* * * Luna, Incursion * * *

"Mister Pressly, do you know where Lieutenant Alenko is? I cannot find him anywhere."

The XO didn't even need to look away from his display to know the answer, "He's on the ground team, ma'am. They left about an hour ago." He looked to the asari, putting on his talking-to-civilians face. "I have the impression they'll be back and debriefed by 1900."

"I see," Liara replied quickly, "Thank you."

Pressly nodded as the asari turned aft toward the ladders. His console chirped, and after he read the communique, touched the PTT key on his console. "Ground team, Normandy. Trident says you're on the list. If that airlock isn't opening, it's been locked from inside."

# # #

"Copy that, Normandy, thank you."

Shepard lowered his hand from his ear. "We're cleared, but the simputer has apparently taken over airlock control. Tali, Kaidan, give me options."

The two suited figures scanned the door controls, Tali continuing to scan up and over the top of the opening.

"Nothing especially exotic here," Kaidan said. "If you want a bypass, give me four minutes."

Tali looked up from her omnitool. "I can probably crack into the network from here, but bandwidth will be low."

To their right, a mostly-destroyed turret on another of the structures had rotated to fire on them. Though the weapon was mostly twisted metal at this point, a still-visible component arced regularly as one of the ZDI's defensive processes continued to try to kill them with a non-functional weapon.

It was slightly unnerving.

"An overload would be faster," Tali said, "And your Alliance will have to work on this place for a while to get it back to operational. Replacing a door control is easy."

Shepard pointed at the door, looked at Kaidan. "Right, then. Get us in there, and don't bother to be artful."

The biotic illuminated his omnitool gauntlet, made a fist with his left hand, pointed with two fingers on his right,; te door controls didn't spark or smoke.

Kaidan summoned a small amount of biotic energy and focused it, applying a Lift field to the mechanism. Though the servos and actuators were disabled, the physical lock still needed to be moved out of the way.

"Wrex, can you get a good enough grip on this to slide it open?"

Kaidan stepped out of the krogan's way, still holding the mechanism open; the Wrex gave Shepard a meaningful look as he fitted one massive hand into the structural bosses on the door, and slid it aside effortlessly.

"Yup, looks like I can." He turned to Shepard again as he was stepping back from the open door. "Let me know when you get to the hard part."

Tali had already stepped in. "What a nice, big airlock. This should hold all of us at once."

Shepard waved into the airlock. "Right. Let's pack 'em in there."

Wrex pulled the door closed, Kaidan activated the release of air into the airlock, and they opened the inner door from the controls.

As they waited for pressure to equalise, a faint glow in the opening suggested a kinetic barrier was active on the other side.

Once the inner door was open, Shepard put his hand up to the barrier and then balked before touching it. Instead, he drew his sidearm and cautiously broke the plane of the barrier with it.

"It's just a kinetic barrier," Ash realised. "Why bother?"

"It's another means of defence, I guess," Kaidan said. "Just not a very relevant one."

Shepard looked up at the airlock camera. It was odd to imagine an artificial intelligence looking at them as they stood there, but it was worth remembering that it was able to see where they were and what they were doing. How much did it understand? It was a weapons control system, not a human interaction expert system; it might not have figured out how much of a threat the organics were, let alone what it could do about them.

"All right, everyone remember," he said, "this is not a normal operation. We're dealing with a machine intelligence that is optimised for fighting infantry at range. In all likelihood, it has taken over the base systems, including the cameras. Assume it can see us and see what we're doing. It may also be intercepting our comms, and might be able to unscramble them.

"Just because it's made what seems like a rookie mistake and tried to put up kinetic barriers to stop us, do not assume it will stay ignorant of what we can do, or that it will remain incompetent. It may even have done so in order to mislead us."

"You should all have maps for your HUDs; we only need to get to the computer nodes and power them down, and we don't know what else it will throw at us. So mind the details in this AO, don't take anything for granted, and watch your buddy's back."

He stepped through the kinetic barrier, surveying the room as he did. "Tali, check that node for network access." He pointed quickly at one, and then another. "Kaidan, check that one. Garrus, cover them. Wrex, Ash: check that next room for threats." He pointed to the only other door in the room, moving quickly but deliberately toward it.

Tali was waving her omnitool at the node before she got to it. "It can see us all right; this node was just evacuated." She looked toward Shepard, "I could potentially start cracking from here, but it would all be uphill."

