Smoke on the Water
by P.H. Wise
A Mass Effect/XCOM Crossover Fanfic

Chapter 03: The Grey Ship

Disclaimer: I own neither Mass Effect (EA) nor XCOM (God only knows).

The snow crunched beneath their feet as Jane and her squad made their way through the colony of Freedom's Progress. It was cold, and it was night, and the lights of the colony washed out the stars. There were active civilian-model security SHIVs in the main colony complex - rugged all terrain models that were popular more for their ability to take a beating than anything else - but EDI was already on it, and expected to have them all shut down before either fireteam got close enough for it to be an issue. The two fireteams, Jane, Miranda, Jacob, and a tall XCOM marine by the name Leo Jones on one, the other four XCOM marines on the other, would alternate with one advancing and the other on overwatch, and the colony layout made that easy enough.

"Shepard," EDI said through Jane's commlink, "I have control of the local mechanized assets. I am rerouting their sensor data to your mapping software." Even as she spoke, the Augmented Reality image of the colony as a whole lit up with new information.

"Acknowledged," Jane replied. "Good work, EDI."

"Thank you, Shepard," EDI said. "Be advised that the Quarian life signs are fading. There are currently only three left alive. One will be dead in less than a minute."

Jane frowned. "Got it. Keep the Seekers on patrol, and inform me if you spot anything."

It was an eerie, empty place, and the only sounds aside from the snow and the wind were the sounds they themselves made moving through it. There were signs of weapons fire - plasma and laser burns, mostly - but not nearly as much as there should have been for a colony of 900,000 people to have been so utterly depopulated. The condition of the buildings varied: some places looked untouched, with dinner still waiting on the table, as if the occupants had just stepped out for a moment, but other rooms had overturned furniture and hasty barricades thrown together. The latter was where they found signs of weapons fire. No bodies, though. Not yet, anyways.

The other fireteam was on overwatch as Jane and her group moved forward when they got near where they'd detected Quarian lifesigns earlier. They had reached the entrance to the central colony complex - the main dome inside which could be found administration, security, public housing, and the commercial district - and it took a few moments for Sgt. Jones to get it open.

The door split in the center and opened with a grinding sound. Immediately, a Quarian body fell through it; whoever he was, he'd been propped up against the door, and he was dead. He'd taken a hit to the chest, and the nearest comparison that Jane could make was that it looked like someone had gone to town on the Quarian with a chainsaw. The damage was horrific and extensive. Tissue had ruptured, bones had shattered, and the whole ruined chest cavity was full of blood, which had pooled around his body. There was evidence of medigel in the wound, too - someone had tried to give him first aid. It hadn't worked. Whatever had hit him had torn right through his kinetic barriers, and it had happened recently - within the last thirty minutes. Beyond him, the secondary airlock door that allowed the main complex to be completely sealed had been blown open with explosives. Shepard took a moment to place a tiny locator beacon on the body for later retrieval.

Her fireteam and the other one traded off advances and overwatches for another quarter mile into the main dome before, with her team on the advance again, she found herself in front of the primary administrative building for the colony. It was a five story building, roughly square shaped, and with two main entrances: one in front, one on the side. A fountain stood in the public square in front of it, and when she caught sight of the statue at the fountain's heart, her breath caught.

The statue was a woman standing tall, clear eyed, gazing towards the horizon. Bob-cut hair framed a lovely face above a body in an old style Earth Coalition uniform whose features were perhaps more heroic on the statue than they had been in life. There were few humans who would not recognize that image, cast in bronze or not: The Volunteer. Her name had been Annette, but nobody referred to her by that, nor by her last name. It was always The Volunteer: the woman who had laid down her life to save the Earth from destruction in the final hours of the First Contact War. Looking at that statue, Jane Shepard felt a sudden sense of vertigo. She had to shut her eyes for a moment and take a deep breath before it began to recede.

Jane could feel Miranda's eyes on her as she stared at the statue, and she was glad of the helmet: she had no idea what her face looked like right now, but she was sure it would reveal too much. Too much of what, she did not know.

"Shepard," EDI said, and as quickly as that, the moment was over. "I have gained full control of the colony's security network. Please be advised that there are six unidentified life forms advancing on your position. I am sending the security feed to your display."

A camera feed popped into view on Jane's HUD, and what she saw made her blood boil: Sectoids. They were God damn sectoids. Weird sectoids that looked like they'd gone feral, with skin that had a greenish hue instead of their more normal grey, more distinctly webbed hands and feet, and tiny claws at the tips of each finger, but sectoids. They moved the same way as she remembered, half-scuttling, half running, and they carried strange pistols - not plasma, or at least not recognizably so - which had an odd, narrow, nearly dish shaped design with a central spoke that could only be the emitter for whatever it fired. Shepard held up a hand. The team didn't need any more than that: the telepathic link she'd already set up for the squad showed them all what she intended. Jane's fireteam fell back from the fountain and took up positions in cover even as the second fireteam - the one on overwatch - took aim and waited for her signal.

