Chapter 11
Sentry Omega cluster, Hoc system, close proximity of Relay, SSV Normandy – 06.12.2183
The Normandy left the mass free corridor projected by the relay in the Attican Beta cluster with its characteristic blue 'optical boom'. As the world around them left 'Einstein's Nightmare' physics and bled back into 'Teenager's Nightmare' physics, Harry stood beside Shepard in the CIC staring at the positional data trickling into the holo-tank at the center of the bridge.
Well, staring at one number anyway.
Joker had worked his own personal brand of magic to drop them inside a thousand kilometers of their target, and when those three digits popped onto screen, Harry crowed in delight.
"Hah! 'Don't feed the addict', you said. 'It's only going to distract him', you said."
Gritting her teeth so hard it actually hurt, Shepard slapped a credit chit into the Spectre's hand, and stomped off to the furthest tactical station away from the cackling bastard.
Harry triumphantly highlighted the jump position on the display, alongside the last few jumps, and ran the math that proved Joker's average displacements had dropped by 30%. Around him the limits of the bridge crew's professionalism were sorely tested, but they managed to remain strong in the face of idiocy. Harry was left laughing and pointing to a silent crowd, all due to a lifetime's platinum-premium pass to a certain corporation's products, gifted to a certain Flight Lieutenant.
As the distraction passed, the frigate's sensor suite kicked into high gear. Millions of credits and years of research and development showed the bridge crew every visible thermal, electronic, and gravimetric reading inside the local heliopause.
Oh the things they saw.
For what should have been an empty planet in a politically unstable sector, not only was there a lot of traffic in Orbit, but also an impressive amount of debris. Standard equatorial orbits were crowded with blasted shuttle parts, and most of the LaGrange points in the system were similarly crowded with well-destroyed sensor arrays.
Something had entered the system hot, and with few reservations about the use of force.
Benezia had been both peeved and relieved to be freed from Sovereign's mental control, so in the end (after swearing vengeance against Harry for his transgressions) she had been happy to share the details she had on the facility.
It wasn't looking great.
Virmire was a biological research lab focused on developing a cure for the Krogan genophage, and lately to the study of what Benezia now understood to be the reaper's mind control.
Saren, apparently, was in possession of a much clearer picture of his cause than what he had relayed to his followers. The more Harry learned about the guy, the more glad he was that he incinerated first and never stopped to ask questions.
In any case, the labs had security designed by thinking-machine-super-computers on top of what was easily the largest single concentration of Krogan off Tuchanka. It would have been a very tough nut to crack, had a very familiar shape not been literally striding across it.
Visual and gravimetric data from the target indicated both a sky full of anti-aircraft fire, and a dreadnought shaped like an Asari dreadnought had gone and done the nasty with a cephalopod.
Sovereign was here, and it was raining fire down on the facility and nearly all the surrounding territory like a gaunt figure astride a pale horse. They had expected a lot of things, but this one was kind of a surprise, also the whole death thing was really Harry's shtick.
The Normandy began running silent as soon as it's thermal buffers cleared, passing into the system proper on a long elliptical arc that kept it out of Sovereign's line-of-sight as much as possible. The analysts began properly pouring over their data, which was further refined, and then displayed in the massive holo-tank where the galaxy map usually lay. Shepard was crouched next to the tactical display she had retreated to, now deep in discussion with the tech there, and Harry was back in his Shatner pose above the map, staring down at it thoughtfully.
At least that was what it looked like.
Harry loved a bit of showmanship, but was at his core a very lazy man. He was actually disillusioned and perched on a stool, sipping a smoothie. It helped him think, but the crew did deserve the effort he was too lazy to physically provide.
Harry/Shatner pressed a stud in the Panel in front of him, opening a line to the cockpit, "Joker, keep us as quiet as you can and bring us into a high orbit over the planet, well away from the spaceship the size of a building if you please."
There was a second of silence before the regular vibrations of the ship changed slightly, and a tight voice returned over the comm, "On it boss."
