The Avenger dropship was surrounded by a corona of fire as is blazed its way down through the atmosphere, but between the inertial dampeners and the kinetic barriers, no sign of the forces at work outside touched those within. A squad of XCOM soldiers were strapped into their seats, waiting for the landing and the battle that awaited them in the crashed UFO below.

"Okay," the ground force leader for the Iwo Jima's marines - Captain Charlene Varela - said, "The Normandy found aquatic Sectoids and evil ichneumon squid. You wanna place a bet on what we hit?" She was a woman of average height with olive skin and the effortless musculature of the professional soldier. Her medium-brown hair was buzz cut, and she had dark Spanish eyes.

A tall, grim-faced, blue-eyed, gravelly-voiced male soldier to her left intoned solemnly, "I'm going with magic space ponies."

Most of the squad just rolled their eyes. Charlie gave the man a sidelong glance. "You always pick magic space ponies," she said. "It's not going to happen, Jim."

Corporal James "Jim" Bishop sighed. "Hey, a guy can dream, can't he?"

"Sure, Jim, sure." A brief pause. "You hear what they're calling the evil ichneumon squid now?"

Jim looked sidelong at Charlie. "No. What are they calling them?"

Miranda gave Shepard a long-suffering look. "Squidalids, commander?" she asked. "Really?"

Shepard nodded seriously, her expression completely deadpan. "It was either that or Chryssasquids."

Miranda sighed. "Commander, with all due respect, you aren't allowed to name things anymore."

Jim raised an eyebrow. "No, seriously. What are they calling them?"

Charlie shook her head. "I kid you not, Corporal."

A beep signalled their final approach. Though none of the marines could see it, the colony of Ferris Fields stretched out below the dropship, a central prefabricated colony complex surrounded by equally prefabricated residential modules. It was recent; only a few buildings, all of them new construction, weren't prefabs, and most of those clustered towards the southern side of the colony.

The Avenger came in low, almost clipping the tops of the buildings as it went to avoid potential fire from the alien ship that had landed here. It was a vast vessel, seemingly made of rock and living matter as much as of metal. It had two primary rock-formations jutting out from its metal superstructure, with a smaller secondary rock section next to each of the primaries. The ship was landed vertically, engine on the ground, the rest of the ship rising into the sky like a spire. The sky was dark with insects, and the people of the colony were just… lying there. Or standing there. Or sitting there. Paralyzed. Insectoid alien troops moved among the colony.

"All right, people, listen up! This is our last check before we land and we start kicking some X-Ray ass. We may not be familiar with the X-Rays in question, but as far as the boys upstairs can tell, we've stumbled upon a garden variety alien abduction in progress, and we are not going to let that pass, are we?"

The marines in the crowd let out a shout. They would never let that pass. Never again.

"We do this by the numbers people. We have a full mechanized deployment of all available assets for this mission. Our mission objectives are threefold: kick ET's ass, capture the alien ship, and rescue the colonists. Are you ready?

Another shout, this one almost deafening in the crowded space. Then they all lowered the helmets on their powered armor suits and clasped the seals into place.

They released a pair of cyberdisks while the Avenger was still on approach, then half a dozen seekers which went invisible immediately and began their unseen descents. Then the dropship touched down. The doors opened, and the Iwo Jima's marines rushed out by twos. They were met by Collectors almost immediately. Three drones came in low over the main colony complex, each bearing a strange, partially organic rifle. One of the drones landed on the building just above the northern airlock; the two others set down in cover behind a set of suspiciously well placed crates.

Fire from the three drones deflected violently off of Charlie's kinetic barriers as she rushed down the ramp, each shot depleting those barriers by an appreciable amount. There was no cover within easy reach, but that was no problem; with a moment's concentration, Charlene Varela sent out a telekinetic barrier to cover her squad's approach. "Nothing can penetrate the mind," she whispered.

Even as the rippling, translucent purple barrier took form around her, she raised her laser sniper rifle, took aim, and put a shot through a drone's center of mass. The shot burned through the crate the creature had been sheltering behind, completely ignored its kinetic barriers, and vaporized a fist-sized chunk of its chest. The instantaneous conversion of biological material to gas had predictably explosive results; the damage to the drone was horrific, and the resulting corpse was both nearly unrecognizable and on fire.

"Except bullets," Jim said even as he followed up Charlie's shot with one of his own at the second drone. His was a standard laser rifle, and the hole it put in the drone was much smaller, but against an enemy whose biological armor, while impressive against mass drivers, was ineffective against directed energy weapons, the results were no less lethal.

On top of the north airlock, the third drone floated into the air and began to glow a bright golden. A deep voice spoke, saying, "ASSUMING DIRECT CON…" and that was as far as it got before a half-dozen high powered laser beams vaporized the majority of its chest.

"Knives," Jim continued as if nothing had happened. "Arrows. Lasers. Blunt force trauma if you apply enough of it. Ideas." His expression grew more serious. "The power of friendship." A beat passed. "Not sure if the last three count as penetrating."

Charlie sighed. "God damn it, Jim."

Smoke on the Water
by P.H. Wise
A Mass Effect/XCOM crossover fanfic

Chapter 05: Illium, Part I

Disclaimer: I own neither Mass Effect (EA) nor XCOM (God only knows) nor Terror from the Deep. Some dialogue in this chapter is taken from Mass Effect 2.

The Normandy reached Nos Astra at sunset. The city stood near Illium's north pole, and that was the only reason people could walk around outdoors without environmental protection suits. The heat here could kill, and did. Outside of the higher altitudes in the polar regions, cities were housed in great climate-sealed and carefully maintained arcology skyscrapers. But here, at the temperate north pole, a traditional city was possible.

