Disclaimer: I do no own Mass Effect, I do not claim to own Mass Effect, I am only doing this for fun.

Author Notes: This episode suffered from "excessive outlining syndrome". It's when you outline things so thoroughly that it feels like you've already written it down. Process woes aside, I hope you enjoy it!


Episode 65: The Revenant of Eden Prime [Part III]

They only got about fifteen meters into the ark's dark entry passage when Legion issued a warning about dropping air quality, beating their detectors and suit sensors by a few meters. Shepard was none too surprised that after being locked up for fifty thousand years that the oxygen level in the ark had dropped quite a bit. It was still breathable, but rarefied, akin to the conditions on top of a high mountain.

The ark's entry passage led ever deeper into the mountain with no artificial light source in sight. Whatever sections of the surrounding walls and floor that showed up in the halo of flash-light were bare metal with no decoration or signage, scattering their artificial lights, but not nearly enough for any sort of comfort. Every footstep also echoed and resonated off the walls, coming back from multiple directions. All of it served to distort her sense of direction and make estimating size nearly impossible. Fortunately it was literally impossible to get lost in a passage that did not branch out.

After a good ten minutes of walking there was a throat clearing from the back of the group. "Am I the only one who thinks we must be climbing into the mountain?" one of the younger miners asked.

Shepard stopped and glanced back.

"How can you tell?" The other wondered.

"It's more of a guess, I mean, the mine tunnels below never breached into this place. It has to be above the mine. And… we are probably not going in a straight line either, though without more lights we haven't got a hope of seeing the curvature of the walls," The first miner explained.

Shepard hummed, "That's a good theory."

"It would also make sense to build the facility up into the mountain, as opposed to down into it." Denis voiced calmly. "Strictly from an engineering stand-point. They would have had to hollow out a chamber for the facility. The less material on top of that, the easier it is to stabilize the surrounding rocks."

Shepard hummed. She had not thought about that, but it made sense. Given that this place was not a lab, but a stasis facility meant to preserve a genetically-viable population, the pod chambers would have to be enormous. The bigger the facility, the more difficult the engineering.

"We should test for the slope, it's the only way to answer that, and I have an idea that'll work in the darkness," Sophia announced, sounding very proud of herself.

All lanterns turned toward the woman in the rear of the formation.

Sophia brandished her water canteen and then opened it, "Let's see what happens." She tipped the bottle, spilling a few tablespoons onto the metal floor. Then she twisted the lid back on, and clipped the canteen back on her harness belt.

Carl turned his lantern on the spill. Before their eyes the water pool started to shift in the direction they had come from.

"It's probably a few degrees at most, but gravity does not lie," Sophia went on, pausing only to draw a breath. "Which raises questions. If the passage climbs slowly and curves so imperceptibly, it must be quite long. I doubt they would build that, this deep into a mountain, for a small lab or a weather station."

"That's a fair point, Miss Waters," Carl said.

Shepard turned back to the direction they were going. The civilians were starting to put two and two together. At least Sophia was becoming comfortable about letting calling her out on obfuscation by omission. At this point Shepard had to weigh the pros and cons of timing on spilling the beans. On the one side, having to do it was inevitable, however, she did not have all the answers, and did she want the civilians to freak out?

"Also… how did you open the door so quickly?" Sophia continued, her tone never wavering from her professional, authoritative blandness.

Shepard almost flinched. She should have known that question was coming. In hindsight, maybe rushing that part had not been the best idea. Then again, she would have never expected needing to ask the door to open. It sounded kind of preposterous, even though there was some logic to having such a lock. Dumber systems could be forced, hacked, or overridden. A password or a set of physical keys could be obtained by the enemy. It would have been pretty tricky to hack a VI system from a distance. Someone had piled on those rocks because in all likelihood they never found any other way inside. In that sense, having a VI-operated locked had done the trick.

"The Commander seems able to… understand and speak Prothean," Carl stated.

Shepard sighed, trust a civilian to talk about sensitive things without considerations for security. Well, she was going to admit to it, so he only beat her to the punch, but she would have done it on her own terms.

"I see," Sophia replied.

The way the woman said those words told Shepard far more than the words themselves. Sophia wanted to say something else. Or rather she wanted to say more than that. The executive demurred at the last moment, likely due to remembering that she was dealing with a Spectre. Shepard grinned to herself, "Well now that all the cat is out of all the bag… shall we continue?" Without waiting for a reply she turned and continued down the corridor.

The passage continued on for what was beginning to feel like kilometers. The pools of light from their various lamps offered nothing of the sense of scale. Even knowing her average stride length was no help at all. Time itself seemed to distend and Shepard could not afford to stare at her HUD clock the entire time. Her only anchor was the fact that Nihlus walked at her side, his shotgun's bright beam preventing her from feeling entirely alone in the dark.

Thus when a door materialized out of gloom right in front of her, Shepard had not been anticipating it. The panels were similarly plain, though smaller than the main entryway. There was also a clear seam right in the middle, showing that these were supposed to separate, not retract and roll out of the way. Set into the middle of the top frame was what looked like four eyes, and as Shepard approached, they lit up, projecting the VI's avatar right in front of her. Shepard heard a woman's airy gasp from the back, and grinned. Sophia had laid her eyes on what was her first Prothean.

The avatar stared at them, its eyes roving person to person as if it could see them perfectly in the near-total darkness. It was possible that its cameras were equipped with night-vision or infrared, but still, there was no reason for a hologram to have such a piercing stare. In that moment, that singular thing unsettled Shepard.

After a moment the hologram turned and stared at her for a long moment, but then suddenly vanished. The door started humming, pitching up a little as it went, and then there were four rapid, though relatively quiet thuds before it split down the middle and slid open, its halves disappearing into the frame. The space beyond this door was no brighter, but when Shepard cast her helmet lights from side to side, the light failed to hit a wall.

