Sorry for the long wait, work was crazy, then it was holidays which is another kind of crazy. Anyway now we are past this. I think another chapter and this adventure will be done. I have a few ideas on how to make it interesting, I was after all thinking about this for 2 months. Hopefully I won't disappoint anyone.
As always I welcome feedback or just any questions you might have.
By the time I finished a quick read through the file I had finished the bourbon and was glad that I didn't have any other kind of alcohol on board. Otherwise I would have drunk it all in an attempt to distance my mind from the information on the file.
The obelisks were a weapon. Yes, obelisks. Plural. Alien civilisation that called Tau Volantis it's home had built dozens of them, all placed around their planet in huge necropolises. Each built to last as long as possible and to safeguard the obelisks.
Clark Isaacs called them Necromorphs, a familiar name to me, but not because they were zombie-like monsters. No, that would have been too easy. This species believed that they could only achieve their destiny through death. And not just individual death but death on mass scale, in fact death of everyone, everything on their world. From what Doctor Isaacs wrote these Necromorphs devoted hundreds of years, their entire culture to building their own tombs and the weapon to use in their suicide. When the necropolises were finished the obelisks at their hearts were activated turning everyone inside into psychotic killers.
From the few passages that Isaacs translated he surmised that the Necromorphs had believed that if they sacrificed their whole species in one huge orgy of violence and bloodshed they would be transformed, morphed into the avatar of their god. Unfortunately either Isaacs didn't find any images of the god or the Necromorphs themselves never actually recorded what it was supposed to look like.
But theory of the obelisks origins aside, as chilling as it was the real reason for my disturbed mental state was the experiments performed by the company he worked for. A list that included such entries that made me think Cerberus was just a playful little doggie rather than the three headed hell beast it was.
A list that made me think back to such real world monsters as Mengele and his work at Auschwitz or the leaders of the Imperial Japanese Unit 731. Isaacs was lucky that he put a bullet in his head, finding him alive would have been worse. For him.
There were two truly useful things in the document. One was the explanation of how obelisks worked. My initial thought that it was similar to indoctrination was the right one but instead of using some kind of energy field like the Reapers the Necromorphs invented a bio-technological plague. Semi-organic nanoscale robots acting as a virus would enter the hosts bloodstream and from there would get into their brain. There they would make the changes required to make an average person into a killer without remorse. And the reason why I have been chasing terrorist cells instead of fighting against some kind of zombie apocalypse was quite simple. The bio-chemical make-up of their creators was just different enough that the nanites could not multiply, could not cause instant burst of murderous rage instead turning them into terrorists plotting to kill as many as their can before their own death. Not like in the direct proximity of the obelisks where the people near it were exposed to hundreds of times more nanites. It also meant that someone had infected them, deliberately. In fact that was what most likely Phase 2 was in the various other notes I had managed to download. No one had gone into the detail of what exactly it was but there was not other explanation I could find.
The second useful bit of information was a location on Tau Volantis named only as Source. Or The Source. Isaacs theorised that it was some kind of research lab or a factory where they made the obelisks. Whatever it is there might be some crucial information that might help to cure people infected. Maybe even a way to remotely shut them down.
31/12/2174 Earth Geneva 2238 hours
Mr Orange sat down with a barely audible sigh of relief in an antique leather chair and let his head rest on his clasped hands. To anyone watching him it would have looked like an old man was sitting at his desk in a prayer. Despite the genetic modifications, despite the best that human and alien medicine could do, despite the doctors telling him that he still had decades to live Mr Orange felt old. He was old by any measure but asari or krogan at 98. Miss Vermilion told him years ago that the organisation that they had started would be the death of them. He would have liked to talk to her again but she was now living a quiet life somewhere on Eden Prime, or as quiet as life can be for a rancher out in a new colony. She had the good sense to walk away while she still could and for a moment he wondered, like he had done many times in the past, if he had accepted her invitation would he have been spared this exhaustion that had seeped into his bones. It was a but a pleasant distraction, a nice what if dream that he toyed with for he knew that he couldn't have walked away from this. The organization was his creation, he had seen the need of a super-secret branch of pan-human government even before First contact war. It's main goal was to police humanity, the traitors, the ones who would betray their own people to aliens. No matter who they are or where they were. What Mr Orange didn't expect was that the galactic community was so familiar. Below a layer of different biology and different cultures the rivalries, the politicking and the machinations were the same as on good old Earth. Simply on a million times larger scale. At first it had delighted him. It made the organisations job so much easier. Gathering intel, bribing corrupt officials, establishing back channels to the people in power of each species had been far easier than he had anticipated. He had been elated with the rapid growth and progress of his organisation.
