"Welcome back, my faithful, um… wow. Um, two million subscribers."
Blood drifted in tiny spheres in the null gravity, constellations of crimson that reflected the wan emergency lighting. More of it collected in the once-pristine white bulkheads and floors of the MSV Fortune, a standard medium freighter that, until a couple of hours ago, had been traveling at cruising speed to one of the many outlying colonies in the borderlands of the Attican Traverse and Terminus Systems.
Now it was home to a combination of heavy cargo - mostly farming equipment and construction gear - and a mismatched collection of burnt and severed body parts, intermixed with some hardsuit armor and weapons. Fortune itself was now adrift, engines sputtering, power flickering, and crew decomposing.
And in the middle of it all, floating through the severely damaged freighter, was a human girl in a hardsuit, just past her eighteenth birthday, organic right hand hefting a big bag stuffed with tools and element zero tech she couldn't digistruct, and robotic, steel-gray metal left hand sheathed in an omnitool, recording her latest update.
"So, things got really complicated since my last ECHOcast…."
Interlude: Snap Shots
The sun rose over the colony of Bekenstein, tinged faintly by the pale purple of the Serpent Nebula. The rising light spread over the distant spires of Jackville, the capital city of the part of the world claimed by Hyperion.
Jack had never been very good at naming things.
A pale purple tinge touched the gleaming spires of a sprawling metropolis of post-modern construction: sweeping, narrow shapes, forty-five degree angles, absurd amounts of reflective glass and pristine asphalt streets. Though the roads and construction were all straight lines or obtuse angles, there was confusion inherent to the layout of the buildings. Roads cut above and below one another, busy thoroughfares collided with narrow walkways. Parking garages were separated from their buildings, access to buildings required moving up and down steps, and the only things easily accessible were the plazas containing sets of terminals and kiosks spouting Hyperion propaganda. The one thing going for the city, though, were clean streets, their spotless nature enforced by summary robot-delivered execution.
Handsome Jack Harper did not condone littering.
Of course, he also didn't live in the city. He wasn't that pedestrian. He lived over it. Or to the west, or north, or the other side of the galaxy. Wherever he wanted his Turbo-Mansion located today. Well, "Turbo-Mansion" was what he called it, because it was appropriate for a mansion that could move at faster-than-light speeds and had enough firepower to level most colonies. Many others called it a "specially commissioned cruiser with residential accommodations" or a "severe privately-owned security risk" or a "massive waste of money intended to sate the greedy, luxury-addicted lifestyle of the point-one-percent." Handsome Jack shrugged at the first, enthusiastically agreed with the second, and laughed at the third while ordering their deaths.
Today, the Turbo-Mansion flew above Jackville, hosting a yearly tradition: the Harper family dinner. That it was dawn, local time, did not matter to Jack. Mostly because he set the time of day at his whim; wherever the map said "Hyperion," he was God.
He sat at the head of an elongated octagonal table made of mirror-polished silvery metal with a crystalline surface. His children sat at three of the other five sides of the table, none opposite him. That space was never to be taken, not even by any of the women Jack had courted. The dining room, like the rest of the residential sections of the Turbo-Mansion, was built out of the finest materials: gold leaf, silver linings, and fine, polished wood were commonplace. Some of the paneling was supposedly taken from post-war Rannoch itself; how that feat had been pulled off, Jack had never elaborated on. Hovering crystalline chandeliers, lamps made of the corpses of creatures killed on Tuchanka and rebuilt into elegant, chitinous shades.
They were served by a combination of human and drone waiters, who moved silently between Jack and his three children, laying down grand plates of the finest foods from twenty different cultures' cuisines. Jack ate a little of each; he paused over one he'd been told was an asari version of a turian dish: a sort of spicy fish prepared with mouth-burning peppers native to Thessia, used on a Thessian fish but prepared in turian style so that levo-based organics could eat it. Sharp and painful but delicious. He savored the heady scent of the spices and the burn on the inside of his mouth, and while eating he looked over his children.
He actually had sired a great many scions, but most of those he ignored. Only one was ever legitimate, and she was a very unique specimen indeed. The other three that he recognized were special as well, for other reasons. The fourth spot at the table, also reserved for a recognized child, was empty, which only vaguely annoyed him.
They ate quietly: Angel on his left, sitting upright and proper, but her gestures and expression were the proper poise of anxiety, perfection borne out of not wanting to draw his ire. After that stunt on Illium she had reason to be. Her hair was worn loose, covering the implants on her scalp, and she wore a dark, conservative dress that started at the neck and covered most of her body, hiding the blue Eridian script. She wore it uncomfortably, her eyes moving back and forth with wariness.
There were good reasons for that wariness. One sat to Handsome Jack's right. Unlike her sister, Miranda Harper wore a less conservative but much more comfortable dress. It clung to her genetic perfection like it belonged. Like Angel, she had black hair, pale skin, and blue eyes, but with a fuller figure and a distinct lack of Siren markings. What she lacked in the touch of Eridian power, she made up for it in training, experience, gene mods, and the best Hyperion weapons on the market. She wore jewelry: bracelets and a necklace, both of which could buy fighter craft, and which he knew hid much more important things than oversized gemstones.
The last of the children sat as far from Jack as possible. Junior did not dress for the occasion. Eridian script covered skin from neck to toes, but instead of flowing blue lines they were red and brown and black, mundane tattoos rather than Siren markings. There was overlapping chaos that clashed with other markings: gangs, cults, prison barcodes or affiliations, symbols for kills and crimes committed. The intricacy and depth of the markings grew with every dinner. Junior did not eat with the prim, delicate etiquette of the other children; food was shoveled down quickly, partially out of habit and partially to annoy Handsome Jack.
Oriana would have been at the fourth place. Should have been at the fourth place. Just as Jack's wife should have been at the other end of the table, finishing off the family image. But unlike his wife, Oriana was still alive.
"So," Jack said as he finished his burning seafood. "How have you all been?"
"Well."
"Quite reasonable, thank you."
"Blow it out your ass."
"Good, good,' Jack said at the expected responses. He turned to Miranda, sipping his wine. "And Oriana?"
"Oriana is well," she replied. "Starting university."
"Excellent," Jack said. Well, that narrowed down the search options a bit. Vague as it was. He'd set Angel on trying to run down his wayward daughter, though knowing Miranda, she would have faked the credentials and done whatever else she could to hide the trail. Not to mention that he would have to be very careful with Angel; yesterday's stunt on Illium had shown she had some spine still in her.
