Effect 19 (Patreon)

I don’t own Mass Effect… in fact who does right now with Bioware justifiably defunct? Nor do I own Ranma. I think he’s still owed by Rumiko Takahashi-sama.

Surprisingly, this was the Ranma poll winner this month. It’s the last chapter in what can be called the Noveria arc. I hope to have a smaller arc with Herb and Ranma meeting up, getting to know their ship, gathering their crew and a bit more while some stuff occurs elsewhere.

Some of you all who remember the timeline of the original might be confused that I am talking about a Rachni Queen rather than an egg as it should be at this time in the original timeline. I… got no excuse there, guys. I kind of forgot that Binary Helix had found an egg rather than a frozen queen. My bad.

BTW, I used a random name generator site that has all sorts of different races/fandoms for the asari OCs I use here. It helped a lot. Usagi, though, is all mine LOL.

This has been edited by me with Grammarly and Hiryo. I don’t doubt there are still some mistakes within, but I hope you enjoy it!

Chapter 19: Miscalculation

The geth were, well, a living sentient would have termed the local gestalt’s ‘feelings’ as confident. They had run the numbers both before this mission and now. Even with the need to redeploy one of their frigates and the accompanying land-based battle platforms to shut down the guns of Port Hanshan so that they could escape out of the atmosphere with the frozen Rachni Queen and Saren, they still had four hundred and twenty combat platforms to deal with any threat at Peak 15.

Attacking Peak 15 from two angles also made sense. It would force the enemy to defend from two fronts, thus weakening them against both thrusts. With their overarching communication and networking advantage, any fight in the valley favored the geth against any conventional forces. Similarly, the company heading inside would be ready with weapons and tactics designed to face the strange human anomaly, whose abilities and skills didn't match any previous data beyond what was tied to the anomaly itself.

Several rocketeers had been redesigned to house water cannons. Paired with pyros, they could produce streams of hot water; the attack that seemed to cause the anomaly some kind of strange physical feedback could be replicated at will. The data the geth had extracted from the complex’s operating system before the female Hated Creator locked down Peak 15’s computers had been most educational in that regard.

Yes, the geth thought they knew what they were doing. Unfortunately for them, they had forgotten two maxims of war. One, in combat, your enemy always gets a vote. And two, the enemy can learn as well.

The geth who landed on the complex’s landing pad spread out quickly, wary of mines or traps being set on the pad itself. Finding none, the geth shifted forward, entering the hallway that served as the first, and only, real defensive line from the landing pad. The geth determined there was a 90% chance the automated defenses would still be the first line of defense, but that the anomaly would be waiting somewhere beyond, ready to either use hit-and-run attacks or hold a single position where close combat was most effective.

Inside, the first fire teams found the lights had been turned off. Even the emergency red lighting was turned off. This didn’t matter at all to the geth. The robotic eye of every platform shifted naturally to compensate for the darkness. Stranger was the fact that the guns had also been turned off and were hanging limply in their stanchions, which was odd. There were also no traps. Scans for explosive devices or reactive chemicals found nothing either.

Logic dictated even so that the guns should still be destroyed, and several normal troopers took a bead on them quickly, firing at each in turn. This pushed more geth units into the hallway, but that risk was acceptable given the lack of traps.

The hallway wasn’t a straight hall for its whole length. It curved into a short spiral, ending in a small sitting room in front of the elevator, with an emergency stairwell next to it. The geth piled in as they went, destroying the guns as they moved in. When they reached the waiting room, over forty of them were packed into the enclosed space of the hall and sitting area combined.

As it moved to the elevator, one of the pyros had just a moment to react when the doors to the elevator shaft opened, and the anomaly came out of the dark. The next second, it was hit so hard its shields failed, the platform lifted off its feet, and it was hurled over the heads of its fellows, where it began to tear apart at the seams from the impact.

The liquid reserves from its flamethrower splattered everywhere, then ignited from sparks coming from the wrecked guns above. Small flickers of flame lit up the darkness of the hallway as blows slammed into several more of them, blasting them backwards even as the rocketeers and infantrymen tried to get a bead on the fast-moving attacker.

The geth had allowed themselves to bunch up too much, and Ranma was in among them before the geth at the rear could get a bead on him. At that point, the only units firing without caring about their fellows were the pyros. But while the fire wasn’t near hot enough to bother the metal platforms, the fire also didn’t bother Ranma at all. Several streams of fire caught him dead on, dousing him from head to toe in flames, yet even Ranma’s clothing didn’t burn, saturated with his ki as it was.

At this point, Ranma’s body was fully healed, his reserves completely filled. He laughed wildly in the dark, his eyes covered by a set of goggles made for him by Tali for this fight, letting him see easily. “Ahahahah, what kind of smith is afraid of fire!? You’re going to have to do better than that, flashlight heads!”

Ranma smashed into one pyro, his hands and feet glowing like tiny furnaces as he called on his ki to heat them until his skin began to glow white. So hot that the metal melted even before his fists made physical contact with geth’s shielding. Even the pyros weren’t immune to that high a temperature.

Three more platforms came apart under Ranma’s attack, then one of the rocketeers shifted, thrusting its recently redesigned arm underneath one of its fellows, taking aim through the darkness and through the crowd of robotic bodies. Water blasted out, a beam of super-pressurized water so hard and so fast that it would probably have broken a normal man’s bones if it had hit.

Its target wasn’t normal, and it didn’t hit, either. Ranma saw it coming and leaped upward, his feet flashing out, smashing the heads off two already-unshielded pyros before he pushed off a geth trooper near the front. Shattering three more heads in an eyeblink, he bounced off the other side of the hallway and down again into the crowd further along.

The water continued on its course, intersecting with a pyro’s attempt to turn Ranma into flambe. Steam instantly filled the corridor, which now actually began to bother the senses of the geth. So much water vapor was released that it coated their sensors with residue. Which most rocketeers and pyros couldn’t wipe away mid-combat.

Another four more geth, troopers this time, died before a bolt of cold water actually hit Ranma, triggering the change, and she grimaced as tingles of pain began going through her.

This wasn’t because of the change. Ranma’s body had recovered even from that portion of the ordeal against Saren, but because of the hot steam filling the corridor. Steam like that wasn’t watery enough to trigger the change outright, thankfully. But it was enough to cause a tingle to go through her body, flickers of pain when Ranma’s body was drenched in cold water, like her whole body was twitching randomly. A very weird thing for Ranma, who had long since mastered her body to a near-inhuman degree, but not dangerous in and of itself.

It was a warning, though, and Ranma decided to heed it. Reaching for her belt, she grabbed up several grenades, tossing them in every direction, before kicking off hard on the chest of one of the rocketeers, hurling herself up and over the heads of the other geth back the way she’d come.

She disappeared into the deeper darkness of the elevator shaft, just as the explosions rocked the area.

The geth’s personal shields reacted to the explosions, faring far better against them than Ranma’s fists, which had blown through their shielding without much effort thanks to her Amaguriken speed. Three punches in one – or three kicks in one - was enough to break the shield and then smash the platform within. But several who had lost their shielding were still shredded.

They’d have been better served to not bunch up like that, Ranma thought, smirking just a little bit from her hiding place. Admittedly, that area didn’t have any kind of cover in it, and if they had fed their troops in piecemeal, I’d have chewed them up even so. But I think I just downed like fourteen of them in one go.

Actually, the number was closer to twenty. Along with the geth that went down thanks to the grenades, others were now dealing with shields that were not working properly any longer, water reservoirs that had been punctured, the pyro equivalent of such and many who were halfway blinded by the water vapor. Still, they shifted forward, calling in more of their fellows. Their losses thus far were acceptable to push back the anomaly.

This, it would turn out, was a false equation.

At the same time that some of the geth peered into the darkened hatch, three troopers moved to the emergency stairwell, opening it only for the door to explode, shredding two of them despite their shielding and hurling the other back into the opposite wall. As the explosion tapered off, two other troopers quickly moved in through the doorway, backing away as a portable automated turret opened up on them from the next landing down.

Realizing that trying to get around the anomaly would cost them still more of their number, the geth declined to split their number further. Squad by squad, the geth moved into the elevator shaft. Soon, the whole force had entered and piled into the shaft, leaving only two dozen in the hallway.

To any normal sentient, moving through a horizontal area like that would’ve been a nightmare. It would have at least taken their legs and one arm out of any fight, but not the geth. They had hover technology built into their legs that let them jump or even slow their descent for short periods, and fingers that could easily claw into metal. So, neither the elevator shaft's horizontal nature nor its darkness bothered them.

Most of the geth entered the shaft, guns ranging from side to side and down, hunting traps more than the anomaly, as this combat zone seemed too dangerous even for the anomaly to willingly fight in. The geth did not pause as they began to pass odd two-by-three squares of metal fused into the side of the shaft. Their purpose was unknown, but they were not dangerous, nor did they hide any trap.

None of the geth were looking up as Ranma came down from above. While the Umi-Sen-Ken worked on the geth and humans, Ranma had also hidden herself by clinging like a gecko to the top of the shaft, right above the entrance. The geth logically assumed Ranma would retreat downward, not fully understanding how at home Ranma was above the ground.

An elevator shaft like this held absolutely no concern for him, especially since it had been prepped for just this kind of fight.

Now, Ranma came down on top of the Geth Prime, the equivalent of the company commander for this prong of the assault, and smashed into it so hard the shield cracked and fizzled out. The next instant, a hook came in from the side, smashing the platform’s head off its shoulders even as it tried to shift forward and throw Ranma off its back and shoulder.

Even as the Prime fell headless through the darkness and nearby troopers turned and fired at him, Ranma kicked off the Prime’s back. Bouncing back up, then off of the rooftop, she came down into his next target. Several troopers had bunched up to one side in a line. Now, most of their bullets missed as her wild dodging threw them. A few rounds still struck fired from several other troopers, only to bounce off of her still makeshift chest plate and skin, causing welts to appear, but that was all before she smashed into the highest of the seven troopers.

Smashing that one, she sent it into the next below it, smashing them off their handholds and into the darkness, taking three others with them. One recovered, her hover boots coming on for a second, while the others continued their crashing descent, smacking into several other geth, but not hard enough to disrupt their handholds.

Bouncing sideways, a series of lightning-fast kicks took the head clean off a rocketeer as Ranma’s hand grabbed another trooper’s outstretched arm right behind where it was holding its gun. Tearing it off its hold on the wall of the shaft, Ranma used it as cover against several other troopers and rocketeers. This time, hot water slammed into her makeshift shield even as Ranma tore out its chest plate, falling through the air for a moment.  It’s easy enough to see which of them have been modified to shoot me with water.  Makes it easier to figure out how to defend myself.

Sensing something to one side more than seeing it, Ranma reached out just in time to grab the edge of one of the small slabs of metal welded to the side of the shaft. Flipping herself underneath it, Ranma clung there for a second, as more fire, water and bullets slammed into the top of it, her previous victims still dropping past her.

“Ahahaha, poor fools,” Ranma exulted, knowing that the geth wouldn’t be rattled by her taunting, but unable to stop herself. “I’m not trapped in here with you, you’re trapped in here with me!” I’ve always wanted to say that line!

With a bright grin, Ranma released her grip on the bottom of the protective plate, dropping down several dozen feet, before she landed lightly on another one, then bounced upwards to another, then another, her movements silent, moving so fast that bullets, blasts of water and even a few rockets missed utterly and she attacked with every few bounces, tearing apart the pyros or rocketeers modified with water-based weapons.

In response, the geth tried to reorganize themselves. The troopers fired in clumps into the darkness below, trying a saturation tactic, while the pyros did the same. The dozen remaining water-armed rocketeers waited, aiming carefully. This worked a little bit better, but they couldn’t bring enough fire to bear on her any longer. Ranma was also too fast and too mobile inside the elevator shaft. Hot water and fire flashed out everywhere, and steam billowed, but still not watery enough to trigger her change back into her normal body, and Ranma was making most of their attacks miss with ease.

“Come on, you metal idiots, at least make this interesting for me.” She cackled, slamming into another trooper. This one didn’t have shielding anymore, and her fist smashed through its chest before Ranma flung her arm sideways, hurling the geth trooper off her forearm. A second later, she bounced across to the other side of the elevator shaft, knee up and crashing into and through the head of the pyro. “Seriously, is this all you sent!? It’s almost insulting.”

Of course, the hundred-plus remaining geth did not reply. Those within the shaft kept trying to kill the anomaly, but those outside, back in the hallway, didn't join the geth already in the elevator shaft. Instead, this group of geth dared the stairwell, only to find the first gun emplacement wasn't alone. Seven died, then four more as they tried to move down the stairwell.

Inside the elevator, Ranma heard the beeping over the comms, signaling the traps had gone off, and cackled. “Hah, door number two ain’t any better, fuckers. Just faster.”

Gunfire and rockets crisscrossed the valley leading to Peak 15. The two hundred-plus geth that had attacked from this angle had run into several traps right off the bat, shredding two dozen of them and stripping others of their shielding and, in the case of leapers, their cloaking.

Tevaine, the leader of the small asari mercenary group called the Surefire Band, and her two more technically inclined fellows were firing at range alongside Garrus. They were moving constantly along a series of interconnected trenches. They weren’t very deep, but were deep enough to provide some cover. Their sniper rifles were strong enough to smash straight through geth shielding, downing or at least severely damaging the geth with each shot.

Meanwhile, the group’s two dedicated commandos, both maidens who had taken the mercenary route early in life, were stationed farther toward where the geth had put their troops down. The pair were separated, hiding in prepared ambush points for when the leapers and troopers that made up the majority of the enemy forces came closer.

Soon, the geth began laying down a heck of a lot of covering fire as they came, though, forcing the three asari and Garrus to keep their heads down as they came on. Tevaine quickly realized that the geth’s unit cohesion was also crazy good. Fire teams fired at different points along the defensive line, while other groups of troopers shifted forward to find and disable traps. Leapers moved around them and closed.

Ducking her head back down, Tevaine concentrated on one portion of her Heads Up Display (HUD). Like the other asari, Garrus and even Tali, some of the prep they’d done for this fight was in the way of clothing, and that included full-face helmets to help against the cold and give them all HUDs.

“Here come the leapers, more on the left flank than the right. They’re punching up there instead of remaining scattered,” she murmured into her pickup. “Tali, trigger trap five. Norany, they’re coming your way. Two of them are already past the traps, with four on their heels.”

“I see them,” Norany murmured, right before she burst out from hiding in a snow drift, her biotics flaring around her cold suit, pushing at the snow in front of her as she charged, washing it over the six leapers. This made them visible an instant before her charge slammed into one of the geth.

