Disclaimer: I do not own the Mass Effect games. This story is written with no profit in mind. I make no money from it. It isn't for sale or rent.
Chapter 4
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Part 1
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24.04.2183GS
SSV Normandy
Knossos system
Four people stood at Normandy's bridge, and Shepard was sure that all of them thought about different things besides their obvious concerns. First, the Acting Captain was busy making sure nothing unexpected happened or at least didn't develop into a significant enough issue to kill them all. On top of an experimental and possibly viciously temperamental ship, Presley had to worry about Geth, filling up Anderson's shoes, aliens running all over his brand new, supposedly secret ship, a pair of Spectres as if everything else wasn't enough… The list went on and on.
Second was the Turian LT – the First Contact War or the Relay 314 accident as the aliens called it still stung, both sides. It was telling that the short campaign that included the bulk of Humanity's military space assets was a mere footnote to the Turians and the reason why the Hierarchy took so long to respond to General Arterius stunt – they had so many ships, so many fleets and task forces running all over the galaxy that initially, first contact with Humanity slipped through the cracks and by the time anyone with a sense figured out what was happening… Shepard glanced at the stoic Turian. He had to grand the LT that much, his people had handled being stuck on a SA ship better than some of the Humans. All things considered, while some of the crew were merely curious, others had issues keeping their hostility in check. In that regard, Kaidan was godsend – at least when he wasn't on a rest period or suffering all but crippling migraines due to his now outdated L2 biotic implants.
Shepard hadn't had enough hands on experience to accurately guess Lieutenant Fabius' thoughts unless the Turian went out of his way to make it obvious. Still, he had to commend the man's professionalism and the way he kept his people in check – if they had responded more forcefully to the couple of verbal spars initiated by Normandy crew out of line, Presley and Shepard would have had to deal with an international incident on top of everything else – not something anyone needed at that point.
Third, well Vasir was an enigma. At the best of times, John couldn't figure out what was the real Spectre, if he had seen it in the first place, and what was mere theatre. What he knew for a fact was that his new colleague and mentor had had centuries to hone her skills and if he had to guess, nowadays she could be anyone, anything she deemed necessary. That combined with her charisma one the few occasions she allowed it to show, made her extremely dangerous… then there were combat skills and biotics. When all was said and told, there was little doubt who was the most dangerous being on board and that wasn't the bored Krogan in the hangar.
Hell, Vasir didn't need weapons, biotics or the sheer physical presence Wrex had in order to cause or solve problems. A few words, the way she acted depending on the situation and she could have people either terrified by her very presence or eating of her hand and asking for more.
As he stood there, between the Turian Lieutenant and his fellow Spectre, Shepard began to wonder if he was up to the task of being Humanity's first Spectre. Too many things happened between Anderson and Nihlus dropping the bomb during the approach towards Eden Prime and now for John to really ponder his situation. It was just now, during a moment of calm before a storm they all knew was coming that he got a time to think without distractions – like observing how the Spectres worked and trying to absorb as much as possible or dealing with all kinds of stuff he simply didn't have anyone to really delegate to.
So, and fourth – the First Human Spectre who doubts himself, he had to add in his mind. Was this when his luck finally ran out? Shepard knew that surviving Elysium much less earning his moniker – the Lion, was as much down to luck as skills and training. If there were a few less veterans among the smattering of civilians he all but conscripted to help him make a stand, if the pirates had fought smarter, called in an orbital strike or had a few more heavy units… He was lucky to survive that maelstrom and all it earned him was becoming the SA's poster boy, all but being ordered to finish up the N course up to 7… and once it was done, the brass didn't waste any time in throwing him at Torfan along with thousands other sorry bastards. Again, Shepard got lucky – he landed into a sector manned by pirates with only a smattering of Batarian External Forces types to give them a spine. He and his team got in, got the job done and got out more or less intact. Just thirty klicks west, another N7 led unit went into hell, backed by a whole company. Only three people got back and the N7 in question was now equally demonized and hailed as a hero – as the Butcher of Torfan. Hell, that Captain trained Shepard and if it wasn't for the high profile of the target and everything basically going to hell, he shouldn't have needed to shoot his weapon in anger during that operation…
And now, Eden Prime and its fallout…
Shepard felt a nudge and looked to the left where Vasir stood. She was looking at him and lightly shook her head. He gave her a barely perceived nod. This wasn't the time nor the place for his doubts. He had work to do and people's lives depended on him doing it right.
