Deep Space: An Epic Sci-Fi Romance

by Joan Jett

  The ExoGeni Corporation had staked a claim to Trebin, hoping to terraform the planet. Unfortunately their survey team had gone silent, just after sending some very odd reports back to their headquarters. We had no reason to believe the geth had any interest in Trebin, but the planet was close to our patrol route and Shepard decided to investigate.

  We began to suspect something had gone badly wrong the moment the Mako arrived at the survey team’s camp. We found several pre-fabricated habitats, living quarters and lab space for a large team of geologists and terraforming engineers. Someone should have been moving around outside, but we saw no sign of occupation. We emerged from the AFV and looked around, hearing nothing but the occasional sounds of wind.

  Shepard tried to communicate, as he had been trying ever since the ship entered orbit. “This is Commander Shepard of the MSV Normandy, calling any member of the Trebin survey team. Please respond.”

  Silence.

  “All right, this is way too much like the start of every horror vid I’ve ever seen. We’re going to check out the main work center over there, and we’re going to do it together. Ashley, take point. Wrex, watch our backs.”

  All our caution went to waste. We found no threat. We found almost no sign that anyone had ever lived or worked there.

  We spent an hour examining the campsite, working our way through all of the habitats. Everything was clean and orderly, as if the survey team had neatened uptheir work areas before vanishing into thin air. Personal items carefully stowed, weapons and equipment put away, no half-eaten meals or half-empty cups of coffee. We didn’t even find much dust.

  “As if they all just . . . got up and left,” said Kaidan finally.

  Finally we returned to the main work hab. Tali and I circumvented the authentication systems on the team’s mainframe computer and called up the chief scientist’s personal logs. A few minutes of speed-reading and I began to see what had happened.

  “The problem began about fifteen days ago,” I reported. “The team detected an underground structure not far from here, a sealed cavern too regular in shape to be natural. They drilled down to it and sent geologists down to investigate. They found something astonishing: artifacts, some kind of ancient technology.”

  “This planet has never been inhabited,” Shepard objected.

  “No, but the chief scientist speculated that it had been visited at some point in the distant past. Geologists dated the cavern to about a million years ago. The team could not determine the age of the artifacts, but they appeared to have been placed in the cavern at about the same time.”

  “A million years ago? They can’t be Prothean artifacts, then.”

  “No. We know that starfaring civilizations existed then, but we know nothing about their nature. You may recall my theory about a cycle of galactic extinctions?”

  “Races before the Protheans. Right.”

  “We know a great deal about the Protheans, who became extinct fifty thousand years ago. Before the Protheans there lived at least two competing civilizations, the inusannon and the thoi’han. Both of them became extinct just as abruptly about one hundred twenty-five thousand years ago. We have only hints and scraps of evidence for spacefaring cultures before that. Enough to guess that the cycle goes back at least several million years, but not enough to tell us anything reliable about the civilizations that rose and fell over that time.”

  “So the scientists here thought they had found evidence of one of those ancient civilizations?” guessed Ashley.

  “They were quite excited about it. None of them were archaeologists, of course, but among them they had enough expertise to see the implications of what they had found.” I frowned. “But then the log entries become increasingly erratic.”

  Shepard leaned close, looking over my shoulder at the screen in front of me. “How so?”

  “Scientists who worked in the cavern, or who examined the artifacts, began showing signs of obsession with them. The chief scientist writes of listening to them, as if they spoke to him in words no one else could hear. Others reported visual as well as auditory hallucinations. Then, as of three days ago, there’s nothing. No log entries at all.”

  “Hmm.” He stood up again, rubbing at the stubble on his cheeks and chin. “We had better check it out. If there are any survivors, they may be down in that cavern.”

  “We need to be careful,” said Kaidan. “Whatever’s down there must have been affecting their minds somehow. Liara, do you have any idea how we could protect ourselves from that?”

