"I'm curious, kid," Cayde-6 says, "They say you got up close with the latest round of Ethereals. You ever seen this before?"

The Exo reaches into a pouch and produces something that might get him arrested in more reputable place: an oblong, egg-shaped hunk of smooth plastic, with ports in the front for optical wiring from sensory systems and a thick plug in the back for spinal connection hardware. While the exact design is unfamiliar to Shepard, the general shape is easy to understand. No matter the species, form follows function, and this is obviously a storage case for a cyberbrain.

"Looks like a cyberbrain, though I don't know the species," he replies.

"Yeah, neither do I," Cayde says. "And considering how long I've been alive and what I've seen, that should be pretty damn scary, son. Especially considering what I pulled this thing out of."

The Grimoire: Part Three

Pain was the first thing that slammed into its awareness. It calmly regarded the agony, and pushed it aside, instead access internal systems.

A check of the chronometer showed it had been inactive for eight minutes and seventeen seconds. Medigel applications were repairing cranial damage. Pain lanced along its body, but was not debilitating. Diagnostics of armor and equipment showed minimal loss of functionality. Medical systems reported minor injuries along back and left leg, in addition to cranial trauma. Implants were active and functional.

Foxtrot Eight-One-Three reopened its eyes.

Probability of combat encounters: extremely high based on previously-available information. Environmental status of cargo deck: compromised, according to limited mesh reports. Foxtrot Eight-One-Three assessed its armament while reestablishing local mesh connections.

Assessment of surroundings: Portside aft secondary cargo bay, used for storing perishable supplies. Room was dark save for emergency lighting. Local mesh connections sporadic. Majority of cargo deck offline due to electrical pulse prior to munitions detonation. No friendly unit responses from this deck. Access to crew deck located three meters left via internal access hatch.

Foxtrot Eight-One-Three moved toward the hatch while finishing equipment diagnostics. Plasma rifle: intact and functional. High-frequency blade: intact and functional. Psionic amplification systems: minor damage to regulatory systems but otherwise functional. Cranial implant: intact and functional.

The ship's internal mesh was severely damaged. The intruders had done massive damage to data systems and communications. Foxtrot Eight-One-Three's comms system had to work to reroute around damage while it cut open the hatch with the blade and entered the crawlspace. There was no gravity within the maintenance sections to ease movement, and it advanced quickly.

Attempting link with other units in squad…. No response, no connection.

Attempting link with other units in platoon…. No response, no connection.

Attempting link with other local friendlies…. No response, no connection.

Attempting link with external communications - initiate sole-survivor emergency override protocol…. Connection established.

Foxtrot Eight-One-Three patched into the ship's comms systems. Hyperwave offline. Long-range comm buoy systems offline. Quantum entanglement communicator online.

It patched in emergency codes and sent them to the QEC's twin on the other side of the galaxy. Response came back instantly.

We receive you, Foxtrot Eight-One-Three. Upload status.

It took a couple of seconds to send a full XP upload of what Foxtrot had seen before losing consciousness.

Several more seconds passed as the Replica climbed up to the crew deck.

Foxtrot Eight-One-Three: Situation is critical. IMMOLATE SUNDOWN protocols engaged. Direct intervention necessary.

Foxtrot Eight-One-Three emerged into the crew deck, exiting the hatch within the frigate's infirmary. It crouched, sweeping the area with scanners and its rifle, confirming all clear. It sent that message along the quantum communicator, and then adjusted settings on the psionic implant within its cranium.

Port is open, it reported, and the Replica laid down on the floor once it was sure the room was clear. Safe position assumed.

Standby for remote personality override X-223-MBS-PHANTOM.

Assuming direct control.

Foxtrot Eight-One-Three's visor glowed a faint purple, and its body twitched violently. There was a cold, rippling sensation, shifting into a dizzying disorientation as the blank functionality of the Replica was rewritten with history, personality, beliefs, and ambitions.

When the body stopped convulsing, he lay there for a moment, acclimating himself to smells and textures of the hardsuit, glancing over the interface and settling into his new body. He took a moment to review the logs and situation, though he already knew their objectives; he always did when they put a fork on standby for direct intervention.

"Alright then," he said, and smiled beneath his faceplate, as he always did when taking over a Replica. It hurt a bit, using muscles that had never been worked in that manner before, but it felt good and helped him acclimate. He stood up, rolling his neck, and his fingers tapped the sheathed blade on his back and the rifle strapped across his chest.

