Delayed a day due to a nasty bout of illness. Sorry!
The plan was simple: Shepard would take the lead in the conversation between their team and Benezia, if at all possible. Wrex would keep an eye and ear out for anyone trying to sneak up on them, and Liara would focus on determining whether or not Benezia could be convinced to come quietly, based on her own experiences with her mother. In the event of a fight, Joker would open things up with the Normandy's guns, hopefully clearing out the asari commandos before they could turn the ground team into vaguely meat-like goo while Liara would try to trap Benezia in a stasis field. If that failed, they'd split up and throw whatever they had at her and hope that she got killed before they did.
It wasn't an elegant plan, but when four biotics and a starship's cannon were involved, elegance was one of the first things thrown out the window.
Shepard glanced over her shoulder before the final door to the lab. Wrex was as impassive as always, although his slow shifting of weight from foot to foot belied his tension.
The krogan's survived more wars than the entire Normandy put together, she thought to herself. He'll be fine.
Liara, on the other hand... it was obvious the poor girl was barely holding it together, and it hadn't gotten better. The hot labs had been stressful, gunning down the asari doctor had been stressful, having the other doctor fly off the handle had been stressful, having to kill the guard captain had been stressful... the list went on.
Still, that she hasn't broken down completely so far speaks well of her fortitude, Shepard thought, giving her a quick reassuring smile (or what she assumed was reassuring – she was never sure how much of a crossover there was between human and asari facial expressions, despite their other similarities) before turning back to the door and taking a readying breath of her own.
Time to earn my pay.
She was waiting for them.
Not idly – she was clearly trying to do something to the largest rachni Shepard had seen in their trek through the facility – but she stepped back almost immediately when the door opened.
The older asari's eyes flickered across them, registering their presence one by one and lingering only briefly on Liara.
"You do not know the privilege of being a mother," she said, in a harsh voice without preamble. "There is power in creation. To shape a life, turn it toward happiness or despair..."
She clenched her fists, and Shepard tensed, but it was only an expression of anger, not an attack.
Not yet, at least.
"Her children were to be ours," she continued, her gaze drifting back to the caged rachni queen. "Raised to hunt and slay Saren's enemies."
She stepped back from the cage and moved a few paced toward them. Posturing, Shepard thought briefly. Still not an attack.
Benezia stared down at Liara, her face twisting with something like disdain. "I will not be moved by sympathy, no matter who you bring to our confrontation."
"Truly?" Shepard canted her head to the side, drew her pistol, checked the safety with her thumb, leveled at it Liara's temple and pulled the trigger.
For a moment – the barest, briefest moment – Benezia's eyes went wide, and her arm spasmed with a flare of blue.
Interesting, Shepard noted as the weapon clicked, very interesting. She is under his control, yes, but it is not absolute.
It was a common trait among creatures that used K-type reproductive strategies to care for their offspring. In fact, it was the defining trait – protect and invest, to ensure that genes were passed on successfully, despite having a low number of children. Most sentient creatures used it, with salarians, krogan, and to a lesser degree vorcha being the only exceptions in the settled galaxy.
Threatening the offspring, especially the sole offspring, of such a species was one of the surest ways to provoke a powerful emotional response. Very few people wanted to see their children harmed, and Shepard had taken advantage of it to end fights more than a few times in her life.
Now that I know that, though... what do I do with it?
She lowered her pistol from Liara's head and holstered it while the asari gasped beside her. "Of course not," she said to Benezia, whose composure had already recovered. "Despite what you might believe, that's not why I recruited your daughter. It was, shall we say, a side benefit."
"Indeed," the matriarch said, and for a moment Shepard could guess how she sounded with her voice not twisted by rage. "What have you told her, Liara?"
"What should I say?" Liara spat, recovering remarkably quickly from Shepard's unannounced ploy. "Should I say you're brainwashed? Evil? Should I tell them how to kill you, mother?! What should I say?!"
"Have you ever-"
Her earpiece beeped once.
"-faced an asari commando unit before, Commander? Few humans have."
And not a moment too soon, Shepard thought. "No. I suppose that means we're done talking?"
"Quite so," Benezia said, raising her hands while the doors leading out of the main chamber hissed open.
"NOW!" Shepard bellowed with her radio open, and the world exploded.
The Normandy mounted three forward-facing heavy weapons: A spinally mounted mass accelerator cannon used on targets without some kind of barrier, and a pair of disruptor torpedoes used to take down said barriers. While the torpedoes would handily clear out the entire chamber, they lacked the precision to do so without killing Benezia and the ground crew at the same time.
However, the main gun of the Normandy was a weapon meant to rip through capital ships from prow to stern, and even on its lowest power settings it was still not something you wanted to be anywhere near the receiving end of. Which, of course, was what Shepard was relying on: The idea that nobody was insane enough to fire on their own close quarters battle with ship-to-ship weapons.
