Chapter 50. Vigilia
The Mu Relay looked no different from any other relay. The energy signatures fell within accepted parameters. It responded readily to Joker's ping. The rings had started their spin without so much as a hiccup.
Pressly tapped his fingers against a flight console, scowl on his lips. Joker eyed him from the helm.
"You know, old man, there's nothing keeping you from watching this go down from the CIC."
"I don't like this," the navigator said in reply.
Joker sighed. "Yeah…I gathered that. But you're not the one flying, so until you stop giving off that heebie-jeebies vibe why don't you go give it off somewhere else?"
Not surprisingly, Pressly ignored him. When the old man wanted to make a point he generally tuned out everything else until he'd accomplished it.
"No one's used this relay for thousands of years. We have no idea if works, and no way to test it."
"Yeah, uUntil we remember that the relays have apparently been around a little longer than we thought." A fact everyone conveniently isn't talking about. "If Shepard's right, those things could be a few million years old. I'm not exactly worried about the equipment going bad."
"Need I remind you this relay got knocked loose by a supernova?"
Joker made a disgruntled sound and pointed to his scans. "Do you see debris of a giant reaper floating around? I think it's safe to assume Saren made it through. We'll be fine. Don't worry, Pressly, I'm here to save you."
"I still don't like it."
No way was Joker going to admit he actually agreed. Unless Sovereign had been lying the damn relays were reaper technology, not prothean. Another fact everyone all the sudden seemed very, very careful not to mention. Who's to say that the giant tin can hadn't sabotaged the Mu Relay on its way through?
At the sound of approaching footsteps Pressly stood. Joker didn't need the visual confirmation to know it was Shepard. The treads of that Colossus armor torturing the deckplates wasn't exactly subtle. He shifted in his seat and tugged the brim of his hat a little lower on his head. Joker had been at the coffee machine when Liara had slipped out of his quarters rather early this morning. She hadn't said anything and he sure as shit didn't hadn't speakspoken up, but. It was interesting nonetheless.
Interesting.
Shepard came to a halt behind his chair. "What's it look like?"
Joker risked a quick look behind him. The commander wore his hardsuit in place of his fatigues and had enough firepower strapped to his back to supply a whole platoon. But nothing in Shepard's face gave away anything that might have happened the night before. Not that he expected it to. When he wanted to be, Shepard may have been the most opaque man to ever live. Great when you were dealing with an enemy. Maddening when you were looking for a little personal ship gossip.
"She's talking to us, sir. Numbers look good. Adams has the IES ready to go. Soon as you give the word we're gone."
More boots. This time Alenko, followed closely by Liara. Great. An audience for their imminent demise.
He snuck one more glance over his shoulder, this time at Liara, who appeared just as infuriatingly focused and neutral as Shepard. She stood on the opposite side of Alenko, gazing out through the shutters at the massive, rotating rings of the looming relay.
Her graven expression little resembled the dazed, almost delirious scientist Shepard had carried on board back on Therum. The first time she'd put on a hardsuit it had worn her rather than the other way around. Now she owned it with an almost graceful aplomb. Like a soldier.
Amazing what killing your own mother and gunning down any combination of geth, plant zombies, possessed colonists, krogan warriors and goddamned rachni could do to a person's demeanor.
"Everything's ready, Shepard," Alenko reported. "Garrus and Wrex have the Mako primed."
"Then let's do this," Shepard said grimly. "Joker? Take us in."
Joker took in a deep breath, shot a quick glance at Pressly and pinged the relay. "Initiating transmission sequence." His fingers flashed over his haptic interface, comm panel lighting up with feedback as the relay acknowledged them. So far, so good.
"We're connected. Calculating transit mass and acquiring an approach vector."
"Here goes nothing," Pressly murmured.
The relay's rings spun faster, a growing sphere of energy swallowing the ship, swathing it in a mass-free cocoon. Joker braced himself as the stars heaved, twisting into dazzling streaks of light before snapping back into a completely new and unfamiliar alignment.
Fuck, we're still here.
