Thirteen: Hotting Up
"Jack! Unless you want to burn to death I suggest you find somewhere else to lurk!" Tali'Zorah vas Normandy yelled her advice down the stairwell, then turned and headed into engineering, using her suit's sleeve to wipe condensation from her faceplate.
"Ok," Daniels was saying, "We need to repatch this trunking line over to the portside coolant shunts-"
"Are you mad, woman?" Donnelly said, shaking the ratchet he was using to unfasten the below-deck conduit seals, "All you'll do is fry the portside damage control cam-"
"We can afford to lose them," Daniels snapped, "Now come and help me connect the hose before we boil."
Donnelly grumbled but he got to his feet, following her out of engineering at a near run. It was only sensible, Daniels was right about the damage control sensors being an acceptable loss. Tali stood over the management console, trying to rebalance heat loads.
"What the hell's going on?"
Tali hadn't been expecting Jack to come into engineering. She barely afforded the woman a glance; Jack's skin was slick with a thin sheen of sweat, but she otherwise looked unperturbed by the heat. "The stealth system's running too hot," she answered, shortly, staring so hard at the data that her eyes started to cross. Crew on the CIC were doing the lion's share of balancing heat loads throughout the ship, given that most of EDI's automated control had been wrecked by the Collectors, but the fact was that the stealth system hadn't been fully fixed before they'd started running it, and there had been no real way of testing those repairs until they'd run the system.
When this was over, Tali was having a long, loud discussion with Shepard about how proper repairs needed a drydock, and that Shepard was never to abuse the Normandy in such an appalling matter ever again. On the other hand, if she said nothing and kept the system running, it would undoubtedly add to her 'I am a genius mechanic' air, which Tali was privately rather fond of. It was well earned, after all.
"Huh," Jack said, looking around, "Anything I can do to help?"
Tali snorted too quietly to carry over her exterior speaker. "Is that a genuine offer or just a platitude?"
"Platitude," Jack answered with a toothy grin. "I'm much better at breaking stuff than fixing it."
Tali resisted the urge to say something uncomplimentary. "If you're going to stick around down here," she said, "You'd better get an environment suit on. We're venting a lot of the excess heat down here, and it's going to get too hot to breathe soon enough. I hear blistered lungs aren't fun."
"Please. Like you'd catch me dead in anything as unflattering as that."
Tali really didn't like Jack. "Then you need to get out of the way." She leaned forward and hit the commline switch. "Donnelly, where's that coolant patch?"
"Coming, boss, coming," was Donnelly's response.
Jack rolled her shoulders. "I think I'll go grab Grunt and head upstairs," she said, "Maybe crack a window or something." She strode out of engineering without so much as a parting farewell.
Tali released an annoyed sigh once the human woman was out of sight, and patted the lip of the console. "Keep together just a little longer," she murmured. "Just a little while?"
Later, she would regret having said anything, as that was the moment that a loud tearing sound tore through the air, and alarms started blaring.
Gabriella Daniels was an experienced engineer. She'd suffered her share of conduit blowouts, minor electrocutions and even, memorably, the one time on the Perugia when the kinetic barriers had failed during a pilot skirmish and a hole had been punched in the hull. Half the air in the hallway had been sucked out while Gabriella clung to a support stanchion and prayed to a God she'd never honestly believed in, and it had seemed an eternity before the internal barriers kicked in and sealed the breach.
She'd also been witness to a fair number of ship-board disasters. Fire was the biggest fear aboard a ship, consuming oxygen faster than it could be replaced, but the one that had truly scared her was coolant leaks. It had been her first posting, an engineer, one of her classmates from training, as green as she was, had failed to properly seal off a section of coolant line that he'd replaced. As soon as he'd started to run coolant through the line again, the pressure had caused the hose to rupture, spewing supercooled liquid into the air. He'd been standing directly in its path.
Gabriella had been on the damage control team that responded to the emergency. When they'd got there, and after they'd managed to seal the leak, she'd gotten a good look at the unfortunate boy. He'd been flash frozen by the coolant, his face eternally pinched into a grimace of pain and terror. One of his fingers had broken off when the medics moved him into a body bag.
