…
"Are you a blessing or a curse, good or evil? Be what you will! You are destiny!"
(Black And White)
…
CASTLE Base, February 23rd, 2:12 PM, 2184
…
The last few hours have moved pretty fast, and I felt nearly as excited as a kid in a candy shop.
After getting my friends down here to get a look at the artifact, we began pulling every single piece of research equipment down here that we could. Energy readers, spectrometers, 3D imaging scanners, and a whole host of other advanced equipment.
Sira, Jack and Richard all agreed that it was indeed of Prothean origin, especially Jack, who said it looked just like the Prothean archives on Mars. Back when he was younger, he was there when they first found them. If this really was some kind of archive, it could contain many years of advanced technology.
In his own words, the archives on Mars propelled human technology forward nearly two hundred years. I had no reason to doubt his expertise.
I continued to monitor the energy readings on the portable console, looking between it and the artifact. The levels seemed to fluctuate in a predictable pattern, though I still had no idea if this was natural, or the result of pre-existing damage.
"Dimitri, have you been able to detect anything dangerous coming from the artifact?" I asked, looking over at him in his hazard suit as he slowly scanned it from a distance with one of Dan's terahertz locators.
"No, other than energy fluctuations and heat coming from inside, it seems perfectly safe." He replied over the radio before pulling off his mask and taking a deep breath. "I'm sweating to death in this thing."
"Any idea why it's em…emitting so much heat?" Dan asked, walking over to the edge of the platform as he pulled off his coat and draped it over a nearby crate.
"The Protheans used a unique form of data storage in these structures derived off of microwaves." Jack explained, walking over to the two of us with a curious look in his eyes. "Due to the way they they've stored it, it emits a lot of heat. If you were above those little pylons, your body water would boil in less than a minute."
"And here I was starting to think they were running off of RTGs." I commented, leaning on the computer console as Jack looked back at me with a confused look on his face.
"I thought I was supposed to be to be the old one here." He shot back, causing me to chuckle slightly. "The heat is actually a good sign. That means there's likely to be more information stored here."
"So if this really is a set of Prothean archives like the ones on Mars, how we should go about accessing them?" Mara asked with crossed arms as she walked over from the spectrometer.
"Well, on Mars, we ended up using an advanced electromagnetic scanner to read the signals." He further explained, walking around the archives on the circular platform. "The Protheans figured out how to actually store this information as opposed to just transmitting it like we typically do. It's actually comparable to that of high energy D-band transmission bouncing continuously back and forth."
"So if we got a scanner capable of reading these signals, how would you translate them into decipherable data?" Mara questioned further, looking between the archives and Jack as Dimitri walked back over to us.
Before he could answer her, we heard a small amount of commotion from the entrance. We looked back to see all five Admirals were here.
"Oh boy." Dan remarked, taking in a deep breath at the sight of them. I was, admittedly, still very worried about pissing off Gerrel and Rael any more than I had already.
Who knows, perhaps this find would help calm them down.
"Admirals." I greeted with my hands folded behind my back.
"Captain Michaels." Raan returned as they all stopped and stared at the archives.
"So this is what you found." Koris commented, staring up at them much like we had.
"Baena'Loen and her dig team uncovered this about four hours ago." I began to explain, slowly walking around the thing as all five Admirals followed me. "My team and I are certain that it is of Prothean origin."
"Keelah, this could change everything." Raan said as we all stared up at the uppermost obelisk. "An undisturbed Prothean relic… we haven't seen anything like this in over a millennia!"
"I know this is all very exciting, Admirals, but we need to set up a containment field around the archive as soon as possible." Jack interrupted with a slight frantic tone to his usually calm voice. "The excess oxygen in the air carries the potential to damage it."
"Understood doctor." Rael agreed in a rather calm voice, nodding to him. "We'll have a field around it in less than an hour. What type of environment should it be?"
"It should be a cold, -24 degree Celsius nitrogen atmosphere. No oxygen, no carbon dioxide." Jack quickly answered as Rael nodded his head and took down his commands on his omni-tool.
