Review reply: lordheistra222, I believe something you're really looking forward to is happening in the chapter after this one. ;)

Chapter 51: Friend or Foe

In trials, we learn our true alignment
And how true our allies are
Those who are truest are there irrevocably
No matter the past or how far

The day finally came that there was no more putting it off. The upgrades were complete. The squad was all in with no more lingering issues. No side missions or extra leads came along for them to worry about. All that was left was the IFF. So Terra reluctantly set the course for the dead Reaper and they were on their way.

As soon as they entered the system, she had cause for concern. The Normandy was a very smooth ride even without the kinetic stabilizers activated, so when the ship started shaking while the squad was gearing up, she was worried enough to run to the cockpit and ask Joker what was going on.

He had only just finished informing her that there were solar winds in excess of what the ship could easily shrug off when he noticed something. "There's another ship docked on the Reaper. No IFF, but the ladar paints its silhouette as geth."

Terra groaned, shaking her head at how nothing was ever simple. "Guess we know why the Cerberus team stopped reporting."

Almost immediately after she said so, the shaking stopped.

"…what just happened?"

"The Reaper's mass effect fields are still active," Joker explained, "We just passed inside their envelope." He scoffed. "Eye of the hurricane, right?"

Terra couldn't help but think it was ideal meteorologically but furthest from it in every other way. After all, the eye was supposed to be relatively safe and there was no way a dead Reaper was, especially if there were geth aboard.

Garrus and Zaeed stayed close as they docked with the Reaper. Fortunately, there was functioning life support as well, so they didn't need to bring helmets. That, however, didn't change the fact that merely stepping aboard unsettled them all, like the air itself was thick with shadows and every sound was cold and threatening. This ship was millions of years dead, as far as they could tell, but that didn't change what it had been before that. If the mass effect fields and life support were still functioning after so long, what else might it be capable of?

There was no sign of the Cerberus scientists, but there were terminals they had set up littered about the path. What little data was available was very disconcerting even without the added tension of their surroundings. Terra took that as another signal to get what they came for and get out as quickly as possible.

A plan that hit a stumbling block the second they went through the first main door and felt the ship shift.

"Normandy to shore party," Joker came over the COMM, "Please tell me you still read us."

"We're here, Joker," Terra answered, "What's going on?"

"The Reaper just put up kinetic barriers. I don't think we can get through from this side."

Garrus was instantly as nervous as Terra was. "Uh, of all the things I could be trapped inside of, a Reaper is definitely at the bottom of the list!"

Terra fervently agreed. "We've got a Thanix cannon now. Use it!"

"Reaper shields can resist fire from several dreadnoughts," EDI responded, "However, kinetic barriers can only be produced by a functioning drive core. If you can locate and disable it, the barriers will come down and allow us to exfiltrate you. Be advised, the core is also maintaining the Reaper's altitude."

Terra sighed. "So we shut down the core and the Reaper falls into the brown dwarf…"

"…and everyone dies," Joker said, "Yeah, we got it."

She smirked. "If there's any pilot in the galaxy who can pull us out in time, it's you."

"Yeah, yeah, just get a move on before we end up repeating history."

That was certainly a mission plan. Terra, Garrus, and Zaeed moved a lot faster now, and not just because the ship was so disturbing to be in. This worked well enough moving through the uninhabited walkways. It stopped working so well when a husk suddenly crawled up from under the walkway to jump out at them. All three of them were so caught off-guard that it was a wonder Zaeed managed to let off a concussive shot to throw it back over the edge before more starting coming from the woodwork. The zombie-like creatures were simple enough to handle in small groups, but this was an unceasing torrent that followed them down the walkways. They had just barely managed to clear a path forward when, upon approaching a corner, two husks rounding the bend suddenly dropped dead.

"Sniper!" Zaeed declared.

Terra took cover at the corner and peered around. There was no sign of anyone, but they were clearly a good shot. Guess we just have to hope they're on our side. With no other option but to head forward, she readied to fight off the next long wave of husks. This one came with one of those biotic abominations known as a Scion (as well as a few literal Abominations that exploded when they died, an uncalled-for complication) that could throw them and fry their shields even from behind cover with a single shockwave—not that taking cover mattered when the husks were running right for them from all sides. Terra made the logical call of telling Zaeed to lob an inferno grenade into the middle of it, burning the Scion's armor and splashing the flames into the husks surrounding it to clear a path for Terra and Garrus to finish off the rest. It didn't end easily, but at least it ended.

