A/N - In the first section of this chapter, the geth use a relatively old (as of the story timeline) technology that has been demonstrated fairly recently: news dot mit dot edu/2014/algorithm-recovers-speech-from-vibrations-0804
*** Therum: En Route ***
Having set up its programming herself, Liara watched in horrified fascination as the mining laser began to spin its 1.6-meter forward array in preparation for the scan. There were nineteen generators on the front end of the "laser;" normally they switched modes three times during each rotation, annealing the material through which it dug to turn it into a slurry-like mush. Her view allowed her to see the generator startups all at once, the glowing preignition forming concentric rings that made it look like a shooting target.
The mountservos tilted the massive "laser" down and to its left; the air shook when the array's igniter sequence ran, its spinning head becoming a blur of motion. Liara had tested the individual emitters, but never seen all of them operating at the same time, each one a white-hot thunderbolt.
The array of whirling beams swept across the lowest level of the cavern, describing a circle.
It tilted up, swept around the cavern at the next calculated elevation.
Liara tried again to use her omnitool to stop the laser remotely.
She had time to think about the people she would never see again, though she knew the real pain would be theirs, of never seeing her again. Who would even remember her to the Temple?
She called out for the geth, asking them to cut power to or destroy the laser, or knock it off its mount.
None were there to hear her.
She had time to be reminded of a human story, The Pit and the Pendulum.
She wondered if the laser would damage the Prothean system and allow her to escape before it extinguished her.
As the laser finally began to cut through where the bubble held her, she noticed she was not seeing the beam inside the bubble.
Of course, like gamma radiation, it could be invisible to me.
When it should have been burning through her feet, she still saw nothing inside the bubble, felt nothing of the beam.
The Prothean barrier curtain does not stop the laser, but the bubble does!
As it thundered against the bubble, she saw only a bright ellipse where the beam struck the surface…and simply stopped.
Continuing to pan right to left with each pass, the ellipse changed shape at each new elevation. As it slowly climbed up the height of the sphere over the next ten minutes, she had time to consider whether to look directly into that deadly beam – something surely no one had ever done – or to stay as safe as possible…even if the difference was only an eyelid's thickness.
She closed one eye.
Perhaps the barrier curtain and isolating bubble work in combination…?
The beam swept across her vision, growing no brighter or dimmer.
It continued its progression upward; Liara was amazed, confused, and relieved…and then worried all over again; the geth were still out there, and the krogan. Her problems had changed from instantly lethal to merely life-threatening.
She had time to think about the nature of this Prothean structure, to realize that the control centre high above was probably smart enough to know the security should not be activated by someone in the cells, that it could not have recognized her as an authorized user, and had sprung a trap to hold her until someone – surely authority figures dead for lifetimes – returned to investigate the situation.
She looked to her left at the control panel, its holographic interface still open, with one glowing key flashing green. If only she could get to it! She tried to generate a Lift field, and direct it to apply a vector to the holographic sensor.
Nothing happened.
Did any ally know where she was?
She drifted to sleep again as the automated laser worked its way up the tower of containment cells.
She awoke again to lift squeaking and grinding its way down to the bottom level; it clearly needed service after becoming collateral damage to the walking geth cannon. A geth android – Liara wrongly assumed it was the same one from earlier – stepped out of the lift. It appeared damaged as it hobbled over to her, stopping just beyond the barrier curtain.
"Liara T'Soni, we assume you were not responsible for the activation of the mining equipment. If it was an attempt to damage the equipment holding you in place, please do not activate it again. Though Grodis-contractor has been protected, the mining laser has inflicted significant damage to a number of our platforms. We have still not found a way to extract you from your current entrapment."
Liara remained silent. The mining laser must have been activated remotely, she thought. Perhaps Professor Hannell had persuaded the university to request help from the Council!
"Additionally, optical sensors indicate that sonic vibrations of sufficient range and amplitude are successfully transpenetrating the shielding. Your silence has been identified as a failure to attempt communication. This is understandable. However, if you have any insight into how your liberation may be achieved, we again invite you to disclose it." It waited for a few seconds. "We will resume our efforts," it said. It turned away, and ascended in the lift again.
# # #
After talking with MFO Gomez, Ash had walked across the hangar to the weapons bench/armory, pulled out a seat, fitted herself with an interface visor, and began tearing down her weapons. Her Banshee had begun overheating sooner than usual during the horror of Eden Prime, but she had been unable to do anything about it at the time.
