A/N: Just wanted to throw out a quick 'thank you' to anybody who reads my story. Whether you choose to leave a review or not, your support is still very much appreciated regardless!

In this installment, we shall meet the second of the story's two protagonists

Chapter 2

When an aspiring politician first entered into the interminable labyrinth of Imperial bureaucracy as a Junior Administrator, it was the standard precedent to assign them the jobs that had been deemed too dull or too mundane for high-ranking magistrates. These "bottom of the barrel" commissions could take on many different forms; ranging from simply tedious to outright intolerable, and everywhere in between. On the whole it was agreed that the worst you could possibly get was an assignment which either had no specific expiration date, or provided no payment until the commission was completed. Dertek V'tun was unlucky enough to get both.

"Shuttle is docking with Orbital Station 03 at this time," the automated voice buzzed with its inhuman pleasantry, finally ending over two and half hours of furious silence. "Please clear the shuttle doors and prepare to disembark with the station."

Dertek shot the overhead speaker a murderous look in a vain attempt to silence it; he resorted instead to looking pensively out the side window. From here he could behold the research station in its full glory – or lack thereof. The dull steel chassis, grimy windows, and compact size seemed pathetic and unworthy to one who had set foot upon the Citadel. Dertek felt another surge of anger as his thoughts drifted back to his classmates from the Academy. Some of them were off on real assignments; chairing committees, directing colonies – in short, the things that he was qualified to be going.; but instead he was here, orbiting some backwater frontier world so he could help them dig up a couple of worthless old relics. Dertek's whole body sat as rigid and tense as a statue, his knuckles practically turning white from clenching them so hard for the past hour. He impulsively vaulted himself up and, with as much contempt as he could possibly muster, spat a thick, bloody wad of phlegm onto the floor of the shuttle. His hand jerked to his mouth in shock as he beheld the crimson smear with a start. "My blood?" he blurted stupidly. "How hard was I grinding my teeth?"

A high-pitched beep rang through the cabin, and before Dertek had even figured out what was going on the station airlock hissed and slid open, bringing him face-to-face with a garrulous welcome-wagon of personnel. He counted the seconds as he watched their eyes travel from his face, down to the lump on the floor, and slowly back up again. In seconds their faces slipped from excitement, to confusion, to and finally to a strange mixture of shock, revulsion, and comprehension. Dertek grinned weakly and waved a hand, staunchly determined to proceed as if nothing had happened. "Er…hi there. I'm the new overseer from the Academy. I, uh, presume you were expecting me, yes?"

"We were indeed," came the response as a particularly dour-looking member of the group stepped forward. A tense second passed, in which the researcher seemed to evaluate his new colleague from behind his rounded spectacles, peering intensely up and down Dertek's body as if he were just another specimen brought in for a vivisection. At last his grimace broke, replaced by a massive grin that barely seemed to fit securely on his face. "A pleasure to be working with you." He grasped at Dertek's hand with both of his. "I'm Doctor Zhor Gavrom, the Chief Archaeologist for this project; and you are Mr. V'tun, are you not? Tadosh V'tun, was that it?"

Dertek forced himself to swallow down another wave of anger, although he couldn't really blame the man for his confusion. "I think you're getting a little bit mixed up, sir," Dertek said, trying and failing to keep his voice on an even keel. "Tadosh V'tun is my uncle, the honorable Governor of Fhaldric. I'm afraid I am actually his less famous – but no less capable – nephew."

That last part was especially important to him. Dertek had never quite gotten over the social stigma of growing up as nephew to the renowned Governor V'tun; it still scarred him long after he claimed to have put it behind him. People saw the name 'V'tun' and seemed to immediately associate it with persons of the highest possible echelons of virtue and character. Everything that Dertek said and did had to be superior; his failures, not his successes, were identified and remembered. At first he had hated being pushed all the time. After a while, he learned to just live with it; eventually, he came to enjoy it. He was better than his peers, and he had proved it time and time again in every possible way.

This new development seemed to come as a surprise Zhor; and his face fell a little as he slowly recognized the difference. "I see then. Well," he resumed cautiously, "we were sort of expecting that the honorable Councilor would be here to oversee the rest of our operation…"

Dertek's already drained patience began to wear perilously thin. He folded his arms and drew himself up to his full height, causing him to tower over his comrade. "Well it looks like I'm here instead, doctor – will that be a problem? The Academy certainly didn't seem to think so…" he finished, leaving the threat of Imperial reprisal dangling ominously out in the open.

Zhor took a sizeable step backward, hastily throwing up his hands in defense. "Mr. V'tun, I certainly did not intend to question your capabilities – not at all. However," he continued as he began to regain some of his business like tone, "this is an extremely critical excavation we are working on here. You must forgive me if we perhaps expected a more…senior functionary to be given this assignment."

