A/N – The 'canon' story "Homeworlds #2" reportedly tells what happened between the time Tali ambushed the geth (the one containing recorded conversation between Saren and Benezia talking about "Eden Prime being a major victory", a conversation that necessarily happened after they had left Eden Prime) and when she stumbled her way into Dr. Michel's clinic. It spans several days, including a trip to Ilium with bureaucratic delays, stowing away to the Citadel, and jail time. This is a problem because in the game, from the time Shepard gets zapped by the beacon (only after which could Saren have said "Eden Prime was a major victory...") to Normandy's arrival at the Citadel is little more than fifteen hours (according to Dr. Chakwas.)
Don't try to hand me any "time dilation" baloney...even at .9c, there would only have been 30 hours. This is just old-fashioned bad continuity (under these circumstances, that's pronounced, "sloppy storytelling.") What we see happen in ME1 is difficult enough to make work. (Like the fact that Dr. Michel says that the quarian came in a couple of days earlier.) The only way I've thought of that makes it all fit is if Normandy docked at the Citadel and sat there for days before meeting with Udina.
This chapter is rated MA for some language and violence against the person. And since every chapter seems to be rated MA (and never lower,) I'm going to stop saying so. Anyone who's read this far and not been put off by it has nothing to fear from anything else that will follow.
*** Tali'Zorah nar Rayya ***
The past few weeks had been interesting, but the past day had been chaos and several brushes with death.
Since leaving the flotilla, Tali'Zorah nar Rayya and Keenah'Breizh nar Iktomi had tracked hostile geth to a frozen outpost world, and managed to land while evading detection. But the stunt-like landing had damaged the ship.
While Keenah and the other quarians made repairs to the tiny 30-meter pocket starship – using soil for printer feedstock – Tali had led one of the geth patrols on a hurried chase away from it, and mugged one of them only to find she had overloaded a control system that would normally have destroyed the processing cores.
The "flat" system architecture used by the geth was a familiar one, and Tali seized upon the opportunity to download its contents, knowing that there was a backup to the security backup; the substrate was designed to be unstable if power was lost for several minutes. She was hunched over the inert geth when the feeds finally went dark. Feeling like she'd missed an opportunity, she sat back with a sigh and began to study the data she had managed to salvage. It wasn't as much as she had hoped for.
Looking forlornly at the exposed innards of the android, she realized the substrate had not in fact crumbled to dust. The cores, suspended in a borophene plasma, were still intact. More importantly, because the containment bubble was still intact, they were functional. The data may not have been important, but a functioning processor cluster was an amazing find.
The unit she had ambushed had apparently been one of several present during some kind of discussion with or between organics. This alone was startling; since driving the quarians from Rannoch, the geth were well known to be hostile to all organics. On her own, Tali would probably have mistaken the audio recordings for damaged data. But her neural interface allowed Tali to task her collection of specialized Virtual Intelligences with highly complex and intricate assignments as easily as she moved her own limbs.
So it was only because of her father's actions that one of her VIs – officially unapproved, but given to her by Rael'Zorah vas Rayya – noticed the sampling structure and rendered a low-bitrate excerpt of the unusual material. Without asking for approval to play it, the "willful" VI simply fed it straight to her suit's audio pickups.
Tali heard a voice say, "…the return of…"
She froze, looked around quickly, checked her sensor feeds. Nothing else was moving, no other people were near.
Audio recording detected in quands 11259-35070. Unstripe / rebuild / delete?
Father's crazy VI,Tali realized.
Rebuild and playback, she directed it.
While the VI worked, Tali continued her own meta-analysis. Five other VIs were searching for data about the geth themselves in what she'd recovered; how they had changed since taking Rannoch from the quarians. The chunks of data she was finding in the caches had been 'striped' across the geth memories. Normally this allowed for data reconstruction if at least 20% of the units were accessed, but Tali would have to locate the encryption hardware and hope it wasn't damaged.
She did find it. Not only was it damaged, it was thoroughly self-immolated.
Still, the data had been captured, and with the geth patrol misled, she returned to the Honorata when the Captain called; they lifted ship and made for Ilium, Tali using the time en route to process the data, asking her crewmates if they had any decryption algorithms that might help.
When the VI finished its processing, it recalled her reaction to its previous interruption, and popped open a window on her helmet's HUD: Audio recording rebuild complete. Contiguous 32 kBps 22.5 kHz mono signal available for playback.
