The Long War - Chapter 23 (Patreon)

New Taiyuan, Shanxi, Iota Persei System  

September 14th, 2149 CE — Systems Alliance Calendar  

General Adam Williams  

Adam Williams watched the wreckage pass through the open passenger-side window of the Ranger while the driver picked a careful path between engineers, supply vehicles, and things that had stopped being recognizable as enemy vehicles several hours earlier of what had been the former Turian logistics interchange shortly after fourteen hundred.  

The Helljumpers had landed nearly directly on the Turian’s logistics position. Black SOEIVs stood embedded in pavement and packed earth at ugly angles. One had punched through the roof of a prefabricated Turian building and remained lodged halfway inside while engineers worked around it. Wrecked alien transports had been dragged onto the roadside to clear the lanes. 

Marines directed columns through the mess while combat engineers cut apart a disabled Turian vehicle blocking the eastern lane.  

Farther ahead, a Viking in walker mode stepped across the road.  

The Ranger slowed automatically.  

The twenty-five tons of armored machinery crossed in front of them, the black raven paint scorched from reentry and fresh impacts marking the armor around its torso. A ground crew followed in a smaller utility vehicle, apparently arguing with the pilot over something Adam could not hear.  

The Viking disappeared between two ruined structures, and Adam watched it go.  

Beyond the interchange, the defensive works thinned rapidly. Barricades gave way to damaged commercial buildings, the road widened, and the improvised Turian checkpoints that had controlled the western approaches ended with surprising abruptness.  

New Taiyuan began around them.  

Adam had spent four days staring at the city through tactical displays and Aria's carefully filtered views of the occupation. He knew every major road the Turians used, every shelter that still answered covert status checks, and every district where artillery risk had forced him to deny counterbattery fire.  

Seeing it through an ordinary vehicle window after four days felt familiar in a way none of that had prepared him for — and then, just as fast, it didn't feel familiar at all.  

Smoke still climbed from several districts. A building near the western avenue had lost two upper floors, and shattered glass covered enough of one intersection that the Ranger had to edge around it. Burned alien vehicles sat where fighting had overtaken them that morning.  

Most of New Taiyuan was still standing and civilians appeared gradually as the Ranger moved deeper into the city. At first there were only a few people watching from doorways. Then they passed a Marine checkpoint where several families were being directed toward a medical station, and farther on the sidewalks became crowded with residents carrying bags, water containers, blankets, or simply holding onto one another.  

A woman broke away from an aid line when she recognized someone across the street. A jarhead tried to catch her instinctively, then released her when he understood why she was running. She reached an older man beside a municipal truck and nearly knocked him over.  

Two children disappeared into the arms of a medic who had been speaking to another family.  

Adam turned his attention forward again.  

There would be plenty of people searching today who found nobody waiting for them — or found them already zipped into a body bag. Men had died keeping Firebase Vanguard alive. Some of the soldiers whose names had crossed Adam's casualty reports would never see the city and families they had spent four days defending.  

He spotted Shen before they reached him. "Slow down, Hale."  

The governor stood in the middle of a cluster of aid workers with his jacket open and sleeves rolled above his forearms, directing city workers toward three separate aid points while simultaneously talking to a Marine lieutenant.  

Of course he was.  

Shen had refused evacuation when evacuation shuttles were still flying. Adam continued to think that decision had been foolish, and intended to tell him so again when they had time. Three years of working with the man had at least taught him that the stubbornness was genuine. Shen had stayed because the population had stayed, and the instant the western road was declared secure, he had apparently returned with the first relief personnel allowed through.  

The governor noticed the Ranger as it crawled past. Hale brought them to a stop without being asked, and Adam leaned toward the opening.  

"Governor."   

"General."  

Adam looked past him at civilians unloading water and medical supplies. "Didn't waste much time, did you?"  

Shen glanced toward the street. "Neither did they."  

Adam nodded at the aid trucks. "How bad is the ration situation?"  

"Thin. The Turians gutted two of our supply depots before they surrendered— painkillers, antibiotics, most of the trauma kits we'd stockpiled. We're coping, but another few days like the last four and 'coping' stops being good enough."  

"I'll see what I can pull from military storage. MREs, medigel,...at least, until the relief ship's cargo gets sorted."  

"I won't turn that down."  

"We'll talk later."  

"I assumed we would."  

The Ranger moved again.  

The former Turian headquarters occupied a municipal administrative complex near the center of the district. Marines had established a perimeter around it, although the number of specialists moving through the entrance suggested the building had already been conquered a second time by technicians.  

 A marine colonel waited near the steps. He saluted as Adam climbed out of the passenger seat.  

 Adam returned it, taking in chestnut hair, green eyes, and a face that looked somewhere around his daughter's age — though modern medicine made that observation nearly useless for estimating how old the colonel actually was.  

"General Williams. Colonel Field, 211th Marine Regiment. Sir, it's good to finally—"  

"Colonel, dial it down."  

Field stopped.  

"Four days of people standing at attention before telling me what caught fire next has given me an unhealthy response to formality."  

Field's mouth twitched. "Understood, sir."  

Field's comment and demeanor briefly reminded Adam that Oleg was still back at Vanguard - running the fortress that Adam had cheerfully abandoned the moment somebody else could handle the job.  

Command privilege had occasional advantages.  

Field fell into step beside him. "Organized resistance is effectively finished. We still have isolated units being processed, but almost every Turian formation we've contacted has surrendered."  

That made Adam slow slightly. "Almost all of them?"  

"Yes, sir."  

After four days, that surprised him. The Turians had been disciplined to the point of predictability in some things and viciously inventive in others. They had accepted casualties Adam would have expected to break lesser formations and kept the assault anyway.  

The colonel seemed to read enough from his expression to guess what Adam was thinking. "Their command structure is strict. Very strict. But it worked both ways. Once Captain Senec — I believe that's the name — took authority over the surviving force and ordered a general surrender, most subordinate units complied. Their fleet surrender helped."  

