Absolute Magnitude

-Chapter Two-

Terminal Velocity

Part II

From all reports, the geth had launched a turian-style offensive, sending in a large enough force to crush any resistance with minimal loss on their part. And yet two things struck Shepard as the team tried not to lag behind Nihlus, their eyes on the enormous ship sweeping overhead.

There were no geth shells, except the ones they were leaving behind. And there were far fewer bodies in general than she'd expected.

The quarians had been reluctant to release any information on the exact level of emotional awareness possessed by the geth, though they clearly had some concept of 'death' if they'd perceived being shut down and reprogrammed as a threat. It could be sheer practicality at work, retrieving the deactivated shells and repairing them rather than manufacturing fresh platforms, but some part of her couldn't help but be curious about their thoroughness. Surely they weren't so desperate for scrap that they would collect even truly mangled platforms. Marines didn't leave men behind. Did the same hold true for geth?

(N7s didn't leave men behind, either, but for them it wasn't just camaraderie, it was a matter of leaving no evidence behind. It was only once she was running her own operations that she could be more certain of avoiding civilian involvement and, by extension, civilian casualties. If she hadn't thought she'd known her final destination from the moment she'd earned the right to be called a Marine after the crucible, from the moment when she'd been drowned, been baptized, and rose up as an N7, she'd have had a far worse time living with herself.)

The other was less a matter of curiosity and more a matter that warranted serious consideration. Eden Prime might not have had a large garrison, but with the discovery of the Prothean beacon, an asset that could earn prodigious credits on the black market, most of its force should have been concentrated on the protection of the relic.

That only a skeleton force had remained with the research team wasn't unusual, but three was less than she'd expected, especially as some of the equipment used in these kinds of digs was very heavy and very expensive. With relatively little threat elsewhere, she would have expected the garrison commander to lend some Marines to help shift supplies and close up the camp.

Maybe they had been here, she thought as she eyed an empty spike, still extended. And maybe the geth had some way of controlling their little zombie army and it wasn't only machines that they should expect to confront. Their original force was going to be enough to contend with without their ability to produce ready-made cannon fodder.

As they approached another installation, she shut down the extraneous thoughts. She had enough training to retain vigilance while working through theories, but abstract thought under the possibility of live fire was one of those things best done in moderation.

She hadn't seen the tell-tale movement of massed troops, so she signaled for the core team to check on another of the pre-fabs while she shadowed Nihlus down to the docks, prepared to offer support fire until the core team could rejoin them. Talking with the scientists seemed to have exhausted Nihlus's patience, but Shepard wasn't going to die because she was too impatient to sweep outbuildings.

But the firefight she was expected didn't materialize. Nihlus's voice carried bemusement when he identified the silver-plated turian pacing on the dock, but no hostility. "Saren," he said, lowering his weapon.

Shepard took in the familiarity in the greeting and realized she was looking at Saren Arterius, whose name was famous throughout the traverse. Or infamous, depending upon whether you agreed with his methods. As with all Spectres, information concerning him was classified, leaving him little more than a name and a legend.

She'd never seen a turian quite like Saren before, who resembled Nihlus about as much as pre-galactic migration Earth races resembled each other. They had enough characteristics in common to be part of the same species, but where Nihlus was smooth, sleek, and streamlined, Saren was all brutal power. There was none of the deceptive turian fragility at his waist, the angle of his cowl strangely flat, and the hard edges of his mandibles promised considerable crushing force rather than looking faintly vestigial. And he had a strange ancillary crest coming in along his cheekbones, which were left uncovered by his hood.

It was...unusual to see a barefaced turian serving in any acknowledged capacity-usually refusal to don colony markings was treated as something so unpatriotic, so unturian they were treated a like social lepers in the settled systems.

Somehow though, for being an aberration in almost every way, he came off as the essential turian, like he was the embodiment of a primeval ancestor come to rumble and sneer at too-civilized descendents. And he had a voice to made that image, low, powerful, faintly disdainful. "Nihlus."

"This isn't your mission, Saren. What are you doing here?" Faint irritation edged Nihlus's voice, something Shepard felt partially responsible for. Turians, even turian Spectres, liked it best when the chain of command was clear. His authority had been challenged enough today.

"The Council thought you could use some help on this one," Saren replied unperturbedly as he clapped Nihlus on the shoulder, glancing significantly over at Shepard.

She didn't respond to the taunt. The only thing about Saren as well-known as his tactics was his dislike of humanity.

"I wasn't expecting to find the geth here," Nihlus replied after the briefest pause. "The situation's bad."

"Don't worry," Saren said, shifting toward the stairs. "I've got it under control. They moved the beacon to the spaceport. I'd invite you to come along, but it looks like you brought a lot of baggage," he said as he drew level with Shepard.

For a human woman, Shepard was not short by any stretch of the imagination, but with Saren so close he was almost brushing against her shoulder, the angle required to meet his eyes was uncomfortable. But she did not step back and she did not look away.