The Sectoids approached the administration building cautiously, but didn't spot Jane or her team. Three of them paused to the side of the door, glancing about furtively. The other three moved up to the door. One of them reached up and opened it.

With a silent signal, Jane's team lit them up from the side. She lashed at at one telepathically, blasting it instantly unconscious and hoping she hadn't just caused a fatal cerebral hemorrhage in the creature. The other five would have scattered instantly, but Miranda gestured, her body flaring with the electric blue of active biotics. A biotic singularity rippled into being between the five remaining Sectoids, scooping them all off their feet to orbit helplessly around it: combined fire from both fire teams killed them instantly. Their guns exploded upon the deaths of the users, sending a spray of weapon fragments across the ground.

"Sectoids," Miranda said disbelievingly. "No sign of any of the races involved in the First Contact War for almost two hundred years, and now they're here, and in ships that actively resist any effort to identify them?"

"What I want to know is, why were they left behind?" Jane asked.

Miranda thought about that. "Maybe their ship is still nearby, and will be returning to collect them once their mission, whatever it is, is complete?"

"Either way," Jacob said, "Them being here is either one hell of a coincidence, or…"

"Or the Ethereals are back to finish what they started," Jane said. She glanced over the data she was getting from the colony's security systems. There was another two groups of Sectoids in the colony. One was moving towards the main building's infirmary, while the other… "EDI," Shepard said, "Have the Seekers and the local security SHIVs take out the group heading for the power generator. We'll handle the other." She looked to her squad. "Let's move, people," she said.

Jane's team went in. The other fireteam remained outside to cover the building, while the SHIV maneuvered to where it had a clear line of fire to the building's side entrance.

The building wasn't complicated: it was just two central hallways that intersected halfway down with numerous rooms on either side. There were five floors: the ground floor was security, the second held primary administration and the infirmary, and above that were offices. Jane could see all six of the second sectoid group on the security feed, gathered outside the infirmary on the second floor. One tried to open it, but it had been locked. The aliens grew agitated. One of them produced what looked very similar to a First Contact War plasma grenade. It manipulated the device, applied it to the door, and stepped back: the grenade adhered to the door. It let out a low whine, and blew the door open with a low, thrumming thud of a green explosion.

A startled cry came from within. Someone opened fire with a shotgun. The sectoids scattered for what cover they could find. Then one of them heard Jacob's approach: even in a carpeted building, a MEC was hard to miss. Its eyes widened almost comically at the sight of Jane and her squad. Even more so when Jacob fired off a plasma grenade. Two of the sectoids dove through the door into the infirmary. A shotgun roared, and a sectoid let out a dying shriek: quite a feat without a mouth.

Three of the strange, green sectoids were caught in the blast of the plasma grenade, and were instantly killed. The one who hadn't panicked returned fire, its weapon making an odd high pitched squeal that you felt in your teeth more than you heard. Most of the blasts missed, but one scored a lucky hit Jacob' MEC right on the left arm's elbow joint, and carved a deep enough gouge into it to damage its internal servos, effectively disabling the arm. Jane felt confident she didn't want to take any hits from that gun.

Jane let herself connect with the creature's mind, privately marveling at how much easier this was now, after Lazarus. She whispered into its thoughts, murmuring aloud as she did so, "You are going to die here."

The sectoid lost it. Its eyes bugged out, and it dropped its pistol and ran. A short burst from Sgt. Jones's plasma rifle put the creature down. Then another high-pitched, squealing weapon discharge came from inside the infirmary. Then another shotgun blast. Then silence.

Jane brought up the security feed for the infirmary, and then cursed loudly. "Friendlies coming in!" she called. "Don't shoot!"

There was a pained cough, and then a familiar voice replied, "Shepard? Is that you?"

Jane walked through the infirmary door. Two dead sectoids lay on either side of it. The infirmary had taken a lot of damage from the explosion earlier, and the beds closest to the door had partially melted. Two quarians were huddled behind a medical scanner on the far side of the room, well beyond the damaged area, one male, one female. Their suits were badly damaged, and both had taken gruesome hits: the male's upper arm and shoulder was a bloody mess, and the female had taken a gut shot from one of the sectoid pistols. It was bad.

It was also Tali'zorah nar Rayya. Her shotgun lay discarded next to her, the muzzle still smoking from its recent discharges.

Jane's eyes widened. "Tali!" she exclaimed, rushing to her friend's side even as she called up the Quarian profile Doctor Chakwas had developed for the medical nanites used in the Terran medical kit during the voyage of the previous Normandy.

"Aren't you supposed to be dead?" Tali asked distantly, her eyes glassy and unfocused, "I'm pretty sure you're dead."

"I was," Jane said as she unclipped the medical MELD dispenser from her belt and administered the treatment to Tali. She couldn't quite manage a grin. The situation was too grim for that. "I got better."

"Oh, right," Tali said, and passed out.

