Brief note: I'm upping the rating on BtF to M in this chapter for depictions of graphic violence and gore. I still don't plan to include any overtly sexual scenes, but I did want to keep the rating representative of the content. If you're not comfortable with that sort of thing, I hope this has been a warning: there's a lot of blood, gore, and some reasonably gross stuff in this chapter.
XXX
"All right, Garrus, Liara, this will both be your first time under my command," Nicole instructed. They were all just outside the airlock, wearing combat armor; Nicole had her helmet slung under one arm, while Garrus was fully outfitted. Liara was wearing an asari breathing device and some minor protection along her head ridges, since if asari wore anything as restricting as a full helmet, it set something off in the equilibrium of their skull. Asari designers had been trying to come up with a full helmet that an asari could wear without vomiting in her hardsuit, but so far it seemed doomed to failure. "I want you to understand something. If I give an order, you follow it without question. Understood?"
"Yes, sir," Garrus said in strict fashion. Liara nodded.
"You will not deviate from any orders I give you in a combat scenario for any reason. Especially you, Liara." Nicole turned to the asari, who to her credit took Nicole's words with equal seriousness. "Your biotics are phenomenal but you haven't been involved in an active gunfight in a while. We already know you can block geth rifles. I'm probably going to need you to use that skill."
"Yes, Commander."
"Just one last thing. In front of civilians or on the battlefield, it's Commander Shepard. But for god's sake just call me Nicole when we're off-duty. That goes for both of you." Nicole slid on her helmet as the Normandy's VI confirmed the air lock was secure. It was a fully breathable planet, but protocol was protocol—and you didn't want to bring a foreign contaminant onto a starship.
"That will probably take some getting used to, Commander," Garrus said dubiously.
"Most things do. Remember to stay safe. Don't get into a fight you can't win. Follow my orders. If we get split up, return to the Normandy. All right. Let's go."
XXX
The Freedom was a small ship with stealth capabilities that Ten hadn't known existed. It was certainly the smallest vessel she'd ever seen capable of jumping through a Relay; there was barely enough room for the cockpit and one other chamber, a small armoury with a sleeping pod. Ten was standing behind Tobias, who smoothly piloted the ship into orbit. With extensive surgery, she'd changed her facial features significantly, and raised the melatonin levels in her skin. She didn't resemble anyone who'd ever been at Shadowhill now, but she resembled a lot of people—she'd chosen a very common face.
"Shepard doesn't know about the Thorian," Tobias told her. "Or at least we don't think she does. That may be your advantage. She'll be fighting geth and who knows what else down there. She should be plenty occupied."
"Even so, I can't take her in a direct engagement," Ten said. Tobias smiled at her, a perfectly mirthless expression that chilled her to her bones.
"Don't doubt yourself so much."
"I still don't see why you're not accompanying me."
"I will be busy preparing a … let's call it a back-up plan."
"Right," Ten muttered. She knew that Tobias wasn't telling her nearly everything, but the "watch" clamped to her wrist gave her another reminder of his hold over her, in the form of an hourly, microscopic injection of the Stigma. She could only pray that Tobias wasn't lying about his ability to replenish the supply. She had no way to generate more of the drug, and without it, she'd die in weeks.
Better a quick death, Ten thought. None of the suffering, none of the long agony of withdrawal. Shepard was monstrous, but at least she wasn't sadistic. She'd just slit her throat and be done with it. Ten wondered, for a moment, how Tobias would have killed her, if he'd decided to. She thought he would be quick about it, too. Most of the survivors of Shadowhill were that way. All of them were too acquainted with pain to have any real desire to see more than was necessary. The ones who enjoyed it always died, unable to make the grade.
"I'll drop you close to Zhu's Hope, but not too close. Make sure to use the tech cloak I gave you. It won't shield you from vision, but it will keep you off scanners."
"Well I didn't expect to become invisible," Ten said dryly. Tobias shrugged.
"There exists a cell working on that technology as we speak. Remember, Ten. Do this one task and you'll never have to worry about Gabreau for the rest of your life. You'll never have to see me again. Not another moment in withdrawal. You'll even get to keep all your teeth and hair, thanks to the improvements I made to the drug." He smiled at her, his grin entirely too pleasant. They descended into orbit and Ten reflected that if she really was going to die, she wouldn't mind all that much.
XXX
Feros had every appearance of being a massively colonized city-planet, like Illium or Earth. However, the concrete walkways were all degraded, and in the distance it was easy to see a dozen crumbling skyscrapers. Structures over 50,000 years old, remnants of the Prothean culture. It was shocking to believe they were still standing. The Normandy had landed on what looked like an ancient town square, nearby the complex of buildings where the Zhu's Hope colony had been founded. As Nicole, Garrus, and Liara walked out of the ship, they saw a man waving at them and running to meet them.
"Hi! Are you the Spectre the Council sent?" The man asked eagerly. Nicole realized, with some amusement, that he was looking to Garrus.
"That'd be me, yeah," Nicole said. The man looked at her, and after what looked like a great internal struggle said,
"Oh. I see. Hi, I'm David Al Talaqani. Fai Dan sent me, he was hoping to speak with you."
"Fai Dan?"
"He's our leader. He—"
The man's words were cut off as a laser bolt dug into his neck, killing him before he even had time to scream. Nicole grabbed her sniper and yelled,
"Cover, now! Sniper, 6th story of the building at the far side of the square!" Nicole had already ducked behind some fallen rubble as she levelled her own sniper at the geth, squeezing the trigger in one swift motion. The geth's head exploded in the distance, and it went down. "Garrus, give me a full tech sweep of the area! Switch to a high band, they must be masking their frequencies!"
"Aye aye, sir!"
"Liara, get ready. If you see so much as a flashlight, I want barriers on all of us. Prioritize yourself, your armor's lightest."
"Understood!"
Not the military response, Nicole thought absurdly. She looked across the square through her scope, searching for more geth.
"Shepard, there's at least three geth coming towards us, from that pathway."
"Right. Liara, can you prepare a biotic singularity?"