No time to dwell on it. Joker immediately began running scans. Hell, after a few thousand years it was at least within the realm of possibility things might not be exactly where they'd been left. Even finding star charts for Pangaea had taken a little doing. Liara had to call in a favor and have a colleague dig some up from an archive on Thessia.
"Adams," Pressly called into the comm.
"Stealth systems online. We're invisible."
"Good," Joker said. "Because I have good news and bad news. The good news is Ilos is still where it's supposed to be, and there's no sign of Sovereign. The bad news is we have company." He pulled up his initial scans. "Geth dreadnaughts. Two of them."
Alenko shifted his weight. "That's…a lot of potential ground troops. What the hell is Saren doing down there?"
"I'm more worried on where Sovereign has stashed itself," Shepard replied, brow furrowed.
Pressly scowled, squinting at new data scrolling across his interface. "I'm picking up some strange transmissions from the surface. ," Pressly reported. "Don't know what they're doing, but I can at least tell you where they're doing it."
"The conduit," Liara murmured. "Do you think he has found it?"
"Not going to wait around to find out," Shepard replied, posture reforming into something Joker most definitely would not want to see coming at him on the battlefield. "Find us a drop point for the Mako. We're going in."
"Negative, Commander," Pressly interrupted, swiftly working his haptic keys. "Nearest landing zone is two clicks away."
Alenko took a step forward. "Shepard, even with the Mako we don't have that kind of time."
Shepard nodded. "Agreed. Pressly, I need alternatives."
"There is no other landing zone," Pressly argued, jabbing a finger at his readouts.. "I've looked.! You need a drop zone of at least a hundred meters to get the Mako in safely. Closest I can find near Saren is twenty."
Joker pulled up Pressly's initial terrain scans while they argued. Saren's forces appeared to be clustered in an aggregation of old ruins, presumably prothean. Dense jungle on the perimeter. Too much scattered stone and obstructions in any of the open areas. Pressly had isolated a twenty meter straightaway leading to some kind of bunker that sensors indicated ran deep, deep underground. Conspicuously deep.
If Saren wasn't in that bunker then Joker would get out and walk home.
Behind him the argument got louder. Pressly's agitated insistence got even more agitated. Joker tuned it out and called up atmospheric telemetry. Wind velocity. Air density. Thruster output on the Mako, angle of descent…
Twenty meters.
"I can do it," he said aloud suddenly.
The arguing stopped. , and he felt sSeveral sets of eyes swiveled his direction.
Shepard hands dropped down onto Joker's headrest, rocking his seat slightly as the commander hunched his shoulders and lowered his head. "Joker?" Shepard asked.
"Twenty meter drop. I got this, sir. I'll get you down there."
The headset jumped again when Shepard let it go, but before the seat snapped back forward a reaffirming hand settled on Joker's shoulder. Shepard's hand settled briefly on his shoulder. "Let's do it."
"Yes sir."
Shepard vacated the cockpit, sucking half the oxygen out of the room with him, Alenko and Liara at his heels. Pressly slid back into the seat on Joker's right. He could sense the navigator's scowl without having to look for it.
"Twenty meter drop. You've got to be insane."
"I'm a miracle man, Pressly," he replied, hoping his hand looked steadier than it felt. Shepard hadn't even questioned it. No hesitation. No second guessing. Just blind faith.
Fuck if he was going to screw that up.
"I got this," he said with an exhale.
Twenty meters.
Liara clutched the handle in the seat behind Alenko as Shepard gunned the Mako off the Normandy's ramp. The sickening sense of freefall lasted only seconds before the eezo core kicked in. Outside the windshield the bunker loomed fast and large.
Twenty meters didn't sound like much to begin with, but seeing that wall of grey stone rise abruptly to meet them made it seem considerably smaller.
Garrus swore from the gunner's seat. On Joker's cue Shepard fired the thrusters to normalize and slow their descent. The brakes groaned the moment the tires struck ground, and the tank slewed hard to the left, then back to the right. They came to a halt with the Mako's nose less than half a meter from the unforgiving wall of granite sealing the bunker. Alenko exhaled audibly.
"Commander?"
Shepard thumbed the comm. "We're still here, Joker. Good work."