"We're approaching Knossos. ETA, ten, nine..." Joker's distinct voice came over the comm.
Shepard didn't need to imagine the Mass Effect field surrounding the Normandy as her engines propelled her past the bounds postulated by Einstein. As an engineer, and someone who did find the time, if barely, for a university degree in physics, he knew first hand how odd and misunderstood eezo and the effect it produced were. Oh, people could use them for all kinds of things, the stuff worked like a charm, yet ever since the first Asari physicist took a look at it, Element Zero and what the galaxy came to know as the Mass Effect were the stuff that gave scientists nightmares. Simply put, they shouldn't really work as they did. You could explain how things worked to a layman, said layman could understand said explanation… said explanation could even be more or less right from engineering standpoint. From theoretical one – there were hundreds of theories built around explaining how the damn stuff worked… It should have invalidated conventional physics, meant it didn't work, something everyone had proof wasn't the case on day to day basics… Whoever actually figured out how to explain eezo's effect and its weird relation with dark energy through a unified working theory would make a killing and immortalize themselves, not to mention reshape the galaxy. It was the holly grail of physicists all over the galaxy and an idea that Shepard toyed with from time to time, before the real life intervened.
Shepard closed his eyes briefly as Joker counted to zero. When he got really nervous his mind often went after such nagging facts – a source to find comfort or something, at least his therapist from after Elysium said so.
"And we're in at the edge of the system." Joker grumbled. "Short range sensors… we're clear. Long range… damn… we've got energy signatures in orbit of Therum as of four light hours ago. I can't make it better from here without getting active. CIC – can you refine the data?"
"We're on it, Flight Lieutenant." Presley answered. "I need answers, people. Once it became clear Therum went off the grid and given our suspicions, the Admiralty ordered all incoming traffic to Knossos to halt. Unless someone disobeyed orders, there shouldn't have been that many ships in orbit a few hours ago – much less with strong enough signatures to pick them from all the way here. I need information."
"Sir, we'll need at least ten minutes to gather more data and properly analyse it, but eyeballing it and preliminary scans both indicate possible Geth signatures." The chief sensor operator responded. "I'm seeing what suspiciously looks like what we got from Eden Prime but from this distance and on such a paltry sample..."
"Go for it, Lieutenant." Presley ordered. "Flight Lieutenant," he addressed Joker, "bring us in closer – nice, slow and quiet. If I'm to make an educated guess, those smaller signatures are frigates with the larger one being a cruiser leader. We won't be engaging them directly or at all..." The Acting Captain trailed off and turned to look at the Spectres. "We might be able to cripple the cruiser, perhaps take it out if we manage to sneak close enough and unleash a full alpha strike undetected. However, that looks like a whole frigate pack with it and we don't know what else they have in system. Alone we won't survive a prolonged engagement nor do they need all those frigates to chase us off the planet in which case any force we insert and gets detected, dies." He explained.
"Unless we absolutely have to, we won't engage at such unfavourable odds. Leave a comm buy for our reinforcements – we know where they'll pause in dark space to await Intel."
Despite what popular media claimed, until you had one of the extremely expensive and rare QEC installed on your ship – something currently nothing less than a fleet flagship got, you couldn't call anyone while moving in FTL – the side effects of the ME bubble surrounding the ship prevented it. Strictly speaking, said bubble should be doing much more than it apparently did, much less as well but thinking deeply about it and trying to figure it out had driven all too many physicists up the wall over the millennia. That certainly wasn't a topic to amuse yourself with in the given situation.
'Damn nerves,' Shepard thought and went through a couple of mental exercises to focus his thoughts.
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Part 2
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24.04.2183GS
SSV Normandy
Knossos system
People often liked to claim that there was no stealth in space and on the face of it, they were right. An active ship radiated tremendous amount of energy – heat, light and radiation from the engines and life support, not to mention the sensors – especially the radar and lidar… In practice however, space was big. Incomprehensibly so.
For most intents and purposes, if you were smart and had the right tech you could hide in plain sight within a heavily developed system – merely one more ship among hundreds or thousands. The odds were that in a such a place you would be noticed, however you could deceive most if not all distant watching eyes as to who you were and your purpose…
In a system like Knossos for example, one where the only populated planet had less than forty thousand souls on the surface? Space was big and no one could really afford the resources to properly watch it within such a system, much less place enough assets in place to make such a thing worth it in the first place. The Geth, with the few ships they had in place? No matter how advanced those craft were, they operated under the same principles and constrains as everyone else. All they had really going for them was the fact that they didn't need life support and thus had a better heat budget – something that would matter in a battle but not so much in the current situation.
