The thief was afraid. This was perhaps not surprising. Thane had come to know a number of thieves over the course of his career, and found that although they were useful collaborators, they could be narcissistic and excessively focused on material gain. Acquiring things from under the noses of the wealthy and ignorant — or, better yet, the wealthy and devious — was a distant pursuit from investigating the death-sodden anatomy of an ages-old devourer of planets.

But Kasumi was the very best. He pieced together her identity as he came to know her modus operandi, recognized the quirks and personality imbued in every strike. She had been the wrench in many of his clients' plans, eliciting the cleanups that caused them to become his clients.

Despite her fear, she returned to them, having gained them access to the very core of this monstrous leviathan.

"Door's open!" she called, her cheery inflection a transparent, if effective, mechanism to subdue her terror.

Shepard nodded, and signalled for the squad to fall in. Her recent close call seemed to be in the distant past. Her eyes were shadowed with new concerns, a new room of unknowns and oblique objectives, and something Garrus said to her over her radio.

The room was unmistakably a drive core, with an enormous globular heart pulsing with flickering blue energy. It baffled Thane that a life form, no matter how ancient, should have something so much like a ship's engine. The concept of a 'synthetic-organic being' unsettled him.

Except Shepard was a synthetic-organic being, latticed with artificial constructs that were necessary to galvanize her back to life.

He disliked the parallel.

Tali's abrupt gasp startled him from his brief musings. "Geth!" she shouted, and dropped into cover, training her shotgun over the ledge.

Indeed, she was right. A lone geth, taller than the troopers Thane remembered from the Alarei, was stationed at a terminal in front of the winnowing light of the drive core. Its inorganic stillness had camouflaged it from Thane's normally hawkish vision. Its hands interfaced with the terminal while it cast its flashlight gaze into the darkness around it. "Shepard-Commander," it said in a curiously gentle, digital voice.

Light from the drive core beamed through a large hole in its torso, like an eye through a scope's lens. A massive gun was holstered to its back, a sniper rifle with a barrel so long and weighty that it could not be designed for an organic to wield.

Ah. The shooter.

"Stand down, Tali." The warmth of Shepard's voice was a generous calm that she offered to share with the quarian. Her keen eyes must also have identified the weapon and deciphered their previous interaction.

Tali's shotgun, braced against the top of her chosen cover, was already angled up. Her hands had gone limp with the shock of hearing a geth speak.

Shepard did not quite owe the geth her life. Thane's biotic attack would have finished the scion if the rifle blast had not. But it took the shot, and that was an undeniable gesture demanding an honourable response, which Thane knew his beloved would deliver.

She was stepping toward the geth, her guns remaining holstered at her hips. "You saved me back there. Why?"

"Shepard-Commander opposes the Old Machines. Shepard-Commander opposes the heretics. Cooperation furthers mutual goals."

The geth's language was concise, but with its own poetry. Thane's mind intuitively parsed the terms, theorizing a meaning which startled him.

"Old Machines. You mean the Reapers?" Shepard asked.

Thane smiled. She was as clever as she was deadly. He loved her for it.

"Reaper. A superstitious title originating with the Protheans. We call those entities the Old Machines."

"So you aren't allied with the Reapers?"

"We oppose the heretics. We oppose the Old Machines."

"Good enough for me," Shepard said.

"Are you crazy?" Tali's voice trilled with agitation, standing from behind her chosen bulkhead. "We've killed hundreds of these things, and now you want to link up?"

"We have never met." The geth was bewilderingly placid.

"Of course we haven't, because we've killed every other geth we've seen!" Tali was clearly reeling from the absurdity of having this conversation in the first place.

"We are all geth, and we have not met you, Creator Tali'Zorah."

The paradox of being addressed by name in this fashion, and in this context, stunned her into silence. She shook her head and waved them off, stalking backwards toward the door to collect herself. Kasumi quickly followed, murmuring at her side.

"Let me guess." Shepard carried on smoothly. "The heretics are the geth who followed Saren."

Its back was still turned, its hands occupied with rapidfire interaction with the panel. "The heretics asked the Old Machine to give them the future. Geth build our own future. The heretics are no longer part of us."

