AN
Thanks for the reviews, everyone!
To answer a few outstanding questions: this Story is taking place before formal First Contact. So are the events that involve John's backstory.
As for more on the Council and Eclipse, there are segments yet to come that will answer these questions.
For all things Rachni, read on. That's what this arc is for.
Human Space (Fala's Story) (V)
. . .
Fala Tyrani
. . .
The Kopis Main Complex, identified on maps as Letra Tori (a famous garden on Thessia), was an oasis in the wasteland. Situated beneath a great trapezoidal ceiling was a garden of green: flowering trees and green grass filled picturesque boulevards between the more businesslike facades of interconnected buildings and sprawling facilities. Before the Rachni, Fala could imagine how the elite matrons and matriarchs of Trident had walked down the green paths and along the cobblestone streets on their way to and from work. This wasn't a proper colony, they had been told. At least on the surface it looked more like a typical corporate retreat and research park. Such things had a long history in asari space, and, from the looks of things on the modern Citadel extranet, nothing much had changed in a thousand years. The asari mega-corporations knew how to use luxury to attract talent.
That had been before the Rachni, of course.
Keeping close to Hannah Shepard, Fala kept her ages-old mass effect rifle at the ready. Protected beneath the human powered armor hardsuit, she would've felt fairly confident even by herself. With a psionic powerhouse floating next to her and literally surrounded by a squad of vicious servitors, she felt nearly invincible. Her job, her paramount job, was simply to ensure no harm came to Hannah. As long as she lived, as long as she could bring her psionics to bear, there seemed little that could stand in their way.
Fala watched, feeling hints of it in the psionic link, as a squad of mutons and chryssalids cleared out an enemy-occupied apartment block. She could see their silhouettes through the walls as well as those of the defending rachni warriors and soldiers. Cyberdiscs hummed overhead as they took up sniping positions, shooting clear through windows and walls, blessed with the same Squadsight that allowed her to see through meddlesome obstacles and obstructions.
"Tsk," Hannah growled, using her voice for the first time in minutes. "Trouble up ahead."
Commands crackled through the air on psionic wires. Fala's thoughts were in them as well. In a split second, she wondered what she could do and what Hannah wanted done. She felt Hannah in communion with the other human Overlords advancing into the Letra Tori Complex. The humans consulted with their servitors for any additional experience or possibilities. That took a half second. They then narrowed down who was in the area and who could assist, reducing the number of humans involved in the final decision-making process. Finally, in their chain of command, they made a decision and began executing it. Orders rippled outward from each human like pebbles dropped in a still pond.
Fala began to move.
Breaking into a run, her vision expanded. Other servitors had identified the enemy up ahead: where they were thick, where they were thin, where they were strong and where they were vulnerable. She could see it with alien eyes. Jumping, her suit lightened as she came in contact with the wall of a clean white building adorned with a mural of a smiling maiden in a labcoat. On contact with the wall, she adhered using what the humans called a "van der waals" projector. Parts of her armor possessed inflatable pads that could anchor her in place. Leveling her rifle, Fala activated the sight and took aim.
Up ahead was a plaza with a once proud fountain, now left dry. The Rachni had another barricade up here, made of assorted debris and rubble and cemented together with resin. A strange looking pair of mass effect cannons were mounted behind the barricade and staffed by rachni soldiers. Yet more soldiers were emplaced in the buildings, waiting for the carnage to come. Rachni warriors, meanwhile, milled just behind the barricade and out of sight, waiting to surge forward into the enemy.
The battle began with long distance fire from mechtoids and cyberdiscs. The barricade HMGs were protected by miniature kinetic barriers, but those crumpled quickly in the face of plasma and particle beam fire. The rachni were roused, unwilling to be picked apart from afar. Warriors began to stream over the barricade like a rising tide, skittering forward on their four segmented legs, tentacles snapping like hungry whips. Among their number were malformed cousins: these, the humans had learned, projected powerful kinetic barriers forward like a shell. They protected their warrior kin as they rushed over the plaza. Others served as mobile cover for teams of rachni soldiers, firing accurately even on full automatic.
They were a chittering, terrifying horde… yet Fala felt nothing at the sight of them: not fear, not contempt, not anger. There was a coldness in her heart, a dispassion. It was the blanketing presence and power of the human Overseers, Fala knew, steeling the minds of their servitors from panic.
Fala opened fire, synchronizing her targets with those being targeted by a pair of heavy-weapons mutons who had taken a rooftop. Her antique mass effect rifle was less powerful than that of any of the other servitor species, but it was extremely accurate and had a superior rate of fire. She put four rounds in each designated target, the large rounds designed to pierce the hides and armor of krogan marines. HVTs, high value targets, ripped apart in the first few moments of the fight.
The charging warriors were not high value targets. These, the humans let close ranks while they focused on tearing apart the ranged soldiers and heavies. The warriors were instead met with swirling vortexes of pure death. Fala recalled, not too long ago, when the rachni had foolishly and ignorantly run right into and through the human Rifts. They knew better now, and the lesson learned by one Rachni was instantly disseminated to all of them. At the sight of the Rifts forming, they scattered and jumped, doing anything they could to go around the crackling psionic singularities.
With a chittering crash they slammed into the ragged muton and chryssalid pointmen. The hulking beast-men roared in joy, always eager for bloody hand-to-hand combat. Lashing, slashing, poisonous tentacles did not deter the armored servitors. They ripped into the rachni warriors with shouts and barks. The chryssalids, too, felt the humans release their reins and let them cut loose. What followed as a bloody melee, as the mechtoids backtracked, particle cannon arms jerking as they fired into or through the massed rachni horde.
Fala detached from the wall and jumped, catching hold of a rooftop and pulling herself up. Running to the edge she pointed down and fired into a thick group of lightly-armored Rachni Leapers trying to scale the other side of the building. Rasping radula snarled up at her as she hosed the creatures down. Two fell, mortally wounded. Others continued to climb.
A torrent of hellish green flame covered the wall, disintegrating both it and the rachni. Striding onto the field was a human MEC. Three times as tall as an asari, such war machines were not known in Citadel space, in Fala's era or the modern one. Humanoid in shape and design, the MEC was an armored terror wielding a weapon fit for a battle tank or a fleet-spec gunship. It eschewed use of the massive rifle, however, preferring to blast apart nearby rachni with rapid-fire micro-grenades, flatten them with fist or foot, or burn them to carbon ash with bright green flame that left painful after-images in Fala's retinas.
They were relatively few in number, Fala knew, yet the rachni had foolishly concentrated their warriors to try and force a breakthrough. As they tried to press forward, more MECs descended on them, having launched themselves from nearby areas soon after the battle began. Flying over using anti-gravity engines, they dropped like meteors amid the rachni below, each landing followed by more explosions that ripped apart everything nearby. Maddened by pain and panic, rachni warriors tried to climb aboard the human war machines, like insects swarming over a larger predator, but reactive armor exploded on contact, sending plumes of severed limbs and scorched tentacles flying. One exploding rachni painted an entire apartment bloc with its insides: green and yellow and orange in a speckled splash covering white façade.