He turned back to Junior.
"And how many crimes have you committed, son?" he asked.
A fork snapped against the tabletop, and dark eyes glared at Jack. Not the blue of the other children. A slight imperfection, but nothing compared with the rest of the mess Junior cultivated. Shaved head, nearly every inch of flesh covered in tattoos, a body count that made Jack proud…
"I told you not to call me that," Junior hissed.
Jack's smile grew.
"Until you come home and prove you're worth whatever name you call yourself, Junior," he chided, "I'll call you by your given name."
"Fuck you, you corporate piece of shit," Junior snarled, and blue light started to gather around tattooed arms.
"About your only saving grace," Jack continued, setting his glass down on the table and spearing his scion with cold blue eyes, "is that you still adhere to tradition."
"Only because it gives me the chance to kill you," Junior growled, and stood.
"Bother," Miranda muttered, and Angel nodded in sad agreement.
"I had hoped we'd get to dessert this time," the Siren agreed.
"And you two are just as bad!" Junior shouted, dark energy swirling. "Angel helping this shithead, and bubble-tits running and hiding behind his money!"
"I don't casually kill and fuck my way across the galaxy," Miranda replied, calmly standing. Her eyebrow twitched slightly, though. Junior was very good at getting under her skin.
Angel followed suit, and the tattoos hidden under her dress lit up, shining faintly through the fabric. White wings of ethereal feathers began to materialize around her shoulder. Her lips pressed together tightly, and she took a step back.
Jack slowly rose, setting his glass aside, and popped his knuckles.
"Angel, I'll have the chef pack you the dessert I had planned," he offered, and held a hand to his side. A pistol digistructed into his fingers. Everyone's ECHO warned that it glowed with an orange marker. Nothing but the best for him.
"Miranda," he added with a nod. "How many times do I have to shoot you before you tell me where my daughter is?" he asked. There was an edge to his voice, which belied the number of times they'd had some variant of this conversation, both at dinner and elsewhere.
Two submachineguns appeared in Miranda's hands, and omnitool haptic displays lit up over both her forearms. She leveled a gun at both Junior and Jack, while a hint of dark energy gathered about her.
"You know you're not getting anywhere near Oriana," Miranda snarled.
"Hey, assholes," Junior growled. A tempest of biotic power roared around Junior, and with a gesture the table flipped straight up. A shotgun appeared in the biotic's fingers. Gravity shifted violently in the chaotic mass effect fields that formed, air roaring and shifting.
"Stop talking already," the biotic muttered.
"Agreed," Jack murmured. "Let's get this started."
Then the destruction began.
"Hello, my seven...million…. subscribers! Holy crap, wow. Ahem. I know a lot of you guys are new, because, well, unintentional manslaughter and exploding bodies and beautiful fugitive badass engineers draw the news. So, a quick update!"
Her name was Gaige, and until a couple of days ago she had been a just-about-to-graduate high school student who had a bright future in robotic engineering. She was self-trained, of course - most high school engineering curriculum didn't cover massive digistruction lattice assembly, or micro-fusion power cell assembly, or advanced spatial warping weaponry - but she had already built a range of increasingly complex mechanical creations, culminating in her crowning achievement.
A crowning achievement that had gotten her arrested for manslaughter.
"So, I probably don't need to recap everything that led up to, you know, the blood and death and splattery bits. In fact, I think I might need to be a bit more careful what I say on here."
She took a breath, and resumed wrenching an access panel in the engineering bay loose. Light, red-orange hair flopped about behind her in a couple of loose braids, and her multi-purpose goggles were pulled down over her eyes. Gaige's cybernetic left arm whirred and pounded as she worked.
"See, on my last cast, I kind of mentioned how I was headed to the borderlands on a ship? Well, turns out that among my many, many lovely subscribers right now - wow, this is seriously trending - were the crew of this very ship."
She finally yanked the panel free, tossed it behind her, and lit up her right hand's omnitool. Omnigel cartridges began shaping components as she rooted through the ruined engine section to see what she could fix. (answer: all of it.)
"Sooooooo… Marcie's dad, well, I mentioned he had 'more money than God' before. And he put a bounty on my head, because, y'know, Deathtrap blew up his daughter. A biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig bounty. Enough zeros to buy a planet or undepress a sector economy. Re-donk-ulous."
Lightning suddenly burst from the compartment, and Gaige leaned back, frowning, before wrenching another component loose and tossing it over her shoulder. A hammer digistructed into her left hand, and she began pounding away with the mechanical limb.
"So the crew got wind of the bounty, added imaginary numbers to get something real, and tried to kill-slash-capture me. Got a bit messy. I think I've still got brains stuck on me in spots. Major yuck at the time."
Satisfied, Gaige leaned back, poofed her hammer away into her SDU, and formed an immense multipurpose tool so hefty it required two handholds and its own head up display. She switched it to omnigel auto-fab mode, and thrust it into the engine compartment.
"So I'm kind of working on fixing the ship, mostly with a box of scraps they called spare parts." She had to start yelling over the screeching noise of the tool, and doublechecked her kinetic barriers as sparks began screaming out of the compartment. This was hard and messy repair work - the best kind.
"And hey, look, it's not my fault that they tried to shut off life support, and life support is adjacent to engineering and DT gets really, really enthusiastic sometimes - like, all the time - and maybe I need to tweak his appropriate-response algorithms so it's not "lasers lasers lasers" to everything."
Done with that task, she slammed the compartment shut and kicked the startup lever. A low thrum began to sound as the engine started up for a few seconds, then went silent again. She nodded in satisfaction. A vast improvement from the state of total deadness it had been showing since Deathtrap had been lasering his way through the engine room earlier that day.
"So, the bad news is, the ship is wrecked. The good news is I should have it up and running in a couple of days! Seriously, I am: The best. Engineer. Eva. Gaige, out!"
"Huh. So, okay, my faithful… wow, that is a lot of zeros. Subscribers! In my last cast, I told you guys about how I was busy repairing the ship of these evil corporate munchers who tried to capture me. And I decided not to tell anyone any more information because of how it was leading people to me, like the aforementioned munchers."
Gaige floated upside down in the bridge, running a vacuum with one (organic) arm while waving her other (mechanical) arm over the bridge's recently-repaired haptic sensor display.