The little nanites she'd just applied could and did save lives, speed healing, help to close wounds, and fight infection: Especially if used in conjunction with medigel, which Tali's companion was already applying. And with both of their suits damaged, infection was almost a sure bet. But although they could stabilize the dying in many cases and bring those with minor wounds back to full fighting form in short order, nanites weren't magic. For injuries this severe, Tali still needed major surgery or she'd die faster than the medical MELD could fix her. Jane looked to the other quarian. "How bad?" she asked.

"Very bad," the male Quarian said. "Even if we were back in the Migrant Fleet right now, I'd only give her 50/50 odds of survival. Myself, maybe 75/25." He grimaced. "So you're Shepard, then? She talks about you." He offered a hand, and Jane shook it. "Kal'Reegar, Migrant Fleet Marines. I wish we were meeting under better circumstances."

"You're not the only one," Shepard replied. Then she tapped her earpiece. "Shepard to Normandy. We need a cleanup crew, and we're coming in with a medical emergency. Please inform Doctor Chakwas to prep for surgery on wounded Quarians."

"Acknowledged, Shepard," EDI said. On her HUD, the last enemy contact vanished. Then EDI reported, "All sectoid contacts have been neutralized. Several civilian security SHIVs were destroyed in the process."

Jane rose to her feet. "All right, people, we are moving out. Kal'Reegar, you're with us." She picked up a device from one of the shelves, positioned it directly above Tali's body, and pushed a button on the back. Immediately, Tali's body floated into the air, her back, arms, and legs held perfectly straight, as if she were on a stretcher. The grav-stretcher's systems linked up with Shepard's armor, and she set it to 'follow' mode. "Team 2 will remain on site with our mechanized assets to provide security for the cleanup crew."

"Commander," Miranda began, "I realize you allowed aliens aboard your previous ship, but…" She trailed off in the face of Jane's murderous glare.

"Tali is my friend, and a vital ally," Jane said, speaking in a voice of deadly calm. "She proved herself a dozen times over against Saren and the Geth. You make whatever arrangements you need to to accommodate having a pair of quarians on board, but I am not going to leave her to die on this Godforsaken rock. Is that clear?"

Miranda let out a weary sigh. "I'll make the necessary security arrangements," she said, and immediately opened her omni-tool and went to work.

Jane Shepard sank into her chair in the Normandy's CIC. The ship might have been XCOM, but the design of the CIC was alliance standard: the captain's chair was in the middle of the room, with the various crew stations all around it, positioned for ease of communication in the midst of battle. She studied the information being projected on her terminal intently: if the Grey Ship had left those Sectoids on the surface, then it was probably still in the system. The fact that they hadn't detected it on the way in meant that either it was equipped with an IES - internal emission sink - stealth system like the Normandy's, or it was hiding in the shadow of one of the other celestial bodies in the system. In this star system, that made for an extremely limited range of options: the Liberty system had only two planets. The first was Freedom's Progress. The second was a gas giant without a specific name, mostly just called Liberty Two. It had a dozen small moons in various orbits, and unless the Grey Ship was on the far side of the star, it was probably hiding amongst the moons of the gas giant.

Lieutenant Susan Yamada - this shift's primary sensors operator - had been working on the problem for the last twenty minutes. Her uniform was spotless, her shoes shone, and she had dark pixie-cut hair, an oval shaped face and warm brown eyes; her demeanor was never less than professional.

Lt. Yamada had narrowed down the possible vectors the alien ship could be on, and the Normandy had just begun to deploy a series of sensor probes. Three were on trajectories that would take them to the far side of the star. Six more were moving to cover the gas giant and its system of moons. It was a sure bet the Grey Ship knew they were here. The only question was what the ship would do when they found it.

As much as Jane Shepard would rather have been in the medical bay where Doctor Chakwas was trying to save Tali's life, she knew that the best thing she could do for Tali was stay out of Doctor Chakwas' way. Her hovering would not make the Doctor's job any easier. And more to the point, they had a potential hostile contact to find.

An hour later, Tali was still in surgery, and the probes had reached the gas giant and settled into their pre-planned orbits. New telemetry filled the display on Jane's console.

Nothing.

No sign of the Grey Ship. Which didn't make sense. Stealth was basically impossible in space. Even the Normandy - a ship specifically designed for that impossible task - could only hide her heat emissions for 6 hours at most, and she only got that much because her drive was gravity based, and therefore had no huge heat-producing plume of thrust.

"Maybe we're missing something," Jane mused.

Miranda looked thoughtful, but didn't say anything. She'd come in about twenty minutes prior, having posted guards outside all the sensitive areas of the ship to prevent curious Quarians from wandering through.

Jane brought up the sensor feed from Freedom's Progress. Colony in the northern hemisphere. Most of the southern hemisphere dominated by an ocean rich with various forms of algae that served as the planet's primary supplier of oxygen. The water had a distinctly greenish tinge even from orbit.

"Do you think they may be landed on the planet? Hid their ship, somehow?" Miranda asked.