"Push forward to the statue," Hannah's mental command spurred her servitors and her newly re-animated to a battle frenzy. The rachni, monstrous though they were, cunning as they were, still had no answer to their slain rising up behind them to turn on their former sisters. Many fought on, desperately. Others finally succumbed to panic attacks and tried to flee. Fala took advantage of her hood ground to shoot the rachni in their vulnerable backs, between the vestigial wings.
Soon they would-
'Yours is a terrifying battle song,' a slick, alien thought whispered. It wasn't Hannah's. It wasn't any human's.
'No, not a song… a… a chorus, not-Rachni. You are many?' Fala winced, eyes squinting. Whatever this was, thinking at the humans, it was not particularly pleasant. The battle raged on; Fala seemed to be the only non-human to stop and pay the voice any attention.
'A chorus of Queens-not-Rachni,' the voice faded slightly. 'How do you have a chorus? Why is your song so strange? It hurts our ears.'
'Fala.' It was Hannah.
A compulsion had Fala turn her head and narrow her eyes. Through her eyes, both human and asari saw it. There was a humanoid… asarioid… shape in the distance, atop a roof. As if realizing it was in sudden danger, the distant shadow slipped away. The voice was gone.
"What was that?" Fala asked, stepping away from the ledge of the roof and more in control of her body. "It looked… it looked like an asari."
'I don't know,' Hannah's thoughts were slow and lucid, easy for a non-psionic mind to digest and converse with in normal terms. "But we believe it must have been psionic. It called out to us and touched the surface of our psi-net."
Fala almost stumbled as that last sentence had been spoken, with actual mouth-words, and right from behind her no less!
"W-when did you get here?"
Hannah hovered in the center of the roof behind Fala, her face and body obscured beneath mantle and hood. There was very little to see of the human beneath, just a flutter of metallic robes and the somewhat unnerving faceless glare of her composite helmet. Had she levitated up? Fala had gotten used to the idea that humans could float using their psionics, it was graceful but not particularly nimble or quick.
"Doesn't matter I guess," Fala decided, shaking her head. "That thing… it won't be getting into our heads like you guys do, will it?"
"You won't be Mind Controlled unless I am," Hannah assured her, her thoughts a gentle echo and a cool shade on a hot day. "Don't worry. It couldn't enter the network, either, though it did try."
Fala frowned at that. If Hannah said she was safe she believed it, but it silently unnerved her all the same. It had taken time to get used to being attached to a human like she was… to being this re-animated version of her past self, neither alive nor dead. The one constant in it all was Hannah Shepard. The thought of some other force tearing away her strings and making her its puppet very nearly left Fala feeling ill. At least with Hannah she knew where she stood.
Stepping off the edge of the roof, Fala dropped down onto the shoulder of a passing MEC. The soles of her boots attached to the surface, leaving her arms free. She kept her rifle at the ready. They were mopping up the rachni stragglers, pursuing them into the nearby buildings. Fala watched as an explosion of green fire engulfed one of the structures, flash frying the bugs within. A MEC, meanwhile, ripped up one of the Rachni barricades and tossed it aside like garbage.
Still, it bothered her.
'What in the name of the Goddess was that thing?'
. . .
The Trident Revenants were waiting for them below the statue of Kaiena Naga T'Var.
Seeing the grandiose statue, amazingly untouched by the rachni or the battles that raged over the colony, Fala had to fight the urge to roll her eyes. Even during the war, scuttlebutt on the fleet had always had new rumors about the devout older daughter of Dilinaga. She had always been seen as somewhat self-aggrandizing, but it only became something people whispered about after the Battle of the Three Moons when Kaiena claimed to have orchestrated the entire ambush. By the end of the war, she'd cycled out anyone on her personal command who didn't question her position as a literal Child of Destiny. That she'd guided the fleet and the colony after Dilinaga died was a small miracle instead of flying them into a black hole by misreading a 'Sign from the Goddess.'
Not surprisingly, Fala recalled seeing quite a lot of heroic statuary of Kaiena on Trident including one of a pair of statues that were clearly designed to stand out despite being surrounded by actual skyscrapers. This one was smaller, thank Athame. Standing tall over the main boulevard in the research complex, the statue depicted Kaiena raising a rifle in one hand and dramatically clutching Dilinaga's armilia to her chest. The armilia itself was just a simple three-quarter circlet, common among matriarchs. Since it was bestowed on a matriarch only by other matriarchs, it was pretty… unconventional for a matron like Kaiena to have it. Kaiena herself was adorned in a flowing wispy dress over her highly stylized armored hardsuit. In her bearing, it almost seemed as if she was stepping off a ship and onto Trident, the first to do so, proclaiming it their new colony and the heart of the Third Republic… and crowning herself Matriarch while she was at it.
Milling in the shade of their colony's founder, Trident's Revenants paid the statue little mind.
It was true that the rachni had left the statue itself undisturbed, but everything around it had not been so lucky. Structures had been fortified with rachni soldiers and barriers and barricades of resin were everywhere. They were also in ruins: the asari Revenants had been less careful with collateral damage than the humans (ironically enough) and had leveled much of the colony around the statue itself. Armored vehicles loitered around the base and automatic turrets were set up along advantageous fields of fire next to portable barrier generators.
Nor were the Revenants themselves the only interesting thing to catch Fala's eye. Nearly as large as Kiena's statue and lying in a pool of viscous blood was the largest bug Fala had ever seen: the Rachni Behemoth must have been at least twenty meters from the rasping mouthparts to the segmented hindquarters. The fact that rachni could just scale-up in size to such a ridiculous degree was a fact omitted by the old history books and the Trident asari both. It must have been the last later of defense for the rachni here… an impressive specimen, once covered in heavy armor and wielding equally heavy weaponry. Now dead, of course. It was probably the huge hole in the thorax that downed it – enough guts had spilled out to literally fill a good-sized apartment. It was almost poetic how the Behemoth died right at the feet of Kaiena Naga's statue, left there like a sacrifice.
"Would you look at that," Hannah said aloud as she lowered from a float into a steady walk close by. "Makes me wish we'd ordered some kaiju from Titan. I haven't seen a good monster fight since I left Systems space, and I do enjoy the occasional monster fight."
"Kaiju?" Kala repeated, not familiar with the word. It didn't sound like the human language she had been taught.
"Think of it as a giant animal, like a Thresher Maw. Titan usually brings a few to the CAS Games to pit against our newest Sectopods," Hannah explained, and there was mirth in her thoughts. "We may even get to see John's team kill one once we get back to human space."
Fala hustled to flank her human. "I don't really follow…"
"I'll explain later," Hannah promised. "For now, let's say 'hi' to our new friends."
"At least one of us has a friendly face," Fala joked, tapping the transparent visor of her helmet.
