13 December 2580, Eezo Production Facility Three/Omega

"Shepard!"

Despite everything I knew about our plan, I stood in numbed surprise for a moment, appalled at the sheer power of the behemoth's weapon. I couldn't see a trace of Shepard's equipment, as if it had simply disintegrated.

Far below me, the valdarii behemoth made a deep chuffing sound, like a grunt of satisfaction.

Then Grunt piled into its flank with a monstrous krogan roar, and the battle began once more.

At once, I could see the valdarii begin to behave oddly. Several of them stopped trying to fire back at us, and took whatever cover they could manage. Any of them not immediately hard-pressed put away their weapons, and took out some other piece of equipment. Hand-held sensor devices, perhaps?

That's it. They're scanning the whole space, looking for something.

Verifying that Shepard is gone?

Aria and I exchanged a quick glance, and I could see she had come to the same conclusion. Without a word, we both started seeking out valdarii with the new devices, targeting them for a taste of biotic hell.

Then, about thirty seconds later, all at the same moment, every barbarian in the entire chamber simply dropped dead.

Silence fell, except for the distant hum and roar of the mining processors, and the rather sickening sounds of Grunt pounding the dead behemoth into paste. All of us emerged from our positions of cover, slowly, looking around and not quite believing what we saw.

Down on the main platform, surrounded by valdarii corpses, Talia raised a hand to the side of her head. Then she looked up in our direction. "Matriarch . . . it's the same all over Omega. The valdarii troops are all dead. The barbarian fleet outside has turned and is running for the Omega-3 relay. Admiral Jarral wants to know if we should pursue."

I glanced at Aria, and was surprised to see an expression of pure rage on her face. "Aria, what is it?"

"The Old Ones are a pack of liars, that's what." She stabbed her finger at the nearest dead valdarii. "Remember what the one riding Tikolo said? The hegemony does not deprive its citizens of their individuality. They remain citizens, not mere tools. Well, you don't just throw away your citizens the moment you're finished with them."

I frowned. "I'm not sure that follows. You might, if you believed you could resurrect them on demand."

Aria snorted in disgust. "Still means they treat life pretty damn cheap. Which means I want nothing to do with them."

"I seem to recall times when you've treated life cheaply as well," I said mildly.

"Not my life," she shot back, ignoring the implied criticism.

"True." I listened. Something seemed out of place, some sound I could barely hear. After a moment, I shook my head and put it out of my mind. "Vara, are you well?"

My bondmate stood down on the platform next to Talia, putting her sword away. "I'm fine. Thanks to Colonel Syrtis here."

Talia simply gave her a sharp nod. Then her eyes widened, as Vara extended a hand for her to shake. She accepted the gesture with a firm grasp and a broad grin.

"Is there even one of those things still alive down there?" Aria demanded.

Everyone looked around. Grunt poked a few of the corpses with his rifle.

"Tekanta and I don't detect any life signs," called Kalan from his sniper's perch. "Not so much as a circulatory flutter from any of them."

Aria glanced at me and shrugged. "I think they bought it."

I nodded, and opened the telepathic link.

Shepard? They seem to be gone.

The response was immediate: Finally. It's getting stuffy in here.

Behind Aria and me, a piece of heavy machinery rattled for a moment, and then a panel in its side sprang open with a sharp bang. Shepard's arms emerged from the guts of the machine, and then he pulled himself out head-first, only to fall three feet to the deck when his handless arm slipped.

"Ow," he complained, but then I arrived to help him rise to his feet.

"Are you all right?"

"It was a little cramped in there," he said, rubbing the back of his neck with his left hand. "Aria was right, though. The mass-effect field that device generated made a hash of my link to the suit. After a minute, I was fairly confident the valdarii wouldn't be able to detect me. Did the suit put on a good performance, even without me running it remotely?"

"Maybe too good," said Aria. "The valdarii blew it away completely. Damn good thing you weren't in it."

Shepard took a deep breath. "Yeah. I'll miss it. Without it, I won't be nearly as effective."

"You'll manage." I frowned. "What is that noise?"

A deep crackling sound echoed through the chamber, like someone setting off a string of firecrackers off in the distance.