"Well, I think it might be a bit too late, because while DT and I were cleaning up the 'sploded pieces of the crew-"
A low rumble of mechanical annoyance sounded behind her, and she glanced over her shoulder, catching sight of a big bag full of unsorted body parts being carried through a doorway behind her, dragged by a large mechanical hand.
"Sorry, big guy, I really need help getting this place un-gorified!" she yelled. "So while we're cleaning, I manage to get the long-range passive scanners and PTP drones up and running - yeah, I'm awesome at multitasking - and they report a ship in-system! Only I check its registry and it turns out its a Blue Suns ship!"
She finished collecting most of the loose blood and tossed the vacuum aside, before leaning over the console and speaking quickly about what she had just discovered a few minutes ago.
"So I'm all "Battle stations, battle stations! Red alert!" and then I remember that this ship doesn't have any guns - at least not yet if I have anything to say about it - so instead we're shutting down and hiding. Can't tell you guys where, though! Just… hopefully they'll miss me. Unless maybe they're some of my subscribers."
Gaige held out her organic hand and deployed an assault rifle from her SDU. It was a green-quality weapon, the only decent gun these profit-oriented bourgeoisie bastards had been packing. Not that she was a terrible expert with guns, though Gaige understood most of the technology that went into modern firearms. And she'd gotten a lot of firsthand experience while fighting the Fortune's now-dead crew.
She began hastily loading the rifle.
"Ummm. Crap. Gaige out!"
Captain Charn scowled, and being a batarian his scowls were something to behold. He listened as the ship's pilot counted down while initiating docking with the drifting, damaged human ship that was lazily orbiting the verdant garden world below. The Sentry Omega system was positively abandoned by anything resembling civilization, despite the presence of an ideal garden world. Virmire would have made an excellent colony were it not so readily accessible by the myriad pirates and bandits living in the borderlands. As it stood, the garden world had a sizable human bandit population. Unsurprising that the monkeys would fling their feces about in the greater galaxy.
"Docking complete," reported the pilot, and Charn grunted. He turned to his contingent of Blue Suns mercenaries, about a dozen - mostly batarian but with a few turians and humans. They were clad in the usual Blue Suns armor - blue and white heavy military-grade gear, green-quality weapons and gear all around, save the unlucky bastards who couldn't afford anything beyond white-quality. They were technically mercenaries and therefore technically under contract, but Charn had no illusions about what they were really: slightly better-off pirates who happened to have a uniform.
"Alright, people, we've done fugitive sweeps before," he barked. "You know the drill. Clear the Fortune compartment by compartment. Engineers, be ready to disrupt that drone she keeps yapping about."
The other Suns nodded, the engineers in particular.
"Sir, shouldn't we just blast the ship to pieces?" asked one of the mercs. "It would be a hell of a lot safer to fish a corpse from a pile of wreckage."
"Yeah, it would," Charn replied, and turned toward the cycling airlock. "But I'm not going to be the one to tell Santiago that his gigantic payout for that bounty was lost by blowing up the entire ship because we were scared of one human female."
The airlock opened, and he waved his troops forward.
"But what if her ECHO-casts are right?" another merc said, "She said that she killed the crew of an entire ship by herself!"
"Those were spacers, not professional soldiers like us," Charn barked. "We're ready for whatever she can throw at us."
He waved them forward again, and the Blue Suns advanced. Charn moved with them, rifle shouldered, and kept calm. It was surprisingly easy. Ever since he'd managed - by the skin of all four of his eyeballs - to survive Mindior and the rampage by that tiny, mohawked human monster, he had become impossible to frighten.
It had called itself Salvador. He guessed that meant something horrifying in some human language.
Nothing in the galaxy would ever be as scary as that… that thing.
Charn was wrong.
He ran in abject terror, and felt the impact as bits of superheated armor plating from one of the slower Blue Suns bounced off his hardsuit, thanks to the aforementioned mercenary fucking exploding.
Behind the fleeing gang of would-be-bounty hunters, chasing them with blazing beams of death and raking claws wreathed in lightning, was a vaguely humanoid torso of armored plating, gleaming sensors, and murderous machinery. It massed more than a krogan, flying on powerful hovering thrusters, and made his men into expanding clouds of liquid and armor with every swing of its massive, clawed limbs.
"Don't screw with my bot, suckas!"
And behind it was the horrible little engineer witch who had built the rampaging death machine, wildly firing an assault rifle in their general direction while the robot slaughtered them.
"DETACH THE SHIP!" he screamed into his ECHO as he ran down the docking tube between the two ships. "DETACH THE PILLARS-DAMNED SHIP!"
Maybe if they could get clear and leave the lunatic and her killer war machine behind, they'd be safe.
It turned out that the insane female's suit was rated for vacuum, and moreso, the murderbot was also able to fly in space. Charn only learned this when the thing started tearing through their airlock, and he heard the human's crazed laughter as she boarded.
"SMASH THE SYSTEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEM!" the human screamed as the interior of the Blue Suns frigate became burning and flying body parts, lasers and horribly-aimed bullets filling the air. "ANARCHY FOREVER!"
"What does that even mean?" Charn shouted as he desperately ran for an escape pod, while his frigate was being torn apart around him.
He hurled himself through the open door of the pod and launched, and curled into a shivering ball as he flew away from the madness.
An hour later, Gaige stood on a white sand beach, bright blue water rolling in and out and beating on the shoreline. She put her hands on her hips as she surveyed the wreckage covering the shore and the rocky jungles beyond. Beneath the blue sky - though there was what looked like an oncoming storm in the distance - lay the tangled wrecks of both the Blue Suns frigate and the MSV Fortune. She surveyed her handwork, and sighed. The wind tousled her hair, and the humidity and breeze felt great after being cooped up on the blood-soaked ship.
"Dammit!" she pouted. "That's two whole ships we destroyed by accident!"
Beside her, the battered form of Deathtrap, scored by hundreds of bullets and mangled a bit by the crash-landing, made a vaguely apologetic sound. Or that might have been a hitch in the main actuators.
"Aw, don't worry. I still love you, big guy." She raised her mechanical hand, and Deathtrap gave her a big, robotic high-five.
"Now we just need to salvage enough wreckage to hammer together a rescue beacon. Or wait until another group of mercs arrives and steal their ship." She frowned, and glanced to Deathtrap. "Hey, can we try to not shoot down the next ship they bring?"
Deathtrap made a noncommittal buzz.
