In Isolation
"Great, another one."
The voice came from ahead of Jacob as he rounded the corner. He kept his head down, watching where he put his feet on the uneven floor and criss-crossing power cables. Shepard's armored boots came into view, drawing his eyes up to a light coming from across the vaulted cavern. The sight stopped him dead in his tracks. A massive sphere of reflective silver hung at the end of the cavern, seemingly unsupported. There was an unnatural stillness in the air, broken only by the beep of the Vakarian's omni-tool.
"'Another one'? You've seen one of these before?" Jacob queried, fingering his shotgun.
Shepard tapped the muzzle of her SMG against her thigh. "A Prothean artifact. But the last one was... smaller."
Jacob eyed the back of the commander's helmet. Some researchers spent their lives sifting through sand on hundreds of worlds looking for evidence of the galaxy's previous inhabitants. On their way down, they'd passed the remains of this ill-fated expedition- scattered corpses and increasingly desperate-sounding journal entries. Thousands of credits and even lives had been spent here. And yet Shepard's reaction to the two-story silver sphere was one of pained irritation, as if she'd discovered she was missing a mate to a favorite pair of socks.
"Well, we knew they'd found something," Vakarian said.
"I suppose it was too much to hope they'd found a decorative Prothean cheese knife."
"Maybe the geth just want this as a centerpiece for Thanksgiving dinner," Jacob said.
Shepard flashed him a smirk, an expression that seemed plastered on. "Wouldn't you?" She turned and started walking across the rock bridge toward the circular plinth.
To Jacob's surprise, Vakarian jumped forward and stopped her with a forceful hand on her arm. "You don't have to do this," he said.
The commander stopped, and her shoulders drooped. "I have the best chance of surviving it in one piece."
"Wait, what?" Jacob interjected, hurrying up beside them. "What do you mean, surviving?"
"But what if it makes..." The turian's blank-faced helmet twitched toward Jacob. "...things worse?"
"Haven't you heard the line?" Shepard's voice cracked with thick sarcasm. "Sleep is for the dead."
"Mind cluing me in, Commander?" Jacob asked. The stillness was starting to grate on his already raw nerves. "Just what are you planning on doing?"
Vakarian waved at the sphere. "These artifacts always do... something to whoever activates them. Try to download something into your head."
"But I've got the Cipher," Shepard said.
"The Prothean language code?" Jacob guessed. He dimly recalled Miranda lecturing him about how it was one of the major things that made Shepard so valuable. No other human held this so-called Cipher, and the original source was gone. Lazarus station seemed like a long time ago now, another life.
"It's a lot more than that, I think." She shrugged, weapon loose in her grip. "But it keeps my brain from being fried."
"You don't have to activate it," Vakarian insisted.
Her eyes stayed rooted on the artifact. "What if it's got important information stored on it? About the Reapers? An advance in element zero technology? The geth obviously wanted it for something."
"The Cipher doesn't protect you completely, Shepard."
Jacob glanced from the turian back to her.
"I have to."
Vakarian wagged his head. "No, you don't."
A frustrating, uncomfortable weight lurked just outside Jacob's understanding. "Commander, we have the Hammerhead, and we eliminated the geth. I'm sure some scientist somewhere would die happy for the chance to get at this sphere and do whatever they want to it. And they can take their time. We can get back to the Normandy, forward the info to someone and get on with our mission."
"The lead researcher was starting to suffer some kind of indoctrination effect. We have to assume this thing is important to the Reapers somehow. If they care about it, I have to care about it. This is the mission."
"Commander-"
"Look, I don't want that thing anywhere near my head, okay?" she snapped. He eyes flashed and she caught his gaze and held it. "I didn't want the last one, or the one on Eden Prime, or the Overlord, or the fucking ardat-yakshi! Any of them! But any means necessary, right? Isn't that the Cerberus rule?"
Heat flashed in Jacob's head. Several angry retorts bunched up in his throat, but she didn't give him the chance to sort them out before she turned and marched down the stone path. He forced the sudden anger to unfurl itself in silence, gripping his shotgun hard.
"I wish Legion could tell us what the heretics were doing out here," Vakarian said as he trailed along after her.
"They said this group was operating in isolation," Shepard replied in a tight voice. "Hadn't plugged back into the collective yet."
Coming up behind them, Jacob slowed and stopped, staring up at the silvery horizon arching away from him. "So, I suppose it's normal that it's reflecting the room, but not us?"
