device which looked almost like a camera* didn't mean they weren't there. Or twitchy. By all his ancestors in the next realm he hoped these sentients weren't like the krogan.
Maybe he could communicate with them... it would be far easier if one of the asari had survived, but that didn't prevent the basics. As Wrex stood thinking, the natives seemed to get more agitated. He could hear them speak their language to one another, some odd combination of clicks and grunts, with small stops between said combinations that Wrex assumed delineated words. But all that talking stopped when Wrex pulled out his omni-tool. The natives were now all focussing on the panel of orange light, and Wrex could notice many flashes being taken from above, which seemed to indicate the camera he'd spotted before was just that. Which in a way was good, it meant the natives might be decently technologically advanced.
Then Wrex completed what he'd intended to command the omni-tool to do. A bright hologram floated in the air, it was easily a hundred metres in height, and displayed the symbol of the citadel council** for all the planet to see. It was something of a gamble, if they recognised the image it meant they could get him off planet, if they didn't then he was really far from the creche this time.
The chatter above him increased, and he started to hear long wailing cries, they were artificial but he didn't know their meaning. Then the natives started to move away en-mass. Wrex could spy figures in uniforms beginning to shepherd the other natives away from the edges of the canyon he was in. Law enforcement? Security attaches? Special forces? Wrex didn't know, and that unnerved him. As the last of what he assumed were the civilian natives were shooed away from the pit, Wrex decided that it might be best to leave them alone for now. Let them come to him so to speak.
After all, he didn't want to get them agitated, who knew how strange alien cultures could be about the smallest things.
United Nations Building - New York - 1 hour after Wrex exited the ship
Being the Secretary General of the United Nations was a hard job. You had to deal with uncooperative nations, international conflicts and emergencies, fortunately no wars had occurred in recent years but frankly that was more luck than anything else.
What Secretary Madina Niyazov had truthfully never expected, was aliens. She'd been born into one of the better off Uzbek families, gotten into politics, somehow gotten into the position of Secretary General. All of that had at least been a pipe dream at some point. But less than an hour ago an alien vessel had crash landed in Sydney. And they knew it was alien because of the fact that one of them exited the damn ship into full view of a live news network and three thousand smart phones. The entire world now knew aliens existed, and the repercussions of that were only just starting to be felt.
Doomsday cults were crying that it was the end times, alien watchers and alleged "abductees" were flocking to buy tickets on airlines which took them to Australia, the stock market was in chaos and had actually shut down in a few nations already.
And in this emergency meeting of the United Nations, that was to say, every nation on the planet, nobody knew what to do. Still, her job was to ensure things got done, perhaps she should do it. She breathed in deeply before yelling in the loudest voice she had yet mustered for a meeting, even the ones with the representative from the Maldives.
"QUIET!"
It took almost five minutes for silence to reign, but when it did, Madina began to speak in a frustrated tone from being bombarded with information for the past hour straight.
"I'm sure you all know why this emergency meeting has been called. Approximately one and a half hours ago an object struck the Bicentennial park in Sydney, no casualties were reported, nor was the object initially identifiable. Approximately an hour and five minutes ago, an alien being exited what we now believe to be an escape pod of some kind, the being is being shown on your screens now... So far as we can identify, it is sentient, it's wearing some kind of bodysuit and it showed the crowd a hologram of the following image"
At her words the strange alien symbol, a blue circle with a five pointed shape inside it, and a single thermometer like shape inside that, was displayed on the screen.
"We don't know what the symbol means, but the alien was watching the reactions of the crowd to it, so we can assume it is of some importance."
Madina gave a small sigh before continuing.
"Currently we are looking to gain information on how to communicate with the alien, so as Secretary General, I am requesting that all nations make available their best linguists, behaviourologists and physiologists so we can reach some form of agreement as quickly as possible. Those specialists will join a team which in seventy two hours will be sent in to attempt basic communications."
She looked around at the numerous delegates and officials, everybody was paying attention, even those that normally would be opposed to certain acts on sheer principle.
"Are there any objections?"
Silence reigned once more.
"Then I suggest we get to the business of formatting a basic alien law, and a guideline for political interactions with aliens since we now know they exist.
This time the responses were nods and affirmatives. The ambassadors and secretaries of the United Nations rapidly got to drafting what would be perhaps the most important pieces of legislation in their lives.
Authors Notes:
Uhhhh. I have a severe case of "write whenever plot comes into head" syndrome. I apologise.
* Assume its a translation of the Krogan term for the word