Freedom's Progress — Omega Nebula

The shuttle did not so much as touch the ground. It hovered in position as ten shapes jumped out, then it took off with a muffled sound of pulsing engines, to vanish into the night.

Tali'Zorah vas Neema hid behind a rock, and from her perch atop the hill she spied the settlement two kilometers away. Freedom's Progress was small, one of many independent initiatives that had sprung up on the Terminus Worlds like mushrooms. Some flourished. Some failed.

The night lights seemed cozy to her eyes. An omni-tool command, and the HUD on her helmet zoomed in on the settlement. The buildings and vehicles she could see looked in good shape. Pristine, even.

But…

Why would a housing have its doors and windows wide open and the lights on in the small hours of the morning?

Something is off.

Tali dreaded having arrived too late. A digital query: the signature of Veetor'Nara's implants placed him somewhere down there.

Prazza knelt next to her. "It doesn't look like there's anyone awake there."

Slowly she stood up. "Veetor's signal comes from that place," she said resolutely. "We have to get down there." She took a cursory glance at her team. She had brought two squads, one under her direct command, the other under Prazza's. They were veteran Flotilla marines, not improvised militia, but a far cry from the elite soldiers next to whom she had served during her stint on the Compact nonetheless.

Said stint had made her one of the most experienced and skilled quarians on the Flotilla when it came to military tactics and small deployments — to her displeasure. She had never wanted to be a soldier.

But a soldier was what a rescue mission called for. "Chatika, show me the local map." Her tech drone obliged on the spot and projected a chart of the settlement and the surrounding environs on the ground.

A large part of the colony was highlighted in yellow. "Veetor is somewhere in this area. We haven't been able to get an accurate fix on his position, and we don't know why, so we'll assume the worst and suppose something has happened here." Tali pointed at a small hill to the north of the town. "This is the extraction point. We go together there, then we try to make contact with the locals. Prazza, you'll take your squad east, while I'll go west. We'll adjust our routes once we pinpoint Veetor's location."

The marines crowded around her bowed their heads in acknowledgment. "Alright," Prazza said curtly. "Let's get going."

Like most quarians, Tali tended to feel too exposed and naked whenever surrounded by nature instead of corridors and bulkheads, but in her case, it was less acute than the norm. Prazza and the others were also used to it, some of them veterans with more years of planetary operations than Tali was old. There was always that nagging feeling hovering at the edges of conscious thought, that longing for a world to call their own, but no one put it into words. There was only one world that would really suit them — only one world to call home.

Rannoch.

Would she ever be able to take off her helmet and breathe the air of her homeworld, she again wondered distantly, as her unconscious self was in charge of managing her combat-sharpened senses and scanned the landscape for signs of danger.

Few on the Flotilla really believed they would live to see it. One thing the Alliance had shared with them via the Compact was their assessment of the military strength of the geth, obtained from observations garnered by the omnics that had visited Tikkun with Zenyatta. Even if the Shambali had claimed to have seen more stockpiles of raw materials and construction machinery than military hardware, what they had actually seen was enough to put the geth armada at least on par with the turians.

And directly witnessing their ships in action near the relay leading to Ilos and near Ilos itself had allowed Tali to gauge their power. Pound for pound, one of their destroyers was a match for a quarian cruiser — which was expected, as most quarian ships were vintage in design and kept operational through refits and intensive maintenance.

But hard confirmation of their estimates had been disheartening nonetheless.

And yet, to her own surprise, she had hope. The Council had apparently believed the Alliance's assessment (which was to say, they had apparently believed an AI's assessment on other AIs ), because all they had done in response was to conduct some limited reconnaissance. The geth had been similarly staid, only deterring whatever interlopers they intercepted with warning salvos — a radical departure from their usual behavior, which had been to summarily and efficiently vaporize anyone they caught, as Tali had heard time and time again while growing up. Quarians who went into the Perseus Veil did so knowing they took their lives into their own hands. But now?

Then there was the revelation of how they had known of Tali's own intrusion, and how they had allowed her to complete her mission and depart with the data that ultimately had allowed the Compact to go after Saren.

