Chapter 23
Hours after the entertaining meal with his shipmates, Kevin was still in his room. Wrapped around his right hand was the strap for his Xelvas'taersh symbol. The symbol itself was held in his open hand, unable to succumb to gravity because it was still attached to the strap. He had been thinking for a while now about how he should wear it. He had been given a fairly prestigious position in being part of this squad, and he still hadn't honored the colors by sporting this emblem. He was going to make it happen. Even if it meant not leaving the room until he did.
As hard as he thought, however, he couldn't think of a way to wear it that meant anything real to him. At least not in any way that kept the dangling emblem from getting in his way. After a while, he just gave up and started picking areas that he could wrap it around. It was then that it occurred to him to wrap the strap around his left upper arm. After awkwardly fiddling with it to get it clipped and wrapped tightly without the use of his left hand, he was able to get it to stay in one place with the emblem dangling on the outside of his arm. It was wrapped high enough so that, as it dangled, the bottom of the emblem was just above his elbow. It reminded him of when soldiers of his own species wore icons on the outside of their sleeves in the same place to denote rank.
The problem was, the strap was wrapped so many times, it obstructed his arm's movement. Kevin briefly flashed back to what admiral Han'Gerrel said about the strap material. An omni-tool cutter could easily take off unwanted portions and he could affix the freshly cut end to the clip. Kevin unwrapped the strap to the point where it was wrapped only once. He measured out where he would want to cut it and marked it a centimeter or two shorter. He wanted to make sure it was tight enough so that it wouldn't slide or flop around during periods of activity. After it was cut and the necessary pieces were rejoined, Kevin wrapped it once and clipped it. He tested how tight it was by tugging on it, practicing some quick melee combat moves and by stretching. It was snug enough that it wasn't going to move, and didn't compress his suit enough to constrict his arm.
Kevin made a short trip over towards the bathroom in his quarters. He used the large mirror there to get a new sense of what he looked like to everyone else. An armored quarian with unusual boots, colorless and clanless, with a vague emblem denoting some non-existent faction dangling on his arm. The clanless part didn't bother him much. He wasn't quarian and certainly wasn't expecting to be asked into a clan. The dark gray of his plain suit wasn't so bad either. It was a color easily forgotten and quickly overlooked. If he really did plan on using this suit when 'returning to the workforce', he'd benefit more from less colors.
"Rolush to Folner," boomed a voice over his suit's comms, interrupting his thought process.
"Go ahead, Tosh. What's up?"
"Two things. First, I've unlocked the various systems related to the IES Stealth System, which in the future I'll just call the Stealth System or IES3. Second, I've opened a secure tunnel between our omni-tools. If you have anything you'd like to 'show me', you can use that to transmit data."
"Duly noted, Tosh. I'll be down in a few minutes so we can go over the details."
"Understood. I will be inviting the captain and Welkas here as well so that they are aware. If there is anything you want to send me, I advise you do so now or wait until afterwards."
"Got it," Kevin confirmed as the comms shut off.
He immediately headed for the desk terminal where his storage device was resting. He plugged it into the terminal and used his omni-tool to access the data. After finding the collection of locked files, he made copies and sent them off to Tosh through the tunnel network the clever quarian had set up. Once all of the data was confirmed received, Kevin closed off the tunnel and headed out to meet the others in the VI core room.
As Kevin came around the corner into the hallway right outside the engine room, he met up with Siri and saw Welkas making his way down from the opposite end. He and Siri stopped just outside the door as they waited for Kar and they walked in at the same time when he caught up. With Siri to his immediate left as they squeezed through the door just barely big enough for two people, he heard the high pitched klink of metal on metal. It wasn't their armor, however. The ablative pauldrons would have resonated a much deeper tone. When they were all the way inside the VI core room, he and Siri simultaneously looked at each other's arms to see what that was.
It turned out that Siri had finally found a way to wear her Xelvas'taersh emblem as well. What was interesting was that despite being in very different, isolated places, she wore her emblem nearly the exact same way he did, but on her right arm rather than her left.