Tali gestured the command to begin playback.
"Eden Prime was a major victory," said a voice. Tali picked out the dimodulation as obviously turian. "The beacon has brought us one step closer to finding the Conduit."
Another voice – more feminine, but sounding equally grim – said, "And one step closer to the return of the reapers."
It was not much to go on.
But during the hours it took to get to the mass relay, Tali had learned more from the geth's secondary controller. Originally a way for a damaged unit to have its actions analyzed upon recovery, the system had been modified by the geth after the war to function as a platform BIOS, allowing it to function even if severely damaged, until its individual system could be restored from backup.
The fundamental data it contained was apparently not considered important enough to provide with redundant self-destruct, but it was immensely informative to Tali. She discovered that there was something called "Nazara" that the geth regarded as an endstate they were pursuing…but so fantastically advanced as to be considerd godlike in its power. The syntax of the name (having no designator,) and the way the BIOS parsed the name made it clear that it was not even unique; there were other 'reapers,' and someone named "Arterius-Spectre" was apparently in control of them.
A Council Spectre?
The situation was simply awe-inspiring…and terrifying. But Tali had no time to consider the implications, because by the time the Honorata had jumped to Ilium, their landing permit had expired, and an official was claiming the landing site had been rented out to another ship. A turian identifying himself as a Port Authority Officer (and his credentials seemed to be in order) told them the ship they were on had been listed as stolen, that they were all to be arrested as soon as they docked, and the Honorata impounded.
He boarded the ship and started shooting, killing the Captain of the Honorata, her husband, and the navigator (who hadn't even been on his pilgrimage yet) before Keenah activated the fire alarm remotely, and Tali opened both airlock doors. The cabin was too small for the gun-waving turian to be blown out, but he stayed gaping and confused long enough for the suited quarians to kill him.
Contacting Ilium's Traffic Control again, they were politely asked if they needed to declare an emergency. Keenah suggested that, while the Honorata clearly belonged to the Second Officer, he and Tali should take the courier that the turian had boarded from – the transponder of which was now declaring it to be unregistered – and head for the Citadel. They could operate a shipping business and amass enormous pilgrimage gifts, maybe even use the turian's courier as their own ship after fitting it out.
Tali had other plans for the information she had collected and analyzed. She was also uncertain that the ship was actually unregistered; its condition was too good for it to have been abandoned willingly.
When they arrived at the Citadel, the proper corporate owners tried to have them arrested for piracy, but the charge was reduced to stowaways and then not pressed because the ship's flight recorder validated their part of the story, and they had brought the ship back to its home port voluntarily, and in excellent condition.
Now shipless, they split up temporarily; Keenah went to get berths at a shelter, and Tali headed for the embassy to get help, or at least to find out what sort of resources there were. The turian clerk was dismissive and rude, saying it wasn't his job to just hand out money or ships or whatever, even calling her a "suit-rat" before threatening to call C-Sec if she didn't leave.
Not to be stopped so easily, Tali realized C-Sec might be able to help, and headed for a public area helpfully called the Commons. Shopping, housing, restaurants, banking, and most importantly a C-Sec office where she might be able to find an information broker who was in the market for information like she had about this Saren. Perhaps even Saren himself would pay to keep it quiet…if he didn't kill her first.
No…clearly this information would only benefit anyone if Tali sold it within the intelligence community before Saren realised she had it. Having ventilated the agent of Saren's who could have told her that, she was taken entirely by surprise when a sniper put a round through her shoulder.
She collapsed on the stairs, sealed her suit sections around it, managed to get to an unfinished suite around the corner. Coming soon, read a hologram on the wall, New C-Sec Storefront for Sector Eight.
Noticing a subhall with two exits, she positioned herself where she could see everything from shadows, and waved her omnitool over the injury. While the analysis ran, she opened a medikit and began working on it. The single-use GrabIt (a gift from a favourite cousin) extracted the largest bullet fragments, which she set aside and pushed a thimble-sized dose of medi-gel into the wound, sealed it with tape, and closed the suit.
Polonium ammunition. Seek professional medical aid immediately, warned her VI.
Another VI located the nearest free public clinic, but it was in sector six. It would take her almost half an hour to get there; her suit informed her that she was entering a state of shock, and there wasn't much more it could do to help.
