Ripples in the Stream
A D&D / Shadowrun / Mass Effect crossover by Vyrexuviel
Disclaimer: The author of this story does not, in any way, derive any profit from the story. D&D, Shadowrun and Mass Effect are the property of their respective copyright holders. Jorukaia and other unfamiliar characters in this story, however, are mine.
"Lotta dead bodies and blood, Chief. Watch your step."
Udina grimaced as he watched the scene through the video feed from Ashley's helmet-cam. They weren't really meant to be used like this, but in a pinch, they'd do. The quality was good enough that it was sufficient to make him regret his large lunch.
Garrus wasn't kidding about the bodies. The entire top of the outside stairwell was covered in gore. "See what you can make out."
"Will do, sir." Williams' voice was a bit tinny, but otherwise perfectly audible. "Whoever did this did it recently, sir. This hasn't had time to congeal yet."
The turian gave a nod, "I'd estimate five to ten minutes, tops."
"Then they might still be there. Find them, if at all possible."
Udina turned at that last order, sending Anderson, who had given it, a glare fit for a drill sergeant, "This is going to be costly in political capital. It seems I can't involve you in anything and have it come up anything but an unmitigated disaster." The barely-restrained fury of the man was very much in evidence, his arms folded tightly, and knuckles white as he gripped his biceps.
"I did my duty as I saw fit, Sir. You can put in a request for a military review of my actions, of course." Anderson wasn't going to give an inch. With Shepard dead, Udina's pet project fell through, and there was nothing the man could do to put the ashes of his dream back into shape. He knew it too, which was probably why he was firing in all directions.
"Wait, got something here. There was someone here, lost a bit of blood. Turian. Right shoulder punctured. That must have taken some work." Garrus' voice cut through to the two men in the Ambassador's office. "See this, Ms Williams?"
The view swung dizzyingly as the Gunnery Chief bent to get a closer look, "Is that a hole in the alloy?"
"Yup. Punched clean through, neat as you please. To judge by the blood splatter, the man was pinned here by that for a bit, then released." His voice dopplered oddly as he moved around, then burst out in a swear, "Damn. Well, here's that missing hand... Aand the other head. Spirits blessed be, whatever did that was some kinda sharp."
"Probably that weapon she used on that cop."
"Probably." Garrus' voice was surprisingly pensive. "No sign of the quarian yet."
"You can stop looking. Uff. W-Would either of you happen to have some distilled water, please? I could use something to drink."
Anderson had glanced aside as the door to Udina's office opened, so he was first to the quarian girl, helping her to a chair and ignoring Udina's look of thunderstruck anger, "Are you hurt, Miss?"
The quarian was splattered with blood, both turian, the bright blue patches, and either human or batarian, the bright red. She moved with a bit of caution, one hand on her stomach, and gave the captain a grateful glance as he seated her. "Tali. Tali'zorah nar Rayya. N-no, just.. just a bit of nausea. She said it would pass." The amount of blood splattered across her was, in the aggregate, tantamount to a body part. It was surprising she was in such firm control of herself. Anderson had seen many civilians break when faced with the realities of combat for the first time.
Udina glared almost malevolently, "Who said it would pass?"
"Her. The one you're looking for. She said she was called...Jorukaia?" That last came out half-lisped, untranslated, and had the two humans shared a startled glance.
An asari leaned against the rail, peering out the huge window-wall into the interior of the Citadel. To the casual observer, she might have been dressed a bit oddly, wearing a long, flowing robe of shimmery fabric in an archaic but not unfashionable design. She gazed with interested abstraction out the wall, as if what was out there was both intriguing and uninteresting at the same time.
'Stupid, stupid, stupid! You really buggered things up but good there, killing an officer. C-Sec will want you now, not just because you broke out, but because you put one of their best in the morgue!' Joru's internal rant at herself was never betrayed by the impassive face of the asari she wore. 'And to top it all off, you just had to leave that blasted message for Garrus, showing off again. Admittedly, Tali had to get out of there right then, and she'd probably accept your explanation of a short-range, single-use personal mass-corridor better than "yeah, I have wings", but still, you could have done that so much better!'
