Deep Space: An Epic Sci-Fi Romance

by Joan Jett

  I heard a babble of voices, angry, confused, and fearful. Finally one voice cut through the chatter. I recognized it, the flat drawl of the female officer who had been with Captain Matsuo in the docking bay. "Bullshit. You gonna let some vigilante lecture you on Noveria law?"

  "You know the law just as well as I do . . . Sergeant Stirling," said Shepard, checking his omni-tool display for the name. "I've got every one of your names right here. Also pictures of every one of you in this building where you're not supposed to be."

  Tali touched another control on her omni-tool. Outside, every security camera in the building slowly swiveled to point unerringly at the nearest ERCS guard. We already had all the footage we needed, of course, but Shepard thought the maneuver might prove intimidating.

  "Four minutes and fifteen seconds. Then all of this goes right to Captain Matsuo's mailbox with a big red flag tied to it, with a courtesy copy to the Executive Board."

  "Screw this," said a male turian voice. Artos Vossarian, the name appeared on my omni-tool in the window I had slaved to Tali's. "You aren't paying us enough to go up against the Board, Stirling."

  "That's very good thinking, Corporal Vossarian," said Shepard. "And thank you for verifying that it was Sergeant Stirling who handled the money for this job."

  Another buzz of angry voices. This time Stirling discovered herself unable to regain control of her team.

  "Three minutes," said Shepard.

  Tali suddenly nodded and made two quick hand signals. A run for the exits was under way . . . but another movement seemed of more immediate concern. We relocated to make sure we had good cover, and drew our weapons.

  The door to our storeroom slammed open and three ERCS guards rushed in.

  I threw a biotic field that knocked two of the three off their feet. Shepard and Tali opened fire, assault rifle chattering, shotgun roaring like thunder in the enclosed space.

  Sergeant Stirling countered my throw with her own biotic barriers. Her rifle swung toward my position, just a fraction too slowly. Shepard concentrated fire on her shields. They wavered, and then went down under a blast from Tali's shotgun. The blonde woman fell in a welter of blood a moment later.

  "One minute and thirty seconds," said Shepard calmly over the radio. "Oh, and in case it matters, Sergeant Stirling is dead."

  Much less than a minute later, we had the Synthetic Insights facility to ourselves.

  Once we reached the manager's office we had no difficulty recovering the data we needed from the corporate mainframe. Then we left by the main entrance, using the secured elevator. A few minutes later we arrived on Port Hanshan’s main plaza, emerging in the middle of a cluster of confused, angry ERCS guards. They fell silent and gave us hostile stares as we passed. Shepard ignored them, looking perfectly tranquil.

  As soon as we passed the guards, he activated his omni-tool and tapped at the controls. The tool made a small chirp as it sent a data package into the Port Hanshan public network.

  I glanced at him, my head cocked ironically to one side. "Commander, they did comply in the end."

  "I didn't make any promises about what would happen if they did."

  Tali gave a small and rather vindictive laugh.

  The suspension and arrest of almost a dozen ERCS agents set Port Hanshan buzzing. An hour later Internal Affairs agents hauled Administrator Anoleis himself out of his office, triggering an enormous political firestorm. Gianna Parasini managed to keep her own involvement a secret, but she still had a great deal of work to do out of the public’s eye. It was hours before we could meet with her again, at the same table in the Solyanka Lounge where we had held our last private discussion.

  "Well, Spectre, you certainly delivered," she observed as she seated herself at our table.

  "You don't seem very happy about it."

  "I'm ecstatic," said Parasini in a tired monotone. "But right now it just feels like the end of a very long day's work."

  "We kept our side of the bargain," he pointed out. "More, if you count the house-cleaning Captain Matsuo will be able to do now. I still need that surface clearance."

  Parasini nodded and produced a card from an inside pocket of her blouse. "Full access. I've sent topographic maps and directions to your ship. I'd advise you to wait until local sunrise before you go. The weather's downright nasty up in the Aleutsk Valley, and trying to drive through it in the dark is just asking to go off a cliff."

  "Thank you."