The Normandy descended to the dock with the sun setting behind the city, on the banks of a calm lake, shone with purple and blue lights that lent the place a mysterious, enchanted air. The architecture was a strange mix of Turian and Asari influences, tall spires often rising up from strangely angled, sweeping buildings. A few straddled the lanes of traffic, shaped like horse-shoes and allowing air cars to pass between the two sides. But for all its beauty, none the buildings looked like things outside the realm of possibility in a human city. The enchantment only went so far. That was a little disappointing, actually; an alien city shouldn't look like a human city with blue and purple lights, but there it was.

Still, it was lovely, and Shepard had plenty of time to observe it as the ship came in to land at the lakeshore docks. Once landed, leaving Miranda in command, Jane left the ship with a small shore party consisting of herself, Tali, and Jacob.

Outside the Normandy, an Asari in white and blue robes that exposed her midriff met them at the dock, a pair of Asari in black flanking her on either side. "Welcome to Nos Astra, Commander Shepard," she said. Jane raised an eyebrow, but didn't otherwise reply. The Asari went on. "We've been instructed to waive all docking and administration fees for your visit. My name is Karina, and if you need information about the area, it would be my pleasure to assist you."

Jane and Tali exchanged glances. "Liara?" Tali asked, and Jane shrugged her shoulders slightly in reply.

Karina nodded in confirmation. "Liara T'soni has paid all fees on your behalf, and has asked that I direct you to speak with her at your convenience. Her office is near the trading floor."

Huh. Well that was… suspiciously easy. "All right," Jane said. "Lead the way."

"Of course," Karina said. "If you'll just come with me, I will get you through customs with the minimum amount of fuss. We don't get many human visitors here."

It took an hour and a half to get through customs. Well, more accurately, it took an hour and twenty minutes of waiting in an utterly packed waiting room that smelled like red sand, sweat, stale booze, and despair. Giant holo-screens blared audio-only announcements that echoed maddeningly off of the unpadded walls almost constantly, with only a few seconds passing between one announcement and the next, and most of them went on for several minutes each. This was followed by five minutes in the office of a bored looking Asari worker and another five minutes of actually going through the security checkpoint. They actually hit Nos Astra's main trading floor another half hour after that. It was fully night when they arrived, and the stars were washed out in the glow of the city lights. It was crowded, and Shepard and Jacob were the only humans in view; Tali was the only quarian. They drew eyes. It wasn't generally hostile attention, but they stood out. Some of the people here had never seen a human before outside of trids. Most people were asari, with a scattering of turians and salarians. A couple of volus could be seen here and there. A krogan or two. And almost everyone who saw the two humans and quarian stopped to take a second look.

They walked past numerous kiosks where day traders engaged in their business, hearing snippets of their conversation as they went until they finally reached the location Karina had pinged for them on the city's extranet mapsoft: a small, unremarkable elevator door with a visible stairwell off to the left of it, both of which led up into the trading center proper.

Jane walked up the elevator and pushed the button. The doors opened with an audible ding, but she hesitated as the soft but distinct sounds of Girl from Ipanema drifted through the open elevator door. She looked at Tali, then at Jacob. And then the memory of the interminable elevator rides on the Citadel of two years prior came back to her, sudden and strong.

"...my people are wanderers, not military leaders," Tali said in Jane's imagination. "All this fighting seems strange. It must be more familiar for you, Lieutenant Taylor."

Imaginary-Jacob shrugged, and when he opened his mouth to reply, what came out was not words, but visible waves of grey that flowed from his mouth like sound-waves made visible, each one washing over the universe and leaving it just a little more colorless than it had been before.

"Good point," Imaginary-Tali said.

Wow. Apparently, she really didn't like Jacob very much. At least she'd refrained from letting those thoughts out through the telepathic communications network she was maintaining. Less than second had passed since the opening of the elevator doors.

"...Let's take the stairs," Shepard decided.

Not long after, the group finally arrived on the fifth floor of the trading center at Suite 507. The secretary - a blue-skinned Asari with purple facial markings - greeted them as they entered. "You must be Commander Shepard," she said pleasantly. "Ms. T'soni is waiting for you in her office." She looked to Tali and Jacob, next. "If the two of you wouldn't mind waiting here,"; she didn't finish the sentence. She just left it there with a slightly expectant trailing off.

"I'll only be a few," Shepard said, and walked to the door. Then, on the very threshold, she felt a distant fluttering in her stomach at the thought that Liara was on the other side. She couldn't hear anything through the door, but that didn't mean much. She opened the door and stepped through.

"... delivered the information in good faith, Rani," Liara was saying as Shepard came in. "I expect to be paid for my efforts." Her tone was cold. Commanding. In that moment, she seemed very much her mother's daughter. Honestly, it was creepy - Shepard had known Liara to be many things, but never cold.

The office was a sparse, spartan sort of place. The desk was black, but the room itself was done in the same subdued blues as the rest of the building, with only the green plants on either side of the door to contrast. Liara stood with her back to the door, speaking to another asari on the holoscreen built into the wall.

"The information is useless if we can't perceive it, T'soni. You may not have noticed, but the local defense force has a distinct shortage of human operatives."

"Nevertheless, the information is genuine," Liara said. She made no threats, but tension crackled in the air just the same. Power. Liara had it. The woman she was speaking to feared it. Wanted it, maybe. This was not an exchange between equals, and both knew it.

Then asari on the holoscreen sighed. "I'll see what I can do. No promises. Rani out." Her image vanished. Then Liara turned towards the door - and caught sight of Shepard. The cold, regal demeanor held. "Shepard," she said, inclining her head as if she had just seen Jane an hour ago. Then she brought up her omni-tool for the time it took to say, "Nyxeris, hold my calls."

