Spectres 3

Jenkins was dead. Shepard stood and stared numbly at his body, lying broken on the floor of the cavern. Damn it, Jenkins, she thought tiredly. You really weren't supposed to wander ahead. At her side, her fingers twitched randomly, pebbles and dust skittering about her feet.

The natural human reaction would have been to cry, she suspected. She just felt empty. I'm sorry, Jacob, she thought. I fucked up again. All these years and I still keep letting you down. It had been almost eight years now since Private Jacob Taylor's death, but the guilt still felt as raw as ever.

If she'd been paying more attention to their route, if she'd been less focused on showing off to her new officers, she might have been able to avoid the thresher maw nest entirely. But she'd been young, cocky, convinced that she was invincible. She hadn't done her job properly, and Jacob Taylor had paid the price. She'd never worn the medal they'd given her afterwards. It wouldn't have felt right to do so. It would have felt like a betrayal.

She'd told herself after that that she'd do better, next time. That she'd honour Taylor's memory by learning from her mistakes. She'd tried. But trying wasn't always enough. It hadn't been enough on Epyrus or on Torfan, and it hadn't been enough tonight. She wondered if Nicollier would ever forgive her for this. I should have ordered her to come, she thought. If she'd been down here to look out for him...

"Commander, I …I'm sorry, I don't know what to say."

She hadn't noticed Vakarian moving to stand behind her. She didn't think she was ready to speak yet. She couldn't stop staring at the body. Jenkins had been a tall man, but he looked so small now.

I am my thoughts. She forced herself to breathe in. To breath out again.

"Soldiers die," she said slowly. "I said that earlier, didn't I?" It seemed like a long time ago now.

"Jenkins though …" she trailed off. Her voice was shaking. She hated the fact that she couldn't make it stop.

"He grew up near here, you know?" she said. Of course, she hadn't known that herself until today. She'd known what planet he'd been born on, but very little else about his childhood. They hadn't talked all that much, she realised now. Not about anything that really mattered. Now they never would.

"He grew up on this planet, volunteered to go out into space to defend his home, and he ended up dying right back here," she said, forcing herself to continue. "Not killed in battle, fighting an honest enemy face to face, but murdered in the dark by some coward's bomb. Stabbed in the back by his own kind.

She couldn't keep herself from trembling. Shock, she told herself. Adrenaline. Physical reactions you can't expect to avoid. Not your fault. But there was more to it than that. She was angry. Angrier than she'd been in a long time.

"I'll miss him." she said. "All the crew will." Jenkins was - had been - an easy person to like. It wasn't much of an epitaph, but it would do.

The human and the Spectre were both silent for a minute. The burning fragments of the wrecked machinery cast wild shadows on the walls of the cave. The weather outside had begun to grow worse, storm winds blowing in from the south.

"We're going to find the people who did this, Vakarian," she said finally, forcing herself to look the turian in the face. "Cerberus, or whoever they are. And when we do, they're going to die."

Her voice wasn't shaking any more.

Any reply Vakarian might have been about to make was cut off by the sound of the radio crackling to life.

".. omannder, this … is Komarov … you read?" a tinny voice echoed in both their ears, partially drowned out by the squealing noise of static. " ...peat, this is Privat-"

The rest of of the transmission was lost to the static. Shepard fiddled with the controls, but there was nothing she could do.

"Damn it," swore Vakarian. "We shouldn't be so far out from the spaceport that we can't get a signal."

Shepard shook her head. "Maybe something about these ruins is interfering with reception?" she suggested. Or maybe somebody's interfering with the signal. She hoped Komarov wasn't in any danger. She should be safe in the spaceport, she reassured herself. Unless things were going much more bady than she'd imagined.

They both heard the rumble of a spacecraft flying low overhead. Cerberus? she thought. She hoped it was. It would be good to have an enemy to fight.

