As they cruised over the lunar surface, pock-marked and strewn with random sizes of rocks, Val had trouble even spotting any signs of human habitation. She leaned over the back of the pilot's chair, frowning through the viewscreen. "Are you sure this is the right place?"
"These are the coordinates I was given," Alex said from behind her. Somewhat to Val's surprise, there was no defensive edge to his voice. If anything, he seemed subdued, hunched into lightweight armor that didn't quite fit.
"A little room, please?" Garrus asked.
With a guilty start, Val took half a step back from his seat. There wasn't room for much more in the tight quarters of their ship's small cockpit. She rolled her shoulders, getting used to the fit of this hard suit, and crossed her arms. She took even breaths, in and out. Focus, she told herself; this wasn't the time to get distracted by Alex's attitude or Garrus's presence. She had to treat it like any other mission. As she squared her shoulders, concentrating on the smooth flow of air in and out of her lungs, the churning frustration of the last few days settled into a more familiar resolve. This should be a simple, routine reconnaissance mission, but with Cerberus, nothing was very simple. She knew herself, though, and she knew Garrus well enough; whatever came up, they'd handle it.
"There it is," Garrus said, as the ship slowly circled around. Peering into the distance, Val could see it: a small dome with an entrance, dark and straight-edged against the moonscape below.
"Don't suppose you have any idea what's in there?" Garrus said, glancing over his shoulder.
Val glanced back herself to see Alex shrug. "Sorry. Coordinates are all I've got."
There was no guarantee it was even the right facility, she reminded herself. Or that whatever device they found would work. It should have filled her with uncertainty, but the prospect of taking action, of having a clear purpose, buoyed her up instead. They had a clear mission: get in, investigate, get out. After that, they could deal with whatever they'd found. "All right," she said aloud, conscious of the two men looking to her. "Could you set her down by the airlock, Garrus?"
Without comment, Garrus guided the ship down to the lunar surface. Part of Val wished for Steve Cortez's steady hands, though this was an easy flight, with no visible danger, and Garrus was more than capable of handling a routine VI-assisted landing. Vega, now, she was never letting Vega fly anything anywhere ever again. They'd have to leave the ship unoccupied, though. In the back of her brain, she worried that the vessel would be visible from above, that it might attract unwanted attention, or tampering.
Regardless, that was a risk they'd have to take. She could postpone worrying about that until they emerged from whatever they found in the facility.
Given that a small dome was the only thing on the surface, Shepard was willing to bet the facility was mostly underground. With any luck, the life support systems would still be functional, and they wouldn't have to rely on their suits' oxygen. She finished suiting up without any chatter, pushing down the brief surge of tension she felt every time she locked her helmet into place. She'd never quite been able to shed the bone-deep dread that came from knowing that helmet, hardsuit, and oxygen hadn't saved her before.
She'd checked her O2 lines obsessively ever since. Never mind that the ship wasn't likely to blow up around her more than once. She didn't want to push her luck.
Alex and Garrus had suited up as well, turning faceless and alien in their helmets. Together they waited for the airlock to cycle. When the lock turned green, Val reached for the controls. "I'll take point," she told the others. "Garrus, take the rear."
Alex didn't object or grumble, but simply nodded.
They were only a few paces from the entrance, especially with the long, bouncing strides that came with the low-G environment. Val stepped back and let Alex work on the lock, scanning around them at the sharp black-and-white line of the horizon. Nothing moved; there were no other signs of human habitation in view.
"They've got crappy security," Alex reported. "I'm not even going to have to get fancy over here. I'll be through this in thirty seconds."
Garrus fired up his omni-tool as well, the screen casting a lurid orange glow across the dark faceplate of his helmet. "Accessing their systems... looks like life support shut down months ago. No one's home now."
Val sighed inside the privacy of her helmet before a thought occurred to her. "Did they shut it off themselves, or did it automatically shut down?"
"Automatic shut-down, looks like. Which doesn't tell us much. I can start it up again." Garrus's fingers moved across the omni-tool's interface. "Yeah, the system's still functional. It'll take a few minutes to get heat and breathable air again. The facility's VI is operational, but it's pretty limited. It's here to run life support and monitor exterior hazards, not much more."
Val nodded. "Can we access their data storage from here?"
After a moment, Garrus and Alex both shook their heads. Alex said, "Central data storage is disconnected from facility systems. There has to be another system inside."
"On the plus side, I found a building schematic," Garrus said. "Pushing it to your 'tools now."