Her suit had located the shooter, and warned her that three people – all humans, and all with their IDs off – seemed to be converging on her position. She made it to an elevator and had gone two levels short of the maximum that the elevator would let her go before she was beckoned into a duct by a human child who looked only a bit younger than herself. He pointed at her wound, and said, "You're bleeding. I can take you to a Humanist clinic; you can get help there."
"I'm quarian," Tali explained.
He rolled his eyes. "I know that," he said, "But Doctor Michel is a Humanist…she helps everyone."
Tali tilted her head quizzically.
"For free," explained the dirty-faced youth. He held out his left hand, palm open. "See this?" He drew a line with his right index finger from the web of his thumb to the other side of the hand. "I fell out of the skycar maze so I wouldn't get hit by this one car – I couldn't hear him, right? – and I missed the stopper shelf. But I grabbed the edge of a vent fan. I thought I was fucked. But Moni found me in time, helped me back up. That's when it happened; on the way up, I didn't get my hand out of the way in time." He drew the line across his hand again vigorously, "Whack! There was blood…everywhere. But Moni knew this doctor, Doctor Michel, who runs a little clinic right there. She always helps us kids out."
Another of Tali's VIs warned her that her temperature was rising. "Can you take me to her? I've been hit with radioactive ammunition, and it's toxic." She lit her omnitool to show him.
"Sure," he waved a hand casually, not bothering to look at her forearm, "But I didn't tell you the best part. Doctor Michel regrew my hand for me," he held it up again, flexed his fingers. "Good as new! So Moni started calling me the Salamander. I think it kind of weirded her out, but I like it." He backed away down the duct, "Come on, I'll take you there."
Tali nodded unconsciously as they traveled along the duct. Her vision was enhanced by infrared sensors, but she wasn't sure how he could see where he was going. "So where's Moni?"
"She got stuffed. Said it wasn't mine, but she had it aborted and Doctor Michel gave her a genetic mod to turn it off. Said she could get it turned back on later if she wanted." He paused as he continued to clamber ahead. "I thought we were going to be able to live on what she could make, but…she's been gone for...days."
Caution: elevated circulatory rate increasing toxin propagation.
Tali tried to keep a sense of perspective. "Then…wait. Stop for a minute." Ahead of her, the boy squirmed around to face her again with astonishing speed. "What is it?" His expression begged her to tell him where Moni was.
Tali reached into a webbed footbag. "I think you need this more than I do." She struggled to reach the trinket, but continued to talk as she did, "I got this from a human on Ilium. She told me she sensed I was going to find my soulmate, and she gave me this to give to him. Or, well...mmh…just a minute. Ah, there you are." She produced a gold coin about three centimeters across, held it up for him to see.
"She called it a 'living mizpah.' It's really just a one-bit entangled pair device. You can't communicate with it, but you can find each other. I'm sure you'll find her again, and when you do, break this along the jagged parting line, and each of you take a part of it. To find each other, just hold it in your thumb and fingers with the round edge forward. The edge will brighten where it's closest to the other half of the coin." She held it out to him. "But don't break it until you find her; the battery is not very big. As long as you both have your halves, you can always find each other."
The boy looked delighted. "Solid!" He looked at Tali, his eyes bright and optimistic. "I just know I'll find her again. This is great!"
Tali sighed, feeling nauseated and sleepy. This exchange had let her rest, lightened her load, encouraged this human child, and let Tali check to be sure she wasn't still being followed. She shook her head. "Ooh…this is getting bad. I really need help."
"Salamander" looked at her with renewed determination, nodded once. "Come on, I'll get you to Doctor Michel." He performed another one of his contortionist reversals, and shot down the duct. "She'll help you out, I just know it."
After another few minutes of crawling, they emerged in a high-speed skycar corridor. Salamander helped Tali up over the railing above them, and onto what looked like a viewing balcony. Tali barely noticed that the view of the station; right now, she was feeling much too sick.
"The clinic is just over here," the ragged boy said, turning to the right. He started off, and then glanced back to see Tali leaning on the railing. The climb had been wearying for her…and it shouldn't have been. Grabbing her waist, and putting her hand on his shoulder, he glanced up at her. "Come on," he said, "We're almost there!"
The last few meters was a struggle; Tali felt like – for only the second time in her life – she was going to throw up in her suit. The anti-nausea biostim apps were not keeping up. As she stumbled through the door, the medic – a red-haired human – practically ran over and caught her as she collapsed.
Looking up at her, Tali was barely able to speak through her own delirium. "On the whole, my pilgrimage is really not going well right now," she mumbled as she slipped into unconsciousness.