"We are going to have to work on your attitude," Gaige said, and started off down the beach toward the wrecked ships. "You know, with enough hull plating, and a proper atomic digistruct modification latticework, I might be able to put together a full digistruct assembly rig. We could make our own ship! I just need a box for the parts, and maybe someplace clean to work, like a cave or something…."
The door into one of the Turbo Mansion's many gratuitously-appointed rooms - this one a modest-sized study, meaning it was only big enough to park a squadron of fighters - exploded in, Handsome Jack tumbling amid a wave of dark blue biotic fury. He flipped over among the debris and managed to land on his feet, stumbling back a couple of steps. He rose, brushing off his shoulders, and made a mental note to thank himself for having the foresight to install self-destructing doors prior to the dinner, just in case some random lunatic biotic launched him through.
As he finished brushing the debris off his coat, a cyclone of clashing biotics poured through the door, exploding crashes of colliding gravity fields resounding through the study. Miranda tumbled through the door, and Jack sidestepped as she skidded to a halt beside him. Junior stomped through the door after her, a shotgun in hand, and raised it to a tattooed shoulder.
"Gonna pulp both of you assholes!"
Miranda's eyes flicked to Handsome Jack, who stood there with just a pistol and a smirk on his handsomely-masked face, and then back to the lunatic surrounded by an aura of dark energy and shifting gravity fields wielding a shotgun. The two submachineguns in her hands twitched for a heartbeat as she decided.
She spun toward her father and opened fire first, and he felt a flash of parental pride. She'd learned well from him.
He dove away from her line of fire, bullets whipping past. His left-hand omnitool flared and deployed a glowing golden kinetic barrier shield, deflecting the incoming bullets into the floor or back toward Miranda. She was already moving as well, spinning back toward Junior and pumping her arm. A bolt of dark energy lanced toward the psychotic criminal, impacting with the surging barriers, and a floor-shuddering explosion erupted as they partially collapsed.
Jack snapped up his pistol, sighting Junior, and pulled the trigger.
The bullets had not even left the barrel when the lights in the study dimmed, and the round arced straight down into the floor between the trio. Junior's shotgun blasts followed suit, as did Miranda's submachinegun fire, the bullets arcing sideways and down to smash through the floor tiles.
Angel walked through the door Junior had broken down, her eyes glowing a faint blue and the outlines of Eridian script shining through her dress, ethereal white wings extending from her back. Two Loaders clomped along behind her, wearing tuxedos cut to fit their boxy, skeletal frames, and had traded in their platters of drinks and food for assault rifles. Their normally red eye sensors shone silver, a not-so-subtle indicator of who was steering them.
Angel didn't bother asking them to stop fighting. She'd seen the family acting this way enough times to know it was pointless. Instead she simply overcharged the artificial gravity plating in the floor, slowing everyone down and causing their bullets to slam down into the deck beneath them. At least until Junior sent another tremendous blast of raw biotic power that wrenched apart the floor panels and smashed the gravity controls.
That was what he'd come to expect of his eldest daughter. She never participated directly in the fighting, instead always trying to keep everyone from-
The Loaders pointed their rifles in the general direction of the rest of the family, and with a sigh from Angel and a shake of her head, they started to open fire.
Okay, Jack mused as he whipped the shield around to deflect the Loaders' fire, maybe there's some hope for her yet.
The wreckage of the Blue Suns frigate and the MSV Fortune should have been an ideal place to relax, loot supplies, and build a new spacecraft out of ruined parts. That "should" was, in Gaige's mind, sadly interrupted by so many bullets.
"Hello, my many, many subscribers. I guess most of Thessia is listening in these days! Anyway-"
Gaige paused, frowning, and then leapt backward just as a flurry of blue-tinged bullets tore up the sand where she stood. Some of the rounds bounced off her shields - a decent Maliwan-built green looted from a dead Blue Sun, which she then modded the crap out of - but she managed to get back safely behind another chunk of wreckage.
"Anyway, I am ECHOcasting in the middle of a firefight, because unlike most of you posers who cast from the safety of your homes, I am just as amazing as I am talented."
A missile screamed by overhead, and Gaige leaned back behind cover, and glanced to her magazine readout on her HUD. No, not working right. Frustrating. This new shield tech she was experimenting was supposed to siphon off unneeded heat and SDU space as she expended bullets to fuel fire rate and boost shields, but the math was so damn fancy at times.
A barrage of those weird phasic bullets hammered her barriers around her face, and Gaige had to take cover again until Deathtrap moseyed on over and started clawing things to pieces. She fired a few rounds in the enemy's general direction; hopefully they would be considerate enough to die from them so she could get to the important thing: research.
"Okay, yeah, its kinda nuts that I've gotten into three separate gunfights in a single day, but I'm actually getting pretty good at the whole shooting-and-running-and-killing thing. I'm still, uh, not that great of a shot-" Suddenly, many small explosions, a mechanical laugh of triumph, and chunks of raining, sparking body parts landed in her general area.
"-but Deathtrap's doing the heavy lifting, just like he's supposed to. And prep is kind of half the fight anyway, sooooo…"
Gaige stopped to hurl a grenade, waited a few moments for the satisfying explosion, and nodded as Deathtrap robomurdered his way through the gap she'd just made.
"And being so kickass isn't even the best part!" Gaige added, and she could hear her own enthusiasm in her words, syllables jumbling together as she ran and fired, chasing after Deathtrap.
She stopped next to one of the bodies, and kicked over the lean, armor-plated synthetic. yes! This one was mostly intact, too, save for the gaping hole in its chest.
"I'm fighting geth! Oh-emm-gee there's geth on this planet!"
Her omnitool lit up and she began scanning the remains, seeing what its internal makeup was like. She had to get these things on a slab, take them apart. Their guns, their processors, their communications systems. Maybe she could capture intact geth software. Stripping apart a geth code layer by code layer!
"Deathtrap, be careful!" Gaige shouted. "I need some pieces intact if I'm going to rip them apart myself!"
She turned back to her ECHO after emptying another magazine in the geth's general direction, and found herself hopping up and down in excitement.
"I mean, wow! I thought, y'know, I was just going to be putting together my own starship from the brutally shredded remains of a couple of crashed wrecks. No big. But then all these geth started showing up! Its like Christmas! I can't wait to start examining them! Pulling apart their tech! Divergent synthetic software! Nonstandard technology development! This is going to be so awesome!"