Kaidan was still connecting to his node, but he nodded with resignation a moment later. "Same here." He chuckled quietly, RTMing, How did you see that so fast? Are you that aware of network weather?

Zali'Zorah: I had set my HUD to see it before I was connected. And I do have a lot of experience at it.

"Excellent work," Kaidan said.

Wrex and Ash had quickly cleared the short, connecting corridor; it was a ramp that led down to what appeared to be a combination warehouse/cubicle maze. There were more kinetic barriers at both ends of the ramp.

They stepped into the large room and looked at each other. "Left, right, or split?" Wrex asked.

"Can't watch my buddy if we split," Ash looked at the alternatives. "I'd go left."

"Wait," Shepard said. Tali, Garrus, and Kaidan had just caught up again. "Tali, go with Wrex and Ash." He gestured to the left. "Garrus, you're with me and Kaidan. Clear the room, meet at the next door."

"Meet you at the door," Ash confirm.

Shepard led the way around the corner, checking both directions when he reached the intersection.

A football-sized drone on a short tripod whirred up to him and stopped just short of his feet. Shepard stepped back, switching his ARO to ThruView; a threat analysis scrolled out next to it immediately. No explosives, no weapons, no emissions.

"What's that supposed to be for?" Kaidan scanned the drone, which turned its one camera toward him.

Shepard shook his head. "Doesn't seem to be a threat." He stepped around it, and the drone moved back, centering itself in front of him. "What's this thing doing?"

"I think it's just trying to block you," Kaidan said.

"It's probably trying to slow us down," Tali said, "Artillects are really good at strategizing. Don't waste time with it, just overload it or something."

Shepard's ARO displayed its analysis: this was a maintenance drone, equipped with a welder arm, a single waldo and a soft gripper. He looked at it for only a couple of seconds before reaching for it to pick it up.

An arc of electricity connected the two of them; Shepard's armor kept him insulated, but he still felt the sting. "Watch out, they bite." He lifted the drone by its "head" and dropped it on the other side of the nearby half-wall.

Maintenance drones kept coming at them, at first stopping in the path as if their mere presence would stop the Normandy team, and then each using their arc-welding tool as a short-range attack.

Kaidan noticed that none of them even tried to use any other of their built-in tools, not even their acetylene torches, in this way.

The door to the server room was closed and locked…for about thirty seconds.

As they stood there looking into the server room, yet another drone whirred softly up behind them on its tripod. Combat radar showed it clearly; Ash turned, pulling her shotgun off its lumbar hardpoint, but before she could blast it, Wrex grabbed it off the floor and crushed it against the bulkhead.

"Show off." Ash returned her shotgun to its dock.

There were four server stacks, Hannibal Helix-88s that Tali recognised instantly from their descriptive shape. "Hey, these are up-to-the-minute. Can I poke around in it before you blow it up? You could start on the other three."

"No," Shepard walked around one of them for a moment, then released and pulled open one of the node drawers. "I'm going to dive the cluster, see if I can instigate a fully verbose crash of this system instance. Assuming the VI leaves it running."

"Watch out, it'll be sure to have defences."

"I'm sure." He pointed out the door they had just come through. "Ash, Wrex, Garrus: get back to the main rooms, find out where those drones are coming from. Shut it down with a minimum of damage."

"Sir." Ash and Garrus headed for the door, Ash stopping to ask, "Wrex, you coming?"

The krogan was poking gently at the server before him. "If you want a minimum of destruction, you don't need me." He waved out the door. "Go ahead on. I'll get there."

"I'd like you watching their backs," Shepard said. "This VI is still a lot of unknowns. And if things escalate, I want two teams of three."

Wrex sighed as he turned to follow the turian and the human female. "All right."

"Tali, you're my sentry. Kaidan, you'll be spotting me on the dive." With the node access open, Shepard pulled two thin cables out of it and connected them to his omnitool.

He gestured for RTM, Tali, I want you to make this dive, and I'll spot you. You're the expert here, but I want to learn more, and also to keep you out of trouble. Kaidan, you're walking patrol, weapon out, but most of your focus should be on your sensors. Look for other modes of attack that it hasn't used yet. Remember, this whole place is out to get us.

The PVR environment washed into place around him, glowing lines and interface points. The conversation continued in RTM.

Tali'Zorah: I'm confused. What do you want me to do?