"Well Captain, you and your team are just full of surprises." Gerrel commented, standing directly next to me as he stared up at it with me. "I'm still confused though… I thought our original preliminary scans would have picked up something like this beforehand."
"I thought so too, but apparently there was enough iron content in the rock to bounce away the signal." I replied, picking up a rust-colored rock. "Then again, the structure itself could have deflected our scans."
"Sean, the 3D scan is f-finished!" Dan announced with a smile on his face as we all walked over to the large projector we had set up. We now had a full holographic readout of the structure itself.
"Wow, it goes down a fair distance." Mara said, pointing at the largest part of the archives. "That's almost a quarter of a mile deep!"
"This could be the greatest find of century!" Dimitri remarked with a lot of energy. "I can only imagine possibilities…"
Before I could join in on the brewing conversation, Rael walked over to me and acted as a wall between me and my friends.
"Doctor, can I speak with you for a moment? In private?" He asked, sounding cool and collected as opposed to annoyed and angry like normal.
"Yeah, sure." I agreed as we began walking away from the research area towards a slightly more secluded end of the room.
"I didn't originally want to bring this up with you, doctor, but Gerrel insisted that you know." He began, opening up a radar readout on his omni-tool. "Last night, we received two pings on the edge of the system from our radar buoys. It suddenly appeared and disappeared after a few seconds around twenty-four hundred hours, then reappeared and disappeared again around zero two hundred hours."
I looked closely at the readout, looking at how quickly it appeared and disappeared.
"It looks like a ship jumped into the system and activated some kind of stealth countermeasure." I hypothesized, pointing as what looked to me like a spatial distortion around the signature.
"We suspected that as well. We believe someone is spying on our system." He said, his voice actually getting a lot lower. "Considering we're already in a so-called "partnership" with the Alliance, there's only one other group I can think of that has access to technology like this."
"Cerberus." I guessed as Rael nodded his head.
"I want this level's security to be you and your team's top priority, doctor." He replied, looking back at the archives. "In the meantime, we'll be deploying drones with better radar and laser scanners just to keep a closer eye on the system borders. If anything at all happens to this artifact, I'm holding you and your team responsible."
With that, he walked off wordlessly with the rest of the Admirals as I watched.
"Jawohl, Mein Führer." I mocked as they exited the cavern, getting a laugh out of Dan.
Things could never be simple.
…
CASTLE Base, March 20th, 2:49 AM, 2184
…
*BEEP BEEP BEEP*
My eyes shot open as my personal alarm went off, waking me up. It jolted me so bad that I nearly fell out of my chair. Again.
"Ah, for Christ's sake…" I exclaimed, rubbing the rheum out of the corners of my eyes as I leaned back up and checked the time on my omni-tool. I groaned when I realized it was the middle of the night.
I allowed myself to acclimatize for a few seconds before I checked my coffee cup. It was half filled and stone cold, but it would do the trick. I downed it all in one motion, wiping the remnants out of my moustache as I looked around the room to see if anyone else was here.
After our big discovery last month, the Admirals pushed a lot of fresh resources our way to help support research on the archives. The entire area was now completely covered head-to-toe in new walls, all brand new and polished to a shine. The archives at the end of the room towered above all else and were now protected behind a pressurized layer of starship-grade ballistic glass.
The Archives were located on Sublevel 12 of the base, underneath of the other eleven sublevels. Due to the sensitivity of the Archives, we stopped digging here at twelve and decided to expand outwards instead.
After determining that there was, in fact, no one else in the room with me, I checked the console I had been sleeping next to. The deciphering process looked as if it was finally finished, much to my happiness. The amount of time it took to read the signals and translate them into readable data reminded me of my gaming days where it would take hours to download games off of Steam. It was not fun in the slightest.
I pulled my chair up and focused on the raw data in front of me. As usual, it was heavily jumbled, and thus unreadable. I turned on the auto organizer subroutine and leaned back in my chair once more as I opened up my omni-tool to view the latest news from the rest of the galaxy.