From the back of the tank Wrex muttered under his breath, gripping the harness cage strapping him in with enough force to dent it. Liara's own stomach had admittedly done a flip or two on the way down, but now that they were on land and in one piece, her gaze immediately sought the view outside the windshield.
Ilos.
Almost nothing about it existed in the records Liara had managed to dig up while grounded on the Citadel. Only one archive on Thessia had turned up search results for her query, but those results had mentioned something else of rather interesting note.
A conduit to salvation.
The clue had been there, all along. She simply hadn't had enough context to see it. And now they were here.
From what she could gather, the asari had never studied ruins on Ilos. The location of the Mu Relay in rachni space had discouraged exploration in Pangaea. In fact Liara wasn't even sure where the reference to the planet came from in the first place. There were no recovered artifacts. No archeological sitemaps. No architectural commentary. Joker's scans had indicated only a very small pocket of ruins still remaining, if there had been anything more in the first place. Landmasses with favorable building conditions existed in abundance, but only this small compound at the edge of a jungle had registered on sensors. It was almost as if Ilos had been an afterthought.
Or an act of desperation.
But even though she couldn't see much through the Mako's windshield, what she could make out puzzled her. Just like the ruins on Therum, it didn't quite match what she knew about prothean architecture. They liked clean lines, efficient spaces. A proud but simple aesthetic, with little heraldry. What greeted them out the window achieved none of those ideals. Under thick trellises of climbing vines she could see hints of old, rust-colored stone, impeccably constructed to have survived so long, but there was a…flourish to it that took her by surprise. Decorative arches painstakingly grooved with exquisite detail stood along the boundary wall that fenced out the leering jungle. How it had managed to do so for millennia was beyond her. Surely none of the technology left behind could still be functioning. But how else had this small compound not been swallowed whole?
"What do you see on radar?" Shepard asked.
"Lot of activity, lot of geth signatures," Alenko replied, voice threaded with frustration. "But they're all behind those doors. Out here there's…nothing. Not even a guard detail."
"Don't suppose Saren left the door unlocked," Garrus mused.
A brief silence fell. Liara thoughts turned to Tali, and she doubted she was the only one.
Shepard peered thoughtfully out the windshield. "We have to get in there."
"It doesn't even look powered," Liara observed.
"Reserves are low," Alenko concurred. "But something's still active. At least in the bunker. As for the rest of the compound…Wait. Look at this." Alenko pointed to one of his scans. Liara leaned over his shoulder, eyes widening when she saw what he had found.
"Something is drawing power."
Alenko nodded. "Very small. Not enough amperes to do much more than feed a console or two."
Liara's heart pounded. "Or—"
"If either of you say a beacon, I'm throwing you out of this tank."
Liara bit her lip. His tone was light but she heard the pain behind it, knew it all too well. "We do not know that is the case. All of the evidence points to the protheans wishing to keep this place a secret. But whatever that power source is, we need to find it."
"Yeah," Shepard said after a pause, fingers drumming against the console in agitation. "If Saren's already down there we're a step behind. Time to catch up. Set a nav point to that power source. We're going to go see if we can use it to breach that door."
"Can't get the tank through those ruins," Garrus pointed out.
"Of course not," Shepard said, reaching for the hatch. "That would be too easy."
Outside the Mako the air was still, temperature cool. In lieu of an immediate threat Liara refrained from putting on her helmet, instead gazing about in wonder, fervently wishing she had her equipment with her and time to use it. Months. Years.
Look at this place.
Latent sunlight cut through the trees, slanting down over the ruins and gracing them with a faint, scarlet glow. A weak breeze fluttered though the foliage, rustling it like dried parchment. Despite the pressure for haste, a somber, almost reverent feeling settled over Liara's shoulders, as though she'd entered into a monastery. No one spoke. The silence hanging over the compound lived and breathed.
Ilos did not feel abandoned. Ravaged. It felt merely forgotten, as though time had simply tired of it and moved on, trapping it in some half-remembered dream.