"Time to get this situation unfucked."

"Ellie, bring us alongside the Valkyrie," Cayde ordered. "We'll use the u-collar to link up. Take your extra… uh, yous, in the launch pod and sweep the research ship while we clear the frigate."

The Paxterae closed to within a kilometer of the two derelicts, matching orbital velocity. The asari research craft was closer, and Ellie rolled the Pax's flank to present the starboard keel to the vessel. While the frigate didn't have a shuttle, it did feature a repair and cargo transferral pod affixed to the cargo deck. As with most of his equipment, Cayde had scavenged and refurbished the cylindrical device, this one coming from a salarian repair platform that had intercepted a meteorite and been scattered across half a star system.

Ellie had stuffed the pod with half a dozen hoppers, most of them loaded with scanning equipment or microdrone launchers. Coupled with more than half a dozen more that she had scattered throughout the Pax direct-linked to the systems, it was far more hopper platforms than she'd started with when she'd joined the crew. She apparently assembled them out of spare parts and minifabricators. Cayde would have been worried about Ellie assembling her own drone platoon if they weren't covered in pink and yellow paint with smiling animal faces.

Also, Cayde-6 wasn't going to admit that he would totally be building his own robot army if he could, with faux evil laughter to accompany it.

The Pax shuddered slightly as the pod launched toward the Amelisean, and the frigate continued on its way toward the drifting Valkyrie. This close in, they could easily make out the coloration on the hull, a generic dark gray with no identifying marks. Cayde tried running a hull match to see what shipyard had produced it, but came back with nothing conclusive. Corpus shipyards in the Terminus had a history of building ships like Valkyries "off the grid" and not registering hull compositions and patterns. They didn't like being linked to their customers' indiscretions, and many of the mercs and pirates with enough money to buy new ships disliked leaving a data trail.

"Looks like some bodies were ejected," Mesa said, eyeing the sensor feeds. "Mostly human, a few turians and salarians. Hmm." She leaned closer to the console, waving a three fingered hand over it. "Hard to tell, but I think they're wearing uniform hardsuits and armor."

"NC 'independent' mercs, likely," Miranda said. "Pretty much just New Conglomerate troops wearing non-identifiable gear. They tend to be well-equipped and organized. Discipline, on the other hand… not so much." She scratched her chin, looking over the same feeds that Mesa was receiving. "Normally the NC wouldn't be hiding their presence like this in the Terminus. They're not afraid of pissing off random warlords or pirates."

"These fellas are worried about much meaner things catching them than some tinpot planetary dictator," Cayde said. "Y'know. Like us."

"Why would anyone be afraid of you?' Bakara rumbled. Cayde opened his mandibles, but she cut him off. "If you say the word 'cape' you will be replacing all of your limbs."

"...anyway, Ellie, ETA?" Cayde asks.

"Couple of minutes," she replied. "Synched with remote platforms. You want me to come with you?"

"Yeah, I suspect we'll need your big body on that tub," the Exo replied.

Outside, the drifting mercenary frigate loomed closer, the enormous jagged wound visible on its gently-rotating hull.

The central deck of the frigate was littered with debris and bodies. He didn't know what it was that hit them, leaving charred corpses of Replica security and normal organic crew scattered about. Plasma scoring sliced up and down the walls, narrow tracks of boiled metal that almost resemble blade cuts in their precision. Foxtrot Eight-One-Three didn't get a chance to see what attacked them before being knocked out by the explosion in the cargo deck.

He stepped over the body of a salarian bisected by scalpel-like plasma, and around blood pooling on the decks. Main lights flickered off and on, and damaged emergency strips cast everything in a dim red glow. He moved slowly, with balanced, silent steps, wary of any noise or interference indicating something else was nearby. Danger could come from any direction, much like high school.

It looked like the crew tried to make a stand in the central mess, which was right on the path between the cargo elevator and the bridge access elevator. The Valkyrie was designed with repelling boarders in mind, so if you wanted to reach the bridge, you had to move through a chokepoint into the biggest room on the main deck. The mess made for a good tactical position, and it did precisely jack shit to stop whatever had been murdering its way through the frigate.

