Somewhere over the rainbow, Arc 5 of "Gone with the Sun"

Chapter 53 Bad Mama


Omen of Nemo

The moment came to revisit Pax, Anadius, and Cronos station. This once, Shepard was taking Javik, despite the risk of losing the only Prothean in existence.

Javik insisted on his old berth in Normandy so he'd only seen him at the start of the journey, but Ash had kept everyone up to speed on the mood of their resident (evil). Shepard had a (faint) hope that a visit to his warped descendants might be profitable, or at least put him in a better mood, if not interrupted by husks of various kinds.

On arrival at Pax it was clear not much had changed, though as requested Qu'in had Nairobi in a close-support orbit – the turian cruiser was now in synchronous orbit also, powered down as much as possible; it and Nairobi had only minimum crews. This gave the mission some fire-support options if something should actually still be alive in the Collector vessel.

The first order of business after offloading stores at Hanshan's docks was the collector vessel. Boris Mikhailovich had loaned some spetsnaz (special purpose) military engineers to replace the fusing on the Sakharov mines with something slightly less primitive. This was a delicate business.

Peacemaker stood off at five hundred kilometres while a shuttle towing an M-44 Hammerhead made the transit to the Collector ship, nominally a cruiser but huge.

In the event, a single encrypted radio chirp proposed interrupting the mercury switches for a random time period which was sent back to the approaching engineers.

The time (six minutes) was not judged sufficient and the process was repeated; this time, with eighteen minutes available, the engineers confirmed the chirp and proceeded to replace the fusing. They then signaled readiness for the away team; Normandy and Peacemaker closed, with Pegasus and Overlord standing off.

Javik, Garrus, and Ashley arrived in two shuttles with a platoon each of Hierarchy and ethnic-Russian Alliance marines out of Nairobi (this time including a small contingent of Normandy's marines, of NAS origin). The engineers followed with one of the mines which was set in the power plant a third of the way in. Once again Shepard found himself constrained to watching from the gunnery's director board. At least this time he effectively had a finger on the Thanix cannon, just in case.

The troop's first communique came five hundred metres in, moving fast.

"Dark in here. The EMP must have completely trashed the Collector power mains."

"Can you tell if there's anything alive?"

"Yeah, sort of, there's bioluminescent strips along the path. Some kind of emergency lighting, but very low level." (Ash)

"We are leaving flare lamps every hundred metres, Captain. So far, only corpses."

"Some of them are very fresh," observed Garrus.

"Collector corpses decay fast. They must be less than five days old, Sir."

"Shame. Might have had live specimens to give Jana. Just died for lack of power?"

"Or air. The wards have gone. It's close to a vacuum."

For the next six minutes progress was a little slower as some items of Collector or Reaper tech, including a cache of Blackstars, were passed back down the line. Finally, they broke into the expected orange-lit huge chamber, provoking an exchange between Javik, Ashley, and Garrus:

"Pods, Captain. Empty."

"Were they planning to fill up at Noveria, do you think?"

"Unlikely, but possible. From the way they fought – poorly – there's indications they're no longer in contact with their Reaper masters."

"So if filling pods was their intention, they were operating on automatic. What puzzles me is why they didn't just lay down and die. What's the point of going on?"

The troop followed bioluminescent markers to the far end of the monstrous ship, and a hemispherical room festooned with multicolored lamps in hexagonal motifs. There was a cluster of transparent spires with occasional flickering glows at the bottom.

"Captain Shepard, can you see this? It resembles a Prothean command bridge."

"Really, Javik? After all this time?"

"Yes. Captain. That translucent structure would have been the ship overmind. It is still powered. We should transport it for study."

"Whoa!"

"Williams?"

"Come and help me with this, Garrus. There's a huge Collector here in some kind of armor, and I don't think it's quite dead."


Witchy Boss

"Captain, all this Collector material we are picking up, and this latest… item…"

"We should isolate it somewhere?"

"I realize there has been no evidence of indoctrination, but Earth's moon would not be too far."

"Such a place exists, Javik, run by the Russians and the Hierarchy, in a quarantine vacuum, with only remote controls and monitoring of the scientific staff." (Garrus)

"Right. A prison for scientists. The Russians are almost as paranoid as Liara about security and I don't know the details, but she tells me it's a place where the bad guys go from Limbo if they're deemed irredeemable."

"Limbo? My translator has no Prothean referent."

"The name's of religious significance to Catholic Christians."

"I thought they had declined in importance since Cerberus and their Pope –"

"Speak to Gabriella. They lost many followers to the closest rival sect, yes – the Episcopalians. Especially women. But any Catholic male can be acclaimed Pope."

"I see… I think. It is difficult to speak with Daniels alone. Perhaps the asari, Liara."

"They'e dealt with antipopes before. It's a hiccup, but far from the end of the sect."

Ashley's curiosity got the better of her: "Hey Shepard… What do you know about this end-prison for the rejects from Limbo?"

"They call it Baba Yaga's cabin."

"That means nothing to this Prothean. The translator just beeped at me."

"It means something to me. There's a security failure there, I interpret that to mean it's mobile. It's watched over by someone called Kuzka's Mom, who is presumably a very hard-nosed lady."

"Da. Nyet." The Russian voice was having difficulty suppressing giggles.

"Thank you, lieutenant, do you have anything to add beyond bare confirmation of what I know and don't know?"

"Pyotr Mikhailovich would dine on my liver if I did, Captain. I will pass on your hint about the security."

"Ouch. Very well. Could you organize the removal of the lucite sculpture, computer, whatever, the thing on the bridge, in a stasis projector field. Put the Collector General in in another one, please… Kuzka's Mom is going to LOVE this."

"If Collector General gives trouble Baba Yaga will feed it to the Yahg. If the Yahg hasn't pissed her off too much already."

"Too much information, Lieutenant. I fear for your liver."

Later, over chocolate, Ashley expressed her unease:

"Can these nightmares reproduce?"

"No. Remember Mordin's post-autopsy summaries? Everything important, "replaced by tech." My guess, they reproduce by cloning and the Reapers add their own special tech to the mix. We never found a cloning center on any Collector vessel and we've run through the entire ship. No Reapers, no more tech, so no more Collectors."

"Do we know that for sure?"

"Maybe not. The QEC attached to the aerogel computer was receiving an odd 'are-you-there' CQ-type message, over and over again, but that could just be automated."

"What was odd about it?"

"It was operating about seven orders of magnitude slower than the normal QEC bandwidth. Something's wrong at one end of the connection. Liara has an idea about that but she won't discuss it. Apparently I don't need to know."

"Yet. Are we sure there are no more Reapers?"

"Well if there are they're laying low. The Ontarom array reports in to Hackett by QEC every day, and it's detected nothing but a few geth in distress."


Next chapter: #54, "Garbage collector"


Wednesday, July 29, 2015