Chapter 30

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law

July 2220

If Miranda Lawson had to choose the one way she would have discovered her not-entirely-willing foster father after many days of sudden and unexplained absence, she would have said – with no shame at all, and perhaps a little humorous mirth – shirtless, underfed, and neck-deep in a scientific discovery that would boggle the mind of every living being in known space. The four years she had spent with this man had seemed to go by just as fast as she could read a book – that is to say, in no time at all. In those four years she could safely say she knew Christopher McGraw, perhaps not as well as some others, but an almost constant exposure to him when he was on the space station he'd named after himself had taught her many things about what to expect when it came to him, to the point where she hadn't been surprised at all when McGraw had made two of the scientists in his cell play hot-potato with a prototype canister for holding antimatter. Nor had she been surprised when he'd vanished into his 'Enter and Die' room for three days straight and exited somehow twice as tan as he'd been before, bleeding from both ears, and complaining about a desire for something he called a 'ruj'taneel hotslide'. The man was as odd in private as he was in public – she could argue even odder, but when she'd confronted him about it, he had simply quoted Alice in Wonderland, in effect making her have to force herself to read the book so she would understand his reference. So when she entered his room this day, after six consecutive days of silence from him, she had expected to see either nothing – which meant he was in his 'Enter and Die' room and she couldn't go in – or him simply sleeping in a random state of dress atop a desk piled two feet high with an assortment of notes notes on whatever it was that had tickled his fancy at that point.

What she had found was not at all what she'd expected; it had surprised her. The lights were on, there was no noise coming from within, and even Gladys wasn't trying to coax information from the maze that was her creator's mind. The newly minted adult Lawson looked around curiously, though with a concerned crease in her brow as the silence continued. She had almost missed him when she finally did pass over him, he was as still as a statue, staring at something clenched in his cybernetic hand.

"McGraw." Miranda sighed, at least satisfied that the man hadn't gone and died on her.

He didn't respond. There was a palpable silence for several seconds, in which he did not move in the slightest. She didn't even see his shoulders raise and lower to show he was breathing.

"McGraw." Still nothing; now concerned, Miranda strode into the brightly lit room with a quicker pace than earlier. A trickster though he may be, McGraw never tried the 'playing dead' routine, he was very serious when it came to the subject of his death, though he never elaborated as to why.

She reached him and placed her hand on his shoulder, softly calling his name again. She looked over his shoulder at the document clenched in his hand, it was just a report from one of Cerberus' agents stationed in the Terran Rebels, nothing of too much concern.

"McGraw? Are you okay?" She shook his shoulder once, and that did the trick.

He jumped in his seat, and looked both ways, as if suddenly realizing where he was and not knowing how he'd gotten there. "Whoa! What time is it?!" He demanded, quickly, "what day is it?" He got to his feet quickly and jammed the paper in his back pocket.

"It's July first, three O'Clock standard." Miranda was thoroughly concerned now, McGraw was acting almost frantic as he dashed across his room and dug through the piles on his 'serious desk'.

"Wait, really?" He turned and looked at the raven-haired woman over his shoulder, his blue eye shining with something she didn't recognize, as if he wasn't really looking at her and was focusing on something completely different. "Shit, I need food, don't I?" He managed to look somewhat concerned for himself, but Miranda saw the brief glaze in his eyes - he was only looking so for her sake, he was faking the look so he could take that instant to think more on whatever it was that had put him into his fugue state.

"McGraw, when was the last time you had water? Or ate solid food?" Miranda urged.

"When was the last time you saw me?" McGraw responded quickly, snidely, as he grabbed a tablet from his desk and then reached under the desk to produce a bottle of water, which he consumed quickly. "You came in here on your own. No, wait, no you didn't, you don't care that much…" He teased, "is Jackie lookin' for me?" He asked quickly, snatching a coat off of his bed and slinging it around his arms.

"No, Jeera was worried – where could you be going right now? You've been starving yourself for six days, that's bad even for you." Miranda absolutely detested having to play the role of McGraw's nanny whenever he got too into whatever it was he was working on, but it was a role she'd learned she had to embrace, when Gladys had informed her that he'd once gone without food or sleep for two weeks in order to figure out how to send probes into another galaxy, and make certain the information came back before he died of old age three times over. That kind of self-abuse wasn't something she'd tolerate, even if she secretly enjoyed getting under the man's skin.

"Going? Nowhere, I need to talk to Jack, and as quickly as possible. Gladys! Get him on the Q-E-C right now." McGraw was moving before the coat was even fastened on, but he was stopped by Miranda grabbing his cybernetic arm.

"McGraw, no! You need to see a -" He didn't even listen to her, he detached the arm without a second thought and kept walking, leaving her shocked for the second time in one day as she held his replacement limb. She blinked once before it finally clicked what he'd done, and she chased after him, arm-in-hand.