"Yes, Commander Shepard."
"All right. On my signal. They'll be shielded against biotics. Garrus, we have to peel that shielding off." Garrus nodded and readied his assault rifle; Nicole noted approvingly that he had his weapon modified to disrupt shields. The geth walked heedlessly down the narrow alley between two buildings, one of them carrying a rocket launcher. The geth fought with a suicidal determination, since their real selves—their programs—suffered no threat from combat. "Garrus, covering fire!"
Garrus launched a spray of assault rifle fire downrange, but the geth just walked forward, ignorant of the damage their shields were taking. The shock troopers raised their own weapons and fired, but Liara raised her barriers in time to deflect the bullets. The rocket trooper jerked his weapon up, but Nicole was faster: with a single movement she raised her rifle, took aim, and squeezed the trigger. She knew without looking the trajectory of the bullet. There was a vicious explosion as it collided with the rocket the geth had just fired, sending all the geth flying against the walls of the alleyway.
"Liara! Now!" Liara stood up and extended a hand, looking almost peaceful. A dark blue ball of energy appeared over the scattered geth, while gently pulsating waves of energy lifted them from the ground. They looked almost comical, floating in the air, one of them having lost an arm from the explosion. Liara clenched her hand into a fist and they were pulled towards the sphere, colliding with each other in a vicious crunch of metal. They were actually warping under the force of Liara's biotics.
Nicole raised her sniper and shot each of them once in the chest. She walked back to where Al Talaqani's body was and closed his eyes. At least his death hadn't been painful—the shot had severed his brainstem and killed him instantly. There was at least that.
"Damn," Garrus muttered, his flanged voice even more metallic over the comm in Nicole's helmet. "There must have been some way to save him."
"Probably not," Nicole muttered. "The geth was well hidden. Its programming must have suggested taking out the most vulnerable target first, once we were exposed. It's a machine. Some things they just do better than us."
As they advanced towards Zhu's Hope, they encountered more geth, dispatching of them with relative ease now that they knew what was coming. Garrus proved to be a good shot, and Liara's biotics were more powerful than Nicole would have hoped. Still, by the time they reached the colony, she could tell that Liara was exhausted. Using those biotics so much had to take a toll. The colonists looked at them with some suspicion, and whenever Nicole identified herself as a Spectre or Alliance marine, they instructed her to speak with Fai Dan. The prefab units made up most of the housing, but the colony seemed to be centered around a crashed freighter. All that Nicole managed to get out of the colonists with respect to the fallen ship was that it was called the Borealis.
"Something about this place feels off," Garrus muttered, as they walked past the prefab buildings. Nicole could feel the colonists' stares, but she knew that the second she turned to look, they would occupy themselves with something else.
"I agree," Nicole said. "These people aren't just scared of geth. There's something we can't see here. Keep your guard up."
"When you mentioned Al Talaqani, they did not so much as bat an eyelash. Are they in shock, perhaps? No doubt there have been many casualties caused by the geth." Liara sounded worried.
"Perhaps," Nicole said, "But I'm not convinced that's it."
When they did find Fai Dan, at the far end of the colony, he was accompanied by a woman in light armor. She was carrying an assault rifle, though she'd left the safety on. When Shepard, Garrus, and Liara approached, she stiffened, and her grip on the rifle tightened.
"Helmets off. I want to see your faces." The man next to her, Fai Dan, looked pained, and said,
"That is not necessarily. Arcelia, please, these soldiers are here to help."
"How do we know that?"
"If we weren't here to help, do you really think we'd have our weapons stowed?" Nicole asked. Arcelia didn't look impressed. Nicole took her helmet off as a measure of good faith. Arcelia flinched a little when she saw the scar, and Nicole immediately thought: One of those. "I'm Commander Shepard, a Council Spectre. I was sent here to deal with the geth."
"You're some kind of big hero, huh?"
"Not even slightly. Just tell me what you know about the geth."
"So what, you three are going to storm the tower and take out an entire dropship?" Arcelia scoffed.
"Arcelia! That is enough," Fai Dan insisted. "The geth have a dropship attached to ExoGeni Headquarters—that's the company that founded the colony. They repurposed one of the old Prothean buildings for their HQ, and now it's crawling with geth!"
"Let me guess—the way there is also crawling with geth."
"I'm afraid so. There is a tower leading to a Prothean skyway which should provide an easy route—ExoGeni has a Mako-class jeep they use to make the trip, Arcelia left it by the tower when she made her way here."
"Made her way here?" Nicole asked, unable to keep venom out of her voice. Unsurprisingly, Arcelia stiffened.
"I'm a fucking rent-a-cop, okay? I was hired to deal with kids spray-painting graffiti on Prothean ruins. When I saw geth, I got out with as many as I could take with me. Most of the other security guards are dead."
"Fair enough. So that's our way up." Nicole kept her opinions on Arcelia's actions to herself.
"Yes, but the tower is crawling with geth, and what's worse, there are geth in the tunnels below—there's some sort of signal generator that's co-ordinating their attacks and scrambling scanners."
"Yeah, we found that out the fun way," Garrus muttered. When Fai Dan looked at him questioningly, Nicole added:
"Al Talaqani is dead. A geth shot him at long range, and we were ambushed twice on our way here." She waited for Fai Dan's reaction, but he only seemed anxious—but what about? Her gut told her he was hiding something. It also told her to gouge out his eyes and rip his secrets from him screaming, but that she clamped down on. Just Shadowhill. Old memories.
"How terrible," Fai Dan said, not entirely convincingly. His eyes kept flickering, between Nicole and her squadmates, though they never quite settled on any one of them.
"Indeed. We'll go take care of the geth in the tower and the tunnels."
They left Fai Dan and Arcelia to head towards a stairway which led to the tower. The second they were out of earshot, Nicole muttered into the comm,
"That man is not right mentally. I'm not sure what it is. It looks like brainwashing, or some kind of drug—I don't know." She opened a link with the Normandy. "Joker, relay this to XO Pressley. Seal off the ship, and have Wrex, Ashley, and Kaidan ready for action. Do not leave the Normandy, and do not admit any colonists to the ship. Understood?"
