Missing Links

Dawnfall, Rannoch, Perseus Veil

Shepard could barely contain her smile as she dropped from the deck of the Kodiak to find Garrus waiting, armed, armoured, and grinning like a kid at Christmas. "Let's get going, Shep," he enthused, punching her shoulder. "You, me, and little Jimmy – just like old times."

Vega grinned as he stepped to the platform and clasped hands warmly with the turian. "Dios, Scars, you're a sight for sore eyes. Looking mean and lean, as ever."

"Good to see you too, Vega," Garrus returned. "Have you put on weight?"

Vega puffed out his chest with a grin. "All muscle. Nothin' but prime beef, birdman, nothin' but prime beef." He ducked reflexively as Cailian swiped at his ear from the shuttle deck. "Need to be quicker than that, Bolts," he chuckled.

Garrus laughed, exchanging a nod of greeting with the asari commando, then looked into the shuttle to greet Oraka. "Lieutenant. How's your grandfather?"

"He's well, General, thank you," Oraka returned formally, stiffening to attention.

"I always liked that old raptor," Garrus confided to Shepard. "He was never a very good turian either—we had a lot in common."

"He's a tough old bird," Shepard agreed with a grin. "Not many men can say they tangled with both Sha'ira and Aria T'Loak and lived to tell the tale."

"Not many women, either," Garrus noted with a wink.

"Why are you standing around talking?" Grunt complained from inside the Kodiak. "Don't we have enemies to kill?"

Garrus' eyes widened, and then he burst out laughing. "Somebody pinch me, I must be dreaming," he chuckled. Grunt looked out, did a double-take, and roared with approval as he as he jumped down from the shuttle, shaking the landing platform and favouring the turian with a none-too-gentle headbutt.

"Krannt-brother! Ah, our enemies should tremble this day. Not even a Reaper could match our might."

"That's the general idea," Shepard noted, smiling as Garrus shook his head to dispel the effects of the krogan's enthusiasm. "And fun as this is, we have work to do, so let's get going, people."

They reboarded the shuttle, and Cortez had them in the air in moments, heading south over Dawnfall for the drop zone. Shepard activated her omni-tool and brought up a topographic map. "OK, let's go over this one more time. Miri, you reading me?"
"Loud and clear, Shep," Miranda confirmed over the comms. "Adams has EDI offline while we're in orbit to make a few hardware upgrades," Miranda reported, "So you're stuck with me for tactical analysis today."

"God help us," Shepard mocked.

"He already has, Shepard" Miranda declaimed loftily. "He gave you me."

"Fair point. All right, our objective is an old geth communications hub," Shepard highlighted the location, "eight klicks from the landing zone, south-by-southwest down this river valley. It closes to a ravine about three klicks from the target, and from that point we're on a clock, since there's almost zero cover and good visibility for any defenders. You will need to be on the bounce on the approach. Oraka and Garrus will take point—they have better eyesight than the rest of us, and they sneak better than Grunt."

Grunt shrugged equably. "Krogan don't sneak."

Shepard looked around the squad. "You've all studied the building layout, you all know your waypoints. When I give the go order, you'll advance by squads, sweep for hostiles and secure each room behind you. We're looking for whatever Reaper artefact is controlling the thralls."

"How many hostiles, ma'am?" Corporal Campbell asked.
"No more than fifteen," Shepard replied. "Tali confirmed the numbers for us. They were civilians, on a survey mission. Kindest thing to do is to end it for them fast." Shepard swallowed hard. "I know none of you like these missions, I know it's a hard thing I'm asking you to do, but we can't let their indoctrination pose a danger to others. Honour their courage in trying to build a better world for their people, remember them as comrades, but don't hesitate."

Grim nods of acceptance rippled round the squad. "OK, then. When we hit the building, Cailian and Grunt, with me. James, you'll take Takagi and Campbell. Garrus, you have Oraka and Hussain. Miranda, any words of wisdom?"

"You'll need to be fast on the approach, as you said. Fortunately, there doesn't seem to be a great deal of activity outside the building, but keep your eyes open. Environmental conditions are stable, so you shouldn't have any weather, and there are no significant energy signatures to imply mounted defensive weaponry."

"You picking anything up inside the building?"

"No. There's a sizable plume of igneous rock near the ravine, and the natural background radiation is interfering with the sensors. I can't get a good read on biometrics or anything else through the noise. I'll see if Sam can help me clean it up while you're on approach."

"One minute to the drop zone, Commander," Cortez reported.

