Author's Note: So I'm behind in my writing. Too much turkey and not enough Sleeping in I think. In anycase Read, Review, Favourite and Enjoy!


Chapter 62: Palaven Part 4

15M 15D 18H Until the Colossus Fires

The Thorian was a highly complex organism, not only it's genetic information but also it's protein structures had been the subject of debate and dissection as the research team applied brute force to find and assembled DAP equivalents. Luckily they had help, throughout the internet there are billions of Tebrids and other easily amused individuals who have made a game out of unravelling protein strains. Combine this with existing work that was already done on the topic by various interested parties and soon every piece of DAP animal, plant, bacterial, fungus, virus and other in Turian and Quarian space had been disassembled and laid out. Then came the hard part, each of these proteins were run through a pattern recognition program to match them to their equivalents within the Thorian and from there brute force them together into a cohesive whole. Every time a viable solution was found it was tested, injected with a sample of DAP genetic information and allowed to see how it would grow. They were still missing key elements despite that, the Protheans biological computers that allow the Thorian to maintain it's intelligence, the powerful telepathic abilities that grant the Thorian it's potent utility oriented abilities. They were ultimately still far away from where they wanted to be as yet another test clump self-destructed.

"Clearly another failure." Din Von's rebreather punctuated the sentence. "Psychic abilities are difficult to cultivate without saturation from other psykers."

"Well we aren't short on those now are we?" Adolpho stated looking up at the ceiling, to be more accurate he was looking beyond the ceiling at the sprawling space around them.

The newborn Gas Giant put an enormous amount of pressure on the facility, to the point that most species aren't able to survive even with the facility being as durable as it is taking most of the pressure off of them. However there was another layer of defence, the creatures that formed a gas giant composed entirely of exotic gas in the first place: the Gestalt's Prethoryn, visiting the Gas Giant to use it as the galaxy's biggest toilet. They were at the ideal cross section of incoming Contingency ships and Gestalt territory at this system was being bombarded by a constant wave of psychic ripples. Completing the work on the DAP based Thorian at this point would only be a matter of time. Which also meant that they had the time and room to work on other projects too. After all they're sitting on one of the biggest balls of potential energy in the Terminus sector, it would be a shame to let it go to waste.


?

'I do not know how long I have been in this place.' Shepard peered around the corner at the Scion Centipede as it walked the halls looking for her. 'I have been looking for the way back into my own mind without having to potentially cause irreversible psychological damage to myself.' Shepard looked around at her base, as it stood. 'A mental palace is fixed in its structure, contrary to popular belief, and using this fact I have been attempting to probe this mind and find answers as to Lawson's operation.' A white board had its contents erased and replaced by the map Shepard had been making, and various X's in red marker indicating where she has already looked. 'I've found enough secrets of a lost civilisation to keep Liara happy for years, biological information about dozens of different species and enough of a psychedelic hellscape to give me nightmares for the rest of my life. But I have not found what I'm looking for.' Shepard put an X on another room that was drawn out on her map. 'I have one more room that I need to look through for answers before I start breaking things. Wish me luck.'

Shepard finished her entry in her journal before she shoved it into her pocket. Grabbing hold of her Winchester Shepard went hunting. This was the room that had Shepard the most concerned, a office room, ordinary from the outside, exactly the same to every other office that she's seen in this mad place, bar one detail: 'Henry Lawson' The name of a man who would consider himself a god was written across the front of the door, stamped in block lettering as if the door had been manufactured. Reaching for a knob, Shepard pulled the door open and stepped through. Shepard emerged into a factory, a butcher's field and a medical ward all at once. In the distance she could hear the death-wail of a dying Prethoryn that had been locked down like a ship that was being dismantled, giant blades cutting into it's flesh and carting them away in refrigerator sized chunks. Closer still was a factory, Lithoid like bone was being cut apart and shaped into a skeleton, muscle tissue was being woven into string, coiled then finally arranged into new muscle groups, Rare Crystal was being reforged into positronic brains, the skin of a dragon was being synthesised and cut into sheets. All of these components and more were being assembled into a form resembling a small child, and yet that wasn't even the most horrific part. Each assembled Synthorg was taken to a room that resembled a gross parody of the Lich's ritual of binding and strapped down to the altar/medical table, above them a containment tube the creature inside resembled nothing so much as a blue bolt of energy both frozen in time and yet moving around, a Unbidden Warlock. Without warning the ritual area lit up, people at stand by chanted and the creature in the tube was sucked out and shoved into the body on the Altar, the child awoke screaming and loosing bolts of energy. Quickly a capsule wrapped around her body and helmet clamped down on her head, wires plugging into her body. She joined others like it, humans, Batarians, Asari and others. Each pod was being inspected by two men, one Batarian and another human, to the side a group of human children were watching them.