Shepard found a collapsed spot in the border and climbed over it into the facility proper, where they found themselves in a courtyard of ancient, tumbled masonry choked with overgrown flora. Positioned throughout were tall, slowly crumbling statues standing forlorn in the stillness.
At the sight of the statues Liara's eyes widened. Art! She stifled a cry of joy. For a moment her excitement was too great to find the juxtaposition strange. Abandoning all caution she strayed from her crewmates, approaching the nearest one with her heart pounding in her ears.
The graceful figure sat on a throne under the shadow of a stone archway, faceless head bowed as if in meditation or prayer. It had a faint suggestion of extremities not unlike her own; graceful ridges similar to the ones on the back of her own neck flowed down its trunk. Flagellations? Limbs?
She placed a hand against one of the undulations. Is this you? Is this what you look like? Goddess, was she finally face to face with the ghosts that had run rampant across her imagination for decades?
For all the data caches, fragmented archives and elusive technology the protheans had left scattered across the galaxy, almost nothing remained of what truly defined them. Art. Culture. The things that brought them joy.
But the same sense of incongruency she'd felt on Therum began to nag at her.
The pattern has repeated itself more times than you can fathom.
Ilos was a window. But what if it looked in to the wrong room?
Footsteps approached her. Shepard's gauntleted hand came to rest on her arm.
"Shepard," she breathed. "Do you see this?"
"We have to keep moving," he said, though his voice was gentle. She nodded, backing slowly away and turning her head. Garrus and Alenko were halfway across the courtyard headed for a hill on the far side, both looking over their shoulders and waiting.
"Sorry," he said, with genuine contriteness in his voice. "I wish there was time to explore."
She forced a smile. "No. You're right. Let's go."
Shepard nodded and resumed his course. Liara followed, still casting glances behind her, until the statues were hidden from view.
"What do you think this place was?" Alenko asked.
They'd found an entrance leading underground. Not into the bunker, but some adjoining chamber that according to their sensors contained the mysterious power draw. Shepard squinted into the darkness and flicked on his helmet light to give them some illumination. Thick, round tree roots bored through the ceiling, twining with stone before plunging into the ground below. Blankets of moss formed where thin rays of light snuck through. The air down here felt stale and dry, almost desiccated. Whatever purpose the room had served before couldn't be discerned now. The fact that there any technology down here still functioned struck him as rather miraculous.
So far everything about Ilos had set his teeth on edge. When the Mako had jetted out from the Normandy's cargo bay he'd been expecting to land in the middle of a firefight. Instead they'd spent nearly an hour skulking around like kids on a field triptourists while Saren inched closer to his goal. Liara was in heaven, but Shepard was ready to shoot anything that moved. From the creepy statues to the mausoleum-like atmosphere surrounding what he'd expected to be a research base, nothing here seemed right.
A rumble issued from Wrex's throat. "Security."
Garrus and Alenko both turned to look at him. The krogan shrugged.
"What? You think just because there are a few twisted statues out front this isn't some kind of vault? It doesn't still have power by mistake. The protheans wanted to keep something in and everything else out."
"I…agree with Wrex," Liara said as she moved out into the open space, eyes roving but expression troubled.
Shepard grunted. "I'm more worried about why Saren hasn't left any troops behind to guard it."," he said.
"I've got a few theories," Garrus offered. "None of them particularly encouraging."
"Either there's nothing for us to find, or Saren has better use for the contents of two geth dreadnaughts somewhere else," Shepard supplied.
Garrus hummed. "That about sums it up, yes."
"There," Alenko said, pointing up to a second-level observation window overlooking the chamber. "That's where the power draw is coming from."
Shepard caught the hesitation even behind Alenko's faceplate and sighed. "It's a beacon, isn't it."
"Still not sure. But, uh. Doesn't look good for you, sir."
"Great," Shepard said, tugging his helmet off and trudging his way towards the observation room. "Then let's get this over with."
"Shepard."
The pinched note of concern in Liara's voice brought him to a halt, shoulders tightening involuntarily under his hardsuit. "It's fine," he said without turning. "I've got this." After all, he'd made progress with beacons. The second one hadn't even exploded, and he'd at least held his sanity together long enough to go toe to toe with Saren. If he could do that well again there was nothing to worry about. Fallout was a problem for another day, beyond the parameters of the mission. And anything beyond mission parameters wasn't important.