There was also absolute silence, broken only when someone shifted their weight or the clink of a D-ring on a harness. The absolute absence of other background was ominous, and more than a little stifling. Standing there, it was not hard to see why someone who believed in the existence of the supernatural could come to believe that curses might befall those who entered the tombs of long-dead pharaohs.

Shepard was the first to step past the second door, and only a few steps into the space the echo of coming off the walls disappeared. Only the sound of footfalls from the others still seemed to stir the air. Yet for the lack of sound, her helmet lights caught the first signs of furniture that hinted the space had been used. On either side of her were a series of benches and tables. There were also pillars, these bore signs in Prothean. The closest she could see was an orientation plaque, it pointed to locations around them, including a security checkpoint and property storage.

"Shepard?" Nihlus asked.

"This looks to be like… a receiving area, where those who were to go into stasis were to be checked in." She raised an arm, "That's an orientation sign if I ever seen one."

"This would be a good place to start our work then," Liara replied.

"Somehow I doubt anything of importance would be this close to the entrance," Shepard mused as she looked up, only to see that her helmet lights were just barely gracing against the ceiling.

"This would have to be a big space to serve as a receiving area," Kaidan noted.

Shepard turned to him, "Of course. We need to search it too, to find where we have to go from here. Our first priority is the power core. I need to see how much power is left and if it is enough to power the lights." Of course if they came across any terminal for the facility's VI, she could try to ask it to turn on the lights. Unless it was ever-present, like EDI? Well, that could wait until she got a good look at the core too.

"Sounds like a plan," Denis stated.

Shepard nodded. With no idea of how the facility was laid out, this next part might just end up quite embarrassing. She would not be surprised if they would stumble across all the dead ends before they found the metaphorical light switch.

"Before we explore this place, I think we need to ensure we do not get lost," Sophia spoke up.

"Yes, that is actually a good idea," Liara agreed.

"We commenced recording our navigation relative to this platform's orientation when we entered the facility." Legion announced flatly. "Based on the count of steps and internal positioning data, we will be able to facilitate navigation in these conditions."

Shepard glanced back, "As you can see, that's covered," she said, grinning, not that Legion would see that with her breather in the way. "Legion, you are anticipating everything today, aren't you?"

"Affirmative," the geth replied, managing to sound almost cocky.

Alright then, let's start looking. First though, we need to create frame of reference. If I'm right and this space is a huge hall, then we will need a point where we can converge without getting lost. We can leave one of the torches on the floor here. I do not want anyone going anywhere where they can't see that torch." Shepard would rather not have to look for the civilians in the darkness, and relying on moving helmet and weapon lights was not a good idea. At the same time, the room needed to be looked over. Maybe there was a sign that would point them in the right direction.


As Shepard predicted, there were some surprises and bad turns before they eventually found the power core. Reaching the place involved taking three flights of narrow, winding steps, and down a corridor that was positively claustrophobic in its diminished width and height. The typical fare of an employee-only area.

The core room itself broke the pattern a little. The facility's core was enormous, easily as large as something that could power a small city. It was mounted on an equally massive pedestal in the back of the core chamber. This necessitated cutting the room into the shape of a right triangle, with one of the tips blunted. When Shepard laid her eyes on it the question asked itself, just how much fuel would it require to operate for fifty thousand years? She could not even begin estimating.

On the narrower side of the room were banks of equipment and machinery. The core would have been designed to operate with minimum if any maintenance, but the equipment needed to do the work was still in place. Shepard knew that something here could probably shed more metaphorical light on what was going on, and answer the question whether they could get some literal lights up and running.

Shepard made her way toward what looked to be a console set right at the railing surrounding the core, and was utterly unsurprised to see that Liara followed her. Shepard reached out and tapped the console. For a long moment there was no response, but then, the screen flickered on and the projected keyboard materialized. As could be predicted, the system language was Prothean.

"Fascinating," Liara breathed.

It took a few moments for the system to come out of whatever standby state it had been in. Shepard stared at the screen, and pondered. This seemed like the first stirrings of activity, as if the computers had never left their millennia-long torpor. That did not make sense. The VI knew that the entrance into the facility was clear, and that someone was there to check on the sleepers. One would think that it would act, yet it did nothing. Something was not right here.

"Can you operate it?" Carl asked as he stopped on her other side.

"I can read the language, but… I'm no power systems engineer." Shepard replied. "I'll bring up a status report first," she announced. That seemed like a good place to start, right?

"Good, we can start there, and maybe we can figure it out," Carl said.

"Shepard, do not overthink it. It would not have made sense to build an excessively complex system for this type of facility." Nihlus added.

Shepard hummed as she requested a system diagnostic. It was a few seconds for the system to collate the data and to display it on the screen, and as she feared, it was a complex readout, sigils on top of sigils, looking positively byzantine.

"You can read Prothean as well?" Sophia asked.

"Yes, and even if it was in English… I'd still be out of my depth," Shepard confessed, her eyes never ceasing to glide across the read-out. Not everything was clear, but she could make out a few things. "The core is only producing five percent of its design capacity." That was right at the top. "It's a primitive configuration at that, a deuterium-tritium reaction, with the free neutrons re-enriching deuterium to tritium in… some system here. So okay we're not in danger."

"The first fusion reactors on Earth were deuterium-tritium reactions," Denis noted.

"I wouldn't call it primitive, just… using readily available materials." Carl argued. "Sure, helium-three reactions produce more power and no free neutrons, but the isotope is almost non-existent on any planet with its own magnetic field."

Shepard tapped to access the system labeled as fuel processing. Which brought a new batch of readouts. Fortunately what she wanted to know was near the top. It took her a few seconds to bring up the meaning of each sigil, akin to reading a language she had not used in years. The knowledge was there, just no longer at the forefront of her mind. "It is almost out of hydrogen. From what I can understand, the core has been drawing hydrogen from… a reservoir? An aquifer? The word here-" she pointed at one of the sigils at the heading of a list of items. "Can be translated as both."

