At the rear of the control chamber, Tali hunched over the geth terminal. Her omnitool pulsed and glittered on her wrist as it worked to map out the geth network. Flashes from the corridor chronicled the geth advance as her friends laid down a steady stream of fire into the approaching horde. The walls of the corridor glowed orange from constant impacts by beam weapons and phasic slugs.
Tali's hands shook as she manipulated the screens in front her and tried not to look at the tactical display in her HUD. She couldn't even send Chik'tikka out to assist. She needed every last bit of processing power in her omni directed at the geth terminal. The virus was designed to infect a mobile platform, which would in turn infect the hub upon interface. But with no platform available, she had to find a way to implant the code using only her omnitool. After combing through screens of files, she'd finally found a suitable library in which to place references to the infected code. By editing the file, she was performing brain surgery in the middle of a firefight.
"They're breaking through!" Xen's marines called out over the comm.
Shepard stayed at his corner, alternately firing and hurling arc grenades into the corridor. "Fall back! Fall back to the control room!"
More shadows appeared in the entrance to the corridor, quarian in shape, taking cover where they could and joining the squad in firing into the geth. Heatsinks and arc grenades were passed freely to the quarian soldiers who put them to immediate use, with none of them taking notice of Daro'Xen lying dead on the floor.
Shepard yanked an irregular, angular weapon from the mount on his back. With a touch on its trigger, the arc projector sparked to life. He wheeled around the corner and a massive bolt of fuzzy lightning spewed forth, turning the entire corridor a bright-blue white. Light rippled and flickered as electrical bolts jumped between what had to be dozens of targets. Before it faded, Shepard fired again, and again, with the entire squad joining in.
"I'm out!" someone shouted, followed by a scream.
"They're still coming! Keelah-"
The floor was covered ankle deep in geth debris. Shepard threw down the arc projector, now powerless, and picked up his rifle. "Tali, hurry! They're right on top of us!" Shepard and Miranda both recoiled and fell back as a giant red appendage swept around the corner, followed by the rest of the geth platform. Tall enough to touch the ceiling with its head, the Juggernaut raised its enormous pulse rifle to its shoulder.
With a mighty roar, Grunt threw itself at the behemoth and wrenched its arm. The huge machine lost its balance and fell across the corridor. Grunt fired his claymore point blank into its head, then started stuffing grenades beneath it's armor plates.
Muzzle flashes and and kinetic barriers lit up the corridor beyond. As much as Tali wanted to grab her shotgun and join the battle, she did not look away from her displays. She double checked the location of her copied files and verified the paths in the libraries. There was no time to do any real debugging. There was no time to do anything at all except compile the updated code. She started the process. It would either work, or not.
"Fall back!" Shepard shouted again. This time Tali did look up. Fall back to where? Now that the squad was in the terminal chamber with her, there was nowhere else to retreat. Backlit by explosions, Garrus leapt over the downed Juggernaut to take a position behind one of the columns at the end of the room. To the right, Samara staggered through surrounded by a shimmering bubble, held up by Zaeed as he sprayed his rifle into the geth with his free hand. Debris from demolished geth platforms began to pile up in the opening, bouncing as explosions detonated all around.
A progress bar marched across the screen in front of Tali, marking time until the code compilation completed. "Come on!" Tali gripped the side of the console as if squeezing it would make it run faster.
"Tali!" Shepard shouted over the comm. "How long?"
"Almost there!" The Cerberus console signaled that compilation of her makeshift injector was 99% complete. In a few seconds, consciousness of the entire geth collective would be at her mercy. She keyed in the sequence to load the virus into the substation so it would be ready when the compiler finished.
But she had two files that she could load. The first, a copy of Xen's virus that would revert the geth to quarian control, the other modified to restore consensus to control of geth.
Tali looked at Xen's body, lying on the floor where Shepard executed her. She died doing what any self-respecting quarian was expected to do: defending the fleet. Xen believed taking control of the geth was the only way the quarian species could survive. What would the geth do now that the quarian invasion which was underway? Would they listen to reason after being deceived and betrayed so many times? After the collective changed their mind to help after the destruction of the Rayya, Blue warned that any further deception would be met with dire consequences. Had the geth had already decided the fate of their creators even before Cerberus took over?
Maybe she should use Xen's virus? That was the safe move, regardless. Xen was a fanatic developer, and her code would have undergone many rounds of inspection and revision. There was no doubt it would work, unlike Tali's untested patch. Once the quarians had control and returned safely to Rannoch, maybe Tali could free the geth after, once the quarian people were safe and the geth were under control.
"Grunt's down!"
Tali looked up, stunned.
"Cover me!" Shepard hurled himself headlong into the corridor and disappeared into blinding fire. Garrus, Miranda, Zaeed and Samara all fired around him.
