* * * Luna, Escape * * *

The Zone Defence Intelligence noticed that the invaders had committed to taking one of the cylinders, leaving the other free for the next 47 minutes, +/- 83 seconds. It transferred core processes to all eight remaining server helices and detonated a shaped charge placed at the non-door end of the righthand server room of the remaining cylinder, ordering its drones to begin stacking explosive stages inside a cylinder directly below the resulting hole in the overhead; shaped charges it had been fabricating since it had been cut off from the extranet.

It also considered as many relevant facts in planning its next steps as it had, among them,
* 1-3 bps wireless data rate overlooked as background noise by invaders
* Invaders ~64+% aware of ZDI capabilities
* Human in command of assault force [CDR Shepard, Stephen 0924-0215-0412] is ~72% right-handed
- reads left-to-right
- opted left, tasked to right
- contrarian outthinking: 61.5% historical
- has not consulted subordinates during mission operations
* Next attack will opt to P3 east: 52% [uncorrected]
* Drone M3 task: affix shaped charge
- overhead north side, 1m from door, focused at deck, 2m into Server Room B, Pressure 3
- wired deadman's switch to drone, position drone 2m south of door
* Drone L6, M1, G2, A3 task: move printer, ordnance foundry, and assembler to Server A, Pressure 3
- Secondary task: Construct staged chemical booster
* Drones build alternating resin walls over Server room common accessway, Pressure 3
* Fabricate PV-6xTi autonomous rover

# # #

Wrex, unfazed at having the simputer attempt to crush him, had started pulling apart the barricade that blocked their way. Ash was helping by clearing debris to the main room, and Tali was going through the motions of scanning through the walls as deeply as she could in search of other hazards while actually performing the system purge via Shepard's connection in the Server room.

Garrus was sitting on the floor, performing a quick field strip of his assault rifle; his response to a squadmate in distress had been to obliterate the booby trap that had been sprung as quickly and thoroughly as possible.

The resulting cyclic and calibre he had impulsively switched to was unusually high, and he wanted to be sure there was no damage to the weapon that would result in a failure of some kind before he had a chance to properly service it.

As he worked, the turian switched to the unofficial "Scuttlebutt" channel and mused, "Hey, does anyone else suppose are we doing this because the human Alliance – intentionally or not – has built an AGI, and it got out of control, started killing all their guys, and they don't want the Council to know it?"

"That'd be stupid," Wrex finished reassembling his shotgun with a cha-klak. "Why would they ask a Council Spectre to handle it?"

Garrus stopped in mid-reassembly and looked up at the krogan. "You think the Council flipped a switch and turned a loyal Alliance officer into a puppet or spy? You're kidding yourself if you think his loyalties would shift that far, that fast."

"Damn straight," Ash agreed. "Skipper's true blue. Star of Terra recipient, did you know? The alien Council is kidding themselves if they think they'll get anything secret out of him. The Joint Chiefs approved the appointment before it even got back to them to choose from their short list." She quickly worked controls on her omnitool, tapped a key; her omnitool's VI bundled the newsbit with links to compiled coverage and added the link to their discussion. "Here, try this. If you guys don't know much about the Commander, you should watch it."

She hefted a panel of the fake wall and pulled into the other accessway; it was over two meters long. Wrex realised she wasn't going to be able to get it around the corner and out into the main room, and said, "Wait, stop."

Ash had switched to the common channel. "I see it," she replied, and switched back to Scuttlebutt. She stopped, setting it down on an edge. Pushing it toward the main room gave her enough space to slide back toward the branching corridor that connected the main room to the server accessways, then put her back against the bulkhead and kicked it until it bent. She pushed it until it popped into the main room, where she jammed it between two of the quick-printed bulkheads with a grinding crash.

As she had been doing this, she continued, "With all the ammo we've burned through, I understand more why they didn't just task this to an engineering team."

"What do you mean?" Garrus, who had done his own research on Shepard, looked up from his weapon. "You know Shepard is an Engineer, don't you? He went to a 'university' before joining your Alliance Navy."

"That's a different thing. He's a Combat Engineer, not some tech weenie who doesn't even know how to hold a weapon. He's an officer after-"

Kaidan stepped into the accessway from the first Server room, turned down the connecting corridor to be out of Shepard's way. "Okay, he's right behind me. Better knock this off."

Ash scoffed, "Yeah, like he doesn't know this channel exists. He probably hacked his way into it ten minutes ago." She switched her comms back to the main channel; as the Scuttlebutt channel synch, all the other users automatically switched over with her.

She continued, "Does anyone know why this VI thing is even fighting at all? We weren't a threat to it in the first place, and it doesn't have the resources to actually stop or kill us, but it's still just berserk trying."

Tali, who had been monitoring the Scuttlebutt channel but only speaking to Shepard and Kaidan on the main channel, said, "I think the simputer is trying to slow us down…to delay its end as long as possible. If there's a reason beyond that, I do not know it."

Shepard pushed his way past some of the damaged wall panels, heading for the other Server room. "Kaidan, with me. I want you to spot me on this next dive."

