Author's Note: Not a lot to say right now, still behind in my writing but I've got some time off booked ahead. Read, Review, Favourite and Enjoy!
Chapter 51: Terminus Sector Part 4
Time Until Colossus Fires: 17M 27D 06H
The Synth/really strange organic debate raged on in Liara's Fenrir suit, at this point she was just leaning towards the opponent being a cyborg. Honestly what was trying to kill them was not nearly at the top of her priority list at the moment. Shepard was on a rampage, the mercs being here to escort her to safety appears to have never crossed her mind. Well at the moment Liara had other things to worry about. The girl charged around the battlefield, more frequently and for a larger distance than any biotic that she knows of, except for maybe Wrex. The Girl slammed her fist into the side of the Fenrir with a glow of biotics pushing the Fenrir to the side by several feet. She was increasing the weight behind her blows too with her punches, which given the number of times that she's hit the Fenrir's hull, and the size of the welts she's left behind, should've shattered every bone in her arms by now.
The Main gun was useless against something that could move that fast, instead Liara decided on the biotic field Rare crystal combination to protect herself while she reorients the main gun. That was a mistake. The girl undid one of the sleeves of the coat and held out a single arm, which then unfolded. The top part of the extended fore arm folded outwards to reveal a tract of some kind, Exotic gasses trapped inside of a biotic field in the back of it, while something resembling a silver blade about a foot long, which then unfolded further the segmented blade sections flipping over and pulling apart into diamond shaped rings.
"Dodge out of the way of that weapon now!" EDI shouted and Liara didn't have to be told twice, running off with the Fenrir as the arm weapon was fired.
If there was an atmosphere here, the friction of the shot would likely ignite the projectile, instead the projectile could be controlled remotely with the power of biotic field to chase after Liara, and ignited remotely with a laser beam that was fired directly from her eyes as it slammed into the back of the Fenrir, exploding loudly, breaking the biotic field tearing the Fenrir apart and scattering the lasers over the area. Liara neutralised, the cyborg(?) turned her attention back to the creature formerly known as Shepard already getting ready to clothesline her with a charge. The Girl had to side step as another tank shot was fired over the stretch of distance, cybernetic eyes zooming in on the point of origin. Liara had escaped the wreckage of the Fenrir mostly intact, what wasn't intact was quickly healed by Thorian Spores and her biomedical implants, right now she had torn out the main gun of the Fenrir, she had to cut off the barrel of the weapon, bent and partially melted by the biotic field, but the range was extended back up with warp ammo.
"As Shepard would say: Say hello to my little friend!" Liara was annoyed, Now she's thoroughly pissed.
The Girl completely shrugged her coat, revealing in the process a set of long tentacle like tendrils two coming off of her shoulder blades and one the base of her spine like a tail, as she started slamming her fist into her chest, on the third try some kind of dark purple glow made itself known under her skin as if she had just hit a light switch on something buried under her flesh. Suddenly more of the girl's body unfolded, her legs turned into a tri-parted mass growing in height by an extra foot while her feet split apart to give her a wider base, the entire thing connected together via strings of some unknown material. The other arm split into a second exotic plasma ball launcher, the face unfolded and slipped away revealing a three eyed skull, the bikini top that was acting as a bra snapped as a pair of laser rifle barrels and a scope attached themselves to the skull, the two pigtails coming undone with a snap as the black hair glinted with a purple light.
"So... cyborg?" Liara was a little stunned by the sudden transformation.
"According to my censors there's very little room in that body for anything other than the weapons systems she just pulled out, and what places do have room for organics don't make any sense." EDI was just as confused as Liara was.
If anyone could figure out how to give synths biotics it would be the Geth, and Liara hasn't heard anything about them developing the technology. Still, Guns, Ships, artificial gravity, it wasn't like there wasn't biotic technology that could do much the same thing as what a biotic could if you strapped it into a synth, mind you it would be a synth that was over a story tall. The Psionics on the other hand, the one that was being used to telekinetically toss meat shields/bullets around like so many ragdolls? Organic. Thus the debate raged.