The Admiralty board was still debating how to respond to these developments. Tali was undecided herself, though often her musings circled around an as-yet uncertain idea…

If I were to approach them… how would they react?

Then the crest of the hill that was their extraction point loomed before her eyes, and any thoughts not relevant to this mission were boxed away. She gestured rightward with her left palm, and Prazza took his squad in that direction without a word.

After a painstakingly slow approach and numerous scans to make sure there were no automated defenses armed nearby, they reached the walls of the closest building. It was a tool shed of some kind, the walls made of cheap sheet metal, with a single window on their side. The lights inside were on.

One of Tali's troopers deployed a scout drone, and very carefully used it to peek inside the shed. After a few seconds he gestured with his hands: clear.

His commander nodded and gestured in response: Let's move out.

The next structure across the street was a small apartment building. The same sequence repeated itself: they cautiously moved about, looking, listening, scouting. Again, the building was clear.

So was the next one, and the one after it, and another, and another.

The colony was empty.

Or almost so. After clearing another housing, they again waited for their scout to deploy his drone and explore the nearby surroundings for hazards—

—and a burst of gunfire narrowly missed the tiny spheroidal flyer as it tried to cross a street. "Alliance sentinel drones, five of them," the scout reported. He patched through his sensor feed to the rest of his squad.

"Attempting override." One of the troopers under Tali's direct command was an engineer. She peeked through a window, tapped her omni-tool a few times—

—and her attempt not only failed, but also attracted the attention of their targets: "INCOMING!"

Everyone dove for cover inside the small living room. A barrage of plasma blasts exploded against the wall outside.

"Someone has reprogrammed these drones using our own methods!" the engineer noted.

"That must have been Veetor," a marine observed. "On target!" He loosed a burst on a drone that was positioning itself to flank them, blowing it to bits.

If Veetor'Nara had hacked the drones, then he had surely done it to protect himself, and most certainly something very serious had happened here—but what? Tali could not figure it out. The guns of these drones left bullet holes and scorch marks, and they had not seen any battle damage yet.

But that was for later. Right now she had to dispose of the drones. She sent out her own to draw enemy fire, and as they shooted at it she targeted the two furthest from them with a focused electrical blast. One of her targets exploded on the spot. The other, thrown away by the shockwave, wobbled jerkily in midair for an instant and tried to get out of sight, but their marksman seized the distraction and fired a high-powered Mantis round at it. The drone was shielded, but for the good it did, it could as well have had none.

The rifleman and the scout made short work of the remaining hostiles. The scout again took his time exploring their surroundings, being even more wary and cautious now. An entire minute of silence passed before he said reluctantly: "Clear."

Tali nodded. "Good work, everyone." She keyed Prazza: Be on the lookout. There are active security drones around and they don't ask questions. Don't try to hack them.

Understood, came the answer.

Then the rhythmic noise of an approaching voidcraft reached them.

We have unknown inbounds, Prazza warned over the squad network and attached a picture. A small, unassuming shuttle. A Kodiak. Tali quickly scanned it for crests or identifiers: none.

Avoid detection, she ordered. If they were locals returning, she did not want to be mistaken for looters or raiders. Which would probably happen anyway. The quarians' practice of strip mining asteroids and deserted worlds —and no few clashes with people laying claim to those stellar bodies— had fueled rumors depicting them as such.

Both squads laid low and waited, in opposite parts of the town, for the shuttle to arrive. They saw it circle around the colony twice, before landing on a square closer to Tali's team.

Having unknowns show up mid-mission was a contingency they had planned for. Still she cursed to herself.

One of her troopers asked, using a very short-range transmitter to make sure her message only reached Tali's team: Raiders?

Very stupid ones if they are, Tali answered. If this place was a trap, then that shuttle would be a fat target the moment it landed. If they aren't locals, they know more about what happened here than we do.