Now we're finally getting to heart of this thing, Dertek determined. To his disdain, the answers he was getting had only raised a new set of questions. "Backtrack with me for a second, would you doctor? When I was given the dossier for this commission, they told me your team was just digging up some ruins."

Zhor nodded and gave Dertek a theatrical wink. "We were 'just digging up some ruins', Mr. V'tun; and last week, we finally found what we were looking for – which, it turns out, is much more than just another old tomb or some fossils." Zhor abruptly seemed to discover, to his amusement, that their conversation had transpired entirely within the station's airlock. He laughed and cast his hand in an arc cross the chamber. "But this is no place for us to be having this discussion, Mr. V'tun! If you would be so kind as to follow me?"

Dertek walked briskly at Zhor's side, trying his best to keep up with the historian's unforeseen speed. Their pace didn't leave much time for casual observation, but Dertek was already noticing how well-kept the interior seemed compared to the outside; although, whether this disparity in condition actually existed or whether it was just his mind showing him what he wanted to see, he couldn't really tell.

Eventually their route took them past a colossal observation window overlooking the planet below. Zhor slowed their pace down a little and pointed at the view as they passed by. "Have you ever seen Paeon in person before? It's really quite breathtaking."

Dertek had to admit that it was indeed an impressive sight. He had known the basics about Paeon before he arrived, of course. It was an abundantly green and verdant world, with an extra-dense atmosphere which left most of the surface terribly humid and covered in an endless blanket of thick, serpentine tropical jungles. The gravity was fairly standard, the air was rich in carbon and oxygen, and bio-diversity was exceptionally high – the only obstacle preventing large-scale colonization was the lack of clear space and an unfortunate propensity towards aggressive and poisonous life forms. From out in space the planet looked almost like a giant green ball of yarn – or maybe just weeds – with only the rare spot of yellow or brown to suggest that the jungles were being resisted.

"My dossier said that this world has colonies already," Dertek said as more of a question than an assertion. "Do you have any idea what the population is?"

"We only have the official census estimate to go by," Zhor admitted, returning to his original speed now that they had cleared the observation deck. "It's somewhere between twenty and thirty-thousand people in total. We don't know of any major settlements though; they're all spread out in subsistence farms that have been cleared by hand. Our main digging team has been using one of the villages to re-supply," he explained, "but these people don't exactly have a lot to give up. Their generosity has been welcome nonetheless."

The inside of the station was proving to be larger than Dertek had originally thought, and he was beginning to feel genuinely fatigued by the time they reached their apparent destination. Above another set of vacuum-sealed doors the words "Mission Control" had been etched in big, blocky script. The armed soldier standing guard by the door seemed especially out of place here on a non-combatant research station, but by this point Dertek had decided it best to simply drop all presumptions and wait to be told more.

Zhor exchanged a quick salute with his guard. "This guy is with me. Tell Security to write him in for full access to the station records – name 'Dertek V'tun'. That'll be all, soldier. Right inside, if you please."

The station's central command center was already cramped to begin with, and the dozens of researchers, technicians, and engineers all trying to force their way in at once only exacerbated the matter. Dertek collided with one of the scientists and shoved him away angrily, his good humor having been ground down to the nub. The most striking thing about the setup here was that nothing seemed to strike him at all; in terms of design and layout the room was nothing that hadn't been seen on a million different ships and stations before. Several rows of flickering orange computer terminals gave the lighting in the room a strange, almost strobe-like effect. Wondering now if he was going to have a seizure he squinted and redoubled his efforts to catch up to Dr. Gavrom, who had nimbly maneuvered the party down to a dais in the middle of the chamber. A holographic projector had been mounted squarely in the middle, displaying a grainy image of Paeon which seemed to rotate around at surprising velocity.

Zhor tapped out a few quick keystrokes at his terminal, and the holographic image of Paeon seemed to jerk violently and then freeze in place. "Ah, very good!" Zhor nodded. "Now if we can just zoom in a little here…"

The hologram abruptly flickered off and then reappeared, this time displaying what appeared to be a top-down view of a small section of the planet's surface. Zhor withdrew from his terminal and began to pace slowly around the projector. "Now that you are here I suppose that we should fill you in on the whole story," he began with a sigh.

"I read the dossier," Dertek cut in quickly.

"The dossier that you were given by the Academy is inaccurate," Zhor retorted. "Or, well, it was accurate at one point but I'm afraid that the relative scope of what we are attempting to do here has changed."

"I don't understand," Dertek said a little impatiently. "What happened?"

