4. HIT IT!

A soothing feminine voice repeated what they had just been told over and over as they ran. The voice also said they had four minutes to extract the prisoners and themselves from the ship.

Reaching the lift, Tali thumped the control pad that would take them down to the captives. The ride was only a few seconds but it seemed to take far too long to both of them, and they were glad when at last they were able to move on at their own rather more up-tempo speed.

They ran again then, through the deck's labyrinth corridors, Tali calling each turn and door as they did so. It became dark, the colour of the Blackwatch uniform, with lower, grilled metal ceilings and neon green strip-lights running along the walls on either side. Occasionally a red spotlight added an extra sickly quality to the environment. It was also hot and Shepard guessed they were close to the engine room. Then Tali pointed to go right at a T-junction ahead.

They had two minutes left.

They made the right. They saw the captives. Well, one of them.

Behind the blue tint of a kinetic barrier, in a dark, featureless cell, one man was huddled in a corner, looking up and listening to the announcement of his impending demise. His face was ashen, unshaven and lacerated. Sweat coated his brow. He appeared confused when he saw them.

"The other...oh." Tali saw a trolley parked in the shadows against the left wall. A sheet covered something lying upon it. A single arm drooped out to show what that was.

She switched focus and swiped her omnitool, tapped in a code to disable the barrier.

"You got a code for everything, Tali?" Shepard asked, running forward and pulling up the surviving Cerberus officer. He did not struggle, but looked entirely bewildered.

Shepard clasped the man's head tight between her hands and shouted at him over the still repeating self-destruct warning. "Hey, you listening? Better be, because we got to haul ass out of here pretty fucking fast! Understand?"

His eyes widened a little but he nodded quickly.

Shepard gave him a gentle slap on the cheek. "Good. Come on." With that they turned and made a desperate dash back from whence they had come, through the alternately dark and green corridors, under flashing red light, trying to ignore that damn voice. They reached the lift at one minute. When the doors closed behind them, Shepard realised they weren't going to make it. She looked at Tali, who was thinking the same thing. The Cerberus guy was too busy gasping for breath, hunched double, to care.

Tali looked at the data pad. Then back at Shepard. They reached the boarding deck at forty-five seconds. They could see the airlock. But it was just a little too far. Even if they made it and got onto the Jeeya, they knew Joker, for all his skill, would be unable to get clear before the dreadnaught's explosion took them out with it. So Tali smashed the pad and examined the mess of wires and data-chips that revealed themselves beneath the amber plastic. She could feel Shepard's eyes burning onto the pad, but tried to focus. She'd been in these types of situation with her before, she told herself. Then she spotted the tiny light green chip that she knew directed operating function orders to the ship's mainframe. Once there the electronic request would be acknowledged and enough power would be allocated to the elevator to push it up or down. A more clearly visible red chip would relay when it should stop. Activating her omnitool once more she tapped in a level 9 Quarian military hacking code. Technically she shouldn't have owned this, but a friend on Omega had owed her a favour and now she used it. Except it didn't work. Turian state of the art anti-cyber-warfare tech kicked in and all she got was an aggrieved blip. She swore. Thirty seconds. Then a moment of clarity occurred and she remembered Legion.

Legion had been a geth, an AI, unlike any other she had known. That is to say he had helped them. His claim that the geth and her people could live in something akin to harmony she found impossible to believe, but he had proved himself in combat and saved her and Shepard's lives on more than one occasion. The fact she referred to Legion by name, and as a he rather than an it, said it all. Legion had "died" though, during the final assault on the Collector space station, his body consigned to the galactic void. But just before that ceremony, Tali had, despite Shepard's reservations, examined what was left of Legion's memory functions. It had been an unsettling task, but she reasoned there may be some technological data available which could prove useful in future. It had been agreed that Legion would probably have assented to this, though inwardly neither the Commander nor Tali were fully convinced. Nevertheless, as she looked at the broken panel, Tali realised some of Legion's data was about to save their lives.

She fed a virus Legion had owned into the chip connecting to the mainframe.

The voice stopped somewhere between fifteen and ten seconds remaining. There was a silence, then the it started up again, but it kept jamming, hopelessly corrupted and slow, making the cool feminine tone sound dark, digital, heavy and torn.

"Legion," Tali said to Shepard when she turned around and the Commander raised an eyebrow at her that asked simply: how? "A geth virus he could slip into hostile AI," she explained, "It interrupts your more basic calculating systems, disabling weaponry, shields or, sometimes, self-destruct sequences," She looked up. "But I think this ship will adapt and find a way around it. Soon. So we better move."

Again they ran, constantly, painfully aware that the broken, uneven croaking of the alert echoing around them might suddenly find a new source of life. They reached the airlock, however, and hastily opened it. Again it seemed to take forever for the mechanics of the lock to hiss free of each other. But they did.

"Joker, get ready to go to light speed, as soon as we're aboard!" Shepard shouted as they reached the second lock. A moment later it also opened and they jumped into the Jeeya. They heard the door hiss shut again behind them. Then there was a clunk as the ships separated.

"Jump," Emily whispered to herself, leaning back against a wall and closing her eyes.

Jeeya eased away from the dark hulk of the Turian dreadnaught and vanished in a burst of white light. Everything was dark once more.

Moments later, the dreadnaught's belly cracked and began to fragment, gutted by the impact of an internal explosion. Yellow fire consumed the main body of the ship and the twin dorsal fins vaporised. The face and control tower followed in the next moment, erupting more violently into a cloud of orange and red that pushed out for half a mile in every direction. Finally, the engines caught on to the spectacle and ripped the rear section apart with such force that the destruction reached out and grabbed a hold of the two previous blasts as they were fading and reignited them ten-fold. And then the huge fireball was gone, choked by the vacuum. Only a belt of dull, twisted nuts and bolts remained, floating in the inky black forever.