# # #
When she awoke, Doctor Chloe Michel was just walking over, studying a datapad. "Oh, good…you're waking up." Her accent was unknown to Tali, but the translator had no difficulty rendering a translation she could read. "You were lucky that young Timmy brought you in when he did." She inclined her head toward the human child, napping in the next bed. "He is a good boy. How do you feel?"
"Sleepy," Tali answered slowly. "Hungry."
"Do you feel any nausea or dizziness?"
Tali paused to check before answering, "Ah…no."
Doctor Michel nodded at her datapad. "That's a relief. I haven't treated many quarians, especially not for polonium poisoning. So I was unsure if the subjective readings were accurate." She nodded decisively. "I am Doctor Michel…and you are welcome to rest here if you want. But who would want to shoot you? And why with polonium ammunition?"
"I don't know," Tali shook her head, "But I should try to find my friend from the Honorata. May I connect to your network? I'd like to text him." Tali knew what her answer would be, but she also knew that asking let others feel valued, which made interactions easier. Pilgrimage training (where she had learned this) could make the difference between returning successfully, and not returning at all.
The doctor lit her omnitool gauntlet and waved it past Tali, looking at the results. "Of course; the whole Citadel has realtime PVR, so feel free." She waved the omnitool past Tali again. "Wait. Now that you're awake, I should ask; may I give you a toxinverter? That bullet must have had some really aggressive tech."
"You're the doctor; I'll take whatever you recommend…and thank you for it."
Doctor Michel adjusted her omnitool, "We really need to figure out who shot you; they might try again. Have you upset someone? Offended, maybe?"
"Only the geth I killed on that frozen world." Tali thought for a moment, approved the medicine that the doctor had just offered to her systems, then continued, "Then this turian pretended to be a port official on Ilium and killed the captain."
"Killed your captain? Where's your ship?"
"It's a long story. Only the Second Mate and a child survived, though, so it's their ship. It was just an old Roshlym-2." The doctor's blank look told Tali she had no idea what that was. "A pocket starship from fifty years ago. I think they said they got it from the asari whose mother had used it for adventuring. Keenah and I had taken the turian's ship and came here; apparently he had stolen it, so it was taken from us."
"Would he want you dead?"
"The turian? He was probably just trying to steal a ship that wouldn't register as stolen—"
"No, the other quarian."
"Keenah?!" Tali was shocked; how it was that members of the same species could kill each other was baffling to her, but quarians especially understood the value of community, and even of each individual. There were relatively few quarians, so any life lost was a tragedy to their gene pool…if not to their civilization.
She sighed. "Certainly not. We're on our pilgrimages. Keenah was going to check out the nearest shelter and see if there was room for us." She gestured, sending off the text. "Though we should split up again soon. You don't want to get mated while you're on your pilgrimage…and he's not really my type…which is kind of what makes him a good pilgrimage cohort."
Doctor Michel shook her head. "I'm still worried about you. You don't know who shot you or why. But someone wanted you dead enough to use expensive ammunition…"
"I'll know if they come around again," Tali interrupted, "My suit identified three humans who were approaching after I was shot; it will tell me if they get within a half a kilometer. But I'm looking for a way to sell information to the Shadow Broker. It's about someone named Arterius."
"The Shadow Broker I know, and that probably means this will be dangerous. But Arterius? That sounds turian. Do you have a first name? Is he important?"
Tali looked at the image, shrugged. "I don't actually know. I have an audio recording of his voice, and some geth data that…um…" Tali turned quickly when the main entrance door hissed open. "Uh, maybe we should talk about this later."
"I'm sorry…I'll be right back." The doctor turned, stepped around the half-wall. "Hello, and welcome to the Medical Clinic. How can I help you?"
What had come through the door was – at first glance – a floating red crate. As the crate moved into the room, it was followed by a krogan, carrying it in one arm. He continued in, carrying a white one behind him. Setting them on the ground with gentle thumps suggesting they were quite heavy, he produced a digital tablet, which he extended toward the doctor. "I don't know how to set this up," he rumbled, "So don't ask."
Doctor Michel took the tablet, signed it, and handed it back. "No no, I will set it up later. Thank you very much."
The krogan took the tablet and left without another word.
Tali was still watching the door after it closed. "That was a krogan? I had no idea they were so large!"
The doctor nodded thoughtfully. "Yes, they certainly are."