It would figure that written Prothean was as complex as the people who created it. Each sigil represented a phonetic syllable. Some also had the same base, differentiated by an additional stroke or a mark above, in the middle, or below the main form. Overall, the forms were rounded and flowing, as if meant to be created in fluid brush strokes. The best comparison she could come up with was that the sigils functioned like some East-Asian languages, but their physical shapes better resembled Arabic.

"Hydrogen to fuel a fusion core can be extracted from water or hydrocarbons. So it could be both," Denis stated. "We are close to a large sea, but there are no deposits of hydrocarbons in this entire area."

As far as Shepard was concerned, it did not make sense for the facility to use sea water. The water intake pipe would have been an easily-exploitable vulnerability. Seal the entrance and sabotage the intake and you had a catastrophic power failure. Here the entrance had been sealed with rocks, but the core was still fusing. Furthermore, the list of vital subsystems in front of her included multiple hydrogen extractors, far too many than necessary to process seawater from a single source. That could only be explained if each tapped into a different source of fuel. Right then only one extractor was still operational.

A few taps of the keys brought her back to the main core controls. "I think the core is at… minimum power for a reason. Only one of the hydrogen extractors is still working. The core is at the bare minimum output it can do without a plasma flame out." Did they want to power up the lights like this? Was convenience worth the risk of running out of fuel at the last moment? It went without saying that at five percent capacity, this did not bode well for the odds of survival. Increasingly it looked like fifty thousand years had been far too long for the facility. "I will not mess with the core. I don't even think bring up the lights is a good idea." Especially given how dubious her ability to translate the written language happened to be.

"It is your call, Shepard," Nihlus said.

"Where to now?" Liara asked.

Shepard hummed, "This is engineering. I'm thinking since the VI is still online, the main computers are probably online as well. I need to check on the status of the sleepers." Low odds or not, she had to make sure. Her conscience and all norms of decency would not accept any other course of action. "This level seems to be the administrative center, any mainframe access ought to be here.

"We're in the metaphorical and literal dark," Kaidan murmured, a lilt of amusement in his tone.

"Nothing I can do about the literal, but I'll be damned if we'll stay in the metaphorical." Shepard replied.

"Just another day in the office," Kaidan murmured.

Shepard grinned, but said nothing. Kaidan's attempt at wry levity, such as it was, was perhaps just the surface of what he was thinking right then. She would not be surprised if he was picking up on all the same clues of something untoward going on, but he was far too disciplined to talk about it around civilians. Everything started with the continuing lack of action on the part of the VI. Why was it pretending not to exist? Sure she was the only one who could speak its programmed language, but one would think the Protheans would have programmed it to attempt lending assistance in circumstances like this. They would have been entrusting an unknown number of lives to it, there ought to have been layers upon layers of backups and redundancies. Yet the VI did nothing of the sort. Something was simply off about this place, and with every passing bit of information Shepard's paranoid side grew louder in its insistence that it was not an innocent design flaw, accident, or malfunction. Her danger sense insisted that there was something more sinister going on.


Shepard would say one thing for the facility, it was at least laid out logically. The upper level indeed proved to be the administrative center. After leaving engineering, they readily found the life support plant. They did not linger inside as there was no need. The air inside the facility was still breathable, even if the mix was slightly off. She was none too surprised at that, as it made sense to power down the oxygen delivery systems to the larger spaces of the facility while there was no one inside to breathe the air. Shepard did not bother to power them up any higher.

After that, they found the administrative center of the facility. It was another large space dominated by the greatest number of computers and other equipment. The vast majority if not all of which was still active. The space was dominated by five different work stations that faced an enormous, bare back wall.

The layout was evidence for a little theory Shepard had. If she had been the one to build such a facility, she would have designated a priority crew, a team of engineers and other staff to be awoken first, so they could double-check the facility and the outside environment prior to mass awakenings of civilians. This nerve center spoke of a similar arrangement in place. That was good.

What was not so good was that the VI had not done anything yet. At that point the best case scenario was that there was no one to wake up. The worst case scenario was that the VI was actually compromised so that it would never wake anyone up. If it was done at any point during the facility's construction it would have only taken a couple nefarious lines of code meant to activate only after full lockdown. The lesser possibility was that the Protheans did things differently, and she was just spinning her wheels, but the administrative center's layout hinted otherwise and Shepard firmly believed in the universality of psychology in all sapient species.

She drew near the central workspace in the middle of the room and leaned over the bolted-down seat to tap at the area where a keyboard should have been. However, five seconds ticked by and there was absolutely no response. Shepard tapped at it again, waiting another five seconds, but still there was nothing.

"Is it… inoperable?" Liara asked.

Shepard glanced around at the hardware behind them, but then turned back to Liara, "I don't think so."

"Maybe it is voice activated, like the door… or maybe you need the VI to wake the system," Kaidan offered as he appeared on Liara's other side.

Shepard glanced at the lieutenant and hummed. "Entirely possible, and also entirely bothersome."

"Whatever do you mean?" Sophia wondered. "It's a computer, you got the door to open somehow. Just do that again."

Just a computer? Shepard thought a lot of things in life would be simpler if computers had stayed just computers.

"Shepard, what are you thinking?" Nihlus asked.

Shepard turned. "Most would think we are dealing with a computer. But… consider this. We cleared the door about two hours ago, the VI knows there are outsiders in here. One would think there would be a programmed response for that. Even just activating the facility's defenses. Yet… there's nothing." She was not going to say any more, the implications would do here. It was common enough knowledge that most VI software was little more than an agglomeration of if-then scenarios it followed to the letter, without second-guessing whether it should. A VI was incapable of questioning its programming. If someone asked it something, then it would reply in some pre-determined manner. If the room's temperature slipped outside defined limits, it would turn on the appropriate regulatory system. Not this one though.

Nihlus crossed his arms and emitted deep, contemplative rumble, seemingly right into her ear due to their suit communicators. Shepard twitched. His microphone had to be catching something of his sub-vocals, because that had been so low that it passed right through her body like the base in a club. Behind him, she saw Legion shift around, their sensor suit iris ratcheting down to narrow the beam as they turned to look at the computer cases. She grinned, of course Nihlus and Legion would read into that.