Shepard made eye contact with Vakarian, exchanging nods, and they both moved wordlessly into cover. It was impossible to see out into the darkness beyond the cave, but at least they should be able to hear anybody moving down the stairway before they could be seen themselves. She checked her biotic amp, cold and ready on the back of her neck, while Vakarian prepared his rifle. I hope he's as good with that thing as he thinks he is, she thought.

Everything was quiet again, but for the noise of the wind howling outside. Shepard took several slow breaths. She was about to speak when the silence was broken by the distinctive sound of footsteps. The footsteps echoed down the spiralling stairway, the footsteps of a single person walking casually and unhurried. Shepard readied herself for combat. One Cerberus agent shouldn't be any problem, she thought. But perhaps she was being overconfident again.

The footsteps stopped at the bottom of the stairs, and she heard a voice cough delicately. Cautiously, Shepard peered up over the ruined wall she was crouching behind.

The new arrival was an asari. She wore blue and white armour and carried a heavy assault rifle by her side. The faint glow of a biotic barrier lit her up in purple light. Her eyes and cheeks were decorated with faint violet spirals; Shepard had seen similar designs worn by other asaris, but had never investigated to learn what - if anything - they meant. As she looked, she saw the asari smile slightly to herself, as if enjoying a private joke.

Well, safe bet she's not with Cerberus, anyway, thought Shepard.

"Who are you?" she called out, standing up slowly from behind her cover. Vakarian, she saw, remained crouched in the shadows, his rifle pointing steadily at the asari.

"Tela Vasir," the asari said, her smile widening. "Special Tactics and Recon. And you must be Commander Shepard."

A familiar figure was waiting for them by the shuttle when they got to the top of the dig-site.

"Komarov!" exclaimed Shepard. She was torn between relief that the pilot was all right and irritation that she wasn't back at the spaceport where she was supposed to be.

"Vasir found me in the spareport an hour ago," she explained to Shepard. "Told me she'd been in touch with the Resolute and needed me to fly her out to the dig-site. She thought it would make sense for us to work together on this. I tried contacting you on the way but we couldn't get a clean signal."

"We don't need any back-up on this mission," said Garrus firmly.

Ah, thought Shepard. This might be awkward. The turian had been brooding silently since they'd met Vasir down in the cave. By his body language he was obviously unhappy. He reminded her of some of the younger turian officers she'd had to work with. Pride in their newly-won status could all too easily manifest as stubborn over-defensiveness when their ideas or judgements were questioned. Once again, she wondered how old the turian Spectre was. She'd been surprised if he wasn't at least a couple of years younger than her. Which would make him very young indeed to be a Spectre.

"Relax, Vakarian." said Vasir, "I didn't fly halfway across the galaxy to provide a junior Spectre with back-up."

The asari's smile didn't quite reach her eyes. Vakarian scowled, mandibles flaring. Shepard didn't think he taken the 'junior Spectre' remark very well.

"Who sent you out here, Vasir?"he asked, angrily. "The Council? Does Tevos think-"

"Nobody sent me," Vasir replied, interrupting him. She paused, considering.

"The truth is, I'm hunting for a members of a human terrorist group," she said. "They call themselves Cerberus. I assume you've heard of them. They've certainly left their mark on this place.

"I got some intel that they were active on this planet, and a tip about some of the communication methods they use. I was exploring the spaceport when I picked up their signal. That led me here."

"What made you look for our pilot?" asked Shepard, curiously. "We certainly weren't the only shuttle at the spaceport, so if you just wanted to get here quickly…"

"I didn't look for her," the asari said, "Not at first. Once I picked up the signal and decoded the message, I realised that Cerberus were interested in Kumun Shol's missing dig team. After some digging I realised that Vakarian was already looking into that and might already be planetside. I assumed he'd have travelled here via a Hierarchy ship, and the Resolute was the only turian ship in orbit. So I called up the ship and introduced myself, and they sent me to your shuttle pilot."

"Lucky break for you that we were here, ma'am" said Shepard.

The asari shook her head.

"Not just luck, Commander," she said. "Keep looking for leads and sooner or later you make your own luck. After all, good intel is what makes good Spectres. Any idiot can point a gun at somebody."

