A distant roll of thunder caught the ears of the family as they looked out over the vast and open sea to notice the large rolling storm clouds of the rainy season for the fields and the outlying forests, though there were few enough to count easily. Most people would have hurried and ran to their houses to prevent getting wet, but John had always enjoyed seeing the firework display of a long jagged lightning bolt. Just as he was about to tell his daughter a story about lightning, a long crack of light broke the boundary of the wispy clouds and lit the sky for only a second before instantly fading leaving a line burnt in their eyes as they adjusted to the growing darkness.
The clouds, like a fit of sadness from the cracking lighting almost instantly began to pour heavily. Nadja laughed as she slowly spun in circles her arms outstretched as she felt the rain hit her hands and her head. She looked up into the clouds and watched the streaks fall and hit and run down her face. She also saw herself as loving the rain more than even her father, but she felt that she couldn't really know unless they were directly compared using some sort of machines or something, Nadja couldn't care less. The young quarian girl slowly rotated on heels in the growing wet dirt and laughed to herself. It was rare to experience such heavy showers on the planet and Nadja wished to enjoy every second of the amazing and natural feelings.
She snapped herself out of her daze and turned back to her father and mother who hollered out her name from halfway up the hill. She giggled and ran up the hill, her feet slipping on the wetter surface. She quickly gained on her parent's and squeezed beneath them, smiling to herself. They walked into the living room and the automatic lighting illuminated the cozy house, but before they even had time to dry off and put the fishing gear away, Tali was glad that they let the fish go after they had the picture, a knock came at the side of door and they turned to see the dark shadow of a heavily built man standing in the door with two darker shadows standing behind him.
"May I come in…?" came the heavy and naturally demanding voice of Aldric.
"Yes. Please come in." Shepard answered cautiously.
Aldric sent heavy footfalls into the room along with the two lighter footsteps of his two guards.
"We are here for your daughter… We are sorry for your loss, but the danger that she holds is too great to remain unchecked…" Aldric failed at spicing his language with fake sympathy.
John played his role and acted concerned and still generally naive about the situation, but he knew of their motives and desires and had the card to drive them from their lives forever in the basement, but he wondered how he would ever be able to convince them that the Shadow Broker had actually exited Nadja and had gone back to his cylinder in the basement, he scratched his head in thought and played it as a nervous itch.
"Now… Aldric right? Good. I don't think you have to take my daughter." Shepard began to almost negotiate the situation.
Aldric's façade changed shades to that of puzzled surprise. "Really? …Well commander, count me interested in this counter-proposal."
Shepard walked to the door to the downstairs door and pointed. "Come with me…"
Aldric's eyebrows rose as he slowly changed his weight forward and began to walk toward Shepard. He stopped at the door and grasped it from John.
"After you… Commander…" Aldric spoke heavily.
The human host only grinned at the threatening show of intimidation. He proceeded down the steps and listened to the heavy footfalls of the man behind him. Aldric shook his head at the workshop setup, a sign of being impressed. They closed in on the drawer when it suddenly slammed open and the cylinder began to float up and out of it. Shepard hurriedly finished the last steps and snagged the stasis pod and turned to the unmoved muscleman behind him.
Aldric merely looked down at the cylinder and a crooked smile grew across his face. He didn't even let Shepard have the honors of introducing the counter proposal, he knew it was right and that the power emanating, the dark call echoing from it. He listened to it hum in his hands; slowly vibrating his molecular structure, yet he held it in place and without much notice.
"You… have a deal… Shepard. You have yourself a god damn deal!" Aldric exclaimed as he began to take his leave without Shepard's notice or parting words.
Shepard hurried to follow him and was surprised to see how general if he was a general disregard all of his surroundings as he didn't even look up from the device like it was controlling him to leave. The robotic movements and the straight lines that he traversed through the house were beyond anything that any normal person could manage, especially in a house that he had only been in twice.
"Aldric?" Shepard called out to the man. He may have hated him and suspected him of lying, but this event was too bizarre to not just let go.
No response.
