I still don't own Mass Effect, or Blake's 7. I guess the story's over. After all, Sovereign's dead. End of story. Very efficient.
Oh, wait, I guess there is some stuff which has to happen, seeing as how Sovereign is not the only Reaper in the galaxy. Right. Thanks for the reminder.
254.8 NC The Liberator, Still Departing the Monolith System"Die! Die! Die! DIE!" Blake screamed over the sound of laser fire bursting from the weapons he, Jenna and Vila were wielding, and the louder thumps of the armor-piercing rounds fired from the rifles the mutoids carried.
Fortunately for Blake, Jenna provided covering fire whenever he stood up and pulled him down before he could get himself killed. With Vila basically cowering and shooting only when he absolutely had to, Jenna wasn't able to keep the mutoids from moving and while two were holding position right inside the bridge, a third was scuttling around to flank her. The fourth lay on the ground with a neat hole drilled in its head where Blake had shot it when it burst inside. Its effort to take them by surprise had run right into the hypervigilance of the furious Liberator crew.
While Vila wasn't being of much assistance, he had hit the intercom, which should have broadcast the ongoing firefight to Avon and Cally down in the medical bay. 'Should,' being the key word, given the utter devastation of the ship's systems.
Back in the hall, Servalan stood, hands loose by her side, elegant in her white gown, white fedora covering her head, meeting the raised collar of her dress to transform her into a pillar of white, with only her lips, eyes and hair to provide her any color at all. She spoke a word into her communications device, commanding the other pair of mutoids to lock down the shuttle and join the assault.
Further back, Avon stood at the intersection, weapon in his hand as he drew a bead on Servalan's back. He'd only get one shot before the mutoids reacted. The question was, how would they react? If they'd been ordered to avenge her, they'd focus on him. Even with the others on the bridge, three top-of-the-line mutoids would almost certainly kill him. She might not have given such orders, simply because the Supreme Commander didn't truly believe she was mortal. On the other hand, she might have given such orders to manipulate, or dissuade her enemies…
After a moment's thought, Avon gave a mental shrug and shot her in the back of the head. She collapsed forward as Avon retreated into cover, expecting an attack from the mutoids, he kept his weapon trained on the open door. He was, somehow, both astonished and in no way surprised when Servalan's hand rose and a miniaturized explosive burst from one of her rings.
The shot missed. Mostly. And it was some sort of flashbang. Mostly.
Avon staggered backwards, blind and bleeding, but still mobile. Instinct sent him retreating down a cross corridor away from the not-dead Servalan and the even more not-dead mutoids. He tripped over a piece of rubble, weapon sliding from his hand as he hit the floor. Fortunately, it was still connected by the power cord attached to the belt at his waist, so he didn't actually lose the weapon. Irritation at himself for forgetting the presence of the rubble was ruthlessly suppressed as he rose and forced himself to remember the distance from the rubble to the next intersection and turned at the right time.
His vision came back just in time to see the two mutoids Servalan had summoned from the ship turn the corner, just walking along as they hadn't been ordered to engage, yet. As soon as Servalan updated their orders, or he attempted to attack them, they'd take him out. If he killed one, the other would kill him.
Three slow steps back and he retreated down another corridor before the mutoids reacted. Fire came from the end of the hall, where one of the mutoids had retreated from the bridge and hovered over Servalan. The mutoid was a good shot, like all its ilk, but the torn up hallways, the damaged lighting and its programmed need to stand between Servalan and any return fire meant the shots went wide. Avon's return fire likewise went wide, for the same reasons, save the last, which was replaced by the fact that he was sprinting away.
Ducking into another, further out, cross corridor, Avon took position between the cluster of mutoids and medical. Without internal sensors, or defenses, it was always possible there were more out there, looking to flank him, or get past him. He was aware of that, but his available options were fairly terrible. Retreating to medical would leave him trapped in a room with only one entrance and minimal computer access and going to ground would give Servalan the run of the ship. Even worse, almost all of the communication systems were down. Though the intercom in medical had let him hear the exchange on the bridge, he hadn't been able to broadcast anything. So he stayed here where he hoped he would be able to get back to the bridge and trusted to the…steps he had taken to ensure that medical remained…secure.
It wasn't a bad gamble, but it didn't work out for him. After a brief exchange of fire with a mutoid, he attempted to withdraw and circle around to the bridge and promptly ran into one of the mutoids. The range was close and Avon prioritized not getting shot over shooting his opponent and the mutoid closed quickly. Its enhanced strength and speed let it rip the weapon from his hands and club him to the ground easily. Avon got in a few blows, but the creature didn't even bother to feign pain before slinging its rifle over its shoulder, wrapping Avon in a bearhug and lifting him off the ground. It turned around and simply carried him back to Servalan.
