Chapter Fifteen
Vigil In The Tombs Of Ilos
A warning to the people, the good and the evil: This is war.
To the soldier, the civilian, the martyr, the victim: This is war.
30 Seconds To Mars: "This Is War"
Chief Castle's Quarters
04:30 hours
Richard Castle drifted awake to find Kate sitting at the foot of the bunk - dressed only in her uniform shirt - searching for her underwear. His first thought upon waking to note how absolutely sexy it was that under her squared away military uniform, she managed to wear relatively expensive black lace. Something he'd noted when he'd removed the scrap of lace from her the night before.
"Well now," He quipped with a naughty-boy grin, "that's a whole new spin for on the floor and give me twenty"
Kate rolled her eyes, but laughed softly, the first genuine mirth she'd experienced since this whole thing began. "Would you scoff at me if I said this was the first time in months that everything felt right with the galaxy?"
"Oh Captain, my Captain," Castle started.
"Is my rank all you see when you look at me?" Kate asked.
"No, I see a strong, passionate woman, after all this time, I'm … I'm still amazed at the depth of your strength, your heart … and your hotness. A mystery I'm never going to solve."
Kate smiled and leaned closer to him, angling in for another kiss. Her lips no sooner brushed his, when the comm system announced itself.
"Captain, CIC," Pressly announced, "we are twenty minutes out from the Mu Relay."
"Understood, CIC," Kate replied, then cut off the comm and turned to give Rick a more solid kiss before reaching for her clothes. "Duty calls, Mr. Castle, I have other weapons to inspect this morning."
"See you in the CIC in twenty," Castle quipped as he rose, naked from the bunk and started for the small shower, one of the few amenities for sharing a bunk in officers country, "unless you'd prefer to conserve water?"
Kate didn't have to think very long about it as Castle added a bit more shimmy to his stride.
"Well, as Captain," she replied, letting the shirt slip off her shoulders, "I should try to set a good example as far as resource conservation is concerned."
SSV Normandy CIC
Twenty-Five Minutes Later
The Normandy slipped closer to the Mu Relay, shutting down the IES system and venting the heat sinks for transit through the relay as they went. By the time anyone would be able to react to the presence of an Alliance warship in the region, they would be long since through the relay and back in silent running. The massive relay station began to spin up its mass effect field as they linked into its network and within seconds the relay slingshot the vessel to its twin in the Pangaea Expanse.
Though Ilos had been an isolated outpost even before the Prothean extinction, the Refuge system and its surrounding star cluster had cut off from the rest of the galaxy for the majority of the past fifty thousand years - much to Liara T'Soni's chagrin. .
Occasionally, a university would organize an expedition to Ilos, but without the Mu Relay, any such expedition would have necessitated a long and arduous series of FTL jumps and multiple stops to discharge drive cores to get there. The long duration of such a trip on its own was enough of a complication, but the prospect of such an extensive trip through the heart of the pirate infested Terminus Systems would have made any such expedition both prohibitively expensive and dangerous enough to give even the most dedicated and adventurous of archaeologists pause.
Kate had been a little self conscious as she and Chief Castle entered the CIC at the same time. Their "shower" had gone a little longer than either of them had anticipated and they may have come out dirtier than when they'd started, but she hoped the "I just got laid" expression she'd only barely managed to hide before stepping out into the CIC told him that she regretted nothing.
Castle joined Beckett in front of the galaxy map, but the visual representation of the system on the holographic display dominating the center of the CIC became juxtaposed in his mind with the Prothean vision of the planet Ilos and its surrounding star system in his mind's eye. The formerly lush garden world it had been at the height of the Prothean Empire was difficult to resolve in his mind with the rust-colored over-oxygenated planet dotted with decaying ruins from two civilizations on the main view screen.
Kate nodded at him, and was about to give the order to enter the system, when the passive sensor array began to wail for attention.
"Multiple signal contacts!" Hastings exclaimed from her station. "Bearing: two four zero! Range one hundred thousand kilometers!"
Hastings' hands flew across her haptic display, and she wasn't liking the information she found there. "Geth capital ship signatures confirmed, Captain, orbiting the second planet."