Jane shook her head. "Any ship big enough to take nine hundred thousand colonists would be pretty damn obvious to an orbital scan."

Lt. Yamada looked to Shepard and Miranda, "Unless," she began, "Unless they landed in the ocean. They might be able to hide their heat signature that way."

Miranda blinked. "A submersible spaceship? I suppose it's possible. We do it at Cydonia with shuttles and Avengers, after all."

"If they're down there, they're probably just waiting for us to leave, Ma'am," Lt. Yamada said. "As soon as we're too far away to get back in time to intercept them at full military thrust, they head for orbit on the opposite side of the planet and then it's clear sailing all the way to the hyperlimit." She thought about the problem. "If these are sectoid ships, they'll be made of the same alloys as ours, won't they? If I reconfigure the planetary survey scanner for Terran Alloys…" she looked to Jane. "It may take a few hours of scanning, but we should be able to find them."

Jane nodded. "How long to reconfigure the scanner?" she asked.

"Twenty, maybe thirty minutes," Lt. Yamada said.

"Do it."

It took closer to thirty minutes than twenty to make the necessary modifications. Then the Normandy began its search pattern. In the two and a half hours that it took to complete the orbital scans, Jane received word from sickbay that Tali was out of surgery, but she was still unconscious. She stopped in to the medical bay to see her.

Jane had known that Tali's suit had been damaged beyond repair, but knowing that and seeing her lying there on a bed in a sterile, hermetically sealed room were kilometers apart. Her skin was a shade that hugged the border between purple and pink, her hair a rich, dark purple, and the visible texture of it was much coarser than human hair, though that might just have been the result of living her life every day in her environment-suit. Her face was surprisingly human-like, though less so than an Asari's despite the presence of hair. She had three of what Jane could only call swept-back bone crests? It was hard to describe. Hard to find the right word for. They weren't horns, at least. The tips of her ears were pointed, as were her earlobes. She wore no makeup, but that wasn't surprising, and she would have been incredibly cute if she didn't look so frail, brittle, and washed out from having suffered severe injury and just having gone through major surgery.

Kal'Reegar's suit was in no better condition than Tali's: it had been ripped open from the upper left shoulder down all the way to the right hip. He was still wearing it, though, and the mask still covered his face. Doctor Chakwas had him in yet another sealed off, sterile room. His exposed skin was an ever so slightly darker shade than Tali's; his left arm hung in a sling, and his shoulder was covered in bandages. His chest and stomach were hairless, and damn. Jane wasn't particularly into men of any species, but you could grate cheese on those abs. She couldn't help but wonder what the rest of him looked like. He was awake, and he nodded to Jane when he saw her, showing no indication whatever that he'd noticed her checking him out. Jane nodded back. Then she turned to Doctor Chakwas. "How is she?" she asked.

Doctor Chakwas' lips thinned slightly. "If she survives the night, then I think she's in the clear," she said. "All we can do now is wait and hope the MELD does its work."

Jane looked away. There were a dozen things she wanted to say. She wanted to thank Karen Chakwas for the work she did. She wanted to ask Kal'Reegar what the hell they'd been doing down there in the first place. She wanted to ask about the damage Tali had suffered from the strange sectoid gun. But she was tired, and seeing Tali like that hurt her. She wanted to tell Karin to take care of her friend. But what she said was, "... I should go."

Chakwas seemed to understand anyways. She nodded. "I'll let you know if anything changes," she said.

"Thank you, Doctor."

By the time Shepard returned to the CIC, the scans were completed. No sign of Terran Alloy anywhere on the planet except for the colony proper.

Lt. Yamada scowled at her instruments as though they had personally offended her. "Sorry, Skipper," she said. "Nothing. No Terran alloys outside the complex, and no traces of Elerium, either. Maybe they're on the other side of the star after all."

"Maybe," Jane said.

Lt. Yamada frowned at her console.

"Lieutenant?"

"Probably nothing, ma'am. I didn't actually disable the detection algorithms for traditional materials when I was scanning, and there's a small gold deposit that's…" she trailed off, her fingers flying across her console. "That's in the ocean." She further isolated the signal, focusing every scanner the ship had on that point. "... and is the source of a very small gravitic anomaly - small enough that we never would have noticed it if we weren't looking right at it…" she grinned, then. "I think I just found them, Commander."

Jane took the Lieutenant at her word. She looked to the tactical station, currently manned by a Lieutenant Ramirez - a clean cut, dark skinned young man. "Guns," Jane said, "Draw up a firing solution."

Ramirez looked up. "Ma'am, plasma's no good under that much water, and I don't know if our lasers will do much better." His protest didn't stop him, though: he went to work.

"I wasn't planning to broadside them, Lieutenant," Jane said.

Ramirez got it. "Right." He finished the necessary calculations.

Jane nodded. "Fire."