The VI almost immediately noticed that the assault rifle's ammoblock had begun to deteriorate. Tagging the assembly with a callout, it added a brief analysis: there was C60 on the heat sinks, coating them with the designer carbonate. While the shaver was capable of microknapping individual fragments, some other process had been at work that day, degrading the coherence of the material. It was not something she had seen or heard of before.
Switching the visor back to Maintenance mode, Ash opened the service access, snapped the release, and pulled the halves apart with an unusual metallic ping.
Squinting, she looked inside the chassis shell, puzzling over what had made the sound.
What she didn't see was the fragments of the ammoblock shattering away, too large to be captured by the filtered air intake at the bulkhead end of the bench. Normally, the low-displacement vacuum kept the workspace free of particulates that happened to break loose in the workspace.
The fragments of C60 arced forward (to her right,) landing next to a floor service panel with negative pressure on the other side. It only took a few seconds for them to rattle their way down between two components, silently jumbling together to accidentally complete a circuit.
The result was that the portside servos of the main hangar door received a signal to open the hangar door.
# # #
Tali hadn't slept for almost two days; she was too excited. She had now met and conversed with most of the engineers, starting with Greg Adams, and had left her Human Social Interaction VI (HSIVI) as sensitive as possible so she wouldn't become a nuisance. She even took a lunch break with them, and mostly listened as they discussed the power system integration difficulties they were having. It was a bittersweet experience, because it reminded her of the round-table discussions she had been allowed to sit in on while growing up aboard her birthship Rayya, now so far away.
After Adams went off-shift, Tali had continued to talk with him about increasingly arcane issues of the engine design and operation. She was almost as impressed with his expertise as a human as she was with the technology. Her HSIVI had informed her that the man was unconsciously leery of her, but this was probably because of his unfamiliarity with quarians; her passion and knowledge about engines and power systems had eventually won him over.
But now she was exhausted, and standing by the starboard flow monitoring station, heard an electronic blip from the console to her left. She looked up just in time to see the maintenance request appear on the display. She tapped it to get the problem details. The machine assumed the main actuator had failed and suggested it be replaced.
I can fix that, she thought. And even if the actuator has failed, there are ways to troubleshoot it.
As she turned around toward the door, Adams saw the motion and looked up from the center station.
"Oh, Chief Engineer Adams. I just saw the notification of a failure in the hangar mechanics. Do you mind if I fix that, or did you want one of your own people to handle it?"
A lopsided smile formed on the Engineer's face. I don't have anyone to do it right now, he thought, and it's too simple to screw up that badly. "If you can do it, I'll officially make you the mascot."
Tali smiled to herself as if she'd just won a can't-miss bar bet. "You're on," she nodded once and dashed off.
Her smile grew as she went forward; humans were not quite as dangerous as her training had suggested. These ones are actually nice.
# # #
Henry's omnitool!
Miranda recognized her father's device, even with the gauntlet interface off because she knew he wore a heavily modified Aldrin Labs Bluewire. He must have thought his office would be a safe place to keep it while he was having his way with today's whore.
Normally, perhaps it would have. But Miranda had been monitoring his activities for several weeks, applying the behavioral science neurolearning she had just acquired during her third Ph.D. The VI she had been carefully grooming to emulate Henry Lawson had been correct more than it had been in error about where he would be and when he would be there. Though she knew the man worked at being unpredictable in his habits, he wasn't nearly as smart as he wanted to be about it…and she was not going to inform him of this.
Rather than grab the flextronic sleeve, Miranda darkened her omnitool, lifted a PIRAD from an inert part of her own sleeve, and snapped it into place on the omnitool's flatjack before reactivating the holographic gauntlet. Summoning the pattern that she kept in the offline "safe," she fabricated a seven-centimeter mesh in a few seconds, and then had her fabber extrude almost its entire supply of computing paste. She noted the exact placement of her father's omnitool sleeve before turning it inside out, unrolling the mesh across the underside of the 'tool before spreading the paste across it with her left thumb. She righted the sleeve again, and returned it to his desk.
She slipped out of the office, removing the self-expanding gap filler from the door lock as she closed the door. Now would be a good time to be seen playing tennis. Nicket was still flying one of the Pegasi, but that had been part of her cover for the past hour. A message to meet at the sports house was sure to be met with enthusiasm.
Over the next several hours, the mesh integrated itself with the omnitool flextronics, then began to randomly turn itself on, record activity from Henry Lawson's omnitool, and turn itself off after four to nine minutes had elapsed.
When it finally had enough data to interpolate the device's state range, it used the omnitool's own CPU clusters to calculate a series of descriptive intergers, which it then encoded into a series of emails. Miranda collected the emails, rearranged the data into its correct order, and tasked a VI to assemble an on-demand tap into the system.
