On a dusty unnamed moon above Serao, one of the two gas giants of the Century system in the Hawking Eta, an asari excavation was underway to explore recently-discovered Prothean ruins that an observation post established to monitor Serao saw when a bored technician started pointing the spare equipment at the other 82 moons.
The moon had no atmosphere, so the scientists descending on the site were fully equipped with environmental suits. Even so, the asari designs were sleek and barely visible.
Chief Anthropologist Lira Nissi stepped onto the barren surface from her shuttle, looking down into the crater that contained the ruins. They seemed to be different than most Prothean ruins; she surmised they were early Prothean.
She strode down the gentle slope of the crater out of the direct light of Serao and Century, to an area lit entirely by huge industrial-sized lights run off of solar collection cells arrayed around the rim of the crater.
"Doctor Nissi, we found something strange down here," one of the Tersicor University fellows announced as Nissi got close.
"What did you find?" Nissi asked, looking down onto some kind of metallic box.
"We're not sure, but it gave off some power readings when we scanned it," the fellow explained. "It was under a few centimeters of dirt and we carefully uncovered it. This is exactly the position we found it in."
Nissi looked around her. They were in the center of the ruin, and she noted they appeared to be in what had been a room at some point—there was a raised section of metal forming a large square that she took to be the remnants of a wall. It appeared to have been worn down, meaning there was likely an atmosphere on this planet, or something else occurred to destroy the building. Nissi's guess was the latter scenario.
The senior scientist kneeled down next to the artifact, noticing a strange blue light flickering. How could it still have power after so long?
It was smooth to the touch, and she had the distinct impression that it was warm. It blinked red when she touched it, which was curious. She ran her fingers around the edges, seeing how far down it went. It wasn't too deep, and she started digging around it. The archaeology students stooped down next to her and helped.
In a half hour they team had dug down to the ancient floor of the room, less than a meter below the box. It appeared to have been on the ceiling or attached to one of the walls before whatever befell this facility occurred.
The floor was a strangely-textured silver-colored metal, again not familiar to the seasoned Prothean researcher. Her excitement began to grow as she thought this could be a relic that was forgotten even to the Protheans themselves.
A human scientist with long black hair who walked with a pronounced limp and a green-skinned salarian came over and stood above the asari down in the pit arrayed around their find, which was still flickering faintly. Its activity picked up when the new arrivals drew close, an observation not lost on the asari. She also noticed the human had a piece of equipment on his leg, denoting some kind of injury.
"What have you found?" the salarian asked.
"We think it might be some kind of storage device. It still has power," the anthropology fellow said.
"Fascinating," the salarian said, jumping off the ledge and into the hole. "Can you access it?"
"No," Nissi said. "It doesn't appear to respond to anyone's touch. It must not be operated through haptic interface."
The salarian leaned down and brushed his long fingers across the surface, eliciting the same red light, much stronger this time. "Wrong. It does have a haptic interface, but it seems to be rejecting interaction with us. Not surprising, probable we'll have to force it open."
None of the preoccupied scientists noticed that the human hadn't joined them in the hole, and in fact seemed totally disinterested. Consequentially, they didn't notice that the human's 'leg brace' had in fact not been a result of any accident, but concealed a long but delicate looking blade.
"How would you recommend forcing it open without forcing an emergency information dump?" an anthropology student asked.
The salarian didn't answer; as he was looking down and trying to figure out the source of the green stain spreading across his chest. He crumbled, falling to the side and revealing the human already making his next move—decapitating the archaeology student standing to the salarian's side.
Before the asari scientists could make use of their totally untrained biotics, they were dead to the last man. For all her years in a lab, Doctor Lira Nissi met her end on the first dig she'd visited in centuries.
The human kicked a body off of his objective, leaving a smear of purple blood across the top that he used an unstained piece of cloth to rub off.
"Objective secured," the human said flatly.
"Good," the voice of the Illusive Man replied. "Very good job, Leng. Get it back to the pick-up point and we'll exfiltrate you."