Val opened the schematic on her helmet's internal display and gave it a quick once-over. "Not long on labeling rooms, are they?" she commented, observing the number of undifferentiated rooms and corridors.
"Like Cerberus would be helpful that way," Alex said, and Garrus chuckled.
Val smiled thinly, trying to remember the last time she'd heard Alex make a joke. Was he more relaxed, or whistling in the dark? Either way, she found it obscurely heartening.
She reached out and slapped the entrance's controls.
An eternity seemed to pass while the airlock cycled; no one spoke, but Alex and Garrus fidgeted slightly to either side of her, fueling her own rising anticipation. When the lock finished its cycle with a dull chiming noise, the door whirred open, and Val stepped forward into a bland corridor, almost eerily featureless except for the plain doors on either side.
"Anything interesting has to be further in," Garrus said. "No one stows their valuable prototypes near the door."
"True," Val said. "But let's check just to be thorough." She pushed on the first door, which opened easily. Cerberus's symbol stared back at her from the wall inside, oblong, black and ominous. Val sneered back at it. "It's a Cerberus facility, all right," she commented.
The first few rooms held nothing of particular interest: suits for surface exploration, tools, safety equipment, storage crates. A couple of personal lockers, emptied, one of them half-open; a couple more lockers still containing spare clothing. Everything was dully impersonal: no personal pics, IDs, or anything else distinctive. Alex did a quick search of a couple of the crates, but found them mostly full of stored rations, spare O2 cylinders, and raw materials for a fabricator.
They continued, onward and downward. The corridor descended a dozen steps, narrow enough that Val could easily touch the walls on either side. The whiteness and stillness of the place set the hairs at the back of her neck prickling. More Cerberus symbols loomed over them as they descended.
"Love the decor," Garrus commented.
"Cerberus does have a style," Val replied. The sound of their voices rang hollow inside her helmet, doing nothing to settle her nerves. Their footsteps echoed down the corridor. She wondered how far down this place went.
The stairs ended at a single door; beyond, the overhead lights flickered wanly before coming to life, glaringly bright in a square, white room. Tweedy beige chairs and couches and datapads scattered across low tables suggested that it had once served as a lounge space. One artificial plant sat in a black pot, plastic flowers incongruously bright in the otherwise colorless room.
"Looks like we've found the living quarters," Garrus said.
"I guess Cerberus blew its budget on the Normandy," Shepard said, glancing around. The furniture looked cheap and blandly functional, nothing like what she'd seen on the Normandy SR-2.
"Blew its budget on Shepard, more like," Alex muttered.
Val grimaced, thinking uneasily of Lazarus Station. The same spare, impersonal, functional construction as this place. Less death and destruction, at least. Lazarus had had a lot more money spent on lab space, probably; only the best for Commander Shepard.
To chase away the nagging memories, she picked up one of the datapads and thumbed it on. The title Journal of Theoretical Physics flashed across the screen. Flicking it off again, she said, "All right. Let's fan out and search the place."
This level had clearly been the living quarters; besides the lounge, there were lavatories and a sparse kitchenette. A jumble of dirty dishes sat in the sink, and there was an inch of cold black sludge at the bottom of the coffee pot. Of the five bedrooms, three had been emptied, evidently in a hurry; a few forgotten articles of clothing lay limp at the bottom of one closet, and the bed in the other was rumpled. The remaining two looked untouched, the closets and drawers stocked with clothing, a few datapads and other personal items left on the nightstand. Val walked into one room and found a Blasto nightlight glowing luridly pink; she nearly shot it before she realized what it was. In the other room, a photo frame sat by the lamp. Val picked it up and scrolled through the images: a smiling, dark-eyed young woman, an older man and woman with their arms around each other, a few landscape shots, the older couple again, this time flanking a beaming young man in academic robes.
Garrus called out, "Looks like part of the team left in a hurry."
"Then where's the rest of them?" Val wondered. She glanced at Alex. "You get anything from their notes?"
He shook his head. "They have a bunch of scientific journals lying around, and some more crackpot stuff, but nothing too exciting. Anything about their project must be in the labs, wherever those are." He glanced toward the stairs that led down out of the lounge area.
Val checked the readouts on her suit. The atmosphere had stabilized to a livable temperature and oxygen concentration, so she unsealed her helmet and took it off, taking in a long breath.
The air smelled stale and dry, but the simple act of breathing unfiltered air eased something in Val's chest and made her shoulders unknot a little. Walking toward the stairs, she inhaled deeply, and a whiff of something sickly-sweet hit the back of her sinuses. She frowned. That smell, and the research team unaccounted for...