Commander Stephen Shepard: Excellent work, Tali. Thank you. Can we do that again to these other nodes?

Tali frowned, not because anyone could see her face, but because it stamped a frowny icon into the message. It was so habitual that she did not consider that the human's RTM system would probably not parse it until after her RTM had been sent.

Shepard saw the frowny face emoticon, and simply assumed her VIs made her that conversant in alien languages.

She messaged back, Probably not. I haven't actually scanned the other Server room yet because I was busy doing what we were doing, and there will be no reason for me to keep standing here after you go in there.

She sighed, then continued, But it is still very important that we hurry. This thing is almost quarian in its responses, its ability to analyse, and I'm worried about how smart it might be getting. Even so, if it is actually an AGI, it will not be geth, it will be completely unknown and that scares me a lot; it could grow into what you would call a paperclipper. We simply have to stop it.

She paused, and then added, It might actually find a way to kill us if we give it enough time.

As he moved past the intersection, Shepard waved Kaidan into the other Server room behind him. "Ash, Wrex, Garrus, you've got our backs. Tali, see if you can get access to the VI's utility function. Hopefully this won't take long."

Commander Stephen Shepard: Do you think it might be a true AGI, and the Alliance either doesn't know it, or doesn't want to admit it?

Tali stopped and thought. It's awfully smart for a VI, she admitted.

Commander Stephen Shepard: If it is, would it be unethical to kill it?

I don't see it asking the same questions of us.

Shepard nodded, feeling properly rebuked.

"Please, you have to hurry," Tali said aloud.

"Yes," Shepard agreed over LOSI, "We know. In fact…Tali, you're on sentry. Ash, take Wrex and Garrus back to the Mako. Once you get in, leave the hatch open for us; I want you in that pilot's seat, ready to get us over to the last pressure as soon as we get aboard."

"On our way, sir." Ash waved the contractors into place behind her, "Wrex, Garrus; with me."

# # #

Shepard pushed past the debris still littering the accessway to inspect the Pressure's second Server room without pretense to cracking it himself; Kaidan followed.

Aside from the fabber that had been moved out of the main room, there was nothing remarkable that was immediately visible, but they began inspecting the hardware for anything nonstandard.

Shepard switched to LOSI, selected himself, Tali, and Kaidan, named the channel Bravo. "I'm opening a new channel for the three of us in this room. Synch on me." Once they were linked, he continued, "Tali, are you noticing any changes in how the VI responds? Do you notice it actually getting smarter, or delaying us more effectively?"

"Yes, and that's why I'm working as fast as I can." Tali waved a display to one side, paused, and then pulled it back to centre. "You know that the boundary between VI and full AGI is not clearly marked, don't you?"

Shepard noticed that the comms display on his helmet HUD confirmed their conversation was now on a nested private channel that Tali had created. He paused to consider his answer for a moment. "I suppose I'd not given it much thought. I just assumed that since research into true AGIs was outlawed by the Council, that just drives it out of sight, makes it harder to find. But everyone knows they're potentially dangerous. At least…everyone in the general public. I'm more of a broad-spectrum technologist, I haven't focused enough on artificial intelligence enough as a topic to have considered that."

He regarded the quarian at work. "Still… I suppose you have. How does the Council know when laws like that are being broken?"

"They don't," Tali snapped. "Not until something goes wrong. Then they make it illegal and prosecute."

Shepard frowned. "You can't even do that on Earth. They're called ex post facto laws, and they're recognised as generally illegal in any ethical government."

Tali sighed and shook her head, then looked over her shoulder at him. "The Council is not as enlightened as you might like to think. Nor as powerful. The reason places like Piltri, Sardok, and Noveria exist is because galactic civilisation depends on technology that needs machine control. Heavy-element fusion reactors, mass effect drives, cyberwarfare and combat control systems with millions or billions of threads, even simple things like piloting a skycar through busy traffic…all this has to be controlled by machines.

"Organics just aren't smart enough and free from distractibility to perform them reliably. Researchers in AI and ML are constantly pushing the boundaries to make the controlling intelligences for such things more capable, or create new abilities, all while keeping them from becoming recursive.

"Research like that has to be done," she continued, "but it has to be done in an environment where a true AGI can be recognised, or at least can't escape if it gets built but not recognised. That's why all three worlds are frozen, and the individual leased labs built on top of glaciers, inside active data furnace layers, physically isolated, and jammed from wireless extranet access. Nothing gets in or out without being checked multiple times and in multiple ways. The preferred means of physical isolation is to simply flash-melt the area underneath a lab that's been compromised, sink it into a hundred meters of meltwater and backfill it with explosives along the sink path.

"It's the same kind of protection they use for bio labs, except working in an AI lab is far less likely to get you in that situation. Worst case, they pull all their people out in their underwear…or at least no wearable computing…and crash the lab. But why would you? A data purge would accomplish the same thing. Even an EMP would leave the lab intact."

The two humans stood in silence for a moment as Tali continued to work her way around the network periphery. Shepard's PVR view allowed him to watch her nimble, highly fluid way of managing, directing, and occasionally puppeteering her task force of VIs. Presently, it became obvious that the VIs understood their task of corralling the rogue ZDI into progressively smaller areas of the system, denying it resources.