She couldn't even remember his name now.
But, she was an engineer, and a damned good one at that. It had scared her, made her triple check every patch she put on a coolant line for years to come. Eventually, it had just become habitual, rather than fear-driven. She'd even stopped thinking about it.
So she wasn't worried when she and Daniels started yanking wall panels out of the portside storage area, Zaaed's old haunt, with the intent of exposing coolant lines with the intent of patching them together, diverting coolant from where it was needed less to where here, where the sensors said it was so low pressure that the stealth system couldn't regulate pressure properly. It was just a job, and it needed to be done quickly and efficiently with no time for worrying about what might happen.
"OK," Ken was saying, "Now all we need to do is expose 4B and attach-" he only got that far before he twisted the ratchet around the sixth and final bolt securing the panel.
The moment Ken loosened the bolts, the pressure built up behind the bulkhead forced the panel backwards with explosive force, taking them both with it. Ken got the worst of it, slammed full in the body and pinned underneath it when it finally came to land. He didn't move; dead or unconscious Gabriella couldn't say. She was closer to the door, only having been caught by the edge of the panel. But it had hit her leg with a surprising amount of thrust, and Gabriella knew without checking that she'd broken it.
Over her head, the reason for the pressure loss was easily apparent. The coolant line had ruptured, and had been leaking out behind the panel. Now it was vaporising on contact with the air, reducing the temperature by several degrees per second. She wasn't standing in the face of it, and that was probably the only thing that was saving her life. She and Ken had both been wearing environment suits, knowing that it was going to get a lot hotter in engineering, but they'd left their helmets off, given that they hadn't been needed as yet.
Gabriella coughed convulsively, and tried not to breathe too deeply. Freezing the alveoli in her lungs didn't sound like a pleasant way to go. There was an alert sounding in the background, urging an 'immediate area evacuation', but there was no way that she was leaving Ken here to freeze to death in a coolant bath. She crawled over towards him as best she could, thankful that the room wasn't very large at all. The panel wasn't heavy either, pushed away easily, but Ken was, and Gabriella had to blink back tears as the effort of dragging herself and a heavy man across the floor sent jagged lines of pain all the way up her side.
She scrambled backwards awkwardly, trying to drag Ken with her one-handed, her leg screaming at her. Her hardsuit was stiffening automatically, responding to the detected break, but, unlike a combat model, shipboard environment suits weren't equipped with medical units to dump painkillers into the system for bad injuries. The leak, though, was spreading as the cracks widened. Clouds of coolant gas were forming in the air, ice crystals appearing on the bulkheads and on her hardsuit. Gabriella's vision blurred, becoming nothing but smudged white.
For a moment, Gabriella recalled seeing that boy, flash-frozen and lying dead on the deckplates. Andy, that had been his name. Andy Hesh.
A flash of blue and a dark shadow interrupted her vision, and Gabriella blinked a few times to try and clear her sight, realising that the biting cold had suddenly stopped getting worse. Then a pair of hands looped under her arms, her hand was prised off Ken's arm, and she was dragged out into the hallway even as she made protesting noises. She rubbed at her eyes and as the world came into focus, she realised that the dark smudge was Jack, standing with her hands raised, a biotic barrier holding back the gas, her expression one of fierce concentration. Grunt had Ken slung over his shoulder and as soon as he cleared the storage area he barked, "Got 'em!" to Jack, who released her biotic field, leaving the door to slam shut, sealing the leak.
Tali was the one who had dragged Gabriella out, who was still holding on to her even now. She'd never realised that the quarian's suit was actually pleasantly textured, not the hard plastics and synthetic polymers that the Alliance preferred. It was an odd observation to make, Gabriella realised, but her brain was still fixated on the fact that she wasn't dead.
"Thanks," she said, to Jack, meaning it.
Jack looked uncomfortable, wiping her hands on her pants like she'd touched something distasteful. "Yeah, well, Shepard'd be pissed if I let you people die, even if you are Cerberus."