And she was now certain she knew what a turian sneer looked like, fine hair prickling beneath her hardsuit as Saren walked on by. They said that a turian was not actually functionally stronger than a human, that a human with comparable conditioning would be their equal, but the fact was there just weren't very many humans with a turian's height. And no human came with their natural armor, though they had an edge on the reflexes side of the equation due to a more sensitive and efficient nervous system.

Somehow, she still preferred her odds with about two hundred meters between them.

"You didn't try to stop him," Nihlus murmured as he came level with her, his eyes focused on the senior Spectre.

Because she'd had enough time with Nihlus to know that at worst he would have said no; grabbing Saren's carapace seemed like a good way to lose an arm.

The senior Spectre moved at something they'd called the turian lope in training, a pace that looked gentler than a human sprint, but which their stride length made just as distance-eating. He was soon lost to sight, but the sound of gunfire made it relatively easy to track his progress.

She was a little surprised when Nihlus didn't immediately follow Saren, but she was distracted by a noise from behind one of the crates. Shepard vaulted over them before Nihlus reacted, one hands slammed up beneath the jaw-human, her mind registered, which was the only fact that saw her holstering her pistol rather than putting a cluster of rounds somewhere effective.

"Wait!" he bleated, "Don't shoot! I'm one of you! I'm human!"

"What were you doing skulking around back there?" Nihlus asked, then shook his head sharply. "Never mind. It's safe enough now. Let him go. We need to follow Saren."

Shepard released her grip and the man stumbled back, clutching at his throat. Her eyes swept over the crates on the dock, which provided less than ideal cover, but she was beginning to have a sense that the geth weren't being careless. They were leaving witnesses.

This wasn't a covert operation. This-this was a declaration of geth military strength.

What exactly was so important about this beacon that it was worth ending their two hundred year isolation behind the Veil to retrieve it?

What did the geth stand to gain?

What did everyone else stand to lose?

Those were the thoughts battering themselves against the walls of her mind, but no matter what the answers were, they wouldn't matter if she didn't make it off this planet. The gunshots had stopped, so presumably Saren had cleared them a path, and the core team had returned. Alenko handed over a box of grenades, bounty from a home-grown smuggling operation, Williams had a few vitriolic words to say about ungrateful civilians, and then the whole team was moving toward the cargo rail.

At first she had to admire Saren's efficiency-there were enough geth littering the station that she caught Jenkins almost tripping over one in her peripheral vision-

No. He hadn't almost tripped. That was a geth hand, clutching at his leg, and it was a geth rifle that swept up and pressed into the soft hollow of his jaw, the contact muffling the shots that followed. His head snapped back, his barriers useless at point-blank range, the bullets piercing flesh, brain, skull, his helmet preventing a clean exit, leaving the bullets with just enough energy to pulp to his brain.

Shepard would know. She'd done it before.

"Barrier up!" she roared at Kaidan, already flinging a handful of grenades past him, the glowing wall of his biotics flickering to life milliseconds later. "Kryik, Williams-"

"Already on it, Shepard," Nihlus growled, pistol in hand, Williams at his shoulder, both of focused on putting down the nearest geth so that cover wasn't a synonym for grave marker. She and Kaiden slid in behind crates just as her grenades denoted, his barrier surviving long enough to protect them from shrapnel, the explosion killing enough geth to give them some breathing space.

She and Kaiden concentrated their fire ahead, while the other two mopped up behind. With their combined skills as well as a far reduced force facing them, she and Kaiden made an efficient team, stripping shields and slaughtering geth, him falling out of the rhythm occasionally to renew the barrier keeping the geth behind them from testing all those claims made by shield-tech manufacturers.

There was a pained grunt from Williams, but from the soft cursing, she would survive.

In the end, there weren't as many geth as the ambush conditions had made it seem, but it remained a fact that Jenkins was dead. Kaidan gently disengaged the shattered ruin of his helmet, flinching when he went to remove the whole thing and saw the mess underneath, but his hand was steady as he swept the Corporal's eyes-forever frozen in surprise-closed.

Williams had a hunted look in her eyes, the kind that came with seeing too many good men die too quickly. Some people never lost that haunted look, some people lost themselves to it. And not all the medication, psychiatrists, and alcohol ever seemed to help those men, though sometimes, in the thick of things, when there wasn't time to think, they seemed almost themselves again.

Shepard hoped that Williams didn't end up like one of those men, the ones with abridged expiration dates.

Her injury turned out to be nothing more than a bad graze, safely clotted by medi-gel, but Shepard was still worried by her mental state. Just like she'd hardly known what to say when she'd reported the slaughter of her garrison, Shepard didn't know what to say to her and to Kaidan, who'd seemed to have a rapport with Jenkins.

She hated the disingenuous platitudes that death brought, but Jenkins was almost a stranger to her, for all that he'd died under her command. Some part of her could hear Chakwas telling her about soldiers like him, but Shepard had lost enough men to know that all of them had stories. "The Alliance probably has another ship en-route by now. I'll flag him on the map-they'll make sure he makes it home," she told the two of them as gently as she could manage. "But if we don't press on, he'll have died for nothing." And that she would regret more than his death itself.