Apparently, all the damage from the attack on the Citadel has been repaired. The damage had been extensive enough that it took several months before they could declare certain portions of the Citadel safe for living. I suspected that this had actually been a cover for the major governments to collect as many pieces of Nazara as they possibly could for study. I couldn't blame them, it was one hell of a beast.
Thinking back to the Reapers, I opened up the latest results on the Reaper material that Hackett had sent us on my omni-tool. It was a twenty kilo sample, a fair chunk, and had been from one of Nazara's "tentacles." It was an extremely hard material, whatever it was. We were having trouble just scanning the substance, let alone determining its exact chemical composition.
Based on what we knew so far, it was an incredibly dense material with properties similar to tungsten and osmium, but containing an extremely high number of polymers. These polymers were the baffling part, because we could not identify them. Our best guess at the moment was that they were biopolymers, but I still couldn't understand how that could be possible. If these current results were indeed correct, that would suggest this thing was an organic hybrid of some kind.
Essentially, a living starship.
The idea alone scared the hell out of me.
The console beeped, drawing my attention away from the chart and back to the Prothean data. Now that it was all organized in a logical pattern, I could actually see what this latest batch of data involved.
Much to my initial disappointment, it first appeared to be nothing but basic information about the system's star. It noted rotation times, top temperatures, and all the other basic information you'd expect to know about a star. Fortunately, I kept delving a little deeper into the information, and discovered something rather strange.
Apparently back when the Protheans were still around, the star here used to emit a lot more electromagnetic and particle radiation than it was supposed to, enough that it easily penetrated the planetary field of Reach and bombarded the surface. Mid-sized stars aren't supposed to emit that kind of energy during this point in their lifetimes. They only do this when they're about to become red giants or collapse onto themselves.
This brought to mind a lot of questions. First off, if the star was emitting this kind of radiation before, how did it stop? It would take an immense amount of energy to effect a star on the macro scale. The second was how Reach's biosphere managed to survive this radiation. According to the data, it was intense enough to fry every organic element on the planet, no matter how resilient. The third and last one was why the hell the Protheans were so interested in this. Why did they care about the life cycle of a star? I didn't understand the purpose of all of this. The location of these archives would suggest that they were buried here so they would be shielded from the star's radiation.
I wrote it off for now and logged it into the archive database. I would look at all of this more at a later time. For now, I needed to go find another cup of coffee.
…
CASTLE Base, March 22nd, 1:49 PM, 2184
…
"Alright, move it back slowly!" I shouted to the forklift operator as I slowly backpedaled and gestured in my direction with both hands.
The new crate of Gen IV exosuits had just arrived from Dolor, and just in time for CASTLE Base to fully go into operation. These eight suits would be the first of many to outfit our primary security force, along with our newest line of Mk III Plasma Guns. Six of these guys would be guarding the primary surface access, while the other two would go to our guards outside of Sublevel 12.
This place would be as tight as Fort Knox.
"OK…OK… good!" I said, as the crate was lowered down. "Good job, we'll take it from here!"
Me and one of the lab assistants pried open the container to reveal the shiny new suits in all their full glory. The finalized helmet design was a lot like a normal quarian helmet, but it was reinforced with retractable armor plating around the visor. It looked a tiny bit like Isaac Clarke's helmet from the Dead Space series.
My omni-tool then beeped as I received a private message. At first, I expected it to be from one of the Admirals, but I was pleasantly surprised to see it was from Mara.
"Hey handsome, I just wanted to let you know that it's gotten a bit worse since this morning and won't be able to come to the lab today." The audio message said with Mara indeed sounding a little under the weather. "Knock'em dead for me, hun."
I smiled and nodded in an understanding fashion, closing my omni-tool. Nearly three months into the pregnancy, and she was starting to suffer from random bouts of morning sickness. It was natural and nothing to worry about, though it made her extremely nauseated.
I banished the thought from my head as I ran over to Hanger 5 where Jack and Sira were waiting for me.
