Author's Note: So than I've decided on how to do the Codex, I'll be posting new codex chapters every time I complete a "mission" or to put it another way, every 2 or 3 chapters. So expect a Codex entry next week. Read, Review, Favourite and Enjoy!

Chapter 22: Noveria Part 2

Even though Omega's new primary purpose as a guard outpost was established, its status as a massive deposit of Eezo had not changed, hence plans had been made to mine it out, hollowing out the asteroid and thus increasing the width of space that the Vorcha can inhabit. Of course the Union wasn't going to do things as boringly as the Council had, sending personnel down into the mines with jack hammers and floating Mass Effect pallet jacks to carry the rubble away to the refineries. A Geth relay station had been planted down there, designed to act as a networking station for VI programs, but not Geth in this instance. All across the station the Vorcha with the new L-3 model implants and Savant Amps were hard at work, synchronised VI programs coordinating the Vorcha in a display of massed Mass Effect phenomena rarely seen, funnelling molten Eezo slag from the mines that was melted with particle thrower devices directly into vats full of molten Eezo.

The materials didn't stay for long, sophisticated Mass Effect technology separating the impurities away leaving behind nothing but pure Eezo. From the vats of pure Eezo a factory was being set up, sophisticated fabricators combining the raw material with others, omni-gel included, for the express purpose of making highly sophisticated pieces of equipment, a far cry from the broken and degraded Matter Decompressor that nearly destroyed Khar'shan. Combined with a massive enough support frame to hold it all together without getting caught in the Blackhole's gravitational field, a sufficiently potent power source, and several other tidbits of importance.

The Video file served several purposes, starting with showing off a demonstration of the capabilities of the L-3 implants, as well as the sophisticated fabrication technology that the union had under their belt. Sparatus and Tevos looked at the footage with fascination, Valern was recording it with his omni-tool since the Union wouldn't let him keep the footage.

"Omega's mines are going to be depleted awfully quick." Sparatus noted suspiciously.

"Depletion irrelevant." Valern stated finger raised to the air. "Blackholes excellent source of Element Zero."

He says that like they actually have a method to get Eezo away from the blackholes safely and reliably, the Council didn't, but the Union does, they were mass producing them in this shiny new facility they were showing off.

"I have so many questions." Tevos looked directly at a picture taken of the contraption in question, about a quarter of the size of the event horizon in question, a massive station by all accounts with four purplish energy beams, three lesser and a central one. And Tevos has no idea how any of it works. "How do you even power anything like this?" Tevos asked looking confused at the images.

"We call it a Penrose generator, it harvests the radiation produced from the Blackhole. The humans had an idea of how to theoretically build one as early as pre-spaceflight, I imagine your own scientists have similar ideas." Admiral 'Krakkenorbust243' was a insepid little creature, Shepard walked in like she owned the place and made demands of them, but when she did it she at least had the common courtesy to pay attention to them. This creature treated them much like it would treat the air around it, eyes kept elsewhere at all times, they were beginning to learn that acting like a omni-tool addicted Maiden was just normal behaviour for the little monstrosities but it was still rude, and they couldn't help but feel like sending this creature their way was the Union's subtle way of telling them what they thought about their opinions. Still this mockery of prepubescent teenagers was apparently the admiral of one of the Union's scientific fleets, so it was apparently up to him to tell them what they intended to do in their territory. "In any case, that was my part about the Matter Decompressors. My boss wants me to go figure out what your conduit does and how to make it work." Sparatus sincerely hope that the science admiral completes those objectives in the order that it mentioned them.

Peak 15 would not go down easy, it's own security system had been reactivated and so the 'ratatat' of automated turrets and various mercenaries filled it's halls, the Geth had thankfully been left outside while the Collectors were no where to be seen, busy off doing something else perhaps? Or being held in reserve. Wrex and Liara were taking turns spamming barriers to block the incoming stream of gunfire, as this was a high security laboratory someone had thought to install guns into anything that would be intruders and/or rogue experiments could hide from the turrets behind had been thoroughly scrubbed from the hallways leaving behind smooth flat walls and floors that broke no cover. Every few tens of seconds Shepard would telekinetically scoop up the material piling on the floor in front of the two biotics from the slugs being fired at them, vibrate that into a molten mass, and fire that at the enemy forces as a flaming disk. Kaiden on the other had already made use of the battlefield, people look awfully funny when their dead buddies guns suddenly float into the air and fired at them from the side.