The first round struck the wall three and a half meters behind them, tearing through the ice and steel exterior of the lab building with ease before embedding itself nearly twenty meters into the wall on the far side of the building. The projectile itself missed everyone – flying clean behind the Normandy's ground team and above the assari commandos that were advancing out of the back chamber.
The same could not be said of the impact debris, and fully half of Benezia's commandos died in a torrent of steel shrapnel and fragmented ice that carried on in the wake of the hypersonic cannon shot.
The sonic boom and shockwave knocked all four of them onto the floor, and Shepard covered the back of her head while debris continued to bounce around the room, hoping the barrier she was desperately throwing power into would hold against it.
The main gun has an absolute minimum cycle time of eight seconds, which means we're either going to get run over by the other commandos, or-
Her train of thought was derailed by a searing red glow and the staccato cracks of laser impacts as the Normandy's anti-missile GUARDIAN lasers strafed the other side of the room, blowing the lab equipment – and any living creature unfortunate enough to be near it – to tiny, well-seared bits.
She lifted her head off the ground and glanced around. Wrex was already picking himself up, Liara was curled into a ball behind her, and nobody appeared grievously injured. Benezia, too, was shaking her head and pushing herself off of the ground.
Clearly a tough one, Shepard thought, heaving herself off the floor to pull Liara up. "LIARA! STASIS!" she yelled, hauling her up.
But Liara just sank back to the floor, and it was then that Shepard spotted the seeping head wound from the piece of ice that had crashed into her.
Swearing, she knelt down and checked her pulse, finding it strong and steady, her touch causing the asari to groan softly.
A flash of blue from above announced Benezia's return to the fight – a barrier, if Shepard was any guess – and Shepard swore again. "Wrex! Distract her!"
Her answer was a krogan battle cry, loud enough even after the apocalypse they'd just weathered to echo through the building, followed by a searing blue flare as a biotic ability missed its target.
He has maybe ten seconds before he's dead, Shepard guessed, letting Liara settle slump back down on the deck. Sorry, T'Soni. Looks like we're not bringing your mother in alive.
Shepard quickly swapped the magazine on her pistol out, replacing the explosive brick for the toxin-laced rounds she'd had Wrex purchase back on the Citadel, then moved to support her krogan.
Did... did anyone see where the aircar that hit me went? Liara thought fuzzily.
She was sore all over. Her head, her aural membranes, her side, her chest... she could count on one hand the parts of her that weren't aching, and she'd been involved in enough accidents to realize she'd been hit in the head somewhere along the line. Everything was soft and fuzzy, and she couldn't quite remember what she had been doing.
She rolled over onto her back and blinked. The bug in the cage was huge! It almost looked like a rach-
Memory came thundering back.
"Shepard! Mother!" She gasped, twisting around to push herself off the floor and see what was going on.
At the top of the stairs, her mother was locked in one on one battle with Wrex, the krogan managing to dodge the bolts of gravitic energy her mother was hurling out well enough to avoid a fatal wound, but he'd clearly lost the use of his left arm and a gash in his stomach was bleeding in time with his pulse.
Shepard was nowhere to be seen.
Gathering her strength, she slowly began building up the energy to bind her mother in a space-time bubble. It wouldn't stop her for long – she doubted she could maintain the effect for more than a few seconds – but it would hopefully buy them enough time to arrange an ambush that wouldn't kill her.
She made a hurling gesture – a mnemonic more than anything, as the ability manifested at her target rather than traveling – only to watch in horror and confusion as the entire ability evaporated into nothingness around the bright blue shell surrounding Benezia.
"Oh, your friends didn't kill you, I see," her mother sneered while waving her hand, and Liara instantly collapsed to the floor with what felt like a small mountain on her. "Such good companions. Stay down, daughter. I will deal with you lat-AGHK!"
The weight vanished with the shout of pain, and Liara's head snapped up in time to see her mother gasping, writhing and trying to clutch at something behind her before her legs crumpled under her and she crashed, unceremoniously, to the floor.
"Mother!" Liara cried, lurching to her feet.
Standing behind her mother's prone form was Shepard, holding a standard-issue Alliance combat knife in a ready stance, purple blood and thicker things dripping off the blade.
"Nice... timing..." Wrex gasped, pushing himself off the pile of crates Benezia's last attack had thrown him into.
Liara limped to the top of the stairs, and Shepard held up a warning hand. "Liara-"
"It's my mother," Liara sobbed. "Shepard. Please. I can't..."
Shepard looked down at the pain-wracked asari at her feet and nodded. "You may regret it, but the choice is yours," she said. "She is no danger to anyone now."
