Author's Note: So a short explanation. Most of Mass Effect 2 was gathering the crew together, earning their loyalty and killing Blood Pack/Eclipse/Blue Suns in anticipation of the suicide mission, I on the other hand managed to speed run through those events and now have this huge two year gap to fill with story content. So I'm filling in the gaps with a triple Crisis threat package. Read, Review, Favourite and Enjoy!
Chapter 48: Terminus System Part 1
The Union started the Reaper war with a retreating battle. The Reapers had an incalculable number of ships, but the Alpha relay could only bring in a few at a time. Currently the Mixed Union retrofitted Council fleet was fighting the reapers ten to one. The issue was that by the time that a single reaper succumbed to continuous bombardment five more would slip through the Relay, worst yet the Reapers apparently got wise and disabled the fail-safe that keeps the relays from crashing ships into each other, and thus weaponized their own bulk to slam into Union ships. That said, every time heavily damaged ships were forced to retreat back into another system there would be more ships and weapons embankments waiting to tear apart Reaper forces with long range bombardment. The Sheer durability and growing numbers of the Reapers meant that they will overwhelm the Union's forces in time, but they pay in blood for every light year. One Galactic Standard Week later The Collective admirals of the Union and Citadel were looking at the battlefields via holograms, coordinating multiple fronts with AI and VI assistance in order to slowly bleed out the enemy forces.
"Is this the wisest course of Action?" Sparatus asked sounding suspicious. "If we destroyed the Alpha Relay, or concentrated our forces in the Bahak system we could've prevented so much territory lost."
"If we did destroy the Alpha relay we would've bought ourselves six months at the most, at the cost of the Reapers entering the fight from multiple fronts at once making things more difficult for us to pick them off." Admiral Shepard may have been the one that the Council has interacted with the most up until this point, but Admiral Steven Hackett was in charge of the real military might of the Union's ships. The man in question let out a sigh as he looked down at his own battlefield. "At the same time if we plugged the system with all of our fire power they would avoid the obvious kill zone and go around anyway. Need I remind you all this is only their advanced forces?"
Relying on only the Alpha relay to send their forces through was highly impractical for the Reapers considering they can only send a few at a time, they should assume that the majority of their forces are entering the Galaxy under their own power, which will take them six months, longer if they decide to try and flank them. Even the 'youngest' reaper is in the tens of millions years old, a few months is a drop in the bucket to them. Compared to the opportunity to slowly bleed the bastards out a delay of a few months is absolutely nothing. And yet the ancient war machines were still making good time despite their best efforts, rapidly approaching the edge of the Terminus system.
"Looks like phase one has basically ended." Aethyta noted dryly tapping her fingers. "So Phase two?"
"Engage!" Admiral Hackett snapped waving his hand over the holographic field of battle, and a voice sounded out from within their minds.
"Finally!"
Once a system had been secured Reapers broke off to scour the surface of nearby planets and were met by forests of psychic trees bombarding them with telekinetic as well as mental attacks and Thresher Maws breaking any who stepped foot on the surface. In response the Reapers would just park above the worlds in question and bombard them from space. But how do you kill a mushroom? Burn it? The High Mosture content of the material in question kept it from burning. Crush it? The spores would just fly away to repopulate elsewhere. Disease or nanotech? A combination of Vorcha Cells and the plentiful Reaper Nano technology from Sovereign meant that the Gestalt has had plenty of time and materials to adapt countermeasures against the technology with. Indoctrination? The Thorian has long ago overcome that particular tactic.
Indeed the two forces seemed to be at a deadlock, although the Reapers refused to step foot into the Gestalt's apparent effective range they also couldn't burn out the Gestalt forces. Then the Gestalt received the go ahead for Phase 2, and the Reapers were suddenly ripped apart. Neu Eezo was dangerous even in it's unrefined form, a massive block of material that manipulates gravity with stupid, Highly Destructive, efficiency. The Union took advantage of that, each and everyone of their matter decompressors whipped up batches of the stuff the size of sugar cubes and dropped them onto every world that had been given over to the Chimera gestalt. Infesting the material with roots the Gestalt could get better control over the material via psionics and through that create their own Mass Effect field, usually lightening the material to keep it from wreaking mass destruction, but now to draw the Reapers out of the Sky. The Reapers reacted poorly to the sudden pull and so naturally pulled back.