  I shook my head. “I’m afraid not. What disturbs me is that this sounds familiar.”

  Shepard gave me a sharp glance.

  “I thought so too,” remarked Tali. “Shepard, do you remember what Benezia said on Noveria? Saren has some kind of mind-control capability.”

  He nodded slowly. “Indoctrination, she called it. Maybe it’s a technological capability, and some of the same technology is here? But there’s no evidence that Saren or the geth have ever been here.”

  “Talk, talk, talk. Only way to find out for sure is to go and see,” growled Wrex.

  “I’m with the krogan,” said Ashley. “Let’s find this cavern.”

  Shepard braced his shoulders and nodded. “All right. We go in, we check for survivors, we get out. I don’t want us exposed for very long to whatever affected the survey team.”

  We bundled into the Mako, drove about two kilometers, and parked once again in a small box canyon. The survey team had built an airlock into the top end of the tunnel down to their mysterious cavern. We cycled through in stages, mustered in the tunnel, and began to descend into the depths.

  Shepard took point with Ashley and Wrex right behind him, moving slowly down the long slope. Kaidan and Tali followed, and then I took up the rear. I opened my omni-tool and checked the software Tali had provided me. Yes, my shields had been improved to almost twice their previous strength.

  Nothing broke the silence but the sound of our footsteps. I felt tension at the back of my neck, and found myself glancing behind every few steps to make sure nothing had emerged into the tunnel behind us.

  A massive hatch blocked the bottom of the tunnel. Shepard tried and failed to open it. “Jammed. Tali.”

  The engineer moved up, worked on the controls for a moment. Something crashed deep in the mechanism, then the hatch split open and began to move aside.

  I heard a horrible noise, like multiple voices groaning in terrible agony. Some source of illumination stood in the center of the cavern, dark bipedal figures moving against that light. They moved fast, rushing toward us across the floor.

  Ashley cried out. “God damn it. Husks!”

  The nightmare began.

  Dozens of the things crowded toward us, like horrible perversions of the human form. They had flesh, blackened and twisted, but deep inside they seemed more machine than living creature. Their eyes, mouths, and guts shone with a sickly blue light.

  Shepard, Ashley, and Wrex opened fire with their assault rifles, but the creatures proved surprisingly tough. Even with legs blown off or gaping holes in their torsos, they continued to move in our direction.

  “Don’t let them touch you!” shouted Shepard.

  That seemed like very good advice. “Tali, do they have shields?”

  The quarian glanced down at her omni-tool. “I’m not sure how, but yes!”

  “Get to work overloading them!”

  Kaidan began using biotic force to disrupt the onrushing tide of warped creatures. For my part, I tried something I had never managed before. I called up all of my biotic power, my entire body crackling with dark energy, and visualized folding the space between Shepard and the closest husks, crushing it down to a dense knot of distorted geometry.

  The closest husks reached out for Shepard.

  I let the power surge down my arms, seized the space between us and the enemy, and squeezed.

  A large globe of deep-blue energy appeared, humming with power, twisting the very light that
passed through so that everything behind it looked distorted. The vortex pulled the first husks off their feet and into the air, sending them spinning helplessly around the singularity I had called up.

  Shepard threw two grenades into the writhing mass in front of us. Crack! Crack!

  I had to turn my face away for a moment, at the sight of gobbets of blackened flesh and bone flying through the air. I felt suddenly and violently ill, but I suppressed the reaction and called up my biotics once more. A warp on one of Kaidan’s targets detonated it. A second warp into my own singularity field produced an even larger detonation, loud and echoing in the confined space.

  “Hah!” shouted Wrex. He had set his shotgun to use “shredder” rounds, and was blasting away into the mass to stomach-churning effect. “They’re not just machines after all!”

  We all fought as hard as we could, and it wasn’t enough. The husks simply evaded our biotic obstacles, clambered over the bodies of their fallen, and rushed us.

