Ruth gaped at Osco. "You couldn't have warned-"
"Does it matter?" Gellian asked, the cool expression in her eyes speaking volumes. No, Ruth supposed it didn't really matter. Who cared if she insulted what was basically a temporary prisoner that Gellian meant to dissect…probably sooner rather than later?
It means a lot if that thing gets out of there and decides to hunt me down, Ruth thought, trying to ignore the way the rakir was glaring, baring its teeth. The teeth alone discomfited her even more. Given the ovine nature of its face, the smallness of its mouth, Ruth had simply assumed her teeth would be the same as most herbivores…small, flat, and unimpressive. However, that small mouth apparently had a great deal of elasticity to it, and every tooth within was sharp and pointed and designed for tearing through flesh. Those jaws could easily close around her neck, and from the look in its eyes, it- she- was envisioning them doing that right now.
"No, I suppose not," she said slowly. "But if you're getting rid of her, the sooner the better. I still think Luka was playing with far too much fire even bringing her here. I-"
The sharp wail of a klaxon broke the air. The rakir lifted its head in surprise, tensing as it took a step backward and looked around in confusion. Osco, far less confused, immediately turned and rushed for her console.
"Someone is on the black ship."
"What? How is that even possible?"
"They must have traversed the Omega Four relay," she said, and then hit the com. "I need two squads down in sector G immediately!"
"What do you want me to do?" Ruth asked, already heading to a second console.
"First missile is ready for launch, already targeted. Run the final diagnostic and get it in the black. I need to wipe the computer systems and prepare for evac-"
Ruth paused and stared at her. "You're wiping your work and preparing for evac because someone happened to find the black ship?"
"Someone, yes…or an entire marine platoon of someones, lead by Captain T'Soni. If they're on the black ship it is only a matter of time before they stumble on the doorway and end up here. I cannot risk my plan failing now. Launch that missile and set to wiping the databases, protocol Hades. I'll oversee the second missile being loaded on Luka's carrier."
"What about the…thing. It. Her?" She pointed toward the rakir.
"As our evac ships launch, protocol: Hades will release cybenox gas through the facility. It will kill her and won't be picked up by even the marine's hard-suit filtration systems. If any of them are stupid enough to take their helmets off they'll drop dead. Quickly now, Ruth. We haven't much time. Get that missile launched!"
Returning her focus to her own console, she opened a link to the black ship's computer system. Not nearly as fine and advanced as the ship's own mental interface, it allowed her some small level of control of the vessel's systems by using a tight beam directly through the doorway. There was, in fact, only one command she could execute through this signal, and she did so now without hesitation.
The command only consisted of two words.
WAKE CREW
Liara and Shepard followed Feris across the wide room. Nearly lost in the shadows was a thin archway. It was formed the same black material that made up everything else. Within was a different kind of blackness-colder, somehow, and emptier- yet with almost a sense of life about it. It suspended like a soap bubble in the archway, inexplicable- still as death yet endlessly shifting.
"I don't know what it is," Sam said. "Never seen it's like but…it sends every hair on the back of my neck up."
"Doctor?" Liara asked. Shepard took half a step closer to it. Gooseflesh crawled down her back as she tried to look into that darkness, and she unconsciously backed up again.
"I have no idea," she said. "Possibly some kind of energy field, a barrier? Maybe Miranda can find out what it is in that computer-"
Suddenly, lights. Lancing like distant suns out of the dark black of the room, they sliced down from tiny ports on the ceiling, casting pools on the wide floor. As they turned in surprise, Miranda suddenly lifted her voice.
"Captain, we have a problem! Something somewhere else just accessed the ship systems, just for a moment-"
"Captain, I have life signs," Ashley said. Liara headed her way, drawing her rifle again.
"Life signs?"
"Yeah, I'm reading about…about twenty. They weren't there one moment and then just appeared. They-"
"Captain!"
Miranda, still connected with the computer, drew their attention to the pools of light. The floor was moving, shifting away, opening up much as the airlock had done. Shepard, standing only a few inches away from one of these pools, backed up a few paces as the solid floor was replaced by a gaping hole.
Then, out of the holes, things began to rise.
At first Del thought they were plants, some kind of old trees. The others had all drawn their weapons, all but Miranda who was still connected to the computer. Del didn't know what she was doing but she was probably trying to figure out what was happening and get it to stop.
