A/N: Mass Effect 3 improved many things, graphically speaking. The female hairstyles were not one of them. My Shepard is not Akhenaten, so what is up with that strange, elongated skull look when you choose to sweep your hair up into a bun? Again, written in cooperation with Ghostdragon31. Some lines borrowed directly from the game, but everything belongs to Bioware anyway.

Mass Effect: Absolute Magnitude

Chapter One

-Terminal Velocity-

Part I

As Nihlus made to jog past her, Shepard's hand closed firmly over the armored rim of his carapace. Judging by the surprise on his face, either no one dared lay hands on Spectres or she'd violated some turian social norm. Which was entirely possible, as she was familiar with their politics, their tactics, and their anatomy, but their day-to-day living had seemed an irrelevant tangent.

One day she might correct that, but today she was addressing the gross stupidity that had just reared its head and declared it made better time on its own.

"What, exactly, do you think the political ramifications would be for humanity if you were to die here?" she asked him in a cutting, low voice. "I don't mean to insult your infiltration skills, but unless this beacon is something you can carry out on your own, it's not worth the risk of losing you behind enemy lines just so you can tell me it's the best-protected thing on this planet. Spectre or not, you saw the same footage I did. And unless you've secreted some weapon aboard that would make a ship of that size, with unknown armaments and payload, something that you can deal with on your own, I would appreciate it if you exercised appropriate caution."

Turian inscrutability had failed against this assault-she could clearly read surprise edged with insult on that alien face. His lateral mandibles flexed out in threat, then were pulled flush against his jaw.

"If I am worth taking into consideration for Spectre status, my judgment should also be worth taking into consideration," she pressed, grip tightening. "I realize time is of the essence, but the Normandy isn't able to field a large enough ground team to afford losses." Shepard's smile was more a baring of teeth, full of the memory of Torfan and less storied missions. She'd lost the most men on Torfan, but it had been elsewhere she'd come closest to failing. It helped that she wasn't exaggerating. The Normandy had been crewed for stealth missions in space, meant to field only herself and Nihlus. The Corporal she'd be taking down was a comm specialist, the Lt. Commander had limited experience in hot zones. There wasn't going to be any room for heroics here.

"If you trust nothing else about my assessment, trust that."

Nihlus did not look pleased-and neither did Anderson in her peripheral vision-but she won a short nod of concession. "All right. But I'm taking point," he said, tone clipped and entirely unlike his usual self.

Shepard did not care that he was unhappy, only that he complied. She had no argument with his taking point, which meant something different in turian military culture than it did for someone accustomed to working with a full Special Ops team, four-man fire team, or a two-man sniper unit. To her, he'd designated himself as the scout, which would work out well so long as he respected the fact that he was tethered to the team.

Putting down went smoothly, their landing site well out of range of where the hostiles had been flagged on their radar.

"Alenko, Jenkins," she said curtly, signaling them to flank the turian. Corporal Jenkins, for all that he was green, at least was familiar territory. The Lt. Commander was a different story. She'd read his dossier, knew that he didn't like using his biotics on live targets and that he suffered from unpredictable, severe migraines as a result of his L2 amp. He was also Navy and a career officer, which made her a little leery, even though he'd given every indication of general battlefield competence.

It was not the fire team she would have chosen-not when something like this would have been best handled by a full squad with enough manpower to put down whatever was waiting for them, but she'd make do. And she'd make them do well enough that Nihlus wouldn't have reason to leave them behind.

She eyed the low, rocky ridges that compromised their line of vision, decided they looked scalable and despite earlier evidence to the contrary, she doubted Nihlus was stupid enough to skyline himself if she sent him up to assess their field. Still, his carapace meant that even belly-down he couldn't match her profile and she'd spent a chunk of her career of giving orders and support from an overlook position, though she'd done close work as well as an N7.

She'd done nigh everything as an N7 and she wished she had one of those elite and uniquely qualified teams working for her now.

"Hold," she ordered before they could round the rock formation, her eyes taking in a body that looked like it had spent a few weeks desiccating in the desert rather than being freshly killed.

