Author's Note: Okay so another week down, just a day left before my anti-covid measures go into place which'll leave me plenty of time for writing. Read, Review, Favourite and Enjoy!
Chapter 11: Leviathan Part 2
The council Advance team has officially missed their check in time. The Lich's now had full justification to begin wrecking what was left of the Batarian's remaining mot. Flying into visual range of the planet two things of note were happening. First and less important was that a union fleet had already beaten them to the planet. Of more significant concern though was that the entire planet was now on fire. One apocalyptic crisis at a time.
"Contact the flagship." High Lord Xidre commanded while lounging in his command chair. Three slightly more humble and significantly less creepy and skull themed chairs had been prepared for the Councilors. The Familiar form of Admiral Shepard appeared on the screen. "Amanda you look to be in good-"
"Code Omega."
The High Lord's slightly flirtatious tone died, along with what felt like all humour in the universe, like no one would ever laugh again.
"Are you Positive?" Xidre asked concern clear in his features.
"I have obtained footage of the inside of a Temple on Khar'Shan depicting the abomination's corpse, as well as coordinates depicting the temple's location on the planet's surface."
Amanda had sent over the exact coordinates but Xidre had walked over to the observation window of his ship as he looked down. The planet was burning, if a Reaper was responsible for that then something of unrivalled importance was on the planet right at this moment.
"Contact the ground team." Xidre stated in clear and certain terms.
"What the hell is-" Sparatus started but Xidre rounded on him with shocking speed, his eyes glowing so brightly his skull was visible underneath the darkness of his visor.
"DID I GNIKUCF STUTTER!? CONTACT THE BLOODY GROUND TEAM THIS INSTANT!"
The city looked like it was falling apart as boiling hot magma rose to the surface, it probably resembled what the rest of the planet looked like. Some people were panicking, others were trying to kill them. The three of them had hijacked a sky car and were now zooming down the city streets. Saren was driving, simultaneously maintaining a biotic barrier around the car, because while most of the Batarians were trying to escape the eminent demise of their world, a good chunk of them were shooting at them.
"Shouldn't they have bigger things to worry about!?" The security officer with the eye piece, Garrus Vakarian, asked as he sniped enemy combatants.
"Self preservation is the furthest thought away from the minds of the indoctrinated." Leo stated in no uncertain terms.
""The what?"" Both of the Turians asked at the same time.
"Reaper technology emits a sound, inaudible to most species, that degrades the neural tissues of those in its proximity and imprints new commands on it." Leo interrupted a biotic attack with a shot from his plasma shot gun annihilating an entire building. "False memories are implanted, desires and goals are twisted, beliefs become corrupted. Through these processes the Reapers make allies out of enemies. Fanatical dogs who would do anything to fulfil their whims, most often delivering their own species into their butcher houses."
"How does this cause the planet to begin self destructing?" Saren asked as he felt his feet pressing harder against the pedal. "It has nothing to do with the planet being on the cusp of blowing up to my knowledge. If I had to guess..." Leo wasn't an engineer, but he was thoroughly educated on a thousand ways to turn a piece of technology into a weapon in an emergency. With the Tebrid's database they should have access to most of the technology in question, if you eliminate everything that they don't have the raw materials for... "Damnit!" Leo growled as he whipped out his laser rifle and demolished an entire building that was in their way.
"I take it that you know what they're doing?" Garrus asked looking at the ruin that they drove through.
"A Matter Decompressor!" Leo snapped as he turned another group of Batarian's into ash.
"Are you going to make us ask again?" Saren asked using the car's built in biotic vibrator to remove the Batarians from the window.
"A Matter Decompressor! A machine designed specifically to mine for material from inside of a black hole!" Leo growled while he did another sweep with the laser rifle. "When Matter enters a black hole so much pressure is put on it that even it's atoms are forced to shrink and compress down to the smallest possible size!" It might seem like a strange thing to say, but Atoms, the smallest thing in the known universe, actually has a lot of room in them. If you were to take a baseball stadium, placed one baseball on the pitcher's plate at the centre of the stadium, the electron, and had another baseball on top of the wall of the stadium, the proton, you'd have a good approximation of a single Hydrogen atom. "The Matter Decompressor is designed to take that compressed matter and forcibly expand it back to the point that it is useful again."