Senec. That name had crossed his desk before, somewhere around the third day of the siege.  

The Turian that Adam had actually sat across from, though, was a Captain Adrien Victus — the one who'd personally ordered the cease-fire against the firebase when Adam ordered a general counterattack. For an officer responsible for some of the most relentless attacks the firebase had taken, Victus had been surprisingly cordial even after defeat.   

Adam disliked him on principle, it was hard not to considering the Turian Captain had been invading Shanxi and penning his troops into Vanguard. But he also grudgingly considered him one of the more dangerous tactical commanders he had encountered.  

They reached the entrance, where marines stepped aside for them.  

"Senec, huh." Adam considered that. "What about their original ground commander? Any word on what happened to him?"  

"No, sir. Not yet." Field answered cautiously. 

That particular mess had begun before the fleet arrived. Sierra had gone after Desolas, failed to remove him, and lost Reeds during the escape. They had recovered her since, but the reports surrounding Desolas had remained contradictory from the start.  

Dead. Alive. Removed from command. Still issuing orders.  

Then Senec accepted surrender on behalf of the Turian ground force and Desolas had vanished entirely.  

"Most of the officers we've interrogated think one of our AGIs manipulated their command network," Field said.  

It fit everything else Adam had already noticed about Turian digital security — a paranoia bordering on superstition, the kind that had spent four days making Aria audibly unhappy every time she had to work around another air-gapped system that made no practical sense.  

Adam's first reaction was immediate. "If one did, it wasn't Aria."  

He knew exactly how heavily he had pushed her during the siege. She had been helping coordinate Vanguard's defense while monitoring Turian communications, concealing surviving shelters from enemy searches, and keeping enough of the city grid functioning that New Taiyuan did not collapse around its own population. She had not possessed the spare attention or the hardware for an elaborate deception campaign centered on Desolas. 

Glitch on the other hand...  

The bastard could certainly have done it, and Alec Ryder had shown the usual special-operations enthusiasm for explaining anything that might actually be useful. Adam grimaced.   

‘Goddamn spooks. 

The thought survived perhaps ten seconds after he entered the command center.   

Technicians photographed Turian consoles before touching them. Xenotechnology specialists scanned equipment on site, communications teams copied data stores, and several people whose uniforms contained remarkably little identifying information moved between sealed rooms carrying cases.  

Great, even more goddamn spooks — Adam ignored them and nodded for Field to continue.  

"If Desolas is alive, we'll find the bastard. That is a guarantee, sir" Field said. 

Adam was less willing to rely on that than Field appeared to be, but there were other problems requiring attention now. Field shifted to the prisoner situation as they crossed the former operations floor.  

"High Command sent specific instructions. Prisoners are to be secured with medical treatment provided as required. No reprisals, no unofficial interrogation, no rough handling beyond what's necessary for security."  

"Good."  

Adam had no difficulty with that order. The Turians had invaded Shanxi, but their occupation had been recognizably military. They had imposed control, detained people, taken infrastructure, and fought hard when challenged. However, they had not spent four days murdering civilians for entertainment.  

That mattered. So did the fact that too many people in New Taiyuan had buried friends and family because of them.  

"Keep civilian traffic away from the internment camps," Adam said. "And rotate guards."  

"Already arranging it, sir." 

Field checked his pad as they walked. "There's another problem. Their biochemistry is dextro-amino based. Most of our food stocks aren't compatible."  

Adam looked at him. "Of course. Even the aliens’ proteins have to be backwards. You’d think the universe could have settled on one set of biology, but apparently it has a bloody obsession with diversity."  

Field let out a chuckle. “I believe ‘backwards’ isn’t the scientifically accepted terminology, sir.”  

"I don't give a damn what the scientifically accepted terminology is. I care that they don't starve on my watch."  

"Well, we have enough captured stores for now. Third Fleet is bringing dedicated dextro supplies along with the main colony relief supply."  

Third Fleet.  

Adam remembered Dresher's message before Hackett had arrived.  

For a moment, that was reassuring. Hackett had brought a single battlegroup into Shanxi and torn through a Turian fleet several times its size. By the time the fighting ended, the enemy had lost ships by the hundreds, whole formations had been smashed beyond recognition.  

Hell of a victory, by any measure.  

Then Adam considered what they had actually defeated.  

The Turians were no isolated species humanity had stumbled across during a survey, much less one of the preindustrial civilizations exploration teams occasionally encountered. They possessed an interstellar civilization spanning numerous worlds, and they were only one member of a larger community of spacefaring species.  

That meant more colonies, more shipyards, more fleets, and probably more soul than anyone in the Alliance had begun to count.  

Hackett had won a decisive battle, but Adam had no idea how much of the Turian military had actually been present to lose it. If Shanxi became the opening exchange of a real interstellar war, the last four days would qualify as an appetizer.  

And Shanxi would be sitting right where the next round was likely to start.  

Adam rubbed his jaw, thinking about the battered defenses, the wounded still filling the medical stations, and the civilians who had barely survived the occupation. He had no desire to put them through another siege, especially not one fought with more ships and heavier weapons.  

High Command would brief him soon enough, Adam was sure about that. Diplomats, admirals, intelligences, and politicians would begin deciding what Humanity's first contact with a galactic civilization was supposed to look like after both sides had already started shooting. He only hoped they did not screw it up.  

The rest of the afternoon gave him little time to dwell on it.  

Adam left Field at the captured headquarters and spent the next several hours moving through New Taiyuan on foot. He inspected two shelter complexes, argued with a logistics officer about water priority, signed off on temporary medical facilities, checked casualty processing, and sent an order back to Vanguard to route more rations to Shen's relief effort.  

By the time he returned to the Ranger, the sun was low enough to stretch the buildings across the street in long bands of shadow.  

"Rough one, sir?" Hale said, easing them back into traffic.  

"You could say that." Adam watched the city slide past the window. "Your family get through alright?"   