Since the shuttle had touched down near them, it fell upon her to attract their attention, and so make sure the other half of the team was free to complete their mission. The only real way those people knew more about what had transpired in this colony was if they were somehow responsible for it, and she would act according to that assumption. The safety on her plasma shotgun went off, and so did those on the weapons of her soldiers.

They entered yet another empty building. This time the signs of something being horribly wrong were jarring. Breakfast had been set on a table in a living room, a typically human one if she remembered right — bread, canned fruit juice, and a mixture of grains and seeds she knew they called muesli. Nothing wrong there—except that it was a few hours before midnight. Then, right next to the dining table, the fragments of a decorative vase lay on the floor. Tali looked around. No signs of battle… no. There was one — a single bullet hole on the ceiling.

What… *happened*… here?

Then they heard the sound of a door opening somewhere else in the house. Quickly they all took defensive positions and waited.

Tali's finely tuned senses quickly picked up on cues. The unseen others were being singularly… careless. They were making just too much noise, and…

…and not really paying much attention to the rooms they traversed…

…as they headed their way.

A door slid open on the corridor adjoining the living room. Light flooded in…

"Quarians! We mean no harm! We are coming in!" a voice called out.

A stridently familiar voice.

Tali'Zorah went rigid.

That's… that was…

A human clad in powered armor walked in, holding a hardlight caster above her head.

On top of rigid, Tali now also went livid and pale.

In disbelief, she stood up slowly from her cover behind a couch, and hesitantly stepped forward:

"S… Shepard?!"

The woman before her grinned broadly. She put her gun away and, heedless of the quarian guns trained on her, walked up to Tali and hugged her tightly.

The overwhelmed Tali'Zorah needed a few moments to adjust. Then tears spilled. "I was… I was at your funeral. On the Citadel." There was not a shadow of a doubt in her mind regardless, yet she still asked in shock: "Is it… is it really you, Shepard?"

A tear welled up and rolled down the woman's right cheek in turn.

"I'm damned happy to see you too, Tali."

Now it was the quarian that squeezed her former commander, comrade and… friend... in a tight hug. She finally found her words again: "Me too."

Then she let go. "It's… it's no coincidence that I meet you here, isn't it?"

The joy of the reunion fled from Aaliyah Shepard's face. "I knew it was you the moment I landed here, but… honestly, I can't say. Sombra tipped us about this place."

The face of the hacker prodigy flashed in Tali's mind and she nodded. "You can't say she hasn't somehow eavesdropped on our comms." She felt the unease that rippled through her men upon hearing those words, but there was little that could be done about it. So far, there had been exactly one person that had managed to outsmart that girl — or, more properly, that had gotten the girl to outsmart herself: Saren Arterius.

Or had it been Reaper — the dreaded nemesis of Overwatch, the elite anti terror corps that had preceded Starwatch and the Compact?

Then she noticed the other people that were with Shepard, and she again went pale inside her helmet. She was transported back to those horrible hours after their fateful deployment to Garvug.

Many had died on that mission. Including the two that were there standing before her now.

Amari and Shimada.

The ninja noted her disbelief and smiled behind his mask. "Konbanwa, Tali-sama," he said with a polite half-bow. "It warms my heart to see you are doing well."

Layali Amari, clad in her flight suit as usual and loaded for bear, gave her a curt nod instead. "We ought to socialize after our business here is done," she said dryly.

"Speaking of which," Shepard asked, "what brings you here?"

The question earned her some hard looks from Tali's men, but her friend answered earnestly: "A distress call. A quarian on his Pilgrimage is somewhere in this colony." She glanced at the table where the breakfast sat untouched. "We hope. With this thing about human colonies being found empty…"

Shepard nodded. "This is the third place where it happens. We wanted to investigate before anyone else arrived and tainted whatever evidence we can find of… whatever happened here." She glanced at Tali's squad. "You're back with the Flotilla… We'll have to do some catching up, but as Amari said, we got business first. How can we help?"

Tali sensed the restlessness of her men, so she decided to err on the side of caution. "Just keep us posted. There's some kind of jamming here that prevents us from pinpointing where the distress signal is coming from. If you find anything that could assist us in our mission—"

"We'll tell you about it." Shepard had also noted the distrust of Tali's squad, and understood. "We'll begin our search on the western part of the colony and stay out of your way."