"Yes, Commander."
The geth in the tower were easy enough to wipe out—Garrus and Nicole handled most of the heavy duty combat, while Liara pulled more than her own weight with her biotics. More than once, Nicole was astonished by the sheer destructive force the asari was able to conjure up.
"Kinda surprised you never wound up as a commando, T'Soni," Garrus opined, while surveying scrap metal that had been a geth before it had been introduced to Liara's biotics. Garrus had stripped its shields with admirably accurate fire, given the fact that he'd nearly been shot by a geth sniper. Nicole reminded herself to mention that, later.
"Oh, no, I do not think that is quite the life for me," Liara said, leaning forward on her knees and taking a breath. Such extensive usage of her biotics was clearly taking a toll. "Too much danger."
"Yeah, not like this," Garrus replied wryly.
"This is different," Liara insisted.
"Sure, sure. In a few months we'll find you in some seedy Omega bar, guzzling ryncol and swindling some poor fool out of his credits." Garrus shook his head. "'First time playing poker' my spiky turian ass."
"I had a capable teacher," was all Liara said. She smiled in Nicole's direction, and Nicole was grateful her expression was hidden by her helmet. For some reason, she was blushing.
I never blush.
"Come on, Abbot and Costello."
"Who?"
"I think my translator may have glitched," Liara said uncertainly.
"Don't worry about it," Nicole said. Most of her outdated expressions were Anderson's fault, in some way or another.
After they'd cleared the tower, and the tunnels beneath, they returned to Zhu's Hope and informed Fai Dan that they should be safe for now. He seemed relieved, but also distracted in a way that Nicole couldn't quite put her finger on. She hoped that was just her own paranoia talking—the man had been through hell, no wonder he was a little shaken. And yet there was that pit of doubt in her stomach.
"No doubt there'll be some geth at the top of the elevator, as well," Nicole said, as they rode the ancient contraption to the height of the Prothean skyscraper. Once more, Liara was at the controls. Though Feros had been looted of any really valuable relics centuries ago, Nicole could still see the asari's obvious pleasure in working Prothean technology. Liara was smiling without thinking to.
"Just imagine," Liara whispered, "50,000 years ago, a Prothean would have operated these controls. Entire Prothean families might've used this. Politicians, doctors, educators … using this same panel."
"And then they vanished," Garrus said. "Or were wiped out, according to Saren."
"They were," Liara said, a hint of mourning in her voice. "I have seen it. So has Shepard."
"Unless that Beacon was a remarkably elaborate lie," Shepard said, though she didn't really mean it. The images had been so real, so painfully visceral, that it felt impossible for them to be lies. But she knew that feeling. At Shadowhill once she had been convinced she had been dropped, alone, in a derelict space station. She'd survived there for a month, the station on backup life support, scraping food and drink together from whatever she could find. At the end of the month, Gabreau had just appeared in what Nicole assumed was an abandoned cafeteria, and informed her that she was on the other side of the asteroid. Her reaction had been a strangled, inarticulate cry of anger. They'd tortured her for more than a week for that. The torturer had used a bucket, salt water, and a corded rope. That had been all he'd needed.
It didn't take much to mess around inside someone's head. Just the right planning. That was why Nicole wasn't yet convinced that the Reapers existed, not even if every instinct she had screamed that they were real. That was also why she did not trust a single thing any of the colonists had said.
XXX
"Is it just me or are these geth getting smarter?" Garrus yelled.
"Just shut up and keep shooting!" Nicole barked, spinning the wheel of the ExoGeni Mako to avoid an anti-tank shell. Garrus was manning the cannon, while Liara was maintaining communications with Tali via the jeep's comm system.
"The geth are more intelligent when they are around more geth! Is there some sort of cluster of them nearby?" Tali asked.
"There's a big goddamn ship stuck to the ExoGeni building, if that counts!"
"Ah, um, that's probably it. But if you can somehow disable the ship, you should be able to take out the majority of the geth!"
"What do you want me to do, shoot at it?" Garrus demanded hysterically. Nicole revved the Mako's engines and charged through several geth shock troopers, their metal torsos crunching beneath the weight of the Mako.
"While it's attached to that building it'll be using most of its power just to adhere to the surface. If you can find some way to disconnect the claw, the ship may very well collapse under gravity."
"Wait," Garrus said. "Are you telling me we have to kill a space ship?"
"Looks that way."
"You've got that look on your face again, don't you?"
"I'm wearing a helmet, Garrus."
"I know, Nicole." Despite the fact that a geth armature was exploding in front of them, Liara laughed a little—and miraculously, so did Nicole.
XXX
They took the Mako as far as they could, until rubble in the road forced them away from the jeep. As they advanced through what felt like a giant parking garage, Nicole heard someone calling out to them from a lower level. She trained her sniper rifle on the noise, then put it down. Civilian.
"Oh my god, you're not geth!" Nicole signalled Garus and Liara to approach. The woman was in her fifties, wearing a scientist's garb. She looked absolutely at the end of her tether.
"Last time I checked," Nicole muttered, shipping her sniper rifle. "You with ExoGeni?"
"Yes, we managed to get out of the building—it's swarming with geth!"
"That's the least surprising thing I've heard all day," Nicole replied. Garrus tried to make a chuckle sound like a cough. "How many of you are there?"
"Come on, I'll take you to them. Mr. Jeong will likely want to talk with you." The woman took them below to a large complex where a few ExoGeni staff, and two security guards, had assembled. One of the men rushed towards them, looking harried and irritable.
"When the geth attacked, we all tried to escape," The woman said. "We managed to get this far. I'm Juliana Baynham."
"Commander Shepard."
"The Spectre Shepard?"
"That's the one. Didn't think you all had heard."
"Of course we had." Baynham sounded confused.
"Funny. When I mentioned it to the colonists at Zhu's Hope they seemed real surprised. And slow."
"Slow?"
"Never mind. Tell me what happened."