The SR2 Normandy was one of the most advanced warships ever fielded by humans. No one had ever put a graser on a destroyer before, but the Normandy had two spinal mounted grasers serving, along with two pairs of plasma cannons, as her chase armament: one set of weapons facing fore, the other facing aft. They had a monstrous power requirement, and they could only be fired three times each (or six from one, given that you could technically power either one of them from either bank of capacitors) before their capacitors were depleted and needed to recharge - a process which took three hours - but for those six shots, the Normandy class destroyers were able to punch far above their weight class. The ship had already maneuvered to position itself for an ideal firing of the weapon. When Jane gave the order, Lt. Ramirez executed it. There was a tenth of a second delay. Then the gamma ray laser was discharged like a lance of nuclear light. It hit the water and vaporized it on contact. It lost energy as it went down, flash-vaporizing a hole about a meter in diameter through an eighth of a kilometer of water and into the hull of the Grey Ship that hid beneath the waves. An underwater laser was extremely inefficient, and a stupendous amount of energy was lost just getting to the target.

There was still enough power to burn through the Grey Ship's armored hull and score its innards with damaging amounts of heat and radiation. A tremendous plume of steam billowed up into the air, obscuring the target from view, followed immediately by a churning in the water.

"The target is moving, Ma'am," Yamada reported. "Their systems are powering up, and it's rising rapidly."

The second shot seared off part of the Grey Ship's superstructure just as it broke the surface of the water. They still couldn't see the damn thing, but their sensors were able to tell them where it was, and that was enough.

The third shot caught the Grey Ship amidships flying over land just as it had completed a series of complex evasive maneuvers that meant very little against a light-speed weapon fired from orbit. It never had a chance to raise its shields. It never had a chance to fire back.

The Grey Ship went down, and it went down hard: it hit the side of a cliff that overlooked a long, muddy beach with a thunderous crash, deflected off it, hit the ground below, flipped several times, pieces of its structure breaking off as it went, and carved a muddy debris-filled trench 1.6 kilometers long before it came to a rest in the water, halfway submerged, with greenish waves lapping at the wreck.

A cheer went up from the CIC crew, and Jane clapped Lt. Ramirez on the shoulder. "Nice shot," she said.

Then something flickered, and the details of the Grey Ship's remains snapped into place as its systems failed. Not that they could tell much of what it had originally looked like from the wreck. What was left of it was a central section about 300 meters across, and it was obvious that the ship wasn't large enough to have taken 900,000 colonists. An escort, then, or perhaps a cruiser left behind to monitor the situation. It was a start, at least.

"Now comes the hard part," Jane said.

Now it was time to secure the crashed UFO.

Underwater engagements were problematic. Visibility was limited, and sensors that worked just fine on land or in space were of limited use; water absorbs electromagnetic radiation a lot more strongly than air. Plasma weapons didn't work; the magnetic sheath that contained the shots would just collapse when it hit the water two times out of three, leaving you with a pocket of superheated ionized gas flash-vaporizing the water directly in front of your face. Powered armor meant that was survivable, but it didn't make the plasma gun any less useless. Lasers were also problematic. Water absorbs light, and it absorbs ultraviolet, yellow, red, and infrared frequencies most strongly. Most of the hand-held lasers used by the Alliance did their work in infrared and red, and XCOM weapons, by and large, were Alliance weapons: the technology and combat doctrine of the Extraterrestrial Combat Unit had been foundational to the Alliance, and even though XCOM still existed as a separate entity, its equipment was, by and large, the same. Powered armor also had its problems: although it go into the water without issue, you could forget about swimming: it was too heavy to do anything but walk along the bottom.

But the Alliance military was a great believer in adaptability. All of its weapon systems were highly modular, and could be adapted to fit the situation at hand. That did not mean they had all the parts to do so readily available. In the world of military procurement, Murphy's Law was holy scripture.

The latest Archangel powered armors which eschewed thrusters entirely for a fully anti-grav flight system would have been amazingly useful for any entry to the submerged alien craft. The Normandy had two. There were five SHIVs on the ship, but only enough SHIV-lasers to equip two of them. Donnelly, Daniels, and a team of engineers were scratch-building more from replacement parts for the first two, but they didn't expect to have more than one ready before it was go-time. Sectopods couldn't go into the water at all, though their weaponry still worked just fine in an aquatic environment - though it did have a vastly reduced range. Seekers no longer used gas to become invisible, so that was fine as well, but there was no telling how well they would be able to hide in an aquatic environment when fluid dynamics came into play.

Jacob Taylor, in charge of the second squad, was perhaps understandably irked. 'At least we've got the mods to swap over our lasers over into blue and green,' he thought sourly; a laser with a maximum effective range of 20 meters was less than ideal, but it was better than nothing.

The problem was that there just wasn't that much demand for underwater capabilities in a space-faring society. The next time the Normandy made port in Alliance territory, he was damn well going to make sure they had everything they needed to operate in said environment. In the meantime, he'd do the best he could with what he had.

At least the Blaster Launchers still worked.

Twenty minutes later, after all the necessary preparations for their mission had been made, and all the laser rifles and pistols were all switched over to blue or green - the process took about a minute per weapon - both of the Normandy's Avenger class dropships, each carrying eight soldiers and an anti-grav laser-wielding SHIV and four Seekers, set down about a klick away from the beach and out of sight.