The advanced decay, which had peculiarly turned the skin into a dark, almost leathery surface, made it harder to indentify cause of death even though it had been stripped, but it looked more like bullet wounds than anything she'd associate with an accident. Unless they had a tannin-rich watersource nearby that the body could have been dredged or dragged from-and there was no scavenger activity at all-she didn't have any good explanation for its condition or why it was here.

"What now?" Nihlus asked irritably, though he did stop and she'd seen him take notice of the body as well. Strange how much more strongly irritation traveled when driven by subharmonics.

"Give me time to get a seat with a view. I don't like blind turns. Or, rather, I do like blind turns, but in a purely professional sense," Shepard said as she scaled the rocks easily and in almost complete silence. She wouldn't have tried it on the local equivalent of shale, but it was such an easy climb she began to wonder if it was the result of clearing the fields rather than a natural feature of the landscape. She went to her belly as she crested the hill, careful not to dislodge loose stones as she crawled into a depression that was deep enough to offer some cover with compromising her view.

"Tucked in up there?" came Nihlus's voice, still grumpy but more for the sake of it than actual upset any longer. Adaptable, she marked in her mental file.

"Snuggly," she reported, scanning the road for unfriendlies as her sniper rifle unfolded itself from its mag-holstered position Or, rather, the Alliance's sniper rifle. The rifle she'd used as an N7 was in storage, modded to the very edge of legality. She missed that rifle. At least she'd had the opportunity to mount a reflex sight atop her scope and make this rifle functional as something more than just long-range support. "Shuffle on."

Nihlus must have signaled for Jenkins and Kaidan to hold their position-he emerged smoothly onto the path in her peripheral vision, but her focus was on sweeping the rise of the path for any sign of movement.

Her brain registered the flicker of motion milliseconds before her body responded to it, head dropping to sight through her scope, breathing already calm, even and then there-one drone down in fizzling sparks, another falling prey to Nihlus's more-than-impressive aim, and then the other down in the one, two heartbeat she had to wait for the heatsink not to lock up the mechanism.

So that's a Spectre, she thought to herself as she raised her head but didn't otherwise shift her position, only slipping down to join the team when they came level with her.

The path funneled the up into a valley, where they met more of the drones. These apparently had less stealth-tech or their earlier encounter had stirred them out of dormancy-whichever it was, they didn't survive long enough for it to matter. Surprisingly enough, it was the Corporal who was the weak link. His training was solid enough, but his response time was sluggish.

They made quick time through a forest of huge, old-growth trees, somewhere between a mangrove and a redwood. They held up well to the high-speed, low power assaults laid on by the drones. With plenty of cover and enemies still showing up on their radar, she switched out weapons for her pistol-their movement was too quick and erratic for her to trust the slow reload of her rifle, even with the reflex sight and their shielding unimpressive-and paralleled Nihlus, enough space between encounters for her to get some sense of the turian's battle rhythm.

He would have made better time without them, but she still held that a dead Spectre was just as useless as a dead private, unless your object was a propaganda war.

The sound of gunfire not directed at them sped their advance, because though it had been made clear that their primary objective was the beacon, it would be valuable to have the testimony of something other than fuzzy vid to help shed some light on the ground conditions.

She'd never thought to see one of the geth-the 'quarian sin'-outside of an extranet site, but unless someone had gone through a great deal of trouble to model their troops on that distinctive profile, they were seeing the first major emergence from behind the Perseus Veil.

If she'd known that, she would have updated the photo-record function on her omnitool.

There was a survivor and the part of her that her parents would not be proud of was glad to see it was a Marine. Not so much because of a feeling of solidarity, but because most civilians in traumatic events were something worse than baggage and made terrible witnesses from a military point of view.

Not so a Marine, even if she was mentally passing judgment on armor with more pink than she thought ought to be allowed by regs. It was a measure of how little action this garrison expected to that she was even in personalized armor in the first place.

But her salute was crisp, her posture solid for having recently come from a slaughter. "Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams of the 212. You the one in charge here, ma'am?"

Shepard noted two things. Williams had assumed she was in charge, which meant that her own chain of command had fallen apart. And from the way her eyes had slid across the turian, despite the fact that he was leading the formation and fallen hopefully on Shepard's N7 insignia, she didn't like turians. That was almost as standard-issue as her assault rifle, so Shepard ignored it when Nihlus didn't correct her.

