Something Blue Chapter 21, a mass effect fanfic

A/N: full author's note is at the bottom this chapter, mostly because the one I wrote when I started this stopped being relevant after the fourth draft. I suggest reading it after, as it has a couple spoilers for what goes on in this part.

Needless to say, not abandoned! I'm just busy sometimes.

"The Artemis Tau cluster," Pressly said, presenting a collection of four glowing orbs above the holo tank. "It consists of four star systems that share a single mass relay: Knosses, Sparta, Macedon, and Athens."

The Normandy had arrived successfully through the Artemis Tau relay, which, unlike most of the other corridors of galactic transit, didn't lead anywhere noteworthy on its own. Its endpoint was an otherwise unremarkable patch of interstellar space approximately centered between the four systems that made up the cluster.

The article Shepard had skimmed while preparing for this briefing had mentioned the controversy behind that. The protheans had obviously settled the cluster – there were notable ruins on Therum, and likely more on other worlds as well – but put the relay out in interstellar space, an inconveniently long FTL jump from their primary settlement. Some experts claimed that it meant there was enough value hidden among the other systems to make further exploration worthwhile, others claimed it was a simple accident that had pushed the relay out into the middle of nowhere.

Shepard didn't particularly care, except insofar as it required that she pick a destination to travel to in the system. Which was why she had called the meeting Pressly was now making the opening remarks for.

The elderly navigator waved his omni-tool at the Normandy's holo tank, and the orbs depicting the four systems in the cluster expanded to show the planets and their orbits. "Across all four systems, there are a total of nineteen worlds, not counting the multiple asteroid belts."

He folded his hands behind his back primly. "Frankly, ma'am, unless you've got a lead on where to go, this is going to be a very long search."

She nodded. She'd known that, of course, and while she didn't know where the young doctor would be, she had a fairly good idea of what she was looking for. "I believe we can narrow it down to something more manageable," she said with a lopsided smile.

"To begin," she said, pitching her voice to carry throughout the communications room, "let's review what we do know: Liara T'Soni, daughter of Matriarch Benezia, entered the Artemis Tau cluster three weeks ago, presumably to study a prothean ruin."

"Er-" Ashley said with a worried glance at Shepard, who motioned for her to continue. "Sorry if this is a stupid question, ma'am, but how do we know she's even here?"

"Relay logs," Pressly replied. "The comm buoys stationed at mass relays? They track what ships travel through them. They can't identify a ship unless it requests network access, but they can tell when a relay's been used."

Shepard nodded at the navigator. "We pulled the logs from the buoy leading in to Artemis Tau," she explained. "Almost all the traffic is commercial shipping, mostly headed to and from Earth. A few weeks back, though, an asari vessel registered to House Benezia entered the relay, but there's no exit notification, and no anonymous departures since she arrived."

"And Artemis Tau's too remote to leave through conventional FTL," Joker added. "She's definitely here."

Or dead, Shepard though, but there was no sense in pointing out the obvious.

"Anyway, as I was saying," she said, returning her attention to the tank, "the fact that she's looking for protheans allows us to eliminate a few worlds. Any world where the environment would eliminate any trace of prothean activity, for example, can be safely struck from the charts."

She tapped a button on her omni-tool, and a third of the worlds went dark.

"We can also eliminate the gas giants," she added, "as the vessel she took here isn't large enough to equip with the kind of sensors required to thoroughly scan them."

Another third of the worlds went dark.

"From here, it becomes more difficult. We're left with a large collection of worlds where there could hypothetically be prothean ruins, and both Pressly and I lack familiarity with these planets. If any of you," she said, gesturing around the assembled officers and new specialists, "have good reason to rule out a world, speak up now."

Garrus' eyes narrowed at the display. "That one, there," he said, pointing a talon at a blue-green planet in the Macedon system. "Patavig. She's almost certainly not there."

Shepard quirked an eyebrow at the turian. "Oh?" she asked.

He nodded. "Yeah. The Hierarchy's been negotiating for colonization rights with the Systems Alliance for months, one of the men at C-Sec had family on the diplomatic team for it. Wouldn't stop talking about it. If there were prothean ruins there, they'd have come up as part of the negotiations."

For a much higher price, I'm sure, she thought to herself. "Thank you, Garrus."

He inclined his head politely and settled back down in his chair.

"Anyone else? Wrex? Have you been around here before?"

The old krogan narrowed his eyes at the display. "Not a lot out here, Shepard," he said slowly. "Not much reason to hire mercenaries on empty balls of rock and ice. Unless..."

"Unless?" she prompted.

"That one, the pale one on the lower left. Shar-something," he said, squinting at the display.

"Sharjila?"

"Whatever you humans call it. She's not there," he stated flatly.

"What makes you say that?" she asked. She didn't doubt the krogan's veracity – you didn't live to be old, krogan, and mercenary all at the same time without a solid head on your shoulders – but she was curious about the reason.

"It's a popular trading point for slavers," he explained. "They hide around the ore barges going to Therum, then break off for Sharjila to do their business. If your doctor went there alone, well... she's not there now," he finished with a dark chuckle, and several of the assembled crew members winced.

Ashley frowned at the glowing tank. "That still doesn't narrow it down much. There are, what, five or six worlds left that she might be hiding on?"

"Only if you include all worlds it's physically possible to land on," Kaidan countered. "She's going after prothean ruins, right? That means that we can skip icy balls of rock at the outer edge of the systems, there'd be no reason for the protheans to go there in the first place."

Tell that to the zeioph, Shepard thought. The world of Armeni was the local oddity for Artemis Tau, an icy planet covered in what appeared to be a mausoleum. She'd originally considered it as a possible place that Liara could be hiding, but ruled it out early on. It was too much in view, and there were no records of prothean ruins there – and Liara's field of study seemed restricted to protheans, not other races.

"You don't know that for sure," Ash pointed out.

Kaidan held up his hands, acknowledging the point. "True, but we can at least see what's left over. Pressly?" He turned to the navigator. "If we rule out pluto-like planetoids, what's left?"

Tali, who was a fair bit faster with her omni-tool, pointed at the tank. "Just two," she said. "Altaaya in the... Sparta system, and Therum in Knossos."

Shepard pulled up the data entry on both worlds on the tank. She was actually familiar with Therum, at least by name. It was a human colony, the largest in the system, and provided a steady stream of iron and heavier metals that allowed for the cheap production of electronics and starships the Alliance had enjoyed for several years. She'd considered it as a first stop, as the world was supposedly rife with prothean ruins, but given the heavy looting that had happened she wanted to examine the other options before committing.

Altaaya was more interesting from a geological perspective – a much warmer world that had suffered some kind of catastrophe thousands of years ago, it was entirely plausible that there were unrecorded and unspoiled ruins on the icy rock.

Garrus sighed. "A frozen ball of ice that might or might not have prothean ruins on it, or a strip-mined furnace with a bunch of illegally looted dig sites. Can't say I like either option."

"I say we go to Therum," Wrex said. "Colony means a bar, and drinks in the heat beats the piss out of freezing in suits."

"Lucky this isn't a democracy," Ashley muttered under her breath.

Pressly cleared his throat. "Altaaya or Therum, Commander? Those do seem like our best choices at present."

She leaned back in her chair, casting her gaze to the ceiling in thought. If I had to guess, I'd say Altaaya, she mused. The doctor's young, at least for an asari, and going after a rare chance at an amazing find seems more like something a young archeologist would do.

But if she's smart, she'll go to the planet with many known ruins and hope to find one that's been missed by the opportunistic looting.

She sighed. Plus, even if she isn't there, we can ask the locals if they've seen anything, and maybe get more up-to-date information on the worlds in the cluster.

"Therum," she said at last, lowering her gaze from the ceiling to regard the assembled crew. "How fast can we get there?"

Joker and Pressly exchanged a shrug. "Probably three or four hours," Joker guessed. "The system's pretty spread out."

"Copy that," Shepard said. "Williams, Alenko – I want the two of you to go check the environmental units on all of our marine detachment's armor before we arrive. Therum's hot."

The two humans nodded. "Understood, Commander," Kaidan said.

She glanced around at the rest of her new additions to the crew. "The same goes for the rest of you – make sure your gear's set up for high heat. Additionally, report to the quartermaster and have him give you some tungsten blocks for your weapons – if we do run into trouble, it's likely to be geth, and I want people prepared."

There was a rumble of acknowledgment from the assembled soldiers and specialists. "Nothing else? Good. We'll do a full briefing when we get on site. Until then – crew dismissed."

"That's odd," Joker said from the cockpit, and Shepard looked up from her data slate to scowl in his direction.

"What's odd?" she asked, setting the slate aside. In theory, her Spectre authority let her do next to anything in pursuit of her mission. In practice, find the pieces of bureaucratic paperwork that actually said she could do whatever she wanted was an exercise in futility.

Well, I can always threaten to shoot them, she thought testily.

"I'm going through the logs we pulled from the comm buoy," he said, pointing at a list floating in front of him, "and while there's no sign of her leaving, there are a heck of a lot of anonymous transits in to the cluster."

Her eyes narrowed. Saren's geth? "Define a heck of a lot," she said.

"Uh..." Joker scrolled through the list. "A lot. Like, fifteen or twenty. Look to be about the same mass, judging by arrival and departure timestamps, but it's hard to tell for sure."

Definitely Saren's geth, unless there's somebody conducting fleet exercises in Artemis Tau. "Engage the stealth systems as soon as we come out of FTL," she ordered. "We don't know who that is, but I've got a hunch they're not going to be happy to see us."

Joker nodded, his face set. "Aye aye, Commander."

Liara T'Soni, archaeologist, explorer, and estranged daughter of the esteemed Matriarch Benezia, was not having a good day.

It had begun like any other – wake up shortly after dawn in her suddenly sweltering tent, throw off the now-unnecessary warm blankets, and flop for the opening with about as much dignity as a gasping fish out of water had. Relief usually came in the form of a bucket of water upended over her head before quickly dressing and spending the rest of the day in the relative cool of the underground dig site, and she had set out for the condenser with haste.

If she'd had her druthers, she'd have simply camped underground and avoided the miserable daily awakening. Unfortunately for her, this was a region rife with volcanic activity, and there was a very real chance that something might shift underground during the night. Dying from asphyxiation in her sleep, while fairly painless as ways to go went, was still not high on her priority list.

