The shuttle's front viewscreen glimmered with the jeweled horizon of the garden world of Aite. Legion had decrypted a distress call while on Heretic Station, which was evidently intercepted and blocked by the heretics from reaching the consensus. A geth cruiser had crash-landed on Aite, and their final transmission was, in Legion's words, "flagged exceptionally urgent." Shepard found the unshackled EDI quite willing to divulge that a Cerberus cell tasked with investigating AI was stationed in the same system.
Shepard's hands relaxed on the shuttle's haptic controls, flying the squad in easy curves to the coordinates of the crashed ship. It was rarely this quiet on the descent. Legion might as well have been cargo, and riding copilot was Thane, master of the companionable silence.
The shuttle jostled in the slipstreams, affected by the planet's larger gravity well despite being propelled in its own mass effect field. Thane swayed with the turns like a meditating cat. He wore his breather at Shepard's urging, because the geth ship was crashed near one of Aite's bodies of water, and EDI had calculated the humidity to be higher than advised thresholds for Kepral's sufferers. At that, he had closed his eyes and prayed a moment, then acquiesced with a bittersweet half-smile.
Shepard was beginning to resent the shot of not-quite-adrenaline that raced through her circulatory system every time she looked at him. It felt so woefully teenaged. She was suspicious of the pleasure it gave her, an entirely un-cynical rush. It was particularly irksome while on a mission, when he was at his predatory best, and there could be no hastening off to her cabin to make something useful of the feeling.
And she had no emotional context for being in love.
She guided the shuttle around a cliffside bend. The geth cruiser was partly submerged in soft sandy earth due to impact and time, and Cerberus techs had left their mark in the forms of hastily constructed struts and prefab labs around the downed vessel. Beyond, the landscape was beautiful: yellow sunlight glinted off the water sea, lending a rich emerald glow to the primitive grasses that populated the banks of young and jagged cliffs.
There was no activity there now. Sensors failed to pick up any humans in the vicinity, although there seemed to be a sub-structure beneath the ship that was impervious to scans. Readings of synthetic life were present, but hummed at a low level that Shepard had never encountered before.
She landed the shuttle and swung out of the cockpit into the passenger compartment. Legion lifted its lamp-head to watch her, and rose to its feet.
"We are experiencing difficulty establishing a connection to local networks," it said. "Ports are closed despite the presence of functioning units. This deviates from geth standard operation. We suspect tampering by Cerberus agents. Immediate intervention is requested."
It sounded legitimately worried, but maybe that was just an anthropocentric projection. Hell, if she couldn't figure out her own feelings, she sure couldn't trust her read on a geth.
"Let's hustle, then," Shepard said, and hopped down from the shuttle onto springy, grassy turf. She wondered if she should be feeling any nostalgia for Mindoir, another human-friendly garden world. She realized with abrupt certainty that she shouldn't. Mindoir was all arid air, dusty roads, and vast fields of grain. Not like this place at all. She glanced at Thane, pleased with herself for the recollection, and wanting to share it with him.
"Alert: open network zone begins at perimeter of geth cruiser," Legion announced. "Cerberus has piggybacked wireless infrastructure on geth network protocols. Ready infiltration countermeasures in case of viral attack."
Shepard nodded, and glanced to Thane. He inclined his head in acknowledgment. Anyone in Shepard's crew knew to keep all active omnitools locked and off-grid while on a mission. Only she and Tali had permission to open ports, and only under carefully controlled conditions. This policy existed for the same reason that Shepard kept her notes on paper in her cabin: having a cyberwarfare suite is well and good for a frigate with an onboard AI to manage it, but Shepard knew too much about cracking omnitools. The hacker cold war and its spiralling ecosystem of backdoors and trojans could pop out with an unexpected new exploit at any time. Better just to lock everyone's tech in a wooden box, so to speak.
