The moon, dubbed P11-14a, was registered as the property of ExiBaric Mining. They had purchased it for a fairly modest amount just short of five years previously, and had sent the methane extraction team down six months later. Being as the moon was basically worthless for any purpose other than mining methane- a job that paid the bills but did not offer astounding profits in the way that palladium or eezo mining did- the price the company paid for it was not unreasonable or unusual.
Sallie Rogers, as well, checked out thoroughly. She had been with ExiBaric for nineteen years, ten of those as a project foreman. No criminal record. This was her second project command, the first repurposing a large comet in a space-born capture mining station, extracting water to be used in terraforming and colonization.
Melara was finally able to get ahold of Aria only three hours out from their destination. T'Loak seemed a bit irritated and pressed for time, but that was normal for the Omega matriarch. She had a million and one things to oversee in her small little empire, and she disliked being questioned.
Even so, she understood Melara's concern and need for verification. "I enlisted many of my current and old employees to help scour the underground for the information you requested," she told her. "I was notified of the discovery on that little dirty snowball through those channels. Once I verified its legitimacy I instructed Rogers to make the contacts."
"And you trust the channels this information came through?"
Aria looked at her pointedly. "Melara, I have known you since you were born. You know perfectly well I trust no one- not even you. I respect the channels that this information came through, and I respect you enough to have shared it. I have no desire to place you or your family into a trap. If our mutual understanding had withered to a point I felt action was necessary, I would at least have the good graces to kill you face to face."
"I understand, Aria. I had to be sure."
"Very well. If we are quite concluded, I have other urgent matters that require my attention. Give my greetings to your mother."
And with that, she ended the comlink.
Melara knew Aria well enough to know she was speaking the truth. Setting up an elaborate trap was not her way, and she did in fact respect the T'Soni-Shepard family enough that she would indeed take care of the problem herself, face to face, if it ever came to that- even hired assassins would be out of the question. So if she said that this information was legitimate, than it was in fact legitimate as far as Aria was aware- and she was not easily fooled.
Still, even this confirmation did little to soothe the small knot still lurking in her stomach.
Long range scans showed that Gerty's little ship was already in wide orbit as the Normandy approached the system. Unlike her predecessors, the Normandy had two small Saber Class X fighters attached to her belly- when integrated, the ships could act as another set of guns for the main ship. When detached, they were nasty, fast, stealthy fighters that could be manually piloted or controlled by Joker as part of his engagement suites. Melara immediately deployed these two fighters to sweep the system and look for any hidden hostiles, bringing the Normandy in to close lunar orbit only when they had returned the all clear.
By this time, another ship was dropping out of FTL. As Gerty's little merchant transport drew in nearer to the Normandy, they fixed their guns on that ship, relaxing only when it flagged as a private transport bearing Drs. T'Soni and Williams. Her mother's confirm ident to her omni-tool verified it. Less than twenty minutes later, EDI's ship, the Freedom, appeared.
Built by the geth, the Freedom was more a direct part of EDI and Joker than it was an independent vessel. When aboard, they abandoned their mobile chassis and lived within the ship systems themselves, along with a crew of several geth. It, in essence, became their physical body, their minds physical software that moved on energy streams and through biocybernetic circuitry.
Everyone present and verified, Melara notified the mining colony of their impending arrival, and headed down to the shuttle with Daenys, Vina, Sihra, and six of her security team. All were fully suited to protect against the unbreathable atmosphere until they passed into the actual mining dome where the environment was artificially generated.
They landed first. As they waited for the other shuttles to settle, Melara looked around at the moon and the mining facility. The landscape was an endless sea of twisted and frozen ice, streaked with blue and yellow and a lovely deep, almost oceanic green. The sun was somewhat shielded by an almost constant plume of vapor- methane wasn't the only gas extracted from the melting ice, simply the only one kept. Byproducts such as carbon, sulfur, and contaminated water were just released back into the poisonous atmosphere in thick billowing clouds.
Below the haze produced by the waste gasses, the atmospheric dome encompassed a wide collection of prefabs and the access ways down into the shaft for the depth stations. Portable airlocks would have been established underground as well, moved as the dig grew while maintaining enough forced air pressure and scattered oxy-generation units to keep things livable even two miles down. It'd still be cold as hell, but breathable.
A figure was waiting on the inside of the dome's airlock, watching them curiously. She was an older female human- perhaps mid-fifties to early sixties and wearing an ExiBaric uniform.
Mel nodded to Vina, who headed toward the airlock with half the security team while Melara waited for her family. Irie disembarked with Gerty, looking around much as Melara had before she looked to her younger sister.
"Everything clear?" she asked.
"So far," Melara replied. "Gerty, it is good to see you again."
"Nice to see you too, Mel. I daresay, this is quite a place isn't it? I wonder if they have skiing?"