And even if the world was miserable, she'd been making amazing progress on the site.

Archaeological excavations had benefited greatly with the advent of modern technology. Ground-penetrating scanners, hovering survey drones, high-density data storage and holographic projectors allowed archaeologists to explore entire sites in completely pristine condition. Gone were the days of a dig with fragile contents disintegrating to nothing in hours after being disturbed and exposed to oxygen.

They still taught the old methods in school, of course. Why, Liara didn't know. If a critical piece of equipment failed to function, the equipment was repaired or replaced – it wasn't like they would fall back to laser rangefinders to map out the entire structure from a single datum point. Doing so was time-consuming menial work, and the chance of some inept student knocking the marker that they measured from over was too high.

Or, say, placing the datum point for the locating beacon on a napping turtle mistaken for a rock, she thought with a wince. They had spent hours trying to figure out why their data was off until one of the other students at the dig had nearly fallen over laughing at the bright pink beacon slowly walking away from the noise they were making. Her classmates had never let her forget that particular stunt, and even decades later the thought of it still managed to conjure a blush.

She shook her head firmly. Now was not the time to sit around reminiscing. The temperature was climbing at its usual alarming rate, and if she wanted to have her morning chores taken care of before the sun went from 'uncomfortable' to 'intolerable,' she needed to move quickly.

Turning around the outcropping where she'd placed the condenser, she ran into the first problem of the day when she sank twenty centimeters into silty mud.

Mud? Oh, Goddess, that's not good...

She quickly looked over the small condenser, eyes widening in alarm. They weren't complicated devices – a small fan assembly to draw air in, a cooling block to lower the capacity of the air to carry moisture, and a catchment and storage system to hold the water that precipitated out. They worked better in humid areas, but even in the blasted volcanic part of Therum that she was working in they provided enough water for a single asari to live.

She traced her fingers along the path the water had taken, wincing when the problem made itself clear: The ever-present ash and dust had clogged the float that shut the device off when it was full, and it had run until the water had backed up into the condensation chamber... where the cooling unit froze it solid, cracking the unit and sending it flowing over the ground.

She pursed her lips. She was in no danger of dying from dehydration, at least not in the short term. While the condenser was broken, the storage tank was still mostly full, and even in the worst case she could simply pack up and depart on the small shuttle she'd flown in on. What it did mean was that she would be spending the morning in the blistering heat repairing the blasted thing, instead of examining the computer terminal her drones had revealed in the hive-like prothean building.

Well, such is life, I suppose, she thought with a weary sigh.

"Exiting FTL in three... two... one..."

The bright blue glow of superluminal travel vanished with a flash as the Normandy's mass crossed above zero, allowing the normal cosmic speed limit to return in full force.

"Contact!" Joker shouted as the holo-tank lit up with a series of angry red icons around the large red planet. "I see twelve... no, fourteen unidentified ships in orbit around Therum."

Shepard gripped the back of his chair absently. "How old is the data?"

Faster-than-light reconnaissance was an interesting proposition. While the Normandy could move manyhundreds of times faster than the speed of light, it could still only see things via signals that propagated at light speed. They had arrived about fifteen light-minutes from the planet's surface, which meant that the people on the planet – and the geth, if they were there – couldn't know they arrived for at least fifteen minutes.

The downside of this was that the same latency affected them: Everything they detected from the planet's surface was fifteen minutes out of date. If they were watching the geth make their descent now, from where they floated two hundred and seventy million kilometers away, then the geth had likely already reached the surface.

The pilot tapped a few buttons. "Nine thirty seven on my mark... mark," the pilot said. "They were moving fast for the planet's surface."

"Copy that," she said, pushing off of his chair. "Get us in there, Joker, fast and quiet... but fast trumps quiet."

He nodded grimly. "Aye aye, ma'am."

Liara's day had not improved.

The young asari stood and stretched, working a kink out of her cartilaginous spine. She wasn't a mechanic by trade or even natural inclination, but one didn't mount multiple successful solo excavations on remote worlds without picking up some knowledge of how to maintain and repair equipment. Equipment that was all too prone to jamming, shorting out, melting, or even exploding at the drop of a hat.

Unfortunately, the damage to the condenser had been far more extensive than she'd originally thought. It had looked, initially at least, like a simple patch job. Nothing that omni-gel and a few hours of work wouldn't fix. That was before she's realized that the expanding ice in the condensation chamber had cracked the cooling block as well, rendering the thermoelectric unit completely useless.

She bit her lip worriedly. If she couldn't get condenser working again, she'd be forced to replace it... which meant a trip to the local human colony.

She'd been desperately hoping to avoid needing to travel there. Not because the humans were particularly bad in her eyes. What few experiences she'd had with their kind had brief, and while significantly more informal than she was accustomed to, relatively pleasant. No, she avoided the colony for the same reason she'd taken pains to keep her camp and excavation site as low profile as possible in the first place: Looters, scavengers, pirates, and slavers.

The looters and scavengers would see an educated asari with survival equipment and make the connection immediately: She was working a site, and if an actual archeologist was out and about, it meant there was the chance of getting really valuable salvage. If she was lucky, they'd render her unable to stop them and steal anything that wasn't bolted down (and many things that were). The site would be ruined, and it wasn't like the protheans were making any more of them. If she were unlucky they'd take her shuttle, as well, but most looters and scavengers weren't the murdering kind.

Most.

The pirates and slavers, on the other hand, generally were. While it was unlikely that there would be any major ones on an active industrial world patrolled by the Systems Alliance, it wasn't impossible. They'd leave the site alone and go after the far more lucrative find: The lone daughter of a powerful asari matriarch. Even if they believed her when she said she was estranged, she was still looking at a miserable turn of events.

Which is why it's really better if I can get this blasted device working again, she thought as she leaned down to apply more omni-gel to the cracked cooling block.

She was just about to apply the hardening catalyst to it when her omni-tool screeched.

The proximity alarm.

Liara dropped the condenser component without a second thought and sprinted around the outcropping for her camp, diving into her small tent for her pistol and armored research uniform.

Exploring alone was always dangerous. Ignoring the sentient threats to her well-being, there were far more mundane things that could go wrong when working solo. Her equipment could fail, she could hurt herself in a way that prevented her from leaving, her vehicle could be damaged, or countless other things could end her trip in all too unpleasant ways.

There were things one could do to mitigate many of them, of course. She made heavy use of drones – heavier use than most of her peers – to explore sites that might be unstable. She filed intended arrival and departure dates with reliable individuals and institutions. She kept a low profile as to not attract local attention.

And she set up proximity alarms to ensure that nothing large got the drop on her.

She finished tugging on the green and white armored coat over the loose lining she normally wore on the furnace of Therum and ducked back out of the tent.

Then the ground shook.

A cloud of dust washed over her, and she sputtered in the sudden darkness brought on by it. Her mind flashed immediately to the volcanic activity this region of Therum was well-known for. If it was a volcanic event that had triggered her proximity alarm, she was already dead. There was no way to possibly start her shuttle in time, not with the ash cloud already swirling, and the gasses would start to asphyxiate her in seconds-

Except that the dust was clearing, and the scent of sulfur and burning rock hadn't assaulted her nose. Tentatively, she lowered her arm from her eyes and squinted around for the source of the noise and chaos.

Her stomach froze as solid as the condenser she'd been trying to repair.

Looming before – no, over – her was the largest robot she'd ever seen. It stood on four widely-splayed limbs, each painted silvery gray with loose cables hanging beneath it. A mechanical whine echoed around the campsite with every slight shuffle it made, and the various weapons mounted on the thing's almost animal-like head almost oozed lethality.

Far more unnerving than its strange design or sudden appearance, however, was the frightening sense of intelligence she felt when it peered down at her. The subtle shifts it took to keep her in view, the flaring of the shield on its single optical sensor, so like an eye... no. This is no mere robot.

She flinched as it lifted one of its legs, gently positioning the limb between Liara and her shuttle. Now why-

Then it fired.

The burst of blue light was blinding in its intensity, and her eyes watered while spots swam in front of her vision. Distantly, over the sudden cry of anguish she heard herself making, she recognized the sound of her shuttle's hydrogen fuel storage detonating. The shockwave from the blast, even blunted as it was by the creature's shielding leg, knocked her flat on the ground.

Dazed, she began to crawl away. She had no direction in mind; everything was happening far too quickly for that. She just knew she had to run, to crawl, to get away from whatever had just landed literally in the center of her makeshift camp.

She managed to move a good meter and a half before a clawed metal talon pressed into her back, pinning her to the ground and shoving her face into the cracked and dry surface of Therum.

"Now hold on," she heard through the dust that the thing was shoving her into, "I ain't gettin' paid for a corpse. Let her breathe."

The terrible weight on her back lessened with another mechanical whine, and she lifted her face out of the dirt, gasping for air. She flung her head left and right, trying frantically to clear the dirt from her eyes.

"You gonna make this easy or hard?" the voice said again, and with her head out of the dirt she could finally identify the speaker:

A krogan.

"Did'ja hear me?" he demanded again. "You gonna make this easy or hard?"

Her mind flashed back to the warnings her friends and family members have given her about exploring alone. They'd warned her that if the wild creatures didn't get her, the slavers in the traverse would. She'd scoffed at them – while slavers were certainly a problem, especially close to batarian space, few would risk working with asari. Their natural biotics made them very difficult to keep confined, and they were often far better trained than most homesteaders or colonists.

"'S no difference to me," the krogan rumbled, kneeling down to look her in the eye. "Saren's gonna get what Saren wants in the end, so why don't you just-"

Saren.

The turian her mother had allied herself with. She hadn't liked the idea at first – the idea of her mother working with the arrogant, condescending Spectre was bad enough, but then she'd started actually helping him! Her letters had gone from kindly to slightly odd to downright alarming over the months she'd spent with him on board his ship, and Liara had been forced to eventually break all contact off. It was too painful, watching the final message her mother had sent, her face twisted with hatred and scorn instead of care and concern like it used to be.

She didn't know what Saren had done to her, or why her mother had changed. She hoped and prayed for it to have all been a ruse, and that she would come to her senses before it was too late.

But if Saren is trying to kidnap me...

She set her jaw. This krogan and his assistants might capture her eventually, but she would be damned if she would take it laying down. She hadn't survived a hundred years to just give up and let someone she hated do what he wanted with her.