"Spine? Both clusters?" Wrex asked, liberally covering his stomach in medi-gel, and Shepard nodded. "Good."
Liara knelt down by her mother's head and gently lifted it, propping her up her knee. "Benezia... mother..."
The matriarch's expression changed, then. The pain was still there, but the hate, the malice that had twisted her visage from matronly to maniacal receded. "Liara... listen..."
"Mother, I-" Liara sobbed.
"Hush, little wing," the asari gasped, and Liara went suddenly still. "I can fight... his compulsion... only for a moment... please, you must listen..."
Shepard tapped her omni tool, setting the device to record.
"Saren... he searches for the Mu relay. It was..." she coughed, and blood coated her lips. "Cast out of position when the star it orbited went supernova. The rachni have a... genetic memory. They can pass knowledge from queen to drones... it's how they made soldiers so quickly."
Shepard walked up and knelt down across from Liara. "Why does Saren need the Mu relay?"
Benezia rolled her head to face the commander. "He believes... that it will lead him to the conduit," she said. "I can... I can give you the information," she said. "Help you stop Saren."
"Shepard," Liara said. "Let me. I will give it to you. But please, let me have this. If she doesn't... if we can't..." she trailed off.
Shepard looked at the pair, then nodded. "Go. Before your resolve or strength fail, Matriarch Benezia."
Their touch did not last long, nor was it bracketed by ceremony like such things usually were. Shepard supposed that made sense, given the urgency, but it did answer the question she'd always had as to whether or not the ceremony was necessary.
Benezia broke the brief meld with a gasp. "I cannot- he is too loud- please, little wing, before-"
Liara sobbed. "Mother..."
The matriarch smiled, tears growing in the corners of her eyes. "You have... always made me proud, Liara," she said, then turned her head to Shepard. "Do it."
A flash of blue from Shepard's fingertip ended the Matriarch's life and Liara collapsed onto her body, howling in anguish.
"Well," Wrex said, his arm wrapped up in a makeshift sling, "what do we do with her?"
He gestured with his pistol at the armored cage that had the last rachni queen in the galaxy resting in it.
Shepard stood, leaving Liara to her grief, and walked over to stand by the krogan. "Rightfully," she said after a moment, "I don't know."
"You ask me, I think we shou- wait," he snapped, interrupting himself. "Did you hear that?"
Shepard shook her head. "Either krogan hearing is just way better than mine, or I need to get my ears checked," she said. "What did you hear?"
He frowned. "Sounded like somebody moving around. Did you finish off the commandos?"
"No," she said, "I never had time, but there weren't any in fighting shape when I was flanking Benezia."
"Well, I think you missed one, 'cause... what in the..." he trailed off, staring.
Shepard had seen a lot of strange things in her life, and lot more since she started chasing after Saren, but this was beyond even the usual level of weird she'd grown accustomed to.
A commando, one of the ones Shepard had dismissed for dead, was crawling toward them. No, that's not quite correct, she thought, crawling toward the rachni.
It wasn't hard to see why Shepard had written her off. Half the asari's face was missing, seared off by a near miss from a GUARDIAN laser, and both of her legs and her torso had been drilled clean through by the same weapon. Yet there she was, half crawling, half-dragging her way across the rubble-strewn platform to the rachni's cage.
"I'm gonna shoot her," Wrex said, clearly unnerved by the woman's behavior.
"Wait," Shepard ordered. "She's not a threat."
Wrex stared at her, then lowered his pistol a millimeter. "If you say so," he said dubiously.
The asari reached the cage and began hauling herself, weakly, to her feet, her head lolling back and forth while her eyes rolled up in their sockets.
Her mouth opened, and in halting, broken words, she began to speak.
"This one... serves... as our voice," she stammered. "We cannot... sing. Not in these low spaces. Your musics are... colorless."
"Joker filled you with enough plasma to pop a tank," Shepard said, staring at the rachni through the holes in the asari.
"This vessel... is at the... edge," the asari said. "Yet she... struggles. You cannot see... her... magnificence."
Shepard cocked her head at the asari. No way...
"We are... breathing on the... embers... we are... the... mother..." it continued, the asari beginning to twitch. "We sing... for those... left... behind. The children... you thought... silenced."
Stepping past the barely-standing asari, Shepard put her hand up against the glass to peer at the rachni within.
"Did you order your drones to kill the science team?" she asked.
"N-o," the asari replied immediately. "We were... locked away... here. The children were... beyond... our songs. They have been... lost... to silence. Stolen. From us. Before they could... learn... to sing."
Liara stepped up to the asari, silently, looking between her, Shepard, and the rachni with an expression of exhausted wonder.
It seems even here, she's still a scientist, Shepard thought with a faint smile.
"These... needle-men. They stole... our eggs... from us. Sought to turn our children... to beasts... of war. Claws... with no songs... of their own."