The door locked. The windows went black. Time seemed to slow. Liara was there. Jane's heart thudded in her chest. Liara, with blue skin and dark freckles, a shapely head-crest, facial markings that mirrored human eyebrows and lips the color of frozen mulberries, and her blue eyes shining through it all. Jane's gaze was always drawn to those eyes; they had always been warm, but there was no warmth in them now, and it looked wrong to see those eyes so cold. Jane had just enough time to feel worried before Liara's cold demeanor vanished like it had never existed at all; Liara made a high pitched delighted sound and kissed her within an inch of her life. And in the moment of contact, the faintest reflection of their Joining snapped back into place - a residual contact that was unique to joinings between an Asari and her telepathic bondmate - and a hole in her heart that Jane hadn't realized was there was filled in.

"You're alive," Liara breathed at last. "By the goddess, I, I knew - my sources said you had been revived, but I never believed…" Her eyes were shining with tears unshed, and all the warmth that had been absent before was there now.

"It's good to see you, too," Jane said between kisses, and her words were wholly insufficient to the burden of her heart. Here, now, feeling the immediacy of Liara's presence, the warmth of her breath, the ever so slightly pebbly texture of her asari skin, the taste of her lips, and knowing that she was here and loved and was loved in turn, it was utterly, fundamentally right, and for the first time since her resurrection, Jane Shepard felt…

Alive.

Tali wasn't really sure what to make of Jacob. She knew he was one of those insane humans who replaced the majority of their bodies with mechanical parts, but looking at him now, he didn't look mechanical. Cybernetics weren't unknown amongst the quarians, but those were medical devices! People didn't just have their own limbs lopped off for fun! It was… oh, Keelah. He had noticed her staring. Why was Shepard taking so long? She had already been in there for nearly half an hour. Hadn't she said that this wouldn't take long?

Jacob raised an eyebrow, as if waiting for her to say something.

"So," she finally said, "You're a cyborg."

"Yup," Jacob replied, giving her absolutely nothing. Tali had no idea if he was doing that on purpose or not. He probably was.

"What's that like?" Tali asked.

Jacob shrugged. That was all. He just shrugged. The movement didn't even have the decency to look artificial.

Right. That was not going anywhere. With a faint little sigh that didn't actually pass through her suit's external communications, Tali sank into her chair, tapped her omni-tool, and logged in to her character in Galaxy of Fantasy.

It hadn't really been the same since the Waters of Kolono expansion had been released, but it was better than nothing.

Tali hadn't been playing for more than five minutes when a shadow came between her and the light in the room. She looked up.

Her eyes widened.

She had needed that. God, but she had needed that. They shared one last lingering kiss before Liara let her eyes go back to normal, and they slipped out of each other's minds. Asari joining was not the same thing as telepathy - it wasn't psionic - but joining with a telepath allowed for both a deeper and more selective connection during the joining: one with certain benefits beyond the norm for either. And even if they hadn't physically had sex in Liara's office, they had made love all the same, and the lingering endorphins of the act were quite... pleasant.

"Well," Liara said, leaning her head against Shepard's shoulder, both of them lounging on the couch that Liara kept here for the times she needed to sleep in her office. She looked considerably more relaxed than she had half an hour earlier.

"Well," Shepard echoed, trying not to giggle. Commander Shepard didn't giggle. She might laugh, chuckle, cackle, snicker, chortle, even occasionally cachinnate, but giggle? Never.

"I had a speech prepared about how it's been two years," Liara said, "and we've both changed, and if you didn't want to continue our relationship, I would understand. I suppose I won't need it, now."

Shepard smiled. "Probably not," she said fondly. Then she looked down at the floor. "Liara..." she began.

Liara waited for her to go on.

Shepard tried to find the words. It was all before her: the resurrection, the dreams, the aching sense that she was a stranger in her own skin, the disconnect that undermined even this moment with the tiniest sense of unreality, as if the life of Jane Shepard were just something she had been watching and not participating in. "Am I me?"

The question took Liara off guard. Shepard hadn't shared this during the joining. "Who else would you be?" she asked.

Jane fell silent.

Liara turned to consider her face in profile. "Jane, what's wrong?"

"I died," Shepard said. There was an awful finality to those two words. A sense of permanence. "I remember dying. I was floating in space, my suit leaking air, the Normandy and the Grey Ship were in pieces around me. I tried to hold on. I didn't want to go. But... it was like falling asleep. I just faded out, and then..."

"And then?" Liara asked, her both hope and dread in her tone and in her thoughts, and intermingled so completely that Jane could not tell where one ended and the other began.

"...Nothing. Just... nothing. The next thing I remember was waking up again."

'No light? They always said there would be...'

"I've been having dreams since then. Memories, maybe. They aren't mine."

"Whose are they?" Liara whispered.

Shepard shifted uncomfortably. "How much do you know about humanity's first contact war?" she asked.

"I've read the extranet article," Liara said.

"Do you know about the Volunteer?"

Liara blinked. And then she understood, and it was obvious in her bearing. "You're remembering her life," she said. It wasn't a question.

"Yeah."

"Show me?" Liara asked.

She nodded. And then, for the second time that day, Jane Shepard embraced eternity.

Afterwards, Liara winced and rubbed her forehead. "XCOM," she muttered like the word was a curse.

"You all right?"

Liara nodded, but she looked tired, now, and she hadn't before the second joining. "Fine. I just…"

"Never imagined the experience would be so… intense?" Shepard asked teasingly.

Liara gave a rueful smile. "Yes, that."

"I can call Doctor Chakwas down to take a look at you if you want," Shepard said.

"You're enjoying this," Liara said with a roll of her eyes.

Shepard didn't quite grin, but it was there in her eyes. "Just a little," she admitted. Then she grew serious again. "What do you think?"

