Author's Note: One more Shepards, for a total of three on Noveria. So, if I have everything planned out right, three more side missions, and then Feros. I'm uploading this today, because I won't have time to write Reloaded until tonight. Who's Who will be updated this afternoon. Work has just been kicking my ass the last two days. Hooray for pointless all-day meetings.
Lorik Qui'in had originally been inclined to balk. After all, he'd only been talked to by a small handful of people before. This time, though, Angela went up with Charles, Eric, Wrex, and Robo, and seeing both a krogan and a human the size of one quickly changed his mind. Parasini offered them the garage pass with indecent haste, promised to buy the lot of them a round at a later date, and fled the bar.
Meeting up with everyone, they went to the garage entrance. The lone guard took one look at them and bolted, running for the elevator and locking herself in. "Really?" Marid said, disappointed. "Not that I'm upset about helping bag Anoleis, but all we had to do was show up in force?"
"I expect the firefight in the office preceded us," Charles said as they shuffled through the doors.
"ERROR: Geth units detected," Robo Shep announced, hurling an overload at the far end of the garage before detonating the fuel tank. There was only a handful of the hostile synthetics, enough the Sheps outnumbered them only three to one, so the entire fight took about five seconds and barely drained anyone's shields.
"Oh for crying out loud," Angela griped. "This place could fit a dozen vehicles, and there's one Mako and an armored transport missing a wheel."
Without missing a beat, Tali, Gina, and Robo moved over to inspect the vehicle, Garrus looking over their shoulders. "This isn't a problem," Gina announced, "we can swap one of the wheels out, have this thing rolling in fifteen minutes at most."
"Battlefield capabilities will be reduced by three point four percent, maximum speed reduced twelve point seven percent," Robo concurred.
"Well then, what are we waiting for?" Polarity asked, snapping her sniper rifle closed and stowing it. "Who gets to ride in the Mako?"
Twelve Shepards, plus Garrus, Liara, and Alenko, all said in near unison, "Not it." Angela fumed quietly. "Fine, then, Polarity, Williams, Charles, with me in the Mako. Everyone else, assist Gina as she needs you."
"Oh goody," the Shepard in question purred, "but then it'll take a lot longer to finish."
"Professional or I'll program the medbay machine to rip your spine out!" Angela spat as she climbed up into the armored vehicle.
"You wouldn't do that, Angela," Williams said, before ruining it by asking, "would you?" Getting only a wordless growl in response, the marine shrank back into a seat. Polarity fought briefly with Charles over who got the gun controls, and lost, as his hands proved superior to her hooves when it came to climbing into the raised seat.
They roared out into wind and snow, the temperature a balmy -5C (-25 with the wind chill factored in). "We just had to come hunting her during the local winter, didn't we," Charles muttered, swinging the turret around and scanning the path before them.
"Blame Benezia. Hey, isn't she Liara's mother?" Polarity asked tactlessly.
Angela nodded, flooring it and pulling a drifter turn that nearly toppled the unwieldy vehicle. "I'm hoping she's pulling some kind of scam on Saren. Otherwise," she paused, adding disgustedly, "well, I suppose Quistis will have her work cut out for her."
"You're going to tell me that having another 'you' dating Liara bothers you, Angela?" Williams said.
Her response was drowned out by Polarity's cheerful, "I know, right? Garrus is more like where it's at. That metallic skin, and those teeth!" She gave a dreamy sigh, and Angela sideswiped the edge of the tunnel.
"Polarity? Get out and kill those geth."
"But it's freezing out there!"
"Move it or I'm going to shoot you!" Angela shouted as she parked the wheels over two more geth, the vehicle rocking as Charles blew apart some geth further down the tunnel.
Forty-five seconds later, the unicorn stood up on her hind hooves, looking in the armored windshield with a look of such abject sadness it actually made Angela sigh and rest her forehead on the steering wheel. "Ashley?"
"Um, yes, Commander?"
"Next time you pray, ask God why he hates me so much?"
"Sure, um, thing." Only then did she unlock the door and let the frost-covered Shepard inside.
They rattled along through a few more geth ambushes, bouncing around to dodge rockets. They pulled up at the peak facility only a minute ahead of the other armored vehicle. They all stared as it pulled up, with Eric and Havok riding on the roof. "Marvelous, Commander! But I'm not dumb enough to try that in the Mako," Havok shouted against the wind.
"Can we go inside now?" Kohana griped as they piled out of the other vehicle. "I'm going to freeze my feathers off."
The garage, blocked by a thoroughly wrecked bus, was only inhabited by a handful of krogan and geth, simple enough for them to handle. They moved inside, dealing with the handful of geth, and encountering the bizarre bug-like creatures. Which, naturally, Eric had to attempt stomping on, nearly ruining the armor on his foot and cursing in pain as it then exploded inside his shields.