She stopped struggling underneath the claw of the thing above her, and the krogan nodded. "Smart move," he said with a low laugh, mistaking her concentration for acquiescence and reaching for her hands with a pair of heavy cuffs.

A little closer...

Just as the krogan was about to shackle her wrists, she twisted on the dirt, throwing all she could into her biotics. The effect wasn't directed at the krogan, but rather at the strange four-legged robot above her, and it squawked an electronic alarm as its mass dropped to a tiny fraction of what it normally was.

She wasn't particularly strong, in the grand scheme of things, but even a child could have lifted the suddenly featherweight automaton into the air. She grabbed the leg that had pinned her and swung it, flinging the entire five meter tall machine around like a giant club at the krogan. Of course, since it now massed next to nothing, the krogan would barely even feel the impact.

That was, of course, assuming she maintained the field.

She dropped the biotic lift affecting the machine an instant before it struck the krogan, and instead of shrugging off the equivalent of a thrown piece of fruit, he was instead subjected to several thousand kilograms of metal and plastics crashing into his face.

His roar of pain and anger was cut off by the screeching crash of strained joints and overloaded servomotors. She didn't wait for the pair to untangle themselves. She ran, ran for the only place that would provide her with any fighting chance:

Into the dig site.

The crew of the Normandy was once again gathered around in the circular briefing and communications room. This time, however, they were armed to the teeth and armored in an almost comical array of colors.

Despite the relatively gaiety of their garb, however, their faces were set.

"We've had a small stroke of luck," Shepard said to the waiting silence. "The administration at Nova Yekaterinburg has kindly informed us the corporation that contracted our young doctor to excavate. Unfortunately, they don't know precisely on the property she is, which means we get to go hunting."

"Pah," Wrex grumbled under his breath. "Not the good kind of hunting."

She flashed a quick smile at the krogan before turning back to the briefing.

The display at the far end of the room obligingly lit up to show a fuzzy topographical map of the region. "The property is split into two parts: Living quarters and the excavation site. Miners working commute along several kilometers of rough road to reach the mines proper."

The display twisted, highlighting two broad regions while darkening the rest of the map.

"The geological activity in this region is, shall we say, intense," she said dryly, and a chuckle ran around the room. "The living quarters are so far back from the mine to ensure that there's time to evacuate in the event of an 'unanticipated eruption,' quote unquote."

She tapped another button on her omni-tool, and two small green dots appeared near bottom of the map. "We'll be splitting into two teams," she announced. "Team one will move with the Normandy's marine complement, and will be in charge of sweeping the living quarters. Team two will take the Mako and head for the mines. We'll be in radio contact the whole time, so don't hesitate to call out if you've found something interesting."

She sighed. "It is my understanding that the doctor is here alone to avoid drawing attention to herself, but that doesn't rule out the possibility of a civilian presence, so watch your fire. Any questions so far?"

"Just the usual one, ma'am," Kaidan said while the others shook their heads.

"Right, then," she said with a nod at Kaidan. "Team one will consist of Kaidan, Williams, and Garrus, with Garrus leading," she said.

Garrus' mandibles flared in surprise, and Ash frowned. "Garrus, ma'am?"

She nodded in confirmation. "Garrus. Of the six people with seniority on the ground team, there are only two people with experience taking biotic prisoners. If Doctor T'Soni is hostile, then this is a kidnapping, not a rescue. Given the geth wandering about," she gestured at the display, "I doubt she'll protest us picking her up, but whether she likes it or not... she is coming with us."

Ashley tilted her head back and forth, mulling it over. "That makes sense," she admitted finally. "Who's the other one? You?"

Shepard shook her head. "I'm not really the capture type," she said dryly. "Wrex?"

The old krogan huffed. "Been a while since I had to catch an asari," he rumbled, and Ashley made a face as she realized what scenarios would lead to the old mercenary catching an asari. "Might be a bit rusty."

She nodded. "I doubt it'll be necessary. In a choice between the geth and us, I'm almost certain she'll pick us. Tali?"

The quarian jumped. "Yes, Shepard?" she asked.

"You're with Wrex and me, but make sure Kaidan and Garrus have copies of your latest combat hacking programs before we go."

The quarian bobbed her head. "Will do," she acknowledged before unfurling herself from the egg shape chair to walk over to Kaidan with her omni-tool.

"Any questions? No? Then meet up down in the cargo hold, we drop in five."

Liara gasped as she stumbled down the long corridor leading into the dig site. She couldn't hear the krogan or his automata behind her, but she knew they were there, and if she stopped to look back they'd be right there and-

She tripped on a rock.

At first, she thought that the krogan had managed to shoot her. Her world lurched, and an explosion of pain ran through her chest as she landed flat on the damp metal catwalk. It was only after several ragged breaths that she realized the pain was not from a stunner, or bullet, or even a tranquilizer needle but from a simple rock on the ground, moved there after another minor seismic event caused it to fall from the roof of the mine.

The other thing she noticed as she dragged herself back to her feet was how quiet it was. There was no echoing thud of footsteps coming down the metal corridor behind her, no metallic springing sound of boots or claws on metallic walkways, not even the whine of a scouting drone. She was, for the moment, completely alone.

Alone, unarmed, and trapped underground with a would-be kidnapper chasing her.

She tried to fight the rising panic down, closing her eyes to take a steadying breath. Stop that, she scolded herself. Yes, he's trying to catch you. Screaming about it won't help you now. Think!

Her mind obligingly conjured up images of her strapped to a chair in an empty room while a shadowy turian paced back and forth with malice in every step.

Not helping!

She shook her head, trying to force the images her subconscious had created out of her mind. That kind of morbid imagination, combined with her embarrassing habit of speaking before thinking, had gotten her into more than a little bit of trouble in the past with the few friends she had at the university. And even if it is accurate, it is still pointedly not helping!

A haunting electronic chitter echoed down through the hard walls of the mine from somewhere above her.

Deeper, she thought desperately. The prothean ruins she'd been excavating had been remarkably well-preserved, including a working generator and even computer systems. If there was anything that could slow her attackers down, it would be in the ruins.

Setting her shoulders, she ran once again into the deepening gloom.

Shepard wished she could reach her brow to wipe the sweat from it.

Sadly, Alliance helmet design prevented that, and if she thought it was warm inside the climate-controlled combat suit, well... the world was more than willing to inform her of just how wrong she was if she took it off.

"Vakarian, Shepard," she said, depressing the radio toggle with her left hand.

"Go for Vakarian," the turian's voice said in her helmet.

"We've just hit a mine staging facility full of geth," she said, sweeping her gaze over the mangled and crushed bodies of the geth. "It's clear now, but Tali tells me that radio contact's going to be iffy from here on out."

"Understood. We're almost done here; no sign of the doctor so far. Do you want us to move to support you?"

She pursed her lips. The extra support from Ashley, Kaidan, and Garrus, and the rest of the Normandy's marines would be welcome, but they'd have to walk out to meet her, and the path in was literally next to a lake of lava.

"Negative," she said. "Have the Normandy pick you up, I want you ready to deploy if things go badly here."

"Copy that. We'll finish our sweep through the habitat and return to the Normandy."

Releasing her hand from the communicator toggle, she turned to where Tali was carefully cutting a part out of one of the destroyed geth rocket troopers. "Tali!" she called, although the volume wasn't needed with the radios they used. "Are you done yet?"

The young quarian pulled something out of the geth's chest cavity with a vicious yank, depositing it carefully in a heavy suit pocket. "All set, Shepard," she said as she shuffled quickly over to the commander.

"Good. I sent Wrex to get the Mako, he should be here any-"

Her words were cut off by the high-pitched whine of the Mako's powerful electric motor and the scrape of heavy tires on gravel. She raised an eyebrow as the massive personnel carrier slash tank whipped around the entrance to the staging area like ground car on a racetrack, sliding expertly to a stop mere meters in front of them. The cooling fans whirred loudly in the sudden quiet.

She stared at the tank, and Tali took a slow step from where she'd jumped back in alarm. "Shepard, I don't mean to be rude, but..."

"Speak."

"...I think Wrex is a better driver than you are."

She snorted, reaching for the latch at the back of the tank. "Give me a thousand years and I'd probably figure it out, too," she said. "Come on, we've got a doctor to find."

She let Wrex drive for the remainder of the trip.

Not only was he a better driver, but she was a far better gunner. It turned out that krogan favored shotguns for more than aesthetic reasons: A close-range weapon didn't require binocular vision and depth perception to use well, both of which krogan lacked.

It certainly explains why I've never seen a krogan sniper, she thought as she punched another armor-piercing high explosive shell straight through the center of mass of another geth prime.

It was odd, she thought to herself while the geth crumpled to the ground in the distance. They'd seen several geth dropships fly by overhead, a few of which had even dropped enemies in her path, but nothing resembling major resistance. It's almost like they just want to slow us down, not stop us... or like they don't care where we're going, but want us to think they do.

She scowled. "Tali?" she asked, not taking her gaze from the gun camera.

"Yes, Shepard?" Tali replied, looking up from her omni-tool.

"You know any reason why the geth wouldn't be deploying more forces? These are barely slowing us down."

The quarian quirked her head to the side. "No idea. It's not like they're lacking for troops..." she trailed off.

Which means they've almost got T'Soni and just need to leave or we're going the wrong way and they're leading us along like Hansel and Gretel, except with easily-exploded automata instead of breadcrumbs.

She grimaced. Worse still was that she didn't have any way to find out. "Wrex!" she called forward to the driver's seat.

"Hrh?" The krogan grunted, keeping his attention on the treacherous road.

"Step on it," she ordered. "I don't think we have a whole lot of time."

She didn't hear an acknowledgment, but she felt the Mako shift, even through its internal gravitic system, as the krogan accelerated.

"Looks like this is as far as we go," Shepard said as they slowly pulled up to the narrow rocky pass.

"Hrph," Krogan grunted, carefully extricating himself from the tight confines of the driver's seat. "Figured it was too good to last."

"You'll get another chance, I'm sure," she said. "Tali? You ready?"

The quarian took a shuddering breath and nodded. "I am. Let's go."

"You're doing well," she said, patting the young woman on the shoulder before keying her commlink. "Shepard to Normandy, do you read?"

