Omake - The Vanishing
GS year 2449.3
Unnamed Star System, 17 light years from Relay 127
Turian Cruiser Justice Maker
"Captain! Contact at extreme range, no, multiple contacts! Hundreds of them!" The sensor operator looked around at Captain Dickus, who leaned forward in his seat. "All sizes, several of them are absolutely enormous."
"Active drive signatures? IFF transponders?" the captain queried, feeling intrigued and worried. They were on a long range patrol looking for a pirate group that had been reported to have come through Relay 127 some two months earlier, and while it was unlikely that the pirates would have come this far on conventional FTL, it wasn't unknown. The system was known not to have any suitable rocky planet, but at least one of the gas giants had a number of large moons as was quite common so they could have established a base here.
"No, nothing," the operator replied after another scan of the complex screens at his station. "They're reading as completely cold. No power output at all as far as I can tell. And it's not hundreds, it's thousands of ships." The man's voice was shocked. "More than forty five thousand distinct pings and still rising. They're in a cometary orbit of the primary, spread out over half a million kilometers or more."
"Derelict, then," Dickus mused, flexing his mandibles in thought. "But the only fleet that size I've ever heard of was..." He froze, as everyone on the bridge slowly turned to look at him.
"The Quarians..." his XO murmured with a tone of complete astonishment in his voice.
"The Migrant Fleet," the captain nodded.
"But they vanished without a trace nearly thirty years ago," his second in command commented. "Everyone's been wondering what happened to them ever since. No one has seen a single Quarian for at least twenty seven years, either. They all just… disappeared. Got on ships and never came back."
"Maybe we finally found what happened to them," Dickus mused. "Any signs of the pirates, or any other active drives in the system?" he asked the sensor man.
"No, Captain. Unless they're hiding behind one of the planets relative to us, I can't detect anything. We'd need to move to a few other locations to be sure, though."
With a nod the captain turned to the helm officer. "Short FTL jump to a position ninety degrees around the ecliptic," he ordered. "Rescan the system again. We need to make sure this isn't a trap of some sort."
Very shortly the ship accelerated to superluminal velocities, crossing billions of kilometers in minutes, then slowed to sublight again. Scanning for anything waiting for them in the dark or behind a planet or the star took several hours, and Captain Dickus repeated the process twice more until he was reasonably sure that they were genuinely alone.
Even then, no one was willing to be absolutely sure of that. For years, there had been rumors going around about how some people, in some far flung places, had reported an eerie sensation of being watched, even when nothing at all was detectable on sensors of any sort. The rumors were just that, rumors, but they were similar enough and numerous enough that most spacefaring people tended to wonder if there might be something to them…
But, leaving superstition out of the equation, it seemed likely that they really were unobserved, so in the end he gave the command to, very carefully and with weapons ready, approach the vast fleet of apparently dead ships.
When they were close enough to see them with the forward cameras, they coasted for a while just inspecting the sight. Thousands upon thousands of little pinpoints of reflected light, only visible after a lot of light amplification, drifted without power far from the star they were in orbit of. At this range the primary was only a very bright pinprick, the small white dwarf star nearly twenty light hours away, and their orbit would take hundreds of years for one complete rotation.
"No heat sources at all, every ship shows as being at ambient temperature, sir. No active energy readings either. Looks like they're totally shut down and dead."
"It's definitely the Quarian fleet, though," his XO remarked, pointing at a very large vessel that dwarfed most of the rest. "That's one of their liveships. I've seen it before, once, a long time ago."
"But where are the Quarians?" the helm officer said, sounding a little disturbed.
They all exchanged a glance. It was a good question.
Eventually, Captain Dickus stirred, looking away from the screens. "Take us into the fleet. Head for that big ship first, get some scans at close range." He tapped a control on the panel next to him. "Lieutenant Tercius, prepare a boarding party. Shipboard weapons only, with an investigative team."
"Yes, Captain," the voice of his Marine commander came back a moment later, even as the Justice Maker slowly and cautiously headed towards the apparently dead Quarian ships.
"By the Spirits, this is freakish."
"Quiet, Fractious! They might hear us."
"Who? There's no one here. Just like the last six ships." The armed Turian Marine looked around somewhat nervously even so.
"Both of you shut up," Lieutenant Tercius snapped. All of them were wearing environment suits as the derelict ships were mostly lacking in the general breathable atmosphere area, which was yet another aspect of this whole scenario that was bothering everyone.
"They're right, Lieutenant. This is extremely puzzling." Corporal Celestus put in, studying the hand held scanner he was waving around. "Every ship we've been in is intact, no damage other than what's consistent with about thirty years of lack of maintenance and no power, but there's no sign of anyone. No bodies, not even any blood. Or any sign of a struggle, weapons fire, or anything. It's like they all just… vanished."
All the Turians, even Tercius, gripped their weapons a little harder at his words, and yet again looked around, even upwards. He was right, the lieutenant thought. This was one of the most bizarre things he'd ever experienced, and walking around in zero gravity in the dark, only their mag boots holding them to the deck, wasn't something he was actually enjoying at all. The lights spearing from the sides of their helmets made shadows dance about in a way that constantly had one or other of them flinching and pointing his gun at something that wasn't there, which wasn't helping discipline at all.
"What do you think happened to them?"
"No idea yet," Celestus muttered. "Not violence, that much I'm pretty certain of, but what else it could be… I'd swear they just sort of wandered off. There were even food packets left lying around like they were in the middle of eating on the last ship." He stopped and pushed on a door to the side of the corridor they were on, forcing it open in the absence of power, and stuck his head inside. Tercius watched as he pulled it out again a moment later. "Same as the others. Everything intact, no damage I can see, but abandoned."
"I really don't like this, sir," Private Fractious said, his voice a little unsteady. "The Quarian fleet had millions of people on it, and they're all gone? What if whatever took them comes back?"
"What do you mean, private?" Tercius growled. "Took them? What makes you think that something 'took them.' Maybe they just..."
"Neatly jumped out the nearest airlock, all of them at the same time?" Fractious said, interrupting him without really thinking about it. "So where are the bodies? There's nothing floating around outside the ships. And if they left somewhere else, who brought the ships here?"
The small detachment of marines stopped and looked at each other, before glancing around again. As much as he didn't want to admit it, Tercius thought, Fractious had a point.
This was indeed freakish. And getting more worrying by the second.
Still, they were Turians, and Turians laughed in the face of the freakish.
That didn't stop him looking around again, peering into the corners where the shadows were, and thinking about all the stories he'd heard in bars all over the galaxy about how things out there in the cold of space sometimes took someone home with them…
It was a relieved team that finally reported back to their ship many hours later, with a hell of a lot of scan data and not one clue as to where the Quarians had actually gone.
When the Justice Maker reported back, it caused a lot of confusion, and in various places a lot of deep worry, that only added to all the other bizarre things that had been happening around the galaxy for nearly fifty years now. People who were aware of the truth, of which there were only a few, spent quite a lot of time staring out into the night and thinking.
When, some years later, someone had the bright idea to send a ship to poke around the Perseus Veil, they only got even more worried.
Finding that the entirety of the Geth fleets had also up and vanished at some point was the sort of thing nightmares were made of. It paled into insignificance when they made the really worrying discovery, though.
GS year 2453.6
Councilor Tevos's Private Quarters
Citadel
Councilor Tevos stared wordlessly at the STG operative who was looking back, his skin paler than it should have been and his face showing subtle signs of what she recognized through many years of experience as a Salarian who was terrified.
"What in the name of the Goddess do you mean, Rannoch is missing?!" she finally shouted.