Avon struggled for the first moment, then stopped, feigning exhaustion, or defeat. He would act when the moment was right. It was right when he was halfway back to the bridge and the mutoid was stepping over terrible damage to the floor. A sharp jerk and the slightly off-balance mutoid tripped, falling to the ground, arms jarred open Avon reacted instantly, kicking the sprawled mutoid hard in its, once-female, face. It slid backwards into the hole and fell down to the next level.
The mutoid he'd been retreating from casually lifted him up and continued on its way, carrying him again, while the other began trying to figure out a way back to the bridge. Given the damage to the Liberator, that wasn't as easy as it should have been. Servalan smiled as Avon hove into view, easily held in the enhanced grip of the mutoid. He wasn't struggling, as he'd been hoping to pull the same trick again. Without his weapon, he didn't stand a chance without the element of surprise. A second mutoid was standing by the entrance to the bridge, keeping the others pinned down.
Servalan smirked at Avon and drew a pistol from the belt of the mutoid which was keeping the others penned in. "Blake?" she caroled.
A repeated, loud, request that she die was his only response. "Cally? Jenna?" she caroled, somewhat less certainly, given Blake's sudden instability and even more sudden inarticulateness.
"What do you want, Servalan?" Jenna asked, though Avon could swear he heard her muttering that it just figured that Servalan was going to be one of the last survivors of the human race.
"To deal, of course. After all, I have dear, dear Avon here," the pistol rose to hover before his eyes, "with a gun to his head. I think he'd like to deal as well."
Jenna laughed, "What, so I trade Avon's death for his death and ours? How stupid do you think I am?"
"Don't answer that, Servalan," Avon interjected. "Jenna has a point however. And, seeing as how she has Orac, and Orac's key, she can always vent atmosphere from the rest of the ship. So, since we can kill each other, I think we should actually deal, don't you?"
Servalan smiled back at him.
"Deal? What is there to deal for? The FUCKING Federation lost the entire FUCKING galaxy. Thus proving that they can't even win a FUCKING war. Pretty fucking embarrassing for a tyrannical military dictatorship." Blake yelled.
"As opposed to your rebels, who accomplished…oh, yes, nothing. I don't think they managed to destroy even a single one of the invader's ships. Embarrassing, indeed," Servalan countered.
"To answer your question, Blake," Avon interjected, before the madman could respond, "what we have to deal for is escape and our, respective, lives."
"Escape? There is no escape. There is nowhere to go where these monsters will not hunt us down and destroy us!" Blake responded.
"Nowhere, indeed," Avon kept his eyes on Servalan's face. She'd seen it too. Of course she had. "But not nowhen."
"What are you blithering about?" Vila asked, when neither Blake, nor Jenna responded.
Blake interjected, "Avon, if you tell me this ship can travel through time and then respond to my asking why you didn't tell me by saying I didn't ask, then I will vent the atmosphere and kill us all."
"All ships travel through time. You can tell because we aren't stuck in a single moment for all eternity," Avon snapped.
"Time dilation," Jenna whispered, audible in the momentary silence.
"Of course," Servalan replied. "I was going to use my shuttle, but the engines and regenerative power banks on the Liberator mean that we can go much further, much more safely."
"And arrive with much more firepower at the other end," Avon added.
"Of course," Servalan repeated.
"There are repairs which need to be made and we need a destination," Jenna shouted from the bridge, over the sound of Blake being restrained by her and Vila.
"Telluri 8. No civilization, but it's an inhabitable world and it'll take us almost ten thousand years to get there. That should give us time for these…" Servalan searched for the right word, didn't find it and substituted 'ships' for something more venomous, "ships time to move on."
Blake was loudly explaining that Telluri 8 was uninhabited because the Federation had killed the local population after a rebellion a decade ago, when Avon asked her to remind him of the period of recurrence of this little alien invasion.
"Archaeological evidence suggests approximately a hundred thousand years," Servalan reminded him.
"Then we'll need a different destination, or a different path to our expected destination…" Avon replied.
"You think ten thousand years isn't long enough for them to finish up and go wherever they go?" Servalan asked.
"It may be, but seeing as there's no chance we'll be going to the planet you suggest. And my proposed destination is approximately a hundred thousand light years from here. So, we need a new route. Of course, flying only through those areas we've got good data for will slow things down. And Orac and Zen will only have tiny amounts of time to react to anything unexpected, given that by the time we see anything, it'll be on top of us."