"Thank you. We'll also tell you if we find proof of what happened here."

"We'd appreciate that." She smiled. "Great to see you again, Tali."

The quarian girl smiled in turn. It was not the appropriate moment or situation to feel overcome with joy, but so she was. "Great to see you too, Shepard. Stay in touch."

Tali watched Shepard and her team go with a twinge of longing on her chest, but she was a commander herself now with a mission of her own. "Alright, people, you've heard it. Let's move."

Her team was still uneasy. "Trusting them is reckless," said their scout.

The quarian girl felt a surge of indignation, and her voice showed it. "Kal'Reegar…," she said slowly and deliberately, then her tone rose in pitch: "When I was selected for my first planetary mission they told me I had to obey orders, not that I had to like them."

The man recoiled as if he had been slapped and squared himself. "You're right. I apologize," he said tersely. "I will report this when we return to the Flotilla regardless."

"You do what you have to do," she acknowledged him testily, "but right now I am in charge. So move it."

Tali noticed the brief hesitation of the rest. They would have backed Kal'Reegar if he had challenged her further, she realized, but as he backed down no one spoke up in his stead. She groaned to herself, knowing she would have to discipline these men later, but then locked that ugly thought away and again concentrated on their mission.

They had cleared two more buildings without coming across anything noteworthy when some rifle shots echoed to their west. Some bursts of automatic fire and a few detonations followed, then Tali recognized the report of Amari's powerful anti-matériel railgun and the noises died away. A text message flashed on her omni-tool: More sentry drones, Shepard told her. I think your friend has been in this dormitory. We found some message exchanges on a terminal. Sending them over to you now.

Thanks, she replied gratefully. She went over the messages. There was nothing interesting there. Veetor, being the tech savant he was, had been asked a few times by the locals to help them fix misbehaving machinery. She wondered briefly why had Shepard sent her this, then she understood: if her former superior in the Compact withheld anything from her and her fellows learned of it later on, it would do no good to her reputation as a commander.

More detonations again rent the nightly quiet asunder, only more distant now — and to their east. The first few shots were answered with a long and buzzsaw like barrage and a series of powerful explosions. "That's Prazza's squad!" Tali exclaimed. She queried them on the squad network, but there was no response. The exchange had now become a furious firefight. She swore in her language, then harangued her team: "We're needed! Move!"

Quickly, Kal'Reegar released several scout drones ahead of them. Two ran into groups of security drones, but the other three charted a safe path for them. In this fashion they raced through the deserted settlement and arrived before a large hangar, one guarded by a trifecta of YMIR heavy mechs — just in time to see one of Prazza's men cut down by another machine-gun burst.

Tali blanched. From her position in cover, she looked for signs of the rest. She only recognized Prazza's bluish suit as he lay face down on the dirt, his back an ugly mess of bullet holes. "Keelah… why didn't you wait for us!?" she let out in horror.

The mechs had taken note of the newcomers at well. Two of them started moving towards their position, one of them laying down a deadly stream of gunfire as it advanced. "We have to pull back!" their sniper shouted. "We cannot fight back against that volume of fire!"

Then the second mech advancing in their direction stopped, looked upwards and fired a burst at the night sky. Half a dozen railgun rounds punched cleanly through its optics and machine gun arm in response. The robot clumsily stepped sideways, trying to get out of the line of fire — without reacting to the blur that quickly dashed towards it and attached something to the servos of its left leg. A violent explosion sent the heavy mech flying in pieces.

"We got help!" Tali exclaimed. "Keep the others distracted!"

With their resolve restored by the intervention of Shepard's team, the quarians rejoined the fight. The mech advancing on them ceased fire briefly and brought its twin missile launcher to bear, but before it could fire at them their engineer unleashed an electrical discharge upon it, momentarily overloading its shields — and the sniper, having expected that opening, let loose a single round that blew the optics to bits. Exhaust gases blazed in the night as the rockets launched, but one merely slammed itself against the wall of a nearby building and the other corkscrewed skywards, as the combined efforts of the quarian marines deprived them of guidance.