Then after the latest group of mercs had been finished off the doors slammed shut and the room was filled with visible gas, neurotoxin, or worse. Their hard suits were sealed air tight for just such cases of emergency, what they weren't sure about was if Reaper nanotech could eat through them. Holes where the gas was flooding into the room were quckly identified, the dead mercs bodies hacked apart and stuffed into the vents in question via a combination of Biotics and Telekinesis.

"Anyone notice something funny?" Shepard asked checking to see the state of her weapons after a few minutes of fighting against the mercenaries.

"Such as?" Liara asked looking concerned.

"Wrex what would you do if someone broke into a heavily guarded top secret research station and you were in charge?" Shepard asked hoping to get some coordination on the matter.

"Gas." Wrex replied bluntly.

"After that happened." Shepard replied equally bluntly.

"Figure out where the enemy is going, prepare a choke point and ambush them with as much fire power as I can muster." Kaiden piped up after thinking it over for a moment.

"They aren't doing that though." Liara stated bluntly. "This is the third group we've run into already. They aren't trying to ambush us, they're looking for something."

"I have an idea of that." Wrex stated as he looked at a nearby wall. The wall was rougher than what it should be, fabricator's leave material smooth after it's done with them but this was more like something that was familiar to him, and so playing to his best guess Wrex hit the wall with his fist, and made the slab of materials fall over. "Rachni." Wrex growled under his breath.

"You sure?" Shepard asked looking at the crude wall suspiciously.

"Fits their MO." Rachni had several advantages during the war named for their kind, numbers, ravenous appetite, an incredible ability to reverse engineer technology, Their construction tools are built in. Prepare a mold in the shape you wish to create, dissolve a mass of materials in the mold using Rachni acid, let the acid evaporate and leave behind a hardened mass of materials in the shape that they want.

"So they dug a hole and needed to cover it up, is that what I'm getting from this?" Shepard asked looking at the hole stupidly. The Rachni have built an entire ants nest in the middle of the facility. "How stupid are these people?" Shepard asked trying to wrap her head around the madness before her.

To be fair, the whole 'brains leaking out of their skulls' thing from indoctrination probably didn't help any.

Inside of the Binary Helix HQ, the Krogan were having a party, one unfortunate Turian had been turned into a pinata, and Salarian's were being used as the bats.

"People who piss off Krogan don't have a single ounce of intelligence to their name." Wrex coldly informed, not only had Binary Helix pissed off them, but their little stunt with the Genophage research meant that they had made a enemy out of every single Krogan in the galaxy. Thus Wrex had simply concluded that whoever the decision makers of Binary Helix were they were a bunch of idiots. Moving on. While contemplating the actual IQ of a bunch of self proclaimed geniuses the group observed more Rachni continuing to dig tunnels throughout the facility. Wrex took aim at one of them and prepared to fire, but Shepard stopped him. "What are you doing!? These are Rachni!" Wrex snapped in a low voice.

"Yeah yeah alien locusts, eat everything in sight, Prethoryn of the galaxy hundreds of years ago I got that." Shepard picked up a rock and tossed it up in the air a few times as if testing it's weight. "Except that they aren't doing that." And tossed the rock in the direction of the Rachni, missing them by a couple of feet as the Rachni turned to face the group, showed no sign of hostility, and returned to face the rock wall they had been trying to bore their way through. "So lets see if we can figure out what the roaches are up to then."

Simply put, the sum of the Rachni's activities were digging. That and fighting mercenaries but mostly digging. The issue here was that they couldn't dig too deep, because whenever they were on the verge of breaching the mountain the ice would rapidly start to melt with the acid, destabilise the entire area, and collapse it on top of them. That's what happens when the foundation of your top secret research facility full of ancient alien bugs is made out of ice. Shepard and the others weren't the only ones who had breached the tunnels either.