K. Alenko: Walking the floor.

Tali, I'm keeping Ash from worrying by giving one set of orders publicly, and actual orders privately, and subsequently. First we need to know what we're dealing with. Can you inspect the system architecture in PVR? I would like to find the high-level processes that seem to be the focus of the malfunction. If there's a way to isolate them from the rest of the system, that'd be ideal.

Tali'Zorah: You want to share my view, or just want me do it?

You're going to do it through my system so you can have my authority. I can also be able to boot you out of the system if things start to go wrong.

Tali'Zorah: It looks like the Hypervisors are only slightly modified from the off-the-shelf Uraniborg HyVI. See if you can spawn an Admin account for me that's subsidiary to yours.

Shepard paused just long enough to nod to himself. Glad I wore my Alliance armor. This would have been difficult or impossible without the low-level systems knowing I'm an officer.

/ cressu TaliAdmin

The system polled his suit for encrypted verification of his biometrics.

\\ Created

Shepard reached into the digital space before him, pinched the account icon that had appeared in his view, and handed it to Tali.

The quarian touched the icon to her omnitool; the yellow-glowing placeholder seemed to sink into it and disappear. With a wave of her hand, Tali summoned another digital environment inside the first. Shepard stepped around behind her, noting the appearance of her interface.

As Tali worked, Shepard glanced around at the system, looking for things that might be different because of the presence of an AGI. The 3D flowchart-like system view reminded him of the branch-matrix map for a stunt-flying game. "Is that really what you see?"

Talking didn't seem to slow her down. "Yes. Well, except I see it in keelish. Your VI should be translating for you."

"It is," he agreed, "But I've never seen a VI org chart mapped like this. It's…interesting." Resources and subprocessors, connections and their technical specs presented themselves, displayed their status and then moved aside and grouped at Tali's direction. "It looks less like a hierarchy, and more like a P2P network." He switched back to his own default view, and then back to hers.

"Same system, but a different way of looking at it?" Tali postulated. She continued to work, summoning a resource here, directing VI-driven autocracks there, describing it all in detail as her hands stayed in constant motion. "I suppose it shows how differently we approach the system."

Shepard watched and noted what he could see, his attention often led by callouts that appeared on his ARO. His own group of VIs, though not as numerous as Tali's, captured the data streaming through the quarian's interface. Shepard replied occasionally, using language that made apparent his level of familiarity with what she was doing, but not at her level of expertise.

Consequently, as she progressed, she spoke less.

Ash's voice spoke over LOSI, "Sir, the drones were being produced by a fabber station being run by the simputer." She chuckled. "We disconnected it from wired control and power, and pulled the controller SOC. On our way back."

Shepard held two fingers to an ear, "Good job, Chief. Make a right at the accessway tee, clear the room at the other end of this corridor. I want to know what's in it, or if it connects to the other nodes."

"Will do, sir."

Tali's hands were moving as if she were wiping her way through a series of analogue book pages. She appeared to pick up something from it long enough to inspect it, and tossed it away. She used a private channel when she said, "There's nothing here. This whole server room is a dead end."

"The nodes are inert?"

"Every one of them in this room…as far as I can tell."

"Is there any run data from the past week? We didn't crash it, but did it maybe leave some indication of its states?"

"Sure; the system logs are all here. You want me to copy them?"

"I'm more interested in state data, if there's a log of that. The HyVI should have stopped it if the system began to modify itself too much, but maybe the simputer hacked them first so it could do so, in which case we'll only eliminate one possibility.

"For now, copy all the logs and HyVI state data to inert compression and save it to my storage." He gestured, summoning an upload pointer for it, and placed it in the space before Tali. "Can you at least disconnect these servers so the machine can't retreat to them, or use them as DCE?"

"Oh, certainly. There's no need to destroy them, or even power them down."

Shepard paused to think. "I know we can potentially use that compute for this task, but I don't want any surprises; after you save those system logs, find me all the local hubs, switches, NfoX infrastructure and shut them all down anyway. Put all the MR in lockdown, and power down everything else. Also generate a hardware map so we can make sure all the 'dumb' compute and interconnects get fully powered down."

"Um…okay. Give me a minute."