Liara's salvaged tank gun fired, even in the vacuum of space Liara could feel the recoil going through her entire being, if she was in a normal environment she wouldn't be able to pick this thing up let alone fire it, the stores of ammunition extremely limited, she needed to get Shepard and get out of here!
"I have drones circling the battlefield to secure Shepard. The issue here is that..." The heavily armed weapons platform that use to be shaped like a little girl raised her 'face' up and blasted one of the drones out of the proverbial sky. "...that." It was something of a problem.
"Pull back the drones. I'll keep her busy, use the distraction to grab Shepard." Liara dropped the almost depleted gun and Charged!
A Biotic streak across the battlefield marked by shades of purple, even in the back drop of space it was still obvious to see. The Girl delayed her pidgeon shooting and instead aimed one of the massive guns at Liara before firing the plasma shot. Liara saw the shot coming, immediately dropped her charge, let years of downloaded sniper training guide her implants, and fired a super heated projectile into the rushing cloud of explosive gases and artificial gravity. The shot was detonated prematurely, Liara used the smoke screen to pass through without getting shot again and continued charging. Two charges in and Liara had already crossed the vast distance of the space hulk, it was no longer safe for the girl to strike at this distance. The Gas Launcher folded up, the diamond shaped rings folded themselves back together again and took on the form of blades and the heavily armed weapons platform sprung forward slashing. Liara dodged out of the way of one slash as she held the opponent with a stasis field. If those laser beams really are coming from rare crystal then the field should trap them, or if they fire them off again...
"RRREEEEEEEEE!"
A high pitched scream of pain was let out across the telepathic wavelength, the surface of the weapon's platform's flesh like skin was glowing red hot like it was some kind of super heated metal. The raging heat reached a crescendo as the flesh-like body caught fire, mixed with the biotic field, and then exploded.
Across the void of space a elderly man was looking at a tablet screen that was just consumed in a static snow indicating that it's live feed was cut off.
"Looks like big sister Eva has been killed." The old man had a young girl easily young enough to be his grand daughter sitting on his lap, her appearance identical to the person that had just tried to kill Liara. "Unfortunate. Each one of you costs a fortune to put together." Henry Lawson stated as he let out a sigh. "For now let's see if we can get the data that we wanted anyway."
"We aren't going to try and grab it again?" The little girl on the lap asked sounding confused.
"The data provided by dissecting that creature is valuable, not irreplaceable, nor is it unobtainable via lesser means." With that in mind Henry began work on getting his own plans organised.
There weren't really too many places in the Terminus system that was considered to be 'safe' the organic worlds were under assault by the Gestalt, even Tuchanka was giving the no go signal, the Quarian's territory were being assaulted by the Contingency, Omega was under Aria's control and most of the former Batarian space was swarmed with unbidden. In lieu of finding one, Liara made one instead: anticipating that Shepard would be in horrible condition when she was finally found again she had a hyper sophisticated medical wing built in her ship. Now the team she would be counting on to put Shepard back together again had arrived on board.
Skeletor and his team of experts looked over the chaotic mass of parts of Shepard who had been frozen in Cryo while he looked at the damage. At least ninety percent of this was his fault, he had been the one to implant the alien organs and grafts into Shepard's body, now he was seeing what kind of reaction they have to the shroud. Most of those side effects it seems are 'extreme growth' that in part is probably as much to do with what she's had to eat recently as it was where she was eating it.
"EDI run a diagnostic scan of this rare crystal, I've had enough of Contingency programming for a lifetime." Skeletor instructed bluntly to EDI.
"Understandable, but we might want to reinstall anyway, from what I can tell Shepard's time in the Shroud seems to have driven her insane."
"Reinstall?" Liara was sitting off to the side looking at the group questioningly.
"The Grey Box retains the memories of the people that they have been installed into, before the suicide mission Shepard and her siblings backed up their memories." The Union, more specifically the Lich's, invented a method of using Grey Boxes to transfer the memories of their dead soldiers into cloned bodies, the Flerkin immortals, in theory Shepard could be put into a new body. In theory. "I don't believe you have the ability to take everything that a person is and put it into a box. You yourselves have built your entire method of reproduction around it." Liara stated making her opinion known.