She said the last part with a pointed look at Vakarian and his sniper rifle. Shepard wondered if there was anything more to her apparent animosity than the asari's general disdain for non-biotics. At least Vakarian was easy to figure out.

Shepard decided to leave them to it and climbed inside the shuttle. She sat in the co-pilot's chair, stared into the darkness ahead, and tried to focus, breathing deeply while she concentrated on gathering her thoughts. After a short pause, Komarov joined her, sitting beside her in the pilot's seat. She looked nervous. Shepard could guess what she was worrying about. She'd been dreading this conversation all through the walk back with Vasir.

"By the way, um. Where's Jenkins, ma'am?" Komarov asked. "Did he head back to the spaceport before we got here? Or…"

"I'm sorry, Komarov," Shepard said, hoping her voice would stay level. "Jenkins… I'm afraid he didn't make it."

The young pilot blinked, wordlessly, fighting back tears.

"..oh." she said, quietly.

"The people who trashed this place," said Shepard slowly, unsure where to start. "Cerberus … they left behind some sort of bomb in one of the excavation chambers below us. We must have done something to set it off, somehow, but ..."

She trailed off, hopeless. What was there to say, anyway? Anything she could think of would just feel like she was making excuses. Richard Jenkins was dead, and it was her fault. It's always my fault, she thought.

Komarov sat, quiet and small, on the pilot's seat, saying nothing. Shepard opened her mouth, thought better of it, and closed her eyes. They both sat in silence for a while. The storm winds still raged outside, but inside the shuttle the sound was muffled.

"Commander, I-" at the sound of Komarov's voice Shepard opening her eyes again. But the pilot had nothing more to say. It was almost a relief when the two Spectres both pulled themselves into the shuttle, still arguing furiously.

"For the last time, this is my mission, Vasir," Vakarian snapped, "I don't need your help.".

"We're on the same side, Vakarian," replied Vasir. "We both want to bring down the Cerberus operatives who did this. I don't understand why you don't want to work together."

"The Council assigned me to this mission, not you" he said. "If you want Cerberus taken down, you should just let me get on with the job."

Vasir made a show of looking out of the shuttle's windows at the ruins of the dig-site, and of glancing pointedly in the direction of the pit they'd first found the bodies of the archaeological team, and in the direction of the chamber where they'd left Jenkins' body. "Oh yes, of course, Vakarian," she said pointedly. "I can see you're doing quite a job here.

Vakarian said nothing, but a dejected look crept over his face. Shepard found herself speaking up before she realised what she was doing.

"It was my fault, ma'am," she said quietly. "Vakarian recommended bringing a second biotic. I didn't listen. It's because of me that things went sideways."

She kept her eyes on Vasir's face, not daring to look at Komarov.

Vasir's expression was unreadable.

"This is a Spectre mission, Commander." she sad. "It's not your fault if things go badly. But since you say Vakarian listened to you then, perhaps you can talk some sense into him now?"

She pulled out an expensive looking datapad, and brought up a holographic map of the area.

"The Cerberus signal I picked up was being routed through a device near the cave I found you both in," she said. "Sub-FTL, but not on any of the registered radio bands. We were homing it on when it cut out abruptly, shortly before we landed."

That had been right around the time that Jenkins had somehow activated the trap hidden in the strange tripod device.

"But I traced the signal's target," Vasir said. "It was being beamed towards some hills, not far from here." She pointed to a spot on the map. "I think we should investigate. The sooner, the better. The three of us should have more than enough firepower to deal with anything we find there."

Shepard frowned. It did seem like their best shot at finding the people who'd trashed the camp. If the device had stopped broadcasting, it was surely only a matter of time before Cerberus moved to a new position or disappeared from the planet entirely. And an asari biotic would certainly be a useful asset if Cerberus had any serious defences.

"It … might make sense for us to work with Vasir on this," she told Vakarian, reluctantly. "Sir."

The turian sighed to himself and nodded. "Okay, Commander", he said. "We'll go with Vasir's plan. Let me just make a few calls first."

