Cenotaph II: The Monolith

by Rob Sears

The year is 2214. A weary galaxy festers. Military privatization has become the norm in a new economic depression. A malicious plan, decades in the making, has finally been set into motion. The only one who can stop it? Roahn'Shepard and a team of some of the most extraordinary individuals the galaxy has ever seen. Fear. Agony. Hatred. Roahn's lethal nightmare begins!

29. Chapter 29: What Will Be Your Epitaph?

"You complained. We listened. No vehicles for you!"

The Mass Effect 3 Manual (2012)

---

Engineering
Menhir

Dark coils of pipes curled over the head of the asari, filaments spilling oily light upon the grate of the floor. A wall of bright luminescence, emitted from a rectangular shape, lightened the already deep blue of Liara T'Soni's skin, her eyes constantly wandering as she sat in the underbelly of the level, typing at the keypad of the console station.

Comforted by the eternal thrum of the drive core, the hours slipped away from Liara as she engrossed herself more and more into her work, though it was not without the occasional flash of introspection. Despite the importance of her duties, Liara was prone to the everyday occurrence when Liara would marvel at the direction her life had wound up taking. Perhaps not in her entire lifespan could she have predicted the wonderous and unexpected twists and turns that had cropped up after her fateful first encounter with her old commander. She would have probably settled for a life more routine, in all honesty, had she known what ventures were laying ahead. She had been fine with the status quo when she had been a scientist, even if it had left her feeling slightly unfulfilled.

Now the status quo had changed. Her routine had taken on a natural disorder—with adventures being piled on and on in varying states of importance. Scientist turned information broker turned warrior. A rather turbulent journey for someone who had originally been dead set in their ways.

She now sat at Korridon's desk in the lower deck of engineering, her face lit only by the light of the screen. A command window lay superimposed on the upper right corner of the screen—Liara's nimble fingers were typing out line after line of code on it, scouring the device's drives in the hopes of finding an item of critical importance, buried deep in the layers of silicon and copper.

Hacking may have been a new skill in the asari's repertoire, but she was a fast learner and had taken to it with a stalwart patience, apparently a trait quite beneficial for those who worked with code as a living.

Liara's previous analyses of the Reaper artifact, before Roahn had abruptly taken it, had come up with absolutely nothing of note. This had been a constant source of frustration to her ever since she had taken up this task—rarely was she used to succumbing to any roadblocks in her work. Admitting defeat would not only let herself down, it would let the team down as well. She couldn't have that happening. But she had recalled, after an hour of thought, that Korridon had been able to obtain a key bit of useful information from the other artifact that they had previously examined. He had unearthed an incomplete fragment of the entire puzzle—the tracking signal that the artifacts naturally resonated—and had managed to do it all on his own. Realizing that she would be unable to replicate the turian's methodology, she had resorted to breaking into the man's console to use his own equations as a template. He would understand this invasion of privacy, she figured. This was for the entire team's benefit, after all.

A little smile of reminiscence came to her face as she worked. Had her path not crossed with that of Commander Shepard's, Liara would have starved to death in the ruins of a Prothean dig site a long time ago all by her lonesome. If she had managed to get free without the human's assistance though, she probably would have continued her futile foray into being known as one of the most gifted archaeologists of her age. Her research up until that day had made great strides into the then-theory of there being multiple "cycles" of civilizations, the ebb and flow of intelligent life rising and following through the will of the Reapers, though her proof had been too scant for any of the research institutions on Thessia to take notice. Worse, the seemingly contrarian nature of her findings had caused her to be shunned within the science community—now that had stung. Of course, the arrival of the Reapers and the knowledge of their existence would soon prove her exhausting years of detailed analysis to have been completely correct, but if she had continued exist as "just" Liara T'Soni, her own voice would have been lost in the storming thrum of the horde of inward and stubborn academic matriarchs. No one would have listened to her. No one would have cared.

Yet she had risen above it all. The inquest into the Prothean/Reaper connection had yielded results that had been irrefutably proved correct. She had been granted a permanent position at Thessia's most prestigious institution of knowledge after the war—allowed to teach the coming asari generations all the knowledge she had learned. And on top of it all, she was the ex-Shadow Broker, the last in a rather long line of information merchants, though her resources as such a dark intermediary came with a lot more ordinance than any regular agent. But she had put that life behind her a while back—there had been no reason for her to continue as the Shadow Broker. The galaxy had finished with its war, the information she had at her disposal would only do more harm than good at this point. She had tired of wielding the power to topple governments right from a console screen and had wanted to be rid of it, to return to occupations more productive and soothing to the soul.

Heavy is the head that wears the crown, Shepard had said to her once. That man sure had quite the repository of meaningful quotes when they were needed.

Funny how she could barely see herself returning to her past life. Archaeology was not a science that guaranteed exact results, for it was a process built around extrapolation. It was a different type of uncertainty compared to the quandaries she faced today. Lives had not been on the line from her work back then. Her days of remote sensing areas, surveying fields, excavating the ground, and analyzing finds were long gone.

Liara's eyes flicked up to the corner of the screen at the exact moment her cracking software had breached Korridon's profile. The Menhir's internal net was not designed to prevent against brute-force attacks from allied personal profiles, but from external sources. No wonder the firewalls had not put up much of a fight.

The console had a record of all the files that Korridon had accessed last, organizing them in that order. Liara noticed that the file at the top of the list had a particularly large size associated to it. The name was also curious: "/ITEMS/Catalog/Artifact/Triton/Artifact2-Copy::obj." How did Korridon come to have a file location for Triton when he had not even made it onto the ship to perform his own analysis of the artifact? Also, would he have labelled any of these items as copies? What exactly would be the point in doing so?

She commanded the console to open the object file and the ship's allocated MWorks software came online. Odd, Liara had not expected the multiple-paradigm numerical computing environment to boot up upon requesting access to this file. That meant this file was not just an object. According to the immense amount of data contained and designated by the swath of menus that was now positioned upon the sidebar, this was an entire system simulation.

But a simulation for what? That answer was quickly solved as soon as the residual graphic within the object itself finally ceased pixelating, revealing itself as an item of abject familiarity.

It was the Triton artifact. A complete iconograph of both it and its related energy profile had already been uploaded to the Menhir's drive. But… how? Liara wondered. She certainly had not done any sort of upload to the ship when she had been trying to crack the artifact's mysteries. Then how did the entirety of this item come to exist in this digital format, patiently awaiting to be used?

Perhaps there was an answer already, she recalled. Something that Roahn had mentioned in her after-action report on Triton gave Liara pause. She spent a few minutes trying to track down the report in question, along with any transcripts that the auto-recording software had jotted down. About an hour into the mission's log time, Liara's finger hovered over a line that Korridon's ID had flagged.

She read the action lines and the denoted dialogue over and over for clarification.

[01:05:21] Cpl. K. Sidonis connected to MWorks suite.
[01:05:55] Cpl. K. Sidonis uploaded a schematic to MWorks.
CPL. K. SIDONIS: Backup. Just in case.

Liara blinked several times as she looked from the artifact scan to the transcript, almost in disbelief. The answers she had sought now lay bare before her eyes. Just as she might have thought: Korridon, somehow anticipating any hiccups, had taken the time to conduct a thorough scan of the artifact when he had first laid eyes on it in that Alliance base—make a virtual copy, essentially—and uploaded it to the Menhir in case they had not managed to conduct a thorough examination of it without him.

But there was more. When Korridon had uploaded the artifact's information, he had previously set a program to run upon retrieval of the file. The software had automatically run a power spectrum of the series of radiation that had been monitored from the artifact. The white noise in the spectrogram had been steadily filtered in the background, parsing out nonperiodic outliers in the spectrum. This had all occurred without anyone else's input. Liara was pulling up additional menus of data to confirm all of this, but she soon found out that Korridon had been even more thorough than she had thought. Once the final rendering of the equations had been completed, another program had sifted the results into that of the readings of the first artifact the team had taken from Dark Horizon. Previous data points that might have been too faint in the squall of data now lit up like fireflies in the light. A distinct pattern could be interpreted by the Menhir's supercomputer now.

All pointing to one undeniable result. A singular energy profile, inimitable. Distinct. One that could now be tracked by the ship's sensors.

They now had the key to locating Aleph.

Liara slowly pushed herself away from the desk in an awed befuddlement. "Huh," was all she was able to say in the moment.

She would have liked to have been able to say something more profound, more definitive in the wake of such a revelation, but then again, she had not expected to have been gifted the answer in this manner. That was neither here nor there, anymore. They had what they needed!

A helpless grin crept to her face, unable to be warded off. When Garrus could learn that they had finally gotten a break…

Her eyes naturally drifted upward as waxy shadows slowly began to undulate upon the wall in front of her. The light on this level was dim and adipose, accompanied by the low moans of ventilation. The portages of darkness were stark constants in this part of the ship, but Liara's eyes had been long adjusted enough to see the vivid outline of a raised weapon in the silence of this sublevel.

A weapon that looked to be pointed right at her head.

The asari shot out of her chair and broke into a crouch at the same time she smoothly unholstered her submachine gun. Before she could fire, a chatter of bullets ripped through the coarse shadows, spitting harsh tongues of sparks and heat. Liara felt something blister past her head, but she was too hopped up on adrenaline to react. She fired her own weapon—there was a distinct crash and an electronic yowl charged its way through the confines of gray hullplates. A body slumped to the ground; three holes had punctured clean through their chest plate, leaking a dark fluid. Liara rose from her crouch, light at her back, making her outlines appear vague and a dull blue. An eerie wraith.

Liara's heart was now racing as she recognized the armor of the person that had just attacked her as that of Dark Horizon. A million questions came to mind, though she knew most did not have the hope of having answers.

How is Dark Horizon here, on the Menhir?! Stealth systems are engaged and we're locked in orbit! It's impossible to be boarded this easily!