"A method that Shepard herself now enjoys." Skeletor stated bluntly. "We might not have the technology to lock the soul into a piece of machinery, but in this case we do not have to." Indeed Shepard's soul was right here, as was her body, they just had to fix it.
There was an extensive amount of detail about Shepard's body that was taken back when she was being raised into a Dragoon. Three aliens were gathered around Shepard's body, drained of fluid and replaced with cryo fluid in order to prepare for the numerous surgeries that she would be going through in the days, if not months, yet to come. Skeletor, Salarian and a Tebrid.
"Doctor, I leave the cybernetic fabrication to you." Doctor-Doctor gave a salute indicating that he understood his orders. "Kale'ya, you will be responsible for the bio printing." The Telepathic woman in question nodded her head.
Duties assigned Shepard's body was cut up and separated into different tasks. Kale'ya, the current avatar of the budding Salarian Hive, was given the task of reconstructing the biological parts of the body. First and foremost: the Thorian simply had to go, it had reacted extremely poorly to the soul fusion process, to put it mildly. Using the fungicide the unnecessary tissue was removed leaving behind only the absolute bare minimum in nerve tissue, tissue that was connected to cybernetic adaptors in order to keep it alive, tissue that was now being injected with Medigel. Slowly but surely, the parts of the flesh that had been destroyed and replaced by the Thorian was now slowly growing back.
In comparison, dealing with the stone limbs was easy. There were tissues buried under the hunks of stone, there but barely, a stone cutter was deployed to remove the hunks of stone piece by piece reducing them into a bone shape over which new tissues would be grown, cybernetic joints and binders already prepared to help deal with the worst case scenario. The brain would be by far the most difficult to deal with, there was a giant crystal tumour sticking out of Shepards face from the back of her head. The frozen brain tissue made it relatively easy to remove said shard of crystal. Medi-gel formulation had taken a dramatic improvement since the Thorian's appearance, using Shepard's grey box, containing a neural map of her brain, a biological scaffold had been built in the likeness of Shepard's missing grey matter and Medi-gel would be used to slowly refill it. At the current estimates it would take days of surgery before Shepard was in fighting shape once again, which left Liara plenty of time to examine their other 'patient.'
"EDI, what exactly is... this!?" Liara was of course referring to the mangled corpse of the being that attacked them back on the space hulk, currently represented by a hologram.
"I cannot in good faith call this creature a cyborg." EDI concluded a hint of doubt in the synthesized voice. "Near as I can tell the Cybernetic Organic connection goes as deep as the cellular level." A hologram was brought up, a scaled up image of what suspiciously looked like a similar sample taken of one of the poor bastards that the Reapers turned into one of their cybernetic monstrosities, a cell with a nanite lodged inside of it. "Near as we can tell the entire body is like this, there's also a high concentration of Eezo and Exotic gasses in the cells as well, in the case of the latter the fat cell." Well now that's just plain odd. "There's more." Video footage played, a rally for one of the Union's admirals, when a man in the crowd unfolded his arm into a very familiar weapon and started blasting. "The Contingency has developed Synthetic infiltrators, dubbed 'Terminators' by the Humans. Heavily armed weapons platforms that are intentionally designed to look more like mundane races when not being actively threatening."
"Do these ones have the same cell structure as this?" Liara asked indicating the mangled and broken body before she rephrased her question. "Does it have cells at all?"
"Near as we can tell?" The footage fast-forwarded, to the infiltrator getting hit by a tactical airstrike. "No." EDI continued on. "Though mangled the muscle tissue on the one that attacked the hulk uses coiled thread muscle as opposed to more standard electrolysis muscle." Liara's face scrunched in confusion.
"I'm not a engineer EDI, explain it to me in a way that I can understand."