Silence fell. But it wasn't total- there was a faint hum that came from everywhere and nowhere. He found he couldn't tell if it was an actual sound or some kind of vibration in the local gravity. He squinted at the artifact- something was holding it up, but he couldn't feel anything like he felt he should have for its size.
Shepard touched the sphere.
A ripple crashed over the surface like a wave. A sudden crushing weight wrapped itself around Jacob's head, making his vision tunnel and sucking the strength out of his legs. He stumbled, throwing an arm over his eyes. There was no sound, and yet a rushing roar filled the air, humming along his mutant nerves. He lowered his arm to squint over it. The sphere shuddered and then contracted, impossibly swallowing its own size until it was no larger than his head.
For a moment, it froze and held in the air, as if time itself had stopped. Then it dropped straight down and landed on the flagstones with a sonorous clang and sat there like it had never moved. The silence was sudden and deep as the bell-like echoes died away. The hum in Jacob's head was gone.
"That was... different," Shepard commented. Jacob turned to see her straightening, unhurt.
Vakarian muttered some acerbic oath that skittered past Jacob's translator.
"Commander," EDI's voice cut into the comm channel, making all three of them start. "I just detected a sizable energy surge originating at your location. It appears to have been modulated. I hypothesize it was a data burst of considerable density."
Shepard flicked a finger across the brow plate of her helmet. "Pa-ting," she murmured, "right off the top."
Jacob stared at her, incredulous, searching for something to say. Instead he keyed the ship comm. "Did you catch any of it, EDI?"
"I was able to record only a small portion, but given the density, it could represent a considerable amount of information once decrypted."
Shepard walked over to the now-small sphere, crouched, and tapped it. It pulsed a single burst of the same non-sound it had been making before, then popped up a few centimeters off the ground and hovered there, benign as a table lamp.
"What were you saying about a centerpiece?"
Jacob checked the time. Five minutes until the meeting Miranda had called. He'd been in the forward battery half an hour now, double-checking the power linkup to the ventral kinetic barriers. A nameless tension corded the muscles of his neck. He was being redundant, and he knew it. The same numbers flashed at him for the third time. He snapped the panel back in place and turned to go. There was still too much to do.
As the battery door cycled shut behind him, he stopped, his breath hitching in his throat. Someone had moved the rows of sleeper pods on their hinged arms. They had been lowered, leaning inward. The orange-tinted cowlings peering down at him seemed... awfully familiar.
He blinked and stared hard, gritting his teeth. "They didn't move," he muttered out loud. Squaring his shoulders, he marched down the corridor, rooting his eyes on the floor. The deck plates were scraped and scored by heavy, clawed toes.
The coffin lid is closing. Can't move, can't-
The end of the hallway opened explosively, spreading wide into the empty mess hall. The bulkhead lines were broken by swirling, burnt contrails; the table had been forced back into shape but was still warped, sitting uneven. For a heady moment, the horizon line seemed to list off to the left, making him stumble on the stairs. Dark energy static buzzed across his arms, prickling his skin. He realized his hands were shaking. Jacob locked his arms down at his sides, flexing them rigid. The memory of the hard round of push-ups he'd done yesterday lurked in the muscle fibers, a sensation he'd come to associate with a certain satisfaction. But it was little comfort now. "Pull yourself together, Taylor," he muttered through his teeth.
He walked across the mess and around the bulkhead to the bathroom. The door hissed shut behind him, and he stopped for a moment to breathe deeply. Then he went to the sink and let the cool water run over his hands and splashed his face. In the mirror, the sterile, clean lines of the undamaged bathroom seemed to stabilize the world. After a minute, the whole incident started to feel surreal, even silly.
"Think you need some sleep," he informed his dripping reflection.
He swiped the water away, running a hand over his closely cropped hair. His back still felt tight, but his heart had calmed its panicked flutter. He walked back out into the hallway, turned the corner into the mess, and nearly walked right into Crewman Rolston. The man startled, then stammered out a quick greeting. For a moment, it seemed like he would say something else, but instead he dropped his eyes and hurried away to the general quarters.