However, the entire time she practically chased the man through the station, he ignored her entirely, only stopping to finally acknowledge her when he came up on the QEC room and he had little other choice.

He whipped around and without breaking momentum, snatched his arm out of Miranda's hand, saying as he did, "I'll tell you what's going on when I'm done talking to Jack, but I've got to deal with this now. Those six days I was out I had to plan so far ahead it would boggle even your mind." The weight of the words and the way he'd said them was enough to make Miranda pause, and though it took her no time at all to process them, he hadn't needed any time at all to go into the QEC and lock the door.

"W – what just happened?" She thought aloud, staring at the locked door with an absolutely stupefied expression.

Thankfully for her, Gladys arrived timely, proving to be the ever-present voice of reason when it came to how enigmatic McGraw could be. Unfortunately for her, the AI had been raised by McGraw a lot longer than she, and as such the machine knew when to and to not reveal what went on in its maker's head.

"Miss Lawson." It said softly, "I know things don't make sense, but -"

"No buts, Gladys." Miranda said irritably, "I've never seen him like this. What the hell just happened?"

"He thinks he has been outmaneuvered." The AI said simply, "he is rushed because of the gravity of the situation he has found himself in."

"What kind of situation would make him starve himself for six days? Did he even have any water?" Miranda shook her head and made her way to a bench on the other side of the corridor, just a few inches from the door to the QEC.

"I'm sorry, Miss Lawson." Said the AI, "if he will not reveal the information, I cannot either." There was a catch in the AI's voice, a fragment of its admittedly experimental programming that had been self-corrected a long time ago, it was a catch that Miranda knew correlated to whenever it was conflicted about something. How human it was to have such a tell, wasn't lost on the Lawson. It apparently hadn't been lost on the AI either, because it soon added on to her statement, "I worry about him too, Miranda. I wish I could tell you what ails him so... But the affairs of Titans are not meant for mere men." It paused, "or, as the case may be, women."

Miranda ran a hand through her hair, she hated admitting that sometimes McGraw acted more clueless and self-destructive than her own father when it came to raising a child, but it was because McGraw had made an effort the last four years that caused the gengineered woman to care for him, if only a little bit. "What goes through his mind, Gladys? Four years, I've never seen him like this. If I didn't know any better I'd say he's scared."

The AI was silent, "I've seen him like this, once before. He is." It said, "but not for himself. No, I've never seen him be scared for himself."

"What is he scared for?" And, she didn't ask, why didn't he seek outside help?

"His best friend."

"Chris." Came Jack Harper's voice as the dusty hologram swirled into existence, "Gladys said this was very important." There wasn't anything that would keep Harper from responding to an important message from McGraw, loathe though he was to admit it, not having a hands-on leadership role like McGraw meant he had something of a bit more free time than he would have liked.

McGraw pulled up a chair – scraping it across the ground as he did, with a horrendous grinding noise – and sat down. He took Harper's features in for a moment, his dark red hair with the briefest flecks of gray, his cybernetic eye replacements, the cigarette that never seemed to leave his side; to others, they all had become synonymous with an enigmatic, 'Illusive' man, who could control the fate of so many in the galaxy that it wasn't even funny to think about. To McGraw, however, he saw something else, something beneath his friend's exterior, bubbling like tar, or oil, and he prayed he was wrong.

"I know what Ed's after and I know where he can get it." Said McGraw, "we need to move on this now and pray we can outmaneuver him." He was speaking lightning fast, almost faster than his Salarian acquaintance. "If we don't, he could have everything he needs for his goals and much more, the game is being played, he's twelve moves ahead and we're all being left six moves behind him. Jack, we -"

"Christopher. Slow down, take a deep breath." Harper had lost all pretense, he had only ever seen McGraw get like this once before, and it had terrified him then as much as it was now, though he kept up the strong appearance for his friend's sake. If McGraw ever lost control, it would only hurt him to make it seem like he didn't have any control either. Harper waited for McGraw to calm himself, idly noting that he was holding his limp cyberlimb in his organic hand, and wondering if he would get a story out of that. "Are you okay?"

"No." McGraw shook his head, his wavy, unkempt hair flowing with his motions, "but I'll be fine for now."

"Tell me what he's found."

"Okay..." McGraw breathed deeply, nodded twice, "okay." He gulped, "I think he's found what he needs for the best worst-case scenario."

"Cloning tech?" Said Harper, instantly deciphering McGraw's babbling, "you said found, what does that mean?"

