Olasie pressed her hands into her back just outside the infirmary doors to try and break the tension that'd been building in her. Eyes on the ceiling and chin slightly up, she breathed in deeply before letting it all out and opening the door to finally see Kylie.
Chakwas gave her a nod from the water cooler.
"Hi, Doc." Olasie greeted.
"Hello, Olasie. Here to see Kylie?"
"Just to tell her what's going on."
"Well, you know where she is." Chakwas smiled. Olasie went over and slipped into the curtain dividers to see Kylie watching something.
"Hey."
"Hi."
Olasie stared at the screen herself for a couple seconds. "What're you watching?"
"Just some movie." Kylie said.
Olasie took a seat next to her. Kylie took the hint that she wanted to talk. So she paused it. "…What's up?"
"Don't know if the others told you already, but we're off to another mission."
"Lukh told me, yeah. I know what's going on."
"Oh." Olasie cleared her throat, "Guess I don't have much to tell you then."
"That's okay." Kylie said, giving her a small smile, "Just make it back in one piece."
Given that this would be their third time this month going into the unknown? Telling anyone that was starting to become a tall order.
Olasie stared at her knees and sighed. "Yeah."
"I'm a little jealous, actually." Kylie huffed, "Wish I could join. Pretty neat you're working with a geth." You could see Kylie's lips purse together and she thought about it a little more. "It's freaking weird."
"Have you ever even talked to Legion?" Olasie asked her.
"Only when it passes by. And only pleasantries. What's it like?"
"It's… so polite." Olasie muttered, squinting like she was looking for words, "I… don't know. That's like asking if it has a personality. I just don't think it has that."
"Oh."
Olasie's chest rose and fell. "I'm just glad you're so open to it." she admitted, "The drama it's caused."
She couldn't be bothered to finish that sentence.
"Darehk still giving you problems, then."
"He said he'd stop bitching when either he or it died."
"Sounds 'bout right." Kylie said tightly.
"Yeah." Olasie said, growing despondent.
Kylie adjusted her bubble and decided to change the subject matter to something a little more lighthearted.
"So… how are things with you and Juel?"
That seemed to be enough to put her in slightly brighter spirits, because Olasie huffed to try and hide the bashful smile. "Oh, you know. This and that. Nothing too serious. Yet."
"Well you best bust some moves, boss, or else I'll take him for myself."
They both laughed stupidly at that and Olasie shoved her from where she lay.
"Yeah. Don't think so."
"Naw, I'm just joking." Kylie gave her a dismissive wave, "I need me a man like Shepard."
"Just ask Tali to share." Olasie said dumbly.
Kylie's brows scrunched up as she pondered that. "Huh. You think?"
"Sure." Olasie shrugged, "Don't see why not."
"Say it louder. So Chakwas can hear." Kylie grinned like an idiot.
Chakwas shook her head, but there was a smile while the two of them giggled from the comfort of their little drapery of a room.
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Most of space, unfortunately, was pretty dark. Not pitch black, of course. But not nearly as vibrant or as lively as the vids and pictures made them out to be. Enhancing what didn't immediately meet the eye was necessary to capture the beauty of space. And you'd either do it by taking a long exposure image of something, or by editing it afterwards.
It wasn't like that everywhere, though. Mnemosyne's system with its decaying reaper was something of an exception. This here, out in the Phoenix Massing, was what your typical stretch of space looked like. Pin pricks of light with an endless blackness as your backdrop.
"Everything's always tentative, isn't it." Joker mumbled before he sipped from his cup.
"Yes, Jeff." EDI answered simply.
There was stillness at the helm as the two, both organic and machine, stared implicitly at the Haratar's growing figure as they approached.
"You said the quarians made this place?"
"Yes. Though it is likely the heretic geth have re-purposed and rebuilt around its existing frame." EDI supplied.
"I was about to say. That is not a reflection of quarian architecture."
Joker really wasn't expecting the station to look like this. The geth were known to design things for function. They didn't embellish their stuff with eye-catching aesthetics.
Except for when it came to their ships. Even past a glance, you'd feel pressured to believe their ships were anything but theirs. Any mode of transportation, be it in space or on the ground, was a crude depiction of a harrowing insect. What drove them to conceptualizing ships to look like a molting maggot/wasp eluded the man. But it was something that Joker would eventually ask Legion about, if he ever worked up the courage to do so.
Legs. Of all things. Like, why though? Why legs? Why a wasp?