The illusory Harry paused, his finger just above another stud on the panel, "Keep an eye out everyone, anything big explodes or anything significant changes, alert me," he pressed his button, "Ground team to comm room, ground team to comm room."
Real Harry stood, vanishing the remains of his smoothie and his stool, before the fake one moved to mesh perfectly with him in how he stood. Harry canceled his illusion and made himself visible, leaving the universe with only a single insane master of death. Whistling a jaunty tune, he made his way to meet his crew.
Ashley and Benezia were already in the circular room, standing before the large holo-display at the end of the room and speaking in hushed tones. On-screen in front of them were every picture and video they had of Sovereign. The aged Asari had been on board a handful of times, and appeared to be discussing tactical weaknesses of the dreadnought. such as they were. Harry just took a seat and watched two beautiful and intelligent women discuss military action like the dirty old man he was. Two hundred years taught him to both take all the time for himself that he could in a time of war, and that anything was a sexual euphemism if one tried hard enough. Explosive breaching at the airlock indeed.
Richard 'Leroy' Jenkins, Kaiden Alenko, Tali'Zorah nar Rayya, Garrus Vakarian, Urdnot Wrex, and eventually one Jane Shepard all slowly filtered into the room. When they were all seated Harry started in with his usual aplomb.
"I've got good news and bad news. Who wants what first?"
Benezia twitched at the phrase and Harry suppressed a grin. Total Potter exposure for the crew was currently at ten days, so they had grown to expect oddities but were still confused by his briefing style.
Silence reigned.
"Okay then! Good news first, thanks to our new friend in blue over here," Benezia inclined her head, "we have the full layout of the lab complex, and while we don't know exactly what defenses the Geth have embedded after the fact, Benezia did manage to get us access to the logistic records the Geth left from their procurement, so we can take some excellent guesses. Also my guess is that at least some of you heard on the way in, but in case you did not, the massive ship we encountered briefly on Eden Prime is also here, and is in the process of razing the base."
Harry smiled.
"In case there is confusion, that was the good news."
Ashley looked like she wanted to interject something, even going as far as leaning forward, before evidently remembering who was giving the briefing and thinking better of it.
"The bad news is a lot more fun. That ship out there stomping around is a Reaper. It's a single Reaper, a single omnicidal AI inside the shell of a ship the entire galactic community together would be hard pressed to replicate. It seems intent on burning down the buildings and hoping we can't get any kind of intel from it, so we probably need to get down there and figure out anything and everything we can as fast as we can.
"Right underneath it. You know, where it's safe."
Ashley looked vindicated for a moment (she knew the other boot was going to drop!), but then she realized what it was she was about to do and somehow the feeling of satisfaction vanished. In her stead Tali seemed to be the one with the question.
"If that is a facility that belonged to it, why is this reaper fighting its own people down there? Why wouldn't the Geth and Krogan just board it and move on?"
Harry looked to Wrex and his smile slackened somewhat, "That's actually part two of the bad news. The reason why that facility isn't already just dust is the fact that there is something in the neighborhood of fifteen hundred Krogan down there, sitting on top of what Saren's files claim is a cure for the genophage."
The Krogan sat bolt upright.
"A cure? For the genophage?"
"Indeed, my blood thirsty friend. Before you get all excited, I want you to think this through. This is a cure devised by a Turian extremist, and let be honest for a moment here, a Turian megalomaniac, who was attempting to get all sentient life in the galaxy harvested by agents of the big-ass ship down there. It might be a cure, but do you think for a second that it doesn't have a hidden kill switch or some kind of terrifying mind control built into it?"
Wrex's eyes moved back and forth rapidly, his hands clutching at nothing and his breathing audibly getting faster. It took a lot for an apex predator to look like a rabbit being circled by a hawk, and it wasn't a pretty sight.
Everyone in the room watched as the Krogan battlemaster attempted to deal with what was clearly a huge emotional trauma, and of them only Harry and Benezia weren't wishing the ship had a more relaxed policy regarding guns leaving the armory.
