No Going Back
Javik squinted at the distant horizon to where sheets of green spread between a ring of mountains. Even though he'd never been here himself, he knew there should have been spires jutting into the sky. A city thriving around a central processing facility. By no means a large one; not compared to the industrial coreworlds or the sprawling liveworlds of the Talvan Empire, at least. Even their ruins, all Javik had ever seen of their glory, made a mockery of such wayward rimlands as this. The humans in their briefing called this planet bare, tectonically dead, water-poor and naked of resources, useful only as a listening post and staging ground for the nebulous border between this cycle's core and rimlands. He had not wasted the breath to explain that this place had once been rich enough, but the resources close to the surface had long since been stripped away, and what was left was now far below, lining the caved-in tunnels of centuries of semi-autonomous boring machines. He couldn't help but wonder if any of the machines had been left down there, fathoms deep, or if the Reapers had sent their thralls down into the depths to cleanse even them.
'Reapers'. Tawdry and blunt, like the rest of their talk. Not a one with the ken. Even the asari, who so long ago showed the spark that should have led them to dominate this cycle, still apparently used it only to mate. An entire cycle of species whose fifth eye remained closed, who communicated only in noise and posture. And now he had to take to the battlefield with them, unconnected to any but for their crude communicators.
The asari scientist bounded ahead of him, stepping lightly over the tumbled stones weathered by centuries of merciless wind. Had they once been part of great buildings? Perhaps even in cycles past? He'd laid his hand on a few of them as they passed, searching, but felt nothing but empty air and the stubborn mosses that clung to the barest edge of life. For all he knew the thin film of green had outlived a hundred cycles- there was a survivor's success to be found in simplicity.
"There!" T'Soni said, pointing with her pistol. She said something else he didn't catch, but context, at least, made her intent clear enough. A score of shambling creatures were scrambling up the far bluff, headed for their objective position.
Javik freed up his line of fire with a few more steps, then raised his particle rifle to his shoulder and fired. Shear's unerring green lance came as something of a comfort, its pinpoint accuracy a reminder of times past, that not everything had come to disorder and chaos. It boiled away what armor the creatures possessed and speared through their tissues as he raked the beam across their numbers, pulsing the trigger with care to keep the quick-charging power cell feeding a near-constant flow.
The creatures scattered unevenly, twisting to return fire. Among them, Javik spotted the surer steps and taller stature of the officer, then a second one. Left standing, he knew they would make their charges stronger.
"The shieldbearers!" he called to T'Soni. "Concentrate fire!"
A second too late he realized he'd called out in his own tongue.
"What?" the asari shouted back. She pushed forward, arm extended.
At least one trait bred true and strong among the asari even after the centuries. Shimmering blue, the all-binding force heaved and drew itself into a tight ball, yanking three of the creatures off their feet. The raw power she could draw upon was impressive indeed, even if it lacked the refinement of the elder force-wielders of his time. It seemed they could still only affect the warp of gravity in its crudest form- their understanding of the true power they wielded was limited, but it was still an effective battlefield weapon.
"Matriarchs!" Javik tried again, seeking the asari word for officer.
He was still struggling with the language. The aliens must have taken his frequent silences for inscrutability, even when he was fighting to make sense of their babble. The brief touch of the human language he'd acquired from the ken of the Shepard woman served in part, but he was secretly grateful the asari had shared hers. It was a sprawling tongue, but the structure was logical and closer to his own than the human one. Then it was a matter of arranging one of their translation devices for his use, set to speak to him in T'Soni's asari dialect. A frustrating few hours in which he rued that he was no scripter who could find a way to make their device speak to his own VI kami.
He was still in no way used to the fact that the human, Shepard, could apparently understand him, despite not being able to summon a single word of the Talvan on her own.
If T'Soni was confused by his mangled meaning, at least she properly interpreted his actions as he rained fire down on the first shieldbearer, then reached out to the all-binding force and slammed it into the ground. Her high-speed slugthrower stripped the second one of its own kinetic barriers, whereupon it was yanked into her gravity well and flung bodily into the ravine to their left.
