Climbing the tether came with exhilarating memories of boarding Citadel flagships when Dad made it back to Alliance space. The retractable tunnels always made Sara think of primitive bounce house slides and if she could trust the atmosphere enough to drop her helmet, she just knew the static electricity would be sending her hair skyward in a manic halo.

That was the easy part. It was amazing how many easy parts there were to life or death missions if Sara broke them down step by step, breath by breath. At least, that's how she had to view it as she approached the first sealed door onto the kett ship and knew that despite her adrenal system being unable to differentiate the level of stress presented by a, "we need to talk" message from Reyes, a disapproving glare from her father or a kett soldier aiming a weapon directly at her, rationally, she knew they were all intrinsically different.

This was big. Monumental. She was relieved the responsibility of Ark Paarchero had been passed onto someone else's shoulders. Now, all she had to focus on was the relic. And not dying. The relic and not dying preferably, although there was a whole spectrum in between dying and evading capture that included all kinds of torture and imprisonment that precipitated death.

SAM overrode the locks at the terminal by the door. But not the alarms.

"Shit!" Not the cleverest of things to say, but it worked. As soon as the word left Sara's mouth, the siren cut, leaving only flashing lights that faded into a red dim. "SAM?"

The AI hadn't been quick enough to disable the initial alarm, but he did the next best thing. He made it appear as malfunctioning systems so they'd only have to deal with an engineer and not a patrol. Sara took a second to breathe and glanced to her team. "SAM countermanded the alert," she said. "It's temporary, so let's move before we're noticed."

Jacking into the closest console confirmed everything the AI predicted. A small team was coming to examine the alarm systems, but it also provided them with schematics to the flagship, Verakan, and having schematics meant a clear path to the Archon's chamber. They'd want to avoid the mess hall or any central hub containing the vast majority of kett until they had to force their way into what was presumably the most heavily guarded room.

Sara waved her team toward her omni tool. "You seeing what I'm seeing-?"

"Ryder?" It was Raeka.

Sara frowned at the crackling radio frequency. "I thought you were on the ark."

The docking bay door where Sara had previously entered the ship opened and Raeka emerged with three other salarians. "I left Captain Hayjer on the ark," she explained. "Too many of our people are missing. If we don't find them now, we never will."

It wasn't a discussion and Sara certainly didn't have the time to debate. "Their outlook is pretty grim," she warned. "But I understand. Don't take any unnecessary chances, because it's likely those missing are already dead."

"Understood. We can stick to the shadows and improvise." The salarian Pathfinder ran a hand along the wall of the corridor. She stopped at a maintenance shaft and pried it open. "We'll focus on the rescue, while you push ahead, Ryder."

"All right." Sara nodded ahead as the salarians disappeared into the shafts. "The Moshae said the relic would be in the Archon's chamber. Let's get there."

"Us three versus a ship full of kett?" Cora snorted. "If only it were that easy."

Drack chuckled. "Four of us. I count double."

With the schematics before them it became apparent just what the Verakan was about. Crew quarters and mess hall aside, the ship contained storage space for armaments as well as a massive lab attached to the med bay. Sara could see- if not a clear path, then a steady one- toward the Archon's chamber. She decided against any maintenance shafts so that they would be a separate entity from the salarians should anything go catastrophically wrong.

They crept along at a cautious pace of continuous movement. With SAM monitoring security, they would pause, tucked behind corners or supply crates as patrols made their rounds. Sara and her team edged closer, cutting through the winding back corridors of their food pantries, the trash disposal and incinerator.

The path got more complicated the closer they got to their target. There weren't any back hallways to scurry down in the heart of the ship. They'd have to take a chance and travel through an observation deck and then the lab.

Drack sounded almost excited at the prospect of combat. The sentries at the door didn't stand a chance against the old krogan who was itching for a fight. He ignored Cora's hiss of, "Quietly!" and with a sweep of his arm, pulled the one kett guard into the air with a wave of biotics and slammed it into its partner. As they fumbled with their injuries, palming their skulls, he rushed up to them and shot them point blank, one after the other.

"Always got to be excessive, don't you?" Cora grumbled.

"They won't be ringing any alarms." He hefted one body to the side of the door.

She scoffed and readied her rifle. "I'm not worried about them," Cora said. "I'm worried about whoever's behind that door."

"Let them be worried about us," Drack replied and opened the door, guns blazing.

The kett were a menace. Not only did they view all other sentient life in Heleus as lesser, but they destroyed the angara as part of their reproduction and slaughtered everyone else without a second thought. They were the closest thing to the personification of evil in Sara's life. Still. That being said, there was a slight twinge of guilt at watching Drack and Cora lay to waste the skeleton crew of unarmed techs on the observation deck before they could even touch their consoles.

