Mass Effect: Cycles End

PART 1

Lost

CHAPTER 1

The Stranded

It had been several long, hard days since the Normandy crash landed on that mysterious world. They had made a desperate FTL jump away from Earth in hopes of escaping the blast from the Crucible.

Instead, the energy released by the Crucible had unexpectedly, and rather quickly, caught up with them, knocking the Normandy off course onto an uncharted planet.

After the initial shock of the crash the crew of the Normandy took to assessing the damage to their ship. It had not been a soft landing. Multiple bulk heads had been jolted loose from the sudden impact, with a few of them landing on several unlucky crewmen. While the hull had remained largely intact, the ship's engines weren't so fortunate. The crash caused the ship's drive core to become dangerously unstable and was minutes away from venting deadly radiation into the whole of the ship. Chief engineer Adams' quick thinking managed to prevent this catastrophe, but the damage was extensive, and it would take them some time to get the Normandy space worthy again.

But that wasn't Traynor's job. She was a comm specialist. Her duty was to open up communications with Alliance Command as soon as possible. She had spent the last few hours in the ship's comm room replacing broken circuit boards with jury rigged scraps that she had acquired from some of the Normandy's less essential systems. A certain weapons specialist might be disappointed when he finds out that his computer is missing half of its internal components, but she figured she could make it up to him once they made it back to Earth.

"Ok. Lets fire you up," she whispered while tapping the activation sequence into the command console for the quantum entanglement communicator. The lights flickered wildly for a few seconds before staying solid.

"Finally some progress. Now for the final test."

She reached for the controls and typed in the comm channel for Alliance Command.

CRACK!

The lights flickered and went dark as sparks immediately shot out from underneath the console.

"Dammit!" she shouted, jumping back from the now smoking QEC.

"I thought that would have finally done it!"

Defeated, Traynor slumped down to the floor and began rubbing her throbbing temples.

How could this be so difficult? she wondered, trying to wrap her brain around what could possibly be wrong this time.

Her whole military career had been about fixing and establishing communication networks. Quantum entanglement communication was a fairly new technology, but she had been working with it for more than a year. Under normal circumstances she would be done and could have called the entirety of the alliance military by now. But these weren't normal circumstances. Not by a long shot.

"Having trouble?"

Traynor nearly jumped at a sudden, unexpected voice.

"Oh! Hey Liara."

Even with her blue skin, Traynor could see the dark circles under the asari's eyes. She hadn't gotten any rest since they left Earth either.

"I came to see if you've had any luck getting the comms back online," asked Liara in her typical professional tone.

"See for yourself," Traynor said, pointing a dirty finger toward the still smoking console.

"Seems like you've gotten about as far as I have," sighed Liara.

"Your equipment still isn't working? I would've figured at least some of that fancy tech you have would still be functional."

"Much of it is, but I am unable to connect with anyone outside the system. All I get is static. And Glyph has been no help to me ever since we crashed."

"What's wrong with Glyph?" Traynor asked, worried. Despite its rather annoying tendency to be overly polite to those it interacted with, she had always been fond of the obnoxious little drone.

"I'm not sure. It seems to get confused every time I ask it to do something. I asked it to run a diagnostic on all our remaining systems, and instead it came back with a diagram of an elcor mating totem. I then asked it to go help Adams in engineering. It responded by playing classical turian music at full volume."

Traynor couldn't help but chuckle, which inadvertently brought a small smile to Liara's tired face. The first in days. Then, as quickly as it appeared, her smile vanished.

"I suspect Glyph's malfunctions and EDI being offline are connected," Liara admitted sadly.

Traynor's smile faded as well. Ever since they had crashed on this planet, EDI had been unresponsive. Several surviving tech specialists have been working on bringing her back online, but have had no success so far.

"How's Joker taking it?"

"About how you'd expect," Liara said flatly as she moved from the doorway and over to Traynor. She let out a quiet sigh as she slowly sank down to the floor and rested her hands on her knees. "He keeps asking whether the techs have tried just unplugging her and plugging her back in."

Traynor snorted a short laugh. "I guess we all have our own ways of coping."

The room was quiet despite all the noise coming from outside. Both Traynor and Liara sat silently for a while, mesmerized watching the last little puffs of smoke twist and rise from the console before eventually dissipating into nothingness.

"I believe I have something that might help you," said Liara, deciding to break the comfortable silence.

She reached into one of the pockets around her waist and produced a small circuit board. "It's a transducer from one of my more sophisticated communications devices. I thought you might be able to put it to use."

Traynor delicately lifted the small circuit board from Liara's hand and examined it.

"I've never seen one of this design before. Salarian?"

"Elcor," Liara admitted plainly.

Traynor shrugged. "Well, I had just used up all the parts I had borrowed from Garrus' computer. Might as well give this a try."