"I had told you they recurred at a hundred thousand year interval earlier, and you still chose—"
"I assumed we'd be departing from Earth, where it wouldn't have been nearly so lengthy a journey," Avon interrupted her. "And you certainly didn't say they recurred at a hundred thousand year interval. You said that they had been here once before, a hundred thousand years ago. The one does not necessarily follow from the other. Though it is a feasible hypothesis."
"Which fits the fact that they're here again," Servalan put in, trying to focus him on the thing which actually mattered.
"Where do you suggest we go?" Jenna asked, over their bickering.
"Kilara Prime."
"Don't know it," Jenna said.
"No reason for you to. It's uninhabited—" Blake muttered some imprecations which suggested that the Federation must have depopulated it, "because three corporations, both branches of the military and, well, everyone else, has been fighting over who gets to colonize it since it was discovered almost two centuries ago."
"And everyone keeps an eye on everyone else to prevent them from staking a claim, so it hasn't become a haven of criminal vermin, unlike most non-Federation words," Servalan agreed, for a value of 'agree' which contained 'insult' and 'condescend to'.
"Great. I'm so glad we have a destination, which for some reason we've shared with a sociopathic, genocidal, mass-murdering lunatic. Can we get on with killing her?" Blake asked.
"Still in her custody, Blake," Avon pointed out.
"What a fucking shame. I wouldn't want to lose one of the five humans left in the universe," Blake said.
"Sorry, are you not counting Cally, or Servalan?" Avon asked brightly.
"You're right, it should be four humans. Or, perhaps, three," Blake's sarcasm was a savage thing.
"You realize that that the implication that Avon isn't human undercuts what you were saying literally a sentence ago?" Jenna asked, unusually irritated, perhaps because she'd spent the firefight trying to keep the suicidal Blake from successfully committing suicide by mutoid.
"I've decided I no longer care about my question. Let's turn back to the issue at hand, how can we work together to survive. Does anyone object to the obvious solution?"
Blake and Jenna glared at Vila until he did his duty and asked what the obvious solution was.
"We give Orac the necessary orders while together, then separate, with one party controlling the bridge, where Orac remains and the other goes elsewhere, with Orac's key, preventing the rest of us from changing those orders."
"Reasonable. Of course, we'll need to agree on those orders," Servalan said.
"Of course," he said over Blake's warnings about the dire consequences of working with Servalan.
"And we'll need to figure out who goes where."
"Your return to your shuttle seems the obv—"
"No."
"Most of our quarters are…unstable at the moment. Where else would you like to be?"
"The bridge, obviously," Servalan said.
"No."
"You see it, too then?"
"The possibility to simply destroy Orac and give the replacement orders to Zen? Yes."
"Then we'll need a way to lock Zen's commands. Do you know of one?"
"Yes."
"Then obviously you can do that and I'll take the bridge."
"Of course."
"And Zen's commands will be given orally?"
"Of course. However, the locking process will require certain commands in computer languages and hardware alterations."
"Which you'll make and I won't understand…hmmm….I think not, Avon."
"Very well. So neither of us can be on the bridge and it will have to be secured against us both. Difficult."
"But hardly impossible."
"Indeed not. We'd need to block it off, not merely electronically, but physically, which won't be easy, given what terrible shape the ship is in."
"You cannot be serious," Blake yelled. "If she was willing to work with us, she wouldn't have just shown up shooting!"
Avon gave her a sharp look from his perch in the mutoid's arms and gave the little jerk of his head that suggested she explain, or at least offer a pretend explanation to soothe the savage rebel. "I would have done so, but I was sure you wouldn't be willing to deal with the reality of the situation and withdraw."
"Are you saying this is my fault?" Blake exploded.
"Yes. In fact, I'm saying that not just this little skirmish, but this whole thing is your fault. If you'd turned over the Liberator when you captured it, then we'd have had a fleet of them to fight the invaders and we would have destroyed them. Instead you kept it yourself, because of your pathetic need to rebel against the lawful rulers of the galaxy. And where has that lead us?" Servalan asked, going from soothing to furious so seamlessly that Avon couldn't tell if her emotions were real or mere manipulation.
"Yes, how dare we fight back rather than roll over for you, you psychotic, manipulative, mass-murdering—"
"You know we can't trust her, right?" Jenna interrupted Blake's lecturing.
"Of course. That's the point of all the precautions," Avon said.
"So, shall we negotiate those precautions now? Or would you like to continue wasting time on who did what to whom?" Servalan asked.
"We're not coming out," Jenna said.