Now he was afraid. Not the fear of losing power, or fear of dying. No, it was a fear that if everything was so familiar even across species boundaries that what he was doing was in the end futile. Just as his organisation was worming it's way into the political and economic structures of the alien governments so were theirs doing the same. Twenty years ago he would have said that the humans still had the upper hand, humans were more driven, willing to take risks and use chances that asari and salarians didn't. Now he wondered if they simply knew a better way. If the reason why it was so hard to find agents working for aliens was because they simply were so much better.
Mr Orange reached for the bottom drawer of his desk and drew out a bottle of the finest armenian cognac and a glass. With a practised motion he opened the bottle and tipped it letting the amber liquid spill carefully into the glass. At just over a finger he put the bottle away inhaling the familiar scent.
This was a present from Mrs Viridian, predecessor to Miss Green, just before she had left her post telling him that a bottle just like this had helped her through many difficult decisions. He had been fond of Mrs Viridian, she was exactly the type of person who was needed as Coordinator. She cared about her people but she also knew that the cause was bigger than any of them. This mess would have never happened if Mrs Viridian was still here. Miss Green had too much ambition, not content to be Coordinator she wanted to move up, replace Mr Blue or Miss Mauve. She should have known better. But she had been dealt with.
The current problem was that she was unfortunately not alone in her ambition. He has seen the seeds grow, their growing influence, the familiarity of the galactic affairs, it all had given them illusions. Illusions of their own importance and that nagging voice asking for more power.
As he took a careful sip of cognac Mr Orange replayed the crucial parts of the last report forwarded by Mr Blue from Iron 6. Mind enslaving obelisks. A suicide weapon by a non compos mentis alien species. A few images from the ship turned into a slaughter house. He had wanted to send a team to help Iron 6 but with dismissal of Miss Green a few of the more ambitious of her supporters have been making waves. So until he had a good enough grasp on the situation he needed all the agents loyal to him and Mr Blue close. Iron 6 would have to fend for himself for just a while longer.
Finishing off his cognac he stored the glass and the bottle back in the drawer and stood up. The image of the praying old man vanished and he once again projected the kind of steady, experienced persona that was capable of leading the most powerful secret organisation in Alliance space. Mr Orange had a party to get back to.
02/01/2175 Tau Volantis
Dropping out of FTL into Tau Volantis I set the sensors for passive detection only and input a circuitous route towards the planet in the file. Just in case there was anyone here with a ship and a reason to put a few holes into anyone that comes looking. A few hours later I was approaching the right planet, 4th from the star, a frozen ice ball with just enough atmosphere left for weather to form resulting in what I could only describe as one planetary snowstorm. I didn't know how long such thing lasted but considering it was covering the whole planet I doubted it would end anytime soon. Landing on it would be a challenge but I had to go down there and destroy the Source. It had to be destroyed so that no one could use this technology again, Leviathans and Reapers was enough mind-enslaving aliens for me.
As I swung the shuttle around the planet bleeding off speed so that I could enter the atmosphere safely I activated the sensors, flying without them into a snowstorm was just plain stupid. Even if I could survive a crash from a sub-orbital flight I would be stuck on the planet and die shorty after.
A few seconds later the active sensors pinged what it classified as a debris field. Approaching it I saw what was clearly left after a battle, debris from several ships in orbit degrading slowly towards the planet. The shuttle's computer identified several pieces as belonging to a human Veracruz armed cargo ship and an asari Saro-type light corvette. Veracruz was a quick and dirty chop shop job during the First Contact war, the fleet needed an assault carrier to carry the troops to Shanxi and be able to take a few hits while it was launching the shuttles. So the fleet engineers took a Helium-3 fuel barge stripped out most of the fuel pods and mounted standard cargo containers instead. Reinforced the whole ship with extra struts and bolted armour on top of them. Made it look like an oddly shaped brick. When the war ended as quickly as it started and the ship had not been finished yet the Fleet decided that it would be better if they made a proper assault carrier and sold the ship into private hands. What I was seeing now was that it had somehow broken into several pieces and I could still recognise what was left of it because of it's distinctive shape.