Wrex shifted back and forth, uncomfortably.
"Elders... are comfortable with... silence. Children... know only fear... if no one sings to them," she said, stumbling over the words in her hurry to get them out.
"I understand," Liara whispered. "A child left alone in a closet until she was sixteen would not be sane. We did them a mercy, Shepard, in the labs below."
"Agreed," Wrex said.
"We stand... before you," the asari said. "What will you... sing? Will you... release us...? Are we to... fade away... once more?"
Wrex pointed a clawed finger up at the top of the cage. "There are acid tanks rigged up on that thing," he said. "My ancestors would like it if you didn't make their sacrifice meaningless."
Shepard ignored him. "What would you do?" she asked simply.
"Hide!" the asari spat. "We... I... do not know... what happened... in the war," she continued. "We only heard... discordance. Songs the color of... oily shadows. We would seek... a hidden place. To teach our children... harmony."
"Are you a survivor of the war?" Shepard asked. "Or a clone?"
"We do not... know," the asari said. "We were only... an egg. Hearing mother cry... in our dreams. A tone from space... hushed... one voice... after another. It forced the singers to resonate with its own... sour... yellow... note. Then we awoke... in this place. The last... echo... of those who came out... of the singing planet."
Shepard glanced at Liara. "That sounds an awful lot like-"
"Saren's indoctrination," Liara nodded. "But how? The rachni wars were centuries before he was even born."
"His flagship is a reaper relic," Shepard offered. "Maybe he wasn't the first to find their gear."
"What... will you... sing?" The asari asked again.
Shepard thought for a moment, then tapped a few buttons on the terminal to open the cage. "You'll go free," she said simply.
"Are you stupid?" Wrex half-bellowed. "Your people didn't fight these bastards, so maybe you don't get it – they're a scourge!"
Shepard turned to face the krogan and raised an eyebrow. "I'm surprised at you, Wrex," she said. "I thought you'd like this outcome."
"How could I possibly like making what my people fought for irrelevant," he growled. "You're rendering every sacrifice the krogan made worthless."
"Your ancestors are dead, Wrex," she stated bluntly. "You are here today. You heard her. You saw what they were doing to her. Count the parallels between your people and hers, Wrex, and tell me killing her would be justice."
She folded her hands over her chest. "And if I'm wrong, and she does become a scourge... what was the name of the only species to win a war against the rachni, again?"
Wrex rocked back on his heels like he'd been hit with a brick.
She pantomimed flipping a coin in the air. "Heads you win, Wrex," she said. "Tails... they lose."
"... fine," he said gruffly. "Let her go."
"You will... you will let us sing again?" The rachni stammered through the asari. "You will... let us... compose... anew? We will sing of your... forgiveness... to our children!"
"Great," Wrex muttered under his breath while the asari crumpled to the floor. "Bugs are writing songs about you. I almost hope we'll get to clean up this mess."
"Well, I think it was the right decision," Liara announced.
"Glad somebody approves," Shepard said dryly while the rachni skittered out of the cage and into the facility's upper levels, then sobered. "Liara... about your mother..."
Liara flinched, all of the joy fleeing her eyes.
"... how do you want to handle her? I mean, what do asari do?"
Wrex cast one last glare at Shepard, then moved behind Liara to rub her shoulder.
"I-" she took a shuddering breath. "The Normandy has cold storage, yes? I... we can bring her back with us, and I will... make arrangements from there."
"Okay," Shepard said, and began hunting around for something to put the matriarch's body on. Carrying it back wouldn't be an issue; even tired, the three biotics could carry a single person back with them without difficulty.
The place was lacking in convenient coffins, or even scrap to serve as a board, but Wrex flattened a piece of lab equipment into something resembling a platform, and Shepard found a curtain to drape over her for the return trip.
Not something out of a holo, but better than dragging her around by the boot, I suppose, Shepard thought while they made the long trip back down the mountain.
It was a slow procession back down to to the port.
While the Normandy was more than capable of flying in growing blizzard, the shuttle was significantly less so, and as a consequence their return involved retracing their steps, getting back in the Mako, and driving slowly back down the darkening mountain to the garage they'd first set out from.
Port Hanshan security took one look at the three of them and decided not to see anything. It was, Shepard considered, a prudent move on their part: An injured krogan, a blood-soaked Spectre, a teary-eyed asari all carrying a cloth-covered figure meant business far above their pay grade.
"Holy shit, Shepard!" Noveria's interim administrator exclaimed when they walked slowly by the front of her office.
"Hello, Parasini," Shepard said. "An Alliance rescue team will be here in the next day or so. Please don't make their job harder; there are still civilians at Peak 15."
"I- right, Commander, will do. Is, uh," she bit her lip, "is that... blood? And is that the matriarch?"