"Copy that, Steve. OK, Miri, stay in touch." Shepard nodded and pulled her helmet on, locking it into place with a now familiar surge of nausea. "Get on the ready line, people."

She looked over at Garrus, and the turian threw her a confident nod as he locked his own helmet. "Just like old times, Shepard," he murmured over a private freak, and she clapped him on the shoulder. "Bragging rights?"

"First to the artefact," Shepard decided. Anything else would be deeply inappropriate.

Garrus cocked his head to one side and unshipped his sniper rifle. "Well, I hope you brought your A-game, Shepard. I imagine you've let yourself go these past few months, with all these badass Spectres around to do your heavy lifting."

Shepard snorted. "Yeah, 'cos I'm seeing a lot of opportunity in your home-on-the-range settler lifestyle for busting caps. I'm betting the only thing you've calibrated lately is Tali's…"

"Commander, you're good to go," Cortez interrupted on the general comm. Shepard exchanged a friendly helmet knock with Garrus, and nodded to Campbell to get the door. "Let's move!"

GCV Normandy, Standard Orbit, Rannoch

"So Tali wants to restart the geth," Sam mused as she deposited a mug of tea on Liara's workstation. "Interesting."

"Thank you, Sam. Do you disapprove of Tali's plan?" Liara enquired.

"Oh not at all. It's high bloody time someone got around to it," Sam clarified, taking a sip from her own mug. "I mean, it's absolutely the right thing to do, isn't it?"

"I think so," Liara agreed. "But many people would disagree."

"Well, everyone and their uncle's got an opinion, of course. But simply having an opinion doesn't make you right."

"So what makes your opinion right, Sam?" Liara asked.

"Oh, well that's easy. I'm always right." Sam batted her eyelids outrageously, and Liara found herself smiling in response. "There," Sam said triumphantly, "that's much better. You've been moping ever since Shepard left."

Liara grimaced guiltily. She was used to having the war room more or less to herself, and Sam's presence, though not unwelcome, was taking a little getting used to. The human had a tendency to chat—more to herself and EDI than to Liara—and as a result she often caught Liara off-guard when she did direct conversation toward her. "I'm always a little worried when she goes ashore without me," she admitted. "Not that my presence reduces the threats any, I just… I don't like waiting, and I don't like being blind."

"I imagine that's hard for you, being so used to all this." Sam waved a hand at the apparatus. "It's like a drug, having all this data. The temptation to just keep looking, check one more thing…"

"Is that why I found you sleeping in here this morning?" Liara observed, smiling as Sam ducked her head.

"No, I stayed up far too late playing chess with EDI," Sam admitted. "Nothing to do with data, I'm afraid." She took a pull from her mug. "But on the topic of AIs, I've been thinking. If Tali has a complete snapshot of the geth's pre-Reaper network, we ought to be able to graft some of that code into EDI's routines and enhance her functions. It's possible we could even achieve parity with her pre-Crucible state."

"Tali wants to use some of EDI's code on the geth, but I have to admit the inverse case had also occurred to me," Liara agreed. "I wasn't certain of the viability of the idea, though. I wondered if I wasn't perhaps simply being too optimistic. Actually, I wondered the same about Tali's plan, if I'm honest."

"No, no I don't think so." Sam set her mug down and hurried over to her terminal station, tapping into the main HUD and bringing up a file directory. "I don't know if you noticed yet, but I'm a hoarder. Never chuck anything out that might be useful."

Liara nodded with a smile. "It's a useful survival trait for underfunded academics. I always managed to eke a few extra fieldtrips out of my grants by stockpiling."

"Right, and we hardly ever got money for new equipment, so when something broke, we cannibalized it." Sam paused for a moment, a wrinkle developing in her forehead. The silence extended, and Liara's smile widened as she recognized the signs of Traynor's thoughts wandering off down a tangent.

Goddess, she is so like me in so many ways. Or, she corrected herself wryly, like me as I used to be. "Sam?" she prompted after a moment.

Traynor blinked. "What?"

"You were off in your own little galaxy."

"Oh, bugger. Sorry." Traynor took a gulp of her tea to cover the awkward moment. "Um, yes, where was I?"

"Tali not being overly optimistic regarding the geth."

"Right, yes. We've never had a complete set of geth runtimes to work with before. EDI did a lot of self-improvement with the fragments she managed to glean from communications with the geth during the war. Now, her original base was Alliance code, part of the Hannibal project, but it was extensively adapted with Reaper-derived tech and code based on Sovereign. That was why the Crucible beam affected her the way it did."