"I'm amazed the entire ship isn't looking for us," Sara commented, walking in.

The observation deck's viewscreen was massive and should have displayed the Tafeno System. Of course, at the center of an armada, the scenery was ships instead of stars. This observation deck in particular seemed to be a tad more important, however, since it not only had a clear view of Ark Paarchero, but there were two military grade armaments crammed onto the deck and taking up the majority of space.

"Look at that..!" Sara was just nailing it today with insightful commentary.

Fortunately, Cora was no better. The lieutenant ran right up to the viewscreen and pressed her hands against the glass for a better look. "Those look like guns out there."

"Are they pointed at the ark?" No wonder security was minimal. Sara's guilt over her team murdering the kett overseeing Paarchero's kill switches began to ebb. "That's going to be a problem."

Drack stalked around the command console as if it was pyjack meat he was inspecting at a street vendor's stall. "Those guns won't miss," he declared with a self-important nod. "You can can scratch the mission, the relic, everything."

SAM uttered an obscenity on Sara's private channel before she had the chance to, so perhaps the AI truly was learning and adapting, although not likely in any way anticipated. She thumbed the radio frequency on her omni tool. "Raeka, did you see those guns back there? I'm sending you their specs now."

"I know." The salarian Pathfinder's voice came out slow and distracted as Sara sent her images of the cannons. "They'll destroy the ark before we can power up the engines. Unless... Venro here used to repair FTL drives on private cruisers. Venro- an EMP device?"

"It might work. If we rig one to detonate near those guns, they'd lose power."

"And the ark would be out of harm's way."

"What about your missing people?" Sara asked.

"I'll keep looking," Raeka said. "Seldin and Venro will focus on the EMP."

Sara looked at the guns. The barrel was easily as wide as a commercial shuttle. "A lot of things have to go right for this to work."

"I guess they'll have to, then." No hesitation. Sara couldn't tell if it was bravado on Raeka's part, or simply the only option. "This is when salarians are at their best."

Sara waved her omni tool. "We'll stay in touch over the radio."

"Good luck, Pathfinder."

"You too, Pathfinder." She turned to her team. "This is the salarians' problem, now. We have to complete our mission."

She let Drack take the lead in mowing down lab techs and medical personnel. By the time she got into the lab to man the command console and prevent any alarms, he was fishing the last one out who was cowering beneath a desk. Free of bustling personnel, it gave Sara a clear view of what was happening on the Verakan, both through data logs as well as physical specimens.

It wasn't a lab and it definitely wasn't a med bay. It was a butcher shop. Rows and rows of stasis pods had been carelessly cracked open and discarded along the wall, their contents missing. Empty pod after empty pod sat like hollowed out husks with no sign of their inhabitants. Where were the salarians? That stupid little thought planted a panicked ember of hope, because if they weren't finding them, then perhaps they still might. But then they did, and Sara wished they hadn't.

Despite all the emptied pods, there were only three deceased salarians laid out on exam tables. They appeared to have been autopsied, but the blood splatter patterns indicated the victim was still alive when their organs were removed. The terminal by the tables was grimly informative with explicit pros and cons of salarian physiology laid out.

"Raeka." Sara brought her omni tool to her mouth and turned her gaze from the exam table to a shattered pod. "I hate to say this, but I don't think you'll find your missing civilians."

"It's only three salarians..." She knew it wasn't her that Cora was arguing with her, moreso the lieutenant was lashing out at the reality of the situation.

"Yes, Cora, and how many empty pods?" Sara forced her voice level, as much to quell the prickling uneasiness in her guts as to not attract any unwanted attention. "We know the kett use the angara as hosts for reproduction, does it have to be angara? Look at these readouts."

High metabolic rate, very low sleep requirements, short-lived, accelerated mental acuity, muscle strength lacking... Did the kett have something similar for the angara? What about humans? Sloane Kelly had used the badlands as a dumping ground; the assumption always being that people would be murdered out there or die from exposure. If the kett swooped in and snatched a few, they'd never be missed.

Raeka had remained silent during that entire exchange. "How many empty pods, Ryder?"

"Dozens, at least."

"I see." The salarian Pathfinder paused over the radio, as if calculating. "Well. Hundreds were missing, so I have to continue, but you've just given me a new objective to think about. Raeka out."

New objective? Should Sara have been worried? Of all the Pathfinders she encountered, Zevin Raeka exuded the most warmth and she seemed as quick and clever as she was personable. But of all the Pathfinders, she was the last that was handpicked by Alec Ryder himself, and that alone could point to any number of quirks.

She tried to press on, despite Cora lingering by one of the salarian corpses.

"Ryder?" Cora stood there, motionless as she stared at the body. "Say it doesn't work. Say we can't free the ark... how many salarians are left?"