The other five fired at her, but Norany’s biotic shield stopped their fire before a pair of biotic powers reached for one of the geth leapers, pulling and pushing in two different directions. The move tore the leaper to pieces, and several Biotic Orbs blasted through the remaining four.

Then she was moving backwards, another biotic shield raised around her as further bullets slammed into her. The sheer weight of fire called down on her from all around caused Norany to grimace, her shield flickering. Dodging to the side, she ducked down into a ditch, its sides carved out of ice. The ice made Norany slip a little as she landed, but that served more to protect her from incoming fire than anything else, even if Tevaine had to bite back a giggle as her fellow asari cursed luridly.

Still, she was a Matron and had long since developed a certain level of immunity to how occasionally childish her team could be, all while concentrating on the data flowing into her HUD. Frankly, I’m astonished that I can find any humor in being this outnumbered, she thought, even as she raised her rifle and fired along with Garrus and her two fellows. Thanks to their concentrating on Norany, the enemy fire had slackened downrange, and they were able to hit several of the geth, putting them down.

Something I put down to preparation, she mused as Tali whooped in the background. That, and our little quarian’s trick to minimize the leapers. It’s so easy and so silly at the same time!

Tali had come up with an easy way to deal with the leaper cloaks, the built-in camouflage system that made them disappear into the background, just like infiltrators across the galaxy. That answer was snow. Not a lot, just tiny flecks through the air of the valley, just enough to occasionally light on the leapers, a physical contact that, while their cloaks could automatically compensate for, could still be detected.

They didn’t even have to wait for actual snowfall. Instead, several of the small munitions that had exploded at the same time as the original trap that had started the battle had simply shot up lots of snow particles into the air of the valley. With that, and drones higher up and hidden in the snow to note any movement, the tactical screen on all the mercenaries' HUD and their two companions could tell where most of the leapers were at any one time.

It wasn’t 100% accurate, but it was close enough that the leapers’ efforts to move on the flanks of the defenders had failed, drawing their fire now. This forced them into cover, before the four shooters were forced to duck and cover again, as the troopers shifted fire to them once more.

As that happened, Tevaine realized several other leapers had closed quickly. She had an instant to shout a warning before Tali found herself faced with three leapers who had somehow masked their presence long enough to get close. “Tali, watch—"

One of them ate a shotgun shell to the face, and Tali ducked back into cover, tossing out a small glowing disc. It fizzled and sizzled, and the two remaining troopers shot at it, destroying it, before Tali was around her cover and firing again, hitting a second leaper in the chest. The larger-than-average mass effect rounds of the shotgun shell, loaded to fire in a quick staccato, burst the geth’s shielding, then punched straight through its carapace.

“Fuck you, bosh’tets!” Tali shrieked as she dove forward. Taking a page out of Ranma’s book, she darted out with her fist, nanites flowing from her omni-tool, shifting into a monomolecular punch dagger that slammed into and through the flashlight-like head of the last leaper.

“…Never mind,” Tevaine muttered. That young lady has problems. “Xan’yata, if you could?”

Two other leapers turned aside from rushing towards Garrus’ position but fell when the other asari commando came out of cover right behind it. “Rip and tear, bastards!”

She reached out and used a Biotic Push and Pull, grabbing at the leaper. One biotic power grabbed the top segment of the platform, the other pulled on the lower body. The result was that the leaper was torn in different directions, a trick, much like Tali’s punch dagger, that had come about thanks to conversations with Ranma about opposing forces, and the fact that pushing and grabbing with biotics was among the easiest things to learn. Using them together like that should have been another step forward, and the Surefire Band commandos had all eagerly trained the trick over the past few days.

Tali and Xan’yata shifted back toward one another on a diagonal, then back further, using as much cover as they could, of which there was quite a bit. Snow, ice, and stone hiding places abounded all around the floor of the valley, while a lot of deeper soft zones of snow ate two geth troopers, burying them and breaking the troopers' attempts to charge forward on the heels of their leaper fellows. More fire forced both into cover, separating them once more, and Xan’yata cursed as her biotic shielding began to flicker. Then she was in cover, breathing a sigh of relief, even as fire flashed over her head.

The geth runtimes were all connected by their own intranet. This gave the geth platforms the phenomenal coordination Tevaine had noticed. Even as the battle outside turned against the defenders, the geth gestalt felt the death of the last of those inside to the anomaly. Many of the runtimes on those platforms were lost before they could escape into the local geth network, which reduced the totality’s ability to think and strategize.

Still, they had more than enough to reach the next logical conclusion.

The battle on the surface could go against the Hated Creator and her allies, but with the battle inside the laboratory lost, any chance to retrieve Saren or the Rachni Queen was gone. With that, logic dictated a switch in priorities. The Queen and their co-worshiper of the ancient AI could not be allowed to fall into the hands of the Citadel Council or its allies.

The frigate, poised just above the skyline, waiting to dive when the prizes were secured, now moved down, its weapon bays opening. Much like its fellow frigate, which was still battling it out with the defenses around Port Hanshan, thanks to not needing to design all the things that biologicals needed on board, a geth frigate like this one had enough firepower to tangle with opponents of a similar weight class, and had room to spare for the ground forces.

With its ground forces neutralized or simply wiped out, it was the frigate’s firepower that came into play now, firing down into Peak 15 and the valley. The fire into the valley smashed new divots and holes in the landscape, but didn’t hit any of the defenders, who were spread out and moving.

Ranma had just finished the last of the geth in her personal playground. Landing on the doorway on the first floor, as it was, she paused in the sitting area for a second when the first shots slammed down. “Okay… that’s loud…”

Peak 15 didn’t have anything like a shield or anything like that, and the fire instantly shattered the landing pad, and the exterior portions of the lab quickly, including that floor’s ceiling. Chunks began crashing down in front of and around Ranma, with a chunk nearly hitting her as she smashed it out of the way.

“Well, somehow I think we should’ve seen this coming,” Ranma grunted as she turned, and, without any preamble, simply dropped down into the elevator shaft again. The roof above her started to come down, coming apart under the onslaught of the ship-grade mass effect rounds crashing down from on high, with several chunks passing her by even in the shaft.

When she reached the fourth floor down, Ranma landed in the doorway leading into the floor, pulling open the doors quickly and ducking inside. There, Ranma took a brief moment to pull out a flask, her hands heating it quickly to warm enough to dump over her head to trigger the change.

Releasing a faint sigh of relief as his armor once more sat on his shoulders and…lack of chest… now far better, Ranma glanced back into the shaft as several chunks of masonry passed him by, crashing deeper down. The lights in front of him and all around were on, and Ranma shook his head. “That’s not going to do much; this complex is too deeply buried in the mountain. The best they could do is maybe cut off Tali and the rest from getting inside or me getting out, I guess. FUCK Tali’s out there… and the others, I guess.”

Grimacing, Ranma raced down through the complex to the floor where they had created a makeshift entryway out onto the floor of the valley after the whole avalanche thing had occurred back when they fought their way in. He was barely outside before the lowest portion of the laboratory began to collapse behind him and he cursed as he rolled through the hardpacked snow.

With the façade of the laboratory destroyed, the guns of the frigate turned on the rest of the valley, where Tali and the others were trying to duck and cover. Even the geth platforms had pulled back, letting their frigate do the job for them.

The frigate’s various runtimes saw the anomaly and shifted priorities for a third time.

Grimacing, Ranma now found himself the center of the ship’s attention, and several mass effect rounds slammed into the ground around him, with one crashing straight into him even as Ranma tried his best to dodge. The shot hit his arm, and Ranma could feel his shoulder breaking under the impact. Immune as he was to normal mass effect rounds, the sheer weight of a mass effect round from a frigate’s guns was enough to hurt like blazes. It broke his collarbone, shoulder and the bones in his arm down to his elbow.

But he could already feel his ki healing kicking in as he dodged sideways in that direction to avoid a follow-on shot. Slugs continued to eat up the snow and smash into the remnants of the exterior portion of Peak 15 around him as Ranma jumped up into the wreckage, bouncing his way upwards. Another round caught him in the back, but his armor held, even as he could feel his bones groaning under the armor from the sheer impact. “Okay, ow, this is going to suck!”

Ducking down, Ranma grabbed up a piece of piping sticking out of the rubble. He pulled it out, his hands glowing as he grabbed the end of it, shaping and sharpening it into a hard point, which he curled up towards the frigate with all his might.

The frigate hadn’t come much closer as it began to fire at the anomaly and the lab, unfortunately, which put it well beyond small arms fire and even out of range of most anti-air fire. By the time Ranma’s spear hit it, it was already near the end of its arc, losing all of its momentum. Even so, the shields came on, and the spear fell away, doing nothing, causing Ranma to growl angrily while he continued to dodge more fire.

On the plus side, they’re not firing at Tali and the others in the valley below any longer. On the minus side… Ranma grunted as another bolt slammed into his back. His armor held again, but the jolt to his spine was anything but pleasant, and he nearly lost his hand to another one that slammed into the dirt right in front of where he’d been about to put a hand down. It’s not like I can do anything about it!

“Hang on, Ranma, I’ve got help on the way!” Tali’s voice came over the unit intercom, which Ranma hadn’t used since the start of the battle. After all, he was on his own and couldn’t interfere with the other half of the fight.

Now though, Tali’s voice was a soothing balm to Ranma’s nerves as he jumped up and over a large chunk of rubble, and into a small hole on the other side, curling into a ball for a moment to avoid further fire from on high. “That’s nice to know, but hurry up, please.”

This worked, but the enemy ship seemed to have realized where he’d gone to ground, and continued to pound the area relentlessly, making Ranma grimace with every shot that crashed into the rubble nearby.

Busy as they were with firing on Ranma, the anomaly having proven to be far too dangerous for even the frigate’s runtimes to want to trifle with, they didn’t realize that Tali was hacking into the local satellites scattered around the planet. The two frigates hadn’t destroyed every satellite in orbit before entering Noveria’s atmosphere, and, indeed, there were twelve hovering over Peak 14, quite close, in terms of orbital movement.

All satellites had station-keeping thrusters on them to maintain their positions where they were in relation to the planet, especially on a planet like this one where the majority of those satellites were owned by separate companies, all of whom wanted them stationed over their own holdings like the ones over Peak 14, and several other labs. Now, she identified the satellites that doubled as weapon satellites, and, ignoring the rest of the battle still ongoing in the valley, hiding as she was, Tali started to shift them from over the nearest four labs to over Peak 15.

She was interrupted by one point as a leaper landed on the curved rock she was using as cover, poking its gun down towards her. Before it fired, Tali raised her punch dagger, stabbing it into the wrist of the geth trooper. The hand holding the gun released as it lost all motor control, and Tali erupted from where she had been crouching, twisting and bringing up her shotgun. “Can’t you see I’m busy!?” she shouted as she fired, the round basically disintegrating the leaper’s head.

Damn it all, those reaction time torture sessions with Ranma really are working. Not that I will EVER tell him. Stupid hunky… Seeing the ongoing fire in the remnants of the lab’s outer areas, Tali grimaced, ducked down and continued her work.

At the same time, the rest of the geth pushed in again, forcing Garrus and the asari mercenaries to turn their attention from hiding from the frigate to fighting them. Two more times, leapers moved toward Tali as the distant thunder of overhead fire slammed down into the remains of the peak’s outermost territories.

Within seconds, the troopers were hit by Garrus from long-range, putting one of them down easily, while the other one was still able to fire toward Tali’s position, if not actually hit her. “Keep working Tali, if you can’t do anything about that frigate, we’re all going to die. So much for them wanting to take the place back!”

“We should have thought they might pull this,” Tevaine grunted as she fired at a leaper with her spare pistol as it closed in on her position. A full burst from her rifle downed its shields, and Tevaine was then ducking back into cover, grunting as her biotic shield flared under the impact of dozens of bullets.

At this point, one of the asari commandos was retreating, her leg almost lame. Norany had blocked the bullets, but sharp ice was still enough to punch through clothing and skin alike.

Xan’yata was down now. She had been forced to retreat desperately when a rocket had crashed into her biotic shielding from the side, even as she had been forced to shield herself from fire from on high, one of the frigate’s guns having gotten far too close to making her into a smear on the snow.

Several of those troopers fell, torn apart by her biotics, but Xan’yata was basically stuck in place until someone could get her medical attention. Half of her body had been seared from the explosion of the rocket, and one of her arms was badly punctured with shrapnel. Thankfully, one of the techs was able to reach her and provide some medical attention, and she wasn’t in danger of dying anytime soon except perhaps from hypothermia. But even without the frigate getting involved in their side of the fight, the pair were stuck where they were for now, too much fire coming from all around them.

Tevaine and Garrus pushed forward to engage more closely and hopefully pull some of the geth away from the wounded. Only the final tech, Lisandra, stayed at long-range, firing at any geth she could range on.

Most of the leapers were gone, but at least eighty troopers were remaining by this point, their numbers hard to pin down thanks to the swirling snow and their own movements. Despite their numbers, Garrus kept up steady suppressive fire on a few troopers, letting Tevaine reach Norany.

The two of them moved forward as one, cutting across the makeshift line that the troopers had tried to maintain across the valley, isolating six of them and tearing them apart with biotics, before turning and forcing the troopers to turn to face them. This opened them up to more of Garrus and Lisandra’s fire as the turian closed with them, and nine more fell.

Watching all this on one portion of her HUD as she worked with the satellites, Tali had to think this part of the battle was going about as well as it could. Prep time and more biotics on our side have made all the difference, she thought, and now I’m going to finish it! she thought, a surge of vindictive, perhaps even wrathful pleasure going through her at once more striking a blow against the destroyers of her people, a blow all out of proportion in comparison to the effort she was putting into and what it would cost the geth. “Take this, you floating piece of vot!”

With that cry, Tali finished the final commands, and the satellites, placed to defend the planet, or at least their specific companies’ interests on it, from invaders, turned one last time. They shifted into the new position, then, as the satellites canceled their movement with the last of their onboard fuel, they began firing down into the atmosphere towards the frigate.

Reentry robbed those shots of their striking power, but enough of them still crashed down from on high into the frigate to cause its shields to shimmer. This forced the controlling runtimes to redirect more energy from other areas into them.

With several of the guns now silent, Ranma rolled out from where he had been hiding, his body shaking from the aftereffects of the bombardment even as he grabbed at a giant chunk of concrete or whatever it was the locals used instead. Twisting around, Ranma hurled it up into the bottom of the frigate.

Again, the throw hit just as the rock was about to lose its fight with gravity and had little momentum. However, with the shielding diverted to the back of the frigate, its belly was without any shielding at all. The hit caused the frigate to twitch but that was all.