Now she could use his omnitool at will. She did so only when she was certain he was not using it.
She collected vast amounts of data – most of it of little immediate interest to her – about his corporations, accounts, meetings, technologies, and even personal thoughts. The detail of the man's event journal ranged from boringly tedious to amusingly explicit, but it was while reading it that she finally discovered her own life had a specific purpose in his.
It was not for her benefit, but for his self-aggrandizement. Henry Lawson wasn't satisfied with being "just another trillionaire;" he wanted to be the beginning of a human dynasty, and he had used his power and wealth to endow a perfect heir with everything that made one human more capable than another: The best education, the greatest knowledge, the most wealth, even the best looks and exceptional health. A lot of it boiled down to the best genes; she had been made to be the ultimate designer baby…according to Henry Lawson.
She found herself actively disliking him; not just keeping detached from him, but actively trying to damage his interests, investments, and reputation.
Which was how she found out about the Conductor. It took about fifteen minutes for her to discover that Henry was making a musical reference with the name "the Conductor." This "Conductor" was apparently part of a human-centric organization that called itself Cerberus. Henry supported them with well-hidden funding and was even part of their executive board. Miranda tasked several almost-legal fully-autonomous VIs with finding out what this organization was and did.
Cerberus, the three-headed hound of Hell. Why would they choose such an association? Certainly a fearsome foe, but the name seemed inconsistent with their current activities. Though they had started off as black ops consultants during the First Contact War, they had grown over the past three decades. Now they were involved in life extension, genetic engineering, human biotics, weapons systems, personal armor, cybernetics, neurotronics, and a dozen other fields. But they kept their work and people well hidden; if Henry had not been a major player, she would have been hard pressed to discover anything on her own that wasn't already last year's news.
Their agents were mostly scientists and white-collar professionals, and Cerberus provided a forum for researchers doing basic science to exchange information before the applications people got it. Major science journals like the Nature Group, and IEEE had Cerberus people in them, pushing to keep knowledge moving through the well-secured Cerberus NfoX.
Of course, any information that flowed through Cerberus channels also found its way to researchers within the organization itself. Innovation accelerated, and all Mankind ultimately benefitted. Cerberus innovations were licensed through puppet companies held by the major players, and their resources became revenue streams for further Cerberus research.
Even the salarian STG had begun to attempt to compromise Cerberus operations, or just get some visibility into the organization. But until they could actually compromise a dedicated operative, they had as much chance of getting hard intel on a Cerberus operation before it was carried out as they had of getting a salarian elected to the Alliance Parliament.
The more she learned about them, the more she approved of them…even admired them. She only briefly considered that her father also liked them. To be otherwise would be self-defeating, she rationalized, and forgot about it.
The next day, her "special formula" YSM-powered VI informed her of its 92% certainty that the surname of "the Conductor" was Harper.
Now she had something to go on.
# # #
Dearest Tali,
Your transmission of the geth core contents was astounding and unprecedented. I almost cannot believe you did it. Your Aunt Raan nearly tore the display off the bulkhead when she read you had engaged the geth in combat yourself.
Sadly, I do not know how to tell you this in any gentle way: Because you transmitted the geth core data through the RSFN channel, it was screened by VIs that watch for attacks.
At first, it was suspended from getting to me at all. Once they had processed and understood it, it was declared Critical Intelligence, and I received a copy because I am an Admiral. As did every other Admiral on the Board.
What you have done is without precedent. It is legendary. Researchers are poring over it, myself included. But now it is considered Fleet Property. You cannot gift it to a Captain in the Flotilla…nor should you have to! You should be able to choose your own ship for this, even the Rayya! (By the Ancestors, you should be given a ship of your own!) This benefits the entire fleet, and takes us significantly closer to reclaiming our homeworld. I am working to get this acknowledged by the Admiralty Board, but until they officially rule on the matter, I'm sorry to say you should proceed as if you have yet to obtain your Gift of Passage.
I am very upset with the Board; only because it is without precedent can they do this. Technically, I should recuse myself from the Board regarding this issue, but I am fighting to get your work recognized for its significance. Rest assured I will keep you informed of any change. You are my own and only, and you have made me so very proud even if the Board has lost its collective mind.
Your loving and very proud father,
Rael'Zorah vas Alerai
# # #
After the first briefing, Shepard had stayed in the CommCon for a few minutes; Pressly informed him that the LRSA had seen none of the geth dreadnoughts on Therum since Normandy exited the relay, but that it was currently occulted by its stellar primary, and their course to intercept the planet upon their arrival wouldn't provide more intel until they were about six hours out of orbit.