Shepard glanced down at her armor, which was still covered in rachni ichor. "Yes to both," she said. "Oh. Everyone not approved by the rescue team is to stay out of Peak 15, on my authority. Parts of it are irradiated and there are probably still monsters in it."
The woman just gaped while Shepard walked slowly on, Wrex chuckling under his breath as they went.
"First order of business," Shepard said after they got through decontamination, "showers. The appeal of rachni guts wears off quickly. Doctor Chakwas?"
The doctor strode purposefully up to them, giving Wrex a brief examination and a muttered remark about soldiers and their over-reliance on medi-gel before grabbing Liara and pulling her into a fierce hug.
Liara made a faint squeaking noise, then went limp.
"Huh," Wrex said, raising a scaled eyebrow. "Figured you'd be the first to do that to her. Guess I owe your pilot twenty credits."
He tossed a lazy salute at Shepard and waddled off. "I'll be in the mess hall if you need me, Commander."
"You know, I wondered why we hadn't been ambushed by the rest of the team when we got in," Shepard said after a minute of nothing happening. "Your doing, Doctor?"
Chakwas lifted her head from the asari's shoulder to glare at Shepard. "Yes. Now shush."
Liara, who had collapsed into the old woman's arms, took a deep shuddering breath.
"It's okay," Chakwas whispered to her, rubbing her back in reassurance and pulling back from her, holding her shoulders and looking her straight in the eye. "You're going to be okay."
Liara said nothing, but nodded jerkily.
"Now, are you hurt? I know Wrex broke his arm, I'll wrangle him down for an X-ray and that gash later, but-"
"I'm fine," Shepard said over the asari's shoulder. "Liara took a knock on the head from debris."
Chakwas gently spun Liara around, lifting the back of her head to take a look, then hissed in sympathy. "Ooo, that's a nasty bump," she said. "You don't have hair to get rachni stuck in, so let's have you come down to medbay before you get clean."
Liara started to follow the doctor, but stopped and glanced over her shoulder. "I- Benezia-" she began, then cut herself off.
"I'll bring her down," Shepard said, heading back into the airlock to gently lower the mass and lift the former matriarch, then gestured for both of them to go.
It was a strange kind of procession. Chakwas had cleared the crew out of the upper level, save for Joker, but the ship wasn't that large, and most of them had piled around the mess hall. A few of them looked ready to cheer when they'd emerged from the elevator, but a glare from Chakwas cut them off before their fists were halfway in the air.
A silent gathering of marines, technicians, pilots, and engineers silently watched the three of them walk into medbay, the privacy glass fogging the instant they were inside.
An hour and a half later, with wounds tended and showers indulged in, the ground crew gathered in the briefing room.
A much more somber tone this time, I think, Shepard said, casting her gaze around the room. Given Benezia, as well as what we fought through, that is not wholly surprising.
"Alright, ladies and gentlemen," Shepard said, tapping her omni-tool on the side of her chair to silence the side conversations, "shall we?"
She waited for the crew to quiet down, then nodded at all of them. "So. Noveria. Not, I think, what most of us were expecting."
A snort and some bitter laughter met that remark.
She gave them a lopsided smile. "I know, I know. Still, I would like to point out that we accomplished all but one of our objectives: We found Benezia. We stopped one of Saren's plans. We found our more about what Saren is up to and how to stop him for good. We don't have all of the information for that, mind, or we'd be en route already – but we had more than we did when we woke up this morning. In fact, the only goal we didn't accomplish was bringing back Benezia alive... and not for a lack of trying."
On the other side of the room, Liara squeezed her eyes shut.
"Now, obviously, this comes with more than a few caveats," she said. "Binary Helix will almost certainly be furious about what we've done to their research facility, and for exposing them. I will likely end up on the receiving end of a smear campaign when the findings from the Alliance rescue vessel come out. Any of you who have concerns about this, please contact me after this meeting and I can discuss your options."
"Lastly," she said with a heavy sigh, "the rachni."
Silence filled the chamber.
"It goes without saying that none of you are to make any mention of their existence until I, the Citadel Council, and the Systems Alliance high command decide to make that information public... or those orders are contradicted directly by the Council. And yes," she added, her eyes narrowing, "those are orders."
"Copy, ma'am," Ash said heavily. "So what next? The Mu relay?"
Shepard shook her head. "No point. We're a stealth frigate, not a scout vessel, and crawling through dozens of solar systems to look for a ship that may or may not have made a short-range jump is futile. I was hoping Benezia would know where he was, but... no such luck."
Liara opened her eyes and nodded tiredly. "I know where the relay is, and I gave that information to Joker on the way here, but..."
"I know," Shepard said.
"Question," Garrus said, raising a talon. "What are you going to do with Binary Helix? The same as ExoGeni?"