"Not enough," Sara admitted. SAM's numbers were clear. "The entire species is as risk."

"Guess they'll know what the genophage feels like, then," Drack said with a shrug. The krogan had already made it past them and was waiting at the exit.

"Really?" Cora popped a fist against the exam table. "Now's the time to be an asshole?"

Drack just snorted.

"Come on," Sara said. "We can't stay here."

The security presence towards the heart of the ship was thicker. Patrols appeared more frequently, but they were still only pairs of soldiers who seemed bored. If it was anything like Alliance politics, it sounded about right. Guarding the Archon's chamber was probably a cushy, low-threat job they'd earned from prior service and proving themselves trustworthy.

There were too many patrols to wait them all out, so Drack finally got his wish. SAM froze the security feed for that corridor as the krogan did what he did best. Sara guarded their rear as Drack sprayed his assault rifle down the narrow corridor, Cora on his heels to tidy his mess, her biotics pulling kett and bullets alike.

"That door should be the Archon's chamber," Sara called out, stumbling over a body.

"Don't let up!" Cora hollered in front of her, as if Drack even knew the meaning of such a phrase.

They pushed their way down the hall and once at the door, Sara swapped places with them. She brought her hand to the door's console for SAM to do his thing while Drack and Cora watched her back.

They'd made it. The strangeness of not encountering any real kett threat as they traversed the Verakan was beginning to mount. Even SAM was leery, noting how many personnel were present onboard and that it was rather convenient that until that final push, they hadn't rounded a corner on a single one. No one popped into their hallway, no one had to double back through the lab for a forgotten keycard, no one even had an ill-timed potty break. The Archon's chamber stood before them without a guard in sight.

Would it have been prudent to run? As obvious as the trap had felt, in a sense it was already sprung. Sara and her team were already aboard the Verakan, along Raeka and the salarians. There was no way to free the ark with those armaments aimed at it unless they did something. The artifact that lured them all here was purportedly just a room away.

It was never the immediate act, but rather hindsight that would keep Sara awake at night.

The chamber door slid open even as SAM warned her to be cautious. It was a room with a terminal and not much else. No immediate life signatures and a single, central dais with what could only be the relic. Too simple. Who else would leave the most important item on the entire ship out on display like ripened fruit begging to be plucked?

Sara didn't even have time to assess the situation. As soon as all three of them were in the room just beyond the door, some sort of field activated in their presence. Firm and unyielding, she instinctively bucked at it, which just separated her feet from the floor and left her suspended in the air. From behind her, she could hear Drack's grunts and Cora's uselessly flaring biotics. Sara couldn't move, she could hardly breathe.

"It's useless to struggle." And there was old ugly, himself. It had been so long since their first introduction, Sara had almost forgotten what the Archon looked like. He was taller than his underlings and broader, but shared their gray chitinous outer covering and cloudy eyes in a milky blue. In the viewscreen of the Tempest she had thought the Archon was horned, but here in person, Sara could see the bones curve upward and arched until they joined together in a parody of a halo.

"I've been in this forsaken cluster for decades surrounded by amoeba." The Archon approached them, his tone conversational and he circled around as if inspecting them, stopping just short of the field they were trapped in, careful not to touch it. "Then you arrive- a human, able to do the unthinkable. You even evaded me. Such an unlikely rival." He peered at Sara specifically, singling her out." It was almost invigorating to have one. And yet, it's a fitting end."

End. Bone-chilling in its certainty. It gave weight to Raeka's decision to dismantle her SAM. The only thing Sara could do was keep him talking, but suddenly her mouth felt very dry.

"What are you going to do with me?" she managed.

He chuffed a little laugh in the back of his throat. "Whatever I please."

In an instant, the Archon was on her, his hand around her neck. She made a startled squeak, though thankfully he made no move to strangle her despite his grip being firm enough for her carotid to beat feverishly against his thumb.

"Hey!" There was a flash of electricity in Sara's periphery as Cora fought against her restraints. "Back off, asshole."

The Archon ignored her. His hand slackened enough to fan out to the base of Sara's skull. With a bored lack of ceremony, he yanked her neck forward and shoved her head down. Sara felt the sharp stab of a needle crudely glancing off her vertebrae and then only air.

The Archon stepped back, eyeing the syringe in his hands smugly. He went back to that conversational clip with his gravelly voice. "A first sample," he said. "Your testing begins now. I will learn your secret soon enough. Save your strength, human."

And with that, he departed without so much as a goodbye or second glance. Secrets! All Sara could think of were silly, trivial things, like letting Scott take the blame when Dad discovered the bottle of Serrice ice brandy had been replaced with water, or the time the toilet had overflowed because she'd stupidly been flushing- she was panicking and even SAM was requesting she silence unnecessary thoughts as he ran through options.