On his way to his quarters, Shepard got a reminder from his Event Scheduler to practice with the omnitool stabbing weapon he'd seen Kaidan use on Eden Prime. He adjusted it back three hours and took the lift down to the hangar.
The door rolled down into the floor, and he headed past the MFO station on his way to the Spectre equipment crate. Gomez looked up, straightened and saluted with a huge grin on his face. "Hey, Commander. Looking for supplies?"
Shepard pointed at the crate as he looked toward the MFO. "Yup. And there they are. But you seem awfully happy for someone who's looking at 12-hour days for the next week. You must have figured out how to get the contractors to set up their own profiles and start fabbing their own hardware?"
Gomez raised and illuminated his omnitool gauntlet almost victoriously. "Better than that, sir. I have a boatload of new licenses, thanks to you. If you need anything, and I mean anything, I've probably got it in the First Tier catalog. If I don't, I can probably cobble it together from all the bits and pieces. And that new contractor? I mean…the quarian, right? She gave me…gave me…a biotech library that works with the ThumbPrint-4!" He pointed at the device, behind himself and to the left. "I can interface directly with the medical library and make custom nanotech right here at an averaged mole a minute."
Shepard had forgotten about the new licenses; he smiled at the man's enthusiasm. "Well I'm glad you're feeling so empowered. If you've got a minute, can you partition a secure workspace for me in here?" He indicated an area around the Spectre crate.
The MFO's head snapped to his right, and then back to the Commander. He pointed at the mysterious crate. "You gonna bust that stuff out, sir?"
"I'm at least going to have a look at what they've sent. We're about a day out of our first official landing, and I want to know what I've got in my bag of tricks other than more bullets."
"Maybe bigger bullets, sir?" Gomez stepped out from behind the MFO desk and approached the crate from aft. "So…do you just want a safety clearance, or do you need to open it first?"
"Sorry, Gomez. The manifest was pretty explicit, and so was the message from the Council; I need a full privacy screen with perimeter, and internal control."
The MFO nodded as if he wasn't the least bit disappointed he wasn't going to get to see what was in the mysterious crates. "Comin' up, sir." He lit his omnitool gauntlet, and tapped a Workspace key. A couple of handwaves marked out the safety clearance with a red-and-black holograph. "How much work area do you want?"
Shepard pointed as he spoke. "Give me six meters forward from there, deck to overhead, and all the way to the starboard bulkhead from centerline."
The holograph changed dimensions almost as fast as Shepard gave the specs for it. Gomez held out an icon from his omnitool. "Centerline to bulkhead, full height, six meters longitude. Here's your control, sir."
Shepard took the holographic icon and placed it in his left palm. Then he reached down to his right leg and drew his new Spectre pistol, checked the safety, flipped it in his hand, and extended the grip toward Gomez. "But I can let you have a look at this while I'm busy. I'm going to want to be able to get that and a couple other weapons maintained and serviced; make sure the Spectre office gives you the service VI for 'em, or whatever they use."
"The Spectres make their own weapons?" As Gomez took the weapon, his headband holo scrolled down into place, providing him with technical information. The man seemed to be almost be drawn into it. "Yeah...Konko. Now that is one awesome pistol, sir."
"See if the Spectre Office also offers the DFR on it. If you don't have any other questions now, message me if you have any later."
Gomez saluted. "Will do, sir." He worked his omnitool with a gesture, and held the sidearm up close to his face as his ARO generated a technical thru-view on his holographic eyepiece. He turned and walked slowly back to his station.
Shepard stepped into the space defined and concealed by holography and waved his omnitool past the sensor on the crate. Its indicator turned green and the crate itself cracked open at the center, the nearer half folding open like a book.
Shepard's first impression was of a workshop. Two benches sat next to each other, cabinets above and below unfolding into place; smaller crates lifted and slid away as the side panels rotated out to 90 degrees. His Spectre-updated omnitool briefly covered his view with callouts, then kept them only on what he was looking as for as long as he looked at it.
An array of VI-driven fabrication equipment was on one side, computation on the other, both with equipment he knew, and some he only understood in principle. And not run-of-the-mill molecular fabricators; these were atomic picotech assemblers, capable of constructing purpose-built molecules in quantity and on demand. Indicators showed 50 kilos of exotic feedstocks; most of the metamaterials Shepard knew about were only 10-30% exotics by weight.