The elevator door slid open and disgorged Doctor Chakwas and her corpsmen, Gabriella brushed aside all attempts to get her onto a stretcher, saying, "No, no, I have to get back to engineering."
"Crewman, you're injured," Tali started, clearly about to pull rank as Gabriella's superior in the ship's hierarchy, but Gabriella shook her head sharply.
"If the coolant's leaked that badly, then it's only a matter of time before-"
Tali hissed and swore. "I know." She handed Gabriella over to one of the corpsmen, hurrying to her feet. "I have to go and make sure this ship's up to a firefight." She darted back along the hallway; the door to engineering almost didn't open fast enough.
Gabriella wasn't sure it was; they kept finding little cracks that had been silently growing, without enough time to trace them, but she had faith in Tali'Zorah. She also knew exactly what her place was. "Give me a painkiller, Doc," she instructed, "Then get me back in engineering."
Chakwas frowned in disapproval. "You're in no condition to be working, crewman," she said, each word outlined with a sharp rebuke. You could only hear that in a British accent, Gabriella thought.
"We don't have enough engineers to spare, our stealth system's probably going to futz out any second, and there's a cruiser out there that's probably going to start shooting the moment it does. I have to get back to engineering."
Jack, who had been standing back, watching the show, snorted. "Got spunk, at least," she said, thought it didn't sound like she was trying to offer a compliment.
Chakwas still didn't look happy, but she was at least experienced enough to know the truth of what Gabriella was saying. "Very well," she said, and dosed Gabriella with something that made the world seem a much more pleasant place to be. Then she pulled a small med-module from her kit and inserted it into her environment suit. "That'll keep you going, but not forever. I want you in my medical bay the moment we're not all about to die."
"Aye, Doctor," Gabriella said, and took the assistance of the corpsman to stand up. Her hardsuit had completely stiffened to hold the bones of her leg in place, and so walking was awkward. She had to hold onto the bulkhead and limp back towards engineering.
"I'll send Legion down to assist you," Chakwas said.
"Just take care of Ken," Gabriella said, and hoped that her last words to him hadn't been, 'If you don't stop bitching, I'll shove that ratchet where the sun doesn't shine'.
Joker didn't swear, but Miranda thought he wanted to. At least, that was what she picked up from listening to him tersely report, "Our stealth system just bugged out. We're going to be hot and clear on their scopes in a few minutes."
Miranda stared dumbly forward to where she could just see the back of Joker's chair through the hologram. "How?" she demanded.
"There has been a coolant leak on the engineering deck. We will have to drop stealth before internal systems overheat in approximately two minutes."
They had two options: run, try to make it for the relay, abandoning Shepard on the planet below, or stay. Miranda was ashamed to admit she spent entirely too long seriously contemplating that as an option before she abruptly dismissed it, reminding herself that she was being too easily panicked. "Can you get us behind the planet before they spot us, Joker?"
"No guarantees, but I can certainly try."
The cruiser hadn't made orbit yet, though if Miranda's adhoc mental calculations were correct (and they always were) they should be out of line-of-sight view by the time the cruiser arrived. Of course then it would depend what the cruiser did: what orbit it chose, whether it was in contact with any ground stations, whether the stealth system held out that long...
Miranda held her breath and stared at the tactical hologram without blinking. She'd promised Shepard she wouldn't break the ship, promised to prove that she could be trusted. She couldn't let them all get blown apart now, not after Shepard had managed to take them to hell and back in one piece.
Luck was, unfortunately, not with them.
"The cruiser has altered course." EDI said, at the same moment as Miranda's stomach twisted into a knot as she watched the image of the ship changing direction. "They are increasing speed and arming weapons."
"Action stations," Miranda snapped, and ran through the possibilities in her head while EDI's voice repeated the order throughout the ship. "Joker-"
"I can't go any faster without jumping to FTL," Joker barked before she'd even had a chance to frame her question.
Jumping to FTL would get them out of the system, but they'd be leaving the shuttle and team behind.