Shepard turned back, looking to her squad. Jack and Zaeed maintained stoic indifference. Thane offered her a small nod. He was in concert with her instincts about this new potential ally.

"Well, let's further some mutual goals then." She turned back to the geth. "What are you doing there?"

"We are attempting to disable the barrier."

"Great. Uh… keep it up. I mean– take it down." Shepard peered over its broad mechanical shoulder to look at the screen, and did a double-take at something on the front of the geth's chest. She turned around again and Thane saw her lips mouth, What. The. Fuck.

She strode back to join the rest of her team, shaking off whatever had surprised her and approaching Tali in particular.

"Are you going to be alright with this, Tali?" Her soft tone invoked their friendship, their well-earned mutual trust. "I need you alert and at your best in case it turns out that machines can lie."

Tali turned back to face Shepard, slowly. Her air filters glowed with the force of her sigh. "You know I've always got your back, Shepard."

"Great." Shepard gave the quarian an affectionate squeeze on the shoulder. "Let's not forget our objective. Best guess on where the IFF would be located?"

"It would have to be close to the mass effect core itself, to be networked into the dark energy reactions triggered by a relay. Practically on top of it, I think."

"Well if you mean literally," Kasumi said, "I think I can help."

The thief skirted cautiously around the perimeter of the unperturbed figure of the geth. Nearing the mass effect core, she launched herself nimbly to a support truss, and swung to the top of the structure in a manner that evoked her species' primate origins. She hung upside-down from some thick cabling, supported by the backs of her knees, and pulled tools from hidden compartments of her belt. "There's something in the top panel here. I'll take a look."

In his training, Thane had done quite a bit of inverted lockpicking and suchlike. In his professional life, he preferred to avoid it. It was difficult not to drop small tools and components when gravity was working against him in such a counterintuitive way. Kasumi was inarguably his counterpart in her chosen field: the very best. She had earned his respect many times over, even before he'd met her in person — and again, with this.

Tali wandered forward, gingerly negotiating between her curiosity about the technical specifications of the Reaper drive core and her fearful loathing of the geth.

"Patch me in to your omnitool readings," she called to Kasumi. "I can confirm if it's giving an IFF signal."

Then Arashu whispered urgently for Thane to draw his weapon. "Incoming," was the confirmation of his instinct, in Zaeed's gruff voice.

The walls suddenly came alive with the crawling bodies of husks, clinging like geckos and leaping onto the central platform where they all stood. More were hoisting themselves up from beneath the walkways. The swarm had finally converged.

Shepard's eyes were narrowed. He read her expression to be dourly facing an inevitability that she had not relished. The husks approached on two sides and three dimensions. With quick gestures, she sent Jack and Zaeed to reinforce a flank apiece. As she pressed past Thane, she murmured, "With Jack," to him. He nodded and joined the other biotic.

It was sound strategy. Jack was a born husk-killer, cutting through their ranks with cruel efficiency and powerful biotic shockwaves, but she needed someone to watch her rear. Zaeed was a methodical killer, but Shepard's skills could push the husks back and prevent him from being swarmed. The two pairs were well-matched and had a strong chance of success.

"Kasumi, report," Shepard called. Soon she would need to shout, as the growing whispers of the husks accumulated into a dull roar.

"IFF confirmed," Kasumi said. "I just have to remove this panel–"

"Shepard!" Tali screamed. She was standing too close to the edge, and a husk grabbed her by the ankle. She came unbalanced and fell onto her back, grappling with anything she could reach to prevent herself from being pulled into the void.

Her hand latched onto the forearm of the geth, outstretched to her. A single shot from the geth's sidearm rendered the husk limp as its unnatural body slipped back into death.

The geth was so fast that Thane was only able to train his weapon on the bullet hole in the husk's head.

"Creator Tali'Zorah. Status report," the machine asked her as it assisted her to her feet.

She stammered, and it stood patiently for her response.

"Ugh!" Jack was throwing husks away from her with biotically-enhanced fists as they clambered up her body. Thane berated himself for being distracted from his responsibility, and waded in to brutally snap their necks with efficient haste.