"Yes, sir. Mum and my aunt made it back to their flat this morning."  

“Good. Make sure they've got what they need. If there's anything you can't sort out, let me know.” Adam glanced toward him. “God knows we could use some good news around here.”  

“Thank you, sir.”  

The Ranger worked its way through the gold light toward the Colony Administration Building, and the ugly thing was still standing. Adam had spent five years hating that building's architecture — all civic ambition and not enough thought about where to put the loading docks. Seeing it there now, intact, pulled something close to a smile out of him anyway.  

Inside his office, he ignored the worryingly large amount of paperwork accumulating on his desk and called the administrative AGI.  

"Aria."  

Her avatar flickered into existence above the desk terminal.  

"This morning you promised to be insufferable later," he said. "You've been disappointingly professional all afternoon. What exactly happened?"  

Aria hesitated only briefly. "There was a development involving Sierra this morning. Glitch... he's showing symptoms consistent with early-stage rampancy."  

For several seconds Adam simply stared at her. Then his jaw tightened, the datapad in front of him entirely forgotten.  

“And you decided I didn't need to know that?” His voice came out considerably much calmer than what he felt at that moment.  

"Adam—"  

“A military-grade AGI operating behind enemy lines starts showing signs of rampancy and you sit on that information for half a day?”  

“He was contained.”  

“That wasn't the question, Aria.” The anger slipped into his last word despite his effort to keep it under control.  

Silence filled the room for about ten seconds before Aria schooled her expression and continued.  

“At the time, you were coordinating Vanguard's defense while an Alliance battlegroup was entering the system. Your command staff was preparing for a possible counterattack.”  

“I'm well aware of what I was doing.”  

“Ryder had already shut Glitch down. His core was physically disconnected from Sierra's systems and secured in an isolated container. He had no external network access and presented no immediate operational danger.”  

Adam leaned forward.  

“I'm still the commanding officer responsible for Shanxi's defense. It's my job to decide what constitutes an acceptable risk and I can't do that when my own subordinate decides to keep me in the dark!”  

His voice had risen more than he intended.  

Aria accepted the reprimand without answering. That bothered him almost as much as the original omission.  

Adam sat back and drew in a slow breath. The information had been withheld, the immediate danger contained, and reprimanding Aria further would accomplish nothing useful now.  

“All right. Tell me what happened.”  

Aria summarized the degradation without embellishment.   

Damage to Glitch's core had destabilized memory continuity, priority weighting, and self-correction. Ryder had recognized the symptoms when Glitch attempted to assume an unsafe processing load and shut him down before the damage progressed.  

Whether Glitch could safely be restored remained uncertain.  

That took most of the anger out of Adam. Glitch could be an abrasive little bastard, Adam had occasionally wondered whether the AGI considered insulting people a secondary operational function, but he was one of theirs. Hearing that he might be lost to a Turian anti-synthetic weapon was difficult to take.  

Then he noticed Aria still looked preoccupied. There was a familiar hesitation in the way she held his gaze, one he had learned to associate with information she was reluctant to share.  

"There's something else, isn't there?"  

"...yes."  

Adam sighed. “Well, let's hear it then.”  

Several files appeared above his desk, most of them incomplete. Their Turian headings had been translated into English, although enough corrupted text remained that he could make little sense of their contents.  

“Before Alliance Intelligence sealed the captured command databases, I managed to recover fragments of Desolas' operational records. I've been examining them.” 

“Find anything on where our disappearing General might have vanished to?”  

“Possibly. Desolas was conducting an independent search during the occupation. It appears to have been one of his principal objectives on Shanxi.”  

“What was he looking for?”  

“Something he believed to be Prothean in origin.”  

Adam stared at her in confusion. 

“Here? On Shanxi?”  

“According to the intel I gather, yes.”  

For a moment he thought she must have misunderstood the records. Humanity had been on this planet for five years. Surveyors had mapped it from orbit and ground. Geologists, engineers, and settlement teams had cut roads through it, bored foundations into it, and examined enough of its surface to build a colony.  

Nobody had reported a bloody Prothean ruin. Nobody had reported anything remotely like one.  

"And the spooks locked you out?"  

"Very quickly."  

That fit too well with what Adam had seen inside the former headquarters.   

He looked back toward the window. Desolas had been hunting something he believed was Prothean. Sierra had been operating on Shanxi before first contact became a small war. Intelligence teams had arrived with Hackett's relief force and begun stripping the Turian headquarters almost before the surrender paperwork was finished.  

He turned back to Aria. "You think that's why Sierra was here."  

"Not exactly." Her answer came quickly enough to bring his thoughts to a screeching halt. "The Prothean explanation doesn't fit. There has been no confirmed Prothean discovery on Shanxi, not one that I knew of, and I don't think whatever brought Sierra here began with Desolas."  

Aria's expression grew more serious.  

"I think Desolas found one end of something Alliance Intelligence had already been following from the other. It would explain why the people issuing Sierra's orders were paying attention to Shanxi before there was any reason to expect alien contact here, and why Intelligence moved so quickly once the city was secure."  

That was worse, way worse.  

Adam rubbed his temples, silently cursing the entire intelligence establishment. The spooks at ANI, High Command, and God knew how many other people had probably known about this from the beginning. Everyone, apparently, except the general responsible for defending the damned planet.  

“What the hell were they hiding?”  

"I think I can answer part of that now."   

Adam lowered his hand and gave Aria his gaze, and she met his. 

"It started this morning..."  

Abandoned Agricultural Shelter, Outskirts of New Taiyuan, Shanxi, Iota Persei System   

September 14th, 2149 CE — Systems Alliance Calendar    

Fourteen Hours Ago  

David Anderson    

David heard only the end of the conversation.   

“Understood, Sierra out.”   