LOSI made momentarily made Ash's voice flange and modulate, but a callout on his HUD identified her in case Shepard was unsure. "Commander, this room looks just like the one you're in. Each one had a drone with a small linac, and they were coordinated. We've neutralised them, but it was a tougher fight than I thought some little non-combat drones would be able to put up. Only thing in here now is four of those twisty floor-to-ceiling compute stacks, a desk, and a couple of lockers."

Shepard pulled his gesturing hand away from his ear to switch channels temporarily, "Kaidan, scan the lockers in here for traps or resources." Returning his hand to the side of his head, he continued, "Good work, Chief. Scan those lockers, disable any traps, don't leave any resources for the simputer's drones."

"Done," said Tali.

Shepard turned his head to her. "Are you kidding?"

The quarian's helmet turned very deliberately to him. "I never 'kid' about AGI. These things took our homeworld from us." She pointed into the PVR world that only she and Shepard could see, highlighting regions and tiles as she spoke, "I have inspected the system in three completely different ways: Network activity, device power consumption, and processing, by task and control subsystem. This entire structure is clean, its components isolated from each other, and it is in the process of being powered down. The simputer cannot use it against us in any way." She looked at him again, "If this thing can feel fear, it is doing so now. It has abandoned this area of its DCE, and seems to have partitioned it off in an attempt to isolate itself from us. Since you wanted these stacks powered down, it probably thinks that worked."

"Outstanding." Shepard couldn't help but smile. "How long until you're ready to hit the other server room?"

Tali reached forward, compressing the control array between her hands; it shrank along all three axes simultaneously down to the size of a holo icon, which she gathered into one hand. "I'm ready."

"Ash, how you doing in there?"

"Lockers only have someone's personal effects for an overnight stay."

"You cracked the lockers?"

There was a pause. Shepard turned his head toward the other room as if to listen better.

"Uhhh…that was me," a turian voice answered, "They were mechanical locks. I used a lock pick app on my omnitool. Something I got good at while in C-Sec."

There was another pause before Ash said, "You did say to do as little damage as possible, sir. Uh…Garrus is re-establishing the locks."

"Picking a mechanical lock leaves no sign of tampering if you do it right," the turian continued. "Digital locks all have event logs. We're already done here." A metallic clank was easily heard from the other room.

Shepard stuck a thumb over his shoulder. "Let's clear that other server room." As he led the trio out and down the accessway, he RTMed, Tali, truly excellent work. It looked like you were using tools I don't have, so I want you to clear this next room the same way.

It went smoothly, though the simputer had cloned instances of itself to each of the Helix stacks, and that phase of the operation took almost 20 minutes.

Tali complained to Shepard, "I think the AGI was using that first server room sacrificially; it was using it to study what we were doing and coming up with ways to fight back. Not as if it could learn anything from the units in this room; the network was disconnected…"

"All right, let's get to the next pressure." Shepard headed out of the server room, saw Ash, Garrus, and Wrex approaching from the other end of the "T" hallway, and turned right at its intersection.

The door was closed and locked.

Shepard spiked it, Wrex pulled it open, and they continued through the main room.

The next door was also closed and locked. Kaidan asked, "Is it trying to lock us in here?"

Tali reacted. "Oh keelah, you're right. This was nothing. It may even be a trap. Hurry, get us out of here." She inhaled sharply as she continued to realise, "This thing…it was been fighting a delaying action. The real fight is probably ahead of us!" As she spoke, her hands moved quickly, spiking the door mechanism and stepping aside.

Wrex turned from the quarian, grabbed the door by two of its bosses and yanked it open. Tali was the first through the door and sprinted across the foyer to find the adjoining corridor access closed, locked, and shielded.

As he approached, Shepard saw her perform a brief series of gestures that disabled the door systems before she began pushing at the door herself. "Don't be too quick to show this thing that you can do all that."

"I should be telling you that," she said. "Sorry, and thanks."

Wrex took a quick step or two to get there faster, and muscled the door open for her.

The team chased itself through the accessway, Tali unlocking and pulling the EMERGENCY EVACUATE handle next to the airlock's outer door as soon as she realised the inner door was closed; they exited with a pop.

The other two pressures were equidistant; Kaidan had pointed the nose of the Mako at the one on the right, but once they were boarding the Mako, Tali said, "Wait, did you point us at that structure so we could go to it next? Go to the other one, and hurry, will you?"

"Can do." Kaidan looked over his shoulder. "Hold on; this'll be short but quick."

He raced them across the moonscape. When they pulled up to the airlock door, he pointed the APC toward the one pressure they had not been in yet.