"Back up a bit, Doc," Feris said, edging closer with her rifle and putting herself between the hole nearby and the geneticist. Nervously, Shepard immediately obeyed. She realized she was holding her pistol as well, though she couldn't remember drawing it.
Branches. That was what Shepard could see. Twisted, dry, gnarled branches. By the time Sam had her back up, however, enough had risen from the holes to realize they weren't really branches, weren't really plants.
The creatures were incredibly long and thin, with rounded heads and enormous, closed eyes. Their noses and mouths were tiny, rudimentary…almost vestigial. Their skin seemed to be covered with some kind of angular chitin, and along the sides of their almost wasp-thin necks she could see folds, nearly identical to the asari.
The one closest to her was a startling, bright blue color, paler over the face and highlighted with darker sapphire. It looked as if some child had painted it with primary finger-paint. The others were of different colors, all eye wrenchingly bright- yellow, and green, and orange, and purple.
The closest one to the computer console where Miranda still stood was blood red.
They didn't move, didn't open their eyes. Shepard couldn't even tell if they were breathing…if they even needed to breathe. There was nothing to indicate that they lived- but nothing indicated they were dead, either.
They rose until they stood about ten feet tall, before the floor beneath their feet solidified once again. Liara, shimmering with biotics, shifted the scope of her rifle from one to another, but none of them moved.
"They are alive?" she asked.
"They are giving off typical organic life signs," Miranda replied. "They're definitely alive, and the infrared shows their body temperatures are rising. I think they were in some kind of cryogenic or static state that made it impossible for them to be read."
"They must have been sleeping, preserved in the ship, ever since it came here," Shepard whispered. She edged up to Sam's shoulder without even realizing she'd done it, scrutinizing the blue figure in front of her. "Millions of years…and we tripped something that brought them out again."
"We have no way of knowing if they're hostile," Ash said. "They look pretty delicate. I could wrap my hand around one of those legs, probably snap it like a twig."
"They must come from an extremely low gravity environment," Shepard said, edging closer again. Sam, noticing her, stepped in front of her. "Back off, Doc, until we're sure it's safe."
"Sorry, I…they're just fascinating. Such brilliant colors in a ship so black. They look…insectile but those lines on their necks suggested at one point they had gills. And the size of their eyes…nocturnal maybe-?"
At that moment, the crimson creature opened its eyes, lifting its head. If it was confused at the sudden consciousness or the strange situation in front of it, it nevertheless didn't hesitate. Standing less than three feet from Miranda at the computer console, it was nothing for it to reach out, the motion incredibly fast.
Shepard physically jolted at the sound of the creature's talons sinking right through the chest plate of Miranda's hard-suit as it impaled her. The scientist made a single gasp before those claws were ripping free and she folded.
"Fire!" Liara shouted, sending a wave of biotics toward those closest to her, just as they lifted their heads as well.
Everything instantly became chaos. Shepard saw the biotic wave barely stumble the things before she was suddenly thrown to the ground, Feris knocking her over and emptying her rifle toward the blue thing's face as it swiped out. Flashes of color were leaping everywhere, the horrible heavy drone of the rifles almost drowned in otherworldly screeches that sounded like band saws tearing over metal. Del lifted her head toward Miranda, who still lay slumped several feet away. She tried to get to her feet, something hit her, and she went tumbling over metal, the pistol she'd been clutching uselessly spinning away out of her hand.
Somehow she managed to draw the second one, heart thundering as she stumbled up to her feet. She was grabbed again, yanked backward as claws passed by so close to her face plate she actually saw them scrape past the plastiglass.
Liara shoved Del backward, nearly sending her off her feet again, emptying a shotgun blast directly in the yellow creature's face. Over her headset, Shepard could hear her shouting toward Jura and the others. "Jura, we are under heavy attack, and are retreating to the airlock! Disengage as soon as we are on board the Aswa! Williams! Feris! Get back to the Aswa-Doctor! Stop!"
What the hell are you thinking? Del darted past Liara, running as fast as she could toward Miranda lying unmoving on the ground. She knew that the woman likely was dead, but just leaving her there while they retreated seemed unthinkable…almost as unthinkable as abandoning this ship and any hope at Osco's research.
She had the pistol in her hand still, and when that horrible, primary emerald face bared its teeth at her from only a few feet away, she didn't allow herself to think. Lifting it she pulled the trigger four times. The bullets struck home, two skidding off the almost rock-hard skin of the thing before one landed in its eye. The huge orb popped like a balloon filled with ink, and the thing fell back.
