AN: I'm sorry to say my next update won't be for a little while. I'll be away from the Internet starting tomorrow so I won't be able to update with quite the speed I have been doing. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Chapter Nine: Therum Landing.

In the transporter room, Shepard checked and triple checked his TR-116 - this would doubtless more be more of a cleanup mission than a rescue, unless the Borg were being unusually slow on the assimilation front, but he couldn't help but feel as though there might be something down here worth his time, even if it was just some idea why fifty thousand year old technology was somehow relevant to an ever advancing, improving collective of hyper-logical machine creatures.

Garrus and Wrex were both present. The quartermaster had apparently decided that, rather than try to adapt standard uniforms for their use, he would be better getting something like their armour, except in Starfleet colours. Wrex's shoulder plates and crest armour were in Starfleet grey, the rest in black, save for bands of security mustard around his wrists and collar. The rim of Garrus' neck armour was security yellow, as was the same kind of band around his wrists, and he too had grey and black. Both of them had the field commission rank insignia bars of Lieutenants. Lieutenant Zorah hadn't changed her suit, but had instead put over it an extra ablative armour vest.

"What do we know about the planet?" Garrus asked, hoisting a TR-116 With a scope attachment.

"Not much," Shepard replied. "Volcanic, breathable atmosphere, Federation research post with Borg problem."

"Sounds like fun," Wrex put in, racking his shotgun. It seemed as though he didn't like Starfleet's standard issue projectile weapon, and Shepard wasn't about to argue with him about it. To his left, Lieutenant Zorah checked her own TR-116 methodically.

"Wish they made a pistol version of this," she muttered.

"Something for you to work on Lieutenant?" Shepard said with a wry grin. The Lieutenant jumped slightly when he spoke to her, and almost stood to attention.

"Yes sir!" she said quickly. "Will work on it sir!"

"I was more joking, Lieutenant," Shepard said softly. "But if you want to work on it, you can."

"I will sir," Zorah said, nodding, "and I'll get results to you as soon as possible."

Shepard nodded, smiling. The Lieutenant was definitely what he'd call "jumpy" among other things, but he'd worked with officers like that before. They might have been a little on edge, sometimes too eager to please, but they were always the best at their job. Best to leave her to work on that if she felt the need to.

"Ok," he said to the team. "We land, we look for anyone who hasn't been assimilated, we out down the Borg and we try to find out what they wanted."

"Sounds like a simple enough plan," Garrus put in.

"Sounds like a duck shoot," Wrex out in sourly. "Most Borg don't shoot back, if your files are accurate."

"The Borg are smart," Shepard reminded everyone. "They might well be working on ways to adapt to our offensive capabilities, and that might include personal weapons, or projectile shields. Since the Citadel has that technology, the Borg probably have it too by now.."

"Considered that sir," Lieutenant Zorah put in. She drew out a phaser from her belt mounted buffer. "I've modified the phasers to rotate modulations. Will probably get us about twenty shots between us before they become useless."

"Multiple choices are always good," Garrus commented.

"Agreed," Shepard said. "Good work Lieutenant."

"Thank you sir," Zorah said, definitely sounding sheepish.

"Ok people, transporter pad," Shepard ordered, stepping up to the pad.

The team took up positions, Shepard and Vas Normandy at the front, with Garrus and Wrex behind.

'You're materialising behind a ridge fifty metres from the campsite," the transporter operator told them. "From there, it should be relatively clean sailing."

"Acknowledged," Shepard said. "Energise."

With a nod, the transporter operator entered the command and the away team was beamed away.

The minute the team had all fully materialised on the arid surface of Therum, Shepard gestured for them to follow him. He raised his rifle in front of him, keeping a sharp lookout for Borg, but the area was barren and lifeless. He headed up to the top of the nearest hill, and crouched at the top, looking over the landscape ahead.