The Seekers activated their tactical cloaks and fanned out to perform recon of the site. The only sign of their passage was the faint splash they made when they entered the water, moving invisibly through it every bit as gracefully as the squid they resembled. Jacob's MEC was being repaired, but he had a backup, and the backup was what he wore now, towering over the human sized soldiers in squad: his was a mixed team, four MECs, four psychics. He watched on his tactical display as the Seekers performed their primary reconnaissance function, filling in details, showing hidden Sectoids in the water.

One of the Avengers took off, then, taking Shepard and her team to their underwater insertion point on his right flank.

Then they began the first part of the plan: even as Shepard approached underwater from the west, Jacob signalled the three telepaths he'd brought with him. They began to concentrate, their eyes shining with the purple and ultraviolet light that signalled active psionics. A few moments later, a pair of sectoids who had been positioned to ambush Shepard's team turned on their fellows: one turned his strange rifle on the sniper who waited next to him and blew the other creature's brain out. The other threw a grenade into a group of three sectoids who lay in wait behind a broken piece of debris. There was a high pitched, bone-rattling shriek like nothing Jacob had ever heard, even filtered through the water. Then the spray-dome of the explosion fountained into the air, and the water roiled for several seconds in its wake. Shepard took the next one, and yet another sectoid turned on his allies, turning and firing a full automatic burst from its rifle into the vulnerable bodies of its fellows, reducing two others to little more than clouds of murky seawater mixed with blood and viscera.

In the space of a few seconds, the sectoids on guard outside the ship were in full retreat. That was when the Seekers struck, decloaking as they each seized an sectoid from behind, snapping their fragile necks with grasping metal tentacles.

The retreat instantly became a rout, with a full dozen sectoids fleeing madly back to the nominal safety of their ship. Exposed and out of cover, they were cut down by a hail of close range blue and green laser fire from Shepard's team.

Two minutes later, Shepard's telepathic voice rang in their minds: "Begin phase two."

Damn but that woman knew her business. When he'd first heard Shepard was being given command, Jacob had been… concerned. She was a known alien sympathizer. And worse. He tried not to judge. He had tried to be philosophical about it. He tried to dismiss it with, 'Who she loves is none of my business.' But it had made him angry and disgusted to see the images of Shepard and that Asari together, holding hands after the battle of the Citadel. The incredible similarity of Asari to humanity in general just made it worse: there was this uncanny valley effect that made his skin crawl when he watched them for any length of time. But now, seeing her in action, he figured Central had made the right call putting Shepard in charge, alien girlfriend or not.

It was still creepy.

Banishing the extraneous, non-mission related thoughts from his mind, Jacob glanced at his fellow troopers. "Hope you're ready to get wet," he told them.

'So far, so good,' Jane thought. The water was full of silt and sediment after that last explosion, and that was going to degrade the range of their lasers even more, but there was no helping it. Jacob's squad of eight was moving into position to surround the ship: her own would be making entry. They didn't bother with an airlock. Those were almost certainly traps: it's what she would do, after all, and there was no reason to assume that the sectoids would be any less vicious. So Jane and the other seven soldiers with her made entry through the hole the graser had cut in the ship.

Even as Jane's teams made entry, the the mind-controlled sectoids walked through the doors on the opposite side of the vessel, each carrying a primed alien grenade. Weapons discharged the moment the airlock (water lock?) cycled open. Only one of the sectoids actually made it inside, and Jane had the brief impression of four of them staring at it in horror before she released its mind.

The high pitched, bone-rattling, teeth-jarring shriek of the new alien grenade went off, and the subsequent explosion rocked the ship.

Jane's two fireteams found themselves in the ruins of a whole mess of alien artifacts of unknown design in a long chamber which narrowed as it neared the heart of the wreck, where a green wall cut off their view of the rest of the ship. About halfway between their entry point and the door was an open circular hatch in the floor. The remains of what might have been grey spheres mounted on pedestals were beneath their feet. The walls were mostly green, the floors mostly a subdued gold. The lights in this section flickered fitfully, giving the place a dreamlike feel further enhanced by the fact that it was underwater, and moving through it was strange.

A pair of Seekers slipped through the hatch and into the chamber below - a long corridor that led to the entry airlocks at the base of the wreck, below its main superstructure. It was designed to be defensible. To funnel attackers through a series of vicious ambush points. A lone, panicked sectoid guarded the one the Seekers approached. Something set it off. Its eyes narrowed, and it swung the enormous, oversized rifle it was carrying around and fired on full auto, filling the air with bolts of energy accompanied by sonic shrieks.

One of the Seekers took a hit despite its invisibility, and the blast simply ripped it apart.

The other Seeker took the sectoid from behind and broke its neck.

With the way cleared, the two fireteams went down through the hatch and into the lower level of the ship. This floor was roughly x-shaped, with a central chamber walled in on all but one side. Between the two spokes of the x opposite their entry point, another spoke jutted out from the central area.