"CIC, Engineering." Tali's voice came over the internal comms. "That coolant blowout damaged our portside barrier generators. Those won't take a sustained hammering."
"Got it, Tali," Joker said.
So they'd have to evade fire and keep their portside turned away. Miranda at least had great confidence in Joker's abilities as a pilot.
"They're firing!" Jacob barked, and Miranda clutched at the railing at Joker banked the ship hard to avoid the incoming fire.
There was a jolt, a loud bang reverberating through the bulkheads from somewhere below her feet. Miranda banged her hip against the railing as she was knocked sideways.
"Direct hit," EDI reported, with eerie calm, "Kinetic barrier at seventy percent, section two."
Section two wasn't part of the crew habitation section. It covered part of the nose of the Normandy, where nothing but conduits and plating sat. A minor hit. The ship continued to twist and jerk as it dodged out of the way of the super-accelerated metal fired at them.
"Standby weapons!" Miranda barked, and felt more than heard the mass accelerators that were the ship's main guns below deck spinning up. It made the back of her teeth ache, which she put down to her biotics still being oversensitive.
The asari cruiser had sped up, drawing closer, but as she watched, they stopped firing. Mirana hesitated, briefly uncertain, and it was into this space that EDI gave her report.
"The asari cruiser has ceased fire. They received a transmission from the surface and are standing their weapons down."
Jacob leaned forward, his fingertips clutching the edge of the console. "We should hit them now," he told her, "While they're not prepared to retaliate."
"I am unable to discern the content of the transmission," EDI said, "However, I would hypothesise that it was a stand-by order, ordering them not to attack us. Further provocation may be unwise."
"That's a guess," Jacob snapped. "They could just be waiting to see what we do. Either we run now, or we fight and try to take them down before they take us down. The Normandy can take out half their ship before they can counterattack."
Miranda stared at the hologram blindly, not seeing any of it. If they ran now, they abandoned Shepard, Garrus and Commander Alenko on the surface. While she didn't care about the latter two, Miranda had thrown her loyalty behind Shepard, superseding that she'd once given the Illusive Man. Shepard had helped her with Oriana, even though she'd had no genuine expectation that the woman would help, given her blatant dislike of Cerberus and Miranda herself at first. But loyalty was a liquid, changeable thing, wasn't it? Miranda was useful to Shepard, her biotics and her brain assets to Shepard's cause. For all Miranda knew, Shepard was just using her the same was everyone else had in her life, without having the courtesy of being upfront about that manipulation.
Miranda had command of the Normandy. They could run. Shepard would almost certainly be killed, and Miranda would be free to chose whether to go back to Cerberus or do something else with her life, without being beholden to anyone at all.
The thought lasted only as long as it took for her to remember that while she might command the ship, Joker would shoot her before allowing her to fly away and leave Shepard alone. Grunt would probably try and crush her skull, Tali would probably cause life support in her quarters to stop working, and Jacob would never forgive her.
And Miranda realised that even without these things to discourage her, it didn't matter. Miranda would never leave Shepard behind.
The cruiser was still hanging there in space, watching them. They'd clearly received orders from the surface, and Miranda chose to mean that meant Shepard was still alive and either causing a lot of trouble, or negotiating. If Miranda gave the order to fire, and destroyed the ship, it could mean that whoever was down on the planet might take retribution on Shepard's team. She simply didn't have enough information to make a rash decision and so Miranda Lawson, so used to decisive action, elected to do one of the more painful things she could do: wait.
Miranda bit the inside of her cheek, and hoped that she wasn't wrong. "Hold our fire," she said, "Don't do anything."
Jacob stirred uneasily. "They could just be waiting for explicit orders from the surface to destroy us," he said, "We might not get another chance at this."
"I've made my decision," Miranda said, and deliberately turned aside, dismissing him from her attention.
She heard him mutter something uncomplimentary, but ignored it. She really, really, hoped that Shepard was alright.