"Well, well. Isn't that curious?" Siri said as her eyes trailed up to meet his.
"That's one way of putting it," Kevin responded as he stared back.
"Over here, please," Tosh called out as he waved everyone over to the area between the T.E.R.A. hardware and the VI core.
When everyone gathered, Tosh projected some data and some images on the wall. It appeared to be a dense wireframe rendition of the Kellius, with a few things highlighted by different wire colors.
Tosh began his explanation. "Now, because the captain and Welkas were not here for the previous conversation, I'll just briefly recap what Kevin and I talked about. While doing some routine checks into the VI to make sure the new guns were working, I came across some locked and hidden systems. Specifically, they are directly related to a stealth system pioneered by an alliance ship a couple years back. Welkas, I assume you've seen no such thing in the helmsman's terminals?"
"No. I haven't seen anything like that before," he said.
"Right. This was because these systems were deliberately designed to remain unusable by the party that installed them until certain conditions were met. As I told Kevin, we have not met any of these conditions yet, partly because the hardware installation is incomplete and partly because the Terra system hasn't gotten the go ahead from Cerberus."
"Let me get Tavval in here before you continue, Rolush. If this is a potentially mission critical system, she, as the only other officer, will need to know."
Tosh nodded and Siri called Arla up over the comms, ordering her to report to the VI core room. Not more than a minute later, Arla showed up and joined the crowd of participants. She stood directly behind Kevin until he sidestepped so that she could move between him and the captain to get a better view.
Tosh continued. "As I was saying, the conditions that needed to be met to unlock the stealth system have not been met yet, but this is all coded in. I had just completed unlocking these systems myself before I called you all down. As Kevin pointed out to me in our previous conversation, the installation isn't complete, so we weren't sure how that would affect the system. As it turns out, the stealth system can still be used, but with limitations that the original design didn't call for."
"What sort of limitations are we talking here?" Kar inquired.
"The main limitation we will have to deal with is active stealth time, since the hull refrigeration is in place and complete whereas the internal emission sinks are short a few. The original version allowed for running stealth times of several hours and passive stealth times of a few days before the emission sinks would have to be vented. I ran some calculations based on where the fewer number of usable sinks lands us in terms of stealth time. It looks like we can run active stealth for about forty-five minutes and passive stealth for somewhere around thirty hours."
"That doesn't give us a lot of active stealth time," Arla vocally noted.
"All that means is that we'll just have to be extra frugal with when we run active during stealth," the captain said. "We can still do some stealth missions as long as we're strategic in our execution."
"I assume that venting would instantly give away our position. What happens if we don't vent the captured emissions?" Kevin asked.
"Seems to me that if the emissions are not vented and the containment capacity of the sinks is exceeded. . . " Tosh zoomed in on the wireframe image of the Kellius towards the aft where a few highlighted items lined the wall of the ship near the thrusters. "They probably burst and release the emissions into the ship, which would easily be enough to cook us all inside our suits. Case in point, it's something we really do not want to do."
"I assume I will have some way of determining remaining stealth time up at the bridge?" Kar wondered.
"I'm in the process of putting together a passive interface for the bridge terminals to denote remaining stealth time down to the minute," Tosh replied.
"Good work, Rolush," the captain applauded. "This will definitely help us get to the relay if the geth fleet is still there. Speaking of. . ." Siri suddenly turned and headed out of the core room with purpose in her strides.
Everyone looked at each other in confusion in response to Siri's quick withdrawal from the room. Kevin followed after her while Arla and Kar stayed behind to continue to hear Tosh's explanation. When he stepped out into the hall he caught Siri ducking into the crew quarters out of the corner of his limited peripheral vision and he pursued. Inside, the only other person there was Tyr, and he had been called by Siri to help her with something on the terminal at the far end of the room. Kevin moved up right behind them and peered at the screen.