"I'm not here to be friendly," Hannah noted, dryly, and without irony. Fala rolled her eyes in response and moved ahead of the human and her servitors. She raised a hand and waved to the asari Revenants milling around the statue and the dead Behemoth.
Two of them raised their hands in response, though they were hands decked in power armor. The suits the Revenants wore looked only a little different from the soldiers Fala had encountered on Trident itself, but patterned in mottled gray and white and a little lighter in terms of armor plate. They also sported a sizeable pack on the back and faintly glowing bits on the arms and legs. Supposedly, the Revenants possessed additions to their armor that made use of their "innate Ardat-Yakshi abilities." What that meant, exactly, Fala could only guess. Despite this colony being founded by her now long dead sisters and comrades in arms, she had never met an Ardat in her entire life. Not a single one had been on the fleet to her knowledge, yet now their colony crawled with them.
"Sisters!" Fala called out in greeting, well ahead of the humans. She made sure they could see her face, the face of a fellow asari. In her human-spec armor, she may have appeared a stranger.
Regardless, the Revenants knew to expect them. They had coordinated the assault over the local network and been in communication with the human commanders. The chance of some stupid friendly-fire incident was about as low as it could get on any battlefield. This was just their first time meeting face-to-face.
Out of the scattered group of Revenants, one came forward, hand half-raised.
"Sister," she replied, though with a noticeable hesitation. An ornamental aiguillette fastened to a bolt on her right shoulder indicating rank and achievement. Fala had taken notice of the practice before on Trident – it was an old ceremonial holdover from the pre-spaceflight pre-commando days on Thessia. In ancient asari warfare, duels between champions, like Sarui Abekhs, were common and it was helpful to be able to gauge an opponent's worth at a glance, sometimes to provoke a fight, but more often to avoid one. Higher ranked or simply highly decorated officers and warriors would wear a few telltale adornments just for that purpose. In the long run, it helped to cut down on bloodshed… something that was of universal interest, win or lose.
"Sergeant Major, Cilicia Tora Hyberi," the approaching soldier introduced herself, retracting the visor on her helmet as she got closer. Fala saw a youthful face, a maiden's, but with a hideous claw-shaped gash over her right cheek just below the eye. Cilicia's skin was heliotrope purple but the scars had healed over in almost pure black. Her eyes were a clear light gray, steely for someone her age.
"Fala Tyrani," Fala said, raising her voice. She held up her hand in greeting, to touch palms. They were both in power armor so it wasn't like there was any danger, but the Ardat Yakshi Revenant declined, letting her hands fall to her side.
"I've been briefed on you," Cilicia said instead. "Where is Lieutenant Commander Shepard?"
"Not far behind me. I'd say to look for the mane of red 'hair' they call it, but she's all bundled up," Fala joked, trying to lighten the mood a little. Cilicia just stared forward, looking at the approaching ranks of humans and servitors.
"Those green beasts," she remarked, as the vanguard of mutons stomped past them in good order. One nearly brushed by the Revenant in her power armor, exhaling a thick vapor from its covered jaws. It was still covered in gore from close combat with warrior bugs. The muton's eyes lingered on Cilicia, glowing a faint yellow-white from the cybernetic implants within. The asari Revenant, in full power armor, stood almost as talk as the emerald hulk. She snorted back, not intimidated by the servitor. The alien almost seemed amused, but quickly marched on with the rest of his fellows.
"I know what you're thinking... they look pretty savage, but most of them are more turian than krogan," Fala assured her, walking around Cilicia in her less bulky human armor. "The green ones have solid discipline. The red and gold ones with the heavy weapons are more temperamental. There are a few rare ones with the big blades on their arms. Those are another story. Hannah called them berserkers. Those ones are more 'fire and forget.'"
"What I see is that these humans use other races to fight for them," Cilicia sounded unimpressed. "How is that different from the Citadel, cowering behind the skirts of the Hierarchy?"
"Our servitors are our tools," Hannah said, walking forward, robes swishing around her armored boots. With her mantle's faceplate up, her expression was unreadable. That she was Shepard at all was something only Fala could tell for sure. "They don't fight for us, they fight alongside us. 'This is my servitor, there are many like it but this one is mine.'"
Cilicia narrowed her eyes, curiously, at the approaching human. "We have a similar saying: 'my weapon and armor are entrusted to me, for me, I will care for it and it will keep me alive.'"
"Hannah." Fala pointed to her face.
Hannah's mantle crackled and the pieces of her faceplate cracked apart and floated around her head like a halo of jigsaw pieces. Cilicia seemed to recognize her, based on reports, and nodded. She raised a hand briefly. "Lieutenant Commander. I am Cilicia Tora Hyberi. I'd like to brief you on the situation."
"Please do." The faceplate retracted back into place. Fala frowned at the human's standoffishness. Was it so hard to show your face when talking to another officer?
"My company made good time getting here," Cilicia began, letting Shepard come close before spicing up her talk with a little walk back to the statue and her soldiers. "You drew off a large portion of the Rachni defenders, just as planned. I trust it wasn't too much trouble?"
"Those that fell are easily replaced," Hannah answered, simply. "We have ample forces to finish the fight."
"Good. As you'll recall, we'll be spearheading the actual attack on the primary installation," Cilicia reminded her. "These are the forces we have at our disposal. I'll introduce them and then run through our plan of attack again. We have to wait anyway, we're still scouting the interior…"
Fala kept pace, but let the two officers handle most of the nitty gritty. Cilicia pointed to the facility's' blast doors and the breach they had made in it. Apparently, a few asari Revenant scouts were moving ahead to get a feel for the enemy positions within. Hannah was more insistent on attacking right away, but Cilicia quickly reminded her that they had done this many times before and that they had a way of dealing with entrenched Rachni. In the end, Hannah deferred to the Sergeant Major's judgement. It had already been agreed that the Trident girls would be the first ones in, after all. It was a Trident facility and they had insisted, plus no one wanted to risk damaging the prothean ruins.
While they waited, Cilicia pointed out some of their more distinguished formations: Revenant platoons that had fought the rachni menace in many engagements before, a battle-scarred trio of armored vehicles with squat bodies and narrow turrets, and finally their pair of Ardat Yakshi matriarchs who sat alone, checking the blades they wore with their armor. Hannah didn't pay the implication there much mind, but Fala lingered on it and what the duo represented.
In any normal asari commando unit, in Fala's era or the modern one, the matriarch would be commanding the unit from the rear, taking advantage of her wisdom and experience… even if that 'wisdom' and 'experience' was of debatable value. A matriarch had centuries to hone her craft or, alternatively, centuries to become attached to outdated ideas or centuries to become sure of how great her own plans were, no matter how often they failed. The asari of Trident had gone off the rails of normal asari society, though. Matriarchs had a big (even disproportionate) say, but they didn't run things. The Matrons did, technically.