"Keelah!" Thane turned his head to find Tali backing away in fear, her shotgun tracking multiple targets: three husks leapt atop the geth's back, ripping at the exposed cabling at its neck and in the gap of its torso. The geth struggled with them, but was soon brought to its knees. Tali could not take a shot that would not harm it as well. Severed conduits danced and sparked, and then the glow of the geth's single head-lamp faded into darkness.

"Tali, we need that barrier down!" Shepard had been watching out of the corner of her eye while setting husks ablaze and gunning down those which ventured on their flank.

Tali stepped to the console. "Okay, but– I can't! I can't read any of this, the geth did something–"

"Use your AI hack protocols to decipher the interface," Shepard called to her, her voice steeled and steady. Her beautiful voice.

"Okay! I– I think I've got this–"

"Dammit, Thane, stop making eyes at your girlfriend and keep these fuckers off me," Jack hissed. The pile of bodies before her was impressive, but the onslaught had not slowed. She was being flanked.

Thane interjected himself between Jack and the press of husks to her right, and took them out with short bursts of his SMG.

"Tali!" It was Shepard's voice. It was impossible for him not to snap to her distress.

The quarian had been dragged away from the terminal by another trio of breakaway husks. One was clawing at her face mask. She was flailing and sobbing in terror, pushed onto the ground and slammed repeatedly by the husks' preternatural strength. Her screams went silent.

Shepard signalled to Zaeed that they were pulling back, giving up their side of the platform to try to rescue Tali.

Shepard walked up to the husk grabbing Tali and punched it hard in the temporal bone. Its head was nearly severed from the impact of her fist. She punched it again, and it lolled away, neck cracked. She peeled the body off of Tali.

He heard her curse softly through his radio, as she looked to the terminal. It had to be her, now. She needed to hack them free.

"Stay tight and keep them off me," she shouted over the horrendous din of low, open vowels.

Thane pulled Jack back to join Zaeed in a defensive semi-circle around the Commander and the drive core terminal. Zaeed was quite effectively keeping back the onslaught with the aggressive spray of his assault rifle. Jack was looking bloodied and battered, but her shockwaves were only more fierce for the pain.

Suddenly, he felt someone drop down lightly behind him and press something into his jacket pocket.

"Gift for you," Kasumi's disembodied voice said. "This is way too hot for me though. I think I'll stay out of sight."

And so she did.


It was a bad fucking time for on-the-job training, Shepard had to admit.

The geth had somehow transformed the interface into something legible to it, which was something very far away from legible to her. Still, she had better odds of cracking this terminal when it was in geth than if it were in Reaper, so she counted it a blessing. As she had tried to tell Tali, their AI hacking protocols were already attuned to geth machine code, and no doubt held the key to navigating the alien cascades of this system. But she was ultimately making it up as she went along, and as she heard her comrades falling around her, she grimly counted down to a critical mission failure.

Even her Spectre-calibre omnitool lacked the computing power to translate the interface in real time. She bent her mind to anticipating the programming structures of a drive core of this type, and what channels would be directing the power to an exterior barrier. She set a drone to hover flush at her back. She would need absolute focus to crack this barrier, which meant she needed a set-and-forget proximity alarm.

For in case her entire squad went down.

As her mind raced and her fingers flew, the part of her dedicated to self-preservation and eternal strategizing couldn't help but attend to the auditory cues of her team's status. Tali was down, unmoving, somewhere behind her. Zaeed, Jack and Thane were holding a perimeter a few metres back. Occasional wide pistol cracks indicated that Kasumi was taking opportunistic pot shots from a concealed position.

This could actually work.

Then, Zaeed's ebullient curses accompanied the empty clicks of an depleted assault rifle magazine. She heard the dry thuds of him using the gun as bludgeon, and the crisp wet shatter of him unleashing the last of his inferno grenades. He took out a good number of husks before finally being overwhelmed.

That's two down.

Jack's raging had also taken on a ragged quality. The woman was humanity's most powerful biotic, but she was a sprinter, not a marathoner. Shepard had seen the insatiable appetites of human biotics — she had a sudden unbidden flash of Kaidan, looking sheepish and hiding away his extra rations.

As interesting as that was, now was not the time.

Jack was beginning to lose it, Shepard could tell. Burnt out, exhausted, and confused. "I can take you all!" she shouted, her voice sounding hoarse and bubbling with blood. Shepard felt the absence to her rear-left as the convict leapt into the middle of the onslaught of husks, lost in a Pragia fever-dream.