"What did I miss back there?" Kevin asked.
"Hold on," Siri replied. "You will see in a minute. I just need to dig up that copied data."
Kevin did as instructed and waited patiently for them to find what it was they were looking for. About a minute later, modified LADAR scan vids started playing on the screen in sequence. What was modified was the various objects that showed up on the scans, which were now color-coded. There were a large number of red objects varying in size and shape, a single large blue object a distance away, and a small green object right next to the source of the scan. The big blue object's shape looked a lot like a mass relay, and that's when it hit Kevin – this was a modified version of some of the data leaked by the military. The same stuff that got him out here. Tarsil, Ralik and he glossed over this and focused more on the mass relay.
"This is the leaked information," Kevin stated.
"Yes," Tyr confirmed. "We've color-coded the entities according to what they seem to be. The blue is, obviously, the Melkanis mass relay. The green is a second stealthed probe. All that red crowding around the outside of the relay's estimated incoming drop zone? Those are geth ships. A surprising variety of geth ships."
"Alright, we figured the geth would be keeping an eye on their discovery. Are we looking for something else?" Kevin wondered.
"Not so much something else as something within the geth fleet." Siri said while taking control of the view on the vid.
It was a three-dimensional representation, thanks to that second probe, so Siri could control where the view on the screen was aimed. She scrolled about through the collected mass of geth ships, searching for something in particular. Kevin had already seen at least two ship variants that he had never witnessed before, but Siri just kept on looking until she eventually settled on easily the biggest ship in the fleet.
"That's it. It looks like my hunch was right." Siri sat back in her chair and folded her arms, her bodily language indicating a hint of exasperation. "Keelah."
"This just a lot more complicated," Tyr said.
"What exactly am I looking at?" Kevin asked.
Tyr was happy to oblige. "That's what we call a Valesh'saat geth ship, which roughly translates to 'Homeship-class'. For lack of a better term."
"I didn't know geth even needed homeships," Kevin said.
"As far as we know, they don't," Siri replied. "The geth communicate over tightbeams using pre-established FTL comm buoys, so they can transfer processes across the galaxy's network."
"But we're not in range of any comm buoys now, much less by the time we get there," Kevin pointed out.
"Precisely," Tyr replied. "There has only been one time a ship like this has ever been witnessed and documented amongst our people. That was during a deep space search near the fringes of the Perseus Veil to see if the geth were trying to push out. That was about fifty years ago or so."
"The search nearly came up empty," Siri continued. "It wasn't until the last few days of searching when they picked up a clustered bunch of geth ships surrounding a larger entity. They went in for a closer look and found that the larger entity was, in fact, a geth ship of previously unseen size. It was similar in external configuration to that of the smaller ships, aside from maybe some additional insect-like leg mechanical appendages, and was easily as big as our own homeships."
"And that's where the name came from," Kevin concluded.
"Yes. We had no other name for it," Siri explained. "The deep space search vessel was able to steal one hull-penetrating scan of its middle – which amounts to just over a third of the entire vessel – before having to turn around and FTL away due to catching the unwanted attention of the geth cluster. They went straight back to the Migrant Fleet at that point and were hailed as heroes."
"Yet in all these fifty years," Tyr said, "we haven't been able to determine the purpose of such a ship. We have many theories, though. One is that it's a manufacturing site, churning out more geth ships and infantry. Another is that it's a repository for mined materials. The most popular theory, however, is that it actually does fulfill a role similar to that of a homeship. Since it was beyond the communications of its own kind, a ship that massive would provide a hub of network connectivity and storage for a small fleet, like the one pictured here. They could house billions of processes there. Thousands of ships and infantry. All while being out of the data sharing range of the rest of the geth."
"A self-sufficient fleet away from home? Sounds familiar," Kevin pointed out.
"I doubt it's because they want to model us," Siri said. "It's simply a fairly efficient setup for geth on deep space runs. They don't want to lose processing power by running out of connected range with the majority or their kind, so they take a huge piece of hardware with them to keep neural network connections high."