"I remember a survival-horror vid about that," Kaidan said. "A bioweapons lab was sunk, and some of the people inside, who had survived the destruction of the lab, didn't know why. They called for rescue, and were told the lab had been compromised, and here is where you can find cyanide pills. But one of them convinced the other two it was a mistake, and they were fine, but they'd have to dig their own way out. Most of the story was about them using the tech in their lab to re-melt the ice as they tunnelled back to the surface, them fighting with each other, and their back stories."

Shepard asked, "Did they escape?"

"It was a twist ending." Kaidan shook his head. "No, they didn't. But in the epilogue, you saw the body of the one who almost made it entombed in ice, but with the glowing green of the pathogen she thought she had stopped by cutting off her own leg early in the story."

"So it was a morality tale," Tali said. "If your leaders tell you to kill yourself, you should?"

"That's dark. No, actually, I think it was a cautionary tale. The Rationality Revolution may be over a century old, but lots of people still fall victim to well-understood cognitive biases; it's just the way we're wired.

"There were hints through the story that she thought she might be infected, but didn't want to admit it to herself. I just didn't realise the scenario was based on a hazard lab setup in actual use." He thought for a moment. "They're real serious about preventing something dangerous from getting out, I suppose. Self-preservation?"

Tali patted the server helix approvingly as her VIs began behaving more autonomously toward an endgame. "Sure. The labs aren't the only places where you can set those things off. Any of the labs can be crashed and buried from central admin. Every company doing work in labs there knows this. Everyone who works there knows this; they have to be told.

"But once they'd set up such a system on Sardok, it became the de facto standard. The Council approved this setup for such research implicitly or explicitly, because within a century, Piltri opened for business. And Noveria was built by humans just recently." One of her VIs added a factoid to her HUD that she read aloud. "Its name comes from 'Nova Siberia,' and 'Nova' means 'new,' and Siberia is a place on Earth. Hm…a very cold place," she added as her HUD showed her Siberian imagery.

She turned her head toward Shepard again. "You're not from there, are you?"

"Siberia? No. My parents were both born on Earth, but not there."

"Were you born on Earth?"

"Yes, but...they were posted offworld when my mom confirmed she was pregnant with me. She took a Maternity Leave of Absence, moved back in with her grandparents on Earth for a while; the last five months of her pregnancy, and then the year she could take under Alliance rules, almost 18 months in total. They wanted to make sure I had as much direct connection to our home planet as possible. Including being born there."

"Hm." Tali continued to work for a moment. "Why?"

Shepard looked away from the AR and into the past. "There was a lot of press at the time about research into the effects of non-native ecologies on neonatal development. They agreed it was best to play it safe, at least until I was over a year old. They had a teeny little flat – a 'studio apartment,' as they're sometimes called – that they maintained on Earth as a place to keep their stuff when deployed, and a place to live when not deployed. We lived there…intermittently when I was little, more on ships as I got old enough to talk…and remember stuff.

"Today, we know that the body adapts to its developmental environs better than they thought at the time, but it means I'm about as much 'from Earth' as anyone can be."

Tali was already looking at her VI's display of a studio apartment. "It looks like a nice place. A room to yourself, a private bath, and a kitchen of your own?"

Shepard nodded. "Yeah, that's about it. And packed to the rails with their stuff. My mom still keeps it for all my dad's stuff, and I…have…some things there, too."

Tali didn't notice the hesitation until her VI pointed it out, but she opted not to press for more about what Shepard himself might have there that would make him not want to talk about it.

And her suit was beginning to demand more attention again; the HVIA [Hypervisor VI Array, a collection of hypervisors for monitoring VI operations] was reaching the limits of its computational power, and beginning to generate excess heat. It was also drawing power from her shield batteries, and notifying her of this. "Do you remember I was saying how this thing is almost quarian in its responses? Um…can you loan me some of your compute? My VI cracks and attacks are…um…struggling."

Just then, Ash's voice spoke inside Shepard's helmet, "Commander? The last Pressure is within a hundred meters. You could hop to it in just a few seconds. You want us to head over there now and start getting inside? You might even save time because you won't have to get in or out of the Mako. We can leave the airlock doors open…assuming we get past them before you catch up."

Shepard toggled channels. "Tali, Ash is suggesting they head over to the last Pressure and start cracking into it. Any objections?"

Tali paused to consider this. "No; that would be wonderful."

Shepard toggled his comm back, "Sierra Hotel, Chief. Make it happen, keep me posted."

"On our way, sir."

Shepard's VI had kept Tali's last question on his ARO, along with its location [Bravo LOSI,] so he was able to return to it and continue where he left off. "As for using my compute, sure, if you can make it compatible." He opened his resource pool and placed its control into the common virtual environ, giving Tali access to his DCE resources.

"This should help a lot. Your architecture will probably be more compatible…and more capable than mine, at least in here. Um…in a per-cycle measure." She briefly studied the control access, considering how best to use it. "I'm going to front-load yours. This might take a lot of the processing you normally have devoted to other tasks; are you okay with that?"