From the grating above, Liara could now see vague shapes move at harried paces. Clearly this little skirmish had been noticed. Before trouble could chance upon her again, Liara found a little nook in between a pair of thick fluid conduits and wedged herself between them, resting the grip of the submachine gun on a little ledge so that she could take aim.

A trio of similarly armored men then rounded the corner after descending the staircase, all hefting heavy assault rifles. One of them bent down to assess their dead comrade.

"Shit," their distorted voice burst from their helmet's vocabulator. "We didn't get the drop on this level. Fan out—she's in here somewhere."

The three mercenaries did not get the chance to complete the action because Liara had been taking aim at them all this time. She unleashed one bullet from her hidden crevasse that caught the lead soldier in the neck—a gout of blood sprayed from the gaping wound in his trachea. The other two had been caught completely off guard and, without knowing where they were being attacked from, they started spraying the entire level with a hail of gunfire in all directions. Liara did not flinch, even as thunderous crashes made quite the cacophony in this confined space. Rather, she waited until the two mercenaries had finished firing, the energy in their thermal clips expended. After ejecting the spent clips, the soldiers began to clunkily proceed forward with the intent to storm the position of their aggressor, despite still not having a clue where that might be.

Liara held her breath as the two mercenaries passed her by—she had hunkered herself into a tight ball, breathing entirely through her nose. She did not want to take the chance in case the soldiers had sensitive audio-receptors in their helmets. Once the loud footsteps had sounded like they were receding did she leap up from her hiding hole and strike at their rears.

In the blink of an eye, Liara aimed her weapon and let loose a deafening burst straight into the back of the closest aggressor's left knee. Bone popped out the other side, the joint having been obliterated. With a scream, he began to drop. The mercenary's cohort had been in the process of turning in reaction to the commotion, but in the terrible light, could not see all that well and thus mistook his ally for Liara. His answering volley, poorly aimed at that, took out part of his comrade's foot and also buried several bullets into his gut. Protected by the darkness, Liara cleanly pulled the trigger of the submachine gun, the mechanism making crisp breaks, and removed part of the second man's head, helmet and all. Both soldiers slumped to the ground, one bleeding out from major wounds to the abdomen, the second already dead with a chunk of his brain pan glistening within the ragged cracks of skull.

"Sagan," Liara spoke into her comm as she did not leave time to breathe, already in the process of moving back up one level. "Dark Horizon's on the ship. Have we been boarded?!"

"Negative," the geth immediately responded. "There are reports of incursions on multiple decks, but there are no craft that have docked with the Menhir at this time."

"That doesn't make any sense!" she hissed as she clambered up the stairs before stopping. "Wait… cease all communication, this location's compromised."

The asari had just about reached the main engineering deck, but it looked and sounded like more Dark Horizon troops had taken care of this part of the deck first. In their superior armor, the mercenaries had embarked upon a skirmish with some of the Menhir techs, who were woefully equipped in comparison. Bodies lined the ground, mostly allied troops (to Liara's dismay), dark blood outlining their corpses. Gunfire echoed on all levels—harsh cracks and dull thumps.

Liara hid at the halfway point on the stairwell as she watched a squad of five armored troops pass her by. It looked like they were heading toward the drive core, probably doubling back after completing their sweep of the deck, now hoping to seize control of the ship by overriding its propulsion systems.

Energy perpetuated itself in a glowing aura around the asari. She felt it billow through her fingertips, pulsate around her head. She clenched a fist before embarking into a charge up the rest of the stairs.

The squad had no idea they were being flanked from behind until the last possible second. The rearward trooper took a quick glance backward before performing a double-take, noticing the onrushing asari coming dangerously close to their position.

Too little, too late.

"Hey!" he managed to shout, "we got inco—"

He never managed to make out more than that before Liara's heavy pistol crashed, taking him fully in the chest and bowling him completely over. Weapons turned in the asari's direction, but Liara was already making her next move. She reached out with a shrouded hand, yanking upon the invisible threads that permeated all matter in the universe. A sharpened tool, resting upon a nearby workbench, suddenly sprung up and out as if it had been yanked across the room by a very thin string. The tool, now cushioned by an azure emanation upon its outlines, zoomed through the air in a deadly arc. With a dry thunk, it embedded itself into the neck of one of the soldiers—blood immediately spurted around the metallic protuberance in a long spray. Coughing as he died, the stabbed man's knees gave out and he instinctively clenched upon the trigger of his weapon, opening right into the back of the man ahead of him in a crescendo of noise. Sparks and sticky ichor flew in a psychedelic hail. Neither one truly had an idea of the exact nature of how their deaths befell them.

Liara had to roll in order to avoid the answering blasts from the final two soldiers. Upon exiting the maneuver, she gave her pistol another pull on the trigger. A Dark Horizon soldier reeled back with a shout, three of his fingers now missing from his right hand while blood, bone, and armor littered the ground at his feet. Teeth gritted, Liara brought all her fingers together in a fierce clench—honing residual energy into a natural locus point—and then yanked her hand toward her chest in a savage motion. Gripped by a massive amount of force, the biotic wave flung the trooper over the asari's head, straight into the wall behind her. He impacted head-first, a sickening crunch apparent over the noise of gun reports. He collapsed to the ground, neck at a funny angle.

The last man roared and opened fire on Liara with an obliterating burst. The asari had raised her hand just in time, conjuring a watery barrier that rippled manically as bullets exploded onto its face. As she continued to hold the biotic barrier, with her other hand, she slowly made a sweeping motion from the ground upwards. A rift of dark energy began to billow right underneath the trooper's feet. He looked down at the glowing light under his heels, helmeted head tilted in confusion.

"Always the last place you expect," Liara quipped right before she shot her arm upwards, a cosmic current streaming between her fingers like she had just uplifted a fistful of sand.

The biotic lift seized hold of the Dark Horizon trooper, enveloping him in a swath of light. His feet left the ground momentarily as his entire body was hoisted several feet into the air. But in the next few moments, the gravitational field's polarity abruptly shifted, slamming the man back down to the ground with the force of a freight train. The impact was heavy and resounding. Armor plating and ribs snapped in a percussive series, accompanied by the familiar wheezes that usually indicated severely punctured lungs. The man's chest had been caved in completely.

Liara stepped forward, biotic energy flaring away in glimmering sparks from her fingertips. Casually, she walked over to the body of the man she just dispatched, who was still, for the moment, miraculously clinging to life.

She put an end to that right away, courtesy of one final report from her pistol. The dying man slumped, a hole now implanted into his forehead, blood and smoke wisping from the entry wound.

The asari looked around the engineering deck with a mournful sigh. The entire place was in a bad way. Blood, oil, and other liquids stained the grating and sides of nearby holo-consoles. Walls contained several battle scars—bullets, scorch marks, bite chunks from grenades. And then there were the bodies that littered the floor. Encased in matte black and carbon weave armor, or simply dressed in standard-issue ship tunics. Dark Horizon had already claimed several lives today. More and more the quest to seek out the how became less important. What was pertinent was stopping them in their tracks. Right now.

Still, the maneuvers from the paramilitary group seemed oddly detached. As if they had chosen to rush into all this without a plan. Liara knew the circumstances were hardly similar, but it was easy for her to recall the lengthy efforts Cerberus had gone to in their failed attempt to seize control of the Citadel. In that attack, they seemed to have pulled out all the stops: legions upon legions of cannon fodder grunts, heavily shielded Centurions, riot-shield toting crowd control warriors, automated turrets, cloaked sword-wielding Phantoms, and an entire arsenal of Atlas mechs. Granted the Menhir was a smaller target, but the lack of variation in the overall strategy seemed deliberately regressive.

There was no more time to worry about that now, because Liara's radar was now going haywire. Several red blips were now appearing in the corridors that led to the room she was in right now. A quick check of the ship's decks showed her that there were no more allies in her vicinity. Cautiously, she retreated into the drive core room, the thrumming and gigantic silver orb of the core threatening to shake her eardrums to pieces, and locked the door behind her.

"Sagan," she spoke into her comm. "I've got enemy troops on the other side of the drive core's doors. Vent this deck and we can have it cleared."

There was a pause as the geth connected to the ship's systems. "No additional friendly contacts detected on your level. Confirm command to vent atmosphere on deck 3."

"Do it, Sagan."

The door to the drive core had no windows but Liara could still hear the effects of the directive through the semi-soundproofed surface. There had been a distinct sucking noise and a curious lack of fidelity in all sound shortly afterward. There were a few muted thumps here and there that sounded like objects tumbling away in the background, but otherwise the effects of the order had been eerily quiet.

"Process completed," Sagan intoned two minutes later as the lock to the door flashed from red to green. "All hostiles have been ejected. Atmosphere restored to normal levels."

Listlessly, Liara crept through the door back into the engineering room, peeking around the corners for good measure. It had looked like someone had completely upturned the entire interior of the ship here—chairs had been tossed aside like they had been made of paper mâché, loose articles that had been previously perched on countertops were now missing, and splatters of blood now marred the walls instead of just the floor. The results of exposing this deck to the cold open of deep space certainly had done a number on both the ship and their antagonistic foes.

Liara's radar was showing no activity, good or bad. A small comfort, though it was not likely to bring her much peace for very long. She headed out into the hallway and pushed the button for the elevator. There were still others on this ship that needed her help. The rest of the crew, obviously, and… and…

The elevator panel blared angrily. The entire console had been disabled! Wrathfully, Liara could not help but strike the side of the wall, breaking open the skin at her knuckles and leaving red blotches upon the warped steel.

"Sagan! I need you to engage the lift. Right now!"

---

"Menhir system controls have been currently partitioned away from ship-wide alias," Sagan calmly reported to Liara as ocean-blue bolts sang past his head. "Currently executing retrieval programs to restrict external intrusion attempts. Stand by."

The glow of the geth's omni-tool matched the color of his yellow armor—Sagan did not deactivate it and left it running, continuing to utilize its processes.