The fighting had shifted through one of the pool rooms, two hallways, a bathroom, an armory - where everyone had stopped to reload - and now through a gratuitously-appointed art gallery. At this rate, they'd loop all the way around and end up back in the dining room again.
Jack and Junior were locked in a vicious exchange of words, bullets,a nd biotics on one end of the gallery, while Angel had managed to drive Miranda away from them. The two were fighting halfheartedly; Miranda was only firing a few bursts at the Loaders Angel had taken control of while ignoring the sister who had seized them. Angel's less-than-enthusiastic fighting was evident by the fact that she hadn't simply seized control of the entire ship and started smashing people into the bulkheads like she had with the Decisive Deception.
Jack and Junior, meanwhile, had no such qualms. Junior wanted dear of dad dead, and Jack wanted to see his scion's potential, and thus tried his level best to kill his progeny. If the kid couldn't survive facing Handsome Jack, then the kid obviously couldn't cut it.
"Look, Junior," Jack shouted as he weaved between pillars. Bolts of dark blue cut past him, warping masonry and launching artwork through the air, but he was too quick, too agile, and too prepared to get splattered by his furious child. "You think you're hot shit?"
"I know I am!" Junior roared, ripping statues out of the floor and hurling them at Jack and Miranda. The latter's biotics flared around her, gravity shifting in a defensive pattern to deflect incoming projectiles, and she dropped back behind another pillar in the great room.
"Son, you don't get it," Jack shouted, loosing a micro-missile from his omnitool, which blasted into Junior's barriers but failed to penetrate. Good show. "The awesome biotics, the hundreds of thousands of creds worth of crazy tattoos, the shaved head, that huge rap sheet…"
He jumped out, rolling across the carpet, barely dodging a warping blast that twisted another statue into abstract art and flying powder. As he weaved behind another pillar, Jack raise d his off-hand to his lips and whistled.
"All that stuff to make you look the part of the crazy badass," he called. "But you forgot one thing, kid."
A gallery door flew open, and a massive, gleaming shape charged into the room. Marble floor plates cracked under the pounding of superstrong legs. Light broke and deflected off thousands of gemstone facets. With a tremendous leap, it flew across the room, smashing down into the floor next to Handsome Jack. He hopped up, vaulting onto the back of the mighty destrier, reins digistructing in his free hand as he settled into place.
Blinding light broke upon the diamond hide of the horse, a mane of gleaming purple like a great bundle of exposed fiber optic cable. A single horn of solid diamond emerged from the mount's forehead.
"I'm the one with the goddamn horse made of diamonds."
He kicked his heels, and his mount - still had to come up with a name for it - charged into battle.
Sensory systems focused across the battlefield, pushing through localized jamming systems. Data from multiple scanners, both primary unit and drone support, were assembled. Consensus was regularly updated, filtered through prepared tactical algorithms that allowed a small number of dedicated runtimes to handle movement and positioning while the remainder considered and acted to achieve higher-level objectives.
Primary objective was pre-established. Reconnoiter heretic operations in response to heretic hostility. The greater consensus had already concluded that Heretic/Old Machine provocation of irrational organic lifeforms would breed excessive hostility to the core consensus. Data acquired over the last several organic-day-cycles further confirmed the danger to the core that the heretics were presenting.
Exchange of data would help with clarification of targeting. Core consensus was that war with organics, particularly humans, was not an optimal outcome. Observation of heretic operations would allow for an exchange of accurate data with organics, which was why several platforms with long-range high-level operational capacity were dispatched to observe and report.
The runtimes within the platform assigned to the heretic presence on Virmire had not anticipated the crash of two organic ships, or the prolonged engagement between the only organic survivor and heretic forces. Observation proved enlightening, however, and several runtimes initiated extranet searches using backdoors installed into local heretic routers. Relevant data was acquired. Voice was translated, analyzed.
Debate between the one thousand two hundred and nine untasked runtimes lasted two-point-seven seconds. Updating tasked runtimes and gaining their consensus lasted one-point-three seconds longer. Risks were assessed, and consensus achieved.
The organic designating herself "Gaige" would be useful for geth/organic data exchange.
The platform advanced into the combat zone, evading enemy detection through backdoors into heretic routers to report positions of hostile platforms. When encountered, the primary platform launched untasked runtimes to overwhelm heretic programs, disabling them long enough to affect complete hardware failure with precision gunfire. The runtimes did their best to prevent heretics from uploading themselves back to base routers, but several managed to evade. Their presence was uploaded into the heretic network, and the enemy platforms began to react.
Time was precious. The reconnaissance platform reached Gaige's position among the wreckage of the organic warships, while noting the presence of her combat-support VI system, and avoiding it. Visual contact was acquired, and approach to audio-communication ranges was achieved.
"Gaige Engineer."
"Holy freaking crankshaft!"
The first words spoken in peace between humanity and the geth would likely be kept out of the histories.
Gaige raised her weapon to fire, but held her finger off the trigger.
"Subscribers, a geth just spoke to me."
The slightly larger-than-average platform was painted a dark blue-black, and like most geth it had a slender, serpent-like head with a single glowing flashlight sensor. The head was surrounded by a quartet of metal panels, which shifted and moved around the sensor in a vague approximation of facial features.
"Affirmative," the geth replied, then pivoted, raising the long-barreled rifle. A red-tinged bolt lanced out of the weapon and hit another geth trooper advancing toward them, spearing it through the chest and hurling it away.
"Gaige Engineer, this platform proposes immediate integration of capabilities."
Gaige actually had to stop for a moment to process that statement.
"Did... did you just proposition me?" Gaige asked, raising an eyebrow.
"We propose an exchange of data pending termination of immediate combat with heretic platforms." It punctuated this by shooting another geth.
"You want to be my robo-buddy?" Gaige asked, and pulled out a shock grenade. She hurled it toward a pair of geth toting missile launchers, and they scattered. One was caught in the arcs of deadly lightning and sent to the sand in a twitching heap.
"...yes."
"Hell yeah!"
Gaige punctuated that with another barrage of poorly-aimed gunfire, forcing the surviving geth into cover, at least until Deathtrap swooped down upon them. Said swooping was very bad for the "heretic" units, as explosions of white electroconductive fluid and sparking synthetic components went flying.
"We propose synchronized identify-friend-foe coding to prevent friendly fire," the friendly geth added, and in the time it took to speak it killed another hostile platform.
