Chapter 5: Research, Discoveries and Dreams! Oh My!

Disclaimer: I do not own Mass Effect or Halo in any way shape or form.

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Tali's first impression was that the people who designed this ship believed utility triumphed over, well, everything. Really, with the outside looking the way it was, she should have been expecting this. Every inch of the vessel she saw screamed of a military mindset, from the walls and floors to the layout of dead and decayed wiring of what looked to have once been an illumination system… All of it cried out its designed purpose to any who knew how to listen.

This vessel had been a warship, and the tech had been overlaid through the ship's hull after its base construction was complete. Like an upgradable module snapped into a template, everything could be ripped out and replaced with new systems with incredible speed and efficiency! A must-have trait for vessels of war in a time of rapid advancement and fierce faction competition.

Tali knew her history; she knew of her people's ascent to the stars and how quickly they advanced. How they used similar designs in their ships to prolong their operational ability and life span, how some Quarian-manufactured ships were still the most dependable and easy to repair vessels in the migrant fleet… despite their centuries of age.

This vessel took that memo to new levels of genius, and it looked to predate her people's own discovery of the stars. It intrigued her even more with its deceptive simplicity. What seemed to be plain, drabbed aging bulkheads had telltale signs of electrical component architecture being present, hyper-advanced use of 3D printer-style construction at a micro, possibly molecular level…

Impressive!

The theme of the bay she had docked in was age and decay; its signs were everywhere. She hoped the rest of the ship was more preserved than this portion was… she wished to get more than just valuable metals out of this discovery after all.

The ship's construction techniques and design might be invaluable from what she could see as it was now, so she was somewhat optimistic about having found something already.

Without further ado, she hoisted the small portable generator she brought with her and headed for the nearest door…

She really hoped this worked.

Hot-wiring the door took a few minutes but was surprisingly easier than she expected. The door opened slowly and if the vacuum of space allowed sound, Tali would have been sure it would have been making a horrendous racket in protest. A small puff of atmosphere came through the door as it opened, but the sealed door at the end of a short hallway showed that it was only a small, localized event.

She would use this hall as an airlock; it would risk damaging the ship even more if she decompressed all the rest of it at once, depending on whether the rest of the compartments happened to be open already.

She would rather the thing not implode while she was in it.

It was surprising that any of them were even pressurized at all! By her estimation, this ship should have been reduced to bits and pieces within the Sea of Storms ages ago.

Looking about the passageway, she further surveyed the design and construction materials used in its creation, only to freeze at the alien language written on the floor as a directional guide.

Her visor's HUD could translate it.

It was the Human tongue.

Looking around the vessels interior, she found more Human words written or engraved on its walls, as well as one or two from another of the human race's many languages. They were placed as such to not be recent additions but instead a key part of the vessel's original construction.

Tali groaned in frustration as she put her head in her hands to stymie a sudden brain ache. Nothing was clicking like it was supposed to! She knew the basics of Humanity's history in relation to space travel; she was aware they were still relatively new to the stars.

The age of this ship, the materials used... it was drifting in space thousands of years before even her people had explored the stars. Her people had been spacefaring for hundreds of years before the Geth rebellion, an event which itself was hundreds of years before the humans had even launched their first satellite.

Nothing about this wreck matched up with the codex entry of Humanity's timeline. It was with exasperation that her run-amok mind halted its processing a million thoughts a second diatribe on this singularity presented before her, and she gave a cry of frustration incarnate.

"Keelah! What sort of Bosh'tet craziness is going on here? None of this makes sense!"

With a mounting headache, she made her way to the opened door and began to work on closing it; she would not want any atmosphere from the next room to escape into the void. Once the door was shut properly, she made her way to the unopened door at the end of the hall.

Starships had to have computers, even the Rachni had used a biological equivalent. She just needed to find a salvageable one and start digging up data from its archives to figure out what in the name of Rannoch was going on here.

The fact that this vessel was apparently Human in origin would make learning things so much easier. She had everything she needed to translate their words and computer code.

No undiscovered species' language and such to have Citadel-approved experts decipher; that was a relief! The Migrant Fleet would have no issues keeping this discovery quarantined and away from the eyes of other species and their politicians.

Large Element Zero and mineral deposits had been taken from them already upon discovery of Quarian mining operations by the Citadel species. To oppose these thefts was exactly the excuse the Council would need to have the Turians attack the Migrant Fleet (regardless of the estimated casualties) and make them a client species… that feared event was viewed by the Quarian people as highly possible and considered tantamount to enslavement.