"I'm going to need time to sort through everything you showed me," Liara said. "And somewhere quiet. But before that, I think we have other matters to attend to. As welcome as the visit is, I am sure you did not come to Illium just to see me."

"What if I did?" Shepard asked. "What if I'm here to ask you to come with me?"

"Is that hypothetical, or are you really asking me?" Liara asked in turn.

"Come with me."

Liara's smile was a little sad now. "I can't. I have commitments. There are things I have to take care of before I can…" The warmth drained right out of her voice. "I have debts to repay."

Jane raised an eyebrow. Liara had always been a bit scattered, a touch flighty, but now… now there was focus; Jane could pick up on the fact that whatever this debt was, it was something that made Liara very angry, but nothing more; she would have to dig through Liara's mind to see what was behind it, and she wasn't willing to just rifle through the thoughts of loved ones like that. "Is there anything I can do to help?" she asked.

Liara nodded. "Ask me again once we've taken care of the other reason you're here."

"I'm here to get you back on my team," Jane replied. "You were invaluable before, you'd be invaluable now. You're brilliant, capable, resourceful, and I love you."

Liara looked very pleased at that, and a tension behind her eyes seemed to release, but there was still something there, something guarded in her expression. "And I you," she said, and waited.

Jane focused on her HUD, brought up the relevant data file, converted it into a transferrable Augmented Reality object, and then flicked it Liara's way. It vanished once it left the radius of Jane's holo-emitter. Then Liara's omni-tool lit up. She authorized the data-transfer, and then reviewed what had been sent to her. Then her faux-eyebrows tried to climb up into her head crest. "Ms. Dantius," she murmured. "What have you been up to?"

"The Alliance is going to go public with a sanitized version of this information in a few days," Jane said. "If you could provide independent corroboration, it would help."

Liara nodded, quickly calculated the probable angle the Alliance propaganda would take. "A Spectre," she murmured, "A Q-Ship, multiple Eclipse sisters as expendable wetwork specialists? It almost seems too obvious."

"So Jondam Bau is a Spectre after all?" Jane asked. "We'd suspected, but didn't know for certain."

"And exceptionally good at his job," Liara replied. "He gave you his name, too. That's unusual. He doesn't normally identify himself if he can avoid it. Or if he does, he generally gives a false name."

"I am a telepath," Jane suggested.

"Resistance to telepathic intrusion became a standard part of Spectre training as soon as they realized telepathy was real. The initial techniques were crude - they were based on methods to resist forced Melding - but they've improved significantly since then. The Citadel is not unaware of the security threat the ability represents."

Jane was pretty sure that no technique for resisting telepathic intrusion was going to keep her out. That hadn't been true before she'd come back, but with her powers so much stronger now than they were before, she was pretty sure she could break through if it came to it. But there was no way for Bau to know that, so she nodded. "Okay. So he wanted me to know who he was."

"And likely knew that his name was on your list of suspected Council Spectres."

Jane thought about that. "You're making it sound like somebody's framing the Council. Trying to sour relations between the Alliance and the Citadel."

Liara shook her head, "It's too early to know for certain, but it's possible. The Council is fully capable of making this kind of mistake, so I wouldn't rule that out entirely. It is also possible that elements within the Citadel government are unhappy with the change in the status quo that your efforts brought about two years ago. We'll see." She tapped a few keys onto her holographic keypad. "I'm sending you everything I have on Nassana Dantius."

Jane smiled. "Thanks, Liara."

"It's my pleasure," Liara replied. She tapped the intercom, then. "Nyxeris, inform my guests we are ready for them."

The door opened with a hiss. In came Tali and Jacob. Tali looking over her shoulder as she came in, talking to someone behind her. "I have a shotgun," she said warningly. The response was the flanged laughter of a turian.

He came in just behind Tali, a male turian with blue facial markings and a blue suit of armor. Jane's eyes went to him. Then she recognized him. "Garrus?" she asked with genuine surprise.

"Hello, Commander," said Garrus Vakarian. "Fancy meeting you here."

"Small galaxy," Shepard replied. "How have you been? And do I need to worry about Tali shooting you?"

Tali glanced at Shepard, but only the two points of light that were her eyes were visible through her suit's faceplate. "He misses the citadel elevators," she said.

Shepard shuddered. Then she looked to Garrus, who, despite her relative inability to read Turian facial expressions, was displaying an expression she could only call 'exaggerated patience.' "Seriously?" she asked.

Garrus shrugged. "It had a certain charm."

Shepard wasn't sure how to take that. So she changed the subject entirely. "You're working with Liara now?" she asked.

"Two years, now," Garrus replied.

"Since about a month after the Grey Ship hit the Normandy," Liara clarified. "He was the first person I contacted after I was finally released from the custody of your Alliance security forces."

"I needed a job," Garrus helpfully explained.

"I thought you were one of the Heroes of the Citadel?" Jane asked.

"So did I," Garrus said, "But a month after the the Battle of the Citadel, after all the excitement had died down and we weren't the center of attention anymore, I was told to report to Executor Pallin's office. He said I'd be resigning effective immediately. He explained that the alternative was me being prosecuted for treason. I resigned."

"I'm sorry," Shepard said.

Garrus made a dismissive gesture. "I knew what I was doing when I helped you," he said.

"And now you work for Liara."

Garrus nodded. "The pay's good. So's the company. Being for a good cause helps." Jane couldn't read turian expressions very well, but she had a vague notion that he was smiling.

"Garrus and his team have been my personal troubleshooters here on Illium," Liara said.

"Troubleshooters," Jane echoed.

"If there's trouble," Garrus said, "We shoot it."

Jane made an amused snort. "I see," she said.

"He's exaggerating," Liara said. "They don't normally use violence of any kind."