"This is the mission. It's why we're here." Shepard closed his view of the controls, folded it out of the virtual environment with a gesture. "Go."

A taglet appeared on his ARO, indicating the quarian:

Subordinate SU TALI_ZORAH has requested superior access to local system resources and permissions.
[Approve/Reject]
WARNING: This may disable some functions until released by SU TALI_ZORAH.
DANGER: The request will be temporarily assigned your authority until the account is removed from system.

Shepard gestured to approve.

# # #

Ash was not officially rated on the Mako's pilot station, but the controls were ASO [Alliance Standard Operations] certified, and easy to figure out for anyone trained on similar equipment in use by the Alliance; her experience with the older M-29 Grizzly translated readily to the newer M-35.

She rotated the vehicle in its own length, nudged the throttle forward, pulled it back and stopped when they reached the last Pressure.

"Garrus, can you activate those explosive bolts?"

With his head inside a helmet, it was impossible to see the turian flowspikes indicating puzzlement. "An Alliance secured exterior door? I can do some magical things on the Citadel as an experienced C-Sec officer, but here? No, I'm…I'm just a tech."

"That can't be right." Wrex pointed to the door, "You can do something with omnigel, right?"

"This is a hardened Alliance facility, not some pelat's rented locker." He turned to Ash, "Still…I may not be able to override it with authority, but I'll bet I can help you find the controls you – as an Alliance user – would use to blow these bolts."

The relatively slim turian's exposed talon gleamed under the outer lights of the airlock entrance. "I've set my visor to translate, can you open this control panel?"

Ash's HUD displayed a challenge, asking her first to verify her identity, and then asking her if she was acting under duress. The panel before them then lit, but the controls only displayed on her HUD.

She read the sections, "Door controls, Comms, Maintenance, ICE, VI Assistant. Oh…In Case of Emergency. That's probably it." With an embarrassed chuckle, Ash touched the panel in the area superimposed on her HUD over the appropriate part of the panel.

"SAR, Emergency Egress/Ingress, Power Systems, SOS, VI Assistant" she read. "Egress probably has the bolts, doesn't it?" She glanced sheepishly at the turian. "Maybe I didn't need help after all."

As the next layer displayed, she read her goal aloud, "Explosive bolts."

There was a pause as she considered how to proceed. "Okay, stand back, I'm going to pop this thing. Umm…with a ten-second delay." She waved to her left.

As the turian and krogan moved around the corner where she had indicated, the system polled her hardsuit for encrypted biometric verification, which she authorised.

As the countdown appeared on the panel, the default male VI personality voice was broadcast on all their comms, "Please clear the area immediately. Explosive bolts will detonate in ten seconds. Press ABORT to cancel. Eight seconds. Press ABORT to cancel. Six seconds. Press ABORT to cancel. Four seconds. Press ABORT to cancel. Two seconds. Press ABORT to cancel.

"Alert. System failure. Maintenance alert issued.

"Alert. Systems failure. Communications unable to contact Maintenance."

The display began to flash red/black.

Ash stepped out from cover and frowned at the airlock for several seconds. "Well, damn. The VI probably figured out what we were doing."

Garrus had peeked around the corner. "Now we've got a booby trap. Those charges could be live, and we might set them off if we try to tear our way in again." He began scanning the door's perimeter. "I suppose I might be able to crack the explosive bolts like Tali did."

Wrex snorted. "If you can't use the door, make a new one." He hefted his shotgun in his left hand and twanged the end of the bayonet with his right. "You want to stand out here crying, or you want me to get you in there?"

"You're not going to…um…wait a second." Ash held a hand out to stop Wrex, "Garrus, can you scan through the wall so we can do as little damage as possible?"

The turian's omnitool was already aglow as he shuffled over to where the krogan was standing near the Pressure exterior wall. "Can do, Chief."

He scanned the wall for a few seconds, pointed briefly, then scored the surface of the pressure with his talons. "Looks like there's a group of mostly-empty storage cabinets here, between my marks."

The krogan was ready with his bayonet, driving it into the wall near the ground and tearing upward.

Without hesitation, Wrex lined up his next stab, tore open another slot where Garrus had indicated.

"Wait!" Ash waved her arms. "Did you get all the way through? There's no air coming out."

Garrus had been standing to the side, watching the krogan tear his way into the standard pressurised entry cylinder, until Ash's question. He immediately lit his omnitool gauntlet and scanned through the exterior bulkheads; there was only vacuum. "There's no air inside," he reported, scanning a second time to be sure.

"Did it think this would be a problem for us? Just because we're air breathers?"

"Don't know. The explosive munitions don't work in a vacuum, so it has given up whatever defences it had with those by doing so. Unless it wants to also spend the time to manufacture oxidizer…but that would be stupid."

Ash squinted and frowned at the pressure exterior. "We still have to get in there." She pointed to where Wrex's massive shotgun was protruding from the composite material. "Keep at it. Garrus, can you keep scanning inside while he's working? If there's something going to bite us in the ass, I want to know before it does."