Terra was really aching to get off the ship now. She rushed Garrus and Zaeed through the next door to a more central chamber. When they stepped through, it seemed clear enough. She played it cautious, though, gesturing to Garrus and Zaeed to watch their flanks as she edged forward. Then, suddenly, two husks jumping up behind her dropped dead before she even heard them come at her. Terra quickly turned to check where those shots came from.

On a platform overhead stood a geth. "Shepard-Commander."

Terra couldn't have been more shocked if it had started doing the robot.

The geth simply strode away, out of their line of fire, not even waiting for a response.

"Since when do geth talk?" Zaeed asked.

"Or travel alone," Garrus added, "They're a network intelligence. Tali said a single geth would barely be able to function."

Terra was all for stoking curiosity, but the horror vid groans of more husks emerging from below put a pin in that course of action. "We'll catch up to it. Focus on staying alive."

She didn't need to tell them that. There were too many husks in the chamber for them to focus on anything else. Not to mention more Scions shambling toward them the farther they got. Terra was starting to wish she'd brought Grunt to charge right through them, but Zaeed more than made up for that with the sheer number of inferno grenades he'd brought along with him. Garrus and Terra fell into a rhythm of firing concussive shots to line up shots for the other, Garrus' armor-piercing ammo giving them the power to snipe down three husks in one shot (Terra was definitely asking him to teach her that trick later, maybe even trading her favored incendiary). Between that and Zaeed burning down the Scions, it was an ordeal but not an impossibility to clear the chamber and get to the next passage that led straight to the drive core.

And, as luck would have it, the IFF was exposed on a terminal right next to the door.

Garrus quickly used his tech skills to extract it. "Alright, we got what we came for."

"So the survey team did recover it," Zaeed noted, "But where are they now?"

Terra cast a disheartened glance back at the remains of the husks, remembering how they had passed a chamber lined with the spikes her people knew from Eden Prime, called Dragon's Teeth after the story of Cadmus and his monsters. She'd seen what they did. These creatures hadn't come from nowhere, and they hadn't been on the ship in the Cerberus teams' logs, at least not to this degree. "…I think we can guess." The thought of it made her shudder. Cerberus or not, no one deserved that fate. Garrus and Zaeed, slowly realizing her meaning, wisely kept silent as she turned to the next door and opened it.

The way through was sealed with a sort of barrier that didn't appear to be breakable or vulnerable to hacking. On the other side of it was the drive core chamber, at the end of which stood a terminal at which the geth sniper stood. The geth paused only long enough to shoot down some husks that were shambling toward it before finishing at the terminal. Amazingly, one of the actions it seemed to perform at the controls was to lower the barrier blocking the squad's path. Unfortunately for it, this was followed by another husk emerging from nowhere and attacking it.

Terra wasn't able to intercept the attack (though she wasn't sure what exactly she would've done), but she was able to shoot down the husk as the drive core exposed itself. All three of them immediately started firing at it, but it had a built-in shield that quickly closed around it. The shield seemed to be malfunctioning enough to open back up again at regular intervals, but husks were coming from all sides again to occupy them. This wouldn't be such a problem if they could find a way to bottleneck their assailants, but the room was too open, so all they could do was take up position at the three corners to the back of the room and watch each other's backs, taking shots at the drive core whenever possible. When Garrus informed them that the drive core was nearly disabled, Terra came up with an idea and asked Zaeed to toss her one of his handy inferno grenades. While Garrus and Zaeed covered her, she waited for the drive core shielding to open then tossed the grenade in and shot it. The burst of fire coupled with the force of the shot was enough to destabilize it so that one shot from each of the three of them not only disabled it but also rattled the ship with a small shockwave that chased off the last of the husks.

Once it was clear, though, Terra's attention turned not to the ship's gradual loss of altitude as it began to pick up speed toward the brown dwarf but instead to the geth lying by the terminal. "This thing's still active!"