"You don't need any of the fancy materials you guys traded to the council to do that?" Saren asked sounding surprised.
"You don't need it to expand the material back to its full size, a machine like that can probably be built with a shit tonne of Eezo and that fancy Omni-gel you guys are so proud of." Leo corrected, but the news was far, far worse than that. "The issue here is what happens when you use that on normal material that hasn't been wrung through a black hole."
"I'm afraid to ask but I need to anyway." Saren asked as he let out a sigh.
"If you expand matter to the limit, to the point where you are separating Protons from Electrons, then what you are doing is splitting apart the atoms which means a nuclear explosion!" The Two Turians looked around them, and crashed through the windows of a building as another short cut, when they came out on the other side they were in the middle of a fiery hellscape, as if the land had opted to start growing a volcano right then and there.
"By the looks of things the thing that they're using the decompressor on is the entire planet." Saren noted, Leo wasn't good with reading the faces of Turians but even he could see the fear that lit up Saren's features. The entire planet had just been turned into a giant, fat, bomb!
"Then I suggest you step on it!" Leo shouted at near point blank range.
Saren used his remaining arm to produce an omni-blade and stabbed the console next to him, ripping it out and revealing a Eezo core that was being pushed to it's limits. Saren ripped out one of the cords that had connected the core to the car and jammed it into the side of his head where a small amount of metal could be made out. As one, Saren and the entire car started to glow a deep navy blue.
"I'd hold onto something if I was you."
Suddenly, the Car charged forward, moving at ten times the speed it was travelling at before, it was a struggle with everything they had to just hold on, let alone shoot at anyone.
At the same time the Union ships were acting. The Voyager moved above Khar'Shan, the Dreadnaught to the edge of the Solar System, if the planet does detonate it would be the greater of the two losses, but more importantly: Something else was coming. The Voyager acted to deal with the threat planet-side, it bombarded the various defences of the planet with the objective of destroying any thing that would stop them from delivering their payload, that included the temple itself leaving behind a hole like the gaping maw of a great beast.
Once that was done, a single drop pod was fired from the Voyager, crashing through the hole left where the temple should be.
"Shepard." The Dragoon inside of the pod was getting ready to go on the offensive. "There's a low level of ultra sound in that area."
"The Reaper?" Shepard asked for the sake of confirmation.
"We believe so, we're adjusting the nullifier now." Sound can be cancelled out by another sound equal yet opposite frequency, even sound that you're not suppose to be able to hear like ultrasound is no exception. Considering the destructive effects of Ultrasound it becomes especially important that you get the frequencies right.
"Hurry up, cause something tells me we don't have time to waste!" The Batarian's already had their harpoons lined up to go on the offensive, the shell of the drop pod pinged as if being rained on as the ones who were outside shot at it.
"Calibration complete." With those two words the shell of the drop pod blew away knocking away the people nearest to it.
Several singularities were set off at once, giving Shepard the option of being torn apart by the miniature black holes or getting blown up by her own plasma shot gun. In the mean time another hole was punched into the temple as a sky car that was moving far faster than what it should be punched through a wall, three figures, two Turian's and Leo, floated down slowly while the car ended up ramrodding several of the Biotic Batarians before firing the plasma shotgun at the car blowing it up. A small number the singularities removed, Shepard now had a avenue of escape, and once a safe distance away, detonated the singularities.
"Code Omega?" Leo asked looking at Shepard suspiciously.
"Ancient dead Reaper being worshipped by the Batarians." Shepard replied as together with her fellow Dragoon and the two Turians he had brought with him she started shooting more of the swarming Batarians. "What happened to the planet?"
"Shoddy malfunctioning matter decompressor." Leo bluntly summarised as he used his war club to sweep aside charging Batarians.
"That's Bad, might not be worse than what's coming though." Shepard summarised as she simultaneously fired her laser rifle and ran through the ruined temple.
Xidre had turned the Dreadnaught away from the unstable planet after deploying Shepard, and their entire ground crew, after all they had far more serious things to concern themselves with than the mere destruction a single habitable planet. The sheer, unimaginable rage of Xidre was rolling off his body in massive waves alongside his power as he concentrated on the source of his anger, his very reason for existence. A Reaper, a live one, had just entered the system and was making for Khar'Shan. The ancient machine was only a third the size of the folded up Citadel, composed entirely of black material making its shape difficult to make out until it moved in front of Khar'Shan's star. A tear drop shaped body, ending in several pointed legs like a spider, giving the overall thing the appearance of a back cuddle fish.