With the connection broken, Kai Leng reached down to grab the box when it began to glow brilliantly as he touched it. His first thought was that that would complicate his escape, and nothing else. It wasn't his job to think, it was his job to retrieve this object.
However, the light took the form of a bright orange circle with a smaller dark circle in the center with a line leading from the lowest point on the inner circle to the very bottom of the design.
"Reclaimer," the device said in a voice that was guttural, primal, and mechanical all at once.
The box speaking was a complete surprise that nearly caused Leng to drop the box onto the ground. His instinct was to keep silent, a byproduct of a few years of working as a Cerberus assassin.
"Reclaimer," the device repeated, its tone and its cadence exactly the same.
"What does that mean?" Leng asked the box, looking at the emblem flashing across the front of the box. Driven by cautious curiosity he touched the flashing icon and it disappeared. In its place appeared a ring surrounded by other glyphs.
Leng regarded the ring and noticed the inside was dotted with mountains and bodies of water. It must've been awesome in size, but he didn't have time to study it closely so he wrapped the object with bloody cloth he tore from the suit of one of the asari.
By the time the guards arrived to the scene after the science team went silent, they only found a nightmarish pit filled with the bodies of the six asari scientists and one salarian expert. None of them noticed the absence of the human 'scientist', and by the time anyone noticed him missing he was out of the system.
"What do you mean he woke up?" Miranda asked as she blew into the lab holding the apparently-living body of Commander Shepard.
Baldheaded Doctor Ian Wilson looked up at her from among the other scientists saying, "He regained consciousness while we were augmenting his left leg. We hit him with a heavy dose of sedatives and put him back under."
"How is he now?" Miranda asked, moving around to see the leg they had operated on a few days ago. It seemed unnaturally long, but such had been the nature of their operation. With so many millions of credits, they'd been given clearance to 'improve' Shepard physically, but they were not to do anything to his mental status. The Lazarus team wasn't so sure how to do one without impacting the other, but they didn't touch his brain as a rule.
"He's at seventy-percent reconstruction," Wilson stated, looking at his data pad.
Miranda looked at Shepard from head to toe. "He's going to be tall. I don't know if stealth will be a possibility for him. An eight-foot-tall behemoth will be rather visible against the crowds."
"You're right, but we've sacrificed stealth to make him strong, incredibly durable, and fast. His muscles are denser than yours or mine, his bones are reinforced with titanium and carbon nanotubes, and his internal organs are all augmented," Wilson said. "He's not going to be stealthy, but he's going to be unstoppable."
"That works out, given his psych profile," Miranda said. "He's a ruthless individual."
Wilson nodded. "I haven't really worried about his psychology, doctor. That's your department."
"It's not mine either," Miranda said, looking up from the body. "How long now?"
"It can't be much more than four months until he's ready to move, we've just got some minor tweaks and a complication in the left shoulder that we need to repair," Wilson said. "With luck we'll have him on his feet by April, in time for his birthday."
"Good," Miranda said, pushing away from the table and leaving the room. Wilson shook his head and went back to work on the left leg, carefully reassembling the revitalized muscle tissue while the rest of the team went to work.
Miranda went down the hall to her office and saw she had an incoming message marked in such a way she knew it had to be the Illusive Man. Picking up her pace somewhat as she moved across the room; she opened the message and saw the familiar face of her boss.
"Miranda, I've got an operative coming to your station. He's got a piece of technology I want you to examine. It's not got anything to do with the Lazarus Project, but you're the best we've got, so give it a look," the Illusive Man said.
"Will do," Miranda answered. "When is he due to arrive?"
"He'll be there in minutes. His name is Kai Leng, and the object in question is a small metal box believed to be a data storage box we heard about over asari communications traffic a few days ago," the Illusive Man explained. "Do what you do best."
The connection was broken and Miranda got up from the seat and walked around the desk and back out of her office. She made way through the large space station to the hangar bay, passing several guard droids patrolling the halls and arriving in the hangar bay several minutes later as the shuttle was coming in for a landing.
No sooner had the door opened than did Miranda walk up to the man and seize the bloody rag in his arms that was glowing despite Leng's best effort to suppress it.