But after infiltrating and exploding the heretic stronghold from within, this lone and crippled geth ship seemed quite unintimidating in comparison. After all, Cerberus was here, and their techs' primary innovative talent was finding new gruesome deaths for themselves.
So it was with hubris that the impenetrable Commander Shepard stepped through the threshold of the geth ship.
It was dark, all systems down. The bright sunlight from outside dimmed more quickly than she expected. She took no more than ten steps into the ship before she needed to activate her pistol's torch. Thane left his off. No doubt he was quite comfortable in darkness, but his breather mask would also supply him with wide-band visuals.
Shepard surveyed the scene, which was illuminated by the beam that swung at the angle of her firearm. The geth designers of the low ceiling had no reason to concern themselves with claustrophobia. Every inch of bulkhead was probably jammed with server infrastructure. As she had observed on Heretic Station, passageways in a geth ship were no more than an unfortunate necessity for the occasional manoeuvring of mobile platforms.
Some of those mobile platforms were there, in the trapezoidal chamber just past the airlock. They were definitely not dead, but not a threat either. Sprawled against bulkhead panels, their lamplights flickered, lenses contracting and dilating. Electric pulses crawled across limbs, repair protocols that seemed to have gotten lost. One pair of legs continued its forward march despite its carrier body being horizontal on the floor.
It was eerie enough for her, but it occurred to Shepard that Legion might find it truly disturbing—rather like a first encounter with human husks. She turned to look at it.
Legion had stopped precisely on the threshold, frozen.
"N–n–n– not virus," it said, its vocalizations skipping as if from an overclocked processor. "Network overwhelmed—nature of data—un-pr-ssssss—"
The pitch of Legion's voice dropped like it had been abruptly unplugged. It dropped to its knees and plummeted forward onto the bulkhead.
"Fuck," Shepard said. "We need to get out of here so we can safely open comms and—"
She turned on her heel to stalk towards the door, but she was suddenly hit by a wave of generalized agony. Pain rolled through her, tearing through her insides until it billowed out of her eyes like a raging spirit. She nearly retched.
Thane appeared at her side, a thankfully solid apparition, steadying her with an arm at her waist. She opened her eyes and found herself staring at the floor. She realized she had bent forward, overcome, like a teenage girl with cramps.
"Siha," Thane murmured, concern rasping at his vowels.
Shepard didn't know how to respond, aside from angling her Carnifex at every corner in the room—but no one was there, and her medical exoskeleton didn't register an injury. According to her cloistered tech system, nothing was awry.
She groaned and pulled off her helmet. Her eyes felt so dry. She blinked, hard.
"Siha." His voice was firmer now. His fingers grasped her chin, lifted her face up. He was more forceful than usual. His lips moved, but she couldn't hear him.
She couldn't hear anything, in fact. The whole world had shut up, shut down, gone as silent as an unconfigured sleeper pod. She looked around, unsure what was real.
The geth were real. They were all around her. In fact, she could hear them. She couldn't hear sounds per se, but somehow this quiet was allowing her to hear the geth network. It had been here all along, but the world had just been too damn noisy.
She tilted her head and tried to listen.
Her mind was slammed with a thousand images, with force enough to knock her on her back. Coordinates, spectrographs, endless arithmetic with no discernible goal—she couldn't breathe. She couldn't blink. She clasped her palms over her eyes but she still couldn't close them against the wash of endless data. Make it stop.
Her body hurt so much. It felt punctured, run through with cold metal, held fast and spread prone on some cruel torture rack. Her eyes felt so dry. The pain itself she could shelve, as she had so many times before. The data, though—it flooded through her like shrapnel, shredding her from inside out. Death, destruction… she wasn't sure what she saw. She could feel herself beginning to shut down. She was meat being stretched apart. She was being implanted with unwanted cybernetic parts. She saw war. She saw lost civilizations, falling to the Reapers. Goddamn it, Liara, this wasn't helpful at all.