After a moment Wrex looked back at Harry, "We're getting it."
Harry scoffed, "Of course we are! What, you think I like genocide? I just want you to be aware that we aren't using it for a long time, and we're dropping a nuclear device in the base to kill everything that has had it used on them."
Wrex grunted, which doesn't sound like a lot, but he had something like a thousand years to learn how to fill a grunt with malice and the promise of violence, so it was a hell of a noise.
"Oh keep your quad on, you big baby. Think about it! You want a bunch of Saren-controlled Krogan running around the galaxy inspiring the council to their next act of genocide?"
Wrex grunted again after a moment, this time with a bit more humor injected into it, and said, "I'm going to shoot you, you know that right?"
Harry stood and clapped his hands, "Absolutely, you can kill me when we get back."
/-/
The ground crew armored, armed, and loaded up in the Mako, each waiting only for their illustrious leader. Except in the case of the ground crew's newest, oldest, and most Asari member, who had seen the sensor readings alongside Shepard and knew Potter had to have a better plan than a standard sub-orbital drop. Unless they dropped on the other side of the planet, they weren't getting inside a hundred kilometers of the facility without doing so as an interesting multi-colored paste.
After a moment both the group and the individual got what they were looking for. Harry stuck his head in the hatch of the tank and with an exasperate tone asked, "What the hell are you all doing in there? I expected better of you, Jane, and Tali! Did none of you look at what's waiting for us down there?"
Tali and Jane both felt chastised for reasons they didn't understand, and moved with the group back out.
When they were all out in front of the tank again Harry stood in front of them and with a disappointed look began speaking, "Not only is there enough anti-air to knock a dreadnought out of the sky, but there is that whole Reaper standing on the facility thing to consider. I'm surprised at you all!"
Benezia looked silently at Harry expressing both a desire to be done with the lesson for the children and her belief in the fact that he had an answer for their dilemma, the assembled humans and Quarian all looked suitably abashed.
Garrus couldn't stand being upbraided like a boy forgetting the safety on his first gun, "What about Wrex!? Shouldn't he have known better!"
Harry injected even more disappointment into his expression and looked to the Turian, "Silly Garrus, Wrex is a Krogan. He knows, he just doesn't care, and when you grow a secondary nervous system to replace the one you've lost getting shot, you can afford to not care too."
Harry just shook his head and looked at the object of the discussion, "Kids these days..."
The Krogan seemed to agree, with a quiet, "Heh."
"Alright, you've all seen some of that voodoo that I do up to now, but now you get introduced to one of the more fun aspects of it. I'm going to say to you all now the four words that terrorized me all through primary school," Harry smiled widely, "Wanna feel something weird?"
With the wand he had been concealing behind his back, Harry mass transfigured each squad member into a sealed tin of potted meat. A swish and flick saw the squad rise into the air and file neatly into their improvised atmospheric re-entry vehicle. It stood just under a meter tall, was a forbidding black, and-
It was a trash can. A heavily charmed trashcan, but nonetheless a trashcan.
Harry picked it up and held it under and arm as he made his way through the ship to the airlock, whistling the tune to 'If I Only Had a Brain'. He got a few strange looks as he went through the CIC, but the command crew had all been briefed extensively by former-captain Anderson to just ignore anything they saw Harry doing that did not immediately endanger the structural integrity of the ship. They chose to let it go.
When he reached the cockpit, he stopped at Joker's seat, "Hey, so I need you to point the airlock onto a ballistic course with the facility, and just cycle it for me. When we're off ship it's you and Pressly in charge, so just keep her afloat, yeah? That Reaper's ECM makes it impossible for us to actually communicate, so just keep your eyes open and keep this on or near you."
Harry Pulled a massive conch shell from a pocket that was way too small to actually hold it, and set it on the edge of the pilot's console. It was comically proportioned, like someone had glued an old school phonograph to a softball, but it rested easily on the edge of the holo-emitter's plastic shell.