"Is that one of your Reapers?" All three of the Councilors couldn't peel their eyes away from the ancient machine that had just moved into visual range of them.
Sparatus was eagerly watching every inch of the mechanical abomination, wondering what kinds of weapons that the ancient enemy of the Lich's would use, where they would fire from, and how to best counter them.
Valern was studying the Reaper mesmerised, as if he was about to achieve enlightenment just by glimpsing the technological marvel that had appeared before him.
Tevos on the other hand had done the most logical thing of the three of them, she whipped out her Omni-tool to record the entire thing.
"Kill it." Xidre ordered immediately.
"How sir?" One of the Lich's at the controls for the ship asked confused.
"Move into attack range and fire all weapons for a start, we'll figure out the rest from there." Thus the Dreadnaught already began to move. But the Reaper acted first, perhaps it already came in with it's weapons armed.
Spreading out its legs, its main gun fired, a familiar molten stream of Radioactive material was spat out of the main area of the weapon aiming directly for the Dreadnaught's centre mass.
"Brace for Impact!" The entire ship shook as it was hit by the molten stream that was fired by the Reaper, many people stumbled and the three standing councilors had to grab railings for support.
"That hit shaved off about a third of our shield's high lord!"
"Psi-contingent is prepared to initiate emergency back up!"
"Engineering is reporting that the charge for the back up shield capacitors is full!"
"Get closer and hit that bastard already!" High Lord Xidre shouted while swinging his arm.
So the Reaper's weapons out-range the Union ship? And it looks suspiciously similar to the anti-ship weapon that the Batarian's used to shoot down their ship as well. If it can shave off a chunk of the Lich's defences then the technology has a lot of value. As the Councilors were making note of this the main weapon of the Reapers was charging up to fire again but this time the high lord was prepared.
"Fire on the main gun of the enemy ship with the missiles!"
"We're not in range sir!"
"I said fire the damned missile!" Making the Highlord repeat himself was already a cause for demotion, not to mention that this was already a life or death situation. Thus the Missile was fired, just in time to intercept the stream of radioactive material and detonate blowing it up reducing the severity of the resulting hit.
"That one shaved off about ten percent sir!"
"Keep intercepting those shots until we are in range and then cram so many shots down that bastard's throat it'll puke!" The Dreadnaught did indeed manage to snipe the majority of the incoming fire saving precious shields as they moved into knife fighting range.
Plasma, Laser beams, missiles, telekinetics, and even the solve all energy drain main weapon. The Reaper was barely even scratched. Taking a 'offence is the best defence' approach thousands of laser beams were fired out of the surface of the ship blasting at every missile and plasma to come near it's surface destroying the projectiles before they could land. The Dreadnaught's laser beams bounced off of the surface, the hull was too damned strong for the telekinetics to sunder, and there seemed to be no limit to the Reaper's reserves of energy. Instead of just getting one sidedly attacked, the Reaper went on the offensive. While Xidre had ordered the various weapons fired scientists and engineers were studying the ancient monster in the cross hairs of the Dreadnaught for anything they could find to scratch it. The Mass relays work on a fixed sub-atomic structure, what this means is that every atom of a Mass Relay has been 'locked' in place massively improving the structure's durability. How this is done is unknown but is thought to involve the massively powerful Mass Effect field that surrounds the relay, perhaps by studying a Reaper's corpse the solution could be found.
The Ancient machine's legs spread out and unfolded to reveal a dozen smaller guns mounted in the tips of the legs, each of which started to glow with a Biotic field before firing, releasing sinister red lights that hit the broadside of the dreadnought, leading to more red lights to appear within the ship itself.
"That last volley killed our shields, shaved off some of our armour and destroyed several secondary weapons sir!" Frig the main Cannon, Sparatus wanted whatever was on the end of those legs! Xidre didn't look like he was taking the situation very well, if the way that he slammed his fist down on the arm of his chair hard enough to snap it was any indication.
"Ramming Speed! Concentrate the shield on the bow of our ship!" The councilors wisely choose to grip the railing with both hands. The entire dreadnought shuddered as it slammed face first into the Reaper and together the two of them were making their way into the sun.