Tali's sensors and VI had identified what was inside the crates, but a moment's reflection made her realize that saying so might reveal more than was wise. "What did you get?"
"A new set of automated beds and a scanner." Doctor Michel continued to inspect the boxes. "One of the clients I had a few days ago was grateful I was here to help, and this is how he's showing it." She turned quickly to Tali. "Ah! I know what to do. Fist. You should talk to Fist. He's not an information broker, but I know he's done work for the Shadow Broker, and can put you in touch with him. He can also protect you." She paused thoughtfully, then shrugged. "He will want a cut, of course."
"You can't do it?"
The doctor shook her head and smiled. "No, I prefer to keep my life simple where I can. Fist causes enough trouble for me, but I'm sure he can help you. You will have to go meet him at his club." She worked controls on her omnitool, pinched an icon and held it out to Tali. "This will get you there. It is very close; you can probably walk there in five minutes. I will call and tell him to expect you."
"I can just go there?"
"When you get there, go to the bar. Ask one of the servers to tell him you're there. He works out of his office, but if you just go barging in, you could find yourself staring down the barrel of a large gun."
"No, I mean I can just leave? I don't owe you something?"
The woman's face lit up as she smiled. "No, you don't owe me anything. I have enough income that I don't have to work, and I enjoy helping people who need it."
Tali thought quickly. "Well, you've probably saved my life, so I'd like to give you something…but I don't know what would do you the most good." She glanced at the crates. "You said this white box is a set of automated beds? Maybe I can help you set it up…I'm very good with technology."
"That would be helpful…I'm not sure I can move autobeds by myself." She pressed her thumb to a reader, and the top of the white crate sprang open as her omnitool chirped. She looked at it. "Oh…but Fist says he's there now and he'd like to meet you as soon as possible." She waved a hand toward the door. "You'd better go. But you can stop by again after you talk to him. I will look at the instructions while you're there."
Tali looked toward the boy "Salamander," still exhausted in the bed nearby.
"I'll tell him where you went," Doctor Michel added, "If you hurry, you might get back before he wakes up."
"Hm. Perhaps." Tali looked at the door once more, and then started toward it. "All right then, I'm going, but I'll be back to help you, Doctor."
It turned out to be more like a ten minute walk to the club, and Tali was surprised at the things she saw even in that short span. The spectacular view of the Citadel, the simply enormous spaces with nobody in them, even the service corridor didn't have specialists living next to the equipment they tended. This station had to be unimaginably huge; even larger than it already seemed. Tali continued down a set of stairs to a transit station. She peeked into the door on her left and saw a collection of seller kiosks…small enough to remind her of home, but still far and away more spacious.
Moving to the other side of the transit station, she looked across an expanse through which cars raced with quiet speed at a neon silhouette of a stylized asari reclining on an abstract graphic. The image pulsed slowly.
This may not be my kind of place, she thought, but I suppose I don't have to go back if I don't want to.
She loitered on the bridge, looking down at six vertical layers of skycar lanes, her head spinning at the volumes that would be required for this, the accelerations necessary to get the cars up to these speeds in the first place, the money spent on the cars…
But a human, exiting noisily from the door opposite reminded her of where she was. The man leaned awkwardly against the wall, pushed himself away from it to the half-wall, watched a few cars race by, shook his head, staggered along the walkway to the left. Tali waited for a few seconds for him to get back up before crossing over at the other bridge.
Chora's Den, read a locator as she stepped through the door. A Coitophile's Club and Restaurant.
The place was dark; her visor switched immediately to enhanced spectrum view, highlighting people with high-contrast outlines, identifying weapons, cameras, and other hazards with color-coded overlays. The music droned and thumped and groaned; it set her on edge.
She approached the bar; a salarian bartender looked up and pointed at her. "Here to see Fist?"
Tali nodded. "Yes...uh..."
The salarian waved to his right. "He's waiting for you. Go on in."
Tali followed his gesture to an opening in the wall; a short accessway ended in a door. It let into a ready room that could have easily accommodated four complete families. Instead, there was a set of lockers and a pair of humans playing an H2H game on their omnitools. Both of them looked up as Tali entered; her suit was getting identity info on neither of them.
Tali stopped. "Fist?" she said uncertainly, "I'm Tali'Zorah nar—"
One of the humans waved a thumb over his shoulder. "In there."
