"Okay...there's a console. Let me see if I can learn something about what they were actually doing here.", Tali said and got to work. John gestured the others to set up a perimeter and went to join her, stepping over a mangled, limp Geth destroyer to get there.

The air in the room was still rich with smoke and the smell of hot oil. The floor was covered in destroyed Geth, blown off parts of the interior and the occasional shell from Grunt's gargantuan weapon. His expectations of how the Geth would choose to fight had been met; their sweep through the ship's spine had been uneventful, none of the synthetics showing themselves. They weren't stupid; in the long, relatively narrow corridors, the impact of their superior numbers would have been diminished. The sweep had been harrowing in another way, though. They'd found several more bodies of the crew, but what had really gotten under everyone's skin were the recordings - more than one of the doomed men and women of the Alarei had used their last moments to say goodbyes to loved ones. At least they'd learned that the locking out of all the ship's systems had been executed according to a preexisting plan, instead of on the fly and panicked. This had lessened his worries about nasty surprises involving the Alarei's own systems considerably, but also raised the uncomfortable question of why such a contingency plan had been in place in the first place. Had Rael'Zorah and his people simply been cautious, or had whatever experiments they'd conducted here raised the risk of something like this happening to the point they'd deemed it a realisitc possibility?

So far, they had not found much evidence to answer the question. Two of the teams had encountered storage rooms with inert Geth parts, but upon inspection Tali hadn't been able to divine anything substantial from them. Some of the items had been repaired several times over, which suggested weapon tests, while others were in about the same state as she remembered them. Along the way, she had continuously grown more nervous and irritable. Not that she'd said anything, but he knew her well enough to know the signs. Even her fingers were at it again, continually changing their grip on her shotgun. The few words she'd said out loud had been terse, and he'd heard her mutter something about her father under her breath more than once.

They hadn't found him yet, and Shepard had no illusions about what state he'd be in when they eventually did.

Fighting their way into the crew compartment had been tough. The Geth hadn't made their stand at the entrances, opting to deploy in depth instead. A possibility he'd been aware of, but the danger of getting stuck in a killzone by the door had convinced him to push forward hard anyway, and so the team had punched straight through the center, swatting aside the hopeless resistance of a mere three Geth troopers. John had known in that moment that they'd indeed sprung the trap he had half anticipated, and so there had been nothing else but to bunker down and slug it out, and by god, they had. The synthetics had descended upon them from all sides. The firefight had soon spread out into a running battle spanning several rooms and corridors at once, and with the Geth knowing the ship, there had been dangerous surprises and close calls. The team looked decidedly worse for wear, with Jacob and Samara having caught a bullet each. The Geth intelligence here gave high priority to biotics, it seemed. Miranda had been hard pressed as well, but she'd been with John most of the time, and he'd seen to it that she remained shielded by his armored bulk as much as possible. She was currently tending to the two wounded together with Mordin. Next to them, looking absolutely exhausted, sat Jack,with her back leaned against a shelve and one hand pressing a compress against her nose to try and stem her nosebleed. The synthetics had somehow – Tali swore she hadn't sent back any parts of one – assembled a Pyro. In the tight confines of the ship, it's hellish flamer had been a nightmare to face. Not even Grunt could brave it, and so the Pyro had flushed them back out of several rooms. With their back to the synthetic's main gunline, things had just started to get seriously dicey when the former convict had let loose a string of particularly crass curses and flung herself forward, a biotic human bullet that had cut through the flames and shattered the Geth spewing them.

John had no real conception of how it was to be a biotic, but he reckoned the effort to do that had to be about as titanic as the shocked looks on Samara's and Miranda's faces suggested. Now Jack was spent. She was still cursing though, albeit at a reduced cadence, and Mordin thinking out loud about tamponading her nose hadn't done much to mollify her.

"Dammit!"

Tali's voice tore him from his reminiscing.

"Found something?"

"Yes...I'm still not entirely sure what they were doing, most of this data is corrupted, and what's left is mostly results data. They were doing some sort of weapon tests...and they assembled Geth models for them."

Miranda had stepped up to them. "Seems reasonable enough so far."

Tali's eyes bore into the holo desktop. "Yes, but...I found some logs too, and skimmed them. One of them mentions hacking techniques."

Miranda's eyebrow shot upwards. "That would imply activation, wouldn't it."

"It...might, yes."

"Which would explain what happened here." , John supplied.

Tali shook her head. "There has to be another explanation. If they really activated them on purpose...then father would have been doing something terrible." She stepped back from the console and gave it a frustrated kick. "What was all this, father? You promised me a house on the homeworld. Was this supposed to get us there!?"