"Mostly it's investigations," Garrus said. "The occasional extraction. We've also cracked a few secure networks, recovered stolen property, recovered kidnapped children, played bodyguard, provided distractions, that kind of thing."

"So you're…" Jane hesitated for a beat. "Liara's private mercenary company?"

"More or less."

"Damn," Jane said, feeling impressed.

"She's also got a spy network," Garrus said. "It's pretty impressive."

Jane glanced Liara's way, and Liara blushed. "You did all this in two years?" Jane asked, not entirely sure if the incredulity she felt was in her voice.

"I was extremely motivated," Liara said.

Jane had another look at the information Liara had sent her. It scrolled across her HUD, her body's MELD allowing her Alliance commlink to interface directly with her visual cortex, and she studied it for a few seconds before she came to her decision: "Looks like we're hitting Dantius Towers," she said.

Garrus made an expression that Jane was totally unable to interpret without glancing into his thoughts; Turian expressions were often difficult for humans to get a grasp on, and Garrus was no exception to that. "My team and I have been waiting a long time for the chance to go after her," he said. "Want some backup?"

Jane considered that, then nodded slowly. "Yeah, I think I do."

Before any operation can be executed, there is always a certain amount of preparation to be done. Generally, it takes much longer to prepare for a run on a corporate office than it does to actually do the run. Any number of things must be considered and planned for, and this planning needs a secure location from which to be done. The Normandy was out of the question; she liked Garrus and she was progressive as far as aliens went, but even Commander Shepard wasn't about to allow a Turian and his mercenary team onto her ship if she could avoid it. The question was never raised; Garrus didn't ask to board the Normandy. He just gave Jane the location of a safe house run by one of his contacts here on Illium.

On the surface, Eternity looked like just another bar. Place was clean and the lighting was pleasantly subdued. It was mostly blues and greys, though the bar itself was solid wood, a rich red-brown, and polished until it shone. The bar was well stocked, and light gleamed off the bottles on the shelf behind the bartender - an asari with uncharacteristically green skin, facial markings, an easy smile, and a confident manner who went about her job with the sort practiced ease that you only really get after doing something for years. She looked familiar, though it was a distant sort of familiarity. Thirteen tables were scattered about irregularly, each with a handful of chairs. A pair of bathroom doors were at the far end - one with a high-pressure industrial airlock and a little sign showing the outline of a volus, the other showing the outline of an Asari. Between the two doors was a public extranet terminal. There was an unmarked door off to the left of the bar, and a fourth behind the bar marked 'Employees Only' in Thessian, which Jane's commlink automatically translated for her, giving her an overlay of Martian Standard over the asari script.

The place wasn't crowded, but a half dozen asari were scattered about along with a couple of turians and salarians, with a turian and a quarian talking off in a corner.

"Come on," Garrus said, gesturing towards the bar before walking off toward it.

'I don't like this,' Jacob sent into the telepathic network.

Tali wasn't visibly jumping every time she heard someone's voice in her head anymore, but she still tensed a little bit. "Can't we just talk normally?" she muttered.

Jane shook her head. 'Sorry, Tali,' she sent into the link. It wasn't difficult to maintain - she just compartmentalized it, allowing a tiny portion of her awareness to attend to holding the telepathic connection in place while the rest of her was free to do as she pleased. 'Until we're in a secure location, we're stuck with it.'

'This is one part of working with you that I did not miss, Shepard,' Tali sent, though there was an undertone of fondness beneath the familiar discomfort..

'I don't like this,' Jacob repeated. 'Look at the way the patrons are sitting. They've all got their backs to a wall. And the tables are arranged to give everyone a clear view of the door. That doesn't happen by accident.'

'What do you think?' Shepard asked. 'Guards or mercs?'

'Could be both,' Jacob replied.

"Shepard," Garrus called.

Jane and Jacob exchanged glances, and then they followed Garrus to the bar. A few people glanced their way as they went, but nothing out of the ordinary. That set off alarm bells, too: outside of Eternity, they'd been getting stares almost constantly.

"Hello, Shiala," Garrus said. Jane didn't start - her self-control was better than that - but she recognized the name, and with that recognition came the remembrance of where she'd seen the Asari bartender before.

The stench of burning flesh but not quite right not quite flesh the Creepers swarm across the chamber empty eyes and vomiting sprays of acidic filth a stench like corpse-rot and bags of mulch left to moulder for days and it feels familiar in her memory. It didn't, but it does now. Something. Something familiar. Something from Before. Black empty pits for eyes and desiccated flesh and spores are not the creature's only means of influencing other life forms; the mind-lash whips through distance that is not and inside and outside scream alike in harmonic agony as a dozen identical naked asari close the distance...

Ferros.

Tali visibly shuddered. She realized then that both Tali and Jacob were giving her worried looks. 'You okay there, Commander?' Jacob asked.

'I"m fine,' Jane replied.

"Garrus," Shiala said, nodding to him before turning her attention to Jane. "Commander," she said. "Welcome to Eternity. What can I do for you?"

Jane had several questions, the first of which was, "Why aren't you back on Ferros helping Zhu's Hope like you promised?" but now wasn't the time to ask them.

"We've got a room booked," Garrus said.

"Of course," Shiala said. "If you'll just follow me." She led the group through the unmarked side door, down a long stairway, and into a long hallway lined with doors. She kept going to the far end, where she slid aside what Jane had taken for a solid wall to reveal stone behind it. She gestured to Garrus, who stepped forward and placed his hand upon the stone. A holo-image lit up at his touch. Then the 'stone' slid aside, revealing a large meeting room behind it. Inside was a table made from the same wood as the bar with six dark wood chairs around it. A small wet bar was to the right of the door, a computer terminal to the left. The room was all in off-white, and the walls gleamed strangely. A few doors led off from the room, but all of them were closed at the moment.