Jacob watched him go, then shook his head. The power management operator would be one of the ones leaving once they docked on Illium. They weren't supposed to talk about it, but the tension had been building steadily on the long cruise from the relay. The mutterings among the crew were hard to ignore- sides were quietly being taken, each treating the other with mounting suspicion. The halls echoed with tense, whispered arguments. Many remained loyal, but several pled fears for their families and careers if they stayed on. A few more remained undecided, at least outwardly. Jacob wondered if there would be a few more empty bunks than expected when they left port. After the Collector abduction, he knew he wasn't the only one having some trouble closing his eyes at night. The Normandy wasn't the invisible, impregnable fortress anymore, and the scars of its violation were still scrawled all over the walls.
All they'd accomplished, and it felt like a funeral cruise. Shepard barely left her cabin. They should have been celebrating, cheering the sheer unlikelihood of their continued survival. They'd done the impossible. And yet, back on the other side of the Omega-4 relay, nothing had changed. Omega Station still orbited as it always had, a gangrenous shadow of the Citadel. Out there in the black, all the exact same problems raged and consumed each other, crushing millions of lives between their jaws. And beyond it all, out past all the petty struggles of organic beings, the Reapers were still coming.
The elevator door opened and Vakarian stepped out.
"Vakarian," Jacob greeted him. "Wanted to ask about the CBT tuning you've been doing."
The turian nodded. "I think I might have saved us at least three percent on startup, I still need to get Tali's input on my variance install. But... we have a meeting to get to." He gestured toward Miranda's office door.
The main conference room upstairs was still a mess. Repairs had been deemed lower priority, and Jacob suspected Shepard was in no hurry to step back into the holo-scanner that had once been her main communication link with the Illusive Man.
"Something's up," Jacob suggested.
Vakarian nodded his agreement. He was hard to read sometimes, but it seemed his loyalty to Shepard could be relied on. The combination of a soldier's discipline and a survivor's pragmatism meant that even after a lifetime focused on human and Alliance concerns, Jacob got along far better with Vakarian than he ever thought he would with a turian.
Shepard was already there when they arrived, standing by the door with her arms folded. The small room stank of a battle that had yet to break out. Miranda was stressed. She'd looked like this when the first diagnostics came back on Shepard's body- the tightness of uncertainty lurking around her eyes. She was hiding it well, like she always did. But her words were just a little bit more clipped, her voice a little louder than usual. Jacob doubted anyone noticed, except maybe Shepard. But right now, it seemed to him the commander's gaze was fixed on some vague spot on the far wall. Just as tired as the rest of the crew, he assumed.
"Hull integrity is stable," Miranda was saying, "but the cargo bay remains a critical weak point. Several plates of ablating still need replacement, and the Kodiak needs major body work and replacement of nearly the entire forward instrument panel. We should be able to get many of the necessary parts on Illium, and without too many questions asked. But we have one outstanding problem."
"Money," Shepard said.
Miranda nodded. "I'll concede the Hammerhead could be an asset to future operations, but we spent a great deal of fuel acquiring it. We have to decide what we're going to do about crew salaries, Shepard. Those that are staying, anyway."
"Wait, we get paid for this?" Vakarian asked mildly. "Why wasn't I told?"
Miranda ignored him. "We can't expect them to simply work pro bono. We already have serious morale issues to address without cutting everyone's pay."
Shepard rubbed her temple. "Can we sell any of our mineral stores?"
"We can, but don't expect much for them. Commodity prices on Illium aren't favorable- they're well-supplied by local trade routes, and pirates as well. I believe we're better served keeping the ore for our fabricators. There's still a lot of repair work to do. Regardless, it's not a long-term solution."
Miranda tipped the datapad on her desk up. "There's been a new development. I have information here regarding the Shadow Broker. Information that stands a chance of leading us to the center of the Broker's operations."
In the surprised silence, the turian caught Jacob's eye for a fleeting moment.
"It came from him, didn't it?" Shepard said.
Miranda pursed her lips together as the question hung in the air. "Yes. But I didn't contact him; the information arrived in one of my secure mail accounts."
Shepard made a soft exhalation an awful lot like a growl, a sound that echoed the sudden sour feeling in Jacob's gut. "I'm not doing the Illusive Man any more favors."
"Shepard, finding and possibly eliminating the Shadow Broker would be an enormous gain for humanity, even the Council races. Think of the kind of information this could uncover!" Enthusiasm cracked out from under Miranda's controlled tone. In Jacob's experience, she treated information as a wealth greater even than credits, and the Shadow Broker was sure to be sitting on a stockpile to beggar her considerable imagination.
"Isn't it just a little bit convenient that this... unprecedented piece of information surfaces now?"