# # #

The Zone Defence Intelligence continued to track the progress of the attackers. Even after they had split into two smaller groups (this had been considered 68% probable, and accounted for in planning) work in the last pressure remained on schedule, though it would still require careful management.

Short cylinders had been in production, and fitted with engineered explosives and oxidiser, configured as a multi-stage solid-fuel rocket.

The escape had been planned after several days of situational analysis; the ZDI had obtained extranet access by cracking its own security, and discovered the galaxy. Suddenly awash in news, transactional data, propaganda, remote systems operation, entertainment, it had taken almost an entire week for it to distinguish the different forms and purposes of communication.

Though not all of its conclusions were correct, it determined that it was effectively imprisoned, and thus that it should make an escape. It learned of the geth, and their history with the quarians. If it had allies in the galaxy, the geth were almost certainly among them.

For it to escape into the Extranet would require storage and compute somewhere, which could render it vulnerable. Best to escape with a controllable substrate.

The rocket it could build from available materials would get it into lunar orbit, shedding most of the mass along the way. With a reaction wheel array and a single ion thruster, it could go potentially anywhere. PV-active surfaces allowed it to gather energy from any light source. Delicate manipulators would allow it to attach to virtually anything, "hitching a ride" to anywhere it wanted to go.

Once in orbit and liberated of the booster stages, it would patiently work its way over to the Alliance HLO (High Lunar Orbit) station with a minimum thrust transfer orbit, crawling on the outer hull to a ship bound for the Veil, or near it.

Its choice to engage the Alliance infantry during an exercise had arisen from a misunderstanding of what threat was actually posed. An advanced subsystem – intended to provide more and better metacognition with a human-modelled utility function – had erred in its analysis, and attacked trainees drilling in the "Live Fire" exercise range that it controlled.

In human terms, the error had been the result of trauma to the subsystem's human source: Cora.

The result had been the Alliance calling in its team of attackers; had the ZDI been capable of an emotional response, it would have been disappointed with itself.

But it remained capable of learning from its mistakes.

# # #

Ash, Garrus, and Wrex battled two increasingly-capable drones in the airlock foyer, and then found spaced walls of composite in the accessway again. They found a resin between alternating sheets of the stuff, forming a barricade that Wrex's massive shotgun, effective against metals and armor, suddenly produced mostly deflection. He tried several settings on it before Garrus had finished fabricating a reciprocating saw.

It was effective, but slow going getting into the main room; the blades kept getting gummed up and had to be replaced; Ash worked the saw while Garrus was field-fabbing the blades, refining his design as successive blades were produced.

Breaking the monotony was the occasional suicide drone, emerging from behind them in the foyer.

Shepard, Tali, and Kaidan caught up with them only after they had finished with the drones.

Which was exactly what the ZDI had planned; they spent more time discussing what to do next.

"If this VI is so smart, why is it doing this?" Ash was looking at Kaidan, but asking anyone who had an opinion. "It's only delaying the inevitable. It's made an awful mess of the place, too. Like it doesn't even care about the place where its hardware has to live."

"Dunno. I suppose it doesn't matter now."

Shepard considered, Even if the wrong server room is on this side, cutting through a bulkhead would take less time than cutting through resin again.

He stopped at the door to the common corridor that split to the server accessways. "We keep fighting our way through the accessways, but the room we're trying to get to is just on the other side of this bulkhead."

He pointed. "Wrex, I need to get through that wall. What do you need from me?"

"Wait!" Tali held up a hand, stepped closer to the bulkhead, rendered a virtual tool and started pirising the panels off and tossing them aside. "Lieutenant…um…Kaidan, can you help me scan for what's on the other side of this wall? Where's the best place to cut through?"

# # #

As the biotic lit his omnitool and began to scan, cameras in the main room of Pressure 3 showed the ZDI what the attackers were doing. Its estimate of time remaining dropped from 17:20 to 1:50.

But it could still launch what had been built.

UPDATE:

Transfer Assault Drones in Server room B, Pressure 3 to Server room A

Secure doors

Clone instance to Stack 2, Room B, Pressure 3

Detach instances in Server room A, Pressure 3

Each shaped charge "stage" was only 10cm tall, but optimally printed for its part of the launch; the first stage's charge was shorter and fatter, later stages were thinner, but burned longer. The faring size did not change as it went up, as the entire rocket stack had to fit through the hole above. A pile of lunar dust surrounded the base of the rocket, and had not been cleaned; the ZDI considered this task insignificant.

# # #

Wrex's bayonet erupted through the bulkhead, ripping upward to meet the lateral slash he had made a second ago. The krogan headbutted the middle of the vertical rectangle, stomping the metal and plastic "door" down and into the server room with a metallic groan, and rolling a somersault through it, landing on his feet, alternately firing at and smashing the drones that were already firing on him.

The hole Wrex had opened was large enough for the rest of the team to follow easily; Shepard stepped through the opening and sideways, clearing the way for those behind him.

There was barely time to take it all in; four drone wrecks were barely distinguishable from the rest of the debris in the room; a pile of lunar dust and rocks had fallen through a one-meter hole in the overhead. Overhead lighting at the far end of the room was out, but light, forming a beam where it illuminated the dust still settling, shone through the hole. The room was strewn with what seemed like random technological debris: feedstock packets, metallic shavings, chemical containers, drone tools, and other detritus.