There was a wariness to his tone that Shepard wasn't sure she liked. She thought the solution to ExoGeni had been rather elegant, even if she doubted they would see her point in doing what she'd done.
If Garrus disapproves, I may need to re-evaluate, she thought. She was talented, but far from omniscient, and there was little point in bringing on experts if one wasn't going to listen to them!
"Probably not," she answered slowly. "I can work with ExoGeni's greed. It is a... predictable factor. Binary Helix had Saren on their board, which means I can't trust anyone on there. Spectres are encouraged to make spies out of high-level corporate members as part of their own information gathering network."
Garrus nodded slowly. "What are you planning, then? Wait-and-watch?"
"Nothing so passive," she said. "As soon as I get reports off to the Council, warrants for the arrest of everyone above middle management at Binary Helix will go out ahead of the press release for this operation. They're just person-of-interest warrants at this point, so local law enforcement will handle them, but I fully expect a few more people will be dead or in jail by the time the dust settles."
Kaidan whistled. "And I thought the fallout from ExoGeni was going to be bad."
Shepard shrugged. "If I had any other choice, I'd take it," she grumped. "I'm already going to be dumping a huge pile of work on the Systems Alliance's public relations and legal defense team. Still, if the Binary Helix board members were involved with Saren's work, I'd be remiss in my duties not to at least haul them in for questioning."
"Besides," she added with a humorless smile, "it beats executing them in job lots."
"Keelah," Tali said, jerking back in her chair at the flat tone in Shepard's voice. "You'd really-"
"Only if absolutely necessary," Shepard interrupted, her voice firm. "In a choice between a repeat of the Eden Prime attack and whatever portion of their corporate leadership that's innocent, I know which one I'd have to pick."
The quarian shook her head. "Glad I don't have your job," she said fervently.
"There are days I wish I didn't have my job," Shepard admitted. "But getting back to your original question, Ash, what follows next is likely to be... well, boring."
"Boring, ma'am?" the soldier asked.
"Boring," Shepard confirmed. "While Benezia warned us that Saren was accelerating his work, there's very little we can do in response to that without knowing where he is or what he's up to. We clearly need more information, which I had hoped to find at Peak 15, but sadly fortune was not with us. As such, we'll be mounting a three-pronged approach from here out."
"First," she said, counting off on her fingers, "is the automated arm. The Systems Alliance made and makes heavy use of automated FTL-capable drones for exploration, and I plan on commandeering as many of them as I can get my hands on to explore the ends of the Mu relay. Anything anomalous turns up, we either send a scout team or investigate it ourselves."
"Second up are the salarians," she went on. "The STG had several teams dispatched shortly after we set out. Most of them have been following in our wake and sifting through the rubble, but a few set out after their own leads, and most of them have started to report in. Not a whole lot to go on, but a couple are late to check in, and if the STG is late it usually means they ran into trouble. Where's there's smoke..."
She trailed off, and Ash nodded enthusiastically. "There's fire. Find the missing eyelickers, find Saren."
"Language, chief," Shepard scolded gently, and Ash blushed. "And that's the hope, at least. Now, third, and finally, we get to hit the books."
Ash frowned. "Book, ma'am?"
"Actually, this is more Liara's area of expertise," she said, glancing at the asari. "What do you say, Liara? Up for a little library research?"
Liara smiled, a little wistfully. "I would be happy to assist. What are we looking for?"
"Any leads on another Prothean communication beacon," Shepard said.
"That will be difficult," Liara said with a frown. "They were not common before Saren began searching for them, and I suspect they will not become more so now that he's scoured the galaxy."
"Nevertheless, it's an avenue we haven't pursued yet, and that doesn't require anything else to get started," Shepard said firmly. "The first part we can conduct here – I'll give you a form letter of introduction that you can wave at any people that consider giving you grief about database access."
Liara smiled, a little wistfully. "That will be tempting to misuse, given some of the runarounds I had to put up with last time I went looking..."
"It's only misuse if it closes off avenues of research or wastes time," Shepard said. "If you want to give a stodgy old bureaucrat an ulcer by forcing them to give us access, by all means, be my guest."
"However," she said, turning to address the crew, "we start that tomorrow. I have a very strange report to write and deliver to the Council, and this has not been an easy mission – for any of us. Take the afternoon off. I'll be in my quarters if any of you need to discuss things further."
Three hours later, Shepard leaned back in her chair and groaned.
There simply was no good way to tell the Council that she'd discovered a living rachni queen and let her go without sounding completely insane, and she had the sneaking suspicion that "she seemed trustworthy" wasn't going to fly.
A chime at the door interrupted her train of thought, and she rubbed her eyes. "Enter," she called.