Joker looked from the shell to the earnest face of his CO, and then back. Harry had done a lot of strange things, but he had also bought him porn, so overall Jeff was willing to give him a pass until he could explain himself more fully. Sure, they were in a combat situation, and there was a decent chance that he would die, but damn, it had been a lot of porn.
"Whatever you need, boss."
"Good man!"
Harry continued whistling and went into the airlock. The vibrations of the ship's hull changed pitch and frequency gently over the next minute, indicating to Harry that Joker was performing his requested course corrections. After a moment Moreau's familiar voice broke in over the speakers in the airlock.
"You want me to cycle it now? Wait, did you even have a helmet earlier?"
Harry shook his head, they always caught the details after the fact.
"Just cycle it, and Remember Lieutenant, keep that shell on you."
"Whatever you say, Boss."
The outdoor to the airlock opened quickly, shooting Harry and the trashcan he was hugging out into the void.
Sentry Omega cluster, Hoc system, surface of planet Virmire – 06.12.2183
Jane Shepard was on her hands and knees emptying her body of every meal she had ever eaten or would ever eat, while Jenkins stared off blankly into space and hugged his armored knees to his chest. Kaiden was the first to really recover, and actually punched Harry in the face, only to audibly break his knuckles on the plating of the helmet that appeared the instant before he could make contact.
The biotic clutched his fist to his chest and shouted, "FUCK! Never do that again!" the cry of frustration seemed to drain the tension out of him, as he quieted and looked down at his fist, "...and you broke my hand."
Harry just tssked, letting his helmet fade away again. He grabbed Kaiden's hand from him and with a wave of his wand audibly knit the shattered bones. No one was comfortable with any of the bone related noises, even the Krogan wincing at the sound.
"I told you guys it would feel weird. It's like no one listens to me."
Garrus stared down at his claws and said with conviction, "I will never eat meat again."
When the group was more or less whole, at a physical level at least, he hoped, Harry began walking toward the sound of gunfire and the massive dreadnought that filled the skyline, "Bunch of babies, like they've never been temporarily Spam before."
/-/
Harry and the trashcan full of his armed friends impacted on the outskirts of the facility, surprisingly only about five hundred meters from the garage/receiving area at the west edge of the base. Joker's careful aim landing them on the opposite side of the facility from the rampaging reaper.
The route into the base was lightly defended by sets of the smaller Geth platforms. It made for a gentle re-introduction to combat for the crew, who all seemed to still be freaked out by their temporary transformations.
All of the ground leading into the base was man accessible at best, being as it was frequently knee deep in seawater and limited by massive rock formations. Harry figured it had to have been mostly supplied by air, especially given the drone landing platforms that they skirted to the north. It looked like Saren was thinking more about how his top of the line genetic engineering facility would look, and less about whether or not it would need new foundations inside of five years.
Harry found himself thinking derisively about 'kids these days' for the second time in as many hours.
The team breached and cleared the garage quickly, entering the facility proper. Garage led to warehouse, warehouse led to maintenance bay, and maintenance bay to the security offices of the base. From there the team had quick access to the lab facility and the hard-wired defense functions of the base.
Sensors showed almost every available Geth platform and nearly every foot-mobile Krogan on the extreme east of the base, all fighting underneath the reaper ship which was delivering starship-grade fire support from a very up close and personal perspective. The rebellion of Saren's Krogan (there was a joke in there, but Wrex had already threatened to shoot Harry so he wasn't going to try his luck) against their machine overlord provided the perfect distraction for the team to sneak inside the base, and they took full advantage of it.
Harry would have felt bad if he weren't also there to murder every one of them, the plans for which he was still in the process of developing. Well, the escape plans. It wasn't the blowing up that was complicated, it was surviving it that was tricky.
The labs contained an impressive amount of genetic sequencing machinery, alongside a truly disturbing number of vivisected Krogan bodies. Whoever was running the tests had put subjects on ice in what looked like the middle of being dissected, which was horrifying on a level Harry hadn't seen since his time in the Aurors. The team could each now reliably say they knew what the inside of a Krogan womb looked like, which was pretty fucked by anyone's standards.