Joker's static-distorted voice sounded through their helmets. "It's pretty fuzzy, Commander, but we read you. What's up?"

She shook her head at the pervasive lack of communications discipline on the Normandy. "We've hit an obstacle we can't pass in the mako and are proceeding on foot. Is Garrus' team back yet?"

"They didn't reach you? Guess not. They ran into a huge geth, a big four-legged thing, and it took a long time to take it down. We're about to load them up."

"A colossus," Tali whispered to her. "They have antipersonnel guns and a plasma cannon and really thick armor."

She swore under her breath. The team split had been chosen on the basis of the ability to capture a potentially hostile wayward asari, not for making sure each team could take down light tanks. "How bad were the casualties?" she asked. "Can the remainder of the team fight?"

"Ash got grazed by a plasma blast, and there's a marine in medbay with, like, eighteen extra holes in his arm, but other than that everyone's more or less intact. You want backup?"

She grunted. Better than she had expected, given how few heavy weapons the marine team was carrying. Either Garrus had a better head for small-unit tactics than she'd originally thought, or Tali's programs were particularly effective. Either way, it meant she had reinforcements.

"Yes," she answered. "Have them restock and get them to the Mako's beacon ASAP. Wrex, Tali, and I will advance on foot. Tell them to follow the carnage and shoot anything that isn't us."

"Copy that, Commander," Joker said.

She turned back to the two aliens. "That's our cue," she said to the pair. "Time to get personal. Tali, any hacking support you can offer is welcome, otherwise keep your head down and watch our backs. Wrex, make sure we're not flanked. I'll take point. Move up quickly when I signal."

Both of them nodded.

She paused before opening the hatch at the back of the Mako, closed her eyes, took a steadying breath, and pushed at the universe around her.

That wasn't literally what happened, of course. In reality, it was a mnemonic, a trick to help put her in the right state of mind, a specific state that would cause electricity to flow through the small chunk of scar-wrapped element zero buried in her skull in just the right way.

Most biotics used a simpler mechanism and their amplifiers. Triggering the right muscle groups with the amplifier active would cause the amp to send a surge of electricity down the user's nervous system, synchronizing and energizing the element zero nodules to create the desired effect.

Hers didn't function that way. She had grown up with her biotics tied to the things she did with her mind so closely that it was like another limb, not a series of gestures to create an effect. Most Alliance soldiers treated biotics like a wizard in a fantasy game treated spells: You knew the specific gestures and motions to use, practiced them, and when you performed them, magic happened.

To Shepard, it was like breathing. You didn't think how you did it, you simply did, and your lungs filled with air. Swing a fist to punch someone, and the fist was many times as massive as it should have been. Jump into the air, and she weighed momentarily less when her feet left the ground.

When Shepard pushed, a barrier coalesced around her. It was an extension of her will, her focus made manifest in a very real manner. It would shield her. She willed it, and so it would be.

She opened her eyes and nodded in reply. "Let's go."

No, no, no, no...

Liara's bad day had long since passed "worse" and was now well into "a disaster."

She'd manage to get to the ruin before the krogan and his cohorts caught her, but only just, and they'd been shooting at her almost non-stop since then. Not just with normal bullets, either – she could have handled that, she'd been in life-or-death situations before. No, they were using compressed air dart launchers, and instead of bullets they were peppering her hiding place with a barrage of tranquilizers.

Which, in addition to driving home the fact that they were trying to capture her and drag her off to Goddess-only-knows what horrific fate, posed the much more immediate problem of moving slowly enough that her personal shield unit didn't consider them a threat worth countering.

She'd been relying on her biotics to stop them, but between preventing the krogan and his servants from turning her into a pincushion of sedatives and throwing the smaller, eerily familiar robotic soldiers away, her strength was fading fast.

If only I hadn't dropped my pistol, she thought desperately as she heaved another one of the automata off the walkway to the ground. At the beginning, she'd taken to throwing them against the far wall so that they might slide down and impale themselves upon the stalagmites on the floor of the cavern, but with her strength flagging she was barely managing to toss them off the walkway.

Which meant that it was only a matter of time before they caught her.

Another silver-headed figure poked its head around the ledge she was hiding behind. She squeaked, and flung her arm out in the mnemonic for the biotic throw she'd be repeating for the last half hour, only to watch in horror as the creature was barely knocked sideways.

No...

She stood, trying to run, but the world was spinning, and the ache of biotic overexertion pounded in her veins with each frantic beat of her heart. Goddess, no...

Crawling. She could crawl. At least the things after her were pulled her way along the cool catwalk floor, past the damage elevator, and in to the core of the ruin before collapsing on the smooth stone floor of the prothean building.

Funny, she thought dazedly as the world spun in and out of focus, those almost look like tally marks...

The realization blew through her mind like a storm.

Even from the very first day, she hadn't been able to figure out what this building was for. A hive of small, featureless cells, built out of hardy material even by prothean standards, with an unusually intact computer system and infrastructure. It was the only piece of intact prothean architecture in the middle of what amount to an active volcano chain.

She'd hoped at first that it was some kind of data archive, like the vast one the humans had discovered beneath the surface of one of the worlds in their solar system. She had quickly realized that wasn't the case, or if it had been, the material within had been removed or never installed in the first place.

But from another perspective...

What other kind of building featured incredible physical robustness, spartan furnishings, strong security, long-lasting construction, unusual computer systems, and its own generator?

A prison.

She lurched to her feet, her people's version of epinephrine burning the fatigue and exhaustion from her mind in a tingling rush. The creature that had been trailing her had nearly reached her; a vicious biotic shove sent the closing machine tumbling head over heels out of the cell she stood in.

She turned to the terminal folded against the wall with a desperate, almost manic energy. She didn't speak prothean, and speed-reading it was beyond even her talents, but if she was right, and this actually was a prison, there would be no need to understand. Prison lockdowns were not complicated to put in place, at least not in any modern facility. Lifting them, on the other hand, could be a different story... but she could worry about that later.

The interface unfolded with a chirp, and she hesitated only for a moment before slamming her palm down on the biggest button the terminal. She almost sobbed in relief when a shimmering blue barrier appeared across the opening to the mine with a quiet snapping sound.

Even the gut wrenching lurch as some containment system yanked her away from the terminal and lofted her into the air, arms and legs splayed out like a plush doll, couldn't spoil the mood.

Rest first, she though muzzily to herself as the world blurred around her, her body paying the price for the adrenaline rush she'd ridden to make the final push. Rest, then escape. You've bought time.

"I see three of them in the tower," Tali whispered, her eyes glued to the small screen of her omni-tool. "Four more on the hillside to the right, and a pair of rocket troopers in the open low part directly ahead."

Shepard nodded. They'd fought through the rocky canyon past the mako with relative ease, Wrex's shotgun and Tali's disabling computer work taking care of what few geth survived their first encounter with Shepard's biotics.

Of all the forces they'd had arrayed against them since departing the mako, only the rocket troopers gave her pause. The rifles wielded by the "standard" ground units were powerful compared to the guns she had access to, but not impossibly so, and the fire rate was atrocious. The snipers were even more of a joke – they used actual laser sights to highlight their targets before taking shots, and while their aim was unerring, their reaction time was atrocious.

The rocket troopers, though... she pursed her lips. Despite their plodding, almost comical gait and their unwieldy looking weapons, the small missiles they fired were powerful, and Wrex had come within centimeters of losing his hump to one of the explosives. Worse, while she could easily protect herself from the shrapnel the rockets produced with her biotics, the heat and shockwave from the explosive would travel straight through her barrier or her shields.

She made a mental note to ask Tali about the somewhat hit-or-miss get weapon development of the geth when she got back on the ship.

In the meantime, she had an assault to run.

"Okay," she said. "First priority is taking out those rocket troopers. Do you have any programs in there that'll let you take control of one of the geth?"

Tali nodded. "It'll only work on one of them at a time, though. Who did you want me to hit?"

"Take the right one, and have it shoot the snipers if you can," she said. "Wrex, you and I are going to hit the one on the left, then the snipers, then the assault troopers on the hill. Copy?"

"Yeah, I got it," he said.

"On three. One... two... three!"

Hacking was never a terribly dramatic activity. The hacker pushed a button and either the code worked or it didn't. There was no frantic programming on the fly – finding security holes took teams of smart people many hours of dedicated work to get one way in to a system remotely. These exploits were recorded, payloads were designed, and tool suites were assembled with the techniques. Good ones covered a wide variety of systems and delivered multi-headed attacks against different security flaws at once to prevent automated recovery systems from recognizing the unauthorized access and eliminating it. Bad ones were just scripts that ran everything while the user hoped for the best.

So when Shepard shouted three, there was no tense tapping of keys and mumbled buzzwords. There was a single beep, a blinking light, and a young quarian giving her a thumbs up.

She and Wrex rose simultaneously from behind their rocky pieces of cover, her pistol and his shotgun already roaring their fury at the unfortunate rocket trooper.

She could have easily used her shotgun as well – despite what the movies showed, shotguns did not actually function like a wide-mouthed hose of death, and remained quite accurate to even moderate distances – but using high explosive rounds in a shotgun was begging for a face full of shrapnel, and she wanted to knock the trooper off balance long enough to close to biotic range.

If there was one limitation to the ability of biotics, it was range. Projecting a mass altering field far away from the element zero was both difficult and draining, meaning that while a clever biotic could easily use his or her abilities to wreak havoc at long range – say, by throwing a boulder – directly affecting somebody a hundred meters away was nearly impossible, even for the strongest biotic.

This limitation was worked around in different ways by different users of biotic power. The famed asari commandos relied on careful coordination and ambushes to trap their targets within range of their abilities. The Drell utilized biotics as an augmentation to their already impressive hand-to-hand combat training, opting to use biotic power as a complement to their skill set rather than the primary focus. Human biotic practice was as back-line support, with the biotic disrupting the environment or allowing front-line members of a team to move through a battlefield with impunity.

Shepard took a different approach.

She had lived her whole life with access to biotic power. It was as much a part of her as her arms or legs were, and she used it almost as unconsciously. When she punched something, her fists grew much more massive a moment before striking. When she jumped, her weight lessened almost to nothing at the moment her feet left the ground. While the effect was minor at most without an amplifier, with one, it was alarmingly effective.