His ARO also identified computation that – while not as powerful as that of Normandy – was dedicated to his tasks for security. A stellarcom device that could automatically connect to any available network within a light-week, a library of weapons and equipment for the fabrication systems from every Council race, and at every level of finish. As he scrolled quickly through the list, he watched system designs being updated in realtime, made smaller, faster, more efficient, more diverse. Clearly this was the ongoing, coordinated work of hundreds of civilized, technically-advanced worlds.
All of it independently powered, secured to his identity, and controlled by the very latest in Coordinated Virtual Intelligences.
The cabinets and crates held even more surprises:
A one-meter shelf full of highly controlled and expensive chemicals, from psychoactives to explosives to afcRNA, intended to be ready payloads for molecular nanotech.
Identification snoopers for every species he knew of, and a whole lot more that he didn't.
Neurolearning libraries on practically every subject…and something he hadn't even suspected: a cognitive redaction system. With it, the limitations of an organic brain could be overcome – at least temporarily – with the ability to "install" mission-specific knowledge, and remove it when the mission was complete. The ARO callout indicated that the system was best used with medical assistance, and that such mission-critical skills were best applied within 60 hours of use, and removed within 90 hours of completion. Shepard wondered briefly if there were instructions for erasing fields of knowledge from others, or if this was even possible. His Spectre-enhanced ARO informed him that it was, though the process was not a well-controlled one.
Three sixth-generation fusion weapons, each the size of a lunchbox, with a yield adjustable from 46 kilotons to 500 megatons. Each was modular so it could be built into seemingly harmless objects. There were also separate detonators of several configurations, quantum transmitter remote controls, and a library of delivery systems that the fabricators could build, from shoulder-mounted smart missiles to operational retail display kiosks.
He realized he was holding a hand to his chin, and that his mouth was open in astonishment.
Looks like my world just got a lot more complicated, he thought. It sure would have been nice to be introduced to this stuff by Nihlus. Or even better, by Era T'Iar.
# # #
Kaidan had been quietly spreading the word about his intended surprise party. The response had been good; two days out from their destination, who could reasonably turn down an excuse for a party? The difficulty had been in keeping knowledge of the preparations from the intended victim.
As Normandy's new Commanding Officer, Shepard had a few things to learn quickly; as a Spectre Agent, he was in a very real sense on his own. Neurolearning could help, but was not a complete answer. There was little enough information about a novel class of ship like Normandy, but having already served as the ship's first XO, he knew as much about the ship's day-to-day operations as almost anyone else alive. As a Spectre already on a mission, he immediately initiated communications with the Spectre Office, with Council representatives and operatives, and with other Spectre Agents in his efforts to play catch-up.
Thus, Shepard had been spending hours in his new quarters, which was helpful for Kaidan (no worries about Shepard unexpectedly entering the room when plans were being made,) but he had been leaving his stateroom door open so anyone could come in and talk to him, which made him more aware of things going on in the ship's Mess.
Kaidan stepped into the Medical Bay. Packing crates were everywhere, from stacks in the corners, to packing material on the beds. Sargeant Crosby sat at the desk near the door, intently focused on the holographic display, a test probe in one hand, and a component – wired to the very technical-looking device on the desk – in the other. Kaidan exchanged a nod with him, but called, "Doctor Chakwas?"
"Back here," she answered. "In the Convertible Clean Room."
Kaidan stepped around the beds to the door at the forward end of the MedBay. More crates filled it almost to the overhead.
"Still getting settled in?"
"This used to be beautiful. And empty," she looked around the room and sighed. "Did you know about the two new dextro contractors?"
"Two?" Kaidan lit his omnitool and checked for the new arrival announcement.
"There's a quarian and a turian."
"Sorry…I only knew about the quarian."
The doctor lifted another crate down to the lab bench and twisted its handles; the top hinged open silently and she looked down into it. "I suppose that would have been enough. A few weeks ago, when we were supposed to become part of the Fifth Fleet, the Admiral of the Scout Fleet - Mikhailovich is his name, I believe - ordered all the duplex chirality gear taken out of the MedBay. I think he argued that it was more efficient, or better. Personally, I think he was just paranoid about getting turned into a dextro by accident."
Kaidan snorted a laugh.
"So now we have to reconvert a lot of the medical gear back to duplex chirality," the Doctor continued. "Equipment that had been replaced before we left Arcturus has to be traded out again." She had waved a hand at the stacks of crates before lifting a device out of its crate with a grunt of effort. "They loaded all of this before we left the Citadel, but Silas and I still have to reinstall it."
"Are we dropping it back off the next time we dock, or turning it into omnigel?"