She wanted them to follow her train of thought, without needing to spell it out. The civilians did not need to know most of her thinking right then. If they followed the conventional logic of VI programming, then a lack of response could mean either the VI was malfunctioning or corrupted. Or it was not a VI at all, but an intelligence capable of making its own independent decisions, an AI. That was what she deemed problematic. None of their previous experiences with a Prothean AI had been positive, or even constructive, and they definitely could not trust one.

The ramifications of another Prothean AI had to be considered. First, if the AI realized they were on to it, they might be in trouble. It was a good thing that it could not understand any of their languages, yet, so getting around it might not be impossible. However, if it was actually biding its time for something else, then the danger shifted toward others who had to deal with it. She needed to confirm things, to prevent the potentially manipulative synthetic from catching anyone unaware.

Suddenly the console in front of her sprung to life, haptic keyboard first, right where she had touched it. Then the whole room was filled with bright luminesce as the administrative center's main monitor came online. It was similar to the one Nabu had showed her, spanning the entire back.

"It would seem that it was… slow," Liara stated.

Shepard thought it, but she would not say it. The more likely possibility was that, assuming she was right about her AI suspicion, it had figured out some madcap scheme, and this was only putting up appearances of cooperation. She needed to find some way of confirming this system's actual nature. She leaned down over the seat and tapped a series of commands to view the facility layout. The large screen flickered and duly showed a full diagram.

Sophia gasped. "It's huge!"

"Commander, I do believe that you owe us a full explanation now." Denis said, his tone stern and unimpressed. "This is not a laboratory or a research station. It is much too large for that."

Shepard stared at the screen. She would have liked to keep the full reveal back until the last possible moment, especially now that she had a reason to suspect that the intelligence operating this facility could think for itself. However, as usual, civilians would not afford her that pleasure. "This place is a vault, Mister Benoit." She tapped at the keys to bring up more details on the stasis chambers.

Additional boxes appeared, two per each of the ark's levels, corresponding to two pod halls, one on either side of the major corridor that took them up here. Each of those general reports was broken up into simplified view of the pod clusters in the chambers, each marked with an alpha-numeric designation, and reporting their general status. She took a moment to carefully read all the sigils, and what she saw was hardly encouraging, there was no way to misunderstand the words 'Vital Signs: Absent'. "This is simply not a vault for things. Every pod in here contains one cryogenically-suspended individual."

Denis and Carl turned to the monitor so quickly that Shepard heard the rings on their safety harnesses clink.

"This place has living Protheans?" Sophia demanded appearing at her side, hands planted firmly on her hips.

"Why were we not told?" Denis asked coolly, though without turning outright confrontational.

Shepard sighed, now it was difficult question time. She could understand where they were coming from, but at the same time she wondered why it was such a shock. The Protheans were said to have been much more advanced in their heyday than the civilizations right now. Was it that much of an unreasonable stretch to say that they could put thousands of their own into suspended animation?

"We are not obliged to explain ourselves," Nihlus stepped in, his tone deepening.

Shepard sighed, her pause had been too long. "Peace, Nihlus." She did not need his prickly pride in the middle of all this. It was hard enough to explain things as is. "There may be Prothean survivors here. I did not say anything because up until I saw that," she motioned to the screen, "I was not a hundred percent sure. My source told me about the place, but at first I was not sure if we were looking in the right place, or if there was anything past the door, then I was not sure that the facility was actually occupied. I did not want to raise hopes, only for them to crash and burn."

"Fair enough," Denis replied as his posture relaxed.

Shepard had not lied, but neither had she spoken the entire truth. There was also the bit that she just did not wholly trust civilians to keep silent. A few wrong words spoken and they could have attracted all sorts of wrong attention. Plenty of people would be interested in the Ark. Starting with Harbinger and Nazara and through the spectrum, culminating with Cerberus.

"Are… they still alive?" Carl wondered.

Shepard sighed again and shook her head. "What you're seeing is the status display. Each of those big boxes is a chamber of pods. The squares within correspond to a… cluster of individual stasis pods, and it would appear we were too late. All the clusters are reporting absent life-signs."

"No! That's… it can't be, we came so far," Liara moaned.

"Shepard double-check everything," Nihlus ordered.

"I was going to do to that." Shepard replied, affecting an air of perfect amicability. She would have gotten to it when the civilians got over the shock that is. She needed to concentrate, because reading unfamiliar sigils rather than her own native language felt all sorts of weird. Furthermore, the list was dense enough that things blended together on her. She had to force herself to slow down and go over all of it carefully, line by line.

"Oh! Commander! I see a different sigil… a different status report?" Liara announced and pointed one finger onto the monitor. "There, in the lowest box, about halfway down."

Shepard followed the archeologist's index finger, but there was no need, the directions alone would have sufficed. She had to stare at the box for a good thirty seconds, but she saw it. One of the clusters in the chamber two levels below them was reporting 'Vital Signs: Error', a difference of a single sigil. "Good eye, Doctor T'Soni!"

"What does it mean?" Liara asked.

Shepard hummed, leaned down, and carefully entered the cluster's alpha-numeric designation to bring up additional detail. A second, smaller box appeared, overlapping the one belonging to the cluster of pods. It took her another few moment to spot the one oddity in the cluster, but when she did, it was like a faint candle of hope flickered back to life within her. "One of the individual pods within this cluster is reporting… its occupant's life-signs as unknown rather than absent."

"Unknown?" Liara repeated.

"Could it be empty?" Kaidan wondered.

"That's one possibility," Shepard replied.

"It could also be a survivor," Liara argued.