Stumbling, half slipping in the mess it left behind, she had just regained her balance when a baseball bat seemed to slam into her gut. Her breath vanished in a tight, molten pulse of pain and her feet left the deck. Flying back, she hit the ground hard, sliding to a stop.
Endless gunfire, that horrible shrieking, all distant and muted as she struggled to remember how to breathe. Weakly, she managed to roll onto her side, air finally coming in tiny, acid-dipped streams that seemed sucked through a straw.
Something was laying a few feet away from her. Her gloved hand groped out, gripping the shoulder-pad smeared with streaks of purplish blue. Coughing, finally filling her lungs again, she turned her head as the hair on the back of her neck went stiff.
That strange archway was mere feet behind her.
She looked back toward the carnage. The things were dying but there were so many of them, moving so fast. Feris and Williams were both wounded but fighting, their guns never halting. Miranda lay an impossible distance away.
Shepard's arm tightened around shoulders and weakly she pulled the limp figure toward the archway, gritting her teeth as she did so. That red ball of pain flared momentarily to white and she stopped again, panting, then grit her teeth and pulled once more.
Inch by inch, she dragged the asari closer to that arch. Someone screamed in pain…someone human.
It sounded like Ashley.
Her face wet, Shepard could feel her arm trembling as she hauled one more time, not daring to look back. The cold black empty of that arch came over her like a shroud…and everything went to silence.
When Liara was young, she had been foolish about a great many things. It was a condition of youth, perhaps- one everyone, no matter the species, had to overcome. Since she had become a commando and picked up her first rifle, that foolishness had seemed done away with. It was not something she could afford, and certainly never while carrying a weapon.
Spectres did not become spectres by being foolish, no matter what the circumstances.
When the doctor had broken away from her, running toward either the fallen Lawson or the computer interface console, Liara had been utterly stunned- but that was not where her foolishness had come in. It had come in when she'd turned her back on an active threat and tried to snare the human woman with biotics.
Even with the knowledge that keeping Shepard safe was paramount to their mission-even if it meant keeping her safe from her own stupidity- it did not justify Liara turning away from that creature in an attempt to stop her.
And if she were to be utterly honest with herself, she knew even as she did it that she wasn't doing it because Del was a civilian who would be slaughtered in moments. She wasn't doing it because her existence was paramount to ending Osco's threat.
She did it because the idea of her being hurt brought more horror and fear to the asari than, by rights, it should have.
She didn't know what happened between the moment she turned and threw out that biotic field, and the moment she opened her eyes. The pain, only partially dulled by her suit's systems, told that she'd been injured fairly badly. She was laying in silence, only a dim light around her. The floor beneath her face-plate seemed to be made of concrete. Moving carefully, she shifted herself up into a sit.
Just behind her, there was an archway similar to the one that had been aboard the black ship. Unlike that one, however, this one had no hovering curtain of nothing. Through it, she could clearly see a blank cinderblock wall only a foot or so away.
Following the trail of pain she found the bloody rents in the side of her armor, but it seemed someone had put medi-gel over the actual wounds. Even so, an alarming amount of blood was smeared over her armor.
The room she was sitting in appeared empty, but it clearly was no longer aboard the black ship. Forcing herself up to her feet, she pulled a pistol and limped cautiously toward the far door. She was nearly to it when it suddenly swung open, the pistol lifting and aiming before she realized who it was.
A shocking amount of relief filled her, and she immediately did her best to strangle it down, lowering her gun. "Merah?"
Shepard hurried over to her side. Judging by the stiff way she was moving, she was clearly in some amount of pain herself. Holstering her pistol, Liara glanced at her HUD. Seeing the atmosphere was breathable she lifted her hands to unlatch the helmet and take it off. If Shepard were wounded she'd be far better able to scrutinize and treat her wounds without-
"No!" Del's gasp was horrified, and she instantly grabbed Liara's hands in hers to stop her. "Don't! You'd be dead in seconds!"
"What? My HUD is reading clean air-"
"This entire facility is lousy with cybenox gas," Shepard said.
Liara stared at her. "What gas?"
"Cybenox…it's one of Gellian's creations. It's a powerful and completely synthetic neuro-toxin. It's hard to make but apparently she had enough to fill this whole facility. I was fortunate to recognize the formula in the computer system-"
"The computer…where are we, Shepard? How did we get here?"