"The intelligence controlling the Reapers told Shepard that all AIs would be affected," Liara pointed out.

"Which is true from a certain point of view. The only AIs we can definitively say were affected were EDI and the geth—there being no other examples we're aware of—and the common factor between them is Reaper upgrades. The Crucible was designed to target Reapers. Ergo, they shut down, simplest explanation being the most likely and all that."

Liara nodded.

"Precisely what damage the beam did is unclear," Sam continued, "since one might think that the geth, being predominantly non-Reaper in origin, would simply have reverted to their prior state. Regardless, Tali has a complete system map of a working geth, a fully evolved one. She can re-map the whole lot, and produce a simulacrum of Legion, as he was, prior to the war. Then load it to a platform and…" she spread her arms, hands outstretched, "ta-da!"

"It's that simple, is it?" Liara asked, amused.

"Well, no. That part where I said re-map? That's a gargantuan oversimplification. But in principle, if the code is correct, the software works, and that's all there is to it. It's not subject to the vagaries of biological memory, it's much more straightforward." Sam shrugged. "And it only gets you one, not the whole consensus. But from that one, you can multiply, and there must be a massive amount of resource on the geth servers, if the quarians haven't been dismantling them…" She looked up in alarm. "Oh, dear God, they haven't, have they?"

Liara shook her head. "Local to Dawnfall, yes, but they haven't ranged further afield as yet. We need to prevent that from happening. I'll speak to the Council about making the sites protected—the Admiralty Board will scream, but they won't risk Council sanctions for non-compliance."

"Good, so there are numerous data sources we can use to provide background data. And having an actual geth process its own development would be far quicker and more efficient than having programmers do it. It only takes one collision to start a chain reaction." Sam cocked her head. "So it's optimistic, but not too optimistic."

"Glad I checked," Liara said dryly, and Sam coloured even more.

"Ooh, God, you should just tell me to shut up when I start to waffle on like that," she complained.

"Not at all. I'm delighted with your enthusiasm. I was just teasing you." Liara smiled a reassurance. "So, at the risk of another data dump, how can you relate this to EDI?"

"Well, Tali did a lot of the repairs using geth-based code, since that was what she was more familiar with. So presumably, from that foundation, if I have Legion's map, I can re-code some of the functions that were previously managed using Reaper programming. Probably not everything, but enough to make some significant improvements. And—back to my distant initial point about being a hoarder—I have all of the development records for the Hannibal project, which is still her foundational code base. So I can tinker a bit with that too. With her permission, of course."

"That sounds good to me, and I'm sure EDI will approve," Liara noted, pleased to see that Sam was enthused by the idea. "And I'd like you to take the lead in helping Tali. I lack the technical expertise. Gabby has volunteered to help out with any hardware and power issues, so you should talk to her about it. Discreetly, of course."

"Marvellous." Sam grinned happily. "I do enjoy a good conspiracy."

"Then you're going to love working with me," Liara chuckled.

"I already do, Liara," Sam admitted. "This room," she waved a hand at the apparatus, "might very well be my idea of heaven."

Even as she spoke, the doors hissed open to admit Miranda, and the Spectre arched her eyebrows in amusement as she approached. "Well, I'm sorry to ruin the moment, but if Liara doesn't need you urgently right now, Samantha, I could do with your help."

"Is there a problem with the shore party?" Liara asked, concern pricking at the edges of her thoughts.

"Just a technical issue. There are some environmental radiation outputs mucking up our sensor data for the engagement zone. Can you take a look at it and see if there's anything you can do to clean it up?"

"Of course." Sam drained her tea and set her mug down. "I'll be in CIC if you need me, then."

"Thanks, Sam," Miranda said as the younger woman headed out. She regarded Liara with a smile. "She seems to be settling in well."

"Very," Liara agreed. "She's going to be a huge help."

"And it's cute, how alike the two of you are. Looks like Shep's not the only one around here with a clone."

"Very funny, Miranda."

"I try." The XO winked. "I'd better get back to it. If a grown-up's not watching the shore party, they'll just get themselves into trouble."

"Hmmm. Rachel, Garrus, Grunt, and James…" Liara chuckled. "You're right. What could possibly go wrong?"

Geth Control Hub, Rannoch, Perseus Veil

The silence was loud.

Sweeping the hub had been the work of minutes—of the fifteen quarian scouts who'd fallen under the Reaper's influence, seven had already died from complications arising from torn suits and environmental exposure. The indoctrination had made them careless. The eight who remained were in little better condition, mostly incoherent and raving, but fit enough to raise weapons and open fire when they saw the team. Having spared them a slow, lingering death was the thinnest of silver linings, but one that Shepard intended to take.