She rolled to a foetal position, then scrambled herself to hands and knees on the prefab floor of the Eden Prime spaceport. The beacon was destroyed, the mission a failure, but she could still fuck up some geth.
She felt a pistol in her hand. Doggedly, she rose to her feet.
Thane had memorized Shepard's eyes long ago, but it always gave him pleasure to look at them. Now, though, as she pulled her helmet from her head, her eyes held an unnatural glow beyond the red glimmer of her cybernetic retinas. Their hue had undergone a green shift. It was electric, as though something had been activated.
Horror dawned with a slow clench in his gut.
"Siha. Your Cerberus implants. They have been compromised."
She gave no sign of comprehending.
Thane had often thought of his own body as a tool, but it was a sick perversion to see Shepard's body co-opted for someone else's usage.
She abruptly sprang back, twisting on the floor in apparent agony, though no cry left her lips. Thane's heart broke, gripped in futile sympathy. He knelt by her, paralyzed by the need to rescue her, knowing that he dare not open comms until he left the geth ship, and yet unable to leave her side. Every muscle in her body twitched and tensed, fighting off a torturer he could not perceive.
Shepard suddenly rolled to her feet. His soul leapt with hope that she had somehow recovered.
She lifted her gun, pointed at his head, and fired.
It was Amonkira who saved him. The Lord of Hunters snapped his head back and melted his knees. From thence, instinct allowed Thane to kick his feet sideways and execute the evasive leap he had practiced in the dojo since before his long bones had fused. He rolled to cover behind the foot of an angular door. His SMG was already in his hand, placed there with Amonkira's blessing.
From his catalogue of death, Thane could not fathom his next move against his siha. His gun crackled with a sudden fritz of electric energy. Thane had never been on the receiving end of Shepard's devastating overload attack, but it was spectacular. The gun burned so hot that he was forced to release his grip. He stared at the scorched skin of his palm. Amonkira coaxed Thane's biotic barrier to life, replacing his lost kinetic shields.
Suddenly, darkness. Thane's HUD went dead, onboard VIs succumbing to Shepard's vicious hack. Blind and deaf, he was locked in a sensory sarcophagus built by his lover. His wearing of the breather mask, an act of love, was shattered by the inexplicable betrayal. He felt the dark energy pinch of his barrier deflecting a sequence of point-blank pistol shots to the head. He ripped off his mask.
Thane glanced up in time for his inner eyelids to flick shut in response to an incoming ball of flaming plasma. He rolled away, deeper into the belly of the geth ship.
"Legion," Thane murmured urgently into local comms. "Please respond."
The radio was dead, killed by Shepard's first salvo.
She strode boldly in his direction, firing her pistol at unseen enemies, this way and that. He knew he could kill her. Forward approach, check and grab shoulder, arm around throat, grip jaw, single-arm neck-snap. This knowledge was no consolation.
He needed to disarm her, disable her omnitool. It was a nearly impossible task, but killing her was even less of an option.
He moved in low, faster than human eyes could see. He darted around her peripheral vision, vaulted over fallen support struts. Side approach, check and grab shoulder, three-finger jab to disrupt respiration. But she already had him fixed in her sights, slugs from the Carnifex pinging off of geth architecture. He weaved underneath her line of fire. Roundhouse kick to knock the pistol from her hand—except her smooth backwards step evaded him, and she countered with a cryo blast from the other arm.
The cold was crippling. The onset of numbness was so fast that it felt as though the leg were already lost. He leapt backward into the shadows, crouched to warm himself. His species' naturally low body temperature would be a disadvantage, and he had no time.
Her armour loomed above him. Geth lamplights glimmered off the burnished N7 logo on her breast. He could count out the delay in his reaction time as his muscles coiled stiff against the freezing cold.
"Siha, please," he groaned. One numb leg swept out to impact against her greaves, a precise chop at the ankle to destabilize her. It felt like an icicle shattering against glass. Her stumble bought him enough time to recover from the blow and limp away on frozen feet. He found deeper shadows and prayed she would not pursue.