He let the moment pass. "A worthy promise. We'll deal with the Geth in time, Tali. If your father can't help you, I will."

"Taking back our homeworld would only be the first step. We'd have to cannibalize our fleet to build cities, spend generations to adapt to the environment before we could live without our suits again." She shrugged. "Sometimes I wonder if it would even be worth it."

He put a hand on her shoulder. "That's for your people to say."

She nodded. "At least we can take back this ship. Come on."

Reorganizing the team took another two minutes; in the end, it was decided that Mordin and Thane would remain with the wounded while the rest would push on. There couldn't be many Geth left now; they would make directly for the bridge.

The way there did not prove difficult. They came under fire from small groups of trooper platforms three times, but the synthetics pulled back as fast as they'd engaged; the collective consciousness was keeping track of their position. With no way to go and surrender not an option, John had no doubt the Geth would try anything in their power to sell their lives as dearly as possible, and so eventually decided to slow the advance down, getting ever more cautious the closer they got to their objective.

As they got closer to the bridge, they came across Quarian corpses ever more frequently. It seemed as if they had attempted to make their stand here, but had quickly been overrun. Not all of them had been armed, and many were lying face down, shot in the back, evidently mowed down trying to escape.

The Alarei had not been prepared.

Nobody spoke an unnecessary word, the scene around them too oppressive. John steeled himself for what he knew had to eventually happen.

They found him in an open storage room, just outside the bridge. Admiral Rael'Zorah sat slumped against a crate, his chest dark with dried blood and his limp fingers still half wrapped around a gun he had to have held on to with last strength as the life left his body.

"Father!"

Tali rushed past him, all but dropping her gun. John quietly gestured the others to set up a perimeter, holstered his handgun and took a second to gather his wits. She was crouching at her father's side, practically pleading with the corpse to rise and prove wrong the horrible reality she'd found herself in. John was struck by the mental image of his family when he'd found them dead the day the Batarians attacked Mindoir. Tali's words became slurred with sobs, and he cringed. He knew this pain well.

"You wouldn't just leave me alone like this! You wouldn't leave me alone here to clean up your mess! You..."

He'd had enough of it and stepped next to her, gently pulling her up and into a tight embrace. "Hey! Come here."

"Damn it!" For a short moment, she openly cried. "Damn it. I'm sorry..."

"It's alright."

"No, it isn't...I'm sorry." She began to untangle herself from him, and he withdrew. "There are still Geth here." She looked down and took a series of deep breaths. "He would have known I'd come. Maybe he left a message."

She crouched down again and started to work on his omnitool, interfacing it with her own. A few seconds later, the device began playing a holographic recording. It was shaky and the sound quality was poor; a hasty recording.

"Tali. If you're listening to this, I am dead. The Geth have come active, I don't have much time. Their main hub will be on the bridge. You'll need to destroy it to stop their VI processes from forming new neural links. Make sure Han and Daro'Xen see this data. They must- "

The sound quality became even worse as the recorder became overwhelmed with a brief moment of very loud noises; still, they were easily recognizable as weapon discharges in an enclosed space. John clenched his jaw ; the recording had probably been made right here, and mere seconds before the man's death.

Tali shook her head and stood up. "Thanks, dad."

He knew not what to say. Her father's last words to her, and he'd used them for instructions.

"The Geth cut him off." he tried, lamely. "You don't know how he would have ended that message."

"Yes. I think I do." She sniffed. "Come on. Let's finish this."

She retrieved her weapon and would've taken point had John not held her back and gently shuffled her back into formation. He admired her for holding up this well, but it was plain to see how badly rattled she was.

The rest of the fighting was not much of a challenge. The remaining Geth had indeed tried to prepare a trap, rigging a fire extinguisher to blow and hurling it at them when they eventually sprang their last ambush two corners away from the bridge. One of the biotics easily reflected it, causing it to explode in the Geth's own ranks. Not that there was much left of them anyway, about half a dozen troopers falling quickly in a hail of bullets and only a lone Geth Prime holding out for a while longer until it too was destroyed. The team was fighting with a cold, controlled anger at this point, passing warnings and commands tersely and calmly. It wasn't much of a fight at all, John found himself thinking. More like putting down a rabid animal.

A minute later, the bridge was finally taken and he allowed himself to loosen up a bit. The true challenge of the day lay still ahead, but the guns had spoken their last for the rest of it. Still, he ordered the others to secure the perimeter as he followed Tali to a console at the far wall.