"Anyone know what the hell those things are?" Angela asked the group at large.
Almost everyone shook their head, except for Wrex, who was still staring at the remains of the big one, slowly collapsing as several dozen inferno rounds cooked it from the inside out. "They sound like … no, they couldn't be." She raised an eyebrow at the krogan, and he shook his head. "Don't worry about it. It's impossible."
Continuing forward, with too many delays at the stupid tiny slow elevators, they eventually reached the VI core, and in a matter of minutes Angela and Robo had the thing up and running again. "Alright, let's split up and get this done. Shepards through H, you're with me, we'll take the roof. I through P, get the fuel going again. Quistis and Robo, stay here with the rest of the squad and keep the VI core intact." At least they could fit eight people in an elevator, if only barely.
The roof was infested with more bug-creatures, which Bradley launched several off the roof of the facility with a singularity, and the rest disposed of with lots of gunfire. Angela and Gina fixed the lines, apparently drooled on with acidic spit, and went back downstairs. Inara's group returned, also successful after blowing up a dozen or so geth, and the home squad had dealt with a few more of the big bugs.
The tram ride was blessedly quiet, almost boring, as they moved to the heart of the facility. Nothing attacked them, though the two guards manning the barricade came close to firing as the first group of them arrived. Their captain just gaped at them, especially when the second elevator load included Havok, Polarity, Wrex, and Garrus. He actually reached up and pinched himself. "Squad, I think I've had too many stims, I'm seeing things."
"You're not seeing things. I'm Commander Shepard, and I'm pissed off and in a hurry. Where's the Matriarch?" Angela demanded.
"She, but, the hot labs, and is that really a bright blue unicorn?" Ventralis finally stuttered out.
"Darn tootin' I am!" Polarity answered. "Name's Polarity Shepard."
Ventralis looked between Angela and Polarity. "But, she, you," he paused, head spinning. "How does that even work?"
Angela sighed, raising a finger in the air, and in unison, eighteen voices thundered, "I'm Commander Shepard." The entire facility seemed to tremble as though in an earthquake, and a moment later, angry screeching from the insectoid invaders echoed up from beneath the floor. "Alright, let's get ready around those vents," she ordered tiredly.
The vent covers were pulled up, and multiple omni-tool lights shone down. Several of the beasts attempted to clamber up the vertical shafts, but withering firepower from pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, as well as nasty biotic attacks tore them literally to shreds, along with the ventilation ducts themselves. By the time the insects halted their attacks, there was a pile of dead insects and ducting fragments large enough to hide Eric and Wrex without them touching.
"Attack repulsed successfully," Robo announced. "You will give us full access to everything in this complex," it ordered.
Ventralis swallowed heavily. "Just for the sake of argument, what happens if I follow company policy and say no?"
"You will be terminated with extreme prejudice. As will anyone who resists," the robot responded flatly. "Go ahead, meatbag. Make my day."
"We have incoming guests," the captain spoke hurriedly into his omni-tool. "Let them do whatever they want!"
"We appreciate the help," Jared said, clapping him on the shoulder as they filed past into the facility. "Ta ta!" Williams shot him a commiserating glance as the poor man started whimpering.
They split up inside, exchanging mods with the elcor merchant, interrogating the lone other asari, checking the med bay and barracks. Back on the lower level, they interrogated the sole survivor. "Wait, those things are actual rachni?" Wrex blurted out.
"Of course. It *shkt* was a mistake to bring them back, but *shkt* money trumped ethics, as always," Han Olar admitted miserably.
"You seem unusually happy about that, Wrex," Bradley commented.
"Hell yes. I grew up listening to the tales of the Rachni Wars. I thought these things were supposed to be a lot tougher," the krogan complained.
"I think we're still dealing with immature ones," Lilitu said, "much as I hope I'm wrong on that.
Inara and Marid came out of the back room with the cure synthesized, and everyone paused as the other door opened, with the local asari Liara had been interrogating flanked by four geth. The firefight lasted exactly three point six seconds, according to Robo Shep, and they looted her corpse quickly before moving into the maintenance tunnels helpfully pointed out by Han Olar.
The door opened on another person in armor, her back to the group. "Garrus, be ready, I think I heard another rachni in here," the new girl said, only to turn and look over her shoulder in shock as Quistis tapped her on the shoulder. "Nani?"
"Oh goody, another Asian Shepard," Angela complained, etching the new girl with an S. "What's your first name?"
"Sa-sachiko. Who are all you people?" Angela shot up an upraised hand to forestall the inevitable response.
"Let's hold that until later," she ordered, "since we already alerted the rachni once with it. We're all Commander Shepard. Well," she amended, "except for the aliens, of course."
"That thing is Commander Shepard?" Sachiko asked, pointing at Robo.