The Reaper Struggled and clawed with it's legs attempting to stab at the ship before it took them both out, it either couldn't fire it's leg cannon's consecutively or it wouldn't risk firing them at point blank range. Eventually the Reaper succeeded in stabbing its legs into the ship and getting a hold of it. As one both the ship and the Reaper glowed with Biotics as the Reaper took them both for a spin before releasing it's grip sending the Dreadnaught flying into the sun, and then followed up by another stream of molten radioactive material for good measure. Satisfied that it wouldn't see anymore harassment from the Dreadnaught the Reaper flew towards the Batarian world in order to claim it's prize while the Dreadnaught stabilised itself. Right now it was a struggle just to get out of the sun's gravity well, several surface machines and hull sections had been damaged first in the initial volley and again when the Reaper had grabbed hold of it and stabbed it across the various parts of the hull.
"You look like you need a hand there Xidre." While Xidre was wrestling with the Reaper the rest of the fleet had already moved into position and had chosen now to open fire on the ancient machine. In response the Reaper promptly noped out of the entire situation, disappearing through a worm hole that was created on the spot and reappearing behind the Union Ships, it's numerous leg guns charged and firing directly into the backs of the Union ships disabling them. It would finish the job but it reasonably suspected that the planet on the verge of going nuclear would do that instead.
"Got anymore bright ideas?" Valern asked after peeling himself off of the floor.
"Huu." Letting out a sigh Xidre pressed his finger to the side of his head and sent an order to the ground team. "Normally, I would prefer to save this tactic until we are farther into the war, but as the saying goes, beggars can't be choosers."
Biotic and Plasma combo attacks, Sweeps with Laser Rifles, or simply just smashing whatever obstacle is in their way with brute force. Eventually they were able to invade the area where the Reaper had been buried, where the Matter Decompressor was located, where Desolas was preparing to get himself rescued. Fighting was going on everywhere as Union forces were fighting against the Batarians as council snipers slowly started to arrive.
"Is my idiot brother on board that thing?" Saren and Garrus had been given nullifiers which had now been attached to their armours via magnetic clamps. They were heavy, but compared to the thought of their brains leaking out through their eyes a little extra weight was nothing.
"We think. Based on the size of that Mass Effect field we know that the Matter Decompressor is there at the very least." Saren nodded his head. "You two are going to have to destroy that while we go track down Desolas. I know that he's your brother but..." Leo didn't think that one brother should have to kill the other.
"Desolas is a traitor and a fool. If you don't kill him then command will." Saren summarised bluntly.
"Am I the only one wondering how we're supposed to destroy the decompressor?" Leo tossed Garrus his shotgun. "Yep. That'll do it."
And on that note, both the Dragoons and the Turians went in separate directions. Unknown to the boarding party who had just entered the Reaper corpse from two separate openings, a contingent of immortals and lich's had just arrived at the Reaper in order to implement Xidre's last desperate measure to kill the reaper above. Working in tandem with each other the necromancers flowed energy into the Reaper's corpse and brought the accursed creature under their control before flying it into space.
Xidre had been reluctant to pull this maneuvre, but there was madness in his otherwise empty sockets.
"Are you watching this Reaper? Do you see what my people are capable of now?" The Lich's greatest power was to take the bodies of their enemies and twist them to their will. However this is not merely their ability, it was taken from their oldest enemy. "When your kind struck down our civilisation you took the bodies of my people and twisted them into feral attack dogs to serve your whims! Now my people have the power to take your corpses and do the same to them!" Xidre broke out in mad laughter, the councilors collectively took several steps back as if they would get caught in his wake.
"What the hell!?" Saren and Garrus's helmets automatically folded themselves around their heads. To their knowledge, the helmets are only supposed to do that if they entered a vacuum, even more bizarrely they started to float briefly before the magnetic clamps in the soles of their boots kicked in and connected them to the floor of the craft. "Don't tell me." Saren made his way over to the nearest hole blown in the side of the ship corpse and looked down, at the world of Khar'Shan that was below their feet.
"We're in space." Saren just let out an exhausted sigh. "Lovely."
The planet was starting to stabilise as well, not by much mind you, but there wasn't anything that was actively trying to tear it apart any more.
"Does this mean that the matter decompressor has been removed from the planet for us?" Garrus asked looking at Saren.