She stood for it for a moment, hesitating. Then she set to work, slowly at first, held up by one popup holo after the other, each one taking more seconds to get past than the previous one, but after just about two minutes she appeared to have access to what she'd been looking for. It looked to be a data folder, a long list of entries stretching the entire screen. Naturally, it was all in Quarian.

"What is this?"

"My father's documents. We will find our answers here."

He took a deep breath. "Let's get on with it, then."

And so they did. It wasn't pretty. They'd had a pretty good approximation of what had kind of experiments had been run on the Alarei, it turned out. Tali skimmed her way through report after report, discussions of concepts, staff meetings, and her father's personal logs. They drew a grim picture. The project had begun with exactly the things Tali had expected her father to be doing; weapons tests on defunct, inert Geth parts. But at some point, the group had decided to work on more sophisticated ways of dealing with the Geth. Rael'Zorah had laid out the reasoning himself in one of the logs; the Quarians were few, the risk of extinction very real. Every life lost hurt the species deeply,and in a conventional war, no matter the weapons they might realistically develop here, there would be many lives lost. And so they had set out to find an edge.

John found himself agreeing with the admiral more than he'd expected to. If he was being honest with himself, what irked him most about the whole affair were the blatant security lapses that had predictably led to this disaster. The experiments themselves left him rather cold, something he was unsure how to feel about. There was no empathy for these abused prisoners in him, if he was honest. In fact, it felt wrong to even think of the Geth as such.

John had never consciously formulated it before, but now that he considered the matter in earnest for once, he found that the Geth were just things to him.

Surprisingly enough, Tali seemed to feel very different. The reading and listening took a toll on her, and John had her leaning on him more than once. After they'd eventually found and gotten through the log in which Rael'Zorah laid out the plans for the specific project that had eventually spelled his and his crew's doom, she almost broke down. She bent forward, bracing herself on the console's handrail.

"It's true. All of it. Everything here is his fault! I didn't want to see it, I tried to pretend that everything didn't point to him, but...it's true."

He sighed and squeezed her shoulder.

"This breaks our most sacred laws! Laws that predate our flight from the homeworld! If this comes up in the trial..."

John did not know what to say, and so he looked around the room. He caught Miranda watching the scene, her expression inscrutable under her helmet.

"None of this explicitly absolves you, Tali.", he said." I'm sorry, but we have to go on."

"I can't. And I don't want to. I don't want to see any more of this."

He sighed. "Neither do I, but it's what we've come here for."

On a whim, he reached out and played the latest log in the list. Rael'Zorah's characteristic voice started playing.

"Do we have enough parts to bring more online?"

"Yes,", someone answered. "The new shipment from you daughter will let us add two more Geth to the network."

"We're nearing a breakthrough on systemic viral attacks." Another person, a woman. "Perhaps we should inform the admiralty board. Just to be safe."

"No." Zorah again. "We're too close. I promised my daughter a house on the homeworld. I won't sit and wait while the politicians argue."

He looked at Tali; she was shaking her head as in disbelief at what she was hearing.

"We'd have an easier time of it if Tali'Zorah could send back more working material."

"Absolutely not. I don't want Tali exposed to any political blowback. Leave Tali out of this. Bypass security protocols if need be."

The log ended and left them in stunned silence. The recklessness, he thought. They could've just taken their time and none of this might have happened.

He relaxed a bit. "There you have it. That's the evidence we need."

"We cannot show this. Not in the trial, not to anyone!"

He stared at her, his relief swatted away. "Tali, without this evidence you're looking at exile!"

"You think I don't know that!?" She was shouting at him, her grief and anger finding an outlet. "You think I want to spend my life knowing that I'll never get to see the fleet again!? But I can't go back into that room and tell them that my father was the worst war criminal in our people's history. I cannot!"

"Your father doesn't need you to worry about him any more. You heard him saying he didn't want you suffering any consequences from his actions."

She shook her head. "You don't understand. They would strike his name from the manifest of every ship he ever served on. He'd be worse than an exile, held up as a traitor to our people! He'd be a cautionary tale to frighten the children with! I cannot let all the good he did be destroyed for this."

He pursed his lips. The raw emotion she was throwing at him phased him not, for he knew it was not truly directed at him, but he would have to get through to her somehow.

"You father's memory is not as important as your life, Tali."

"Do you still not get it!? It is more than that. My father was a big man, John! This revelation, it would set the factions in the conclave against each other like never before. Even more than this " . she waved her hand around the room, " already has! The Nedas captains, they...they might break off." She was speaking calmer now, but it was a strained calm, every word clearly formulated with great effort not to shout. "It would tear the fleet apart."

And in that instance, he knew that he would never sway her.