That said, he slipped back outside into the wind and darkness.

Vasir half-smiled again, tipping her head slightly in Shepard's direction. After explaining that she'd need to prepare herself for any combat, she too left the shuttle's cockpit, heading back to the rear of the ship.

"She's right, ma'am," said Komarov after the two Spectres had both left the cockpit. Her voice was quiet but steadier than Shepard would have expected . "It's not your fault."

In the end, their target was only a few minutes' flight away. They travelled most of the distance in silence, Komarov letting the shuttle coast on its mass effect fields and thrusters as they passed over the empty grassland in the valley below.

Up ahead, they could see a cliff face, pock-marked with cave mouths. According to Vasir's map, this was the target of the Cerberus broadcast. The Cerberus base. Almost without thinking, Shepard tested her helmet's radio and HUD. They'd agreed that Komarov would stay with the ship while she and the Spectres hit the base as hard and fast as they could.

"I'm not sure it's safe to go any further in this wind, ma'am," said Komarov eventually. "Even with the mass effect fields and the jet thrusters, there's a danger we could get pushed up against the rocks in a sudden gale."

"Down there." Vasir said, pointing at a large flat plateau. "Set us down here, pilot. We'll make the rest of our way on foot."

"... aye aye, ma'am," acknowledged Komarov. Vasir was so intent on the scene ahead of her that she seemed not to notice the almost imperceptible pause as Komarov glanced over to Shepard, who nodded in approval.

A short path winding along the cliff face joined the plateau Komarov had brought the shuttle down on to the nearest cave mouth. They were only twenty metres along this path when three humanoid figures ran out of the cave towards them, weapons raised. They opened fire almost immediately, engulfing Shepard and the two Spectres in a hail of bullets.

Shepard and Vasir both threw up biotic barriers, while Vakarian rolled into cover behind a outcrop of rock. This close, it was clear that their assailants weren't human. They weren't any other organic either.

"Good news, Vakarian," Shepard said dryly. "We found those missing mechs."

Shepard hadn't seen an asari fight for years, and she couldn't help herself from sneaking glances towards Vasir as they fought through the security mechs.

Vasir didn't fight like Shepard's old asari instructor. Her instructor had always insisted on the importance of poise, simplicity. She'd taught the recruits that a biotic should fight like a dancer, flowing from one position to another with the minimum of wasted movement.

But Vasir didn't dance. She didn't flow. She tore through the security mechs like a bulldozer, using her biotics at short range to warp and twist the mechs' armour. She combined her biotic powers with her assault rifle seamlessly, throwing out mnemonic patterns with one hand even as her other hand worked the trigger of her rifle. A mech to her left was thrown backwards with a biotic push, and its counterpart on her right fell to the ground with a large hole in the centre of its torso.

In fact all three of them worked well as a team, the asari closing rapidly with each group of mechs they found, supported by Shepard's longer range biotics and Vakarian's sniper rifle. Shepard's fingers flexed out a familiar well practiced mnemonic sequence, knocking the mechs down as they attempted to flank the asari. Vakarian's rifle raised and fired like clockwork, each shot seeming to find its way straight to the centre of a mech's head unit.

Her suit radio crackled to life, Vakarian barking out a warning. She spun to her left as a mech burst out of its hiding place, concealed against the cliff face by a thin layer of scree and debris. Before the mech could reach her, she ducked down, fingers twitching, and lifted. The mechs' momentum kept it moving toward her, but rather than crashing into her as it had attempted it found itself floating above her, then out into the void to her right. A few moments later the effects of the biotics wore off and the mech crashed down into the valley below.

Looking up, she saw Vasir repeat the trick with two more mechs. The asari looked over her shoulder and nodded, then they kept moving.

They'd destroyed around two dozen mechs by the time they reached the nearest cave mouth. Twenty-five, Vakarian insisted, after she brought it up.

"Not bad, Commander," he said, "Though I got two more than you, I think."

"This isn't a game, Vakarian," the asari said, disapprovingly.