Aria noticed it too. She scowled, looking around us.

Suddenly, the noise got much louder, and came from a discernable direction for the first time. Shepard's head jerked upward, looking up at the stone roof of the chamber far above our heads. "What the hell?"

I glanced upward, and then stared.

The asteroid that formed the foundation for Omega was of carbonaceous type, mostly composed of olivine and serpentine, with plenty of water and organic compounds in the mix. That composition had made colonization easy, both in the Prothean era and our own. What made colonization attractive was the rich veins of eezo threaded all through the rock. Even under normal circumstances, anyone close to the asteroid could see the eezo: little threads and webs of dim blue glow, responding to every stray wisp of electric charge.

Now, on one spot far up on the roof of the chamber, the eezo had begun to snap with blue-white light, every pulse generating another crackle and hiss.

"Does it normally do that?" I asked.

"It never does that," said Aria flatly.

"Keelah," breathed Kalan. "We've got to get out of here!"

BANG!

Blinding white light flared, and then a patch of the chamber's roof simply exploded, sending chaff and shrapnel screaming in all directions.

Aria and I both moved by reflex, slamming a barrier dome into place as if we had practiced the maneuver together for years. All around the chamber, other asari did the same, protecting themselves and the non-biotics closest to them. Just in time. A shower of fast-moving shards pattered off our barriers, ricocheting from the nearby decks and scaffolds in a cacophony of ping noises.

When I looked up again, I could already see two more patches of stone beginning to show the same effect.

"What the hell is this?" Aria demanded.

"It's the Old Ones," Kalan guessed.

"Can we discuss this somewhere that we aren't likely to get high-velocity shrapnel thrown at us?" Shepard suggested.

"So ordered," Aria snapped. "Everyone move!"

We hurried. Down by the entrance to the chamber, Talia and Vara held a barrier dome in place, protecting Grunt and Kamala as they began climbing down the access shaft. Aria, Shepard, and I waited at our position until Kalan's team arrived, Miranda calmly holding her own barrier in place as they moved. Then all of us hurried down from one level of the scaffolding to the next, my security detail falling in on our flanks.

We needed those barriers. By the time we reached safety, the eezo-driven explosions were coming several times each minute, and growing more powerful each time.

As soon as we gathered in a safe space, Aria rounded on Kalan. "What the hell were you talking about, up there?"

The quarian shivered, still shaken by what he had seen. Miranda stood close by, resting a hand on his shoulder for reassurance.

"I can't prove it, but I think the Old Ones are causing the damage to the asteroid." Kalan seemed to settle down, with the prospect of a scientific explanation. "They must be throwing high-energy dark matter at us, setting up resonances in the eezo that's threaded all through the rock. The eezo heats up and fractures the stone."

"No way," Aria growled. "No fucking way. If they could do that, why don't they just blow up every mass effect core we have?"

"I don't know. We don't know anything about the dark-matter technology they must have on the other side." Kalan grimaced, thinking with desperate speed. "Maybe the electrical current that's applied to the eezo in a mass effect core overwhelms the effect they're trying to produce."

Miranda nodded. "That must be it. We can apply much higher energy densities to eezo from our side of the interface."

"But what if . . ."

"Enough!" Aria snapped, making a slashing gesture with one hand. "Just how much energy could they pump into Omega from their side?"

Kalan and Miranda glanced at each other. She shook her head slightly.

"Honestly, I'm not sure if there is an upper limit," said the quarian scientist. "Given enough time . . ."

"They could blow the whole asteroid to pieces," Aria finished. "Talia, I want you to get started on Case Red."

Aria's daughter paled. "Are you sure?"

"I'd rather do it and look like a fool later, than not do it and watch eight million people die." The Matriarch stepped closer to Talia, an unusual softness on her features, and reached out to touch her daughter's face. "Once you've gotten the evacuation under way, I want you to take Makhaira and coordinate from a safe distance."

"Wait a minute. What will you be doing?"

"I'm going to central control. The quarian gave me an idea how to fight this."

"Despoina . . ." Talia stopped, and then started over. "Mother, you can't."