"We don't have time to worry about it!" Zaeed snapped, nodding to the husks slowly crawling from the descending ship.

"But Tali said no one's ever captured one intact before!"

"Terra, I understand the curiosity and all," Garrus pointed out, "but we are still talking about an active geth!"

Terra could've stood there weighing the pros and cons for hours—how they needed to know more about the synthetics, even if active geth had desecrated the Alarei, and the squad if not EDI's cyber-warfare could easily handle it should it get out of hand because it was only one geth—but the rattling under her feet and steadily rising temperature dissuaded her from any consideration at all. "We don't have time to argue about it. Grab it and let's get out of here!"

So she and Garrus carried the deactivated geth through the chamber back to the outside of the ship while Zaeed covered them. Joker opened the airlock, they all jumped back onboard, and they raced out of there. Now that they were out of danger from it, Terra couldn't help but draw a small sense of satisfaction from seeing the remains of the dead Reaper fade into the broken light as they flew away.

Miranda and Jacob immediately got into an argument of their own on what to do with the geth, just like with Grunt's pod. Jacob was adamant they should toss it out the airlock the first chance they got while Miranda attempted to make a case for salvaging the platform. Terra had some thoughts of her own, questions rattling in her mind like marbles with "Why did this one talk to us, help us, possibly save our lives?" at the forefront. She wasn't going to get answers from salvaging it and frying the memory core. So she made the questionable decision to start it up behind a barrier and interrogate it, which Jacob was quick to point out would make Tali freak when she heard.

Terra agreed, so she decidedly avoided the engineering deck before heading straight for the AI core.

EDI was at the ready, keeping a barrier up with her systems prepared to resist any and all hacking attempts. One simple omni-tool command managed to give the platform what it needed to reboot. It stood and faced Terra. It didn't even try to break the barrier. Synthetics didn't show emotions the way organics did, but Terra couldn't help but think the look this geth gave her was curious.

"Can you understand me?" she asked carefully.

"Yes."

"Are you going to attack me?"

"No."

She gave the geth a curious look of her own. "Every other geth I've met has tried to kill me."

"We have never met."

"Not you, other geth."

"We are all geth, and we have not met you."

Now Terra's curiosity was giving way to confusion. "Then how do you know who I am?"

"News reports, insecure broadcasts—all organic data sent out is received. We watch you." The geth's more curious look seemed to give way to a form of reverence, though Terra still wasn't sure if she was reading that properly. "You are Commander Terra Shepard. Orphaned on Mindoir, adopted by turian family Vakarian, hero of Elysium, fought heretics, killed by Collectors, rediscovered on Old Machine."

"'Old Machine'? You mean the Reaper?"

"Reapers—a superstitious title originating with the Protheans. We refer to these entities as the Old Machines."

"And you're saying I fought whom, exactly?"

"Heretics. Geth are attempting to build a future. The heretics asked the Old Machines to give them the future."

It took a moment for her to see what it meant: the geth had been attempting to build a life for themselves on Rannoch, but some of them had branched off to worship the Reapers. "So…you're…not allied with the Reapers?"

"No. We were on the Old Machine looking for a way to protect our future."

"And what did you find?"

"A virus being developed by the heretics to persuade true geth to their way of thinking and assisting the Old Machines."

Oh. That would be bad.

"This unit opposes the heretics. We oppose the Old Machines. Shepard-Commander opposes the Old Machines. Shepard-Commander opposes the heretics. Cooperation furthers mutual goals."

Now she was approaching a state of shock. "Are…are you asking to work with us?"

"Yes."

She had changed her mind. Now Tali was going to freak. But this geth had helped them once and had bothered to communicate with them when it knew they would kill it without hesitation. That meant something. Terra had to appreciate that. She also couldn't afford to turn down help, even this kind. So, slightly against her better judgment, she went along with it and signaled EDI to let down the barrier. "So what should we call you?"

The platform simply looked at her, not even moving as its restraints were removed. "Geth."

She blinked. "No, I meant you specifically."

"We are all geth."

She groaned, resorting to being more specific: "What is the individual in front of me called?"

"There is no individual. We are a collective. There are current 1183 programs active on this platform."