The two contrasting forces tore enemy ships apart and sent the debris crashing into the ground. After that let nature run its course, a piece of Neutron Density matter the size of a sugar cube has the weight of a mountain behind it. The surface of the planets were being bombarded by a rain of materials each tiny little scrap dealing enough damage to cause a planetary extinction event, the super heavy materials sunk all the way into the core of the planet. In the mean time the Synthorganic core of the reaper crashed into the planet, every bone in it's body broken as it's nanites worked furiously to repair it, and was prompting tackled by a Thresher Maw and dragged off. The 'Unfortunate Victim' in question struggled as it was dragged away, before promptly being tossed into a lake of Prethoryn acid, it's body being rapidly dissolved down into embryonic goo while the Thorian infested every crevasse of it's body and mind.
Outside of Terminus space a group of technicians were watching the progress of downloads that was being conducted using the Gestalt's Trees of Life as a medium to receive the contents of the Reapers minds onto isolated hard drives. Countless technological innovations from past civilisations, detailed tactical break downs of the Reaper's abilities, extensive biological details of countless past civilisations was all being accumulated here. Millions of scientists would pick through this information to find useful innovations and incorporate them into their own technology, Military tacticians would use the information to dictate the battlefield going forward while scientists and biologists pluck out useful enhancements for their own troops.
It wasn't all all you can eat buffets, the numerous Breeding worlds would now have to deal with several planets worth of extra mass inside of them, but luckily they had the tools to deal with the situation. Tuchanka was one of the better prepared of the worlds in the terminus system. The Tebrids expanded upon the existing network of temple bunkers large enough for several cities, plus facilities to maintain them, miles beneath the surface of the worlds. The Gestalt forces living on the planet had the sense good enough to guide the crashing meteors away from the bunkers in question, but that was only the start of their problems.
"I hope you have a plan to deal with this." Wrex stated staring at one of the plant people that the Gestalt tend to use as a mouth piece. "Otherwise this planet is going to go straight into the sun."
"We do." The Baol nodded as he went on to explain.
Matter Decompressors operate using a combination of Mass Effect Fields and Rare Crystal to guide the phenomena, in this case the Gestalt would use psionics to guide the process instead. Not only the hulls, for the sake of carrying more ammunition the Reapers preferred neutron density Tungstun, Uranium and Iron and then decompressed to normal density and then fired at a target. Right now a massive amount of this ultra dense material was in the cores of the Gestalt worlds, and they were going to use it. For every Reaper that Died on Tuchankan soil the Krogan had taken a shot, yet as they had started getting a good buzz going they sobered up as a video started playing, one of the most beautiful sights they had ever laid eyes on was playing. Omashou, the Largest Super Volcano on Tuchanka, had a worm hole open above it courtesy of the Gestalt. And then the Volcano violently erupted, spewing Warped Neutron density matter through.
Because of the ongoing fight against Union and Council forces, the Reaper Ships were travelling together in groups now. One 'unfortunate' group had a wormhole open up right in front of them, and through that their own ultra dense ammunition was spat forward at full force and tore through their bodies like a hot knife through butter. Before the Worm Hole closed again the Reapers were pulled through and deposited straight into the volcano, were violently torn apart and used to create more ammunition while the worm hole closed and another took it's place. Tuchanka had become one of the biggest Shot guns in the Galaxy!
"Well damn!" Wrex poured a glass for himself and the other figure. "I didn't see that coming." The two clinked glasses and downed the contents.
Across terminus space various planets had similarly turned into 'planetary shotguns' violently consuming the Reapers and spitting them back out through worm holes in order to wipe out as many of them as possible. Not everywhere was a churning mass of spatial anomalies and molten slag flying everywhere, Geth/Quarian space was left largely intact from the Chimera Gestalt who were violently allergic to the carefully cultivated bio-chemistry of Quarian worlds. This in turn left them only what defenders they could rally in the form of the Quarian fleet, it's repairs, retrofits and other upgrades into a true fighting force completed, as well as the joint Turian, Geth, Custodian and Lithoid forces, and the weapon that they built to kill reapers with.
"Commander." On the Valhalla flag ship a group of Synthoids were waiting to deploy their weapon. "The Reapers will soon be in range for attack."
"Yeah, but how close until they won't be able to retreat?" Tor replied grinning nastily. "Give em a few minutes. But make em work for it, no need to be too obvious." Concentrated weapons fire from several Union ships, even at range, was enough to pick off a few reapers, the real goal though was to lure them in close enough and in a large enough group to get the full benefit of their new weapon.