"Please. You're my captain, but this is my trial. I must do what's right for me people. Please. Let me do this. Don't destroy what my father was."

He sighed heavily. He wanted to shout at her, tell her to think about what was best for herself for one goddamn time, but he didn't. He knew full well she would not.

"Fine. I'll just...figure something out. Come on, we need to get back. They probably think we're dead."

"Not yet." Tali activated her omni-tool and began typing furiously. "First, I need to wipe this data. I won't let any of this...this travesty spill out. Not if I can help it."

"We found nothing on the Alarei that we want to submit as evidence."

„Tali?" Gerrel's voice betrayed his shock.

„There were Geth there...we destroyed them. I...have nothing more to say."

Pure adrenaline rushed through her veins, but as an experienced dissembler, Daro'Xen remained perfectly calm and controlled on the outside. Regardless of wether for the right reasons or for foolish sentimental ones, the girl was actually doing it. To her left, the human was standing face down with his hands at his waist. Tali herself was just staring ahead, seemingly resigned to her fate.

"In that case, with no further testimony...", Shaala'Ran began. Gerrel half turned as if to object,but remained silent. Evidently, the old soldier was at a loss for words - a pleasant change of pace, as far as Daro was concerned.

Someone else had something to say, though. "Tali deserves better than this! She's risked her life for all of you on the Citadel, on all her deployments, just now on that damn ship! And you're gonna cast her out because it's possible that she's guilty? Is that what you people think justice is? Is this how the Quarian people reward sacrifice!?"

The commander spewed forth a furious fusillade of words, a long string of righteous anger, with the air of a man fully aware of his odds but utterly unimpressed by them. Xen knew the type well; she'd worked with them frequently enough over the course of her long career, taken their orders, and eventually ordered them around herself. Their stubbornness was obnoxious of course, but it was an attitude that produced results and she respected that. Even now, it was obvious that the crowd was buying it.

But the crowd wouldn't be voting, and if Shepard hoped to sway her with his appeals to emotion, he would be sorely disappointed. Fortunately, the first conclave had been so wise as to make sure cooler heads would be the ones to hold this power. And the human commander would soon learn just how cool that head of Zaal'Koris's could be.

When he had offered her the deal, just minutes after the Alarei had sent her last transmission, Xen had barely believed her ears. She'd known for a long time how devious the man could be when he had an excuse to placate his conscience with, but she never would have dreamed he'd simply hand this prize over. She still wasn't sure if he simply believed that she wouldn't get anything done with the data from the Alarei anyway, or if he hoped to gain enough political momentum from this to put himself in a position where he'd be able to wrestle any potential results out of her hands.

Sacrificing a pawn to obtain the keys to victory. It had been an easy decision.

Shepard eventually finished and Raan finally opened the voting. Gerrel immediately hammered in his vote, as expected by everyone in the room. Zaal'Koris dithered; lowering his head, he seemed lost in deep contemplation. Under her mask, Daro smirked; he'd always been very well aware of the image he was projecting, and how to make sure it was a favorable one. It was part of the public persona he'd built that he couldn't just handwave away a plea as passionate as the one Shepard had just presented.

Daro'Xen had no such qualms. She was the admiral of the science fleet and the head of intelligence; the harder and colder the people thought she was, the better. She submitted her vote, casting a glance to Tali'Zorah as she did so. The young woman's eyes had been fixed on her commander throughout his speech, but now that he'd finished and the votes were being cast, she seemed positively catatonic. In a way, that made her rise in Xen's estimation. It appeared the girl was a realist. A shame, the admiral thought to herself. But the fleet has good engineers aplenty.

At the lectern to Xen's left, Zaal'Koris pushed his conscience aside and straightened up. Nothing had changed, he had been fully aware of the wretched injustice he would be committing today from the start. In the end, preventing a new war was all that mattered. He had to seize the moment, and Zorah's followers could not be allowed to rally around his daughter. Ancestors forgive me, for she won't and I'm not sure if I can either. He cast his vote.

Seconds later, the a middle aged Quarian woman's heavy sigh sounded through the otherwise completely quiet hall, and then she spoke.

"Tali'Zorah vas Normandy, you are found guilty of treason against the Quarian people and are hereby sentenced to exile. You have six hours to collect any personal belongings you might want to take with you, and to leave."

AN:

Took longer than i wanted thx to my ass getting stuffed with work lately. But alas, here we are. As u might have noticed, I have outright copied many of the lines in this mission. The reason being that I just like this mission and many lines in it so damn much. My main aim was to provide an explanation as to why DaroXen would vote to exile Tali, which never really made sense to me. I hope my version is convincing.