The geth was in something of a tricky situation. A foreign presence had managed to sneak past the firewalls of the ship and hijack several non-critical systems that were proving to be more of a hindrance than an actual danger. If Sagan had the capacity to be annoyed, he would most certainly have been exhibiting such symptoms by now. An infiltration like this should not have been possible, not with the cyberwarfare suites he had installed.

Adding onto the confusion was the tactical problem that Sagan was currently embroiled in. He was still up in the cockpit, taking cover in the doorway while onrushing troops tried to maneuver down the corridor of the ship, the very neck in the Menhir's design, in an attempt to take over the controls. Multiple Dark Horizon troopers were just throwing their lives away, charging into the crossfire in a vain attempt to muster past the bottleneck.

Heat sinks littered the floor at Sagan's feet. From time to time, the geth would pop out of cover, a Locust submachine gun in each hand, and fill the corridor with precise bursts of strobing fire, flak, and crushing sound. Body after body would drop—pinpoint holes drilled into the chest and head of each soldier. The geth would alternate fire from hand to hand, using the lull in ejecting one spent thermal clip to resume firing with his other weapon. The continuous hail proved to be too much for the Dark Horizon forces—they tentatively hung back in the CIC, now beginning to weigh their options a little more conservatively.

The geth kept a running tally of his remaining ammunition. There was no need for consternation—there was a small armory that had been installed in the cockpit that contained a few more boxes of thermal clips. A shotgun was even hanging on the wall there.

A stray pistol shot bounced into the cockpit area, nearly scratching Sagan's wrist armor. The geth wisely chose that next moment to maneuver back into his little hiding area to avoid any incoming fire.

Liara's voice piped up again. "Sagan? No luck. They've barricaded all the emergency shafts. I'm in no danger but I'm not going to be of much help to you."

The sheer despondency and feeling of impotence in Liara's voice resonated upon the geth. Tweaking the focus on his twin lenses, Sagan smoothly holstered his weapons and went for the weapons locker, palming it open with a fluid motion. He immediately went for the shotgun and began slotting in fresh clips into the empty chamber—he racked the slide once he was finished.

"The closest hatch is located in the communications room, twenty-five point six meters from my current location," the geth said. "Will shortly commence egress to unlock the hatch. Estimate visual contact in forty-six seconds at average rate of progression."

"Don't rush on my account. I'm safe, you're not."

"Acknowledged," the geth intoned, his voice just a hair softer than normal. "But obtaining collective strength is worth the risk."

Audio receptors picked up light footfalls in the corridor. A three-man team was approaching his position. Sagan adjusted his fingers upon the slide of the shotgun, a timer clocking down in his circuitry to the very instant he would make his next move.

With a squeal of his clawed feet upon the scuffed ground, Sagan leaned out and sent out a massive hammer of fire that threw the lead Dark Horizon soldier back with a yell. Machine gun fire rang out, but Sagan had already shifted his aim in the next microsecond, tearing apart another mercenary's chest with a close-range burst. The geth looked up to see more troopers spill from the adjacent rooms, drawn in to the allure of combat. Sagan had no capacity for bloodthirsty revelry—if he did the troopers would have had more cause to be afraid in the next moment.

Sagan tapped on a control upon his shotgun as his shields, pummeled by enemy fire, had dipped down to halfway. A tactical omni-barrier immediately sprang out from the shotgun, spanning the length from the floor to a foot above the barrel of the weapon. The tech-molded shield offered only a little barrel slit for Sagan to open fire as he pleased—the barrier itself was overclocked to absorb a crushing amount of punishment from both small-arms and heavy gunfire.

Protected by the glowing and portable cover, the geth plodded forward reservedly. His finger, prime on the trigger, was a constant pulse upon it after his synthetic muscles absorbed the recoil handedly, shot after shot.

Pyrotechnics from futile bullets erupting all over his shields, resounding shouts and screams from the troopers made their home in the CIC of the Menhir while Sagan, silent behind his unbroken and blazing refuge, kept advancing, his own shotgun providing stoic reminders of the folly that awaited those that tried to wrench the ship from his meticulous hands.

---

The door to the captain's cabin had been thoroughly sealed—triple-bolted—but still the fierce crackling and fizzing from hostile welding tools on the other side were able to make a thin line through the middle seal. A tiny conflagration upon the door, comprised of instantaneous blinding flowers the color of a sun, curled smoke into the air, a glowing red trail gradually cooling behind it like the tail of a comet. Heat began to warp the surface of the door—whoever was behind it was using a ton of power trying to muster their way through. Two more minutes and they would slice through the final deadbolt, granting them access.

Three sweating crewmembers stood on the higher level of the cabin, all aiming pistols towards the door. One of them, a turian with slight teal facepaint, glanced back at the man standing slightly below him further into the cabin, next to the queen-sized bed.

"Sir," he said, trying not to let panic encroach upon his voice, "you really should get behind something. It's going to be dangerous for you very soon."

But the eye-patched man, fiercely clasping a pistol as well, which he held at his side, firmly shook his head. It was not a gesture of devout defiance, but a world-weary resignation of the future. Of the inevitable.

"I've learned a while back that running only gets you so far," Shepard muttered as he moved to get a clear line of sight on the door. His palm, starting to become slippery with his own sweat, felt hot upon his weapon. "I'll stand. Just as you're doing."

The four continued to watch the door's deconstruction, paralytically mesmerized, while the bubbling hot glow continued to sear across the multiple locks keeping it shut. No one's face was set in confidence, each one slowly succumbing to despair over their own irresoluteness. Even Shepard, the uplifted bastion of confidence, was struggling to hold back his own worries, his deepest fears.

With a crackle of stressed metal, the interior seal of the door gave a thick pop as the door was finally stressed beyond its limits. Liquid streams of boiling calefaction spewed across the ground, sparking and fizzing angrily. The door seemed to list, as if it had been dislodged from its rails. It then split apart, spilling forth a mass of gray smoke into the cabin, tidal and endlessly layered in fractals.

The crewmembers began to cough from the smoke, eyes watering and turning red. Their aim wavered heavily as they moved to rub their eyes.

From out of the darkness, a large figure suddenly stepped into existence. A shadow against the shadow. They were enormous, a bulb of chrome situated upon an impossibly gigantic frame of armor. With a speed that seemed to defy reality, they raised a fist in a savage motion, five fingers clenching together within that time. There was a loud metallic noise in the air, akin to a rusted bin hatch being rent out of proportion.

Immediately the three crewmembers seized, all freezing in place where they stood. Three pistols fell from clawed-open hands, having never fired a shot. Their eyes were only allowed a scant second to roam around the room in terror, before there was a blinding snap in all their heads. Their eyes then rolled upward. As if a great pressure had built up within their bodies, the next scene turned into ferocious madness as blood shot from every facial orifice in each crewmember. Red and blue splashed to the ground in an appalling cocktail. It was as if something in their heads had simultaneously liquefied. Gurgling from their noses, expelled from their mouths, leaking from their ears, dribbling from their eyes. Every one of the Menhir sailors spent the next three seconds hoisted in place, jerking like invisible strings were giving maddening tugs on their bodies. Then they all dropped, collapsing in their blood, the vivid colors staining their clothes.

Aleph stepped over their bodies, lowering his hands as he approached the small staircase. Horrified, Shepard took a step back, nearly tripping over the corner of the bed as he hurried to put his weapon up, momentarily forgetting himself. He had only just gotten the monster in his sights when Aleph made another slight gesture in his fingers and Shepard cried out as he felt his pistol get ripped right out of his fingers!

The brutal tug shot the weapon through mid-air, straight into Aleph's hand. Tender curls of azure energy melted away like the remnants of a morning fog around his fingers. The cybernetic construct then slowly brought his hand closed upon the pistol, but wherever his armored digits seemed to touch the weapon, the casing seemed to glow bright red and slough away, like it was being thermally corroded before Shepard's very eye! Faint tendrils of smoke and the acrid sent of burning plastic reached Shepard's eye and nose. The remains of the pistol soon fell to the floor, the ends melted and dripping polymer.

"Long time coming, for the both of us," Aleph casually mused as he reached the bottom step.

Shepard's lip curled, his remaining eye a narrow splinter. The bearded man stayed where he was, unwilling to give an inch to this monster.

"I wondered if we were ever going to meet like this, face-to-face," he said.

Aleph stopped a couple of meters away from Shepard, his shoulders raising slightly in a shrug.

"I had always hoped for this moment."

Now Shepard gave a tired and angry smirk, the last vestiges of defiance clawing back some real estate on his face.

"It's too bad that I have to disappoint you. I've seen better days."

Aleph looked up and down at the aged commander. One eye missing, shockingly white beard encrusting his features, skin thin and paper-like. True, while time had relentlessly and ruthlessly eaten away at Shepard's body, turning the once formidable human into a plain and ordinary man no different than all the rest, the cyborg could detect unquantifiable amounts of pain, bliss, and love stewing beneath the surface to produce a being utterly content with how his life had been lived. No fear remained on the human's expression anymore. He had stared upon death too many times for it to have an impact.

"No," Aleph shook his head. "You're exactly as I pictured."

The tall being then gave a microscopic glance about the room, a subtle dare for Shepard to try something, anything, if he even thought that he could gain the upper hand in such a short time span.

"You have not lost your relevance, Shepard," he continued to speak. "But you have been surpassed. You should be proud to know how much of yourself made it into your daughter."

The effect upon hearing this creature speak of Roahn had an electrifying effect upon Shepard. His face paled, stricken by a nameless horror—the terror that only a parent could have for their child.

"Do not talk about my daughter!" Shepard choked out, tongue making it difficult to speak.

"You need not fear for her safety. She still lives."

The human's lower lip trembled, an uncontrollable moisture brimming in the corner of his eye.

"I know what you did to her. I saw her in the hospital when she returned from Luna! I looked upon the stump of her arm and I found so much pain in her eyes. You nearly destroyed her that day. If I was still the man that I once had been, I would butcher you right now."

There was a minute sound of distorted noise from Aleph's vocabulator. A laugh.

"Perfect. A quintessential retort from the commander of old. How nice to see you at last."