"Oh. Sorry." She walked past nervously, through a short airlock (More likely a security checkpoint, she thought,) and into an expansive office. Admirals' staterooms are hardly this big. And they usually live with their families.
Two couches were on opposite sides of a stylish table with holographic inset. Beyond them, behind a desk, sat a man with close-cropped hair, who was focused on a DCE terminal. He looked up as she entered.
"Hey. Thanks for coming," he said, "I hear you have some intel to sell."
"Thanks…for inviting me," Tali said slowly, "Um…but I shouldn't really be talking to you, should I? I thought you were going to put me in touch with the Shadow Broker."
He rose from his seat, which caused the terminal to wink off. "I am…but later. I have to know what kind of transaction I'm facilitating. I can't have you talk to him and all you have is a schedule for Transtellar, ya know?" He smiled broadly, ambling around the desk and waving a hand casually toward the couch. "Sit on down. Can I get you something to drink?"
Accept drink, do not consume processed liquids, advised a VI on Tali's HUD. Offer thanks.
"Water would be nice," she said, "Thank you." She perched nervously on the edge of the nearer couch, close to the door.
The man reached for a panel on the wall to his left, which rose at his touch to display an assortment of liquor bottles of real glass. "Water, huh? I suppose our liquor might kill you?" He shook his head as he filled a glass with water from a dispenser. "That's tough." He mixed himself a drink of some kind.
"Well, it's not likely, but it's possible. Water is something we have in common, though."
As he brought both glasses to the table, Fist looked at her closely, the usual I-wonder-if-I-can-see-into-your-mask sort of squint. "This is distilled water. Uh…you want a straw or something?"
"No, that's all right; I have an appliance for water ingestion." She tapped a part of her suit near her shoulder as Fist sat down, placing the water on the table near her.
"So what do we do next?"
He sipped from his glass, smiled easily. "What's your hurry?"
"I've been shot already today," Tali turned to show her left shoulder; the slowly-oscillating shimmer of picoforges showed the suit had begun repairing itself, but the damage was obvious.
"Hey, if they don't do that, you haven't got their attention." He glanced at her shoulder, seemed to become fractionally more serious for a moment. "Good for you. Your info is important enough to kill for, but you're tough and lucky enough not to have been killed. So tell me about this intel you have, and why you're in such a hurry to liquidate it."
"It's about the geth. I have information that shows…someone…has control over them."
"And this is valuable because…?"
Tali recoiled. "Because they killed us by the billions, and kicked us off our homeworld. And now they have had three hundred years to build up massive fleets and manufacture more troops. If this Arterius person really does control them, it's…bad! For everyone!"
Fist looked surprised, and then chuckled. "I'm not blowing you off. I'm just trying to find out who might feel threatened by this intel, and that's pretty obviously who it would be." He took another sip from his glass, and then put the drink on the table. "How did he…or anyone…find out you had it?"
She glanced down at her shoulder. "I wish I knew."
"Maybe you should start at the beginning. How did you even find this…whatever you have. Wait a minute. What do you actually have?"
"An audio file with voiceprint, and an intact geth BIOS mirror core naming Arterius-Spectre as root user."
Fist scrunched his lips in thought. "Saren Arterius? Could the recording be a fake?"
Tali looked at him incredulously. "They would need to have synthesized every nuance of the recording to sound like it was recorded live. There's no reason for them to do that." Tali paused in thought. "Unless they're trying to throw us off the track. But there would be more effective and less difficult ways to do that."
"Do you think Saren might have sent the geth to your homeworld?"
Tali goggled at him. "No." She leaned forward, peering at him closely. "We built them. Do you even know the story of the geth?"
"Uh…no. Oh, wait...it was centuries ago, wasn't it? Forget about it. I only need to know what happened to you. How did you get this file?"
Tali explained that she had only recently started on her pilgrimage. She'd landed on Ilium as part of a group of four pilgims, sponsored by IndentuTech, a company that tested them over the duration of the three-hour flight and then made offers to Tali and one of the others of a one-year contract with berth and board that would end with them getting some money, an F-6 entry card for Ilium and several other asari worlds, and "real-world experience" they could show to a company that might hire them.
In spite of having been warned by their Pilgrimage mentor that there were better companies to work through, the other quarian took the offer. Perhaps because he felt passed over, the one who had not been offered a position asked for a contract and – to everyone's surprise – was offered an R+M EVA contract aboard one of Ilium's high-orbit stations. He took it.