There was a Federation style outpost over a tunnel entrance: two big, stocky pre-fab buildings with a gantry between. There were various Borg drones wandering around, apparently engaged in a task involving a large device being assembled in the centre of the outpost,

"I clock fourteen, but only five of them are fully armoured and augmented," Garrus put in from Shepard's left. "How about you?"

"Same," Shepard replied. "Dunno what they're doing, though."

"Looks like a transmitter," Zorah commented. "Pretty heavy duty too, from the look of it."

"Options?" Shepard asked.

"From your files on the Borg, they ignore you if they don't consider you a threat," Garrus opined. "That means we could sneak past while they're not looking."

"I could overload the machine. The blast radius might kill a few," Zorah added. "And it would definitely disorient the rest - they might have machine components and augmentation but they're still people, and people can be hurt and confused."

"Just start shooting," Wrex said impatiently. "That'll get their attention. If they can't shoot back, what's the problem? We pick them off on approach."

Shepard considered the various possibilities. All of them had merit, but sneaking past only worked until you proved yourself a threat, and who knew what the Borg considered a threat? The second plan was technically complex, but valid, and might work well when combined with a round of fire.

"We'll combine those last two," he said after a moment. "Lieutenant Zorah, overload the transmitter thing on my signal. Once that's done, Wrex, Garrus and I will pour fire on the drones. Should take them all down."

"Aye sir," the three chorused. Wrex and Garrus took up their positions, as did Vas Normandy, who was furiously pressing buttons on a tricorder. Shepard kept an eye on the drones, waiting for a moment when the maximum number of them would be around the transmitter. And then...

"Now!" he hissed. Zorah entered a final command and after a long moment, the Borg transmitter exploded in a fireball. At least half the drones were caught by the explosion, mostly the incomplete assimilations. At that moment Shepard, Garrus and Wrex stood up and poured fire at the remaining Borg.

The five armoured Borg turned to face the Starfleet team as they fired - and green shields flared up as the projectiles hit them.

"Kinetic shields!" Garrus yelled. "They're adapting!"

Shepard blinked.

"They've adapted." "We're shooting blanks." WE ARE THE BORG. "Shepard, remodulate!" YOUR BIOLOGICAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL DISTINCTIVENESS WILL BE ADDED TO OUR OWN. "They've taken decks 26 up to 11." RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.

"Keep firing," Wrex grunted, his gruff voice shaking Shepard out of his brief reverie. "They'll drop eventually!"

The five drones, as one, raised their augment arms and fired. Green disruptor bolts impacted around the Starfleet team as they took cover.

"Damn!" Shepard yelled. He cursed their misfortune - the Borg had definitely learned some lessons.

"Since when could Borg shoot?" Garrus asked.

"It's an adaptation they make sometimes," Shepard replied, remembering various lectures. "That's how they killed Nihlus on Eden Prime."

"Give me a minute," Zorah said, tapping away at her tricorder. A moment later the green shields on the drones fizzled into existence and - for want of a more accurate word - shattered.

"Now!" she yelled.

Shepard didn't wait to be told twice; he stood up and poured fire on the drones, three falling in moments. The last two fell to Garrus and Wrex's fire. After a moment, Shepard exhaled.

"Alright people," he said. "Let's go see what else there is waiting for us down here."

They reached the campsite a moment later. It was, as expected, deserted - there had been no prisoners awaiting assimilation, it seemed, only those who had already been assimilated. Not that Shepard had expected there to be any survivors.

When the team had finished their sweep of the buildings a few minutes later, Shepard motioned for them to head to the large circular door to the excavation tunnels. There was no fancy tech way to open the old-fashioned door, but Garrus seemed oddly confident about getting them down "my way".

"That was good work you did back there, Lieutenant Zorah," he commented to the chief engineer as they waited for Garrus to do it "his way" - which was apparently a bunch of explosive charges.

"Call me Tali," she said quickly. "And it was nothing really, I just had to write a quick invasive program that disabled their kinetic shielding and..."

Shepard held up a hand to forestall any further babbling, smiling as he did so.