Moments came and went with nothing but the resounding void silence filling the air between the two. A hateful stare glimmered from Shepard's last eye, drawn the lingering repository of energy that had yet to be manifested as anything but malevolence. A lifetime's worth of regret had been sealed away within the former commander, old wounds previously thought forgotten.

Sensing weakness, the ghosts had come back home to roost.

"So…" Shepard murmured with a sigh. "What happens now?"

Aleph seemed to take pleasure in his length to respond.

"Now?" he murmured as he slowly moved forward, towards Shepard. Towards destiny. His form blocked out the light behind him as he moved, a brimming and utterly despondent force of malignance. "Now is when you finally see the dawn… of the era you had promised us."

---

Fifteen minutes later

Roahn did not wait for the Kodiak to finish touching down in the shuttle bay before she activated the manual release hatch so she could jump down a meter to the ground. There was a heavy stomp as her boots hit the deck. The first thing she noticed was there were a lot more crewmembers milling around here than usual. Liara and Sagan were anxiously awaiting in the middle while other sullen-looking techs tried to perform a few light manual duties in order to focus their raging minds.

The quarian paid no heed to the others who were slowly disembarking the shuttle behind her. Already she noted the one significant absence. She ran up to Liara and grasped her shoulders tightly.

"Where is he?!" she nearly screamed, abandoning all pretenses of decorum. "Where's dad?!"

"I…" the asari stammered, thrown off from Roahn's ferocity, "…I don't—"

Impatient, Roahn immediately sprinted away from Liara without waiting to hear her answer. She surged into the elevator and rode it up to each level. On every floor, she screamed for her father, sprinting from room to room, her boots thomping through corridors, one after another. It was the same result on each of the Menhir's levels. Engineering. Battery. CIC. No answer. No signs of life from the person she wished to see most.

Then Roahn finally made it to the top. Captain's cabin.

She screeched to a halt as she beheld the disaster that awaited her inside. It had looked like a bomb had gone off here. The desk was smashed to smithereens, the bed was overturned, several dents in the walls were apparent, glass littered every inch of the floor, and even the skylight to the stars had a massive crack in it. Not to mention the fact that there were three bodies of Menhir crewmembers—all dead amongst each other, each one exhibiting familiar causes of their sudden end—told her that someone important, someone worth protecting, had been in this location.

But now there was nary a trace of that person to be found.

"Oh… dad…" Roahn moaned as she walked further into the room in a daze. She rotated on the spot, a bystander to the carnage.

She felt like crying. How could she have been so stupid?! They had all been distracted, each pulled apart in order for Aleph to make his incursion here. All along he had wanted her father. Her father. Had the mattress to the bed not been leaning against the rightmost wall she would have sagged upon it, utterly despondent.

Instead she uttered a short scream of rage before she hurled her prosthetic fist into the side of the nearest wall with a savage clang. The metal there indented and molded to the shape of her knuckles. One more disfigurement to add to the chaos.

Breath coming in short pants, Roahn slowly pried her hand away from the impact site. The wall might have been worse for the wear but her metallic knuckles were still pristine.

Agonized cries threatened to spill from her throat. She held them all back, though her defenses were straining. The quarian's knees buckled, strength being sapped from her muscles. Hot tears approached the barricades of her eyelids but never made it far enough to start their precarious fall.

Upon imagining what Aleph's twisted hands were doing to her father was enough to pry a low moan from deep inside Roahn's chest. Panic churned and twisted her very mind, a tornado of stupefaction leaving her thoughts scatterbrained and half-formed. That ruthless murderer had played with her mind, her body, like a toy, to be crumpled away and left abandoned. Now he had her father and would soon be applying his depraved misgivings upon him. Him. John Shepard, the man who had abandoned everything for his family. For his wife and child.

Aleph wanted legitimacy, Roahn realized, and what better to certify such danger than to possess the one icon that had been the posterchild for galactic unity in the last few decades? Was all this part of his test to Roahn, for her to figure out where her directives would take her? Tormenting her like this… the cyborg was utterly despicable.

"Fucking… bastard," Roahn finally wept as she brought herself low to the ground, head hanging in shame.

She was struggling to hold it all in. The poor quarian had been abused mentally and physically for so long that it was just about to take the ultimate toll on her person. Her prosthetic fingers warbled in erratic twitches—unable to focus on one still movement. But Roahn soon took several deep breaths, trying to claw back as much of her shattered self as she could, attempting to construct a façade so far into the realm of apathy that even her closest friends could be fooled.

Yet Roahn knew that such an attempt was preposterous. Everyone she cared about would know what she was going through. Mask or not, there were some things about her that could be read like an open book. Those that knew of her relationship to her father would correctly intuit her pain, her suffering.

Soon, cold fire radiated past the barrier of blue glass as Roahn slowly rose to her feet. Fists clenched, breathing laborious, she headed back to the elevator and took it all the way back down to the shuttle bay. Everyone was right there where she had left them, all congregated in a ragged circle as they embroiled themselves in fierce conversation.

"…don't understand it," Garrus was talking to Liara and Sagan. "You're saying that the Menhir was never boarded by an actual ship? Like, what, they just teleported onto the deck? And then… they left?"

"Shipwide systems did not detect any physical intrusion," Sagan affirmed, standing noticeably close behind Liara, as if he was being protective of her. "Partial logs from surveillance footage corroborates the theory that an energy transfer was used to transmit matter within the Menhir."

Garrus, still a little beat-up from his fight with the Aeronaut, shook his head in resignation. "I… I just… how is that technology even possible? No one has any device that can do such a thing!"

The geth's head flaps gave a singular twitch. "Not necessarily. If Precursor-Aleph had access to a device that was able to utilize quantum teleportation to within an 85.67% efficiency, he would be able to set up a target system in the same quantum state as his source system."

Everyone's expressions looked lost and Sagan swung his head back and forth before continuing.

"Such technology, though not necessarily novel, has not been documented as being perfected to the degree we saw today. Especially when the added complexity of a moving target, such as the Menhir, is involved. Quantum states are vast and varied, but still require translation into a three-dimensional space in order to achieve the result of teleportation. That requires a fixed point. The Menhir was in orbit above the hostile moon and was constantly in motion. This exponentially increases the difficulty in adjusting the theoretical aim of such technology—the only way possible to achieve this would be if the enemy had knowledge of the Menhir's navigational codes in order to predict our future trajectories. However, the nav codes are not easily disclosed to external hacking attempts. They occupy a separate drive, unconnected to the network."

"Then someone divulged them," Garrus grimaced. "An informer. One more problem for us to deal with, I suppose."

And I think I know who it was, Roahn thought glumly as she stepped next to Garrus, harkening back to the last words Aleph had said to her.

"Your friend was very helpful on that front."

Korridon. Roahn shut her eyes. You couldn't keep them away forever.

But she said nothing nor did she plan on voicing such thoughts at all right now. The team did not need to hear what amounted to vague speculation, even though what Roahn's gut was telling her had to be the truth: that Korridon had been the one to sell them out. She understood the circumstances—no one could hold out for very long from the torture that Aleph's cronies were capable of performing. It had only been a matter of time until he had broken completely. After all, according to Aleph, Korridon had already demonstrated his capability for betrayal. And now Garrus could be proven right concerning all the stuff surrounding Korridon's uncle. It was all true; the man had traitorous genes in his blood.

Yet Roahn feared what the general reaction to such a supposition would bring. It certainly would not do anyone any good. Garrus, she knew, would just be apoplectic with rage upon realizing that his initial instinct about the man had been proven to be correct. And the others, their faith in the team would be irreparably shaken. If one of them could fall, what was stopping them from falling, too?

"Roahn, you with us?"

She opened her eyes again to see everyone staring at her. Garrus (who had posed the question), Liara, Sagan, Sam, and Grunt looking upon her with faces mostly in a complex mixture of worry.

"I'm… I'm here. I'm all right," she said before swallowing painfully. She took the next couple of seconds to regain some dignity. "Dad's gone. Taken, I… I don't know what."

Roahn made a point not to glance at Garrus' face to see the pain registered there. He had fought alongside her father for perhaps the longest out of everyone in the group—in the galaxy, even. To witness his own ruminations on the torture of a dear friend would produce nothing but catastrophic reactions in the quarian. She was barely holding together as it was.

"To hell with everyone else," Garrus seethed. "They won't be holding onto Shepard for long. Can we track his omni-tool if he gets within range of a beacon?" The turian looked to Sagan.

"Shepard-Commander's transponder has not been responding since the incursion onto the Menhir," Sagan said. "It is likely that the hostile forces have disabled all systems enabling us to track them."

Garrus' head gave a tiny shake, almost as if he was chastising himself for not being there to protect his friend, his crew, his ship. Now Roahn looked upon her captain with anguish, heartbeat producing sickening thumps against the back of her ribs.

"We need to get Shepard back… but we can't ignore the bigger problem on the horizon for long, either," the turian then said, voice tight and regretful. He gave a nod over to Roahn, who had looked away from him by now. He then addressed the group. "Roahn met with Aleph on the moon and he made a disturbing revelation. He has made a device—a weapon—out of the Reaper artifacts we've been gathering. He's called it the Monolith. It's a doomsday device of some kind… but I'm not sure what it does. No one seems to know much about it except that it has the capability to kill millions of people all at once. We're all fumbling in the dark, which is just how Aleph wants it."

Roahn was lightly nodding to everything that Garrus was saying. She had informed him and the others of the cyborg's plans on the shuttle ride back up—how they had managed to completely interpret her panicked babbling remained a mystery to her, but at least she was glad that her demons were being understood and expressed. A little solidary went a long way.

Liara's brow furrowed in caution. "That sort of technology… no one's ever been able to figure out the scope of what it was able to do. Do you think this Monolith might have been the device that enabled Aleph to board the Menhir?"

"I know it was," Roahn spoke, her voice gritty and coming out in a light snarl.