Fala thought briefly on the three kuria she had met on Trident. The government in this asari republic had three heads, but if you thought about it, the three equal heads were drawn from very unequal backgrounds. If there were two matrons for every maiden and ten matrons for every matriarch, then a matriarch had the same say in a basic vote as twenty maidens. It was probably more fair a system for a new colony than the old Citadel model, but still… then again, as a young matron herself, Fala knew that maidens tended to be impulsive and (frankly) rather childish. Maybe it was wisdom giving them more say but not all the say.
Yet here was a maiden giving orders to matriarchs in her company!
It was like the natural asari order-of-things had inverted itself.
"We were watching your assault through the northern boulevards," Hannah said, in response to a conversation Fala had only been paying partial attention to. "There is no need to be modest, Sergeant Major. Your people fought well. I only wish I'd seen you fight the Behemoth."
"Well, this isn't the first time we've encountered one of those monsters," Cilicia answered with a growl low in her throat. "They're vulnerable to artillery, luckily, so the rachni tend to use them for defense as a mobile heavy weapons platform. This one was a beam type. We just flushed it out and punched enough holes in the body it bled out. Standard stuff for us. We know where the armor is thinnest."
"Beam type, you said?"
"Hydrogen fluoride laser. The Rachni can do some incredible things with cybernetics and biotech."
"So I see. It is rare to see laser weaponry among Citadel species."
"There's GARDIAN, but that's true. The rachni can do it because they can meld organic biotics with cybernetic weaponry. I prefer hypervelocity kinetics, myself. More reliable. No volatile chemicals."
"As you say," Hannah's tone was markedly warmer and friendlier than before, and she even extended her hand out from within her armored robes and mantle. "I need to attend to some things. Fala, stay here and be my eyes and ears. Sergeant Major."
"Lieutenant Commander." Cilicia hesitantly extended her hand but allowed Hannah to shake it before quickly letting it fall to her side again. Fala felt a bit better seeing that. It seemed Cilicia was just averse to touching others in general.
Hannah walked off – still not resuming her earlier floating.
"Personable enough, for an alien," Cilicia commented once she was out of earshot. "Attractive face."
"You should see the males," Fala replied with a smirk.
"There's no harm in looking," the Ardat Yakshi noted and Fala almost groaned. Of course. Revenants were all Ardats. Even aliens would be off limits. Any sort of melding would be off limits. They could probably still have physical intercourse, that was still pleasurable, but intercourse without a meld was… empty. Probably also too tempting.
"We don't live like celibates, you know," Cilicia remarked, almost as if she was another mind-reader. The scarred maiden fixed her eyes on the breached blast doors as she waited for news. "We just don't do much touching."
Fala coughed into her fist. "You'll have to excuse me. I'm still new to this…"
"'This' meaning being around Ardat Yakshi." The armored Revenant scoffed. "At least you aren't calling me a demon and trying to send me to an insane asylum. The Justicars would have a field day if they saw us now."
Fala felt a bit of her old Thessian sensibilities prickle, even if she wasn't from Thessia itself. The Justicars were a noble order, esteemed and well respected by the asari as a whole. They dedicated their lives to fighting evil and lived according to a rigid code. There was purity of purpose there. They were also rather terrifying to be around, largely because of that rigid purity of purpose. Still, no one bad mouthed them. Even back during the Krogan Wars, at the very end when the Justicars had been the ones to make sure none of the members of the exiled fleet tried to hide or play deserter, there had been respect.
"I knew a Hyberi from back in the day," Fala recalled. "She was a staff officer on the Brave Cyone."
Cilicia nodded, a smile gracing her lips for the first time. "My family is from Cyone. You may have known my great grandmother."
"Rea?"
"Rea," the Revenant repeated, momentarily a little lost. She had a far off look to her, just for a few seconds. "That was her. You must've known her when she was young. Hard to believe."
Fala shrugged. "It was just the other month for me."
"Yes. I'd heard how you were… revived," Cilicia had needed a moment to pick the right word. "I'd expected to meet something more corpse-like when I heard you were with the vanguard." Under hear breath she added, with a grumble, "You're prettier than I am."
"Corpse-like?" Fala inquired, a little shocked by the comparison. "Excuse me, but I'm not a corpse."
"You're not?" Cilicia wondered aloud. She glanced over at her fellow asari. "You were dead, though, weren't you?"
The truth was, Fala had wondered about this herself. What was she? Was she really alive? Was she just walking dead? What she was probably didn't exist in the asari vocabulary or the asari understanding of life and death. For days she had quietly agonized over it. Hannah's explanations of her situation, her assurances, helped, but it was still something Fala knew she was coping with. That didn't mean she had to advertise that fact, though.
"Is someone with an artificial heart dead?" Fala asked, but kept any trace of ager or insecurity out of her voice. She recited the argument she had told herself that very morning. "No. They're on life support. That's what I am. Except my life support is a human and not a machine." She raised a hand to her armored chest. "I still think. I still feel. I still am."
Cilicia's response was a non-committal grunt.
Something else also caught her eye. An asari scout was returning, not from inside the research bunker, but from the perimeter. She had something slung over her shoulder. It looked like a dead sister, except… the color was wrong.
"What's that?" Fala asked, pointing over to the scene. The scout had dumped the body onto the ground, and another Revenant had picked it up, holding it aloft by the head using the amplified strength of her powered armor. Fala could see the whole body thanks to this. It certainly looked like an asari, but instead of bleeding blue, strange coils of green and orange dripped out of the gaping wound in her torso. The other Revenants were gathered around speaking in angry or upset tones.
"A mimic," Cilicia explained, breaking into a stride as she headed over. Fala followed alongside her.
"Don't tell me… that's some sort of…" She recalled the thing she had seen before, on the edge of the battlefield.
"A rachni infiltrator," Cilicia confirmed. "You hardly ever see them anymore. Sergeant? Report?"
"Sergeant Major!" the scout spoke up, hustling over to intercept the Revenant company commander. "I caught this one sneaking around. I think it was spying on the humans over there. Thought you'd want to take a look at it."
Cilicia's smooth brows knitted at the limp body, still held up like a puppet by one of the Revenant soldiers.
"Those things are an abomination," she ordered, and turned away at the sight of a pair of commandos exiting the breech in the blast doors. She gave one last look to the mimic. "Burn it and be quick about it."
"Some of your scouts from inside?" Fala assumed, also taking note of the arrivals. They appeared unhurt.
"Two of them," Cilicia confirmed. She held out a hand before heading their way. "Please stay here, matriarch. I'd prefer to speak with my people alone. Before I go, though, you'd be wise to tell your human friends this: if they see anything asari-like that doesn't share our IFF tag, they should destroy it without hesitation."
"I'll pass that along," Fala replied and Cilicia nodded and broke into a fast walk, eager to link back up with her maidens. "By the way, you know I'm not a matriarch, right?" she called out, for some reason annoyed by what should have been an honorific. "Sergeant Major?"