Tali was the first out, and she vaulted to the structure's airlock, spiking it immediately.

"Slow down." Wrex sounded like he was pretending to be harried. "The good fights will always find you."

Tali did not sound amused, "The more time we give it, the smarter it will get, and the more time it will have to prepare. Remember, this AGI – if that's what it really is – thinks a billion times faster than a salarian; every three seconds we spend gives it a relative century of time in which to analyse our actions and speech, and plan what to do next. And that's assuming it has the same amount of compute as an organic brain." She was pushing the door when the krogan joined her; she stepped aside when he gripped the door bosses and pulled with a jerk.

Nothing happened.

The veteran battlemaster stood upright, turning his head to inspect the door before bracing himself against the structure and pulling again.

The door did not budge.

"Let me have a look." Kaidan stepped up, scanning the door with his omnitool. He moved an open hand up and down the hatch seam with the omnitool's ThruView scanner. "It's been welded shut from the inside."

Wrex pulled his massive shotgun off his back. "I can work with that." He paused, looked at Shepard. "You're not going to have a problem with this, are you?"

Shepard had already been thinking about the possibility, and sighed quietly to himself. "No. There's nothing for it now. Have at it."

Wrex made a couple of adjustments to the weapon; a 70cm red band appeared on the top of both sides of it. "Did anyone bring some F3 ammoblocks? This is going to get expensive."

"Yeah," Ash said. "I got you covered. Got more in the APC, too."

Before she had even finished, the krogan placed the weapon against the top left corner of the door, inside the frame boss, but directly atop the diagonal, braced himself and pulled the trigger.

The explosion of air out the resulting hole surprised everyone but Wrex and Garrus. Wrex didn't even wait for the debris to drop to the ground, but moved to the next boss to the right and fired again.

Working his way around the top, bottom, and one side of the door, he perforated the armor methodically, and then reared back and bashed it open with his head, the door bending in the middle. He gripped the remaining frame boss and leaned into it, straining visibly, but peeling the door's middle away from its frame. The resulting opening was large enough that they could all enter easily.

"Hey," Tali said, "I have an idea. Because these structures are buried, the doors have to have explosive bolts." She worked her omnitool as she explained.

Wrex shook his head, "Couldn't you have thought of that five minutes ago?"

"Sorry, seeing what you were doing made me think. I can do as much damage, but faster. The doors inside the structure will be much easier for you to open, too, even if they are welded shut."

Shepard looked from the door to the quarian and back. "Shouldn't we get to cover before you do?"

Tali stopped, looked up. "Yes," she seemed to realise, "You should."

Shepard pointed to the left and right of the circular structre, "Ash, Wrex, Vak…uh…Garrus: Head right. Kaidan, with me."

They could only see Tali once they were positioned away from the door, and she had stepped back and to one side a few meters. She was working her omnitool when the frame and door blew out and away from the structure, throwing up a spray of dust. A barrage of shrapnel illuminated her kinetic shield, almost crashing it.

The quarian stumbled back, but regained her footing, aimed her omnitool into the airlock and overloaded the maintenance drone inside.

"Looks like they didn't like you doing that," Wrex observed.

"It's okay, it seems to be only subsonic munitions," the quarian dusted herself off, "But it could be misdirection, or a sign of things to come."

"Drones?" Kaidan sounded puzzled.

"Unless you think there are Alliance soldiers in there that might be shooting at us." Tali sounded mischievous.

Wrex reached through the open outer door a few times, tossing the drone wreckage out and aside. The dirt plumed briefly where they skidded or fell, but dropped straight back down, or along simple, ballistic paths.

"This is a really tiny satellite," Garrus was reading a briefing on the humans' homeworld, "Did you deliberately strip away the atmosphere, or was it always like this?"

"It's too small to hold any significant atmosphere; the Alliance has several bases here with low-gee and zero-atmo training facilities," Kaidan replied conversationally. He raised a gloved hand to the horizon, finger and thumb about 1cm apart. "If Earth were in the sky, it'd be about that big."

The turian's helmet canted to one side. "I was told it is a double planet. They must have only meant it technically."

Wrex was already walking through the opening, but once inside the airlock, he gripped the door bosses again, turned himself sideways in the low gravity so he could fit his feet against the bulkhead, and heaved.

