I know for a fact the most popular bits of this are the first-person Commander segments and anything to do with technology - so you'll love this! He said. Like a prick.
Real talk. I have opinions on how the tech works, you have opinions on how the tech works, we all have opinions on how the tech works. I'm probably wrong, but I'm happy being wrong. He said. Defensively.
I just like lasers.
I was pleasantly surprised to find Garrus waiting for me in the corridor outside the briefing room. Always a sight for sore eyes. He was leaning against the wall of the corridor, arms folded, giving me the nod on seeing me. I nodded back.
"More dossiers - get ready to make some more friends and shoot some more people," I said, giving him some finger-guns. Garrus tilted his head.
"That what the word is?"
I sighed. My reserves of faux-enthusiasm were only so abundant and I really kind of wanted a lie down. No rest for the wicked. Or the people who come back from the dead, apparently.
"Word is he's going to be working on how to get through the relay and in the meantime we work on building up the squad. Horses for courses. More bodies wouldn't be a bad idea, I reckon," I said.
Garrus nodded, obviously not feeling a need to ask anything further on this. Instead, this:
"How are you holding up?"
Good question. I rested against the wall myself, running things through my head a second. Great thing about Garrus was that I knew I could take my time. Guy's a rock.
At length I let out the breath that I had been holding and asked him:
"That was weird, right? This whole thing has been weird, agreed?"
"No arguments from me."
I tapped my toe against the floor, thought some more.
"You reckon this is going to come back to us later somehow?" I asked.
"Knowing your luck, Shepard, I wouldn't rule it out."
Again I sighed. What else could I do? He got me in a box. I did seem cursed to live an eventful life or two.
"Well there's that to look forward to. Guess we should just take things as they come, eh? Don't you have some calibrations to do or something?" I asked. That got a little chuckle of him. Did like that sound.
"I'd say you were making fun of me but I actually do."
"Fancy that."
A moment of companionable silence.
"You going to get some rest?" He asked.
I bounced away from the wall and rocked on my heels, nodding my head towards the armoury.
"Soon, soon. Going to go check in on Jacob - I asked him to take a look at that gun," I said.
"Ah. The one Jarrion gave you?"
"The laserpistol, yes. Want to come have a gander?"
I could see him give it serious consideration - Garrus being a man after my own heart when it came to the appreciation of a fine firearm - but then he shook his head.
"I'd hate to intrude on your fun. And I really do have calibrations to run. I'm sure you can tell me all about it later."
"Oh you'll get the full rundown, no detail left out."
"I look forward to it," he said, smiling.
And that was that, for now. Off Garrus went, and off I went into the armoury, where indeed there was Jacob already there.
I could see the lasergun laid out in bits and pieces on the workbench, alongside a silver block which had previously been sitting forward of the grip in what I now saw kind of looked like...a magazine well? That's a blast from the past.
"Alright Jacob, tell me about this thing," I said, walking up and rubbing my hands.
"It's a laser," Jacob said.
I gave him a real nice, slow blink.
"You don't say."
He swept his hands apart before the bench to indicate the disassembled weapon, just in case I might have missed it. I had not.
"It's a very small laser," he said.
"Again, you're wowing me with this stuff, Jacob. Is that a good thing?"
This one he wasn't so sure about and I watched the look on his face as he clearly tried to figure out the best way to sum up his feelings on the matter.
"It's...something," he said eventually, scratching the back of his head.
"You appear to be having difficulty finding the right words."
"Heh, yeah, you could say that."
"Just let it all out. Tell me what you, as a man who knows his way around a firearm, was thinking as you got this thing opened up. Good job, by the way - I wouldn't have known where to start."
"We mostly just took it a careful step at a time."
"We?"
"I assisted, Commander," said EDI, popping up out of nowhere and making me jump.
"Didn't know you had hands," I said.
"I offered technical advice and support."