"Affirmative. Commander ROBO Shepard, Alliance marines."
Sachiko stared at Angela a moment longer. "Right then. I'll just … fall into the back?"
"Works for me. What's your training?" They started moving through the doorway into a rough tunnel carved through the ice to connect two parts of the facility.
"A Vanguard," she responded.
"You know," Charles said conversationally to Quistis, "I'm feeling rather outnumbered here. We seem to have an abundance of biotics."
"And techy egg-heads," the redhead agreed. The lone rachni warrior dropped to four simultaneous sniper shots, the infiltrators not even breaking stride. "They're useful, though," she conceded.
"Benezia is still in there somewhere," Angela admonished the group as a whole, "and it'd be nice if we can capture her alive to interrogate."
"Please," Liara said, her voice barely more than a whisper. The next several rooms were just a build-up of the tension, as each room lacked their quarry. Finally, they stopped before a door. "According to the maps, this is the main lab," the asari said quietly.
"Do you want to be in front, or in back?" Bradley asked reassuringly.
"I … I'll be in the front," she said uneasily, moving up next to Eric at the door.
"Good thought, then maybe Benezia won't risk shooting her daughter," Oksana said, almost instantly getting smacked upside the head by Inara. "What'd I say?"
Scowling, Eric hit the door, and they moved in quickly, two at a time, all twenty-five of them, fanning out onto the walkways just to have enough room. On a platform up a short flight of stairs, Benezia watched them enter, her face an unreadable mask of anger. "Who are you?" the matriarch asked.
Nineteen voices spoke in unison, the effect enough to rattle the entire lab, one of the panels on the large glass cage developing a sudden fracture. "I'm Commander Shepard. Where's Saren?" The force of the words sent the asari stumbling backwards, shock etched across her features.
"Few humans have faced an asari commando and lived to tell about it," Benezia blustered.
"Correction: we have sealed the doors," Robo countered. "Your backup will not be joining you."
"Say the word, Angela," Lilitu said, her sniper rifle aimed, "and I'll put her on the floor."
With a wordless cry of rage, Benezia flung out her hand, dropping a full dozen Shepards, plus Wrex and Liara, into stasis, while a dozen geth platforms exploded out of the cargo crates around the room. But the other dozen people were still free to act. Jared grabbed Williams by the neck and ass of her armor, and flung the warrior across to another part of the catwalk, accepting the first bullets on his shield. Polarity spammed overloads on a geth with Flora, causing it to twitch rapidly and then explode, while Quistis fired carefully to keep the geth in cover. Bradley traded biotic slams with Benezia, his angry attack enough to send her stumbling backwards again.
Then the stasis was lifted, and they dispersed around the room, several of them still firing at the matriarch. The commandos, with Robo paralyzed, had managed to get the door partway open, where they faced the difficulty of trying to get under a waist-high barrier guarded by a krogan and the nearest thing the Alliance had to a Viking berserker. Marid and Flora threw up barriers to keep the last geth off them until they could be destroyed.
Benezia tried the stasis thing again, capturing only eight of them, leaving the others to split between holding off her bodyguards and whittling down her prodigious barrier. By the time the stasis fell, all of her indoctrinated commandos and geth platforms were down, and twenty five pissed off people turned their full attentions to her. Four sniper shots went off, nearly amputating one leg below the knee, as her barrier vanished from ten combined slams and warps.
In eerie unison, all of the Shepards moved towards the platform, where the asari leaned heavily against the armored glass cage. "Where is Saren? What does he have planned?" they demanded, the facility vibrating in time with their words. Benezia winced as blue blood started trickling out from her nose and eardrums from the force of their focus.
"You don't know what it's like," she said wearily, panting weakly. "It gets into your head, whispering and worming inside every thought you have, bending you to its purpose."
"How does Saren do it?" they demanded again, stepping closer in unison. Two more glass panels behind her fractured, and a downed geth behind the cage spontaneously exploded.
"It's not Saren," Benezia whispered. "It's his ship, Sovereign." One trembling hand raised weakly to her cleavage, pulling out a small data capsule and tossing it halfway to the foremost Shepards. "That's what he wanted. The genetic memory of the rachni, giving him the location of the Mu relay and access to the Conduit." She sighed weakly, collapsing.
"Mother!" Liara's anguished shout echoed across the room, breaking the symbiotic consensus as she broke through their ranks to cradle her mother's dying body.
Angela stepped forward, picking up the data module and connecting it to her omni-tool. "I'm sorry, Liara," she said, wholly inadequate to the sitation. Quistis pushed through the ranks, gathering the sobbing girl in a hug.
"What do we do with this thing?" Kohana asked darkly, moving over to stare at the truck-sized rachni in the cage.
"Those things nearly destroyed the galaxy," Polarity pointed out.