While bartering weapon and suit upgrades in a virtualized market, Tali and Keenah had located a small extended family operating a tiny starship and planning to "go adventuring" on a geth outpost world. It was potentially dangerous trip with unknown technology challenges, and so they had been looking for a tech specialist like Tali to be part of the crew.
The pilot and navigator were both proficient in a variety of weapons and relatively new battlefield technologies, and they had the hardware to back it up. The rest of the crew included the pilot's father (a former marine) and sister (a biologist with actual planetary experience and a fondness for incendiary weapons,) and the navigator's brother (who had not yet made his pilgrimage.)
When they offered her and Keenah 18.4% of the net, the two of them agreed it was a great opportunity; at the very least, it would provide bed and board for the duration of the "adventure."
Living in the aftermath of the geth war, during which the quarians' own AGIs had rebelled against them, the quarians as a people were painfully aware that their failure to fully understanding their own technology had cost them their homeworld. Tali's father seemed obsessed with the fact that they now lived tightly aboard starships rather than on a planetary surface, and devoted his life and practically all his spare time to research into "the geth problem."
As a by-product of this, Tali had grown up simply awash in technology, from software interactions with bloodstream computing to the long-term materials stresses of mass effect field usage. The opportunity to actually do something, to make a difference for everyone on the flotilla…and her father…was too attractive to pass up.
In order to remain undetected, their landing involved a near-suicidal unpowered drop from orbit followed by a low-altitude, very hurried restart of the engines. The damage was not extensive, but it was crippling until it could be repaired, and the geth had sent out a single flyer to investigate the mass that had landed without registering on their seismometers. Their landing was as far from any geth installation as they could manage.
The vas Honorata family knew more about their own ship than Tali and Keenah could have, but Keenah was injured during the landing. While they made repairs, Tali raced away from the ship on foot, careful to make her departure noticeable but not obvious…and to make it look like she had a destination in mind.
It worked; the flyer set down about a kilometer ahead of Tali, releasing a squadron of geth androids into her path. As they chased each other over snow-and-ice-covered formations, one of the units lagged back, probably in an attempt to foil her misdirection, and any double-back that she might attempt.
Had she not already done so, it would have been trouble. But because she had, the geth was doomed. She spiked it with an overload at 30 meters, and then attempted something new that her father had shown her just before she left: To hack the geth's own internal command hierarchy and set it against the other geth.
It didn't work, but the timing of the overload damage and the hacking did prevent the geth from frying its own memory cores. The android simply collapsed.
Tali's eyes widened; this was the opportunity of a lifetime. She worked as fast as she could, hoping the other geth would take long enough to get back that she could finish the job.
She stopped in the middle of her tale and sighed. "I didn't know what I'd found until Keenah and I were aboard the little courier ship. It took that long for my VIs to analyze." She shook her head sadly. "I have to admit I actually considered not telling them what I'd found. By the time I could have, they were dead or gone."
Fist shrugged. "Hey, at least you don't have to get the deal approved by a bunch of other people. Besides, you risked your life to get it. The rest of them just waited at the ship." He waved a finger at a few of her pockets. "Okay, so do you have it? Can I see it?"
Tali was about to become indignant, answering that without their ship, she never could have gotten there, and three of them were now dead…but her VI advised silence. She sighed, produced a tiny, clear box from a pocket and held it up for him to see the borophene panel inside. "This is the core. I have as much of its data as I could get before it stingered itself."
Fist squinted at the silvery-magenta crystalline flake.
Tali replaced it in her pocket. "It's actually about thirty or fourty cores, but what makes it interesting is that the one interlaced core cluster that's still intact is not only readable, but it contains a segment of a known datastream."
Tali lit her omnitool and continued, "I have that datastream, or most of it, and it could be used – with the right equipment – to decode this entire structure at an atomic level. Once that's been done, any geth core, fried or not, could be decoded. Well, mostly. At least 60%, and probably 80%, depending." She paused, studying his reaction.
Fist wasn't acting like he understood…at the very least, he did not seem to be impressed.
"This has the potential to let us read every single piece of information that we've been unable to access on geth platforms that have been salvaged. All the geth fragments in museums, in intelligence labs, or captured in the future…we could now read them!"
Tali's VI offered analogies that she could use to help him understand. "To your people, this is like…the Nazi Enigma device. Or the Rosetta Stone. I've just got to take it back to the Flotilla, but before I do, I wanted to try to sell this information to the Council. I've heard about the geth attack, and if they're going to fight the geth, they'll need this. It could be worth a lot to the intelligence services of every Council race…and even to humans, since they attacked you first.