"Five of them bunched together commander, we won't get better odds than this." The Helmsman reported and spoke again after the ship shook. "Also, they're firing on us now."
Tor gave one of the nastiest slasher smiles in his arsenal at that.
Inside of a reaper ship, a rather nasty surprise made itself known, delivered via Jump Drive. Jump Drive technology is usually prohibitively expensive, even after you strip out the 'unimportant' components that do things like prevent system wide failure after a single use, a large enough power supply to fuel it, or a proper guidance system your average jump drive is still well over three meters wide and full of expensive technology and materials. Indeed, the mere thought of using one as a delivery mechanism for a bomb is insane. The Quarian's came through hard, most of the delicate technology could be mass produced via Omni-gel and Mass Effect fields, the installation of the latter also meant that smaller components could move larger masses, as it stood, after the inclusion of certain 'explosive' packages the Quarian manufactured 'jump bomb' was about forty percent the size of a standard jump drive.
As for the payload? Exotic Gas with a lighting mechanism to turn it into plasma. To protect itself and strengthen it's neutron density armour the Reapers use a ultra powerful Mass Effect field both to 'lock in' the molecular structure of their hulls and act as a shield to protect themselves. The Exotic plasma detonates this shielding, the Reaper's own Mass Effect field, previously holding the Reaper together, tore the entire thing apart and scattered the pieces like shrapnel into other nearby Reapers. The number of these bombs were quite limited, even with Lithoids 'manufacturing' raw materials on the fly, so it's use was limited to breaking apart packs of Reapers to be picked off by other ships with judicious amounts of fire power.
In the past two weeks hundreds of reapers have been killed by the ongoing battle inside of the Terminus systems, by all appearances this particular incursion into Council space has been utterly foiled. For Harbinger, this was a problem, and a rather severe one. A mere cycle ago they had suffered the Great Burning, when more Reapers died in a single moment that have ever died before or will ever since, now it seems that the Union was intent on reproducing the Lich's magnum opus. The worse part of all of this is that the Union has shown no signs of yet being pushed to their most desperate contingency yet, the destruction of Mass Relays, thus without a clear advantage the only other thing that they can do at this moment was to retreat. Very well Union, the first battle is yours, but the second on the other hand? That they will have to fight for.
Across the Terminus system, something ethereal and unknown shifted throughout the void of space, the religious would call it the reaper's curse, the scientific community officially classified it as a mass psionic shift brought about as a result of the mass reaper casualties. What it's called doesn't ultimately matter though, certainly not as much as what it did.
On Tuchanka, the local wildlife suddenly doubled over in pain, even the Krogan who previously had been heartily drinking had been affected, and then the screaming started. All across Tuchanka, all across the Terminus system, every world that had the Reaper's sucked in and devoured by the Chimera gestalt, all let out a scream as one. Hundreds of Reapers had been consumed, hundreds of tens of millions years of madness and isolation trapped inside of the body of a machine that eats civilisations had been devoured by the Thorian clusters and was now releasing the madness as a scream. Before the madness could spread outside of the Terminus system the Gestalt collectively severed their connections, not only outside of the system but also within.
As an emergency precaution the Union placed capsules inside of people's bodies filled with the Thorian fungicide, when the grey boxes detected a psionic attack they responded appropriately releasing the capsules of fungicide into people's bodies, harmless to them, deadly to the Thorian.
Wrex still saw the images even as he stood up, the Thorian spores in his brain reeling. It was like having your body stretched apart, wrapped around yourself and tied up, you want to scream but you have no mouth, you want to understand what is happening to you but you have no eyes, you want to run but you have no legs, you want to grab your restraints and break free but you have no hands.
"Ugh... That's not good." Vaguely feeling like he was wrung through a taffy machine or no Wrex still had a look around. He felt like someone took a drill to his head, if that was a common occurrence then a lot of Krogan should be in the middle of their blood rage right about now, held back only by the suffocating feeling that he had just went through, even then he didn't count on everyone having his years of experience with the subject to help calm them down. This guy looked like how he felt, the Baol curled up on the floor shivering like he was having a seizure. "Great." Wrex stated as he went to a nearby console and started to tap his fingers on the buttons. "I need a medic in my quarters! The bloody tree thing is having a meltd-Gah!" Wrex was interrupted by the 'bloody tree' grabbing his entire body with extended branches, including one that tried to gag him. Before, with the other arm turned into a sharpened spear point, the Tree attempted to puncture Wrex's armour. Attempted.
