Lombax Effect—Chapter 9
As the team had expected from one flying bullet, more of Fist's thug army had come into Chora's Den to gun them down.
"Hey, can I come along too?" Qwark asked as he came beside Ratchet while the Lombax was taking cover.
"Qwark, this really isn't the best time," Ratchet said. "We've got guys shooting us from the bar."
"OK, maybe later. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that I just got information about Nefarious and what he's planning. And here's the weird part: he's—"
"Team up with another bad guy who's got an army of robots trying to take over the galaxy." Ratchet finished the ten-foot tall man's sentence. "We figured that out already."
"No, there's more! After I was first invited to Fist, I was wondering around his office and found a video sent by some guy calling himself the Shadow Broker. There was stuff about Saren—not a lot for me to pay much attention to—until I heard the all too familiar voice from Doctor Nefarious."
"And you're sure that was him?"
"Oh, I'm sure. I could tell his voice from a million others. No joke."
Before Qwark could say another word, Shepard had her pistol out and aimed at a thug whom Qwark did not see. The shot had made the ten-foot-tall human-like alien jump.
"What was that?"
"Not paying attention to your surroundings, sir," the Commander said coolly to Qwark. "I appreciate you informing us what you found, but you can save the details for later. Right now, we need to take down those scumbags, get out of the bar and find the quarian!"
By the time, Qwark was told to shut up, everyone was working their way out of Chora's Den, step by step, as they shot down whoever was left of Fist's pack of bodyguards. Each of them foolishly dared themselves to take on their enemies, but the nine had the upper hand. One of the enemies was close to retreated out of the bar before he was biotically pulled back by Wrex, followed by a shotgun blast that sent the floating body to an ungraceful death.
They all made their way out, leaving behind a messy nightclub with a few dozen men lying on the ground motionless.
Shepard was in the lead, with her pistol still in hand, while the rest followed her around the path and up the stairs to the red-lit area they were in several minutes ago. Shepard then turned to the left and jogged up the stairs, reaching a door for her to open for the rest. As they pressed forward, they were in the alley Fist had mentioned. Everyone took cover as they saw four people downstairs.
The four consisted two lithe people in full-body armour painted yellow and black, a turian who was possibly wearing a mask, and one unidentifiable person who was wearing a unique suit covering the entire body, along with a hood joined at the helmet. Voices could be heard from Shepard's squad of eight.
"Did you bring it?" the masked turian asked the hooded figure.
The hooded, suited person stood still, asking, "Where's the Shadow Broker? Where's Fist?" The voice sounded female and held a sort of accent.
"They'll be here," the turian answered. As if believing he can get his way, he approached the suited female and stroked her left arm. "Where's the evidence," he asked slyly.
The female quickly swiped his hand off of her. "No way. The deal's off."
Because he was wearing the obscure mask, the turian was silent, but soon brought up a hand to signal the yellow-armoured figures behind him to approach the female. But before they took one step forwarded, they were attacked with a pair of grenades that detonated when they reached contact of their suits. The hooded female must have thrown them.
Shepard saw this as her opportunity to step in. She pointed to the turian and his two subordinates before coming out of cover and calling out, "Quarian! Take cover!"
The female, or quarian as Shepard had said, saw the Commander and her team of eight. Her face was concealed with a dark purple, glass visor, rendering her own face nearly impossible to see through. She found a large crate and hid behind it as the three who planned to attack her was getting peppered with bullets.
The fight was short, and the three perpetrators were out like a light.
"Fist set me up!" the quarian called out in anger as she came out of cover, looking to the group of nine who defended her. "I knew I couldn't trust him! I should have suspected it when I heard about his new 'partner' a few days ago."
From hearing this, Qwark was looking to the quarian in wonder. But then he looked down to the others who were staring at him squarely in the eye. "What?" he asked innocently.
Shepard ignored him for now; he already explained his role in this façade. She turned to the quarian. "Were you hurt in the fight?"
"I know how to look after myself—not that I don't appreciate the help," she answered. Her head turned from side to side slightly a few times, most likely taking in the people who took down the three who had attempted to kill her. "Who are you?" she asked with wonder.
"My name's Garnet Shepard," the Commander answered. "I'm looking for evidence to prove Saren's a traitor."
"Then I have a chance to repay you for saving my life," the young woman said, looking over the stark alley they were all in. "But not here. We need to go somewhere safe."
"The ambassador," Ratchet suggested. "He's been wanting something linking to Saren to show up soon. We can give the info to him at his office."
"Good idea, Serviceman," Shepard said, showing a small smile at their accomplishment. "Let's go there, see if Udina and Anderson are still around for the show."