"Different fates for different equipment. I know they don't want to have to build another one of these." She set a piece of technical-looking equipment on the bench.
Kaidan raised his eyebrows in surprise. "I didn't realize an RNM would care about chirality."
Doctor Chakwas sighed and regarded the thing. "It shouldn't. But in VIA mode, they actually do behave differently between substrates." She stopped, looked anew at Kaidan. "Lieutenant, how do you even know what this is?"
"Spent six months at Dryden as a biotics liaison. Didn't know how much I'd like it." He pointed at the RMN. "Want me to trade that out with the current unit?"
With a look toward the main MedBay, Doctor Chakwas said, "Assuming you know where it goes, that would be wonderful. Poor Silas is out there trying to build a neutral sequencer from two wrong units."
A few minutes later, when Kaidan returned with the as-yet-unused levo-only RNM, he fitted it into the open crate, closed the lid, and used his omnitool to update the crate's RFID and signed it. "I'm sorry, Doctor; but I have to admit I have an agenda," he said.
The Doctor smiled without looking up. "Of course you do, Lieutenant. Everyone's busy putting in extra time to get things done. But how could I possibly help you?"
"I wanted to have a little surprise party for the CO. It's his first command, and he's a Spectre, and I just wanted to…you know…mark the occasion. Bring the crew together for something not official. And…fun."
Karin glanced toward the biotic, and then back at the technical work. "That certainly sounds nice, but how do you want me to help...other than show up and eat cake?"
"The Commander's keeping his office door open so people can go talk to him if they want. But we need to prepare the mess for the party without him knowing it. With him in there, we won't even have the sound of a door to tell us to hide, so I wanted to use the MedBay to stage some things for the party. We'll bring them out at the last minute."
"I'd be glad to help, but as you can see, we're swamped in here."
"What if I helped you get the place rebuilt? I might even be able to get some volunteers to handle things like 'gelling the crates and things like that."
Karin Chakwas turned to face Kaidan directly. "One of the most important lessons I have learned is, 'Never turn down help.' Lieutenant, I would welcome any assistance you can offer or bring. And it would be my pleasure to help the Commander celebrate his new command."
# # #
Tali had to be notified twice by her VI that she was becoming a nuisance to the engineers, so she went up to the ship's Mess, keyed a request for a recovery boosting meal, and sat down at the table with a plate of pea-sized food pebbles.
Switching the chowlock mode to Trusted Source, she twisted the acceptor open and dropped a couple of the pebbles in, pushed it back in and twisted the other way. Positive pressure inside the suit was used to push the air out, and in a small tray just beyond her mouth, the two spheres rolled to a stop. With her tongue slightly wetted, she touched each in turn and drew them into her mouth like popcorn.
It was a mindless task, her left hand operating the chowlock and her right moving the pebbles from plate to helmet, but she preferred crunchy food to the pastes. (Sometimes it was nice to have a little of one with the other, using the paste as if it were icing or dip.)
As she crunched her food, she looked around. Four other humans were there, all watching some kind of human game on the aft display. Talitha Draven was standing in the shadows of the sleep pod corridor, partly bathed in the glow of her omnitool. As she looked, Tali realized that the krogan was standing a little farther forward only as the bulkhead seemed to move; she realised the krogan had stepped close enough to catch some of the light.
Tali and Talitha had agreed to call each other by their full first names, but Tali had not had a chance to speak with the krogan personally. When they walked by, Tali extended a hand to the table to collapse the plate, gathering the last of the food pebbles into the resulting cuplike structure, and rose to follow them. Talitha went up the portside ladder, but Wrex stopped at the elevator and thumbed its holographic Call key.
"Hello," Tali said as she stopped near him. "May I speak with you?"
Wrex turned and blinked in surprise. "Isn't that what you're doing?" The lift arrived, and its door slid into the floor. "Don't stop now."
"That thing you said about smashing the geth to bits…was that meant to be a joke?"
"Nah," Wrex waved a casual dismissal, "It's just what I do." He stepped into the lift, leaving room for the quarian.
"Because…remember that the geth are software. They're binary digits…bits."
Wrex looked at her for a moment, then shrugged. "Yeah, I get it. But that wasn't what I meant."
Tali nodded and looked down silently.
Wrex tilted his head at the open space next to him. "You going down?"
Tali stepped into the lift. "Thank you."
The krogan waved a hand through the lift's Hangar key and the door closed in front of them. As they descended, Wrex watched Tali for a moment. "Something on your mind?"
"Well, um, yes. But I can't think of how to say it, so I'll just ask: Krogan can get really old, can't they?"