"Yeah but what's it doing right now?" Saren asked by way of reply. Even if it was made by shoddy Batarian's it was still the core of a Union mega structure designed to yank out material from a black hole.
"We should go secure it." Garrus replied executing perfect logic. "I certainly don't want to see it destroy another planet do you?"
Desolas looked across the void, at Sovereign who was rapidly approaching them, presumably to rescue them from the Union. Leo in the mean time had succeeded in hitting the door leading into the chamber where Desolas had been watching Sovereign, where the burnt out five story high out husk made in the image of a ancient extinct monster had been located off to the side.
"Tell me do you realise what your precious 'Zroni' have done?" Desolas gestured to the giant corpse. "Hundreds of civilisations, reduced to... this?" Did he stop to think that maybe the civilisations that they turned into monsters weren't happy with the arrangement?
Well they didn't care about his opinion anyway. The other reaper that was approaching them though? That was another story. The side of the ancient corpse was blown open while a Biotic field covered Desolas's body and yanked him out of the ship, before both he and the reaper who had grabbed him both disappeared through another worm hole, of course Shepard and Leo attempted to shoot him before he got away from them, the issue here was that the Biotic barrier was less something that had pulled Desolas towards the other reaper with a localised gravity well and more like a... giant hand, simultaneously grabbing and manipulating Desolas and protecting him with a massive thick barrier of some kind as well.
"Huu. The Boss isn't going to be happy about this." Leo stated letting out a sigh.
"You're getting off easy." Shepard stated as she put her weapon away. "You only have to tell your high lord about this, I have to go tell my mom!"
Leo gave Shepard a sympathetic pat on the back.
Garrus and Saren found the Matter Decompressor, it looked pretty unstable, and it had the corpses of a bunch of dead Salarian's around it as well, by the looks of things they got torn apart by the unstable mass effect field being given off by the contraption.
"I don't trust shoddy Batarian construction." Saren said aloud.
"Neither do I." Garrus replied bluntly. With a gentle Biotic push the unstable mass of Eezo was pushed out of the ship, and then destroyed by the Plasma shot gun.
"This looks like the console stolen from the Tebrids." Saren stated as he pushed some buttons at random, and confirmed that there were a bunch of languages within that he wasn't familiar with. "Looks like we can't access it anyway."
So they had nothing to benefit from it even if they did risk incurring the Union's wrath and take it back to the council, so they might as well secure some brownie points and make sure it gets back to the union.
"Fabricators they used to build the thing looks stolen too." Garrus noted while he also noted that the last thing these machines built would likely still be recorded in their temporary memory. "We should get them back to the council so they can figure out who they belong to."
Armed with the power of flawless logic the two Turians started to make their way off of the ancient corpse of this ship before someone blew it up.
Majesty's final end was spectacular: It began with being filled to the brim with exotic gasses until the entirety of it's insides were just ancient machinery and gas, then said gas was ignited causing the Reaper to be consumed in a fiery ball of plasma. After that said ball of plasma was gently nudged with a telekinetic field and sent blasting off into the nearest sun. Watching the Corpse's incineration Valern reached out as if he was trying to pull the Reaper back out of the sun, and looked like a part of him had died when he failed.
"We have a lot of ground to cover." Tevos stated as she ended the recording with her Omni-tool.
"Let's start on Khar'Shan. The Batarian's must've been performing maintenance on the main gun of that thing for Millennia, I refuse to believe that there's nothing of value to find down there." Sparatus followed up bluntly as he started to walk away. "Reinforcements from our planets should be on the way. My people will stamp out the Riots. Tevos we'll need your Adepts on search and rescue, excavate that place if you have to but find their data-banks. Valern..." Sparatus only now realised that Valern was still staring at where one of the greatest technological marvels he had ever seen had been destroyed right before his very eyes. Sparatus rolled his eyes and dragged the Salarian along by the horn as he continued to hand out marching orders.
Review Section:
Saif Omar: Always was one.
Clown2107: Wait and see. The Tebrids turned him into a laughingstock/meme after pumping his ship full of hallucinatory laughing gas and posting the security footage all over the council's extra net. Wouldn't that be a little redundant at this point?
RonaldM0196867: She's kinda a little dead for that. Mass Effect Races? The Krogan.
Guest: Cool.