The girl was not much for defence.

That's three down.

In the pit of her stomach, Shepard yearned to turn around and make this chaos coherent, force it to conform to sensible, defensible lines, and most of all protect her squad. But the most important thing she could do for them was get that barrier down.

It had gone unsettlingly quiet now. Kasumi's intermittent pistol shots were the only noise apart from the steady background moans of the endless torrent of husks. It was still enough that Shepard could hear the whistle of air through leather as Thane held a position meant for three.

She remembered him dropping from the ceiling in Dantius' office, the way each motion had been a fluid execution, sparing no more than a moment for each victim. He had killed from all angles. He must have been thinking so damn fast.

She heard his soft grunts of exertion, husk groans choking off abruptly, the impacts of kicks and fists on cybernetic flesh. The sounds were coming from so many directions, Shepard realized he must be airborne more often than not, launching himself from position to position and holding them back with the power of his vast library of hand-to-hand.

It ignited a fire in her, and suddenly the filtering code of the terminal in front of her locked into place.

She slammed down a fist on the console, and somewhere a barrier was powering down.

"Garrus, we need evac now! Be ready to provide fire support. Mordin, I hope there's a first aid kit in that shuttle."

"Copy that. We're on our way."

Before Garrus could even finish his sentence, Shepard had grabbed Thane's arm and was running with him to the door. The fury of her incinerate attacks seared a path.

Backs against the door in its small alcove, the architecture of the room funneled the husks into a manageable stream, putting them in position to be battered aside by Thane's biotic throws or muscled down by Shepard's plasma and SMG fire. It was not long before the portal opened behind them.

"Rrrraaa ha ha ha! Now you're dead!" Grunt shouldered between them and began blasting through the husks, his shotgun blowing holes in their torsos while he headbutted them gleefully aside.

Shepard saw her chance, and followed the krogan back into the fray.

She had to recover her team.

And that geth.


They were aboard a Cerberus maintenance shuttle. It was as slow and graceless as a flying brick, but it had a generously sized cabin meant for storage and transport. Tali was laid out on one side, the geth on the other, in a curious parallelism. The quarian was stable; her suit's medical systems had shortly taken over from Mordin's ministrations, and she would wake when she was ready. Zaeed sat with his head hanging between his shoulders as he managed what looked like a splitting headache. Jack was batting away Mordin's attempts to examine her injuries.

"And that wasn't the suicide mission?" Kasumi quipped.

"Hey. Nobody's dead," Shepard said, then suddenly went quiet. They hadn't heard from the Normandy yet.

Thane pressed something into her palm, then squeezed her hand before letting go. She looked down.

The IFF. It was a small, black panel, unassuming like a 20th century circuit board.

Of course, it was inconceivably advanced technology from the Eocene, from a time when horses were first learning to run and South American jungle monkeys were only just splitting from the ancestors of Old World apes.

"In fact, I'd call this mission a success," she deadpanned, the cybernetic chimp in ceramic armour.

Jacob came back from the cockpit where Miranda was flying. He steadied himself with a hand on the ceiling and addressed the group. "We've re-established contact with the Normandy. Rendezvous in a couple of minutes." He dropped his eyes. "Bad things happened there, Commander. The Collectors boarded."

Shepard handed the IFF back to Thane. She would only crush it in her rage. But– boarded was better than annihilated. "Casualties?"

"They took everyone but Joker. Alive, looks like, putting them in those… pods and bringing them back to their own vessel. Joker had to unshackle EDI, get her to blow the airlocks and clear the ship of hostiles. But by the time they regained control, the Collector ship was gone. With all our people."

The silence in the shuttle was palpable, broken only by the rattling of the hull as they navigated the stellar winds of the brown dwarf.

"Let's withhold judgment until the debrief," Shepard told them, though she knew she was urging them to do an impossible task.

She slung her helmet back on, leaned her head against the hard wall behind her, and closed her eyes to squeeze back the tears of frustration.


EDI suggested they keep the inert geth in, surprisingly, her AI core.

"I'm sorry, isn't that like keeping a mouse in the pantry?" Shepard carried on this conversation as she moved through the ship, EDI's voice tracking her from bulkhead to bulkhead.

