Title: Protoculture Effect (20/?)
Author: Cyclone
Feedback: Please be gentle.
Distribution: Gimme credit and a link.
Rating: Harsh language, violence, that's about it.
Spoilers: Just about anything.
Disclaimer: The characters depicted herein belong to a bunch of other people. I'm just borrowing them for a while.
Summary: Just as robotechnology altered the course of human history, so also did another discovery hidden within Charon.
Author's Note: It was inevitable, I suppose, that I'd try crossing over these two of my favorite science fiction universes. I'm not exactly sure what possessed me to do this beyond just wanting to.
Peak 15 was an impressive facility, but largely dormant. The team had found a single protoculture resizing chamber, damaged beyond repair, as well as a few cloning tanks. They had, fortunately, not run into any other full-size zentraedi, but plenty of the strange bug creatures.
However, it appeared that this was only part of the facility. According to the VI, a subway tram led to Rift Station, and Benezia had ridden it over before it went offline. Getting it back online while getting shot at by geth or swarmed by the bug creatures had been a harrowing experience.
"Departing Central Station. Destination: Rift Station."
Now, however, they were riding the tram over.
"So, Tali," Jane broke the long silence, "what are your intentions toward John?"
"Wh-what?" the quarian stammered.
"Don't play coy," she teased. "I've seen how you look at him, unlike, say, the good doctor here who doesn't seem to realize how distracting she can be."
Liara blinked. "I beg your pardon?"
Jane ignored Liara's question and prodded, "Well, Tali?"
"How is that any of your business?" Tali demanded.
"Just watching out for my ex-husband."
There was a long, pregnant pause.
"I'm sorry," Tali said. "I think my translator glitched. Your what?"
"My ex-husband," Jane repeated.
"There's a story here, isn't there?" Kaidan asked.
Jane shrugged. "Not that much of one. After we got accepted into N-school, we headed out to celebrate, got drunk off our asses, and woke up with matching tattoos and wedding rings. We made it about, oh... three months before we decided it wasn't going to work out." She paused, then added, "Stuck it out another month to make sure Jimmy didn't win the pool."
"'Tattoos'?" Tali asked.
Jane gave her a saucy grin. "Sorry, no previews, but if you play your cards right, John might just show you."
Tali could feel her face heat up at the human's tone of voice, but she shook that off. "No, I mean... what's a tattoo?"
"Ah." Jane was taken aback. "Um. I'll explain later."
"Do you regret it?" Liara asked.
Jane mused over that a moment. "Sometimes," she said finally.
"The marriage or the divorce?" Kaidan asked.
Jane didn't reply.
"Or were you talking about the tattoo?" he asked.
"I'd never regret that tattoo," was her instant reply.
Kaidan leaned back against the wall of the tram, crossing his arms. "Now you've got me curious."
"Play your cards right..." she said, offering a wink.
Kaidan coughed, but thankfully, he was saved from having to respond by the tram arriving at its destination.
"So," he said instead, "what gets me is, if they were cloning zentraedi in the outer facility, what the hell were they doing on this end of the tramway?"
"That's a good question," Jane said. "I suspect those bug creatures have something to do with it. What say we find out?"
"Aye, ma'am."
The fire team advanced cautiously, but aside from a few mangled bodies, bullet holes, particle burns, and spent weapons, there was precious little waiting for them. A little exploration led them to an elevator, the only exit that wasn't completely locked down.
A round zipped past Tali's head as the elevator doors opened, and the team exploded into the room, weapons and biotics at the ready.
"Stand down, damn it! Stand down!"
Jane's eyes tracked. Crates and beds had been moved to form a makeshift barrier, behind which crouched several people with fairly basic weapons, mostly M-8 Avengers with a handful of Micro-FALs mixed in.
"Sorry," the bald man who had given the order offered. "We had no idea what was in that lift. I'm Captain Ventralis, Binary Helix Security Services."
"Lieutenant Commander Hunter, UE Spacy," Jane introduced herself, then glanced back at the elevator she and her team had just emerged from. "Those things can use elevators?"
"Hell if I know," Ventralis rubbing a hand over his head, "but at this point, it wouldn't surprise me, and I'm not taking any chances. One minute, I'm working security for a top secret research project, the next, I find out I've actually been working for a real life Weyland-Yutani, and we're all fighting for our lives. Tends to put things in perspective."
Jane suppressed a snort at the old movie reference. "So I'm guessing you don't know what they are."
"Not a clue, beyond 'something the squints cooked up in the hot labs.'"
"I see," Jane murmured. "Listen, we're looking for an asari, Matriarch Benezia. Have you seen her?"
"Yeah, I saw her," Ventralis replied. "She went deeper into the facility with a cadre of asari commandos. Supposedly, she's here to clean up this mess, though I don't know how the hell she found out about it so quick. We haven't even had contact with Central Station since everything went down."