A brilliant flash filled the room. Garrus staggered back behind cover, head tilted down, enveloped in blinding light. The crab legs of a geth armature slammed down in the corridor, separating the squad from Shepard. The head and legs of the hulking platform hung low, allowing it to squeeze through the door of the room. A writhing mass of geth platforms spilled in around it, crawling along the ceiling and walls. The number of geth in the corridor had to number in the hundreds, their eyes burning red in the thickening haze.
In the midst of them all shone a bright blue light. Legion, in its battered N7 with its hole through its chest, watched her from the middle of the maelstrom.
Tali's omnitool flashed green. The injection module completed compilation. Tali slapped the execute button and fed her modified version of Xen's virus to the collective and yanked her shotgun from her leg holster. She got off precisely one shot before muzzle flashes filled her vision and everything went dark.
Quarian runners flowed through Anba's command center like a river, delivering updates that could no longer be relayed by the ship's overloaded comm systems. The civilian ships of the flotilla continued to stream toward the staging area at Nariph as they would for days to come. But what no one predicted was that the Migrant Fleet Navy would come screaming back in retreat from Tikkun, colliding with the advancing civilians resulting in the greatest traffic jam in galactic history.
Nariph was home to a lone human fuel depot, now under quarian control to sustain the invasion. After bleeding the depot dry, ships of the fleet pulled hydrogen and helium directly from Nariph's gas giants, processing fuel as quickly as they could to get it to the front line. But it soon became apparent that there wouldn't be many ships to refuel after all.
Scattered and separated from their battle groups, every retreating Navy ship told the same story: the geth collective deactivated en masse, presumably as a result of Admiral Xen's virus. The entire Migrant Fleet Navy Heavy Fleet, some six thousand ships, seized the opportunity and jumped to Tikkun to systematically annihilate every geth ship within range. But there were far more geth ships than Fleet intelligence estimated, or could even imagine.
Then in the midst of the offensive, the geth re-awakened. What started as a turkey shoot for the quarians turned into a massacre by the geth. The networked machines coordinated a counterattack that sent the quarian battle groups scrambling for their lives. Their lines shattered, their communications disrupted and their leaders killed, the quarian ships at the rear broke formation and fought their way back to the Tikkun relay. When when they reached presumed safety Dholen to regroup, the reserve geth fleet from Ma-at was waiting for them.
High Captain Wylo stood in front of a giant display board at the front of Anba's CIC and gripped the console in front of him in despair. Less than half the Heavy Navy escaped Rannoch, and so far, fewer than a hundred ships made it back to Nariph. "We've got to position ourselves for retreat," Wylo said over the command net. "If the geth attack now, we're finished."
Captain Fasha asked the question on all of the minds of the Conclave. "Retreat to where? Omega? Without protection, if the geth don't end us, the Terminus will! We most move forward!"
The comm channel burst with thousands of captains in the Conclave trying to speak at once. Once more, protocol failed, with those who had legitimate authority trampled over by the faction and clan leaders who could shout the loudest. The channel fell silent, however, when a deep, authoritative voice broke over the line.
"This is the Shellen. We are declaring Liveship Priority. As soon as our tenders have completed refueling at Jonus we will begin transit to the Caleston Rift."
"You can't do that," said another voice. "Your cargo belongs to the entire fleet! The liveships must remain in bastion until the heavy fleet re-constitutes and-"
"There is no heavy fleet! The survival of the liveships is of the highest priority. Any captain interested in survival will rendezvous with the Shellen at the fuel station and form up for transit!"
Wylo lowered his head. That was it. With a single broadcast, what little semblance of order the Conclave had over the fleet vanished with the declaration that one of the two remaining liveships was was venturing off on its own. The rest of the fleet could either join them, or go hungry, depending on what each captain and crew would decide to do.
"High Captain?" Captain Mirron's frail form approached Wylo. As they watched, the fleet organizational display showed ships begin to clump into distinct groups, all headed in different directions.
Wylo closed his eyes and shook his head. "It's over for us, Sanul. This is the end."
A harsh buzz reverberated through the CIC. Wylo and everyone else looked immediately to the main sensor display. The Dholen relay registered a mass effect field that indicating hundreds of thousands of tonnes transiting through. Unless the Heavy Navy had made a remarkable recovery, it could only mean one thing: The geth were coming. The comms board came to life with shouted orders as panicked captains ordered their ships away from the relay. Remaining Navy ships, battered and exhausted, tried to form a defensive screen for the retreating civilians.
A brilliant flash enveloped the relay and a single, giant contact now dominated the threat screen. A geth dreadnought, larger than any vessel in or ever encountered by the Migrant Fleet jumped in at the edge of the flotilla. The giant cylinder of a ship spun like a spindle in space, illuminated by scores of flashing beacons and running lights. Instead of jamming quarian transmissions or invading their computer networks as geth ships had always done, the ship broadcast a simple transponder squawk using the Migrant Fleet standard protocol:
Liveship-04.
It took all her strength to do it, but Tali managed to open her eyes. Whatever room she was in was dim with a low ceiling, illuminated by a single light fixture hanging over directly over her head. Or so she thought, until the light turned and looked at her.