'Technically, you're old enough to be a matriarch among matriarchs,' Hannah's voice whispered in her head. 'No, don't speak. I'm contacting you like this for a reason.'
Confused, Fala turned around and saw a human walking towards her. 'Hannah? What's going on?'
'That's what we have to find out.' Hannah did not sound happy. 'There's something going on here and we're going to find out what.'
'We as in you and me?'
'Who else would 'we' be?'
For some reason, that thought made Fala smile. 'I'm in. When do we start?'
'That's just it,' Hannah's thoughts were touched by a trace of the human's own smile, wherever she was. 'We already have.'
. . .
Cilicia stepped over a fallen rachni soldier, serving as personal escort for the small human contingent that was technically assisting them with the last few steps in clearing the facility. As agreed.
"Rachni are most dangerous in close quarters," she said, kicking the corpse out of the way for Fala and Shepard. The human was covered up in her ethereal mantle and Fala was likewise fully armored except for a transparent strip across her eyes. This was technically a combat zone, though, so a few precautious were wise. The shared IFF was a Goddess-send, especially with mimics skulking around in the shadows.
"It seems the labs themselves were nearly untouched," Hannah observed, tilting her head to look through the clear glass at one of the R&D workspaces on her right. Within, a handful of asari Revenants and humans were sweeping the lab space for any hidden surprises.
"The rachni are a technologically savvy species but I'm guessing they don't care that much about archaeology or protheans in general," Cilicia guessed.
Fala nodded, seeing the sense in that. "Most of the work here was translation and sociology research. Cultural studies. Studying ancient trinkets and the like. It's rare for anything useful to survive untouched for fifty thousand years."
"You know, if most of the actually useful prothean relics were looted forty or thirty thousand years ago... where are they now and who looted them?" Hannah wondered aloud, gracefully stepping over a pile of rachni entrails. "Weren't you asari the first ones into space after the protheans disappeared? Who beat you to the loot?"
"That's… a good question," Cilicia admitted, frowning to herself and not letting the human see it. "I'm sure the matrons studying this sort of thing have theories."
"Mmhm," Hannah murmured.
"Do you know if anyone ever found anything enlightening here?" Fala asked, perking up at the sound of a single sharp gunshot. She craned her neck and saw it was just a Revenant executing a still-twitching rachni drone.
"I couldn't say," Cilicia answered with a shrug of her heavily armored shoulders. "Command wants the ruins taken intact, so maybe."
Up ahead, the labs abruptly ended. Beyond it was a dome surrounding a series of scattered ruins – mostly intact buildings built along an obviously alien style and floorplan. Protheans were notoriously fond of pyramids and this was no exception to the rule. A sizeable pyramid sat at the center of the ruins, completely intact. Surrounding it were squat buildings with the occasional needle-thin tower. There were only about three of the latter. It wasn't a vast city by any means, hosting maybe a population of a hundred in all, back in the day. More a military outpost than anything else.
The joint asari-human task force was already busily securing the area.
"So this is it?" Hannah inquired, looking up at the pyramid, her face still concealed.
"This is it," Cilicia assured her. "There are little prothean outposts like this all across Trident space. The only planetary-scale find I know of was on Hekesta. I believe the human translation for it was 'Sheol.' That's the Tomb World you must have heard of. We lost that one to the rachni advance about thirty years ago."
"We'll look into re-taking it after this," Hannah answered in an off-hand sort of way. As if re-taking a dead world covered in killer bugs was no great expenditure of blood or treasure. Cilicia couldn't help but raise an inquisitive but non-existent eyebrow at the human's tone of voice.
"It seems we've wrapped things up a little anti-climactically," Fala admitted, relaxingly slightly but not enough to put away her battle rifle. "Wasn't there supposed to be a queen or something in here?"
"She's probably in the pyramid itself," Cilicia speculated, turning towards the prothean monument. "Leave it to us. We'll flush her out. You two just watch us work."
"Very well," Hannah consented.
"Let's see what you can do," Fala agreed.
Cilicia let out a little sigh of relief. Command would be glad to hear that the humans were cooperative, and more importantly, not sticking their funny-colored noses into places where they didn't belong.
. . .
A muton.
Fala supposed it would've been unusual if she and Hannah had snuck off alone, so it probably shouldn't have been a surprise when she saw their mutual escort: a red and gold armored muton. The big bruiser was waiting next to Hannah, hands free and at its sides, casual as can be. The alien was like a mountain of muscle, looming over the two females but inscrutable behind its ornate helmet and armor.
'Fala,' Hannah's thoughts nestled within her own.
'Hannah,' Fala replied, her thoughts slower and more deliberate than the psionic human's. 'Are you sure we won't be missed?'
'The other-us should suffice. None of the normal asari have noticed the switch.'
The humans were relying on a very basic form of subterfuge, it seemed. They knew how to spoof normal omni-tool scans and combined this with a very basic bait and switch. Once Cilicia was identified as their primary intermediary with the other Revenants, they just had to establish and then reinforce a particular pattern, verbal or behavioral, and then have their replacements copy it. Combined with the fact that humans hid their features as a natural matter of course, it was a fairly elementary bit of trickery. Of course, it being so simple and straightforward probably reduced the chances of a complication or something going wrong.
'So who are the other-us, anyway?' she asked, nodding personably to the looming muton as she approached the pair.
'They're both human. We have technology that can copy asari facial features,' Hannah explained, and retracted her mantle's hood, breaking it into a swarm of metal slivers. 'I believe I've mentioned our infiltration missions into Citadel space before? We've become practiced in this sort of deception.'
"What I don't get," Fala asked, switching over to verbal communication. "If you think something is up, why don't you just read Cilicia's mind and find out what it is?"
Hannah's response was a level stare, as if the question was borderline insulting.
"In our culture, non-consensual mind reading of that sort is considered rape," the human answered, right eyebrow twitching in irritation. "Would you meld with someone if they were unconscious?"
"Of course not!" Fala objected, grimacing at the very thought. "It would be… it would… ugh!"
"Exactly." Hannah crossed her arms over her cloak. "To us, your minds are sleeping, unable to resist or consent. To read anything more than surface thoughts would be a violation. I'd do it in a fight, of course, or if it was a matter of life or death, but this isn't that sort of situation. We aren't like the unallied ethereals in dark space. Sapient thought is still something to be protected, not abused."
Fala shirked slightly, seeing her mistake. "I guess I didn't see it that way. Sorry."
"No harm done," Hannah replied, and motioned to the muton. "This little fellow will be coming with us. I'll patch you two together."
"You'll what?" Fala asked and felt a click in the back of her mind.
"Friendly identified," an indistinct voice echoed in her head.
"Was that you?" Fala gasped, pointing at the stoic, unflinching muton. "Hannah? I didn't know these guys could speak!"
"Aside from simple commands and gestures, mutons can only communicate telepathically, either via implants or outside psionics," Hannah explained, and gently tapped her cheek with a fingertip. "Didn't I tell you this before? Oh, I guess I didn't…"
"So what's his name? Or her name?" Fala squinted her eyes as she examined the huge muton elite. Nothing about it really indicated one gender or the other, or anything in-between. "So, uh, are you a boy or a girl?"