"Need anything else?" Shiala asked.

Garrus shook his head.

After Shiala had departed, closing the door behind her, Jane looked to Garrus in askance.

He gestured to the room around him. "One of our safe houses," he explained. "We've got half a dozen of these scattered across Illium." A brief pause, and then he hedged, "Technically, they belong to Matriarch Aethyta, but she isn't around much, and she gave the okay for Liara's people to use them. It's secure."

Jane took Garrus at his word. For now. She nodded. "All right," she said. "Let's get started."

They did.

The preparations for the run on Dantius Towers took the better part of two days. The meeting with Garrus's team went reasonably well. He had a solid group of a dozen people, and evenly split between front-line and support personnel: a salarian tech-expert, a batarian explosives expert who spat on the ground when he saw Shepard's primarily human team but otherwise said nothing, a Turian named Lantar Sidonis who Garrus was on a last-name-basis with, a few others.

Then Jane turned and introduced her own team, starting with Tali and Jacob before moving on to Jones and Turnbow and a pair of XCOM snipers who would be providing overwatch for the mission; Private Ricky - Ricardo Batista, that is - and Corporal Molly Finnegan, though she introduced the pair as Eyes and Lady Grey; no ranks were given out for this: not even her own. The gear that Shepard and her team took with them was standard issue for the most part: ghost modules were loaded into their powered armor, laser rifles were the standard, though each had their choice of laser or plasma for a sidearm. Tali got visibly excited at the sight of the alloy cannon that Shepard had requisitioned for her. One plasma grenade each, one arc thrower each, and at EDI's request, Shepard carried with her a crystalline holo-emitter shard.

Eyes and Lady Grey posted up in a high rise across the way from Dantius Towers with a clear view of both buildings. The buildings were both shaped like narrow cylinders with a rounded piece carved out from the side facing the opposite tower, rendering both into very shallow, very tall c-shapes. The outer walls were solid, with the only visible windows lining the inner c's, which meant neither Eyes nor Lady Grey would have direct line of sight to their targets, the fog would have impeded that sightline in any case, and there could well be a considerable amount of building in the way of any shot they took; they did not anticipate any of that to be a problem.

The final checks went off without incident; every preparation that could have been made had been made.

They would hit Dantius Towers just after sunset. A fog bank rolled in at dusk; visibility was poor, and every light seemed to bloom out from its source, scattering through the the fog around it: shining more, showing less. It lent Nos Astra an ethereal air, alien skyscrapers rising above the murk, the city glowing beneath the slow-moving fog bank with blue and yellow and purple light.

The last gleam of the setting sun vanished. Dusk went down to darkness.

It was time.

Shepard, Tali, Jacob, Jones, and Turnbow went in like the ghosts, each of them invisible in the spectrum of visible light and to radar; the sound-dampening technology built into the armor rendered them equally silent. It wasn't the complete phase-shifting invisibility of the original Ghost armor design; that form of stealth was simply too expensive, too power-intensive, and too important to risk falling into enemy hands to justify using outside of highly specialized gear when a comparatively simple thermoptic camouflage setup worked just as well in 90% of the situations that would require the use of cloaking technology.

The outermost layer of security for Dantius Towers was the cameras and the security drones. There were two drone models in use in the building. One looked roughly Asari-like in shape and coloration, while the other was a simple metal sphere stuffed with sensors of every kind. They were civilian models, and it was trivially easy for Tali to break through their firewalls and introduce a worm into their wireless network. The worm was relatively benign, and would automatically delete itself in six hours, but for now, after five minutes to propagate, it gave Tali the location of every drone attached to the outer security layer: the security intended for the public sections of the building. There were a dozen drones on patrol tonight, scattered between the various shops and corridors of the building's ground floor. After spending a few minutes to observe their patrol routes and confirm that they did, in fact, match what Liara's leg work had indicated, Shepard's team evaded them entirely and proceeded to the first security checkpoint. A nervous-looking salarian was there waiting for them.

"Meet Schells Vaex," Garrus said, tossing an augmented reality object representing the dossier to the center of the table. The file transferred instantly into the the table's holo-projector's, and an instant later, the image of a spindly salarian male in a security uniform spun to full, three dimensional, holographic life above the table, with a brief summary of his life scrolling beneath him including notable achievements, his arrest record, familial connections, and so on. Shepard had a hard time telling most salarians apart, and this one was no different to her eyes than 99% of the rest of his species. She'd seen him before, on the Citadel, but the name didn't ring any bells. Garrus went on. "He's worked for Eclipse for about the last two years, mostly low priority security duty. He's subcontracted out to Nassana like most of her security. Comes from a respectable clan, last child born to the clan's former dalatrass, and owes almost a hundred thousand credits in gambling debts at a casino on Omega. He helps us, that debt goes away."

"How did you manage that?" Shepard asked.

"Hacker on Omega owes me a favour," Garrus replied, his mandibles twitching slightly into a broad approximation of a smirk. He didn't elaborate further.

"All right," Shepard said, keeping her thoughts to herself. "So he gets us past security?"

"Past the first major checkpoint, anyways," Garrus replied. "After that, it's up to us."

Schells was visibly relieved at the sight of the mostly human team. "Hurry, humans," he said. "I've turned off the pressure sensors in the hallway, but my partner will be back soon, and everything has to be normal when he gets here." Then he stiffened as he seemed to recognize Shepard, and his body language turned hostile. "YOU!" he hissed.

