Interloper 2: Chapter 21

"They… spelled it?" Liz's voice carried all the surprise and incomprehension I felt. "How?"

"Just like it sounds. Standing in lines, marking out big, capital letters, must be about eighteen feet tall," Garrus filled in, "whatever was making them do it had to get a little creative with the spelling, one hundred and eighty mechs only stretch so far." He released the dolly that held the buzzing robot. The white plated mech dropped slowly to the ground as its mass effect fields slowly died.

"Sounds like someone's trying to get our attention." I mused, wondering who could have sent the message. The whole situation gave me a bad feeling.

"Sounds like a trap," Shepard said, "the word wasn't the only thing left on the planet, we also pulled up the freighter's black box, and a shipment of prototype reflective armour plating, two crates. An enticing lure, wouldn't you think?"

"So you know where the message came from then?"

"We have an idea; we'll need the data from the black box to confirm it though. The ship's manifest mentions a stop in a local system, Strabo I think it's called, it's only after that that the logs show any signs of unusual activity. You two are going to have to dig any relevant data out on the way, try to narrow down where these came from. If we are walking into a trap, I want to know where, who, and how many."

"Yes, Commander." We each took a hold of one of the pallets, dragging the salvaged devices up towards Liz's little corner of the armoury.

"I've got it… at least I had it." Liz leaned over a datapad, tapping furiously at the keys. The datapad was tied by long leads than ran into the large, blue coloured black box that lay on the table through small holes drilled into the surface by precision laser cutters. For the past half hour she had labored to crack its encryption, to no avail. I had spent the time testing exactly how reflective the new mech plating was in a small rig towards the back of the room. "No, wait, I got it!" the red light on the box's surface flipped to green. "Data coming in…. now."

I leaned in over her shoulder and scanned the last few entries in the ship's log. The syntax was a little confusing, but an entry a few lines in drew my eye.

"There," I pointed out the offending line, "Jarrahe Research Station." The name brought up memories rapidly becoming distant, images of an empty station, dark and cold. There was blood on the floors and at its center sat a great grey computer, malevolent in its silence. A tug at my elbow brought me out of my reverie.

"Why Jarrahe?" Liz repeated.

"It's the last stop before the troubles started and look; an order for pickup, 180 LOKI mechs. If you were a rampant VI, how would you sneak aboard a ship?" Liz nodded, reading the same line.

"All that hard drive space, I guess it's as good a place as any. Let me take a look at what the Cerberus database can dig up on the station." She delved through the horde of data in silence, leaving me alone again with my thoughts. I focused on rebuilding what I thought I knew about the events of the Corsica and Jarrahe Station from foggy recollections. That mission had definitely been an ambush, but then again the Corsica mechs had attacked the party on sight. These standing statues were something entirely new. "Not much to go on here, the name is Salarian, that's for sure, but there are some signs of ties to Hahne-Kedar, and if they're moving around prototype armour pieces, there's a good chance they deal in research and development… hmm, I wonder?" and with that she was off again, muttering to herself and scrawling on a notepad.

"I'll leave you to it then," I said. She gave me a halfhearted wave goodbye without looking up from her work.

I slipped out onto the busy command deck and was instantly hit with a wall of buzzing conversation. The duty stations were full for the first time since the attack of the Shadow Barge, with many of the non-Cerberus crew returning to work after clearing the code-test. Only two had failed, the Broker triggers setting off a variety of strange behaviors, either overtly destructive or more subtle. One of the triggered crew members, a security officer, had gone berserk. Shepard had had to throttle the man into submission before he was carted away. The other man had been quiet, even deathly still. However, his surface reaction only told half the story. The communication room's complex anti-bugging suite had almost immediately detected two dozen hacking attempt before EVA was able to breach and shut down his cybernetic enhancements. Sadly, the sleeper agent hadn't survived the hack.

But now those who had been cleared for duty were in their seats. The rest of the crew still gave them a wide berth, but here or there long separated friends were sitting together enjoying a quiet conversation. The subject of those conversations, from what I could hear from the threshold, inevitably fell on our current investigation. The corrupted mechs were causing a major stir among the deck officers.

"Find anything?" I jumped a little as Commander Shepard walked up beside me. The Commander quietly eyed the crew at work, pausing to take a sip from a steaming mug before looking over to me.

"We think we have a pretty good lead," I flipped on my Omni-tool and pulled up an image of the Salarian research station, "Jarrahe Station was the last stop on the Corsica's tour, plus it's where they picked up our robotic spelling bee."