"Sound general quarters," Kate ordered, "engage the IES system and go to silent running."
"Geth drop ships on descent vector to the planet, Captain," Hastings reported, "pinpointing their landing zone now."
"Any sign we've been detected?" Kate asked.
"Zero aspect change on the geth ships, Captain," Hastings replied after studying her screens, "If they have windows, nobody's looking. I'm reading strange power fluctuations on the surface at their projected L-Z though."
"Mr. Ryan, take us in fast and quiet," Kate ordered. "Lock onto those coordinates."
"Negative on that, Captain," Pressly stated, "nearest L-Z where we can set down and avoid detection is twenty clicks away."
"Find me something closer, Mr Pressly," Kate ordered.
"There is nothing closer, Captain," Pressly noted intensely, "I've looked!"
"Prep the Mako for drop." Kate offered.
"Captain, you'd need at least a hundred meters of open terrain to pull off a drop like that," Pressly pointed out, "the most I can find near Saren's location is twenty."
"I can do it," Ryan stated over the intercom.
"Ryan?" Kate asked, waiting for him to elaborate how he could do what XO Pressly stated wasn't possible.
"I can do it, Captain," Ryan continued, "trust me, I can trim the descent angle enough to get you in there, it'll task the Mako's brakes, but I can get it done."
"Castle, Vakarian, Wrex, T'Soni," Kate ordered after slapping the intercom, "report to the Mako and prep for pinpoint combat drop. Mr. Ryan drop us right on top of that bastard!"
"Aye, Aye, Captain," Ryan replied and began calculating his descent vector.
Shortly after Kate and her drop team were strapped into their seats in the Mako, Ryan assumed the con and the Normandy heeled over and dove for the surface of Ilos. The ship's descent vector locked on the ruins that Saren and his battalion of geth were currently filing into.
When the shriek of Normandy's engines became audible to his ears, Saren looked up he waved the bulk of his force of geth troopers, indoctrinated krogan and armature class walkers into the bunker he'd had his scout force open for them.
"Keep the column moving," he ordered the Krogan warlord who acted as his second, then turned to the nearest geth prime. "Take two squads and two of the armature units. Hold them out here while I secure the conduit. Have the units in the control center set up an ambush in case they get past you."
The prime nodded, issued a series of stuttering chirps and a group split off from the main column of Saren's attack force to set up defensive positions in the ruins. By the time the Mako was ejected from her launch cradle in Normandy's cargo bay, the doors to the bunker were already cycling closed.
It was a tight squeeze, but the Mako managed to drop cleanly into the ruins within sight of the closed doors to the main bunker of the long-abandoned Prothean complex. The breaking thrusters fired and the landing had strained the six heavy tires after they made contact and dug in, but the armored vehicle ground to a halt right on target as the Normandy screamed back upward, toward the blackness of space where the emission sinks could keep her hidden from the geth force tracking her. Ryan knew more than a few tricks to lose them once they cleared atmo.
"We have to get those doors open and get in there before Saren finds the Conduit." Kate stated, glaring at the doors.
"There's no way we're getting through those doors with brute force, Captain." Garrus pointed out.
"Saren found a way to open them," Kate stated, "and so can we."
While Garrus and Beckett went back and forth about the doors to the bunker and what their next move should be, nobody but Liara took notice as Castle had stepped a few paces away from the group, his eyes carefully scanning the length and breadth of the crumbling, lichen and vine encrusted courtyard.
Liara watched him carefully but did not interfere as his gaze swept one way then the next and turned back toward the center of the complex, orienting himself as if studying a map. She was completely unaware that in his mind's eye, Castle saw it's current state mixed with brief flashes of how the complex had appeared fifty thousand years before.
"This way," Castle stated with absolute certainty as he pointed to an archway leading toward the outer courtyard. "There's an elevator to a control center through here."
After a brief battle with the geth Saren had sent to hold them, they managed to find the elevator up to the remains of the control center. Once they'd pacified the minimal geth resistance inside, they filed up the ramp to the upper atrium and gathered around an active console, which Castle and Dr. T'Soni began to study with great interest.