Then a blue-greenish light blazed in the darkness elsewhere. The robot froze in its steps. It let out a disagreeable noise of straining machinery, then the shrill sound of twisting metal filled the night and sparks flew as the mech turned into a tightly packed lump.

From a street opposite Tali's, Shepard and Shimada appeared, their attention focused on the third YMIR mech. The huge robot had its back turned to them and had apparently ignored the destruction of its fellows, instead aiming its weapons at the garage doors of a small housing.

"What's it doing?" one of Tali's riflemen asked.

"Look at its gun arms," their sniper pointed out. They moved very slightly, upwards and downwards, just a few centimeters each time.

"It's… it's broken?" Kal'Reegar said in wonder.

They saw Shepard approach the mech alone, the robot oblivious to her presence. A few more seconds of tension, then the former commander of the Compact took a biotic-powered leap, landed on its back, tore out a thick armor plate and flung it away, and unplugged something inside the robot. The mech powered down on the spot.

"Clear!" she shouted for Tali's benefit.

The quarian girl raced on the spot towards the limp shapes of her fallen men. Neither moved. She knelt weakly next to Prazza's body and stared skywards: "Why, keelah, why?! Why did you have to be so reckless?!"

The rest of her own squad approached her. The engineer addressed her. Or tried to, as she stumbled with words: "I… I told Prazza of the encounter with Shepard. He, he tried—tried to complete the mission by himself."

Tali sprang to her feet: "You did *WHAT*?! " she shouted. Her men jolted under the tongue-lashing. "What in the ancestors' name were you thinking?!"

"I was concerned—"

"Shut up! " With furious strides, she stomped towards the engineer and tore her submachine gun off her hands. "You're under arrest for insubordination and reckless endangerment," she said tersely. "You'll be imprisoned until the Admiralty Board passes judgment on you." Then she glared at the others. "Did you know?"

Slowly and reluctantly, the rest nodded, except for Kal'Reegar.

"Why didn't you stop her?" she demanded.

Nobody answered.

Ruthlessly she glared at each of the guilty marines in turn, but before she could say anything at them Shepard called out: "Tali! There's more of your men here!"

As one, the quarians raced towards her. Shimada and she were next to the open garage doors of the small housing the now-depowered YMIR mech had been staking out. The remaining three members of Prazza's team were inside, one of them badly wounded but still alive. She exhaled in relief. "Thank you so much for your help, Shepard."

"Don't mention it," the woman acknowledged her quietly. "I'm sorry. We couldn't get to you any faster."

"Don't be. You did more than enough already." She sighed. "Keelah… I can understand not believing you're real or trustworthy… but to go behind my back?" She shook her head.

Shimada nodded. "It is an ugly affair. And it's sadly going to worsen."

Amari landed next to them. "The rest of the security drones and mechs are sticking to their positions," she reported. "We're safe for now."

"Good. Keep an eye out here. Report anything that happens." The jumpjet trooper acknowledged her with a nod. Aaliyah turned then towards Tali. "We're going to inspect the hangar the mechs were guarding. Coming?"

"Yes, please." Tali turned towards Kal'Reegar in turn. "You're in charge until I come back. When you draft your report make sure to include everything that's just happened."

"Understood," the man acknowledged her. There was guilt in his voice as well. Probably nothing of this would have happened if he had not doubted her leadership and decisions, and he knew it.

The hangar had thick walls and heavy blast doors, and yet these opened on their own with a grate of groaning gears as Shepard approached. Its cavernous insides were shrouded in darkness. They turned on their lamps, and saw the place was a vehicle workshop of sorts, with shelves and racks bearing tools and boxes everywhere, a pit for a mechanic to work under vehicles and two large workbenches, a partially disassembled machine of some kind on top of one.

There was a small, elevated office against the back of the hangar. They made their way towards it and opened the door carefully. It was as dark there as it was outside.