It was somewhat uncouth, in normal human society, to claim that one enjoyed a good fight. It wasn't considered good dinner party conversation, in certain circles. But Shepard had once thought that anyone who signed up for Special Forces had to enjoy it, otherwise they were just crazy. Perhaps there was a little insanity in her. After all, when you considered that they were being faced with what seemed to be an endless stream of attackers from the front, and others had cut off their path of retreat by circling around them in the tunnels, and she found the challenge of pushing through, using every trick at her disposal to keep the advantage with their small three man team, stimulating; well, she had to be a little bit crazy.
At least the others seemed to be enjoying it as much as she was. Garrus had developed a certain bloodthirsty edge since she'd left him two years earlier, cheerfully calling his more impressive shots as he made them. Kaidan just had a steely, determined look in his eye that he considered this a definite challenge but a not insurmountable one.
They were slowly but surely pushing forward. According to Kaidan's map of the complex, they were roughly fifty meters away from what might be the command centre. They were just consulting which way to turn at the next junction, keeping their heads ducked out of the way as they crouched in one of the alcoves clearly designed to provide cover to defending fighters, when their attention was pulled away by a louder noise than weapons fire.
"Hold your fire!" A loud, female voice, augmented by some sort of audio amplifier, cut across the sound of gunfire. It took a few, stuttering seconds, but their enemies stopped firing. When Garrus and Kaidan looked at her in askance, Shepard held up her hand, gesturing that they should hold off from attacking for a few seconds.
"Commander Shepard!" was the call, into the silence.
Shepard tilted her head, raising her voice. "Can I help you?"
"Our cruiser has detected your ship in orbit. You will present yourself, or we will order it to attack your ship."
Shepard's mouth twitched. "Not hearing what exactly would be in that for me."
"Our leader wishes to speak to you. You will not be harmed, as long as you stand down."
Shepard glanced at Garrus, raising her eyebrow, silently asking for their opinion.
"We could fight our way in," Garrus said, "But this might be easier."
"Besides, as long as they've got the Normandy pinned down, we don't have a lot of choice," Kaidan added.
"Don't count her out just yet. Even damaged she's got a good set of teeth." But both of them had a point. Shepard was curious about exactly who was behind this as it was. "Can you send a message to the Normandy at all?"
Kaidan shook his head slowly. "Not through this rock."
Hopefully, Miranda would have enough common sense to rabbit to FTL if their cruiser made any sudden movements in their direction. For now, Shepard would just have to wait and see. She took a deep breath and stood in one smooth motion, coming around into sight of the enemies who had their weapons still pointed in her direction, and she was intently aware of how exposed she was.
There was an asari in an unmarked commando uniform standing behind the front line of soldiers. She nodded with satisfaction as Shepard revealed herself. "Stand down," she told her men, who relaxed instantly, lowering their aim.
Mercenaries didn't have that sort of instant obedience and uniform behaviour trained into them. These were professional soldiers, not guns for hire. Given the evidence so far, Shepard was willing to bet that they'd been drawn from the ranks of ex-Citadel military. There were too many signs of the Council's indirect involvement to think that this was a bunch of rogues acting on their own. Maybe the mixed mercenary armours confused the issue, preventing easy identification.
"Commander Shepard," the asari said, gesturing behind her, "If you'll come this way, please."
Garrus shifted, clearly uncomfortable with going along with the asari, but he followed silently as Shepard nodded and went the indicated direction, the asari commando falling into step behind her. Garrus and Kaidan followed behind them, and they were trailed by a substantial number of soldiers. Shepard could see Garrus's hand resting by his waist out of the corner of her eye, close to where he kept a stash of concussion grenades. He'd just have to throw it behind them to scatter the gathered ranks into disarray, probably giving them enough cover to make a run for it if they had to.
Shepard had a good team.
The asari didn't make any attempt to disarm them, which was probably for the best as far as everyone was concerned, but she didn't so much look as Shepard as she marched down the tunnel, leading the way to what Shepard knew was close to the control area. Shepard didn't bother to ask any questions, knowing they would be ignored.