Even weirder, Joker remembered overhearing Tali a couple years ago talking about how bugs didn't even exist on Rannoch. So the inspiration for that was deaf on him.
Bugs for ships. How daft.
Why not more like the borg? Cubes made sense. And geth were all about logic, weren't they?
Before he could do any more aimless wandering, he could hear Legion plus two pairs of footsteps approaching.
He whirled his chair around so he could face them.
It was Shepard and Olasie.
"Almost ready?" Joker asked them, stuffing his thoughts behind him.
"Rest of the squad is already suited up and by the kodiak." Olasie answered Jeff, "So that's a yes."
"Good." Joker nodded once and adjusted his hat before remembering something totally unrelated to their mission. He decided now was as best as any to tell John.
"Hate to digress, but I just wanted to tell you, Shepard, that I sent a message to Ash. Well. I sent it to Anderson."
"Good."
"Did you hear? Alliance PRT's finally getting Horizon under some semblance of control. Food's finally reaching people's mouths."
"I heard, yeah." John said quietly, "Civ news is skimp on a lot of it though."
"Yeah. It's all pretty shit. Well. Enough about that." Joker's chair turned back to face his screen as he brought up an enhanced image of the Haratar for them all to see.
"Doesn't it just grease the nostalgia a bit? Us heading out to go blow up some geth?" Joker frowned, though no one saw it. "…Except. You're standing next to one now. So."
Legion's singular eye stared up at the image before staring at John and Olasie. "We recognize that this is not standard." Legion offered.
"Pretty un-standard, yeah." Olasie rasped.
"Significant though." John reassured for everyone involved. "Don't forget that."
"Alright, Legion." Joker sighed, "Green-line confirmed. We're following your flight path."
"Acknowledged."
"Keep us updated of anything." John said as he turned around with Olasie and Legion in tow, "We'll be back soon enough."
"Dinner's in six hours. Your favorite. Shepherd's pie. Be back by then."
"Shepard's pie?" Olasie rose a brow.
"It's not named after me." John grinned meekly as he rolled his eyes.
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With all her gear accounted for, Tali reached for her shotgun and began to insert her sinks into the magazine tube. Racking the slide to chamber the sink, she checked the safety before slinging it behind her back.
Then she saw Jacob clamber into the kodiak before taking a seat and checking the laces on his boots. She was surprised to see him here. He hadn't put his name up on the roster for mission participation.
She gave him a nod to get his attention. "Joining us?"
"Figured I would." Jacob tightened the strap on his chest rig, "Garrus said he had to pass on this one. Something about the Normandy needing an XO 'case we all kick the bucket."
Of all the years she'd been around humans, she couldn't remember if she'd ever heard that metaphor yet. She nodded all the same. "Ah."
Shortly thereafter, Thane took a spot next to her while he casually inspected the visor on his helmet. She breathed and looked at him.
She never quite shook how easy he made it look killing people. And she regularly reminded herself of how incredibly easy it would be for him to do it to her if he ever chose to. She supposed she could say that about a lot of the people on the Normandy, but Thane did it with a type of grace few could emulate.
Her arms were crossed now, and she stared at her boots before giving the green man a nod.
"Hi, Thane."
"Hello, Tali."
A few moments of silence.
"How's your son?" She decided to ask. The only reason she even brought it up was because of how involved he'd made her the last time they talked. And to gauge the man's present mood.
"Doing well." Thane said, pausing only briefly to look at her, "He seems okay."
"That's good." Tali murmured, leaning against the rear arm of the kodiak's engine, "I'm sure he is."
He holstered his sidearm and felt for his pouch of sinks on his belt before facing her with a question to ask. "Do you speak to your father often, Tali?"
"Outside of work, no. Not really." She said.
Thane blinked and said nothing. If it hurt him to hear that, he wasn't making any indication of it. But the seconds of silence following her answer made it seem obvious about how that was making him feel.
"He has been a little different lately though," She added to mollify the message she was sending, hoping that it would alleviate him of any potential burdening thoughts, "He's become much kinder."
"Why do you suppose that?"
"I have no idea." She admitted with honesty. "Maybe he had an epiphany."
"I see."
You didn't need to be much of a detective to know Thane was seeking redemption. Her reply was steering him elsewhere of that.
"Thane, for all the mistakes my dad's made, he's still my dad. I still love him. And I believe your son, if he's smart, understands. He might not show it, but he does."
She spotted only a glimpse of a smile.