"Ah, right. So you can help here, too. Lay it on me. What's the deal with this thing? What does it mean to you? Can we make one?" I asked.
My primary concern here was - as it had been from the very beginning when I'd first seen one of these damn things - whether we could turn this into an advantage. Every little helps, after all, and a functional weapons-grade laser might be a step above a little, at least in theory.
And I wanted a lasergun, damnit. Is that so much to ask?
"We'll get to that. I'm just going to try and unpack on this," Jacob said, leaning on the workbench, looking tired, like it was all just too much.
"Go ahead," I said.
Jacob took a breath.
"I cannot fathom how this thing exists. Going by everything I know about weapons-grade lasers, I mean. I'm not an expert but I've seen enough to feel pretty confident in saying that something like this right here isn't even in realistic development, let alone full production. I've seen GARDIAN lasers disassembled and I can understand the principles involved and I can see one or two components here that I can recognise the purpose of - focusing aperture here, say - but the rest of it beats me."
He straightened up, folded his arms, shook his head.
"There isn't even anything like as much of a cooling system as you'd expect. Which is just hard to explain. Lasers make heat. Lasers make a lot of heat. It's generally one of the two main reasons why infantry-scale lasers aren't a thing now, because the heat issue causes so many other problems. Parts stop working like they're meant to, efficiency goes down, etcetera. Happens on GARDIANS. You've seen it, Commander."
I had. First round of missiles and first wave of fighters always takes the hits. After that accuracy and efficiency drops and drops. It's kind of just how it works. Hell, significant part of space combat doctrine is about exploiting the flaws in PD.
Jacob continued, bending forward over the workbench again and resting his hands on it.
"And yet this thing. Tiny. No obvious cooling system other than this bit here. Assuming this bit here even is a cooling system," he said, pointing to one part that could have been anything and frowning. "I mean, that's what I'm guessing it is but who knows? Either they've made the most efficient laser you can imagine or it's got something else going on. And that's not even getting onto the size of it in the first place. Look how small this is! You can make a laser pointer the size of a finger, sure, but a laser that can kill something? At range? Doesn't overheat? Can fire more than one shot without being hooked up to a generator? This big? How did they do that?"
I know I said for him to just cut loose but seriously, take a breath or something Jacob.
"I was kind of hoping someone else would be able to tell me that," I said.
Jacob didn't comment on this and instead moved onto the shiny metal block which I ventured a guess was a battery of some kind. Just a guess.
"Speaking of power we got this thing. This is the battery," he said, picking it up and waving it around briefly before putting it back down again.
Nailed it.
"Little on the large side, maybe, but given the amount of energy it's storing it's still ridiculous. We'd probably need a generator to run a laser for more than five shots - lasers are hungry bastards - and they're running them off batteries. Rechargeable ones, no less, or at least it looks like. Assuming we're right about that part. And these are rechargeable batteries that'd probably blow out the side of the Normandy if they ruptured. I am having trouble wrapping my head around some of this."
Still leaning over the bench Jacob rubbed his face with one hand.
"Theoretically there's nothing stopping us from making a laser, sure, it's just a question of how we'd make it practical. I could design you one, it would just be a hell of a lot bigger than this and work a hell of a lot less reliably. And this guy just hands you one. And look at it, it's not even that well made - even I can tell you that and I've spent fifteen minutes messing around with it. The ones the others were using - those carbines we saw? - those were proper military-grade stuff. Rapid-cycling. Firing in bursts! Bursts of pulsed bursts, probably, given what they were doing to the Collectors. That's a lot of heat to be throwing out of something for it to just keep on working like it's not even a big deal. I just - are these guys really from the future?" Jacob winced. "I hate that I just had to say that. Or think it."
I shrugged. I knew how he felt but was a little beyond caring at this point.
"Apparently. Maybe? Or somewhere else. Try not to think about it too much, I know that's what I'm doing. EDI, you got anything to add? Can we fabricate one of these?"