  Parasini stood, and Shepard rose as well.

  "Good luck," he said.

  "Thanks." Suddenly the agent stepped close, put a hand behind Shepard's neck, and leaned in for a brief but very warm kiss. "Hey, you're not bad for a hot-shot vigilante Spectre. I owe you a beer. See you."

  Shepard smiled, his gaze lingering on Parasini as she walked away from our table.

  So that's how he responds to sexual flirtatiousness, I thought. Good to know.

  I found myself comparing Parasini to Ashley. They certainly shared common elements: both of them physically attractive and in good condition, both of them with skin coloring several shades darker than Shepard's, both of them competent and very forthright. I began to see a pattern of preferences.

  Shepard sighed, once again cool and professional. "I hate to give Benezia more time to do whatever she came here to do, or to escape . . . but Gianna's right. It's still dark, the weather isn't letting up, and if the terrain is bad too we shouldn't risk driving. On top of that, we've been up for sixteen hours straight. Let's go bunk down on the Normandy for a few hours and come at this fresh after sunrise."

  * * *

  14 March 2183, Aleutsk Valley/Noveria

  An hour after sunrise we returned to Port Hanshan, taking a lift up to the surface-access garage for Peak 15. I knew that my mother had used the same garage a few days before, but since her departure it had been sealed. Shepard presented Parasini's pass-card to the stone-faced ERCS guard at the garage door, who meticulously checked his identification before disengaging the code-lock.

  We stepped out into the cold, dark space.

  "Geth!" shouted Tali, leaping for cover and drawing her shotgun.

  Trust the quarian to spot her ancestral enemy before anyone else can.

  I heard the mechanical warbling of geth speech, saw some sort of weird leaping machine plastered to the floor a few meters away. I fled for cover as a targeting laser splashed on the wall where I had been standing a moment before. Shepard found his own concealment and activated his sniper rifle.

  The firefight was frantic and confusing. I never managed to build good situational awareness, forced to act on reflex and hope my friends were covering my back.

  I saw a geth ocular pointed in my direction, glowing brightly in the dark hangar, and fired wildly at it.

  Somehow one of the geth clung to the ceiling high overhead. I had to fling myself into a roll across the floor to avoid its fire, until Shepard reared back and destroyed it with a single well-placed shot.

  Rockets roared out of the darkness. I brought up my best barrier and cowered behind a very inadequate shipping container.

  A fuel tank ruptured at the far end of the hangar, triggering a vast explosion and the scream of fire alarms. The concussion sent geth flying.

  Tali sent overload charges soaring across the room, setting off short discharges of white light as geth shields went down. Shepard's rifle boomed once, then again.

  Enormous geth-shaped shadows twisted and went down, back-lit by the flames.

  Fire-suppression systems kicked in, scattering water all across the hangar, drenching me.

  I saw a trooper loom out of the darkness, behind Shepard who was for once not aware of the enemy. I had to scream a warning and fling a lightning-fast warp to save his life.

  A single half-wrecked geth pulled itself across the floor with its one functional arm. Shepard's rifle barked once more.

  It was over.

  Suddenly light flooded the garage, and a squad of ERCS guards rushed toward us. "What
did you do here, Commander?" shouted Captain Matsuo.

  Shepard looked at the geth. He looked at Captain Matsuo.

  I stepped in before he could lose his temper. "We were defending ourselves, Captain, from the geth."

  "Geth? Where did they come from?"

  "If I had to guess," said Tali, "they came from those crates Benezia took with her to Peak 15."

  "We scanned those!"

  The quarian shook her head. "The geth have very advanced technology, Captain. In fact, they are very advanced technology. Your scanning procedures are much too limited."

  Captain Matsuo's eyes were wide. "If that's true, if Benezia-sama smuggled those things in, there could be many more out there."

  "How many more?" demanded Shepard. "Dozens? Hundreds?"

  "I don't know. They're machines, they could be packed tightly."

  "Damn it." Shepard stowed his sniper rifle. "It doesn't make any difference. We need to get to Peak 15, even if we have to fight our way through."