"Raeka? Raeka, can you hear me?" Speaking of panicking, there was Cora. "Raeka must have run into trouble."

Sara forced a laugh. "We have her beat. SAM, what can you tell me?"

A biological transmitter in Sara's blood. And here she assumed whatever "samples" the Archon was talking about would be removed from her, not placed inside her. She didn't feel particularly kett, but then, she also had an AI frantically trying to neutralize any damage.

"Okay," Sara told him, "that's priority two for sure. Any idea how to break out of this?"

Kett tech, maybe Rem tech, Sara wasn't sure. Extended and frozen in the air, it did remind her of those trapped scientists on Havarl that they rescued what felt like an eternity ago. Still, if she was making contact with the field, then so was SAM.

"Raeka!" From behind her, Cora was getting more insistent. "Come in, Raeka!"

"A little busy at the moment." Raeka's voice came in pressured, buried under rifle fire. "No guards, no alarm- it's like they were waiting for the perfect moment to stage an assault."

The perfect moment. Like after Sara's team was lured into a trap with open arms. No cavalry would be coming to the rescue. Sara strained her head as far as it would go. "SAM?"

His findings were grim. The containment fields only interacted with living matter. If one were to expire, the field around them would extinguish until manually reset. So, the easiest, quickest way to escape would be to just drop dead. Sara cackled.

"So, let's all die then," she said. "What could possibly go wrong?"

But that was precisely what the blasted AI was suggesting. SAM had access to her physiology so that he was able to enhance signals- she'd seen her father voluntarily utilize that feature on Habitat Seven when he'd pushed himself to the brink- it was a logical leap to assume the AI was also capable of the opposite.

"Seriously?" Sara didn't care if it came out as a whine. "So, if you shut down my life signs- if you kill me- the field will disappear?"

If Sara Ryder were to expire, the containment field imprisoning her body would shut off. Once freed and legally dead for a second time, SAM would attempt to resuscitate. Attempt.

"Oh, thanks," she drawled. "No other options, huh?"

SAM's generated voice didn't exactly have the capability for comfort or confidence, but the AI himself still assured her that he currently had a 100% success rate for reviving Sara Ryder.

Sara allowed herself a single, long suffering sigh to shake off the bleak, unwavering fear. "All right. Let's do it."

"Ryder, this is insane." Good old Cora. Cora wouldn't be Cora if she wasn't campaigning against Sara's continual stupidity. Unfortunately, it was a valid point.

Luckily, Drack interrupted with a snort."You better come back." It was the tiny nudge she needed.

Sara could hear SAM crystal clear in her head. "Stopping your heart... now."

While quick, it wasn't immediate. Sara felt a rush of adrenaline, endorphins- something- flood her body, and warming everything from her belly to her fingertips. Her heart began to pound faster and faster until her breaths came out in desperate wheezing gasps and her vision began to blur. Sara's chest burned and the more she tried to take in air, the less oxygen her body could find. She knew she was dying. Her body knew it was dying. Rationally, she knew this was the plan and what was supposed to happen, but every ounce of her being rebelled against it and as her heart sped to immeasurable arrhythmia, she used her last gulp of air to cry out.

SAM wouldn't just let her die. It would kill him too. Her heart wasn't literally exploding in her chest. He would resuscitate her as soon as she flatlined. He said he was going to resuscitate-

Everything went warm, black and nothing.

"I'm not going to lose you!"

"And you're not! You have me always, but I am going to die."

"Not if I have anything to say about that."

"Just stop. I'm dying, Alec. I'm dying."

"SAM..?"

Reality returned hard and cold.

"SAM- Ryder!"

Sara's head hurt. There was a heaviness to her arms and legs akimbo on the floor as she struggled to pull herself up to a sitting position, her throat raw and chest throbbing. Sara waved aimlessly at Cora and Drack floating behind her before she clenched her icy fingers against her palms.

"That's twice I've come back from the dead," she murmured. "Can't say the experience is improving. Let's not do that, again." Sara tried to hop up to her feet, but the sudden movement made her dizzy. She staggered over to the terminal by the containment field and used it to prop herself up as much as to scan the controls. "Will you two quit hanging around?" she told them to audible groans. "Let's find a way out of this cage, huh?"

Cora was at her side the moment Sara disabled the containment field. "Ryder, are you okay?"

"Doesn't matter." It was the truth, no matter how much her second glowered. "Get the relic; we need to get out of here."

It was what they came for, after all, and now that it was in her possession, Sara was free to smash it into a million pieces if the Archon tried to stop them. Through her armor, she could feel her heart beating- albeit a bit weaker and faster than usual- as she moved toward the door. Baby steps.