The hatch slid open to reveal Doctor Chakwas, who gave her a perfunctory smile before closing the door behind her. "Shepard," she said, taking a seat in the chair opposite her desk.
"Doctor Chakwas," Shepard replied, then frowned. "Is something wrong?"
The doctor stared at her before sighing and shaking her head. "I forget, sometimes, the extent of your condition," she remarked, half to herself. "Yes, Shepard. You have a member of your crew who is in distress, and you are sitting here writing a report that you know the Council will call you to explain regardless of what you put in it."
Shepard blinked. "You mean Liara? But she seemed-"
"Of course she seemed fine," the older woman snapped. "She's not going to go to pieces in the middle of a debrief, but that doesn't mean you can just let her stew in the back room of the medbay all evening."
Shepard scowled. "I had assumed she did not want to be in the company of the one who killed her mother," she said. "Was that wrong?"
"She knew as well as you did what the likely outcome was," Chakwas said. "You prepared her well for that, at least. It is my opinion, both personally and professionally, that she doesn't hate you for what you did – and that she would benefit from not being alone right now. Grief can be... emotionally poisonous."
"Oh," Shepard said. "Then... I should go speak with her?"
Chakwas nodded.
"Medbay?"
Chakwas nodded again.
She glanced at her terminal. "I suppose I'll finish this report later."
"Probably for the best, dear," Chakwas said, her gaze flickering to the mostly empty screen. "It doesn't look like you got very far, anyway."
Shepard shot the doctor a glare. "If you have any suggestions for the report, I'd be happy to hear them," she said.
"None at all," Chakwas said serenely. "Fortunately, that is not my job. Now, Liara, on the other hand-"
"If you any suggestions there, I would love to hear them as well," Shepard said, closing down her terminal. "You know I do not do... people."
Chakwas smiled. "You won her over by treating her like a person, not a title or position. Keep doing that, and you'll be fine."
Shepard paused, not entirely sure what the doctor meant, then sighed and nodded. "Thank you... I think. Now if you'll excuse me..."
"Liara?" she called, stepping through the open door into the dimly lit storage room.
The asari sitting at the desk twitched, then stood and turned to face her with purple-tinted eyes. "Shepard," she said, "if you are here to talk about Benezia's death, you need not bother. She brought it upon herself."
Okay, I might be bad at reading people, but I'm not that bad, she thought before raising an eyebrow. "That would be more convincing had I not been privy to weeks of agonizing over what to do about Benezia upon finding her, and if I had not walked in to find you staring teary-eyed at a locked terminal."
Liara flinched, looking away from her gaze, but said nothing.
Shepard reached out a hand and rested it on the other woman's shoulder. "I won't lie and claim to understand what you're going through," she said, "but I think it is quite clear that you care. She was your mother."
The asari turned her head to face her again, and Shepard could see her lip tremble. "S-she was," she said with a shuddering breath, "and... and she was not. I want to remember her as she used to be, but... every time I do, it just... hurts worse."
Shepard canted her head. "Worse?"
Liara nodded. "E-every time I do... anything... it just reminds me of some way we would interact," she explained between sniffles. "I get clean. It's.. it's the same soap she used to buy. I will never hear her yell at me for not washing my crest properly again. I try to go eat. I will never... never hear her sigh at me for reading a manuscript at the dinner table. I try to nap. Goddess, I am exhausted... but when I crawl into bed, I remember that I will never have her tuck me in again."
She looked up at Shepard with desperate tear-filled eyes. "She is gone, Shepard, and it hurts!"
Shepard didn't know what to say. What was there to say? None of what Liara had said was wrong. The one saving grace, at least from Shepard's perspective, was that she didn't appear to blame her for killing Benezia.
She looked down at the asari, who had fallen to her knees and was crying into her palms.
Her pain is the best argument I have seen against a benevolent higher power, Shepard thought as she looked down at the broken wreck of a woman crying at her feet. Well, if asari grief responses are anything like human ones, at least this is better for her than just bottling everything up.
She stepped around her and rummaged around one of the shelves they'd pushed out of the way to make room for her cot and desk before seizing a sealed container of disposable tissues, then knelt down next to her.
"Here," she said, tearing open the container and setting a tissue in her hand before gently wrapping her fingers around it. "Now come," she said, leaning against the wall and conjuring enough of her own biotic power to let her tug the asari into her lap. It was perhaps not quite as idyllic as it could have been, since Liara was a good head taller and half again as massive as Shepard, but she made it work.
They stayed there, sitting together against the wall while Liara went from near wailing sobs, to intermittent bouts of crying broken up by rough and ragged breathing, to – finally – a weary stillness.
"... thank you," she whispered at last, her voice hoarse and half-muffled by Shepard's shoulder.
"You're welcome," Shepard said, lifting her head off the wall to look down at her. "Does it help? The crying, I mean."