"Attach a rubber hose to a lever, fill part of the hose with water, subject the water to an electrical current converting the liquid into flammable gas, which takes up more volume than water stretching the hose and extending the lever, ignite the gasses converting them back into liquid and the hose will shrink and retract the level." Liara nodded her head. If you substitute 'Lever' with 'elbow' or 'knee' then you'd have a pretty good approximation of a arm or leg. "String based muscle has a thread spun into a spring shape and uses chemical reactions in order to make it extend and retract. As a rule it's higher maintenance and harder to pull off than the electrolysis based muscle, but the end result is roughly 1000X stronger than a human muscle as opposed to Electrolosys's roughly 30X stronger." Higher energy requirement, greater complexity, greater maintenance cost, if you can solve these problems then the string based muscle was superior.
"That creature didn't look high maintenance." Liara stated bluntly.
"No on the contrary, it appears to be very low maintenance." The Hologram went back to the corpse of the creature that self-destructed, or to be more accurate, their prisoner.
When the Terminator, for lack of a better term, was brought aboard the ship it was a scorched mass of carbonised matter and melted circuitry, now it looked more like someone who had been in a fire, the entire body covered in third degree burns but missing it's limbs.
"You cut off her limbs?" Liara asked sounding concerned.
"They're detachable." EDI countered bluntly.
"More importantly how is this thing still alive? It blew up! It was a mangled twisted mass of alloys and whatever plastic or rubber they used to simulate flesh when I brought it aboard!" Liara followed up her earlier question with an exclamation.
"Not simulated flesh, and not alloy, or at least not conventional alloys." EDI produced several holograms of the individual components that she had already taken off of their prisoner, and took those parts apart.
"Every fibre of its being is composed of a mixture of organic and synthetic compounds. Thorian appears to be the main component of the organic particulates, however I'm seeing genetic material from over a dozen different species, including the Gum Bark tree used to make rubber used in Tebrid custodian's for artificial muscle, Giant Constricter Spider whose thread tends to shrink, constrict and cut when exposed to light, a Prethoryn carrier beast, Thuban, Tiyanki, as well a large ratio of Eezo and exotic gas, however the main component is human." Liara folded her hands together as EDI continued. "The 'alloys' on the other hand resemble the self replicating crystal formations associated with the Lithoids, and appears to be psionically active, however they are being used to create nanite technology, the make is similar to what is used by the Reapers to make husks, but there is no sign of reaper coding within." Each component piece showed individual links as if leading to different manufacturers. "The individual components have been made in the likeness of existing Union Cybernetic enhancements, the weapons are relatively new and believed to be Contingency Engineered. The body fat appears to be a fat Exotic Gas composite. The Skin resembles Dragon Scales but are too small and thin for the same extreme defensive power. The stomach is based on similar prosthetic organs but more resembles the digestive furnace of a Gaul."
Liara had to think about it for a moment. "That's the one that farts Exotic gas right?" Liara asked for the sake of confirmation.
"Correct. In this case the gas is being routed into the lungs, which there are three of based on the Nivlarc." Which meant this thing could breathe atmospheres that would melt a normal person's lungs. "The brain appears to be a composite, a rare crystal positronic brain but with the otherwise empty gaps filled entirely with Prothean computing fluid, Likely also sourced from the Thorian. I've also confirmed that this artificial nervous system extends from the brain, down the spine and throughout the rest of the body including both eyes." As Liara recalls from what she read of the Union's files the fluid in question was some kind of psi-sensitive black goo that the Protheans used in lieu of computers. "She also has three hearts: the first a standard human model XJ9 heart, the second a organ designed to produce medi-gel and disperse it throughout the body, it appears to be functionally identical to blood except for it's incredibly potent healing prowess, the third appears to have not yet finished regenerating, but it has a large concentration of Eezo, and several ZPM capacitors."
Liara looked at the body.
"She beat her chest there a few times then it started to glow purple like a Mass Effect field before she suddenly switched to the super mode." Liara made her suspicions known. "It is possible that this organ is a power source, there are still several functions of her body that we have yet to learn, we will likely accrue more knowledge as she heals." Which leads them to their next point of interest.
