RDIÁVASI RELAY

PARNITHA SYSTEM

NOVEMBER 14th, 2188

THE FIERCE LIGHT was 'parked' just shy of the Relay into the heart of asari space, the AI running deepscans into the system. Liara had a small buoy that relayed a particular signal to those 'in the know' that led to her new base. Given the amount of paranoia pervading asari space at the moment Shepard had come down on the side of caution. The Fierce Light was like no ship in Citadel Space. The Normandy would have found the signal long since but that had been by design and the Normandy he'd commanded was currently being overhauled into a museum piece. The Normandy SR3 was at last report still under construction at an 'undisclosed location', which he knew to be the secret fabrication dockyard hidden in the debris field of the old Arcturus station. Shepard doubted he'd ever command it again. He'd long since been of the mind to let a new Captain make a name for themselves walking those particular decks.

So far, to be frank, he was seriously starting to fall for the Fierce Light. The straight and sensible uniforms had been kept in cryostasis and were as fresh as the day they'd been issued. They were comfortable and functional, the slate-grey leather-like fabric suffused with nano-weaves and wafer-processors. Where someone using current tech could call up an omnitool, the uniforms had something similar built directly into the uniform with controls and displays embedded into the sleeves of the garment, of course tied into all the ships systems. Shepard found it so convenient he'd almost forgot he had an omnitool. The armor made him look like an art-deco samurai and fit easily over the uniform and integrated perfectly, the uniform becoming the control underlay for the armor. The armor had shield configurations and kinetic barriers he'd not seen before but were easily better than anything he'd worn to date. Unfortunately for the rest of his crew, only he and Jack could benefit from either armor or uniform. Jack had grumbled momentarily but acquiesced once outfitted. Never one for uniforms, Jack had actually liked this one, which Shepard counted as another point in its favour.

Shepard had Hessam give everyone a crash course in the ship's functions. It had been surprisingly easy, as the AI had easily reconfigured the software to norms they understood. The actual guts of the ship's systems would be something else entirely but Hessam assured him any repair less than catastrophic could be easily handled by the vessel's onboard nano-systems. Hardly a new idea, interspersed throughout the Light's superstructure were blocks of inert material the host of nano-machines could use to craft repairs and replacements. If necessary almost anything could be substituted.

"Even corpses?" Jack asked in a macabre jest. She'd seemed calmer for getting some rest. She'd complained of being sore, feeling unwell, but that seemed to have passed.

"At an atomic level," Hessam informed her calmly, "all matter looks precisely the same."

Shepard watched Jack start an argument with Grunt to pass the time and watched with interest. He always found them entertaining. Grunt had squeezed himself into the gunnery seat. He'd mastered the weapon controls easily enough, a little surprised learning the weapons had been reasonably easy. Jack was comfortable in the pilot's chair. Shepard wondered if he should have been surprised at the range of skills she continually displayed but decided it would just waste his time. No one who'd lived her life was an amateur at anything that kept one alive.

"You're wrong about the Collectors." She began.

"They were Prothean husks." Grunt countered.

"No, you're wrong. They were genetic revenants. Big diff."

"Husks are husks. They were husks." Grunt riposted.

"Typical krogan profiling." She crossed her arms and sat back. "Everybody looks the same to you people."

Grunt snorted and waved at her dismissively.

"You're half-right. Some we miss entirely because they're so short and just get squashed without ever bein' seen."

Jack returned with a derisive laugh.

"Hah – I've killed so many of you lumbering meatheads I swear those humps are just fulla air. Or fat."

Grunt appeared affronted.

"Hey – fat is energy!"

"Says the fat guy." Jack made a show of pointing at Grunt's hump. "Lookit that thing! Hollow that out and you could house a family a' refugees! Fuck knows you ain't using it for brains."

"I don't know how you two manage," Grunt replied after a moment, looking back at Shepard. "She's so scrawny you'd lose 'er in the bedsheets."

Shepard just leveled a stern finger at his 'gunnery officer'.

"Do not drag me into this. Lose on your own damn terms."

Jack chuckled and Grunt growled, then tried again.

"Just cause they didn't look like husks didn't mean they weren't. That's your counter to everything I say. 'I'm wrong.' I'm not wrong." He grumbled.