"He's male," Hannah answered for the muton. "Female mutons are… dangerous and difficult to control, even with psionics. We don't use them in the field."
"Does he have a name?"
Again, Hannah answered for the silent elite. "Mutons do have names, yes, but they don't really translate into verbal languages well. Mutons name themselves based on accomplishments. As a result, some muton 'names' are unwieldly long." She patted the armored hulk on the chest with her left hand. "This guy here is one of those; an old soldier of ours we keep around for special occasions."
Fala considered that. If the names were all super-long…
"What's the first part of his name, then?"
"Steps between Rifts, bane of Turbulent Judge, slayer of thirty one on the Silent Scorn." Hannah quickly explained, "The Turbulent Judge was an ethereal commander and the Silent Scorn was a Temple Ship we chased down about fifteen years ago. When we cornered her, Judge demonstrated the ability to double-rift. This muton was the only one to survive the fight, drawing the ethereal's attacks away while we subdued surrounded and subdued her."
"In that case, I think we should call him Bane!" Fala suggested and saw Hannah's nose crinkle slightly. "What? What's wrong with Bane?"
"Nothing," Hannah decided, and shook her head. "Now that we've all been introduced, let's get back on track."
"You alright with that, Bane?" Fala asked the muton. It remained silent and un-responsive. "Why isn't he saying anything?"
"Is it just me, or do asari seem to have a very anthropomorphic view of other species?" Hannah grumbled, walking away from the pair and prompting them to follow. "Not all aliens are just asari with funny foreheads or scales. Muton thought processes are very different from your own. They don't and can't converse in the way you want them to. After everything the ethereals did to them, they're only semi-sapient. We've reversed that as much as possible in our elites, using surgery and gene-edits to regain some of their old selves, but for the most part what was done can't be undone."
"I'm not sure I follow," Fala admitted, but the conversation paused as they came to a nearby elevator shaft.
They were far from where the Revenants were leading the fight in clearing the facility and the prothean ruins. The humans, unbeknownst to the asari from Trident, had sent in their invisible hanar-robots - "Seekers" they were called - to do some scouting and intelligence gathering of their own. They had mapped much of the above-ground facility and in the process determined that there was an even larger facility below-ground, hidden from normal ground-penetrating scans. What had ultimately revealed the secret was simply the fact that parts of the above-ground layout were so obviously designed to access what lay below.
There were at least three shafts like this, apparently, and all but one were sealed up. Fala could see the concrete just below the slightly ajar elevator. Hannah gave a mental command to the Bane and he stepped back and out of the way. She did the same with Fala. 'Step back. Give me room.'
"This will take some concentration, so please save the questions for later," Hannah said, hands still crossed over her chest. Her boots left the ground as she began to float, psionic power flaring within her and leeching into the air like a purple fire.
Within the elevator shaft, the elevator itself abruptly crinkled and crushed like a soda can.
Hannah turned slightly as she ripped the twisted cage of metal out of the shaft, snapping the wires and magnetic seals connecting it to the elevator rails. She floated it behind and between the muton and reanimated asari, careful not to hit them. While she did this, Fala could see the look of concentration on her human companion's face. Hannah's eyes were completely lost within a blazing, pulsing cloud of purple smoke and fire. Even her breath seemed to be tainted by purple, coming out as a crackling violent cloud when she exhaled.
The crumpled elevator settled gently onto the floor behind them before scooting off to the side with an ear-splitting shriek. That bit done, Hannah Shepard turned her full attention on the sealed shaft itself. Still floating, arms crossed, back to her two servitors, the human psionic Overlord quietly concentrated for a long second or two. Curious, Fala took a step to the side to get a better look. Amethyst lines of light were starting to crisscross over the surface of the exposed concrete foundation.
"Ugh," Hannah made a soft groaning sound and the intensity of the light doubled. "That's… deep."
Slowly spreading her arms she made a lifting motion with the palms of her hands, like Fala had seen biotics do when they prepared a Biotic Slam. For a moment, nothing happened, then she noticed the bits and chunks of rapidly vibrating debris lifting off the ground and into the air. The light within the shaft flared one last time, and with hardly a sound several tons of sectioned and sliced reinforced concrete began to rise up.
Hannah turned to her side, moving the cut blocks out of the shaft and down the hall. Multi-ton blocks, in L-shapes and perfect cubes pulled free and settled down along the side of the hall, flush with the walls to both left and right. Fala had expected a few, but they kept coming and coming, ton after tone after ton. Then came a pair of equally sectioned blast doors, settling against the wall with a thunderous clang. Those seemed to be the very last of it, and when they hit the ground, Hannah similarly deflated and fell back to the ground on her feet.
"Overlord moves many tons," Fala heard the muton Bane think, pleased by the display of power.
"Hannah, you alright?" Fala asked, checking in on her human friend. "I didn't know you could do that."
"Another reason why we're doing this and not some other trio," Hannah said, and motioned with her hand towards the now fully excavated elevator shaft. A shimmer moved past her and down into the darkness: an invisible Seeker drone. Fala ignored it to study Hannah's face. Her eyes were still sputtering purple flame, crackling arcs like electricity dancing from her faded pupils to dissipate against her cheeks and nose.
"You sure you're alright?"
"Nothing I haven't done before," Hannah assured her, standing up tall and sending an unspoken mental go-command to Bane. The muton grunted and jumped down the shaft without hesitation. Fala felt the same compulsion command a moment later and found her body striding purposefully towards the sheer drop. Hannah was just behind her, and the two descended behind their muton tank a second later. Rather than drop straight down, however, Hannah slowed their descent with another exercise in psionic power.
Fala clung tightly to her rifle as the trio descended, meter after meter. At first, she could clearly see the sliced-away sections that Hannah's psionics had excavated. They were still smoking and faintly glowing in the darkness, a strange sort of glow that lingered in the back of her eyes, even when she closed her eyes to blink. Past the broken seal of the black doors, though, it was just a free fall into a bottom she couldn't even see using her helmet visor's night vision.
"By the Goddess, how deep is this?" she asked as they drifted ever downward into the moon.
"One thousand two hundred and ten meters," Hannah answered, arms disappearing into her mantle and habit as she controlled their fall. "We did an orbital insertion before, but in a confined space like this a slow fall is safer."
Without anything to see, around or below them, Fala found herself looking at the muton Bane more closely. He did not seem particularly uncomfortable in free fall, though it was hard to discern much beneath all his ornate red and gold armor. As Fala thought more about it, though, the muton armor was strange. There were marks and shapes etched into it that didn't seem of human origin.
No doubt overhearing her curiosity on the subject, Hannah killed some time with an explanation.