"It means he found it. When I spoke to him four years ago about Nikola, I managed to pilfer a file or two, he's been trying to perfect cloning-tech himself but he just hasn't had any success, they come out unhealthy and usually with some kind of defect, so he wires them into a set of Titan armor and puts them in stasis until he either needs them or they just can't genetically hold themselves together anymore." He explained quickly, "I just got a report from a Rebel staging world – the Rebel staging world. The Ones who called Sixty-Six? They're set up there and they aren't moving. They found something..." He tried to find the right words for it, but couldn't come up with anything heavy enough, to properly convey the gravity of what he was saying, "sufficiently advanced."

Harper leaned forward, his interest – and concern – visible even from his perch in the middle-of-nowhere, space, several thousand light-years away. "As in... Alien?" He said, slowly. "How alien?"

"You ever - never mind." McGraw paused, making a mental note to try his hardest to stop making references to the world of two hundred years ago, it made comparisons very hard to make. "Did you read What Once Was? The point is, the Rebels have found something old, they've found something advanced, and by god they've found something terrifying. The Alliance made a mistake in letting these assholes fester on their own. We made a mistake."

"Christopher. What did they find?"

"Cloning tech. They found perfected cloning tech." McGraw said, "and we can't nip this in the bud, the Alliance found the planet a week ago and they're sending in the Marines."

Harper leaned back, scratching his chin, before he took a puff of his cigarette. "This isn't good." He said, unhelpfully.

"This is exactly what he's looking for, Jack." Said McGraw, "and trust me, I know it won't work. Gladys told me as much. So when he figures out it won't work like he wants it to... It won't matter who says what or what says who, he'll go to plan B, and then I'll be the only damn one who can keep up with him. He'll be on a warpath."

Harper sighed deeply, "we can't send in just any operative, and our best ones are too far to be of any help, given how time-sensitive this is." He paused, "you are under the assumption that he already knows, yes?"

"I'm under the assumption that he's already figured out how to keep us out of it." Said McGraw, a fire in his blue eyes, though the fire dulled slightly as he realized where Jack was going with this.

"Then we'll have to send in Operative Lawson. From where you are, you can get her damn near anywhere in that part of the Galaxy in just a few hours." Harper said, almost solemnly.

McGraw nodded, but he had to play his cards right, there was something else he needed. "Alright, I can do that." He said, nodding, as a weight began slowly sliding off of his shoulders, Miranda was good – she lacked proper field experience, but she was good, her score on the simulator Hampton had designed was the one to beat. "But I need something from you, Jack." He closed his eyes, the fire was coming.

"Anything, Chris. You know that."

"I need to get into Kronos to see Object Mars." McGraw said quickly, "I have a few hypotheses as to what it is and what it does, but I need to see it myself."

Harper blinked, he had expected many things, but this hadn't been it. "What?" He asked, voice permeated with a horrified curiosity, "Christopher… Chris, we agreed." He said solemnly, "I... What we found..." He shook his head, "you saw what it did to Edward. You told me you wanted to stay as far from it as possible."

McGraw repressed a sigh, simply screwing his face up as he tried to keep his thoughts to himself. If he was right, then he was stepping on a field of atomic-edged glass, and he had to be beyond careful, but if he was wrong, he was wrong and he had nothing to worry about.

With him... I have to assume the worst. Just because we found the off switch... He shook his head. "Jack." He looked up, "you have to trust me, here. I have to see it."

"You were terrified of it when you read his journal. You begged me to keep it safe and away from you. Why the change of heart?" Harper challenged, just as McGraw had made him promise to do if this day had come. "What have you learned?"

McGraw couldn't tell him, he literally could not tell the man what he knew, it could very well ruin everything. "You have to trust me, Jack. What I found... Short term, it might just be bigger than Ed and what he's doing."

"Long term?"

"Long term, he's the biggest threat period. But until I know beyond the shadow of a doubt, outside any possible foresight and prediction, as a singular, inescapable fact that he's doing what I fear he'll do, I have to act on this now. If I retrace his steps, I might figure out how to help him." He said.

Harper sighed, and fell into a similar stance as McGraw, slowly running his hand over his meticulously combed hair as he considered his options. He didn't want to distrust his friend, but he remembered what the man had told him when he'd made his first theory on Edward's home on Mars, how terrified he'd been, how out of his league he had looked. Nothing had phased McGraw as much as this had, even first contact and his role in the war mere months earlier hadn't been anywhere near as affecting on McGraw as what he'd seen on Mars. Now he was turning it all around, reversing everything he'd said, and why? Was Spokane's end-goal really that bad? Or was something going on that was entirely different?

I read the journal too, my friend. Thought Harper, as he risked a glance up to McGraw, I know you… But what if what happened to Edward is happening to you? Are you compromised, and this is why you want to see it? Or do you not trust me any more?