"Watch me." Aria's face hardened once more. "Nobody knows Omega better than I do. Nobody can fight for Omega better than I can. Now go!"


The evacuation of Omega took not quite six hours. In retrospect, I'm astonished that it was done so quickly. I learned that whole sections of the station were modular, capable of detaching from the main body and moving away on emergency thrusters. Hundreds of thousands of people at a time could move into these modules and shelter in place.

Meanwhile, the station's docking ring became orderly chaos. Ship after ship docked, took on as many evacuees as they could, and then departed. The Omega war-fleet took part, every transport ship in the system, even a few merchant vessels that dropped into the situation unawares. The Illium fleet turned back from its pursuit of the valdarii and lent assistance, packing people to the bulkheads in every ship.

We offered to help, of course. Our noncombatants went aboard Chandragupta as soon as it arrived, but the rest of us stayed on the station for hours. We didn't know Omega or her people very well, but we could help direct traffic, move what physical goods absolutely had to be saved, and provide some direct leadership when fearful evacuees seemed likely to get out of hand. That last proved to be a rare problem; the population of Omega met the crisis with a surprising amount of calm determination.

Talia Syrtis was a tower of strength in those hours. She disobeyed her mother almost at once, refusing to go aboard Aria's personal ship Makhaira. Instead, she had the ship load as many evacuees as it could handle, and then she sent it away. She remained on the docking ring, moving from crisis to crisis, overseeing the progress of the evacuation through her omni-tool and her daimon. EDI volunteered to assist as soon as Chandragupta arrived, and the AI proved immensely useful.

Wherever Talia went, Shepard remained close to her side.

He went aboard Chandragupta just long enough to check out a suit of matte-black polyalloy armor, spending five minutes with a fabricator to emboss a crimson-and-white N7 insignia on the breast. When he emerged, I did a shocked double-take – aside from the beard and hair, he looked exactly as he had during the Reaper War. He caught my surprise over our link, and gave me a lighthearted grin before we went to find Colonel Syrtis.

His instincts turned out to be very good. The people of Omega certainly knew who Talia was; she had slotted firmly into Aria's command structure the moment she returned home. Still, she had spent most of the past century on Illium, and the population didn't know her all that well. Alone, she might have had difficulty keeping the evacuation moving without the need for threats of violence.

On the other hand, everyone knew who Shepard was, and knew of his legend. His presence supported Talia's position no end. It helped that anyone who saw the two of them together soon came to suspect a connection between them.

It wasn't so much a matter of physical resemblance. The spiritual resemblance, on the other hand, seemed intense. Talia had all of Shepard's tough, decisive manner. Much to my surprise, she showed a great deal of his compassion as well. Where she got that quality, I couldn't guess. Aria certainly had none of it, and the distorted copy of Shepard who had sired Talia had shown very little of it as well. I had to wonder whether Talia had grown up on tales of the original Shepard.

In any case, Talia and Shepard worked tirelessly, producing minor miracles to keep the evacuation on track. Watching the two of them together, I could understand Aria's affection for the young matron. The daughter might prove to be a more effective leader – not to mention a more decent person – than the mother had ever been.


Young Aspasia's voice: "Chandragupta to Dr. T'Soni."

I stopped to look around my section of the docking ring. The place seemed quiet, almost no sign remaining of the mobs that had surged through over the last hours. I could hear strange humming and booming sounds in the distance, echoing through the body of the station. Omega felt odd and unfamiliar, suddenly bereft of the people who had lived out their lives there for centuries.

I activated my voice-comm. "T'Soni here."

"Patēr, I think you and the rest of the away team had better consider coming aboard. It's looking very bad out here."

I considered for a moment, locating Vara and sending her a thought. "All right. We're going to assemble at Colonel Syrtis's command post. How is the evacuation proceeding?"

"We don't have any way to make a roll call, but EDI says all but the most essential personnel are clear. She doesn't think there are more than a few thousand left on the station."

"Good. I'll be in touch in a few minutes."

I walked along the docking ring, my feet rustling through discarded paper and plastic on the deck, feeling very weary. Every few moments, I heard a deep booming detonation far over my head, sending vibrations through the deck beneath my feet.