She frowned, but only slightly, unnoticed by the passers-by, some of whom were giving the tall, slender asari appreciative glances. 'And now you've gone and alienated the people you could have trusted to help you! Cut yourself off from their support, just when you needed it!'
'Still,' she answered back, 'There's always that young asari...' She half turned, lifting a hand and the flicker of an omnitool showing for a moment. An asari face, young, pale, with wide, innocent eyes showing for a moment. It was a sketch, not an actual photo, but fairly good likeness. Another image showed beside it, an actual photo this time, with the legend "Liara T'Soni" next to it. Beneath both of them were the words "Facial Match: 93.6%. Current Location: Therum Mining Site Alpha-371."
'You're trying to find a single girl in the whole damn galaxy, and your only clue is an image pulled from the extranet based on a half-remembered image of a face from outside time itself. Who are you trying to fool, Jorukaia No-Name?'
'Myself, I guess.' The dark-skinned asari pushed away from the wall and made her way towards the stairs down towards C-Sec, though she somehow slipped from notice before she got there. 'Sometimes, hope is like that.'
Victus was going on dextro-caf and nerves. He'd been formally discharged from the hospital over a day and a half ago, but his partner was still in there, so he hung around. Executor (spirits bless the man) had given him a week off to get his head straight, more than the usual allowance when one's partner was seriously injured.
He'd managed to get his eyes working again just in time to see what that bitch had done to Caestron. He'd seen the knife sticking out of his partner's chest, just below the sternum. He'd managed to get to him before he hit the deck, and already had the medi-gel canister in his hand, shooting the stuff into Cae's wound and screaming over his comms for a medic.
He'd been woozy as fuck for the next few hours, but stayed even after he was out of the doc's clutches. His crest had had a hairline fracture running down most of the length, and hadn't felt really right in the head again until after that had been dealt with.
'Spirits blast the bitch, if Cae dies...'
His head snapped up as a door opened, and he was on his feet before the docs got through. One of them stayed, an asari, giving him a weary, but reassuring nod.
Victus almost passed out from relief, sitting down again and waiting for the nurses to pass. the doc stepped over and laid a hand on his shoulder, "He's out of danger, for now. He could relapse, though, so we'll be keeping him longer."
"How bad...was it?" He didn't really want to know, but Caestron had been like a brother to him ever since his own had died during the cursed Relay 314 incident.
The asari pursed her lips a bit, and let out a sigh, "Bad. Left lung nicked, diaphragm scored, but not severed. Missed the heart entirely, but punctured the stomach. The pain must have been excruciating."
Victus was even more glad now that he'd used medi-gel first. That stuff wasn't normally supposed to get into the digestive tract, but better that than having stomach acids eating your lungs.
"We mended the damage to the lung and stomach, but the diaphragm will have to heal on its own. Quick thinking on your part saved his life."
Victus shifted a bit in his chair, "I'm just sorry I couldn't get the bitch that did it to him."
The turian watched intently, patient and relaxed at the side of the open space, where a geth platform was undergoing combat analysis testing. Metallic limbs swung, fingers twitched, its compound eye-light twitched back and forth from target to target with inhumanly precise speed. Shots rang in the enclosed area, rapid as automatic fire, a quick three shots there, four in that target, just one into a third, but a kill-shot none the less. Five towering Primes stood against the wall, exchanging data at a furious rate over their tight-beam radio links, acting as a mobile server-hub for the considerable numbers of geth programs involved in the test.
He turned at a nonmetallic footfall near him, glancing with faintly-glowing blue eyes at the asari. She merely gazed at him, her face not rigid, but relaxed as if asleep, one of the signs of growing thralldom. Saren sighed internally. Another potentially useful servant reduced to little more than a biological construct. Still, the thralls did have their uses. There was only one reason why one would approach him at this juncture, they had been given a blanket order to avoid the geth areas of Sovereign.
"Our guest is secured, her chambers made comfortable?"
"Yes, Master." The asari's voice was not flat, but still faintly toneless, "She expressed her desire to speak to the one in charge, Master."
Saren gave a faint sigh, "What were our losses during her acquisition?" There had to have been some.
"One platform destroyed, biotically thrown into magma; no chance of recovery. Three others disabled when she overloaded her portable generator."