Eventually, they turned down a side tunnel just before the area where Kaidan's map had showed the control area. The asari commando waved the soldiers back, who took up positions along the walls, and crossed to a large metal door. She pressed her fingers to a biometric scanner, and the door rolled aside, revealing a decently sized rectangular room, the majority of which was taken up with a large desk. The back wall was mostly transparent, a window into the cavernous area filled with the stasis pods they'd seen back in the small monitoring room, and silhouetted against it was an asari.
It wasn't until they were fully in the room, and the asari had stepped forward, into the light, that Shepard realised that she recognised her. She'd seen her picture numerous times when reviewing the data that had been collected for her by her extranet crawler bots when she'd been trying to gather information on what had happened in the two years she'd been dead.
"I was hoping that you would come to the surface yourself. When our cruiser detected your ship in orbit, I realised that this was moment was inevitable." The asari bowed with the sort of formal grace that Shepard associated with diplomats of long standing and experience. "Greetings to you, Commander Shepard."
Shepard regarded her thoughtfully. "Defence Minister Lesh T'Vann. I honestly didn't expect to find you here."
The asari smiled politely and inclined her head. "The feeling is definitely mutual, Commander. And I am no longer defence minister for the Citadel Council."
"Lesh T'Vann," Kaidan murmured, obviously searching his memory. After a moment, he sucked in a sharp breath, obviously placing her in his recollections. "Didn't you 'disappear'?"
"Yes, I did. I couldn't create this sanctuary under the watchful eyes of the galaxy." Lesh gestured widely, encompassing her office and the massive hollowed out space visible through her window. "Disappearing was an unfortunate necessity."
If she'd accomplished all of this in less than two years, then she must have been working virtually day and night since she'd left Council space. Desperation was one of the few ways anyone could drive themselves and their people to such extremes. Lesh T'Vann had a tired look around her eyes that Shepard recognised from herself. She wondered if the asari was as haunted by knowledge and duty as Shepard was.
"This is quite the operation you've got going here," Shepard said, stepping forward, stopping when the asari commando that had escorted them to the office stiffened and clenched her fingers around her pistol, one step shy of pulling it. "The resources to construct this place, and to outfit your ship with experimental weapons, to hire and train all these soldiers… the costs must have been extravagant." She might have thought that Cerberus would be the only ones with the finances to pull off an operation such as this, but the fact that asari were in charge seemed to dispute that.
Lesh shrugged lightly. A wry smile flitted across her face, as if she knew that Shepard would likely not believe a word she uttered in protest. "I may not be a Citadel minister anymore, Commander, but I still have my resources."
"But what's the point?" Shepard asked. She raised her hand to gesture to the window, to the vast number of stasis pods that could be seen beyond. "Why kidnap people? Why bring them here?"
"To keep them safe." Lesh T'Vann sighed, and shook her head slowly. "This world is Sanctuary, our one hope of surviving the oncoming slaughter. It was not my idea, of course. If anything, Commander, we have you to thank for this endeavour."
Shepard tensed, feeling her muscles tighten unpleasantly around her shoulders. "I don't follow," she said.
"You discovered Ilos," Lesh said, "You discovered a solution, a way to survive the coming onslaught of the Reapers."
"I thought the Council had decided that 'Reapers' didn't exist," Garrus said, making little quotation marks around the name with his hands in such a near-perfect mockery of the turian Councillor that Shepard might have grinned had the situation been different.
Lesh shrugged, fluidly. "The Council cannot afford to acknowledge the existence of an enemy both vastly older and vastly more powerful than all the races in Citadel space combined. What would happen if they did publicise this knowledge? Chaos, mass suicides, religious and para-scientific fervour that would consume worlds. No, I do not blame them for their decision."
"You spoke out against their unwillingness to acknowledge the Reapers," Kaidan said. He spoke harshly, as if he took the slight personally. "You defended Commander Shepard's conclusions. Then you just disappeared and let it all die down."
"I did not say I agreed with all the Council's decisions, only that I do not blame them." Lesh turned to the window, put her hand up it, resting her fingertips against the glass. "I had bigger things to do. I had to create Sanctuary, a place that does not exist in Citadel records or in any other knowledge base. A place where we could hide enough of every species that we could repopulate our races after the Reapers have been and gone."