  “Fighting retreat!” ordered Shepard, still firing his assault rifle one-handed and reaching for another grenade with the other hand.

  Goddess! I began to back away slowly, praying that I wouldn’t stumble and fall on some irregularity of the tunnel floor.

  Three of the husks came within arm’s reach of Shepard, seemed to pause for a moment, and then erupted with a crackling nimbus of electrical discharge. Shepard gave a strangled cry and went down, his shields blasted into nonexistence.

  Before the husks could tear him apart, Wrex leaped forward with a roar, blasted twice with his shotgun, and then grabbed Shepard by a projection on his armor. The krogan backed away slowly, pulling Shepard with him, as Ashley covered them both.

  Once again I called up every erg of biotic power I could muster, twisting the space at the tunnel’s mouth. Another singularity caught the first wave of husks, rendering them helpless as Ashley and Wrex laid down withering fire.

  Tali leaped to Shepard’s side, slapped the emergency switch on his armor, and then did something with her omni-tool that snapped his shields back into place. Shepard groaned, but he immediately began to push himself back to his feet.

  “We’ve . . . got to hold,” he coughed out. “Never get everyone back through the airlock with the husks at our heels.”

  I threw another warp, detonating my second singularity field. This time the sound was so deafeningly loud that Ashley and Tali both yelled in pain. Wrex recoiled, his jaws agape to equalize the pressure on his eardrums.

  It worked. Even the husks fell back for a moment.

  “Hit them!” shouted Kaidan, firing his pistol wildly into the mass of husks.

  We did, all of us together, and the husks lost ground. As we continued to press forward, even Shepard returning to the fight, the force of the husk assault slackened, dwindled down to nothing.

  A final husk was blown into pieces by Wrex’s shotgun.

  “Keelah,” said Tali in the echoing silence. “Were those the survey team?”

  As we examined the cavern, it seemed to be so. We found it impossible to account for all of the husks, but there seemed to have been about as many as there had been humans on the survey team. None of us had any trouble drawing the unpleasantly obvious conclusion.

  The illumination in the cavern’s center came from an object, like a great flower made of some unknown metal and alive with dark energy. It sat on the floor of the cavern, rooted in the stone, as if it had been there forever. We also found a dozen long spikes, the “dragon’s teeth” that Alliance soldiers had been finding after other encounters with husks. Whatever had turned the ExoGeni scientists into mindless monsters, it had used a process similar to that used by the geth elsewhere.

  Once we knew none of the survey team had survived, Shepard ordered us to abandon the place at once. None of us could tell if the artifact was affecting us, and in any case the ExoGeni team had been exposed to it for many days before losing their minds. Still, none of us had any desire to take chances. We made a photographic record of the place for Shepard’s report, and then planted demolition charges sufficient to collapse the cavern entirely before we left.

  The archaeologist in me wanted to object loudly, but I said nothing. Some things are too dangerous to leave in the open, where any helpless victim can find them.

  As we emerged back onto the surface, Shepard turned to me. “Doctor, I want your scientific opinion on something.”

  “What is it?”

  “I think it’s very suspicious that we found husks here, just as we’ve been finding them on worlds attacked by the geth. We found dragon’s teeth too, just like the geth use. Not to mention that other weird artifact. All in a cavern that’s probably been sealed shut for at least a million years.” He gave me a sharp glance. “The geth have only been in existence for about three hundred years.”

  I nodded. “The deduction seems inevitable. This is not geth technology. It comes from some other source.”

  “The Reapers?”

  “That, we do not know.” I held his gaze. “But the facts remain consistent with that hypothesis.”

  He nodded in grim satisfaction.

  Chapter 20 : The Villainy You Teach Me

  9 April 2183, Interstellar Space

  After fully recovering from my injuries on Luna, I resumed physical training on the staging deck. I liked the effect of my regular workout. Asari don’t develop heavy masses of muscle with exercise, as humans often do, but rigorous training can still improve our strength, agility, and endurance. Not since my days playing skyball at university had my physical condition been so sound.