His lungs began to pinch in protest against the gulps of unfiltered air he was mixing into an adrenaline cocktail. Aite's shimmering springtime was full of seaside pollen. The geth ship was damp with ozone.
His mind was as frozen as his body. He knew a thousand ways to take life, but without recourse to those skills, he was bereft. In the pitch black of a geth storage compartment, he took stock.
Had he made the universe a little brighter?
A sighing breath—not as deep or as steady as it would have been, before the Kepral's. He remembered Dantius Towers, and how he had ascended from Kahje's Deep to Earth's heaven, and met an angel of justice. It had all been borrowed time. He would be grateful.
He rose from where he knelt, and stepped forward to his beloved. He held his palms low, open, toward her, like his heart. It would be a good death. Perhaps she was not only a siha, but also a handmaiden of Kalahira, here to usher him to a distant shore with her sublimely fierce touch. He stepped into the beam of light from her firearm.
"Shepard, I love you," he said in his native tongue.
She looked at him, and recognition dawned in her green-glimmering eyes.
Hope dared to bloom in Thane's chest.
Shepard lowered her gun, and jogged toward him with a face full of love and relief. She wrapped her arms around him and sighed at his ear.
"Kaidan," she breathed. "Thank goodness."
Thane squeezed his eyes shut.
Tenderly, he held her close, and stole her consciousness with a deft jab.
Thane sank to the floor with Shepard's limp body. Her armour communicated none of her warmth, did nothing to thaw the frozen ache in his limbs, or still the rattle in his lungs. He bent his head in grief. He had been willing to die, again. Again, she saved him—this time, another man's name on her lips. Perhaps a man with whom she could live out her human lifespan in peace.
He needed to get her out of range of this geth signal.
"Krios-Assassin," said his discarded breather mask.
Thane turned dully toward the mask, rumpled on a small step between this chamber and the next. He saw tiny lights flickering inside: its reboot and repair protocols.
"Krios-Assassin," the mask repeated, in Legion's voice.
Thane slipped out of his jacket, slid Shepard's head from his lap to rest on folded leather. He padded toward his breather.
"Krios-Assassin, you must eliminate the source of the signal to release Shepard-Commander from Overlord."
Thane patched his mask's radio back into his omnitool's onboard comms. Regardless of the planet's atmosphere, he was loath to encase his head in the thing after that experience.
"I read you, Legion. Explain."
"Project Overlord has established tight beam network contact with Shepard-Commander's Cerberus endoarchitecture. Removal from open network zone is insufficient. You must destroy the signal's point of origination."
Thane looked between Shepard and Legion. She wore the relaxed expression of sleep. Legion was still face down on the floor.
"How are you speaking with me?" Thane asked.
"We were able to sequester emergency cognitive reserves in limited-exposure quarantine away from the Overlord data. We are running at 23.4% processing capacity. The Legion platform is presently unrecoverable. We have moved to Turret 2457. We will stand guard over Shepard-Commander's platform."
The ceiling whirred as a turret rotated to point to Thane, then rotated back to watch over the darkness beyond Shepard's prone form.
"What is Overlord?" Thane asked.
He jerked his head back as his radio stuttered through a series of digital chirps and buzzes. After a moment, Legion regained the ability to speak.
"Project Overlord's mandate was to develop a direct means of contact between human neurological function and the geth consensus. Please destroy the signal's point of origination. This geth network cannot accommodate phenomenological data streams. P- please mak-k-k- it stop-p-p—"
A single wall display shimmered to life in cold geth aqua blue. A representation of the cruiser appeared, updated with the hollow cubes of underground Cerberus labs, which sprung up around the bottom of the ship like encrusters. A hexagonal objective marker glowed in contrasting yellow inside the largest square space, deep beneath the belly of the ship.
A mark. A target.
Thane's course of action became mercifully clear.