"Theoretically," said EDI.
"Okay, I'll be more direct and ask if we can start making our own copies of these things? As soon as possible?"
"If we were capable of producing weapons like this, Commander, we would be. There are materials involved that I will have to find suitable substitutes for, and we lack the manufacturing infrastructure that they possess, so I will have to determine what appears to be the best possible method of construction. For any component that cannot be properly replicated I will have to determine what can serve as a substitute for their assumed purpose. Had they given us plans many of these issues would have been solved, but they did not," said EDI.
"This 'reverse-engineering' malarky is a lot trickier than I hoped it might be," I said.
I was personally offended that having something didn't mean we could just cranking out copies. Offended! Suppose this is why I'm the one in charge rather than the one who actually has to muddle through the details. Generally if I can't get something to work just by slathering omnigel all over it then that's about the limit of my technical abilities.
"I could provide a full listing of the outstanding issues that remain to be resolved if you could like, Commander," EDI said. I waved them off.
"No, no I'm good I'll take your word for it. But we can make a copy at some point, right? It's not impossible?"
"I will be able to produce a variant of this weapon, Commander, following further analysis. Additionally, there may be other benefits and later improvements not restricted to the weapon itself as a result of this process," said EDI.
"That'd be nice."
"As regards the weapon, would you prefer I lean my design towards power or portability?"
I had to think about that one. Agreeably not for very long.
"Power," I said.
Being a cyborg wasn't the worst, sometimes. I could take a hit in portability.
And besides, as whizzbang-supercool as these lasers were - and as technologically unlikely as they apparently were, too - I'd seen that they weren't the be-all and end-all. I mean, I'd seen them going through barriers like they weren't even there which wasn't surprising and doing a fair job on that Collector armour, but anytime they'd hit anything hard the effect had been a lot less impressive.
Which tracks with what I knew about lasers in the first place, really.
Guess that's a tradeoff thing. A laser will cut through metal, sure, but it takes effort and power and requires your target to politely stand still while you slowly work your way through from a couple inches away. Not great in a combat situation, in my experience. We should be so lucky.
Not covering PD lasers, of course. But those are operating on different principles. Let's not get into that. We're just talking about a guy on the ground with a lasergun shooting at someone else. Hypothetically.
Bearing that in mind they'd done good, sure, but most things will react poorly if you shoot them with any kind of gun. In my experience.
It's why we'd settled on mass acceleration, right? The things just worked. A laser will ignore a barrier but if you just shoot enough with a regular gun or shoot them with a big enough gun that's a non issue. Why bother lugging around something three or four times the weight and only half as effective that'll melt itself when fired enough when you could just have a gun? A gun which you know will do exactly what you want it to do when you point it at someone you don't like?
That Thale guy's lasergun though. That beast! That's the real thing here, for me. Wish I'd got one of those! That had been ridiculous. I'd seen that thing burn clear through Drones - through-and-through and out the other side and a good chunk into whatever was behind!
What sort of output was that?
I mean, I know that a modern combat hard suit will, when hit by an energy weapon, boil away and ablate. Standard feature. Generally you don't run into that kind of weaponry that often though, but with one of those regular lasers like the rest of Jarrion's guys had had you'd be pretty safe for a solid hit or two though it's not exactly something I'd want to experience firsthand.
But that thing! Thale's gun! You'd be dead on the spot! Hole the size of a fist right through you, just coughing up blood and chunks of boiled lung. Yeesh. And he'd had the thing linked up to a big backpack and not just running off one of those dinky little super-batteries. So, clearly, power was the key. Ramp up that power, get results.
Even I can tell you that and I just shoot things for a living.
This was my thought process.
"There was one other thing…" Jacob said, snapping me out of my cool laser daydreams.
"Hmm?"
Moving over to the side he picked up something covered with a sheet and then moved back to the workbench, laying it down. I raised an eyebrow.