The ten made their way back up to the Presidium. They were quiet along the way, but they soon reached the Embassies and at Udina's office. The door was open and Ambassador Udina had his back to the group with his armed folded.
"You're not making my life easy, Shepard," they heard him say, his voice holding ire and frustration. "Firefights in the Wards? An all-out assault on Chora's Den?" He turned around. "Do you know how many— " Before he said more, his gaze turned to the full-body suited, masked, hooded young woman Shepard and the others had brought along. "Who is this? A quarian? What are you up to, Shepard?"
"Making your day, Ambassador," Shepard said, armed behind her back and standing straight. "She has information linking Saren to the Geth."
Udina's scowled expression softened. "Really?" he asked the Commander. He turned towards the quarian once more. "Maybe you better start at the beginning, Miss...?"
"My name is Tali," the quarian answered kindly. "Tali'Zorah nar Rayya."
"We don't see many quarians here. Why did you leave the Flotilla?"
"I was on my Pilgrimage, my rite of passage into adulthood."
Most looked to each other in wonder, as if interested in what Tali was doing before her business against Saren came up. Talwyn look to her and said, "Maybe you could tell us what your Pilgrimage is about, give us an insight on what you do."
"Of course," the quarian said with a nod. "It is a tradition among my people. When we reach maturity, we leave the ships and our parents and our people behind. Alone, we search the stars, only returning to the Flotilla once we have discovered something of value. In this way, we prove ourselves worthy of adulthood."
The Commander seemed intrigued, seeing something in Tali's history as a unique part of quarian culture. "What kind of things do you look for," she asked.
"It could be resources like food or fuel, or some type of useful technology, or even knowledge that will make life easier on the Flotilla," Tali answered. "Through our Pilgrimage, we prove that we will contribute to the community rather than being a burden on our limited resources."
As she finished, Shepard looked back to her large team. Some had their eyes wide open in amazement, while only a few others showed expressions that drew their eyebrows or eye ridges together.
"Tell us what you found," Shepard asked back to Tali.
She nodded, looking to the human ambassador and Captain Anderson who had just come into the office. "During my travels, I began hearing reports of Geth. Since they drove my people into exile, the Geth have never ventured beyond the Veil. I was curious. I tracked a patrol of Geth on an uncharted world. I waited for one to become separated from its unit, then I disabled it and removed its memory core."
"I thought the Geth fried their memory cores when they died, some kind of defence mechanism," Anderson commented.
"So," Ratchet began. "How exactly did you get the Geth's memory core out without any trouble?"
Tali looked to the Lombax. She was silent, but as her expression was difficult to read past her dark visor, Ratchet guessed she was either in confusion of his species or in wonder of why he was here with Shepard. The silence didn't last long when she began to answer Ratchet's question. "My people created the Geth. If you're quick, careful and lucky, small caches of data can sometimes be saved." She activated her omni-tool, keying in a few commands. "Most of the core is wiped clean, but I salvaged something from its audio banks."
"Eden Prime was a major victory," a male voice said. "The beacon has brought us one step closer to finding the Conduit."
Everyone was silent, all moved by the voice that spoke from the recording Tali played from her omni-tool.
"That's Saren's voice!" Anderson finally said. "This proves he was involved in the attack."
"He said Eden Prime 'brought him one step closer to finding the Conduit'," Shepard said. "Any idea what that means?"
The Normandy captain shook his head, but said, "The Conduit must have something to do with the beacon. Maybe it's some kind of Prothean technology... like a weapon."
"So, Prothean means ancient, right?" Ratchet asked.
"Actually," Talwyn began, "from what Shepard told me back on Eden Prime, Protheans were a type of people who lived in this galaxy about fifty thousand years from today. So, yeah, there could be something ancient going on."
"There could be," Shepard agreed as she nodded.
"Wait, there's more," Tali spoke up. "Saren wasn't working alone." She pressed some more buttons on her omni-tool.
"Eden Prime was a major victory. The beacon has brought us one step closer to finding the Conduit."
"And one step closer to the return of the Reapers," a new voice sounded, this one belonging to a woman. Judging by her voice, the female who spoke in the recording could fit a character with age and power.
Tali hit the "stop" button on her omni-tool, indicating the end of the recording.
"I don't recognise that other voice, the one talking about Reapers," Udina commented.
"Are they some kind of new alien species?" Shepard asked.
"According to the memory core," Tali explained, "the Reapers were a hyper-advanced machine race that existed fifty thousand years ago. The Reapers hunted the Protheans to total extinction and then they vanished. At least, that's what the Geth believe."
