You are Unquiet
The banshee stared at them with colorless eyes. Long arms hung at its sides, claws flexing in spasmodic movements. Was it considering them? Javik wondered if what was left of its brain was even capable of such a thought process. It was gaunt, leathery skin stretched over bone and sinew, showing only the same rictus grimace of teeth as those they'd seen previously. It swayed, gently, shifting weight from foot to foot as if responding to the distant memory of a breeze. A collar of plain metal adorned its neck, the same as the other collars that circled its upper arms and thighs.
It swayed and took a step forward. There was a bang from behind Javik. He turned and saw Major Alenko shuffle away from the table he'd just backed into. His face under his visor was bloodless, but he didn't take his eyes off the Reaper creature, nor lower his rifle.
Tension crackled. Soft sounds of footsteps moved around Javik as the others shifted carefully away from the creature, waiting for it to attack. For that bitter, scalding wail to burst from its throat. Javik's shoulder and arm ached, and his left foot. The fractures and strains of his wounds still dogging him. His armor tightened, bracing and chafing both, his protection and his cast all in one. Keeping him moving and fighting. Pain was academic, like hunger, a primitive biological convulsion to be contained and ignored.
"Tali?" Shepard said, also fixed on the banshee. "Anything?"
"Working on it!" the quarian called back.
The banshee stopped again. Its head moved slowly, sweeping from one side to the other, nearly raking the ceiling with its crown of horns. A sound came from its throat, a raspy mockery of breath. Did the mongrel organism it was even require oxygen anymore?
In all his years of fighting, Javik had never actually seen a Reaper creature that was not either dead and decaying rapidly, or attempting to kill him. A mix of disgust and fascination warred within him. He could not help but try to see the lines of the asari now distorted into this huge shape. Where skin split and healed to accommodate unnatural growth. On a face drained almost metallic for lack of color, he could make out the pattern of markings that once dotted the asari's face. Was this one of their elders, or a mere child?
Does it matter? "We should destroy this thing, Commander," he said, "before it turns on us."
"Don't worry, Javik, I have no intention of taking it home with us. But we have to figure out what the Illusive Man was doing here."
The emergency lighting strips along the ceiling lent the colorless creature an eerie blue-white sheen. It looked like the ghost it was, a shade from beyond the grave. When they'd burst into this control room, down under Sanctuary's artificial lake, the banshee had just been standing there, staring vacantly at the wall.
The first hostile, such as it was, they'd encountered at the facility tucked away beneath the empty refugee center. The center, a cruel mockery, showing all the signs of a hasty and violent emptying of its occupants. There had been no refugee centers in the Talvan Empire. Everyone had been expected to fight, or to build, or to work at any of the thousands of logistical details required to run an empire-wide war. Those who tried to escape it, to hide, were condemned as pariahs, given no aid. A hard world.
Javik could not say for certain that no place like this had existed in his time. A Cerberus equivalent. A hard world meant doing hard things. Before his time, Ksad Ishan the Wayfinder had fled the battle line, retreated to Ilos to construct his Conduit. He had been called a pariah. A coward. Evil.
Here, they call this Illusive Man evil. He sets himself apart. He breaks human moral law in search of a solution.
The Talvan failed. Ksad Ishan, his mad plan... succeeded.
"Shepard," Tali'Zorah said, "there's a... kill switch here."
Shear still pointed at the banshee, Javik turned his head just enough to bring the quarian into his field of view. With central power offline, they'd been forced to marshal emergency systems to coax computer systems back to life.
She commander kept her shotgun aimed as well. "What's the mechanism?"
"It doesn't elaborate." Tali'Zorah leaned closer to her holodisplay. "But it's tracking the banshee, not the room."
"Is that good?" Alenko asked. "We don't want the room filling with poison gas."
"I don't see anything like that," she said, "this isn't a cell, anyway."
"Okay," Shepard said, "everyone get ready in case this doesn't work. Garrus?"
"Knees lined up," the turian said. He leveled his sniper rifle balanced across his elbow.
Gravity hummed just behind Javik, crawling across his mind. The human soldier was potent indeed, when aroused to threat. For a human.
"Tali, do it," Shepard said.
The banshee stood and stared, placid as a herd animal. Small red lights came on, one each along the metal collars. A sharp whine cut the air, and the collars vibrated and clicked. All at once, the banshee's head toppled forward, sliced clean through at the collar. First one, then the other arm dropped off, then the whole body tipped forward as though a hewn tree.
Shepard swore and put her hand to her neck, jumping out of the way as the torso, now free of all limbs, bounced off the central console and rolled to the ground. There they twitched a few times, then lay still.
Vakarian leaned out over his rifle, peering down. "Spirits."
"Well, it didn't fail spectacularly," Tali'Zorah said, hands on her hips, "so that's a first for Cerberus."
The commander smirked. "Second. After all, I'm alive."