Shepard tuned out Vakarian's response, thinking back instead to how the mechs had tried to ambush her earlier. It could have been pre-programmed behaviour, but Shepard didn't think so. Vasir didn't think so either, when she brought it up.

"You said these mechs were hijacked from the dig-site," the asari said thoughtfully. "My guess is that whoever did that was close by, still feeding them instructions"

"With any luck, we can catch them before they have a chance to escape." said Vakarian eagerly.

Vasir shook her head. "I told you, Vakarian, real Spectres make their own luck. You'll learn that when you get older."

She frowned slightly, corrected herself. "If you get older."

They walked in silence for a while after, the human and the turian following the asari through the tunnel as it slowly worked its way through the hills. Shepard braced herself for another mech ambush, but everything was quiet. Unnaturally quiet. This far into the hillside they couldn't hear the wind. The only sound she could hear was the sounds the three of them made as they proceeded forwards. Forwards and - as far as she could tell - increasingly upwards, towards the summit of the hill.

Eventually they reached an area where the path split in two. To their right, a tunnel sloped lazily upward, spiralling around a central pillar. To their left, a smaller tunnel headed down.

"I'll take the high path, you two take the low path," the asari said after a moment's pause. "We'll rendezvous back here in an hour if we're not found our Cerberus hacker before then. Or anything else interesting."

Shepard nodded, taking Vakarian's silence for assent. They'd cover more ground this way, and the asari could evidently take care of herself. Besides, there'd been no sign of any mechs for some time - Shepard suspected that the ones they'd fought had been all the mechs that the volus archaeologists had had.

"Any idea what we're looking for, ma'am?" she asked.

Vasir frowned thoughtfully.

"I understand the volus were looking for Prothean technology. Doesn't seem like they found anything, but I suggest you keep an eye out all the same. If you see anything strange, let me know."

"Any chance Cerberus took hostages?" asked Shepard.

The asari shook her head. "Honestly, I doubt it. Best to assume that everyone you encounter here is a potential hostile. Apart from me, of course."

She half-smiled again, then took off at a brisk jog up the sloping tunnel to her right.

"Okay, level with me. Just how long have you been a Spectre, Vakarian?" Shepard demanded softly once the asari was out of earshot.

"Ah, well…" he said. "About six days, now."

She looked at him wordlessly for a minute, waiting for him to admit he was joking. When he didn't, she nodded slowly instead, gesturing for him to continue. Well, she told herself, You did think he was young to be a Spectre.

"This is my first solo mission," he admitted. "It was supposed to be a simple one. A routine search operation to appease some crazy volus with more credits than sense."

His mandibles moved up and down, while he stared around him in frustration.

"I've been trained for this," he said, "I've accompanied other Spectres on missions in the field, read their reports, but … it's different when it's real, you know?"

She nodded. Some experiences couldn't be prepared for. Not really. Not in any way that would help.

"I sometimes think things were easier when I was in the military," said Vakarian, almost wistfully. "I used to chafe at all the rules and regulations, but at least things were black and white."

They'd been walking for a few minutes when the tunnel the asari had sent them down opened out into a more developed area.

It looked like this was some sort of science block. They were walking through a series of small cells, each connected to the others by a series of airlock-style doors. Each cell contained a single strange item, presumably lifted from the volus' dig-site. Shepard couldn't tell whether or not they were Prothean, but they certainly looked old.

Most of the artefacts were hooked up to much more modern computer systems. Monitoring them, or drawing power from them, or something else? Shepard couldn't tell. She did wonder if they should start dismantling them, but without any idea of what that could do it didn't seem wise. Instead they walked carefully around the artefacts, from one cell to the next.

When they reached the fourth cell, Vakarian switched his radio off and gestured for Shepard to do the same.

"You should be careful around Vasir," he said. "She's … trouble. If we find anything here, I suggest we keep it to ourselves."

"You don't think asari can be trusted?" Shepard asked curiously. It made sense, she realised. With tensions growing between the Hierarchy and the Asari Republics, it was only natural that relations between the turian and asari Spectres would also have begun to deteriorate.