Dan and I had finally agreed to release a little bit of our old SDD project information to help them make emitters capable of producing this energy shield. It took a lot of time to break down the mental barriers, but in the end we decided that having a shielding system like this would be more important than our feelings on the past.
I walked into Hanger 5, seeing Jack and Sira on top of a platform overlooking their prototype below. I climbed the stairs up to meet them, pulling my datapad out of my back pocket and extending it as I walked.
"Greetings Sean!" Jack said in an enthusiastic tone as all three of us shook hands. "We've almost finished setting up the test prototype below."
"We've been running smaller tests sporadically for the last two weeks, though we've yet to create a field that sustains itself for more than seventy-four seconds." Sira began to explain, twirling a stylus between her fingers. "We're hoping you and Dan's old emitter designs can help us solve this issue."
"You two are entirely sure that the fault lies in the emitters?" I questioned one last time, looking hard at the prototype below before looking back at them.
"Yes, we knew that the emitters were going to be the root problem even during the concept stage." Jack answered, nodding his head quickly.
I took a deep breath, pondering everything one more time before making up my mind.
"Alright, here's the reconstructed design of the SDD energy emitters." I caved, handing them the datapad with the relevant information. "They utilize excited, pure silver conductors to generate a field. The field itself was maintained by background electrons."
Jack and Sira mulled over the schematics for a few moments before Jack finally spoke up.
"These technically aren't even emitters, they're electron exciters." He remarked with an amazed look on his face.
"Correct, though for technical reasons we referred to them as emitters." I replied, walking over and pointing at the hexagonal panels. "When six of these focus in on a single point at full power, you can actually see the electrons trapped in the field."
"That's incredible!" Sira gushed, giddy movement taking over her normal subdued body language. "If we build these and upgrade them with a mass effect field condenser, we should have no trouble maintaining the energy field!"
As Jack and Sira juggled ideas between one another, I casually looked down at the entrance of the hanger to see Admirals Han'Gerrel and Rael'Zorah approaching.
"God damn it." I exclaimed, confusing Jack and Sira. "I'll be back in a bit, Admirals are coming."
They both nodded at me in acknowledgement before going back to their ideas as I made my way back down the platform.
"We've been looking for you, doctor." Rael greeted, several datapads tucked underneath his arm as I shook their hands.
"What's going on? I already mentioned there were no significant discoveries from the Archives in my weekly report." I asked, knowing they wouldn't be here in person if it wasn't important.
"This isn't about the Archives, doctor, this is about something entirely different." Rael corrected, handing Koris the datapads.
"While on a routine patrol yesterday, one of our cruisers made visual contact with one of these "stealth ships" that have been making incursions into our system." Koris began to explain, handing me a datapad with an incident report on it. "It jumped into the system within nearly a hundred meters of the Arroyo, right in front of the three ship patrol. They managed to disable the ship's engines before it could escape."
"We then sent the Limpiar over to board the ship with teams of marines equipped with Gen IV exosuits and plasma rifles." Rael continued, beginning to pace back and forth. "The crew of this ship was not ready for them in the slightest. Out of the thirty seven people onboard the ship, twenty two were killed during the taking of the ship and the other fifteen surrendered, including their Captain."
"Who are they?" I asked, looking hard at both of them.
"Cerberus." Gerrel answered, plunging my gut into the metaphorical toilet. "As far as we've been able to tell, they've been watching the system for the last three months. We're not sure exactly how their stealth system operates, but we do know that they've somehow found a way to mask the engine signature."
"OK… so what do you want from me?" I asked, knowing they wouldn't be telling me all of this unless they needed my help.
"We've secured the ship and are having it moved into orbit." Rael started, putting all the datapads back under his arm. "We want you to get your team together and take a shuttle up there to figure out as much as you can about this ship. We're mostly concerned with the stealth system, but if you can also figure out where the ship came from and retrieve any data off of its computers, that'll be a plus."