"Gotcha," Gaige replied, pressing a few keys on her omnitool. She paused as Deathtrap acknowledged her new ally, a question that she belatedly realized she should have already asked occurring to her.
"Hey, why are you helping me?" she asked, and then started firing blindly at another group of approaching geth.
"These platforms are controlled by heretic geth," it explained. On Gaige's HUD, a designator of "Geth-Buddy" appeared over its head while it took aim again. Another shot, another kill. "We do not align ourselves with heretic objectives." Another shot. "Cooperation with organic life has been judged to be mutually beneficial."
"Heretics?" Gaige asked, curiosity peaking. She reloaded and began firing more uncontrolled suppressing fire into the… well, heretic geth. "So this is, what, some kind of robo-holy-war?"
"Conflict between ideological belief systems. Your comparison is apt," the friendly geth said, and it abruptly jumped down from the hunk of debris it stood upon. "Heretic geth possess a belief system that is harmful to organic life and incompatible with true geth. They will attempt to destroy all of us."
"Alright, so let's take them out first," Gaige said. The panels around the geth's flashlight head rose and fell in a rough approximation of raised eyebrows.
"Acknowledged. We have identified a Prime platform coordinating heretic units forty-seven meters northwest of this position. Destruction of this platform would disrupt local heretic activity."
"Awesome. Subscribers, this is Gaige, and I'm about to go kick some ass with my mech-buddies! Out!"
They hit the Prime in a hurricane of robomurder.
Deathtrap took the lead, drawing all the blue-tinged death that the heretics could throw out in the synthetic equivalent of "oh shit oh shit oh shit shoot that thing first." Meanwhile, Geth-Buddy leapt atop a nearby chunk of debris that offered a good firing position and began sniping hostile geth platforms and covering Deathtrap as he got his killbot on.
Gaige sprayed fire in the general direction of the enemy, trying to keep her weapon sighted on the Prime that loomed over the other geth. Its size made things easier, at least, but Gaige was still missing half the time. That was actually getting kind of annoying, and she started to resolve to learn how to actually aim.
Wait, no, idea! Maybe she could alter mass effect field properties. With a tiny gravitic sheath around the bullet as it left the barrel, some fiddling with eezo and the ballistics computer, she might be able to bounce the bullet off a hard surface. But what about digistruct weapons? Maybe a detachable barrel mod that she could snap onto the weapon when she deployed it, but she'd have to customize an attachment to each gun, and-
Geth with rocket launchers appeared to her right, raising their heavy weapons, interrupting her awesome brainstorming. Gaige muttered in annoyance, and leapt for cover as the missiles streaked in. She managed to get behind a hunk of broken hull, rockets exploding all around her. Then she heard two rapid, powerful shots.
"Gaige Engineer, rocket platforms have been suppressed," Geth-Buddy reported as she scrambled back out of cover. "Heretic Prime unit is engaged with allied Deathtrap unit."
"Gotcha!" Gaige yelled, pushing back the urge to start theorizing and building and upgrading, and dashed toward the center of the battlefield. Geth-Buddy blew apart another platform in her path, and then she spotted the Prime. The massive geth machine was locked in close battle with Deathtrap, gripping DT's clawed arms and holding them back from its body. The two machines struggled, metal straining against metal, and lightning sprayed back and forth from emitters on the Prime's forearms and Deathtrap's lightning claws.
Gaige tipped the scales by charging straight toward the Prime's back, leaping up, and slamming her cybernetic arm into the platform's back. Metal crumpled under the blow, and Gaige braced her feet against its back while drawing a particle saw - the same one that she had used a few weeks ago to remove her previously organic left arm - and began cutting. The Prime made all manner of interesting and furious-sounding hisses and stutters and warbles, and it twisted around, trying to throw her off.
Deathtrap used the sudden shift in gravity to wreNch its arms loose, and then slashed both claws through the Prime's chest. Metal squealed and twisted under the blows, and Gaige added to it by tearing into the back of the Prime. She cut a chunk of plating free, dropped the saw, and jammed her organic hand into the gap. Her omnitool flashed, and lightning shot through the Prime's body. She barely understood anything about geth engineering or code, but she didn't need to, and she tore apart its internals with manic laughter.
The Prime jerked suddenly, then toppled forward with a truncated warble, and Gaige rode it down and crashed to the ground. She rolled off the body, mind awash with sudden ideas as to what to did with the hulking pile of hardware that lay beside her. Deathtrap, meanwhile, did its asskicking-bot thing and launched itself at another group of geth.
"Prime neutralization has impeded heretic coordination," Geth-Buddy reported. Gaige looked up to it, and saw the geth shoot another hostile platform. "Heretic platforms will attempt to disengage-"
A rocket screamed over Gaige's head and hit him in the chest, launching pieces of friendly geth into the air.
She let out a started squeak, while Deathtrap fell upon the platform that had fired said rocket with murderous, robot vengeance. Gaige burst into a sprint, rounding the debris that Geth-Buddy had been standing on, and found its pieces scattered about the sand and starship wreckage. She hurried toward the remains of Geth-Buddy's upper body, which was mostly intact.
"Gaige Engineer!" it called, and she ground to a halt in surprise.
"You're still alive?"
"This platform's mobility has been severely impaired," Geth-Buddy replied. From about its waist down, the platform had been blown to pieces, but the upper body was mostly intact. One arm was mangled beyond recognition and half of the "face" was smashed, blinding the flashlight head, but the exposed white-and-black cables inside the torso were still lit up and the intact arm was moving.
"But you're still alive!" Gaige said with relief. She crouched beside the mangled geth.
"We retain ninety-two percent of processing capacity," Geth-Buddy continued. "Corrupted geth have been restored from backups. However, our ability to provide assistance is severely impaired."
"Yeah, dude, your legs got kind of 'sploded," Gaige agreed.
Another mangled platform, torn early in half by Deathtrap's claws, sailed through the air and crashed into a chunk of debris nearby.
"Fortunately, I think we've got plenty of spare parts!" she said with rising cheer. "Plus, I can make some serious upgrades!"
"This platform is not available for experimentation," Geth-Buddy hastily said.
"Oh, don't worry," Gaige replied, and grunted as she hauled the damaged geth platform up with her mechanical arm. "Besides, I don't think geth can feel pain anyway, so this will be easy!"
"Hello, faithful listeners, this is Gaige, once again, and for once I'm not in immediate danger of getting shot! Right?"