Her natural and intuitive approach had caused more than a few problems when they'd first given her an amplifier, as the default programming was to override the normal neural impulses with pre-programmed impulses triggered by specific mnemonics. She'd actually needed to have a custom piece of amplifier firmware made, one that only boosted the strength of the signals her brain sent rather than one that overrode them.

The results when they had finally gotten it right were alarming, to say the least.

She peppered the leftmost rocket trooper with a barrage of high-explosive rounds, sending roaring crash echoing through the canyon. The trooper's armor held, barely, but it was knocked flat on its back by the force of the blasts.

Beside her, Wrex swore as the trooper dropped out of sight.

"I've got the trooper," she said, pointing up at the tower with the slow snipers. "Take those snipers out. Mind the ones on the hill!"

He grunted acknowledgment, swinging his heavy shotgun to the right and firing for effect while she began dashing for the bowled-over rocket trooper. She closed the gap easily, her artificially lightened stride letting her stretch her normally short stride into multi-meter long bounds across the dusty canyon floor.

The trooper was just begin to right itself when she slammed her shoulder into it, knocking the automata back to the ground. She straddled the geth as it fell, hauling her armored right fist back while a faint blue nimbus surrounded it.

Like all the things Shepard used, her oddly asymmetrical armor had a purpose, and it wasn't just to look intimidating to people. The heavily armored gauntlet with the thick metal plating over the knuckles wasn't just to look menacing; it was also a way to ensure she didn't completely destroy her hand when she hit things – a scenario that was almost inevitable if she punched as hard as she could without it.

The 'biotic palm strike,' as one of her classmates in the Villa had called it, really wasn't a palm strike at all. It was a closed-fist punch like any other, with the point of maximum extension a centimeter or two beyond the intended point of impact. The difference was, of course, that a normal punch didn't involve an armored fist that massed in the hundreds of kilograms while traveling at nearly forty kilometers per hour. It was, for all intents and purposes, like being struck by a small ground vehicle traveling at residential speeds... concentrated into an area approximately five centimeters by two centimeters, with spikes.

She watched with interest as her fist slammed into, and through, the rocket-troopers neck. Articulated plating bent and shattered, control linkages were severed, and conduit filled with some kind of conductive sparking slime splattered into wreckage when her spiked gauntlet slammed through them and into the dust behind the creature's body.

Her hand struck the cracked dirt behind the geth, raising a small cloud of dust, and she grinned savagely as the light in the thing's eye flickered out.

She looked up from the geth's corpse in time to see the dominated geth's rocket hit the sniper nest at almost the same instant as Wrex's carnage blast, with immediate and dramatic results. The entire tower lilted to the side, sending the single sniper that hadn't been torn to pieces by the twin explosions falling three meters to the rocky floor below.

"Shepard!" Tali's voice called out, slightly panicked. "I'm losing the trooper!"

"Right," she said, disentangling her legs from the trooper to sprint for its comrade.

Modern mass effect shielding had several limitations. The most obvious one was its inability to stop slow-moving objects, like fists, knives, or thrown rocks. The different between a fist and a quick slam into a wall after a sprint wasn't big enough, and if the shield attempted to lower the mass of the wall every time the wearer took cover behind one, it would rapidly deplete itself.

The other flaw was that, due to the processing power and ramp-up time required for the field, the shield's boundary was set by a fairly simple "distance from point of generation" algorithm established a fair distance away from the wearer. It didn't stop shots when they reached the wearer's skin, it stopped them when a shot got within a meter and a half of the shield generator – which was typically worn near the belt, at least for humans.

This meant that if one could move a weapon inside the shield, it didn't matter what kind of shield it was – it provided literally no protection.

Shepard quickly swapped her high-explosive block for a tungsten one as she ran, then jammed her pistol into the geth's back. She saw it twitch as she pressed the gun to it, watched its eye flicker as it began purging itself of the foreign programming Tali had inflicted upon it, and proceeded to pull the trigger.

Bereft of its shielding, the geth fell to the ground with a mechanical whine and a small shower of goo.

They were almost done here, she figured. With the rocket troopers and snipers gone, the only remaining forces her omni-tool could detect were the small cluster of rifle-bearing geth coming down the hill. They could be a threat, as the massacre on Eden Prime had proven, but not a large one – especially not to a team that was as well-equipped as hers was. Wrex hadn't lived to a ripe old age by skimping on equipment, she had her own powerful advantages, and Tali was well out of the line of fire.

"Alright," she said into her commlink, "let's clear these out and move up. Map says the mine entrance is up ahead."

Liara's plan, such as it was, to keep the krogan mercenary out of the prothean ruin had proven to be a success. Despite the age of the prison, the kinetic barriers had all sprung up with nary a flicker, and had proven remarkably resistant to small arms fire and the krogan's attempt to batter his way in. Even the concrete walls, unprotected as they were, had endured the rocket fire the automata had unleashed upon them with aplomb.

Unfortunately, she was equally trapped. Her initial plan – freeing herself with her biotics after ensuring the krogan couldn't reach her – now seemed untenable with the field that now surrounded her. She'd struggled against it when the krogan and his mechanical servants weren't looking, but no matter how much of her failing strength she threw into the effort, it adjust perfectly to oppose her efforts and keep her levitating.

Which made perfect sense, when she actually took a moment to stop and think about it. It was well known that biotic talent among the protheans was common if not universal, at least among the more important members of their society. Surely any prison designed to restrain one of their kind would possess numerous systems to prevent a biotic detainee from casually waltzing out.

The krogan hadn't been idle, either. When his various armaments had failed to do more than trigger a small cascade of rocks falling from the roof of the cavern, he'd stormed off in a huff to the back of the large cave with his synthetic assistants. It was hard to tell what he was doing – between the poor lighting, shimmering barrier, and night vision capability of both him and his servants, it was next to impossible to see what was happening – but the sounds of heavy equipment being moved around were unmistakable.

"Finally," she heard him grumble from the back of the cave. "No, don't turn it on yet, lemme talk to her first."

The krogan lumbered up the barrier and tapped an armored finger on the concrete frame with a small clink. "Awake in there, Doctor?" he asked, a wide grin across his face. "Feel like coming out of there on your own, or do we need to knock real hard?"

She glared at him.

"Didn't think so," he chuckled, turning away. "Go ahead and fire- what do you mean there's an intruder?"

Unbidden hope began fluttering in her chest for the second time that day.

"You've lost how many? Stupid machines... no, don't send reinforcements, pull back until you can fix the colossus." He shot her a glare over his shoulder. "Stay put, Doctor," he snarled at her. "We'll get you out of there soon enough."

As if I have a choice, she thought to herself, then peered into the darkness toward the opening of the mine. Please, whoever you are... hurry!

"I don't like this, Shepard," Wrex said quietly as they peered up the slope to the mining facility. They'd caught glimpses of something darting around the heavy metal structure, but hadn't gotten a clean fix.

Shepard was inclined to agree with his assessment. There was only one way in, and the approach was nearly a hundred meters up a smooth sloping incline with no cover to speak of. To make matters worse, the building on the top of the hill was a veritable labyrinth of metal pipes, plates, and industrial equipment.

"Tell me about it," she agreed. If not for the chance of accidentally harming the doctor and her unreliable radios, she'd have taken cover below and called for the Normandy to level the building long before. Unfortunately, corpses made for poor sources of information, and she couldn't risk atomizing the entire reason she'd come to this baking hellhole.

"This is going to be rough," she said, lowering her gun to look Tali and Wrex in the eye. Or, well, the faceplate. "No cover, and I can guarantee we're walking into an ambush."

"So what else is new?" Wrex asked with a shrug, and Shepard smiled. He had a point – all of the engagements she'd taken him on so far had been a straightforward march into the guns of a prepared foe.

"One day, Wrex, I promise we'll attack someone who isn't expecting it," she said. "Now. I'll take point and draw their fire. Wrex, I want you covering Tali – she's not biotic and doesn't have our gear. Tali, I want you focusing on locking down any rocket troopers we might run into. Don't worry about the rest; they're not really a threat."

Wrex shuffled sideways, placing his considerable bulk between the flashes of movement at the top of the hill and the quarian.

She pointed up the hill at a small crate set near the edge of the machinery. "Take cover behind that. Tali in the middle, Wrex on the left, I'll take the right. Everyone ready?"

Wrex nodded, and Shepard saw Tali's feet shift slightly in the dust. "Okay, good. Let's go."

Note to self, she thought absently while swapping her pistol to use a high-explosive ammo block, drill new team members on Alliance hand signals so I don't have to stand around talking for the majority of the mission.

Her pistol ready, she focused on the second part of her approach: Her biotic barrier.

It was largely trivial to maintain a personal barrier, especially for her. Most adepts chose to piggyback their biotics into their shield generators – allowing the shield generator to trigger an automatic surge of biotic power provided by the user to augment the shield's ability to deflect incoming fire. For most people, it could be quite draining, tiring them out and reducing the speed with which they could use their 'active' techniques in the amplifier. The body only could convert glucose to energy so quickly.

Shepard had the advantage of having far more element zero scattered through her body – and brain – than most biotics did. She made better use of her (admittedly heavily modified) L3 implant than most L2s, and Kaidan had been quite surprised when he saw her fight for the first time.

Of course, nothing in life was free, and her power was no exception. She could sustain more abilities than most, use her powers like a natural extension of her body, and wreak havoc on a scale that her biotic trainers found downright alarming... but she ate almost triple a normal soldier's rations when actively using her biotics, and the doctors still called her dangerously underweight.

Still worth it, though.

She had been keeping her personal barrier sustained since they left the Mako. It was only sensible, and while tiring, had saved her life on more than one occasion. Now, faced with the prospect of playing willing bait, she pushed harder on it, focused more on it. It was the difference between wearing a heavy backpack and carrying a Mako tire as exercise: One was a load you grew accustomed to with time, the other wasn't something you did for very long if you could ever help it, and no matter how good a shape you were in, it would still leave you worn out.

The faint blue blur that had given her sharp features an almost asari cast intensified to a pronounced purple shimmer, with ripples coursing through it where her control fluctuated slightly.

Her weapon ready and barrier set, she began her watchful-yet-brisk climb up the hill into the ambush she knew was there.

"Huh. Never seen a robot look like that before," Wrex's commented as the peered down at the strange machine Shepard had blown the head off of.