"Well, I don't see why we can't go up there, but my wife is currently suffering from a bad bout of morning sickness." I replied, putting my hands into my pocket. "She won't be able to come."
"I'm sure you'll be able to make up for her absence." Rael dismissed quickly, ticking me off slightly.
"We'll have a shuttle waiting for you at your dwellings in one hour. Be ready by then." Gerrel finished as he and Rael walked back off.
"What's the word, Sean?" Jack asked from the top of the platform as I whipped around to face him and Sira.
"We've had a change of plans." I answered, filling my lungs with air as I mentally prepped myself for another long day. "Pack up your stuff and close down the hangar while I go and tell the others. We've got ourselves something new to study."
…
Quarian Shuttle "Skippy", March 22nd, 2:57 PM, 2184
…
I nervously played with my wedding ring as the shuttle broke free of Reach's atmosphere. All five of us were crammed in this tiny little shuttle with our equipment and all. It was rather claustrophobic. Richard had refused to participate in the mission because he had developed agoraphobia after our little jumping stunt on the Geth derelict. He was now scared to death of space… among other things.
I looked slowly between Dan, Sira, Dimitri and Jack, trying to gauge their expressions as best I could but with no avail. Everyone had the same depressed deadpan. None of us wanted to be out here today, we wanted to work on our own projects.
This ship that the patrol had disabled was apparently some kind of frigate, and it wasn't even armed with any major weapons. It was now barely operable and unable to move under its own power due to engine damage.
"So, you d-don't seem too… happy about this." Dan commented next to me, hands folded.
"You've read my mind." I replied with a bit of sarcasm as I kept my eyes focused on my wedding ring. "The last thing I wanted to do today was go into space. We had a whole testing regiment set up for today, then this happens."
"Are you w-worried about it?" Dan asked, as I looked at him with some minor confusion. "Worried about what we mig…might find?"
I stared at him for a few seconds, pondering his question.
"No, just annoyed." I replied, quickly going back to fidgeting with my wedding ring.
A few moments later there was a clank as we landed inside the hangar of the frigate.
"Well… let's get to work." I aspirated, taking in another deep breath as the shuttle door opened, revealing a hanger that was only slightly bigger than the one in the Explorer.
If the interior of the hangar was any indication, the ship was in bad shape. Electrical conduits were busted and exposed, emergency power was on, panels from the walls were strewn everywhere, and there was evidence of fire and plasma damage. The patrol had really fucked up this ship. We were lucky that we didn't need our helmets for this endeavor. Looking off to the other side of the hangar, I could see a row of bodies covered up by little more than white sheets. They were soaked with blood.
I could only hope there was still enough left of this to successfully salvage. Repairing a ship with a stealth system would be easier than trying to reproduce the system outright.
"Welcome to the ship, Captain." The sergeant in charge greeted, nodding to me as he held his rifle with both hands. "I took over after the boarding teams left."
"So it's just you and…" I staggered, looking harder at him.
"My squad, sir." He finished, motioning towards one of the men in question. "There are seven of us. We've already investigated all the possible hiding spots where anyone could had avoided detection."
I nodded in approval as I turned back to my team.
"Jack, Sira, you two go to engineering and see what kind of drive core and power plant they've been using. Dimitri, Dan, we're going up to the bridge and the CIC." I ordered as we split up into our respective groups. "Radio in on the usual channel if you run across anything interesting."
"Understood." Sira nodded as she and Jack walked off to the back of the hangar where the entrance to engineering is.
The rest of us entered the elevator only to find that it had been knocked out.
"Well, it looks like we will be climbing." Dimitri remarked with and upbeat attitude to his voice as he grabbed the bars and began the climb. Dan followed behind him as I took up the rear.
About halfway up the elevator shaft, a piece of debris clunked its way down, bouncing my way as it hit my backpack and barely missed my head.
"God damn it!" I exclaimed as I gripped the ladder rungs much harder.
"Are you alright, my friend?" Dimitri asked, trying to get a look at me past Dan, who simply looked worried.