"Listen, Jack." He remembered the enigmatic engineer saying, under the hellish red sky of the fourth planet from the sun. "I have no god damn idea what it is he was dealing with... I can safely say this damn thing terrifies me. I've never seen something so scary, so... Not understandable! Sufficiently Advanced doesn't cover this, this isn't alien it's... Hell, I'd say its something only a God could do, and I may very well be right. This thing emanates so much can-not-be that I don't even know where to begin trying to understand it. Maybe that's how he went mad, maybe it in and of itself drove him mad, but all I know is that that thing is more alien than the entire Citadel Council put together, and if the Alliance catches wind of it, if it does to them what it did to him, there would be chaos." For a moment, he had looked like he didn't want to consider, but one more look in to the steel door leading down in to the bunker-home on Mars steeled his resolve. "No matter what, Jack. No matter what happens... You have to promise me that you'll keep it away from me, and me away from it, at least until I can understand it better."

"How will you know, Chris?" Jack had asked.

McGraw hadn't even smiled, "I have no fucking clue."

Harper looked back up and stared deeply in to McGraw's eyes. The two didn't move for what felt like an eternity, simply staring, waiting for an answer from the other. Finally, Harper broke the silence with a sigh. "Christopher... I will trust you." He said, "but I will not lie. If this artifact does to you what Edward described having happened to him... I will enact my own contingencies."

McGraw nodded solemnly, "alright, Jack. I'll send Miranda to Manheim in the Nomad, and wait for a ship of your choosing to bring me to Kronos."

"Okay, McGraw, talk." Miranda hadn't wasted even a second when the door opened and revealed a tired and haggard McGraw. She steeled herself for what she would say next, "I've played your games for four years now, tried to help you because you helped me get away from my father. But you've hidden things from me and I'm getting tired of it." She noticed the amused grin slowly inching across McGraw's face, as one of his eyebrows raised in a questioning gesture. "I'll transfer to another cell if I have to, McGraw, I have that right, now."

There was silence in the station as if the universe itself was reacting to what she'd just said, and who she had said it to. Even the rushed air McGraw had had up until this very moment froze wholesale as everyone and everything waited for the man's no-doubt witty, disarming response that would mentally destroy the woman standing before him.

"Hm." He said, "okay." He turned to the left and began walking, "come on."

Miranda blinked, her first instinct was to shout a very loud and very confused what, but Hampton had long since drilled such things out of her. She followed McGraw, and for several minutes there was simple silence as the two trekked their way through the station, before finally arriving at a small, out-of-the-way conference room. The two entered, though only Miranda was surprised when they found two horrified Cerberus engineers in varying states of undress.

"Out." Said a bored McGraw, his tone conveying he wasn't surprised at all.

Had Miranda had the rank to do so, she would have conveyed just how irate she was at the extreme lack of professionalism the two were showing, but they had grabbed their clothes and booked it before she could get a word in edgewise. The room still stank of sex, but McGraw and Miranda ignored it as they got down to business.

"Okay, one question, one answer, make it count."

"What the hell made you starve yourself for six days?"

"You're wasting it on that?" McGraw questioned, before he shrugged. "Okay. I figured out something real bad, and we've got to act on it quickly." He held up his cybernetic arm, calling the nanomachines in the air to form the holograms he needed to begin debriefing the newly minted operative. "And before you say that wasn't an answer, I shall say that wasn't an answer you wanted. Think smaller, next time. Or more specific." He added, "you're a freaking super-spy now, I had been expecting something better." The dust-tech finished forming and all the documents he needed were now hovering in mid-air. "Regardless, this is your mission. You're going right to the Rebels main staging world, no cover, no backup, because this is an extremely time sensitive mission, because we're not the only party after what you're retrieving."

"What am I retrieving?" Asked a silently fuming Miranda, she should have seen McGraw's response coming, one would think that after four years of nearly constant assassin and spy-training, she would have been able to get exactly what she wanted from the engineer.

"The Rebels have their hands on technology that the AATF would deem sufficiently advanced. We here at Cerberus have more than enough reason to believe that it isn't even Prothean." McGraw explained.

"How is that possible?"

"We don't have all the facts, but scattered evidence points to a sort of... Galactic extinction cycle, similar to that which is shown by geological evidence on Earth. The Protheans came, rose, and fell, leading to us. But before them was another species, and it is logical to assume that before this precursor race was another one, and so on and so forth. But evidence for these races gets more and more sparse the further back we go." McGraw answered, "think of how difficult it is to find caveman drawings. Then think that it's twice as difficult to find Prothean ruins, and it just gets exponentially more difficult with each species we try to trace back." He shook his head, "regardless, what we know about the Protheans suggests they would never try their hand at cloning tech. That, compounded with what Rebel scientists have learned about their recovered technologies, all points towards one conclusion: It isn't Prothean."

"Do we know how old it is?" Miranda asked, out of curiosity.