  "Good luck, Commander," said Matsuo. "I have to report to the Executive Board. If rumors of geth get out, we could have an investor panic on our hands."

  "God knows we can't have that," Shepard murmured, just loud enough for me to hear as he stepped toward the Mako we had been assigned for our journey up the valley.

  Suddenly I couldn’t follow him. I looked around at the garage, littered with wrecked geth, and a connection formed in my mind.

  I saw the truth.

  My mother is a mass murderer.

  It was like a sword-blade in my heart.

  "Shepard . . ." My voice quivered.

  He stopped and looked intently back at me. "What is it, Liara?"

  "I think we can assume my mother deliberately came here with these geth." I took a deep breath, forcing my voice to stay steady lest I break out in a desolated wail. "I don't think we can lend her the benefit of the doubt any longer. She is cooperating fully with Saren and the geth. She was complicit in the attack on Eden Prime."

  Shepard returned to stand before me, just barely crowding into my personal space, his presence somehow a deep comfort. "I intend to give her the benefit of the doubt until the last possible moment.”

  "Why?" I glanced up at him, silently cursing the tears that welled up in my eyes. "The evidence is too strong. Don't turn a blind eye to it for my sake."

  Shepard rested a gentle hand on my shoulder. I felt warmth spreading from the contact.

  "Liara. I'm not turning a blind eye, but even now I have several reasons to reserve judgment. First, I try to avoid killing influential asari leaders if I can possibly avoid it. Second, if I can convince her to abandon Saren she might make a formidable ally. Third, at the very least she may be able to tell us what Saren is up to.” He paused. “Finally . . . yes, for your sake."

  I couldn’t hold his gaze. I looked down, swiping at my cheeks with one hand.

  Why should he care what happens to Benezia . . . or to me? This human’s compassion astonishes me.

  I shook my head and followed him to the Mako.

  It took a long time for us to drive up the Aleutsk Valley to Peak 15. We faced terrible weather, with visibility almost down to zero for most of the journey. Shepard had to drive very slowly across the smooth, treacherous surface, paying close attention to his instruments, watching for the deep canyons and abysses that lay close beside the trail in many places.

  Geth waited in ambush all along the route: rifle troopers, heavy troopers, at least one armature-class "tank," and rocket turrets placed to block sharp turns on the trail. Four times we had to stop and carefully position ourselves in defilade, protecting ourselves from geth fire behind a natural obstacle. Shepard would carefully move forward, permitting Tali to line up shots with the main and coaxial guns. Then he would back away, as soon as I warned that incoming fire was beginning to tear down the Mako's kinetic barriers. It was a slow and painstaking process.

  Finally we reached the Peak 15 facility, only to find the garage blocked by the burning wreckage of another vehicle. We entered through a small side door, and once again had to fight geth before we could proceed further.

  "User alert! All Peak 15 facilities have suffered a great deal of damage." A voice broadcast to our suit radios, human, female, and neutral, a computer system. "Biohazard materials present throughout the facility. Virtual intelligence user interface offline."

  "Biohazard materials?" I wondered. "Some kind of bacterial or viral research that got into the air systems? That would explain the Code Omega alert."

  "I hope that's not it, because our suits aren't sealed. Except Tali's, of course."

  "That would not explain why the VI is offline," said Tali.

  We moved further into the empty facility, still finding no bodies, no bloodstains, and no signs of a struggle. At one point we passed through a biohazard containment system, a short corridor with airtight doors at each end and plasma nozzles spaced along its entire length. Small laser turrets were mounted at the corridor's midpoint, but something about them seemed not quite right.

  "Shepard, why are the turrets pointing the wrong way?" asked Tali.

  That’s it, I realized. The turrets covered the inner doors.

  "Whatever they were working with here, they didn't want it to get out," Shepard guessed.

  "Not a weaponized microorganism, then," I pointed out. "Laser turrets would be useless against that kind of threat."

  "A bigger animal of some kind," he said. "If you see a strange creature wandering the halls in here, whatever you do, don't stop to pet it."