"Aldric." Shepard grabbed the man's shoulder to turn him around, but instead the heavily built man tossed him aside, shattering one of the tables. Tali ran out of the kitchen, a look of quick confusion and battle-ready senses. Upon seeing her husband squirming on the ground with the shards of broken wood and nails around him, Tali charged at the man, pulling her knife out from her thigh strap and hitting him in a non-lethal area on his back. Tali's eyes popped in shock as the body in front of her kept marching forward without even flinching, the knife sticking from his back.
"John? What did you do to this guy?" Tali questioned as she shrank away from the stationary zombie.
He turned slowly around, his skin basically cracking from his face in intricate patterns and designs. The face was scrunched into an angry scowl as it took the few steps toward Tali and picked her up by her throat, beginning to crush her wind pipe, but the façade quickly changed and the grip loosened letting her go. He turned as quickly as he had when it came to face her and took his leave out the door, vanishing with a bright blast of a lightning bolt, cracking across the sky, breaking it like glass.
Shepard rose quickly from the broken pieces of shattered wood and ran to Tali who gasped for air with heavy coughs.
"Bosh'tet!" She managed to yell through her coughs. "Tre'lala elspa'du bosh'tet!"
John raised his eyebrows at his wife as she looked quickly up to him and grabbed her neck to feel that her translator had actually been crushed and in her rage she had yelled at the man in Khelish.
"Sorry… I called him a-" Tali began to explain.
"I know… " Shepard helped her stand. "I think it is best if we just ignore his departure and figure out what exactly is going on…" a chime from his Omni-tool brought his attention down to a message from both Anderson and Hackett regarding this General Aldric.
He sat down and scanned through the messages quickly, his eyes darting through the important sections piecing together the similar information that each message shared, disbelieving of what they were telling him. The Shadow Broker had told him to suspect the General, but he never would have suspected the General of killed in action during The Final Reaper War. He had all the information granted to him, his ship number, crew manifests, doctrines and degrees, pictures of him in his younger days, and the picture of the vessel that he had commanded. He had been one of the surveillance teams patrolling the vast edge of Dark Space. He was deemed the first true casualty when his pompous and heroic action simplex drove him to pursue a vessel into the reaches of the void.
It was only a year after the battle that mining vessel's reporting the remains of an unmarked vessel, one belonging to a General Aldric. The vessel had been crushed and twisted, something that most of the vessels in the war did not share. The conclusion was dereliction of duty causing a strong-headed General to drive his crew into a comet belt. None of the crew's bodies were ever found.
Yet here he was, a ghost, a zombie, or something else, standing in his house showing politeness and humanity before suddenly snapping and showing his broken, animalistic nature. The longer John reviewed the scene in his head the more it appeared that he was being controlled by a Reaper, much like the Harbinger Drones, but it didn't account for the restraint in killing and the intricacies of the designs that broken from his head.
"What's wrong John?" Tali asked her accent sounding thicker without the aid of her translator to smooth things over.
"Our General friend… has been dead since the start of The Final Reaper War…" Shepard stated.
"That would explain his skin breaking apart…" Tali joked as she sat down next to him, pushing, with her feet, the broken glass from a decorative ornament that had been catapulted from the table that John's body had broke. "Hopefully it isn't another Reaper… " She cooed as she cuddled next to her husband looking at the mess leading up to the front door.
"I think it is something else… if he was a Reaper he would have just kept strangling you and this would have quickly gotten out of hand… I'm glad whatever is controlling him stopped…" He kissed his wife on the forehead. "…Now we know to never trust dead Generals that walk into our house." John joked trying to brighten the mood in the house.
"Where's Nadja?" Tali questioned in alarm.
John jumped up and started calling her name, his heart aching with a parental worry. When he saw her poke her head around the corner, the feeling quickly melted like an ice cube falling into a star. She ran toward him and hugged him tightly.
"Is the bad man gone?" Nadja asked, fear still stiffening her voice.
"Yes. The bad man is gone, but he broke a few things when he left." John explained.
"The table and the vase?" Nadja asked, looking at the destruction.
"That… and me and Mom's pride." He teased looking at Tali who grinned at him and shook her head with a small grin on her face; still the same man she had always known.
"Shepard Commander." Stated Legion, bringing John's attention to the side door. "Would you recommend a pursuit of the General?" John also noticed that he was holding his Anti-matter rifle.