It seemed that everyone was trying to appear sensitive to appease the quarian's outbursts of venomous anger. No one could fault her for that, for Roahn had been living with too much regret her whole life, but today it had been her father who had paid the price. What little she had already was slowly being sapped from her control, bit by bit.

Roahn slowly came to the fact that such outbursts towards her friends, who were only trying to help, would not be doing anyone any good at all. She straightened, a more beholden glint apparent in her shrouded visage.

"He'll use it to kill so many," she whispered. "We need to do something fast before he finishes it otherwise we're all dead."

"Roahn," Garrus sighed, "you know that I'm in total alignment with you, not just for the galaxy's sake but for your father's—my best friend, damn it—but we still don't know where to find this bastard. I mean, he could be anywhere in the galaxy at this point and we have no idea which direction to point ourselves in."

"Actually," Liara interjected as she shifted her weight from leg to leg. "That's not entirely true anymore."

Garrus and Roahn both shared a glance in confusion.

"You're kidding," the turian gaped. "So, what you're saying is… wait, what are you saying?"

Liara took a breath. "I'm saying is that Korridon made a complete copy of the last artifact we retrieved from Triton. He had it all up and running on his console and… he did it. He found the energy profile we needed to track Aleph. The calculations, the projections, everything. All this time, he had provided the answer for us."

"Korridon?" Garrus and Roahn babbled at the same time.

Roahn took a step forward, nearly blurting out the tragic contradiction that, despite Korridon making all this possible, he had still succumbed to their enemies in the end. She cut herself off with a painful lurch, because she still had reason to hope—they all did. Why diminish the one breakthrough that they had been searching for this whole time?

"I…" Garrus' mandibles flexed once in disbelief. "I… I don't know what to say, Liara. How soon do you think we'll be able to get a fix on Aleph's position?"

"With the data? An hour. No more than two."

"Then start working as fast as you can," Garrus nodded. He then looked over at the group that surrounded him. "We'll be taking care of our losses in that time. But this data… it's everything to us. We find Aleph, we find Shepard."

"And the Monolith," Roahn added.

"And the Monolith," Garrus tacked on.

Liara held a fist up just below her collarbone as she backed away, eyes sternly affixed at her friends. "I don't intend to let you down. I'll point this ship in the right direction, Garrus. I swear it."

Garrus did not reply, instead giving the asari a solemn nod. They both understood that their efforts would never amount to anything less than their maximum potential. Total faith in the other, broad and unwavering. The turian could not help but sigh, a part of him wishing that it had been from his mind that he could have found the key to finding the enemy.

The rest of the group had dispersed at this point, scattering themselves to whatever part of the ship they could help the most. Grunt had gone over to the side of the bay to assist with resetting some of the heavy equipment that had been dislodged during the fighting. Sam had gone up to the med bay to treat any lingering injuries before he could provide his services to the wounded. Sagan had returned to the cockpit, keeping the Menhir's course set, obviously wary and alert for any more potential attacks.

"So, what do you think?" Roahn asked as she matched Garrus' pace towards the elevator door. She tried to keep her tone casual, even though the effort was most likely a foolhardy endeavor.

"We're going to need reinforcements," the turian grimly intoned. "Think this might be a good time to talk with the Council." He then blinked, as if overcome by a thought. His head then hung shamefully. "Damn it, Roahn, I haven't asked you how you've been holding up this entire time."

Roahn's immediate reaction was to shake her head. Perhaps a bit too immediate. "You don't need to. I'm fine."

Any other time and Garrus would have let that slide. Instead his eyes narrowed, trying to pierce whatever bubble the quarian had managed to shroud herself in. Did he think she was trying to shut everyone else out to protect herself?

"You just got back from a very trying encounter, you've been on edge for days, and now your father's missing," he sternly told her as the elevator doors closed upon them. "You are not just fine."

The quarian refused to look at him.

"I don't know what you want me to say," she was able to murmur.

Garrus' eyes did not lift from the young woman's form for a long time before he finally gave up, swallowing a grunt of despair to prevent his frustration from becoming too apparent.

"I don't know, either," he said.

He hated himself for saying those words. The daughter of his two best friends and he could not even figure her out. Garrus wondered if Roahn even knew just how much he sympathized with her, that he would be behind her one hundred percent with his completely unconditional support. Their conversations might not have delved too deeply into each other's mindset, but Garrus did know that Roahn had not been sleeping well for months, that she was exhibiting symptoms of severe depression ever since Triton, and that something that Aleph did to her just hours ago had caused her terrifying and explicit pain, as was the case whenever the two of them had crossed paths.

But how to approach that with her? Any pressure and she would just wall herself off and disengage. He could not offer comfort because he had no way of providing it. Yet seeing Roahn tear herself apart like this, letting such pain eat away at her from the inside, broke his heart. She could only hold it back inside her for so long, bury it deep away in the hopes that it would be forgotten.

Garrus knew that such pain could never be done away with, not completely. It would be unearthed eventually, one way or another. He knew that Roahn would never surrender to it. She would let herself be destroyed by the pain rather than succumb to grief and madness, to have the pain warp her into a hellion of misery and devastation instead of crumbling down to weakness.

The turian knew of the exact sort of pain that raged within the quarian. He had felt it once before—on Omega, on the Citadel. But it had been Shepard that had brought him back, that had prevented his own self-destruction. His anger had faded over time, his rage useless and impotent without a reason to exist.

Yet Garrus knew he could not disassociate Roahn from that rage. Shepard, at that man's core, understood all his friends and comrades so deeply they could not keep secrets from him. Garrus did not have that understanding with Roahn. She did not have anyone to pull her back from the brink.

That was why he was so afraid for her. There would be no one to stop her eventual destruction, no matter how hard he could try because, all this time, this was the one moment where Garrus was truly incompetent.

---

Comm Room

At each of their pedestals, Roahn found it somewhat curious that the councilors' expressions were more masked than hers.

She was standing off to the side, out of range of the holographic projectors, while Garrus stood in the middle of the room, arms open as he spoke. The meeting was not going well, was the sour conclusion she had come to, and she was sinking further and further into a dark haze, arms crossed over her chest, while the constant stream of excuses and tentative bickering funneled into her audio receptors.

There were four councilors upon the call, one for each race on the Council: asari, turian, salarian, human. Roahn did take note that the asari councilor, Tevos, was the same one who had been in the position when her father was around. Term limits were apparently unlimited for such a position of the highest order.

"We gave you a fair amount of autonomy for your team, Captain Vakarian," Councilor Tevos was saying. "However, that did not come with the privilege of you being able to dictate the decisions we make."

Of course not, Roahn thought. That's the job of a Spectre, isn't it?

Garrus was handling the councilors with far more diplomatic grace than Roahn would be able to, so she was glad that he was doing all the talking with the politicians. She had enough cause to distrust anyone in politics from her own experience in the Defenders. Even her mother's autobiography had taken great lengths to decry the petty backstabbing and bickering over the minutia of even the simplest decisions that both the Council and the Admiralty Board had been embroiled in. At least Tali had actually managed to reach a position where she could at least do something about the bullshit rather than just complain about it. Roahn had not been offered such an opportunity thus far.

"I did not come here to demand anything of you," Garrus evenly clarified. "I simply gave you all the information I had, expecting you to come to a resolution that should be obvious to everyone on this call."

The turian councilor, Balvenius, shared a look with his human counterpart, a woman named Elmira Petrović.

"What you provided was hardly proof for us to enact a call to action," the man's flanged voice cut across the comm. "I'm afraid the scientific analyses of these 'artifacts' you transmitted do not convey the need for urgency you are espousing. They are detailed, yes, and very thorough of their intended purpose—a mass eradication device, if I remember correctly—but they are merely suppositions, not facts."

"Right, and yet one simple transmission was enough for you to disavow your most prized Spectre on the force at the time," Garrus sarcastically muttered under his breath, his composure now starting to crack.

"What was that?" Councilor Petrović sharply asked, an eyebrow raised on the stern woman's face.

Garrus gritted his teeth together, trying not to betray any more outbursts before responding.

"Look, councilors, you gave me the authorization to seek and destroy any forces that, in your words, would 'threaten the authority of the Council, directly or indirectly.' I believe that what I have brought you today is more than enough evidence that a comprehensive plot, perhaps decades in the making, is about to come to fruition against the civilized galaxy, which, is the domain of the Council. And even if it is not enough, the very notion that someone could be capable of even mustering such a direct threat is not something to be discounted."

"So you're suggesting we send all our fleets in to fight? Again?" Hurari, the salarian councilor asked.

"Yes," Garrus emphatically nodded.

"Our entire strength?" Petrović added. "Leaving our worlds defenseless?"

"Councilor, speaking frankly, if we don't do anything you won't be around to see what horrors your worlds will fall to. But I don't intend to be a witness to any of that. I'm doing this for the galaxy, and a friend, one whom all of you owe your lives to. I'm going after Aleph, with or without your help. But without will be harder for my crew."

Balvenius was shaking his head as he now appropriated a datapad, flicking a slender finger across the screen.

"Yes, I'm more skeptical about this Aleph person than anything else. No prior history, no known former whereabouts until now. A man that somehow comes along and is able to perform technological feats that could easily be dismissed as fantasy. Seems dubious at best."

It was at that moment that Roahn realized the Council was going to be of no help. This was just what it had been like when Shepard had presented evidence of the Reapers all those years ago—and still the Council was so eager to remain blind to the truth! Garrus had nearly reached the same cynical conclusion as well, judging from the fierce twitch in his fingers that he was trying to hide. Roahn was now entertaining the thought of jumping onto the call and commencing a brutal verbal castigation of the councilors, keen on reminding them what the consequences for their last significant hesitation brought them and the galaxy at large. Perhaps, in some roundabout way, it was that body's fault that the galaxy had become so war-torn. Perhaps her mother would still be alive today if the predecessors of these invertebrates had acted sooner.