"The tubes on Ilos broke down," Shepard pointed out, "By the time the Reapers had moved on, there were only a handful of Protheans were left alive."
"Our study of Ilos indicated that the stasis chambers there were never meant for such long term storage. The power systems could not hold out." Lesh took her hands away from the glass, leaving smudged fingerprints where she had been touching the surface. They roughly lined up with the marker lights on five of the nearest towers, like Lesh had been reaching out to try and touch them herself. "Everything in Sanctuary runs off geothermal energy. The only thing that does not are the kinetic barriers we were using for the docking bay, and those would have been destroyed when we collapsed the tunnels and sealed ourselves and our wards inside. Then we would have slept for a thousand years, with no one any the wiser as to our existence."
"All that," the asari commando said, "Has now changed. Thanks to you."
"Peace, Myral," Lesh said, gesturing to her underling.
"So you've been kidnapping people for, what, a year? And I'm guessing that none of them knew what they were being taken for."
"We couldn't advertise for what we needed," Lesh said. She smiled, but she looked sad, rather than amused. Shepard found, uncomfortably, that she couldn't hate the asari who clearly thought she was doing the right thing. "Wanted: a few dozen krogan, a few thousand humans and turians, a few hundred asari, and enough genetically diverse stock from all other sentient races to restart species after coming galactic genocide. We tried to be subtle, taking a few at a time from lost ships or captured slaver transports, but your activities in investigating the Collectors meant that we didn't have as much time as we thought. We realised that if you were digging into their activities, it would no doubt alert the Reapers, and it would make them arrive sooner rather than later."
Through the window, Shepard could see drones moving between towers of stasis chambers, slotting some into place, removing others. She could see construction bots welding new skeletal frames together, designed to hold yet more pods. This was kidnapping on a massive scale, abducting people and sealing them away with no guarantee that they'd ever wake up. If they had friends or family who hadn't been with them, were they now wondering what had happened to these people?
"So in a thousand years you wake these people up and explain to them that they're the only people left alive in the whole galaxy?" Shepard jerked her chin towards the window. "How the hell do you think they're going to take that?"
"It doesn't matter," Lesh said. "At least they'll be alive. At least civilisation will survive, and maybe we'll be better prepared for the next time the Reapers show up."
A few hundred thousand people abducted against their will, for the possible survival of galactic civilisation. Was that really so terrible?
"What happens now?" Shepard turned and deliberately glared at Myral, who stiffened her back and did her best to look threatening. There was no doubt there was a lot of them, but Shepard was willing to give a damned good attempt at fighting their way out. "You kill us? Destroy my ship? Prevent any information leaving this place? Because I don't think that's such a clever idea."
"The thought had crossed my mind," Myral said, tartly.
Lesh T'Vann looked at her commando fondly and shook her head, stopping in her pacing and sitting down calmly, smoothing her hands over the skirt of her dress to stop it from wrinkling. "That's very much up to you, Commander." She reached forward, and a holographic interface sprung up. "I am aware that you are a Spectre, once of the most dangerous sentients in the galaxy. I realise that I cannot truly deny you what you desire. If I were to attempt to block you, or send you away, you would no doubt kill us all."
Myral stirred, uneasy, unhappy. "Minister-" Lesh waved her off.
"It appears that the future of Sanctuary rests in your hands." Lesh sat back after pushing the interface across the desk so that Shepard could see it. They were the master controls for the entire complex. "You can release these people, allow them to awaken and take the knowledge of Sanctuary to the greater galaxy. It will almost certainly not be a safe haven when the Reapers arrive, but if you are so confident in your ability to defeat them, it doesn't matter."
She spread her hands. "Or, you can leave them here. We will take what we need to create viable populations of as many species as possible from the abandoned and ignored in the Terminus systems, and we will seal ourselves off from the galaxy when we hear that the Reapers have arrived, and awaken when the danger has passed. The choice, Commander, is entirely yours."
Just two parts left to go. I'm thinking of putting this in ebook format for the interested. Anyone feel like doing cover art for me? :P