Author's Note: And so we come to, and leave, Ilos, where our intrepid Shepard Squad finds out a little more about their situation, and get to make the Council look like idiots. Not that that's hard., or anything. As always, I love reviews! Fistful just hit 200 reviews, and some lucky guy named Wanderer D was the #200.
The Mako bounced heavily on the surface, Angela slamming on the brakes. In the gun turret, Lilitu opened fire, bullets perforating two geth as she tried to yank the cannon towards Saren, only to have the door slam closed in their faces. "God damnit," Quistis snarled from the back seat. "Five fucking seconds, and we'd have run him over!"
"No time to worry about it now," Angela said, motioning Neville to drop open the hatch. "There's got to be door controls around here somewhere, and the faster we get it open, the faster we can kill him."
"That's the spirit," Neville said, dropping out and scanning the area with his pistol. "Oh, bugger," he muttered, glancing outside the narrow blocking point.
"What is it now?" Quistis asked darkly.
"Oh, nothing much, just a dozen or so geth platforms backed up by three armatures." His British stoicism was in full force as he ducked around the corner long enough to take down one geth's shields, ducking back into cover as Lilitu blew its head off.
"Why is it always armatures?" Eric grumbled, waiting for the first geth to come around the corner, then grabbing it by the flashlight long enough to stick his shotgun inside its shields and fire.
"Just because that one almost stepped on you doesn't mean you need to get all upset about it," Quistis told him as she blew apart another one.
Angela just shook her head, shorting out the power supply of another geth platform. "I'm wondering why Joker didn't just drop us out there," she said. "Plenty of open space to drop the Mako into."
"Who cares," Quistis growled. "There's geth to blow up!"
They cleared out the regular geth fairly quickly, then the armatures with a careful combination of overloads and bullets, not taking more than some shield slams for it. They moved out into the Prothean complex. "I do hope that these statues aren't what the Protheans actually looked like," Neville said as they jogged down a ramp, shooting at several hoppers.
"Why, because you'd hate to see them in Fornax with a hanar?" Eric quipped, snagging one hopper mid leap and slamming it into a stone pillar, making it easy pickings for the rest of the squad.
Lilitu made a retching noise from inside her helmet. "Well, quite, but also because they seem unusually like some of the writings of one Lovecraft," Neville said. "Pre-spaceflight author. Lots of stuff on horrors from beyond our reality. Also, lots of tentacles."
"Enough with the tentacles already," Lilitu muttered. "You're going to make me puke in my armor."
They passed quickly through the area, leaving dozens of shattered geth platforms behind them until they finally found the controls to open the door. Naturally, it was behind several juggernauts and flanked by a half dozen armatures. "Gosh, this looks like a walk in the park," Quistis muttered, as she and Lilitu scanned the large room from their cover on a raised balcony.
Eric looked over at Angela. "Can't you hack those armatures, if they're not active yet?"
She scanned the floor below quickly, marking the locations of the control panels. "Left side, or right? And I'm going to need a lot of cover," she muttered.
"We've got you covered," the other four said in unison. Fighting the urge to twitch, she crept down the ramp, Eric a blocky and slightly noisier presence behind her. Along the right side of the room, she paused behind the last piece of cover, so far still unnoticed by the geth, and glanced back at Eric, nodding nervously.
Grinning widely, the Vanguard readied his shotgun, and stepped boldly out into the open. Lilitu and Quistis fired at the same instant, blowing two of the smaller platforms apart. "Candygram for Mongo!" he shouted, blasting away at the charging juggernaut, getting an extra shot in as Neville's gravity slam interrupted its charge.
The panel was extremely complex, and being rushed for time, Angela didn't bother with trying to bypass it. Instead, she just dumped omni-gel into it as fast as her omni-tool could handle it. She wasn't sure if geth had emotions the way that regular humanoids did, but their body language in the brief moment before the armature blew them apart seemed very 'oh shit' to her.
With the geth clear, they hustled up the ramp on the other side, pausing as the damaged beacon there began replaying the Prothean message. "So, the Reapers appeared around the Citadel?" Quistis muttered in confusion.
"Sounds like it," Lilitu agreed.
"How did they get there without using the relays, then?" Neville wondered, as the device began to repeat the last few words over and over again.
"I don't care right now," Eric growled. "Not while every moment we spend talking lets Saren get further away from us."
"Look on the bright side," Angela said, having triggered the remote door control. "If anything happens on the Citadel, there's twenty-one other Shepards there to take care of things, backed up by Wrex, Garrus, Williams, Tali, and Liara."
Meanwhile, on the Citadel
All the other Shepards stood in the park-like area near the embassies. They had managed to collect the rest of the non-Shepard squadmates. And they were all standing there, surrounded by three hundred of C-Sec's finest. Somewhere further behind them, the Council, along with Udina, were shouting orders at the various Shepards through their omni-tools.
"This is getting old, really quickly," Xander muttered. All four voices were blurred into a nonsensical babble coming through the same speaker.
"I have to agree," Oksana said. "I'm not too eager to open fire on C-Sec, but we can't just stand around here, either."
"I'm glad for that," Garrus muttered nearby. "I was working with these guys just a few weeks ago."
"Afraid they won't invite you to the official barbeque anymore?" Talya chuckled.
"I suppose we could give them a good old Virmire greeting," Bradley said, just loudly enough to be heard. "On three?"
They all waited, and shouted in unison, "I AM COMMANDER SHEPARD!" The C-Sec officers all went tumbling backwards, most of their shields disabled, and a clear line of sight to the Council. "I FACED DOWN THOUSANDS OF KROGAN. DO NOT TEST ME!" The words were perfectly clear all the way out to the observatories at the tips of each Ward.