"'My name is Legion," EDI quoted, "for we are many.'"

Terra shrugged. "Seems appropriate."

The geth took a moment to consider. "Christian Bible, Gospel of Mark, chapter 5, verse 9. We acknowledge this as an appropriate metaphor." So it seemed to accept the title. "We are Legion, a terminal of the geth. We will integrate into Normandy." It spoke the name as if the ship was a living thing rather than a vessel. Terra couldn't help but admire that.

So she held out her hand.

Legion seemed to take a moment to inspect the gesture before accepting it. "We anticipate the exchange of data."

"…right. And that virus you mentioned?"

"It is being held on a heretic station. We have the coordinates."

EDI had said it would take a few hours to fully install the IFF, and they couldn't exactly leave a bunch of Reaper-worshipping geth (sorry, former geth) to add to their ranks, so she didn't mind shifting focus for a while. "Let's go."

Just like when she opened Grunt's pod, Garrus was right outside in the med bay, weapon at the ready and ears on the entire conversation. As she passed him on the way out, he gave her a look as if to say This is one of the craziest things you've ever done, but I guess I trust you. Tali learning of the situation was unavoidable once their course was set, though, so Terra had to go explain it to her before they arrived. To say the quarian responded badly would probably be an understatement. It was a good thing Tali trusted Terra and knew better than to yell at her because this allowed her to restrict her reaction to a simple clenching of her fist and a warning—"Don't come crying to me when this comes back to bite us."

To Terra's face, at least. When the commander left the engineering deck, she couldn't help but notice an abnormally large quantities of crashes and Khelish shouting coming from the drive core maintenance console.

The natural endpoint of this reaction was for Tali to approach Garrus in the armory and assert that she was accompanying Terra on this mission and he could stay back and focus on his "calibrations." He naturally retorted that Tali was too close to this one and she should stay back and focus on her "tinkering." Neither of them had ever been so worked up as to belittle each other's work before, so the conversation almost immediately became a heated argument that was occurring dangerously close to the squad's weaponry. Terra finally stormed in and pulled them apart when she went to get her own guns, demanding to know what the problem was.

"Shepard!" Tali snapped, "You can't go along with this! It's a geth!"

"Yeah, one that helped us," Terra pointed out, "And we're gonna have a lot more to worry about if we don't move in fast."

"That's why you should take me! I'm better suited to disabling geth than anyone else on this ship!"

"That doesn't mean I can't do it!" Garrus snapped back.

"I didn't say you couldn't! I said you shouldn't!"

"Why not?!"

"Perhaps because you'd be a bit distracted?!"

Terra reacted sharply there. That was a very similar jab to the hurtful prod that Ashley had employed on Horizon. Tali hadn't heard it and wouldn't know how it might hurt them both, but that didn't mean it didn't happen. "Tali, that's enough. It's my choice and you don't get to argue about it."

Tali saw Terra's point, suddenly remembering that she was still technically her commander. "Terra, if this thing turns on you—"

"Then I'll need backup. Enough to disable Legion—on the very unlikely chance he does prove inclined to set us up—and still finish the mission. …which is why you're both coming with us."

That shocked them enough that they both cried "What?!" in unison. Terra had been holding the three-person team standard whenever possible since they first started the hunt for Saren. They'd fallen into their rhythms that way, organized maneuvers around it. Even after the restriction of the Mako was gone, they had stuck to it as if it was a military standard they were obliged to uphold. And now she was ordering them to change that?

"I have three good reasons," she explained, "First, we're almost definitely going to be changing the system at the Collector base anyway, so there's no point in calling it a rule. Second, the only advantage to a smaller team on this mission would be in terms of stealthy approaches, which Legion is assuring me will be straightforward enough to begin with simply through its help. And third?" She sighed. "…look, I'm not saying I don't trust Legion, but given it's the first friendly geth we've come across, it wouldn't exactly be smart on my part to trust it completely just yet, so I need some insurance. And you two are the ones I trust most. You work brilliantly together…when you're not at each other's throats. So I want you both behind me here." She smirked to Tali. "Unless you'd prefer to stay behind and help EDI on the cyber-warfare suites."