"The system still has power," Liara noted, "it must be running off its own generator."
"This was the control center for the surface level of the complex," Castle stated, his mind's eye seeing things none of the others were privy to, his senses reacting to the distinct biological markers of the Protheans who had once worked there in a way he had never before experienced. "Saren's troops must have sealed the doors to the archive bunker from here after the bulk of his forces went inside to secure the Conduit."
Castle looked over the console, brushed away some of the grime the geth hadn't bothered with and the console began to boot back up.
"I think I've found something," he said before recorded voices from the past began to speak, though the few distinct words that could be heard in the degraded transmissions sounded like complete gibberish to anyone but him.
"... too late..."
"... unable to..."
"... invading fleets..."
"... no escape..."
"Sounds like a message," Garrus pointed out, "but I don't recognize the language."
"It's likely in Prothean," Liara added, her eyes wide with wonder at what she was hearing, "this recording must be fifty thousand years old! No wonder we can't understand it!"
"The message is broken up," Castle said, "but I can make out some of it. It sounds like reports about the reaper invasion."
"The cipher must have transferred an understanding of the Prothean language into his mind," Liara noted, completely missing Kate's arched eyebrow. "Incredible!"
"... not safe... seek refuge... -side the archives..."
"... called Reapers..."
"...the Citadel... overwhelmed...
"...only hope..."
The garbled, fragmented messages droned on for several minutes, then slowly petered out. Castle wondered what it must have been like to have sat in this room and watched as the distress calls rolled in fifty thousand years before. How it must have felt to witness the beginning of the end of their entire civilization. He was drawn from his contemplation of the emotions practically dripping off the walls around him as a different voice suddenly cut in.
"... act of desperation..."
"... the Conduit..."
"... all is lost..."
"What is it saying, Castle?" Kate asked. "Can you make out anything useful?"
"It said something about the Conduit," Castle replied, "but the message archives on this terminal are far too badly degraded to get anything useful. We should get moving before Saren gets to where he's going."
Kate nodded and as they filed out of the room, Castle was chilled to the bone as the last of the degraded messages echoed off the walls behind them.
"... cannot be stopped... cannot be stopped..."
When they returned to the Mako, the massive doors once again stood open, leading down into the lower reaches of the Prothean research archives where Saren had gone. Though the Turian ex-Spectre and the bulk of his force were on foot, they moved at the grinding pace of machines. He had a two hour head start and they would have to move quickly to make up that lost time.
"What do you say we take a ride into the creepy underground bunker?" Kate quipped, hoping to lighten the mood. Though everyone nodded in assent, there was little mirth to be had, especially since the most likely jester among them seemed to be mired in a deep sense of melancholy.
The further the Mako got into the confines of the Prothean complex, the more antsy the entire group became. None of them had envisioned such a large underground complex below what -at first glance- appeared to be nothing more than the remains of a remote archaeological dig site. It became increasingly clear to all of them -Wrex included- that there was more to Ilos than met the eye. Something the Protheans there had apparently wanted kept hidden, even from their own people.
"This is a big place," Wrex rumbled from his seat. "Considering how many geth Saren brought down here with him, I'd have thought he'd at least set an ambush, if only to slow us down."
"Depends on how deep inside he got when he found out," Garrus noted as the Mako continued to drive deeper inside, "or how badly he needs the bulk of his troops to secure what he finds."
As the Mako transferred from one ramp to another, they began to see clusters of coffin-like metallic pods set into the walls, thousands of them in neat, orderly rows, all of them dark.
"What are all of those containers we keep passing?" Kate asked, noting the glassy look in Castle's eyes.
"Stasis pods," he stated, staring ahead blankly. "The Protheans here tried to escape Reaper detection by going into hyper-sleep. But the very pods they depended upon to keep them alive slowly became their graves."
Kate couldn't help but turn and look at the somber tone of Castle's voice, the single tear coursing down his cheek an expression of sorrow for the thousands of lives cut short as they passed through the Prothean archives which now served as a graveyard for the last of the Prothean race.
Her attention was swiftly returned to the task at hand when a proximity alarm began to sound.
"Warning," The Mako's VI stated sharply. "Kinetic barrier directly ahead."