Garrus dipped his head before he stepped forward to lean against the railing. Even Roahn could feel his anger building from this distance. "Councilors, I've given you everything I have to make your decision. Radiological scans, metallurgic surveys. Hell, I even gave you the footage from my XO's helmet cams when she spoke to Aleph earlier today!"

Roahn perked her head up at the vague reference to herself.

But Tevos was also giving her head a shake. "Footage that had been deteriorated badly upon our attempts to review it."

"And your techs should have informed you that such deterioration is a trademark of heavy cosmic ray activity, which causes data degradation. Either the reason for this data failure was from us hanging around these artifacts for so long, or maybe it was Aleph himself who exuded this energy. I can't say for certain."

Tevos smiled sadly. "I don't deny the fact that you might have been in contact with this person, though you have to understand we are unable to share your sentiment over what you believe to be the best solution. And even if we did, our fleets are in no shape to mobilize so quickly to the strength you want."

"We still have not recovered our full strength from the war," Petrović said. "And still, adding outside forces to our regiments these last few years has not even replaced half of the forces we lost during that time."

Garrus had to fight not to roll his eyes. "Yeah, and aren't those 'outside forces' why we're here in the first place, councilors?"

It was abundantly clear that, in that moment, Garrus had made one quip too many for the councilors' patience. All four of them shared annoyed glances amongst themselves—coming to perhaps what had been the quickest consensus in opinion since the Council was first formed.

"We can only hope that you are incorrect in your assessments, Captain Vakarian," Tevos now said with a cold affliction. "Until proven otherwise, our support will remain in an ancillary fashion. I wish you the best of luck. This meeting is now adjourned."

There was no time for Garrus to get another word in edgewise because the councilors had cut off the call without a second to spare. The turian stared in disbelief at the empty spaces the projections had just occupied for a few moments, as though he held out the preposterous hope that the Council would call them back and indicate that they had conveniently all gone through a change of heart. Yet only silence met him to remind the turian of his ineffectiveness, his restrained nature.

Frustrated, Garrus clenched the railing harder as he lowered his head. Glowering. Infuriated at everything, everyone.

"They didn't believe Shepard then. They don't believe me now. Why did I think that I could change their minds?"

"They're fools," Roahn said as she now walked forward, coming to within a few feet of Garrus' back. "They've only ever looked out for themselves. It's only when their back is against the wall that gets them to act—and even then, all they give are excuses for their delaying."

The talk died down to a dull simmer. The warped hum of the drive core bled through the walls, providing a comforting white noise. The sound of carapaced nails on metal clanked lightly—Garrus tapping on the railing.

"One more barricade of red tape," Garrus groused. "The never-ending bureaucracy. Where does the real accountability end? How much effort does it take to budge those entrenched in the status quo?"

It was almost hard for Roahn to see Garrus like this. Weary and beaten down by politics. As a young child, she had been enamored with wartime images of the turian in battle—he had always been depicted as a fearsome, courageous, and caring individual that was an absolute prodigy with a sniper rifle. A turian with a loyalty to his crew that ran so deep that Roahn imagined that, in another life, Garrus could very well have been a quarian. She had idolized the man for so long that she had thought there was a good chance that he was completely flawless, unable to be broken by anything. But ever since that fateful day she had joined his crew offered one more chink in the metal that was his sterling depiction in her mind.

No doubt her rendering of the man had amassed quite a few chips in its appearance.

Roahn now stood alongside Garrus at the railing that separated the walkway from the projection lenses. "Maybe," she offered, "it's not the people who define the status quo that we have to convince."

Garrus looked over at Roahn, blinking in confusion.

"What do you mean?"

The quarian gave an affable shrug. "My father never actually succeeded in dealing with the Council for their assistance during the war, right?"

"Right," Garrus said slowly, still not getting it.

"Yet he still managed to secure support from the races regardless. It wasn't the councilors whom he brokered those deals with, it was—"

"—The military leadership," Garrus straightened, momentarily awed. "You want me to go over the Council's head? Roahn, I… I'm not a Spectre. I don't have the authority that Shepard did back then."

But Roahn was ready for that answer and she did not want to hear anything like that. She placed her hands on her hips and cocked her helmeted head, a smooth wisp of breath escaping beyond her vocabulator.

"You're going to let that stop you? The red tape is in front of your face, begging to be ripped, and you think that can hold you back?"

She jabbed at Garrus' chest with two metallic fingers. "Where is the man who helped my father call a thresher maw to attack a Reaper? Where is the man who fought through hell in the bowels of the Collector base and left without so much as a scratch? Where is the man who went through everything that was thrown at him, world after world after world, and won?"

The turian was speechless as he stared at the emboldened quarian pushing at him directly, her clouded face hiding a frosted anger.

"You have the authority. You are the captain of the Menhir, the very person who was by my father's side for years, all the way up through the war. You've helped face down Reapers. You've saved the galaxy several times over. That is your authority. That is what everyone will recognize."

Roahn's next words were almost a pant. A breathless exhalation, the words driven from her throat out of pure emotion.

"Because you're one of the greatest people I've ever known. Because you're Garrus Vakarian."

Her two fingers remained precariously balanced upon the middle of Garrus' chestplate, shining viciously from the haloed lighting above. Roahn had embarked into a soft lunge to prove her point, eyes fearsome and decisive as she stilled her entire body. It suddenly grew uncomfortably quiet in the room. The quarian could hear her own blood pounding in her ears but she refused to be the one to move first.

Trapped in the moment, she looked blindingly accusatory, with that hand perched in such a fierce position. The stoic turian made a point to slowly look down at what her prosthetic limb was doing, a sudden lurch taking him by surprise in the corner of his heart.

Then a brief exhale emitted from Garrus' throat. A laugh.

"You've been listening to your father's speeches."

Roahn felt her cheeks grow hot. She removed her fingers from where they had been pointing as she straightened back up.

"I only said what needed to be said. All I told you was the truth."

Garrus' shoulders rippled as he held back another silent chuckle, offering the quarian a soft wink.

"Your father would also have put it as modestly as you have."

He turned back to the projector, Roahn's rebuttal going unnoticed. The turian flicked his wrist towards the console, activating it from his haptic gesture. Garrus' fingers tapped and dragged over several different icons as he prepared the ship's next transmission. The QEC icon glimmered in the upper right corner of the screen—they were within range of a buoy. They would get the highest quality connection to the entire galaxy from where they were.

"Preparing burst message," he said as he hovered his finger over the transmit button. He then looked back over at Roahn before acting, his expression sheepish. "You know I'm no good at this sort of thing, right?"

She just brushed her fingers at him, the universal signal to get a move on.

The console beamed a green light at him. Communication systems up and running. He was live, broadcasting to anyone in the galaxy who was listening. No one was able to see him in his scuffed armor, which dully gleamed underneath the embedded ceiling lamp. They would only be able to hear him.

Garrus took a deep breath, rolled his neck, and bobbed his shoulders. Trying to loosen up the tension that had suddenly seemed to crop up on him out of nowhere. It was time.

"This… is Garrus Vakarian. Captain of the C-APV Menhir. Former executive officer of the SSV Normandy. I am talking to you today because I am in a time of great need. A need for all your help. A need to finish the work of what my old commanding officer, Commander John Shepard, started for all of us."

A pause rippled through his speech—Garrus' lungs swelled as he let the fire inside him bring him a welcome dose of pain.

"There is no easy way to say this. A few decades ago, we were left with the kind of opportunity that has never been afforded to this galaxy in millions, perhaps billions of years. We were given the chance to define an era that had been previously had construed for us, to seize a moment to make a future for ourselves. But we squandered it. Tainted the legacy of what Commander Shepard—my friend—left behind for us, confident that we would not waste such a valuable gift."

It was easy for Roahn to imagine people of all races, all creeds, crowding around ship transmitters, leaning over one another in crowded hallways, trying to hear every syllable out of the turian's mouth. Perhaps the resulting and scattered crowd could be enough to fill the Citadel. To fill two Citadels. She found herself nodding to what Garrus was saying.

"That legacy… is not yet lost. But it will be soon if we do not act. For even now, a new and devastating authority has been gathering its strength, waiting for the chance to strike. That time is almost upon us all. But I know you may be asking yourself who would possibly carry out such a brazen attack? The answer has been surrounding us for years. Dark money, private militaries, and one individual at the head of the pack, with their hand on the trigger of a weapon more powerful than we have seen conjured before, one that not even the Reapers could have imagined adding to their arsenal. I know I would be asking a lot for you to take me on faith, which is why I've structured this message to broadcast all the information we have collected to give proof to my words."

A war chant dimly echoed in Roahn's head. There was a particular tempo to Garrus' way of speaking. Tribal. Percussive. A crescendo that kept building and building.

"Join me! Join my crew as we fight to bring this madman to justice. I cannot guarantee that our conviction will bring us victory, but I know this much is certain: I would rather die fighting to preserve my friend's dream rather than sit back and let it crumble to decay, to corruption, to apathy. We've taken the serenity of our lives for granted once more—I will not allow us to go back into such remission. And regardless if we find victory or defeat, my own conscience will be lifted of the weight that has been hanging around my neck for so long. The words to our epitaph will be a celebration, a testimony to the galaxy that we were there to save it from ruination. We did not sit back and let others do our work for us!"

That imaginary war chant became a sustained roar. A clamor of bass and treble. Multicolored. Varied. Even Garrus seemed to be visualizing a crowd as he raised his arms slightly, fingers spread, voice growing louder.

"So, I ask you, what will be your epitaph? Will you find the strength as the ones who came before you did? Will your closing words be a memorial to your actions, or a vague sentiment doomed to be forgotten? My crew proceeds forth, not to further inscribe ourselves into legend, but to uphold the oath—the idea—that we deserved this second chance. This is your future too. I'll fight with you for it. All you have to do is join me."

Garrus dropped his hands back down and stared directly ahead, at the blank wall past the holo-projectors, the glint in his eyes having lost their luster.

"We're counting on you to do the right thing. This is Garrus Vakarian… signing off."