Javik scorched the last of the squalling monstrosities until they lay still, their stink filling the air. He and the asari advanced through the bodies.
"We've been calling those ones 'marauders'," T'Soni supplied, pointing to a dead shieldbearer. The plated skin of its face was already charring and sloughing away. The Reapers ensured their dead provided neither equipment nor even meat to organic forces.
"Marauders," Javik echoed, feeling out the word. It seemed imprecise at best, but it would do as much as any label.
As T'Soni used her communicator to call the human commander, Javik bent and, gritting his teeth, gingerly touched the marauder's forehead.
He loathed the touch of the destroyers. A steccato of images flashed through his mind, cruel in their precision, so vast as to be numbing. They were not the thoughts of the mortal that had once occupied this body- all trace of that being had been obliterated, its new mind awkwardly filled with a structure it couldn't truly contain. The creature was no longer an individual but a node in a vast network. As the brain crumbled to dust, a last few images flickered through it, carried on the spastic twitches of fading neurons. A place Javik recognized from the recon footage.
"South!" Javik burst out, recoiling from the creature.
"What?" T'Soni said, looking at him with wide eyes.
He took a deep breath of the planet's thin atmosphere. It was mercifully crisp and empty, clearing the cascade of images from his mind. "South," he repeated. "They have dropped forces into the valley mouth. They will have access to the ridge above the landing zone!"
"We have to warn Shepard!" She took off down the slope toward the rendezvous point, speaking into her comms.
They ran, dodging between the boulders and stones littering the valley floor, their feet sinking into the carpet of mosses. Javik could hear detonations and gunfire bouncing off the encircling mountain, and smoke drifted into the sky. Footsteps rang out ahead of them, and up from the plateau below came the three humans and the turian birdman. Were it not for the dire situation, it might have been comical to see this exotic array of primitives parading around in powered armor, hooting and barking and playing at war.
A lifetime of combat had inured Javik to accepting and dealing with terrible circumstances, but this stretched even his tolerance.
"Plan's falling apart already, Blue?" the largest human said. The one called Vega.
A wave of eager aggression flowed off him, carried on the sooty smell of his wide-bore slug shotgun. By contrast, the other human male kept his hostility tightly reigned, though Javik was sure he'd spotted the man glaring at him a few times. The turian, for his part, affected an air of dissociation Javik had seen many times before, hiding his true self behind a morbid sense of humor. The scarring of his face was not what spoke the loudest about how much the turian had seen.
"We destroyed the contingent we found," T'Soni said, "but another wave of reinforcements is coming up from the south!"
"And another from the west," Shepard said. "Whatever it is Captain Harn found, the Reapers want it badly! We'll get overwhelmed if we stay still. Let's move!"
The team broke into a dead run, heading for what remained of the listening outpost at the base of the largest mountain. The slopes were festooned with antenna arrays and relay systems, many now shattered by orbital bombardment. The relay station itself was a thick concrete structure blended into the stone, half covered with green mosses. As they approached, Javik heard Shepard talking to their pilot, who was out there trying to evade notice from the Reapers' air support.
They ran straight into the rear flank of the Reaper forces trying to break through the relay station defenses A formidable troop of artillery creatures was pounding away from behind a wall of stone and bodies. On a raised landing platform, the wreck of a cargo ship smoldered, good now for little more than cover. The heavy gate had been blown off its runners, and the entrance was piled high with cannibal creatures and a few armored bodies.
Shepard didn't waste the opportunity, throwing her small team at the artillery before they had a chance to turn and reposition. The flank quickly began to collapse. It seemed the defenders of the base had been waiting for just such a break. Seven warriors surged out of their makeshift fortress, using the boulders and shattered stone for cover as they pressed their attack on the suddenly split Reapers. Squeezed between two forces, pummeled with explosives, sniper fire and gravity, the creatures could not recover. It seemed that even in this cycle, tactics were not their strong point- they sought to win by numbers and firepower alone.
No, the destroyers saved their cunning for a much larger picture.