"Well—you know what's happened, really. The geth took the headquarters, and now we're all stuck here hoping they'll be stopped. But please, there's something—"
"You'd better not be about to disclose company secrets, Juliana," Jeong interrupted, sounding like he'd missed his coffee. "I hope you can understand the potential for legal repercussions in all of this." Jeong looked imperiously at Shepard. "I'm Ethan Jeong, district manager and temporary leader of this lot. I'm also responsible for representing the rights and privileges of the ExoGeni Corporation, since no one else seems to want to!"
"I'm talking about my daughter, you asshole!" Baynham looked furious. She turned back to Shepard. "Please, it's my daughter—Lizbeth. She's a scientist, she came here with me, she—she's still in there!"
"She's probably dead," Jeong muttered. Baynham turned on him in silent fury. Shepard took off her helmet.
"Shut up," Nicole advised him. The way she was staring at him left him little other option. She walked towards him. "Do you have any idea why the geth might be here? I want you to think very hard about that question."
"None at all, Spectre." He crossed his arms and glared at her. "The geth simply appeared. Do your job and get rid of them, but you may not violate ExoGeni protocol in any way, or there will be very serious—"
Nicole grabbed him by the throat.
"You're lying to me, suit. I don't like it when people lie to me." She lifted him up like he was a doll. The security guards behind him advanced, but they clearly didn't want to get involved. They saw Nicole, saw the entirely different class of dangerous she was in. Like Arcelia, they were rent-a-cops. "Don't you understand what 'Spectre' means? If you don't give me what I want then I'm going to put your name on a blacklist, Jeong. Do you know what that means, or are you the special kind of slow?"
She let him drop to the ground. He gasped for air and clutched at his throat, looking up to her in horror. Everyone in the room was very, very quiet. Nicole bent down and looked at him, resting her hands on her knees. He was splayed on the ground, staring at her in silent shock.
"It means that if you set foot in Council space, you will be swarmed upon by legal representatives eager and willing to turn you over to the Spectre who wants to turn your corpse into jujubes and stir the chunks into soup. Am I making myself clear now?"
"The legal—"
"Haven't you been listening, genius?" Nicole snarled, her expression somehow utterly without emotion. "I am the law. I am above the law. I will bury you and ExoGeni if you cause even one person to die because you wanted to keep your company safe. Start talking or I'm going to practice on your kneecap." She leaned forward and grabbed one of his legs, her grip vicelike, unnaturally strong. "Now."
"Ma'am—" Baynham this time. Nicole looked back over her shoulder. Garrus was unreadable behind his mask, but his body language was uncomfortable. Liara looked like she was trying very hard not to look shocked.
"Quiet." That was all it took. Shepard turned back to Jeong. "You're going to start talking or I'm going to start revisiting my favourite memory aids. Understand?" She jostled his kneecap for emphasis.
"Th-there's a creature! An ancient creature, tens of thousands of years old, and powerful, it's some sort of plant! It's called the Thorian, and it's something like sentient. ExoGeni's been studying it in the basement of the headquarters. It has some kind of psychic ability, but we're not sure what."
Nicole smiled and let go of his kneecap. She pulled her helmet back on.
"Now was that so hard?" She turned to Baynham and said, "I'll find your daughter. Liara, Garrus, we're leaving."
They left. Out of earshot, Garrus stopped walking. Nicole turned to him and waited.
"Shepard, all that … did you really mean it?"
"All of it? No."
"Shepard, that—"
"It was what was necessary. I don't plan on making Ethan Jeong's life a living hell, but he needed to believe I did if he was going to talk. The Thorian sounds precisely like the sort of thing Saren wouldn't want us to find. He said it's tens of thousands years old. Maybe old enough that it remembers the Protheans."
"Right. Sorry, Shepard, I just—"
"Don't worry about it. I'm a good actor. T'Soni, you okay?" Nicole felt her gut twisting in regret. She didn't understand it, and liked the feeling even less. Liara didn't even look surprised.
"Yes. That was rather brilliant, actually. No doubt we never would have gotten that information otherwise." Liara wasn't bluffing. "I was a little surprised at the time, but once I realized what you were doing, I realized I had to continue to look surprised, so Jeong would believe you. You know, the innocent asari all surprised and dismayed by the brutal Spectre she's been roped into working with." Liara smiled a little playfully, and Nicole felt her heart soaring. The dark twist in her gut dissolved. "That sort of thing."
Nicole grinned behind her helmet.
"See, Garrus? Liara gets it."
"Well, could you just—I don't know, wink at me or something, next time? Paint some mandibles on your face and do this with them." Garrus wiggled his fingers in front of his face. Nicole actually chuckled.
"Come on. We've got a space ship to kill, remember?"
XXX
"Are you seriously telling me they stuck their load-bearing insect claw thing beneath an industrial-strength loading door?" Garrus sounded like he was dreaming. Nicole raised a hand.
"Shhh. Don't ruin this moment for me."
"What?"
"This is exactly like the Rancor pit." This time, both Garrus and Liara said,
"What?"
"I'm going to need to educate you two," Nicole muttered. With the flip of a switch the loading door descended on the claw and broke through it like a knife through a lobster claw. There was a sudden, hideous groaning, and Nicole was suddenly aware of the massive weight shifting, falling away from the wall. She watched through the hole made by the claw as the ship fell, a massive metal body plummeting to the earth. When it hit the earth, there was an explosive sound of collapsing metal, and the building shook so violently that Nicole fell to her feet. A glut of flame tinted the light blue of eezo reached up from the site of the crash, but luckily the building remained standing; the ExoGeni skyscraper was so tall that the ship landed quite a distance away from the building itself. Nicole pulled herself to her feet and offered a hand to Liara, who took it gratefully.
"Well, we took care of the geth," Garrus said wryly. They'd had to shoot their way through about a dozen squads to get to this room, but it had been doable. Both Garrus and Liara had proved far more capable than Nicole had dared to hope. Garrus had a keen tactical mind and a clear sense of the battlefield, while Liara was obviously a far more talented biotic than she'd admitted. At first she'd just thought that Liara was a typically well-trained asari, but in reality her biotic power was well beyond what Nicole knew most commandos could produce. Nicole was about to say something to that effect when her omnitool blipped, informing her that Joker was contacting her.