The room was torn to shreds, tables warped and broken, bodies scattered and burned apart. A food dispenser was merrily dropping piles of processed ration goop all over a decapitated Replica's chest, and a turian command officer in a hardsuit was impaled against a wall by the jagged edge of half a metal table. The carnage was kind of impressive, and he took a moment to let it all sink in.

Core, you're receiving? he sent.

Affirmative.

Proceeding to secure locker. Sending you data uploads. Any idea what hit this ship?

A few seconds passed as the people on the other end processed what he was sending. He didn't know how many infomorphs, artificial intelligences, and flesh-and-blood organics were operating on the other end. They compartmentalized like a motherfucker.

They got back to him as he moved aft, into the half-molten hatch connecting the mess to the storage sections and crew quarters. A dozen people had been pumping energy and kinetic weapons into this hallway, mangling it with jagged tears and gaping holes. He stepped with silent caution, edging past the torn metal and into a pitch-black corridor.

Negative, Core finally reported. Cannot provide accurate assessment on hostiles based on present data.

"Whoopty-fuckin'-doo," he muttered under his breath. "Thanks for being useless."

Proceeding to the secure locker, he sent over the quantum communicator.

Aft of the crew section were secure containment areas for high-value items: ship brig, armory, and a captain-access only high-value cargo locker. Normally, cutting through security was as easy, and literal, as a few swipes with a sturdy HF blade, but the locker was located behind a heavy security door that used reactive fortification to repel such weapons. Fortunately, he had better means of bypassing security: a direct link to Core.

At the locker, he reported, linking in with hardline fiber-optic wires from the Replica's tactical omnitool. He closed his eyes and steadied himself, and for an instant everything flickered. He shook his head, catching himself from falling. Core never allowed operatives to be conscious when they used them as conduits to transfer remote override codes. Again, compartmentalization.

The door beeped and slid backward a couple of centimeters, before hissing aside into the wall. Beyond was a fairly large space, big enough to contain a full-sized airtruck.

Doctor Liara T'Soni drifted in the stasis pod that nearly filled the entire compartment.

"Ding-a-ding," he murmured.

The pod was a head-on collision of mismatching technology. The front interface next to the pod was human-built, and the armor-glass casing on the front was a familiar asari medical design, custom-remodeled to fit into the contours of the machine. The wiring connecting the pod's power and control systems was a chaotic mix of jury-rigged adapters between human and alien circuitry, with custom-fabricated components to link the disparate equipment together. The pod itself was an enormous, egg-like device of dull brown metal, sitting on a trio of heavy struts. Despite the rounded shape and lack of edges, there was nothing subtle or elegant about the machine; it was big, heavy, and clearly intended for something much bigger than the asari floating in the suspension inside.

T'Soni was a lean, pale-skinned asari clad in a form-fitting gray-white neural interface suit that covered her entire body. A heavy, elongated helmet completely encased her head, her features hidden behind an opaque faceplate. Sockets and plugs lined the waterproof fabric of the suit, and circuitry ran across its surface in miniscule hexagonal patterns. Cables and tubes connected across her spine, shoulders, neck, and head, with even more jury-rigged interfaces and custom adaptors linking alien technologies together. Within the enormous pod, she looked like a child.

Found T'Soni, he sent.

Status? Core asked.

"Uh…." He leaned down, checking the terminal. She seemed stable, as far as he could tell.

Looks fine. Pulling data and sending you a dump. I dunno about these neural readings, though.

We receive. Standby.

He circled around the pod while waiting for a response, making sure nothing looked out of place. Well, beyond the enormous, alien device itself.

Neural readings unstable, Core reported. T'Soni appears to have been traumatically disconnected from the network, but the Eliksni machinery is keeping her stable for now.

How long until extraction?

We have a ship en route. ETA one hour, seventeen minutes.

He was about to respond when he got a ping from the Valkyrie's sensors. It was a weak signal, transmitted through the ship's battered mesh, coming from security spimes in the cargo deck. A hatch was just forced open, and there were minor disturbances in artificial gravity, indicating someone moving around. A quick check showed no friendly signals from that deck.

We've been boarded, he sent. Orders?

Hold position and observe, Core immediately replied. Do not engage unless they find the pod. Priority is to protect T'Soni and the data in her head.

He nodded, stepping out of the chamber and sealing it behind him. He gripped the high-frequency blade, slowly twirling it in his hand, and initiated his active camouflage.

He disappeared from sight and sensors, and went silent, waiting and watching.