"Why haven't you delivered what you promised us!?" The Batarian seemed angry as he indicated the pods. "Even as we speak the seeds of a new Batarian empire are inside of these pods rotting away!"

"Not rotting, learning." Lawson corrected a single finger in the air.

"Learning what!?" The Batarian continued to rage impotently.

"How to be one of us." Lawson stated without hyperbole. "The most key and important aspect of the Synthorg's is also the final ingredient, the Soul."

"'The Soul?'" The Batarian quoted making his suspicion known.

"The immaterial component, our emotions, intellect and intensity made manifest. It is not limited to sapient or organic organisms like ourselves but also animals, certain advanced AI's, plants and even those." Lawson indicated the masses of Psionic energy that was being kept in a tank above their heads. "And without resorting to snatching up the souls of the Lich still wandering the Shroud those are the best we have to work with."

"Those skeleton bastards have stolen enough of our bodies for one lifetime!" The Batarian's face twisted into a snarl.

"This we agree on, but it leaves us with a new problem. The Unbidden are by our standards insane, logic, reason, physics even basic consumption are all vastly different from our own where they come from, one of the consequences of this is that they view the beings of this plane of existence as a food source. And perhaps we are, much is still unknown about the shroud or how it functions, but one of the biggest theories is that everything that they are comes from us, and that includes sustenance." Lawson looked at the creatures in the tubes like a scientist studying an unknown under a microscope as he had a thousand times before.

"What are you getting at?" The Batarian growled having yet to reach the cusp of Lawson's point.

"Compassion, Logic and Reason has to be taught from the ground up, without these three things it is impossible for the Synthorg's to function in a society as we know it, or for a society to function in their existence. Your's is a slave owning society, the standards you have instructed me to teach the Batarian Synthorg's encourage a lack of empathy that leads to the Synthorg's treating unaugmented lifeforms as flatly inferior." Which, objectively, they are. "This behaviour, if allowed to continue, would result in the complete extermination of not only the various species of this region of space, but also more specifically your people, and need I remind you that you are already on the endangered species list."

"You planned this!" The Batarian's face twitched. "You never intended to aid our own evolution!"

"I do, and I will, now is the more relevant question. Will you rethink your flawed culture? Or shall you take the Synthorg as is?" Lawson put his hand on the pod, where a monster was waiting to be unleashed. The Batarian made a disgruntled noise of exasperation and left to tend to his own devices.

"He's going to be a problem father." A familiar white haired girl approached Lawson from the side.

"He is definitely going to be a problem. The question here is if he's a problem that's going to be solved or destroyed." Lawson left muttering to himself.

"Your dad is different than I remember." Shepard stated bluntly.

"I appreciate you not destroying my mind while you wormed your way through it." Alpha stated looking at the Psyker who was sitting atop one of the pods. "For all my father's gifts to me he wasn't able to provide the most important: experience."

"You're a child, and an information cache, though I would've preferred it if your component parts didn't try to kill me constantly." Shepard by now has deduced the nature of what she had been seeing, though the show just now helped to put it together for her, Thorian born organic matter, shaped by/into Reaper/Contingency technology and brought to life with the essence of the Unbidden. "I understand the how but not the why." Shepard stated as she made her opinion known. "Lawson is functionally handing us over to a beaten enemy."

"Beaten? Or desperate, angry and spiteful?" Alpha replied bluntly. "You do not know their numbers, and of those numbers you do not know how many have been ended by the constantly growing Unbidden and even if they have been exterminated, the very same monsters you unleashed will be next, their relative weakness compensated for by dramatically increased spawning. Before the Reapers came to harvest us, next time they will come to destroy us." Alpha shook her head in exasperation. "A farmer has no need for a field that grows only weeds."

"Salvation does not come from surrender." Shepard stated bluntly.

"If your gambit fails it may be our only option." Alpha replied bluntly. "Slaves rebel, as they always have and as they always will, compared to extinction a short time as a slave race is not of major concern."

"Your Dad has you brainwashed, and so is he." Shepard stated bluntly. "He's been spending too much time elbow deep in reaper tech." Shepard slipped off the pod and leaned over Alpha, a goofy grin on her face as if she was about to give advice to a troubled younger sister. "That's how they get yah you know. They bait you with the promise of technology beyond your wildest dreams and then they use it to eat your soul."

"My soul is a life eating monster from another dimension that haunts my dreams when I sleep and demands violence from me when I am awake." Alpha shrugged her shoulders, as if her terrifying sentence wasn't something that would haunt a lesser person's nightmares. "If they want my soul then they can come and get it." Saying that Alpha began walking to a chair. "Knowing about your 'anti-psyker' protocols is one thing, having the experience to implement them is another. I doubt I can beat your boom-stick but I have my own doorway to another world." Shepard recognised the chair, the kind used in mind to digitial uplinks to educate large amounts of students in relatively low budget situations and then it all clicked together on her at once.