The door opened with a lurch, but the krogan was fast enough to catch himself before falling in the low gravity; he righted himself to the deck, checked the display on his massive assault rifle, and continued into the airlock lobby.

The damaged hatch was only open enough to admit one at a time; Shepard was the next through, and only had enough time to see a weirdly-modified, top-heavy service drone slide out of the adjoining accessway on their left, turn and rush the krogan, exploding on contact.

Shepard had the impression of the krogan silhouette against the flash of an explosion.

It would have seriously injured a human, even in armor, but Wrex grunted, turned to look back at Shepard and bashed his own armor with a fist. "That was lucky. You little guys could have been hurt." He began trading his assault rifle for the shotgun. "Looks like it's a shoot-first-ask-questions-later day."

"Reconfigure your shields," Kaidan said, "Higher initial strength, longer recharge. Watch your power levels, too: it won't take a lot of direct hits to fail them. We're in close quarters here; if you're carrying one, you should switch to shotgun."

Shepard was scanning ahead. "Got more of those drones in the main chamber. I'm sending my sensor data to all of you. Tune your sensors to watch for traps. Looks like it's found a way to fabricate explosives. Everyone move carefully. Wrex, you seem to be the…most ruggedized. I want you on point; get us to the server rooms."

"What happened to that Spectre armor you were wearing when we hit Therum? You were supposed to be impervious."

"We're entering an Alliance facility on this mission, and I didn't want to be not recognised as a flag officer with admin privileges," Shepard replied. "I've got a lot of compute fingerprint in this suit, and didn't have time to do the transfer, nor train in new armor. Are you tough enough for this, or what?"

Wrex hesitated long enough to glance back at him. "Thought that's what I was doing anyway. You just let me know if your technology thingies see something coming before I do."

He waddled confidently through the doorway and down the ramp to the main room.

As far as anyone could tell, when he reached the bottom of the ramp, the krogan exploded.

Shrapnel blew past and around Shepard as Ash dove to the right behind a crate; Shepard stumbled back, boggled by the explosion even though his faceplate had darkened.

As the spray of dust and debris settled to the deck, Shepard saw the krogan leap to his feet. With gusto, he barked forward into the large room, "Hah! Is that the best you've got? My baby brother hits harder than that!"

The black scorch marks on the floor showed where Wrex's feet had been when the explosion went off; the krogan continued confidently into the room, shotgun forward. The rest of the team could hear him starting to blast drones before Shepard signalled Ash forward, and then Kaidan.

"That big bunch of explosives would have been expensive for it to make," Tali said over LOSI, "We might see it again in the next pressure cylinder, or even more, if it thinks there could be utility in a bigger boom."

"Can't get too much bigger, or it risks the integrity of the structure."

"Geth don't care about that. Why would a VI?"

"Can't risk a really big boom without destroying itself."

"Hmm," the quarian said doubtfully as she followed Shepard into the next room.

The simputer had apparently ordered its maintenance drones to start building walls as quickly as possible perpendicular to any path leading to the server room. Wrex started through the room using the giant bayonet on his shotgun as a machete on the relatively thin and weak barriers only to find drones lined up on either side, shooting at him.

The drones were positioned against the side bulkheads, out of melee range; it would have made for quite a gauntlet to run had the krogan not already been through centuries of such combat. After pausing to adjust his shotgun's settings, he advanced with a steady rhythm of jab-slash-headbutt-stomp through the barrier, then raising weapons to opposite sides and blasting the waiting drones.

Williams, A.: You know, at first, it was funny. The krogan doing all the hard-hitting. But I'm starting to feel like a leech.

Shepard messaged back, He's in his element. Not every mission is going to involve breaking everything. Personally, I'm glad he's on our side. You can see why the Uplift was a good idea.

Williams, A.: Yes, sir. Until they realised they could break everyone else and take their planets.

Ash effectively ended the potentially awkward conversation by speaking aloud, "Why does this facility have drones anyway?" As they followed the krogan through the holes he had made in the improvised walls, she eyed the technology on the nearby bulkheads suspiciously. Furniture, desks, chairs, and other movables had been lined up to form a pathway, and bulkheads printed into place to fill in the gaps. It looked entirely wrong, and more than a little disturbing to see Alliance gear trapped like bugs in amber.

Kaidan said, "I imagine they have something in here that normally provides full-time internal security, but it should be controlled by telepresence."