Tali simply looked at her for a moment before grabbing her shotgun and arming it. "Let's go."

Garrus had no objections either when it came down to it, so they all readied weapons, strapped on their helmets, and headed up to the cockpit as Legion was coming by. The geth only took a moment to regard them curiously and accept some simple introductions before going up to guide Joker on the approach.

Joker shook his head as Legion gave the instruction to activate stealth systems. "You know it's just our heat emissions that are hidden, right? They could look out a window and see us coming."

Legion looked at him. "Windows are structural weaknesses. Geth do not use them. Approach the hull at these coordinates."

As the geth turned to input a few commands to the navigational controls, Joker sat there…mocking it viciously. He only stopped when he looked over his shoulder just enough to see Terra glaring at him.

Five minutes later, they were docked and infiltrating the station. Legion was quick to warn them there was little air or gravity since geth required neither, but they had their helmets on and their armor came with mag-boots, so they were prepared. Terra's bigger concern was that the geth might detect them, but Legion was also quick to inform her that it had managed to overload the intrusion detectors so that no alarms would go past the room they were in.

"Sounds like we're set, then," Garrus nodded.

"Then we've got a mission to finish," Terra agreed, "Let's move."

Suddenly, Legion stopped moving. "Shepard-Commander!" it called to her, stopping her in her tracks, "We have just detected the heretic virus. It is complete and can be used against the true geth at any time. However, we have also determined that the virus can be repurposed. The heretics themselves can be rewritten to accept our truth."

"Uh, Shepard?" Tali instantly stepped up in concern, "I'm all for blowing them up, but if we go along with this, Legion's geth will be stronger. What's to stop them from going after us?"

Terra could easily give Tali some poetic argument about the organic-synthetic divide clearly being more grey than they had believed, but the way she saw it, it didn't even matter. "It's not an option. I wouldn't brainwash an organic race to make a choice against their will, and I won't treat the geth any different."

Garrus couldn't help but think that her compassionate, curious, not-quite-pacifist nature was going to get them in serious trouble one day, an opinion Legion surprisingly seemed to share. Still, it was her decision to make and she hadn't steered them wrong so far, so he didn't debate the matter with her when they prepared to move deeper into the station. Legion proved itself useful in hacking defensive systems and guiding them around alarms, even seemed to prove itself trustworthy by watching their backs in the eventual fights against the heretics themselves. As they went, Terra continuously peppered the platform with questions about how the geth functioned and what it was like to be part of a network intelligence and how it would affect the collective to rewrite the heretics on this station. Everything seemed to be going to plan for once, even down to Tali and Garrus looking at Legion in suspicion a lot less.

Until they found a server farm that Legion was able to scan. "Wait. We discover copies of our current patrol routes in these databases. This suggests the heretics have runtimes inside our networks."

Terra gave Legion a curious look. "We wouldn't be here if the heretics wanted to be friends with the geth. Why are you so surprised they would be spying on you?"

"You do not understand. Organics do not know each other's minds. Geth do. We do not distrust each other. We accept each other. The heretics wished to leave the collective. We understood their reasoning and allowed it. How could we have become so different? What did we do wrong?"

Terra had never thought she would wind up feeling sympathy for a geth, but here she was. "It's not your fault, Legion. When they separated, they changed."

"If this is the individuality you value, we question your judgment."

Terra had also never thought she would hear words like that and see where they were coming from. Poetic she could handle, but she rarely waxed philosophical to this degree.

She finally decided it was best to save the conversation for later and led the team through the next door. Legion found a console there that it was able to extract the virus from. The heretics responded with force, but they had the perfect advantage—a sniper's perch over a room that the geth had to carefully cross around a series of turrets Legion could hack while Tali slowly disabled or distracted them. The heretics seemed to keep coming, though Legion was quick to warn them of each approaching wave, and Terra found herself more grateful than she had expected that she had brought both Garrus and Tali along. Even when the heretics began to push harder and made it up to their level, Legion had two more turrets to lean on and Garrus replaced his rifle with an overload attack that stunned them for Tali and Terra to shoot down. With one final shot from Legion at a cloaked hunter, the fight was over.