"What the hell!" Kate exclaimed as the emergency brakes automatically slammed on, skidding the Mako to a halt just in front of a Prothean barrier curtain.
"It's a trap!" Garrus barked from his seat at the controls of the Mako's heavy cannon. "Saren must have set an ambush for us after all!"
"Saren is not behind this," Castle noted, Liara nodding in assent, "that's one of the facility's automated defenses, like on Therum."
A door slid open to the right of the Mako as if in invitation, and Castle sensed no malice from the gesture.
"It looks like somebody wants to talk to us," he quipped. "It would be rude not to hear them out."
Kate nodded, and the squad, plus their asari civilian consultant exited the Mako and found the doorway led to an elevator, open and waiting for them. As soon as they stepped inside, the door slid shut and its descent began with a slight jerk, the mechanism clearly unused for millennia.
The elevator door slid open when the lift reached its destination, revealing what appeared to be a massive computer annex - much like the sort known to house the quantum "blue box" for an AI. That appearance seemed to be verified when the terminal lit up and a badly degraded visual avatar gradually resolved in the center of the room.
"You are not Prothean, but you are not machines either," The AI stated in plain unaccented English, "This eventuality was one of many anticipated outcomes after my creators sent the warning through the beacon network. My scans do not indicate the taint of indoctrination in any of your central nervous systems - unlike the other who passed through recently - perhaps there is still hope for this cycle."
"What are you?" Kate asked impatiently. She could almost feel Saren getting farther away with every moment they tarried there.
"I was originally programmed to answer to the designation, Vigil. You are safe here, at least for the short term. I have calculated a statistically high probability that this will change in the near future. If the Reapers are not stopped soon, nowhere will be safe."
"Wait," Kate asked, "how come I can understand you? Why aren't you speaking Prothean?"
"An adaptive language algorithm was incorporated into my original design prior to being installed as this facility's operating system virtual interface," The AI replied. "I have been monitoring your communications since you entered this facility and gathered enough data to translate my output to a format you can comprehend."
"What are you?" Kate asked, relieved she would be able to communicate directly. "Are you some sort of artificial intelligence?"
"I was originally designed as an advanced, non-organic analysis system with personality imprints from Ksad Ishan, Chief Overseer of the Ilos Research Facility. Though I was not intended to be more than virtual presence, I achieved sentience precisely forty-five thousand five hundred years, six months thirty-six days and twenty-four point one two six hours ago."
"Why did you bring us here?" Castle and Beckett asked in near perfect unison.
"You must break a cycle that has repeated itself for millions of years," Vigil replied. "But to do so, you must understand the nature of the threat, or you will make the same mistakes my creators did. The Citadel is the seat of your government, as with the Protheans and every other civilization that came before them. But the Citadel is a trap. An enormous, powerful mass relay, linked to another in Dark Space – the empty void beyond the galaxy's horizon. When this relay is activated, the Reapers will pour through and galactic civilization as you know it will be destroyed."
"How do the Reapers survive in Dark Space?" Liara asked, unable to deny her curiosity.
"My creators had only theories," Vigil replied, "The prevailing one was that the Reapers enter a prolonged state of hibernation between cycles to conserve energy. This allows them to survive the thousands of years necessary for a new organic civilization to rise up from the ashes of the previous extinction. In this state, however, they would be vulnerable. By retreating beyond the edge of the galactic rim, they ensure that no one would accidentally discover them, keeping their existence hidden until the citadel relay is activated."
"How come nobody ever noticed that the Citadel was an inactive mass relay?" Kate asked.
"The reapers are careful to keep the greatest secrets of the Citadel hidden," Vigil replied, "To that end, they created a species of seemingly benign organic caretakers: the Keepers. They maintain the station's most basic functions and enable any species who discovers the Citadel to use it without understanding its technology. This ensures that no organic species will discover the Citadel's true nature until the relay is activated and the Reapers invade."
"The reapers can wipe out the Council and the entire Citadel fleet in single surprise attack!" Garrus exclaimed.