"Docked and locked, Boss!" Ellie called over the team radio, and the universal collar beeped an echoing confirmation. The u-collar extended from the side of the Pax and spread outward into the gap torn in the side of the hull a bit forward of the main wound in the cargo bay. A clever bit of salarian tech devised for boarding operations. Cayde-6 was happy to steal it.

"Anything from the asari ship?" Cayde asked as his team stood on the opposite side of the tube, the Exo in the lead.

"We've cut through the airlock now, starting the infiltration," she replied. "Ooh, dead bodies already. Squishy!"

"Ellie, stop poking the recently deceased," Cayde admonished her as he walked down the docking tube. Standard rule: cross the tube single file, and send the most expendable/toughest guy across first. None of Cayde's crew were expendable, so he went across instead.

"If you do poke them," Bakara cut in, "Get me scans and samples and forward them to my omnitool. I need to know how they died."

"Yay, poking corpses for science!"

"Do I want to see her data feeds?" Miranda asked, and Cayde shrugged.

"If you like seeing hoppers and gremlins poking people who've been cut in half by plasma fire, be my guest," he replied.

In truth, there weren't that many corpses, and it wasn't exceptionally gruesome. He counted a couple of bodies drifting in the dark, zero-gravity confines of the asari research ship, and unsurprisingly they were asari. One was a scientist who had been cleaved in half by plasma fire, leaving ragged, cauterized flesh where the corpse was split apart. The other was a security guard in a hardsuit who had died to a neat, precise beam through the torso. The interior of the skip was bathed in inky darkness, Ellie's scouts making their way through the interior corridors with thermal sensors, clambering along walls and ceilings or flying through the passageways. Every body they came across was cold, estimated dead for hours at least.

So, they had two derelicts full up on dead folks for the price of one. Lovely.

The door terminating the airlock hissed open, spreading inwards, and Cayde stepped through, the Last Word up and ready to shoot. His first glance indicated and first step confirmed that gravity was still online. The cargo bay was strewn with heavy metal crates and debris. A few bodies lay sprawled here and there, some in generic blue and gray coveralls and others in the olive drab and gray of Replica. Nothing moved, and aside from air currents and a few functional electronics, he found no heat sources.

Stepping further into the bay, the Exo could see out into the vast field of stars beyond the edge of the emergency kinetic barrier. The debris stretching across the hangar spread outward from that point, and he could see the gnarled, molten remains of a shuttlecraft docking rig extending from the ceiling and wall. He turned, sweeping over the walls, ceiling, and floor, and confirmed jagged shards of heat-warped metal and ceramic lodged into surfaces across the bay.

"Our explosive was on their shuttle," he reported as he took a few more steps into the room, moving toward the nearest mass of ruined cargo and crew. Behind him, he heard someone else touch down into the bay, boots lightly tapping across the hangar's floor grating. His tactical feed showed it was Spencer. Mesa was a few seconds behind him, followed by Miranda, Bakara, Qui'in, and Ellie.

Miranda took point, crossing the hangar and passing Cayde, blade in hand. Her mask was deployed, and she swept that blank metal visage across the room, looking down at each corpse as she passed. She suddenly halted next to a Replica that was mostly intact, save for the arm-length hunk of metal that had impaled its torso. She slowly crouched next to it, peering over the body with a careful eye, judging by her body language.

"You got an interest in these corpses?" Cayde-6 asked pausing next to her while the rest of the crew spread out, scanning the bay. Ellie was launching microdrones to scan the nooks and corners of the bay, while Spencer and Mesa moved out to check side storage rooms. Qui'in paced around the bay, scanning with his omnitool, and Bakara lumbered up next to them to cast a quizzical eye over the body Miranda was examining.

"This kit is the same as that which the Replica assault units on Illium wore," she murmured. "Exact same loadout." She reached down and grabbed the Replica's left arm just below the elbow, and fiddled with a catch on the armor. "The autopsy reports showed that the Replica's hands and faces were incinerated by implanted thermal charges."

The gauntlet the Replica wore clicked and slid loose, and the hand flopped to the deck.

"Interesting," Bakara mused, firing up her omnitool and scanning the exposed, pale skin. The hand looked mostly like a human's, except that the fingers were slightly longer and narrower than Cayde was familiar with. Kinda vaguely salarian, by his guess.

