Four weeks later
New Zerg homeworld (Jahannam)
This is all completely off the rails.
Ever since that raid I have had my leviathans and void swarms hunt down and consume all batarian pirate bands they could find in the terminus , provided they could be certain there will be no survivors to spread word of our existence.
From the information gathered from those very few SIU agents we managed to nap , i gathered that humanity was discovered by the Batarians first in this timeline and this time around the systems alliance didn't have the advantage of a "humans are special snowflakes that advance quickly" to save them and are so reduced to being quite literally cattle for the batarians to harvest for resources and slaves as they please. If i was human i would probably be fuming right but try as i might i felt very little for the plight of my original species.
Whatever my feelings on the matter were , the Batarians were certainly quite happy with it , they were growing rich and powerful from their little shadow empire and were on the fast track to becoming the fourth council race (if the extranet is to be believed anyway).
This was... irritating to say the least, this was a wholly different galaxy that was already pretty unrecognizable from the one in the games. I was in unknown waters and every step I took could have unforeseen consequences, and yet i can see much in the way of an opportunity in this, but before I made any moves I needed more information on the situation.
But it will have to wait , because there was something else I had to deal with right now as I sensed the unmistakable psychic signature of a protoss approaching me.
The protoss were completely under my control and yet they weren't really part of the swarm hivemind which made them one of its few components who still had a modicum of free will , and the only ones whose minds i couldn't effortlessly read ; i could whenever i wanted to but it is far more... artificial than my connection with my zerg , akin to the difference between normally breathing and having to consciously control your breath.
"My Overmind, our scavenger parties have found more remnants of the Planet Earth as you commanded."
Good, it wasn't so much that I cared for earth , I only wanted one thing.
"Did you find any wreckage of whatever machine it was that transported us here?"
"Yes Overmind, albeit most of it is destroyed beyond recovery. However i am happy to report that its core power source appears intact."
"Excellent , have any remaining Protoss engineers work on repairing it immediatly and if that's not possible i want every nock and cranny of it scanned and anaylzed. You will have the swarm to assist you in any way possible. "
"Yes Overmind" and with a bow he left , leaving me with my thoughts once more. This transporter thing being wrecked wasn't ideal but it was far better than having nothing. I wanted it for many reasons , mainly so that no one else in the mass effect galaxy recovers it and causes even more wild changes to the timeline.
But if I was honest with myself , I really wanted to see if I could use it to move on to other worlds , after the swarm has dominated this one or if the reapers proved to be too much of a threat to deal with and we had to cut our losses.
Ah yes the reapers , the swarm of biomechanical cthullus who might arrive from Dark space any second now to exterminate all civilization : I will have to figure out a way to deal with them or at least evade them. I saw plenty of VS videos but there was surprisingly no Reapers vs Zerg hypothetical battles.
Of course I guess the swarm has the advantage in terms of capital ship size seeing as leviathans dwarfed even the largest reaper and we didn't use any mass effect technologu , well not yet anyway. But what worried me the most was the effect indoctrination could have on my zerg nor if the swarm could assimilate reaper technology. So many unknown variables , if only I had a...
Wait a second , that's it.
"Lara" i reached out through the stars to my "daughter"
"Yes overmind " she dutifully replied
"Gather as many vorcha as you can and prepare whatever ships you have , I will be sending you coordinates to a relatively close system soon. Once there have the leviathans mass produce as many aquatic combat zerg forms as possible"
"Your will be done Overmind, may i ask what our task is when we get there?"
"Oh not much we are just gonna have a little chat with some leviathans."
STG outpost 118
Location unknown :
"Fascinating!"
Professor Malyos Solus was, no IS the foremost expert on Krogan biology in the Salarian Union. That was why STG recruited him in the first place and why even after retiring he was still occasionally recalled as an advisor. He mostly treated recalls with resigned acceptance ; for the last five decades the krogan have shown no signs of adapting to the Genophage ; though that certainly didn't stop the higher ups from having a meltdown whenever a krogan warlord would get statistically lucky and sire more than one child.
He had been recalled for three such occasions which meant that he wasn't exactly enthusiastic about time number 4 (especially when that meant missing the hatching of his son.
But now looking at these new genetic samples , he now found himself wishing they had brought him in earlier.
"Do you see why you were called back into service professor ?" the agent , who asked to be referred to only as SG-089 or Eight asked him and he could not help but feel a little anxiety in the agent's voice despite his outward stocism.
"I do, this is even worse than the reports indicated."
"Clarify."
"The reports hinted that the Krogan might have mutated to be gradually immune to the Genophage over generations of natural selection. But from what I see in the genetic analysis, the markers of the Genophage seem to be vanishing from the genepool at rates that should not be possible in nature." he said leaving the implication in the air
"So you are saying that there could be someone out there who discovered a cure for the Genophage and that cure is now circulating among the Krogan clans?"
"Not all clans actually , only those samples of clans allied with Gataong. Clans unaffiliated with or hostile to them show no signs of genophage resistance."
"I take it you already have a solution for this."
"Unfortunately I have none….. At the moment at least, the problem is that genetic samples of genetically immune krogan are decaying far too quickly for me to properly test for possible countermeasures."
"But none of the other samples are showing these problems?"
"Correct, without a fresh supply of samples we are at a dead end."
"Then we will just have to get you your samples professor."
Unknown to the two salarians was that even as they continued discussing a possible solution to their problem, they were being watched , their every word being impossibly transmitted at galactic distances to a certain swarm leader.
Unnamed system in the Attican traverse
Batarian merchant vessel Nag'ira
Shafa'arh vas Noora had heard stories about the Batarians before ; everyone on the flotilla had , the four eyed species hadn't exactly endeared itself to the Flotilla by outright barring them from all Hegemony systems (and threatening outright war should even a single ship trespass on Batarian space ) but then again all the council species and most of their associates had similar policies enacted , albeit not as blatant.
No what made the Batarians especially hated and feared by the quarian people was the constant spectre of enslavement looming over the heads of young quarians as they made their pilgrimage ; the Hegemony may not like the migrant fleet but quarian slaves were always in high demand. Valuable however does not equal well treated as the very few quarians who managed to escape enslavement could attest to : the slavemasters of the Hegemony had many ways of torturing a quarian while keeping it perfectly sealed in his or her suit from hacking its environmental protocols to months long solitary confinements among other more unpleasant punishments.
Thoughts of this happening to her almost had her crippled with fear when she learned her buyer was a batarian. She shouldn't have bothered for he was (surprisingly) not a pirate or a slaver but had the far more mundane profession of being a deep space trader and simply needed a live-in engineer for his voyages. It was almost boring really , just doing routine maintenance and check ups on the ship's mass effect drives and maybe fixing a systems glitch occasinaly. The (mostly non-batarian) crew were a bit distant but were polite enough and she even had the luxury of having her own (cramped) quarters near the engines.
She hadn't talked much to her new owner (his name was Qrex) but he did promise her that he would release her from her contract in two years if she did her job competently. It wasn't ideal but she was far happier with this than most of the less pleasant alternatives.
Today would have been another monotonous day on the job when the alarm sirens start blaring their terrifying tone.
"Attention all of you, move to your stations immediately and be prepared for possible boarding parties. I repeat we have just detected…..Spirits! WHAT IS THAT THING?!
