Author's Note: Little behind in my writing right now. Still have to come up with contents to last 15 in universe months. I may have bit off more then I could chew with that number. Read, Review, Favourite and Enjoy!
Chapter 59: Palaven Part 1
17M 08D 08H Until the Colossus Fires
A joint Turian Salarian research facility was being desperately built in on Palaven, it's purpose attempting to adapt Thorian spores to Turian biology. The Research was originally being conducted by a Salarian lab but it had been shut down during the Union's second spree of mass arrests in Citadel space. That said the construction of the laboratory had hit a little snag, in that one of their construction machines had managed to collapse a dormant tunnel that connected to a nearby Turian temple. Now normally this wouldn't be a huge issue for ultra Pragmatic Turians, there are lots of other sites they could build their laboratory on, or failing that simply finish the construction where it was. No the main issue here is that as soon as the excavator broke through every indoctrination detector in the entire area started screeching at max volume.
16M 02D 09H Until the Colossus Fires
Liara was sitting in her office discussing the events that took place on Palaven little over a month ago with one of her contacts within the Council's Spectres.
"I understand that this is a problem for the Turian's but we have countless things we need to look into." They needed to get a team to Rannoch to figure out the problem of getting a probe through the time dilation field that was around the Contingencies territory.
"A couple of days ago you put feelers out looking for leads on Reaper technology that relates to their turning people into husks on a large scale. Something about it being technology of interest to a terrorist group?" Saren asked fully aware of what Liara had been looking for, and how to push her buttons. "The probes we sent down into the temple brought back these images."
Architecture didn't resemble that commonly used by the Protheans, which given Liara's history as an archaeologist greatly appealed to her. The ancient ruins on Palaven had long since been sealed by the Turian Government, something about how much they despised the idea of beings greater than themselves. As an archaeologist Liara would've leapt on the chance to study the ruins in the first place even without the potentially apocalyptic secrets that they held, now though she's thinking that the ruins were sealed for more reasons than just ego. The Turian's use to worship beings that they called 'Titans' a race of giants that use to walk along their homeworld's surface with wildly different appearances, the old texts said that they arrived on Palaven in the form of giant eggs, something that was clearly displayed inside of the temple's pictographs. However when Liara turned the pictograph in question upside down what use to look like a giant egg with trails of fire streaming off it as it fell through the atmosphere instead looked a lot more like a Reaper, to be more specific several reapers falling into the atmosphere of the planet. Liara could offer some guesses as to what was happening.
'After the Mass Relay detonations several Reapers fell onto the surface of Palaven where their shells were broken open and the syntho organic core inside was released, which between literally falling from the heavens, their massive size and their innate powers of indoctrination the native Turian's came to worship them as gods.' Concerning? Extremely, doubly so since they might just be somewhere in a world full of people who can't immunise themselves with the convenient anti-indoctrination Thorian, and it only got worse from there. Many of the pictograph's depicted Turian's worshipping the Titans at obelisks, obelisks that hit them with waves of light that then transformed their bodies, inflating them them, warping them into horrific creatures, occasionally even combining several of them together. It wasn't hard to figure out what happened next with a little bit of knowledge of Turian History. One of the biggest point of pride for the Turians is that their home-world was united under a single government before they even reached their moon, Liara could easily imagine the Reapers only landing on part of the world, which led to the appearance of husks, mass indoctrination, and war being declared. Everyone who wasn't indoctrinated allied together and fought a long and brutal war against the indoctrinated to free their world from the grip of the Titans, and afterwards they buried everything where they thought no one would dig it up again.
"Most of what I can offer here is just speculation, but there is concrete information we have to act on." Among the Reaper technology in that place there's technology that can fulfil the missing gap in Lawson's plans, and secondly in that underground place there is still active Reaper technology. "Huu. Alright Saren we'll look into it." Liara stated bluntly, Saren nodded his head and left.
Liara just let out a sigh, luckily, one of the key benefits of being the leader of a massive network like the Shadow Broker's is that she can act in multiple places at the same time. For now a meeting was called with Liara's high ranking squad captains, Shepard, Garrus and Grunt.
"So if I understand this correctly..." Garrus was holding a tablet with a picture of the 'Titan's Egg' on it, flipped upside down of course. "You think the titan's were a group of Reapers?" "Saren was the one who brought the situation to my attention." Liara reminded the group with a glare. "And every Union sensor at the site seems to agree with the theory. Even without the possibility that Lawson is after whatever tech is hidden away inside of the temple we cannot allow the presence of reaper technology on the central hub of the Turian War machine."
"Don't forget that we're already on our way to Rannoch to deal with the contingency forces." Shepard stated bluntly.
"Which is why I believe divide and conquer is necessary. Garrus for his investigative prowess and Grunt for his brute force to Rannoch." That and Garrus being a Turian is allergic to the Thorian spores that they would be using to protect themselves from the Reaper indoctrination signal that was apparently extra strong on the dig site.