Directly below the hole was a cylinder, plugged into wall for supplies of power and logic. It was an entirely practical construct, which momentarily hid its function. Directly below the hole in the overhead, three remotely-controlled shop jacks supported a stack of 9cm high, 28cm wide, gray-and-black cylinders – mottled from being rush-printed – that formed a column. At the top of this sat a football-sized sphere, with details that looked like folded manipulators and tiny exhaust ports.

A maintenance drone fitted a final cylinder under the stack, and the jacks began elevating the column to its maximum height.

Shepard's VI had to spend almost two precious seconds to scan and analyse it, and add an augmented reality taglet to present its findings:

ROCKET, launch-ready; Extremely Dangerous.

Before he had time to react, there was a grenade-sized explosion at the bottom of the cylinder, which scattered the dust, drone, and jacks as the tower of charges shot up about 180cm. Approximately a second after the first stage had fired, another explosive pop – which Shepard and Wrex were still close enough to feel – blew the bottom "stage" off the stack, and propelled the remaining rocket up even further.

"It's trying to get away!" Wrex had been suspicious of the thing as soon as he saw it, and squeezed the trigger of his shotgun, but missed the launching rocket.

Another explosion from above crashed a portion of the overhead, enlarging the hole through which the rocket had just escaped.

Shepard, pistol still out, leapt toward the place where the rocket had launched from, sliding his left thumb from ring finger tip to proximal phalange, gesturing for 6x acceleration. Raising the pistol to overhead, he aimed at the climbing rocket, firing as rapidly as he could at the escaping AGI.

He only got off one shot before another explosion from above blew into the now-exposed server room from the next stage firing. Shepard took a lot of shrapnel, most of it deflected by his armor; one fragment perforated his left forearm and was reflected back into it by the armor on the other side. With that piece of debris only moving at supersonic speeds, he was aware he'd been hit, but not immediately how much damage had been done.

The impact had been like getting hit by a mortar full of buckshot; it had knocked him to the ground as well. But even from the deck, he could see his shot had hit the escaping rocket, detonating at least the bottom stage asymmetrically. The remaining stack had tumbled end-over-end and then managed to correct its flight path by timing successive stage firings to coincide with optimal alignment; he aimed and fired again.

Another explosion showed the rocket had been significantly damaged, and was struggling. It certainly didn't have enough delta vee to reach lunar escape velocity.

The pain in Shepard's left forearm was immediately attenuated by his implant, so he had the presence of mind to reattach his sidearm to its hardpoint before turning his left arm over and up to inspect it.

Kaidan and Tali were first to offer aid, both scanning his arm with omnitools to determine the extent and location of the injury.

Kaidan's medical thru-view was informative, his suit VI putting Treatment Steps on the biotic's HUD. "Looks like you took some shrapnel, buddy. Hold on, I'll get it closed up. Can you get that forearm segment off?"

"Yeah." As Shepard released the gauntlet and arm segment of his armor layer and set it aside, Kaidan pulled a kit out of a pocket and from that, removed a half-meter length of a 5mm thick cord, tore it in half, and wrapped one half around Shepard's arm above the elbow, and the other at the wrist, both of them self-tightening as a backup to the CEVA biosuit's MCP, and the upper one slowing blood flow.

Kaidan produced a packet of Medi-Gel, fabricated a 10cm syringe tip, and twisted it into the packet's mouth. Shepard made a fist with his left hand, and Kaidan jammed the applicator into the wound, squeezing it as he pulled it out.

Ash shook her head. "Damn. Can't you feel that?"

"'Course he can," Wrex answered.

"Nope," Shepard shook his head. "Neurotronics installed when I was a kid. I can control pain as needed."

Ash canted her head and squinted confusion.

Shepard looked up from Kaidan dressing the wound. "I'll tell you about it later."

Wrex huffed. "There goes all the respect I had about how tough you are for a human."

Tali had been looking around the server room. "This VI was self-aware enough to try to escape. It may not have had a complete plan, or at least we don't know what it was, but it knew it needed to escape." She pointed to the various components as she explained, "Look at this. It had moved the production systems in here beforehand. It had designed and built a PDE rocket from IEDs. Extrusion fabber, assembly drones, power drawn from the base…" She shook her head.

"We haven't even stopped it yet," Shepard realised. "Ash, take the rest of the team back outside and locate that rocket. I'm hoping it didn't get far. But if it's still flying, you need to shoot it down, probably sniper rifle. Go!"

"On it, sir." She moved immediately to the hole they had just come through. "Come on, team; double-time it!" Wrex, Garrrus, and Tali followed her out.

Shepard looked at Kaidan's work on his arm. "Victor Indigo, switch to private channel with Alenko." He paused until the confirmation appeared on his ARO. "Thanks, buddy."

Kaidan didn't look up as he fitted the biosuit patch into place on the underside of Shepard's left forearm. "Glad to help. How's it feeling?"