"The anticipation is killing me," I said.
Jacob removed the sheet, revealing that what he'd carried on over was a tray and on the tray was another one of those rather unsettling skull-drones that that Pak person had brought along. This one appeared to be deactivated, not to mention a bit charred around the edges.
I stared at the skull and, what with it being a skull, got the uncomfortable impression of it staring right back.
Seriously, who makes actual, real-people skulls into things? That's a bit grim. And this is coming from a woman who talked a guy into shooting himself in the head.
Agreeably that hadn't been my intention but still. That hadn't been fun to watch.
And then he'd come back…
"Where'd this come from? They leave it behind?" I asked.
"We found it. Well, EDI found it," Jacob said.
"The device was found in one of the ventral service ducts, Commander. It was active at the time," said EDI.
That's not great.
"You probably should have led with this. It's kind of a big deal. It manage to do anything? I assume it was doing something rather than just wandering around lost?"
"No intrusion attempts were recorded, Commander," said EDI. "It appears the device was attempting to map whatever area it could access. I elected to observe it initially, seeing as how it was not presenting an immediate threat. When it did attempt to connect to the Normandy's systems the unauthorised access was detected and I elected to overload. For security purposes."
"Probably a good call. So it was just snooping?"
"So it would appear."
That's also not great. Friends don't typically stow away secret spying devices on friend's ships, at least in my experience. And that's not even getting into questions of who to hold responsible. From what Jarrion had said, Pak's lot were a law unto their own sometimes. Did Jarrion even know? Would it be rude to ask?
"That's, uh, that's not great. I don't feel great about that. It relaying that information or…?" I asked, trailing off and hoping someone would fill the void with something good.
"No broadcasts of any kind were detected," EDI said.
So it was just wandering around, lost, looking at stuff but not actually reporting back. So nothing it had seen had even gone anywhere. Had it expected to get back somehow? How? And then once it apparently got bored of poking about it tried to connect to the ship. To do...what? Leave me a goodbye message? One imagines not.
Would it have reported back if it hadn't been fried? Was it just something that Pak person left behind by accident, operating on some sort of in-built programme? One imagines not, again. So on purpose then. But why? I can't get a read on these guys. They think miles away from where I'm standing.
But even with that the case I can tell this isn't good. I just can't quite know why yet.
I'd have been angrier about it but I was just too bloody tired at this point. That, and it hadn't actually been doing anything other than blundering around, which was confusing if not actively malicious. If it had been wrecking the place then I could feel properly bad about it, but now I didn't know what to think, really. Maybe that was just how Pak's lot said hello?
"What the hell was the point…" I muttered.
Now I'm just feeling paranoid. Maybe that was the point? Just to get under my skin?
That's just a slippery slope to questioning everything. Let's not worry about anything we can't actually see. Right now all we got another weird piece of technology, some bad faith and nothing actually having happened. So let's just go with that for now. If we're lucky we'll just not have to worry about seeing these guys ever again.
So let's try and get some positives out of this.
"Reckon we can figure out what made it float around like that?" I said, tapping the skull on the forehead.
"This unit does not appear to have that capability. Mechanical motion only," said EDI and Jacob demonstrated this by silently tipping the drone up and letting me see the very unsettling spider legs it had.
Typical. I'd been genuinely curious how they managed anti-gravity without any mass effect know-how. Oh well.
"Tsch. Shame. Well, we can still take it apart and get something out of it, right?" I asked. Jacob nodded.
"That's the plan," he said. I nodded too.
"Great. Well, don't break your back over it, we've still got actual work to do. We're going to be picking up a few more for the squad soon so I'll be needing your ready for that. No all-nighters, eh?"
"I'll try to resist the temptation, Commander," Jacob said, grinning.
"Glad to hear it. Now I am going to lie down before I fall over. Anything terrible happens you all know where to find me."
Me and my bed were going to be having some quality time. Think I'd earned it.