Watching Traynor clamber begrudgingly back to her feet, Liara chuckled softly to herself. "He won't be happy to hear that."

After several minutes of twisting and pulling Traynor managed to replace the burned out circuit board in the control panel. She deftly reattached the interface and began the power up routines.

"Here goes nothing," she whispered as she tapped the commands into her omni-tool.

The lights in the room flickered for a moment, but stayed lit. The familiar hum and crackle of static from the QEC quickly filled the room, causing traynor to breathe a sigh of relief and wipe the gathering sweat from her brow.

"It worked! Leave it to the fast talking Elcor to make good quality communication equipment," quipped Traynor.

"Glad I could be of help," said Liara, slowly picking herself up off the floor and gracefully striding over to Traynor. "Now lets see if anyone is out there."

"Right. Checking all channels now." With renewed determination, Traynor began combing through comm logs that appeared on the display, her eyes darting from result to result looking for any active receivers. To her shock, the interface lit up almost instantly, showing a single active channel.

"I've got a signal! It's weak but we got one!" Traynor shouted in both exasperated joy and disbelief.

Liara blinked in astonishment. "Thank the goddess..."

Traynor instinctively entered the proper commands into her omni-tool to open the channel. The QEC buzzed and crackled loudly as it worked to send an outgoing message request to the new signal. Both Traynor and Liara stood frozen as they waited for a response, as if any sudden movement might cause the new signal to disappear.

Minutes passed.

Their patience was soon rewarded with an even louder buzz and a bright display of light being emitted by the QEC as it worked to conjure an image of whoever was answering their call. Slowly, the bright blue cloud of static and distortion morphed into a vaguely humanoid shape.

"bzzzzzzzzz…Hello?...bzzzzzz….Identify yourse…...bzzzz"

Traynor quickly snapped out of her trance and hit the microphone on the command console. "Yes! This is Specialist Traynor of the SSV Normandy, can you hear me?"

"...ormandy?...bzzzzz…..please standby for…..bzzzz….."

The signal continued to flicker in and out. Each time it did Traynor's heart would nearly skip a beat.

"Is there anything we can do to clear this up?" asked the increasingly anxious Liara.

"If we try to adjust anything now we might just lose it entirely," Traynor warned, refusing to let her tired eyes leave the image for even a second.

"bzzzt...ome in Normandy? Are you there?...bzzt….attempting to boost signal…..stand by..bzztt"

Traynor and Liara both relaxed and returned to more normal breathing as the static began to lessen and the image became more and more clear. Where once there was a vaguely humanoid shaped cloud of static, stood a definite human image. A human in an alliance officers uniform.

"Come in SSV Normandy. This is Lieutenant Thorpe of Alliance Command. Are you getting this? We can't get an image on our end," asked the holographic man, looking past the two women standing in front of the QEC.

"Yes! We can hear you loud and clear!" Traynor accidentally shouted. Tears of joy quickly pooled in her eyes as Thorpe nodded his head in acknowledgment.

"Thank god! We've been trying to reach you for the last few days. What is your location? What's your status?" the Lieutenant asked, squinting his eyes as if trying to make out something in front of him.

"We made an FTL burn as the Crucible fired," Liara interjected before Traynor could respond. "The energy blast must have caught up with us somehow in transit. We were knocked off course and crash landed on an uncharted world."

"Crash landed?" the Lieutenant frowned and furrowed his brow. "How bad is the damage?"

"Our hull is mostly intact, thankfully, but the engines and drive core were heavily damaged in the crash. We are working on repairing them. However, we still aren't sure how long that will take," answered Liara.

"Damn." The Lieutenant began furiously tapping away on a datapad he was holding. "We can't seem to get a lock on your location. The Crucible did hell on a lot of our systems. We're still trying to figure out who survived all of this. If you can figure out what planet you're on, or even what the closest system is, maybe we can send a rescue team… if we can find any available that is."

Liara's and Traynor's excitement was swiftly tempered as a million unanswered questions flooded their heads.

The Crucible. The weapon they had made to combat the Reapers. Did it work? They have had no contact since the crash. They had no idea what had really happened or if their plan had even succeeded.

"Lieutenant? What has happened?" Liara asked, fretfully. "Did the Crucible work? What did it do? What happened to the Reapers?"

Before the Lieutenant could respond, he turned around and acknowledged an invisible person behind him. He nodded and turned back to face Traynor and Liara.

"Stand by, Normandy. We have someone here who wants to speak to you directly." The Lieutenant stepped off the pad and disappeared. Silence once again filled the room, and the weight of Liara's question hung in the air. But before long another man materialized on the buzzing QEC. An older human male with a white beard, sharp eyes, and a scarred face suddenly filled the void left by the Lieutenant.

Liara's eyes grew wide in recognition and joy, "Admiral Hackett!"