"Good, we'll move on this Jarrahe under stealth and see if we can't find out who's taken an interest in us." Shepard took a deep pull on her drink and let out a tired sigh. "If it turns up clean, I'll take a team in."

"Any chance of me tagging along?" I asked hopefully. My hopes were shot down as Shepard shook her head slowly.

"I'm sorry, Liddle, but I'm not going to overrule Chakwas on this. What I can do is give you a seat on mission control. You know, put you a little close to the action?"

"I don't know, Commander, my last hand at leading a mission…" I said quickly, remembering the hard grey concrete of the Virmire installation.

Shepard smiled weakly. "Look, I know you've lost people, but you can't let that hold you back going forward. I still think you've got what it takes to command. Look, I'm not asking you to take a squad onto the station, just be our eye in the sky." Her eyes bore into my own until I was forced to look away.

"Okay, I'll do it." I said slowly. In truth, it was the lack of action that convinced me, since being grounded I had developed an itch to get back into combat, and while sitting a screen away from it was far from the real thing, it was as close as the ship's authoritarian doctor would let me get away with.

"Good, I was afraid I'd have to give you a direct order. Find out what you can about this station, layout, systems, anything. I want you on the bridge when we do our first flyby."

"Yes ma'am."

The Normandy shivered slightly as it decelerated from FTL. Jarrahe Station hung in space, dark and silent. As it spun closer into view, I got my first good look at the enigmatic station. The station's body was a long tube, steel grey in colour with obvious openings for windows. At the base it flared to a wide open ended disk. It was on this disk that the station's spindly boarding tubes stuck out at irregular intervals.

"Bring us in, Joker, nice and steady." Shepard leaned close over the pilot, her slate grey armour already tightly buckled and a snub nosed sub machine gun clipped to a rig that hung about her shoulders. Her team had assembled by the airlock, Garrus, Zaeed, and Miranda. Garrus had finally replaced the shredded suit he had worn during his Archangel days in favour of a steel coloured set emblazoned with stylized eagles. Attached to his shoulder was a rack of miniaturized grenades.

"Looks dead," Joker muttered as we moved slowly past. The Normandy shone a spotlight up and down the drifting metal structure, piercing the gaps in the smooth surface where windows dotted it.

"Can we get a closer look?" Shepard asked. The pilot nodded, tapping out a command. Close-in images of the station resolved in thin air as cameras in the hull whirred to try and get a clear line on the interior. The images were much the same; desolate hallways, empty rooms, and no evidence of habitation, former or otherwise.

I am not picking any movement outside of random drifting, Shepard.

"This crawls, Commander," Joker said, "there's no way this isn't some kind of ambush." He eyed his scopes, as if expecting an armada to drop out of the black at any second.

"I know, Joker, but we need to get to the bottom of this. Bring us up to that docking tube over there." The pilot obeyed, bringing his ship in ever so slowly. At long last, there was a thump and a hiss as the tube pressurized outside. "Alright team, let's move in. Liddle, you know what to do." The squad moved into the open airlock, the doors cycling behind them. I went to my own seat, a spot almost parallel with the galaxy map that had been designated mission control. The interface was custom, overlays showed the helmet-cam views of the squad plus whatever the exterior cameras picked up. Behind everything was a rough blueprint pulled from the construction company's archives. It was a little too much to take in all at once, so I found myself gravitating to Shepard's view. As it stood, all that showed was the inside of the Normandy's airlock.

"Normandy Control here, standby for comms check." I flipped the radios active switch and watched the lights flash green as each member of the team hooked into the Ship's tactical communication system.

All team members report status green. EVA materialized from the mission control's AI terminal.

"Thanks, EVA," I said as I pulled the unit's headset over my ears. "Recon team, atmosphere looks good, you are cleared to begin operation."

"Solid copy, moving in. Shepard replied in clipped tones. The outer airlock door whirred open. As the first team member took a step across the threshold, the skeletal blueprint of the station lit up with motion tracking data, information pumped in from the individual hardsuits.

"EVA, can you filter this for active threats? I don't want to get a ping every time someone kicks a can." The AI complied, clearing the clutter.

"The first lobby is clear, there's no one here to meet us," Shepard reported.

"No blood? Or signs of a struggle?" I asked.

"No, you expecting some?" Garrus cut in.

"Let's keep the chatter down, people," Miranda said. Then, addressing me, "Control, our recon should loop around to cover the station's computer core. We'll need a route and…" her words were cut off as something clanged loudly just outside the airlock. From the nearby window I could see lights slowly flicker on around the circumference of the station.

"Commander? Commander!"

Author's Note:

In the immortal words of Basil the great mouse detective, we set the trap off now!