"Mutons were a thriving civilization seven Reaper cycles ago," she said as they slowly descended. "That was about half a million of our years. The last few Reaper cycles were about fifty thousand years apart, but as far as the ethereal records go, that was the exception and not the rule. According to them, the Great Enemy culls the galaxy as appropriate, not according to a set schedule or timetable. Sometimes more than a million years can pass by without a single species becoming spacefaring. Some remain Neolithic indefinitely and have to be prompted by external agents to advance."
"Enemy," the muton's thoughts were heated, angry. "Great Enemy."
"Well, in that particular cycle, the Citadel had been hit with a radiological warhead and mostly abandoned," Hannah continued her story. "The result was a fractured multi-polar galaxy, divided up between five major superpowers, all highly militarized. The mutons were not one of the major powers, but they were famed as mercenaries and were one of the most technologically advanced species. In human popular culture, we have a long running franchise called the 'Predators' – aliens who are only interested in hunting dangerous prey. It's a reflection of ourselves, of course, and our own predatory impulses, but the mutons of that era were similar to the 'Predators' of our fiction. The males ranged far and wide, fighting in wars or developing dangerous technology, all to impress the females back on their homeworld, Zudjar."
Fala looked over at Bane again, but the armored muton was expressionless and silent.
"The Second Skins that we wear and even our clinical near-immortality are more due to the mutons than the ethereals," Hannah went on to explain. "Second Skin itself was completely a muton creation that the ethereals co-opted."
"I can't believe it… so these mutons are an Elder Race?" Fala regretted thinking of them as beast-like in that light. But it made sense. The ethereals, too, were an Ancient and Elder Race. Even their servants would be of a great age compared to mere asari.
"The age of a species means nothing in the grand scheme of things," Hannah lectured, her expression drawing into a shallow scowl. "All that matters is what a people do with the time they have. Some squander it. Some rest on their laurels. Some are never content and always bite and scratch for more. I like to think humanity falls in that last group. The day when we start thinking of ourselves as an 'Elder' race... I hope to be long dead before then."
She shook her head, realizing she had strayed off topic.
"The muton story ends with the Great Enemy. The Reapers came, and in the confusion, the ethereals also descended on the muton homeworld. More than two dozen Arch-Ethereals had determined they could be valuable soldiers in the fight. They were taken, modified, experimented on… Killing Road was one of them and the ethereals recalled that particular cycle fondly. The Reapers had a very tough time of it without being able to use the Citadel for a knockout blow.
"Temple Ships ran amok, openly aiding many of the races as they tried to resist the culling. When it looked like the Reapers would take a world and harvest it, the ethereals would poison the well by wiping out the population with bioweapons. When the final withdrawals began, the ethereals took nearly the entire surviving muton species with them. They have been servitors ever since, but some tenacious traces of their original selves always remained. The ethereals wouldn't or couldn't completely snuff it out."
"Overlords," Bane thought-projected.
"Here we are," Hannah announced, setting them down on the bottom of the elevator shaft at last. Bane and Fala both locked and loaded their weapons, ready for anything. Overlaid into Fala's own mind's eye was the Squadsight information from the Seeker that had preceded them.
"Stay alert," Fala whispered, as much to herself as to her companions. Bane simply grunted and started down the revealed circular passage ahead, unflinchingly taking point. Fala followed behind him and Hannah took the rear, falling back on her boots and letting her psionics take a much needed rest.
Unfortunately, it wasn't long before they came to a checkpoint in the passageway. Like the service tunnel itself, it had been cut cleanly but conventionally into the rock of the moon, probably with a simple mining drill. A huge set of circular blast doors were blocking their way with only a small section cut away to allow for a raised platform and a single rail. Perpendicular to that was the security checkpoint, visible behind a sheet of thick kinetic-proof glass.
"Luckily, the shield emitters are offline," Hannah said with a sigh. "One more time, then. I really do not want to have to Rift my way through these doors…"
Her eyes flared bright and violet lines cut into the glass. Her red hair drifted in a psionic wind of her own making for a second or two, and then with a crack, a pane of transparent crystal as thick as Fala's hand pulled free. It was too small for her to crawl through, of course, but that wasn't a problem. The Seeker flickered, becoming visible in that moment, as it surged into the security office. From there, the humans could likely hack the doors conventionally.
"In retrospect, I wish we'd invited Cerberus to this party," Hannah said softly, her dark red hair falling back around her shoulders. She exhaled, her breath tinted with crackling lavender fire. "They'd have brought Wraith suits."
"Wraith suits?" Fala asked while they waited.
"Sneaky Ones," Bane thought.
"A type of technology that lets operatives pass through solid matter," Hannah explained, reaching up to tie back her hair so it was out of the way. "Kinetic barriers, shifting mass effect fields, radiative shields… can cause problems, but it works fine once you get under the sheer layer. With one, I'd be able to walk through these doors."
"That…" Fala wasn't quite sure what to say. "That doesn't even seem possible. How does it work?"
"The intangibility effect is due to a partial shift into hyperwave space." Hannah shrugged beneath her mantle. "Beyond that, the exact mechanics are a little over my head. Do you know how to shape a kinetic barrier?"
"Yeah right." Fala snorted. Sure, she knew generally how barriers worked, but the exact specifics… and that was the point, wasn't it?
"Wraiths aren't standard issue, though, and they wouldn't work for you two." Hannah turned to the doors as they began to open with a tired groan. "Here we go."
One set of reinforced doors opened, revealing a loading dock and an overturned monorail tram. It looked like it had slammed into the outer doors and crumpled before de-railing. Beyond that was another set of inner doors. As the set behind them began to close, the ones in front of them began to open. Fala, meanwhile, took a moment to inspect the fallen tram.
There was very little inside at first glance: crushed seats and broken glass, twisted metal and failed electronics, flickering lights. Just like outside on the loading dock, there were plastic crates spilled open and on the floor. Whatever was in them had been removed, though. Splotches of faded blue blood were visible on the floor, the walls, and near the front where the tram had crumpled up the most. It was there that Fala saw something.
Bones.
The remains of what must've been an arm, the hand trapped in the wreckage. It almost looked like some had cut the arm off and left it there. Before she could linger on the scene, she felt Hannah's mental compulsion and left the fallen vehicle. The inner doors were open.
Past them, the rail line continued around a shallow bend. The trio followed it. Flickering emergency lighting provided only a modicum of illumination and interfered with her visor's enhanced vision mode. Written on the walls, though, were signs she could make out in plain Thessian.
"Station for EXIT ALA," Fala read one of the signs aloud. 'Ala' was the fourth letter in the Thessian alphabet. "Thirty meters. That's back the way we came. Primary Facility. Ninety meters. That's up ahead."
"We're getting closer," Hannah said. "Good."
As they got closer, more signs appeared. The biggest one was of a smiling asari outline in a labcoat waving her hand. "SAFETY FIRST!" the sign proclaimed with an X over the asari's hand. "Remember: don't touch something if you don't know what it is!" Under that, it also stressed: "Exercise caution in areas marked with the hazard logo!"