But - "No, that's not what I meant, " he insisted. She had the impression that she'd managed to offend him, that he was trying to articulate a proper response.

That was why he wasn't paying attention when the next door cycled open and he almost walked into a human woman on the other side. She was perhaps a couple of inches taller than Shepard, so she was still dwarfed by the turian. The nondescript black armour she wore matched the colour of her hair, which she'd somehow pulled up and pinned at the top of her head. Shepard only had half a second to note any of this before the woman and the Spectre both burst into motion.

The startled turian reacted almost immediately, but the human reacted faster. As Vakarain reached to grab her, she kicked out at his leg, striking him just above his reversed knee. He staggered a bit, and with her other leg she swept both his feet from under him, spinning around and twisting him over her hip until he fell sprawling onto the floor.

She pulled a pistol from her belt and pointed it at the turian's head. The whole exchange had taken only a couple of seconds.

At the other end of the room, Shepard flung out her hand and the woman's gun flew out of her grasp. The other human recovered faster than Shepard thought possible, her other hand dropping to her side and tossing a grenade in her direction. Shepard threw up a barrier instinctively, but the weapon was a flash-bang, intended to distract rather than to injure. It exploded into a bright ball of light, temporarily blinding Shepard and filling the room with white smoke.

"You okay Vakarian?" Shepard called out through the clouds of smoke.

"I'm fine Shepard," Vakarian replied. "But she's getting away."

Shepard saw that the door they'd entered by was open again, smoke ebbing out into the cave network. The woman in black fled down the tunnels, and Shepard followed.

At first, it was all Shepard could do to keep the other woman in her sight. She was fast, agile, and had had plenty of time to learn the layout of the tunnel network. Once off the main path they'd travelled earlier, the tunnels were a maze; twisted passages crossing and intersecting in a way that didn't seem to make sense. The woman turned right, then left, then right again, and Shepard followed in hot pursuit, stumbling a bit as she threw herself around the tight corners of the tunnels. On her radio she could hear Vakarian speaking to Vasir, letting her know what was happening. If Vasir had noticed the earlier period of radio silence, she didn't mention it.

Who is this woman? Shepard wondered as she ran. She wasn't the sort of person Shepard had been expecting to find. The way she'd fought Vakarian didn't fit the profile of a tech specialist down on their luck or of a failed farmer turned terrorist. If she'd had to have guessed, Shepard would have classified her as a marine, Hierarchy trained, and a good one at that.

Either way, it seemed almost certain that she was linked to Cerberus. Are human auxiliaries defecting to Cerberus now? She wasn't sure if she should be more worried about that, or the prospect of Cerberus having set up their own marine training programme. Shepard thought back to her earlier words to Vakarian. If she's with Cerberus, if she helped set up that bomb, then she's dead either way, she thought to herself grimly.

She almost lost her after the fourth turning. The woman had ducked into a passage to her right, temporarily vanishing from Shepard's sight. When Shepard caught up, she saw the passage was a dead end. Where did she…? A flash of movement on the edge of her peripheral vision made her look up - the woman had pulled herself up through a vent into another tunnel that ran above them.

Without pausing to think, Shepard took a step back and threw herself up after her. Her fingers scrabbled for purchase at the edge, then she got a firm grip and was able to lever herself up through the vent. Breathing harder than she'd have liked, she had time to see the woman in black run down a passage to her right. Shaking her head, she picked herself up and chased after her again.

At first this level seemed like a mirror image of the first. The other woman darted through the tunnels, left and right, either acting on instinct or following a well-memorised path. And Shepard pursued her, too caught up in the chase now to do anything else.

Then they were running through a long, straight passageway, still heading upwards. And now she had a clear and unobstructed line of sight. Got you, she thought. Fingers flexing out a familiar mnemonic pattern, she pulled the woman backwards - or at least, she tried to. But nothing happened.