"That was the fate of my creators," Vigil acknowledged. "Their leaders were dead before they even knew they were under attack. The Reapers seized control of the Citadel and through it, the entire mass relay network. Interstellar communication and transportation were suddenly crippled. Every star system in the Empire was cut off from one another. Divided, the Prothean Empire was easy prey for the Reaper fleets."
"If the war was so futile," Kate asked, "why didn't you surrender?"
"No offer of surrender was given," Vigil replied. "The Reapers had a single goal – the annihilation of all advanced organic life. Through our records on the Citadel, they had access to all of their star charts, colony locations, census data, trade routes, even military fleet strength and dispensation. Information is power and the Reapers knew everything about them."
"The Reapers were relentless, brutally efficient and absolutely thorough. Some planets - like the Prothean home world - were reduced to burned out cinders. Others were conquered, indoctrinated, their populations turned into sleeper agents under Reaper control. Taken in as refugees by hidden Prothean enclaves, they betrayed their benefactors to the machines."
"Moving from star system to star system and world by world, they relentlessly advanced until all resistance had been crushed. Within four centuries, every Prothean world was under Reaper control and stripped bare by the indoctrinated slaves. Everything of value – all resources, all technology - was taken."
"Once they were certain that all advanced organic life had been extinguished and all evidence of their existence was wiped away, the Reapers retreated back through the Citadel Relay into Dark Space and sealed it behind them. Only the indoctrinated slaves were left behind. Mindless husks, no longer capable of independent thought, they quickly starved or died of exposure and the genocide of the Prothean species was complete."
"You said you brought me here for a reason," Kate admonished, "what exactly is it that I need to do?"
"Then as now, the Conduit was the key," Vigil stated. "Before the Reapers attacked, my creators were on the cusp of unlocking mass relay technology. Ilos was a top secret research facility. The researchers here had created a small-scale version of a mass relay which linked directly to the Citadel, the hub of the relay network."
"The Conduit isn't a weapon..." Kate began.
"... it's a back door onto the Citadel!" both she and Castle finished in perfect unison.
Liara was fascinated at how perfectly in sync Castle and Beckett were. She had actually been merged with Richard Castle's mind - had experienced his world through his eyes - yet could not boast such a connection, such complete synthesis with him as he seemed to share with the Captain. "Certainly there is a dissertation there..." she thought to herself, "...perhaps after a period of study..." But she shook off the errant thought and returned her focus to the task at hand.
"How did you stay hidden?" Liara asked instead.
"During the chaotic period shortly before the takeover of the Citadel," Vigil replied, "the few official records of this project had been purged from the Citadel's data banks. All personnel then retreated into the shielded archives and this facility went dark. To conserve resources and create the illusion this facility had been long abandoned, they entered cryogenic stasis. I was programmed to monitor the facility and the beacon network, then awaken the staff when the danger had passed."
"We passed thousands of dead pods on our way here," Castle asked, not certain he was going to like the answer, "what happened to them all?"
"The genocide of an entire species was a longer, slower process than my creators had calculated," Vigil stated, regretfully. "Years passed. Decades. Centuries. The Reapers persisted and this facility's energy reserves gradually became depleted. According to contingency programming added to my matrix by Ksad Ishan, I began to disable the life support systems of pods containing non-essential personnel. First the support staff, followed by security, then the civilians. One by one, stasis pods were shut down to conserve power. Eventually, only the stasis pods of the top scientists remained active and even these were dangerously close to failure by the time the Reapers retreated back through the Citadel Relay."
"When the researchers emerged from stasis, only a dozen individuals were left alive, too few to sustain a viable population and realized that the Prothean species was doomed. In spite of this - or perhaps because of it - they vowed to find a way to keep the Reapers from returning. Through a decade-long careful examination of all signal records to and from the Citadel in the weeks prior to the attack, they were able to find a carrier wave sent directly to the Keepers which they later confirmed had served as the key precipitating event."
"Buried in the carrier wave - which had been dismissed by Citadel maintenance as white noise emanating from the nebula surrounding the Citadel - was a root command ordering the Keepers to open the Citadel Relay. Once the scientists had completed their analysis, they used the Conduit to gain access to the Citadel and infected the keepers' central processing system with a virus that wiped out the recognition protocol for the root command, rendering the Keepers unable to recognize the order to open the relay. They have since evolved to respond only to the signals emanating from the Citadel itself, rendering them completely harmless."