It really didn't look like a geth, at least, not like any geth Shepard – and more importantly, Tali – had ever seen. Instead of the standardized hard armor she'd encountered on all the geth troopers (or mobile platforms, as Tali called them) it had a tough and resilient flexible polymer. Instead of servomotors and linear actuators, it appeared to have some kind of liquid that fueled organic muscles, refreshed by a complicated processing plant on its back.

They had been nearly impossible to pin down, as well. Between an electronic warfare suite that made everything in Tali's bag of tricks look downright obsolete, they could jump. Not a biotic-assisted vault, like Shepard could do, but a purely mechanical leap. Combined with a kind of gripping surface on their hands and feet, and the geth had a mobile weapons platform that was almost impossible to detect and more mobile than the best-trained Vanguards.

"I'm just glad they didn't equip them with better guns," she replied. "Tali, get as many scans of this thing as you can, then we need to move."

Tali murmured an absentminded assent, half her arm shoved into the geth's chest cavity – or what would be a chest cavity, if the geth had internal organs like most bipedal species did.

Shepard leaned over her, resting a hand on her shoulder. She'd worked with scientists and engineers before, during her tours of "reputation rehabilitation" after Torfan. Many of them – the good ones, at least – often had the ability to block out the rest of the universe when they were focused on the task at hand. It was a good trait for getting jobs done, but something of a liability if not checked in live-fire scenarios.

"Just a moment, Shepard," she said before slamming her arm into the geth up to the elbow. With a sudden wrenching motion, she pulled out an ichor-coated piece of electronic equipment, still trailing several large wires. "Memory core!"

Ah. "Download it later. We need to get out of the open before-"

Her explanation was cut off by the characteristic high-pitched whine of a reaction thruster being fired in the atmosphere, and the almost immediate subsequent thud of something massive hitting hitting the ground.

Shepard quickly ducked to the side, glancing around the crate they were hiding behind. Maybe ten meters away, dropped straight from the geth ship with no kind of parachute or counter-gravity system at all, was the largest geth Shepard had laid eyes on. Tali's head poked around the corner and she dropped the data core in shock. "Colossus!" she whispered in shock, ducking behind the crate.

So that's a colossus, Shepard thought while settling in behind the crate. Nasty looking.

At least, it would be, if she wasn't a living piece of anti-vehicle weaponry.

Beside her, Wrex's shotgun roared as he began pouring fire into the thing's armored side. Thanks to the tungsten rounds she'd made everyone carry, it wasn't a complete waste of time, but it wasn't likely to score critical damage before the plasma cannon Tali had said the things carried destroyed them.

Which was fine with her. It gave her a moment's space to determine the safest way to take the thing down without exposing herself to its multiple weapons or nasty looking claws.

Fighting as a biotic was as much an exercise in fighting smart as it was raw power. She was reasonably confident that she could tear the colossus apart with her biotics alone, but it would be slow work and there was no guarantee that there weren't more where the colossus came from. They had spotted at least ten geth dropships searching the planet when they'd arrived in system, after all, and it would be the height of foolishness to think they weren't in communication with each other.

Which meant that she needed to end the fight quickly.

Pulling a grenade from her belt, she twisted the detonation timer to 'remote detonation only' and turned off the tiny mass effect levitation unit built in to the housing. Then, taking careful aim, she stepped back from the crate and lobbed the high explosive into the air.

It landed with a clatter on top of the wide metal conveyer belt assembly that ran overhead.

Perfect.

"Tali!" she shouted at the quarian kneeling against the back of the crate. "Can you make it walk forward?"

Tali looked up at her, and Shepard could easily imagine the incredulous look on her face. "Toward us?"

"Yes!"

"If you say so..." she said, trailing off as she tapped a series of buttons on her omni-tool. "There. Just tell me when."

Shepard settled herself on the opposite side of the crate from Wrex, readying herself for the maneuver she was about to attempt. "Go!"

She heard the servomotors and hydraulics in the colossus whine as Tali's code suborned its movement control, and heard the heavy thuds of its footfalls on the dry earth. She risked a glance around the corner.

Just a little farther...

It stepped beneath the excavator and Shepard sprung her trap.

The grenade she's tossed above the ramp exploded, the high explosive charge easily tearing a gaping hole in the machinery. Metal shrapnel and shattered rock were driven in all directions – including straight down. At the same instant, she directed a surge of effort into a biotic field above the colossus, spanning the gap between the top of its body and the bottom of the conveyor.

The debris from the blast, riding the front of the grenade's shockwave, flew directly into the reality-warping field she established. Pebbles gained the mass of mid-sized boulders, shards of metal carried the force of artillery shells, and the one piece of metal rod that went downward carried, for a moment, nearly as much kinetic energy as a crashing shuttle.

There was an unholy screeching of metal and tormented machinery, then silence.

Wrex and Tali peered cautiously around the crate.

"Keelah..." Tali whispered at the sight.

Wrex just grunted.

The entire top half of the colossus was simply gone, blown away by a barrage that would give even a mid-sized frigate pause. The metal rod that had emerged from the explosion intact had flown through the colossus' neck without slowing down, only stopping when it left the field that artificially enhanced its mass.

The wreckage teetered on its off-balance legs, then fell to the side with the sound of tearing metal.

Shepard stood, holstering her pistol and brushing her hands off. "I don't think our doctor is outside," she said. "Let's go check the mine."

Deep in the mine, still suspended by the prothean security field, Liara heard the muffled echoes of the explosions outside and wondered what in the world was causing them.

The mine was, against her expectations, quite damp. A small trickle of water ran down the long circular pipe that served as the passageway in to the initial excavation, and Shepard idly wondered whether or not Therum was another one of the countless worlds that had been far colder in the distant past.

Archaeological interests aside, the moisture on the ground provided concrete evidence that someone had come through this tunnel recently: Footprints.

"Hold up," she called before any of her crew stepped on them. "Wrex, shine your light over here."

The krogan obligingly swung the light mounted beneath the barrel of his shotgun around to where she was pointing.

"Looks like our doctor came this way," she said, pointing at a pair of footprints that were approximately her size. "Followed by a large number of geth, and something heavy."

"Krogan," Wrex said, turning an eye to the ground. "Looks like he left, though," he added, pointing at the same deep boot marks leading out of the tunnel.

"Maybe he worked with Liara?" Tali offered.

"Have you ever seen a krogan scientist?" Wrex said with a derisive snort. "He's a mercenary, like I am. Selling guns to the highest bidder."

"Not like you," Shepard corrected. "I doubt I was the highest bidder for your services."

"Don't remind me," Wrex grumbled.

Shepard stood up, absently brushing sand from her knees. "Alright, let's move," she said. "Eyes up and weapons ready, but check your targets, we're not here to kill her." Not until she tells me what she knows, at least.

They moved forward, advancing through the twisting corridors of rock and metal with their weapons – or, in Shepard's case, her biotics – primed and ready. Despite their readiness, they nearly walked straight in to the first geth in the mine. Rounding a corner, Shepard almost collided with the back of one that was looking out over a huge open chamber.

The subsequent fight lasted maybe a half second as the unwitting geth was struck by a point-blank shotgun blast, three different offensive hacking routines, and a biotic shove. The poor unit went flying, its electronic chittering cutting out midair before it crashed into the rock wall and shattered spectacularly into several pieces.

Shepard winced at the echoing clatter as it fell down the twenty meter drop to the floor below. "And now they know we're here," she said with a sigh.

"I like knocking like that. We should do it more often," Wrex grinned.

She drew her pistol and swapped the block from high explosive back to tungsten. High explosives in confined mineshafts were generally a bad plan, even if she did like the ability to knock enemies flat on their back through their shields.

"I think I see an elevator up ahead," she said. "Let's go see if it's functional."

Liara would have clapped her hands to the membranes that served her kind as ears if she had been able to. After many long minutes of silence, the sound of gunfire – loud gunfire – at close range was nearly deafening.

In the corner of her vision, she saw another one of the automata that had been hounding her slam into the floor, its broken and shattered body smoking slightly. Faint echoes and a metallic clanging noise continued to sound through the mine as the parts that had been blown clean off of it rained down over the rocky ground.

What is it the krogan say? 'Seek the enemy of my enemy, and you shall find a friend?' Liara thought, staring at the broken machine.

She couldn't help but wonder who it was. She hadn't missed any of her established check-in times yet, not by a long shot, so it couldn't be one of her established fallbacks. Perhaps word of my mother's behavior reached Thessia, and they are retainers of the house not loyal to Benezia's madness? That seemed the most likely scenario... or, at least, the most pleasant one. They weren't likely raiders, as few raiders would risk facing an enemy as well-prepared as her would-be kidnapper was.

No, the worst realistic outcome was that they were Justicars investigating her and her house for her mother's madness, and even that was a welcome alternative to falling into Saren's hands!

"Hello?" she called out into the darkness? "H-hello? Can anyone hear me? I'm trapped, I need help!"

"Or it's a trap for us, and she needs help springing it," Wrex muttered under his breath while they piled into the worryingly unstable elevator.

"It's possible," Shepard admitted, "but I doubt it. Still, be ready."

"I'm always ready."

The elevator predictably failed, although Shepard couldn't fault the engineers that designed it. The entire bottom floor had been torn asunder, with the level the elevator was supposed to dock at crumpled and fallen onto the rock below.

Tali winced at the grinding sound of the elevator motor failing. "That's not good," she said slowly, peering out of the elevator cage and up into the darkness. "We'll need another way up."

"We'll worry about that later," Shepard said, slipping out of the half-exposed gap to land on the crumpled floor below. "I think we've found our asari."

Oh, thank the Goddess.

It was hard to see through the shimmering barrier curtain, but even distorted by the blue energy field she would have been hard pressed to mistake the figure approaching the barrier for the krogan or his servants. The figure – to her embarrassment, she couldn't tell if it was asari or a female human – approached cautiously, obviously wary of the unknown technology active before her.

She squinted, trying to make the figure out more clearly. She was on the small side, for a human or asari. A blue-purple glow, more than the tint cast on her features by the prothean barrier, marked her as a biotic. Her uniform was... unusual, with no rank insignia, corporate logos or even mercenary tags to identify her. The matte black of her asymmetrically-armored jumpsuit was broken only by a single red and white stripe down the right arm and a tiny pair of icons sewn above her left breast: A red N7, and a stylized pair of blue wings floating above a small circle.