The doctor grinned excitedly at his colleague's confusion. "We started digging, like we were told. And eventually, our digging turned up something quite extraordinary."

He tapped a button at his terminal, and several markers seemed to flicker on the hologram. "At one time we had five different dig-sites; they've all been combined into one at this point. Eighth days ago," he began, finally sensing Dertek's frustration, "our team at Dig Site Three unearthed a large plate of metal, curved like the hull of a starship. The alloys used to fashion it are unknown to us, and it resisted all attempts at adulteration."

Zhor began his frenzied pacing again. "Further excavation revealed that the buried artifact at Dig Site Three actually was a starship; and it was unlike anything we could have imagined. Initial estimates from on the ground placed the ship's length at two-hundred meters – large by any measure, of course. Imagine our surprise when the ship's length kept going at four-hundred meters, then at eight-hundred! When we finally uncovered the entirety of the ship three days ago, the length was placed at just under a mile long."

Dertek bobbled his head automatically and tried to grin, the scientific magnitude of this discovery apparently lost on him. "Oh…well then," he said uncomfortably. "I don't-"

"And that's not all!" Zhor interjected excitedly, his enthusiasm proving to be indefatigable. "Our teams finished performing formal lab dating on the ship; and if our results are to be believed, the ship that we have unearthed must be at least five billion years old."

This seemed to elicit a reaction from Dertek; he shook his head back and forth in silence, as if this new piece of information was too much for him to comprehend at once. After a few moments of trying, he managed to find his voice. "That's insane!" he retorted, his gaze darting back and forth between Zhor and the hologram. "No way – who could have built a ship like that five billion years ago?" he demanded.

Zhor smiled pompously and raised a single finger in response. "That was a question which we were afraid would never be answered. It seems, however, that our archaeologists on the ground have delivered yet again."

Zhor began walking again and signaled for Dertek to follow. "We received a message from our digging teams yesterday, claiming that they had found important information about the origin and function of the artifact. Unfortunately, we have been unable to re-establish a communications link with their camp; we think that the planet's atmosphere must be interfering with our signals. That," Zhor said pointedly, "is where you come in."

Dertek willed himself not to groan, but it was a genuine challenge. "Do I?" he muttered, chewing disdainfully on his words as they left his mouth. "How so?"

"You and I are going to take a team of scientists down to the surface," Zhor explained, already making his way over to the shuttle bay. "We'll meet up with our digging team and help them perform some more advanced analysis on the artifact – and while we're there, hopefully find out what it is they wanted to tell us."

Shuttle rides were already boring enough in Dertek's mind; knowing that he was riding a shuttle down to a humid, tropical jungle planet only made things worse. He spent most of the descent casting long, furtive glances at the planet surface as the jungle rose higher and higher to meet them. Not that he could see much of the surface anyway; Paeon's atmosphere was so thick that it practically obscured the entire planet under its opaque cloud. Eventually he gave up at trying to peer through the fog and resorted to sprawling himself inanimately in his seat. "I hope this shuttle is equipped to land right in the middle of the jungle. Most that I've flown in wouldn't be able to handle the impact."

"Oh, it can't," Zhor assured him cheerfully. "We're going to need to land in a clearing and then walk a few miles to the camp – hope that's okay."

The rapid stream of despondent curses which spewed forth from Dertek's mouth were masked only by the timely popping of the shuttle's heat shield as they forced their way through the atmosphere and down toward the ground below. This was, by far, one of the worst days that Dertek had ever suffered in his entire life; and that was actually saying something. Here he was, stranded on the absolute edge of Prothean space with no salary, no vacation leave, and nobody to talk with but a colorful cast of abrasive, bat-shit insane scientist sycophants. He balled up his fists so tightly that they're practically bled. "How many miles, doctor?" he spat, as if he could somehow intimidate Zhor into landing the shuttle closer.

"Uh…two, maybe closer to three?" Zhor shrugged, appearing to be completely unconcerned with the prospect of walking two to three miles in tropical heat. "It won't take more than half an hour if we hustle," he added in a poorly judged attempt at reassurance.

"Shuttle is touching down at Korlietus settlement, population: three-hundred and seventy-eight," the intercom squawked, the VI comically placing emphasis on all the wrong words. "The exterior temperature is calculated at one-hundred and three standard degrees. Humidity level is high. Please prepare to disembark at this time."