Nothing externally, anyway - her amp flashed hot against the back of her neck, overheating almost painfully. She must have a dampener, Shepard realised. Though illegal on most of the colonies, there was a thriving black market trade in biotic dampeners: electronic devices that interfered with the operation of a biotic's amp, stopping them from using their abilities.

We'll just have to do this the hard way, thought Shepard.

Dampeners were notoriously energy-intensive, which must have been why the woman hadn't had hers turned on in the science cells earlier. Given enough time, the dampener's effects would wear off. Then Shepard would have the upper hand once more.

She wondered why the woman hadn't tried to ambush her on the way through the tunnels, or to take a shot at her now that her biotics were suppressed.

She's unarmed, she told herself. The gun she lost back in the lab must have been her only weapon.

The thought gave her renewed energy, and she felt that she was starting to narrow the gap. With a start, she realised that she was more than narrowing the gap - she was suddenly gaining ground rapidly. The other woman had stopped running. In the darkness, she hadn't realised that they were outside the tunnels and back at the top of the cliffs.

They'd emerged out of the funnels high up in the hills, much higher than where they'd started. The chase must have taken longer than Shepard had realised. She hadn't run this fast for a long time, as the numb aching in her legs attested to. Her pistol was in her hands now, and she approached cautiously, half expecting an ambush or sneak attack by more of the security mechs.

The woman in black was cornered, her back to the cliff edge behind her. Shepard kept her pistol trained on her warily. The woman raised her arms carefully above her head, palms opened and empty. She raised an eyebrow quizzically. She's not even out of breath, thought Shepard.

"Vakarian, Vasir, this is Shepard," she said into her suit radio. "I've got her."

No answer.

"Shepard, was it?" the woman asked conversationally. Shepard ignored her interruption, focusing on trying to adjust her radio's setting.

"You're fighting on the wrong side, Shepard. You know that, don't you?" The woman's spoke calmly, seemingly unconcerned about both the weapon being pointed at her and the gaping drop waiting behind her.

"Cerberus - the human species - we need people like you." she continued. "You have no idea what's out there, waiting, in the darkness."

I've got a pretty good idea, thanks, Shepard thought. She'd been fighting slavers, pirates and mercenaries for all of her adult life. Her parents had been killed by batarian raiders when she was just a child. She knew what sort of horrors the galaxy was capable of. But she also knew that there was nothing to be gained in arguing with a fanatic. Which the woman in front of her so clearly was.

Come on, she thought to herself. Just give me an excuse. Vakarian or Vasir would be here in a few minutes. They'd want to interrogate the prisoner, find out what Cerberus had been up to here. That was the only reason the woman was still breathing.

"You think that the Hierarchy will protect us?" the woman asked, after Shepard had been silent for several minutes. "Or the Council? They won't be able to. They won't even try. When they finally realise the magnitude of the threat, they'll abandon the human colonies without thinking. They'd let Mindoir and Horizon and all our other worlds burn to ashes rather than risk the slightest threat to Palaven or Thessia."

She shook her head, regretfully. "It's not even a question of malice, not really. If your house was on fire, would you risk your children's lives to save your dog? However much you love your dog, it's not human."

Shepard fought down a retort - don't engage with lunatics, she reminded herself, that's what they want - but she couldn't keep her disapproval from showing on her face. It was an analogy she'd heard before. Calling me a dog seems a strange way of winning me over, she thought wryly.

"You know it's true, Shepard," the Cerberus operative insisted. "No matter how hard you try, you'll never be good enough for them. You will never be one of them."

"You talk too much," snapped Shepard, finally, raising her pistol as a warning. "I won't stand here and be lectured by a terrorist."

The radio fizzed briefly back into life. It was Vakarian, but his voice was faint, distorted. "Shepard, I've found … incredible …"

"Maybe you should go check on your boss, Shepard." the other woman suggested casually. "You and I can pick this up later."

As she spoke, she took a step backwards and dropped over the edge.

Cursing, Shepard ran forward. She hadn't considered the woman to be a suicide risk, but who knew what fanatics were capable of?