Tevos and Sparatus were still standing, gaping at them, as the C-Sec officers attempted to get back onto their feet. The asari looked ready to say something, then stopped to look past them at a sudden high-pitched whirring sound, accompanied with a bright light. "That's not a good sound," Xander said slowly, as everyone turned to look.
The miniature mass relay, what everyone believed to be an art sculpture, was now whirling up just like its kilometer-long space brethren. With a sudden burst of light, two geth colossi emerged, clanking forwards to flank the relay. "Aw, nutbunnies," Oksana muttered.
"Shepards D through M, with me!" Bradley shouted, grabbing Liara and Williams as well, already crossing to the other side of the Presidium waterway. "Everyone else, with Charles! Let's show those geth who's in charge!"
They split up quickly, the groups flanking down the sides of the Presidium, as more geth continued to pour through the relay, capturing anyone to slow or unlucky enough to be within reach, already setting up the dragon's teeth next to the elevator to the Council chambers and holding down the bodies for them to activate.
Back on Ilos
Angela slammed the Mako to a halt as the force barrier sprang up in front of them. "It's a trap!" Eric cried, but after several seconds, nothing happened. "A really disappointing trap," he finally muttered.
"That looks like a door," Neville pointed. "Perhaps the off switch is down there?"
"We're sure as hell not getting forward," Quistis complained. "Might as well see how many geth are there to blow up."
Thus fortified with this solid, if emotionally unsatisfying, logic, they dropped out of the Mako one at a time, moving down the short hallway and into an elevator. "I'm curious about one thing," Neville said as it crawled downwards. "I can see the Citadel and a fifty thousand year old Prothean ruin having the same door controls. But why are they on every pre-fab colonization building we've fought mercenaries and Cerberus? Human tech should be somewhat more different."
The other four all looked at each other. "Is this one of those things, like why you park on a driveway and drive on a parkway?" Lilitu asked as the doors opened.
To their surprise, the path before them was empty of geth, cloned krogan, indoctrinated asari, or anything but dust. At the far end was a beacon, seemingly larger than the others. As they cautiously approached it, a damaged hologram sprang to life in front of it. "You are a paradox. You are not indoctrinated, and not machine. That outcome was foreseen. Scans of the dark energy inherent in your paradox predict a likelihood of a seventeen percent chance of the complete obliteration of this universe."
The five of them looked at each other in confusion. "We're a paradox?"
The hologram spun around itself. "'We' implies multitude. There is you, in different versions. You made yourself a paradox, and then you summoned you to yourself."
"Anyone else know what the hell that meant?" Quistis said darkly.
"I … think so," Angela said. "Who, or what, are you?"
"I am Vigil, the computerized intelligence built to maintain this research facility. From here, my creator, Ksad Ishan, and the last remaining Prothean scientists activated the Conduit, and disabled the signal that allowed the Reapers to appear, trapping them in dark space."
They all stared at each other again. "Wow," Lilitu sighed. "Can we fit this in the Mako?"
"Are you kidding?" Eric grumbled. "We can barely fit ourselves in the Mako, and you want to bring a giant spear of Prothean computer?"
"I do not have the power reserves to maintain any transit," Vigil interrupted. "The Conduit activation is quickly draining what little remains. The signal to summon the Reapers can still be broadcast. The last task set to me by Ksad Ishan was to develop a computer countermeasure." All of their omni-tools beeped as they received a sudden download of data. "I estimate five minutes of power remaining to reach the Conduit and pass to the Citadel."
Blinking quickly, Angela motioned for everyone else, whispered quickly, and they turned to face the VI. "I command you to live," they said in unison, the ripple of their voice nearly tearing the hologram apart.
"Power reserves increased. I now have direct control over the Conduit. Chance of complete universal destruction increased to eighteen percent."
"Hold it," Eric said. "How is that going to destroy the universe?"
"The paradox inherent in multiple versions of you existing together consumes dark energy and strains the seventh, tenth, and fifteenth dimensions of this universal reality. Each usage of the paradoxical harmonics has a cumulative effect."
"If I understood that correctly, each time we do our unison talk, we're breaking the fabric of space-time," Neville said. "Smashing."
"That's putting it mildly," Angela said, icy sweat running down her spine. "Let's get back to the Mako. If we don't get there before Sovereign can get into the Citadel, we're all going to be dead anyway."
They rushed through the canyons, overgrown and submerged in water, running over the smaller geth in their way, flooring it downhill and shooting past the Colossi to burst through the Conduit, rolling the Mako several times before crashing to a halt over several geth.
Pulling themselves out, they were surrounded by the crackle of gunfire and flames, and as they took down the few husks within range, the other two groups converged on them. All twenty-six Shepards passed the information from Vigil through them, not even conscious of the process. Then, as one, they turned towards the elevator to the Council chamber. "We saw Saren come through here," Wrex said, "but we couldn't get close enough to even slow him down. He's already on the way up."
"WE KNOW." They couldn't help the voice now, this close to what they had felt before, right after being made a Spectre, when there was only a handful of them.
"We're going after him. Right?" Garrus asked, suddenly nervous.
Angela fought the pull of the collective. "You are. There was a Prothean VI, it gave us a program to upload." With a few quick finger motions, she sent the data to Tali. "Just keep Saren busy long enough for Tali to upload the program, and we'll have beaten Sovereign."
"But, Commander, what about you?" Williams asked, nervously fingering her rifle.
Angela had already been subsumed back into the collective. "WE ARE GOING DOWN."
Dun dun dun!