"So that's gonna be how this works out." Wrex bit down and snapped the branches in his mouth, and casually walked through the ones that were trying to restrain them. "I can tell that you're having a bad day..." Wrex cracked his fingers. "...so I'll only make this hurt a little bit." It didn't hurt a little bit.
Across Quarian space a code was spreading out, a virus. Even a dead reaper can dream, can plot, can spread the tenants of their hate across the void of space. On Board the Valhalla the Geth, the Custodians and the Synth's all froze up as one, even EDI had shut down and left the ships floating in the void on emergency power.
"What the heck is going on here?" Admiral Daro'Xen was a woman of scientific curiosity.
For many years the main source of her interest lay in the Geth, more specifically with the AI, she sat firmly within the camp that the secret to retaking Rannoch was to retake control of the Geth. She lost that argument with the intervention of the Union effectively rewriting the entire political landscape of the known galaxy, and then she moved on with her scientific research, adapting Union technology for the Fleet, she was in particular taken with the Tebrid's Custodians, they have a much firmer grip on the servitors than what the Quarian's ever had on the Geth after all even after gaining the same level of intelligence they have yet to rebel, that's what she believed until today anyway.
"So than..." Admiral Xen was in the middle of admiring one of the 'Genius' programmers she had come to admire over the past year attempt to hot-wire a Geth into functioning form again. "Any idea on when we're going to figure out what hit us?" The Tebrid gave an annoyed chirp as he waved her off. There was mystery afoot! He had no time to bother with translators or Text to Speech devices. Then the Tebrid got a look at the Geth's programming code, and thus called over Xen to provide her expert opinion. "Finally." Xen walked over and leaned over the Tebrid and the console that it had hardwired into the Geth. "Geth are the result of a network of VI programs, usually ranging from the several tens to the few hundreds, the more of them there are in a single platform the higher their displayed intelligence. To my knowledge there's only one platform that managed to break four digits." A baseline amount of information was good, it was important to know the basics so that you'll have some idea of what to work off of, which in this case needless to say was bad.
"Oh that isn't good." Daro'Xen, in the privacy of her personal laboratory, has experimented with AI before. In one example she created a core program, one instructed to randomly delete part of it's own coding and then write new coding in order to replace what was lost, the idea being to see if it was possible to have AI spontaneously generated. Her experiment was shut down of course, the same bloody handed Citadel paranoia that had led to the morning war in the first place had once again reared it's ugly head. Now Xen wished she had done a better job of hiding her pet project, it might mean that she would have a better idea of what was going on right now. "It looks like parts of their coding is being erased and replaced." Xen stated as she held her chin in her hand. "No they're being overwritten before they're replaced." Oh that had lots of implications didn't it?
Xen had researched so called 'suicide AI's' before, programs that were designed to infiltrate Geth platforms and rewrite their code to make them delete themselves. Based on what she was seeing here someone had the same idea. The Benefit of the linked VI Programs is essentially decentralised warfare rapidly backing themselves up in newly freed space by the deletion, each time making changes to the program with the hope of making it so that the Reaper suicide program could no longer break in. In-genius!
"I've written suicide programs before." Xen began accessing a console of her own. "The secret is data compression, increase the density of the data, encrypt it, make it so that the enemy AI's cannot access the pivotal data that they wish to corrupt or remove."
Turn about is fair play after all, Daro'Xen's first mistake was assuming that there was only two horses in the game, one trying to destroy the other, but in reality there was several hundred. Even a piece of technology the size of a pinky finger is capable of transmitting, receiving and storing vast quantities of data, and the Reapers are obsessed with making sure that they can deliver a transmission over to another server in order to spread their indoctrination signal as far as possible. Course there's more than one way to skin a cat, during the previous cycle there was a race who were made into unwilling allies of the Reapers known as Zha, who to survive the harsh conditions of their homeworld by cybernetically enhanced themselves becoming the Zha'Til, making them a enemy of the Protheans. When the Reapers came they infected the Zha'Til's implants with a virus that enslaved them to their new masters and initiated a comprehensive re-write of their genetic code to transform them into monstrous synthorganic abominations, an entire race subjugated and enslaved to the Reapers without the use of their prided indoctrination signal but instead a more conventional computer virus. Course that leaves open the question of who is wiping out the stores of overwritten data? EDI, whose own local programs are far too busy trying to keep Reaper codes wiped to focus on the admiral or what she is doing.