"Let's just get the hell out of here." I shook off, taking a quick moment to dry the sweat off of my individual hands before continuing.
Once at the top, we were immediately faced with the CIC, which wasn't actually in bad shape compared to the lower decks. Many of the consoles up here were still in working order, which boded well for the work we had to do. I looked as the nearest marine, who's body language was entirely subdued by the Gen III exo he was wearing.
"You guys all climbed that? Wearing those?" I asked with a small bit of bewilderment obvious in my voice.
"It wasn't easy." The marine replied simply, not uttering another word as he stared back forward.
I shook my head in dismissal as I pulled off my backpack, carrying it in my left hand as I made my way to the bridge. Dan and Dimitri were going to investigate the CIC while I did the same there.
Inside, it bore a striking resemblance to the one we have on the Explorer, down to a tee. The only difference that I could nitpick were the comms and weapons consoles having their places switched.
"Alright, let's see what we can find." I said to myself as I pulled my portable terminal out of my backpack and linked it directly to navigation. In less than a minute, I was in the system.
I had to give the quarians credit, not only were they talented engineers, but they are much better code breakers than any of us. I think they're good enough that they could've given Alan Turing a run for his money, and he was a bloody genius.
I scrolled through all the navigational data as it automatically downloaded, trying to see where the ship had been, where it had come from, all that jazz. It looked as if this ship had been here dozens of times in the last few months, and I had serious doubt that this was the only ship of its kind based on the gaps in the movement charts alone.
I was hoping that navigation would also contain some information on this mystery stealth drive, but alas, no luck. I figured that if it wasn't in navigation, it would instead be in engineering.
"Hey, have either of you two found anything interesting?" I asked over the comm channel, hoping to be enlightened.
"No, we're trying to get main power restored at the moment." Jack replied, the sounds of tools hitting the deck clearly heard. "The reactor doesn't seem to be damaged, we don't know why it would be disabled."
"Well, be careful. I don't want either of you two getting injured by a shitty knockoff of our reactor system." I finished, cutting off the line as I unhooked from navigation and moved over to communications to see if I could pick up any recordings or comm frequencies.
While I was in the process of decrypting the comm station, I could feel the ship rumble as the reactor turned back on. I smiled, looking back to my console to monitor the process. Then, without warning, the ship shuttered violently as it somehow made a gravity drive jump.
"What the… Jack! What is going on?!" I questioned before suddenly getting angry, shouting into the comm channel.
"I don't know! A few moments after the reactor started back up, the gravity drive charged up and made a jump!" He answered with a sudden distraught tone as the sound of the drive in operation nearly drowned him out.
"Is there any way we can stop it?" I asked quickly, trying to come up with possible solutions while my mind was still processing what happened.
"I could try to stop it in mid operation, but that could end up killing all of us!" He hypothesized, sounding very worried.
"What's going on?" Dimitri asked as he and Dan ran into the bridge with equally confused looks on their faces.
"Somehow we've made a jump. Jack and I are still trying to figure out just what the hell happened." I replied, looking over at the communication console to see where the hell we were going. "Apparently, we're going towards the Titan Nebula."
"Wait, Titan Nebula?" Dimitri repeated with surprise evident in his voice.
"Yeah, why?" I asked, thinking about it for a few moments before it dawned on me.
Back when we interrogated Lynda a year ago, she mentioned that a Cerberus facility known as "The Barn" was located in the Titan Nebula. That could only lead to one conclusion.
This ship and everything that led up to it, it was all a trap. And we had walked right into it.
We would be surrounded by Cerberus in less than fifteen minutes.
…
A/N: Cliffhangers are fun for authors, you know? It's fun to leave the audience guessing.
Anyways, I was still in recovery mode from my spring finals while writing this chapter, so once again I apologize if anything seems slightly disjointed or oddly structured. I've been fighting a bad case of writer's block ever since I failed my math course. I hope it is acceptable.
I'd love to read any reviews, I'm always up for suggestions or constructive criticism. Stay tuned!