Still, when the Normandy exited FTL a light second and a half away from Therum – a bit more distant than Luna was from Earth, the only way to detect them was if the Geth had the right sensors looking their way. By the time the light-show of their short journey there reached the enemy, the reinforcements would have already dropped on their heads. That was one of the constrains imposed of not having FTL sensors – the only real way to detect an incoming enemy at FTL speeds was to have an observer platform see it before it arrives and said platform having access to FTL communication and giving you a head's up. Otherwise, long before even lidar could give you a warning, the enemy would have dropped on your head… unless you happened to look at the right place and time anyway.
When the Normandy dropped from FTL, her engines were already shut, their arrival in part masked by the drop of the ME bubble that allowed to bypass Einstein's shackles in the first place. From that point, the frigate merely continued to drift and gather data using primary passive sensors and low powered lidar bursts that would hopefully not trigger any Geth sensors. The optical ones – advanced cameras and such would really come in handy once they were in position to see anything useful on the planet or already detected a Geth ship and knew where to look at.
It did help that they didn't approach on a straight line and instead moved to come from the other side of the planet compared to the cruiser they saw when entering the system. The first thing the Normandy detected were three omniosly silent mining operations on the surface – on the opposite hemisphere from the capital and most existing developments planet-side. Thermals and other passive sensors found no movement, nor trace of life down there, however with the increased heat and volcanic smoke chocked skies predominant on Therum, said sensors were less than reliable. There were too many heavy trace elements in the air and brightly glowing rivers of magma to be sure without punching drones relatively low under the smoke and even then laser comms – the stealthiest thing after the invention of the QEC wouldn't be useful requiring burst radio transmission with enough power to push through the natural interference surrounding most of the planet. That in turn would make it much more likely for the Geth to notice they had an uninvited guest and wasn't worth it at that point. Especially when there were three of their frigates covering that side of the planet and looking presumably for Dr T'soni or merely keeping guard out of sight from the main enemy force. If the Geth deployment hadn't changed in the past few hours, that made it one cruiser and four more frigates on the others side of the planet with unknown number lurking deeper in the system – probably there were no more ships waiting in ambush but no one could be sure without actually checking.
"We're moving on a trajectory that would put us relatively below the enemy cruiser when we swing around Therum." Presley said. We'll gather as much information as we can and keep quiet until the reinforcements arrive so we could feed them coordinates to jump the Geth. Even if that cruiser is just sitting there with its proverbial pants down – no active kinetic barriers and we manage to kill it, any forces we deploy will be sitting duck for those frigates and there's no way we distract them all much less take on them and do anything but die." The Acting Captain stared the Spectres down. "While we managed to insert a strike team on Eden Prime, given the terrain, we were able not only to use it to mask our approach but we knew where the target was. From what we're seeing down there, without transport you would be sitting ducks constrained by predictable routes through the lava rivers and we don't know where to insert you in the first place."
"Not to mention that given the heat down there, an insertion would be even worse for the heat sinks than on a regular Garden World." Shepard concurred. "On the bright side, the Geth hadn't plastered those mines we saw from orbit. On the other hand..." John trailed off.
"Why are they still here?" Vasir asked. "How many platforms did they have on board those ships? My guess is that they want Dr T'soni alive otherwise we would have arrived to find only rubble and corpses. Unless they begin pulling back before our backup is in place, we'll merely gather information. However, if we see them try to leave, I want that cruiser crippled and we'll do our best to stall the frigates. At worst, we'll deny them Dr. T'soni."
"Besides, with those frigates we're watching, it's unlikely we'll be able to both get you in and pull back to safe orbit without being noticed on the way down or up. At Eden Prime the enemy was concentrated in one fleet covering that super-dreadnought from orbit. We managed to insert from the other side of the planet and use those large valleys to keep out of sight from orbital surveillance as much as possible. Here? While the smoke cover would help, by the time we get you in position the heat-sinks would be full enough we won't be able to distract the enemy for long before we have to run to cool."
That in a nutshell summarized life in the military – hurry up and wait, even with the enemy right here, unaware of your presence.