"Thanks," she said before turning from the operative, leaving the man staring after her and catching sympathetic looks from knowing dockworkers.
She made it back from the hangar and shut her office door, taking the cloth from the device and throwing it in the nearest trash bin.
The emblem had reverted to the symbol Leng had seen on the moon's surface, though Miranda guessed that it was a button much quicker than the other Cerberus operative had.
After pressing it, she saw the ring and was impressed. She leaned in closer and saw it had geographical features on the inside.
It was an easy logical jump to assume that the thing rotated like a wheel, creating centrifugal force that would act as gravity across the ring. The real challenge, though, was trying to figure out the size. It wasn't really possible to calculate without any reference.
Something else piqued her interest: the glyphs on the side of the ring. She ran her fingers through them and the display flashed bright blue and reformed into English characters. "Extraordinary," she whispered as she read it.
Find the [maker's] salvation and his doom;
The final line drawn against the dark [flood];
Within lays the secret to our triumph;
Within lays the secret to our great fall.
Between two stars that burn with each other;
Working in tandem to light up the sky;
Rests the installation, our [Camelot];
Waiting for the returning Reclaimers.
Most people would've been too engrossed in the device to notice the door opening, but Miranda's situational awareness was nearly perfect and the moment the door opened she looked up and regarded the operative who'd retrieved the device, an Asian man with long black hair tied behind his head.
"What did you find?" he asked.
Miranda cocked an eyebrow and looked at him with more than a little incredulity. "Who are you?"
"Kai Leng, and I'm safeguarding that box until it gets to the Illusive Man," the man said.
"I don't answer to you," Miranda said, searching for a way to turn the box off and succeeding by running her hand across the surface. "He charged me with examining it. That was just a few minutes ago, so I'm judging my order to be superior to your old one."
"That's not how it works," Leng said, stepping forward. "I'm not leaving the box."
"Then wait outside," Miranda said, powering up her biotics and not-quite-violently pushing the operative out of the door and locking it behind him.
"Damn it, woman! Let me in!" Leng shouted from outside, his voice muffled and barely audible.
"Woman?" Miranda scoffed, giving brief thought to violently pushing him up the hallway and into the wall now. She rounded the desk and reactivated the box. The picture of the ring appeared in the air above the box again, surrounded by the cryptic words she'd read.
She gathered that the ring was a fortress of some kind, probably one used in a failing defense given by the forlorn tone of the first passage. What happened to the race that built it was impossible to determine, but Miranda had been keyed in on the research about the Reapers. Perhaps this thing was a Prothean construct, which would be incredibly important.
Two stars lighting the sky likely referred to a binary star system, in which two stars orbit each other. No known race inhabited a planet or base that orbited a binary star system, at least, not to Miranda's considerable knowledge.
The box had been found in the Hawking Eta, just outside of the 5 kiloparsec zone around the galactic core in which traveling through FTL was nearly impossible due to all the stellar activity and the rapidly increasing gravitational pull of the massive core. If they wanted to find "Camelot" they'd have to search outward from the Century system, looking for binary star systems.
That brought something else to mind. "Camelot" was a rather timely reference, on the scale of time they were working on. Nine hundred years ago Camelot appeared in ancient French literature, yet this box was at least 50,000 years old. If nothing else, that bore out a little more research.
Putting her findings into a highly-secured file and sending it to the Illusive Man. She didn't have long to wait before a response came through from Cronos Station.
Take Leng with you, requisition the telescope above Serao. Find Camelot.
In an old building in the outskirts of New York City a group of about one hundred people gathered, and several dozen more were on the way. It was a ten story hotel, and the banquet hall had been rented out for a political function.
Events in the colonies, particularly Terra Nova, had catalyzed human opinion against the Citadel. A month ago when the human population was four million stronger and one colony greater the idea of a reputable hotel chain hosting a gathering of such an extremist party as Terra Firma would've been preposterous.
Today Terra Firma was meeting in their banquet hall.