Shepard typed in the pod's own, individual designation code. If nothing else, of all the pods in the whole facility, this one was reporting something other than the death of its occupant. Right then, it presented an opportunity to test her theory by calling the AI's bluff and goading it to action. If the occupant was still alive, if there was an AI here, and if it was interested in keeping things under wraps, the lookup might just provoke it to react. "You're both right. It could be unoccupied, or just malfunctioning, but it could also be the last survivor." She pressed one last key and the screen flickered, bringing up another box which displayed the pod's information, including the profile of the occupant inside.

"It's not empty!" Liara exclaimed she turned to Shepard, her eyes practically glowing with excitement.

Before Shepard could even open her mouth to reply, the screen went dark and the keyboard vanished, plunging the room back into darkness. There was a quiet whine and then deathly silence. The computers had shut down, seemingly on their own.

"What the…" Carl said. "Should it have done that?"

"Probably not," Denis said.

Shepard straightened, it fell for it! "Someone does not know the meaning of the word subtlety." She could not bite back her feline smile right then.

Both miners turned to look at her, but neither said anything.

"Did the… VI do that?" Liara asked, her tone coloring by a slow realization.

"Sure, who else?" Shepard replied automatically. "Come, we are heading two levels down." The AI did not want them looking for that particular pod. There was a single survivor, and the AI did not want anyone to find him. From what Shepard had seen on the screen before it flicked off, and unless Protheans had absolutely no sexual dimorphism, they were looking for a male. "Nihlus, Legion… now would be the time for it to get desperate. Weapons at a ready!" She turned toward the room entrance.

"Acknowledged," Legion replied and reached behind their back for their pulse rifle.

"I guess this is where I step in," Kaidan murmured.

"Thanks, Kaidan." Shepard replied.

"We are not dealing with a simple virtual intelligence, are we?" Nihlus asked as he laid his hand on the butt of his shotgun.

He sounded too wry for that to be a serious question. "Gee, what gave it away?" Shepard replied blandly even as she thumbed both Sin and Dex, turning them on.

Nihlus chuckled, rumbling practically right in her ear.

Shepard smiled, maybe that was one of her more out-of-place comments, but right then she could not care less. Her primary goal became that pod. If it was a survivor, they could prove invaluable. She needed to ensure that victory did not slip through her fingers. Then again, unless the AI had an army of synthetic units in some closet, its options might just be limited.

The trip from the administration center to the eastern stasis chamber two levels below the administrative floor was comparatively short. However, no one spoke the entire way there. Shepard's danger sense had started tingling, and the sensation only got worse by the minute as the tension in the group increased. It became impossible to miss the fact that the civilians had become twitchy. One particularly loud footstep or the creak of armor and the miners would twitch. More than once Shepard had seen lantern beams whip around. Shepard never liked that sort of mood. A team that was not chattering, even a little, was either facing insurmountable odds, or other tensions were approaching critical mass. Right then, it was doing more to unsettle her than any threat posed by another potentially mad machine.

As she crossed the threshold into the pod bay any preconceptions about the room's size were jettisoned. All echoes died, as if she was simply too far from everything for the soundwaves to retain the needed intensity to bounce. The sensory deprivation effect of that chamber was only broken by the fact that she could still feel the effect of standing on something through her feet and that she could see a series of twinkling white pinpricks of light at a distance on her right.

"Spirits," Nihlus breathed.

"It's huge!" One of the younger men in the back said, sounding breathless.

As Shepard made a few more steps into the room, her foot encountered an uneven patch. She glanced down and her temple-level lights hit on rail recessed into the floor. "Careful, the floor presents tripping hazards. There are… rails of some sort here."

"How many pods are in this place?" Liara wondered.

Shepard glanced at the asari, "I did not have the time to check for counters, nor count the pod clusters, but given that this place was meant to preserve the population from an enemy set on outright genocide…" She stopped there, honestly unsure what she ought to say. Strictly speaking that was already more than the civilians needed to know. Still, this was just one chamber of six, and if the other five were just as large, the numbers would start to add up.

"Genocide? It got that bad?" Carl asked.

"The Prothean Empire spanned the galaxy, but it collapsed catastrophically some fifty thousand years ago. They ceased to exist as a culture and as a species," Liara explained.

"Which naturally begs the question, how does something like that happen?" Shepard asked as she started deeper into the room. "Someone was clearly very unhappy with the Pax Protheana." That was an understatement and a conscious choice of words on her part, she hoped it was illustrative enough to carry the point across. Ultimately she did not want to linger on that topic right now.

Then her lights encountered a huge metal structure, rising high overhead, likely right to the otherwise invisible ceiling. She was at one of the corners at its narrow end, and even then it was a considerably wide thing, she could only just see the other corner. Was the chamber divided by narrow passages and supported by these? As she rounded the corner, her lights encountered a series of hexagonal metal hatch covers clustered tightly together, each with a small plate marked with an alpha-numeric designation. With a start Shepard realized that the support structure was essentially an enormous honeycomb frame that continued uninterrupted horizontally and vertically right out of the reach of her lights.

"These got to contain the pods," Nihlus murmured.

Shepard hummed. "We won't be finding the pod visually, that's for sure." There was no way of doing it manually. The hatches were perfectly flat, and they went all the way up. There was no way of climbing up to look at the upper levels.

"If the AI is set on preventing us from finding the last operational pod, it probably won't let us use the proper system freely," Kaidan said.

Shepard glanced at the quiet lieutenant, "That goes without saying."

"AI? This place has an AI?" Carl asked.

"I don't quite understand… why wouldn't it cooperate?" Sophia cut in, practically speaking over the miner.

"It has a mind all its own, literally. Being recalcitrant is a choice." Recalcitrant would do as a word choice right then. Shepard was not going to come out and say that it could very well be outright psychopathic and malicious. She would rather avoid making the civilians fear the AI if at all possible.

"Shouldn't there be some sort of override on its access? You might be able to disconnect its ability to interfere with whatever you need to do," Denis asked.

"Assuming its quantum box is not actually the place's central processing unit," Shepard replied. Quantum computers had processing capacities far in excess of any conventional machine. It would simply be more efficient to use its free capacity when available for more routine tasks. "Well, let's see now? Follow me," she said as she turned the corner again and started on her way toward the distant status lights.