"And that didn't strike you as odd?"
Ventralis shrugged. "Hell yeah, it struck me as odd. If it didn't, I wouldn't have mentioned it, but I'm not going to question anything that helps our chances of getting out of here alive unless I really, really have to. I'm counting my blessings as it is."
Before she could question him further, however, she heard something above and behind her. Turning, she saw a ventilation grill suddenly fall from the ceiling, clattering to the floor, quickly followed by another swarm of the bug creatures.
John was frustrated, but in retrospect, he really should have seen this coming.
Once the package had been delivered, Nerisse had shut him out of the investigation and then had the gall to deny him a garage pass until the investigation was complete. Garrus was no help, but then again, there were probably personal issues at stake there too. Still, he was worried about Jane.
Well, no, that wasn't quite right. Jane could take care of herself, and Alenko was a Marine. He was worried about Liara and Tali. They were civilians, after all.
So, at the moment, he was poking around the Normandy, looking for something to do. Finally, he made his way to Belmont's "office," only to find the intelligence agent deeply engrossed in something on his computer.
"What are you looking at?" he asked.
"Hmm?" Belmont looked up. His eyes flicked back to his monitor for a moment, and met John's gaze and replied, "Oh. Intel reports from the Vol Protectorate. Looks like trouble in paradise."
That piqued John's interest. "What do you mean?"
Belmont waved negligently to the report on his monitor. "Their First Mechanized Infantry Regiment was on combined arms maneuvers with a turian unit, but... well, some turians don't have much respect for volus military, and it looks like they reacted a bit... forcefully... to being ridiculed."
John grimaced. "How bad is it?" he asked. Since the Vol Protectorate was a client state to the Turian Hierarchy, this was technically an internal matter, but he was Spectre, expected to get involved in anything that threatened "galactic stability," and this definitely counted.
"The turians are calling for blood, and the volus are standing their ground," Belmont replied, shaking his head. "Someone's gonna give - and I'm not sure I'm willing to bet on who - or it's gonna get ugly. We're talking economic sanctions, embargoes, maybe even war."
"'War'?" John echoed, not quite believing what he was hearing. "Between the turians and the volus? I thought the volus relied on the turians for defense."
"They do, but they have a decent bombing fleet, and their new mechanized infantry isn't something to sneer at. Their Mandrill battloid's pretty impressive for someone so new to the mecha game."
"Still, that'd be a short war."
"The turians had better hope so," Belmont snorted, "or they're going to find themselves running out of ammo and fuel before it's over. Who do you think supplies the turian war machine?"
John leaned back, turning this development over in his mind. The volus, he knew, weren't culturally predisposed to military solutions, but as a species, they probably benefited more from a mechanized combat doctrine than any of the other Citadel species. He idly debated asking Belmont if the EIA was planning on doing anything to... prod... the disagreement. The Vol Protectorate was an industrial and economic powerhouse that could prove a beneficial ally if they could be swayed away from the turians, much as the Migrant Fleet had with their engineering expertise.
He massaged his temples.
God, I hate politics.
"There are times," Jane murmured, "I really, really hate scientists."
"Hey!"
"Not you, Liara."
"Archaeology is a science!"
Kaidan threw a biotic warp at another rachni soldier - and hadn't that been a pleasant surprise? - and asked, "Ladies, is now really the best time for this conversation?" They had learned what they were fighting from Dr. Tartakovsky, who they had met entering the hot labs; sadly, he had only survived long enough to identify the creatures and tell them how to activate the neutron purge.
"Spiders! Spiders, spiders, spiders, spiders!"
BOOM! BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!
"DIE!"
"Alenko's got a point, Doc," Jane said. "That neutron purge isn't going to wait for us." She turned to the cackling quarian. "Tali, come on!"
Tali showed a rare moment of spite as she stomped particularly hard on the remains of one of the rachni workers before following.
John marched into Nerisse's office, glad to finally be getting some answers. "So, what did you find?" he asked without preamble.
She looked up at him. "Right down to business, then. I like that. We tracked the package to a krogan bounty hunter, name of Weyrloc Inamorda. Seems he was contracted to assassinate Administrator Anoleis."
"Any idea who hired him?"
"Some," she said, standing up. She clasped her talons behind her back as she began to pace. "Based on evidence we found on Inamorda's omni-tool, we've detained the Synthetic Insights branch manager, Lorik Qui'in, but something about this doesn't sit right."
"You're right," John said, folding his arms. "I told you Qui'in contacted me, said he had evidence Anoleis was accepting bribes and asked me to retrieve it for him."
She nodded. "I remember, but he could have ordered the hit once he lost the evidence."