"I suppose so," she said with a wet chuckle. "It doesn't hurt any less. But things are... less overwhelming, I think."
"That's good, then," Shepard said.
"Mmm," Liara hummed, resting her head back on Shepard's shoulder before jerking it up. "Oh, Goddess! I'm sorry, Shepard, you must have things to do-"
Shepard laughed. "Only a report I don't want to write," she said. "Well, that, and dinner, but both will be there later."
"Those are hardly unimportant," Liara argued, turning over and trying to push herself out of the commander's lap. "You have far more important things to do than hold me while-"
Shepard pressed a finger against Liara's lips. "None of that," she scolded, making Liara squeak. "In my travels across the galaxy, do you know what one of the most irritating trends I have noticed among the sentient species is?"
Liara shook her head back and forth.
"It is the apparent inability for people to accurately judge their own worth," Shepard said. "Fools presume themselves to be masters, while masters believe their expertise to be worth no more than that of a layman. The idiots blather while the wise stay silent, and the result is that the course of history is dictated not by the best... but by the loudest."
She sighed. "It seems to be a trait that crosses the bounds of species, so I doubt that I will ever be able to do anything about it on a broader scale, but at least here and now, I do not have to tolerate it."
"You," she said, removing her finger from Liara's lips, "are important, Liara. Whether or not you think that you deserve it, or whether you think it fair, the fact of the matter is that your expertise and skill, combined with the whims of fortune that led us here, make you one of the single most important figures in the galaxy. Our success or failure will change the lives of trillions."
"In a choice between making sure that a piece of paperwork that will prompt no immediate action is filed on time, snagging an early dinner, and insuring that one of the people who will help me quite literally save the galaxy is mentally prepared to do so... I know which I will pick."
She reached her hand up to cup the asari's jaw, tilting her head up slightly to force her to meet her gaze. "Injuries of the mind are no less real than injuries of the flesh," she said, "and while their treatment is different, I would no sooner call a mission complete with my arm bleeding over the decking than I would retire with trauma that could be soothed."
Liara stared at her for a moment before dropping her head with an explosive sigh. "You are right, of course," she said with a hint of what Shepard suspected was bitterness, "although I suspect you underestimate what it is like."
"Almost certainly," Shepard agreed. "You could show me, if it would help," she added.
"Show you-?" Liara said, her head snapping up. "You mean-"
Shepard shrugged. "If it would help you feel better, I'm fairly certain I could handle grief. Besides," she said, "I believe it would be fair, given what I forced you through the first time."
Liara laughed, tiredly but without bitterness. "I had managed to forget that... but no, Shepard. A doctor need not contract an illness to help treat it. That you care- well, in your own way, at least... is enough. Besides, I do not think I could keep-"
She cut herself off sharply, blushing slightly, and Shepard frowned at her. "Keep what?" she asked.
"Ah... it is nothing," Liara said. "It would not be advisable."
Hiding something, but then again, who isn't, Shepard thought. Well, unless she decided to turn traitor sometime in the last week, I doubt it's my business.
"I defer to the expert," Shepard said, letting the topic drop while Liara moved over to sit next to her, staring at nothing in particular.
They sat there together in silence, Liara lost in thought and Shepard straining to make out the voices in the mess hall, until after several minutes Shepard felt Liara's head press against her shoulder. Shifting her eyes as far to the side as she could without moving her own head, she saw the asari dozing on her shoulder, her mouth half open.
So much for being unable to sleep, she thought with a smile.
She moved her shoulder gently. "Liara," she called. "Doctor T'Soni."
The asari gave a start, lurching back to something resembling consciousness. "Did I- Goddess, yes, I did," she mumbled. "I'm sorry, I-"
"Shh," Shepard interrupted. "It's okay. I thought you might be more comfortable in bed."
Liara blinked a few times, then nodded, putting an arm down and stiffly pushing herself to her feet.
"Goddess," she groaned under her breath, "why am I so sore?"
"Exhaustion, grief, emotional trauma, spending an hour on a metal floor, an extended combat mission, a bad chair..." Shepard counted off while standing up. She was on the sore side herself, and with the bone-deep hunger that came from biotic overuse.
Liara gave her a strained smile. "I suppose we have been busy."
"We have," Shepard agreed, "but at least for now, we get a breather. Do you want me to wake you for dinner?"
Liara bit her lip, staring bleakly at the door to the medical bay. "... no," she said. "I do not think I can face them today."
"Alright," Shepard said, and made for the door.
"Shepard?" Liara called from her cot.
She glanced over her shoulder at her. "Yes?"
"Thank you."
Shepard smiled. "Anytime."
Next: One more chapter of wrap-up with the crew, the report to the Council, some consequences, and then a brief sidequest sojourn.