Here I have to admit that all that knowledge was just me nerding out. I always liked spaceships, I always liked reading about their fictional design and fictional histories. Here I was in a real sci-fi setting with real spaceships that had real design histories. So I had terrabytes of documentaries, articles and books written on spaceship design and history of their design. Human and alien. Which is how I knew that that the Saro-type light corvette didn't belong to any asari. Asari built them and sold them on an open market with downgraded tech. I had seen real asari tech and it's decades ahead of anything humans have at this point. As I scanned the wreckage I noticed a power signature from the asari corvette. It was faint but steady and considering that her aft section was one giant gap where her engines and mass effect core should be I guessed that it was some kind of VI distress beacon feeding from emergency power cells. I needed to know what happened here before I attempted to land so I started a careful approach hoping that I didn't hit anything my kinetic barriers could not hope with.
After an hour of very careful approach I arranged for my shuttle to align with the wreckage a few hundred meters off. Quickly getting my armour on I attached an EVAMP, Extra-Vehicular Activity Manoeuvring Pack , to it and went into the airlock. SMP was basically 20th century tech with a slight 22nd century twist. It still used gas jets to propel you around, it still looked like a rocket pack but in addition it also had additional kinetic barriers so that I wouldn't need to rely on the ones in my armour and it had a built in autopilot in case of emergency. Handy when you worked alone.
Shutting off the artificial gravity in the shuttle I pushed myself out gently and drifted a few meters away from the shuttle. I had used it only once before so it took me a few minutes of careful flying to get comfortable with the controls and the response of the EVA pack. Pushing myself to a gentle 3m/s I aligned myself with the wreckage and for a few minutes I just enjoyed the feeling. Zero-G, space, stars and the strange planet below me. Despite the reasons which brought me here, despite everything I knew about what is going to happen, despite everything I have experienced here so far. I enjoyed this moment. It appealed to the kid in me, the kid who used to read scifi novels and dream about space. It had been a long and painful road but I was here.
Saro-type corvette was not a big ship, at just over 50 meters long and 20 wide it didn't look like a typical asari ship, more like an extremely large metallic seed. Approaching the airlock closest to where the power reeding was I let my omni-tool run it's usual hacking routine and was rewarded moments later with the airlock opening slowly. Since the pressure inside was the same as pressure outside, and by that I mean that there was none the small stupid computer that controlled the airlock and fed from emergency power cell let me gain access with generic Council search & rescue codes.
I drifted into the opening and let my magboots connect with the deck plating. Despite the asari love of composites for building nearly anything they built starships out of good old steel same as everyone else. It was far too versatile, cheap and allowed the use of magboots which is a very easy safety feature for working in zero-G.
The search through the ship didn't take long, the damage to the ship making my progress slow as I had to reroute several times around damaged sections. Surviving VI core was heavily degraded, it had survived the battle damage well enough but the radiation from the star did it's work on unshielded circuitry. So instead of trying to fix it I did a full memory dump of what had survived and after a few more minutes of searching for anything else useful left the ship.
Getting back to my shuttle was fast. Waiting for the data retrieval software on my omni-tool parse through the data I downloaded was not. The first thing it found was the crew manifest. Thirty two people. As I scrolled through the list one name jumped out at me. Nicole Isaacs. She was listed as part of xeno-archaeological team but nothing beyond that. After another hour I shut down the software. It hadn't found anything else useful, the rest of the data recovered was just basic logs that a ship and it's crew produced during normal operation. A few personal messages but nothing of consequence, nothing that would tell me why they were here or what happened to them. Who destroyed these ships. Since I didn't get any answers here there was only one place to go. During my EVA I had the shuttle scan the planet for any power signatures or anything that would tell me that there is someone alive down there but the snowstorm was making it impossible to tell for sure. The VI in the shuttle was simply not smart enough to understand if what it was seeing was a genuine signal or a reflection from the storm clouds. I angled the nose of my shuttle down and let the engines push it down gently. Flying through a snowstorm was never a good idea, I just hoped that it looked worse than it was.