Chapter 2: Whispers in the Void

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Tali stared out into the vastness of space. It was an odd realization for her, the knowledge that barely a generously estimated one percent of the galaxy had truly been explored. She had always known this fact, but never quite grasped its full meaning... until now. Space is vast, and Tali had found the time she wanted to just sit and think while her scout ship traversed the empty void between solar systems.

The galaxy is so big that, without the Mass Relay network, all the known species would probably still be searching for other life among the stars. Tali had been contemplating the sheer vastness of space, trying to puzzle out how the Reapers could reap it all, as Sovereign had said they did. The logical answer was not helping matters. The Reapers would have to be ancient... very ancient. There would have to be enough Mass Relays placed throughout the galaxy to give at least a 90% chance of every space-faring species finding them. And the same thing that had corrupted the minds of Saren and Matriarch Benezia could be used to sway a species into using Element Zero-based technologies if they had already started on a different path.

Indoctrination terrified Tali. She still had nightmares of the Reapers controlling her mind and compromising the Migrant Fleet in some way... the worst of these dreams was one where she had been a Quarian youngling slowly being tortured and converted into a husk. She had not slept for days after that nightmare.

All the logical thinking Tali had done was illuminating several highly concerning conclusions! First: The Reapers had to have been at this a long, long time. Second: The Reapers had mind-blowingly massive amounts of resources at their beck and call. Third: There were no known living species in space that had fought the Reaper Threat and survived in the past cycles... so this made Tali lean towards the conclusion that there was nowhere to hide and wait out a Reaper harvest within the reachable galaxy.

Which was exactly what the Quarian Admiralty Board had stated they would do in the "theoretical" event of a Reaper invasion. Without "solid" evidence, they would not even consider the Reapers to be a real, much less an imminent, threat. Tali hadn't wasted her breath arguing with them, she could understand where the Admirals' decisions were coming from... despite her frustration.

Tali hadn't actually been thinking about resources when she had taken the scout ship on her solo journey. It was true she had wanted to have solitude to think and to mourn... but she wasn't one to waste her time on being inefficient. The Migrant Fleet needed a miracle to save the Quarian species from being harvested by the coming storm. Tali was at a loss. She couldn't think of anything that would be able to give her people the edge they needed... and she wasn't stupid enough to even think of messing with Reaper technology in her search for answers. She had seen the consequences of doing such a thing firsthand... it wasn't a good way to go.

She once had a faint hope of finding the motherlode of all motherlodes of Element Zero. But that was really a worthless enterprise. Virgil had hinted that the Reapers could track Element Zero when Shepard had spoken to it on Ilos... So Tali continued to search the stars in desperation, searching for a way to save her people and perhaps the rest of the galaxy. With three months and nothing besides the average resource findings to show for her efforts, Tali started to become desperate. Thus, it was that she turned her eyes to the edge of the Perseus Veil, traversing the lesser explored edges of Geth space, searching for something to give her hope for her people's survival. Something that Tali hoped would have made Jane Shepard proud.

It was in the Phoenix Massing Cluster, on the borders of Council, Geth, and Terminus space, that she found it: a trail of oddly irradiated micro-debris. Nigh unnoticeable except to a trained eye monitoring a quality scanner, were small irradiated particles of highly refined titanium floating in the black void of space. Something had left this micro trail, and according to Tali's ship's sensors, whatever it was had done slingshot maneuvers around multiple planetoids in the system.

The trail led into the Typhon system, its originator having traveled from unknown dark space, as of yet unreachable by Mass Effect vessels without any Relays for them to use. After some highly complicated slingshot maneuvers around planets had been completed, the trail led out of the system, pointing towards the only Nebula in the cluster.

Tali couldn't get an exact date on the irradiated particles she picked up on the scanner, but she was at least able to learn that they were old... very old. With not much else to do, Tali set out towards the Sea of Storms Nebula, following a breadcrumb trail that most wouldn't notice, yet she found it to be rather intriguing. Comets and asteroids don't make system-spanning course corrections, nor do they contain what might be extremely highly refined Titanium-A metals. As far as the Quarian species knew about all the ships in use or retired by the current spacefaring species traversing the stars, and Tali's people knew about all of them, excluding some of the brand-new prototypes. None of them utilized super refined Titanium-A metal in any large quantities. The material was mostly used in exceedingly large high end scientific instruments, although most such facilities used a cheaper less long lived alternative, and why wouldn't they?

The stuff was bosh'tet expensive and therefore very much worth her time to investigate.

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This Chapter has been reworked as of 16NOV2023