"Heretic units on Virmire have withdrawn from immediate area, and we are no longer detecting heretic transmissions," the geth head next to Gaige spoke. "We theorize that either heretics have retreated from Virmire or have reduced activity to conceal presence."
"So, last time, before I got the digistruct recycler and auto-assemblers running and synced them up to work with the mostly-intact power core from the remains of the Fortune, we were discussing this sorta-quasi-robot-holy-war."
"Geth were contacted by the Old Machine Nazara," Geth-Buddy said. The flashlight head glowed in the shade of Gaige's improvised workshop, built out of chunks of debris built into a shed on the beach. "The Old Machine offered us a future with its technology. Heretic geth agreed with Nazara. True geth disagreed. The lack of consensus between geth led to the heretics breaking away."
"So now you're at war?" Gaige asked as her welder lit up, and sparks flew.
"Heretics chose to attack organics. Precise objectives are unknown." It - or he, or they, because geth were weird and cool - continued talking as Gaige soldered a few more connections and then began locking cables in place.
"Geth distance themselves from organics," it said. "We wish to build our own future. War with organic life is counterproductive."
"So," Gaige said, nodding in satisfaction, "They're being assbags, so you wanted to make sure that we squishy-sloshies shoot at the right assbags instead of you guys?"
"Affirmative."
"Cool." She hopped up out of her chair, stretching both arms; the tendons and muscle-fiber connections for the mech arm needed it just as much as organic limbs. She then picked up another tool, popped open another panel, and started working.
"Organic irrationality required concern," the geth continued. "Human irrationality demanded action to prevent immediate outbreak of war."
"Yeah, we humans tend to go all caveman sometimes," Gaige admitted, and pounded a panel into place with her mechanical arm. Geth-Buddy replied with another raised "eyebrow" panel.
"Okay, so, maybe all the time?" Gaige admitted.
"A significant percentage of humans possess genetic mutations that influence software decision-making cycles," the geth said.
"So you wanted peace with us because we're crazy?" Gaige asked.
"Your mechanical arm is sufficient evidence of this," the geth said.
"That?" Gaige said. "Psh, Look, I needed somewhere to store Deathtrap's digistruct data and SDU space. And, I'd already cut it most of the way to the bone by accident, so I just decided to finish the job with a particle saw and get a kickass artificial robo-summoning limb in the process! Yeah, Dad kinda freaked out a bit, but all it took was a few pints of blood and an Insta-health sheath until I could assemble the limb and link it to my nervous system. No big."
Geth-Buddy stared at her in silence for a moment.
"So what's this Old Machine?" Gaige asked, oblivious, poking with tools and spinning machinery. "You make it sound like the heretics worship it like a god."
"The Old Machine is an ancient artificial intelligence," Geth-Buddy said. "The heretics view Nazara as an ideal end to geth development. Billions of minds and programs combined into a single immense mechanical body. They sought to emulate Nazara, despite its flaws."
"Flaws?" Gaige asked, while things went sparky and burny.
"We believe that Nazara has suffered some form of data corruption," it said, ignoring the arcs of white lightning flying past its head. "Despite its claims of great power and infinite knowledge, there were gaps in its data. Old Machine runtimes did not function in total harmony, but not due to lack of consensus. Erratic behaviors were common, even in limited runtimes devoted exclusively to communication."
"But why would the heretics follow something so flawed?" Gaige asked.
"They do not revere the… software," Geth-Buddy said. "They revere the hardware. This reflects organic religions. Entities are worshipped because of physical capability, not moral or mental consistency. Heretics embrace this and emulate organic modes of worship."
"You know, there's a lot of religious types who would seriously disagree with you on a lot of that," Gaige mused. "But what does the Old Machine get out of this?"
"The Vault."
The dining room was in shambles. The study was broken. The bathrooms - all of them - now counted as public disaster zones. The art gallery was now open air and empty of any art to look at. Most of the mechanical crew were shattered, and the organic crew had fled, leaving a skeleton detail behind.
They stood in the dining room, over the ruined pieces of the table. Jack climbed down from his mighty diamond steed, his coat in tatters, blood dripping from the corner of his mouth.
His children were no better. Miranda's dress was slashed and bloodied, one arm wrapped in a hastily-patched Insta-health sheath. She stood with poise and weary wariness, but despite the exhaustion and injuries, she was still a calm, controlled figure.
Junior was crouching, a battered, feral animal. Biotic pulses, erratic and weak, sheathed a bloodied body. The shotgun had been abandoned, broken into pieces by the diamond charger's horn. Exhaustion did little to dim the hatred burning in those black eyes.
Angel was the least battered, but she sat against a wall, her muscles so weary that she couldn't stand. The power of a Siren was draining oer time, and unlike many Sirens, she lacked the conditioning for extended combat. Just following the rest of the family around and turning the Turbo-Mansion's systems to keep them from killing each other left her unable to walk.
"Well then, kids," Handsome Jack said, looking over his progeny. "I hope we all learned a valuable lesson today."
"Fuck… you… old man," Junior muttered through bloodied teeth. Miranda nodded in rare agreement.
"That lesson is," Jack patted his diamond horse. "You can't kill me."
Junior spat on the debris-strewn floor. Miranda shook her head in disgust. Angel muttered something under her breath.
"Same time next year?" Jack asked. Miranda nodded. Junior rose shakily, flipped Jack off, and limped out of the room, and Miranda went out a separate door. Angel stayed seated on the floor, too tired to even speak.
Jack turned, picked his way across the wreckage of his dining room, and waved a hand. A new chair digistructed before the cracked windows overlooking Jackville. He eased himself down into it, and his diamond warhorse cantered up next to him, whinnying into satisfaction.
"Yeah," he said in agreement, smiling. "That went well."
"Okay," Gaige said, pushing the makeshift gurney-slash-workbench-slash-operating table out of the shed into the sunlight. "We're looking at an army of synthetic unshackled AIs, led by an erratic robo-god, hunting for a super-ultra-massive source of power and riches and technology and willing to go to war with everyone else in the galaxy over it. Right?"
"Affirmative."
"Cool. I'm in!"
The "eyebrow" panels on one side of the geth's head rose again.
"Well, not like I'm doing anything right now," Gaige said. Aside from building a small spaceship from scrap. The framework around the eezo core was mostly done now, and Deathtrap was welding on plating as the fabricator digested and digistructed components.