She'd barely made it halfway to the edge when she heard the familiar roar of a shuttle's engines.

Impossible, she thought to herself. What pilot would be reckless enough to bring a shuttle so close to cliff face like that in these winds? Mass effect fields meant shuttles could fly in and out of planetary orbit with little ill-effect, but a shuttle simply didn't have the mass or the shielding necessary to survive actually crashing into the hillside. One wrong move by the pilot at the controls and the shuttle and its occupants could end up smeared across the landscape.

But that was exactly what had happened. The shuttle was visible now, rising up slowly past the cliff face. The craft itself looked utterly unremarkable; she'd probably walked past a dozen like it as she was leaving the spaceport. But there, grabbing hold of a support beam and very much alive, was the woman from Cerberus.

Shepard took aim with her pistol and fired, but the bullets bounced harmlessly off the shuttle's shields. She tried to pull the woman down with her biotics, but the warm pain on the back of her neck made it clear the dampening field was still in full effect.

The Cerberus agent smirked down at her, waving lazily with her free hand as the shuttle lifted upwards. Beyond her reach. She was still staring futilely upwards when her radio crackled back into life.

"Commander." The voice on the radio was Vasir's. "Are you in contact with Vakarian? I was talking to him a moment ago but he dropped out of signal. I've not been able to reach him."

Shepard realised with a sudden chill that she'd left Vakarian alone in the science area they found the Cerberus agent in. Who knew what she'd been doing before they arrived? She'd had time to sabotage the artefacts, or to plant another bomb. A bomb like the one that had killed Jenkins.

Not again.

Shepard took off at a run, retracing the path she'd taken while in pursuit of the woman in black. She barely noticed the distance this time.

Vakarian was waiting for her in the cell where they'd first surprised the Cerberus agent. Or at least, he was waiting in the cell. Whether he was waiting for her was a different question. In truth he seemed entirely uninterested in her re-appearance.

The artefact in this room was unlike any of the others she'd seen. Bigger, older, and altogether stranger. This one, she was sure, was definitely Prothean. Something about it seemed disturbingly alien, incomprehensible in a way that none of the species who shared the galaxy now could be.

Unlike the other artefacts, this one was not attached to any sort of monitoring system. It was larger, too; freestanding, like an obelisk, or a beacon. And it floated above the floor. Ancient relic or not, it was obviously still capable of generating mass effect fields. And who knows what else it's capable of?

Vakarian seemed transfixed. He didn't respond to her arrival in the cell, or to her voice when she called out to him. Instead, nodding absently as if to a voice only he could hear, he took a deliberate step forwards, closer to the beacon. The beacon was humming, she realised - an unpleasant noise that set her teeth on edge. Shepard couldn't help but remember all the horror stories about lost survey teams driven beyond reason by mysterious alien artefacts. Gangs of savage cannibals wandering mindlessly through ancient ruins. It had been easy to laugh at such stories back in training, but now...

"Vakarian!" she shouted in warning one last time. The turian paid her no more attention than before and continued walking slowly towards the humming beacon.

Without thinking further, she threw herself across the room, crashing into the Spectre and pushing him towards the floor. They fell together, sprawling on the floor in the middle of the cell. Vakarian blinked up at her, a confused look on his face.

"Commander," he said, groggily, "What happened? Where was …?"

She stood up herself, looking down at Vakarian and opening her mouth to answer. The beacon stood behind him, filling half of her vision. The humming noise had grown louder, but now sounded much less discordant than it had moments ago. It felt almost as though the humming had meaning, as if the machine was trying to communicate. If only she could understand. She took a step forward.

The beacon was fully lit up now, green lights flickering and reforming across its surface. The machine was definitely trying to communicate. She took another step forward.

She was beginning to hear something else now. Almost like a voice, echoing in her skull, almost comprehensible. Vakarian was trying to say something too, she realised, but it wasn't important. Not as important as the beacon. She stepped forward again..

Another step… another… her burning alien vision smoke voices began filled screamed to the in blur room unison and-/ while-/ as-

Everything went black.