Tali mentioned the possibility of Contingency infiltrators on Rannoch, she could be right, or she could be butt hurt that the machines managed to outsmart her, either way Liara promised support, so support Tali will get.
"Any more questions?"
15M 29D 20H Until the Colossus Fires
The Shadow Broker fleet had split off into different directions in order to observe, and when necessary, provide relief to multiple fronts in the Terminus Sector, that said for the first time in months Liara had left the sector wide war-zone for the relative comfort of 'civilisation'.
"I can feel your relief at having left the Terminus Sector." Shepard stated even as she and her alien beau were getting suited up.
"You don't need telepathy to tell that." Fenrir was a little big for the tunnels, the Hugin wouldn't do much good in an underground labyrinth, so Liara was getting suited up for her third pick of mech suits the Kraken. Long Custodian like tendrils trail off her arms and legs with four more out of her back just like them, each arm is capable of smooth fluid semi-independent movement controlled via a series of Networked VI's all under Liara's control. On top of that the entire thing is covered in a layer of active camouflage skin, a type of material covered in thousands of light sensors that is constantly taking in data from the surrounding area and changes it's colour using that information, with the management of the data put to work under a VI program Liara can effectively turn invisible. Couple this with Liara's other VI programs managing the data of the Shadow Broker Network for her and she had about as many VI programs floating around her Grey Box as your average Geth, but not even Liara's new half Geth status could temper her excitement of getting to explore ruins no one has step foot in in millions of years.
"You're not even upset at the whole 'almost certain death' bit?" Shepard asked looking amused.
"There's always 'almost certain death' these days, right now I simply get to cut the impending life threatening crisis with something that I actually like to do." Liara stated without a single hint of shame on her features, and the sad part was: Shepard could tell that she was serious. Having exited the Terminus system Shepard and Liara finished their preparations with an injection of Thorian spores into each of their necks, outside of the Terminus System and it's screeching madness it was actually safe to have Thorian spores inside of your body, certainly safer than going into this hell pit without them.
"So you two are back again are you?"
Palaven was still host to a research site that was actively trying to develop a variation of the Thorian spores that they could use to protect Quarians and Turians in the same way that the normal Thorian would protect the rest of the galaxies populace. So naturally, somewhere on the planet, there was a Thorian cluster that people were experimenting on, which also meant that as soon as the two had injected themselves they had the megalomaniac in their heads again. Lovely thought that.
"Good to hear your ugly Cloaca voice again too." Shepard replied annoyed at her favourite megalomaniac.
Shepard started by sending telepathic feelers down through the underground ruins. Only useful for detecting living creatures but given what Saren thinks this stuff down here can do... A shiver went down the Dragoon's spine as she felt an intelligence that was alien in ways that few aliens were brushed against her mind. Because that was full of good news.
"Well?" Liara asked sounding suspicious.
"Yeah there's something down here alright, have your VI programs check to see if anyone has gone missing." Shepard stated as she turned on the flash light on her helmet.
"No one lately no." Liara still activated the active Camo on her suit, partly because in this mode it takes thousands of pictures of the tunnels to help build a detailed camouflage for the tunnel.
"Pity." Shepard replied bluntly.
"Pity?" Liara asked sounding astonished.
"We would know what we were dealing with if a bunch of Turian's had gone missing down here." Liara admitted that was a good point. "Let's have a gander at the kinds of animals the Turians have instead, pests, pets, other kinds of animals in the area. Give us some kind of idea of what we're dealing with."
One of Liara's tendrils turned visible again, a light being projected from the tip showed a hologram of the creatures in question one by one. A lot of the critters in question reminded Shepard of four legged bugs, similar to how the Turian's metal like exo-skeletons reminded her of insectoid races, even if the only other race she could compare them to was the Rachni. Some could fly others could not, Shepard was not fond of fighting against lots of small enemies swarming in from all directions, nor was she fond of the realisation of various cracks and gaps that led into Turian sewage systems, not at all. Still there's more than one way to skin a cat as they say, and more than one way to check unknown areas. Case in point: Sonar.
"Hold up." Liara stated as she used a tendril to stop Shepard's movements.
"Lots of movement up ahead." Shepard whipped out the particle beam weapon and fired down the hallway. The intense light from the particle beam revealed a veritable swarm of cat sized beetle-like creatures with familiar circuit board lines going over their bodies.
"Mot!" Shepard cursed, both because they just walked into an ambush and because said ambush apparently disapproved of the bright light so it started to come at them. Liara promptly scooped the creatures up in a Biotic singularity and Shepard turned the particle beam from flashlight to the deadly weapon it was.