Saren's contracts for his scientific personnel could have used much more stringent morality clauses, but in the end Harry supposed it did kind of come with the 'mad science' territory.
He winced and shivered.
Throughout the lab Wrex went immediately to the consoles, his rage over the bodies and enthusiasm for the data in the lab's systems overwhelming both his focus on the fight against lab personnel, and his awareness of just how unqualified he was in the technical sphere. His omni-tool was just a step above civilian grade, and the Geth had already come through on Sovereign's orders to delete what they could of the data which left him in the lurch.
He had two saving graces, however.
First, the Krogan on site had insisted on solid state back-ups instead of the galactic standard optical storage discs, so when the Geth came through to wipe data their efforts were less effective, even physically destructive methods.
Second, Tali'Zorah nar Rayya was behind him, chuckling at his efforts, and in an attempt to ward off the gruesome sights in the lab. While the rest of the team shot scientists and partially dissected Krogan husks, she used her Potter Mark I to scan, defragment, and reconstruct nearly every bit of 'lost' data. Wrex and Harry were each forwarded what she got, before she ejected and destroyed the temporary OSD storage she held the data on.
The Krogan got a copy because she didn't want to get shot, Harry got a copy because he was the captain, and she made sure she did not have a copy because, well, she didn't want to get shot. Data even hinting at a cure to the Genophage seemed like a great way to find one's self on the wrong end of a STG firing squad regardless of Spectre status, and that was a problem for captains and Krogan, not engineers.
By the time the squad had been planetside for two hours they collectively added ninety seven Geth platforms and seventeen Krogan to their Kill Count, and they uncovered what a talented genetic biologist could turn into a cure for the genophage, given a few years anyway. Beyond the genophage cure Tali was able to pull terabytes of additional encrypted data that would require later analysis. Harry could only speculate on what else they were getting, but any more information on what Saren had done in preparation of the coming reaper invasion would help.
Overall, that left the ground crew in the enviable position of having accomplished all of their objectives save one: total destruction of the facility and everyone in it.
The team holed up in the lab building closest to the center of the facility, but still outside the skirmish lines of the Geth and Krogan. The reaper was firing some kind of cannon that left huge volumes of what appeared to be a liquid slurry of tungsten and uranium, which made it both an appalling weapon, and an excellent way to block off hallways. The rapidly cooling metal blocked off huge sections of the facility, where it hadn't simply ripped through the building's superstructure, effectively isolating the Normandy-s ground contingent from the fighting.
Garrus set up a small perimeter with Kaiden, Jenkins, Williams, and Tali, while the rest of the team huddled around Harry whose plan they had not yet been briefed on. It didn't bear mentioning that they weren't thrilled when he let them in on it.
Shepard, as Harry's designated handler, was given first dibs on expressing her discontent.
"I'm sorry, you want to what?"
Harry paused for a moment in his work, and lovingly patted the casing of the bomb he was assembling, "WE," he said with emphasis, "are going to detonate a roughly hundred megaton bomb, easily clearing the base and hopefully hurting the reaper," his expression clouded for a moment as he looked back into the exposed interior where his omni tool was still hard at work flash forming components, "not too sure on the reaper though..."
Wrex was stuck in a short loop of looking from Harry, to his omni-tool, laughing a bit, and then repeating. He would be no help.
Benezia looked as if she wanted to protest, and Tali looked like she was doubting herself as much as she was her captain.
Shepard inclined her head to the Asari, a gesture which artfully combined a plea for help and recognition of her turn to try and stem the madness.
"One is almost forced to ask, do you intend for us to die alongside the Geth and Krogan here? Unless you have a shuttle hidden in your pockets somewhere, or some means of ensuring the Normandy is not shot out of the air by the Reaper you so casually mentioned, it seems we are rather short of transportation at the moment."