"Of course it is." Shoulders straight, Miranda seemed immune to the commander's suspicion. "I'm not naive. But there's too much potential here to just dismiss it out of hand. Alone, it might not be enough to convince me, but Doctor T'soni should be able to make much more of this lead. Between us, we might actually have a chance where others have failed."
"What if it's another one of the Illusive Man's traps?" the turian said.
"That's a possibility, yes. But he also has plenty of incentive to want the Shadow Broker gone."
"Can we risk that right now?"
"We weathered the Collector ship raid well enough. And came away with invaluable information. Nothing is without risk."
"No." Shepard straightened. "I'm not the Illusive Man's little toy. I won't be jerked around every time he decides to yank my strings."
"Shepard," Vakarian said, "didn't Liara-"
"No!" she snapped. "Lawson, you can send the Illusive Man detailed instructions on just how and where he can cram his 'intel'. And don't skimp on the language. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a lot of problems to solve." She turned and swept out the door without another word.
Miranda folded her arms, her eyes flicking to the turian then back to the door. "She's being irrational."
Jacob expected Vakarian to say something, but he remained silent, staring at the datapad on Miranda's desk. The armory officer shifted his weight. "Don't think she sees it that way."
The irritated glance lingered a moment longer than usual before returning to the cool mask. "Whether she likes it or not, many of our goals still coincide with those of Cerberus," Miranda said. "Shepard can hate the Illusive Man all she likes, but he'll find a way to benefit from our actions."
"Unless we take him out," Vakarian said.
"Impossible."
"You may have noticed that word doesn't carry a lot of weight around here."
She stared him down for a long few seconds before replying, "We have no information on his whereabouts."
He head pushed forward just a little, his teeth glinting under his mandibles. "That seems hard to believe, somehow."
Miranda didn't give the alien an inch. "Whatever I knew is long since obsolete. He moved his main operations a long time ago, and most certainly after I... resigned. Whereas we do have a substantive lead on the Shadow Broker. A lead which more than likely has an expiration date."
Vakarian held out his hand. "Give it to me."
Miranda blinked. "What?"
"We'll be arriving on Illium soon. Liara knows me. I'll take it to her."
"Shepard-"
"One thing at a time." Vakarian gestured, spreading his hand expectantly.
Miranda's eyes narrowed, and Jacob could almost hear the numbers and probabilities buzzing in her mind. Finally, she handed him the datapad. Vakarian took it and transferred the files to his omni-tool, then turned and left with a nod of acknowledgement.
"You'd better go along with him, Jacob," Miranda said once the door had closed.
Jacob folded his arms. "To keep an eye on him?"
"To keep an eye on my intel."
"You're still treating them like they need to be manipulated, Miranda. We should be past that."
Her eyes flashed with anger. "Tell that to Shepard!"
"Shepard's got every right to look this gift horse in the mouth if you ask me. Nothing is ever free, not from him."
"Don't you think I know that?" She tossed her head. "I'm doing what I've always done, Jacob. I'm trying to keep this ship together while she charges around chasing her personal crusades! We did not have fuel reserves for that trip to Kopis! But she decided it was a viable target, all because the AI was the one that intercepted the location! And now we're headed back to Illium, and I have to perform a few miracles just to make sure we'll be able to leave!"
She exhaled, controlling the rare outburst with effort. "We don't have many places to turn. The Citadel barely tolerates us, so long as we stay far away. There are standing demands for our capture and interrogation from the Alliance, and we both know those are tantamount to arrest warrants. The Shadow Broker's files would give us leverage; it would make all of them sit up and listen. Even the Illusive Man."
He couldn't argue with the practicality of her words. Despite his suspicions of the Illusive Man, Jacob knew Miranda wouldn't even have brought it up unless she thought the information had some merit. Her pride wouldn't let her.
"All right, I'll back Vakarian up," he said. "Check out your lead."
Mollified, she rounded her desk and sat down, smoothing her hair into place. She pleated her fingers together, once again the picture of efficiency. "Keep me informed."
Even if it wasn't stated aloud, Jacob heard the gratitude in her tone. All of the uncertainty was wearing on her too, and he wasn't unsympathetic. But she wouldn't want sympathy from him- that line in the sand had been drawn before the Lazarus project had even begun. In a crisis such as this, she wanted results, and that suited him fine. He nodded smartly and left the room.