"Of course not," Servalan agreed. "We can talk like this with you hiding in there, while I and my troops have free run on the ship."
254.5 NC The Liberator, Deep SpaceThe negotiations had been…painful and lengthy, but they were finally over.
"Then we're agreed?" Avon asked.
"Yes. Everyone except you, me and one mutoid will be locked in. That mutoid has been given the agreed upon orders in your presence and neither of us has any way to communicate with it. You'll read the script, exactly as written to Orac and to Zen, in my presence, then I get the key, you get Orac, we leave the bridge, then you'll be sealed in the medical bay, while I'll be sealed in the vault. The bridge having been separately sealed by the mutoid, whose ears have been disabled and given orders to kill anyone who enters the bridge before we arrive."
"Indeed. We enter the rooms at the same time, Zen confirms that and locks us in simultaneously as commanded."
"And if either of our life signs cease, or we're unable to give code word to Zen upon demand, then the ship's self-destruct will go off," Servalan concluded.
"More accurately the engines will burn out. Even with the repairs which have been completed, the self-destruct is disabled and low priority for repair. With the engines burned out, we'll all die soon enough."
"Can't they be repaired? They've just been repaired, haven't they?" Servalan pushed.
"No, when I say they'll be burned out, that'll be done by overloading the power banks and running that power through the engines. That will destroy the regenerative power banks as well, without which nothing else will work. Or so I anticipate. The agreed order to give to Zen is to irrevocably destroy the ship."
"Fine, fine. Then let's get on with this."
It was a surprise to both of them that neither of them attempted to double-cross the other.
2183 CE The Liberator, Kilara System"150,000 years…AND THEY'RE STILL HERE?" Vila shrieked.
"Based on the existence of other ships resisting them, I believe it is rather the case that they have returned again. It would appear that the expected interval of recurrence was incorrect," Servalan said, carefully eliding who was responsible for that incorrectness.
"Your people missed the one that occurred fifty thousand years ago?" Blake asked silkily.
"Or they didn't come then. Who knows? But there's one alien ship and some support craft on the surface of Kilara Prime. And there are people fighting them. Human people," Servalan countered.
"I don't suppose you can do that whole 'scream and make the enemy ship kill itself' thing you did last time?" Jenna asked the, mostly, recovered Cally.
"No."
Cally leaned, self-consciously on Avon, careful to remain on the side opposite his holstered weapon. Her own remained in her hand, despite her weakness. The time the Liberator had taken to repair itself build up the speed needed to let it slalom through the stars to Kilara Prime had given her a chance to recover, somewhat, but the physical symptoms were the least of the damage. Facing down the creature's mind had been hard, but for the first time in her life she was truly alone, not mere exile, but the last of the Auronar.
"The question is, are we going to attack, or do we try again, aiming for about 10,000 years, in the hope that we have missed too many other iterations of this galactic invasion?" Avon asked, perhaps shielding her from further questions, perhaps simply bored by the byplay.
"Are we going to—They're the enemy! There's only one of their big ships and the rest don't even look like their ships and are far smaller. They're trapped in atmosphere. We'll shatter them. A bit of payback for the genocide of our people. We cannot let them get away with it!" Blake snapped.
"No, certainly not. Far better that we join them," Avon muttered.
"We need to make a decision. We're still slowing down, but we'll be inside the gravity well and committed in ten minutes," Jenna pointed out, before they could devolve into further bickering.
"Then we vote. I say we go in," Blake voted.
"Agreed," Servalan said from where she loomed over them, as she'd remained, flanked by her mutoids on the top step of the bridge's seating area.
"You don't get a vote!" Blake snapped, despite her agreeing with him. He knew she only did it in the hopes that he would concede she could vote, which would grant her greater influence over future events. Cally was obviously going to agree with him which gave him two of the three he needed and either Vila or Jenna would side with him, he was sure of it. He didn't need her vote and he certainly didn't need to add another dissenting (and insane) voice to the crew of the Liberator.
"Agreed," Cally said, before they could continue their argument.
Jenna and Avon glanced at one another and shrugged. With three votes in favor, even if all of them voted against, they would simply be stalemated. Vila, not quite so quick on the uptake looked at the three already in favor and especially at Servalan's mutoid guards and agreed with them. Jenna nodded her acquiesce a little sourly as she moved to the pilot's console. Avon didn't even bother to do as much.
"Then, in we go," Blake said, pleased. Or as pleased as he'd gotten since his world burned.
End of Book 1
Author's Note: Well…okay, so it took me a while to get to the actual crossover. But it's here now!