Harry waved her off with a hand still holding a screwdriver, "I've survived nuclear explosions before, I'll survive them again, we don't have to worry about that."
As much as the casual dismissal of the explosive force of one hundred million tons of TNT was interesting, the three women were somehow not comforted. Tali took her turn at the wheel.
"I'm not a politician, but isn't there some kind of ban on fission weapons being used on garden worlds?"
Harry's voice echoed hollowly from the inside of the device, "Eh, sort of. I'm a Spectre though, so it's not like we can't get away with it."
The ladies seemed more troubled than they were before they voiced their objections as harry continued, "Virmire here may be a garden world, but we're fairly deep in the Traverse. No one develops out here so at worst I'll get a slap on the wrist, especially since we're," Harry's use of air quotes for his audience while his head was buried inside a bomb made less sense than his message, " 'Destroying a cure for the genophage'."
Wrex's attention finally caught on the conversation, his contribution more threat than statement, "But we're not."
Harry looked back up from his work, "Of course we're not! But for the love of god, no one can say anything even remotely like that or we're in deeper shit than I can reliably pull us out of. The genophage is an extinction level event for the Krogan, and anyone that says otherwise is an idiot. I can't let that stand. That said," Harry leaned on his device and pointed his screwdriver at the Krogan, "you and I are going to have a talk about some hows and whys of its use."
Wrex looked at Harry with murder in his eyes, before realizing that the object of his rage was casually supporting himself on the casing of a nuclear device he assembled in less than thirty minutes. He grunted and nodded his head once.
"Good. Now get everyone in here and we'll start this show."
Harry directed his only mildly terrified crew to all stand next to each other inside a circle he used his omni-tool to laser etch into the ceramacrete floor. Arcane looking symbols that none of the collected fighters could identify quickly lined the circle, forming a half-meter thick layer of cuneiform and curving pictograms.
Harry made a much smaller version surrounding his bomb, before stepping inside the circle next to his crew and chanting in old earth Gaelic. As the chant finished a dome of pulsing pink energy flowed up from the edges of the circle, enclosing the crew, who each looked askance at one another and their fearless leader.
Harry was blind to their apprehension, instead removing a small conch shell from a pocket on his thigh and in a move that confused everyone around him, holding it to his ear and calling out, "Joker, do you read?"
Jane caught the eyes of the rest of the human contingent as well as Garrus, and using deliberate eye and hand movements attempted to communicate a rising desire to mutiny against the clearly insane person responsible for leading them.
Jenkins, Alenko, and Vakarian were all instantly on board, each turning to confront Williams, when a tinny voice issued forth from the sea shell in Harry's hand.
"Umm, I read you boss. Do... do I just talk into the hole, or...?"
"Just listen Joker, we're about to light the bomb off on our position, when the reaper leaves the planet's surface and goes for the relay, I need you to get into a geosynch orbit directly over top of us and pressurize the airlock. Just say something when you get there."
The four prospective mutineers suspended their efforts for a moment to look at the shell in Harry's hand as though it were radioactive, speaking of which...
Harry turned to the others in the dome, each just inside the other's comfort zones as they tried to squeeze away from the pulsing pink walls they didn't understand, with a smile he pulled out the detonator causing six sets of eyes to widen and the seventh to close in a resigned manner.
"A wise man once said that one should not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger. Now I don't know about subtle, but-"
In an instant the dome of energy around them went white, a roar that resonated in each of their bones seemed to come from every direction at once, the weight of the sound pressing in on each of them uncomfortably. In the same moment it was as though someone had lit a flame beneath each of them, all of their armor systems registering a massive radiation spike across the spectrum from infrared to gamma and exotic particle. Nothing registered as lethal or even threatening, but alarms still blared as the background levels of radiation that had been there before tripled and quadrupled for just a second.
"-I can do quick to anger."
[A/N]: Next time on getting too Old for This: Wrex shoots Harry in the face, the crew of the Normandy can no longer deal with their suspension of disbelief, and the Rachni queen discovers nude photos of herself on the extranet.