The last words only lingered in the air dryly for a single second before vanishing into the ether. Garrus looked down on the console and undramatically cut the connection with a single tap of his finger. He then leaned back over the railing, appraising the close wall, staring out into space as he soon became lost in thought.

Roahn hung back at a respectful distance, hands clasped together, not wanting to disturb the man. Several minutes passed in silence. The distant vibrations of the ship were all the more apparent through Roahn's boots. The beating of her heart did not subside in its speed, for there was very little in this room to calm her.

After about ten minutes did Garrus finally move from his position to look down at the console. He solemnly stared at the reply counter, where a big "0" was emblazoned. Like the space around them, the clamor had been empty, completely imaginary.

"They're not coming," he said to no one in particular, voice nearing the edge of cracking. "No one's answering."

Only now did Roahn approach, resting her hand upon Garrus' shoulder. "You couldn't have said it better," she told him honestly.

"No, it was lousy."

"I'm being serious."

Garrus creaked his head around, appearing to brighten just a tad, but even the tiniest glimpse of hope resonating within the man was enough to bring Roahn joy.

"Then I'm glad I was able to reach one person," he said before he pushed away from the railing to walk to the center of the room. "At least I can say I tried, which is more than can be said for most. Doesn't matter. We've still got a job to do and we're going to do it."

He then turned to Roahn, a new determination apparent in his face. "Go down and find out how much progress Liara's made on the data. Once she's finished, prepare the ship to move out immediately. We're going after Aleph. For the galaxy. For your father."

A feral grin crept across the quarian's face. There was the turian that matched the image in her head.

"Yes, sir," Roahn replied with a vicious bob of her head. "Hell yes, sir."

---

The Citadel

The elevator door to the apartment slid open, allowing Irissa to enter the sanctity of her domain. She tiredly rubbed at her scalp before she adjusted the collar of her suit—after spending all day seated in congress, embroiled in debates, enacting legislature, fending off malcontents within her own party, and formulating answers to the press, she was exhausted. Her chronometer showed that, if she started preparations for sleep now, she would be able to get in at least five hours of a decent rest.

The asari walked further inward, the heels of her shoes clicking on rugged tile flooring. One of the benefits of being faction leader for one of Thessia's largest political parties was that she was well compensated for her duties in rallying everyone in that party under a singular mindset. The salary was sufficient enough to allow her to purchase a flat in the 750 Eternis building, one of the most luxurious high-rises, stationed in the heart of the station's Financial District. The apartment here boasted a 270 degree view, with aweing shots of the Citadel's inner ring apparent from one side of the balcony, to gigantic and splendid vistas of Earth on the other. Irissa barely spent any time on the balcony, one reason being that she had been warned time and again that venturing outside without any guards was a major security hazard for someone in her position but she did not want to expense the installation of bulletproof glass bubbling her inside, as she believed it would be an eyesore to the décor she had spent years cultivating.

Irissa had spent thousands and thousands of credits on an interior designer, obsessive over having her home decked out with accoutrements that would derive immediate feelings of jealousy in her rivals and envy in her friends. The designer had been renowned back on Earth and hailed from the Russian Federal Union. The person in question had founded perhaps the best international design and architectural studio on the planet—naturally Irissa had wanted her input when it came to renovating her apartment.

The two had been in agreement that they would eschew the Bauhaus or avant-garde expressionism of Irissa's contemporaries. The asari wanted a home that would feel warm. Inspired. The designer was all too willing to accommodate.

The living room featured a slatted wall of natural wood from an endangered forest as a way to mask the column that held the ceiling up. The wall was supplemented by a brass rack with wooden inserts so that Irissa could place some pieces from her sculpture collection upon it. A sofa by an opulent asari brand, Ver, was situated against the wall, colored olive-green. Hanging overhead was a ring-shaped chandelier comprised of thousands of delicate crystals, custom-made by the firm Matteo Athos Fiore.

The dining area consisted of an open kitchen with a circular table, in which a dripping gold vein had been embedded. Wooden soft panels, colored the barest gray, helped give the smooth contours a light touch. The bathroom was also receptive to the same extravagance—double sinks (despite Irissa being the only occupant), spiral crystal light inserts, and a zebra-striped floor made out of Panda marble. The shower was a glass cube in the middle of the room, replete with rosewood benches. A detachable showerhead had been slotted into the corner, capable of washing in any configuration at any pressure.

The fantastic display was left unappreciated by Irissa as she proceeded to walk into her office, the sparsest room in the office by a mile, but no less ostentatious. The enormous window, spanning the entire height of the office—offered a wonderous view of Earth and the full length of one of the Citadel's arms. A good portion of the room here from the entrance on was empty—a decent place to embark upon pacing tirades. But a closer look would reveal that Irissa and the designer had carefully constructed a theme of patterns upon the room. Gray linen couches flanked the sides of the office, which foregrounded a triptych from an abstract salarian artist. A dark marble fireplace stretched upwards, seemingly beyond the ceiling. Pops of green waxy plants broke the faded color of fog. Pencil-thin chrome lamps punctuated the area around her desk, where she had a MonoForm chair that cost more than the yearly salary of one of her staffers. Retainers of twisted cane and orchids enhanced a natural focus on a bookshelf to the right of the desk. A media center, capped with lacquered glass and ridged with beige stone and copper speckles, sat plaintively to the side.

The asari headed for a liquor cabinet, charcoal acrylic and more marble flowing here. From there, she withdrew a stout bottle of a dark amber liquid—a human alcohol. She poured herself a glass and did not bother letting it sit before she took a sip. Dark fruit—cherries, perhaps—macadamia nuts, and leather made themselves known on the palate. It had a hot burn to it, the sign of a rather young whisky.

As she chewed the whisky in her mouth, swishing it around to intensify the flavors, Irissa turned towards the window, basking in the glow from the planet and the station, finding a grateful relief that she was home to revel in the silence, with none of the insipid and gnawing voices chattering at her ears here to slowly drive her insane. She could play the political game as well as anyone, but it still took a toll on her, one that she had been fiercely determined to never let others see within her.

The clicking sound of a mass accelerator weapon being primed broke through that silence, slicing right through the dark.

"Turn around," a voice said behind Irissa.

The woman recognized the voice right off the bat, a sour smirk twitching at the corner of her mouth. She slowly complied, silhouetting herself against the bright night behind her.

From out of the shadows, in a corner of the office, the sound of heavy boots upon polished stone began to resound. An armored Cirae, completely encased in thick plating, levelled a pistol straight at Irissa's chest. A belt filled with thermal clips had been looped around the younger asari's waist. One of her shoulder guards had a jagged cut in it, almost as if something had taken a bite right out of it. Her face carried a grimness on it that just edged out Irissa's own expression, not at all reveling in what she was doing right at this moment.

"Don't even bother to try and call this in," Cirae hissed. "I've already disabled your local network. It's just us right now."

Irissa swirled her drink, not breaking eye contact. Defiant to the last. "I guess I now know why Veyre never reported in. Useless bitch. Nothing more than a four-million credit write-off. Apparently, she was more loyal to you than I thought."

Cirae slightly shook her head. "No. She did exactly what you wanted. Almost succeeded, too. To the best of her ability, she tried."

"Evidentially she failed."

"Evidentially," Cirae repeated tonelessly.

Irissa took another sip of her drink, making a point to smack her lips obnoxiously to try and get a rise out of the intruder.

"I can probably guess at how you're feeling right now. Conceited. Arrogant. Pleased that you've finally managed to come out on top of something in your pathetically short career. Apparently, I underestimated your eradicative habit to try and bend reality to meet your will. To a point, that trait could be laudable. But with you… delusional is how I would define it."

Cirae stepped forward, holding her weapon evenly, in a practiced grip. Her brows were furrowed in concentration, in cold anger.

"I'm not the one who called out the hit here, Irissa."

"Oh, please!" Irissa spat with a lurch. "Don't pretend like you're the epitome of righteousness, Cirae. You don't get to act like you're above us all. You thought that you could put up a façade and play your part in the grand scheme of progressive politics. But it never worked—we all saw through your performance. We knew you were putting on an act! Act, act, act, that's all you've ever done since you walked into this congress. Who did you think you were trying to fool? Us… or yourself? Either way, you're still more of a hypocrite than you claim I am. The difference here is that I don't pretend to be a moral person!"

The faction leader's eyes then flicked over to stare at a particular point on the side of Cirae's gun. A cruel smile came to her features.

"And I think the fact that you haven't scuffed off that insignia on the side of your gun tells me that you're not ready to accept your new persona, or am I wrong?"

Cirae did not need to look at what Irissa was referring to. She knew full well what was printed on the side of her gun. In black, a slatted sun, flares like tentacles groping from the edges. She had kept the weapon for all these years, never once thought of getting rid of it. It was meant to be a reminder, a dire warning for her not to slip back into old habits. But she had been pushed, and pushed, and pushed so far off the edge that the time for reason had long passed her by.

"We all made choices we regret when we were young," Cirae gritted, but her tone was beginning to waver.

Irissa gave a snort as she took a seat at her desk, not bothering to ask Cirae for permission.

"We didn't all join Eclipse when we were young," the elder asari retorted.

When Cirae did not respond and even paled a bit, Irissa gave a harsh and unforgiving laugh. "You thought you had put that part of your life away from everyone else, did you? Small mistakes have a habit of defining one's life. It's something we all have had to deal with when we were maidens. The curiosity. The restlessness. Trying out mercenary life seems like an obvious choice for many, though little thought for how it affects their future is generally given to such a decision." She took another sip of her whisky, not reacting to the alcoholic bite one whit. "But I do recall you didn't seem to particularly take to the mercenary life, if I read your file correctly. Still, ten years under that banner was a long while for you to come to your senses. That was when you joined the Union's military, I believe. Seems that was where you found your taste for public service. Always the good little soldier, following your orders. Perfectly content to wallow in your naivete."

"Stop trying to bring me down to your level," Cirae seethed, jabbing the pistol forward to add emphasis to her words.