He expected her to voice her objection. She didn't. By this point she'd probably seen enough to know that he wasn't going to change his mind.
"Saren has been here," Wrex said with a growl, scaly lips pulling away from his teeth. "I can smell him."
"Then at least we know we're in the right place."
Wrex and Garrus lingered took up defensive positions on the chamber's ground floor, on alert for hostiles that might have slipped the net. After all, despite how quiet things appeared, in Saren's place Shepard would have set up an ambushThe last thing they needed was to get ambushed down in a basement with no way out. It would have been the smart thing for Saren to do, especially if he'd known Shepard would find his way here to try and get past the bunker door. No reason to assume the former Spectre wouldn't do the same. The fact that that he hadn't only confirmed what Shepard had already guessed – time was of the essence, and whatever it was he had planned, he didn't think Shepard was a big enough threat to warrant concern.
Well. Shepard intended to prove that assumption wrong.
It didn't take much to find the active console. Wrex was right - Saren had already been here and done the dirty work for them. Thick layers of dust and detritus covered the floor of the observation room, and whatever glass or panel that had covered the window looking out on the room below was long gone. But in the very center one console had been cleaned, its panel restored, a soft glow emanating from its interface.
The good news was it didn't look like a beacon. Or at least not like the others.
"Why wouldn't he have just cut power to the console?" Shepard asked. "Not that I'm complaining."
Alenko examined it briefly with an omnitool. "Doesn't look like you can. It's tapped directly into whatever's still running in the bunker."
Wrex grunted from below. "You mean he wasn't clever enough to just shoot it?"
Alenko raised an eyebrow and shrugged. Shepard opened his mouth to reply, but the console flashed. A starburst of projected light collated into a sphere not much bigger than Shepard's head, its radius distending sporadically where the emitters were damaged.
-The taint of indoctrination does not lie upon you.
Shepard sucked air though his teeth, hands flying to his ears as though they could ward off the sudden buzz surrounding inside his skull. Beside him Liara gasped. , and he could see Alenko's feature's twisted as he pressed fingers to his temples.
The thing hadn't spoken aloud. He'd heard it, but not…heard it.
The buzzing sensation intensified, sending a current of warmth through his extremities. It clawed at his brain just like the beacon, but without the steel bite that severed control over his own body and manipulated his darkest memories like fucking puppets.
-What are you?
He'd meant to speak the words aloud. Had actually opened his mouth to push them out. But instead they bounced around in his temporal lobe, never actually uttered aloud, though to his rapidly diminishing surprise the sphere appeared to have understood.
-I am Vigil. An advanced non-organic analysis system with personality imprints from Ksad Ishan, chief overseer of the Ilos research facility. Your arrival here is one of many scenarios we anticipated.
-What do you mean? What scenarios?
The light sphere vanished, along with the rest of the room. Shepard stifled a gasp. For a moment he swam in nothingness, feeling solid ground beneath his feet but unable to find any sense of bearing. No smell. No light. No sound. Though he was positive Liara and Alenko still stood right next to them him, he had no awareness of them at all.
The room flooded with light, but it wasn't the same room. It wasn't even the same time. No bracken covered the walls. No debris marred the floor. Tall, smooth walls rose up over his head almost as far as he could see, lined floor to ceiling with rows upon rows of identical, cylindrical pods whose edges gleamed with circlets of light. Dark shapes moved back and forth beneath, the last remaining shadows of a long dead race waiting and watching for time to catch up and snuff them out.
The bunker.
He could feel their hopelessness. These people had known they were defeated. But twined with their hopelessness he sensed also a dogged resolve, the kind that only death could shake, and Shepard did not believe death had come easily to anyone who had dwelled here.
-You are here because of the reapers.
-Yes.
-Then you know of our fate.
(we are prothean and we traverse the stars)
-Yes.
-We had hoped this would come to pass. That the next cycle would uncover our warnings and learn from our mistakes.
-What is this place?