The N7 she didn't recognize, although the human lettering marked the figure as a human woman and not an asari. The blue wings, on the other hand... any member of the races living in council space would recognize those. Illegal to wear unless directly approved by the council, they marked the woman as a Spectre: Highly trained, secretive agents with nearly unlimited personal authority and incredible power. Her mother, as connected and powerful as she was, had only met with members of the shadowy group once.

And now one was standing here before her.

She wasn't sure whether to be reassured or terrified.

"Can you hear me out there?" she called while the human carefully examined her face. "I am trapped, I need help!"

"I can hear you, Doctor T'Soni," she replied levelly. "Are you hurt?"

Liara blinked. She hadn't expected the woman to know her name! She shook her head, at least as far as she could while suspended in the prison's security system. "N-no, I am fine," she said. It wasn't strictly true – she was scraped, battered, thirsty, and suffering from mild hypoglycemia from biotic overexertion – but those weren't really injuries, nothing that would require immediate treatment.

"Good," the woman said, then rapped a heavily armored knuckle against the edge of the cell she was trapped in. "What is this, and how do we disable it?"

So close!

"Listen," she explained urgently, "this thing I'm in, it's a prothean security device. I cannot move, so I need you to get me out of it, all right?"

She tried to keep the rising panic down. There was no rational reason to panic now, she told herself, not when rescue was literally on her doorstep!

But it didn't matter. She could see her freedom, envision it, almost taste it, and rationality be damned she wanted out of this mine and away from mercenary krogan or unsettling synthetics or political intrigue or any of it.

"Hey," the woman said, her voice lowering slightly. "I know it's been rough, but we're here now. Just hang on a little longer, alright?"

Liara swallowed once, and nodded.

"Good," she said, stepping back from the barrier curtain. "Tali! Got something for you to take a look at," she called over her shoulder.

"It's a prothean barrier curtain," Liara began explaining to the human while another armored figure clamored down from the wrecked elevator. "I knew it would keep me safe from..."

She trailed off in shock. The figure jumping down looked like them! It wasn't, of course – this was clearly a quarian, wearing one of the stylized environment suit typical of their kind – but the resemblance in build was uncanny.

Wait. Apparently intelligent synthetics. Brand new, apparently original design. Unusually strong resemblance to the quarians... No. It cannot be...

"Goddess," she whispered, staring at the quarian in shock. "They're geth, aren't they?"

The quarian woman – Tali, Liara assumed, given the name the human had shouted – shot a questioning glance at the human, who nodded slowly.

Tali sighed. "They're geth, yes," she confirmed. "We're trying to figure out why they're helping Saren."

She paled. Saren, the radical Spectre who her mother had run off with? Her stomach sank. That would certainly explain the presence of another Spectre here, personally, for her...

"If you're here about my mother," she said, "I don't know why she got involved with Saren! I haven't spoken to her in years!" Please, you must believe me...

The human raised two hands and motioned downward gently. "Easy. That's part of why we're here, yes, but only part. Are you the author of Mechanisms and function of prothean communication network terminals?"

"W-what?" Liara blinked. That was one of her academic papers, but why in the world would a human Spectre be interested in those? "Yes, that is my work," she admitted. "But why?"

The human's eyes flashed, then, with something Liara didn't recognize. In asari, it might have been triumph, but in a human she simply wasn't sure. "It's too long of a story to explain here," she said, "but I promise you I'll give you the whole rundown when we get you out of there. Trust me, it's quite the tale."

"I-I see," she stammered, momentarily put off balance by the vehemence of the woman's reply. "That won't work," she said to the quarian waving her omni-tool at the barrier. "The barrier curtain can only be shut down from inside. The krogan was trying to blast his way in, but-"

"Wait a minute," a deep and gravelly voice rumbled from the level above her. "What krogan?"

The floor shook, then, as half a thousand kilograms of armored krogan slammed down on the metal walkway in front of her cell. She flinched in spite of the barrier between the two.

"The geth have a krogan leading them," she said as politely as she could manage to the battle-scarred krogan staring at her. "A different one, I mean. He left not long before you arrived."

"Sounds like we found the source of your other footprints," the human murmured, and the krogan grunted. "Doctor T'Soni?" she asked.

"Yes?"

"Is there anyone else down here besides you?"

Liara thought for a moment. "There might be a few geth left," she admitted. "I don't know if the krogan took all of the ones he had back out with him when he went up. They were working on something in the back, but I couldn't see what it was."

"Mining equipment, probably," the human said with a shrug. "Hold on for a bit longer, Doctor, we're going to go see about re-purposing their gear."

"Be careful," she called to their retreating backs.

I don't want to die down here...

The equipment, as it turned out, was an industrial mining laser. Turned around and aimed at one of the open cells, it would blow a convenient hole through anything short of a literal wall made of reflective armor... and the concrete analogue that made up the cells, while tough and polished, wasn't anything remotely resembling a mirror.

"How's it look, Tali?" Shepard asked, peering over the shoulder of the quarian. She didn't really understand what the girl was doing – she could use an omni-tool and a commlink, but anything more advanced than that was completely out of her league.

"Just calibrating it for the material we're pointing it at," she explained, not turning away from her omni-tool. "The miners had it locked down, but it's a mining laser, not military security. I'll have it ready in a moment."

"Good work," she said, patting the girl on the shoulder before stepping back and letting her work.

"Hrrh," Wrex rumbled, eying the distance blue figure in the prothean trap.

Shepard gestured him aside and leaned in close, lowering her voice. "Something bothering you about the doctor?" she asked.

"What, her?" he jerked his head at Liara and scoffed. "Nah. Even if she was a fighter, she's worn out. Just can't tell why everyone's so keen on getting their hands on her. Lotta effort for an archeologist, and Saren's not the sentimental type."

"You've worked with him before, then?" she asked, hoping he'd miss her sidestepping the question.

"Once," Wrex said. "Didn't like the smell of him. Bailed as quickly as I could. Smart move, too – everyone else on his payroll wound up dead fast."

"Interesting," Shepard murmured, filing the information away for later use.

"Shepard!" Tali's voice called from the side of the mining laser. "Good to go!"

She reached over and thumped Wrex's hardsuit. "That's our cue," she said. "Okay, Tali, fire it up!"

The mine exploded.

Not literally, of course. For a moment, though, as the piercing red beam struck the half-buried shimmering barrier, the pit was filled with reflected and refracted light brighter than the noonday sun. Wrex swore and Shepard blinked while the flash suppression filters in her helmet activated.

On the heels of the brilliant display of color came the sizzling roar and echoing crash from the beam's thermal shock, the hiss of rock and prothean construction flashing to vapor and expanding, and the far more ominous ground-shaking rumble as something shifted deep below them.

Wrex swore again as a couple rocks bounced off his head.

Shepard held her breath, waiting tensely for the shaking to subside. It did, gradually, but the occasional tremor spoke poorly of their long-term safety.

"I think we're on borrowed time," she said to the pair. "Let's get the doctor and get out of here."

"I'll say," Wrex muttered, eyeing the cavern roof with distrust.

Between Wrex's muscle, Shepard's biotics, and Tali's omnitool's microfabricator, they managed to cut and wrestle enough pieces of the metal catwalk into the freshly bored hole to avoid melting their boots on the still-glowing surface.

Shepard had to hand it to the protheans; they certainly built things to last. The laser had easily torn through the rock that had built up around the structure in the fifty thousand years since it had last been inhabited, but the actual building itself was barely affected. There was only the slightest hint of softening at the center of the beam's impact point despite the several gigajoules of energy they'd directed at it.

Not really surprising when you consider the mass relays, though.

They clamored through the burned out barrier curtain quickly. While she was reasonably certain the field wouldn't restart after being melted, nobody wanted to find out what would happen if it did.

She smiled at the small console on the central platform. Ancient enigmatic progenitors they might have been, but an elevator was an elevator no matter how advanced your people were.

Shepard couldn't count in prothean, but it didn't take an expert to match a pair of symbols. She tapped the button that had the same characters on it as were etched into the wall next to the cell Doctor T'Soni was in, and the entire center platform lurched upward with the groan of long-disused machinery.

It settled on the next floor up with a loud clank.

T'Soni obviously heard their footsteps, and struggled to face her inside the prothean energy field. "It worked, then?" she asked. Mining lasers weren't precisely subtle tools, and it would have taken a corpse to miss its activation.

"Yes," Shepard replied, "although it almost didn't. This building is tough."

"I think it was a prison," Liara said. "It's the only explanation for the cells, the lack of furnishings, the traps, the heavy construction..."

"Protheans normally don't build things this well?" she asked, only paying half attention to the doctor. There were two consoles in the room, although only one was active. It stood to reason that the one that turned the field on could also turn it off, so she focused her attention there.

Liara blathered on about something regarding prothean architecture and construction techniques. It was interesting, certainly, although not terribly pertinent to their current predicament. Shepard asked insightful-sounding questions at the appropriate times, more than a little amused by how readily the doctor was distracted from the more pressing problems at hand.

There's something about academics, she mused while examining the buttons on the panel, that either by nature or training, allows them to ignore absolutely everything not related to their current task.

If the doctor was correct, and this was in fact a prison, then it wasn't surprising that she had managed to trap herself. A prison had to be easily secured, and it had to be far more difficult to let people out than to keep them in. Logically, that implied that the easiest course of action would be to secure the facility, and the hardest had to be to unsecure it.

The console was divided into two regions, a series of buttons, some of which were illuminated, across the left side that appeared to be analogous in function to the drop-down menus on human computer interfaces. The right side seemed to be some kind of information display, and was filled with what she assumed was prothean writing.

It needs to take willful effort to disable security. That's going to mean multiple steps, with confirmation sequences that cannot be triggered by accidentally tapping a button twice.

Experimentally, she pushed one of the already-illuminated buttons. It stood to reason that pushing an already-active button wouldn't cause further harm, as that would raise the chance that a panicked guard would do something unintended. Indeed, the left-side button was highlighted with a small red outline, and two smaller buttons, one green and one red, lit up on the opposite side of the display.

Excellent. A selection system made sense – it would help the user confirm their choice, and requiring them to redirect their focus to the opposite side of the interface would help reduce accidental activations.

"-but I'm not sure what I did wrong to trigger the trap. Can you maybe take a holo of the menu so I can translate it?" Liara asked.