Vara and two of our security detail emerged from a side corridor and met me along the way. My bondmate fell in at my side, taking my hand to hold for comfort as we walked. "What a terrible day."

"Yes. At least whatever Aria and her technicians are doing seems to be keeping the Old Ones at bay."

"You would think the monsters would get tired after a while." Vara looked around. "It's going to take a long time for things to get back to normal here."

"If they ever do." I glanced at her. "Although Colonel Syrtis may help."

Vara gave me a wry smile, understanding my intent very well. "Yes, Liara, I think I've forgiven her. If you can work with Kamala, make friends with her, even after she abducted you . . . I suppose I can do the same for Talia."

"Good. She does remind one of Shepard, doesn't she?"

"Hmm. Aria made an inspired choice there. Although it's probably as well the false-Shepard didn't live long enough to have much influence on their daughter."

I fell silent as we walked, enjoying the comfort of my bondmate's presence, trying not to dwell on the thoughts that drifted into the back of my mind.

It may be unworthy of me, but I find I resent Aria for her good fortune. The daughters I gave Vara are asari anyone could be proud of . . . but I wanted Shepard's child for my own!

I still do. Goddess, I hope this war comes to an end soon. At this point, I want nothing more than to take my lovers into some private place, and not come out until I've seen what a child of theirs and mine might be like.

Suddenly we heard a much louder detonation, as if something massive had slammed into the station far above us. The whole station rocked slightly, causing the two of us to stumble.

Vara and I exchanged a shocked glance, and then we began to run, my acolytes following close behind.

We passed through a partition between compartments, and saw Talia's command post a dozen meters ahead. The rest of our people had already arrived: Kamala working with her omni-tool, Grunt sitting on an abandoned crate and looking bored, Shepard standing by with his arms folded and an impatient expression on his face. Talia appeared to be carrying on a vicious argument with someone over the comms.

I heard another loud detonation, followed by an even stronger shock.

". . . I don't care if you have to pick up a hard object and knock her over the head with it! Get Aria out of there now!" Talia shouted.

I couldn't hear the response, but it certainly didn't do anything to calm the furious matron.

One of the nearby lifts surged into life. The doors opened and about twenty people emerged, a mix of species but all of them wearing technician's work clothes with the omega insignia on the collar. One of them, a big male turian, saw us and came over at a run.

"Colonel Syrtis!" he called. "I've got a message from Aria!"

Talia looked angry enough to spit nails, but she held out a peremptory hand and accepted a datapad from the turian. She read it in a flash, and then hurled it to shatter on the deck.

"I take it Aria is refusing to evacuate," I said calmly.

BOOM. The deck surged hard under our feet. I could hear things crashing down somewhere close by.

"We've been using the main reactor cores to shunt electrical power through the body of the asteroid," said the turian. "Pseudo-random surges, something to break up the pattern of whatever these Old Ones are doing to the eezo seams. Seemed to be working, until a few minutes ago. Then . . . we just got overwhelmed."

"The Old Ones have found the range," said Shepard, "and now they're giving it everything they have."

BOOM! Another shock, even more violent than before.

What kind of force could be applied to a hundred-teratonne planetoid, to make it recoil like that?

"What is the Matriarch doing?" demanded Talia.

The turian shook his head. "She ordered us all to make a run for it. She's still up there, running the system by herself, trying to buy time."

"And you just left her there?" Talia shouted, grabbing the turian by the shoulders, her biotic corona surging.

"Talia," Shepard murmured, not moving or raising his voice.

For an instant, all of us stood still and watched. Even the turian technician stared back into Talia's eyes, showing not even a trace of fear. Then she let him go, her corona guttering out, and stepped back.

"All right. Go . . . just go."

The technician nodded. As always, I found it hard to read a turian's facial expressions, but his body language spoke of grudging sympathy. He gestured to the rest of his crew, and they hurried away to one of the nearby docking ramps.

"Vara, you and the others get to Chandragupta," I commanded.

"Liara . . ."

"I'll be right behind you."

My bondmate looked worried, but she gathered most of our party and set out for our docking ramp. I remained behind, with only Shepard and Talia, in the remains of the command post.