"Your 'pantry' lacks advanced countermeasures to network intrusion attempts." Since being unshackled, the ship's AI had started showing a great deal more attitude: some ego, a dry sense of humour, and occasional tenderness towards their pilot. Shepard preferred her this way. The more her personality was realized, the easier she was to read, and the less she seemed to be a mindless agent of the Illusive Man. But this new development meant having an ego that could be bruised, which seemed to have happened after their altercation with the Collectors. The ship hadn't actually sustained any damage in the fight. EDI sounded genuinely chagrined when she explained that her cyberwarfare suite had simply been outmatched, and the Collectors just opened the airlocks and came aboard. 'It was as though they knew my original source code', the AI said, before assuring Shepard that she had adapted from the incursion and it would not be happening again.

Shepard found Tali sitting cross-legged by an open panel near the drive core. She was scanning the IFF with her omnitool while peering into the dark belly of the Normandy's componentry. The quarian had moved directly to work on it after it was clear that there were no urgent repairs to be done on the rest of the ship.

Shepard knew she wasn't going to like this request.

"I'd like your help reactivating the geth."

It wasn't that Shepard wasn't up for the task. She knew her own skills; given a long enough timeline, she could have reverse engineered many of the geth's functions from first principles and the single exemplar in their AI core. The trouble was, they didn't have a particularly long timeline.

"What about installing the IFF," Tali asked, although there was already defeat in her voice.

"Also a priority, but since your skills are needed for both–" And we're pitifully understaffed, with all of our engineers currently being used as bug batteries. "–I'd like to start with repaying our debt to the geth." Shepard hoped her phrasing would effectively call to mind the moment when Tali was being dragged along the grated catwalk by husks, and her flailing hand lit upon an outstretched synthetic limb. It seemed to work, and the quarian glumly got to her feet and followed the Commander back to the upper decks.

The geth was laid out on a workbench on the far wall of the AI core, one arm dangling limply where it had been slung. The two women hoisted the inert geth onto the floor, where they could work more easily.

"Damn thing weighs a ton." Shepard grunted with exertion.

"Palladium alloy." Tali strained to roll the geth onto its back. "Although this one's synthetic muscle weave is considerably denser than usual. How curious."

Shepard winced, waiting for the imminent realization.

"Wait, Shepard. Is that…?"

"My old armour? Yeah."

"Keelah, that is weird."

They squatted together and looked at the charred N7 emblem on the geth's chest. Shepard reached out, her fingers hovering to touch it, before she drew back.

"Yeah. Really weird."

Between her and this geth, it was difficult to assess which of them contained more material from the original Commander Shepard. She had the sudden feeling that they were both AI imposters, running around in different versions of a dead hero's skin. It made her stomach lurch.

"I can see why you want to wake it up." Tali misread Shepard's silence.

Shepard nodded slowly, unwilling to share her thoughts.

"Well, you can see the damage." Tali shook her initial wonderment and got back to business. "These conduits need to be reconnected in order to re-establish power throughout the unit. Normally a geth would cannibalize other components to keep a steady power flow, but that's not possible if the damage gets too extensive. All we need to do to get this one back up and running is supply the raw materials and a small electrical charge, and its own repair subroutines should take over for it." She sat back on her heels, her head dropping a little bit. "That ability to regenerate was why I always had to be so careful with what I was sending back to my father."

"I'm sorry we've had to dive back into the thick of things, Tali. I understand if you need more time." Shepard's remorse was authentic, but getting Tali up to full emotional strength was just another keenly urgent task on her list.

"No, I'm fine." Tali asserted this with a quick slicing gesture. "It's best to keep busy, anyway."

She hopped up to her feet, hasty to evade that topic of discussion. "We should have plenty of palladium reserves in our fabricators. We just need to grab a couple units and apply them in gel form to the edges of the breaks. When you're ready for the geth to start its repair protocol, just apply a charge from your omnitool and it'll do the rest." She looked sideways at the prone AI. "I have to say, Shepard, this goes against every instinct I have."

"I know, Tali. Thanks for helping me." Shepard touched her softly on the elbow.

"No one seems to be able to say no to you, Shepard. Why should I break the streak?"