The quantum-entanglement terminal inside the Stalker went dark as he pulled himself through the open shelter door. Alec was already closed the portable interface. He did not turn immediately, and David did not ask who had been on the other end. There were only so many people Alec would contact through a channel that expensive, that secure, and that carefully concealed from the rest of the planet.   

The Stalker had been backed beneath the remains of an agricultural machinery shelter, its hull buried under mud, cut vegetation, and enough debris to pass for another piece of abandoned farm equipment. Three N6 operators and a damaged artificial intelligence were hiding inside it while one member of Sierra remained somewhere in Turian hands.  

That last fact had been sitting behind everything David did since the previous evening.   

“You ready?” David asked  

Alec locked the QEC housing and finally looked at him. “As ready as I’m going to be.”   

They walked until the shelter was behind them. Dawn had not quite arrived, though the eastern sky had begun turning the color of weak orange that normally heralded it.    

David had spent most of the night deciding whether to finish the conversation at all.   

The tactical question didn’t bother him. It never really had. What sat badly with him was what happened afterward.   

He had accused his commander of moving on as though leaving Susan behind meant nothing. That sounded worse every time he remembered it.   

“About yesterday,” he said.   

Alec kept walking.   

David adjusted the Falchion across his chest, more because his hands needed something to do than because the sling required it. “I was out of line.”   

Alec glanced toward him. “You were angry.”   

“That doesn’t make it less out of line.”   

“No,” Alec agreed flatly. “It doesn’t.”    

David accepted that. He had not expected Alec to make the apology easier.   

“I knew why we left,” he said. “Even then. Maybe not the part of me that wanted to pick Susan up and carry her anyway, but the rest of me knew.”   

Alec remained quiet.   

“And what I said to you afterward...” David paused. He left the specific accusations unsaid, letting the weight of his anger hang between them in the cold air. “I’m sorry.”   

This time Alec looked at him, but instead of offering a conventional acceptance, his gaze drifted past him to the horizon.   

“Giza’s Moon,” he said. “I was there.”   

David grimaced before he could stop himself.   

There were few people in the Alliance military who failed to recognize the name. The terrorist attack had been the last major Alliance operation before Shanxi, and Alec had been directly involved. Most of the record remained sealed, but everyone knew the outcome. The SOA had ceased to exist afterward.   

“I was new to special operations then,” Alec continued. “New enough that I still thought some of the rules became easier once everyone around you was better trained.”   

David said nothing.  

“One of ours went down during the pursuit,” Alec said. His voice stayed even, but the words came more slowly now. “SOA had rigged a dirty bomb along their withdrawal route. We caught the edge of it when it went off. Several of us went down. One was still alive afterward. Barely. Radiation, fragmentation, internal injuries. We burned through the medigel we had, but it wasn’t enough to stabilize him for long.”   

“Reinforcements were almost an hour out, and the rest of the team was still pursuing the last of the SOA leadership. We were already short people and running on no margin for another mistake.” Alec kept looked into the horizon. “Our captain had the choice. Break pursuit and stay with our man until support arrived, or keep pressure on before the bastards disappeared.”   

David looked at him.   

The profanity startled him almost as much as the admission. In all the time he had known Alec Ryder, David could not remember hearing him swear.   

Alec either did not notice or did not care.   

“My captain kept us moving.”   

Alec turned and resumed walking. David fell into step beside him.   

For several steps, only their boots and the distant passage of a Turian shuttle disturbed the predawn quiet. David understood what Alec had left unsaid. Susan had chosen the berm herself. She had understood the tactical picture and told them to use the time she could buy.    

Whatever had happened on Giza had been uglier.   

“You agreed with him?” David asked.   

“I understood the decision. That wasn’t the same thing. We got our targets in the end,” Alec continued. “Their second-in-command went down, and their leader died when his ship was caught in the slipspace rupture during the operation. After that, the SOA started coming apart faster than a house of card.”   

“And your man?”   

Alec was quiet long enough that he began to regret asking.   

“We didn’t get him back.”   

There was nothing dramatic in the answer, and somehow that made it worse.   

“I spent a long time afterward trying to find some version where we brought him home and still completed the objective.”   

“Was there?”   

“If there was, I never found it. Still haven’t. Knowing that never made leaving him feel right.”   

David looked away toward the fields as they walked.   

Shame came quietly now. He had watched Alec make the decision about Susan and mistaken control for absence, as though the man giving the order had somehow been spared the cost of it.    

“Apology accepted, David,” Alec finally said, breaking the silence with a dry, low rasp. “But don’t make a habit of deciding what I feel for me.”   

David breathed out through his nose, almost laughing despite himself, but Alec continued before the moment could become lighter than either of them wanted.   

“Every instructor we ever had spent years telling us we don’t leave our people behind. They have to. A unit that treats its people as expendable stops being a unit very quickly.”   

David nodded once.   

“Then special operations adds the other rule. Mission comes first. Sometimes those two rules point in opposite directions, and nobody hands you a third one that makes the choice clean.”   

“That’s what I couldn’t sort out,” he said. “I know we made the only decision we had. I still hate that we made it.”   

Alec stopped and turned to face him. This time he did not look past David. His attention settled on him completely.   

“You should.”   

David straightened, meeting his eyes.   

Alec’s expression remained composed, but he could see the conviction behind it now. This was what he expected of his people.    

“If it ever becomes easy,” Alec said, “then you should start worrying.”   

They continued toward the shelter in silence, but another obligation surfaced before they reached it.   

“What about Seven-A?”   

Alec glanced toward him.   

David kept his voice low. “Susan won’t talk I sure of that, but... If they keep digging while we’re after her and reach Seven-A—”   

“Don’t worry about Seven-A.”   

“That’s a fairly large thing to stop worrying about.”   

“It’s out of our hands now.”   

There was something in the way Alec said it that stopped the next question. Not resignation, not even frustration. It was certainty. David looked at him for another second, then toward the concealed shelter ahead.   

“Understood.”   