He clenched his mandibles and stroked his cybernetic arm. At close range, that would short out much of a Geth's higher processing functions, and they'd need time to reboot using alternate processors. "Were the damaged platforms recovered?"
"No, Master. They were left behind. Sensors detected organic activity near the relay. Haste was considered essential."
Mandibles gritted in anger, "Send a scout craft back to recover or destroy any geth technology. I want no connection to our operations left on that planet."
The flaccid-faced asari gave a faint nod, "It shall be done, Master."
She turned to go, and Saren spent a moment gazing after her and musing. She had once been a high-ranking commando, part of the company that Benezia had sent to him, a peace overture, willing to open a dialog. They had been nosy, suspicious, but willing to talk. He hadn't known that Sovereign had turned up his indoctrination until they started hallucinating, and had decried their usefulness in an undamaged state to his Master.
In vain. Sovereign had, in no uncertain terms, informed him of his subservient status, and that these would be useful tools, no more. It had reiterated its desire for him to seek the Anomaly, without further distractions, and that brought up another thought.
Saren slipped out of the testing chamber and strode down towards Sovereign's main chamber, where a holographic map of the galaxy swirled in endless, real-time representation. Sovereign was powerful, and while it could sense the Anomaly out there, it had never been close enough to it to get a bearing save at one place. He swept his hand through the galaxy, highlighting one star, which swelled to show its system, then zoomed in again on one planet. The legend "EDEN PRIME" appeared to one side, along with the note that the attempted destruction of the colony had failed.
'I failed Master there. Never again.' He gazed at the world, eyes narrow and frowning faintly. His geth had been on-site for only a few hours, but they'd been defeated consistantly only by a single group. An irritated twitch of his fingers brought up a map of the encounter, his geth marked as blue sparks on the orange-and-red landscape. And one other spark was there, marked in blazing yellow-white. Sovereign had been in full retreat, ans was about to access the relay when the Anomaly first manifested itself. Even at that range, it had had enough of a glimpse to mark its location, almost superimposed on the marker indicating the last known location of the Prothean Beacon.
Somehow, had the Protheans left one last trap for their ancient adversaries? Saren's gaze intensified as he gazed at the image, then gave a grunt. He'd have to start by searching through the records, seeing who was on planet at the time, and that could be tedious. Not to mention dangerous, if those fools in C-Sec dug up something they shouldn't, or that windbag Udina's bleating forced the Council into investigating his activities. Still, there was nothing left of his presence on the planet. Yes, they knew the geth had been there, but as far as the rest of the galaxy was concerned, it was just a raid by the Geth to get some prothean tech.
Still, something about that spark seemed to draw his eyes. "Somehow, somewhere, I'll find you. That I promise."
As is usual with pivotal events in one's life, Aethyta wasn't prepared for hers.
Specifically, she was in the shower when the comm went off.
She growled softly, shut off the water, and rapidly toweled down as much as she could while the comm squealed to itself in the other room. "Alright, alright, I'm coming, blast you."
The face that appeared over the vidplate slapped away any irritation she might have felt at being dragged away from a relaxing passtime. Matriarch Benezia T'soni looked old. Given that she was in her ninth century, she had reason to be, but she looked haggard, almost frantic. Her eyes were wide, the light-blue pupils almost entirely rimmed with white as she stared at her friend.
Her old lover.
"Aethyta. She's gone. Taken."
"Who's gone, what are you talking about, Nezzie?"
"There might not be time. She's been kidnapped!"
"Who? Slow down, for the Goddess's sake, take a deep breath and begin at the beginning."
That seemed to finally get through the older woman's panic-haze "Liara! She's gone, snatched. Please, I can't go myself or I'd be already headed out there. I know we didn't exactly part on the best of terms, but she's your daughter too, Aethyta, you have to help me, help us!"
A cold knot of ice settled into the pit of Aethyta's stomach. Benezia was right, they hadn't parted on the best of terms, but she had undestood Matriarch T'Soni's reasons for ending the relationship so abruptly. They had been several-fold. First the growing political current that didn't want to listen to what Aethyta had to say at the Circle of Matriarchs. They would have moved to silence her if she had stayed, which is why she was in her appartment on Illium. Benezia had been one of the few moderating voices in the Circle, so her distancing herself from Aethyta was a good move, politically. And then there was the fact of their daughter. Liara had not been born at the time when the pair of them broke up, and Aethyta occasionally still wished to meet her daughter.