At the podium was party president Charles Saracino, a severe man with piercing blue eyes and a goatee. He'd been party president for more than a decade at this point, running unopposed in the elections since Inez Simmons resigned in 2173. He waited as the banquet hall filled up. Each chair was taken, and the standing room was mostly gone. That had been somewhat unexpected, and vid screens had been set up outside the doors of the hall and several more were prepared if the lobby filled as well.
The Arcturus Parliamentary elections were to be held in June, four months away. At the behest of Terra Firma's chief contributors the party declared candidates for every seat they could. The party's resources were stretched to the breaking point, even with the extra donations they'd picked up. If they didn't win at least half of the seats they'd put up for the party would be destroyed.
Finally he got the green light from one of the ushers at the doorway and cleared his throat, drawing the attention of the crowd and some scattered applause.
"Good afternoon fellow humans!" he began, getting more applause. The atmosphere was charged up already, though he hadn't done anything to help that. The specter of the Terra Nova Massacre did more than he could hope to through a speech. The lights went down and he couldn't see anyone past the front row.
"Today we meet on the one-month anniversary of the so-called 'glassing' of the human colony Terra Nova. To reiterate the consequences of that vicious attack on human interests, four million humans were killed despite the valiant efforts of the Marines. Not above mention are the efforts of the Terra Nova militia, of whom there were no survivors. I'd like to observe a moment of silence for those we lost," he continued, carefully playing on the crowd's emotions. The room was silent for a full minute as behind the stage an image of Terra Nova before the glassing appeared, spinning silently.
"Thank you," he said, drawing to a close the moment of silence. "Now we move on to the business at hand. The Systems Alliance has, for the past thirty years, been living under the heel of the Citadel Council. For all the good the aliens have done, for all our technological advances with their 'help', for all the conflicts that have been prevented, human advancement and human achievement have been stifled, if not totally stalled. What have we gotten in return? What has this so-called 'mutual defense' yielded to us when attacked?
"One of our largest colonies was utterly wiped out, and what is our Councilor told? 'Sorry, we can't help you.' Four million humans are burnt to ash and what is humanity told? 'Take this one on the chin; we'll get them next time'. The Council expects us to wait for the Covenant to enter our space and begin killing our people wholesale for them to respond. Theirs is a plan that uses humanity as bait! They hope the Covenant will drop out of FTL over our worlds and destroy them one-by-one in a process that opens them up to attack. We are not bait!
"'Charles, if we leave the Council, we will be alone and vulnerable!' I hear you think. I counter: are we not already alone and vulnerable? Are not four million men and women dead as a direct result of that vulnerability? As humans, the newcomers of the galaxy, are we not alone? We are alone, we are vulnerable, and people are dying as a result of a vain hope that aliens will intercede against their own on our behalf!"
His voice had been carefully controlled up to the final few sentences, when he let all the anger and the indignity loose and the crowd erupted into a combination of cheers of approval and animalistic roars of rage. The rage concerned him a little bit, but he pressed on.
"Today I want to announce that Terra Firma is running a candidate for every seat in the Alliance Parliament. I call on each of you watching here and across the colonies to get out and stump for every vote you can. The Alliance is not acting in humanity's interest any longer! We must change the self-destructive policies of our own government! We shall do it by beating them at their own game, by using democracy against them. Ours is the greatest system in the galaxy and we shall make use of it!" he finished on a note he hoped would direct the efforts of the incensed crowds. He anticipated record turnout in June.
"Thank you for your time, today," he said with his voice under control again. Saracino left the podium and went backstage, the applause thundering about the banquet hall and the lobby, and later he learned that the crowd had reached out into the streets by the end of the speech. It was success like he'd never known it, and it felt good.
Colonel Arnold surveyed what was left of the 212 in the courtyard of their compound on Eden Prime. The brigade was at half strength. Well, that was optimistic. The real figure for casualties on Terra Nova was 56%, so in actuality the 212th Marine Brigade was at 44% strength. Between the six—five after the total loss of Fox Company—companies there were now only 658 Marines where once there were 1500.
A lot of Marines were left on Terra Nova.