There was an sectoid waiting for them in the central chamber, and it opened fire as it caught sight of the humans. It missed, and the misses were near miraculous: given the awkward way they were moving in the underwater environment, with the exception of Sgt. Jones and Jane herself in their anti-grav equipped archangel armor, they had very little mobility - to the point that they were practically sitting ducks. Corporal Robert Jenkins - the telekinetic assigned to her squad - put the creature down with a blast of blue laser light at point blank range.

Then Jane felt a sense of something skittering across her thoughts.

Damn. Enemy psychics. "Brace for telepathic intrusion," she told the squad.

Jenkins apparently didn't hear her, or wasn't listening. He let out a laugh as he walked forward into the central chamber - a lift of some sort that allowed access to the second floor. "Damn but these aliens suck. Is it always this easy to take an alien ship?"

Before Jane could say so much as a word in reprimand, what looked like a feral hanar on acid with a vicious octopus-style beak swooped down from the floor above. The shape was similar, but it lacked the gelatinous flesh of the hanar, having instead ropy tentacles and smooth, muscular flesh. It wrapped its tentacles around the soldier, drew him in, and used that beak to bite clear through his armor. It took less than a second.

Jenkins freaked, "GET IT OFF ME!" he shrieked, "THE DAMN THING BIT ME! KILL IT!"

Concentrated laser fire brought it down.

"Shit!" Jenkins hissed, trying to bend to examine his injury. "Shit, this really hurts."

"What have we learned, Jenkins?" Jane asked dryly.

"Yeah, yeah, never be a jackass when a professional soldier is called for." He frowned. "Shit, I don't feel so good, Commander."

A new telepathic presence. A psychic attack slammed into Jane's defenses, and she staggered. Anyone else would have crumbled in the face of it. Hell, before Lazarus, SHE would have crumbled in the face of it. She was stronger, now. The rest of the squad was in varying states of psionic-induced panic; one dropped his weapon, three of them ran. Sgt. Jones had presence of mind enough simply to take cover, but a sixth soldier, in the grips of panic, discharged his weapon repeatedly into Sgt. Jones' back. He went down.

Even as Jane strove against the psionic attack, peeling it back from her squad, Jenkins howled in agony, his body jerking violently as he clutched at the bite. He was incoherent, now. Just screaming.

Then two alien grenades dropped down the shaft from above.

Shepard telekinetically batted them back up the way they came. They detonated somewhere above her. The lapse in concentration cost her, and she lost her grip on the enemy minds. "Damn it," she hissed. The rest of the squad was non-functional. Another of those beaked not-hanar came gliding smoothly down through the hatch.

The Seeker caught a mere second before it would have latched onto Jane. They struggled against each other, two tentacled beings, one biological, the other synthetic, and found themselves evenly matched. The water churned violently.

Jenkins decked her with a metal-clad fist backed with all the enhanced strength of his powered armor. Shepard would have fallen if not for her archangel armor: the anti-grav unit caught her halfway to the ground, and she spun upwards, shot back from Jenkins, and lashed out at the mind attacking her squad. 'Minds,' she realized as she came into psychic contact. At least a dozen sectoids had combined their abilities to launch this attack, and they were using Jenkins as a goddamn psychic relay!

Then she sensed the nascent monster growing inside Jenkins, and a thrill of horror shot through her. No. Not Jenkins. The egg that the creature had laid inside his gut after it had bit through his armor, now hatched and growing as quickly as it could feed..

Jenkins came at her again, this time swinging his blaster launcher like a baseball club. She caught it. The impact was jarring, and a little surreal, but she caught it. Then she slipped into his thoughts. She had half a second to sense the sheer agony he was in, being puppeted by the creature that was devouring him from the inside before she sent him into unconsciousness with the telepathic equivalent of a cudgel to the back of the head. Then she shot back from the central chamber, leveled the blaster launcher, and fired.

The guided projectile emerged from the end of the weapon and, guided by her thoughts, it shot forward, moved smoothly around Jenkins, the Seeker, and the alien horror, completely altered its momentum and flew up to the second level of the ship before detonating.

The detonation of the micronuke simply erased everything within ten meters.

Jane came back to her senses thirty seconds later. Her armor was damaged, but body was a lot worse off. The water was dark and murky. The lights of the ship were off in this section. Jenkins was dead, and so was the half-grown monster within him - killed by the blast wave, not the fusion reaction. The Seeker and the creature it had been fighting were both destroyed. Her ears were ringing and her everything hurt, and her HUD informed her that medigel was being applied, and that her secondary heart had kicked in to keep her alive even as her meld began the slow process of repairing the damage.

The psionic attack had been broken. Without their relay, the sectoids above couldn't target her squad; if they were lucky, the feedback might have killed them. Sgt. Jones was alive, his secondary heart having kicked in as well. Jane and her squad were on their feet and ready to move out within a minute. When they reached the ship's command center ten minutes later, they found a dozen badly concussed aquatic sectoids who could barely stand. Nearing exhaustion herself, Shepard and her squad killed them all in a hail of laser fire.