"The Illium Replica had unusual amounts of sectoid DNA integrated into them," Miranda, said, and she flicked on her HF blade. Electricity hummed along the sword's edge, and she lightly applied the edge to the faceplate of the Replica's helmet. She worked the blade slowly down the side, and then hooked her fingers in the plate with her free hand.

"You are very familiar with these things," Cayde remarked, and Miranda nodded. She twisted and tugged on the plate, and it popped loose with barely any effort.

"An understatement, Miranda," Bakara said, crouching and looking closely at the Replica's face.

It definitely wasn't human. The eyes were enormous, much larger than a human's. The nose was flatter, with larger nostrils. Kind of like a feline's nose, to be honest. The mouth was a thin, narrow slit with very little of the lip shape that was characteristic of humans, quarians, or asari.

"Who'd want to hide that pretty face with incendiaries?" Cayde quipped.

"Someone worried about PR," Miranda said, standing. "It's one thing to look at a DNA sequencing readout and see how many letters and numbers correspond to sectoids."

"But seeing big pictures of these fellas puts it in a whole 'nother light, I agree," Cayde said. "Ain't that why they use Replica in the first place? Even if they're pretty much drones, they're still something a human can relate to."

"Precisely," Miranda said with a nod.

"But these ain't," Cayde mused, prodding the body with his foot. "So ATC was worried about blowback and triggered those thermals."

"Or someone who ATC can order to press the button," Miranda replied with a nod.

"Boss!" Ellie called, and the trio looked up. The geth loomed at the far end of the bay, among scattered cargo crates thrown about by the explosion. Many of them looked like they had come off the research ship, going by their markings. She stood next to something big and metallic, about the size of a small aircar. Qu'inn was standing next to it, scanning with his omnitool, his mandibles tight against his jaw in concentration.

"Found something else new and terrifying?" Cayde asked, walking over and leaving Miranda and Bakara to inspect the Replica corpse. "Wondering what the researchers found that killed everyone and blew up that mercs' shuttle."

Cayde came to a halt when he saw the rounded, oblong metal shape. The hull of the machine was shaped in an almost organic fashion, with no sharp edges, save for a pair of long, four-barrelled cannons protruding from blisters along the machine's lower sides. A pair of flat, disc-like thrusters extended from the top sides of the machine, and clusters of dome-like sensors adorned the front, underneath a grilled opening that looked like it vented excess heat from the inside of the machine.

"I've never seen a machine like this," Qu'inn mused. "Some element zero masses, but the electronics and engineering are completely foreign. Some sort of drone, I suspect. Hull sampling is returning some unusual alloys, including vahlenite derivatives."

"Because it's eliksni," Cayde murmured, walking around the machine, recognizing the engineering. He brought up old files as he did so, comparing them to the samples he'd seen a long time ago.

"What?" Qu'inn asked, and Ellie's plating twitched a bit around her eye-light, the glowing sensors locking onto the Exo with disturbing intensity.

"You'd know 'em as the Fallen," Cayde said. "Terminus species, not very friendly. Not much known about them. Most folks who do know 'em find out right before they get vaporized. Raiders and pirates, mostly. Been roaming these stars since before the asari found the Citadel, by most accounts."

Cayde crouched beside the cannons on the left side of the machine, running a gloved finger across the metal.

"Not seen this particular machine before, but I know this metalwork and engineering. No reason for something like this to be on an NC ship unless they brought it aboard from the researchers' boat."

"So, this is part of what they found," Qu'inn said. "Ancient eliksni technology. Is this somehow connected to Oronvik?"

"You said your Broker agent sent a mission complete message," Cayde replied. "This must have been part of what they found."

On a hunch, Cayde brought up the sensor readings Ellie had collected on the wormhole array the research ship had plowed through, and he compared them to similar arrays built by humans. Now that he knew what to look for, Cayde could see the distinct engineering differences: rounded, almost organic metal on the former, while sharp edges and blunt angles on the latter.

The wormhole array the hapless researchers had come through was built by the Fallen at some point.

"No corrosion on the vahlenite components," Qu'inn mused. "But non-vahlenite machinery appears to have been severely corroded. Nothing organic inside, either. If it was, it's rotted away."

"Thing's old. Might predate asari spaceflight," Cayde said, standing up. "Great. Whole buncha other questions to ask now."