Now, however... "Where. When. Talk details, Nezzie, I'm going to pack."
She turned, and thus missed the grateful look that the older matriarch gave her, "She's with an archeological dig on Therum. I'm not sure which mine it was, but one of them broke into a prothean ruin. She's part of the archeological team there, and I was having a weekly call when something happened. I heard her being snatched. I heard, heard gunfire. Biotic discharges. Screams. Please, Aethyta, hurry."
"I'll contact my hanger and get my ship skybound as fast as physically possible, but you'll need to get off the line, Nezzie." In a lighter tone, returning to the comm station, she murmured, "It's good to talk to you again, though I wish the circumstances were otherwise."
"I...yes, it is. Go with the goddess's grace, Aethyta. And bring her back." Benezia's eyes seem to burn through the commlink, then she was gone.
Aethyta's fingers were allready tapping out the commcode to the hanger she owned, "I don't care who you are, get me the hanger supervisor- Ahh, good. Get my ship ready to fly as fast as possible"
"B-B-But, ma'am, Ms Shevanna said she was going to do an overhaul!"
"WHAT?!"
"I still say we need to do an overhaul on that port side engine cluster. I could hear the damn thing buzzing the entire trip."
Aethyta sighed and gave a faint nod, "As soon as we get back to a decent port, alright? I just... Needed to get here as soon as possible. You and Aiyata do what you can with it while I'm dirtside, alright?"
"You're just damned lucky I'm a good engineer, Thea." Shevanna gave her old friend a smile. A friend of Aethyta's from back in their wild maiden days, Shev had turned into a very good engineer by necessity, keeping their asteroid-hopper functional despite all the bangs and dents Aethyta's erratic piloting had gotten them into.
Aethyta gave a wry smile as she grabbed up her encounter suit and skinned into it with the ease of much practice. "Yeah. Yeah, I am. Thanks again for keeping the old bucket in one piece, Shev. I'll try to get us back before anything else falls off."
A snort followed her into the airlock, along with a raised voice, "Alright, newbie, you know anything about old-style quarian ion-drive engines?"
Aethyta's booted feet rang on the metal decking as she raced up to the mine entrance. Why humans insisted on starting from ten or fifteen meters up the side of a steep hill when doing their mining was anybody's guess, but at least the tunnel was fairly smooth and not too steep. She stopped at the end of it, gazing into the depths of a deep, deep chasm, and the wall that ended it across about fifty meters of open space. A smooth, white wall of unknown material that resisted even the infernal heat of molten rock.
She shook her head slightly, glad to have gotten out of the helmet. The atmosphere on Therum wasn't unbreathable, just hot in the extreme, and she could feel her faintly-scaled skin starting to dry and contract. 'Best get this over with.'
She was halfway down the scaffolding when she heard the gunfire.
She quickly glanced over the catwalk, clinging to the side of the rock face, and spotted the trouble. Around a dozen gleaming shapes, most of them between one figure and the walkway up to the elevator, a few more of the metal assailants trying to find flanking shots. The figure seemed to have found herself a nice hole to hide in, an upturned metal table taking the brunt of the fire while her flank was protected by a thick outcropping of basaltic rock.
She was just too damned far away to make out details, but the figure was an asari. Young one, too.
She rushed to the end of the catwalk and threw caution to the wind, leaping off and wrapping her biotics about herself to slow her fall. Even as she did so, she heard a few shots ping off the catwalk and let go her biotic control to drop faster. She landed heavily, but missed a razor-sharp ridge of rock as she landed on the hard floor, rolling behind a rock just as more bullets stitched into the wall behind her.
She heard a voice calling out from across the open space, but couldn't make out the words over the fusillade of fire, which while not loud, was constant. 'Time to do something about that.'
The matriarch waited until she heard a momentary lull in the gunfire, strengthened her Barrier, and rolled out to fire off a Throw at the central group of geth. She managed to catch five of them in the blast, but only buffeted two while three were hurled off their feet.