"Veetor!" The quarian that Tali's team had been dispatched to rescue was huddled against a corner, sitting on the floor, knees huddled against his chest. She ran toward him: "Are you okay? Are you hurt?"

Quickly it appeared that the man was incoherent. "So many of them… they took them all… so many of them… they took them all… so many of them… "

"So many of them? Who's 'them', Veetor?" she asked nicely — or tried to. The tensions of the moment only made her voice sound that more disquieting to Veetor's ears, as he huddled himself tighter against the corner and refused to speak any further.

Then she heard Shepard's voice: "Tali… I think both our answers are here."

She turned around. Shepard had been working on a desktop terminal with several screens. The images on display there were ghastly: the security cameras had been dutiful witnesses to the horror that had transpired there. Swarms and swarms of small flyers had flown about, like the ones they had first seen when Sovereign and Reaper had assaulted the Erinyes asteroid base, stinging everyone they could find and so encasing them in stasis fields. And, walking among them, other insectoid figures that no one recognized:

Shimada put into words the thoughts in all their heads: "What in the name of all gods are those things?"

He unpaused the recording and zoomed in on one of the insectoids. It had a roughly humanoid shape and size, with two arms, two legs, a head, and a humanlike gait, but the similarities ended right there. All of them had black chitinous exoskeletons with brown and purplish hues to them, an extra pair of vestigial arms, and two pairs of gossamer wings sprouting from their shoulder blades. Four glowing yellow eyes lined their heads, arranged in pairs. They wielded firearms of different sizes but not of any design or model that they knew of.

Tali was about to say that she had never seen anything like it, but she did not — there was something vaguely familiar about it. The shape of the sloping, tapering head; the four eyes; the four-fingered hands, with two opposable thumbs each…

She looked at Shepard. "Correct me if I'm wrong," she almost whispered, "but… doesn't this creature resemble Javik a bit?"

The former commander of the Compact was staring intently at the picture. "Yeah, it looks like him." But it was not a prothean, and everyone saw it. Javik's skin was scaly instead of chitinous, and he had no wings, unlike this creature. And, whatever this creature was, it lacked a prothean's mouth in turn, having instead a small pair of spider-like chelicerae.

Aaliyah straightened up, her grim eyes still focused on the screen. "I think we've found who's responsible for the abductions. Whatever they are."

Tali saw her and the ninja look and nod at each other. Curiosity got the better of her: "What are you going to do next? Are you returning to the Compact?" As she spoke, she realized she had not asked the question that she wanted to ask most of all: "What happened…? Did you die… if you're here, you didn't die, didn't you?"

She heard her friend grunt in amusement. "One question at a time, Tali. About the Compact, I… I don't know. I heard Javik's in charge and running things now. If there's a commander already I'd only get in his way." Shepard shook her head. "No, not for the time being." Then she took a deep breath. "As to what happened to me… that's a long and very weird story. I think we have more urgent matters at hand. It'll have to wait."

The quarian wanted to know more but could not dispute the point. She then again knelt next to Veetor. He was still huddled tightly against the corner, still unresponsive, knees pressed against his chest. "How did he escape the attack?"

Shimada looked around, then through the single window in that small office. He took note of the partially disassembled machine on top of one of the workbenches. On a corner of that workbench, a thermal bottle and a cooler had been neatly stacked on top of each other. Labels bearing quarian script had been affixed to either. "This is Veetor's working space. I might be mistaken, but I believe he was in the midst of a repair job when the attack started. His immediate reaction was to seek shelter and hide, then to try and send the drones after the invaders. But either his programming failed to identify the attackers as the enemy… or they disabled the drones in turn and reprogrammed them to ambush anyone coming to help. Probably he escaped detection because of his suit — thanks to it, he has a very reduced biological signature. And this hangar is sturdy and has thick walls. It's quite possible that reduced his profile enough for his suit to obscure it completely."

Tali toyed briefly with Shimada's analysis and found no flaw in it. "You're probably right." She turned then again to the catatonic quarian on the corner. "Come on, Veetor, get up. We're going to get you home. Come."