"Thank you, Tali." Thane said quietly. The lull that would've undoubtedly followed never came. The cargo bay's elevator door opened to reveal Legion, Olasie, and John.
As the two of them watched the three of them walk out, Thane leaned up against the kodiak himself.
"I never did get your opinion on Legion."
She didn't know how to answer that without stigmatizing herself.
"I don't know what my opinion is anymore." She murmured, still staring at the geth. "There just hasn't been enough time for me to be processing this mess."
The thing scared her. She wanted it gone. She wanted to see it air-locked and float away while she waved it good-bye.
But… she didn't want that. She would be remiss to say that there was, strangely, some infinitesimally small piece of her that was actually filled with hope. That whatever Shepard was envisioning was going to happen. At the scale they were at, it was actually working. Narrowly, of course. Barely, by all counts. But it was. For now.
The hardest part would be trying to scale that up to where it really mattered. To where it would make a difference.
"Fair answer." Thane said rather quietly.
The two of them watched four of EDI's LOKI mechs load in a nuclear warhead into the kodiak.
After, they watched Grunt lumber into the shuttle, loading shells into a mag for his cartridge shotgun.
"Climb in, it's time to go." Shepard ordered.
Everyone went in and took their seats. Tali sat between John and Samara. Thane took a spot across from her. Legion stood next to the ordnance before securing itself with a handle draped just above him.
The announcement to vacate the bay blared while the kodiak doors closed.
"Y'all ready?" Teri asked everyone while she inspected her rig for all the heat sinks she'd secured, "Because I'm not."
"I've been ready for ages." Lukh said before looking up and peering at the geth. "What about you, Legion?"
"This platform is functioning within intended parameters."
"Even with that big ol' hole in your chest?" Jack asked.
It faced her. "Yes."
"Great." She mumbled, half paying attention as she tried to scratch the stitches that ran across her back. It was a vain attempt given that she was in gear.
"Are you sure you want to come with us?" John asked hesitantly, "Stitches might split open."
"I'll live, boss."
He gave her a single nod. Then he scanned the cabin and caught wind of the two dozen mags strapped to Grunt's chest rig.
"I'm hoping those are frangibles." John said, frowning with concern.
The krogan stared at his gear and smiled. "They are."
Talukh leaned over from his chair to peer at the tank bred. "Holy hell, Grunt. We're killing geth, not threshers."
"No quarter for our enemy."
"Double-taps are overrated, right?" Jacob joked, bristling at the girth of his rounds, "Best not miss, doesn't look like you have that much ammo."
"I won't."
The shuttle rose and inched slowly closer into the blackness of space. Darkness overtook the cabin and the team quieted.
The kodiak, unfortunately, lacked an IES, unlike the Normandy. But they needed to close the remaining distance without the Normandy getting into too vulnerable a position. So the solution was fairly easy.
Nudge the kodiak into the right direction to deploy, keep only your most basic systems on, and glide the rest of the way there. Drop them off without stopping, maintain your heading, and let the Normandy move in to pick them up. Rinse and repeat as needed.
"ETA, five minutes." Their pilot announced.
"Put on your helmets." John ordered, "Air's not going to last long in here." The team did as they were instructed. Once they were finished, they began to run through their preliminaries for the fourth time.
"EDI, how are we looking?"
"Dust and echoes, Shepard. Approach steady. Ordnance on stand-by."
The rest of the ride was carried in stifling silence.
Soon enough, there was a slight deceleration until they came to a near standstill.
"We're here. Y'all be careful out there."
"Thanks, Audrey." Shepard sighed as they all stood, "Wish us luck."
"Good luck."
The kodiak door opened as they approached and Legion began working on opening the trash chute.
"So." Jack rasped over the comms as they all waited, "What, uh. What do geth throw out?"
"Whatever cannot be recycled. Or where efforts in reclaiming spent materials would incur greater cost in energy consumption as opposed to manufacturing a new product from raw resources." Legion answered.
"And that would be?"
"Filtration mediums. Contaminated or irradiated metals. Radiation scrubbers."
"We're not going to get blasted with radiation, are we?"
"None that would cause great harm to organic life."
The trash chute split open.
"Please follow us." Legion requested before disappearing into darkness.
They all stared at each other.
Samara was the first to cast herself out toward Legion. Grunt was next. Then Jacob. Teri followed soon after.
"Keelah. This thing is huge." Olasie muttered, her gaze beset on what was essentially a space-megalith. She jumped in after them.