-The last surviving outpost of the prothean empire. We were too little, too late, but it may yet prove that our final days were not spent in vain.
-Tell me about the conduit. What is it? Why do the reapers want it?
-The conduit is a portal, one the reapers intend to use to seize control of your cycle.
-Explain.
-The citadel is the heart of your civilization and the seat of government, is it not?
-Yes.
-As it was with us. And every civilization that came before us. But the Citadel is a trap. It functions as an enormous mass relay. One that links to dark space beyond the galaxy's horizon.
Ice slithered in Shepard's gut.
-It functions as an enormous mass relay. One that links to dark space beyond the galaxy's horizon.
(…there are empty spaces between the stars, a cold interstitum of utter dark, where blood runs black and monsters lurk. In the silence something broods, waits, watches)
-When the relay is activated, the reapers will return.
(the monsters are awake, and they set the stars ablaze)
-All you know will be destroyed.
Silence. Shepard watched the shadows lurk. Watched the narrow bands of light flash on a sea of pods – lifeboats – that gleamed like tiny stars.
This will be us. This is how we could end.
He drew in a breath.
-I need to know how it happens.
The ball of light that bobbing in his peripheral waxed and waned, then shimmered.
-Every cycle, the dominant races discover the Citadel. But they also discover the subservient race that maintains it.
--…the keepers?
-Yes. We come to rely on them. Allow them to maintain technology we do not understand in order to use it. Reliance on the keepers ensures that no other species will discover the Citadel's true nature. Not until the relay is activated and the reapers invade.
Shepard put the pieces together. The Council. Every attaché to every species of prominence. A hub of sensitive information all ripe for the taking.
- A single surprise attack and the reapers would throw them can throw us into chaos.
-They'll have our records. Starcharts. Know exactly where to find us and how to kill us.
-That was our fate. Our leaders were dead before we even realized we were under attack. Through the Citadel, they also controlled the mass relays. Communication and transportation across our empire were crippled. Instead of unified fleets met in strength, the reapers traveled from system to system and found easy prey. We were systematically obliterated.
-But you did something. You tried something. The conduit. Saren is after it. I can't let him get it.
-You refer to the other lifeform that came before you.?
-Yes.
-He is a tool of the reapers. An indoctrinated slave. There will be more. Many more. Ever and again the reapers turned our own people against us, taking us down from within. Every foothold we gained, every act of desperation we launched, ultimately ended in betrayal. For all their might, this proved to be their most powerful weapon.
-I'm…beginning to understand that. How did you overcome it?
-Ilos was a secret facility, known to few. Most perished in the initial Citadel attack. After the reapers arrived and the threat of indoctrination became known, we severed all communications. No one knew of our research. There were no records. The reapers knew nothing of our existence. World after world burned, but Ilos was spared. Ishad recognized that our people were doomed. So our scientists retreated into the archives and submitted themselves to cryogenic stasis. I was programmed to monitor the facility, and wake them when the danger had passed.
Shepard gazed around at the hundreds of stasis pods embedded in the walls of the bunker. An entire people distilled into a paltry collection of small, black caskets, the only sign of life within them coming from the illuminated strips of light on their oval panels.
The vision blurred. As time began to pass, decades stretching into centuries, one by one, the lights began to wink out.
One by one, the stars dimmed. Until there were none.
-The genocide of an entire species is a long, slow process. My energy reserves began to dwindle. When they became critical, my contingency programming required disabling life support to all non-essential personnel. By the time the reapers retreated back through the relay, only our top scientists remained.
-Why not fight? Why not try? There wouldn't have been enough of you here to perpetuate the species. Why not finish your work, or die trying!
-Our work would not have saved the protheans. However, we did believe that if we could complete it, might prevent the reaper's next return and spare the next cycle.
The walls of the bunker shimmered like a star field racing past the Normandy's shutters. It re-solidified somewhere else somewhere deeper. A wide open space filled with a deep, resounding thrum that raced its way up and down the walls in ceaseless repetition. At the center Shepard saw a familiar shape rising out of the ground, at the center of which turned a pair of rotating rings.
A relay.