"So how does this make things more complicated for us? If we time our stealth system right, we can float right by them all." Kevin folded his arms.
Sir looked to Tyr and Tyr back to her. She drew in a deep breath and turned the chair to face Kevin. "This mission is more than just exploration, Kevin, if you remember. Part of it is seeing about elimination geth as much as possible as we search. We never really anticipated finding a Valesh'saat geth ship, even if I had hunches about it, but it provides us with the greatest opportunity for eliminating a massive amount of geth in one blow."
"Oh God. You want to take on that?" Kevin took a step back. "You guys are out of your friggin' minds! That's easily a dreadnought equivalent!"
Tyr folded his arms and leaned against one of the nearby bunks. "It's not a warship, Kevin. It's a support ship. At least, as far as we know. We have the scan data of the midsection of the ship, which gives us a considerable advantage for an internal strike. If I remember, the scans picked up a server cluster. I'd say that's a perfect way to bring down a Valesh'saat and cripple the surrounding fleet. We just need a plan of action."
Kevin let his head fall back. This didn't seem like a good idea to him at all.
"We're all on the same mission now, Kevin," Siri said while approaching him. "You have no idea how important this is to our people. It's just a slight detour. That's all."
"We won't be going in blind," Tyr piped in. "We have a known portion of the ship. The captain and I will use the next few days drawing up a plan of action and to strategize."
"We'll be walking into a bee's nest," Kevin said.
Siri placed her hands on Kevin's shoulders and stared him in the eye. "I am confident that a small team can get in and out without much agitation. We have to do this, Kevin. We promised we would."
Quickly realizing that he was going to be the minority on this, and realizing that he was now under her command, he acquiesced with a sigh. "Yes, captain."
"Good. I will talk to the others about it individually. For now, Kevin, you should go see if Rolush has any more details on that stealth system for you to know."
"Yes ma'am," Kevin somberly replied before heading out of the room.
When the door shut behind him Kevin let out another sigh. He wasn't blindly agreeing to it, but he wasn't going to just outright disagree either. She was right in that he accepted this mission when he agreed to be a part of the Xelvas'taersh, and that he had a duty to fulfill all of the objectives to the best of his ability. He decided to wait and see the reactions of the rest of his squadmates before he would say anything, hoping that they would agree with him on it. With one last peek at the door behind him, he headed for the VI core room.
Arla and Kar were still talking with Tosh when he stepped in. Arla must have noticed the heaviness to his steps because she promptly picked up on it.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
"You'll find out soon enough, I'm sure," Kevin said.
"Is there something wrong with the captain?" Kar wondered aloud.
"Not exactly. . . The captain will tell you guys later. Anyways, Tosh, what else is there to know?"
Tosh spent the next twenty minutes outlining the various technical bits and pieces to the IES3. When he finished, he dismissed everyone so that he could get back to work on his helmsman's interface.
A few hours after the technical debriefing on the IES3, Kevin had the chance to catch up with several of his squadmates and ask them if the captain had talked to them like she said she would. It seemed that their opinions of the idea were evenly split. Bela, Tosh and Kar all simply thought of the idea as dangerous orders they had to follow. Bela made the interesting point of "If we didn't do anything with risk, what have we done worth merit?". Tyr, Arla and Riik were all for the idea of assaulting the geth ship. Ralik expressed a few concerns about the quarians' level of strategical expertise and what the act of disabling a geth ship in geth space would amount to, but other than that, he was fairly neutral. It seemed Kevin was the only one genuinely concerned. Voicing his issues with the mission didn't seem like it would hold much weight on its own. He needed other people to agree with him. So much for that plan.
Kevin sat himself down in one of the comfortable couches facing the large viewport in the port side observation lounge to think. He was again reminded of why he left the Alliance military to begin with. He disliked following orders that he believed were bad ideas, even if he was the only one. It was why he started working alone. He could decide what he wanted to follow and what he wouldn't bother with. His contract work was always by choice, but he had to admit to himself that he hadn't come up against a contract that he straight out disagreed with.