"I'm not entirely sure where we are-I-I mean what planet. I've only been able to piece together some small amount of data from the computer network. It's been fairly efficiently wiped. It's a habitable world, fairly standard gravity. We seem to be in some kind of mountain facility. As for how we got here, apparently that…"
She nodded toward the archway. "I pulled you through, back on the ship. Next thing I know we're here. It was filled with black before, but only a few seconds after we got here it just kind of…vanished."
"Some kind of teleportation device," Liara asked, looking toward the archway.
"I-I think it works on the principle of folding space but…I'm no engineer."
"That was how Osco was getting on and off-board the black ship without tripping the Omega Four," Liara said, frowning.
"It must be, but how did the connection get established in the first place? How did she ever get there to activate it and link it here?"
Liara looked over at her. "You said you have been looking through the computer…how long have we been here?"
"About an hour," Shepard said. "You were unconscious. I used some medi-gel to stop the bleeding but I knew I needed to find some kind of communication system, get you to some help. I had no choice, I had to go take a look around. I was careful, I swear it…but it doesn't matter. This whole place is empty, but it hasn't been for long. I think they had some kind of warning system aboard that ship, and when it triggered those things to wake up it set off alarms here and they ran, in case someone made it through that thing."
"We need to find some way to get communications out, figure exactly where we are," Liara said, and began to limp for the door. "We need to see if we can get ahold of the Aswa, or get through that door again…"
She broke off, hissing in pain, as her wounds throbbed sharply. Instantly Shepard caught her arm, peering at her with worry. "You know we won't be able to reach the Aswa, not until they can make it back through the relay into home space. There's a lab upstairs, medical facilities. You need better treatment than medi-gel slathered over your side. Let's take this one step at a time, ok?"
Liara nodded stiffly, gathering herself again, then looked at Shepard. "You are absolutely sure there is no one left at this facility?"
"I….well…"
Liara narrowed her eyes slightly. "Well, what?"
"There…there kind of is someone left…"
Liara moved over to the floor where it was laying, a mask strapped around its face, before she crouched carefully. The chest was rising and falling almost imperceptibly.
"It was lying unconscious over there, in the cell," Shepard said. "I thought it was dead, because of the cybenox but…it was still breathing. I put the mask on it to filter out any further toxin but…I think it's in really bad shape-"
"She," Liara said.
"I'm sorry?"
"This is a rakir female," Liara told her.
"The…that one species you were telling me about? The one the Council was waffling over making first contact with?"
"Yes. Osco must have taken her off her home world for some reason, and left her here to die when they had to evacuate." She reached out, touching a loop of metal at the unconscious rakir's neck. "She put a translation collar on her…why would she bother to do that and then leave her behind?"
"Because she wanted to talk to her," Shepard said. "I know Osco. It came down to nothing more than this…rakir…made her curious, and she wanted to talk to her before she cut her up and found out everything that made her tick."
Her voice turned soft, and Liara looked up at her. Through her face-plate, Del looked incredibly sad. "This poor woman…torn away from her own home world by creatures she doesn't understand, surrounded by things that to her must seem like magic, and then left here to die. Osco gave her no more thought than as a simple curiosity, something to be cast aside like a used tissue if she couldn't get anything useful from her, mentally or biologically."
"That is true," Liara said gently, looking back at the rakir before shaking her head. "Yet this woman is going to be incredibly angry and very dangerous when she wakes up. She's also still breathing in the cybenox."
"What?" Del blinked, then crouched. "The mask-"
"Covers only her first set of nostrils," Liara said, then turned the rakir's head, lifting an ear upward. Behind it, flapped like the blowhole on a dolphin or whale, was another nostril. "She's still breathing with this second set."
"I-I didn't know. I just…I'll find something to…"
She headed away to a medi-kit, finding some surgical tape and returning, helping Liara to gently cover the two nostrils behind her ears. Then she helped Liara back up to her feet, the asari's voice catching in pain. Even with her helmet on, she could see her face pale.
"Ok, over here. You need to lay down."
"We need to find the communications system, see if anything is left at all in the computer databanks-"
"Right now, you need to lay down," Shepard said sternly. "Or you are going to pass out, and I can't lift you, not without taking your hard-suit off. I do that and the gas will kill you in moments."
"The rakir-"
"Osco clearly didn't have time to adjust the cybenox to the rakir's particular biological systems, that's the only reason she's still alive. Trust me, you it will kill fast. Now c'mon. You're laying down. Now."