Legion turned to the terminal. "Data-mine and analysis complete. Shepard-Commander, it is time to choose. Do we rewrite the heretics or destroy them?"

Terra looked at the geth hesitantly. "They're your people, Legion. Why am I choosing?"

"We are conflicted. There is no consensus among our higher order runtimes. 571 favor destruction while 573 favor rewrite."

Terra, for once, found herself falling back on numbers rather than words. She couldn't help but add up Legion's report and wonder why the other 39 of his 1183 programs were abstaining. Even then, her focus fell upon the slight majority that rewrite had taken—after all, two or 200, it was still a majority. "…if…if they're…rewritten…the geth will accept them back? …will they even wanna go back?"

"We will accept them into our consensus and learn from their experience of being rewritten. All will be stronger."

Terra only now thought of the geth as different from organics, though not in the way she had mentioned earlier. The geth reasoned differently and needed a push like this to see when a decision was wrong. It wasn't brainwashing to use the virus now. It was undoing what the Reapers had already done by turning them on their own people. "Take them then. Unleash the virus and destroy it."

"Acknowledged." Not seeming to notice the uncertain glances Garrus and Tali were giving to Terra, Legion turned to the console and input the command for the virus. "Releasing virus. Note: remote access via high-gain transmission required."

"That sounds ominous," Garrus said almost nervously.

Tali agreed. "What does it mean?"

"The virus will be sent to heretics in nearby star systems as well," Legion explained, "This station will broadcast a powerful electromagnetic pulse through FTL channels. Alert: this EM pulse will be lethally hazardous to unshielded organic life-forms. Addendum: the interior of this station is not equipped with barriers."

"OH!" Terra groaned, "I really wish you'd mentioned that earlier!" She quickly drew her gun and ran for the door. "Back to the ship! Double-time!"

So they ran for it. Even the geth prime blocking the final door barely slowed them down—Tali and Garrus wore down its shields so Terra could shoot off its armor and Legion took it from there. Once they were back onboard, Terra told Joker to floor it and they raced off, watching from a distance as the station sparked with the effects of the virus and sent out the signal.

"If you'd told me this morning," Garrus remarked as he and Terra put away their helmets and weapons, "that we'd be saving a bunch of geth…"

"It can't hurt to have friends," Terra smirked.

"That much I agree with. But when those friends are geth, it gets a bit…dicey."

Terra shook her head. Garrus got her. He'd see it the way she did if she just gave him time. He was already not suggesting Legion itself was an immediate threat and that was a major step. Now if she could just convince Tali—

"Uh, commander?" Joker spoke up over the PA, "Tali just went to have a 'chat' with Legion. You better get down to the AI core."

Terra groaned. So much for that plan. "I'm on it." She raced down to deck 3 and past the med bay to the core.

Tali and Legion were indeed locked in a standoff, Legion apparently having scanned Tali's omni-tool for data on her father's experiments with the intention of sending it back to the other geth. Tali was livid, to say the least.

Terra wasn't about to let this go on. "Tali, your father was performing brutal experiments. If the subjects had been human, I would've told the Alliance about it."

Tali shuddered to think of it that way. "I…I know. But if the geth found out—"

"They'd attack. Which would cause a war that would leave both sides vulnerable when the Reapers show up. Is that what you want, Legion?"

Legion withdrew. "We did not intend to cause hostilities."

Terra shook her head. "Sooner or later, you both are gonna have to stop fighting this war."

Legion seemed to ponder her words for a moment. "To facilitate unit cohesion, we will not transmit data regarding creator plans."

Tali stood down then. "…thank you, Legion. I…understand your intentions." One look at Terra seemed to sway her to go one step further. "What if I gave you some non-classified data to send?"

If geth could smile, Legion would've done so then. "We would be grateful."

Terra certainly did.

When she came out of the med bay, Garrus looked at her in shock. "Did you seriously just get Tali to not shoot a geth?"

Terra smiled. "I'm getting to be a real miracle worker."

Garrus laughed. "And we all thought coming back from the dead was a big deal."

She laughed with him before following him to the battery, no plan in mind except to stay close to him while Tali and Legion attempted to put old wounds behind them.

She was actually making friends with a geth. Would wonders never cease?