Unlike Lazarus station, there might not be murderous bots here, but something had gone wrong, all the same. Five bedrooms, and only three had departed.
She took another breath, feeling the weight of the others' attention on her. The faint smell of decay had fled, leaving her to wonder whether her imagination had conjured it. Only flat, recirculated air now. Val mustered her resolve. "Let's go."
These stairs spiraled down to the next level. The lights, motion-activated, lit as they descended, casting a sharp white glow in the room around them: an open office space, dotted with cluttered desks and inactive vidscreens. A heap of datapads had fallen from one desk to the floor, a rolling chair had been knocked over, and another chair had rolled into the corner, away from all the desks. As Val looked around, unease tightened the muscles of her back. A couple of the desks weren't squared up to the others: coincidence? Or had something gotten pushed out of place? "All right," she said, and heard the tinge of worry in her voice. She tried to sound more commander-like. "Fan out, and see if you can find anything." She moved toward the pile of fallen datapads.
"Because going through someone else's research notes is fun," Alex muttered, heading toward another desk.
"Delightful," Garrus agreed, taking a third. "Did I ever tell you about the time I had to go through a volus scientist's financial records?"
Alex snorted. "No, I think you skipped that one."
"It took me fifty days just to discover there was nothing to discover. The volus had been messing with his own accounting just for the fun of it."
Alex laughed, the sound echoing around the room. Val bent to scoop up the datapads. As she straightened, she noticed a dark brown smear across the edge of the desk. Stiffening, Val glanced around quickly and then scraped at it with a gloved finger. Reddish-brown flakes fluttered to the floor. Dried blood. Disturbed, Val looked around again. In her imagination, the fallen chair and datapads now assembled themselves into signs of a struggle, though she didn't see any more blood. She let out a breath and set to work, quickly scanning through the datapads and setting aside the ones that only contained more scientific journals. She got lucky on the sixth one down, which contained someone's personal log.
2186 June 13
More mice lost. I keep telling Fletcher and Mazzota that we're not ready for testing on live animals yet. I know I'm new to the project, but I'm not convinced by Mazzota's results. We need to back up and recheck our data instead of just throwing more mice into this thing. I know they're just lab animals, but still. I think Sinha agrees with me, but he's afraid to say so. I'm not sure what I've gotten myself into here.
2186 June 21
I've tried to talk to Mazzota, but she won't listen to me. I don't know what else to do. I don't even have the comm codes to contact our bosses. I tried to talk to Whitman, too, but they just want to tinker with the machinery. They're sure we'll get it right next time. I hope they're right.
2186 June 23
Fletcher took me aside to "explain the realities of our situation," he said. I'll say this much, it was informative. I don't really understand the urgency to deliver results. Obviously this would be a huge breakthrough if we can pull it off, but doesn't that mean we should take our time to get it right? It's not like the world is about to end. Having this much pressure is kind of freaking me out.
Val winced. These entries were only written a year ago, but they might as well have been written in another world. She glanced around the room. Garrus had his omni-tool up, datapads sorted into neat stacks in front of him. Alex had planted himself at one of the desks and was reading, brow furrowed.
2186 July 2
Back to inorganic object tests. The object disappears when the device activates and reappears when the device deactivates. I can understand why Mazzota's so irritated about our failures with live subjects, but I think she's overly fixated on that issue. I've tried to point out to everyone that we don't actually know what's happening when the object disappears. We don't have proof it's going to another dimension. The portal does something, all right, but we don't know what.
I wouldn't even mind so much if the mice were only dying, but it's as if they're getting turned inside out. Why continue this when we haven't figured out what's going wrong?
A picture followed, of a small scrap of bloody flesh that Val wouldn't even have recognized as a mouse without being told what it was. Frowning, she scrolled on quickly.
"Anyone got anything?" Garrus called out.
"This one has a billion schematics for something they thought was a dimensional portal, at least," Alex said. "They're a little vague on what evidence made them think that."
"Whoever wrote this log wasn't so sure they had a portal," Val said. "Evidently their live tests didn't go well."
Alex's nose wrinkled. "Got it."
Val returned to the log, skimming through the continued catalog of the scientist's frustrations, trying to take note of the key points.
2186 July 18
Finally convinced Mazzota and Fletcher to stop the live tests. For all I know they agreed because they didn't want to buy more lab mice. Anyway, they agreed we should do more data analysis. Hopefully we can figure out what's happening in there.