"The running theory over on Manheim – the staging world – is that this race existed alongside the Protheans, though another popular one says it's older than the Protheans themselves. No one knows for sure, but they're not willing to look into it – they're more interested in using it as quickly and as efficiently as possible." He said, "because this world, it's been found."

"By who?"

"Three interested parties. Ours, the Alliance, and an independent faction. All three of them can do unquantifiably large amounts of damage with the cloning tech, we're hoping to get it for ourselves to mitigate the damage the other two could do." He explained, "that being said, destroy everything that isn't nailed down when you make your extraction. I'll leave the method up to you."

"How am I extracting?" Miranda asked, as she took the documents McGraw offered to her and began flipping through them, with emphasis going towards the dioramas and blueprints for the base she to infiltrate.

"The Nomad." Said McGraw, "try not to scratch it, will you?"

Miranda had tuned out his sarcastic comment, "what kind of opposition should I expect?" She asked, her calm tone belying the butterflies in her stomach.

"They're rebels, lady, you should expect just about anything. But given that this is Manheim, I'm willing to bet they've got the Sixty-Sixers there." Said McGraw, pulling another document out of thin air.

"Who are they?" Miranda looked up and saw a low-quality snap-shot of three SIGMA Operatives corroborating with the Rebels.

"They are the reason the Alliance is putting so many cards into one basket. The Alliance doesn't know about the cloning tech – or, if they do, they're playing it smart and aren't going for it openly – they're trying to take down these guys." He explained, "to keep it short, when my father formed the SIGMAs, he included on their charter a very specific clause, he called it 'Protocol Sixty Six', as in, just one removed from the Beast. In short, it allows the SIGMAs to legally secede from whatever incumbent government currently runs Humanity." He nodded to the three, "when the Rebellion started in full-swing, the Ones called a meeting and voted on whether or not they should call Sixty Six and support the Rebels. In the end, only three of them decided that the Citadel Council was a better ruling body than an independent Systems Alliance, so they threw in with the Rebels."

"They can do that?" Miranda repressed a gape, but was still visually surprised, the SIGMAs were touted as the Alliance's 'instant-win' strategy, their get-out-of-jail-free card; to think that they could – at any moment – secede from the Alliance and become their own rogue faction with an unbeatable infantry fighting force was understandably terrifying, she could see why the Alliance wouldn't openly admit such a thing.

"The SIGMAs aren't part of the Alliance to begin with, Miranda, they just work with them. They are, technically speaking, their own independent nation, though very few people on Arcturus know this, and even fewer understand it. To keep it simple, the Alliance and the Laconia system are like the United States and Russia on Earth – two separate nations with an alliance keeping them friendly." McGraw explained, "but this isn't important, what is is that you face the very real and very present possibility of having to fight SIGMAs with no backup." The unspoken warning was clear, good as Hampton said she was, and good as the simulations proved she was, even the lowliest, unaugmented SIGMA was better than her, twofold.

She couldn't afford to fight them.

"What do you suggest?" Miranda looked back down to the documents she was flipping through, slowly coming to the conclusion that stealth would be her best bet and trying to figure out what route would be best for her.

McGraw grinned, "call in the Marines." He slid the last document towards her, and she snatched it up immediately.

Joining the Systems Alliance Marine Corps. Force Recon had to be the best, worst decision Jorell'Sahn nar Mindoir had ever made, hands down, with no possible comparisons. There were many, various things he could have done with his life, and he'd let Christopher McGraw rile him up into making this decision. If he could have gone back four years to tell his younger self anything, he wouldn't have – he would have kicked his ass instead. He didn't regret the decision, far from it he considered it one of the best bad decisions he'd ever made, but the fact of the matter was that he thought he was a fool for doing so.

Father was a Marine, so how hard could it be? He remembered thinking before he'd bucked up and entered the recruiting office. How hard indeed. He thought now, fresh from graduation and becoming a full-fledged Marine. He could count on one hand how many times he had ever been this sore and this sleep-deprived in his life, though he was unspeakably thankful for his quick learning of the tried and true skill of falling asleep and waking up on a dime, such a skill had helped him out whenever and wherever the Drill Instructors weren't actively trying to kill him.

Force Recon, as he'd learned, wasn't the 'Common Man's Special Forces', far from it, it was one step below the Orbital Dropping Death Dealers, the key differences lied in training: In Force Recon, the worst that could happen to you would be a few broken bones and – even more likely – lower-end malnutrition. In OD3 'Suicide School', people dying was almost a regular occurance, with grievous injuries being something that purportedly happened at least twice per program. Thinking about it made Jorell – who thought Force Recon was hell enough – shudder, and respect the OD3's all the more. Though the thought had entered his mind, if OD3's died during training, what the hell did the N7, who were seconded to exclusivity only by the SIGMAs, go through to get their armor?