Irie nudged him lightly as four others approached from their small vessels. Mel moved forward and hugged her mother, their hard-suits making the motion somewhat awkward at best.
"It is good to see you," Liara said with a smile.
"It is good to see you as well, Mama," Mel said, then nodded stiffly to the figure at her side. "Dr. Williams."
"Captain," the human woman replied, just as stiffly.
Liara looked pointedly at both of them. "It is cold enough on this moon, I am sure, without the both of you dropping the temperature further."
"Mama-"
Liara ignored her, stepping past to hug EDI as the two synthetics arrived.
"Wow, reminds me of Noveria," Her Joker whistled as he looked around. "Only less cozy."
Melara gave the synthetic a dry look. While her Joker had some of the elements of the original's personality, he was not an identical copy. This Joker was the first EDI had constructed after the death of Jeff Moreau. His personality and even encoded memories were identical to Jeff's in pretty much every detail, only now he had a body ten times stronger than any organic. He was aware, of course, that he was not the true Jeff Moreau, but he had long since come to terms with that and considered himself, if anything, Jeff's son and legacy.
{We're clear to enter,} Vina said over her helmet, and Mel glanced around at her and nodded.
"It's clear. Let's get inside. I want to see this ship for myself."
"As do I," Liara said, her eyes lighting up a little. No matter where she had gone or what she had experienced, Liara had always been an explorer at heart, enamored with new and mysterious discoveries, always seeking knowledge.
The group headed inside the dome, Melara and the rest of her security team going through first before she allowed anyone else entrance. The older human woman just within watched them curiously. Once inside the atmosphere, Mel reached up and removed her helmet. "You are Ms. Rogers?"
"Sallie, yes," she said, and offered a hand. "Thank you for coming, Captain. I've already started plans to move the operation to the secondary mining field. I don't know what you're going to decide to do with the damned thing but regardless, I suspect uncovering it completely and taking it out of the mine is a given. Can't do that with our equipment and tanks here. Still, it's going to delay us significantly and impact our production. Got a few of the ExiBaric credit-pushers down there now. They arrived last night to have a look at the thing themselves, dot all the i's and cross all the t's, figure out the financial impact the company is looking at because of this delay. I just hope they don't decide to take it out on me."
"I am sure the Council will make whatever losses they suffer here worth their while," Irie said, taking off her helmet as well, in concert with Liara.
"Ms. Rogers, if you could tell us some about how exactly you discovered this artifact?" she asked. Rogers gestured at them.
"Might as well head down to the lower shaft while I fill you in. This way."
The group followed on her heels, Melara leaving two of her security at the top of the shaft lift they entered before they started down.
"It was about a week ago," Rogers said as she closed the door and started the lift. "We'd gotten unusual scan return data but it looked like just a large carbon deposit until we were about thirty yards away. When we realized it was something else I had more extensive scans performed and ordered my team to clear the ice away from the end of the thing."
"And you believe it is a ship?" Liara asked.
"I know it's a ship," Rogers said. "Made of some material I've never seen before, and it gives me the creepy crawly heebie jeebies just being near it, but it's a ship all right."
"What can you tell us of the material?"
"Nothing I've ever seen, and nothing that registers on what instruments we have. That's all I know," Sallie replied. Mel had been watching and listening to her carefully. The human woman looked frustrated, tired, and stressed, but the Spectre didn't get the impression she was lying. She was genuinely confused and irritated by this entire situation, and just wanted it out of her lap.
As Liara, Sam, and Irie continued to ask varied questions about the ship, the ice composition it was found in, the dating techniques they'd used- the lift continued to sink downward. For the first part of the trip- say the first half mile- the lift was enclosed in a metal shaft that left no view whatsoever. Then it passed into open air with a rush of cold that Mel felt sharply on her cheeks. Not cold enough to be painful or damaging, but definitely colder than she liked.
They were now open to the shaft. Great sailing walls of ice, lit every few feet with illumination pods, spread all around them. The ice was colored the same blue and green streaked with yellow as it had been on the surface, but the deeper they got, the more the green became prevalent, the yellow switching to veins of rust red.
Sihra seemed especially taken with the sight. Nakira had experienced its share of ice ages, of course, but she had not been alive during any part of the last one. She had only ever seen temperate landscapes or tropical ones- snow was unheard of save at the very poles, and ice to this quantity would have been unthinkable.
The shaft suddenly widened, more lights and the faint hum of generators filling the air as they passed the first depth station. It narrowed again quickly as they sank past, closing up once more. Four more times this happened before the lift started to slow.
"They had started to widen this area for another depth station," Sallie said as the lift drew to a final halt. "The cleared area is about five hundred yards, and there are some tunnels that were intended to house the pressure drills for the next shaft stage. Nothing ended up being installed but the oxy-gens and the pressure fans, so there should be plenty of room."