Mercenaries were coming down here, with flame throwers, the Rachni's attempts to build hives were being torched, the insects used acid, the Mercenaries used biotics to defend against them. The biggest thing that made the Rachni a threat was not their seemingly inexhaustible numbers but rather their preferred planetary conditions: Tomb Worlds. Bases built deep underground miles of rock, earth and inhospitable conditions that no planetary bombardment could reach, at least none devised by the council, allowing the Rachni to build and breed with impunity and assault as many nearby garden worlds as possible for raw organic material, it was only until the introduction of the Krogan, a hardy race themselves from a tomb world, that the council could actually go down to meet the Rachni and kill them with impunity. To put it another way, without that impassable shield the Rachni aren't a threat, least of all to mercenaries with years of experience clearing the inhospitable tunnels of Omega of Vorcha. Shepard silently gave the rest of the group a telepathic message, they can wipe out both Rachni and Mercenaries, but that will take time, time that they may not have, so an alliance was in order, and of them the Rachni was the lesser threat.

"Fine!" Wrex ever the grumpy overgrown fossil that he was, had to concede to Shepard's logic. "But don't come crying to me when the bugs eat a planet." Wrex cracked his neck, you get old enough and the Blood Rage just sort of... clicks. You reach enough experience that you can call upon it at will, and so Wrex did. "RRRAAAWWWRRR!" Barriers fully charged and weapon in hand Wrex ran out into the enemy crowd bumping off two Rachni who were in his way. The Enemy was caught off guard, unless the flame throwers are spewing red hot plasma they don't do a lot of good against biotic barriers, point blank gunfire on the other hand? More so.

"That's quite enough thank you!" Liara threw a stone with enough biotic force to crush the skulls of several of the Mercenaries that Wrex hadn't yet picked up and used to beat others to death. And then Wrex hit one of the flamers and sent him flying into a wall, the liquid fuel that was in his tank started to leak.

"Don't mind if I do!" Shepard telekinetically vibrated the molecules inside of the fuel tanks of the mercs until they caught fire and exploded with enough force to collapse the chamber that the Mercs had been using to enter the Rachni nest through.

The Rachni looked at Shepard's group suspiciously, and then turned around walked to the entrance to another tunnel and turned around as if waiting for them to follow. Contrary to the group's belief they were led not to some grand centralised nest but rather a junction of four Rachni tunnels, each with Rachni of their own indicating for the group to follow them.

"This is a trap." Wrex was quick to voice his opinion. "They're trying to divide us up."

"Trap? Divide and Conquer?" Shepard gave a mocking gasp as if she was shocked by a revelation. "Do you mean to imply that the Rachni are capable of tactics?" Which was a step up from the mindlessly aggressive insects that Wrex has been treating them as up until now.

"Grr. The most basic of tactics, but yes." Wrex had been trapped already, not by the Rachni but by logic and Shepard.

"So's the enemy of my enemy." Shepard stated bluntly. "Scavengers like Ravens use it all the time."

"If those bugs eat me, I'm blaming you." Wrex stated shoving a thick armoured finger into Shepard's chest. "Can you even read these thing's minds? Is there even anything in there to read?"

"Good question." Shepard's eyes glowed and so did the eyes of one of the Rachni. Reading their minds was like taking hallucinogens, Rachni are what's commonly known as Synesthetes, that being people who possess a neurological disorder where one sense triggers another, colour is interpreted as sound, sound is interpreted as colour. Figuring out what they're saying is a matter of assigning value to colour that doesn't exist among the human spectrum, figuring out what they're seeing requires that you assign value to sound that also doesn't exist among the human spectrum. In Layman's terms... "Complicated."

"Of course it is." Wrex bumped Shepard as he picked a tunnel to go down.