"The final direct command from my creators was to monitor all communication frequencies for the Reaper carrier wave and the Citadel's response. When it was again broadcast - two thousand, one hundred and twenty-four point five eight of your years ago - the keepers ignored it, trapping the Reapers in Dark Space."
"What happened to the scientists?" Liara asked.
"The Conduit was a proof of concept prototype," Vigil replied, "and only links to the relay network in one direction. After accessing the Citadel and uploading the virus, it is unlikely that they were able to find sufficient food or water on the station. There is a high statistical probability that they met a slow, grim death."
"If the reapers are trapped in Dark Space, how did Nazara get here?" Kate asked, pointedly. She never in a million years thought she would be interrogating an AI, much less two of them in the span of a few days.
"It is logical to extrapolate," Vigil responded, "that the Reapers would leave one of their number behind after each extinction as a sentinel to pave the way for their eventual return. Like those in dark space, Nazara would have spent the intervening fifty thousand years in a state of hibernation. Periodically it would awaken to analyze the state of the galaxy and when circumstances warranted, send the signal to begin the next purge."
"But this time, when Nazara sent the signal to open the Citadel Relay, nothing happened. The Keepers did not respond and the Reaper sentinel was left with an anomaly its programming had not been designed to account for. Alone, it was forced investigate. During the first one hundred years after it first sent the order, I noted one thousand, two hundred and forty-seven additional broadcasts of the root command."
"Saren may be the most visible of Nazara's agents, but it is unlikely that he was the first. Nazara had likely been analyzing the problem for centuries before coming to the same conclusion my creators did. Once it had identified the cause of the failure, it likely began pursuing it's options to resume control of the situation, using generations of such agents as proxies over hundreds of years seeking a way to gain direct access to the Citadel and now it has found one."
"Saren will use the Conduit to bypass the Citadel's defenses like my creators did. Once there, he will transfer control of the station directly to Nazara, who will override the Citadel's systems, manually open the relay to Dark Space and the cycle of annihilation will begin anew."
"How do we stop them from succeeding?" Kate asked.
"There is a data file in my console," Vigil replied. "Take a copy of it with you to the Citadel. When you reach the master control unit, upload the file to its operating system. It will corrupt the Citadel's security protocols and grant you temporary root control of the station. This will give you a chance to defeat Nazara."
"Wait," Garrus - the member of their party most intimately familiar with the Citadel - interjected, "master control unit? I've never heard of anything like that."
"The master control unit will be Saren's destination as well," Vigil replied. "Follow him through the conduit to the citadel tower and he will lead you there."
"Saddle up people," Kate ordered, "Saren has enough of a head start. Castle, download a copy of that data file and lets get back to the Mako. Move!"
"Saren has not yet reached the conduit," Vigil reported, "I will expend my emergency power reserves to erect barriers and activate the remaining internal defenses in that sector to slow his progress until you have returned to your ground vehicle. There is a one hundred percent chance that this action will result in the termination of my sentience, but if you hurry, it may buy you enough time to effect the outcome. May fortune favor your journey. End of line."
Castle hadn't believed until that very moment that a sythetic could be capable of it, but in his eyes, Vigil's willingness to sacrifice it's own sentience - to save a civilization his creators had never envisioned would replace their own - was an act of true courage. He finished downloading the file to his omni-tool, snapped to full attention and saluted Vigil's now dark, silent console.
"Semper Fi, Vigil. Rest in peace," he stated coolly, then turned on his heel and headed for the lift.
"Ooh rah," Kate whispered just before the lift jerked into motion.
Vigil's act of self-sacrifice had given them a fighting chance to stop the Reaper invasion, but now the race was on.
Author's note: Yesterday was Veteran's day. Today is election day. It is time for everyone in the United States to do their patriotic duty to go out and vote. A lot of good men and women buried beneath white marble in Arlington, France and other places in this country and around the world to both secure and defend our rights to vote.
Honor the fallen.