"That's because of Miranda Lawson," the quarian sniffed, "if it weren't for her, you probably would've come out of Lazarus with an extra leg."
Alenko winced, but Shepard actually chuckled darkly. She waved her hand. "Spread out and look around. Look for comm pads, data drives, key cards, anything. Tali, keep working on what might be left in their main drives."
Lip curled, Javik turned away from the quartered banshee and walked along the far wall past the door, examining the esoteric instruments arrayed along tables and attached to swing arms. The image of the terrible creature grown placid and dumb gnawed at him. He came upon the turian, who was attempting to coax life out of a small console attached to what looked like a person-sized stasis tube, one of many they'd seen scattered throughout the facility.
The tube was somewhat fogged, the interior scratched with long, random marks. Javik kept his hands on Shear's reassuring weight. The ken of this place was murky, confused. Out of nowhere, there could be intense fear. Pain. Then an eerie vacancy, the dull throb of life without focus or agency.
"Another test tube, I guess," Vakarian muttered. The control console remained dark.
Javik heard Tali'Zorah call Shepard over. Together they watched a holo-recording whose oblique image angle suggested security camera footage. There was a voice speaking.
Beside him, Vakarian tipped his head. "Miranda?" He walked over to the other two.
As the recording hissed and switched to another feed, Javik's gaze was drawn back to the tube. The back side of the interior was lined with disconnected sensors and hookups of indeterminate usage. Not for the first time, he wished he understood more of the sciences. The how of things, instead of just the how best to destroy them.
Before this room, they'd crossed another bank of these tubes. One had a body in it, one that looked a great deal like a human husk, its face wizened and mummified. Tali'Zorah had much to say about the process that created them, the complex nanite interaction induced normally by the spikes they called Dragon's Teeth. A lyrical name for a blunt and simplistic device of terror.
He dared not touch the tube.
"It's true," he heard Shepard say, "he's working on his own version of indoctrination. Trying to control the Reapers!"
Cold snakes slithered through Javik's gut. The quarian, in her element, pulled apart the computer system with quick strokes, a diviner reading the portents in digital viscera.
"Wait, there's a name- Keelah!" she exclaimed. "It says Henry Lawson!"
"Miranda's father?" Vakarian asked.
"He's the lead researcher! Look, these are all logs... most of them are encrypted. But look, a reference to a as an early alpha test!"
Alenko peered over her shoulder, face dark. "All those refugees, test subjects. The viable ones brought here, the others pressed into their soldier-making machines!"
"They keep thinking they'll be the ones who won't get indoctrinated, don't they?" Vakarian said. "Despite all prior evidence."
"And it's not just about controlling Reapers, is it?" Alenko said. "The Illusive Man sees a world where everyone follows his lead, doesn't he? Not just human supremacy, but a control scheme for the entire galaxy!"
An empire. Javik quietly bit his tongue, watching the horror pass through the others like a wave. They still believed so ardently that lesser peoples could be left to their own devices, that subjugation and integration were evils. Yet they argued and fought ceaselessly. Fought whole wars of stubbornness.
And yet they are here, and the Talvan is dust.
Vakarian shook his head and turned to the back wall. It was slanted outward, lined with long steel shutters set into tracks. He touched a control panel, but it did nothing. The manual winch inside a wall bracket was more fruitful. There was a thud, and the shutters slid open as he cranked it.
Beyond was a long bay lined with thick buttresses, large enough to house several shuttles. Javik walked over and peered down. The room they were in looked out from the upper part of the bay. An array of cables lay thickly along the floor, coiled and strewn haphazardly, their open sockets disconnected. Along the ceiling was what looked like some kind of gantry and lift system that led away to the far end of the bay, which was a large set of doors.
"Whatever was here," the turian said, "it's gone now."
Shepard looked down, sweeping her gaze from one end to the other. "Whatever it was, it took a lot of power," she said, pointing to the cables.
"I think it was the other way around," Tali'Zorah said from her console. "Whatever it was provided power. It... wait, I think I have an image here."
They all turned to look. It was another security camera still, this time showing the interior of the bay. It had been occupied with a cylindrical device stretching from end to end, hooked up to the cables. In the grainy image, its core looked hot, the center swell pushed inward and pulsing with unnatural light. It was large, well over the size of the Kodiak shuttle.
Shepard grunted. "Garrus, does that look familiar to you?"
The turian's helmeted head cocked. "It does, yeah. Didn't we destroy that?"
Major Alenko squinted at the image. "What is it?"
"I can't be sure, but it looks an awful lot like the heart of the... machine the Collectors were building. Beyond the Omega 4 relay. The one that tried to kill us, the proto-Reaper."
"The dimensions match," Tali'Zorah said, looking at her omni-tool.
"Are you sure?"
"Well, I have the data from the Collector base, and I can extrapolate the size of that," she pointed at the image, "because I can compare that step-down generator to the real one in the bay."