"Go ahead, Joker."
"Uh, Commander, looks like you were right about sealing up the ship. The colonists have kind of gone crazy."
"Gone crazy?"
"Like, 'clawing at the ship and moaning like zombies' crazy."
"Stay put. We'll be on our way."
As Nicole was turning to walk down the staircase to the ground level, she heard a noise. She raised a hand to stop Garrus and Liara, then quietly drew her pistol. Bowed over in a predatory stance, she inched into the room opposite them—and ducked when a wildly fired shot narrowly missed her head.
"Stay back! Stay—oh my god, are you geth?"
"No," Nicole said dryly. A young girl was waiting in the room, still holding a pistol towards Nicole and shaking with obvious terror. She'd probably never fired a gun before, given the look on her face. Nicole stowed her pistol. "Put the weapon down. Are you Lizbeth Baynham?"
"Y-yes. How do you know my name?"
"Your mother sent me. I'm Nicole Shepard, Alliance Commander and Council Spectre." Her titles were becoming more than a mouthful. "I'm here about the geth attack. Don't worry. You're safe."
"Oh thank god," the girl whispered. She dropped the gun and collapsed to the ground, hugging her knees to her chest. "I thought—I thought that you were, you know. Geth." Nicole knelt down so that she was on Lizbeth's level and took off her helmet, looking into the girl's eyes. Nicole hoped her face wouldn't scare the poor girl.
"Hey. You're going to be fine, okay? I promise." Lizbeth looked up at her and jumped back a little. "But I need you to work with me, all right? I want to help everyone here. But I can't do that if I don't know what's happening."
"What do you mean?"
"The Thorian. It's why the geth are here, isn't it?" Nicole could tell from the look on Lizbeth's face that she knew it was. "Tell me everything you know, Lizbeth. Please. Let me help."
"I—I couldn't believe what they were doing. I kept thinking I should tell someone, but I just didn't know what to—"
"It's okay," Nicole interrupted. "Don't worry. Just tell me."
"The Thorian is a lifeform at least as old as the Prothean occupation here. It's like some sort of super-plant—like the ancient trees that used to exist on earth that survived millions of years, because they were sort of like an entire forest? It's like that. But sentient. Really sentient." Lizbeth was talking in a rapid babble. Nicole decided not to interrupt her. "It has extremely powerful psychic capabilities, and it thinks of us as lesser forms of life. It—it's taking over the minds of the colonists."
"What do you mean, 'taking over'?" Nicole asked, a little too sharply.
"It's using some kind of spore to control them. ExoGeni knows. ExoGeni was just observing the effects the Thorian was having on the colonists. That's what—that's what's happening. I'm sorry. I wanted to stop it, but I'm just a scientist! I only came here with my mom, for the research, to try and find a better life. I didn't … I didn't…."
"It's okay," Nicole said. Very gently, she laid a hand on Lizbeth's shoulder. Lizbeth grasped Nicole's hand with her own shaking fingers. "It's okay. You did the right thing by telling me. I need to get back to the colony to try and keep the colonists from doing anything drastic. If you're right, then the Thorian doesn't like the fact that my ship is here. The group that your mother's with is on the way."
"You'll take me to her?"
Nicole nodded.
"I'll take you to her."
XXX
"Hold up." Nicole signalled for Garrus and Liara to stop. Lizbeth stayed behind Garrus, apparently feeling safer behind seven feet of armored turian. At the end of the corridor they were in, Nicole could see a krogan getting increasingly frustrated with a V.I., banging at the controls. Nicole unslung her sniper and inched forward, trying to get close enough for a killshot—
Quicker than Nicole would've expected, the krogan turned around and whipped a grenade out of a pocket, hurling it down the hall at them. On nothing but instinct Nicole tackled Liara out of the way, while Garrus grabbed Lizbeth and ducked into a demolished room of cubicles. Nicole crawled behind some rubble and braced herself for an explosion. Instead, there was a sound like breaking glass, and a surge of electricity that shocked Nicole in her bones but didn't do any real damage. When it passed Nicole realized that the HUD in her helmet was gone, and her sniper was useless. She tore the helmet off in frustration and looked down at Liara. In her haste Nicole had pinned the asari to the ground.
"You okay?"
"Yeah."
"Good."
"EMP grenade," the krogan said. From the volume of his voice and the thudding of his feet, Nicole could tell he was getting closer. "Disables weapons, scrambles biotics. Little trick of Saren's. The way I see it, you pyjaks don't stand a chance in hell of taking me in a fight." Nicole got to her feet and stared the krogan down, watching the stupid grin forming on his flat face.
"Both of you stay back. Protect Lizbeth."
"What? Shepard—"
"That is an order, Vakarian." Nicole reached into the back of her armour, into a secret compartment that she'd installed herself. She unslung a long, curved dagger, like a claw, with a ring around the end of the handle. She slid her index finger through the ring and clasped the dagger in her hand, feeling the familiar weight of the weapon. The blade was six inches of wicked, grinning steel, tapering down to a deadly point. It was as natural in her hand as the scar on her face.
The krogan was fully armoured but also unarmed—his grenade had disabled his own shotgun. He leaned forward and charged, the way Nicole knew he would. She dropped into a fighting stance, crouching like a predator, dagger in one hand, the other braced against the ground. She felt the earth pounding as he charged, watched him build momentum, knew that he was moving with enough force to turn over a jeep. The distance between them shortened, and like any good krogan he raised his head to roar—
Nicole whirled out of her stance faster than seeing, her legs wrapping around the krogan's outstretched neck in the moment he should've turned her to pulp. He screamed in inarticulate rage and reached for her with a stubby hand, trying to slow himself, but Nicole had already slipped onto his back, grabbing onto his hump with her free hand and bracing her knee against his mountainous shoulder. In one swift movement she jabbed the butt of her dagger into the side of his neck, choking his air supply to delay his blood rage, then grabbed him by the neck and swung herself down, using the sheer torque to twist his body into the wall. Before he could recover, she jabbed him in the throat, then slashed just beneath his left eye with her dagger, leaving a deep, violent wound. Blood gushed over his eye, and he thrashed his way back to his feet, Nicole always ducking away from his vicious swings with laser precision. He reached for her again, but she slipped past the blow and slashed at the other side of his face, blinding him in both eyes. Taking advantage of his disorientation, she grabbed onto his shoulders in each hand and kicked off of his chest, landing several feet away from the flailing, furious krogan.