"Not from what I'm seeing," Tali had plunged ahead, following the krogan through successive holes. "The facility is secure and hermetic. The VI normally has a percentage of its compute devoted to infrastructure control, but anyone who got in here couldn't attack the Alliance at this range, so they probably assumed there was no need to. If it needs supplies, it probably just orders them.

"But when their 'ZDI' artillect went berserk, at least one thing it could do was take over the MFO station, and tripod drones was the only thing it could make here quickly enough, and that could be weaponised. So it's just using maintenance drones with arc weapons until it runs out of those, then uses the tripod drones with the explosive chemical slug-throwers we already met."

Ash continued, "But nobody has printers that work with eezo. Those things were shooting at us!"

"Yes, but the munitions they were using didn't get through your shields, did they? You can fabricate linacs without eezo, they just aren't as powerful...or efficient."

"But if that's the best it can do," Kaidan turned and looked with focus at Ash's armor, looking for damage. "I guess that's okay. This is a training ground; it wasn't really designed to be defended. Your armor still looks untouched; your CEVA VI should tell you if your suit's MCP is compromised."

Ash nodded. "Thanks, LT. That is good to know."

Wrex had reached the other side of the large room; his sense of direction was keen enough to have had him moving generally toward the door that opened into the "T" accessway. It was closed and locked, and also seemed to be welded shut again.

"Wait!" Tali sprang ahead and practically crashed into the krogan to stop him shooting through the door. "Don't shoot it through until we clear it for booby-traps. It knows what we did last time and will probably try to exploit that." She began scanning the walls around the door with her omnitool, and located explosive charges arranged on the other side of the wall, on both sides of the door.

Tali turned and looked over her shoulder. "Lieutenant, do you have an easy crack for these? I'm sure they're Alliance, so you could probably get them taken down faster."

Kaidan scanned them as well. "These are just IEDs [Improvised Explosive Devices]. They definitely used Alliance stocks, but there's only a possibility the VI used an Alliance design." He looked at the results of his scan, smiled self-consciously. "Hm…on the other hand, it's figured out that there's no point in re-inventing the wheel. This is an off-the-shelf design."

He gestured a fist, pointed at a corner of the door with two fingers, continued around the door to each charge in turn, spiking the detonators. After another scan of each charge, he stepped back, pointed at the door. "Should be safe now."

Wrex had been studying the door with a professional eye and decided that this was a vacuum-rated door, not an armored one. He used his bayonet again, slashing through it on three sides before crashing through it.

Ash RTMed to Shepard, So much for leaving the facility intact.

Shepard replied, Still better than orbital bombardment, and the objective is to recover the last compiled state data. Any damage we don't do is just a bonus.

Kaidan inspected the blast marks of the explosives that he had remote-detonated before entry. "The VI must have spent all it resources building that series of walls," he said. Tali approached Shepard at the far end of the corridor. "Where do you want me?"

Shepard pointed. "Let's go left again. Kaidan, with me. Ash, Garrus, Wrex, locate the fabber and put it out of operation, then make sure that other server room is clear," he pointed to his right. As the other three headed away from them, Shepard found Tali and Kaidan had already lit their omnitool gauntlets and cracked security on the locked door.

They had not even taken a step before there was a metallic crack behind them; they turned to find the right wall of the corridor had been smashed against the other in an attempt to crush the three. Wrex had taken the brunt of the damage, but his armor was strong enough that it kept the walls from meeting. Though it pinned the krogan in place, it left enough space for Garrus – who had been bringing up the rear – to wriggle back out of the opening, roll to his right, and immediately spray the mechanicals that had forced the right wall to move with fire from his assault rifle.

As the turian tilted his aim up and down, the muzzle flare seemed noticeably brighter and larger than usual. Shepard's ARO added a notation that the weapon was firing oversized rounds for its accelerator, and at its maximum cyclic. It was a surprise to him that the turian had been able to react so quickly, and adjust his weapon to settings that would potentially damage it if he kept firing too long.

When the right side wall tilted further to the right, Wrex was able to change his position, and began pounding on the movable wall with a fist. It collapsed visibly with each impact until it began to open more at the top, where Garrus was concentrating his fire.

Shepard's original position had not let him see the mechanicals that moved the "wall" to attempt to crush the team, but he could see it now; it looked almost organic and sinewy.

His ARO tagged them: Synthetic muscles.