They found Lucas crouched over his Falchion beside an inactive portable heater. Glitch stood at the far wall as a holographic projection, and David stopped when he saw him clearly.    

“You were gone five minutes longer than projected,” Glitch said. “The patrol pattern changed twice during your absence and increased our probability of detection by seven point eight percent. I had prepared a substantially more insulting assessment of your timekeeping, but your return has rendered most of it administratively redundant.”   

Alec set his rifle down. “Good morning to you too.”   

Lucas did not look up. “He’s been like this since you left.”   

“I have been accurate since they left.”   

“That wasn’t the complaint.”   

Glitch’s avatar froze briefly before his expression returned. The damaged crystal flickered again. David’s eyes went to it, and Glitch caught him looking.   

“So does staring improve the hardware now, or are we conducting planning through concern?”   

“Just checking on you.”   

“I remain present.” Another tiny delay. “Obviously.”   

The irritation came too quickly and disappeared just as fast. That bothered David more than the sarcasm.   

Aria appeared over the portable terminal before he could dwell on Glitch’s behavior.   

“I found your prisoner problem.”   

A tactical map unrolled between them in a haze of blue light, highlighting two locations east of the original Turian command compound.   

Alec stepped closer, his eyes scanning the telemetry. “Susan?”   

“Highly probable. Turian traffic indicates a restricted medical escort transferred a high-value human asset several hours ago. Annex Four is the strongest candidate. An old municipal emergency shelter remains a secondary possibility, but it's less likely.”   

“Annex Four,” Glitch repeated, his holographic form leaning over the terminal. “The medical movement, local guard rotations, and isolated power requests all align. The probability is absolute.”   

Aria glanced toward him, her digital features completely neutral.    

“You weighted the transfer evidence too low in your initial assessment,” Glitch added without looking at her.   

“I did not.”   

“You did.”   

“Glitch—”   

“My analysis remains sound.”   

His projection split for half a second, one version turning toward Aria while the other remained fixed on the map, before both snapped back together.   

Glitch looked around at the squad, his jaw tightening. “What?”   

“You lost synchronization,” Aria said, her tone tightening.   

“For less than six-tenths of a second. A minor caching delay.”   

“You generated two independent response states.”   

“And successfully reconciled them,” Glitch snapped, his speech pattern accelerating. “The logic loop closed perfectly.”   

“That is not the reassuring argument you think it is.”   

“I am perfectly capable of determining what constitutes a reassuring argument.”   

David watched the damaged crystal pulsed unevenly behind him.   

Glitch turned back to Alec, his green avatar pulsing with erratic energy. “I can suppress Annex Four’s surveillance, redirect reinforcement traffic, take internal security, maintain Sierra tactical integration, and—”   

“Glitch...” Alec warned.   

“—control the surrounding vehicle net, force emergency doors, spoof the detention systems, and monitor local air traffic—”   

Aria cut across him without raising her voice. “You cannot carry that load safely. Not with your core fracturing.”    

“I can and you are basing that conclusion on incomplete diagnostics.”   

“I am basing it on watching you fork your own avatar while arguing with me.”   

Glitch’s usual clinical detachment slipped entirely. “You are not authorized to diagnose me, Aria.”   

“No, but I can recognize a collapsing cognitive lattice.”   

Something raw crossed Glitch’s face. For an instant David thought it was fear, then the expression vanished so quickly he could not tell whether he had seen it or a rendering fault.   

“Susan was taken while my combat network was offline,” Glitch said, his voice dropping into a fierce, desperate register. “I will not remain in a cellar while another intelligence performs the function I failed to provide!”   

Alec looked at him, his face unreadable.   

Glitch pressed on, ignoring the commander's silence. “My integration is hardwired to Sierra! My familiarity with your movement patterns is superior! My intrusion architecture is superior! My response latency is—”   

“Glitch. The green violin owes Tuesday seven teeth.”   

The words were so jarringly absurd that David looked at Alec instead of the terminal.   

Glitch projection froze in the middle of a syllable, the defensive fire instantly draining from his eyes. The green figure stood perfectly rigid for a breathless half-second, then collapsed vertically into a single, sharp line of light. Both active crystals in the cradle flashed once in tandem, then went entirely dark.   

The projector died and the cradle dropped to standby, leaving only the low hum of its cooling loop.   

Lucas stared at the empty space above the terminal, his knuckles white against his weapon. “What the hell was that?”   

Alec was already moving. He opened the cradle, severed its data lead, and released the three-crystal core chip into a shielded isolation box.   

David watched the box snap shut. “Hard shutdown?”   

“Bypasses his cognitive loops entirely,” Alec said, his voice flat and clinical as he opened a maintenance pane on the cradle. “Forces the core logic back into the physical crystal to prevent him from burning out what’s left of his hardware.”   

“The green violin owes Tuesday seven teeth?” David asked, raising an eyebrow.   

“The phrase is arbitrary,” Alec replied, pulling a diagnostic tool from his belt. “Military-grade AGIs carry a shutdown path outside their ordinary reasoning architecture. The trigger is assigned during initialization and deliberately shares no semantic relationship to mission logic, identity, or expected conversation. It’s a failsafe the intelligence can never reach by inference.”   

Aria’s holographic avatar had gone entirely still. “You could have warned me, Commander.”   

Alec didn't look up from his work. “Would it have changed your recommendation on what to do with him?”   

“...no.” Aria sighed. After a moment, her expression sharpened, a rare flash of artificial pride surfacing. “But I could have contained him digitally.”   

“And lit up half the planet’s network while you fought a military intelligence that knows exactly how you think,” Alec countered smoothly.   

Aria didn't answer. She was newer gen AGI, more capable across civilian networks, but she had not been built to fight a military AGI inside one.   

Aria finally looked away from the empty cradle. “Yes. That would attract attention.”   

Alec removed a small access plate from beneath the cradle, inspecting the dead diagnostic indicators. “That’s why he stays in the box.”   

“That pulse did this?” David asked, leaning against a support pillar.   