Wrex grinned as he nodded; it was an impressive sight. "You bet. Look at me. I've seen two Great Convergences on Tuchanka. I'll be there for my third soon."
Though her VI started to scroll out an informative briefing on Tali's HUD, she asked, "What's that?"
"There's a giant planet called Kruban that orbits closer to Arlakh, and every few centuries, it eclipses it partially. But it's positioned and sized so that it doesn't completely block it out. It makes Arlakh look like a big, bright circle in the sky. They used to write all kinds of legends about what it was and what it meant…until the salarians came along with science and made it all boring. Orbit eccentricity and apparent size...whatever." He shrugged as the lift door hissed into the floor. "But if you want, I could tell you the story of the mighty war in the sky, and how Arlakh defeats the encroachment of Kruban by engulfing it completely, eating it alive, and then crapping it back out."
"Uh…" Tali hesitated.
The krogan laughed easily as he stepped out; Tali followed. "Or maybe that's as much as you need to know."
"Mm…yeah, I suppose." Tali began to follow him toward a collection of crates on the port side of the hangar.
Wrex paused just long enough to reach into one of the crates, and lifted out something that looked like a small, thick coffee table with the legs collapsed. "My go-to weapon is a real custom job," he said casually. "Here, have a look at this."
Tali's VI identified the weapon immediately, and put a callout on her HUD. She inhaled in surprise. "Is that really a Revenant? Where did you get it?"
"From a corpse." He gripped the thing with both hands and seemed to snap it apart, then held one part closer so she could see. "Actually, I don't know if you could call it a Revenant anymore. I had it tricked out so it fires from both barrels, over and under. And I never bother with a scope, so I had it replaced with a grenade launcher."
"Hm." Tali nodded. "Dual-fire is a good idea. If you set it up to fire from alternating barrels, you can double your time to thermax at the same cyclic." She pointed at its top, "But mounting that grenade launcher dorsally would probably kick that thing into your face if it weren't so heavy."
Wrex nodded approvingly. "You sure know a lot about this stuff for a little engine wonk."
Tali nodded and sighed. "Thanks. Uh…yeah, the galaxy is a dangerous place, especially for me as a quarian. There are lots of aliens out there who would as soon shoot me as look at me."
"I know the feeling." Hefting the customized Revenant over his shoulder, Wrex held the other weapon toward the quarian. "And here's one for really close encounters."
Tali reached toward the weapon, but stopped herself, and simply moved her head along its length, inspecting it closely. "Wow, a Kassa. That's scary. I'm not sure I could hold it without dropping it. But I like that it'd probably stop problems before they start." She looked at it more closely, reading some of the info her VI was displaying on her HUD. "The barrel is bigger at the muzzle than the butt. Did you have the linac array made to spec?"
Wrex rotated the shotgun so she could see the other side. "Nah, I just had a Citadel Maker do it. Said I wanted the biggest boom within three meters. Also doubles as a club."
Tali pointed at the weapon's muzzle. "I figured that. There's no other reason I can think of to make the barrel material so thick. Bet you could park a skycar on this and it'd be okay."
Wrex laughed. "Sure can. Used it as a monopod for the Revenant, and even as a wheel chock." With the two weapons in hand, he started forward. "Well, I gotta get IFF installed, but you can come along if you want."
Tali pointed across the hangar toward the MFO. "Actually, I was coming down to see if the stuff I ordered was done. But thanks."
Wrex continued forward to where a human female was standing in front of a weapons bench.
Ash looked up at the sound of heavy footfalls. "Hey, how you doing?"
Wrex shrugged. "Bored. Lots of planning, not much fighting. But it should get good once I can sink my teeth into an enemy."
Ash assumed he was kidding, then blinked thoughtfully as she realized he probably wasn't. "Okaaaay. Well…your timing is good. I assume you're here to get your IFF. What sort of weapons do you carry?"
"Funny you should ask," Wrex said. "Funny because they probably weigh as much as you." He raised the Revenant, rotating it so she could see its side.
Ash put her hands on her hips, studied the weapon for a moment. "The mighty Revenant? Never actually seen one in person, but I'd heard about it." Considering what she knew about it, Ash grinned to herself. "High cyclic rate, low muzzle velocity, poor accuracy. 'Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.'"
Wrex nodded and considered the human. "To a professional, yeah. At this point, the looks are just to impress folks in the Terminus." He carefully set it down on the bench before her with a heavy klunk, pounded a release and lifted the service panel away. "The guts are a whole different animal."