"He is already gone… and we might as well not anger that beast anymore. Plus killing an already dead man poses a difficult task." John stated as he walked to a picture on the wall, moving it aside and opening a safe. He pulled out two pistols and tossed one to Tali. "If he does come back… we will be ready. Legion. I need you to turn the house security on for tonight. We don't want any nighttime visits…"
Legion's head panels flared with a series of quick clicks and grind as a million voices discussed, argued, and debated the point before a formed consensus arrived to his neural network; it was the best reasoning considering the circumstances. Legion nodded and opened a side panel on the wall, flicking a series of switches and writing a large stream of numbers and symbols for the password. A faint blue glow filled the doorway that the late General Aldric had left.
"We better get some sleep…" He rested his hand on his daughter's back before rising and shooing them all back to their rooms. When they started to move on their own he stopped and bowed his head in thought, biting his lower lip. "Legion. I need you to stay on the roof and keep an eye out for that man. If he returns, well… use your imagination."
Legion stared at him thoughtfully. "Geth do not ha-"
"I know… " John scratched his head thoughtfully, breathing in before he said the next words. "Shoot him if you have to, go for the head, nothing else seems to affect him from what I can tell." The human looked at the door and scratched the small stubs on his chin, growing ever more paranoid the longer he looked at the outside darkness filled with rain and lightning. He purged the memories from his mind before giving a reassuring tap on Legion's shoulder. Legion stared curiously at him, before the twitching head flaps decided against asking.
The late General Aldric walked through the pit of night, his eyes barely moving, but his body moving stiffly and awkwardly through the mud and the rain. His men moving beside him, equally showing signs of awkward movement, joined his ranks as he stepped aboard his shuttle and placing the small black cylinder inside of a shielded container that closed upon the presence of the black object.
"We have you now…" came an echoing and broken voice from the cracked lips of the deceased General who watched the container expecting some sort of response, some sort of fighting back, but none came to him. He grunted and started his ascension to the cabin, pieces of his skin beginning to flake off and fall on the ground, disintegrating before ever touching it.
By the time he reached the pilot's seat, his whole right shoulder where the knife had been plunged was exposed, showing an intricate design of moving machinery. The machinery glowed from some inner power source that radiated through the body, apparently mirrored and amplified by the interior of the human suit that new resident had fashioned. The deep designs in the face finally broke the fleshy exterior away and a machine like face appeared underneath, the concentration of the blinding light decreasing as more of the creature was seen.
It punched in the autopilot codes on the shuttle and stared at the rain droplets hitting the front viewport. Disgusting… A flood of light from the back told the strange creature that his brothers cleared their bodies from the wretched dead flesh that they skinned from a vessel traveling into Dark Space. Too easy…
The skin-popped and boiled, eventually broke apart and left the body of a creature, gold in color. Large and decorated panels covered its body with large gaps leading to its interior that dimmed down to only a faint glow. It's large red eyes shifted in their almost organic sockets amid the appearance of being a machine. The feet fanned out quickly into three large and armored toes that stuck out to keep balance. The almost built in helmet cascaded and tapered off the front of its head and bending back elegantly the opposite direction. The torso appeared to be constructed from a series of biomechanical muscle fibers with interlacing metal sheets. The majority of their figure was swathed in a golden bronze color that reflected their surroundings in a pulsing degree of reflection as if they could control it. It lifted its hand up to its face and observed the golden-clawed hands. It grunted at the fact that the wretched creatures had been allowed to live.
"Higstrat…" a voice spoke directly into his mind. "I know you wished to kill that family… I could feel it boiling in your system and in your system, but we are serving only as an intelligence mission. We must keep ourselves secret until we strike. Our infiltration teams have already set themselves in places that hold power over the feeble minds of this galaxy. The takeover will be quick, clean, and peaceful… for the most part." The voice explained in a strange language.
"Glav… It was the defenseless and vulnerable Shepard… We could have used this opportunity to set the example now, no loss of men either." Higstrat bellowed mentally to his superior officer.
"All in due time… All in due time…" Glav answered.
The shuttle broke the atmosphere of the dark planet, the lighting that still flashed inside of the clouds shot faint echoes of their power even in the higher altitude orbit of the planet. Higstrat stared at the flashes and grunted again. He didn't want nature. He wanted war.