"This is Spectre Kryik and I'm Commander Shepard. We're here to help," she said, modulating her voice to tread a fine line between concern and professionalism. "Can you tell us what happened, Williams?"

The question broke her composure, just a little, her body posture shifting to reflect how painful she found the memory. "Oh man," she breathed, "We were patrolling the perimeter when the attack hit. We tried to get off a distress call, but they cut off our communications. I've been fighting for my life ever since. My squad-," she made a strange, choked noise in her throat, "we tried to double back to the beacon, but we walked into an ambush. I don't think any of the others...I think I'm the only one left."

Shepard was not good at providing grief-counseling, even when the grief was fully justified, so she only said, "I'm sure you held as long as you could."

She was glad when Kaidan said, "The geth haven't been seen outside the Veil in nearly two hundred years. Why are they here now?"

It was Nihlus who answered. "The only thing of interest on Eden Prime is the beacon, though what the geth would want with it...," he flexed his mandibles dismissively. "Had they removed it from the dig site when your line broke?"

Williams shook her head. "No, sir. But there were a lot of them. It wouldn't have taken them long to remove it. The dig site's not far-I can take you."

"Let's go," Nihlus thrummed.

Shepard's attention was caught by a freshly impaled human as they moved toward the dig, her mind trying to work out why the geth would go to the trouble. A form of psychological warfare? There were more of them, their bodies approaching that desiccation she'd noted in the first corpse and she realized that those spiked did more than simple pierce. Again, motive escaped her.

"The beacon should be at the end of this trench," Ashley called.

Her eyes swept their surroundings, disliking this feeling of being funneled, caught on another rocky barrier that led up to a hill that would give her an excellent view of the area ahead.

"Breaking off," she reported to Nihlus, who gave her a short, thrumming answer that seemed affirmative.

Shepard moved her pace to something closer to a sprint so she could be in place before the team below arrived and though she kept scanning the area, found it completely absent of other snipers or the recon drones. She slowed as she drew closer, aiming for a ridge of rock that would give her cover, switching from her pistol to her sniper rifle.

As she'd expected, there were geth troopers clustered in the site, which was absent anything that looked like a beacon, though a low, circular depression at the center of the site gave her some idea where it might have once been.

She had worried that geth tech might be incompatible with her tech skills, but the nearest geth's shields stuttered and fell when she overloaded them and she was glad that they apparently hadn't thought to shift their main processing center out of their heads, toppling as her round pierced its metal skin.

If she'd been an AI race without organic limitations building an army, she might have randomized the location of the processor core and built-in secondary processors that would have allowed continued limited functionality even after they were partially destroyed. Sort of like inorganic krogan.

...it was a good thing she wasn't an AI species.

It was also a good thing that the geth didn't seem particularly clever, reacting more like pre-programmed drones than a sapient species. She ducked behind her ridge of rock as they turned their fire on her, giving the ground team below an unchallenged entrance. When she popped up again, overloading another trooper's shields, she found that they'd made neat work of several of the troopers. She downed another one and, counting on her shields to deal with a much-reduced enemy fire, used her rifle to bring down the shields of the other geth, each quickly finished by Nihlus.

Their pairwork was echoed by the other three humans, Jenkins overloading enemy shields, Kaidan reinforcing their own shields using his biotic abilities, and Williams ripping through enemies with all the furor of someone with comrades to avenge. It didn't take very long to clear the area and she saw Williams very deliberately kick one of the geth shells that lay in her path.

She wasn't privy to the short conversation that followed, but then Nihlus's voice came over the comm. "We're pressing ahead to the research camp," he said. "It's up the hill. We can rendezvous there."

So she hadn't been wrong-the scientists had opted to study the beacon in place before removing it, weren't offering it like an unopened present to the Council.

"Understood," she acknowledged, shifting from her cover and tacking up the hill. She paused as more of the spikes came into sight. Each of them had a body impaled on it, but these didn't just look desiccated. Their skin was darkened and shriveled, just as the others had been, but there was a distinctly inhuman grey tinge to the dermis and, last time she'd checked, humans weren't one of the species capable of bioluminescence. Unsettling blue light marched in inorganic patterns across their skin, like very poorly integrated cybernetics.