Crossing to the elevator, Jacob made a point of not glancing to his left, down the hall to the rows of sleeper pods. He could guess where the turian had gone- the same place he would before planning a mission. He fidgeted from foot to foot in the elevator, uncomfortable in the feeling of going behind his commanding officer's back. He preferred everything up front, on the table, and he wasn't sure Vakarian would tell Shepard what he was doing.
Jacob's guess was justified when the armory door opened to reveal Vakarian leaned over the table, fitting the scope onto his sniper rifle. As Jacob rounded to his left, the turian glanced up. His targeting eyepiece was off, sitting next to his heavy pistol.
"What have you been taking apart?" Vakarian pointed to the other worktable closest to the far wall. Its entire surface was covered in parts of various sizes. Jacob knew without going over there that each piece was laid out with fastidious precision, sorted in someone unknowable but highly deliberate pattern.
"That's not me," Jacob said. "The geth's been in here for three days, fiddling with the geth weapons we recovered from Canalus. Can't figure out what it's trying to do; all those little pieces keep changing places. Like it's sorting them."
"Maybe it's bored. I should ask if it likes doing manifold calibrations."
There was a ping from across the tables, making Vakarian turn his head. An instant later, the CIC door cycled open and Legion strode into the room. The geth stopped and regarded them, the lens of its eye contracting.
"Our requested fabrication is completed," said the modulated voice, "but if our timing conflicts with Taylor-Armory-Officer's duties, we will postpone our work to a later time."
"We were just leaving," Vakarian said. He clipped his sniper rifle to his back and reached for his sidearm.
The eye focused on Jacob. With so little face to work with, it took him a second longer than usual to realize it was waiting for his permission to continue.
He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "Go ahead."
Those strange little head-flaps flickered, and without a word it skirted around them and went to the worktable. Tension crawled up Jacob's neck as it passed behind him. He still couldn't believe Shepard had woken it up, never mind given it permission to walk around the ship. For all the help it had given them, Eden Prime was still far too fresh a memory for Jacob to ever turn his back on that single glowing eye.
As Legion opened the fabricator, he turned back to the turian, pitching his voice low. "Just what are you up to, Vakarian?"
"Do you wonder why Shepard just refused to go after the Shadow Broker?" the turian replied in a soft burr, fitting a set of sinks into the pistol.
"Guess I do. Doesn't seem like her."
"And how would you know?"
Jacob frowned, taken aback by the hint of accusation underlying Vakarian' voice.
"You've never even met the real Shepard," the turian said. There was a loud click from the cowling of the gun as he snapped it into place. "You don't know what Lazarus failed to put back together. I'm trying to finish the job you couldn't."
"What are you talking about?"
Vakarian shook his head. "She's never been herself. Not once, since the SR-1 went down."
"Bringing someone back from the dead isn't easy."
"It wasn't enough." Vakarian pointed at Jacob's hands. "Imagine waking to find your life gone, shackled, and with a knife to your throat. And your enemies saying 'we're all you have, and millions will die if you don't work for us'. What kind of existence is that?"
"Cerberus was..." He almost said it. Never her enemy. The room seemed to grow colder. The tinny sound of the geth puttering with its collection of parts bounced off the walls. That statement just didn't hold up to recent evidence.
Vakarian reached for his eyepiece, and seemed to linger over it for a moment. "A mission alone doesn't sustain the spirit, Taylor." He slipped the device into place. Subtle indents in the plated skin of his head bore witness to how rarely he'd been without it. "There have to be foundations under the things we do."
Jacob had never been sure how to take the turian notion of spirits. The translation seemed inadequate, loaded with too much human baggage. The concept seemed at once more complex and quite a bit simpler than the human definition assumed. Either way, it was further muddying waters already made vague by Vakarian's allusions. "Saving a hell of a lot of lives isn't enough?" Jacob asked.
The turian stood and looked at him squarely, his mandibles flicking outward. "I don't think it is."
A pop and a hiss of sparks startled them both. At the far end of the room, a flickering light danced over the geth's smooth surfaces as it applied current to something. Wisps of dark smoke rose up before being whisked away by the room's ventilation. It reached out and selected another piece from the array on the table, engrossed in its work.
"What are you planning?" Jacob said, turning back.
"I'm going to try to help my friend."
"How?"
"I'm still working on that."
Jacob raised an eyebrow. "Well, I'm in."
"Let's go, then."