"But because it contains information pointing to that Arterius-Spectre, I think he's the one who tried to kill me. His voice is recorded here, and probably other identifying information, but there's seventy or eighty petabytes of data; I haven't finished processing it by myself, it's too much with just my suit's DCE."
"So how did Saren find out you had it?"
Tali stopped, tilted her head down slightly in thought. "I don't know. But if he has root privileges to the geth, anything the geth know, he could find out." She looked up. "That would explain why they tried to kill us at Ilium. He knew, and sent one of his henchmen…"
"But how did he know you were going to Ilium?"
The quarian paused for a long time. "The geth had a transponder?" She shook her head. "No, it was dark. I wouldn't have brought active geth aboard the Honorata."
"Maybe it was dark for a while, and then reactivated?"
Tali thought about the remains of the geth they had tossed overboard from orbit. She did not want to consider that she might have overlooked a functioning system, and so she didn't. "Well it can't hurt anyone now. I think the Council will be most interested in it, but so far, they've only seen fit to call me a suit-rat, so now I'm going to make them pay dearly for it. The only way I know to do that is to sell it through an infobroker. And this is too important… so I must contact the Shadow Broker. I know you're going to get a cut, and I know that the Shadow Broker will, too. But I need to fund my pilgrimage, and I need to get this data to the Shadow Broker to do that."
Fist pursed his lips, "Hmm…okay. I'll admit you've really done your homework on this; let me see what I can do." He glanced toward the door. "Go help yourself to a drink or a meal or whatever; I'll tell 'em it's on me."
Tali was startled at the gesture. It was typical of being invited into someone's home…on the Flotilla. So she was not expecting it from a human. "Oh…really? Ah…thanks. That's very nice of you, Mister Fist."
He snorted a laugh. "Not 'Mister Fist,' just 'Fist.'" He held up a large meaty hand, clenched it, pantomimed a right cross. "Bam! Fist of Justice. Fist of Fury. But always a fist." He grinned confidently at her.
"Oh…sorry about that. Um…Fist." She twiddled fingers nervously. "I saw you had a ready room just outside. Would it be okay if I just waited there? I'm not eager to be seen again too soon, and the two guys you had in there looked like they could help if—"
"Two guys?" Fist was on his feet immediately. "If those idiots are playing their stupid game again, I'll brain 'em both." He stomped through the security lock and into the ready room.
The table and chairs were empty.
Tali came up behind him slowly. "Uh…maybe they left after I came thro—"
Fist had two fingers to his ear. "Jonus, Ravi. Where are you?" He listened, seemed to be relieved. "Okay, good. Stay alert. I've got a hot item in here and I don't know if there's a tail. Watch for bad guys." He looked at Tali, and like most aliens, he looked at the speech-responsive bioport on her mask, then tried to look up to where he thought her eyes would be. "You're safe here…but you're welcome to stay in the ready room if you prefer. I could have something brought to you if you're hungry."
Tali's resistance finally broke. "I am actually quite hungry, and I saw a couple of turians in there," she pointed out to the main floor. "I assume you have a dextro menu?"
Fist nodded, "Sure…on the Citadel, you bet we do. The menu's on the DCE. Order up whatever you want…I can't eat it." He shrugged as he grinned. "I'll contact my favourite broker; wait here." He stepped back into his office.
*** Glossary ***
AGI: Artificial General Intellligence
BMI: Brain-Machine Interface
BIOS: Basic Input-Output System
DCE: Distributed Computing Environment
H2H: Head to Head; a style of game played between two players, usually within arm's reach of each other.
picoforge: Molecule-sized, high-resolution thermal manipulator cells capable of annealing, cauterizing, sintering, and other catalytic reactions. Recommended fuel is carbon. Typically a component of exosuit systems.
PVR: Polyphase Virtual Reality. An immersive VR technology that stimulates multiple regions of the brain, allowing for a nearly complete reproduction of environments or experiences. Because it is a demanding, high-bandwidth technology, it became a measure of network capability, particularly among users who depend upon it.
toxinverter: a medical protein-refolding technology that targets very specific toxins and neutralizes them by inverting their structure, neutralizing their effects and configuring them to be flushed from the body.
Transtellar: a commercial spaceline operator