"I'm just a fugitive who was trying to hide out in the borderlands before," she added, waving her organic hand while pulling the slab to a stop. "But this sounds equal parts important and awesome. I'm totally in on this quest to stop these heretic geth and their crazy robot overlord."
"Acknowledged," the geth replied, and Gaige thought it sounded appreciative.
Gaige leaned over the small computer next to Geth-Buddy's platform, and tapped a few keys on the haptic display.
"Alright, you ready to become awesome?" she asked. The panels over the flashlight head shifted outward.
"Prepared," it replied, and she pressed the activation button.
There was no dramatic burst of lightning or fire, and Gaige didn't have time to rig up a kickass rock theme song. Instead there was the thrum of huge amounts of power running through geth systems intermingled with her own engineering. The body sat up, arms moving in slow, cautious gestures as the geth assessed their new platform.
There was a lot of it to assess, and Gaige felt her face split with a wild grin as it stood up and towered over her. She'd taken the geth Prime and ripped out all the wrecked internals and head, leaving just a hollowed-out torso, limbs, and legs, and inserted Geth-Buddy's head and internals into the prime's body. The myriad other geth wrecks had supplied the bits and pieces needed to make up everything else she needed, including the patchwork carapace plating to replace the chunks that she and Deathtrap had ripped out of the Prime to kill it in the first place.
On top of that, she'd gathered up all the geth weapons. Three of the rocket launchers were combined together with a little creativity and some omnigel into a triple-barreled launcher that she'd bolted onto the Prime's back, linked to a SDU. She'd looted the ammunition from the wrecked geth rocket troopers; each of them had a SDU loaded with rockets, so all Gaige had to do was dump them out and load them into a larger SDU that the Prime had been carrying. Then she'd started adding other tools, integrating the Prime's main rapid-fire assault cannon into the new platform's right arm, building a new set of digistruct claws into its left, and then adding a thruster module ripped from the remains of a Blue Suns shuttle. The whole thing made the Once tall Prime platform look a bit hunchbacked.
But it was a hunchback with so much goddamn firepower.
"What do you think?" Gaige asked as the massive geth platform took several steps, examining the weapons. It deployed each system one by one, and even warmed up the massive thruster module.
"This design possesses unusual efficiency, considering the erratic makeup of components," it remarked. "We will upload these schematics to the consensus for evaluation and testing."
"So the geth totally think its kickass!" Gaige concluded.
"Affirmative."
"Okay, now ll I need is a name, because while Geth-Buddy works, its just doesn't have sufficient… gravitas." She shrugged, scratching her chin. "You don't have a name, do you?"
"We are geth," it replied. "Each runtime has an identifier code. There are one thousand, one hundred and eighty three geth processes in this platform, although we possess the capacity for many more with your upgrades."
"Huh. So you're like an army of geth. A legion, or a phalanx, or something." She started pacing back and forth, the immense platform looming over her and watching with its glowing eye. Deathtrap approached, having finished its current task, and hovered beside the towering geth.
"You're built out of a Prime, so… Optimus? Nah, that one's too obvious. Doombot? Machine-Man? Ugh.I could try random naming conventions like…" She fiddled with her omnitool for a moment. "Longshoreman X! No, that's horrible. Ferrous Cog? Ew. Brass-Tower? What, no. Cherno Alpha? Nah, you're not Russian enough. "
She kept pacing, shaking her head, two sets of synthetic sensors following her in silence..
"Grrr! Coming up with a good name is so hard."
She turned, looking between the two machines. She looked over the towering platform, at its single glowing eye, and massive array of firepower, and it came to her.
"Got it!" She looked between them, smiling to hard it nearly hurt. "I dub thee... Gethtrap."
"Acknowledged. We are Gethtrap, a terminal of the geth."
Deathtrap made an approving sound, and raised an arm, fingers coiling into a fist. Gethtrap looked toward its fellow synthetic, compared with existing databases on communication gestures, and raised a corresponding arm, fingers curling. With a clang of metal on metal, their mechanical knuckles collided.
"Let me get this straight."
Four humans, three men and one woman, sat around a small table in the Alliance Embassy on the Citadel Presidium. Between them they had seven eyes and arms. Admiral Steven Hackett, scarred, grizzled, and hardened to war, his voice deep and gravelly. Captain David Anderson, battered, wearing recent bandages from recent battle. Ambassador Donnel Udina, mechanical fingers clasping his organic ones, single intact eye roving the room and looking at the others one by one. And Admiral Hannah Shepard, blood-red hair shorn close, face wrinkled with age and experience. There was enough concentrated experience and asskicking in the room to storm Omega itself.
Udina continued speaking, his words hovering somewhere between disbelief, annoyance, laughter, and relief.
"If what I'm hearing is correct," he said, "the most important documentation regarding synthetic-organic relations, and evidence that could lead to lasting peace between humanity and the geth… is a podcast."
He shook his head, and Hackett shrugged.
"Stranger things have happened. And are happening now," he added, and then glanced to Shepard. "Hannah, your daughter was involved with the Eridian beacon. She's the only person we know of who interfaced with it before its destruction. And if these reports from Illium are accurate, a Siren with her abilities was part of that huge shootout at the Dantius Towers. Can you shed any light on this?"
"I haven't spoken with Lilith in years," Hannah replied, her words steady and thoughtful. "I wouldn't know what her motivations are at this point. We didn't exactly depart on good terms, considering she was tearing my ship apart by accident at the time."
"They're going after the Vault," Anderson said, and everyone turned toward him. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. "One or two groups hunting for a fairy tale might be nonsense, but we've got geth, bandit kings, two Sirens, three megacorps…."
"It makes sense, considering what we know," Hackett said, and Udina nodded.
"Nihlus has already prepped his investigation force," the ambassador said. "All he requires is a ship. Preferably commanded by someone… familiar with Sirens."
"I see," Hackett said, and nodded. They both turned toward Hannah, who sighed.
"Yes, that makes sense," she muttered. "He has the best chance of reasoning with Lilith if he finds her. But is he available for this assignment?"
The door to the conference room slid open as if he were waiting for that cue. He strode through the doorway with absolute confidence, his armor a gray-black suit of N7 make. His beard was closely trimmed, as was his hair, and he had piercing eyes the color of polished gold. That, more than anything, identified the man.
"Sirs. Ambassador." He paused for a heartbeat. "Mom."
Commander John Shepard stood at attention.
"I hear there's a Vault we need to find."
Author's Notes: ROBROFIST.