"...After you, Tali." Juel mumbled.
Tali clutched the end of the kodiak, stared up at the expanse, took in a breath, and catapulted herself into the dark abyss.
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"What is it that we're looking for, exactly?" John intoned, keeping his eyes on his designated sightline, "You said a computer, but what is that entailing?"
"A physical hard point. To inject the junk code, we require significant quantities of bandwidth and a level of reliability that wireless transfers cannot provide."
"Really?" Talukh coughed a little, "How much are you trying to push through your cables, there?"
"Enough to overwhelm even their highest runtimes. We anticipate, even with total participation of all heretic geth aboard this station committed to data eradication, that their only means of returning to a sanitized state would be to gradually ablate the data we deployed."
"Wow." Talukh gave a sideways glance to Juel to see what the man was thinking, "How large is this?"
"Two hundred fifty one point seven seven exabytes of data, Creator Daer."
It took Shepard a couple seconds to bristle, because he had to look up how big that was. "Holy shit, Legion. I heard you were making something up. Didn't know it was that goddamned big."
Talukh was frowning now. "How the hell did EDI and you make that in less than six hours?"
"EDI's cooling systems were routed to the Normandy's internal emission sink. This platform ran algorithms to help ensure that over sixty percent of all strings created were unique. The collective beyond the Perseus delivered what they could via non receipt protocols."
"Legion and I filled in whatever packets were lost during transmission," EDI butted in before explaining further, "This concerted effort was a technical marvel. Every CPU with sufficient memory that was available to me was utilized and overclocked in its creation. This included all the LOKI mechs and Jeff's personal computer."
Jack laughed.
Jacob only looked surprised. "Joker let you use his laptop?"
"I asked him." EDI replied, "He said yes. He requested we insert pornographic material. We did."
Jack was grinning ear to ear. "What kind?"
"The worst kind." EDI answered.
It was funny and all, but Tali was hardly paying attention to the banter. She glowered and did some math. Not in her head of course. Because she couldn't even remember what the amount an exabyte was. But, running off what they knew, it was estimated that there were 6.6 million active geth units living on this hunk of metal. That gave every unit about forty terabytes worth of junk to sift through. It was a lot for a single geth to handle. A singular geth didn't possess all that much processing power.
"Halt." Legion stated. They all stopped walking and Legion leaned around the bend to scan the area.
"It is clear. Resume." The reared the corner, paced down the corridor, and entered a fairly large room with a plethora of computer podiums fashioned into a grid.
Tali narrowed her glare as she let her eyes waltz about the room. The place was... filthy. Equipment installed over the decaying ruins of what the Haratar used to be.
The team spread out and lined their back up against some walls with Grunt and Jacob holding point at their rear. Thane and Samara took to watching where they would undoubtedly be heading out to after this.
"Where are we?" Juel asked Legion.
"We are at routing." Legion said before interfacing with the console to search for the location of the virus. Given that Legion was a geth and that all geth shared everything together, confidentiality didn't exist here in this world of theirs. It wasn't hard for it to find and copy at all. And, luckily for the Normandy crew, Legion did a little more pilfering and found an IFF as well.
"Virus copied. IFF retrieved. Forwarding findings to EDI. We will begin dissemination."
"Good work." John praised. It was a miracle it was that simple for once. It was a shame they couldn't just leave now.
Shortly after, Legion retrieved, from his pack, an abnormally large data disk, and shoved it into one of the open ports on a computer he picked at random. Legion did this with eight other computers to open up the bandwidth needed for what was essentially a distributed denial of service.
"Stand-by, party. Code is being inserted. Compiling data before delivery. We will await a reaction."
Tali counted to six before the lights, barely even illuminating the darkness, grew even darker. The quarian held her stare up, face impassive. Power draw was being routed elsewhere. Likely to combat all the trash that'd just flowed through their systems.
"Junk data is deploying into their network. Heretic geth are now actively working to defragment and re-purify systems corrupted by junk data. Call to rescind has been administered. Active platform population is receding."
"How many platforms did they have?"
"One million active. One million storage."
That got people's hearts thrumming in their ears. Yeah. There was no way they'd be fighting that. A standard team this size could barely take on an even number of them. At least, not without the combined arms that they were so sorely lacking in this one-dimensional plane of war. At least they had grunt and four biotics to better balance their odds.
"You've got harder numbers now, Legion. How long do you think this is going to last?"
"Upwards of up to seventy standard galactic minutes. We are not far from where the ordnance should be detonated."