Even an enraged krogan couldn't see through his own blood. The krogan stumbled towards Nicole, but by now his movements were furiously sloppy, easy to predict. She barely even had to try to get out of the way, and when he went for a vicious overhand she grabbed his elbow and swung herself back up onto his back, using his hump as a brace again. She reached forward with one hand and grabbed his forehead plate, digging into the wound she'd made. She raised the dagger, waited a moment—as she expected, the krogan flailed an arm up to try to prevent what she was going to do—then slashed downward, digging the knife into the base of his plate, slashing deep past thick krogan skull and brain matter, creating a wedge in his flesh. Genetically engineered muscles heaving, she dug her fingers in and yanked backwards. With a sucking sound, the entire cranial plate detached from the krogan's skull, leaving his head a bleeding, pulpy mess. She took her dagger and plunged it three times into his brain, cutting off each brain stem.
The giant body shuddered to the ground, and Nicole calmly dismounted it once he was dead. She looked at the faded green cranial plate in her hand, bits of sinew and bone still clinging to it, and tossed it aside. Then she stomped on what was left of the krogan's skull. No reaction. He was dead. She spun the dagger on the ring, flicking the blood off of it in a simple, clean gesture, the way it had been designed, all the krogan matter flowing out of aerodynamic grooves. Her arms were still soaked in krogan blood as she returned the clean dagger to the compartment in her armour. Liara and Garrus were both staring. Garrus had taken off his helmet, too, and his shock was plain on his turian face. Liara looked like she didn't know what to say. Nicole suddenly felt embarrassed, like she'd just changed her clothes without realizing someone was watching.
"Where—where did you get one of those?" Garrus asked hoarsely. Of course he'd know what it was. "Only Colonels in the turian military are given a Talon."
"That's true. Colonels, and whoever those Colonels decide to pass the weapon down to. I once knew a turian who owned one of these. He didn't have any next of kin, and … I was the only one who came for him when he died." Nicole's face was utterly blank as she spoke. Garrus bowed his head respectfully.
"I'm sorry. I thought maybe you'd just—"
"It's okay. I came by it honourably. If I hadn't, it would've been your duty as a turian to take it from me. I know." Nicole unsheathed the dagger again and read the name inscribed on the hilt. Rameus Talinor.
That had been Talon's real name. It had taken a lot of searching to find out who he was, but luckily, Shadowhill had trained her to find people with nothing more than a nickname. When she'd flown to Palaven during shore leave, she'd been hoping to find some family, to tell them how he'd died. But there had been no one. Talon—Rameus—had been a Colonel in the turian military, before his talents as a torturer were put to use. He had felt ashamed at this vocation and had resigned, leaving the military and his Talon dagger behind. He'd taken the name, Nicole gathered, as a combination of joke and grim reminder.
When she had told the officer in charge of Talon's belongings, he had promised not to tell another soul. Nicole believed him; turians didn't lie. She told him nearly everything, or at least everything that related to Talon. Then the man had given her Talon's dagger, since it was a great crime for such a weapon not to be passed on. The turians believed that every soldier should have one last weapon, one last, simple tool, to use when all else was lost. With a Talon, it was said, a great soldier could carve a path to victory from certain defeat. It was a weapon of subterfuge, cunning, and stealth; rare for the turians. But it had been Talon's kind of weapon.
It was hers, too.
"Who did it belong to?" Garrus snapped her out of her reverie.
"A man named Rameus Talinor. He used the name 'Talon' when I knew him. He was a good man. He'd done things he wasn't proud of, but … he was a good man. He saved my life when I was very young." She sheathed the blade. "Our electronics should be back online soon—that grenade wasn't an actual EMP, or we'd be dead. Just some kind of tech scrambler. A hard reboot should fix it."
When their gear was fixed, Nicole pulled her helmet back on, glad to hide behind its steel surface. But when she saw Liara, who was still staring at her like she didn't know what to make of her, Nicole again felt a sense of hot shame. The krogan had needed to die, but the only way Nicole knew how to kill a krogan was to do it brutally. She wished that Liara hadn't seen that. Garrus was a turian—they understood brutality in war, practically had it bred into them. But Liara….
Nicole forced the thought out of her head. It was unproductive. What was done was done. She couldn't change it now, no more than she could change who she was. Even if she wished that she could.
XXX
Lizbeth rushed into the complex where the other ExoGeni escapees were, and though she was annoyed Nicole couldn't blame her. But when she heard shouting, and what sounded like violence, Nicole ran after her, Garrus and Liara following in her wake. When she arrived in the chamber where the survivors had gathered, she saw one security guard cuffing Juliana Baynham, and another detaining Lizbeth. Lizbeth broke free and ran to her mother, hugging her in spite of the security guards.
"Stay out of this, Spectre!" Jeong declared, advancing towards her. She could see a pistol at his side. "When you took out that dropship, we were able to re-establish communications with ExoGeni headquarters, and they're decided—"
"They've decided to liquidate the entire colony, is what they've decided!" Baynham hissed. The security guard struck her in the stomach, knocking her to her feet. "You won't get away with this, Jeong!"
"Zhu's Hope is ExoGeni's property, Baynham, and that means that they can decide to cease funding if they so desire. If any of you try to interfere with ExoGeni's legal rights, there will be serious repercussions. Immediate repercussions." Jeong grinned like a fox in a bird's nest.
"That's true," Shepard conceded. She walked towards Jeong, and continued almost conversationally. "Do you know what the Council's first contact laws are?"