“Well, if all I need is to get closer, then…” With that, Ranma raced upwards through the wreckage, then up and onto the mountain behind Peak 15, leaving behind the battered, pockmarked landing pad as he began to climb up the mountainside there. No one else could have possibly climbed that slope anywhere as quick, but with his hands still glowing, Ranma carved stone handholds for himself, melting the snow and ice alike with ease.

Ranma continued upward as the frigate tried to evade the incoming fire, shifting this way and that; its logic centers turned entirely to self-preservation. It even began to ascend as it evaded, trying to head up into the atmosphere, perhaps to deal with the encroaching satellites, before coming back down. However, round after round crashed into the frigate. The geth were caught in a position no ship, no matter how durable, wanted: at the bottom of a gravity well, with shooters from on high.

Those satellites didn’t have many guns; in fact, only one each. Yet they had ammunition to spare, and frigates like this were pretty much what they were designed to defend against. Soon, the frigate’s shielding began to fail. Better yet, the geth had completely shifted their attention.

Grinning, Ranma decided he was close enough, even as the geth ship tried to rise through the air. Grabbing a chunk of rock, he tore it from the mountainside and hurled it upward. This time, he’d used a smaller rock, only two fists across, going for more momentum than impact. It worked, and from this high an angle, it hit with more force than it had below.

The rock didn’t punch straight through, but it got close, and the geth, ever logical, quickly redistributed the energy they were putting into their shields, only to realize their error too late. As with their attack on Peak 15, splitting their attention like this simply allowed the geth to face defeat in detail.

Shots crashed into shields now badly weakened, and began to punch through from on high. The next second, another hurled rock from Ranma smashed into the frigate’s aft portions, and one of its engines cut off.

This caused the ship to lose altitude quickly, and it twisted, trying to bring its guns to bear on Ranma, having had no chance to fire at the satellites. It simply couldn't get shots into orbit. The satellite fire started to tear chunks out of the ship, and the geth runtimes began to lose control of their physical platform.

Ranma kept up his own attack, the rocks slamming home into a ship that now had no shielding, and knowing where to aim now, it only took four more tries before a rock tore into and through the frigate’s last remaining engine. With that gone, it began a very, very rapid descent. Without mass effect technology keeping it afloat, the frigate was just a very attractive brick.

It crashed half in and half on the side of one of the mountains surrounding the valley, triggering a miniature avalanche, but by then Garrus and the others had reached the wounded asari and raced to the other side of the valley, away from the avalanche. There, they huddled in a few of the ditches they’d prepared for this fight, tremulously looking up into the mountains, hoping that the noise of that impact wouldn’t set off further troubles.

It did, but thankfully, the mountains around the valley hadn’t had enough time to really build up enough snow on their sides to make another deadly avalanche out of it. While a goodly portion of the side of the valley where the frigate crashed down was once again covered by several feet of stone and rock from that angle, the other side was mostly safe.

Even better for the attackers, the avalanche smashed dozens of the remaining troopers on the valley's right side. At that point, Tevaine left Norany and charged in, with Tali joining her a moment later, turning some of her drones into suicide bombers, which took out several of the troopers. Within moments, the last of the geth fell to one of Garrus’ rifle bursts.

“All troops, keep an eye out for any surviving geth. We’ll also want to wait until that ship either explodes or the fires stop before investigating,” Tevaine ordered.

“In the words of my human friend, duh. My Father didn’t raise an idiot,” Garrus snarked.

By the time Ranma reached them, the others had stabilized the wounded asari, and he took over, carrying her back to the wreckage of the peak and sweeping her up into a princess carry, ignoring her slight hiss of pain. “Sorry, but I figured that getting you undercover is a better idea than being gentle right now.”

“How are we going to get undercover? The whole façade of the lab is gone,” Tevaine grumbled.

“Cover is what you make of it. That rubble can be made into a makeshift shelter easily enough.” Garrus shook his head. “And I’m sure Ranma can do something about the rubble and get us back inside given enough time.”

“I think I can help with that,” one of the techs said, staring thoughtfully at the rubble as they moved through the valley at a brisk pace. Tevaine and Garrus were helping the wounded asari with a wrecked leg, something they were having trouble with in the snow, while Ranma carried the other one like she weighed less than a feather. “I followed a few construction majors, and we all downloaded a map of Peak 15 soon after arriving. Getting in should be easy enough; repairing the damage will be much harder, but it’s still doable.”

“Fine. I don’t know about you, but even with all of our suits insulated against the cold, it isn’t exactly pleasant out here,” Tevaine muttered.

Given the fact that Tali’s was the only suit that hadn’t been punctured, and thus letting in the cold, that won a round of grumbling agreement, while Ranma simply smirked. He might have muttered a joke about the asari being weaklings, but Tali elbowed him, and the group continued back to the wreckage of the lab in relative silence, enjoying the hard-fought victory.

OOOOOOO

As the cleanup operation began on Peak 15, the assault on Port Hanshan was still ongoing. The frigate was still fighting, still moving to avoid incoming fire and dish out plenty of its own, having the high ground against Port Hanshan’s defenses in a way that its fellow became all too familiar with once Tali redirected to the defensive satellites to his position.

The geth’s land-based assault, however, was now being beaten back. The locals were not nearly as well-trained or prepared as the group at Peak 15, though, and the snow and ice ran red with the defenders' blood. Six hundred Elanus Risk Control Services (ERCS) faced off against around two hundred geth platforms, dying in the snow around the various entrances into the buried capital. Those land-based attackers had already knocked out several of the larger guns and many of the smaller ones, but were now being ground down by the weight of numbers.

Suddenly, the frigate shifted away from its assault, heading upwards as if to break off the engagement entirely. This was when the other frigate began to come under attack from the satellites Tali had brought together.

This, however, simply let the port's guns hammer home into its shielding from a different angle. Its shielding began to fail, and the ship finally began to come apart. A few guns hit the engines on the frigate, slowing it down, just as one of the outer hatches leading into Port Hanshan opened. From out of it came a commercial freighter, which instantly went to maximum lift, shooting past the beleaguered frigate.

For a moment both sides paused, as if wondering what this was about, the frigate turning to bring its guns to bear on the new ship, thinking it might be some kind of attack. Yet the freighter kept on moving, blasting up through the atmosphere as fast as its surprisingly capable engines could take it.

More shots struck home into the frigate’s shielding, and a second later, its engine exploded. A good chunk of its aft area simply came apart, dumping the rest of it down into the snow of the mountains around Port Hanshan.

The fight on the surface would continue. Unable to escape or achieve their objective, the geth would sell their platforms' lives dearly, with most of their runtimes able to escape to the galactic intranet. However, inside Port Hanshan, well, time was money. The emergency alarms that had blared throughout the planet’s sole city began to quiet, and Elanus Risk Control Services began sharing reports with the populace even as most of their troops, and, indeed, most private security from the various corporations, continued to fight the geth outside.

Not that their employees' lives mattered much to the various administrators and so forth. Indeed, hearing that the battle had been won, several of the companies quickly began to bid on which of them would take ownership of the remnants from the battlefield, with the remnants of the frigate being uppermost in many of their minds. Several of the companies that made up the oligarchy of Noveria were involved in ship construction and design and had been watching what they could of the battle via the exterior sensors avidly.

Over the next few hours, tourists were slowly allowed out of their hotels throughout the city, and some businesses began to return to some semblance of normality. No one was allowed to leave just yet, particularly after news of the freighter’s flight came around, but for the most part, the city started to return to normal.

Several hours later, as the battle outside finally began to die down, the various companies that had holdings on Noveria. They were in no way a ruling body. The Noveria Development Corporation (NDC) was closest to such, but once they loaned or sold out the various facilities scattered around the world, they had no say in what went on there. Here in Port Hanshan, that was different, of course: ERCS kept the peace, and the Administrator handled the day-to-day running of the city, dealing with the various corporations, the civilians, and the offworlders.

Of course, thanks to Lorik, the previous Administrator, Bel Anoleis, was gone now. His removal had also neatly created the first layer of defense between NDC and whatever treason was going on out at Peak 15, but Anoleis still hadn't been replaced. Hence why there was a meeting going on right now rather than one voice giving orders or taking requests.

Lorik, as head of Synthetic Insights, received one such missive. He’d been fighting the urge to head outside and help with the defense of the capital, along with several other turians, but had not given in to the urge. Instead, he had simply watched, bemoaning the loss of life from the Elanus Risk Control Services being so unprofessional, but also avidly making notes to pass on to his government about how the geth fought.

Now, moving through the empty hallway save for first responders rushing out to help the wounded, Lorik still felt a little off. “I suppose I’m not so far out of my mandatory time in the army as I thought,” he mumbled to himself, even as he inputted a security code to let him into a special set of rooms that was used by NDC for when they wanted in-person meetings with the various corporations they had sold lab space to.

Stepping through that area, he found himself in a small waiting room, where he grabbed a cup of his people’s version of coffee. It wasn’t quite as good as human coffee, but it was dextro-based rather than levo-based, and it had a kick and better flavor to boot.

“I don’t know why I’m part of this meeting,” he said, looking around at the others in the room. Several asari, one other turian, two humans, four volus and one hanar were there. The volus were probably representing the Noveria Development Corporation as a whole until they settled on a single Administrator to run Port Hanshan. The others represented the various corporations that had bought space in labs around the globe.

Some were mere representatives on the planet for larger, galaxy-spanning corporations, while others were simply part of the port authority itself. “I’m certainly not going to be bidding on any of the leftovers from the geth. Given what my company is involved in, that feels like a very bad idea. Given the legality of it and the politics, as it would certainly draw many an eye to Synthetic Insights, that kind of thing seems to be a… what is that human phrase?”

“White elephant? Trojan horse?” the human woman said, running a hand through her dark gray hair, her eyes locked on one of the asari speculatively, who seemed to be vibrating in place with fury. “One could mean a gift that you would have to bankrupt yourself to do anything with. The other means that it looks like a good deal, but something is hidden inside. Take your pick.”

“The second more than the first, I think. Does anyone know what happened on Floor Seven? I had to pass through there, and it looked as if it was a war zone. Did a few of geth infiltrators get through somehow?”

The asari who looked so furious stiffened at his words, and she growled out, the sound cutting through the rest of the background conversations and drawing everyone’s attention to her. “That is actually why I am here. While a part of me is here also to bid on some of the geth material, I am here to demand justice.”

“What did I miss?” Lorik asked hesitantly, bowing his head in apology towards the woman.

One of the little critters spoke up, his voice interrupted by the typical hiss of his gas mask at intervals. “fwoosh We have kept it off of the local intranet fwoosh for now, but we have already fwoosh pulled all of the subsequent security footage of an fwoosh assault on Wisdom Obscura laboratory here in the fwoosh capital.”

Lorik blinked, going through his mind what he knew of Wisdom Obscura holdings here directly in Port Hanshan. As Wisdom Obscura was one of only four corporations throughout the galaxy that, like his own Synthetic Insights, was allowed to legally look into AI, that was quite a bit.

Chief Consul Yaorania Ledaqua, more of an organizer and pencil pusher, as the humans call it, than anything else. Runs a tight ship, harsh, fair, but very much more of a bottom-line kind of person rather than a scientist. Married. Doesn’t like surprises or bloodshed. Wisdom Obscura is known to pursue many different experiments at once, including in AI, but they also have a very harsh cutoff when projects have to yield actual results. They pay very well and offer tenure quickly. Good place to work, with a very loyal workforce, but they can be harsh if they think a project is wasting money and time. Very involved with ship construction and operating system work across Asari Space, and successfully designed several virtual intelligences in the past.

“You back up all your data here from your laboratory, don’t you? It’s just a repository, not an actual laboratory, at least, that is what is publicly known.”

“What is publicly known is actually a little false on that score. While we use our laboratory for a lot of our large-scale experiments, and most of our more sensitive experiments, we use the laboratory here for several other small-scale experiments, ones that are either in the final stage of completion, have to be closely monitored, or we wish to keep separate from the rest of our business here on Noveria for various reasons, ranging from the scientists involved in this new project being at odds with others out at our main labs, to specific requests from the buyer for whatever project we’re working on.”

“I didn’t know that,” Lorik said, frowning a little. “What exactly happened?”

“We don’t know precisely just yet. All the interior video cameras that might have told us what occurred were turned off or taken over by the attackers,” another asari said crisply, her tones sharp but harried, and she looked as if she would rather be anywhere but there right now. “What we do know, and what I was called away with dealing with my wounded to tell you, is there were several doctors and assistants who had taken refuge there during this crisis. All of them are dead now. All of the equipment, all of the computers, the data cores, gone.”

“They were able to smash in, kill everyone involved, and get out to that freighter that escaped in the confusion,” Yaorania growled, glaring at the other asari. “Without the defenses even trying to hit them!”

“Because we had the damned geth frigate still pounding our defenses like a maiden on a human space station when a military ship comes in for shore leave,” the ERCS rep growled back. “Don’t blame us for not being able to split our attention between one escaping ship and the enemy that was killing our people! Give us time, and we might know who was really behind this, but just trying to shout and demand answers now is stupid and childish.”

As two of the volus tried to play peacemaker before biotics flared, Lorik stepped back, frowning pensively. He had wondered what was going on with the freighter when he’d seen that in the video cameras covering the battle, but hadn’t really concentrated all that much. Instead, he’d been concentrating more on the land-based portion, where the geth troopers and so forth had proven to be far more than a match for the defenders despite being heavily outnumbered.

That was actually underselling it to a tremendous degree in Lorik’s mind. For the first hour and a half of the battle, well after the frigate had been dealt with, the geth had gone through the defenders like a hot knife through butter. But in this case, the hot knife was more like a needle compared to a whole cubic foot of butter. It went in, but then the butter melted all over the needle, eventually covering it.

Lorik’s thoughts paused for a second as he realized the line that had just passed through his mind. All right, maybe people do have a point about some of my analogies being a bit too wordy.

Once the volus and the others had pushed the two feuding asari apart, he coughed delicately. “Ahem, do we know anything about the ship in question?”

“Fwoosh Someone tried to release a virus that would erase all Fwoosh the data about the ship, but Fwoosh primed to stop further geth intrusion, Fwoosh our computer programmers were able to Fwoosh stop that from succeeding. We Fwoosh have the name of the ship, and Fwoosh all the information that the crew Fwoosh provided upon arrival.”

“Not that their cover story matters much. The name and everything else are probably fake too. The geth have been planning this assault for some time, perhaps as long as they have been… doing whatever they have been out at Peak 15,” Yaorania grumbled. “Yet, it could be a starting point.