Any deactivation of the security field will carry the prothean warning color. For humanity, that's red, but I can't assume that we assign the same meaning to the same colors. Warning colors are generally chosen for how readily the eye and brain recognize them, and they should stand out from their surroundings.

"Doctor T'Soni? What color features most prominently in prothean living spaces?"

"I- what?" the asari asked, bemused. "It varies, but usually green, gray, and brown. Blue like this is rare. Why?"

Shepard tapped the red button on the right, then when the entire display darkened and a red and green button appeared in the center, she tapped the red button again.

Behind her, Liara dropped to the floor with a gasp when the security field vanished, sinking to one knee.

"That's why," she said with a smirk, extending her hand to the asari.

Liara took it, and Shepard pulled her to her feet. "How did you-" she began to ask, before a much more pronounced tremor shook the mine and a small rain of stalactites crashed through the ruined catwalk outside the cell.

Shepard glanced upward. "I'll tell you later," she said, urging the doctor to the elevator in the center of the room. "We need to get out of here."

"You trust her?" Wrex asked while they piled on to the elevator. "Her mother's working with Saren," he reminded, and more than loud enough for Liara to overhear.

"I am not my mother!" Liara protested vehemently. "I don't even- I don't know why Benezia... joined... Saren! I don't want anything to do with that turian bastard!"

The asari could be amazing actors, Shepard knew, but she she was fairly certain Liara was telling the truth. There was too much hurt in her voice at the implication, too much sputtering anger for Shepard to believe that she was secretly in league with either one of them... although it certainly sounded like she missed Benezia.

She seems young, Shepard thought. I wonder how old she is.

"I don't trust anybody on principle," Shepard addressed them while the elevator slowly ascended, and Wrex nodded approvingly. "But if she was working with Saren, why were the geth hunting her? Why was she trying to stay hidden? It doesn't make sense."

"Works for me," Wrex grunted.

Another tremor shook the structure, knocking Liara to the floor again and eliciting a grinding noise from the elevator.

"These ruins are not stable," she commented as she picked herself up. "We need to get out of here..."

"Tell me something I don't know," Shepard snapped before pressing her finger to her ear. "Joker, we need immediate evac on my signal."

To her relief – and significant surprise – the pilot's voice came through her communicator loud and clear. "Aye aye, Commander, secure and aweigh. ETA eight minutes."

Eight minutes? What is he doing, stopping back by the citadel for tea?

"If we die in here, I'll kill him," Wrex said, echoing her views aptly.

She looked up at the rumbling tower and hoped they wouldn't run into any more obstacles.

"Surrender," the silver-armored krogan ordered. "Or don't," he added as an afterthought. "That would be more fun."

I should know better than to taunt Murphy, she thought with a silent groan.

The large complement of geth and the krogan – he didn't give his name – had arrived at nearly the exact same instant that the prothean elevator had ground to a halt at the topmost floor of the structure. The damned fool had even activated the same security field that she'd blown through with the mining laser down below, making a quick "biotic lift and exit" a nonworkable tactic.

She could easily toss the entire force he'd brought off a cliff, but holding them in the air long enough to figure out how to drop the barrier wasn't something she was interested in gambling on. Just because she'd gotten lucky with the doctor's cage and picked the correct option the first time around didn't mean she could do it a second time... and especially not with a crowd of geth watching over her shoulder.

Ultima ratio regum, she thought with resignation: The final argument of kings, or, who had the biggest guns.

"We don't have time to deal with this idiot," she snapped, "CHARGE!"

The hefted his shotgun with a broad smile. "I like your attitude," he muttered under his breath, aiming the weapon at Shepard's torso.

Liara really had meant to help.

She was not worldly, at least, not compared to most members of her species. A sheltered youth on Thessia combined with a privileged upbringing had left her somewhat naïve in the ways of the greater galaxy, especially when it came to other species. Nonetheless, even she could see that this confrontation was not going to end peaceably.

If she was being perfectly honest with herself, she wasn't entirely sure she wanted it to. She knew, on a higher level at least, that a peaceful outcome would be best in the long run. If such a thing was possible, it might even mean that her mother wasn't as deranged as the initial behavior of the krogan had led her to believe. But it was very hard to resist the urge to lash back at the one who'd hounded her, wrecked the integrity of her dig site, and threatened her at gunpoint. A primitive desire, to be sure, but one that had a certain allure... especially when she was exhausted as she was.

She'd prepared herself while the synthetics – the geth, she reminded herself – had fanned out behind the krogan, while he'd demanded her surrender. She'd gathered her energies and steeled herself to throw a barrier in front of her, ready to turn aside any shots that might come her way.

Then the human's command to charge came. She'd flared her biotics... and nearly collapsed on the floor, her knees refusing to hold her up while gray splotches floated serenely across her vision and a white hiss sounded against her auditory membrane.

I'm done, she thought almost dreamily as she sank to her knees, fighting for consciousness. Between repairing the cooling unit, her flight into the mine, fighting off the waves of geth, and her subsequent rescue she was simply exhausted.

At least both sides seemed to be ignoring her.

The red-armored krogan was, for lack of a better term, hosing down the left side of the room with his own shotgun. His shields had failed sometime during her little break from reality, and it was obvious the rounds were tearing into his armored hide, but he brushed them off with all the care a great veldt beast gave to fly bites.

The other side was even more interesting, as the geth had seemingly fallen victim to the quarian's fabled computer expertise. A small civil war had broken out, with several geth bearing rocket launchers directing their weapons at the oversized unit that had led them into battle. The shattered remnants of several smaller ones, large impact craters where their torsos should be, littered the floor.

But while the combat prowess of the two companions to the Spectre was impressive enough, it was the human that drew Liara's addled attention the most, and the human whose behavior she found to be most alarming. One expected a krogan to kill things and ignore injury. The same of a quarian and hacking.

One did not expect a human to leap into melee combat with one of the most capable and powerful hand-to-hand fighters in the known galaxy.

But that was precisely what the human did.

Liara looked on as, with the geth distracted, the slight-framed woman bounded forward, her feet barely touching the ground. She carried her pistol in her left hand, but wasn't even pointing it at the mercenary. Her right was drawn back in a clenched fist, the spiked metal plating gleaming.

It would be menacing if it was coming at her, but the krogan simply laughed, and Liara was inclined to agree with him. He outweighed her by a factor of five at the very least, and she could easily believe it if someone told her the krogan was an order of magnitude more massive.

The krogan didn't even bother to raise his fists to block the attack. He fired a single round from his shotgun that failed to penetrate the human's shields, and then spread his arms, laughing as she closed, inviting her to take a swing.

The Spectre obliged him.

Liara could scarcely believe her eyes.

The human's closed fist connected with the krogan's jaw with a sickening crunch instead of the thump she had been expecting. Rather than bouncing off the tough and weathered krogan hide, the spiked fist carried straight through, from the left base of his jaw through to the other side. Blood, shattered fragments of jawbone and a torn-off piece of tongue splattered across the wall of the prothean ruin with a meaty splat audible even over the gunfire.

Impossibly quick, the human reversed direction, bringing her gore-covered guantlet up to grip the battered lip of the krogan's armor. She proceeded to heft him, armor and all, into the air without the slightest evidence of exertion.

Another bounding dash brought her, and the krogan, slamming into the right-side wall of the cell. Even from twenty meters away, Liara could feel the impact shake the building, and a star-shaped pattern of cracks spread from where the krogan's back connected with the wall.

He was screaming, now, she realized. Roaring in mindless pain while the secondary nervous system took over and sent him into the madness the krogan called the blood rage.

The spectre paid it no heed, holding the him u[ against the shattered wall with a single hand while she brought her weapon to bear. Jamming the barrel up inside the ruined wreckage of the krogan's lower jaw, she squeezed the trigger.

An explosion like a grenade detonating erupted from where the krogan's head once had been, sending chunks of muscle, bone, blood, and less pleasant things flying all over the corridor and the human. Liara turned her head, closing her eyes against the almost casual brutality she'd seen the woman inflict.

When she looked up next, the Spectre was quite calmly tapping buttons on the control panel next to the display, apparently unperturbed by the gore covering both her and the cell around her.

Wrex lifted her by the arm – not gently, but not with the grip of someone trying to be forceful. He simply needed her to move, and she shuffled her legs back under her.

"Keelah," Tali whispered in a mixture of awe and horror as they approached the console and shimmering barrier. "Shepard, how..."

Liara tried to breathe through her mouth.

"Not now," the human – apparently named Shepard – snapped. "I've almost got- there!"

She punched a final button and the barrier flickered out.

"Move, move, move, MOVE!" she bellowed while dust filled the air and rocks fell around them. The seismic event that the mining laser had apparently started was reaching the critical point, and the entire unstable mine was collapsing around them.

Liara barely remembered the mad dash to the surface.

It was, to her, a mixture of noxious scents, choking air, massive falling chunks of rock, the groan of shattered machinery and the ache in her arm as Wrex half-carried, half-dragged her out of the mine on the heels of the Spectre.

They made it out, somehow just ahead of countless tons of collapsing basalt and volcanic rock, and Liara was never happier to feel the burning heat of Therum's fifty degree midday sun as she was then.

Overhead, a ship – the one piloted by whoever Joker was, she assumed – floated serenely, a small surface-to-ground shuttle waiting with engines running at the base of the ramp to the mine.

Liara didn't really know who had rescued her, or why, and at that point, she didn't frankly care.

Holy crap. That took way too long.

But! We have Liara. Next chapter is her (proper) introduction to the Commander, a debriefing, an interview with the council, some worrying (and some good) news from the Citadel, and finally settling in the Normandy. Lots of delicious delicious character interaction.

The section concerning pants will come just after Feros.

As far as scheduling goes, the next chapter will be out much more quickly than this one, mostly because I find it very easy to write internal monologues and character interaction and much more difficult to write combat stuff. Not because combat is boring; but because conveying that excitement is hard. It also helps that I've had Liara's and Shepard's first "real" meeting planned out since I started writing this fic, so I have a pretty good idea of how it's going to go.

Expect next chapter in a week or so, two at the absolute most. Thank you all for reading, and I hope you're enjoying the tale!

(P/S: Since I'm bad at answering reviews and PMs via the web site, I'll probably do an extra-long A/N at the start of the next chapter that covers the questions people have been asking me.)