The geth hoppers sprang and clambered through Amelisean's dead corridors, flooding the air with microdrones that only showed up on the finest of sensor scans. Gremlins floated down the passages, releasing scanning pulses to map the interior of the ship, thrusters and mass effect fields casting dim blue shadows across the corpse-filled interior of the devastated asari vessel. The hoppers and gremlins paused by each floating body, carefully analyzing their wounds to determine what killed them, as well as collecting facial recognition scans. Some of the hoppers poked and prodded the bodies in what seemed like macabre curiosity.

Which, she reflected, was super weird for geth.

Avoiding the gremlins and their scans were easy enough. Your typical wraith-cloak could prevent mapping scanners from picking you up, and hers was very specially upgraded with stupendously illegal modifications. Microdrones, on the other hand, were a more serious problem, because no amount of cloaking tech was going to prevent a lady from occupying space, and the moment one of them touched her otherwise-invisible skin, the geth would know something was strange.

She moved carefully, slipping around the expanding clouds of the microscopic mapping machines, observing them passively by tracking the miniscule energy readings from their propulsion systems. While she kept her muscles relaxed, she was still tense and watchful, and worried that any instant a bot she hadn't detected would brush up against her.

The geth didn't react as she evaded them. Either she'd slipped them, or they'd spotted her and didn't respond. Either was quite possible, but the latter was naturally more worrying. There had been a few times in her career when a security system did the latter, and she'd usually ended up shooting her way out of it.

Whether detected and ignored, or undetected and still-amazing, she had no choice. Thus far, she knew of only one way off this wreck of a ship: the boarding pod that these geth had used to come across to the Amelisean. Of course, what she was going to do after she got there was another story. The few external sensors still functioning showed a Frankenstein of a turian frigate out there, and the mauled remains of the Valkyrie loaded with the idiots who had come to loot the research vessel.

The survivor in her wanted her to try and get to the newcomers' ship, hijack it, and be on her way. Space piracy was a rarity in her line of work, but she wasn't averse to forking a dozen copies of herself and making off with someone's boat.

But she had a job to do, and that involved getting on board the New Conglomerate Valkyrie, because that was where they'd taken Doctor T'Soni.

She fought the urge to sigh. There was a reason she preferred stealing - no, correction, "recovering," that was the word she used in government work - inanimate objects.

The repurposed repair pod was locked into place on the main docking port, and aside from the drifting bodies of the unlucky scientists who'd tried to flee this way, the compartment was empty. She pushed herself toward the airlock, accessing its systems and overriding reporting protocols in mid-flight. Couldn't do to tell everyone she was opening it, right?

The doors hissed open near-silently, and she moved inside, locking her helmet down in case of atmosphere loss. The door sealed closed behind her, and she brought up the interface to the outer hatch, which was linked to the repair pod the geth had used. Naturally, it was locked, so she began running scans and identified the model of the pod. A salarian system, surprisingly. That was going to make this tricky.

She started running through her library of known exploits for that model, and began checking for physical workarounds. Salarian designs were notorious among the criminally-minded because of how hit-or-miss they were on security programming. Either you had a vacuum-tight system with no exploits thanks to insane security testing, or you found something so hastily-programmed by a hyperactive coder that you could practically walk in.

But she didn't get time to find out which was the case.

"Why hello there!" blared a cheery female voice directly overhead, and she froze in place. She turned slowly, checking to make sure her pistol was loaded, charged, and ready, and looked up.

The geth hopper emerged from a wraith cloak, flashlight eye peering down at her from its vantage point on the ceiling. It detached one of the arms from the top of the airlock and waved down to her, and a holographic ":D" appeared in front of the machine's eye. Like the others, it was painted bright pink and yellow.

"Hi," she replied, and managed a smile back at the cheerful geth. "That's not usually the first thing I hear when I get caught."

"My name is Ellie, and we're here to conduct search and rescue!" the hopper said. "You look like a survivor. Are you a survivor? I really hope you're a survivor."

Oh my, you are the most adorable thing, she thought.

"Kasumi Goto," the thief replied. "And yes I am a survivor. Though unfortunately, I suspect I'm the only one."

The geth - Ellie - paused, leaning a bit closer. The eye whirred, clicked, narrowed, and then expanded.

"Oh, okay." she replied. "That's great! I've never met an XCOM Intelligence agent before!"

Kasumi froze, staring at the geth for a moment.