"I'm familiar—"
"Well, actually, it's not so much the Council I'd be worried about," Nicole said, entirely too pleasantly, "It's the turians. They take first contact very seriously. After all, any pre-contact species possesses the potential to be dangerous. That's the kind of potential they'll start a war over, remember?"
"Are you referring to the First Contact War?" Jeong demanded, sounding scandalized that she might do such a thing.
"I'm referring to the Thorian. The giant psychic plant your company has been watching infect the minds of the Zhu's Hope colonists. Turns out ExoGeni's computers aren't so hard to hack." She approached, just slightly, looking down on him. Jeong wasn't terribly short, but Nicole was a tall woman. "You're going to contact ExoGeni, explain the situation to them, and make it very apparent that if they further jeopardize the lives of these colonists a very pissed off Spectre is going to contact the turian Councillor and let him know that your corporation let a 50,000 year old alien plant into the minds of about thirty colonists."
"Y-you can't do this!"
"Why not? ExoGeni violated one of the only laws I can think of that will start a war, not me. It's not my fault you're dumb fucks who think they're above consequences. Tell your guards to put that woman down and tell ExoGeni that they're probably going to need to filter considerable funds into Zhu's Hope to make up for the geth attack."
"For all you know the damn colonists are going to go crazy and claw their eyes out!"
"For all you know I'll claw your eyes out if that happens. Better hope it doesn't," Nicole advised him. "Send the message to ExoGeni. Now. That blacklist still exists, you know. You've been just annoying enough that I don't mind making you into a personal distraction."
Jeong backed away, clambering over to the comm system. Nicole didn't smile, but inwardly she was pleased—he was exactly the kind of coward she'd hoped. Any more resistance and she would have had to shoot him in the knee, at least, and somehow, she didn't want to do that in front of Garrus or Liara. Didn't want to do it in front of anyone, really.
"Thank you, Spectre," Baynham said, her voice a great deal quieter, now. Twice now she'd seen Shepard threaten bloody murder, so Nicole wasn't too surprised at the barely masked dread on her face.
"I'll take care of the colonists, don't worry. Without killing them."
"Thank you," Baynham repeated, making hurried motions to get out of Shepard's way. Lizbeth was looking at her very differently. Nicole signalled Liara and Garrus to follow her, and she left the group, feeling their eyes on her back. She put it out of her mind.
"Commander Shepard!" Nicole turned around, surprised, to see Lizbeth running up to them. The other survivors were watching.
"Yes?"
"I wanted to thank you. You might be a little frightening, but … I think you're a good person. You probably just saved our lives."
"The saving's not done yet. I have to keep those colonists from killing themselves."
"Here." Lizbeth handed her a small cluster of grenades, which was just about the last thing Nicole would've expected. "These were riot control grenades ExoGeni developed in case of an attack by the colonists. They should just knock them out—no fatalities."
"How sure are you?"
Lizbeth smiled, the kind of eager smile of an expert with an audience.
"Pretty sure. I designed them."
XXX
"T'Soni, when I throw this grenade, guide it to the colonists behind that cluster!"
"Yes, Commander!"
"Vakarian, concussive grenade! Just hit their cover, disorient them!"
They tore through the colonists in a matter of minutes. There were nearly twenty of them, all crazed and half mad, but only some of them had weapons and they tended to cluster together. Lizbeth's grenades worked as promised, and when they ran out it was a simple matter of knocking the remaining colonists out. Nicole checked all their pulses to make sure they were still alive, then signalled Joker on the Normandy.
"Joker, the cause of all this is something called the Thorian. Big sentient plant. According to the data I mined from the ExoGeni system, it should be beneath the freighter. That thing wasn't put there by accident."
"When did you mine the ExoGeni system for data?" Garrus asked, bewildered. Nicole shrugged.
"Had a program running in the background just about the entire time we were in the building."
There was a crane nearby—one which had been rather suspiciously guarded by colonists when they'd first arrived—and with a little work, she managed to move the freighter out of the way, revealing a path down into what looked like tunnels beneath the colony.
"Y'know, if you had asked me," Garrus said, looking into the tunnels with no great enthusiasm, "If I would ever wind up marching into crumbling Prothean tunnels to look for a psychic plant that apparently wanted to kill me, I probably would have called that bullshit."
"But only probably," Nicole said.
"I've been on worse dig sites," Liara said optimistically. "We may even be able to negotiate with the Thorian."
"Okay, name one dig site worse than this, Liara. One."
"The last one," Liara said cooly. "I was trapped under a volcano when a crazy Spectre made it erupt with a mining laser." Nicole chuckled and walked into the tunnel, forcing Garrus and Liara to follow.
"'I want to track Saren down,' I said. 'It's my duty as a turian,' I said. The next time I make plans to chase rogue Spectres down, one of you talk me out of it." Garrus shook his head. "Did you know turians don't like being underground? Because we really don't like being underground."
"Eh, humans evolved from tree climbers. We're not huge fans of it, either," Nicole admitted. Even through the filter on her helmet, she could smell the unpleasant decay of old dead earth, and also the faint but omnipresent scent of rot. Humans had a far more developed sense of smell than turians or asari, so she didn't mention it. No reason to freak them out.
"It always amazes me how much monkeys look like siandi climbers," Liara said casually, obviously clinging to the conversation to keep her mind off of the danger. The last time they had been in an underground Prothean structure—well, a volcano had erupted.
"Actually, most habitable planets come up with a lot of similar basic variations on life," Nicole replied. "On Earth we have birds, and their ancestors the dinosaurs, which bear an uncommon resemblance to turians. It's like convergent evolution, but on the planetary scale. That's also why we all look like we're stamped from the same frame. Turns out it's pretty advantageous to be bipedal and about five to seven feet tall on most life-bearing planets."
"There is also a theory that there was some genetic tampering by the Protheans," Liara submitted. Nicole personally didn't hold a lot of stock in that theory, but she kept that much to herself. "The sentient convergent evolution theory does have its merits, but some in the scientific community find it a little hard to believe that a human being and an asari should be so similar without some sort of outside interference."