Now, though, a new worry was beginning to nag at Shepard's thoughts as she completed her search of the sector she'd appointed her team. They hadn't found the artefact.

"There's nothing here, Shepard," Grunt rumbled as he stepped out of the room he'd been searching. "No tech that isn't geth."

Cailian shook her head. "I couldn't find anything either," she reported.

"Nor me," Shepard agreed. "Hopefully one of the other teams has it." She clicked on her comms. "Garrus, James, report. You found anything?"

"Negative," Garrus replied. "Heading back to your position now."

"It's not here, Lola," Vega stated wearily. "We've looked in every rathole in the whole damn complex. There's no Reaper tech anywhere, it's all just smashed-up geth junk."

"OK, James," Shepard acknowledged reluctantly. "Miri, anything on the scans?"

"Nothing," Miranda responded. "Sam's cleaned up the sensor data as much as she can, but as far as I can tell there are no emissions on any frequency that might indicate Reaper tech. I can reconfirm that retroactively when EDI's back on line, but the location appears to be clear."

"I don't get it," Shepard muttered. "The behavior patterns all check out; it must be here somewhere."

"Maybe they moved it to another location?" Garrus suggested as he joined them, followed by Oraka and PFC Hussain.

"That doesn't fit our observed pattern," Miranda replied. "In all the cases we've seen so far, the confrontation has been provoked because the thralls were protecting their control source. They never seem to want to wander far from it. But it's a possibility I can't discount without better data."

"We'll widen the search to the immediate area around the hub," Shepard decided, "and if that doesn't throw anything up, EDI can do a wider scan when she's back online. If we still can't pick it up, then the best thing we can do is warn the quarians that the source may still be active and to treat the whole area as quarantined."

"You don't want to get some help and check the canyons?" Cailian asked.

"No," Shepard decided. "That just ends up putting more people at risk. And we could spend our whole lives searching these ravines and come up blank."

The wider search also yielded nothing, and after an hour, Shepard called time. "OK, people, let's hit the trail. Miri, you have the geomarker for EDI, right?"

"Affirmative."

"Then that's as good as this is going to get. Move out."

Garrus fell into step with her as they began the hike back to the pick-up point. "This bothers you," he observed.

"I don't like leaving booby-traps out where people can walk into them," Shepard agreed.

"It's contained for now. The quarians know the risk is there, so really, it's not likely that anyone else is going to get curious. Leastways they won't when I share the images of the consequences around Dawnfall." He sighed. "That should curb their enthusiasm for exploring for a while."

"What's it like living with the quarians?" Shepard asked curiously.

"Invasive," Garrus chuckled. "They're so used to everything being communal that it never occurs to them to knock before entering a room or that there's any conceivable reason why you wouldn't want eight or ten or twelve of your neighbours and cousins to suddenly show up with dinner and stay for eight hours." His mandibles flared in a laugh. "Tali's got a lot of cousins, and they were all pretty offended when they found out that all of the doors on our house lock and I wasn't going to share the code. Tali blamed it all on me, but secretly I think she's quite glad of the privacy. She has enough crap to deal with during the day without it spilling into what little downtime she allows herself."

"Well, an overprotective turian is always a handy thing to have around, I find," Shepard grinned. "But seriously, G, all joking aside, aren't you bored?"

"A lot of the time," he admitted. "But it's not that easy to pick up and go. I think Tali wants to, if she's honest—the conversation last night should give you some insight there—but she's not ready to cut the cord yet." He shrugged. "I'm patient, and she's worth waiting for. We'll get back out there sometime, Shepard. Sooner rather than later if this madcap plan comes off."

"Well, now that Liara and Sam are involved, it'll probably spiral out of all control," Shepard chuckled.

"True." Garrus shot her a sidelong glance. "Is this where you ask me to join the crew again?"

"No." Shepard bumped his shoulder with a fist. "I know if you felt you could you'd be there already. I know I don't have to ask." She met his gaze with a smile. "And I know that if I really need you…"

"You also don't have to ask," Garrus agreed. "Say the word and I'll be there. About two weeks later, but I'll be there."

Shepard laughed, feeling the weight of the mission lift from her shoulders. "I miss you, bro," she admitted, slinging an arm around his narrow waist. "It's been good to see you."

Garrus hooked his arm around her neck and squeezed. "Yeah. Yeah, it's been good. Don't leave it so long next time, all right?"

"I won't."