Whether the Turians wanted to do it or not was irrelevant to the Quarians; history had shown that if the Council ordered something, then that order the Hierarchy fleets would follow to the letter. The current Turian Primarch would not be likely to immediately intervene.

With mounting curiosity and frustrated confusion, she plugged in the portable generator and started opening the next door. Hopefully, there would be a salvageable computer terminal soon; she only had so much breathable air in her suit after all.

With a sigh, she checked her breathing gauge; she would have to head back to her ship for new air soon.

He dreamed. Dreamed of small gems of great beauty and of a great, vast darkness. He had seen great light after great light, seen heavenly bodies in abundance! Dancing about them in beautiful and graceful arcs, he always left each dancing partner behind for another. Each great light and its family falling behind as he moved on to the next guest to house him for a time, only for him to dance about them and move on once more.

Such was his existence.

He knew not who he was, he knew not what he was, and he remembered not what he had seen or the many planetary orbs he had passed, for the existence he lived was but a dream. The here and now defined nearly his every thought.

And for long, his thought had been naught but the same thing, always the same place of rest he had seen. Not having danced with heavenly bodies for a very long time, tucked away with small rocky travelers who now traveled with him, he had simply drifted and rested.

Then something new had registered: a small light in the calming darkness approached him, approaching while it danced not unlike how he had done once long ago. It was a presence not unwelcome, yet not welcomed either… his mind stirred as the light alighted upon him, joining with him where he was no longer able to sense it.

Then portions of him awoke at the new presence's touch. Pieces he knew not he had began to stir awake and then fall asleep once more; the light was feeding his starved parts small portions of sustenance, it seemed. Gifts in exchange for traversing his ruined body. Something not normally accepted… but its gifts sated his wariness, and he was curious.

For now, he would watch.

For now, he would wait.

For now, he would sleep.

As he had always done.

Finally! She had found a computer device that appeared usable. It was a large, boxy thing floating in zero gravity. It seemed to have originally been in a container of sorts, which was floating on the other side of the room she was in.

With her acquired artifact in tow, she made her way to the place she had docked her ship in, having barely traversed more than three hallways and two rooms besides the ruined bay she had latched onto.

Upon reentering her vessel, she set the blocky computer in the small work area in her ship and began to study it. It was designed to be durable, but what she wanted to know was at what technological level of computing this thing was. For all she knew, this thing ran off a central server network and had no data stored on itself other than the operating system. She hoped it was a completely self-contained computer device; that was the most likely thing to provide her the most information and enable the easiest access to the aforementioned information.

Using the tools at her disposal, she started disassembling it piece by piece and cleaning the components, making extra sure to note which piece went where and in what order it was to be reassembled later. This was a gamble on her part, but she couldn't really salvage any information without knowing how the thing worked. That, and any dust, rot, or other substance over time could have devastating effects when she started running current through the device's circuits if she didn't clean them first.

… A few moments later …

Now, this was interesting… Crystalline architecture. Tali's hopes of retrieving something tripled at the sight of the base materials the device's internals were made from. Sure, there were a few degraded silicon parts present, but that had apparently been for the device's screen interface, and she was after the hard data, not the restoration of functionality. Finally, she found what seemed to be the storage drive of the device, a crystalline matrix! Something proven as not impossible but still very expensive to construct… Tali was coming to expect that modus operandi to be a normal occurrence with this wrecked ship.

She couldn't retrieve data directly from the crystalline structure, but she could use the housing portion of the device as a connection point and plug directly into the circuitry, bypassing everything else and only having the crystalline matrix receiving power.

The fact that it was apparently made by humans (she still couldn't grasp how that was possible) meant that she would be capable of accessing the hard data, perusing it to pull anything important-looking onto a separate drive of her own for further study.

The Systems Alliance had been kind enough to sell ships at normal prices to Quarians on pilgrimage. They weren't the best vessels, but they had cargo space, and cargo space in the Migrant Fleet was of incredible value. These ships had required a significant study and overhaul when incorporated into the fleet, often having systems rewritten, excess materials and accessories removed and used on other ships that needed them, as well as their drive cores optimized. The list went on and on, and Tali had been a worker on one of these projects before her pilgrimage had happened.

The things she had learned and the translators and decryption of human encoding and language had become a major asset in her repertoire. All the more reason a quiet investigation of her management of the Normandy's drive core after the vessel's destruction was immediately rebutted by the remaining crew and the Alliance engineering command when they had tested her capabilities and found her to be in no way at fault.

So, she was rather confident in her ability to glean something from the data she was going to overview.