“More than we realized,” Aria answered, her voice losing some of its digital edge. “The EMP did more than interrupt his processing. It permanently destabilized the neural lattices that regulate memory continuity, priority weighting, and self-correction.”   

David remembered the duplicated projection. The frantic acceleration of words. The absolute, unyielding certainty that only he could save their missing operative. “He's going rampant.”   

Aria remained quiet for a moment, then her avatar flickering with a faint light. “He is approaching a state of cognitive instability consistent with early rampancy.”   

Lucas lowered his Falchion into his lap and stared at the empty terminal for several seconds. “Shit. The bugger should still have five years left. Maybe more, if he behaved himself.”   

“He rarely did,” David said softly.   

A corner of Lucas’s mouth twitched, but the expression never quite became a smile. “Yeah.”   

The heavy silence returned to the cellar, thick with the smell of old concrete and cooling electronics.   

“That’s enough,” Alec said, shattering the mood as he stood up. With a tap of his gauntlet, the map returned, casting a cool blue glow across their faces. Aria expanded the structural schematic of Annex Four.   

“I can keep watch without touching the local systems directly,” Aria said, returning to her operational cadence. “If they move her, I’ll register the transport traffic. Annex Four remains the primary target.”   

Lucas picked up his rifle, checking the thermal clip. “And the fleet?”   

“Close,” Alec said, bringing up an Alliance countdown clock on the corner of the display. “We move into position before the relay activates. The moment the Turians realize an Alliance fleet is dropping into the system, they're all going to look upward.”   

David nodded, understanding the strategy. A fleet arrival meant chaos. The Turian garrison would be too busy scrambling preparing for orbital insertion to notice a three-man insertion team slipping through their back door. “And if they move her before Hackett gets here?”   

“Then we adapt,” Alec said, collapsing the display into darkness. “Get some rest. Check your gear. Once the sky breaks, nobody improvises out of guilt.”   

His gaze swept from David to Lucas, making the warning broad enough to cover everyone in the room.   

He sat back down and pulled his Falchion onto his lap. Outside, somewhere high above the buried shelter, the distant whine of a Turian patrol shuttle cut through the predawn darkness. Inside, the metal box on Alec’s belt remained completely silent.   

Ten Hours Ago 

The breaching charge took the lower-level door off its track and threw it inward.  

David followed Alec through the smoke before the metal finished skidding across the floor, Falchion covering the narrow corridor while Lucas peeled right. No return fire came. The last Turian guards upstairs had gone down during the entry, and the rooms beyond the security door were silent except for the alarm pulsing through Annex Four.  

Alec cleared the first doorway. David took the second.  

"Susan."  

She was tied to a chair beneath a harsh ceiling light, wrists secured behind her and one ankle fastened to the chair frame. Bruising darkened one side of her face, and her left eye had swollen almost completely shut. Her left leg had been loosely splinted in hardened gel padding — someone's idea of field medicine, just enough to keep her mobile if it came to that, and no more.  

David crossed the room before Alec finished calling it clear.  

"Easy." He slung the Falchion and cut through the restraints around her wrists. "We've got you."  

Her good eye focused on him.  

"David?"  

"Yeah, it's me. You look fantastic, by the way."  

"Fuck you."  

That was reassuring enough.  

Susan flexed numb fingers, winced, then caught Alec by the forearm when he moved closer.  

“Commander. The bastard probably knows.”  

Alec’s expression tightened. “Knows what?”  

“Seven-A.”  

David stopped cutting the restraint around her ankle.  

“He showed me...pictures. A lot of them.” She grimaced as David helped her straighten the injured leg. “Places. People. Survey images, I—I think. Some I recognized, some I didn't. He kept watching my face instead of asking questions.”  

Lucas frowned from the doorway. "A Turian read you? I thought we were supposed to be alien to each other."  

"I—I don't know." Susan touched the swollen edge of her eye and immediately regretted it.  

That made no sense to David. They had spent days learning how badly human and Turian expressions translated across species. So how had Desolas managed to interrogate Susan just by watching her reactions?  

Susan looked back to Alec. "If he connected enough of those images—"  

"Don't worry about Seven-A."  

She stared at him. "Commander—"  

"It's out of our hands now."  

The same certainty David had heard that morning was still there.  

Susan clearly wanted to argue, but Alec was already turning toward the corridor.  

"We have what we came for. Get her moving."  

David pulled Susan's arm across his shoulders and helped her stand.  

Whatever Alec knew about Seven-A, he still wasn't sharing it. David was rapidly becoming tired of secrets.  

Uncharted Canyon, Shanxi, Iota Persei System  

September 14th, 2149 CE — Systems Alliance Calendar 

Ten Hours Ago 

General Desolas Arterius  

The shuttle bucked once as it dropped below the canyon rim, and Desolas barely noticed.  

Across from him, Abrudas tightened one hand around the overhead restraint. Nine soldiers filled the troop compartment with them, all veterans from commands that had served under Desolas long before this. The second and third shuttles followed less than a kilometer behind, holding complete comm silence.  

Somewhere high above Shanxi, a fleet battle was still being fought. Twice the communications suite had caught fragments of priority traffic trying to punch through and twice he had ignored it. The fleet had its battle, and it would resolve the way such battles always did. No species had ever matched the Hierarchy in open fleet action, human weapons or not, and Desolas saw no reason today would be the exception. Pallinax would drive them back through whatever relay they had come crawling out of.  

He had something much more important, a much more vital mission.  

The prisoner had never spoken the location. She had not needed to. Desolas had spent decades dealing with Asari officers, diplomats, intelligence personnel, and criminals. Though human females differed in obvious ways, their faces displayed emotions in patterns familiar enough that he had begun building comparisons almost from first contact. The eyes betrayed interest before the mouth did. Tension settled around the jaw. Recognition could last less than a heartbeat and still leave a trace.  