"It was good work, Tali," he repeated, emphasising the name. "Keep that up and you'll have the Borg whipped in no time."

"Yes sir," Tali said quietly. "Thank you sir."

"Charges set!" Garrus called out, and the team fell back to safe cover. A moment later, three charges Garrus had set at the hinges of the door exploded. There was a creak, and the door fell forward, flattening a few Borg corpses and boxes.

"Your way?" Shepard asked wryly. Garrus coughed sheepishly, and Shepard, sighing, led the team through the door.

The Prothean ruins were deserted. There was no sign of any Borg activity at all. Nonetheless, Shepard felt uneasy about the entire thing: there was something not quite right about this situation, something that nagged on the edge of his perception.

"Elevator ahead," Tali said, pointing to an archeological pre-fab elevator probably installed when the archeologists first arrived.

"Plan?" Garrus asked. Shepard shrugged.

"Going down," he said.

Liara T'Soni did not hate easily. She had a cool indifference for her mother, whom she had not seen in years. She had no ill-feeling toward her father, wherever she was. However, she now felt certain that she could say, irrefutably, that she hated the Borg, hated them with a burning passion.

For two days she had been at the bottom of this damn Prothean dig site, suspended in mid air. The energy bubble doing so - a Prothean barrier device - was all that was keeping the Borg drone standing guard outside from coming in here and assimilating her like it had so many friends and colleagues.

That wasn't why she hated the Borg though. She hated the Borg because the drone was T'Sal, her skin pallid and grey, black veins spread across the surface like some parasitic invasion. A spider-bloom implant had erupted on her cheek, dark metal on the skin. Her eyes, lifeless and unblinking, stared at Liara through the energy shield. She didn't speak, nor did she respond to anything Liara said.

T'Sal had been Liara's friend, and now here she was, her body stolen from her, taken and used against Liara like some kind of macabre puppet. It disgusted Liara more than she had thought anything in this universe could.

Suddenly, there was a loud clanking noise from the levels above. Liara looked up, wondering what could be causing it. T'Sal - the drone - turned around, facing the elevator as it descended, which filled Liara with an irrational hope - other drones had come down here and T'Sal had not so much as blinked. Maybe this elevator had something she wasn't expecting.

A moment later, blood sprayed from T'Sal's chest as a gunshot rang out.

Liara blinked, staring at her now dead friend, and the horror of the entire experience crashed down on her in one swoop.

She screamed.

Shepard had been prepared to face many things at the bottom of the elevator shaft - Borg drones, tactical drones, the Borg Queen - but had never expected to find a screaming asari suspended in an energy bubble.

"What the hell?" he said loudly, holding his hands up to placate her. "Ma'am? Ma'am calm down!"

The asari, after another couple of minutes of hysterical screaming, finally did so, her screams subsiding to quiet sobs.

"I'm... I'm sorry," she said through the tears, trying to get ahold of herself. "It's just... that Borg - that person - was my friend."

"I understand ma'am," Shepard told her. Little did she know just how much he understood. "We'll get you out of here as soon as we can."

"Thank you," the asari said softly. "My name is Liara T'Soni. I'm an archeologist."

"Captain Shepard, Federation Starship Normandy," Shepard replied. "We're here to rescue you and find out what the Borg were doing here."

"I couldn't tell you why they were here," Liara replied. "A group of them landed and started assimilating people before we could figure out what was going on. I used this Prothean barrier curtain to keep them away but..."

Tali tapped Shepard in the arm. She had been focusing on her tricorder.

"The barrier is essentially a large kinetic shield," she said. "I think we can beam her out of there with a pattern enhancer."

"That stuff's heavy duty," Shepard said. "I'd like an alternative to bringing more people down on a world with confirmed Borg activity."

Tali nodded, almost absent mindedly. She scanned for a moment, and then pointed at the edges of the field.

"If I fire a precise phaser beam, I can short out the field," she said, pulling a phaser out of her transporter buffer. "It'll take a minute though."