2186 August 1
Sinha's the only one who seems wiling to admit that we might not have accomplished anything. Mazzota, Fletcher, and Whitman all insist that the theory is sound, so it must be right, but I just don't know.
2186 August 24
Fletcher spent an hour today locked in his private office and came out looking grim. He said we needed to step up the pace of testing. Testing what, though? There's a fundamental flaw in our theory or methods somehow, there has to be. I just don't know what else we can do. I guess our sponsor is getting impatient, but I really think we need to close things down.
2186 September 20
God. I know it's been too long since I kept a log, it's just... there's been too much going on.
We've lost communications. Regular communications, anyway. Except Fletcher says he has a QEC in his office. I don't know why our project would rate a QEC, but I guess it doesn't matter now.
The galaxy's been invaded. It seems almost impossible to believe. We've been arguing about what to do. Mazzota, of all people, wants to leave, says she wants to find her family. We might be able to take the shuttle back to Earth, but I don't know if we could find her family even then. Sinha just wants to get out. But get this, Fletcher wants to keep on with the project. He's convinced that if we can get the portal working, we can use it to get away from these invaders altogether. Whitman seems willing to go along with it.
I don't know what to do. We're safe enough here, and we have enough supplies for a few months, at least. Maybe by then the war will be over?
2186 September 22
Mazzota says I need to make up my mind. Sinha says he's leaving no matter what the rest of us decide. Fletcher and Whitman say they're working on something.
"Got anything?"
Val nearly jumped out of her seat as Alex leaned over her shoulder. She flinched and twisted around to glare up at him. Alex snickered and smirked at her, surprisingly playful. He hadn't looked at her like that since he'd learned her secret.
"Not really," she said, staring. "Sounds like their work wasn't going well."
"Huh." He took the datapad when she offered it and scrolled through it, frowning.
"It just ends," Val said.
"So did they all leave in a hurry, or did something else happen?" Alex glanced at the closed door on the far side of the room.
"What about you?" she asked. So far, reading these logs hadn't done anything but set her more on edge.
Alex shook his head. "I need more than five minutes to get all the technical details, but honestly, I'm not sure they really understood what they were doing."
"That's what it looked like to me, too." She blew out a breath. "Let's see what else we've got here." To find out what they needed to know, they'd have to look further. Val stood, her heart beating faster, and turned toward the door at the far end of the room. It loomed larger than it ought to, and the stale air seemed to press in around them. Her mouth dry, Val stalked across the room quietly, as if there might be something she could startle on the other side of the door. Her fingers curled around her sidearm, reassured by the cool hard weight of it. In her peripheral vision, she saw Garrus and Alex fall in behind her.
Val started to call Garrus up to hack the lock, but stopped when she saw that the lock wasn't activated. Silently, not letting herself hesitate, she opened the door.
On the other side was a small observation chamber, the windows into the next room shuttered, and a man lying on the floor.
Val almost pulled her gun, but the man's body was so clearly dead, sprawled at a stiff and unnatural angle, that her hand only tightened around the grip for a moment before relaxing. She winced at the sickly odor of decay, for once wishing that she'd left her helmet on. Even so, as she advanced cautiously toward the body, the smell wasn't as bad as she might have thought; the flesh had sunken, drawn and desiccated in the dry air.
"Well," Alex said after a moment. "Which one do you think? Fletcher, or Whitman?"
Val grimaced and shook her head. Garrus stepped up beside her, crouching for a closer look. "Gunshot wound. Probably self-inflicted."
"Maybe the others had already left," Alex said.
"Not a good way to go," Val murmured, remembering the pics she'd seen in the bedrooms.
Garrus pulled a datapad from the pocket of the corpse's jacket. "Any last words?" he inquired, pushing a button. A male voice, harsh and surprisingly loud, started speaking at once, startling Val into a flinch.
"Fuck, everything's gone to hell. It should have worked, it should have... the theory was sound. Mazzota's smart, even if she's a coward," said the voice, filled with bitterness. "It was supposed to get us out of here, but now everything's fucked up. There's no way out now. I'm not waiting for the Reapers." The sound clicked off as abruptly as it had begun.
"Charming guy," Garrus said, straightening.
Around them, the walls seemed to shudder softly, even the ground under Val's boots vibrating.
"What was that?" Alex asked.
"I'm not sure," Val said, tensing. It had felt like... she wasn't sure what. She might have thought she'd imagined it, if Alex hadn't said something. "Maybe something to do with the building's systems?"
"Maybe," Garrus said, scanning the room through his visor. "Maybe something from in there."