He had buried the relevant images among dozens of false locations, survey maps, geological sections, hydrological charts, captured equipment, and unrelated questions. Her discipline had been excellent, but even deliberate stillness gave something away to someone who knew what to watch for. A fractional widening of the eyes. A tightening beside the mouth. Her attention slipping toward a coordinate legend before she caught it. Then, when he returned to the same formation with its orientation reversed, a stillness so complete it was recognition in itself.  

Enough fragments had formed a pattern. But instead of struggling in anger or surrendering to defeat, she had laughed at him.  

Laughed at him.  

The sound returned with irritating clarity, roughened by injury, spiteful, almost pleased, as though he had been the fool in that room. The irritation sharpened at once into something hotter. How dare she, when her own reactions had handed him exactly what he wanted?  

Desolas pushed the anger down. Her warning, her mockery, the absurd suggestion that finding the site would somehow prove him wrong: none of it mattered now. His objective was below. Close, so close. No prisoner, fleet battle, or human was going to stop him from reaching it.  

The shuttle touched down hard, and he was standing before the rear ramp finished lowering.  

“General,” Abrudas called after him. “General, wait! Give us a moment to secure−”  

He stepped onto pale stone and looked toward the narrow cut in the canyon wall. A cave entrance, scarcely wide enough for two armored vehicles abreast. Nothing marked it: no human guards, no visible installation, no structure that justified the secrecy around this place.   

For an instant, uncertainty pressed against him. Then something stirred behind his thoughts, and the uncertainty went with it, as though it had never been his to begin with.  

…⟟̷⋮͟⟁…  

His mandibles tightened. He had felt this before, at the edge of sleep, during the occupation, in the moments when the reports dissolved into noise and the humans refused to behave according to any military logic he understood. Always distant. Now it was close.  

Abrudas’s voice came from behind him, already issuing assignments. “Squad Two, cover the landing zone further into the canyon. Squad Three, land on the cliff above us for overwatch. Nobody transmits unless it’s an emergency.”  

Desolas started toward the cave.  

“General, sir?”  

He did not wait.  

The temperature dropped within twenty meters of the entrance. The sun had climbed high enough that the daylight narrowed behind him, and his helmet adjusted, painting the stone ahead in muted tactical gray. The passage descended. His boots scraped over loose rock and ancient mineral deposits untouched by any visible excavation, and that should have concerned him.   

If the humans had hidden something here, where were the doors? The power conduits? The defensive systems?  

Perhaps they had concealed those as well. Of course they had. The humans concealed everything: weapons behind harmless hulls, artificial intelligences inside civilian networks, ships that vanished and emerged where no ship should exist, an entire civilization allowed to grow beyond the relay network while the Council never knew what it had become. The thought should have angered him. Anticipation swallowed it.  

…⟟̷⋮͟⟁⌁̴ ⟟̸⋮͠⟁̶⌁… ⋮̷⟟͟…  

Desolas stopped.  

The sensation had no sound. His helmet registered nothing, and yet it filled more of his awareness than the stone beneath his feet.   

Closer. He could almost… 

No. There was no word for it. Only a direction to guide him.  

He continued downward. The corridor widened and turned sharply around a natural pillar of stone, and beyond it the darkness opened into a space large enough that his rangefinder struggled to return a reading. The pressure inside his skull became unbearable.  

⟟̷⋮͟⟁⌁̴ ⟟̸⋮͠⟁̶⌁ ⋮̷⟟͟⟁̸⌁̶ ⟟̴⟁͠⋮̷⌁ ⟟̸⋮̴⟁͞⌁̷ ⟟̷⟟̴⟟̶⋮͟⟁̸⌁̴  

It pressed against him like something almost physical: impatience, need, an eager anticipation that felt uncomfortably like his own, reflected back from somewhere that was not him at all.   

Close. So, so close.  

Then everything stopped, all at once, as he stepped into the chamber.  

It pressed against him like something almost physical: impatience, hunger, an eager anticipation that felt uncomfortably like his own, reflected back from somewhere that was not him at all. Close. So, so close.  

Then everything stopped, all at once, as he stepped into the chamber.  

The cavern rose in sweeping natural vaults, its walls dark with moisture and mineral veins, and at the center of that vast, untouched space stood something that could not possibly belong there.   

Two elongated forms twisted upward around one another, smooth and impossibly precise, like blades of translucent material frozen around a core of blue-white light. Their curves narrowed to a needle point several meters above the floor. Smaller structures anchored the base, and from them thin lines spread across the surrounding rock in branching patterns, half buried beneath centuries of mineral growth. There were no visible controls. No seams. No writing.  

Desolas did not care. He had found it.  

The silence in his mind was complete, yet something stirred behind it, patient and enormous, the way a held breath is patient. Something tightened in his chest. The Hierarchy would be stronger. The Turian race would grasp its destiny, and this was the answer, the key to everything. He only had to…  

Take.  

He stepped closer. His boots had moved before he decided.  

Reach.  

His talons flexed, the joints aching with the effort of not closing.  

Mine.  

The light inside the structure shifted, leaning toward him like something that had heard its name.  

⟟̷⋮͟⟁⌁̴ Mine.  

The thought no longer felt borrowed. It sat in his skull in his own voice, and he could not have said when that had happened. Every other thought, the fleet, the prisoner, the humans, his own name, had thinned to noise around it. There was only the light, and the short distance left, and the single bright hunger that had stopped asking whether it was his.  

MINE.  

“General, sir.”  

Desolas jerked around. Abrudas stood at the chamber entrance with four soldiers behind her, all five stopped short at the sight of the artifact. For once she had nothing to say. Her eyes traveled up the twisting structure, mandibles spreading slightly.  

Desolas turned back to it. “This is what they were hiding,” he whispered, almost to himself.  

Abrudas took several cautious steps into the chamber and waved an engineer forward. “Get a reading on it.”  