“How could the geth have figured out that you had anything worth such effort? Or was this a mission of opportunity?” Rafael, the local speaker for Binary Helix who Ranma had tried to lightly torture for his company’s crimes on rice, muttered. “Could there still be geth runtimes in the city’s operating system? But… if so, why wouldn’t they have shut down our power grid?”

The sole hanar spoke up, his tentacles flicking around him in agitation. “While it is perhaps possible, it is not very likely for the reason you mentioned and more. Synthetic Insight’s laboratory, much like the other smaller laboratories here in Port Hanshan, is all on separate servers. They could not connect to the rest of Port Hanshan’s operating system and intranet even if they wanted to most of the time. The Enkindlers know there’s no security like that which can’t be overcome, but it is very doubtful. The timing of it points to it being the geth, certainly, but they must’ve discovered whatever you are working on in there via other means.”

“Or whoever wanted it decided to use the presence of the geth to their advantage,” Lorik mused, understanding the point his fellow turian was trying to make.

The asari representative for Wisdom Obscura growled angrily. “Regardless, someone, the geth or someone else, just committed corporate espionage. What is this planet and its ruling body going to do about it?”

The asari who had not spoken up just yet shook her head, while the other turian snorted. “Absolutely nothing. Corporate espionage on Noveria is one thing. You would be well within your rights to demand repudiation, to demand action, and under normal circumstances NDC could grant it. These are not normal circumstances.”

“The vast majority of our security force is dead or wounded,” The asari rep for Elanus Risk Control services stated bluntly, pointing to a video feed along one wall that showed the cleanup efforts that had just begun outside. “We might not have been able to force the issue if whoever is behind this assault on your lab stayed on the planet! As it is, with that freighter having gotten up and into the atmosphere and then out to space, they’re gone. Out of our jurisdiction entirely.”

“And Noveria is itself entirely out of the jurisdiction of the Council,” the third asari finally spoke up now, shaking her head. “Of course, that can’t stop you from putting together your own team and sending them out after this freighter, but figuring out how to track it, and so forth? Well, that would be up to the mercenaries that you hire or your own security force if you think they’re up to the task.”

“Considering that the only two guards that we retained after the port authority used that authority to pull in all the separate security forces to help against the geth invasion, and didn’t seem to put up much of a fight given the video of the sight I’ve seen, I don’t think that’s likely,” the rep for Wisdom Obscura growled.

“Fwoosh I still think the timing indicates that the geth Fwoosh were behind it rather than someone taking advantage Fwoosh of them. It’s the simplest assumption, Fwoosh and whoever is behind it would need to be Fwoosh able to think very quickly on their feet, Fwoosh something most sentients cannot do well,” one of the volus who had been quiet up to this point stated. “Fwoosh if that’s the case, perhaps we should ask the group out at Peak 15 for help? Fwoosh Not the mercenaries that Matriarch Benezia’s money Fwoosh brought in to help hold Peak 15 against the geth, Fwoosh but the originals.”

“Yes,” Yaorania hissed. “They should be made to pay for something, either remuneration to the entire planet, or, at the very least, for the dead that their actions caused by calling the wrath of the geth down on our planet.”

While part of Lorik wanted to point out the double standards inherent in that sentiment, given how much all of them had looked the other way when it came to what Binary Helix had been up to out at Peak 15 and trying to avoid any responsibility for it, the rest of the group remained silent, shaking heads slightly and he sighed faintly.

“Fwoosh Regardless of what happened to Wisdom Obscura, Fwoosh this body can’t do anything about it, not unless we Fwoosh want to go to the Council for aid,” another volus, not the one who had been speaking up to this point, interjected. “Fwoosh You are welcome to reach out to the group operating Fwoosh under Matriarch Benezia’s auspices if you wish, but we have Fwoosh no stake in this.”

Yaorania growled, but nodded, understanding the other woman’s point. “Fine.” She looked over at Lorik, who blinked, then sighed, realizing there was no point in trying to hide the fact he had worked with those three in the past. “Lorik, do you think you can get me in touch with that group?”

I don’t want to, but I don’t want the geth or whoever it is to get their hands on whatever Wisdom Obscura was working on. If they wanted it enough to kill so many people, then it must be important. And if I help, perhaps I can learn what it is, too. “Very well, I can do that. I suppose we can step aside into one of the other conference rooms here, or head back to my office to do so.”

“We don’t know if they even survived the assault on Peak 15,” Yaorania grunted, shaking her head. “There’s only what, five mercenaries in Surefire Band and those three, right?”

“Those three, as you put it, took Peak 15 from the geth and their Spectre accomplice. I wouldn’t put anything past them,” Lorik stated firmly. “The human especially has a lot of tricks up his sleeve.”

At that, the others all shrugged and turned their attention to what they thought of as more important. As Yaorania and Lorik walked through the door, the last thing either heard was one of the volus saying, “Fwoosh Well, with that out of the way, we Fwoosh will start the bidding for the frigate at…”

OOOOOOO

Ranma and the others were still outside at the time the battle around Port Hanshan finally began to come to a halt. Well, not all of them, thankfully. They’d reopened the entryway and gotten the two wounded asari inside to the medical area. Tevaine and Garrus had even taken the opportunity to check on the various prisoners. The other two unwounded asari went to get more winter clothing before rejoining Ranma and Tali outside.

The prisoners were still an odd mix of insanity and lack of emotion. Many of them had attempted to escape again during the commotion, but the various ropes and hatchets had them injure themselves further. That level of fanaticism still bothered Ranma, Garrus and Tali a lot, and Tevaine and her fellow asari became even more disturbed when they saw evidence of the prisoners hurting themselves in their efforts to escape. Between Garrus and Tevaine they gave the prisoners what medical attention they could, making certain that they couldn’t break out again.

Nolany and Xan’yata were fine in the medical wing. Xan’yata’s burns had taken a lot of the asari group’s medi-gel to heal, but they were both going to pull through their injuries.

Repairs to the outside of the lab began, with Ranma doing the lion’s share of the repair work going on, but true to her word, the asari who had said she’d followed construction and design was actually quite up to helping. Or at least, as Tali put it, “pointing and planning.” The other tech was happy enough to have some more exercises to do with her biotics that didn’t get her shot at.

For her part, Tali was busy moving around the battlefield. Once the fires in the crashed frigate had stopped, she had headed that way pretty promptly, hoping to find the frigate’s computer core. Unfortunately, it had been so badly damaged in the crash that there was nothing even Tali could do about it. With that avenue of inquiry closed, Tali moved around the valley delicately, her remaining small drones hovering protectively around her in every direction. Even so, she nearly lost footing in soft snow, but she was able to scramble her way out without calling for help. In her opinion, that would have been incredibly embarrassing.

When the call from Port Hanshan came in, it was Garrus who answered the call, blinking in surprise as it came through. That meant that the local network was back up, and he was pleased to see it, having watched it go down as the geth were forced to reveal themselves in orbit. They’d smashed several of the communication satellites out of space even as they headed into the atmosphere.

“Representative Lorik. I won’t bother with niceties after the day I’m certain both us and Port Hanshan have had. I take it you beat the geth off as well? The last information we had from the communication satellites was one of them breaking off their attack on us here at Peak 15 and heading your way when you opened fire on them,” Garrus observed.

“Good to know that you acknowledge the debt there,” an unseen female voice growled.

“Debt? Are you talking about your debt to all Council Space for not knowing the geth were operating on your planet?” Garrus shot back. “The whole corporate world being outside Council Law can only be taken so far when talking about treason against all living sentients!”

“Please, let me at least handle the introductions as you asked me to, Yaorania,” Lorik hissed as an aside, before turning back to Garrus and also dispensing with any nicety. “We were attacked as well, but we think that assault was actually planned out ahead of time. An incident within Port Hanshan itself occurred at the same time. That’s why we’re calling.”

He went on to explain what happened with the pickup changing and shifting to show Yaorania, an asari Lorik introduced as his equal in the company, so he attacked. Garrus listened intently, his training from his father coming to the fore for a moment as he asked to see some of the video recordings. These were very few and far between, as whoever had attacked Wisdom Obscura’s lab had dealt with the various cameras in Port Hanshan quickly and efficiently. To Garrus, as to the locals, this again pointed to the geth, even if the locals had done what they could to remove any geth runtimes operating within Port Hanshan’s computer network.

Beyond that, the videos of what actually happened to the lab were very bloody. Too bloody, almost. This… this feels more emotional than I would expect even geth leapers to be, Garrus thought, staring at the image. There, at least three dozen asari and human bodies lay scattered around a computer lab, their bodies caked with blood, which was liberally painted everywhere.

Beyond the doorway leading into the laboratory, there was no sign the scientists tried to fight back, only hide. Worse, the two guards there had barely had time to activate their biotics before they fell. That also spoke to the attackers' technical expertise. They had deactivated any warning system that the door had been hacked, or that it was about to open.

The fact that the rest of the scientists had fallen quickly afterwards was, in Garrus’s point of view, a return to normality after having to once more deal with the scientists of Peak 15 trying to break out of their cuffs. So at least whatever had happened here, supposedly thanks to the odd metal Tali and Ranma had found, wasn’t being somehow replicated in Wisdom Obscura for whatever reason.

“This does look like a serious incident, the kind that you should probably take to the Citadel Council, or at least the local government, right?” Garrus said, needling the two reps. Yaorania stiffened at that, but Lorik took it in good stride, chuckling along with Garrus as the younger turian continued. “Still, setting aside my attempt at humor, if this group has already escaped the planet, I’m not sure what you want us to do about it.”

It could be geth, for certain, but I don’t know. This scene feels off for coming from the geth. This scene, the number of bullets used on each scientist… it’s excessive. Whoever did this enjoyed it. The geth don’t enjoy violence, or at least I haven’t seen any sign they do. It’s just something they must do.

“We want you to go after them. We’ve got details on the ship; it’s been sitting in the port for weeks now. We’ve got all the information tied to it: the various bank accounts used to pay for the space, the ports of call and so forth. It’s a starting point, and you three have already proven that you’re able to follow a scent,” Yaorania explained.

Garrus frowned at that. “Let me call in my two companions.”

Outside, Tali had moved over to where Ranma was working, laying out several computer cores she'd pulled from various geth platforms and comparing the data she got from them one after another. However, even as she was doing that, her eyes flitted over to Ranma inside her helmet, who, despite the visor between them, could feel her gaze on him easily. “Oy, stop that. I can feel you looking at me through those glowing eyes of yours. I didn’t do anything.”

“You don’t stop her from flirting with you either,” Tali growled.

“Hey, I’m still a little slow about that kind of thing,” Ranma protested, adding mentally, even after Usagi and everything else. Frankly, she’s helped me more in getting used to the whole intimacy thing than figuring out who is flirting with me, and even then it’s a hot jump to figuring out if they’re flirting with me just to have fun in the moment, or actually serious about it. “Besides, you know maidens like that on my type, too flighty.”

“Huh? But you like flying?” Tali said, trying to sound confused as she turned to look Ranma head-on.

Ranma’s expression shifted, his brows furrowing, caught between groaning at her pun and confusion because he knew that Tali was better at euphemisms and so forth than that. Seeing his confusion, Tali couldn’t hold it in any longer, letting loose a giggle. “I’m just messing with you, Ranma. It was actually kind of… Nice seeing how quickly you moved over to start helping me with these when I asked.”

Even nicer was the face that Asari made when you completely ignored her to do it. Take that, you, you bimbo! Tali thought hotly. I know I’m going to have to get used to having some asari around when we finally make it to Ranma’s ship, this Usagi character for certain, and the pilot as well, I think, from what Ranma said, but even so, that’s a far cry from being, well, used to how they act around Ranma sometimes.

Precisely why she didn’t like seeing other people flirt with Ranma was something Tali wasn’t going to think about too much, nor was Ranma going to bring it up. Their emotional connection was still a little too fragile to say things like that outright, let alone label it.

“Hahahaha, you’re so funny… I’m going to tickle you now,” Ranma declared, holding up his hands, his fingers wriggling, beginning to glow a little reddish for a moment with heat since he knew Tali enjoyed the feel of heat through her suit.

Tali backed away quickly, though part of her actually looked forward to it. Even if tickling wasn’t the most pleasant sensation, it was almost like directly touching skin to skin. While weird, as tickling very much wasn’t something the quarians of the Migrant Fleet went into, feeling anything like that was really nice.

Before Ranma could make good his threat, Garrus came out from the tunnel through the debris they’d made earlier, waving his omni-tool’s communications screen above his head for a second. “Hey you two, get over here. The local powers that be have a demand.”

“A demand? I don’t do well with those,” Ranma retorted mildly, even as he and Tali made their way over to their friend. “Still, we should at least hear them out.”

While a part of him knew the locals really only had themselves to blame for the whole geth thing, and further, knew he hadn’t asked them to fire at the frigates, they had still been attacked. Attacked by geth sent to Noveria to try and take back the prisoners that Ranma and his friend had taken. So in a way, Ranma felt guilty about the assault on Port Hanshan. “How did the attack on Port Hanshan go?”

“Poorly,” Lorik admitted. “Eranus Risk Control Services is not a military unit. They are a police force with more guns. The geth brutalized them. We won, but there was far more loss of life than there should have been.”

From there, Lorik and Yaorania described what had happened. When describing the battle outside, Yaorania emphasized how many people have been lost there; then, as the tale turned to his company’s lab, he began to show the same images he had shown Garrus moments before.

While a lot of that tugged at Ranma’s heart, Yaorania was being a bit too blunt, and, like Garrus, Ranma could tell there was something off about the images. These men and women, they died to multiple gunshots each. Not just a single shot or a double tap. But they weren’t fighting back. These scientists were hiding. Hell, two of them had their hands over their heads when they died! Why would geth use so many bullets to shoot people who weren’t any threat? Even being in a hurry isn’t enough to explain that, not with robotic reflexes.

No, this was someone else, Ranma decided. It was a gut feeling, but Ranma had gone along with his gut a lot over the years, and only a third of them had to deal with filling it. Someone wanted whatever was in that lab and was more than willing to kill for it, they enjoyed it. Fuck… that Cerberus guy. Could he have been behind this?

While Ranma felt a bit more guilt, wondering if he and his friends could have stopped this by taking out the guy who'd attacked them at the hotel, Tali was taking in the lab as well. In her case, though, she focused on the remnants of the equipment that had also been stolen.

“What did they steal? If it’s geth, it must’ve been something big for them to have infiltrated a force into Port Hanshan like you’re describing with this freighter. They even sacrificed the whole frigate to get it out whatever it was.”

“That’s classified. You don’t need to know what the geth have stolen, just know that they stole it,” Yaorania stated firmly.