Nicole was so distracted, listening to Liara speak, that she almost didn't hear the footsteps—almost. She signalled Garrus and Liara just before Fai Dan lurched into view, stumbling along with a pistol in his hand. His grip on the weapon was so tight that his knuckles had turned white.
"It wants me to kill you," Fai Dan said, his jaw clenching with effort. "It says I have to. But … every thought hurts. Everything hurts." He raised the pistol, pointing at Nicole. Nicole didn't blink. "When I try to … stop it, it … argh!"
Fai Dan pointed the pistol at his own head. Nicole raised a hand, trying to get him to point the gun at her, pleading with him, hating the fact that she already knew what would happen.
"Fai Dan, hang on. Listen to me, you don't—"
He pulled the trigger. Nicole's outstretched hand fell uselessly to her side.
"You tried," Garrus said softly. Nicole was surprised, especially from a turian—but then she realized that she shouldn't have been so surprised by Garrus Vakarian. He was more than his race. Most people were.
"There was nothing anyone could have done," Liara agreed. Nicole didn't say what she was thinking: that she was fast enough, quick enough, strong enough to have taken that gun away if she'd just moved. But Fai Dan had represented a risk, and years of training bored into her skull screamed at her not to take a risk for someone who was not mission critical. The knowledge galled at her. Dive roll to draw attention and avoid fire, sweep left leg, knock to ground, retrieve weapon, light concussion, check for pulse, apply medigel solution to inner ear to prevent brain injury. She could've done all that before he squeezed the trigger. Instead she had watched.
"Shepard, another colonist!" Nicole drew her own pistol and looked where Garrus' rifle was pointing, towards a figure stumbling towards them from the dark of the tunnels. The smell of rot hit her again, even worse, the sharp, churning smell of green mould on cheese or bread. Instinctively, Nicole backed away.
"That's not a colonist," Nicole said. No sooner had the words left her lips than the figure charged, emerging into the light like a grotesque parody of a human, its pallid limbs the color of dying leaves, its skin stretched and malformed, its mouth deformed and hanging open. Nicole, Garrus, and Liara all gunned the thing down, riddling the body with bullets. For a moment it stood dumbly, staring at them. It gagged, its sunken chest heaving, and a green ooze fell out of its mouth, cascading down over its body. It started dissolving, then, though whether because its own acid was eating it or just because that was how it died, Nicole couldn't say.
"That," Liara confirmed, "Was unpleasant."
"Well, if they all come at us one at a time we can just panic and shoot them all to death," Nicole said, slightly disapproving.
"Of course there's going to be more," Garrus muttered. "Geth? I can handle geth. Geth are nice and easy. Robots who want to kill you. Give me a robot any day over a barefaced plant zombie any day of the week. Spirits." Nicole looked at him.
"Feeling better?"
Garrus stopped to consider, then shrugged. "Little bit."
"Well, I feel ill," Liara said. "As well as a great deal of resentment for your ability to wear helmets."
"You say that like it's weird," Garrus replied. He almost sounded offended.
"It is weird. You put your heads in buckets!"
"Let's discuss head-buckets later, shall we?" Nicole suggested. She stepped gingerly past the corpse of the monster and proceeded further into the tunnels, hoping that they wouldn't see too many more of the creepers. Unable to resist, she muttered, "I've got a bad feeling about this."
"And here I thought that was only me," Garrus added faintly. As they moved deeper into the tunnels, the light faded, save for occasional beams of light glancing through the rubble. The tunnels were narrow and constricting, but they were definitely leading somewhere. Nicole turned on the lights on her helmet, illuminating the darkness, the small cones of light catching a million particles of fluttering dust. The smell was growing worse, filling her nose and making her want to gag. Humans had a much more advanced sense of smell than either asari or turians, so Nicole didn't mention it.
There was a gasping, sucking sound in the dark, bouncing along the tunnel walls. Then, a long silence, the sort of quiet that was only possible in a long dark tunnel. The sound was answered by a moaning hiss. Then there was another, and another, and the dull slapping sound of naked feet on a cold stone floor. The slapping grew rapid, till it was like rainfall, and Nicole wished she'd brought a shotgun.
"Weapons ready! Liara, we're gonna need you on crowd control!"
"Yes, Commander!"
"Garrus, I want concussive grenades at the entrance to that tunnel, then we mow 'em down!" Nicole raised her pistol and waited, staring expectantly at the tunnel entrance. As the sounds grew larger, it occurred to her that they were coming from all around them, that they were presently standing in what was really a network of tunnels, and there were at least three entrances.
The creepers grabbed Liara first, a strangled scream the only indication of what went wrong. Nicole spun around and saw in horror that three of them had somehow grabbed the asari, one of them prying at her face mask with a skeletal hand. Nicole shot two and grabbed the other by one arm, wrenching it free. The arm separated from the body like rotten vegetation, green liquid spraying over Liara and Nicole. Nicole grabbed the rest of it by the torso, this time, and hurled it to one wall. The creature tried to drag itself to its feet, but its skull suddenly collapsed in a flare of blue light.
"More of 'em!" Garrus fired concussive rounds at each entrance to the tunnel, knocking down the creatures as they clambered over one another, trying to reach at their prey. Nicole turned to one of the tunnels, the one filled with at least six creepers pulling themselves to their feet from Garrus' blast, and raised her right hand. She tapped her index finger to her thumb, then to the inside of her palm, and an incendiary blast fired out of Nicole's modified gauntlet, directed by her omnitool. The charge hit one of the creepers and exploded, spreading liquid flame over them, immediately disintegrating the bodies. She grabbed her pistol and helped Garrus execute the creepers still in one tunnel, while Liara ripped the others apart with a massive singularity, doubly effective in the cramped space. For a moment they all stood ready, Nicole and Garrus with their weapons raised, Liara with a single palm extended, her arm wreathed in biotic energy.
Silence. Utter silence. They all breathed a sigh of relief. Nicole gave them a couple seconds to gather their senses. Then she ordered them onward, through the tunnel with the incinerated corpses, towards the Thorian's lair.