Dertek disembarked himself reluctantly from the shuttle, a wave of heat and moisture rushing up to scald his face as he did so. The shuttle computer, it turned out, wasn't lying about the conditions. Now that he was on the surface, the sheer density of the atmosphere became much more apparent. It was like a heavy fog had rolled in, except in this case the fog was blistering hot and never left. Dertek figured that he could maybe see about four-hundred meters in every direction, at most. Overhead the effect was even stronger; the sky had been entirely replaced by a cover of clouds, which dispensed an eerie glow upon the surface that, if you lived there long enough, might eventually pass for sunlight. Only a few farmhouses were visible from where they stood, but Dertek could immediately pick out the massive air-conditioning units which engulfed their windows.

Zhor was the only one who seemed to observe that something was amiss. "How strange," he mumbled, talking as much to himself as to anyone else. "Something seems wrong here."

"Yeah, I know" Dertek panted, each breath of air feeling instead like a mouthful of water. "This planet is like a damn oven!"

"No, not that – I expected that," Zhor insisted, as oblivious as ever to the continual volleys of cynicism coming from his compatriot. "It's just that there's nobody here. The village looks deserted."

"Maybe they're all inside hiding from the heat," Dertek offered. "You know, like normal people."

Zhor shot this down with a shake of the head. "Not likely. There's no way that the villagers would waste their chance to take advantage of the cool weather – they'd almost certainly be outdoors working today." He turned and determinedly overlooked Dertek's disbelieving stare. "I just don't get it."

"Maybe we'll find out if we get going to the dig site," Dertek tried, not particularly bothering to draw a logical link between the two. The sooner he got this hike over with the better so far as he was concerned, and right now he wasn't in the mood to pull any punches.

"Yes, I suppose you're right," Zhor said unexpectedly. "Let's not waste any more time screwing around. I'll tell the others to move out too."

With varying degrees of enthusiasm and optimism, the party set off into the impenetrable undergrowth. The trail they were following was exceedingly narrow, and at times they were forced to spread out into single-file, each man holding onto the shoulders of those in front of him for support. Dertek could scarcely believe it but, in time, the conditions grew even worse. Their path began to cross over unconquered rivers and bubbling vats of mud. The ground on the whole became wetter and more slippery; more than one member of the team found themselves stepping unwittingly up to their knees in water. It was everything that Dertek imagined it would be and more. By the time they had traveled a mile his whole body had been so fully soaked in water, mud, and sweat that he doubted he even looked Prothean anymore. So focused was he on simply keeping his footing that they were more than halfway there before he realized that the man in front of him was carrying a gun.

"Wait a minute," he blurted suddenly, his patience for these new "discoveries" quickly running out. "What's the gun for? You plan on shooting us if we run, or what?"

The soldier grinned and hefted his gun a little in his hands. "Insurgents, sir. There's been some activity on this planet recently; we need to keep ourselves protected."

"Are you kidding me!" Dertek cried, torn between rage and sheer exasperation. He rounded viciously on his colleague. "Zhor you secretive bastard, why don't you just tell me the whole damn-"

Then, as if cued by some hack playwright, a single shot rang out. Dertek felt as if he were watching from a great distance as the metal slug flew through the air, the brilliant colors of its mass-effect field masking the mathematical lethality it delivered. He couldn't stop himself from grinning a little as the round flew in the most convoluted trail possible, passing over one man's head and through another's armpit until it finally came to a rather anti-climactic rest in the soldier's head.

"Insurgents! Shoot, shoot!"

Dertek watched the whole firefight from his position, pressed as low as he could possibly go into the mud, and water, and blood, and tears. He saw them leap out from behind the trees, pale as devils, cutting their enemies down before they could even figure out what was going on. Some of them, he saw, got hit and went down; some of them, but not most of them. One of his own soldiers dropped hard to the ground next to him, his rifle clattering and sprawling uselessly on the ground. Dertek wanted to yell to him, to tell him to get up and that it wasn't his fault because his enemies had cheated and they weren't normal anyway so he never could have won; but Dertek was too scared that he might be seen and so he kept quiet.

He had no idea how long he laid there for – it felt like an eternity but he knew that it couldn't have been more than a few seconds. He wanted to pretend that he was dead, that he wasn't there but somewhere, anywhere else; alas, his breathing betrayed him. Rough hands grabbed at his muddied shirt, pulling him upright by his nape. The rest of the scientists were still alive, he could see, but some looked like they had taken more of a beating than others. He looked over the expanse of fallen soldiers and hoped that one of them might still be alive somehow, ready to jump up and fight back as if he had never even been shot.

The unknown pair of hands returned, twisting Dertek around and bringing him face to face with his captor; a Prothean like any other, albeit a very tanned and grizzled one. The insurgent's eyes scanned his captive, quickly coming to rest on the unmistakable shape of an Administrator's badge. The insurgent grinned maliciously at the discovery.

"Ah-hah! What do we have here?"