There was a clang. Shepard turned on his heel, TR-116 raised and torch on, shining into the dark cavern. Darkness was the Borg's friend.

"We counted fourteen Borg," he threw over his shoulder to T'Soni. "Five armoured, nine recently assimilated, plus your friend here," he added with a glance at T'Sal's corpse. "We're there more?"

"There were at least ten armoured ones," Liara replied, sounding more than a little worried. "Maybe more. And we had a team of twenty down here."

"Shit!" Shepard swore, now desperately searching the darkness for targets. He dropped to his knees, steadying his aim. "Wrex, Garrus, covering positions. Tali, start burning through that damn field, we'll cover you!"

Wrex and Garrus, to their credit, took up firing positions quickly. Tali aimed her phaser and started firing immediately.

And then they came. First one red light darted through the darkness, then two. A third. A fourth. A sickly green light switched on, and in that murky light Shepard could see the shape of hastily adapted medical beds transformed into assimilation surgeries, similar to ones he had seen on Enterprise while clearing away corpses. Except that these had Borg - lots of them. Various Borg were in states of half completion, but they were all deadly enough as they were.

And then, as one, they started walking towards Shepard and his team.

He was almost flashing back to his time on Enterprise, Borg advancing on him in darkness, trying desperately not to think about the fact that he was only a few steps away from becoming like they were, trying not to think about all the friends he'd had to kill in the darkness because they were infected or missing an arm and having it replaced with a black claw and dark armour black as pitch and recalibrating phaser and remodulating and trying not to panic, breathe Shepard, breathe Shepard, breathe breathe breathe...

"Target the heavier armoured ones first," Shepard said, his voice sounding oddly calm even as his mind started having something resembling a nervous breakdown. "Vega, keep recalibrating: they'll adapt any second. Fire! Hold them off and regroup on deck ten...!"

Garrus and Wrex opened fire on the Borg, ignoring that Shepard didn't seem to be talking to them. He had become a machine, firing on one drone until the adapted kinetic shields fell and then another, his body working on autopilot while his mind replayed the events of years ago in front of his eyes.

Shepard couldn't even see the Borg drones he was shooting. Hs mind was flashing with images brought on by hyper-stress and fear and adrenaline.

Borg... Reapers... Assimilation... Indoctrination... Cycle... Destruction... Assimilation... Conduit...

"Shepard!"

He blinked.

"Captain!"

He was holding an empty TR-116, having neglected to reload - or forgotten that he wasn't holding a compression rifle. Garrus had a hand on his shoulder, and was staring at the Captain with something resembling worry on his face. Shepard blinked again, taking in the situation. He stood up slowly, looking around the cavern. Tali had gotten Dr T'Soni down, and looked like she was trying to look busy, studiously avoiding looking in the Captain's direction. Wrex was checking the dead Borg - he shot a downed drone with his shotgun as Shepard watched. There were at least five Borg corpses directly in front of Shepard, although he didn't remember shooting them - or anything.

"Report?" Shepard croaked, his voice hoarse. Had he been shouting too?

"You downed a few Borg, we downed some too," Garrus said softly, not in ting out that the Captain had technically not been shooting the same Borg his body had. "You... you kept firing into the darkness. I think you were seeing something else, Captain."

"Old memories," Shepard said, trying to steady himself. He felt oddly weak at the knees, like he had let something out. "And... something else. Something to do with the Prothean Beacon."

"A Prothean Beacon?" The voice of Dr T'Soni cut through his thoughts. "What about it?"

"Explain on the ship," Shepard said. "Tali, can we beam out of here?"

"Yes sir," Tali replied, sounding oddly subdued.

"Good," Shepard said, never being more relieved in is life. He tapped his combadge. "Shepard to Normandy. Five to beam back."

They dematerialised in a halo of blue light.

Shepard only hoped he'd left some of his ghosts down here with the dead Borg...