  I also added an hour per day of biotic combat drills, working with Wrex or Kaidan to sharpen our skills and teamwork. I practiced the unusual biotic feats I had learned until I could reproduce them at will: the quick flash-step to dodge an incoming attack, the massive singularity to block passage on the battlefield. I also learned how to hurl a biotic throw or warp with a mere glance and a flick of one wrist, reliably hitting targets that had already been weakened by one of my partners.

  I found it pleased me to exercise my biotic skills so frequently. My biotic aptitude had always been high, even compared to other asari, but never before had I taken so much interest in its development. I had disappointed my mother’s more militant acolytes, notably my friend Shiala, when I chose to abandon my training. Now I was becoming a better huntress than ever before. Certainly far better than the awkward young maiden I had once been, wearing ill-fitting leathers and wishing I could be anywhere other than on the training ground.

  Sometimes I wondered what Shiala would think, if she could see the person I had become on board the Normandy. I dared to hope that she would approve.

  A few days after Trebin, during our biotic drills, I found myself becoming concerned about Kaidan. Usually he carried on a conversation while we practiced, but that day he had descended through terse comments into monosyllables. His normally pleasant expression had set into something bleak and pinched. I asked if anything was disturbing him, and got no response.

  Eventually I decided to stop work entirely. “Kaidan, you truly don’t look well. Perhaps we should see Dr. Chakwas.”

  He shook his head angrily, the first sign of real temper I had ever seen out of him. “Forget it. I’ve got this covered.”

  “We’re not in combat and we’ve already practiced for a longer period than our average. If you don’t wish to see the doctor, I see no reason why we can’t rest for a few minutes.” I walked over to the cooler sitting on the floor at the edge of our practice area, pulled out a bottle of energy drink, and threw it over to him. “Here, drink this.”

  He caught the bottle and scowled at me. He seemed about to object further, but then he saw the stubborn expression on my face. He gave in with a sigh, and sat down on a nearby bench. I took a bottle for myself and sat down next to him.

  “Sorry,” he said at last. “I am feeling a little under the weather. A break might be good.”

  I smiled and said nothing. We sa
t in companionable silence for a few minutes, sipping our drinks, letting the nervous energy that comes with biotic exercise drain away.

  The lift opened and Shepard stepped out into the staging bay. “Kaidan! Taking a break?”

  “Dr. T’Soni is making me work a little harder than usual,” said Kaidan with a shallow smile.

  I caught Shepard’s eye for a moment, trying without words to convey my concern.

  He made an almost imperceptible nod. “We’ve received new orders. Kaidan, have you ever heard of someone named Martin Burns?”

  Kaidan frowned. “I think so. Alliance parliamentarian, isn’t he?”

  “Chairman of the Subcommittee for Transhuman Affairs,” confirmed Shepard. “Liara, that’s the subcommittee of the human legislature that examines issues related to biotics and other technological methods for enhancement of human abilities.”

  I nodded. I had done some research, and thought I understood the strange form of representative democracy the humans seemed to prefer.

  “I remember him now,” said Kaidan, his face twisting in distaste. “Political hack, only out for his own advancement. Wasn’t there something about a bill that got killed in his committee? Reparation payments to the first-generation biotics who have suffered medical problems?”

  “That’s right. Apparently some of the biotics have taken violent exception to that. They’ve abducted Mr. Burns and are holding him hostage aboard a hijacked freighter in the Farinata system. Which happens to be just a few hours away if we divert from our patrol route.”

  Kaidan looked grim. “Not exactly the best way to win acceptance for your cause.”

  “No. We’ve been ordered to intercept the Ontario and resolve the situation, any way we can. I’m going to want your help.”

  “I understand, Commander. I’ll be ready.”

  “I know you will.” Shepard put a hand on Kaidan’s shoulder for a moment, and then turned to go.