"This should keep those suicide programs at bay for a while!" And so Daro'Xen sealed all their fates.
With the new data-compression algorithm the Reaper coding obtained what it needed to fortify itself against EDI's deletion, though the native VI and AI programs were also able to fortify themselves against further attempts to reprogram them with walls of high density coding. The lights inside of the ship came back on, indicating that the war for the souls of the ship's artificial programs had been won.
"There we go." The Geth Platform that Xen and the Tebrid had been working on started to twitch to life. "Feeling better now?"
"R-R-R-" The Geth was struggling to speak, clearly the battle inside of it's datacore had gone worse than they thought.
"Those bastards must have taken out more of you than we had realised." Feeling Satisfied Admiral Xen went over to a console to check on the status of the Reapers, however she was stopped by a iron grip of the Geth Platform they had just hacked into.
"RUN!" The Blue eye of the Geth turned red, the Geth whipped out it's side arm and fired point blank into the Admiral.
The Tebrid screeched in horror, slinging the admiral over itself as it climbed aboard it's platform and zooming away, rushing away surrounded by Custodian's, Geth and other Synths as their optics flashed between blue and red lights.
Three weeks into the Reapers invasion, they performed a tactical retreat, many in the Union will celebrate this feat until the end of their days, but for now they had another problem to deal with, and sadly this one was entirely of their own making.
"I've been able to isolate the spread of the Reaper Virus to the Terminus system. My Firewalls, Quantum Computers and the dedicated server worlds are currently working to isolate the spread of the virus." EDI explained into the room of the joint task force.
"You have entire worlds just for- No I'm not even going to ask." Sparatus wisely concluded that he didn't want to know. On another screen, a Thorian Cluster punched out his own explanation Via light to text devices.
"The Reaper's myriad consciousnesses overwhelmed me for a time." The words on the screen explained in simple block text.
"Does that mean you can regain control over your extensions in the Terminus System?" Admiral Hackett asked while he was folding his hands together.
"No. Already I can feel the madness creeping up on the corners of my consciousness. If I didn't have the training of several thousand Union Psionics to block it out I would've lost my mind by now." The Thorian typed out an explanation as the group of experts folded their arms and gritted their teeth.
"We're receiving distress signals from Rannoch, it seems that the Geth, Custodians and Synth's over there have all entered a bloody civil war, and at least one faction is trying to also take shots at them." Cherrel Kahn explained as he looked at the communications deck.
"The reaper computer virus?" One of the Crystal Hive questioned suspiciously.
"That is most likely." EDI stated bluntly. "We can't think of another reason why the Synth's are acting in this way."
"The behaviour of our one time allies is one matter of concern, a far more severe one though is the matter of Aratoht." Admiral Hackett stated bluntly as he pulled up a hologram depicting the world in question.
"What's on Aratoht?" General Sparatus asked sounding awfully suspicious.
"Phase three." Phase one was a retreating battle against the reapers, building their confidence, picking them off, reducing their numbers and luring them deeper and deeper. Phase two was when they released their ambush across the Terminus system catching the entire enemy force by surprise and inflicting mass casualties. "I meant to release them as another ambush, catching them as they retreated." Thus the Admiral revealed what they had hidden on Aratoht.
The containment unit was designed to release its contents after a month of fighting against the Reapers, however a malfunction had occurred. The Reapers found a Union facility upon entering the galaxy and blew it to pieces thoroughly, the damaged containment unit had a hole punched into that the prisoner inside then spent three weeks trying to open. In the end, the hole was only as wide as a Krogan's fist but it was enough for a being made out of pure energy to slip through. The bright cyan entity could sense no living beings left on this planet, but it could feel something passing through the solar system, thus the Unbidden Warlock flew up through the atmosphere and into the solar system itself, looking at the giant black ships that were moving through the void towards the Alpha Relay. The Warlock rubbed his appendages together in a approximation of a human getting ready to dig into a all you can eat buffet.
Review Section:
RonaldM40196867: Define smartest, do you mean 'knowledge' or 'Problem Solving ability.'
Guest: Indeed. More like a 'Me2, Stellaris Crisis mash'