It was these thoughts and more that haunted Jorell's dreams as he slept like a rock while his convoy roared down a barely-cleared out path on Manheim, the latest object of the Alliance's ever-growing manhunt for any rebellious faction within their borders. Jorell had known that joining the Marines meant he'd eventually kill someone, and had known that choosing Force Recon meant that 'eventually' would turn in to 'it would happen sooner than he would have expected', but he hadn't thought – in a million years – that he'd be shipped off to a combat-zone a week out of training. But, this was what he'd signed up for, he'd naively wanted to follow in his killed-in-action father's footsteps, and at the very least he'd make it through his five years and see where he was then.

"Look alive, boys! We're passing the front lines!" The convoy's leader called out over the comm-net.

Jorell woke up with little fanfare, around him is four squadmates were doing whatever it was they did before missions, Sergeant Wessley was checking the sights for his gun, Privates Darren and Jin were praying, and PFC Reyer was reading a book on his smart-watch.

Jorell stretched his arms and sat up straight, Wessley noticed. "Rise and shine Superman." He called out, kicking Jorell in the leg.

Jorell ignored the crack, shaking his head. "Alright, alright, I'm up." He bit back a light-hearted insult, aside from Jin, he didn't know these guys well enough yet. "Did I miss anything?"

"Nope." Said Jin, patting Darren on the back, "mission's the same as it was when we came down from orbit, confirm satellite recon and get more intel if we can." He explained.

"Anyone know why the Rebels are fighting harder for this planet than they were for Durhan?" Reyer asked.

"Were you sleeping through the fuckin' briefing, Private?" Wessley demanded, "even Superman was awake for that."

"I thought Jor El was Superman's dad, Sergeant." Jin chuckled.

"Shut up, Private." Said Wessley, "Reyer, this is Manheim. The, freakin', Manheim. They think the Rebel Leader's here, they're pulling out all the stops for this one, and so are the Rebels." He summarized. "That's the long of it."

Reyer blinked, "and the short of it?"

"Kill 'em until they're all gone, or until they get tired of dyin'!" Darren yelled out, to the 'Oorah' of the entire vehicle.

"Heads up, guys, Thermal's showing some heat sigs ten clicks out." Came the voice of the convoy's leader just a few minutes later. There was silence as the driver communicated with the others in his vehicle. The tension grew the longer the silence lasted.

"What do you think -"

"Mortars!" The ground shook under the vehicle as the massive mortar shells arced through the air and slammed into the ground.

Several things happened at once, the vehicles that were unfortunate enough to get hit directly by the unseen mortars exploded wholesale and were dead in the water, but the ones that survived the original barrage immediately floored the accelerators. Outside of his trips through the Warp, Jorell had never been moved so fast in his life, the driver was steering his APC like a conductor waved his baton, his eyes glued to his helmet's heads up display and constantly scanning everything in front of him and in the skies above him, weaving in and out of the paths of oncoming mortar shells, his Virtual Intelligence helping him by highlighting the incoming paths and keeping him connected to the other vehicles.

"Force Lead's out, who's up?" Someone called out over the roar of his vehicle's engine.

"This is Lieutenant Ferrel, Force-Lead's dead and I'm taking command – we're pushing straight through, all vehicles push forward! Shields up!" The hardened voice of the Officer called out as a vehicle launched itself in front of Jorell's.

The ground and air continued to explode and some Marine vehicles joined them, the air becoming a cacophony of explosions, dirt and death as the Force Recon drove for their lives. Eventually, it all stopped as suddenly as it had started, and the convoy that had once been ten vehicles was now five, with three APC's, one Infantry Fighting Vehicle, and a single Mako Tank.

"Forest to the south, turn in and take cover, we'll regroup in there!" Came Ferrel's voice, and the convoy followed his Mako. In five minutes, the convoy was deep enough into the forest where they could feasibly, safely, stop, set up shop, regroup, and figure out what the hell had just happened. "Everyone out! I want a perimeter set up, snipers in the trees, medics spread about – check your wounded, check your gear, check everything. Officers with me, NCO's get Sit-reps from all our stations, engineers check our vehicles – we may have to move at a moment's notice and I don't want our rovers breaking down on us."

The Quarian shook his head, snatched up his rifle and the backpack filled with his tools, and exited the vehicle. For his first mission, according to his squadmates' stories, he wasn't doing bad at all. Mortar strikes out of nowhere, a full-blown retreat into an uncharted forest, a quarter to half of their number dead somewhere on some random road on a planet in the ass-end of nowhere, and to top it all off, his suit had caught on something sharp and now it had a puncture in it. What would happen next, they'd find Prothean ruins?

He blinked as the sun managed to pierce the massive veil of leaves above them, and squinted as his facemask polarized and darkened to shield him from the offending light, shaking his head as it happened. He didn't want to tempt fate, he had a job to do.

