11 - Eden Prime: Save the Day
Without hostile contacts to worry about, the drive was short and direct. They followed a dirt road that ran parallel to the cargo train, not slowing down and not needing to. They saw more insect-like shapes lifting off and departing along the way, Geth frigates recovering their last straggling troops from the battlefield. More and more as time went by, radio interference from whatever the Geth were using diminished.
Alenko skidded to a stop at the edge of the Aguilar Center's campus... that is, what little was left of it. Where there had been a vast sprawl of office buildings, warehouses, laboratory campuses and factories, there was now only a huge lake of molten rock nearly a kilometer across. Shepard could feel the heat even through the skin of the Mako. From outside the vehicle, it was almost painful.
"This must be where that ship came down," Alenko said.
Williams sighed fearfully, "It looks like a bomb went off... what kind of technology could do this?"
Shepard knew, but didn't have the heart to tell her that there was nothing exotic about the technology, only the scale of it. The melted ground beneath the ship was the effect of a drive core discharge - built up electrical charge from its element zero core finally being released back into the environment - but on a scale so huge it would have dwarfed the discharge from a hundred Alliance warships. This wasn't a feat of advanced technology, just a matter of unimaginable power concentrated on a single spot. Those who'd been caught in its path had probably hadn't had time to feel pain before the tremendous power surge incinerated them.
But she had no time at all to worry about the dead. She bounded up the stairs towards the administrative building and the big communications antenna on its rooftop. The double doors to the lobby opened automatically, and Shepard slowed her pace, scanning the room with her rifle to look for any signs of survivors that might be right now coming out of hiding.
There were no survivors in the lobby. There was a large dome-shaped object studded with blinking red LEDs mounted on top of a cluster of liquid hydrogen tanks. Shepard stopped and stared at it, her mind spinning. She knew what it was, but she also knew what it couldn't be, what it couldn't possibly be. After all, it had been a Geth force that had attacked Eden Prime, so they certainly wouldn't have left a Thanix-series inertial fusion device, left by a certain Turian terrorist as a parting gift...
Shepard heard a low metal sound from the other side of the lobby, past the double doors that lead to the medical center campus. She'd come to know that sound by now: spikes retracting, the altered dead becoming active.
"Cover me!" Shepard yelled and ran to the side of the fusion bomb, omni-tool already open and glowing around her arm.
Alenko ran past her and knelt down next to the bomb, extending his barrier to enclose them all. Williams stood behind him, firing over the top of his head in short bursts, dropping the grey humanoid figures one after another. They still didn't seem to react to being shot at all; each of them kept on charging, ignoring her fire as long as they could. "Hurry, Commander!" she shouted, and fired off a carnage grenade at the nearest one. The grenade blew the creature in half at the waist, and its torso began to pull itself across the floor towards them on its one good arm. "Oh for fuck's sake..."
Shepard scanned the device's wiring, looking for vulnerable circuitry. Nothing useful there, the thing had quantum-dot detonator that was plugged directly into the firing mechanism. So she focussed on the mechanism instead: a standard Turian-designed nanoprocessor hardened against radiation. She got the impression that this particular device wasn't designed to be tamper proof; it was meant for demolition or excavation, not for terrorism or warfare. It should have been much harder to arm than to disarm, if only to avoid accidents...
She scanned the control circuitry and searched for active signals. Finding one, she loaded and fired a logic bomb from her omni-tool that forced the device to reconnect all of its wireless services. The system reached out, and Shepard's omni-tool latched on to it...
Williams' assault rifle sputtered and died, last thermal clip spent. She reached down without looking and plucked Alenko's side arm from his holster, aiming and firing headshots at the dull grey bodies around them. A wall of the creatures hit the barrier at a full run and began to pound their fists against it like rioters trying to break down a wall; Williams pulsed the trigger until her hand hurt, then dropped the spent pistol and pulled the shotgun from her suit's alternate hardpoint. "Now you've done it! You've woken up Andy!" and then squeezed the trigger, letting the M-27 shotgun named Andy blast its own opinion into the nearest creature's rib cage.
Shepard let the detonator's program code scroll past her and skimmed it as fast as her eyes could move. Detonation protocols, command protocols, encryption protocols... it was a standard Elkoss Combine safety mechanism, so the detonator subroutine would be a series of nested if/else statements that... "Found it!" It was a familiar block of code that looked like an upside-down staircase. She copied the entire block, deleted it, and then replaced it with an identical block with the same variables filled with garbage data.
The detonator circuit beeped twice. Shepard saw its services broadcast a warning that the trigger was about to fire. Then it threw out a dozen different system errors and shut itself down as its main processor overloaded and crashed.
"I got it," Shepard said, breathing a sigh of relief, "Damn that was close."
"How close?" Alenko said through clenched teeth. There were a still a dozen of the creatures around them, swarming around and pounding on the barrier, climbing on top of it like insects trying to get through.
"You don't want to know." Shepard toggled her omni-tool for another signal burst. Infrared band. Thirty megajoules should do it... "Stay down and cover your heads!" she raised her omni-tool, gave Williams some time to duck, and fired.