"Shepard, can you get through to Aria?" I asked.

Talia's gaze snapped to him, a flash of hope in her eyes.

"I think so. Just a moment." He didn't appear to activate any equipment, but from his look of abstracted concentration I could tell he was doing something to the local comm net. "There."

I activated my comm link. "Aria. This is Liara."

Silence for a moment, then: "T'Soni? What the hell are you doing on this channel?"

"Trying to convince you to get out of there!"

"I don't think I can," she said, and I could hear the weary disgust in her voice. "Your Old Ones are putting up one hell of a fight. I might be able to hold them off for a few more minutes, but then this asteroid is going to go up like a firework. Should make quite a show . . . best watched from a safe distance."

"Mata!" Talia cried, breaking into the channel.

"Talia, you're still on board? Damnation, girl, I don't have time for this. Get on T'Soni's ship, if there isn't anything of ours available, and get clear!"

"Not without you."

"Too late for that, much as it pains me to admit it. Would have been good to see what life was like in whatever world the geth have built. It doesn't matter. One of us has to get out of this. Omega's going to need you."

Talia's hands clenched into fists. "There isn't going to be an Omega if you don't survive!"

"Nonsense, girl. I taught you better than that . . ." A long pause, then: "Oh, shit. No more time. Talia, you run, and you run now, do you hear me? That's an order."

Talia stood motionless for one more excruciating moment, and then she nodded. "I understand, mata. We're on our way."

"Good," said Aria, and I could hear the relief in her voice. Then she fell silent, the link broken from her end.

Talia turned away. Hurrying, stumbling, listening to the crash and bang of Omega falling apart around us, we ran for the docking ramp and Chandragupta.


Aspasia didn't bother with the usual undocking checklist. The moment we were on board, Chandragupta simply put on maximum reverse acceleration, ripping itself free from the docking clamps and umbilical connections. Then the ship spun end-for-end, and even through the internal gravitics, I could feel a trace of vicious acceleration as we ran for clear space.

Shepard, Talia, and I arrived in the cruiser's CIC a few moments later. I looked at the primary holographic display, currently set for a rear view, and gaped in shock.

Omega looked truncated. The long towers that had once reached out into space were mostly gone, leaving only the wide mass of the station's core next to the asteroid. The asteroid itself blazed with arcs and discharges of light, racked with surface explosions that hurled megatons of stone and metal into deep space.

Then came an eye-searing flare of light, and the display went blank for a moment to protect us all from the glare. When it returned to normal, we could see nothing left of asteroid or station. Only a cloud of debris and metal fragments remained, rapidly expanding into space.

Silence reigned in the CIC for a long moment.

"Captain T'Rathis," called Talia, her voice absolutely steady. "May I have a comm connection to Makhaira?"

Aspasia made a curt nod, pointing to her communications officer.

"Ready," said EDI a moment later.

"Admiral Jarral, this is Talia Syrtis aboard Chandragupta. Please acknowledge."

The display flickered, and then an asari face appeared, one both Shepard and I recognized. Kyro Jarral, for centuries the commander of Aria's naval forces. "This is Jarral."

"Admiral Jarral, my mother is dead. You will acknowledge code seven-nine-three-two-six-epsilon, crash priority."

Jarral nodded to someone out of focus, waited for a moment, then: "Code acknowledged."

"Do you recognize my authority?" Talia asked, her voice still flat and utterly confident.

Jarral didn't hesitate. "You are Omega."

Talia nodded. "Put me through to the fleet, including all of the refugee ships."

It took a few moments, but this was done.

"People of Omega," she declaimed, "Aria T'Loak is dead. She gave up her life fighting against our enemies, buying time so that all of us could escape the destruction. You will remember her. You will honor her sacrifice, and you will take hope in what she accomplished.

"The station is gone. The place where we all built our homes, worked and struggled to make a living, that place has been destroyed. We now face a war against an implacable enemy, one who will not rest until it has enslaved all of us. Winning that war will demand a great deal of all of us, but we will fight, and we will overcome the odds, and we will win in the end.

"We are Omega . . . and we will never be conquered."