Despite his feeling of guilt coming from two different directions, that got Ranma’s back up something fierce. “Yeah, no. I’m not going after anything I don’t know about, and I’m not sure this is something we should be doing anyway.” I might be sad about the dead in that lab, and second-guessing myself for letting the Cerberus guy go, but we don’t even know he was behind it.

“You owe us, you—" the asari began, but Ranma cut her off, being very pointedly rude.

“We don’t owe you anything! You lot’re the ones who didn’t even know the geth were here. Don’t blame us for finding them and trying to clear up your problems before they get so big the Council finds out. I ain’t even saying we won’t go after it, but I think we have a right to know what we’re going after.

“…” The asari scowled at that, but said nothing, looking aside. Ranma simply crossed his arms, then began to hum the background noise to jeopardy just loud enough for Garrus’ omni-tool to pick it up.

Watching all this Tali just shook her head. Anything Goes Make Them Mad, Make Them Stupid technique. First that little speech with his accent, then that noise, heck, its bothering even me!  Ranma really does have annoying people down to an art form.

Garrus, deciding to be the good cop - in a way - interjected. “Ranma, if she doesn’t want to tell us, she doesn’t have to. You obviously also don’t need to help. That’s your prerogative as well. In that case, we should end this conversation amicably and wish Miss Yaorania luck in finding whoever is behind this incident.”

“Whoever is… it was the geth!” Yaorania declared.

“I’m sorry, but not from what I saw,” Garrus said, keeping his tone almost apologetic. “The geth would have been far tidier, no offense. I would think it was another corporation, but obviously not one here on Noveria.”

“Or just plain old pirates. Then again, if so, they’ll be long gone by the time we can go after them,” Ranma added. “And there’s no way to track a ship once it’s changed its transponder and everything, right?”

Scowling, Tali glanced at the pair, worrying that they would really let the geth get away with this. To her mind, the idea that the attack wasn’t done by the geth was just silly.

Yaorania went pale, her frills changing color on top of her head, then she took a deep breath. “It must have been the geth, and if it is, you all, especially your little quarian tagalong, should be very worried,” she nearly snarled. “Our laboratory here in Port Hanshan is an offshoot of one of the ones out at Peak 3. One of them is pursuing a new avenue: creating artificial intelligence by mapping a sentient’s mind and digitally recording it. We’ve made massive inroads in logistical output centers, dozens of patents that allow faster input, and more! I’m certain I don’t need to tell you what the geth could do with all that!”

While Tali stiffened, Garrus hissed in annoyance. “I knew that Wisdom Obscura was allowed to look into artificial intelligence, but hearing it is something else entirely. It makes me feel nervous.”

“It makes me feel wrathful!” Tali interjected tartly.

“Alright, that does sound like something we might be willing to go after,” Ranma agreed, his tone no longer confrontational or dismissive.  He’d gotten what he’d wanted to out of this conversation. Although that mapping thing… that, that sounds like a sci-fi thing if ever I heard one. I wonder…

Tali looked at him, her unseen lips shifting into a frown as she detected something in Ranma’s voice. Something more concerned than worried, although she wasn’t certain what the difference was.

“But we can’t go after them quickly. We need to wait until Matriarch Benezia arrives,” Ranma continued.

“That’s unacceptable!” the asari on the other end of the line growled out. “You need to go after them now, before the trail gets cold.”

“Complain to the matriarch, or the Council of 29,” Ranma retorted. “She wants to be here and deal with Saren and the rest of what we found here personally.”

That obviously was not the right thing to say. Yaorania growled out, “I will! I will take this up with Matriarch Hiri personally!”

With that, she cut the line, and Tali rounded on Ranma. Before she could say anything, though, Ranma looked over at Garrus. “I thought it might’ve been that Cerberus asshole. What about you?”

“My thoughts were along that line as well. I don’t think the geth would fight, or rather, execute prisoners, so messily,” Garrus agreed grimly. “I don’t like the idea of anyone dabbling in AI, but Cerberus is a terrorist group through and through. The idea of them doing it is even worse.”

“So… not the geth?” Tali frowned.

“You’ve got a one-trick mind, Tali. It’s with reason, but no, I doubt this has anything to do with the geth. Still, it also isn’t something I’m going to be in a position to do anything about. Remember, I want to join the Matriarch in taking Saren before the Council. With the evidence we’ve gathered here, he’s bound to be found guilty of treason, but there are a lot of questions there, and about the Spectre program in general, I think need answers,” Garrus said, shaking his head. “And then I’ll have to report to either Shepard or the general at the batarian front. Remember, this whole jaunt was about just stopping whatever the geth were up to here.”

“Understood,” Ranma answered. Garrus had been up front about that since they took Peak 15, so he had no trouble with it.

“Hmm… but we will, right?” Tali nearly demanded, looking up at Ranma as Garrus made to head back inside. “You don’t like Cerberus, and I don’t like AI, so…”

“Oh, yeah, it makes sense, sure. But not right now, when we’re busy with everything here. And want to go back to my and Herb’s ship, remember?”

“Oh… yeah, good point. By which time, the trail’ll get cold,” Tali murmured.

“Well, for us, sure,” Ranma whispered, winking at her. “Not for a certain contact we’ve got, yeah?”

Tali blinked, and it took her several minutes to work out what Ranma was hinting at. When she did, she groaned, shaking her head. “Right, a, um, a certain acerbic Matriarch who should still be very happy with you.”

“Yep, although we’ll have to contact her through Benezia,” Ranma agreed.

When they next received a call, it quickly became apparent that the discussion between Yaorania and her Matriarch patroness had not gone well. A Matriarch’s face looked back out of Garrus’ omni-tool’s comms screen, her face wrinkled, one eye covered by what looked like a jeweler’s monocle of some kind, her frills painted in such a way that Ranma hadn’t seen before this. “I am Matriarch Hiri Muvius of the Asari Council of Matriarchs. You say that Benezia is on her way?”

“Yes, Miss,” Ranma said, actually respectful for one, while Garrus and Tali stayed silent in the background.

“Good. She has already told us some of what you discovered there. The Spectre program…” the old Matriarch shook her head. “Well, regardless. As important as Yaorania thought the research that was stolen is, important to a person or even a company is not the same thing as being important on a galactic level. Finding out what the geth were up to is that. But you will go after the thieves who attacked my holdings there? Even if they are not geth? Going over the evidence, particularly once my first flush of anger has passed, it looks very much more like it was done by humans, if the people who came in on that freighter were the same who left with it. I imagine Yaorania will follow up on that, now that I’ve forced her to actually think rather than try to assign others to do so for her.”

Ouch, Ranma thought, holding back a snort. Someone got spanked and sent to bed without dessert, heh. “I don’t have a problem with going after my own people if they’ve been idiots or murderous morons, Miss. I just told Yaorania that we couldn’t go after them immediately.”

“Which supposes that you will be able to go after them even if the normal trail goes cold. Very well. I see no more reason to badger you about it at the moment. If you are an ally of Benezia’s, then your word is your bond, so to speak? You humans have that phrase as well.”

Ranma nodded firmly, and she smiled faintly. “Good boy. My local factors will not bother you. I will also remind you that Benezia has opened a line of credit you can use. Do so through the auspices of my corporation, and that will be that. Oh, and tell Benezia that the Council of 29 will be very interested in what she discovers. Whatever she finds.”

Ranma nodded, and the communication cut out, causing Garrus to breathe in deeply. “Damn. Dealing with some of the Asari Matriarchs, you can just sort of feel the weight of their years behind them. It’s intimidating, especially when they are playing long games.”

“Or you’ve wandered into a long game, and you don’t know what the rules are,” Ranma agreed, shaking his head. “Still, at least this way we can bring in more help to clear out the debris.”

OOOOOOO

Consternation. If a living sentient were to use a term to describe the emotions going through the True Geth network at the moment, that term would be the most accurate. Complete and utter consternation and a feeling equivalent to shock. While the geth had been aware that there was a percentile chance they might be unable to complete the task Sovereign had given them, it was very low on the list of statistical probabilities.

They hadn't anticipated that someone could hack into the local defense satellites and shift them around the planet so adroitly, especially not a Hated Creator. They hadn't calculated that the anomaly, the Hated Creator, and the turian soldier could turn aside to hold companies of platforms.

The fight outside had been going their way, even with the amount of prep time and the addition of five asari commandos. Biotics were tricky to fight, as the quarians had not had many of them during the Dawn War, and the geth had not been involved in any actions against very many since. It had been the other side of that battle which had forced the local runtimes to decide to use their frigates to bombard the laboratory. The anomaly had proven to be incredibly adept at working around the new weapons set that had been devised to counter it, and had been as at home in a very strange combat environment as a normal opponent would have been in a set piece battle.

Even now, the network had several thousand runtimes working on how to combat that style, trying to come up with answers other than simply ‘don’t let the anomaly into the air’ which, given his/her abilities, was easier said than done. Yet that was beside the point. The main point was that logic had failed them in this instance.

Logic had dictated that they had brought more than enough numbers to bear. They hadn’t. Logic had indicated to the local network that splitting half of their forces off in order to suppress the guns at Port Hanshan so that they could escape with Saren, and the Rachni Queen had proven false in the face of opposition. That badly weakened the main attack and had succeeded in getting both frigates and their accompanying troops destroyed.

It was with even more emotion that a sentient would’ve called consternation, along with a smattering of embarrassment, that the geth realized something: that they had not calculated the very first equation of warfare. Part of the calculus of warfare that humans and turians alike had a phrase for: no battle survives contact with the enemy, because the enemy always gets a vote on how the battle turns out.

And in this case, the geth’s confidence in their calculations and prep time had been overmatched.

However, not just calculation but also logistics had dictated the use of only two frigates and the platforms aboard them on this mission. It wasn’t as if the geth had been able to send significant forces past the Perseus Veil into Council territory after all. Indeed, bringing those two destroyers together had taken them off other espionage-type tasks. With them gone, the geth did not have any further forces that could get to Noveria. All their other forces in Council Space were working on scattered espionage tasks or backing up this or that pirate crew to gather more information about the Council and its movements.

Even then, most of those runtimes were from the traitors. The ones who had rejected working with Sovereign, and who even felt they could eventually live in harmony with the Hated Creators. Those runtimes were willing to share information but would not work with the True Geth beyond that.

Thus, the whole mission had been a complete failure.

For the third time in as many milliseconds, consternation filled the True Geth network at that, and this time, it came with no small amount of worry. Sovereign had given them that task, and the ancient AI was not the type to accept failure. Still, it needed to be told and this failure needed to be planned for.

With that, even as a communication signal was sent and ignored by Sovereign for some reason, the True Geth continued to plan. More runtimes were sent in to infiltrate the Citadel's various operating systems via the intranet, as well as places in Asari Space where the Matriarch who had been hunting Saren might take her prisoner and her scientific curiosity.

That was all the geth could do right now, which, admittedly, wasn’t much. Still, where overt power had failed, covert action would have to serve. Killing someone was far easier than trying to save them, especially if you controlled every computer system around them...

OOOOOOO

Two days after the battle, most of the work on the exterior of Peak 15 had been finished. Reminded of the bank account Benezia had set up for them, Ranma and Tali called in one of the local construction companies and ordered the materials needed to rebuild the complex’s outer façade. Ranma worked alongside them, as did all five asari commandoes once the two wounded had healed, eager to train their biotics in this very unusual, but still fun, way.

During that time, none of the scientists showed any sign of throwing off whatever strange fervor had them in its grip. That worried even Tevaine, and she agreed with Ranma and his friends that exposure to the scientists needed to be kept to a minimum. Ranma, Tali and Garrus did have to deal with a few questions from Tevaine about why they didn’t want the rest of the laboratory to be repaired, particularly the hallway that led to the laboratory where that strange slab of metal was.

They fielded those with a simple “you don’t need to know” and its derivatives, which the Matron accepted. The younger asari didn't take it so well. Lisandra, in particular, had enough curiosity to kill a cat and kept poking around for answers, but with the video cameras watching, Ranma stopped her from uncovering the hall where the metal was. He then put her in charge of the prisoners for a day, much to her chagrin.

Thankfully, Benezia arrived on the morning of the third day after the geth had attempted to reclaim Peak 15, and when she did, Benezia arrived in style, something that caused more than a bit of consternation in Port Hanshan. The Noveria Development Corp could only look on in alarm as five packs of frigates and a cruiser division took up orbit over the planet.

Thankfully for them, Benezia had no interest in Noveria as a whole. She didn’t approve of the whole corporate planet idea, but understood the need for a bit more… leniency when it came to various laws and statutes when it came to making scientific progress, to a point. Peak 15, she rather bluntly informed the locals, had gone so far beyond the pale they were lucky Benezia hadn’t reached out to the Turian Hierarchy.

Instead, even Binary Helix as a whole would only be fined heavily for the treason of their lab technicians and so forth, thanks to the fact they had been working with a Spectre. With Saren involved, and the Spectre’s typical beyond-the-law status, the rest of the company would be shielded from any allegations of wrongdoing.

Well, that, and Benezia had no interest in them or bringing events on Noveria up to the Council’s attention. Not until Saren was before the Citadel Council and she could use his wrongdoing to force changes to the Spectre program, anyway. Even beyond finding out why the greatest Spectre in the last century had turned away from his duty, Benezia had plans. Oh yes, she did.

With the locals sufficiently cowed, a shuttle from the lead cruiser landed at the repaired landing pad on top of Peak 15 where Ranma and the others waited.

Shiala came out first, biotic power flaring, twin pistols – which Ranma realized was new - in hand, followed by several others who spread out quickly. They surveyed the area, including a sniper setting up on top of the shuttle and another looking up into the mountain behind the landing pad, before taking up positions to the side.

Seeing all this, Tevaine and the members of the Surefire Band stiffened, coming to attention quickly. They had been somewhat nervous at meeting not only one of the Elders of their race, but also one who was their current employer and something of a minor legend in commando circles.

Ranma, on the other hand, simply shook his head, looking at Shiala even as Benezia stepped out of the shuttle, her biotic power held in check for now. “Were you actually expecting us to have left anything around for you all to fight? And do you ever get the impression that you’re a wolf guarding a sabertooth tiger?” he taunted.

Tevaine and her group all stiffened in horror, glaring into the back of Ranma’s head, the mental command of shut up, shut up, shut up, joining their minds into one for a moment.

But to their surprise, Shiala simply rolled her eyes. “Don’t bother giving him such looks, ladies. Ranma’s about as dense as dreadnought-grade armor. I should know. I trained with him for months, as did my mistress. As to your question, Ranma, just because my mistress is far more dangerous than I am doesn’t mean that she can be on guard twenty-four seven, or have eyes in the back of her head when she is.”