Jorell's first target had been the Mech Truck, it – like the name implied – carried mechs and mechs alone. It could carry far more robots than it could people, because robots could be folded up tight and stuffed away in corners, where men and women preferred at least some modicum of comfort and personal space. Granted, those two concepts didn't even exist in the Marine Corps, but it was still something people enjoyed when they could have it.

Unfortunately for the recently anointed Combat Engineer, the truck had taken quite some flak during the mortar bombardments, and it looked like its shields had been breached a few times. Three wolf mechs were destroyed outright, with two more getting some pretty severe damage, though he noted it may turn out to be less than he thought, he was eye-balling it. A Titan had some bad shrapnel lining the entire left half of its compressed self, a Turtle had a few deep gouges in its shell but was otherwise fine, and - oh, that wasn't good.

"Who the fuck left a fusion battery just lying the hell around?" Jorell called out, his voice echoing somewhat awkwardly from within the truck's shed. He ambled deeper inside, dodging a few freely-hanging Wolf and Titan mechs, and reached down to pick up the Fusion Battery. By some stroke of the Ancestors, it only had a few light scrapes and dings, nothing that would compromise it and put the entire convoy at risk. There were a great many horror stories about what happened due to improper care and treatment of the miniaturized nuclear energy sources, though they admittedly paled in comparison to the terrifying tall tales told about what came before the Fusion Batteries, their Fission cousins. The point could be raised that the battery had been thrown about during the attack, but that was impossible - nuclear batteries were kept in environmentally sealed containers, and were fastened down and locked tight, there was no accidental spilling.

"What'd you say?" Another Engineer called out, this one a significantly more experienced Human. "Fusion Battery? Who the hell left that out?" He yelled out, angrily.

"That's what I'm askin'!" Jorell called back as the elder Engineer started locating his subordinates to see if the perpetrator was among them. Jorell shoved the Fusion Battery where it was supposed to be and proceeded to finish his rounds.

When all was said and done, he figured they'd made it off light – only a quarter of their robots were dead in the water. The eight surviving Engineers were outside, waiting on his report. He gave it quickly and the Engineer with the highest rank – a Human Corporal by the name of Haymen – dished out some haphazard instructions: get rid of the broken robots, fix the ones that could be fixed, and see what could be done about the truck's hull.

One of the Engineers followed the Quarian inside and they assisted two others in tossing the dead bots outside. One piped in, "anyone figure out who left the battery lyin' around?"

"I heard it was Dan. Dumbass always missed a thing or two." Another Human shook his head, as they all grunted and threw out another dead bot. "Could've killed us all." He clapped his hands together and rid them of some dust and debris.

"I hear that." Grunted Jorell, stretching his aching back.

Soon, all of the dead bots were tossed aside, with a few engineers tearing them apart and scrapping everything useful, a practice the Quarians had largely forced upon the Alliance upon their full integration with the human government, and the injured or otherwise damaged ones were hoisted in to the air by the truck's crane. They could only work on two at a time, as that was all the crane could hold at one time, but there were eight of them, and they had two Quarians – so they worked fast and got done quick; even after being separated from the fleet for almost half of a generation, Quarians and Mechanical Engineering were synonymous.

Jorell specifically, while he had fairly decent combat scores and had been able to hold his own alongside his squadmates during boot-camp, largely preferred and had subsequently been trained in working on robots. He noted the irony in such a profession, given his species, but he was a product of the times – many former Migrant Fleet Quarians were merely tolerant of Human AI's and robots, whereas the next generation, who grew up alongside and around Humans and their machines, were much more accepting, if the slightest bit wary due to their parents' distrust. Some sociologists on both sides of the race coin predicted that, in two more generations, AI hate in Quarians would be non-existent, and to go along with that, historians were predicting that it would be around then that the Alliance would seriously start considering what to do with the Geth. Jorell fully understood why so many of his parents and the members of their generation were wary of artificial intelligence, but the fact was that the Humans had no such fears, and they were the ones he was primarily associating himself with – with the odd Quarian here and there. Things may have been different had he been born on the Migrant Fleet, or raised on Eden or Keelahnan, where the Quarian populations were much higher and much denser, but he was a Marine's son and now a Marine himself, so such things hadn't even been a possibility for him.

"Damn it... Kenichi, this thing's Positronic Brain got fried." He muttered, loudly enough for the engineer assisting him with a Wolf's repairs could hear. "Check the scrappers, would you? See if they've got any spares, otherwise this thing'll need an organic pilot, it wouldn't be able to handle direct-interface with an AI." He reached inside the Wolf's stained steel chassis and plucked out the surprisingly sturdy offending piece of machinery. True to his words, instead of the disc being silver, the entire thing was scorched jet black, with a hole chipped off of its top right corner, Jorell reasoned that one of the robot's bullets must have gotten cooked off and fired.