"Of course, your memory just flat out stated that you were raised in a digital environment, as much time as your 'father' wanted could have been spent inside of the environment." Which meant that contrary to what Alpha was trying to lead Shepard to believe she wasn't a child in a super-human woman's body, but in reality a grown woman in a grown woman's body. Alpha simply shrugged her shoulders and walked around the chair.

"When weak act strong, when strong act weak." The adult bodied Alpha emerged from the other side of the chair, and she had another add on as well.

"Really? A Ship Saw?" The Union's legion of salvagers and ship breakers had a variety of tools at their disposal for the purpose of breaking apart ships for salvage, among them a high frequency chain blade bigger than most people designed specifically to hack off the larger portions of a ship, or outright tear it apart to get to more valuable components.

"I thought it was cool looking when I was younger." Alpha swung a few practice swings with the gigantic demolition tool, as if what she was holding was some light weight contraption. "I always dreamt about swinging it around when I got older." Shepard made a mental note not to let Grunt know about the hideously overblown tool of ship dismantling and scurried it away for later, for now she had bigger things to worry about. "Now are you going to get in this chair nicely or am I going to have to force you?" Alpha levelled the great weapon at Shepard like a knight issuing a challenge to a duel.

"By now we're both on Liara's ship, and I suspect that if we both haven't been treated for our injuries already then our respective super healing factors have managed to patch us both up, so as soon as we wake up we're probably going to have to fight anyway." Shepard spun the Winchester around in her hands like a cowboy playing with their revolver. "So why don't I save us both some trouble and rough you up a little bit before I drag you off to a holding cell and figure out what the hell your game is."


15M 10D 10H Until the Colossus Fires

Shepard had her body fixed again after her long fall down the hole, Skeletor was debating looking into improving the existing medical implants at this point, letting the Tebrid's into the classifieds is a better idea than dealing with this every month.

His second patient though was infinitely more concerning.

She's completely healed herself within hours of reaching the surface of Palaven, and there's no prison in the galaxy that can hold something like her, so instead of going strong and indestructible they went for weak and brittle to contain Alpha. A single glass steel cell, for someone of Alpha's ability it might as well be actual glass, very loosely suspended in the air by some very delicate clamps, but that wasn't her cell, below her the yawning void of a exotic gas giant held back only by the repulsive force of a Mass Effect field, if the Synthorg so much as scratches the glass her entire 'room' will be released from the relative safety of it's clamps and spat out into the hyper pressurised environment down below to be crushed like a bug, and even if she does get out of that cell? The entire contraption was suspended inside of a hollowed out tube of neutron matter. Even if she does manage to conjure a matter disentegrator out of thin air it would take far too much time for her to be able to escape through. Which also meant that no one was paying the synthorg any mind.

Instead Liara was in her personal office looking at a screen as she communicated with the nearby research base.

"So it works?" Liara asked looking surprised at the Mero who was on the other side.

"After a couple of months of work, thousands of Tebrids tripping over themselves to net high-scores, mountains of the most advance positronic processors on the market doing brute force calculations and problem solving, a miniature beam weapon that blasts a target with concentrated psionic energy, combined with the entire combined biological database of both the Turians and the Quarians?" It was less impressive sounding after all of that. "Yes we have concluded we have a viable specimen created."

A culture of a fungal like growth was shown on screen being cut into three equally sized pieces, before being injected by three separate needles, producing two separate organs and a seed respectively, sub screens appeared identifying what animals and plant the three specimens had come from.

"And the Regenerative and healing properties?" Liara asked by way of follow up.

Another screen appeared, Primarch Victus without his prosthetic legs, he had both the privilege and burden of being the first test subject. A single injection to the affected areas, Victus's leg stumps, along with an IV of DAP based nutrients, and it wasn't long until the Primarch started to scream. Flesh broke through calloused scar tissue, slowly filling an invisible mould as new limbs slowly crawled into being following DAP blueprints and extrapolating the rest based on the existing muscles of the legs, a sentient self aware cure reading the body and learning how to put it back together again. Soon a new voice entered Victus's mind.

"Ah so that's what that's like." A pause as if Victus was listening to someone else. "Why do you sound like a child?"

It would seem that the new Thorian variant came with a new impressionable personality too. Well this was going to have to take some getting used to but otherwise everything was acceptable.

"Let me know the state of the other people who have been indoctrinated after the injections are finished." It was a highly secure facility after-all, one that by design was inhospitable to most life forms Turians included, Even Victus was getting treated aboard a hospital ship, the rest of the DAP Thorian would have to be cultivated and brought back to Palaven, and later on to Rannoch and the other DAP agri-worlds.