"He intended to blackmail Anoleis," John pointed out, shaking his head. "No point in wasting a potentially useful asset, and once he thought he had me hooked in, he would have called it off. It doesn't add up."
"Agreed," she said, tapping her chin pensively, "and Qui'in's still denying any involvement. I don't know how much you know about turian culture, Commander, but with him still denying it after being confronted, I'm inclined to believe him."
"So he's being framed." It was a statement, not a question.
"Exactly," she said. "The question is... why?"
"Hmm..." John considered that, then asked, "Can I see a list of ships currently docked here?"
Codex: FAL-2 Series Full Auto Laser
The venerable FAL-2 series full auto laser is perhaps the oldest directed energy weapon still in common use in the Alliance. Dating back to 2027, the FAL-2 laser carbine served in the United Earth Defense Force for close to fifteen years before being phased out in favor of the Mars-Gallant H-90 particle beam gun, but it remains popular in the private security and civilian markets. The FAL-2 was designed to be a reliable workhorse weapon for use in all theaters of combat, so its rugged design emphasizes simplicity and reliability over accuracy and power.
The FAL-2 is capable of being powered by either a flat protoculture cell or more conventional energy clips, and in 2049, this versatility inspired Terrence Kedar, founder of Kedar Armory, to purchase the design and begin manufacturing a wide selection of variants of the FAL-2. Although advancing armor technology has since rendered personal laser weapons unpopular, the FAL-2's affordability, rugged reliability, ease of maintenance, and myriad variants has ensured the FAL-2 series will continue to serve in the private sector for decades to come.
In 2179, Hahne-Kedar made an exceptional profit selling FAL-2 variants to Citadel clients. Although outdated by Alliance standards, the FAL-2 still represented a tremendous leap forward over pre-existing Citadel laser technology, or so it was believed. Unfortunately for Citadel investors and weapon manufacturers, while the FAL-2, as a laser, bypasses kinetic barriers, its relatively poor performance against body armor means it offers little advantage over comparable mass accelerators against any properly equipped opponent, and when scaled up, the FAL-2 proved to be no better than pre-existing Citadel laser weaponry, though it did provide insight into the development of personal DEWs.
Popular variants of the FAL-2 include the compact Mini-FAL; its even smaller cousin, the Micro-FAL, which sacrifices the ability to accept flat protoculture cells; and the much larger, full-sized assault rifle variant, the FAL Plus, with integrated folding bipod, digital scope, variable focus lenses, and tactical rail mounts for additional attachments. In the Terminus systems, the FAL-2 and its variants are also known as "suit shredders" for their notable effectiveness against quarians, who tend to rely on powerful shields and incorporate only light armor into their environmental suits.
Codex: T-CE-LL-07 "Mandrill" Combat Lifter
The Vol Protectorate's T-CE-LL-07 combat lifter - Alliance reporting name, "Mandrill" battloid - is perhaps the most advanced mecha in mass production by the Citadel. Developed and produced by Elkoss Combine, the Mandrill was not an attempt at reverse-engineering Alliance mecha; rather, it was developed as an evolution of existing heavy industry automation technology already in common use within the Vol Protectorate. Elkoss Combine first developed the G-CE-LL-01 through G-CE-LL-03 powered load lifters as technology test beds and released the CE-LL-04 and CE-LL-05 lifters as general-purpose civilian industrial mecha for handling hazardous materials and heavy cargo before selling the concept to the Vol Protectorate's armed forces.
Although the Vol Protectorate relies on the Turian Hierarchy for defense, it still supplies auxiliary troops to serve in support of turian military forces, primarily in a logistics and engineering capacity. The T-CE-LL-06 "Manatee" was adopted in limited numbers by these auxiliary units and proved itself effective in repelling pirate attacks. In light of this success, the Vol Protectorate formed the First Mechanized Infantry Regiment to serve as the first volus front-line combat unit in centuries, issuing them the new and improved T-CE-LL-07 combat lifters.
Standing just over three and a half meters tall, the Mandrill lacks the imposing battlefield presence of an Alliance battloid, but they can be fielded in many more situations. It utilizes a "smart fluid" hydraulic system with a proprietary medium that expands or contracts when certain electrical charges are applied; this lends the Mandrill a strength and responsiveness comparable to Alliance mecha. The Mandrill boasts powerful shields and is built around a fully-sealed cocoon-like cockpit nestled in the chest, behind several layers of heavy armor. This cockpit is fully pressurized for volus, and the pilot's own environmental suit serves as an additional layer of protection.
In its standard configuration, the Mandrill's primary weapon is an anti-armor mass accelerator cannon mounted to the right shoulder, supplemented by a surface-to-air missile launcher on the left shoulder and a wrist-mounted, double-barreled light machinegun on each arm for anti-personnel work.