  I stared at him in disbelief until I realized he was making an obscure joke. No one could possibly be that stupid.

  A lift took us up to the second level of the facility, quarters and recreational areas for the scientists and technicians. The air had become very cold here. Shepard and I emitted long plumes of vapor as we breathed.

  Tali looked closely at her omni-tool. "More geth up ahead," she said in a low voice.

  We passed through a door into what had once been a crew commons area, currently half-buried in drifting snow that had come in through broken skylights far above. Three or four geth troopers were busy with something at the far end of the room, but we took them by surprise and had no difficulty destroying them.

  Then as we moved out into the open space we heard a terrible noise, like metal scraping across metal. A small avalanche of snow slid down from the drifts against the opposite wall. The three of us put ourselves back to back, weapons out, trying to look in every direction at once.

  "What was that?" asked Tali, her voice higher-pitched than usual with unease. "Wind? Animals?"

  "This place is in really bad shape," said Shepard.

  The snowdrifts erupted.

  At first we couldn’t see what was attacking us. A flood of small scuttling things, snow-dusted and many-legged, rushed toward us from three sides. Behind them loomed two large forms that my mind couldn't quite process, big knots of legs and claws and tentacles that waved in the air.

  "Spiders!" shrieked Tali, her shotgun booming as she fired wildly into the mass. "Spiders-spiders-spiders!"

  Shepard back-pedaled slowly, firing his assault rifle in controlled three-round bursts. "Tali, get hold of yourself! Fall back with me, and control your fire!"

  My pistol proved nearly useless against the onrushing horde, but a biotic technique seemed likely to work. I made a wide, sweeping gesture with my right arm, blue fire rushing out like a waist-high curtain, picking up the smaller creatures and flinging them back in a great arc. Fragile, most of them burst open when they struck the far wall.

  One of the big creatures emitted a high-pitched screeching hiss, a weird cry like nothing I’d ever heard in my life. A stream of greenish goo flew through the air and splashed across the floor right in front of me. The stench! It was horrible, some impossible mix of vitriol and sewage, and it hurt my lungs to breathe it. I felt a wave of dizziness and tunnel vision.

  "Back up, get under cover!" shouted Shep
ard. With the little scuttling creatures gone, he switched to his sniper rifle and called down lightning on the larger enemy.

  Tali dove behind an upset dining table, her hands shaking so hard she could barely hold her shotgun. Instead she reached into a pocket and prepared a toxin grenade, hurling it across the room to strike one of the weird monstrosities.

  I more or less fell behind a concrete support column, half-paralyzed, struggling to clear my lungs with a hacking cough. My eyes watered fiercely. I could barely see.

  More goo streaked across the room at us, forcing Shepard to duck aside and break his concentration. The very air tasted unbearably foul as the enemy charged down on us.

  My mental focus was shattered. I couldn't call up my biotics again. I drew my sidearm instead and fired at the nearest monster, knowing it was futile but determined not to sell my life cheaply.

  It turned toward me, annoyed, hissing and waving sharp talons at the end of each long tentacle. At the last moment Shepard killed it, placing a sniper rifle shot at almost point-blank range right behind its . . . I suppose it could be called a head. It collapsed in a heap of mismatched limbs.

  The other one grasped Tali's table with every available limb. It wrenched its entire body, a movement that was difficult to watch, and hurled the table aside.

  Tali thrust her shotgun out until the muzzle was touching the creature's midsection, and fired an incandescent round. This turned out to be overkill. The thing exploded, gore spewing out in a fan behind it. Tali fell sprawling from the recoil.

  Finally silence fell, broken only by the sound of distant wind. We gathered around to examine our fallen enemies.

  The one Shepard had killed was still relatively intact. We saw an exoskeleton, four legs, several forelimbs of various shapes, and an obvious sensory cluster at the top of the curved, reddish-brown body.

  "What is this thing?" demanded Tali.

  Shepard shrugged. "Liara, any ideas?"

  "I don't know, Shepard. Xenobiology is not my field." Still, something felt familiar about the creature.

  He turned to Tali, his voice stern. "What happened back there?"