It took Aethyta several minutes of contemplation, much later in her cabin, to understand exactly what that fight implied. The instant the geth had stopped firing on her position, the girl was in motion. The smooth, controlled grace of a born commando in the prime of her maidenhood, but combined with the precision of a veteran matron, and melded with a speed that Aethyta had never seen. Within three seconds she had literally hacked apart the three geth nearest her and was already en route to the next set when Aethyta's second Throw was followed by the older asari rolling back into cover. The electronic shrieks of the Geth were mingled with the shriek of tortured metal for a bit, before she caught her breath and rolled out again.
Half the geth were down already. Two with their heads severed, and stabs to the torso, two more with their gun-arms removed at the elbow or shoulder, one with a single stab to its midsection, and its backplate blown off as whatever power source they used cooked off. The final one was still twitching and warbling, all four of its limbs hacked off at the joints to the torso, and the girl now huddled against one of the many boulders out in the open with the geth trying to flank her.
Aethyta fired off a Warp at the nearest, followed by a Shockwave at the other, starting to feel the drain. She hadn't eaten well in the day or so since her former lover's frantic call, barely three thousand calories, which for an active asari isn't all that much.
Luckily, she didn't have much else to do. The girl's reflexes were good, blasted good. The girl sprung up and out of cover as if the attack was the result of well-rehearsed coordination. She was across the open space to the warped Geth in a flash, her entire body whirling as she leaped from a low rock and bringing her blade down at the top of its 'head', shearing through it with unbelievable ease. She grunted as the five remaining Geth started to pepper her with shots, dropping prone and scurrying behind a small boulder that wouldn't take much for the geth to get around.
Aethyta managed to crank her jaw back into place quickly enough to summon up a Lift, the mass-negation field catching all the rest of the machines in it. Surprisingly, they kept firing, though their aim became very erratic in the rippling distortions of gravity that encompassed them.
The girl stood, her knife flipped around and before Aethyta could stop her she had thrown it. To the matriarch's surprise, she managed to hit one of the geth despite the distorting effects of an active mass effect field. The geth she hit gave a warbling wail and stopped twitching.
"Great, now how are you going to get that back? Idiot."
The girl just gave her a glance, and as the geth thumped to the ground, a faint smile flickered over her lips. Despite her odd attire, and with at least three bullet holes leaking cobalt-blue blood, the girl seemed to be enjoying this. "Thanks for the assist."
Aethyta just growled at her, and twisted her biotics, sending a Singularity to wipe up the remainder of the Geth, "Never trust to fortune girl, it'll bite you in the ass." She surveyed the girl intently, now that she had the time to do so. Dark blue skin, almost purple, oddly pale golden eyes that hinted at exotic ancestry. No facial markings, which was odd for a maiden as young as this one looked to be, and, on second glance, a network of scars on the outsides of both forearms. 'Defensive wounds. She must have had a hard life.'
"True," the girl stalked over to the dead geth, ripping the blade out of it's throat and tucking it away somewhere. "Name's Jona. Jona Siberys. Thanks again, stranger."
Something about her speech finally clicked home to Aethyta, the girl was speaking English, not High Thessian. She was hearing the girl's talk through her earbuds, not direct. Aethyta cocked her head, "Why aren't you speaking Thessian?"
The girl's gold eyes looked away, "Never learned. Mom died when I was young."
Aethyta winced, but nodded. 'Probably a slavechild. Damn.' "I've got a ship on the surface if you need a lift? Just how did you get here anyway?"
"Hitched a ride. Didn't count on the company." The girl indicated the Geth, "I was looking for someone."
"Oh, who?"
Pale-gold eyes gazed into Aethyta's blue ones, "Youngster by the name of Liara T'soni. You wouldn't happen to know why the Geth kidnapped her, by any chance?"
AN:
With this chapter, Ripples breaks the 20,000 record. YEE. I am SOOOO sorry for the delay on this, but I found myself rewritting the plot halfway through and had to make some rather severe changes to what I had planned to make things work out the way I wanted. Thanks sooo much to Erratus Enigma for beta-ing this pile of steaming dragondung into something approximating the general vicinity of 'good'. Things will start to snowball from here, but it might take me a while to get the next chapter out.