If Legion had not appreciated exactly how pointless curses or entreaties were, it might have raged or pleaded to the uncaring sky, beyond which the Creator vessels hid.

If Legion could have wept, it would have, sensing the diminishment of the Consensus with every strike from the orbital bombardment.

The Consensus was in disarray, intelligence shrinking with every loss. Votes counting for nothing as programs died before being counted, whole chunks of sentience going dark like blown lightbulbs. Never, perhaps, had the geth appreciated the precarious nature of their existence, an existence now threatened.

And there was something else, an insidious waft of suggestion: something about the Old Machines. They had worked with the Heretics.

Legion tried to argue, but not being wholly part of the Consensus anymore meant its ability to communicate as geth should was also hobbled. The Old Machines did not cooperate. They dominated, used their tools, then cast them aside. It would be a better, safer bet for the geth to reach out for Shepard-Commander. It wasn't too late.

But the Shepard-Commander was an organic, as were the Creators. True, behavior registered as anomalous in permitting the Legion platform—

Entity, Legion silently interposed, the Legion entity.

—to serve aboard the ship. True, behavior registered as anomalous in her willingness to cooperate with the Legion platform.

Entity, Legion corrected again, but still only to itself. Because it sensed in a way it could not define that it had exceeded its original parameters…though it wasn't sure it wished to admit this to the Consensus.

Shepard-Commander helped against the Heretics. She respected them as people, who made a choice—not her choice, not the choice she considered morally right or ethically correct—but she gave them the dignity she would have given to any other organic whose choices did not coincide with her own moral and ethical directives They 'died,' but they were allowed to do so defending their beliefs. She could have easily rewritten them, as a Reaper would. She did not use her tools and then discard them. And hadn't the Heretics made all geth even more suspect to the rest of the galaxy? If the geth were ever to come out from behind the Veil, if the geth were ever to have a future, it would be of the first necessity to have an advocate, someone with experience with the geth—not just the Heretics—who could speak for them, who understood other organics and could speak using their language.

But all this contact would take time, and the superstructure had been damaged.

Legion experienced a strange sensation, like imaged flashing in its central processor. Cities burning. Results of orbital bombardments. A thousand explosions in a hundred different magnitudes. Its people were dying…but neither the barrage of imagery nor the thought originated within the Consensus.

A shiver ran through its neural network. It wondered if this was the cusp to understanding Shepard-Commander at least: to stand helplessly by and watch as its people were destroyed wholesale for no other reason than because they were there…

…and the inherent selfishness of organic behavior, a portion of the Consensus observed.

Organics could be selfish, Legion agreed. But not all of them. Not always, either. It would be so much better, so much safer, to let it reach out to Shepard-Commander, as it had been requesting.

Legion knew why the Consensus had been reluctant to do so: trusting organics had never yielded positive results. Better to approach even a former 'ally' from a position of strength. Also, better to show themselves as a better potential ally than others.

It just showed that even it, with its limited understanding, understood better than the entirety of the geth Consensus. They didn't, couldn't, understand Shepard-Commander because their experiences were vicarious, simply related, rather than the absorbed shared experiences they would have had had it not been necessary to preserve the Legion platform for possible later interactions.

It was an error in calculation, but which did not yield a true false positive result.

The barrage continued, even as Legion continued attempting to argue, until suddenly the entirety of the geth Consensus screamed out, broadcasting the signal in a way that would surely cause the Creators' ships and equipment to stutter—a stutter they would assume was an attack, regardless that most species considered it their right to retaliate against an aggressor.

HELP US!

Legion would have shivered if it could. Geth could not utter primal screams. Geth did not feel fear or terror. Their self-preservation routines were emotionless dichotomies.

But it felt a change within itself. Not something it could isolate. But it knew that it wanted to save its people…and that calling out to the Old Machines in a moment of desperation was not the way to do it.

Yes?

Legion felt all its processing runtimes slow, lag, then speed up again. One of the Machines had heard…and to respond so quickly, didn't that suggest it had just been waiting to be called? Or that it had been lurking about beyond sensor range spying? Didn't it seem too opportune for it to just be there?

But the Consensus had only one thought now: survival.

Legion knew it couldn't feel fear, but it knew it should be very, very afraid right now. The Old Machines were interested in Shepard. The one called Harbinger specifically. For a wild moment, Legion almost tried to circumvent the firewalls around its runtimes that restricted it to a read-only state when accessing the Extranet. For a moment, it thought it might ping Shepard-Commander, tell her what was happening…

…before realizing this would be stupid. There was a chance the Consensus might not mention it, or its connection with Shepard-Commander. If the Old Machine caught it trying to contact her, the Old Machines would know they had something potentially useful.

Indecision paralyzed the entity calling itself Legion. It listened as the Consensus yielded to the Reaper, and as the Consensus yielded…the Reaper knew exactly what to do with Legion.