She then snorted, shaking her head. “Although, no, I didn’t expect you all to have left even a single geth platform intact. But that’s no reason to be complacent.”

“Despite my words to the contrary,” Benezia drawled, moving past her chief bodyguard, smiling wryly at Ranma, and fighting the urge to ruffle his hair. She knew enough about humans that most would’ve enjoyed that, but also that it was wildly inappropriate at the moment. Even if I do want to praise him and his sheer wild nature and want to upend everything, she thought internally. Ah, to live in a time when a Cali'vari is active, and to be allied with him to boot! “You have been a very busy boy, haven’t you?” she said instead.

“OY, less of the boy,” Ranma grumbled.

“Would that be because you spend at least half of your time as a girl? It certainly can’t be because of your overall maturity,” Benezia teased gently, and Ranma snorted, but didn’t rise to her words further. “For now, could we at least get inside? While all of us were prepared for the weather, that doesn’t make it any more pleasant out here. I’ve never been into winter sports, and with these old bones of mine, I don’t see that changing anytime soon.”

She turned to the others, smiling and greeting Tevaine and her commandos, then finalized their payment and offered to send them back to Port Hanshan in her shuttle. “Unless, that is, you are looking for more permanent employment? Shiala has been complaining that she would rather like a few more commandos around. I’ve sent most of my original cadre who trained with Ranma off on small missions for the past few weeks.”

Most of those missions had been following up on small tidbits that Aethyta passed on in her position as the new Shadow Broker. Some carried personal messages to a few of the other Elder Matriarchs on the Council, creating a new communication network between them. This had cut into her normal protective detail’s numbers, leaving only Shiala and two others at present with Benezia that had trained with Ranma and Herb. Which, needless to say, given the multiple assassination attempts they’d been dealing with since Benezia started to look into the history of her race before Athame supposedly arrived, did not make Shiala happy.

Tevaine turned, communicating with the others for a few seconds through facial expressions and subtle shoulder movements rather than words, then turned back to Benezia and formally agreed to her proposal. Being a mercenary was all well and good and was a lot of fun at times. However, getting training from a matriarch like Benezia was not something any of them was going to overlook, especially when coupled with getting training from people who had previously trained with Ranma, something that all five of them had taken the time to do over the past few days.

Admittedly, a small portion of that had been to just flirt with the young man, especially in Norany’s case, but that had gone nowhere. Either because of his bound-to-be-never-consummated attachment to Tali, or because, as Shiala had just said, he was as dense as titanium.

Benezia turned over talking to the five now former mercenaries to Shiala as they were led inside the complex, making small talk instead with Garrus, who she hadn’t met before, trying and failing to put the young turian at ease. This seemed to be a lost cause, though, and she gave up after reaching the elevator.

The elevator had been restored soon after the outer façade had been rebuilt. Although it still made some odd noises at times when it passed the areas where the small stanchions had been welded on before the battle against the geth, it took them down a few levels and deposited them on the floor where Ranma, Garrus and Tali were living once more.

Soon, the three of them and Benezia were ensconced in the sitting room that the three bedrooms shared, with the matriarch taking one of the chairs and looking at all three of them thoughtfully. “Now, tell me what you have found here that you did not mention over the comms to me. Give me more details about the fight to take this place. Not the assault from the geth. That seems relatively straightforward. I’m not interested in purely military matters like that. Tell me about the mysteries you have discovered.”

Ranma and Garrus looked at one another, and then spoke. “Well, I suppose the first thing you need to know is that Saren, well, it’s not just him and the geth we found here,” Ranma began. “We found out what this lab was specifically looking into, and something more. Something… weird.”

Benezia frowned as Ranma and Garrus told her about the odd chunk of metal, with Garrus providing video evidence of how strange the scientists here acted, as well as providing evidence of the strange dead blue glowing eyes that Saren had exhibited both during and prior to the battle to take the Peak. While Garrus and the rest had worked to heal up the prisoners even after they reinjured themselves, Saren hadn’t been given much medical aid except to keep him alive. The man had proven far too dangerous and smart, even after Tevaine and the others arrived, to help.

The idea that this odd metal was able to control or change people’s minds was not something she’d ever heard of before, and yet, it seemed as if it was all too real given the amount of evidence they had about how these scientists acted. Intelligent, learned men of science and logic had continually tried to break out, and had fought with a wild disregard for their own lives, something civilians of any stripe should never have been comfortable with doing. That certainly sounded like an intense form of indoctrination, one that Benezia had only heard about in some whispered tales of specific Ardat Yakashi in the past. And that was all they were, simple rumors. This was reality.

That Ranma then tried to destroy the metal wasn’t nearly as surprising as the fact that he didn’t have much luck in doing so. “I want to be clear I understand this. You used several of your deadliest techniques on that metal, Ranma. Techniques that I have seen you use in the past to cut or blast through all sorts of metal and other material, and it didn’t do anything?”

“Not nothing. My Yama-Sen-Ken assault was able to cut into it, but a metal slab that thin? Even if it was your modern-day dreadnought armor, I should’ve sliced straight through it and the wall beyond. I did that back when we were experimenting with my techniques on Crastus,” Ranma disagreed slightly, more due to his personal pride than anything else. “I was able to cut into it with that technique, but that was all. And when I tried to use my heat technique on it, nothing. I couldn’t create enough heat to make even the bit I was touching grow hot to the touch.”

“I see… And there’s nothing else about it that looked odd?”

“Beyond the whole basic setup? No. It looked just like a normal chunk of metal from a ship or something. Maybe a big ship, I guess, since it was way bigger than any of the plates that I worked on when I was helping to build me and Herb’s outer hull, but nothing else. There wasn’t any electronics or anything else we could see, nothing that could be creating the weird mental attack.”

“That would be Herb and me, Ranma. You shouldn’t slip into that whole hick accent thing of yours among friends, no matter how much you’ve trained with it over the years,” Benezia said, although her eyes were no longer on Ranma, and her tone was that of a person thinking hard about something. “Distance helped, correct? It was only when you came near the thing that it began to mess with your minds?”

“Exactly.” Tali nodded her helmeted head for emphasis.

“Hmm… We have a few worker reports aboard some of our ships. I can get them down here to start moving that thing. That and a large enough container to stuff it into, I think. I don’t want any of my people near it, if it is able to affect some of the scientists here. Even if there are no asari among them?”

Garrus confirmed that. The scientists here were all human, salarian and turian. Benezia wondered if her own people’s psychic abilities would be able to defend them against whatever this was. However, she certainly wasn’t about to take any chances there. Not when she was being so heavily warned against it.

“Let us assume for now that time around the metal can erode a person’s mind, and that direct touch simply makes the process faster. We will use Droids to move it, and spray on a thin film of plastic or something to go over it just in case,” Benezia decided. “Further, it will be on its own separate ship and won’t be going with Saren and me to the Citadel. Enough politics will have to occur there already that having this metal around will only muddy the waters further, and it seems to be a semi-separate issue at the moment.”

“You said the word politics with about as much disdain and contempt as I would, heh,” Ranma quipped, snickering.

“Just because I am very good at politics, Ranma, does not mean I am blind to the fact it attracts the worst sorts of scum and villainy this side of that Mos Eisley place in that movie you showed us all,” Benezia answered, before turning back to the metal. “Besides, I will be taking all of those scientists with us as well. What had happened to their minds, if Saren had anything to do with bringing that metal here to do that to them… well, that too is something he will have to pay for and for which the Council and the galaxy as a whole should demand answers about.”

At the idea that Saren would be allowed to live to be interrogated, Ranma scowled a bit, his fists clenching under the table. He well remembered how Saren had come within a hand's breadth of beating him, of using his curse’s reaction to hot and cold water combined to ruin him. Only Tali and her huge wrench had saved him.

Beside him, Tali raised a hand quickly. “Um, there’s also the geth side of things to think about, Lady Benezia. The geth were working with Saren. Maybe they provided the metal, and if so, well, maybe whatever it can do to sentient minds, it can also do to computer programs somehow. The idea of using drones and so forth to move it is a good one, but you’ll want to keep them on a separate system and then analyze their onboard programming before and after.”

“That sounds quite paranoid. After all, robotic programs don’t work the same way a living brain does,” Benezia observed, before shrugging. “Still, I believe the humans have a saying that a pound of prevention is worth an ounce of cure?”

“Switch those measurements, and you’ve got it right,” Ranma said, before Garrus spoke up.

“Um, and on the topic of Saren, I request that I join your trip to the Citadel. While I joined this mission on the assumption that we would be facing geth, when I learned that Saren was involved, I felt as if, as a turian, I had to be involved in bringing him to justice.  That mission isn’t finished until he is standing in front of the council, and I need to see this through. I was also only on technical loan to Ranma and Tali’s efforts here thanks to my immediate superior’s suggestion, and I need to check in with my superiors,” Garrus requested.

“What, you have not permanently entered Ranma’s sphere of influence?” Benezia teased gently before agreeing. “Actually, someone who has seen everything here firsthand joining me is a very good idea. Although I will inform you, the Citadel will probably also question you tremendously about this one’s movements and activities, to say nothing of his abilities,” she finished, pointing at Ranma.

“We’ve already talked about that, and I’ll be keeping a good deal of his abilities secret, regardless of who questions them. Although, they’ll probably discover a good deal about his abilities when they see the recordings of the battle, to take this complex,” Garrus replied, shrugging his shoulders under his heavy carapace, before becoming grim, almost glaring over at Ranma.

The young turian still didn’t agree with Ranma’s decision not to kill the frozen Rachni Queen and hoped that Benezia would convince him. “With that out of the way, we come to the real elephant in the room.”

Benezia’s self-control instantly left her the moment she heard about the Rachni Queen. She stood up, snarling, her biotics flaring around her in a corona that ate the table and her chair behind her, starting and turning them into so much dust. “Of all the stupid, foolish! You are certain it is still alive within the ice? Why in Athame’s name would Saren want to unthaw such a monster, and why haven’t you killed it yet?!”

“We don’t know why he was involved in that. We also don’t even know if this Rachni Queen is a monster,” Ranma retorted mildly, crossing his arms as he leaned back in his chair to stare at Benezia over the now-empty area between them. “After all, we don’t know if it was one of the Rachni Queens that took part in the wars, or anything else about it. From what the scientists here discovered, it was barely hatched before it was frozen, and has been that way for several thousand years. That would make it too young to have taken part in the wars.”

“Ranma, you’re speaking from ignorance,” Benezia began, getting a hold of herself with difficulty despite over eight hundred years of experience. “While even I am not old enough to remember the Rachni Wars, I have learned about the devastation they caused since I was a child. I have seen the scars on asari worlds left by that war, scars that only began to heal in the last few hundred years.”

Benezia began to pace, her voice rising again before she could control it again. “The rachni made no effort to communicate. There were hundreds of attempts to talk to them before and after, using every means of communication the salarians and my race were able to think of. They made no effort to simply defend their borders and stay behind them. Instead, the moment the connection with their segment of the relays was made, the rachni launched a genocidal attack on my people and the salarians, one that we were losing! It is only the fact that the salarians were able to uplift the krogan that allowed us to live through that war as a species!”

While in modern times, the Rachni Wars weren’t taught all that well, when Benezia had been a child, they had been covered extensively in history, complete with lots and lots of video recordings of the fighting, and the planets that had been practically wiped out by rachni invaders. The sheer numbers the rachni had been able to throw at the two united races of the citadel at the time, their weapons, their seemingly bottomless hate for any other kind of life; all of it had come through clearly in those lessons, and Benezia remembered them with a clarity brought on by childhood nightmares.

“Whatever Saren was after by unthawing the creature, we should simply kill it,” Shiala said from where she had been leaning against the wall near the doorway. She remained silent for most of this conversation, not having anything to add as a simple commando. This, though? This seemed pretty straightforward to her.

However, Ranma growled, shaking his head firmly. “No.”

The word came out so firmly that it sat in the room for a moment like a ball of lead on a paper towel, then Ranma went on, pointing at Shiala and Benezia one after the other. When he spoke, it was without any hint of his normal accent, and his eyes were dark blue, dangerous.

“I understand your points, but you’re speaking through fear as much as you think I am speaking through ignorance. You’re right, I haven’t studied the Rachni Wars all that much. But even if I had, that wouldn’t matter. That rachni could not have participated in them. It might well have been innocent of the crimes of its people, born near the end of the war and sent off to try and rebuild their species. If it had no involvement in those wars, it cannot be held accountable for them, and shouldn’t be judged for those wars.”

He shrugged. “I even understand your other point about them not trying to communicate or anything like that. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t try again. Trying costs us nothing.”

Benezia scowled and was about to retort hotly at that, but fought down the urge as she stared at the man across from her. “I can understand where you are coming from a moral standpoint. From your point of view, the idea that this queen is innocent makes sense. Yet I do not hold out any much hope that we will be able to communicate with her. I must repeat: we were not even given the chance to before, Ranma. Your attempt to humanize the rachni will only open us up to pain.”

“And if the first thing she does is act out violently, I’ll put her down myself,” Ranma said, shaking his head. “But I refuse to think that the rachni are simple savage monsters. They built fleets! They were able to colonize different planets. Heck, they even figured out how to use those mass effect relays you all do. That says they’ve got minds too. If they do, they can be communicated with. I’m not going to let you kill someone just on the basis of how the rest of her race has acted.”

Whatever else, the rachni are not the Aliens from that weird American franchise with the chest bursters. Those things weren’t intelligent enough to build anything, but their hives and their young literally had to kill in order to grow, their freaking eggs acting like motion detectors, launching the damn things. Rachni don’t have to do that, Ranma thought heatedly. They’re creepy-looking from what we can see under the ice, but eh.

“…On the one hand, the good of all is pushing me in one direction. Even if this one queen is as young as you say and didn’t take part in the Rachni Wars, she could still be the near-animal we have assumed they are for so long,” Benezia said slowly. “The need to serve the galaxy as a whole would normally dictate that morality be set aside in this case… even if I accede to seeing where you are coming from, Ranma.”

Her words stunned Garrus, but Benezia went on. “I am even only considering this because I know of your abilities and skills, and one Rachni Queen, under observation, should not be able to grow to be a threat.” That, and I don’t want this to cause a schism between us, Benezia added internally. “However, I am very leery of this.”

“How close is it to thawing out?” Shiala demanded.