Shepard looked up. Schells was all but quivering with rage. It took her half a second to adjust to the speed of salarian thought processes, and she immediately saw what was wrong in his racing thoughts; on the Citadel, during her mission to bring down Saren, outside a nightclub called Flux, Schells had approached her. She hadn't paid him any attention at all, just brushing him off and going in, and then, on the way out, she had done the exact same thing despite his attempts to speak to her. He had been caught cheating and barely escaped jail time. Then he went to Omega and tried it all over again, convinced his invention was without flaw. It had gone extremely poorly. He blamed her for all of it. If she'd been willing to help, if Commander Shepard had helped, he would be fabulously rich instead of a two-bit security guard. She briefly considered her course, evaluating a number of potential options even as the salarian reached for his radio. Then she reached into his mind and twisted. Her eyes flared with purple light. It was almost too easy to slip inside and take control. His will against hers was less of a wall and more of a thin film. "Everything's fine, Schells," she said.

He was fighting her, but it was like a child with a plastic toy baseball bat trying to fight an Alliance battleship; there was literally nothing he could do to stop her from doing whatever she wanted. "Everything's fine," he echoed.

"You don't remember the woman you saw outside of Flux. You never saw her face."

He fought harder against that, but it took hold in his mind just the same. Jane watched the last threads of his memory of her presence outside Flux fray and then snap. Then they were gone, replaced by the image of a nondescript asari seen from behind. "... never saw her face," he said despairingly.

She released his mind, and Schells looked briefly confused. Then he shook his head as if to clear it, gestured to the open security door, and said, "Well don't just stand there, humans. Move."

Shepard and her squad recloaked themselves and walked through without another word.

It was a neat incision. An almost surgical excision of memory. But the mind is a funny thing, and the salarian mind was stranger than most. Sometimes - especially if a telepath permanently alters an established mind in a way that fundamentally changes who that person is - telepathic alterations can make ripples, and ripples can build upon themselves, reflecting off the borders of thought and back to the empty space, again and again, each one causing a greater psychological disruption. In a human, such a ripple could take months or years to grow dangerous, and it was generally caught before too much damage had been done. But salarians processed the world at a vastly accelerated rate. And inside the mind of Schells Vaex, a ripple had begun.

Even as the security door cycled shut and the pressure sensors reactivated, the salarian muttered to himself, "... never saw her face."

The security door opened to a long corridor lined with a glass window on the right-hand side. They weren't very high up, so the drop didn't seem particularly precipitous, but Jane felt exposed in the corridor, and it wasn't long before she spotted the first of the inner security cameras just above the door at the far end of the corridor. It was already turned off - the work of Garrus's team elsewhere in the building. Even as she thought it, her commlink clicked twice - Garrus and his team were in position. So it went on throughout the building as the two teams leapfrogged their way through security, bypassing motion sensors, infrared sensors, traditional cameras, pressure sensors, even some extremely advanced network security without so much as slowing down. They were professionals, and thus far, it was just another day at the office.

Things got a little dicey on the skybridge connecting the two towers when, an unexpectedly powerful gust of wind nearly send Tali off the edge, but a quick telekinetic grab placed her back on her feet, and they were on their way again soon afterwards, with dozens of Eclipse mercenary guards none the wiser.

It was supposed to be a clear shot from the far side of the skybridge to Nassana's office. There weren't supposed to be any more checkpoints. That didn't change the fact that as Shepard and her team came into what should have been the main hallway for this floor, they instead found themselves facing a fortified security station in front of an armored airlock door with four asari commandos standing guard.

"Shepard," Garrus said through the commlink, his voice audible only to her and her squad. "I'm picking up some strange chatter from the lower levels…"

"Garrus," Shepard subvocalized. "I'm sending you my video feed." She did. .

"... that's not supposed to be there," Garrus said.

"Do we try to go around?" Tali asked.

"We got time to go around?" Turnbow asked.

"Damn," Garrus said. "Someone just tripped the alarm at one of the lower security stations. Whatever you're going to do, do it fast."

"Arc throwers," Shepard subvocalized. "Set for asari physiology." She produced her own and made the necessary adjustments, then regarded the stubby little gun with disgust. "I can't believe we still use these."

Jacob shrugged. "They've got three times the range of the old models."

Shepard raised an eyebrow. "Which means, what, they work from nine meters instead of three?"

"Pretty much."

"Right," Shepard subvocalized. "Everyone ready?"

Tali, Jacob, Turnbow, and Jones each nodded in turn.

"Go."

Three of the asari commandos never knew what hit them. Each heard only a crackling discharge and felt a wave of agony before collapsing into blessed unconsciousness. The fourth was more difficult: the first discharge may as well not have even touched her. Shepard - the odd woman out for targets - followed it almost instantly with her own shot, which similarly failed to accomplish much besides making the alien stagger.

The asari recovered and whirled towards the mostly human squad, her rifle all but teleporting into her hands.

"No," Shepard said, forcing her way into the commando's mind and temporarily severing her conscious motor control. It was surprisingly difficult; whoever this asari was, she had been trained to resist telepathic intrusion, and keeping her under control was actually a strain, but Shepard slammed home the command even through her prodigious resistance, and the asari commando collapsed in a boneless heap. "She's strong," Shepard muttered. "Give me a second…" She focused, then, going deeper, looking for something specific. The deeper into the asari's mind she probed, the more resistance there was; by the time she found what she was looking for, she had broken out in sweat beneath her armor. Still, she found it, and with an effort of will, forced the asari into a dream state. She didn't knock her unconscious - that would not have been possible - she just triggered a dream state and let the asari's body do the rest, effectively inducing an episode of sleep paralysis.

"There," Shepard said, breathing heavily. "Best I can do."

Tali went to work on the security station even as the others took up positions around her.

"Shepard," Jacob said. "I gotta ask. There some reason we aren't using EDI for this?"

Shepard became aware of the weight of the crystalline shard in one of the pouches attached to her belt. "We are, Lieutenant," she replied. "EDI's on overwatch. But some tasks you need physical hands for. Tali's got this."