Either way, there wasn't much he could do to get out of it now. He had to trust that Siri and Tyr would come up with a plan that minimized the risks, and jumping into a geth homeship probably came with a lot of risks built in as it is.
"What did you get yourself into, Folner? All you wanted was a quick cred," he said to himself.
After another few minutes of thinking of a response to himself, the door opened.
"Are you still sulking about the mission?" It was Arla.
"How did you know I was in here?" He was hoping for peace and quiet.
"Thank Terra for that. She's wonderful when you ask her nicely."
Kevin clenched a fist. That blasted VI. "And no, I'm not sulking. Just. . . Thinking."
"Thinking about how you're going to jump ship when we reach the fleet?"
"I'd be insulted if I wasn't so deep in thought right now."
"Come on. What are you so afraid of?"
"I was afraid of you jumping on my back about it, but I guess I can check that off of the 'to be afraid of' list.
"I'm being serious here, Folner."
"Arla, I left the Alliance military because I couldn't follow orders I didn't agree with. I'm just stuck facing that all over again."
"Why don't you agree with it? Surely the captain's told you how important this is."
"I just have this gut feeling that it's going to turn into a disaster, that's all. There's so much that can go wrong in a situation like that."
Arla stepped around the couch and stood between Kevin and the viewport. "You can trust that it'll go fine, and here's why. Tyr, our best strategist and the captain are putting this plan together. Do you think the captain will allow any of us to die or get left behind after what happened with the Forverna?"
Kevin didn't respond.
"Of course not. If she can't find a way for this to work for everyone, she won't do it. She cares too much about all of us to just toss us into a varren den. And that's only half of it. We will have the entire team's skills working in unison. Those synthetics have it coming, and we're going to give it to them right at the heart of their own homeship. All that's left is for you to put forth an effort."
Kevin snickered.
"What's so funny?" Arla angrily asked.
"Careful, Tavval. Your positive attitude and ego combined might just spontaneously combust and put a hole in the hull." His tone was far lighter than his words might have indicated.
Arla fumed. "You're such a. . . Augh!"
She went to kick him against the couch, but Kevin, being familiar with her ways by now, was ready for it. He stopped her foot before it could gain damaging momentum and quickly tugged on it. Arla was pulled off balance towards the couch and fell onto its plush surface. She flailed a bit to turn herself in preparation of a counter, but Kevin wasn't bothering. Instead, he was simply sitting forward with his elbows on his knees and hands under his chin while staring out the window.
"You're right, I guess," Kevin said before she fully prepped herself to attack again. "The captain won't just send us in without regard and if I'm going to walk into a bee's nest, I'm going to walk in with a really big stick."
"That's more like it, Folner." Arla readjusted herself so that she was sitting normally, turned towards him. "You had me worried for a while there. I thought I might have to hold your hand the whole way."
"Nah, you'd like that too much."
She sighed. "Whatever. If there's nothing else I can do to bring you out of the emotional pit of despair, I'll be going."
"Actually. . ." Kevin said just as Arla stood. He looked up to her slowly and folded his hands as if he were mocking a beggar. "Could you watch a vid with me?" He accompanied this with puppy dog eyes that she probably didn't even see.
"I'm out of here," she replied, almost chuckling.
"I'll watch one with you, Folner!" yelled Bela from the doorway. She ran in and hopped over the back of the couch facing the vid screen, falling down onto it already in a sitting position.
"Wha-?" Arla looked at Bela and then to the door where the captain was leaning against the doorframe with her arms folded.
Kevin was just as confused as Arla, but chose not to show it. Instead, he hopped over to the couch Bela sat on and gave her a high-five for stepping up.
"How long?" Arla asked.
"Since halfway through your incredibly encouraging speech," Bela said as she used her omni-tool to bring up the list of media on the screen.