Turns out the Rachni wanted help dealing with the other mercenary teams. Shepard and Kaiden had the easiest time, telekinesis setting alight tanks of pressurised flammable liquid and exploding taking groups of mercenaries with them and collapsing tunnels with the explosions. Liara wasn't a warrior or a soldier but an archaeologist, one gifted with Biotics and a Savant X Biotic Amp, so she was able to slam tunnels closed on top of the enemy heads. Wrex had the hardest time, partly because of his lack of trust concerning the Rachni, mostly because he was generally pissed and so slipped into blood Rage with a great deal of ease so he ran up to and tore apart mercenaries instead of just shooting them. With the immediate threats dead or buried the Rachni led them to a place that they had been expecting, the Rachni nest, huge masses of eggs had been scattered about, and in the middle of the formation, a single massive Rachni with a large fleshy tube growing out of her body. The Queen.

"Say the word and I can end all of this here." Wrex muttered bluntly.

"Let's try and figure out what she wants first." Shepard replied bluntly.

"And how are you going to do that? I thought you couldn't talk to these things?" At this question an alien unfamiliar to Shepard walked out, she had gotten dossiers about all the races that she was reading from time to time, but this was the first time she saw one in person. The Hanar are quite bizarre as far as the council Races go, a Aquatic species resembling giant four legged Jellyfish perfectly capable of walking on land, they communicate via a form of Bioluminesence, and in the case where they have to speak to the other council Races their unique universal translators convert the light that they normally use to communicate into sound. "That could work." Shepard looked the Hanar up and down finding an identification card that was hanging off of a tendril, poor bastard was part of the customer service staff.

"This one is known as Opold. This one speaks for the Rachni." The Hanar's body flashed as it spoke, as Shepard understood it most of the light flashes were beyond the visible spectrum of light.

"I saw on your name tag. What are the Rachni trying to do?" "Escape the planet and return to their home world."

"To do what? War with the rest of the galaxy? I haven't heard a lot of pleasant things about the Rachni in the past." Shepard turned around and started walking around keeping her eyes on the Hanar and the Rachni queen. "Her Majesty retains the genetic memories of her ancestors, every time outside influence has to come to Suen the Rachni have been corrupted, turned to violence and unleashed upon the galaxy like rabid varren. If left alone the Rachni will be allowed to truly thrive." The Hanar was shuddering, as if imagining a thing of great beauty.

"Does she remember the Rachni wars, how they started?" Shepard asked looking up at and glaring at the Rachni Queen.

"The Salarian's arrival, yes she remembers." The Hanar visibly recoiled, as if seeing something of true horror.

"Did the Salarian's do something to provoke them?" Shepard asked cocking a brow suspiciously. Wrex gave a grunt of acknowledgement, fully believing that the Mad Scientists could've easily provoked the Rachni into going on the offensive.

"There was another." The Hanar spoke slowly, the information coming to it slowly like the Queen was struggling to remember. "Sour and foul, their song perverted all of who listened to it, forcing them under its control. It wanted this galaxy, wanted it to worship it, wanted it to fight for it, wanted burn it out like cauterising the wound." The Rachni queen leaned downwards, as if to ensure that none of her words would be misunderstood when she spoke. "It is a song like that of the intruders, the threats to our nests."

"If the Rachni had Reaper tech backing them they would've taken the galaxy in a month." Wrex made his opinion known.

"Uplifting species to do their dirty work doesn't fit the Reapers MO according to the Lich's." Kaiden pointed out bluntly.

"The Reapers uplifted the Batarian's didn't they?" Liara asked simply. The last time the Asari heard about the Batarian's was in her spare time while casually reading through the literal mountain of news reports she had been sent, one detailed how the Batarian's had apparently evolved or been pawns of some ancient space ship monster. Liara wasn't sure if that was how evolution works, but the Union has been hard at work to challenge her preconceptions of the universe.

"The life from Khar'Shan evolved from the organic matter that leaked out of the Reaper's corpse, chiefly bacteria." Shepard countered sighing. "They were indoctrinated by the Reaper tech, because that's what happens when you get close to it, but aside from a piss-wash attempt at reverse engineering tech from it's corpse it didn't do anything to advance them. We think." Shepard started walking back and forth hand on her chin as she thought the situation through. "If a Reaper is responsible for tampering with the Rachni then things could be more serious than we thought."