She pulled the door of the lift open, and Melara stepped out first, Vina just on her heels. Immediately both began scans, spreading out to let the others disembark.
They were in a wide cavern formed from the heat jets that had melted the ice in this area. The floor rolled and rippled like polished obsidian. It would have been incredibly slick if not for the texture matting that had been affixed to it to provide easy walking. The walls and ceiling were similarly rippled and polished, gleaming in the wake of the lights and showing a rainbow of ghostly colors encased in the soft mint green of the ice.
Sallie headed without hesitation toward the far end of the cavern, the others soon following. Periodically, they could see perfectly oval holes in the walls where cores had been taken to sample the composition of the ice as well as to date it. The far wall looked lost to blackness, but it was an illusion- as they drew closer, Mel could see the darkness was the very artifact they had come to see, shining through the ice. Part of it had been cleared and exposed- perhaps fifteen feet high and ten feet around. It was sloping, black, and looked as slick as the ice around it.
They were still about fifty feet away from it when Mel called them to a halt. "Ms. Rogers, I thought you said there were others down here."
"Yeah, the group from ExiBaric headquarters. Four of them," she said, then paused, looking around more thoroughly. "Wait…where are they? They didn't come up the lift."
"You are sure?" Liara asked as Melara and her men drew their weapons.
"Yeah, I'm positive. That lift has been locked since we found this thing- only my clearance and that of my assistant activates it. I didn't want any of the crew around it without our direct supervision. Henry used the lift to come down here with the ExiBaric team and then sent it back up for us. He should be here too, showing them around."
"Perhaps they went inside," Irie said. She had activated her scan the moment they'd stepped off the elevator, taking readings from the walls as they'd gone on. Almost the moment that Melara had noted the absence of the ExiBaric team, she had turned that scan toward the object itself.
"Inside? Inside what…the ship?" Rogers asked, then shook her head. "Not possible. The only part exposed is solid bulkhead, no way to get in. Henry even tried cutting into it with the laser drill before I found out and told him to stop- didn't even scratch the thing."
"Something must have worked," Irie said. "My scans are showing a door."
"A door?" Rogers looked legitimately stunned, and more than a little frightened.
"We'll have a look," Melara said, gesturing at Vina and two of her security. "Everyone stay on the alert, move carefully. It may be they found a way in, and it may be that something else found a way out. If that's the case we have no idea what we may be dealing with."
"Surely nothing in that ship could still be alive, not after forty million years!" Rogers blurted.
"Such things have happened," Liara told her. "I have experienced it twice in my life time, though in one of those cases only fifty thousand years had passed. Mel, be careful."
This last was directed at her daughter's back as she and her team headed forward, weapons up. Her mother's warning was done out of love, but it was hardly needed. Melara knew of the two events in her mother's life she was referring to. The first was the discovery of Javik, kept in stasis for fifty thousand years before he had been found and revived. The second was far more terrifying. She had just started in the Academy as a child when her parents had come across a creature they referred to as the Red Queen, trapped in some weird containment for millions of years, agonizingly conscious but unmoving, unaging. Her crew were found also trapped there underground among the remnants of an ancient, damaged ship.
If this is anything like that, we are in serious trouble, she thought. Everyone in the group was more than capable of defending themselves- save perhaps Rogers, who was only a miner and who was completely unarmed. Even Irie and Liara had weapons and strong biotics, and the training and capability to use both with incredible skill.
However the Red Queen and her people had proven to be incredibly deadly adversaries- enough so to challenge even Del Shepard's abilities. If it had not been for the rachni and a very nicely timed volcanic eruption, Melara may have lost both her parents to them on that single encounter. She had no intention of allowing such a thing now.
Dae was to her left, Vina to her right as they neared the far end of the cavern. From here, she could see that Irie's scans were true- there was a door in the cleared side of the ship. Nearly perfectly oval, it stood about seven feet high and four wide, an ominous pit of depthless black within black- ebony velvet against obsidian silk.
They were only ten feet away when color and motion appeared in that door. A form coalesced out of the darkness, a striding figure that resolved into an asari.
A familiar asari.
Melara's finger tightened on her rifle trigger. She barely stopped herself less than a hairs' breadth from opening fire- only the power of a promise and the fact she wasn't a cold blooded murderer staying her hand. The newcomer showed some mild surprise, drawing to a halt and then lifting a hand. As it flared blue, Melara snarled.
"Don't!"
It was not an attack, however. The biotics simply formed a shield in front of her, additional to the kinetic barrier she already quite obviously had clipped to her belt. She lifted an eyebrow, framed in the dark doorway and bathed in blue light.
"Melara," Athena said calmly. "Good, you are here. Just in time for our little talk."