-Before the reapers struck, the scientists at this facility were close to understanding the technology behind the mass relays. While our empire crumbled we succeeded in creating small-scale version of a mass relay that links directly to the Citadel - : the hub of the relay network.
Shepard thought back to his first conversation with Liara in the medbay. A conduit to salvation.
-You designed a backdoor onto the Citadel.
-Yes. The portal is a prototype that only links in one direction. But it was sufficient for our plans. The Citadel is the key to the reaper's strategy of attack. The keepers are their servants, and they respond to the reapers' commands. When the reapers wish to begin their harvest, a signal is sent that compels them activate the Citadel relay. After decades of study, we discovered a way to alter this signal. Using the conduit, they gained access to the abandoned Citadel and made the modifications.
-So when the reapers signaled the keepers to start the next harvest…nothing happened.
-Correct. Without the Citadel relay the reapers are trapped in dark space.
-Sovereign – he's using Saren to find out what went wrong.
-The one you call Saren will use the conduit to bypass the Citadel's defenses. Once inside, he will transfer control of the station to the reapers. The cycle of extinction will begin again.
-We have to stop him. Help me.
-I can provide data that can disrupt Citadel security protocols and give you temporary control over the station. It may be enough to give you a chance. Find the master control unit and upload the data.
-Master control unit?
-Go to the Citadel tower. Follow the conduit. Follow Saren.
Shepard watched the miniature relay's oscillating rings. A conduit to salvation. Saren would be there now, had probably already used it. What if they were too late?
-We don't have much time. I have to get into the bunker.
-I will unseal the doors. You still have hope. Use it well. Do not let our last act be in vain.
The bunker vanished, the stifled, ancient remains of the observation room swimming back into focus with an uneven lurch.
"Shepard!"
Liara had him by the arm, one hand resting against the side of his face, blue eyes wide with alarm. Alenko stood immediately behind her, helmet off, omnitool out, medical scan running with a tight, pinched expression at the corner of his eyes.
Shepard pulled away from them, taking one sluggish step towards the ramp leading back down to the basement. "We have to go." The words slurred coming out of his mouth. For a moment he was afraid they hadn't even been words. At least not ones he recognized. Alenko seized him by the arm.
"No way. What the hell just happened?"
Shepard scowled, rolling his tongue around in his mouth until it felt like his again. "Didn't you hear it?"
"Yeah, we heardit. My ears are still ringing. What happened to you?"
Liara grew still. "You did not hear what we heard."
Shepard put his fingers to his forehead as he shook off the last ropes of his fugue. "I talked to it. Vigil. Its name is Vigil. Why…what did you hear?"
Alenko grimaced, fingers at his temple. "Jackhammers."
"The cipher," Liara supplied. "Their technology is based on an organic neural interface. Like the beacons! The cipher enabled you to transcribe the interaction into something you could comprehend."
"What did it say?" Alenko asked.
Shepard was already halfway down the ramp.
"I'll explain on the way. Joker! Do you copy?"
"Loud and clear, Commander."
"Put Pressly on."
Shepard felt the curious eyes of his crewmates, but he did not pause to explain, breaking into a jog in his hurry to get back to the Mako.
"Here, sir. What do you need?"
"I need you to take the Normandy and cut and run."
"…sir?"
"Get ahold of Admiral Hackett. Find the Fifth Fleet."
"And leave you behind? Are you out of your mind?"
"Fair question," Wrex gruffed. Shepard ignored him.
"You're not leaving us behind. We're just going to catch another ride. The Citadel's about to be under attack, if it's not already. Get everyone you can muster and rendezvous with the Citadel fleet. Wait for my signal."
"Commander—"
"That's an order, Pressly. She's your ship now. Take 'er and go."
"Aye, aye, sir."
They weren't too late. They couldn't be too late. Fifty thousand years and countless cycles of endless genocide now rested on this moment. Right now. Shepard released a breath.
The waning sunlight of Ilos waited for them when they returned to the surface. Shepard glanced up at the sky, where the Normandy was hopefully breaking orbit and setting course for the relay.
"Godspeed," he murmured.