They all looked at the door, in a stiff silence. Val waited, holding her breath, but she didn't hear or feel anything else. She wet her lips. "Garrus. Could you get the door?"
"Sure, send the turian in first," Garrus said, but he said it lightly, moving toward the door without hesitation. He bent to hack the lock. "Here we go."
He worked for a few seconds, bent over the lock, the yellow-orange glow of his omni-tool sending odd shadows over his face. Alex glanced up toward the ceiling and then toward Val, before hunching his shoulders and staring at the door with a scowl, his foot tapping nervously. When the lock finally whirred and turned green, Garrus activated the door without waiting for an order. No point in drawing this out any longer, Val supposed. He stepped back as the door slid open, though, extending a hand to Val to indicate she should enter first. She took a deep breath to settle her nerves, lifted her chin, and went in.
For a moment, her eyes refused to take the situation in, and she wasn't sure just what she was looking at. Rock dominated the room, a rough face of gray lunar rock that jutted into the space at a sharp angle, severing the room into odd shapes and angles. It was so obtrusive and strange that Val's first, bewildered thought was to wonder why the science team would have built the room that way.
Then the shattered machinery around the base of the stone came into focus: twisted metal, plastic, and glass shards so jumbled that she couldn't guess what shape it had originally been. There was another body, too, surrounded by dried blood, a spar of metal jammed through its torso. The only intact object in the room, beside the rock itself, was a solitary workstation, which still blinked with a dim orange light.
"What the hell," Val heard herself say.
Garrus made a clicking noise. "Hell of a way to go."
Val surveyed the scattered, broken rubble, disquieted by the bizarre destruction. "I don't think their device works any more."
"You think?" Alex said, stepping up beside her. "Whatever they thought they were doing, they sure fucked it up."
"Another Cerberus success," Garrus said. Alex snorted in agreement.
"Did that come through the portal?" Val asked, staring at the rock. It spanned the gap from floor to ceiling, like a giant, jagged tooth. Had the science team somehow brought it through from somewhere else?
"Beats me. I'm not sure it even is a portal." Still frowning, Alex strode toward the console, activated it, and started rapidly scrolling through the interface. "Okay, here's what we're going to do," he said after a moment. "I'm going to download every bit of data from this thing, because that device is sure as hell not going back together, and then we're going to get out of this place, because we're not learning anything more from it."
Besides that, it was creeping him out, Val thought, watching the stiff set of his shoulders and how he shifted his weight and tapped his fingers against the side of the workstation while he waited for the data to transfer. Seeing Alex rattled, a knot of cold dread seemed to form in her gut.
"Unless there's anything else you'd like to do, Commander?" Garrus asked pointedly.
She'd just let Alex make a command decision, she realized. Maybe John Shepard would have objected to things like that. At the moment, Val couldn't bring herself to care. She shook her head. "No, let's get the data and get out," she said.
A few seconds later, the room shook, rumbling softly under Val's feet. "Alex, hurry it up," she said, eyeing the ceiling.
"Data can't actually be forced to transfer faster," he said through his teeth, but his hands moved faster over the controls.
Val exchanged glances with Garrus and waited, increasingly antsy to move. Her legs prickled with tension. Her biotic amp felt warm, dark energy gathering almost within reach. Facing the door, Val kept her stance loose, at the ready in case anything happened. Garrus had drifted up to a position at her three, shifting his weight from foot to foot and stretching out his neck. It couldn't have been more than a few minutes, but it seemed like an eternity before Alex said, "Got it," and stepped away from the console.
"Great. Let's go." She moved forward like a spring had released, through the door and into the observation chamber beyond. She spared the body — Fletcher's? — only a quick glance, and kept moving. Someone else could come back and deal with the dead later. Right now, she wanted to get out of here.
The door to the observation chamber slid open just as Val reached for the controls. She saw four dark shapes, and her pistol was in her hand before she'd consciously registered the movement.
The figure across from her, slim in black armor, drew almost as quickly. A split second later, Garrus said, "Wait a second, let's all take it easy. Lawson?"
Val blinked, looking past the unfamiliar gold-trimmed black armor. Behind a yellow scanning visor was a sculpted, elegant face that she knew, an unexpected relief. The gun in her hand wavered for a moment. "Miranda?"
Miranda's eyes narrowed, sliding right past Val toward Garrus. "Vakarian," she said. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"Probably the same as you," he said evenly. "A little salvage?"
Miranda seemed to consider, her mouth tightening slightly. "Fair enough," she acknowledged, lowering her pistol. Her gaze slid back to Val. "And who might you be?"