"Stop being wrong."

"I am not wrong! They were husks, they were tools of the Reapers. Same thing!"

"These Reapers of yours seemed to be in the business of genocide. How many did they kill?" Vnkar asked. "Everyone?" He'd been surfing the 'Nets heavily, trying to get up to speed on his new home.

"No, not everyone." Grunt told him. "Obviously."

"How very interesting." Vnkar said in a way that implied it wasn't.

"Never define it by its scale." Shepard told him. "All killing is personal and it all matters. Their deaths mattered."

Vnkar stared at Shepard. After a few moments his mandibles twitched. His eyes were haunted.

"Remember them?" Vnkar said softly. His voice seemed far away.

"Any way you can." Shepard agreed. Vnkar nodded once and looked away. He nodded sharply again and turned back to his Extranet studies.

"That's why krogan are strong," Grunt added, "all our battles are personal."

Vnkar drew in a deep breath and did not look up from the monitor before him.

"Must be horrible," he muttered to himself.

Hessam announced that it had discovered Liara's buoy and relayed coordinates and they were on their way, the Fierce Light leaping across the system.

"So …this thing doesn't use a mass effect core at all you said?" Jack asked the AI, the idea still striking her as odd. She'd seen a few similar ideas years ago among some of the more ambitious pirate bands. Nothing they did ever got beyond a lot of empty talk and a few stolen prototypes engines that looked pretty and did nothing.

"No, madam." Hessam replied and a screen jumped to life before her with appropriate graphs. "The motive force for the Fierce Light is an artificially generated micro-singularity suspended in a heavy phased-plasma torus through forced helical magnetic fields. That energy is channelled through several latitudinal dispersion grids that run the length of the ship."

"Oh. Well, why didn't you just say it was that simple?" Jack rolled her eyes. "How fast is this thing?"

"'Fast' implies that this vessel moves through space. It does not." Hessam displayed a rather complicated looking graph with many intricate numbers around it. "The Overth-class HDV Fold System aligns to disparate spatial points and utilizing the principle of quantum particle synchronization proceeds to link…"

Jack interrupted the description with an out-thrust hand.

"Hold on a minute. How the hell do we go anywhere if we don't move?"

"This ship moves space instead of moving through space." Grunt interjected.

"For long-distance travel, that is essentially correct, sir. For intersystem or interplanetary travel the Fold system contains null-force generators that encase the ship in a zero-point energy field that drops the mass of it and all it contains to near-zero. Utilizing the BVas'aalal Principle of the subspace tunnelling phenomenon of objects in zero states…"

Grunt looks smug and sent a "Ha!" at Jack.

"That's why we don't need Relays in this thing?" Faintly exasperated, Jack waved the explanation on. "Tunnellin' under and squeezin' space?"

"Correct, madam, more or less." The graphs and diagrams went away. "Theoretically, the Fierce Light can travel between any two points in the universe without relativistic penalties..."

"…Since the ship don't actually move…" Grunt added. Jack glared and cocked a fist at him.

"…however it is recommended one knows one's destination with reasonable fidelity before attempting any extreme long distance transit." Hessam continued as if there had been no interruption. "For system and planetary travel, 'Tunnelling' as Mistress Jack calls it is more than sufficient, easily rivalling any known so-called FTL generation."

"Technology developed away from Reaper influence," Shepard muttered. "This should definitely be encouraged."

"Commander… forward scans indicate a disturbance near our destination. It appears to be ship-to-ship. I am reading energy disruptions that are consistent with combat."

Shepard sat forward in his chair.

"A battle near the Bastion? Can you scan the vessels?"

"We are too far out for direct visual – scan interpolation only. On screen."

The large screen before them snapped to life with a computer-generated image of Hessam's scan. A ship similar to the Normandy in configuration surrounded by several smaller orb-shaped craft.

"Shit - what's she doing goin' to Blue's?" Jack looked back at Shepard. "That's Cheerleader's ship."

"Can you identify the attackers?" Shepard asked Hessam, who replied in the negative. Numbers showed the Phoenix roll and begin taking damage. "Intercept." Shepard barked.

"Interception in fourteen minutes." Hessam added. The Fierce Light turned and accelerated.

Grunt began to chuckle.

"Finally, something to shoot."