Kaidan gave her a short, slightly jerky nod. "Understood, commander."

"Ma'am," Williams said tightly, hands clutching her rifle like a lifeline. "It was a trap. A big fucking trap."

"We know," Shepard told her, even softer, but all the warmth leached out of her voice. "We'll take care of it."

Nihlus made no comment as they pressed forward, their boots crunching on shattered fragments of geth and cargo. She wondered what he thought of this, if he was struggling to create some story in his head that might explain why the most infamous Spectre in the traverse was colluding with the geth. For her, there were too many unknowns to even begin sketching an explanation.

As luck would have it, it didn't take an explanation to pull a trigger, just pressure.

Though for the inquest that would doubtless follow, it would be useful to have a better reason for shooting a Spectre than "he set us up".

The rail still proved functional, which got them to the platform just in time for them to be assaulted by a fresh wave of geth, though this time Shepard had to be satisfied with their reduced team flanking her protectively as she had an opportunity to practice defusing timed explosives under heavy fire.

There was a reason some people found combat addictive, the brain reacting to death's proximity with a potent chemical cocktail that made every moment just that little bit more. The real trick was not to drown in it, to rush when her hands needed to be rock-steady.

She chose to be flattered that Saren had anticipated that they would survive the ambush and grateful that he'd used half-kiloton ordinances rather than something smaller and infinitely more surprising. Of course, an explosion that large would be enough to destroy the entire spaceport as well as the docks, which seemed excessive for just erasing evidence of his having been on-planet during the invasion.

Of course, she was also blindly attributing the placement of the explosives to the Spectre, when it might well have been whomever was directing the geth. There was no reason to blindly assume that was Saren, that was just her mind trying to give a face and a name to the attack, to attribute responsibility even at the expense of accuracy.

They swept the area with a grim efficiency, knowing that every second gave Saren more time to accomplish his agenda, but the four explosives she eventually disarmed gave ample evidence as to why they couldn't afford to charge blindly after him. But when Nihlus curtly judged the area clear and they pressed on to the shuttle docks, they found not Saren, but the beacon and what she assumed was the rest of the garrison.

Now shriveled, sexless husks of their former selves, they threw themselves mindlessly at the team. Dangerous only in proximity, as they still shed ambient arcs of electricity when they-was "died" even the right word for it, or would "shorted out" be more accurate?-went down, it was still tense work.

There was only one faint silver lining to being forced to shoot the ambulatory corpses of fellow servicemen-unlike the zombies that had staggered through human imagination since before holovision, these didn't require a perfect headshot to stop them. Enough damage to the center mass was enough to send power arcing through the air, leaving the faint scent of ozone.

Williams's breath was so ragged it almost sounded like she was crying, but her aim was absolutely steady.

Shepard could respect that.

Eventually, there were only the defiled dead and the beacon.

"Saren came this way," Nihlus growled almost too low to hear, "where is he?"

"And where are the geth?" Kaidan asked. "If the beacon was their target, you'd think they'd be here."

"And that ship came this way," Williams remarked. "Even if they hadn't had time to load the beacon yet, you can't exactly hide something that size."

Shepard's eyes swept the empty stretch of the port, coming to rest on the beacon. "It might not have been the physical beacon itself they were after. I didn't think to ask the scientists, but since we're handing it over to the Council, I assume they weren't able to 'open' it. If someone knew how, there might have been data dating from the Prothean period recorded on it. Though that really doesn't explain why they wouldn't retrieve it regardless. We're going to pray that the geth haven't developed effective visual stealth-tec for a ship that size and call in the Normandy for a pick-up."

"It might be another trap," Nihlus pointed out.

Shepard inclined her head, acknowledging his point. "We'll sweep the area first, then make the call."

No further surprises were discovered, so they clustered near the beacon as Shepard made comm contact with the Normandy. She hadn't yet finished the pick-up request when she caught movement in her peripheral vision. Shepard automatically turned her body to look, not expecting anything more than someone shifting with impatience.

Kaidan breaking from the group and moving toward a now-glowing beacon was outside her expectations, but she shoved Williams aside and threw herself forward in a single movement. She'd meant to tackle Kaidan, thought that perhaps the glow had induced the reaction in a kind of hypnosis, but she felt the grav-shift as she came within range.

She managed to throw Kaidan clear of the grav-shifted field and she snarled, "Stay back!" when Nihlus stepped forward with a hand extended, but struggling only seemed to hasten the process. Like the needle on a compass orienting itself, no amount of will could stop her from turning to face the beacon.

Shepard felt her feet leave the ground, but her awareness was turning inward, her body something heavy, foreign, immobile. She was struck by the sensation that she wasn't alone, that she was one with an enormous network of consciousnesses.

And they were all screaming.