The battle turned into a slaughter as they cut down the last of the creatures. As the smoke and dust cleared, one of the defenders strode out of cover to meet Shepard. Above a suit of heavily scarred armor was a head Javik had never seen before. He was immediately struck by a feature he'd seen nowhere else- the creature had four eyes. A strange mixture of confusion and hope rolled through him. Had the mighty Talvan Empire missed a whole sentient species in its mapping of the galaxy, or had the information been lost to Reaper incursions before Javik had even been born?
"Commander Shepard," the alien said. His voice and posture dripped contempt unmistakable even across a gulf of cultures. "So the Alliance sent their murderer to collect our prize?"
Shepard tensed, the end of her shotgun twitching. "I'm not here to debate Bahak, Harn. The Reapers want us all dead or worse, so like it or not, we're on the same side."
He raised his rifle. "I should kill you right now."
To Javik's surprise, Shepard opened her arms. "You'll never get a better chance."
Whatever she was playing at, her companions obviously thought otherwise. Across from them, near the docking platform, the turian already had his longrifle to his shoulder, his finger on the trigger, drawing a careful bead. The two human males stepped closer to the Commander, easily within range to intervene. Alenko moved a step ahead of her, arm tense and ready to sign a call to power, but Vega simply pointed the wide mouth of his weapon straight at the insolent alien.
"Yeah, go on, try, cabron." The human grinned over the guard of his helmet. "Let's see how far you get. I give you one shot to the barrier before you and your buddies are chunky salsa."
The leader growled something, fingering his own weapon as he looked between them all.
"I know what those bars on your shoulder mean," Shepard said, gesturing to his armor. "You serve in the Hegemony military, or did. And you didn't steal or loot that armor, because your military caste would slaughter any interloper who wore their colors without earning it. So you did earn those bars, which means you've had to make command decisions. You've had to make sacrifice calls. I-"
"Don't patronize me, th'gras," Harn snarled. "Your measure is well known. You lured the Reapers to our systems and made us their meat while you ran away to Sol to hide!"
Javik looked between all the arrayed forces with some dismay as they shot invective back and forth. The new alien's fifth eye was evidently closed, too, or else they could have kenned the truth easily enough. He hissed softly between his teeth. An entire cycle, shouting at each other across a void, lies every bit as solid as the real, and no one stepping forth to take proper charge of the lesser species. The rabble allowed their militaries, their governments, and the freedom to threaten their betters over untruths.
"They're batarians," T'Soni said from beside him, keeping her voice low. "Their worlds are rimward of the Citadel, they were hit first when the Reapers attacked."
Of course. Javik realized the misshapen cannibal creatures he'd slain up on the ridge looked like these aliens. Their worlds had fallen, their people converted into the Reapers' first wave of troops. As if any of it mattered now.
Javik strode forward, wearying of the pointless posturing. "The Reapers cannot be lured," he snapped. "They cannot be tempted or reasoned with. Your petty hatreds are meaningless! You fight, or you die and become one of their weapons!"
A startled ripple moved among the alien defenders. They muttered amongst themselves, gesturing at Javik.
"What's this?" the leader demanded. "I won't be tricked by some new fiend-"
One of his soldiers called out a word Javik's translator failed to interpret, pointing at him.
"Shut up, fool!" Harn snapped over his shoulder.
"We don't have time for this!" Shepard shouted, pointing behind her. "Another wave of Reapers is coming in fast. We have to clear a landing zone and get out of here!"
"I'd rather die than set foot on your ship," the leader spat.
Javik raised Shear. "Then we will not suffer gifting the enemy with more troops."
Shepard shouted Javik's name, and at the same moment, one of the other batarians leapt forward and whipped the butt of his weapon into the leader's neck, slamming him to the ground. After a moment of shock, two more batarians charged forward and grabbed the fallen leader's arms. There was a brief exchange of shouting, but it settled quickly, with the now former leader wrestled into furious submission.
"Don't mistake this for friendship," the interloper said, baring a mouthful of needlesharp teeth as he stepped forward. "The Hegemony will have justice, Shepard, after the Reapers are cleansed from our world. But we lost twenty-three soldiers getting this damn artifact, and I'm not going to waste those lives, or risk giving this artifact to the Reapers. Or you!"