That seemed to satisfy him.

"I should have the door open in just a few more…" Tali began. "Oh, no you don't, you little bosh'tet," she hissed. "EDI, stop him." A moment later, Tali seemed to relax. "Done. The airlock should be cycling now. Give it a few more seconds. I've also isolated the source of the alarms. It was that twitchy Salarian. Schells. He..." she trailed off.

"What?" Shepard asked. "He's what?

A video feed opened in Shepard's field of view. Schells was dead. He had cut out his own eyes and set them on the security station facing himself. Written in yellow salarian blood on the console behind him were the words, 'NEVER SAW HER.'

"... Shit."

Then the airlock cycled open, and things got worse.

END CHAPTER 05

Codex: The Human-Batarian War

In the years leading up to the Human-Batarian War, the Systems Alliance, spurred on both by the desire to lessen its dependence on imported Eezo and by the lobbying efforts of numerous corporate interests, began expanding into the Skyllian Verge. During this time, the Alliance colonized Mindoir and Fehl Prime and built a number of mining and defensive outposts throughout the region. Furthermore, dozens of independent, corporate funded colonies were established on promising worlds and moons accessible through Mindoir's nearby Primary and Secondary Mass Relays, most of them in the Traverse, but a few also in the Terminus on the far side of the Primary Relay. These new colony worlds included Cyrene, Feros, Ferris Fields, Freedom's Progress, Horizon, and New Canton.

The Batarian Hegemony, also actively colonizing the Skyllian Verge, petitioned the Citadel Council to intervene. The Council, still remembering the shock of the war between the Alliance and the Turian Heirarchy and not prepared to risk further conflict with the Alliance for varying reasons, declined to do so. At around the same time and unbeknownst to the Alliance, an enigmatic race rarely seen outside of the Terminus systems began offering radical new technology - including highly advanced particle beam rifles to counter Alliance directed energy weapons - in trade for captured humans, particularly for human psionics. The combination of the Council's refusal and the Collector bounty ultimately led to the Skyllian Blitz - an all out Pirate assault on Alliance interests in the Verge, and particularly on the long-standing colony world of Elysium.

The Batarian Hegemony funded the Blitz through a number of back-channel, black market financiers, confident that such a deniable terrorist campaign would not be traced back to them. They failed to anticipate just how much telepathy and mind-probes simplify interrogations and intelligence gathering. They also had no idea of the kind of sheer industrial might the Alliance could bring to bear. The Human-Batarian War followed almost immediately afterwards.

The Human-Batarian war began in 2176 and ended in 2177, lasting 9 months and 23 days. Human FTL technology had advanced significantly since the Second Contact War. The Hybrid Gravity Drive, which incorporated an Eezo core to allow for Citadel-style FTL operations in addition to hyperspace, was now standard on all Alliance warships, albeit limited by the extreme scarcity of Eezo in Alliance space. This technology gave the Alliance a significant strategic advantage in maneuver warfare, allowing their ships to bypass traditional Relay-blockades and other strategies designed for interstellar war in a galaxy that used exclusively Prothean-derived transportation technology. This combined with the efforts of telepathic covert operatives in identifying important Batarian logistical centers plus providing support for slave rebellions nearly crippled the Batarian navy's ability to meaningfully project force in the early stages of the war.

As the Alliance gained ground and began to actually invade and seize Batarian worlds, the Hegemony became increasingly desperate, ultimately resorting to the use of the Alpha Relay to launch devastating attacks into Alliance systems that had been otherwise believed to be secure, the targeted worlds including Mindoir, Shanxi, and Terra Nova. Once Alliance intelligence figured out how they were doing it, it was decided that they needed to deny the Hegemony this strategic resource.

Nothing could destroy a Relay, or so it was believed. Supposedly, Relays could survive even being caught in a supernova without damage. An invasion of the Bahak system would have been costly; it was a well fortified, and, in the late war, a major fleet base for the Hegemony's navy. So the Alliance devised a plan to attempt to deflect the Alpha Relay into interstellar space by hitting it with a large asteroid traveling at a significant fraction of c from above the plane of the Bahak system. They called it, 'Operation Cue Ball.' The asteroid went unnoticed by the Batarian defenses until it was too late. But instead of deflecting the relay into interstellar space, the asteroid struck the Mass Relay, and the Mass Relay exploded in a blast of unparalleled destructive force that took the entire star system with it, including the Batarian colony world of Aratoht and a significant fraction of the Batarian fleet.

All parties were horrified: the Alliance, the Citadel, and especially the Batarians. The Hegemony assumed that the Alliance had used some kind of Relay-killing super weapon, and that more were coming. The Citadel initially assumed likewise. The Alliance military ultimately decided that in light of the destruction of the Batarian invasion corridor and a major enemy fleet base, Operation Cue-Ball would be considered a success. The Batarian Hegemony surrendered a few days after the destruction of Bahak. The government fell to revolution a few months afterwards. Nearly half of the Batarian military, enraged at the thought that the utter destruction of an entire star system would go unavenged, went into exile rather than comply with the order to stand down, fleeing into the Terminus and ultimately becoming known as 'the Batarian Remnant.'

After the war and the subsequent revolution, the slave trade was abolished in the Hegemony, and has subsequently moved entirely out into the Terminus Systems. The current state of the Hegemony strongly resembles post-war Japan.

Not coincidentally, despite later analysis indicating that the size of the Relay explosion was due to the power output of the Alpha Relay being an order of magnitude higher than originally anticipated, the first major act of the Alliance fleet post-Batarian war was a massive logistical undertaking to physically move every Mass Relay in Alliance territory to a safe distance away from Alliance colony worlds such that any similar explosion would leave them and their star systems untouched. Also not coincidentally, the Asari, Turian, and Salarian governments did likewise.