"That's Clumsy Colaya," Fala mused aloud, recognizing the character in the sign. "I can't believe they're still using those old 'don't be like Clumsy Colaya' signs."
"Humans are the same." Hannah glanced up at the sign and then at the others overhead or on the walls, meant to be ready by asari riding the tram. "We've been using the same signs since the Industrial Age. Some things never change."
"I remember this instructional video they used to play every year: Careless Melds Cost Lives." Fala rolled her eyes at the thought. "Goddess."
Sure enough, another sign with the same asari outline had a big X over her talking to another asari outline. The two were touching palms in a light meld. A much more detailed asari was turning away from the pair of outlines and holding a finger up to her lips. "Don't talk about work outside work! It takes everyone, working together, to keep a secret!"
Another sign announced, ominously: "REPORT all SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY to a SUPERVISOR!"
And another asked: "Are You SURE your DOCUMENTS are SECURE?" Above a picture of Clumsy Colaya carelessly leaving her workstation with the computer screen still on.
Finally, a full sized mural on wall proclaimed: "I LOVE MY JOB, MY FRIENDS, and MY WORLD!" On it, an asari in a lab coat type softsuit was hugging a blue and green water planet, almost certainly Trident. It then asked, a little more pressingly, almost accusingly: "DON'T YOU?"
Around the final bend, though, all Fala's thoughts on the signs faded away.
At the end of the tram railway was an open-air station, and beyond that, a titanic cavern that had not been cut by asari hands or asari machines. A huge dome had been carved cleanly into the rock and reinforced with both utilitarian hexagonal lattice and sculpted statues of undoubtedly alien design. Their four-eyed insectoid faces glared down at the cavern floor far below as they seemed to struggle to hold up the roof. In the very center of the cavern was a pyramid, emerging up from the floor, and an inverted pyramid descending from above.
Trapped between the pyramid below and the inverted pyramid above, suspended in midair, was a plain looking metal box, but it must've been quite large given the scale of everything else around it. Arrayed around the lower pyramid and the box were more conventional looking structures, much more recently constructed around them along with scaffolding and supports. Prefabricated buildings were also stacked together around the pyramid, on top of or around different-looking squat structures.
"I believe this is what we're looking for," Hannah said, also in awe at what was before her. "And those statues? Prothean."
Bane sniffed the air. "Enemies."
"Keep an eye out," Hannah ordered, prompting them to keep moving. Their muton elite did so, taking point as before, his oversized heavy plasma cannon swinging in his arms as light as a feather. Fala followed, keeping a watchful eye on their surroundings. These weren't the first prothean ruins she had ever seen in her life, but they were probably the most intact. It was strange that Hannah recognized the statues, though. Did that mean she actually knew what a prothean looked like? Was this what they looked like? Four-eyed bug men?
"Rachni!" Fala yelled a warning as her imaging suite picked up one of the creatures, tagging the silhouette even when it ducked under cover behind one of the pre-fab buildings. A second or two later and her armor's HUD flashed a warning that it had acoustically detected mass effect fire a certain distance away, and located somewhere within the sprawling mess of asari pre-fabs and prothean ruins.
"Hannah-Shepard-not-Rachni, Mother-not-Queen, why do you sing here?" a slick, alien thought touched the surface of their psionic network, announcing itself. "Why do you slay Singers for Asari-not-Rachni?"
"There," Hannah said, pinging the outline of an asari-like figure standing on top of one of the pre-fabs.
"Enemies," Bane thought again, itching to be unleashed. Fala could feel it through their mental link. The muton wanted to be unleashed, so badly it left a sickly sweet taste in her mouth.
Hannah restrained him, but only so much.
"What are you, then?" Hannah thought back even as she spoke. "The mouthpiece for the Rachni Queen? Why have you been attacking the asari?"
"Not mouth-piece." The thoughts were sharp and punctuated, as if it didn't understand. "Asari-but-Rachni. This Child is Asari-but-Rachni! It sings for the Birth-Mother. Singing Strangers, your chorus hurts our ears, confuses us. Still, though your tones are strange, you sing as we do. Sing with us! Do not sing for them! For those who cannot even hear!"
"'Them' being the asari we came here with," Shepard guessed. "I'll ask again: why did you attack the asari? Did they attack you first? Don't tell me it's that sort of situation?"
"Attack?" the asari-not-Rachni jerked as if struck. "Survive! Multiply! Survive!"
"Listen," Hannah snapped, her patience beginning to erode. "You must know we have this place surrounded. You must know our power. If you want to sing with us, you can start by surrendering to us."
"Surrender-not-fight," the rachni creature seemed to understand that. It hesitated. "You mean song of weaker Queen to stronger Queen? What of Asari-not-Rachni?"
"What about them?"
"You sing but you do not listen! Do not see! Asari-not-Rachni must be destroyed. Must be Destroyed! Must be Purged! Harm us. Use us." The asari puppet jerked as the hateful thoughts percolated out of it, through it. "As the Engineers-not-Rachni used us. Cut us. Poked us. Remade us. Our genes. Our songs. And killed us! And shackled us! And silenced us!"
Somewhere in the distance, the gunfire grew louder.
"Even now, they try to silence us, silence us forever!" The asari-rachni opened its mouth and cried in a warbling sibilant scream. "The song of war has been sung! All rachni come! Queens come! We rise up and we silence Asari-not-Rachni first!"
The mad creature jumped down off the pre-fab, but it was only out of sight for a moment. It emerged again a second later, standing on top of something. Something moving. From behind the layered pre-fabs emerged a titanic rachni Behemoth, almost as tall as the buildings themselves and half as wide. No longer concerned about stealth, it lit up Fala's HUD like a Contact Day parade. With a nudge, it knocked aside the stacked pre-fab buildings and stepped out into the open. More than just a scaled up rachni soldier or warrior, it had a particularly bulbous rear end, and the vestigial wings on the back were reinforced with metal plate and cybernetic carapace. Four tentacles emerged from the thorax like a crown, snapping at the air. The Asari-but-Rachni stood on the top of it, like Fala herself had once stood on the shoulders of one of the human MECs.
"Kill enemies," Bane's thoughts were ripe with violence. It could barely be restrained. "Threatens Overlord."
"Hannah-Shepard-not-Rachni, Mother-not-Queen! Choose now! Sing with us or sing for them!" The asari hybrid's own thoughts were incessant, dissonant, demanding. It would not relent easily. "Think of only-egg, think of only-child. John-not-Rachni. Sing with us. Tell others to sing with us. Do this now!"
Hannah Shepard simply blinked, and her mantle's cowl snapped into place around her face, hiding it from view. She didn't say another word, but Fala could tell she was… agitated. Bringing up her son had not been a wise move.
The order came.
"Enemies!" Bane roared, indistinct in the real world but crystal clear in Fala's mind, the plasma cannon in his hands spitting emerald fusion powered death. "I am unleashed!"
So much for diplomacy.