"Creator-Tali'Zorah?" it said with a familiar, mechanical affectation.
Tali slowly, painfully, sat upright and the light moved out of the way. She didn't remember lying down, but then she didn't remember an entire geth hub crashing down on her, either. Her entire body ached and when her vision finally cleared, she instantly recognized the geth platform scrutinizing her. Its exoskeleton, once pristine and glossy, was marred with soot and pockmarked with bullet holes and burn marks.
"Blue?"
"Affirmative," Platform Two said. "We are gratified that you are operational. What is your status?"
The HUD on the inside of Tali's mask told her the entire story. She had taken a severe blow to the head and still likely suffered from a concussion. More worrying was the log detailing four penetrations across her torso, arms and abdomen. For having been shot so many times, her biometrics all looked remarkably normal. She looked down at herself, amazed to see many patches all across her suit, each expertly and precisely applied. She squinted when she saw her chronometer. Was it out of sync? It couldn't be right... "I'm okay, I think. How long have I been out?"
"Thirteen hours, fifty-one minutes, eleven seconds."
In spite of her dizziness, Tali looked around to gather her bearings. She sat on a metallic deck in the hold of a geth shuttle similar to the MV Pollus Maskawa. The compartment was devoid of cargo, but she wasn't alone. Behind Platform Two's legs, Tali could make out another body lying on the deck next to her in the dim light. She pushed around the geth to see.
Garrus lay on his back, eyes closed, stripped of his armor. Neat bandages covered his torso, legs and head, and a thick coiled tube projected from his open mouth to a device next to his head that looked like some sort of respirator. They were obviously in a pressurized, oxygen rich environment. She shook his shoulder. "Garrus? Garrus!"
Platform Two pulled Tali's hand away. "Vakarian-Garrus is in a medically induced coma. He is stable, but his prognosis is uncertain at this point. Physical stimulation is not desirable."
Tali climbed to her knees to look around the compartment. Other than Garrus and a few scattered piles of geth manufactured equipment, the room was empty. As concerned as she was for Garrus, there was something more important she had to know. "Where's everyone else? Where's Shepard?"
"There are no other survivors."
Tali fell backwards and put her arm out against the floor to steady herself. What Platform Two said wasn't possible. It couldn't be.
"Creator-Tali'Zorah, your current physical condition requires rest and restricted physical activity. We urgently recommend you resume a prone position to prevent-"
Tali looked for an exit hatch. The gravity was much stronger than it was on the hub. The geth shuttle must have landed somewhere other than a geth ship, which required neither an atmosphere or gravity. If they were back on the Normandy, what was Garrus doing here instead of being taken to the infirmary? "Open the door."
"Creator-Tali'Zorah, you must restrict your movements. You have sustained severe injuries to-"
Tali stood and screamed at the geth. "Open it!"
"Acknowledged," Platform Two said.
The door slid open in front of Tali and bright light stung her eyes even through her mask. She raised her arm to shield them from the direct light and stepped out. Instead of connecting with the hard metal of a hangar deck, her foot landed on a solid, but softer surface. She staggered forward, now completely enveloped in light. Cracked concrete crumbled to gravel beneath her feet.
"Shepard? Shepard!" Shouting made Tail's lungs hurt, and she doubled over. Metallic hands grabbed her from behind, steadying her, holding her up. Slowly, her eyes adjusted. At first, all she could see were browns and grays, but eventually shapes and more colors took form.
A swollen yellow sun illuminated a purple colored sky above. Skyscrapers, some hundreds of stories tall, surrounded her in all directions with great elevated thoroughfares for ground vehicles winding between them. But they were unusable, and had been for a long time. Entire spans had collapsed to rubble. The windows of the giant buildings were either masked by dirt or missing completely. Thick brown vines crept up their sides, their tendrils now permanently intertwined with the supporting structures. Avians spiraled about the higher floors, roosting in the abandoned ruins.
Wind caused Tali's lavender cowl to flap against her faceplate. Her eyes fell on an old-style billboard beside the highway ramp in front of her. The digital advertising panels had long been deprived of power, but the printed sign still displayed is original, faded message. A quarian family sat around a table filled with fruits, meats and bread, their faces free from any filtration apparatus, their hair flowing freely from their heads. They beamed happily at one another while a shiny white geth platform refilled the glass of the smiling mother. In the background another platform stood at a kitchen sink full of dirty pots and pans. Printed in Khelish above them all read the words "Let us do the work for you!"
Tali slid from Blue's hands to collapse on the ground, her legs tangled beneath her.
The geth platform looked at the immobile creator sitting at its feet. Swirls of dust blew around them and through the streets of the dead city. It queried the entire collective. What should they do next? The creator's vital signs were all at extreme levels, but her cognitive activity had dropped to nothing. Lacking direction from either Tali or the collective, Platform Two sat next to the quarian to await consensus.