But the maddening smile still lingered on Irissa's face. "Bring you down? You were at that level before I ever was, Cirae."

The younger asari was flabbergasted. In her nearly four hundred years, she had not been beholden to such a deranged and enraging person before!

"Even now," she whispered, "you dare lie to my face?"

Irissia's resulting hand gesture was artless, completely nonchalant. One would think that she would be a little more respectful while staring down the barrel of the gun. Either the faction leader had had a turbulent lifestyle before going into politics, or she was the one more naïve of the two.

"We're not here to discuss events centuries ago that may have precluded us meeting here tonight. You are the one right now accusing me of placing a kill order on you. Again we see the hypocrisy, for you have done exactly the same thing!"

Cirae stepped forward, shoving aside the designer chair that was in front of the desk, and nearly pushed the barrel of her weapon against Irissa's head.

"Stop talking."

But Irissa did not back down. Quietly, she gave a tiny scoff as she looked up at her tormenter, a silent judgment running through her head.

"Do you think you can stand there and honestly believe you're the more virtuous out of the both of us? Who do you think I learned this tradecraft from?" She folded her hands together after pushing aside her half-full glass. The faction leader then gave a noble nod towards Cirae. "The disgraced lieutenant, eager to gain back favor by wreaking vengeance on those that wronged her. You were one of the first to speak out against hiding the beacon in the temple and thus were one of the first to be silenced for your outbursts. Did you think we wouldn't be monitoring you afterward, keeping tabs on your whereabouts? Does it seem obvious now, knowing that we saw you hand over all the information you had to that justicar several years ago?"

Cirae did not know what to say. Her mouth had gone uncomfortably dry. A tiny waver jolted through her arm, emitting a slight tremble in her weapon. Irissa's eyes flashed to the tremor, a nasty grin showing gleaming white teeth.

"It was too much to believe in coincidence when, days later, the very person in charge of the Athame Temple cleanup, Colonel Eneris, was found dead on the street. Someone had thrown her through a window, Representative. A window on the fifty-first floor of a high-rise on Thessia. I managed to arrive just in time to see the paramedics scoop Eneris… my friend… off of the pavement. Her skull had been cracked completely open. Pieces of the broken window had sliced her body open to the bone. Her brains had splattered all over the ground, and the blood… there was so much blood. If you had heard the wailing of the children who had the misfortune of looking on that grisly sight that day, I know that it would have also haunted you until your final days."

The truth of the matter that Cirae did have an idea of what it felt like to be haunted. She could remember that day so clearly in her mind it was almost as if it had been yesterday when it had happened. She had been glued to a news feed upon hearing the demise of Colonel Eneris' death. Eneris, her old superior, the person behind her downfall in the military, now lay dead in pieces on the public ground, a horrified crowd clustered around her smashed body. The network had not censored any of the gruesome images, for they all showed, in living color, the bright splashes of red chunks that spilled between blue-scaled cracks in Eneris' head, the distorted bubble of the asari's dislodged eye that dribbled from an empty socket, and the spilled flecks of shattered teeth sitting in blood pools like newborn pearls.

As she had continued watching that, Cirae had slowly sunk into a heap upon her floor upon realizing that all of this was her doing. Samara had misunderstood her intent… or she had misunderstood Samara. Cirae had never wanted Eneris dead, she had just wanted her to be pressured into taking responsibility for the asari's mistakes during the war! But either Eneris had refused Samara's relayed demands or Samara's only remedy for the colonel's arrogance was to have her disposed quite messily and very, very publicly. The justicar had never contacted her after that and Cirae had never sought to search for answers. In time, the asari had hoped that the fright from this event would pass, like a fleeting thought, and that she would just have to settle for coping with this subdued dishonor for a while more.

"All coming back to you yet?" Irissa snarled, snapping Cirae back to the present. "This escalation was started by you, Cirae. All we did was answer in kind. When a sanctioned commando squad tracked the justicar to that Ardat-Yakshi monastery and obliterated it for good, we had hoped that would have been the end of things between us. All loose ends tied up, nice and neat. Imagine my surprise when, years later, I see you walking into the Assembly hall, a newly elected representative. You thought you were home free. You thought you had left your old life behind once more, that this would be your fresh start. All in the service of your own selfish tendencies, not understanding what tortures some of us have to withstand every single day, out of fear from losing everything we have. Money. Power. Our families…"

Irissa then trailed off as her voice seemed to give out. Her bottom lip trembled as she was soon succumbing to intense shivers. Cirae said nothing, but her mouth parted slightly as she realized that the corners of the older asari's eyes were rapidly becoming wetter. Irissa was crying.

Struck, Cirae looked outside herself, rapidly becoming disgusted at her appearance, at her actions. I haven't changed at all, have I? Slowly, she lowered her weapon, no longer pointing it at Irissa's head. Tentatively, she placed an empty palm on the table, her face taking on a sympathetic look for the first time tonight. She did not see a being to completely forgive in the woman weeping across from her, but there was still something left inside her that possessed a conscience, a valid reason to live.

"Then help me, Irissa," Cirae quietly begged. "We can end this dark cycle together. Who was paying you to fund the PMCs? Tell me their name. All I want is their name."

But Irissa was despondent, shaking her head back and forth.

"It won't matter. I… I can't tell anyone…"

"Yes, you can. Please."

Now Irissa met Cirae's eye, no longer audacious or provocative. Something in the older woman had broken—awakened, perhaps—and now she was more vulnerable than she had ever been, in front of the person she probably hated the most.

"Cirae, I-I'm sorry. It's too late. If I did tell you… the things they would do to me…"

"Then they'll be after me too," Cirae declared, slamming a hand down upon the desk in an attempt to snap Irissa out of her funk. "I can help you, but you have to help me first."

Irissa's smile turned watery as she shook her head yet again. "It's not just me they'll hurt. They promised to go after my children. To torture them in ways you couldn't even imagine. They said they would keep me alive long enough to hear their final screams. Then they would ruin my name, tie it all to the Athame temple. I would live in time to see me established as the scapegoat… and then I would be disposed of."

Mind frantic, all of Cirae's previous thoughts of killing Irissa had all but vanished as she stowed her pistol back into its holster. She could still walk out of here with her dignity intact. Both of them could.

"I'll help you get in touch with C-Sec," she said. "With the Alliance, with anyone. We can put your family in protective custody, where they'll be—"

"—safe?" Irissa finished with a harsh laugh, throwing her head back for good measure. "There… is nowhere in this galaxy that is safe. Nowhere at all. Don't you see? I'm a part of this cycle. I'm not the only one they have control over. It's not just the Assembly. It's the Alliance, too. And the Union. And the Hierarchy. And the Republic. And everyone! Everyone is in on the farce!"

Slumping in her chair, the faction leader, once renowned for her superiority in the debate hall, had become listless and empty-minded. Glassy eyes stared out at nothing. A mouth hung open momentarily to only voice empty breath.

After a while, she regained her composure enough to speak, her voice now at a deathly whisper. "You… you have to leave. Go, get off this station. I'm too entrenched in this but you… you're still clear of their reach. But you need to leave now, while you still can."

"Irissa, I don't—"

But the asari cut Cirae off with a hand, eyes closed in serenity, having miraculously found a locus of energy that allowed her to sit up gracefully.

"Promise me you'll get as far away from this place as possible. But you can't linger too long. You need to keep moving to keep yourself and the people you care about safe. They'll find you otherwise. And they never stop hunting."

"But I don't understand."

A subtle twitch teased the corner of Irissa's mouth as she sat up straight. Out of sight, before Cirae could realize what was going on, the faction leader's hand slipped to a hidden drawer underneath her desk.

"I wish I never did. Goodbye, Cirae."

The savage outline of the curved pistol in Irissa's hands was barely noticeable in the dim lighting. Cirae's eyes widened in a microsecond as she beheld the weapon and immediately lunged to stop the asari.

"No, don't-!" she screamed.

But Irissa had jerked herself away from Cirae's scraping reach at the last possible moment. The older asari swiftly brought the barrel of the gun underneath her own chin, squashing it against the flesh of her neck, and with all her strength, slammed down upon the trigger.

There was a quick popping noise. Light and smoke emitted in a blinding bubble that flared into existence, enough to brighten the room for the barest of moments.

Then there was nothing.

Lying half-atop the desk, Cirae was aghast in horror as the only remaining sound was Irissa's body slumping off her chair to land on the floor out of sight. A thick tessellation of dark splatters had based themselves across the room and onto the window—a motley series of blots like resin that dripped and drizzled down the surface. Crimps of heat flourished their way upwards from the pistol that lay on the stone floor, the diodes embedded within the construction fading away to a dull simmer.

Realizing that she was hyperventilating, Cirae tried to combat her fierce shakes as she pushed away from the desk, away from Irissa's body. She increased the distance between the far wall as her breath painfully lodged in her throat. The whole room seemed to spin. It felt like she was drunk. There was even the fleeting inclination of bile churning within her gut, the urge to vomit wanting to become more and more apparent.

She kept the feeling down after a series of intense gasps. Fingers still trembling, she staggered her way from the room and clambered her way into the elevator chamber, making sure to lodge herself well into the far corner of the lift, with one hand on her pistol once more.

The doors slid shut on the terrified asari's face before the tiny box began its downward descent.

---

A/N: Now comes the final act! All the pieces are in place. Roahn's journey into hell awaits.

Also, I'd keep an ear out for any Mass Effect news next week if I were you. The rumor mill is abuzz with many hopeful reports and I'm chomping at the bit for any sliver of hope.

Playlist:

Liara's Heroics/Sagan's Charge
"No Escape"
Tillman Sillescu
Crysis 2 (Original Video Game Soundtrack)

Aleph and Shepard
"The General"
Christopher Drake
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Garrus' Speech
"Opening Credits"
Michael McCann
Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Original Video Game Soundtrack)

Faction Leader Suicide
"She's Rigged"
Harry Gregson-Williams
Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (Original Video Game Soundtrack)