With quiet hums of songs and rhymes she had heard as a child, Tali happily continued to work on her acquired technology. Lost to the lure of work that she loved to do, the Quarian spent hours mulling over the piece and all the things she would need to do.

She was so engrossed she completely missed her planned mealtime, something her stomach was very unappreciative of as it pointed out when it made its frustration known later that cycle.

…One week later…

Suffice to say, she had been wrong… the data was there, but it was not within her power to break the encryption on it. Portions of the basic operating system had been directly decoded to show any human words in it, showing a jumbled mess of random words, but the data files and documents were all encoded differently from the device's basic components. It was disappointing, maddening, enraging… fascinating.

It was with growing (yet begrudgingly accepted) horror that Tali realized she was now Liara… and this wreck and all in it was now her own Prothean dig site. So much to learn. Seemingly so little time.

She had taken one trip outside the nebula in order to update the fleet and expected a small ship to arrive soon to corroborate her claims of discovery. Not all the details had been shared; she didn't expect them to believe the vessel defied what was known of time itself until someone with an admiral's rank had examined it. Still, she had included her scanner's estimation of salvageable resources. That alone would ensure this whole thing was kept very hush-hush, lest they risk losing it to another species.

From a salvager's point of view, the old wreck was a practical gold mine.

While the computer data was a bust… for now, physical exploration of the ship had presented some hard evidence she had begun compiling. The former owners of the thing were some faction called the United Nations Space Command, abbreviated as UNSC. Their engraved bling was literally everywhere and seemingly on mostly everything. The vessel had once had drop pods of some sort, according to the writings and diagrams she had perused in the bay where she had parked her ship's airlock. Not to mention that this thing had a ridiculous amount of non-Element Zero based firepower when it had been fully operational.

Her spacewalk outside the ship and down the big tube the vessel had built into its upper infrastructure revealed much about just what kind of coil gun the ship had sported… the estimated firepower from the already loaded six-hundred-ton depleted uranium round she had found was ludicrous. The sheer number of missile pods and defense emplacements was ludicrous, the number of missiles to a pod was ludicrous, even the massive missile silos built into the ship were ludicrous.

The Boshtet doom ship was cut in half, yet still ludicrously overpowered, and she loved it!

After cackling with manic glee to herself, Tali took a moment to contemplate getting some sleep. She hadn't rested in… well… oh, it didn't really matter! She would sleep later. So, with a nod of her head, she got right back to what she was currently doing: gaining access to one of the vehicle bays at the very rear of the ship. She had slowly and methodically unlocked portions of the ship during her exploration, but much to her frustration, places like engineering and the armory were still not accessible. The vessel still had almost no power, and she had lowered its internal atmosphere extensively in her comings and goings from her ship.

The incoming frigate would need to have a series of powerful portable generators and a lot of other gear to enable proper access to the rest of the ship. She could only do so much with her limited amount of air, even with the portable air container she now dragged along with her. It only lasted her a few hours at a time before she had to go back and cycle it out.

With a click and an enthusiastic cry of jubilation, she watched the door slowly force its way open under her portable generator's power. Once it was open, she entered the short hall beyond, which opened into a large room…

No, not a room.

A mausoleum.

In the center of the tomb was the preserved body of a strange being, its armor gleaming silver in the light she shone upon it. Its body had dried out through the eons of time since it had been laid to rest.

The creature's honored corpse held her fascination for a while, but soon she was drawn to the rest of the room, and what a sight she did see. The ceiling was covered in depictions of sleek vessels and others that were blocky and grey like the one she now stood in, dancing about a slew of burning wrecks and destroyed planets. The remaining ships were frozen in a moment of combat for the rest of time.

Three of the walls had large rings painted upon them, the inner side covered in depictions of land and water, the outside drawn with lights and metallic colors. The fourth wall had a giant starfish taking up the entirety of its face. More sleek ships waged against each other over it, while below what seemed to be continents of land on the starfish burned in raging battles. The floor at each of the walls' base showed grotesque figures crawling up in masses of sickening colors towards each mural.

Tali was enraptured.

BEEP!

Only to scream in fright as her oxygen alarm alerted her: she was now at fifteen minutes until she was out of air.

Taking pictures of each wall, and the corpse laying on a gold-painted crate at the center of the room, she made her exit. Closing the door behind her as she left, she would not want to risk further damaging anything until someone with more archaeological know-how examined the place.

She still didn't know what to make of it.

With a very surprised, exhausted, and wondering mind, Tali returned to her ship, only to crash and sleep for a straight twelve hours. It seems sleep had proved itself capable of being a vicious ambusher.

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This chapter was reworked as of 21NOV2023