In charge of a brigade that was now battalion-sized, Arnold had the task of reorganizing and resupplying the 212 and trying to get it back to fighting shape.
Terra Nova had a much more intangible effect: morale had fallen dangerously low, and there had even been a few desertions. Three men had just disappeared a few nights back, taking their weapons and armor and evidently hopping the first ship off-planet. Finding them was low-priority for just about every agency in the Alliance, and the men had been allowed to fade away without being harassed.
Arnold had raged at the higher-ups for that blunder, and over the following week four more men and three women vanished into the night.
Weapons were disappearing, stolen by the locals in preparation for an invasion they felt was surely coming. That meant stepping up patrols by night, which meant his Marines were tired, which meant lower-still morale. The situation was getting out of control.
His first act as Colonel had been to bring Ashley Williams up to brigade staff as his Lieutenant. Reluctant though she was, he recognized her effect on the morale of the 212. She was a veteran, a lifelong member of the brigade, and on top of that she had a way with the troops he didn't.
Currently she was in town gauging the local population's reaction to the growing anti-alien sentiment. Recruiting lines were absurdly long but they were long for all the wrong reasons. People were joining up to kill aliens, which was all well and good except for the part where the suggestion that they weren't about to get shipped aboard the Faith and Glorious Redemption to start shooting up Covvies destroyed their motivation. Contrary to their belief, the Systems Alliance Marine Corps was not where they were given a gun and taken someplace to shoot at something. There was a lot of training involved where they wanted none.
His 658 troops were about to receive 250 replacements, a collection of angry-looking youths were filing onto base as he walked about the battle-hardened veterans. He left his Marines behind him as he walked over to face the inbound boys and girls who glared at him.
"Welcome to Camp Lloyd," he said, noting the angry stares. "You enlisted to fight the Covenant. I hate to inform you, but we will not be fighting them again for a long time. Right now I see before me a collection of degenerates. I will oversee your transformation into Marines. You will learn discipline, you will learn to be Systems Alliance Marines."
The new guys kind of stared in disbelief. A lot were probably wondering what they were doing there. One raised his hand but Arnold ignored her.
"My name is Colonel Arnold. You may have seen Lieutenant Colonel Williams, as well, and you'll soon be acquainted with your squads. Dismissed," he said, leaving them to their individual squads.
He felt the presence behind him before it spoke, and waited for the familiar voice of Lt. Colonel Williams. "Colonel, it's not looking good out there."
"What do you mean Chie… Colonel Williams?" Arnold asked, still stumbling over the new rank. She'd been Chief Williams for two years; it was a hard habit to break.
"I mean the atmosphere in the bars and the other public places is way too charged up. It was that Terra Firma jackass Saracino's speech that riled everyone up. I wasn't even welcome in the Pony," Ashley said, emphasizing the last part. Up until Terra Nova the Pony had been the regular hangout for the 212 people who were off duty. This time she was met at the door by the bouncer and told in no uncertain terms Alliance types weren't welcome for the time being.
"That was quick," Arnold stated.
"I know! I don't understand. Terra Nova happened and the whole planet becomes hostile. It's not natural," Ashley said. "I can't understand it. It's a total one-eighty."
"You've got that right," Arnold said. He made a mental note to have a chat with John, the owner of the Pony. Maybe he'd be more reasonable if they had a heart-to-heart.
Ashley turned and saw the newbies getting welcomed to their units. "We've got a lot of work to do that doesn't involve the Pony."
"You've got that right, Williams," Arnold said. "You've got that right."
A/N:
I wanted to address the "Reclaimer" part. I didn't intend for anyone to think that only Kai Leng was a reclaimer. I am of the school of thought that all humans are initially identified as Reclaimers, but that that status can be changed. So the simple little box (essentially a message carrier... kind of like a Forerunner version of the Prothean beacons) reads that a human is grabbing it and automatically identifies him as a Reclaimer just by memory. Whether or not Leng or Miranda or anyone else is truly a Reclaimer is up to a far more complex machine to decide (Monitor, etc.)
As always, thanks for reading!
JLake4