"Get rid of it." Liara stated bluntly.
"Shadow Broker?" EDI questioned hoping for Liara to elaborate.
"This thing tore apart a Fenrir, threw me around like a rag-doll, whipped out enough fire power to destroy this ship and didn't die even after being blown up." Which based on what EDI was talking about likely occurred when the exotic gas in the body fat turned into plasma, mixed with the biotic field, and blew her up. "Fly us over a star, put her into an airlock, and throw her out of it. I will not have a hostile self aware weapons platform free to wander around my ship."
"Understood." EDI prepared the burnt out synthorganic creature for transport.
Conveniently the creature had already been strapped to a stretcher, their severed limbs in a case off to the side as they slowly regenerated. Sadly all the work the creature was putting in would soon be for naught, as shortly it would be shot out of an airlock into a final fiery end. Two technicians walked into the cell both wearing hazard hard suits to take it away, after all neither of them wanted to be exposed to what this thing was made of. Sudden the Synthorganic organism swelled, before the fibres that made up it's torso burst the various threads attaching themselves to the inside of the cell, and the hapless fools who had just entered to haul it away, as it slowly lifted itself up.
The threads bore themselves into the metal like roots, slowly eating away at the alloys and converting them into Nano-tech and exotic gas/fat to increase the mass of the recovering monster within, the two screaming lab techs that were slowly being eaten from the inside out also contributed their mass. The root threads dug their way into the power lines, the ether net cables, and other systems. The half dead Synthorganic would soon finish regenerating, then it would retrieve what it had come for, and afterwards it would finish hijacking this ship and vent the atmosphere and kill the crew. That was the plan, but much the same way that it had foiled the initial plan to kill it, someone was waiting to foil the plan for it to fix itself and escape.
"You underestimate us."
And then pulse of psionic energy hit the cell, and the creature could feel its brain being attacked directly.
To complete his objective Lawson had divided up the individual pieces of the information that would be needed to conduct Shepard's repairs and spread that across dozens of information packets across the extranet, each of them laced with a Trogan that once downloaded would feed him the data of Shepard's bodily reconstruction, a attempt that failed. Now Eva had just come back online so he was planning to let her take what they needed physically, for about six seconds before the fail-safe that the Union had put into place took her back out of the picture.
"It's rather unfortunate, that data would help us out in the long term, and it would be better to have it before we begin mass production." Henry lamented while he put his hand onto one of his many 'daughter's' heads.
"Should I get it then?" Lawson turned around to face the eldest of his 'daughters,' the ones that he hadn't disowned anyway. She stood taller and with a fuller figure than the others, the size of an adult woman rather than a child, a product of only a few weeks age difference not that you could tell by looking at her.
"I'd rather not throw you at someone that can one shot Eva." Henry stated as he thought about what his next move was going to have to be.
"I was talking about going into the Shroud myself." Henry turned to face his eldest. Unlike the majority of his daughters she had white hair and red eyes. An anomaly? A albino Defect? Who knows, but she performed as well as any other, better with more time to get use to and understand her body. If memory serves she was on a mission to retrieve someone or other from the Perseus front, based on what had better have been a unconscious Turian general she had been dragging around by the collar of his uniform, it appears that she was successful. "Controlled exposure to the Shroud will let us understand what kinds of problems we'll face down the line, and deal with them one by one instead of all at once so that I don't turn into a grotesque tumour like that thing that Eva fought." Henry continued stroking his daughter's head like she was a cat as he thought over the situation.
"Fine. Controlled exposure only, and you won't expose your core to the shroud under no circumstances." The eldest hit her chest with her fist in salute before she left. Henry made preparations for the rest of the experiment he and his eldest had discussed, he only had a limited amount of time to work with to see his ambitions through after all.
Review Section:
Guest: They will.
RonaldM40196867: No it isn't. Which characters am I disappointed with in my writing? I don't really have much time to flesh out most of the ME2 Squadmates.
Gianfranco Cembran: Not as interesting as you think.