A blip on everyone's huds indicated to them their trek would be a kilometer from here.
"Relative to you." Teri sulked quietly. Only Olasie heard her.
"Warning. We anticipate discovery of our distribution center to be within several minutes. We must exercise haste."
"You all know what's next." Shepard said. Anyone not watching exits began to place plastic explosive in the room.
Tali knelt down, planted her explosive, and stared at the stains and junk that lay haphazardly across the dark floor.
"Remnants of what this place used to be?" Samara posited just to her left as she continued the watch the hallway with Thane.
"Maybe." Tali murmured, still staring. None of it looked identifiable in any way.
"Reminds me of Primerah, a bit." Juel said, now standing right over her, tweaking his charge before sticking it to a computer, "All the shit scattered about and abandoned."
"What's that place?" Jack asked, standing and watching them all.
Juel was about to give her an answer, but Samara, oddly, beat him to it.
"One of the last quarian worlds to fall to the geth during their uprising."
"How'd you know that?" Juel croaked. Jack found it a bit odd herself that Samara would be the one answering for the quarian.
"The archives of the Justicars."
Juel put his hands on his mag pouches and sniffed. "And that is?"
"A chronicle of records. The code recognizes the legacy of Justicars during times of extraordinary crisis. To uphold their sacrifices and to endeavor ourselves to the same conviction if such times are to occur again."
"I read a wiki about a Justicar helping escaping quarians. How many actually helped?"
"Less than ten. It was only the fourth time since our inception that we've ever left asari space."
"Fifth now, I'm pretty sure." Olasie said wryly.
"Quite." Samara said with a mild smile before continuing, "These events and our involvement are likely lost to everyone but the archives."
"We lost damn near everything we knew about the place." Juel said, "All we had was the name of the city and the government that ran it."
"If it's in your records, what did this Justicar do then?" Jack asked, genuinely curious.
"There were three. Justicars Orah, Mare, and Athena. These Justicars fought 'till death. They, with four other quarians soldiers, were among the last souls to perish on Primerah. They died shortly after relinquishing, from the geth, control of four anti-air batteries targeting any who attempted to escape. Their mission was successful, but they were soon overwhelmed.
"One hell of a way to go." Jack whispered.
"They ended their lives on their terms. They took with them an estimated three hundred geth by detonating a thermobaric charge as the geth closed in."
"Sure that's not even maybe a little bit embellished?" Juel said, cocking a brow.
Legion overheard their exchange and verified that Samara's reciting was largely correct.
"We can verify that this event occurred." Legion said.
Juel twisted the ignition into his explosive a little harder than necessary before smacking it up against a wall. "Wow. So killing ships with their engines facing you. Classy. Sounds like your lives were really hanging in the balance there."
"We did not know if they were truly retreating or if they were tactical withdrawals. We had been deceived by this tactic several times during the Morning War. Parameters changed. We pressed our advantage."
"You sure as fuck did, didn't you?" Juel murmured with a lowly sneer. He turned away and handed Thane the detonator.
"You know how to operate this?"
"Yes."
"Okay."
Everyone in the room had overheard. The quarians did not look pleased. Tali, again, felt her anger and hope spin on its axis. How far removed the geth were from the near infinite suffering they'd bestowed upon billions. And Legion talked about it so fucking casually.
'Yeah, we killed those ships full of civilians because a couple on there might put up a sorry ass fight later, lol'
Yeah. That's what Legion sounded like to the quarians.
The unbridled anger she felt welling up inside her was fleeting, but that urge to draw her sidearm and gun down Legion with a mag dump was incredibly tempting.
"Keep chatter to a minimum." John ordered before walking up to the geth and frowning. "And Legion? This is not the time to be talking about your side of the story." Shepard tone was stern and his eyes dead set on its singular one.
"We did not intend to incite." It said.
Shepard turned away. "Are everyone's explosives ready?"
A quiet chorus of yeses.
"Then it's time. Ready weapons. You guys hold them off for as long as you can."
Grunt and Jacob were to keep their escape clear. Samara and Thane would remain as well to support them for what would soon be an inevitable firefight.
"We'll hold." Thane said, clipping the detonator to his belt. Samara did the same with hers.
"Let's move."
John took up a position behind Legion with the quarians lining up as well. Jack was the last to fall in. As they filed out, EDI's mechs hoisted the warhead back up and followed.
"Get us there, Legion."
"Acknowledged."