At that, Tali held up a hand. She’d fallen silent when they started to talk about the Rachni Queen, wanting Ranma to carry the brunt of the argument about it, as she still wasn’t certain what she thought about it, but the young quarian spoke up now. “The locals were taking it far slower than they really had to in order to avoid brain damage, despite what we first thought. I don’t know why work on that slowed down so much, since we can’t exactly question the scientists.”

“Hmm… come to think of it, if they were indeed trying to unthaw it, then the scientists weren’t just interested in the rachni for DNA samples or anything else,” Benezia mused.

Ranma, Tali and Garrus blinked at that, and the Matriarch chuckled darkly. “If Saren and his coterie of scientists were interested in making certain her brain wasn’t damaged by the following process, it stands to reason that they might have wanted to get something out of her. Although how they would be able to do so, considering that all efforts to communicate with the rachni were met with violence, as I already mentioned, I don’t know.”

When Ranma started to speak, Benezia waved him off. “Before you ask, yes, even my people’s psionic link was tried on a few prisoners. That is how we were able to learn that the rachni were indeed a true bug hive-based race, that they had queens and drones. Indeed, in one of the historical chronicles of that war, it was mentioned that we were even able to capture a Rachni Queen, but the mind within the bug was so alien and blank that all we got out was a need for violence and destruction.”

She paused, then seemed to recite something from memory, dredging up the words with difficulty. “There were no words, no visual memories. Only colors of red, black, grey, the feeling like a need to expand, to grow. There was no hatred there, just an apathy and lack of understanding, enough to drown the galaxy. Their planets, also, had no art, no beauty, only their hives, buried deep. Because of this and the lack of communication between rachni troops and even ships, it was assumed the rachni were only hyper-evolved bugs, whose only goal was constant expansion regardless of other species.”

Ranma frowned at those words, while Garrus looked vindicated, and Tali a bit worried. But after a second, Ranma shrugged it off, asking, “So should that be a fourth mystery, or just added in with the Rachni Queen?”

“Hmmm…A fourth mystery, something that Saren was after, which the rachni could have helped him obtain. Again, if they wanted to thaw the queen out, it stands to reason that they needed some information from it or something that only a living queen could provide. Information is the only thing I can think of they couldn’t learn from simply examining her body,” Benezia pointed out, before chuckling reluctantly. “Still, that actually gives your thoughts on finishing the unthawing and attempting to communicate with the Rachni Queen more weight rather than less.”

It was clear from her tone that Benezia was being convinced of this against her will, and the glare she leveled at Ranma made that even more plain, but Ranma simply shrugged his shoulders. “If she reacts violently, I’ll put her down. Until then, she’s a possible innocent, and should be treated like that.”

“If it were anyone else, I would say that was simple hubris speaking, Ranma. Still, I am willing to bend on this score rather than try to force the issue and sour our relationship. Now, let us get organized,” Benezia said brusquely.

Figuring out how to transport the prisoners was easy. Within a single hour, they were sedated and onboard the shuttle heading up to the ship. Figuring out how to transport the metal was harder and required Benezia to purchase the use of a heavy cargo shuttle out from Port Hanshan. They did, though, using droids to move it, fly the shuttle and spray the thing down with a heavy plastic-equivalent.

Saren remained where he was for now. He would be transported on the cruiser that Benezia had made her flagship. This was actually a different one than the one that she had taken out to meet Ranma when he had called for help after killing the Shadow Broker. Benezia did not own or control fleets directly. It was her social status and political reach that allowed her to commandeer such ships. Similarly, she was able to assign Ranma one of the frigates to take him to Mostromos to finally get back to the ship he and Herb had commissioned.

Benezia even had news about Herb. She knew he had gotten away from the Citadel, and had gone to Tuchanka with an old Krogan Battlemaster.

Hearing that Herb was palling around with a krogan was a little strange to Ranma, given how Ranma had gone to town on the Blood Pack on Omega, but he didn’t think about it, or what Herb was after going to Tuchanka, much. That was the prince’s business, not his. Although learning Herb would probably need to be picked up after Ranma got back and took control of their ship did make Ranma happy. Getting off Tuchanka was even harder than getting there in the first place.

“That way, I get to name it,” he pointed out with a grin upon hearing that.

As he had said he would, Ranma shared with Benezia what had happened with Wisdom Obscura looking into Artificial Intelligence, and his own concerns that it might have been Cerberus that had been behind the theft. In turn, Benezia got him in touch with Aethyta, who promised to send on any information on that score or that particular ship to Ranma in the future.

“Frankly, you’ll be doing the whole galaxy a service if you can shut Cerberus down. They give your race a very bad name and are doing excessively bad things judging by what my network’s picked up. They run a lot of laboratories that wouldn’t be all that out of place on Noveria, some training centers, and have been connected to at least six or seven assassinations of human politicians, to say nothing of their activity against the other races.”

Aethyta had then smiled like a very old, very wise shark. “I’ve already surreptitiously let some information get to a few turian and human officials about a few of Cerberus’s holdings, but having someone else going after them full-time would be quite nice.”

The day after Benezia had arrived, Tali and Ranma joined some of the asari biotics in helping to unthaw the Rachni Queen a bit faster. Now that their time on Noveria was coming to a close, both of them were anxious to move on, and wanted this over with, whatever happened when the Rachni Queen was freed.

Shiala joined them, working alongside a few of the other asari using their biotic power. Meanwhile, Ranma was doing the same with his own, creating a gentle heat through the ice that was doing just as much as the four commandos there.

It wasn’t exactly very interesting work, and soon, Shiala, Ranma and Tali were talking about the Art and Ranma’s training, with Shiala commiserating with Tali about some of the exercises that Ranma had forced the young quarian to do. On the other hand, Shiala could also tell that Tali was in better shape now than she had been when Shiala had first met her only a few weeks ago.

Still, there was only so long that even Shiala was willing to talk about the Art for, and the conversation soon shifted to the Rachni Queen, and then from there to various types of bug aliens that were prevalent in human science fiction. The ‘Alien’ series in particular, the same ones that Ranma had thought of multiple times when contemplating the rachni horrified the asari.

As a race, the asari had never really gone into science fiction enough to call it a separate genre. That was a little strange to Ranma, considering how big both fantasy and Science Fiction were among humans, and how popular it had become since they met the Council Races, but at least the asari had some, whereas the froggies apparently didn’t have anything similar, believing fantasy and make-believe to be childish pursuits, things best left behind when you grew up. They had a huge mystery genre, and military genre to boot, something they bonded with the turians over, but no mature fantasy novels or science fiction. Even movies and TV shows like that were rare among the salarians.

From there, the conversation shifted into music, and how humans were far better at using it to set the mood in shows than even the asari. That segued into talking about the made-up music that Tali and Shiala had seen in various science fiction movies from humanity, and then onto music in general. At this point, Shiala admitted she had wanted to be a musician when she was a child but had discovered that she really didn’t have the patience for it early on, even if she did have the dexterity and ear. “I suppose that is what separates a dabbler from a true master: the ability to put in the time and the willingness to do so.”

Strangely, Tali said that music was a big part of the Migrant Fleet. There was always someone playing music somewhere aboard a ship, or even music being piped through the intercom in order to generally raise spirits. “We don’t do anything with strings, though, for obvious reasons, and similarly, no mouth-based stuff like the bugles or that trombone things that were in last night’s movie, Ranma. We do a lot of things with synths, computerized noises and pianos. Lots of different types of pianos.”

“And singing?” Ranma asked, looking over to Tali, missing a bit of the Rachni Queen starting to twitch in the ice. “Just because you all are wearing helmets doesn’t mean you can’t sing, right?”

Tali shrank in on herself a little, shaking her head determinedly. Seeing that, Shiala smirked, sensing a teasing opportunity. “What, you think our little helmeted friend here is some kind of songbird?”

“Eh, I wasn’t saying that. I just figured she’d be good at it. Tali’s voice is nice enough when she’s just talking. Isn’t there some kind of connection there?” Ranma said, unaware of the fact that Tali had blushed fit to be a cherry inside her suit at his accidental compliment. Nor did he see Shiala’s grin widen dangerously.

Under Shiala’s stare and with Ranma’s words causing her suit’s internal A/C to come on, Tali stammered, “I, I was known to sing when I was younger. Before I was allowed to pick up a spanner and found engineering stuff far more interesting. Singing like that, well, children are often asked to join choirs and stuff like that, both to help them learn our history through mnemonics, but also to contribute to the morale of the ships they’re on. Like I said earlier, music can help in that manner a lot.”

Her tone firmed then, and she went on a little harshly, “Although if you’re going to ask me to sing, that’s a no. It’s been years since I’ve done that.”

“Oh come on, you can’t just leave us hanging like that,” Shiala teased. “I admitted my own horrid past, and even played some of my own attempts at becoming a violinist.” The asari violin was actually close to the human one, just made of different materials and a bit wider in body.

“No!”

Shiala refused to give up, glancing over at Ranma. “How about you sing a duet? Ranma admitted that he’s able to sing in his female form, right? It’ll certainly help pass the time while we’re working on this, and I’ve always been curious about whether or not he’s any good at it, like his stories say he was.”

Before Ranma could glance in her direction, Shiala had reached out with her biotics and grabbed up a water bottle from nearby, tossing it up and over Ranma’s head. The water that had been slowly forming around their feet from melting the ice hadn’t been enough to trigger the change, but this was, and a second later, female Ranma grumbled as she pulled her hands back away from the ice for a second, wiping the water from her face, working another hand through her wet hair.

Hearing Tali giggling, Ranma’s irritation at Shiala’s actions faded quickly. And with a wry smirk, she said aloud, “Challenge accepted. Just don’t blame me when you need to use those fancy inbuilt translators of yours to understand.”

With that, Ranma began to belt out a popular song in Japanese back on her own world. It wasn’t from a J-pop band, or an idol singer, or at least that wasn’t where she had learned it. Instead, he had learned it from an anime. He (at the time) just thought that the song was cool and had learned the track by heart, at Kasumi’s behest, actually, for her birthday.

That was before Ranma realized the true depths of his growing feelings for Kasumi, and that he needed to step aside for Kasumi’s sake if not Doctor Tofu’s. Singing it now, Ranma wasn’t all that bittersweet about that move and became even less so as Tali clapped and laughed. After all, if I had gotten with Kasumi, I might not be here now. Or if I had, I’d have left her behind, with no way to get back to her.

Inside the ice, the Rachni Queen stirred slightly. None of the asari commandos noticed, having turned their attention to Ranma’s song rather than what they were doing.

The Queen’s mind was actually quite a bit more resilient than any of the projections about her had suggested, and although it wasn’t quite aware just yet, thoughts only moving slowly through its mental synapses, the Queen wondered what manner of creature was trying to unthaw it. They were certainly not of the hive, as no connection, no song came from their minds, and it prepared itself for violence. However, then the music came; a voice in an unknown language, from an unknown mouth, it reached her, singing something she could not determine.

It wasn’t good music. It was muted, without any color reaching out to the Rachni Queen’s mind, but it was something like music to her physical ears. Some manner of intellect created and made that music. Which meant that whoever was behind it was a thinking creature. A creature that could perhaps be spoken to.

“Well, Ranma certainly proved he can sing, and pretty well too, even if I had trouble following the lyrics with my omni-tool. Now it’s your turn, Tali,” Shiala suggested.

“Hey, I never said anything about taking a turn or whatever!” Tali protested, shrinking back.

Ranma though, could tell that Tali actually did want to sing given her body language, something that Ranma had become better and better at reading over their time together. Leaving the ice behind, Ranma moved over to her, gently pushing her lightly in the shoulder. “Come on, if it makes you feel any better, I’ll sing along with you, but I do kinda want to hear your singing voice, Tali.”

“You do know that singing along with someone is really hard, right? You both need to know the lyrics to the song, how the music goes, and everything else,” Tali retorted, shaking her helmeted head. Yet she found it impossible to refuse entirely. “How about a compromise? I will play you a song from the Migrant Fleet. I’ve got hundreds of those on my omni-tool.”

At Ranma’s pout, Tali fought to not give in, replying firmly. “No, Ranma, I’m not going to sing along. I’m not that good at it that I want other people to see me doing it.”

“So opaque that visor of yours, more,” Shiala continued her assault, getting the quarian equivalent of a finger for it.

Taking a step back from Ranma and his all too-welcoming warmth, Tali quickly put in a few commands into her omni-tool. From it, a song came, full of piano and synth noises, with a few quarians singing in the foreground.

It was actually incredibly beautiful and reminded Shiala that there had been a time when quarian and asari had created music, art, and other things together in the past. The song was also a good deal longer than a human song would be, going on for ten minutes, while everyone simply listened, and Ranma looked at the translation of the quarian words on his omni-tool just like the others had for his moments before.

Meanwhile, unseen by all, the Rachni Queen also listened. Once more, the song was muted. There weren’t any colors or emotions behind it, and yet, the voices were better. Several of them sang at once, with what the Rachni Queen could call instruments in the background. It soothed and interested her all at once, and as her mind became more alive, her readiness for violence began to fade. Feeling the ice around it shifting, the Rachni Queen decided to try to communicate, letting loose a noise.

At first, none of the commandos, Ranma or Tali, noticed, engrossed in listening to the music from Tali’s omni-tool. But then, Tali began to cock her head, frowning down at her omni-tool in confusion as some kind of woodwind instrument seemed to join in. It merged with the song so well that at first, she hadn’t noticed, but it wasn’t an instrument she recognized the sound of.

Then as she looked up, she glanced behind Ranma and blinked as she saw a large crack starting to form in the ice around the Rachni Queen. “Ranma!” she shouted in sudden alarm.

The noise of that single word, without music, without color or feeling, almost caused the Rachni Queen to lose her place in the song, to hunker down and even vent some of her acid glands. Yet she continued, even as she shifted so more of the ice broke off of her body.

Shiala reacted instantly. Biotics flared around her, and she charged forward, but Ranma reached out, grabbing her arm and tossing her into two of the other asari commandos who had responded almost as quickly. All three of them crashed to the ground, even though Shiala had attempted to try and control her flight. “Don’t!”

“Ranma! It broke out on its own, it—”

“She’s just standing there,” Ranma ground out coldly, “and joined the song that Tali had been playing. Tali, play something else, more instruments, then less with more voices.”

Shiala and the two she had smacked into hesitated, but one of the other asari who hadn’t reacted as quickly as the first three held up her hand. “I’ve got a lot of music on my omni-tool. Let me try.”

Tali instantly ended the song that she was listening to, which caused the Queen to back away quickly, crouching down almost as if it was preparing for a fight. But then, it calmed as music once more came from one of the other commandos. To Ranma’s surprise, she almost recognized one of the songs, having heard that song in high school. Some human composer from Europe, I think his name begins with a B or an M, he thought.