"A reaper heart," Vakarian grumbled. "Wonderful."
"How did they get their hands on it?" Alenko asked.
Shepard scraped her hand across the plate of her helmet. "Petrovsky said Cerberus moved into the galactic core almost as soon as the Normandy left. They sent science teams, and they must have found enough of it to rebuild..."
"But how did they get in without the IFF?"
"I don't know!" Shepard snapped.
Alenko held up his hands. "I... I didn't expect you to."
"Who knows how long the Illusive Man has been screwing with us," Vakarian said. "Or how long the Reapers have been screwing with him? For all we know, the Reapers let them in."
"I'm just thinking out loud," the major said, putting his hand briefly on Shepard's shoulder.
She nodded wearily.
"Maybe so the Reapers could get their claws into the Illusive Man's head," Tali'Zorah said. Her hands flew over the display, holo overlays flickering in time in her visor. "It was a power core. It's gone, that's why most of the base is underpowered right now. It was their generator."
"Was it their controller as well?" Javik said. "Did it pacify the banshee?"
They all turned to look at him.
"Good question," Alenko said. "That thing was Reaper tech..."
"I think the control device must have been something else," Tali'Zorah said.
The quarian went on, but Javik turned away, looking back at the killing collars now resting in little piles of black ash, all that was left of the banshee. He bent and picked one up. The human hand that had touched it last reeked of nervousness, but the creature itself... empty. The collar was heavy, and strung across its inner edge gleamed three wires so thin as to barely be visible. Cunning. A single command, and an inner ring of the collar uncoiled, sawing the wires across a limb until it was severed.
"Javik, is there something on your mind?"
He looked up from the killing collar. Shepard stood before him. He considered the human for a long moment. She lacked the ken, and yet she still sensed his mood.
"I did not believe this was possible," he said, gesturing to where the fallen banshee had moldered into blackened ash.
"Neither did I," she admitted.
He dropped the collar. It landed in a puff of black particles. "The belief we could control them was what turned my tal against me. It was madness, I thought. Nothing more than a corruption. What the Reapers wanted us to believe, so we would turn on one another."
"But now it looks like it might be possible?"
Did we pursue destruction all this time when dominion is possible?
Madness. He touched his forehead. "Everywhere I see cycles within cycles repeating themselves. Echoes of my own cycle. Desperate measures that seem like insanity, evil, like this Illusive Man and his goals."
Shepard watched him, scrutinizing him. It frustrated Javik to have to find clumsy words for everything instead of simply sharing his thoughts. Cipher or no, her connection would always be the simple, animal kind.
"I'm not convinced it actually did work," she said at length.
He tilted his head questioningly.
"I mean, I think the Illusive Man is seeing what he desperately wants to see," she said. "Everybody I've ever known who was exposed to Reaper technology eventually turned. All of them."
"Except yourself."
She met his gaze. "I keep asking myself why," she said in a low voice, "and I don't have an answer. Maybe I did get affected but I just don't know it."
"You did not," Javik said.
"You seem awfully sure."
"You are unquiet."
"What?"
He looked away. "In war, necessity shapes us. It was necessary for me to learn to ken the corruption in others. I do not find it anywhere among us. I feel doubt, fear. Pain and loss. Anger. Your people are messy, Shepard. Undisciplined in their natural state. The corruption is a... quiet. A conviction that infects you bit by bit until you are at peace, sure of yourself. The voices in your head become your voice."
Shepard shivered. "That's the way Saren sounded. He had a whole logic set up in his head to justify what he was doing."
The name was familiar from their recent history... the turian who had first fallen to the Reaper called Sovereign. Could they truly be controlled? It seemed like they were finally so close to destroying them...
If the Crucible actually works.
"I have only to think of my people, and I want every Reaper dead." He looked at her. "But I am... unquiet. After so long, I... do not know what to make of this."
His old tal might have admonished him for doubt. She simply nodded.
"Shepard!"
It was the quarian. She'd left her console and ran up to the commander, pointing to the door. "They're here, Shepard! Right now! In the comms wing, a level up!"
"What?" Shepard said. "Who's here-"
"Miranda, she's going after her father! I found more of those logs, and one of them is timestamped an hour ago! Henry Lawson is still here, clearing out data!"
"We can still catch them!" Alenko said, coming up behind Tali'Zorah.
"Damn right," the commander said, pulling her weapon free, "everybody move out!"
Author's note:
I've decided that for my sanity, I'm going to move the posting schedule to biweekly. The chapters are only getting more complex as I leave game canon behind, and the stress of it was getting to me and hurting my usual process. I'd rather space the final stretch out and give myself the breathing room I need to hopefully keep the quality up throughout, all while not compromising my real life. So until further notice, posting will be biweekly, and weekly where time and circumstance allow. Not my first choice, but I think it's for the best. Thanks!