Shepard already knew that the chamber had to be a rectangular box, but by the time she reached the computers in the far corner, she had paced out one side. Unless she was horribly wrong, this was the short side, and it was already nearly a hundred meters. The long side on her left would probably extend two if not three times that. Her initial supposition about the tall honeycomb structures had panned out. The chamber was full to suffusion with them. The reason for the network of rails in the floor also revealed itself in the form of three massive gantry frames, each as wide as the passages between blocks, and just as tall, supported by four slender, spindly metal legs on large multi-wheeled trucks. The most important objects, the room's computers, and the chamber's work station were tucked right into the corner. It was a large system that sprouted massive cables in many directions.

"Let's make ourselves useful," Denis announced, looking at the other miners. "Commander, you figure out the computers… we'll look over these gantries. Maybe they can be operated manually."

Shepard approached the computers and tapped at the plate where a haptic keyboard ought to be, but then glanced at the miners, "That'd be our fallback plan if the system won't work without the AI. It'll take longer too, as we will need to find the pod's cell first." She would rather avoid needing to do that, as it would be looking for specific tree in a large forest.

The status lights on the cases on her left flickered, but the screen came to life and the keyboard materialized. Shepard blinked, that could be a good sign, or a bad sign, and right then her paranoia was starting to run rampant. She was more inclined to believe that the AI was up to something. As soon as the system fully booted up, she went right for the system controls.

The AI took a few seconds to realize where she was going, and then every cooling fan in the cases on her left sprung to life at once.

"What the..."

"It's fighting me, but it's late," Shepard muttered. She was already at the controls and from there it was a matter of a few inputs to switch the system to manual. The screen blinked and the fans gave one last loud whine before a message appeared on the screen, confirming that the override had been initiated. A few moments later, the whirring fell to silence. She waited a few seconds, to see whether the AI could do anything. When nothing froze, crashed, or shut down, she moved her hands away from the keyboard and sighed. "I seem to have control now."

"For a moment there it sounded like it wanted to spin itself apart," Liara murmured.

"It threw a fit. It can't do more than that," Shepard replied. Well, at least she hoped it could not do anything, but there was no real way to tell. Fortunately the Protheans had not provided the machine with any synthetic security proxies. If the thing had access to even one proxy, they would have had to shoot it apart by now.

"What now?" Sophia asked.

"I want to familiarize myself with the system," Shepard replied automatically as she leaned down over the console. The first place she went to was the chamber's status display. Within a few seconds she had the full inventory for this chamber. The Protheans had a curious if slightly glib terminology convention. The sigils referred to the pods as 'storage units' and the chamber as a 'vault'.

The system also highlighted three pods specifically, all labeled as essential staff, and all showing no life-signs. She typed in the ID of their missing pod into the search line, which brought up the pod's information. The life-sign line was still showing an error. She tapped it to access the rest of the available information. A new box appeared with the occupant's full details.

"That's the same photograph we saw in the command center," Liara noted as she leaned down next to her to peer at the screen.

Shepard hummed, reading over the data. Why would this pod be the only one left online? "Says here his name is… Javik, and it seems like he was one of the last individuals to go under when the ark was locked down."

"Sounds to me like he might have been charge of the facility," Sophia noted.

"If true, then it makes… some kind of sense why he would be the last survivor, maybe." Kaidan murmured.

"Maybe." Shepard repeated. "He's not on the list of those who were supposed to wake up first, when the all-clear was given." Getting a skeleton crew up to start waking up the others seemed like a perfectly reasonable protocol, but it never happened, why? The answer was probably in there somewhere, buried in the likely kilometers-long time-stamped records, which she did not have time to scour right now. Ultimately, it did not matter, if this last Prothean was alive, they might get to hear the story, straight from him.

Ultimately Shepard did not need that many details for the task at hand. As she thought over the bits and pieces of evidence she had on hand, she could no longer tamp down the foreboding paranoid feeling that whatever happened to the ark's sleepers could not have been accidental. If there had been a real accident or a major malfunction that resulted in the slow deaths of the sleepers, then why would the AI act like this? One would think that in the event of a cascading pod failure, regardless of cause, there would have been some backup protocol to save the inhabitants. The AI had not followed them, in fact, it was working against them. Furthermore, it clearly did not want anyone to find the last pod.

Everything, starting from the established pattern how Prothean AI's seemed to turn out, the behavior of this particular AI, and now what she saw on this terminal, painted some part of the bigger picture. Shepard did not like the colors of this one. "As far as I can tell, there is nothing… obviously wrong with anything in this facility. Basically the people here should have been woken up thousands of years ago. I can't see a single justifiable reason why no one did."

Nihlus hummed, "But I bet you can see a nefarious one."

"You know me too well," Shepard replied. It would do as far as affirmations went. She straightened. Had the Protheans so miscalculated the emergent personalities of their AIs? Were they flawed from the start? Or had they learned to behave in such a manner? She sighed, well they had what they needed, didn't they? She could initiate pod retrieval at her convenience, assuming the gantry frames worked. With that thought, Shepard turned to her right. "How are those gantries?"

Denis was crouched near the wheels on the nearest frame, rubbing his fingers together. Carl was inspecting the rig one over, and the two younger men were at the third. Then the Frenchman looked up, "Nothing seems to be mechanically wrong with them, except maybe… lubrication. They use solid metal wheels, and I can't feel an ounce of lubrication anywhere. Though it could be a self-lubricating system, assuming any tanks have anything left after so long."

If a lack of proper lubrication was the only problem, then there were no problems. "So it's going to be noisy, and it might only work for a short while before seizing up. Got it."

"It's the same with this one too," Carl called.

Shepard would assume three for three. It made sense. What sort of lubricant would not dry up in fifty thousand years, exposure to air or otherwise? "Alright, I can retrieve the pod, so if you gentlemen would kindly step clear." She announced and turned back to the console. The retrieval protocol was right there, under the pod's information. She just needed to press one button.

