8 - Sovereign: Prove Your Worth

Two Geth Primes greeted Saren at the platform as the cargo tram hummed to a stop in front of them. These two primes together made up the commanding intelligence that coordinated the entire Geth Battalion he had brought with him; like mobile hubs or routers for all the rest, their combined intelligence could be shared among the whole and allowed his troopers to function less like the glorified security mechs and more like the dynamic and lethal soldiers he'd come to respect them for.

There were very few Geth platforms capable of lingusitic communications; these two managed, between them, by splicing together clips of audio from extranet news broadcasts, viral videos, films, poems, songs and even snips from political speeches. It made their speech sound disjointed and random, but Saren had learned to understand them if he listened closely enough. "The... prothean... beacon... has been... secured... at... the... medical station... Ambassador."

Saren grunted as he walked past them, heading up the ramp towards the medivac landing pads that normally would receive ambulances from all over the colony but now contained just debris, discarded storage lockers and several dozen bodies impaled on spikes. "Prepare the beacon for transport to Sovereign," he said.

"We... cannot... the beacon... has become... activated... we believe... it has... detected... Sovereign's... presence... and will... self-destruct... if captured..."

Saren growled, glancing up at the towering bulk of Sovereign standing over them. This close to the ship, it was almost a solid wall of shadow over them, lit from beneath by the fires of the ground and the facilities it had destroyed when it landed. It wouldn't be the first time a prothean device reacted this way; Saren had discovered the hard way that many such artifacts would shut themselves down or even violently self-destruct whenever a sufficiently alien technology moved too close to them. Geth and Elcor technology seemed to trigger their countermeasures the most, but none so reliably as Sovereign itself.

While he was still considering this, a third Prime came stomping down the platform, this one with the decorative blue armor plating and the pattern he recognized as belonging to Matriarch Benezia's escort. The Matriarch was right behind the Prime, her slim form fully concealed by its bulk until they were both down from the stairway and standing on front of him.

Saren hadn't summoned her here, but he had felt the need to speak with her, and therefore she had been summoned. It was one of the many fascinating and sometimes eerie ways that Sovereign made communication so much easier between members of its crew.

"Commander," she said with a slight bow of the head, Asari honorifics seeming slightly out of face. Benezia was over twelve hundred years old and probably set in her ways by now, but h still found her ritualistic approach to everything tiresome.

"Benezia," he said, burying his disdain for now, "Aerial observations reported an anomaly..."

"Yes, Commander. I have confirmation from the Stalker patrol that there is an Alliance special forces unit advancing on Terminal Thirty Six. Our soldiers have engaged, but our resistance is ineffective."

Saren began to pace, the tightness in his gut like a presentiment of death. "Those must be the commando units Nihlus mentioned. He usually works alone, but I've known him to team up with specialists when the mission calls for it."

"As is likely to be the case here. The forces our soldiers have encountered is reported to be small but extremely well armed."

"And our best troops can't even slow them down." He stopped his pacing and folded his arms, considering this. "We still have several platoons available. We'll deploy what we have in the area to buy us more time..."

"Concentrating our forces for our enemies to crush them?" Benezia tilted her head, "That would gain us nothing."

"You have a better idea, Matriarch?"

"I suggest we do the opposite. The enemy is moving with clear intent to recover the beacon. I suggest we withdraw the bulk of our soldiers, leaving only a token force in the nearby towers to divide their attention, and allow the commandos to reach Aguilar Center. We will be able to concentrate our enemies where we can strike them at once."

"And hope that they don't realize they're walking into an ambush? And hope that whatever ship dropped them off - which we still can't locate, by the way - doesn't come in to provide close air support?"

"A conventional attack would be a great risk, Commander. A thanix device with a timed detonator would be ideal."

Saren's eyes flickered. A thought not entirely native to his own mind spilled through his brain and into his mouth, "I agree. See to it. In the mean time, I have business to attend to..."

Benezia watched him as he turned and walked away from her, her mind spinning in too many directions at once to speak at first. Too many of those directions were unnatural, and some of them were utterly compelling despite being wrong.

One of them was the sudden notice of a small, circular object hovering in a corner of the loading dock, silent and still and only noticeable for the fact that it was out of place. It was a drone of some sort, but not one of the Geth's. Judging by its position, someone had placed it there to keep it inconspicuous. Which meant someone out there was watching this conversation, listening in.

Whoever it was would have to be destroyed. No one could know of her purpose, or the mission. No one could know until they were ready to move. Secrecy had to be absolute...

Or did it? What if knowing what they were looking for turned out to be a blessing? What if more people knowing of the mission would help them recruit others to the cause? Benezia seized on that thought and let it fill her with joy... she made it fill her with joy. Because joy and rapture and the almost sexual thrill of Saren's dominance were the only pleasures left to her now, and the only tools she still had left to fight whatever had been placed in her mind...

"How did this happen, Commander?" she asked to Saren's back, using a tone of voice carefully chosen to trigger him, "How did we lose to these humans?"

"Lose?" He caught the tone of contempt on her last word and clamped on to it like a predator on a wounded animal. He whirled around, excitement in his eyes, "We haven't lost, Benezia. This is a major victory! This beacon will bring one step closer to finding the Conduit!"

Benezia swallowed. She wanted to say more... something that would let her... recruit... more of the peoples of the galaxy to... help Saren's cause. But the words weren't there, and they wouldn't come. No one else needed to know anything except for the part that they should celebrate most. "And the return of the Reapers?"

"And salvation!" Saren said, and stomped off towards the beacon.

At the bottom of the cargo ramp, finally reaching the landing pad, Saren found the Prothean beacon very much active, pulsing frantically in Sovereign's shadow. The beacon looked like a lightning rod built into a slanted, angular console on a wide circular base. It was pulsing with an incandescent green light that seemed to dance around it like an aurora.

Saren was by no means an expert on Prothean technology, but he knew enough to know that, as natural biotics, they operated almost all of their technology telepathically. Their beacons were designed to be universal, so that any Prothean or any sufficiently powerful biotic from any of their client races could activate the beacon and download its message. There was a simple signal, a simple prompt that would trigger the beacon to activate. The signal was so simple that Matriarch Benezia - who had first discovered it - had actually laughed when she explained it to him in such a simple turn of phrase: "Pull to open."

Saren charged a biotic field and drew the beacon towards himself. The beacon didn't move even an inch, but it did react. The pulsing green glow intensified, and gravity around him shifted. He was lifted four feet into the air as a mass effect field engulfed his body, and his eyes began to twitch as another, more precise and carefully modulated field began to work inside of his skull...