All twelve of the creatures around the barrier all burst into flames at once, ignited by a surge of radiation so intense it instantly heated the surfaces of their bodies well past their flash points. They all wheezed and screamed at once, and all collapsed as what was left of their muscles burned to ash around them.
Kaiden held the barrier in place a few moments longer, just long enough to make sure the mutilated corpses around them were no longer a threat. When he lowered it, he coughed at a smell like burning leather and rotten eggs. "I hope we never see anything like those things again," he rasped.
Shepard frowned, "I wouldn't bet on it... Williams, where's the beacon?"
"Probably on the landing pad. They would have needed a shuttle or something to move it out of here." She started for the doors on the opposite side of the lobby and the medical center beyond it. Across a foot bridge and up two flights of stairs brought them to a large open-air platform overlooking what used to be the administrative center and its sprawl of buildings and offices. Now it looked out over a slowly-cooling lake of molten lava where the Geth dreadnaught had landed.
The Prothean beacon was in the center of the platform, pulsing with an ethereal green light. It looked intact, undisturbed, and amazingly active for something that had waited in the ground for fifty thousand years. Still, she had learned a long time ago about gift horses... "Normandy, this is Shepard. The Beacon is secure. Request immediate evac."
Captain Anderson sounded utterly astounded at this. "Commander, we're seeing Geth ships already leaving orbit, heading for the mass relay. Are you sure they didn't leave without it?"
"It's right here at the medical center. I'm sure this is what they came for, but for whatever reason they didn't take it with them."
"Huh... Alright, we're on our way to pick you up. I'll have Joker get as close as he can to your current position."
"Have it land by the cargo tram, Captain. Our current position is..." she looked at the lake of molten rock beyond the medical center, "The LZ is too hot. Literally."
"Copy that. We'll meet you around on the other side. Normandy out."
Shepard turned to face Alenko and Williams by the beacon. They were both standing next to it, apparently surprised and puzzled by all the activity around it. Williams saw her looking and stepped closer to her, "It wasn't doing anything like this when they dug it up. Something must have activated it."
"Is that bad?" Shepard asked.
"No idea. Except that the Geth left without it, and that kinda makes me think they couldn't figure out a safe way to load it onto their ship."
Shepard considered this, looking at the beacon for a long moment. "Some kind of defense mechanism, maybe?"
"That's what I was thinking. Could be dangerous to touch. That would explain why they left it behind."
Shepard nodded. "What do you think, Kaidan? Can you lift it biotically?"
Alenko grinned, "Easily. It's not much more than half a ton. Where do you want it?"
"We'll take it over to the cargo dock..." she heard the rumbling sound from the distance and looked to the west in time to see the glinting metal hull of the Normandy moving towards them, skimming over the tops of trees. Captain Anderson signaled again from the CIC, "Normandy to Shepard. Standby for evac."
"Roger, Normandy. Standing by. Kaiden...?"
Alenko took a deep breath, held out his hands, and collected a power field in his palms. Dark energy gathered in a swirl and then bent itself to his will: he encircled the beacon, penetrated its core as evenly as he could, and lifted it off the deck.
The beacon didn't move. It didn't even budge. It might as well have been bolted down.
"Huh," Kaiden tried again, lifting with more force. Again, the beacon refused to move, and he got the distinct impression his feet were getting heavier. "That's weird..."
Normandy passed overhead and Shepard followed it with her eyes. The stealth recon vessel was a beautiful ship: sleek, hemicylindrical upper hull with its cargo bay and engineering module slung underneath. The four Tantalus-series mass effect engines could balance the ship on the tip of a flagpole in the hands of an average pilot; in the hands of someone like Jeff "Joker" Moreau the ship could practically dance on the head of a pin. Control veins on the forward engines tilted downwards as the ship slowed and the ground shook as its mass effect field repelled the very planet beneath their feet.
"It's fighting me," Alenko said, "What gives?"
"Problems, El Tee?" Williams asked.
"No, it's probably just stuck on the railing or something. Maybe I can pull it loose..." Kaiden changed the direction of the field and started to pull. As before, the beacon didn't move... but Kaiden did. The green glow around it doubled and then tripled in intensity and he felt himself being dragged towards it as if gravity itself had shifted.
He left go of the beacon and tried to back away. It pulled him in harder. He felt a tingle in the back of his skull, something like a biotic warp field closing around him. The beacon was reaching into him, penetrating his flesh, trying to get a grip on his internal organs...
"Lieutenant! Don't move!" Shepard was at his side in an instant. She grabbed him around the waist, planted her feet on the deck and twisted, pulling him away from the beacon. Her extra mass was enough to throw him clear of the beacon... but the motion pushed her that much closer to it. Alenko hit the deck and rolled, and by the time he got back to his feet, Commander Shepard was hovering three meters off the ground.
The Beacon's grip tightened, and Shepard went rigid, arms and legs pulled out to the sides as if the mass effect fields were trying to tear her apart. The green glow intensified until it almost swallowed her; Shepard screamed, and then started to shake.
Alenko ran to pull her free, but Williams grabbed his collar and snatched him back. "Don't touch her! It could be too dangerous!"
"Commander!" Alenko shouted, "Commander can you hear me?!"