Rather than advance any further, she settled her rifle snuggly against her shoulder, getting a better look at the corpses through her scope. The view was no more pleasant for the greater magnification.

Her pause had given the ground team time to catch up, and she almost flinched as one of the bodies began to struggle on its spike, which responded by retracting and releasing the...thing.

It was an automatic reaction to pull the trigger and watch its head explode like an overripe melon, but the field of ambient electricity released by its death is unexpected. Her kill gives fair warning to the others, who took care to stay well outside of range. The other two bodies are soon enough just corpses again, all those strange lights winked out.

"Zombies," came Williams's voice as she rejoined them on the flat, "Fucking zombies." There was a quiver to it, anger and fear all tangled up together. Shepard understood her disgust, but she knew it must have been worse for Williams, who might very well have known, worked with, lived with the people they'd been before they'd been reduced to those husks, drained of everything that had made them human.

But Williams kept it together as they split the squad to quickly sweep the camp, she, Kaidan, and Jenkins going to salvage what they could from the ruins. Shepard quickly overrode the security on the second trailer, which had been more designed to keep out thieves than stand against a siege. Luckily for the two scientists inside, the geth didn't seem to practice turian thoroughness.

"Humans! Thank the Maker!" The woman's breath caught when Nihlus-huge and hulking in the relatively confined space of the trailer-followed her inside, but beyond surprise she didn't seem overly upset.

The man hissed, "Hurry! Close the door! Before they come back!" His voice was strangely ragged, like he'd recently done a lot of shouting. Or screaming.

"No need to worry," Nihlus reassured them. "Everything outside is dead."

The woman's shoulders visible relaxed and her hands, which she'd been rubbing together nervously, fell to her sides. The man didn't look reassured, didn't straighten from that strange, hunched posture. But the woman ignored him. "That's such a relief," she said. "We heard when it went...quiet, but we were afraid to open the door, in case they were waiting for us. Manuel and I hid here during the attack. They must have come here for the beacon-there was a lot of shooting at first, but it didn't sound like they swept for survivors. No one tried the door until we heard you overriding the passcode. Of course, at first we thought that they'd made it over to the spaceport and retrieved the beacon and decided to..."

She trailed off, but she'd pricked Nihlus's interest. "The beacon was moved to the spaceport?"

"Yes, earlier this morning," the woman confirmed. "We didn't want to keep the pick-up team waiting. Actually, except for the Marines, Manuel and I were the only ones here when they struck. They," her breath caught on a half-sob, "they held them off long enough for us to get inside and seal the door. They gave their lives to save us."

"No one is saved," the man-Manuel?-interjected, his voice still strange in a way not all the screaming in the world could account for. "The age of humanity is ended. Soon, only ruin and corpses will remain. I saw him, you know. The prophet. Leader of the enemy. He was here, before the attack."

"A geth?" Shepard asked. All of the geth she'd seen so far had been identical to each other. Of course, she was also becoming quietly certain that the man had experienced a nervous breakdown.

"A turian," was the surprising answer.

"A turian?" Nihlus asked skeptically.

"Yes. He looks like us, but he belongs to them," Manuel said emphatically.

"What was this turian doing?" Nihlus pressed, though judging by the angle of his mandibles, he was just as skeptical about this testimony as she was.

"I'm sorry," the woman said, interrupting the man gently. "I didn't see a turian. Manuel's still a bit...unsettled."

"From the attack?" Shepard asked.

To her surprise, the woman shook her head. "Manuel has a brilliant mind, but he's always been a bit...unstable. Genius and madness are two sides of the same coin, but when we came here to research the beacon there was an incident. At first, we thought he'd had a stroke, but then this..."

"Is it madness to see the future? To see the destruction rushing toward us? To understand there is no escape? No hope? No, I am not mad. I'm the only sane one left!"

His words grew more insistent, more impassioned, with every sentence, but the woman was only shaking her head slowly. "I gave him an extra dose of his meds after the attack, but with the adrenaline..."

Shepard eyed the other scientist, but while he looked frustrated, there was nothing to indicate he'd turn to violence.

"The Alliance has already been alerted to the attack. I recommend you continue to shelter here until they arrive," Nihlus said, then glanced down at Shepard. "We've got to get to the spaceport before the geth decide to take the beacon off-planet."