There was more to clear. They weren't done yet. They went room to room, killing or rendering unconscious every alien they encountered. It was harder than it needed to be because of the underwater environment. Several of her squad took hits they wouldn't have on the surface. One had an arm blown clean off by a sectoid with one of those oversized rifles that looked utterly absurd in the diminutive creature's hands but was no less effective. Twice more they happened upon the vicious not-hanar, and twice more they put them down with extreme prejudice. By the end of it, the remaining sectoids were in panic, mostly just trying to flee.

By the time she got back to the Avenger, Jane wanted nothing more than to sleep for a week. That wasn't going to happen. Exhausted and injured, she set about organizing the cleanup and salvage operation.

The reward for work well done is more work.

END CHAPTER 03

Author's notes:
Omake time! No, the following is not actually going to happen in my story:

[OMAKE]

(so very non-canon)

Shepard, Tali, and a dozen XCOM Marines hopped off the elevator of light and stepped out into the Catalyst chamber. It seemed open to space, but there was air to breathe. A smooth walkway led from their position to a pillar of light with a massive pylon to the right and left of it, the right pylon bathed in reddish light, the left in blue. None of them were entirely sure what to expect: the Crucible had been built in secret and at great expense, and it hadn't been easy to convince the Citadel Council that they needed to borrow the Citadel for a little bit. Or realistic. Or possible. None of that had ever stopped XCOM before, so there was no reason it should start now.

Even as they approached the place where the walkway split, with one path leading forward into the beam of light, one to the red pylon, and one to the blue, a little boy made of light appeared before them. Every single one of them leveled their weapons in response.

"Hello," the little boy said. "I am the Catalyst. It's been a very long time since anyone has come..."

"Oh, crap," Shepard said. "A pop-up. Tali? Get rid of this thing, would you?"

The Catalyst glared at her. "I am NOT a pop-up! I am the intelligence which controls the reapers! You will show some respect!"

"I'm on it, Shepard," Tali said, completely ignoring the light-child's words as she brought up her omnitool and typed out a series of commands.

"What are you doing?" the Catalyst asked suspiciously. "Stop it! STOP!" And then it derezzed with a squawk of protest.

"There we go," Tali said.

Shepard turned to the the others. "All right, people. Secure the room. And don't touch anything. Research and Development wants this place as intact as possible before they start taking it apart piece by piece to figure out how everything works."

"Taking it apart!?" the Catalyst asked.

Shepard glanced at Tali.

"No!" the Catalyst exclaimed. "This isn't how it goes! You're supposed to decide between control, destruction, and synthe...!"

Tali typed in a few additional commands and deactivated the voice interface. "Sorry, Shepard. I didn't realize the voice interface was on a separate circuit. Done."

Shepard nodded. "Nice work, Tali."

XCOM went to work.

"So," Doctor Vahlen asked. "What have you found?"

Miranda looked up from her examination of the weird blue control bars. "Ah, hello, Doctor. Aside from being the central CPU for the Reaper fleet, as near as we can tell, this," she gestured to the blue control bar, "Is designed to disintegrate a roughly human sized person who holds these bars. ... and lets them control the Reapers. We're not entirely clear on how those two things coincide. The red pylon releases an energy pulse that uses the Mass Relays to destroy all synthetic life in the galaxy, including the Reapers. We're pretty sure we can duplicate that one. The beam of light in the middle appears to... combine all synthetic and biological life together into a new synthesis, the primary effect of which appears to be to give people green glowy lines and glowing eyes. I suspect we can also duplicate that one, though I can't think of a reason why we would want to. "

Doctor Vahlen laughed. "Your sense of humor has taken an absurdist turn, I see. What have you really found?"

Miranda made a face. "I was being serious."

Doctor Vahlen blinked. She looked at Miranda. "You're not joking."

Miranda shook her head. "No."

Doctor Vahlen gestured to the chamber. "Die and control the Reapers, destroy all synthetic life in the galaxy including the Reapers, combine all synthetic and biological life in such a way as to mostly just make things glow green." It sounded just as stupid when she said it as it had when Miranda had said it.

Miranda nodded.

Doctor Vahlen pinched the bridge of her nose. "Right. Well, if this is indeed the central, controlling intelligence of the Reapers, the solution seems simple enough. Gather what samples you need to allow for the duplication of the reaper-killing effect. No doubt it will make an effective weapon for our capital ships. Once we are safely away, the fleet will begin its bombardment. It should only take us a few years to build a new Citadel - one that isn't the central CPU for a fleet of genocidal dreadnoughts."

Miranda nodded. Then she gathered her things and took a few last samples - not necessarily in that order - and then she, Doctor Vahlen, and all the other XCOM personnel departed.

"Fucking space-magic," Doctor Vahlen muttered as the light-elevator began to descend.

[/OMAKE]