Kevin turned on the couch to look back at Arla. "So wait, you mean to tell me that the captain didn't send you in here to bug me? Interesting."
"I don't need the captain's permission to kick you back to life, Folner," Arla responded.
"Fair enough."
"Come on, Tavval," Siri said. "Let's go before you lose it. Welkas has some minor engine performance tweaks he suggested that I'd like you to work on." She held out a datapad from her now pseudo-crossed arms.
Arla looked back at Kevin once more while she quickly snatched up the datapad. Without another word, she left with the captain.
"How do you guys do it?" Kevin asked Bela. "You quarians are such creepers. I swear, anytime I'm not looking, one or more of you is spying on me."
"Either that or you're just not very attentive. Ah, here we go. I love this movie. It's called "The Beast and the Beauty", and it's about this asari girl who stumbles upon the stronghold of a callous krogan warlord!"
"Oh great. A cheesy love story. Should of known you'd pick something like that."
"You know, there's some Fornax 'behind the scenes' vids in here too. Would you rather I played one of those?"
". . . On second thought, The Beast and the Beauty sounds great."
The days following the discovery of the geth homeship started to fall into what Kevin considered the 'repeating pattern of daily life' category. Each day was becoming more and more typical, but not so much that he was beginning to dislike it. In some ways it was comforting getting back into a predictable routine. The last time he did that was in his highschool days. It was nice to know that he didn't have to worry about who's eyesight he might have to dodge for a few days or what lengths he would have to go to in order to complete a contract.
Each day was dominated by two major events. A tech learning session with 'Ms. Tavval' and a close quarters combat training session with his predictable student, Arla'Tavval. Progress in each was steady. They each grew more and more accustomed to each other's talents as they worked. Kevin was able to keep up with the ridiculous amounts of information she dumped on him and even passed a few more of her exams with Tula'Rok. Likewise, Arla was showing steady progression with her combat abilities. Kevin had even made the official decision to move onto practicing armed CQC with her only a day before they reached reach the relay.
Ralik's social interaction with the rest of the team got less rigid each day and he and Tosh's collaboration on projects increased. Additionally, since the dance party Kevin had set up, all but Ralik seemed to fall into a similar sleep pattern, which also meant more shared meals and moments of little to no activity. Antics between shipmates were frequent, of course, especially if Bela was involved.
The captain and Tyr spent most of their time in the briefing room pouring over data and scans related to the geth homeship and consulting members of the squad about how to handle certain areas. They were hard at work at trying to make sure they had a plan that would work. Kevin's worries about the mission never went away, but he mentally committed himself to going all out to make sure that everything turned out fine as long as there was something he could about it. Luckily, the tension related to the mission that he feared would dominate by undertone wasn't there, which made the remaining days until they arrived easier to deal with.
Kar and Tosh tested the IES3 during discharge stops to make sure of several things. They tested the interface Tosh had programmed, they tested the physical hardware and they tested the overall system to make sure it worked as designed. It turned out that Tosh's calculations were more or less on the dot, and active stealth time worked out to be forty to fifty minutes. Meanwhile, Tosh informed Kevin that he was not able to find a point of reference for cracking the cipher on his locked files. Tosh also informed him that he had not given up, and installed some of his custom algorithms for cracking locked systems and files into the ship so that he could utilize some of its unused processing power to work on the files. He knew it would take a while, and told Kevin that he might not see any results for days.
Kevin began to notice that Bela was frequently disappearing to the cargo bay for hours. When he asked her about it, she only told him that it was related to the upcoming mission. While Kevin was certainly curious, he did not want to press matters unnecessarily. If she wanted to tell him, she would.
All the while the entire team was mentally prepping themselves for when they would launch the mission to the geth ship. No one truly knew what to expect and it started to show as they got down to the wire. Nervous habits like tapping fingers, tapping feet and pacing were prevalent during the day they were scheduled to arrive. Before they knew it, they were only hours away from reaching the Melkanis relay – and the geth fleet.