"We're clear," Carl called after a few moments.

"Alright, here we go. Cross fingers that it does not seize up before the pod is down." Or worse, drop the pod. Shepard would have preferred not to have that thought, but she was a consummate realist. She pressed the final button to initiate recall.

For a long moment there was silence, then the gantry on the end started humming loudly. Then it emitted a loud clang which almost made Shepard jump, and that was nothing compared to the nails-on-chalkboard shriek of metal as the mechanics came to life for the first time in fifty thousand years. The frame budged a few centimeters, timorously slow, the metal parts continuing to grind together. Shepard was really tempted to reach up and shut off her external microphone, but that would make her deaf to the outside world.

A few moments later there was a loud electrical whine and another clang, but it was like the machinery unstuck itself, as suddenly it was moving faster and relatively quieter across the rails toward the far side of the room. It quickly vanished from view, fading into the darkness, but the wheels continued to screech and grind audibly. Even with the complex echoes reverberating over the walls it was possible to figure out where it was. Then, if Shepard closed her eyes, she could about tell about where it was based on every high pitched ear irritant.

"It should bring the pod here, right?" Liara asked quietly.

"Yes." Shepard replied. That is, if everything worked correctly.

Then there was a loud thud, a moment of silence, and then even more grinding as something quite heavy was dragged across metal. Shepard could just picture that poorly maintained crane arm straining under the pod's undoubtedly considerable mass. If the pod itself had wheels of some kind, these would be no more lubricated than the crane. Right then it was performing the single most dangerous part. If the arm could not support the load, the pod might drop. The silence returned all for a few moment before the grinding of wheels resumed.

"I think it's coming back." Liara said, her excitement ratcheting up with every syllable.

Shepard hummed her quiet assent, but glanced at Nihlus. Because of his helmet she could not read an expression, but he was rigid like a column, which did not bode well.

The first thing Shepard saw as the frame cleared the passage between two rows of pod bays was the blue twinkles of light coming from where the gantry's otherwise invisible top was.

"The pod appears online!" Liara cheered.

Shepard hummed, but said nothing. Lights were a good sign, but they did not indicate a survivor per se, just that this pod had some power left. The crane materialized from the gloom, its wheels still grinding and shrieking, and turned to slide into its previous position. New creaks, clacks, and rattling replaced the groaning of the wheels as the equally unlubricated winch and cable system lowered the pod to the floor. Once it was down on solid ground, the claws disengaged and the arms retreated into the darkness above.

The pod itself was for the most part a black and grey casket, slightly over two meters at its longest side. Both ends were blunted, but where the bottom was flat, the top domed out more. The seams between the external plating were scattered with inset blue lights which shimmered and flickered regularly. Up close some of the twinkling lights seemed to reflect ever so slightly off the hoarfrost clinging to the bowed out top of the pod.

Liara and Sophia beat her to being the first to approach the pod. Liara was wary, like a bomb disposal expert approaching live ordnance. Sophia outright stopped behind the asari, her hands clasped in front of her as if shielding herself.

So much for professional distance, Shepard thought. Sophia was definitely nibbling on the curiosity bait. As she drew near the pod herself, her helmet lights hit on a series of tiny sigils on the pod's surface. Most were typical directions for how the pod was supposed to orient, both in its storage cell and how the occupant was to position themselves inside for stasis.

She also noticed a recessed flat section on the pod's flattened base near where the occupant's head was to rest. There was a small plaque of exceedingly tiny sigils, warning labels. However in the middle of it were two ports where something was meant to plug in. Shepard shifted to stand closer to that end and it was then that her lights caught the edge of a jagged crack running through the panel, probably about fifteen centimeters long, splitting the smallest port right in half.

She crouched down to look at the tiny labels over the ports. The bigger port was for a power cable. The smaller was a system interface, and aside from the crack bisecting it, Shepard also noticed the port itself was partly obstructed. Some of the tiny holes for the prongs in a plug still contained prongs and there were pieces of black polymer stuck in the crack on the obstructed side. Shepard hummed, "This pod is damaged, its system monitoring interface port is cracked in half and it is partly obstructed by pieces of… what I assume is the plug."

"Sound to me like that would explain the errors," Sophia murmured.

"Yes," Shepard replied. It looked like the plug had been wrenched out on this pod. Why? And by whom? She rose to her feet and slid her hand across the pod's long flat base. "There should be a control panel on this thing."

Liara slid her hand up the pod's other side, and her fingers encountered something at the head, a single flat panel slid open, revealing a small recessed monitor, and a moment later a haptic keyboard materialized near it.

"Perfect!" Shepard said as she rounded the pod to peer at the screen. The screen was showing full diagnostic information, it was aware of its damaged data port. Shepard tapped for the menu and changed over to the occupant readout, and then froze. Was she reading this right?

"What is it?" Liara asked, sounding concerned.

Shepard looked up, "The pod's own sensors are reporting full life signs! The system could not read them because of the damaged port!"

"Goddess!" Liara clasped her hands over her chest. "This- this is…"

Shepard tuned the world out until the conversations around her became indistinct whispering. Her next course of action was as obvious as daylight. She accessed the pod's internal controls. What had been the odds of a survivor? With a damaged pod no less? This was someone whom Nabu wanted her to find. That alone was reason enough to open the pod. Ultimately she would cite the fact that she had no way of knowing how much energy the pod stored in its batteries. She was not going to take any chances.

From what she could see, the pod's thaw protocol was simple enough. Still, she had to force herself to slow down. To go over every read-out the pod's computer was giving her carefully, lest she make a horrible mistake. Still, the pod's system did not appear to be complex. She knew what to do, and how to do it just as surely as she knew how to read the sigils. With one last key tap, she stepped back to give the pod ample room. The console screen flickered, flashing a green banner with sigils, "Revival sequence initiated," Shepard read it out loud.

"Most of you might want to take a few steps back." Kaidan stated, suddenly stern and businesslike.