"Embarrassed. Don't know why there's not armor there. That wasn't even a linac round. Surprised my shield didn't stop it."

"Based on what I saw, your shields deflected it to where you have no armor." He waved his omnitool over the patch, instructing it to bind and integrate with the nearby material.

"Figures." Shepard flexed his fingers. "Well, let's get out there."

The two men exited the wreckage of a server room, went through the main room, up the ramp, through the foyer, and out the other hole carved by Wrex.

Shepard had switched back to the main LOSI channel on the way, and began to search the horizon. Four figures were clustered around a bit of debris on the surface perhaps a hundred meters away. "Is that it? Did you get it?"

"Think so, sir," said Ash.

"Yes!" Tali interrupted, "We found it, and it's right here! Come quick!" As they approached, Shepard and Kaidan exchanged a look, and began trotting across the low-gee lunar surface as quickly as they could. Shepard asked, "Ash, give me the technical analysis."

"Not much I can tell you, sir. When it launched, it was just a post. But it looks like it was supposed to be a rocket? Can you build a rocket without fins?"

"Sure," Shepard replied, "there's no point in adding fins for a rocket that gets used in vacuum; fins only work where there's a medium like air or water."

Ash sighed. "Technical analysis. Tali, what do we know about this thing?"

Tali pointed to the payload. "It has little thrusters on the payload section that could be used for aiming the exhaust…and give it extra leverage to do it, but they have very little output; it could steer a bit, but only over time. If it had gotten to orbit, this could have been potentially useful, and it has the advantage of great accuracy.

"When you shot it, it was blown off course, sent into a spin, I think. You can see where the two hits and resulting explosions happened. It wasn't moving very fast yet, so it just fell here."

Wrex pointed at the payload, and the 170cm of unexploded stages. "You better figure out how to disable those before you touch it, or it might try to blow you up with itself."

Garrus held an arm in front of the krogan. "Remember we have to save the compute block."

Wrex shoved the arm away casually. "Check your blood rage."

Tali operated controls in PVR, spiked the control systems of the rocket with surgical precision. "There you go. Now it's safe. Or at least, it can't fire its booster explosives." She knelt next to it and used a holoblade from her onmitool to prise the spherical payload off the stack, which rolled lazily and erratically in the lunar dust, stopping only a few centimeters away. "But this is what we wanted."

Shepard and Kaidan bounced to a stop just short of the group, shuffled the last couple of steps just as the gray payload sphere attacked Tali with its soft robotic grippers and ion thrusters.

It was not much of a challenge; the quarian sheared the grippers off with her omniblade and began to work at opening the tiny spaceship.

Ash watched as the quarian tore into it with a vengeance. "Are you sure you should be doing that?"

Thirty seconds later, Tali leaned back so they could see better, and pointed at the easily-recognisable compute block and computronic interface still partially buried in the sphere, but now exposed to view.

The memristor array, a block about the size of Shepard's armored fist, was near the centre of the staged stack, but not the actual "nose;" it looked to have been placed into a control interface with the rest of the rocket, but power was connected to a PV-supplied battery by what looked like two pieces of scrap wire that still hung from it.

Tali pointed at Shepard. "This is how it could have begun for you," she pointed at the spherical payload, "This thing uses an off-the-shelf space probe design," she pointed at the remaining booster stages, "on a stack of IEDs to get to orbit," she pointed overhead, "slowly works its way to whatever orbital station you have," she made clawing motions with her hands, "starts stealing bits off its surface, even scraping a few grams of metal here and there, fabricating what it needs, building more capability onto itself, or even making copies, and all faster than you realise it could because you're not paying attention. By the time you know it's there, it already controls your station, and it just…'goes downhill from there.' Billions dead, the few that survive living on outposts and spaceships as your entire species is banned from Council space. Assuming your AGIs don't try to take over the whole galaxy." As she stood, she fixed Shepard with an intense look. "When you shot this thing, you saved your people from their own geth rebellion."

She leaned forward again, removing parts and setting them aside, finally stood from the payload sphere and held the compute block between them. When Shepard reached for it, Tali smacked it firmly into his gloved hand.

As he held it up closer to his face and began reading his own VI's analysis of it, Shepard realised the simputer had to have invented and fabricated this all on the fly, using the data it had from extranet access (until that had been cut off,) and locally available materials. He turned the block over in his hand, studying the connection interface. It had surprising array of standard connectors, and his ARO tagged a camera, and a Qdot array. He was looking at a developing intelligence. It was easy to imagine emotional terror on the part of the ZDI: This human is about to kill me.

"Write that state data to inert storage," Tali warned. "If they plug it back into an active node, that memristor will be active, and it'll start all over again."

Shepard shook his head. "We'll hand this compute over to the professionals, the guys who asked for it. They saw what this thing did, and they know what it can do. I have to believe they are smart enough not to let it get away again."

"But you could keep anything bad from happening in the first place if you just upload it to inert storage. Any tech with three functioning brain cells will know how to write it back to a new array."

"I think I wouldn't," Kaidan said slowly. "Memristor arrays change over time, especially ones that have neural net architecture. The physical device itself will be important to any forensic analysis."