Ash's interface visor displayed info about the weapon, putting callouts on its linacs and calculating its abilities. This is not a stock build, she realized as she tilted her head. "Huh. Impressive."
Wrex continued, "And for people like you, who know enough not to be impressed with a noisemaker, I'm using big accelerators."
"Urztagh," Ash read from the visor. "Don't know the brand, but it looks like it's more powerful and more accurate. But rounds shot through them tend to disintegrate in transit, so the only safe place in the galaxy is directly behind it."
Wrex pointed to the attachments that looked like flash suppressors on both barrels. "And so…"
Ash nodded. "Yeah, I get it. Linac extensions with VI stabilizers. But if you weren't krogan, you could hardly pick the beast up."
"But I am krogan." He waved carelessly toward the bench and the weapons now on it. "Whatever. But I want to watch what you do so I can undo it later. I wouldn't want you to forget after we bag Saren."
Ash lit her omnitool, requested the IFF add-on from the bench VI, and selected a device from the bench tray. She frowned without looking up at the towering krogan.
Wrex noticed the human's silence. "Remember we have an enemy in common: The turians...all of them, not just that one turian."
"Hm," Ash grunted noncommittally. "The IFF can be installed as software or hardware. I usually install both, for redundancy, but if you uninstall the software, the hardware you can just throw away." She picked up a pair of gyro-stabilized waldoforceps, used them to lift the rice-grain-sized IFF from the microfacturer tray, and held it up for the krogan to see. "Really simple to take out; just crack the weapon and pick this off, throw it away." She placed it carefully on a socket in the weapon's WINC node.
"What about the software?"
Ash waved an exact gesture at her omnitool, pinched an icon and held it over her shoulder. "Run this."
Wrex took the icon, touched it to the tech appliance on his belt until it disappeared.
Ash didn't look up from the bench as she began installing the IFF software. "Don't run it until after your contract is over; it'll let me know if you do."
Wrex nodded. "Fair enough; your house, your rules."
And if you betray my trust, I have other weapons.
*** Glossary ***
AAAS: Alliance Association for the Advancement of Science
AFM: Atomic Force Microscope; a hybrid device developed in the 1980s allowing both observation and manipulation of individual atoms. VI-enhanced AFMs are frequently used in modification and repair of nanotech devices.
ARO: Augmented Reality Overlay
ASO: Alliance Standards Organization
AVA: Alliance Veteran's Administration
CO: Commanding Officer
DFR: Digital Fabrication Rights
First Tier Catalog: MFO slang for objects that can be printed wholly from a single, complete pattern; usually directly from a design company with logged hours of usage by NGOs [like the various Manufacturer's Organizations, ASO, IEEE, AAAS, etc.], and unofficial groups like the Maker community.
HSIVI: Human Social Interaction Virtual Intelligence
HUD: Heads-Up Display
IEEE: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
IFF: Identification Friend or Foe
LRSA: Long Range Scan and Analysis
MFO: Master Fabrication Officer
NfoX: Information Exchange; a technology/protocol used by research organizations and universities for scientific research data collection and dissemination. Pioneered on Thessia, popularized in the Alliance by Husseinomica (part of the Venus Project 2.0) after the Prothean discovery on Mars, acquired by Google in 2073.
NGO: Non-Government Organization (incorporated or privately owned, usually not a for-profit corporation.)
Pegasi: plural of the corpmarked "Pegasus" GMO flying horse.
PIRAD: Parallel Isolinear Redactive Array Device; removable storage that can also function as secondary system memory.
RFID: Radio Frequency Identification
RNM: Ranged Nanoscale Manipulator; a medical device like an AFM, but that operates up to 143 millimeters remote from the target. Used to manipulate deep tissue without disrupting intermediary tissues (e.g., brain surgery without blood, heart repair without a saw.)
RSFN: Rannoch Survivors Flotilla Network
Snowden: Alliance base on Europa with a highly-regarded research hospital. It is co-administered by the (military) Alliance Command and the (civilian) AVA.
Thermax: Thermal maximum; in the context of small arms, it refers to overheat.
VIA: VI Autonomous; a temporary operational mode for conventional VI-controlled devices
WINC: Weapons Intelligence Network Computing
YSM: [Judy] Yu, [Matthew] Salazar, [Steven] Marsh, authors of the intelligence algorithm bearing their initials, designed to interpolate information from non-linear and seemingly unrelated facts; essentially an instrumentalisation of Solomonoff induction that describes the past based of data in the present (Ray Solomonoff had proposed such an inference system that could correctly predict any computable sequence with only absolute minimum data; the perfect future-prediction algorithm)