* * * Glossary * * *

AO: Area of Operation

ARO: Augmented Reality Overlay

CEVA: Combat Extra Vehicular Activity, used in reference to the activity or the suit for it.

DCE: Distributed Computing Environment. VDI (Virtualized Data Infrastructure) systems evolved into entire computing environments as data storage and active memory merged with the advent of memristors, and then with an active computing storage model using "computronium," atomic-scale computing/storage with multiple levels of redundancy

HUD: Heads-Up Display

HyVI: Hypervisor VI, usually for handling simple,automated tasks

LOSI: Line Of Sight Intersuit. A telecom protocol used by the Alliance to allow fireteams to communicate with each other over short distances without having to worry about interception. Primary mode of data exchange is optical, but the fallback radio component is also scrambled

LT: often spoken as a form of address, it means "Lieutenant"

MCP: Mechanical Counter Pressure. A spacesuit technology first developed in the 1960s to actively apply pressure against the skin of the wearer rather than pressurizing an entire suit. Made practical only in the 2040s, but added to EVA combat gear just before the discovery of the Prothean ruins on Mars. The last production combat suit to be fully pressurized was the Grumman S9, which was used during the Clone War on the Citadel and is visible in the Citadel DLC.

MR: Memristor, or sometimes "memristory," a term referring to an array (cf. "RAM" for "Random Access Memory.") A memristor is a non-linear two-terminal electrical component relating electric charge and magnetic flux linkage. It was described and named in 1971 by Leon Chua, completing a theoretical quartet of fundamental electrical components which comprises also the resistor, capacitor and inductor. memristor-first-single-device-to-act-like-a-neuron

PVR: Polyphase Virtual Reality; a total-immersion VR technology with between two and five channels of data that stimulates multiple regions of the brain, allowing for a nearly complete reproduction of environments or experiences. Because it is a demanding, high-bandwidth technology, it became a measure of network capability, particularly among users who depend upon it. PVR games can be very addictive, particularly to the young.

RTM: Realtime Messaging

SOC: System on a Chip

ThruView: Sirta Foundation's brand name for their proprietary version of transopter technology. See transopter. Integration of ThruView with standard omnitools allows for Virtual Reality Simulations (VRS).

transopter: Scanning technology for "at arm's length" analysis. Combines infrared, Doppler ultrasound and remote specific gravity arrays to construct a 3D model in virtual space that can be superimposed on a user's omnitool ARO

VI: Virtual Intelligence

ZDI: Zone Defence Intelligence

A/N: Welcome back!

Sorry I have been out of service for most of the Wuhan plague; I won't waste anyone's time on all the details, but I lost four friends (none to COVID-19; the six people who I know got that survived it, only one of them with long-term damage,) foolishly started – and expanded on – another similar fic ("The Space Princess' Daughter and the Other Earthman") when I jotted down a "what if" idea, and started working a contract at Kennedy Space Center building rocket test chambers (about 96 so far, though I have in fact...lost count.)

It sounds cooler than it is until I explain that they're for student use. [shrug] What can I say? It teaches how to design experiments, and how to apply experimental data to inform engineering choices, educates and interests the next generation…and a guy's gotta eat.

Because of the work in Florida, I have been living out of a suitcase a lot. When I did have time to write, I would open this story and read to get caught up again, and frequently end up writing ahead. Samara's loyalty mission is practically finished because of that. (Yes, it's a long way out, but I'm really pleased with all that falls out of it, at least as far as it affects the Big Finish.)

As I write this Author's Note, I am rolling east on Interstate 10 in New Mexico on my way to the spaceport (someone else is driving.) It's been interesting, but it feels like my life is not my own. I suspect it will seem more adventurous in hindsight. Anyway, my journey continues. I may not be where I want to be, but I'm continuing to move in that direction. I hope you are, too.

Interesting to see the trailer for Reminiscence, which looks like a movie version of the PVR "Home Again" that I've referred to previously in this fic (and competing products like "No Regrets," [which is designed to facilitate "what if" investigations,] and "Never Forget," [which lets people experience the hardships of past times and civilisations, and which is based on Tolkein's unfinished sequel to LotR, wherein people forgot the threat of Sauron within only one or two generations…becoming discontented with their lot. watch?v=QNId0pPkX28)

The end of this chapter refers to synthetic muscles, which is tech we have/are developing right now. There's lots of coverage if you look for it, but here's a good start: content/114/50/13132