Shepard regarded him with a narrow glare. Javik was close enough to sense the edge of a confusing clash of emotions, the unguarded flare of a mind that didn't grow up in a world where everyone around you could sense your moods.
"Good enough," Shepard pronounced finally. "Let's get out of here."
The Cipher, they called it.
Javik glanced across the transport to where Shepard sat, hand to her helmet, talking into her comms. Even this far away, he could ken the aura around her left by this... cipher. The source of her knowledge of his language, it gave her a palpable familiarity, one that in all this chaos shone forth like a guiding star. He looked away, and still the feeling lingered, as if one of his tal were sitting just a short distance away. And yet it was a familiarity altogether unearned, hanging off her like an ill-fitting cloak.
Anger churned in his gut. He slowly closed his hands into fists, folding the sensitive pads in on themselves. It all made him want to wear gloves, perhaps a hood, to close himself off like the fabled monks of the Invisible Will. He could still feel the distant heat of anticipation foiled. He should have woken with his team intact to found a new empire. He should have been sitting where the ape-woman sat, at the head of a ship, drawing the scattered forces of the new sentients together under a new glorious banner. Instead he was the last - the last - of his kin. And a soul-blind, two-eyed mammal was the closest thing to kin alive, resplendent in her memory shard she couldn't hope to understand. A mind full of turmoil.
He could make little sense of his ken of the human commander. In her mind had been a familiar presence, what he'd found out later was this cipher. But it had been a thin layer in a riotous mix of impressions, confusing and deeply alien. The only real sense he took away from it was that it was a mind that had seen a great deal of combat. Flashes of fear, adrenaline, triumph, and determination stretched across years. And buried among it all fury, pain and betrayal.
All that, at least, he understood.
"Are you alright?"
The quiet voice came from beside him, filtered not through the translator device but through his ken of asari language. Javik looked over to see T'Soni staring at him.
"Fine," he said curtly, uncurling his hands. The undisciplined pulse of emotion was worthy of artists and speakers, not a warrior, and this age called for only the latter. Were he among his tal, they would have sensed his disquiet and echoed it back to him, a wordless admonishment of his momentary weakness.
"Is it troubling to see the Reapers again?"
"No time has passed for me," he said, working his mouth around the strange tongue. "Their ghouls simply have different shapes now, but they are the same creatures. The soldier, the brute, the officer, the artillery. The Reapers too have their... templates. "
"I suppose they are not that creative."
He fixed her with a hard stare. She looked like a child, with her wide eyes and small sculpted head. "Do not mistake the truth of these monsters, asari. The creatures you fight in the field are not your true enemy. They are a distraction. Meant to maim and terrify, to drain your resources and your morale."
T'Soni frowned at his words. "The Reapers themselves."
"No, fool," Javik hissed, low and dark, "Your own. Your allies, your leaders and friends. As the war drags on, the Reapers will trickle their poisons into their hearts. Some will resist, but some will fall. The Reapers will misdirect, they will let you waste resources chasing goals you think are worthy, when they should be sacrificed. It only takes one well-placed betrayal, and all is lost." He sat back. "It was our fate."
The asari raised her hand to her mouth. "You… were betrayed from within?"
The memory was still hot and bitter, coppery with the scent of blood, the cascade of warmth and memory over his hands. He remembered clearly the dark slither in his mind, the barest whisper of ken, slick and slimy. The touch of the enemy on the ken of his tal-mates slipping through his mind as their lives slipped through his fingers. "Our Crucible was destroyed," he said. "Do not imagine the Reapers do not know about the weapon, asari. They know. Even now they move to eliminate it. And with it your hope."
Javik shut his mouth and looked around the small compartment again. It was impossible not to wonder which of them would hear the siren call of the destroyers. If not them, then which leader, lover or sibling would be the loose stone in the archway.
"We will be on our guard," T'Soni said. Her tone was far too assured.
He said nothing. The time would come for them too, he was sure, and then they would prove whether or not they had the iron to slay their own. Stars were born and had died in his absence, taking their systems with them, and yet the war went on. There was no going back.