Shepard heard multiple footfalls back away even as all their lights turned on the pod.

Then the pod's monitor flickered again, showing different sigils. The pod emitted a loud hiss, venting clouds of swirling, vaguely glimmering icy-cold gas from of the seams running down its curved sides and the middle of the domed section.

Nihlus was suddenly behind her, Shepard all but jumped when she felt the weight of one of his hands settle on her shoulder as his shotgun appeared at her other side, trained on the pod. "Nihlus put that away n-"

The pod emitted another hiss and the domed section suddenly split open right down the middle, its halves folded away. More icy cold air laden with glimmering hoarfrost spilled out, seemingly flowing down the pod's sides. When most of it cleared Shepard saw a rifle attached to the underside of one of the doors. She wondered, would it work after fifty thousand years on ice? Well, probably not immediately.

Now she turned her gaze to the occupant. He was clad in red and gold armor, his helmet resting at his feet. His skin was blue-tinged, but darkening to greys at the top of the head. His hands were particularly arranged, one over his chest, the other over his abdomen, even though there was plenty of space for his arms at his sides.

There was also a harshness to his features, not that Shepard could call the Prothean handsome to begin with. The nasal slits, the four eyes with two pupils each, the uncanny extra ability. Maybe she was biased by total unfamiliarity, but Protheans struck her as almost too alien. That or maybe his sleep had not been pleasant? Either way, she knew that odds were high that she would walk away with another head-splitter after this one.

Liara made a step toward the pod again, her hands now clasped in front of her, a look of pure awe on her face.

"Doctor, do not come too close," Kaidan warned.

Liara glanced at the lieutenant, nodded, and took a step back.

Shepard would have taken a step back too, but she was unable to. Nihlus was pretending to be a wall at her back and his grip on her shoulder guard had tightened. Worst yet, she could not very well tell him to stop being an over-protective git. He had reasons to go on the defensive, yes, Nabu had been honest about trying to attack her about a second after being released from the Thorian's grip. Still, Shepard could communicate with Protheans now. That had to count for something, right?

The pod occupant twitched, his facial features shifted, mouth curling into a snarl, displaying rows of sharp teeth. Then his eyes opened to a sliver, but closed just as quick.

"I would suggest no one make any sudden movements," Shepard said.

"That's sagely advice," Carl murmured.

"Yes, you won't hear an argument from me," Sophia breathed.

Quite possibly due to hearing unfamiliar voices the Prothean's eyes flew open, gold like the detailing on his armor. Then, perhaps because Shepard happened to stand the closest to him, all four focused right on her.

Shepard stretched out her arm at her side, a silent order for the others to hold, or better yet, back up. The last thing she needed was for someone to do anything they would either willingly regret, or what she would make them regret later. Contact protocol, if she remembered it correctly, was to assume hostility, but that was not how she wanted to start here. "Nihlus, please lower the gun."

"No," he replied.

"Nihlus don't you dare pull that trigger. I'm warning you," she whispered. Damn it, his overprotective tendencies were rearing up their ugliest side just when she needed them the least. She was not afraid of the Prothean in front of her and she did not need Nihlus acting paranoid right then.

The next thing Shepard knew, the Prothean flared with a green corona and let off a blast of unfocused energy. It caused the hair on the back of her neck to rise on end. Before she could say anything the green glow flared out and the energy slammed into her chest. Shepard staggered, but Nihlus had been ready and braced, so she could not move far. The Prothean used the opportunity to scramble to his feet, still glowing bright, iridescent green, one hand groping for his rifle, his piercing glare trained on her. She heard a rumble up against her ear, low and rolling, like thunder at a distance, Nihlus was not pleased, but his finger remained on the shotgun's trigger guard.

Shepard knew she better do something before the Prothean accidently incurred the Spectre's wrath. "I am Shepard," She stated, in Prothean. There was no need for titles, he would not understand them anyways. "Neither I, nor my team, mean you any harm."

"The Turian's weapon says otherwise." He growled back.

Shepard raised her hand slowly, placed it on the muzzle of Nihlus' shotgun and pushed it down. "He is doing what he thinks is right," She stated calmly. Nihlus resisted, she pushed a little harder.

The Prothean seemed appeased, "A human and a turian." Keen eyes swept past her and across the others, "More humans, an asari, and..." his eyes widened and then snapped back to her. "You bring a synthetic! Do you not know what danger they pose?!" His green-tinged biotics flared anew with his surge of fury.

"They will not harm you," Shepard replied.

Suddenly the computer monitors in the corner flared, emitting a bright framing light. The visage of a second, four-eyed alien appeared on the main screen, mouth drawing into a snarl. "That inferior machine may not wish to harm you, but I will!" He hissed.

Shepard opened her mouth, but before she could utter a single sound, Legion emitted a burst of loud, grating geth chatter behind her. In that instant it clicked. The AI was going to- No! She whirled, stepping around Nihlus, "Legion! Shut-"

The geth emitted another burst of chatter, their sensory suite light flaring, the iris widening and narrowing. Their temple-level status lights turned red. "Intrusion attempt detected-" The rest of their alert was swallowed by all the computer fans around them spooling up to a thunderous drone.


Author Notes: The cliffhanger strikes again! But hey, there's Javik! This being episode 13 of season 3, makes this a mid-season finale. I suppose that's fitting for what I still have up my sleeve for the fourth part of this arc. Many questions are going to be answered!

General Notes:

Nothing here…

Chapter Notes:

Pax Protheana – This is of course a play on the term "Pax Romana" (c. 27 BCE – 180 CE). This period is considered to be the Roman Empire's golden age of power and prosperity, reaching peak size and wealth. But also the period when, as the famous quote goes, "they make a desert and call it peace." The quote comes from Tacitus, from The Agricola, attributed to a speech to troops made by Calgacus, the chieftain of the Caledonian Confederation, and the enemy of Rome. Given what we know about how the Protheans ran their empire, it's apropos.