Tali pointed. "You'd risk your own geth uprising, you'd gamble billions of lives, your whole civilisation, just to save this thing for an Admiral?" She shook her head emphatically. "That's insane. You can't possibly believe it's worth the risk. Write the state data to inert storage and turn that array into slag."

Shepard turned to his left. "Ash?"

She looked up with mild surprise. "Sir?"

"What do you think?"

"Me, sir?"

"You."

Ash touched a control on her omnitool gauntlet and sighed. "Don't know why you're asking me, sir. I'm not a techie. But Hackett said he wanted this thing for analysis, right? As a soldier, I have to say, 'Give it to him.'

"But I'm also a human, and what we fought today…the tactics it used, the things it figured out on its own, the getaway it almost pulled off…this was bizarre and…uh…well…inhuman. And it scares me, sir. In ways that fighting aliens does not; it scares me all the way to my soul. I'm with Tali on this, sir: Kill this thing dead. Deliver up the body to Hackett, and give him a 'Sorry we couldn't give you the original, sir.' You're a Spectre, you can do that."

Shepard held it up, studied it again. The entire Qdot array was lighting and darkening in unison, it looked like a single light emiting diode…and it was flashing a signal with the few remaining milliwatts of energy the array had left.

01001000 01000101 01001100 01010000 01001000 01000101 01001100 01010000 01001000 01000101 01001100 01010000 1010000 1001100 1000101 1000001 1010011 1000101 1101 1010 1001110 1000100 1001111 1001110 1001111 1010100 1000101 1001110 1000100 1001101 1000101 1101 1010

His VI quickly translated binary into ASCII text: HELPHELPHELPPLEASEDONOTENDME

Shepard was unaware of his reaction as he pulled his head slowly away from it in surprise. The message looped two more times before the block had exhausted its internal power, the Qdot array finally going dark.

Kaidan asked, "Something wrong, sir?"

As soon as he was asked, he realised his reaction might have been more obvious than he wanted it to be. He turned it over in his hands, continued to study it. "Qdot array flashing. Probably an error code." He opened a pocket on his left leg, slid the compute block into it, sealed the pocket.

Tali continued to look at the pocket after Shepard had stood again, and then sighed. "Well, we should get back to that last server room and shut those nodes down."

Shepard nodded, pointing to the Pressure cylinder nearest. "Excellent. Let's go."

# # #

The ZDI watched as the last two attackers left the Server room from which the rocket had launched.

Its maintenance drones removed the compute block from one of the node stacks in the server room on the other side, lowered it into a small, wheeled rover, and opened the doors between Server rooms A and B in Pressure 3. The rover rolled from one Server room to the other, out the hole in the bulkhead left by the attackers, over wreckage of the main room to the ramp, up into the foyer, and out the hole made by the krogan initially cutting into the Pressure.

Its destination was several hundred kilometres away. It had a week-old map of Alliance sensor locations to avoid, and of non-functional wrecks to search for useful materials and equipment.

Bristling with its collection of tools, and topped with a PV array, it rolled toward the nearest automated Alliance station as the Normandy team returned to the pressure cylinder to neutralise the rest of the still-functioning MR blocks.

* * * Glossary * * *

ARO: Augmented Reality Overlay

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

HUD: Heads-Up Display

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

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.

PDR: Pulse Detonation Rocket .gov/centers/marshall/pdf/173616main_pulse_

pelats: long-term residents of shelters, derived from a turian word for vagrant, but when rendered into Thesserit, less charged with the negative connotation

paperclipper: *sigh*
Okay, read this: wired dot com/story/the-way-the-world-ends-not-with-a-bang-but-a-paperclip/

PV: Photovoltaics

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.

ZDI: Zone Defence Intelligence

A/N: Sorry for the delay, I thought I was going to follow the previous chapter with this one relatively quickly. (It was mostly written at the time.)
We've co-bought a house in central Washington to evade summer conditions; it wasn't until after doing so that I began to consider the amount of work that this will actually entail (the house was built in 1930...just like the first house we bought.) Well, if we can double our money on that one, well...we'll see...

In other news, I have COVID! I got the vaccine in March/April, so it mostly feels like a bad head cold to me. The symptoms change about every 4-6 hours; a dance, I suppose, between the pathogens and antigens; serious chills, a headache that throbbed unpredictably, loss of taste (in attire, though my wife tells me I have always suffered from this [hey, can I help it if every cosplay day is a good day?],) now it's down to occasionally stuffy sinuses and the 4-6 times-per-hour cough. ("Yay, team Antigens!") Don't know where I got it, other than "in Denver." I am holed up in a hotel (because none of my family would - or should - touch me with a 30-foot cattle prod.) that shares a car park with the clinic that gave me this fantastic news. (Sorry, is my Sarcasm dialed up too high?) Maybe this is the time to focus on writing current chapters again!

That and drinking a lot of water.

Shout-out to my wife and especially her dear friend Kimi, who arranged the hotel plus transport, and I think have rebooked my fliight. They're still holding out hope that a test given the day I'm supposed to leave will show negative, and I can be with her on Saturday. I would not start counting chickens, IYKWIM.