Perfect... Mentally groaned the Quarian, as he got to his knees and stuck his flashlit head in the machine's guts, now I've got to look for bullet damage.

"Got your brain, Superman." Came the other engineer's voice, which made Jorell roll his eyes. First time he'd heard that joke was out of Christopher McGraw's mouth, and he'd subsequently hated anything to do with the Humans' ironically alien pop-culture icon ever since, which meant that the moment his fellow marines caught on, they never let him hear the end of it.

He snatched the 'brain' out of the marine's gloved hands and had to resist the urge to jam it inside and slap it together. Positronic Brains were literally the most advanced pieces of technology in Alliance space, seconded only by Warp Drives and Terraforming Disks, in that order, because the PB's were literally just cases waiting to take on a fully functioning, sentient, Artificial Intelligence. The kind of processing power even a first generation Positronic Brain – which in and of itself was wholly outclassed by the modern brains – was capable of could outdo most, if not all computers in the known galaxy. Needless to say, such a thing was far beyond Jorell's level of engineering know-how, but he did know how to perform a patch job on a malfunctioning one, and how to wire a new one into a malfunctioning unit. The rule of thumb generally went, if a Positronic Brain was malfunctioning somehow, let the robot fix it, they knew what they were doing far better than ninety eight percent of the Alliance's population.

Hours passed as Jorell and his fellow engineers fixed up and put the robots back together, and just as the Quarian was reconnecting wires and soldering them back together in a Turtle, he heard a faint conversation reach his ears. Normally he would have tuned it out, but he heard his name, which prompted him leaning out from under the machine to get a better look at who was talking. The Officer turned from the only other surviving Quarian engineer when he noticed the movement, and gave the other Quarian a brief, curt, nod, before he strode over to Jorell.

Ah shit, what'd I do? He dusted himself off and sprang to attention. "Sir." He offered the man a salute, which was returned.

"At ease." The Lieutenant said with a nod, "Jorell'Sahn?" Formal as it was, and a damn accomplishment as it may be these days, the only ones who truly paid attention to Quarian crew-names were Quarians themselves, and Humans conscious of their culture. The Officer, pressed for time and not in the mood for such pleasantries, didn't even try. "How much xeno-science experience do you have?"

Jorell blinked, "I'm sorry, sir, I don't understand the question."

"I pulled your file and saw you had the highest scores when it came to dissection of undocumented alien tech." He paused, "the Prothean classes you took." He finally relented.

Jorell nodded once in understanding, "yes sir."

"Any reason why you find so much skill and interest in that field, but took engineering instead?" The officer pressed.

What's going on here? Jorell shrugged, "when I was a kid, my mother couldn't leave me alone in a room with any kind of anything, I'd take it apart and figure out how it works and put it back together. I don't even remember how I did it, but I managed to take apart an aerial drone and turn it into an unmanned paintball shooter." He didn't add that he'd made a good few hundred dollars from it, it wasn't important. "It wasn't exactly alien technology, but it gave me experience working with something I didn't understand and figuring it out what made it tick, I liked it." He shrugged, "but my father was a grunt in the engineering corps, and I wanted to follow in his footsteps."

"Was he Force Recon?"

Jorell grinned behind his mask, "no sir, I made that mistake on my own."

The Officer cracked a grin, "Hoorah to that." He said absently, "come with me." He turned and waved the Quarian on with him. "It goes without saying, what you're about to see does not exist. You're simply following me to assist in debriefing and planning."

Jorell blinked, what, had they actually fucking found a Prothean Vault? There was no damned way he'd called that, this was middle of nowhere space and there wasn't even a Mass Relay anywhere within the next three parsecs. "Understood, sir." He said after curiosity got the better of him.

He followed the officer, who he soon got the name of – Lieutenant Borrison – and he was soon led out of the impromptu camp the Marines had set up. The forest around them was quiet, Manheim hadn't evolved much wildlife it seemed, the only noise in the forest came from the Marine camp they were retreating from. After a quarter of an hour, they made their way to a somewhat large hill protruding out of the ground like a pimple, there were two Marines standing guard in front of it, they both sprang to a salute.

"Lieutenant Borrison." One said, after he dropped his hand. "Lieutenant Ferrel sent orders ahead – be careful and don't take any risks. If there isn't anything useful, just mark the coordinates and don't bother with anything else." He relayed.

Borrison nodded, "understood, Private." He looked to Jorell, and nodded inside.

Jorell cleared his throat, "excuse me, sir... What are we doing here?"

"We're checking a Prothean vault one of our sniper pairs stumbled on for weapons, something we can use to tip the odds more in our favor."