15M 29D 18H Until the Colossus Fires
The Salarian's annoyed Leo to no end. They think too fast and with thoughts too disjointed to make any sense of what they were thinking, it's like ADHD on Meth or Crack. Personally Leo felt like he had better things to do with his time than acting as a walking sensor for Terminators, but one of the few things that the bots could not duplicate was actual psionic thought patterns, or in other words an actual organic mind to read. The Union had deployed thousands of battle trained psionics throughout citadel space, anywhere that the Council or it's constituent governments was willing to let them in, scanning people as they came in, and subduing them if they were discovered to be a Terminator or something worse. Right now another group of Union technicians had arrived on Palaven from off world that Leo had to scan, in the temporary base on Palaven's moon out of a fortress.
Why was it temporary? The 'Facility' in question was little more than a converted storage room and a lot of the proper equipment didn't fit inside of it. With Palaven itself possibly not safe it might see some reshuffling, in the mean time though he was having a awkward conversation with group of technicians and lab assistants that had just arrived here to work at the Facility to make DAP compatible Thorian.
"Miss I understand that you've come a long way only to be told that you have no place you can go but that is exactly what is going on, the research lab that they have set up isn't functioning at this time." Leo felt for the woman, all the way to Palaven from Union space only to be told that she basically couldn't do anything here.
"Understood." The woman in question stated simply and without inflection. "Should I return to the ship or should I wait for reassignment?"
Leo went through the woman's thoughts again. A genuine desire to help the Turians, training in the biological and computer sciences that would be necessary to see the project through, and she was a host to the Thorian spores themselves similar to the other scientists on the project enabling telepathic communication and allowing the scientists to determine if their test subjects Thorian spores were holding true to their fungal origins. And yet Leo had an odd feeling of deja vu looking at the albino woman. He also had twenty more individuals that he had to vet today and couldn't spend any more time on a lab assistant without a lab she could assist in and thus moved her along to updating VI auto-target subroutines.
15M 28D 11H Until the Colossus Fires
Liara and Shepard had spent the past day blasting. When it became abundantly clear that particle beam fire was simply not doing enough to stop the tide they switched tactics. The standard 'Singularity and Plasma' combination would probably do the trick, in part because it would break the back of the cave system and bury all of them in thousands of tonnes of rubble. Instead they decided to Cross the streams, on Shepard's end a exotic plasma flamer, on Liara's a warped particle beam, packs a punch individually, but together? Much smaller more contained explosions to wipe out groups of the Swarm. After over a day of constant explosions ringing in their ears the swarm finally let up, for the time being. The two opted to rest for the time being.
"I'll take first watch." Shepard sat down leaning against a wall gun in hand. "You get some rest."
"You get some rest." Liara half corrected and half argued while she watched holograms produced by her tendrils. "I have mountains of backlogged data to sort through about these ruins."
"And if we get attacked while you're looking at cave paintings and I'm asleep?" Shepard asked sounding like she disagreed with the plan as it were. "Good Point. Sentry mode." The tips of Liara's tentacles whirled to life, each of the built in Omni-tools in the tendrils worked to manufacture their own little laser shooting drone, and another, and another after that. By the time another swarm came after them they'd have their own swarm to deal with. "Now if you'll excuse me." Liara proceeded to dig back into the Turian Caveman scrawl while Shepard just sighed and laid down to go to sleep.
Admittedly Liara's ancient Turian was more than a little rusty, Protheans had been her main area of study after-all, but no matter she had VI's with auto translate functions on them. Classified VI's. Apparently in a rare move of ingenuity the Turian's had the bright idea to use their people's ancient languages as code ciphers, the STG of course probably cracked them all years ago but have neglected to troll the Turian's by posting them all over the Extra-net, either because it was a legitimately good idea and they actually respected them for it, or more likely, because it would make dealing with the Batarians harder if they did so. Either way Liara put in the request for the ciphers, citing her need to figure out what these pictographs actually said including any relevant details like 'warning ancient alien doomsday device here do not dig' and thus had to go through the usual process of countless checks as she waited for the request to go through. In the mean time there was a lot that could be told from pictographs, she had already figured out 'ancient gods were actually reapers without their cybernetic shells' after all.
"That looks familiar." Liara stated as she tapped on a picture of one of the 'gods' in question, a glowing light emerging from the centre mass of the Reaper, presumably the heart. "So obviously it's a power source, but how does it actually function?" Liara sighed as she looked down at one of her tendrils. "EDI give me everything the Union and the Citadel has on using Mass Effect fields to power something."