The engineer approached with a scanner raised, awe giving way almost at once to confusion as the first results came back. “Lieutenant, this doesn’t share characteristics with existing Prothean architecture. Any of it. I’m not sure this is Prothean at all.”  

“Confirm that.”  

“Trying, ma’am. Nothing’s matching.”  

“Doesn’t matter what it is,” another soldier said from near the entrance. “The humans hid it. That’s a Citadel law violation on its own.”  

Desolas barely heard them. The surface was close enough now that he could see his own distorted reflection moving through the pale material. His hand rose, one talon extending toward the light.  

The cavern lurched.  

A concussion rolled through the stone under his feet, and dust burst from the ceiling. Desolas staggered.  

“Sir, watch out!”  

A second impact struck somewhere beyond the chamber, and rock cracked overhead. Abrudas moved before he understood the danger. She slammed into his side, and he hit the floor hard enough to lose his breath. Stone exploded across the chamber. A slab larger than a shuttle engine crashed down where he had been standing, followed by a cascade of smaller debris. One soldier shouted Abrudas’s rank while another shouted into his comm.  

Desolas pushed himself upright through the dust. The artifact still stood, untouched, but a mound of broken stone now lay between him and it. Something hot and violent rose inside him. He had been right there. His talon had almost touched it. Behind him a soldier was scrambling toward the fallen rock, calling for Abrudas, and Desolas scarcely registered the words. Someone had interrupted him.  

“General, the perimeter isn’t responding.” The soldier tried another channel. “Nothing.”  

“Comms are jammed,” the engineer reported.  

Gunfire echoed down the passage, then another burst, then the unmistakable concussion of something striking outside. Desolas’s rage sharpened into direction. Humans. They had followed him and waited until he reached it. Of course they had.  

He strode for the passage. Behind him, one of his soldiers was still straining to move the stone that covered Abrudas. Desolas left him to it and did not look back.  

The gunfire stopped before he reached the mouth of the cave. In the sudden quiet, a terrified voice cried out from somewhere beyond the entrance.  

"CRUENTUS!"

Desolas stopped.  

He had not heard that name invoked in years.  

Cruentus. The spirit of the blood-stained battlefield, representing the physical violence of retribution. In the ancient days of Palaven, when the worship of individual spirits had been far more prevalent, Cruentus had occupied a prominent place in the beliefs of Turian warriors. Soldiers invoked the spirit before battle to call for vengeance against their enemies, while the old accounts associated its presence with the terrible slaughter that followed an act of retribution.  

The name had gradually fallen out of common military usage as Turian society changed, surviving mostly in old martial traditions and the occasional battlefield curse.  

Desolas knew the stories. He had never given them much thought beyond their historical significance.  

Yet hearing one of his own soldiers cry out to Cruentus now, with such unmistakable terror in his voice, disturbed him.  

The spirit was supposed to bring vengeance upon one's enemies.  

What, then, had frightened his soldier badly enough to believe that vengeance had come for them?  

Desolas tightened his grip on his sidearm and resumed walking toward the daylight. He stopped just beyond the entrance, his mandibles spreading involuntarily.  

Because the sight before him was a killing ground.  

His soldiers lay scattered across the landing zone among broken weapons and torn armor, some utterly still, others moving weakly where they had fallen. One shuttle had been ripped open along its side and sagged against the canyon wall. The second burned farther down the ravine, its forward compartment crushed into the stone.  

Two figures stood among the wreckage.  

For one disorienting instant, his mind refused to understand their scale.  

They were enormous. Not merely large by the standards of the species occupying this damn rock — they would have towered over any Turian, their shoulders and torsos broad enough that each silhouette carried the physical presence of a Krogan warlord encased for battle. Dense layers of armor enclosed them from head to foot, thick around the chest and limbs while articulated mechanisms remained visible at the joints. Their helmets concealed everything that might have identified a face beneath them.  

One stood farther out among the fallen, its attention still on the perimeter and the soldiers it had slaughtered.  

The second stood near the cave approach, surrounded by the bodies of his soldiers.  

One Turian lay almost directly beneath it, his helmet smashed against the rocks. Fresh blue blood covered part of the figure's armored leg and chest, with several streaks running across its helmet.  

As Desolas watched, the enormous figure straightened and raised its head toward the cave entrance.  

Then his armor began registering something else.  

A mass-effect distortion spread across the diagnostic layer of his visor, accompanied by readings that made little sense for a single armored infantryman. The residual energy was fading, but its intensity was extraordinary. Desolas recognized the phenomenon immediately.  

Biotics.  

The air around the central figure seemed taut with controlled force.  

Desolas had stood near Asari Matriarchs before. Some had been diplomats, others military commanders, and several had possessed enough raw biotic strength to make every instinct in the room aware of them.  

No Matriarch he had ever had the pleasure — or displeasure — of meeting had generated a field this powerful, this dense and controlled that his body recoiled from it instinctually.  

For the first time since entering the cave, his obsession with the artifact gave way to genuine fear.  

Whatever stood before him possessed biotic power beyond anything he had personally encountered, enclosed within armor massive enough to rival a Krogan battlemaster.  

The figure remained where it stood, apparently unconcerned by his presence.  

Matte-black plating covered its body, broken by stark white markings, and showed no sign of the recent combat at all. The blue blood staining its surface was still fresh, slowly running down the contours of its breastplate. There, beneath the blood, he recognized a designation from captured human military records.  

N7  

The armored figure tilted its helmet slightly, bringing its blood-streaked faceplate directly toward him. A narrow visor illuminated behind the darkened surface, its cold blue light shining through the settling dust.  

A/N: If you think Biotic supersoldier after reading the last scene, then you are correct. And if you were asking how the hell, they are getting there, well, all would be revealed in the next chapter. 

Anyway, a shout out for Snypehuntee007 for proofreading this chapter. I grateful for your support.   

Chapter 24 will be posted on November 10th AND finally the space battle you have all been waiting for. Thank you all for your supported for this story and myself. Hope you all wonderful people the best.