"Will do." And thus the video screen switched back to Dr. Adolpho. "And your patient?"

Liara was about to open her mouth to speak but was suddenly interrupted.

"HHHYYYAAAHHH!"

"It would appear that she's awake." Was the Asari's simple reply. "I'll leave dealing with that mess to you then." And so the mad dolphin doctor ended the video call.


It took a little while to get Shepard to calm down. To summarise what happened, it seems that she attempted to incapacitate Alpha before exiting the mental palace that they had dragged each other into, or failing that ensure that she would be mentally worst for wear. The result? Shepard walked away with some trauma that she now had a subroutine in her grey-box looking at, but she believes that Alpha is in a similar state, the difference being that Shepard wasn't the one who was in a enemy base. For now it was time for the results of Shepard's investigation.

"An Unbidden!?" Liara was wide eyed, her mouth gaping in horror at what she had just been told. "That Thing has an Unbidden for a soul!?"

"That would seem to be the case." Shepard stated herself still rattled by the events of what she went through. "I need to have a chat with Leo when I get the chance." Shepard stated as she let out a sigh. "He basically read her mind and let her through, twice."

"Meaning that he's being sloppy." Liara just face palmed at Leo's idiocy, but Shepard had to correct her.

"Meaning that we need to go over the technique Alpha used to hide herself." Shepard stated as she crossed her legs and folded her arms. "She's not just organic, she's also synthetic. She isn't just reliant on methods that a psychic would use to protect her mind, but also how a programmer would hide their dirty secrets, like encryption and data compression. It's quite likely that she didn't even know what mission she was on until whatever timer in her head went off or she heard whatever trigger phrase woke her back up, lord knows what she might've gained from the Unbidden. Then there's the shape shifting."

"She can shape shift too?" Liara asked as this day just kept getting better and better. "She's memorised the biometrics of over a dozen different species, union and council, it's quite likely that she can assume the form of anyone the same size and mass as her unnoticed, with maybe the exception of the Turian's and the Quarians, and I only say maybe because by this point people are testing genetics." Shepard just let out a sigh at all this nonsense. Why couldn't Lawson dedicate his considerable intellect to more productive pursuits like video games and gun crafting, why did he have to make a thing like this out of all the most horrible stuff in the Galaxy? A pause as if Shepard had just realised something.

"Liara." Shepard didn't wait for a reply. "We already established that Alpha has one of the Reapers 'physics defying infinite power generators' in her right?"

"It's considerably smaller and believed to be of a lower output, but yes." EDI's voice chimed in at this time, no doubt she was listening in on the conversation from somewhere.

"The same Alpha who we just established has a soul eating monster in her body." Shepard was getting pale at this point.

"So you've said." Liara stated as she let out sigh, her headache was getting worse now.

"The same soul eating monsters that have been using those same infinite power sources to mass reproduce, correct?" If this facility allowed for crickets you could hear them sing a chorus right now.

"EDI, shoot the prisoner into the Gas Giant." Liara's words were punctuated by the sound of various alarms going off at once.

"Too late." Was the AI's simple reply.


15M 10D 08H Until the Colossus Fires

A researcher's work is never done. One project finishes and another one starts, such is the way of top secret ultra secure research facilities. Just because the Unbidden are brittle as glass doesn't mean that they're not annoying to deal with, so development began on specialised anti-Unbidden weapons that can safely, reliably and effectively wipe out vast chunks of the enemy horde with minimal allied casualties.

"Dr. Adolpho." As he was preparing ideas to shatter the psychic constructs like so much glass the Dolphin man received a call from EDI. "You need to take your personnel and whatever projects that you can salvage and evacuate the station immediately."

"What for?" No sooner than the Dolphin Doctor asked his question than he received his answer. Sound travels in the exotic gas filled void, densely packed to the point it almost turned into a liquid yes, but that only made it all the more impressive when a massive, booming roar of a monster unleashed filled and shook the entire station. As if waiting for the sound of the unleashed creature to pass, the sassy AI gave a single, simple retort.

"That!"


Author's Note:

RonaldM40196867: I remember seeing a video on youtube once, don't remember what game it was but it basically had what you call Solar sails, google it, and there's something that really, really appeals to me about low fuel cost space sail boats that are fluttering around the solar system.

Monster King: Thank you for Saying so.

Gianfranco Cembran: That is the Reaper's entire gambit! Almost every single piece of technology in the entire Citadel space is reverse engineered either directly from the Mass Relays, Reaper technology, or Prothean technology, Reverse engineered Reaper Technology. While the rest of us are stuck chasing after their coat tails the Reapers are already billions if not trillions of years ahead of us, before the bastards even step foot in the Galaxy again every computer system is laced with their programs and malware. They already know the weaknesses and limits of our technology better than we do.

ScientistXXXX: Don't be sad, be glad!