"No! They'll find me there and… get them too… they'll catch everyone and take them away—"

"Veetor, look at me." The former commander of the Compact knelt next to Tali so she would be at eye level with the frightened quarian. "Freedom's Progress is the third human colony that vanishes," she said very slowly, her eyes staring into his. "Ferris Fields and Minamo were struck first. These… things — " she gestured at the screens "—are not interested in quarians, only humans. The Flotilla is probably the safest place for you to be."

Tali saw how Veetor returned the stare in catatonic fascination for what seemed to be endless seconds. Then he started shuffling with his left arm: "Then… you'll need this. I took measurements… scans… collected data. It will help you…" He then struggled to his feet, and handed her his omni-tool. Shepard thanked him with a nod.

"This will come in handy." She tapped a few commands on her own omni-tool to make a snapshot of the data on Veetor'Nara's, and then handed it back. "Thanks. I'll have time to digest the data later." She said next to Tali: "I'll send you whatever I find."

The quarian girl was unsettled. "You really believe it's only humans they're interested in?"

"For the time being," she heard Shepard say. "But this is just the opening move. Abducting whole colonies en masse will not go unnoticed. If they're doing it anyway…" A deep exhalation. "Whoever they are, they don't give a damn about any potential retaliation. No one in this galaxy has that much juice."

Tali thought she had understood where Shepard's train of thought was going:

"Except for the Reapers."

A heavy nod, followed by another deep breath. "Except for the Reapers."

Blackburn/Lawson residence — New Thebes, Anhur

Oriana was trying hard to focus on her studies and failing. The messages she had gotten three days hence had vanished from her tablet computer and from Mariana's, as if they had never been sent. While not specialized in that kind of technology, she knew her way around such devices; a colonist would have to know how to repair and maintain these things, she had reasoned, even if she would not probably be one but someone designing colonies instead.

But her digging had yielded no results, and that had been frustrating. Whoever claimed to be her sister was a bona fide specialist on the matter, or had some serious support on that side.

She was puzzled, confused, and slightly irritated. It had been… what, decades now? A very long time had passed since she had been confronted with an enigma she could not crack.

Not being able to discuss it with anyone only worsened her mood. Plus, she had to conceal all these emotions from Selina and the rest of the house staff and the security detail, and it was taking a toll on her. So far she had been able to pass it off as stress caused by the intense efforts she was dedicating to her thesis, but that excuse would not work for long.

So when the bell rang, she was actually relieved that there was something to distract her recalcitrant mind from wrestling with this intractable riddle.

"I'll take it, Chanelle," she said to the maid as she went down the stairs.

"Are you sure, miss?" the mature woman asked solicitously.

"Yes, I need the distraction."

The maid gave her a knowing nod. "You know I don't tell you anymore. But I still believe you study too hard."

Oriana smiled at her, thinking to herself what would Chanelle say if she knew what was really going through her head, and looked on the screen next to the door: it was… an asari?

"Hello? Who is it?"

"Oriana Lawson?" came the reply. "My name is Valena Danaan. I come with a proposal for you. May I come in?"

The name at once blazed in her mind. Valena Danaan had once been a legend, part of the asari-turian quick deployment task force sent to contain the crisis humans would later dub the First Contact War. She had faced the Overwatch elite in battle, become an instrumental piece of the initial cease-fire and migrated to Alliance space to live in self-imposed exile from her kind. Years later, when the Elysium incident had happened, she had been one of the first members of the nascent Compact, and had fought in nearly every major engagement with them until the showdown on the Citadel itself.

But then she had vanished. Along with Avitus Rix, Garrus Vakarian and several others, she had left the Compact and Citadel service even in the wake of Shepard's and Reyes' deaths. What had become of her was a mystery of sorts.

And now the same thought filled both her head and that of her eavesdropping sister two hundred meters away.

This legend was at her door.

"Please, come in."

Author's note: again, brokenLifeCycle helped with comments and suggestions. Kudos to him.