"This one hasn't done anything to us," Havok countered.
"You mean except for all the little hungry baby rachni running around?" Lilitu spoke.
Benezia suddenly opened her eyes, and rose unsteadily to her feet, leaning back against the glass. "This one's song has faded," she said, sounding completely different, and unconcerned with the two dozen weapons pointed at her head. "Your communication is flat, it does not color the air."
Angela swallowed heavily. "You're the rachni queen," she guessed.
"Yes. We listened to your discussion. We can see your power, it tears at us, dark brown, heavy with weight. We cannot control the others, they have lost the ability to hear the song."
"If I'm understanding it right," Charles said, "the other rachni aren't being directed to attack, they're just, what, feral?"
"That is accurate. We sing to them, and they do not hear, filled with fear and pain. We can only throw ourselves on your mercy," the queen/Benezia said.
Angela sighed, covering her eyes quickly with one hand. "Alright, Shepards, quick decision. Show of hands for those in favor of sparing her." A flurry of hands shot up, and she counted swiftly. "All in favor of killing her." Another flurry of hands.
Tied nine to nine, she thought bitterly. Is this some kind of cosmic joke thing, to make it all hinge on my decision just because this is my universe? She took a deep breath, and moved over to the console, reading the commands. "I am going to let you go," she said slowly, ignoring the muttering from half the Shepards behind her, "but get this clear – one single foot out of line, and we, all of us, are coming to wipe you out a second time."
"We will sing of your mercy to our children," the queen said. "We thank you." A moment later, Benezia's corpse dropped to the floor again.
"There's still the issue of what to do with all the loose, feral rachni," Williams commented bitterly.
"They did set up a neutron purge in the hot lab," Gina said, "Ventralis' computer had info on it, but the tech he sent to activate it apparently never made it."
"Good enough for me. Weapons free, if it's not humanoid, shoot it," Angela ordered as they moved towards the other exit.
"What if we run into a hanar?" Deirdre asked rhetorically.
"Then I guess they get turned into sashimi," Sachiko said, shrugging. "Damn jellyfish creep me out anyway."
The hot lab had a dozen rachni running around, and the corpse of one tech, killed but otherwise untouched. They quickly searched his body, finding the security code for the neutron purge, and moved to the back room. "I have a bad feeling about this," Bradley said.
"Me too. Vanguards to the front, soldiers and infiltrators to the flanks, adepts to the rear, sentinels and engineers to the middle," Charles suggested. "Just in case more of them decide to show up, we're going to need to force our way out of here."
"Good call," Angela agreed. "Mira! Activate the neutron purge, two minute delay!" She rattled off the security code from her omni-tool, and the alarm sounded.
Sure enough, when they opened the door again, the room was packed with rachni warriors. Kohana ran out, flanked by Eric and Wrex, themselves flanked by Havok and Sachiko. They tore through the rachni in a straight line to the elevator, halting there as something occurred to them. "Angela, we won't all fit," Neville pointed out calmly as he shoved a singularity inside a warrior.
"I realized that," she shot back. "Ideas?"
"Is the elevator shaft shielded?" Jared asked.
"I think so," Polarity said.
"Then allow me," he said, pushing to the front. Straining, he pulled together a ball of biotic energy the size of his head, and thrust it into the elevator. The moving box crumpled inwards, and then dropped heavily five feet to the bottom of the shaft. "We just have a long climb," he panted, dropping to one knee.
"Everyone into the shaft!" Angela shouted. Gina snickered loudly enough to be overheard as they all backed in, Flora and Oksana starting to climb the maintenance ladders. "Robo! Move your metallic ass!"
"A neutron purge will present minimal hazard to my hardware, and someone must close the doors," it said. Charles and Quistis were firing past its ankles on full auto, and Bradley and Neville launched another two singularities to keep the rachni off it. "Please stand clear of the doors," it announced as the VI countdown reached three. The doors protested being forced shut, but the next several seconds went by with no one suddenly keeling over dead.
"Oh good, it worked," Polarity said. "Now, how the hell am I going to climb to the top when these ladders were designed for hands?"
Three hours later, they trudged through Port Hanshan from the now-operative tram back to the Normandy. "You can do magic, yet you never thought to learn how to fly?" Havok asked the unicorn.
"I never thought I'd need it! It's not like I made a habit of getting trapped at the bottom of elevator shafts designed for other species!" she protested.
"Don't worry about it," Eric said, "reminds me of N-candidate training. Only none of the stuff they made me carry talked quite so much."
"All in favor of heading to the Citadel for a day or two of R&R?" Angela asked, getting a ragged affirmative from everyone.
Naturally, as she stepped back on board, the very first thing she heard was Joker. "Commander, there's a priority call from Admiral Hackett."
"Tell him I died," she responded half seriously, and slouched towards her quarters.