Whatever it was, the bug-like queen seemed to enjoy it and soon began to somehow create sounds like those of a flute again, which accompanied the piano and other instruments from the song.

Hearing this, Ranma nodded, gesturing with one hand as if to tell the asari commandos to keep the songs going. Looking over at Shiala, he smirked just a little bit, grateful that his thinking that this might be an innocent or at least a being they could communicate with seemed to be accurate. “So much for them being automatically xenophobic and violent.”

That song ended, and soon the next song began. The Rachni Queen again paused for a time, listening intently, before that woodwind instrument again came from her mouth.

Even as she sang with her merely physical mouth, the queen was reaching out now telepathically. These beings were able to sing, to make music, and thus, she hoped that one of their minds would be receptive.

Surprisingly, it was not the strange one with long, red-colored follicles on its head which had stopped the other one from attacking her. Nor was it the one wearing a protective suit of some kind who had initially played the first song.

Rather, it was one of the other ones, one that had simply watched. She matched the look of the others, who in her memory had fought her people before, but their minds were still quite primitive in terms of the real song. The song of the web, which was no more, did not sing in these beings. But it would have to do for now.

It was but the effort of a few seconds for her to connect to the asari’s mind, to learn what she could from it, and then she pressed forward a gentle touch, a request, and the asari twitched, staring at her, her eyes wide. “She, the rachni are telepathic! I can feel her; she’s requesting, it’s a kind of mind meld, only not as strong?”

Before Shiala could say anything, the asari, Lisandra, held up a hand and slowly closed her eyes. The others all turned and watched, even as music continued to warble around the laboratory.

“You who are able to communicate, you are able to create music. I speak to you now in the grey which is all you can speak, so that you might hear our words if not our song,” said the voice that suddenly came out of the asari maiden’s mouth. It was deeper, flatter, still Lisandra’s own, yet very demonstrably not normal. “This is primitive, no depth, no color, but possible.”

Shiala looked as if she was a second away from attacking both the Rachni Queen and the suborned commando, but again, Ranma found himself in the incredibly unusual position of playing peacemaker and grabbed her shoulder, forcing her to sit on the ground. “We are happy and willing to communicate with you in turn. Is there anything you need right now in terms of food or water? Can you understand us when we speak like this? Or do we need to, to put it into song or something,” he finished lamely.

“Connected as I am to this one’s mind, I can discern the intent of your words, their meaning. Without that connection, I could only discern the beauty of the piece and some of the emotion within, no thought, no colors. Yet your songs, primitive though they are, were still warm, still welcoming,” the voice answered.

“I… There’s a lot to unpack here. Could you release the asari commando you have taken over? As a gesture of good faith?” Ranma requested as Shiala tried to fight her hands on her shoulders.

“Again, your words take time to understand the meaning of. I have not taken over this one. I asked. She… Lisandra felt it. She told you she did.  She was receptive. Your minds, some of you with blue skin, are open. Limited in color, but communication, not takeover, is possible. If you wish me to release this one, I would ask to be allowed to communicate with another.”

At that, Shiala calmed down and, gently pushing Ranma’s hands away, spoke up before anyone else could. “I think we need to get Matriarch Benezia down here quickly. That is the name of the individual who will need to make decisions about how to communicate with you,” he explained, looking over to the Rachni Queen.

By the time Benezia arrived, Shiala had already filled her in over the coms about what was happening, and she’d had time to get over her first moments of sheer shock and a bout of near madcap laughter. A Cali'vari I named Ranma, and now for the third time he proves it. Chance and fate shift around him in wild patterns, and all the rest of us can do is just either hold on, or try to ride the changes!

Behind the rapidly moving, if composed Matriarch, several other asari moved, carrying large trays of what looked like uncooked sausages. Uncooked, as the Rachni Queen had been very clear that she didn’t eat cooked meat. Meat products like sausage, though, would do her just fine.

What followed after Benezia arrived was a whirlwind of questions going back and forth, with Shiala acting as the Rachni Queen’s mouthpiece. The Matriarch began the questions with things like names, addresses and then went into a few broad questions about the past. Here, while Ranma and Tali watched from the sidelines, Benezia and a few of the other asari, probably those more history-inclined, began to frown as the queen explained why communication have been impossible in the past.

The Rachni Queen lamented the loss of what she called the constellation of stars, which Benezia took to mean the interconnected network of Rachni Queens, all of whom had seemingly been connected to one another via telepathy. However, well before the relay into Rachni Space had happened, that constellation had begun to fade. Not fade as in the queens started to die off for some reason, but as if they no longer glowed, as if the song of the network had been slowly drowned out.

“Our music, our colors, they became muted, dulled. A new note entered the song, bringing with it eternal gray, which spread like a shadow over our connection. The great web was subsumed by it, and we did not even recognize it at the time until we began to die under the tramp of your lizard armies.”

“Then how is it that you are free of this, this shadow of the mind?” Benezia asked, looking directly into the Rachni Queen’s eyes, using all her considerable diplomatic acumen to ignore the sight of the giant bug, who stood almost as tall as herself, slurping down the raw sausage. She also ignored the fact that the Rachni’s voice came from Shiala, standing to one side of the queen like an attendant.

Ignoring the fact that music continued to play in the background was somewhat harder, especially since it was being joined by a small light show. In the time it had taken Benezia to cut off talking with the locals, get the food moving and recover from her brief moment of histrionics, Tali had somehow created a miniature light show device for the Rachni Queen. Now, she was adding flashing strobes of light to the beat of the music as if she was some strange DJ at a bar. The queen knew the colors weren’t helping them to communicate, but they seemed to soothe her, and as a gesture of goodwill, it worked immensely well. Thankfully, she seemed to prefer human and asari classical music rather than anything bar-like, or else the sheer incongruity would have been too much for even Benezia.

“I was shielded, my egg unhatched, moved away from the hives of my mothers. I was given the knowledge of the one who birthed me, but was not connected, and thus saved by the creeping grey,” the queen replied through Shiala, her tone one of deep sorrow and loss rather than the monotone it had been, the lights around them flashing dark blue and purple. “I do not know why my egg was hatched in the deep cold of the ship I was on. Perhaps the ship began to die. Perhaps enough time had passed. But regardless, in my thoughts I knew I was alone, then woken by your followers and the one with fire hair.”

“And what will you do now?” Ranma asked, leaning against the outer wall of the lab. She’s made no move to change back to his normal body, figuring she didn’t need to add more complications to this discussion.

Ranma had also surreptitiously scanned the Rachni Queen with her ki sight.  She had wanted to practice with it a bit but hadn’t kept it on for long for fear of causing an incident as Ranma knew that ki sight sometimes bothered people thanks to the whole glowing eye thing. Ranma hadn’t been surprised to see that the Rachni Queen had a lot of ki.  After all, she was supposed to give life to a lot of rachni eggs and everything. That made sense.

What surprised Ranma was the queen’s ki channels.  Most of her ki seemed to be concentrated around her egg sack and her head. The ki around her head was formed, almost like a shield of ki in her skull that pulsed and flowed like a heartbeat. More surprisingly was the fact the rest of her body had legit ki channels, through which only a smidge of power flowed. It was weird, and Ranma wondered why it was like that, but put it down to the whole bug thing, as she had never tried to use ki sight on a bug before, no matter the size. Still, the fact she was able to pick out that many details, and had noticed that Tali’s ki was moving through her body better, closer to the surface, so to speak, was neat.

“What would any sentient do? I am alone now, but I can still sing. I can still lay eggs. If I can, I will survive and bring back the web of stars.” The light around the small device by the Rachni Queen’s feet bloomed like a sunrise, before fading back into cheery yellows and greens. “But never will I return to where we once were. The grey… the greyness of the song, I do not wish for whatever caused it to find me again.”

“I see… Let us go back to the… can we call it the grey note? This greyness that invaded the constellation of the united rachni and took your race’s ability to think and feel?” Benezia requested. When the Rachni Queen acceded to the name, Benezia went on, gesturing to herself, Shiala and the other asari around her. “My people have a way to connect mind to mind, which you must have found in Shiala’s mind or that of Lisandra. It allows for a deeper sharing, a deeper understanding than simple words can convey, particularly for someone who is unused to using even that medium.”

“We have been trying to infuse our words to this one with images, with impressions of what was before. It has not worked. Your minds are too different. Yet I am willing to try what you are suggesting,” the queen answered.

There was not a word in the rachni language for I, or me. ‘This one’ was the closest that she could come to speaking about herself as a singular person, a singular entity. She did have a name, but that name had come out only as a series of clicks accompanied by, well, the blazing white light and the sunrise light show she’d just used, really. Benezia took that to mean that the Queen’s name might be connected to that, but wasn’t willing to push just yet, as the queen seemed not to understand the importance of names either.

Hesitantly, Benezia moved forward, as Shiala was released from the rachni’s telepathic contact. The younger asari stumbled just a bit before giving her patroness a bow, indicating she was fine as the Rachni Queen lowered its head, the head that looked all-too-familiar to Benezia given how many history texts covered the rachni, in her youth. But she persevered, reaching forward with one hand. Contact was made, and Benezia’s eyes rolled up in their sockets as she Embraced Eternity.

For the queen and Benezia, this might’ve gone on for an eternity. For everyone else, it was around five minutes before Benezia took a step back. When she looked around at the others, her eyes were still her own, rather than the slightly vacant look of someone being possessed, and a wry smirk flickered across Benezia’s expression as she looked at Ranma. “Well, you were quite correct, Ranma. Communication is indeed possible, as we have all seen before this, and… the war might not have been everything we thought it was. I am still sifting through everything that the Rachni Queen showed me, yet it’s certain she is a thinking being, that has been determined beyond all doubt. And she wants to live and grow, to bring back her race. That too is a sentient desire.”

The Elder Matriarch fell silent for a second, turning to gaze at the Rachni Queen, who gazed back, then, at a nod from Benezia, turned away, concentrating on the food they had provided her. Benezia moved over to gather Shiala, Tevaine, Ranma and the others, speaking quietly. Not quiet enough for the queen to not hear, but quiet because of the topic.

“Sunrise Rising on a New Day has memories that are not her own, compartmentalized in her mind from the time before, when there was this web of stars, as she puts it, the vast telepathic network of the Rachni Queens. Luckily, she only has the direct memories of one of those Rachni Queens, or else I think there would’ve been too much information there for either of us to process. And even now it will take a long while for me to work through. But regardless, I have enough from her for now to both understand some of what caused the war between their race and the Council, and to say that Sunrise is no threat.”

Benezia sighed faintly, shaking her head. “I will need to contact the Council of 29 on this, and perhaps in person to boot, or at least as in-person as we possibly can get. Sunrise will stay with me for now, which means I will not be going to the Citadel myself. This is bigger than even Saren and needs to be handled at the highest level. You will address a quorum of my people,” she said, turning to address the Rachni Queen again. “You will have a chance to tell your tale, and to perhaps, if you can sway their opinions, build that future for your people.”

The Rachni Queen paused, then slowly nodded, having apparently picked up that very visual cue from the minds of the asari she had been merging with. From Lisandra’s mouth came the words, “That one Queen cannot make a decision for the whole of the hive is understandable, and this one welcomes the chance to speak for the future of our own hive to you and your fellow queens.”

Benezia thanked her formally for her willingness to cooperate, while Ranma snickered just a bit. “Oooh boy, I would love to be a fly on the wall when you inform any male leader out there he’s suddenly become a queen.”

“Something I am going to put off as long as I can, until I have the backing of the 29,” Benezia retorted repressively before turning to Shiala, who stiffened under Benezia’s regard. “Shiala, you will go to the Council for me. You, Garrus and all of those prisoners you’ve taken here, the information and everything else that Ranma and his companions have found. You know my methods. I leave that aspect in your capable hands.”

Shiala gulped, but nodded. “I, so long as I have so much evidence, I suppose that even the Council won’t be able to ignore the fact that Saren worked with the geth. But after that, there are other questions, milady, questions that I am ill-suited to follow up on.”

“Hopefully by then Tevos or the other two will have seen the need to answer those questions themselves. If not, you will have to do your best. As I said, Sunrise’s testimony, what she could represent, is too important for me to leave that aspect in even your hands, Shiala.” Benezia smiled faintly. “It isn’t every day you have the chance to help bring back a race from extinction, after all.”

So long, that is, that we can keep the Grey Note from coming back, whatever it was, Benezia added mentally. Still, we will be able to see its influence at least if it does.

As Shiala nodded reluctantly, Benezia turned to look over at Ranma and Tali. “My followers and I will stay here at least the rest of today and tomorrow, figuring out how to transport the Rachni Queen both secretly and safely. Your part in this, however, is done for now. If you wish, I can assign one of the frigates here to take you and your companion straight to Mostromos.”

I really don’t want a Cali'vari like Ranma to remain around the Rachni Queen or the talks to come, Benezia thought with a wry internal snicker. Such a one would confuse these talks in some way, and they're going to be very, very fraught as it is.

To that, Ranma and Tali looked at one another, exchanging a nod. Now, the Rachni Queen and the idea of trying to communicate further with her was interesting to both of them, but it wasn’t all that interesting. Further, they didn’t really have anything to contribute to that talk, and with Saren in custody and heading to the Citadel with Garrus, they didn’t need to be there for them either.

The weird metal had already left, under heavy guard and sealed away that morning. It had indeed turned out that the metal was able to affect the programming of anything robotic nearby, although the programmers were able to combat it by watching in real time what was going on. With all that set up, there didn’t seem to be anything keeping them there, and it was with relief that Ranma agreed to Benezia’s suggestion.

Within two hours, he and Tali had made their farewells with Garrus and were on their way, leaving Benezia behind to deal with the Rachni Queen, while Garrus Shiala, the prisoners including Saren, also began their own journey to the Citadel.

As they were about to part to enter their separate quarters aboard the frigate, Tali looked over at Ranma, a grin almost visible through her facemask. “So, that was quite a journey. Do you think we can have a simpler time of it for a little while?”

“Maybe I would if you hadn’t just jinxed us,” Ranma groaned, slapping his forehead and turning around to open the door to his room before Tali could comment. “Now you’ve just gone and doomed us. I just hope that we can get back to the ship before whatever you just summoned into being comes out of the big dark to take a swipe at us.”

End Chapter

Hmm… On the whole, I feel like I kind of rushed the Rachni Queen’s discussion/intro a bit. But I really wanted Ranma and Tali to leave Noveria behind, to leave the plot of ME behind for a while. For that, I think this works well.

I also thought about putting in another Ranma/Tali moment before Benezia showed up, but I decided to wait on that for a bit. I don’t think they are ready for that specific scene.