"Sounds a little far-fetched," the ambassador said.
Nearly everyone was thinking over what Tali had told them, but the Commander was on a different train of thought. She thought back to the vision she had gotten from the Prothean beacon on Eden Prime, trying to remember what she saw but also wishing she didn't have to; everything in the vision was gruesome to extreme levels. Then she thought back to Tali's information on the Reapers, how they came in the same time period as the Protheans and that the Reapers were responsible for the Prothean race vanishing fifty millennia ago.
So, if the Reapers were there at the time, she thought, then that must be what the vision was trying to tell me. She spoke up for the others to hear her opinion, "The vision on Eden Prime. I understand it now." All eyes—including Tali's from behind the glass visor—turned to her. "I saw the Protheans being wiped out by the Reapers."
"The Geth revere the Reapers as guards, the pinnacle of non-organic life," Tali said, extending her knowledge to the others. "And they believe Saren knows how to bring the Reapers back."
"The Council is just going to love this..." Udina said, determined.
Shepard shook her head. As much as she would agree with the human ambassador about their new discovery to be something interesting to tell the Citadel Council, she believed the issue about Saren allied with a sentient race of machines was more serious than most would care to believe. "The Reapers are a threat to every species in Citadel space. We have to tell them."
"No matter what they about the rest of this, those audio files prove Saren's a traitor," Anderson pointed out.
"The captain's right," Udina nodded in agreement to Anderson. "We need to present this to the Council right away."
"Hold on," Ratchet called out. "Saren's with Nefarious, but we just got something relating to Nefarious. Qwark has it with him right now." His gaze raised up to the man in question. "Do you?"
"Yes, of course," Qwark answered. "He's in lead with someone named Saren. Fist had it on this little thing." He brought out a black disc, a red light spinning around its circumference.
"That's an optical storage disc, Mr. Qwark," Tali said. "Or OSD for short. Can you play it?"
"Uh... no." Qwark's shoulders slumped in doubt.
Ratchet held his chin, as if an idea had hatched in his mind. "Hey, Qwark," he said. "Give the disc to Garrus. He knows all that kind of stuff."
Qwark looked back at the disc then back to the group. "Who's Garrus again?"
"Me," Garrus answered raising his talons in the air.
Knowing now, the ten-foot tall man gave the OSD to Garrus. The turian then put the disc into a slot on his omni-tool, keying in a few commands before an orange, rectangular screen appears above his omni-tool with a line moving as scratches just as the audio started playing.
"Saren!" the high, vicious-sounding voice of Nefarious called. "When do we reach our next destination?"
"We will be headed to a number of locations, Doctor," Saren's less than high voice replied. "However, I haven't decided where we will be going first. We need to stay away from Citadel space, for a start. After that, we begin our search for the Conduit."
"And what will be doing once we reached these destinations?" Nefarious asked.
"There is a particular task I have set up for you. There are a number of tasks we must do. I'd like you to learn about the Geth—understand how they work on the battlefield, how to communicate with them, know when they respond to you. There is also a particular group which needs to be infiltrated. And from what you have told me, this fits to one of your top abilities."
"Give me the name of this group, and I'll give you what you need, Saren." A beep sounded. The recording had ended.
"That will do," Udina said. "Now we have evidence for both halves of the case."
Garrus ejected the OSD from his omni-tool, passing it over to Shepard for her to give to the ambassador to present to the Council. Tali even sent the audio files she gathered from the Geth to him from omni-tool to another.
"We should get ready and hand these over the Council as soon as possible," Anderson said.
"What about her, the quarian?" Wrex asked, eyeing the young woman he spoke of.
"My name is Tali," she said sternly. "You saw me in the alley, Commander. You know what I can do. Let me come with you."
"I thought you were on your Pilgrimage," Shepard said, her eyebrows furrowed.
"The Pilgrimage proves we are willing to give of ourselves for the greater good. What does it say about me if I turn my back on this?" Tali saw the others with thoughtful expressions; she did have a logical point there. "Saren is a danger to the entire galaxy. My Pilgrimage can wait."
"It's probably a good idea to let her tag along, ma'am," Ash suggested. "She's got the know-how on the Geth better than all of us combined."
The gunnery chief was right. Shepard looked to Tali again, saying, "I'll take all the help I can get."
The quarian walked over to the Commander's side. "Thanks. You won't regret this."
"Anderson and I will go ahead to get things ready with the Council," Udina said. "Take a few minutes to collect yourself then meet us in the Tower." Still holding the OSD Qwark found, he and the Normandy captain headed out of the office, leaving the other ten for them to ponder over what they all learned from their rushed investigation.