15M 28D 06H Until the Colossus Fires
The short answer was, there wasn't much. Oh sure the Council eagerly applied Mass Effect based technology to energy production as eagerly as they applied it to everything else, the main issue was how? How does making a generator heavier or lighter improve its power generation capabilities? Rather than the Council EDI looked to another point of reference, namely herself. Entering 'Battle Mode' once more the Synthorg had various probes prod at her body to try and figure out how its power generation works. The answer she reached was a mixed bag, a regular Schrodinger's cat situation that EDI wasn't sure if she would be able to recreate even if it was safe. A mass of Exotic particles trapped via Mass Effect fields into a miniature Dyson sphere turned heart, the isolated and mobile section of unreality took advantage of the lack of laws of physics to apparently achieve infinite energy. Even if Lawson had access to Reaper technology to figure this out he would still have to be a genius to not only duplicate it but scale it down to such a huge degree, but she already figured that out from the assembly of the synthorg's to begin with. No the bigger problem is that there's something on Palaven capable of much the same, and it was a lot bigger than her.
Even worse whatever fail-safes that kick in to keep a dead Reaper's core from spilling unreality all over the place might not be in place anymore, on the Turian home-world! EDI's computer systems flew over the various consoles and communication points. The Turian's luckily were already evacuating much of their planet, having already established a minimal safe perimeter around the area where the ultrasound was being produced and slapped down anti-indoctrination devices around the affected area to further limit the affected scope, a Red Zone if you will. The People of the Red Zone were evacuated to an area that was cleaned out of munitions bar what would be utilised by the guards, id locked to the individuals in question, Union psykers were being flown in order to check all of them out and find the extent of the damage done to them, this area was known as the Yellow Zone. Individuals who were evacuated from the Yellow Zone after getting a clean bill of health were moved across the planet at their leisure, this is what's known as the Green Zone and individuals in the green zone were free to come and go.
Hopefully figuring out the DAP Thorian would make it all moot and everyone can just go back to their normal lives.
"This is Shadow Broker HQ asking for Primarch Victus with Valuable intel regarding the temple structure underneath Palaven, come in Primarch Victus." Turian Beauracracy was as efficient as ever, the only roadblocks EDI faced was those meant to act as security checks for the Primarch.
"This is Primarch Victus." The Turian General received an unexpected promotion. The Previous Primarch Fedorian was caught inside of the Red Zone when the temple was cracked open, and so naturally couldn't be trusted to lead anymore. "How much is your intel going to cost us?" EDI accepted the first offer the Turian had made, if she attempted to give it away for free then the cynical Turian wouldn't believe it, and EDI had no time to waste.
"There is an unstable Reaper Power core on Palaven, a scientific investigation suggests that ZPM technology is used in it's creation." EDI allowed the Turian a few moments to process the new information.
"As in the same device that was cracked open and punched a hole open in reality itself?" The Turian had a note of quiet horror bleeding through his voice. For now EDI just compiled everything that she had figured out from her observations and reported them back to Liara and Shepard.
15M 27D 22H Until the Colossus Fires
Shepard woke up from her rest to the sight of Liara getting ready to go deeper into the ruins.
"So how was the Archaeology?" Shepard asked looking at Liara suspiciously. "Quite good actually. Thanks to the scouting drones I prepared I have made significant progress in maping out the ruins and Identifying the enemies locations." Liara stated, though Shepard was suspicious, mostly about how limp Liara's body was at the moment. "EDI has her own theory about the Reaper's power source, and by extension her own. Tell me Shepard did you see anything that you could interpret as an infinite energy source while you were wandering around the shroud?"
"I dunno. Everything was weird there. There was the time that my arm nearly got twisted off of my body so I guess that if you can make a generator that's strong enough to actually get the energy out of there..." Shepard trailed off and let out a sigh. "...or you can use psionics to just pull the energy out of the unreal space like a pyrokinetic." So it was possible, however much of this crazy stuff was actually possible anyway. "By the way why are you acting so funny?" Shepard stated looking at how, with the exception of her tendrils, Liara hadn't moved since the conversation started.
"Oh, I've put the organic parts of my body into sleep mode, what you're talking to right now are the various Linked VI's I keep in my grey box."
"What happened to the person that was scared out of her mind of AI?" Shepard asked looking at Liara suspiciously.
"She spent too much time on the Extra-net." Liara, or rather the voices inside of her head, replied bluntly, she was speaking quite eloquently surprisingly, if Shepard had to guess there must be at least two or three VI's in there that Liara has dedicated solely to social interaction, if Shepard was lucky then Liara would also have some dedicated to running combat subroutines too. "Also I am not AI, I am a series of linked VI programs similar to the Geth." Okay now she's just making excuses. "I'll take the lead." Liara's VI's stated, even though they smoothly blended into the walls and floor of the cave. Shepard just let out a sigh as she activated the Sonar and followed her girlfriend as her various VI assistants dragged her away.
Review Section:
Monster King: Thank you for saying so.
RonaldM40196867: When you ignore the whole 'eminent apocalypse' problem it does look like a pretty nice place to live. Course the same thing can be said for our current world too.
Gianfranco Cembran: If you mean 'Good work for the Reaper Lore' then thank you, I thought it was well thought out.