"They are not." Opold snapped voicing his opinion. "Although the two songs are similar the behaviour and end result are wildly different." No Rachni corpses survive to this day, not without some serious cryogenics at work, but the Salarian's probably couldn't wait to dissect them back in the day, and took extensive documentation. "Whoever tainted the Rachni before, they were not capable of this."

The Rachni queen's eyes glowed, and so did the party's. Notes sweet and sour, bright colours stained by corruption, filtered through the Hanar's mind it was a thing of horror, the Rachni's own song played along something twisted and demanding, a demon made in their image, a dead thing in the shape of a dead thing made out of dead things. A reaper, or the spawn of one, but it's purpose was different, a breeder of Rachni, born tied into the Reaper's control, born twisted by their technology, a living breathing embodiment of the Rachni's history of perversion at the hands of other races, and it cannot be allowed to live.

"Huh. It isn't often that I'm on the receiving end of that." Shepard shook her head free of the numbness in her mind. Liara and Wrex on the other hand looked like someone just took them for three rounds and were now stumbling a little bit. "Okay so which hole are they trying to come in through?" The four of them just went around plugging them, so in theory they should be safe for the time being.

The caverns started to shake, dust was falling down from the ceiling as stones started to come loose. Something massive was trying to tear apart the facility, not giving a damn about its structural integrity or the potentially thousands of pounds of raw rubble that would be sitting above it's head.

"Sounds like the Reaper Queen is about to wake up." Kaiden stated bluntly while watching their two alien allies shake off the psychic probing. "How we gonna do this?" Kaiden asked bluntly.

"Hey Ash!" Shepard stated her hand on her coms.

The Dragoon in question had just dealt with another group of Geth and left their cybernetic sparking husks off to the side. The issue here was that whenever the Geth are close to dying they download themselves or back themselves up to severs else where and get new bodies, and Ashley wasn't quite sure how they were doing it with all this snow blowing about. For now she just did what she could, destroy the Geth bodies beyond a shadow of a doubt whenever she saw them, without actually having the training as a engineer she couldn't tear these things open and figure out where their signal was coming from. So hunt them down and smashing them whenever they appeared was her best bet.

"Hey Ash!" The Quantum entanglement coms relay she had in her ear went off as a thought dawned on Ashley.

"Hey Shepard! This is Ashley go ahead." Ashley simply sat down and let out a sigh. Quantum Entanglement would allow the Geth to repeatedly send signals through the snow without worries, the issue was that the technology was difficult to mass produce for the Union, it might not be for the reapers.

"Are you getting bored of smashing Geth yet?" Ashley slammed her mace down on the head of the Geth she was sitting on as it prepared to spring up and attack her. "Little bit yeah."

"Sovereign made something out of the Rachni, their own personal Rachni husk egg laying machine. We have to assume that after all the trouble they went through to make it that they're gonna want to retrieve it too."

Made sense.

"I'll shoot down any ship that's not one of ours that tries to leave or get close. In the mean time I think these Geth are using some kind of Quantum Particle relay station to keep these Geth going. If you find it in there do you mind smashing it for me." Ashley's shields lit up as more Geth Plasma bolts started to pelt her.

"We'll keep an eye on it." Shepard paused as Ashley heard the distinct sound of insect like screeches. "Oh that's good to know. One of our new friends here think they know where it is."

"Not gonna ask." Partly because Ashley was too busy, But mostly because she didn't want to know what kind of Crazy antics her friend had gotten into this time. "We'll meet back up inside of the facility. It's freezing out here."

"You're suit is insulated Ash." Shepard reminded her blunt. "It. Is. Freezing. Out. Here!"

Review Section:

RonaldM40196867: True. There's pros and cons, one doesn't necessarily outweigh the other. I think my Shepard just prefer's to smash things.

Chronus1326: You're forgiven. And Don't sweat it, I'm planning on introducing more Stellaris based threats after Sovereign gets taken out, make up a little for the losses suffered by the three mercenary organisations that Shepard accidentally went to war with in ME2 that have already been arrested in my fic. In any case I'm glad you're enjoying the story again! Same to you!

Clown2107: It's sad that the self admitted military dictatorship is the most popular among the council races.