"Wait, what?"

The elevator to the central crew deck was nonfunctional, stuck at the top of the elevator shaft. The shaft was dim, lit only by the lamps attached to their helmets and weapons. The car loomed overhead, blank, dark metal blocking their path.

"Miranda," Cayde said with a nod toward the car, and she glanced to Ellie. Without a word, the geth grabbed her by the waist and lifted her up high enough that she could reach the bottom of the car. Everyone scrambled aside as she drew and engaged her high-frequency blade. Four quick swipes and a shower of brilliant, dancing sparks later, and a slab of metal tumbled down with a tremendous clang that shook the shaft.

"Okay, I'm up first," Cayde said, looking up toward the hole while Ellie set Miranda down. "Can I get a-"

Ellie reached over, grabbed him by the cloak, and chucked him up into the hole. He slammed into the deck of the elevator with a mechanical rattle akin to someone dumping a truckload of scrap metal out a window.

"Warn me next time!"

"Sorry, busy," Ellie replied, cheery but terse. Cayde drew the Last Word and swept the corridor right outside the elevator. Clear, save for corpses.

"Alright, Bakara, Mesa, Miranda, up here with me," he called. "Spencer, Qui'in, Ellie, get to engineering and see what you can find. We'll-"

"Hey!" Miranda blurted as she flew up through the hole. She flipped over into a graceful tumble and landed on her feet.

"-sweep the upper decks, search for survivors," Cayde continued, without missing a beat. Mesa grunted as Ellie chucked her up into the hole, landing lightly on her feet with laser pistols in hand.

"Do not even consider it," Bakara warned. A couple of seconds later, Bakara's head rose into view and she pushed herself up into the elevator, helped by Ellie's gentle lifting.

"No one tosses a krogan?" Cayde asked.

"Those who attempt to often marvel at how they can be beaten to death with their own limbs," Bakara rumbled.

"Okay, Miranda, Bakara, check this deck. Mesa and myself will help ourselves to the bridge. Keep your eyes open, don't know what else killed these folks. Could be they're still about. And hey, Ellie?"

"Yes, boss?"

"Anything interesting over there?"

"Nothing yet, boss. Will update if I find something you need to hear about."

"You're XCOM Intelligence," Ellie repeated, the hopper skittering a bit closer, flashlight head twisting a bit in curiosity.

"Ah, nope," Kasumi said, leaning a bit back and crossing her arms. She quietly armed the ECM launcher on her omnitools, and her fingers brushed the concealed pistol at her hardsuit's waistband. The whole outfit was made for stealth and evasion, but she'd be remiss if she hadn't included direct combat augments.

The hopped leaned down a bit closer, and Kasumi's cortical implants picked up the emissions of several scanner searching over her features. It probably wouldn't hit a facial recognition, considering how often she swapped bodies, but that didn't exactly matter, as she was already ID'd. It had to be reading her facial features and various biomarkers, along with her voice patterns. Time to turn on the bullshit.

"You're rather terribly misinformed," she continued, meeting the glowing eye, while considering how to get into the boarding pod. "You're right as far as who I am - good eye there - but I'm not with XCOM."

The last part, at least, was very much true. Kasumi and government agencies… didn't mix well.

Another hopper appeared in the compartment beyond the airlock, clinging to the floor and watching her.

"I'm geth," the nearest hopper replied, the cheerful female voice not changing. "We're not misinformed." The eyes turned a bit. "But you probably are. Scanner shows you're telling your version of the truth."

The hopper jerked back, settling on its haunches like an upside-down dog, but Kasumi could still pick up the scanning pulses.

"You say you're not XCOM, but you're using XCOM security bypasses on my pod," Ellie said. "Not a bad idea, because those are always up to date and can bypass most security. Because we write most of them."

Kasumi narrowed her eyes. No point in protesting that, because she'd actually ripped most of those programs from XCOM data hubs a few weeks back, and added a few tweaks of her own. A girl had to keep on top of her game in the galactic security business.

"Sorry, not XCOM. I don't work well with law enforcement or military," the thief replied. "The scientists contracted me as a security specialist."

"What kind of security?" Ellie asked.

"Breaking and entry. Prospect of breaking into a Prothean or quarian vault was very intriguing."

"What killed everyone here?" the geth asked, and Kasumi took a moment to process that shift in the conversation.

"That's actually a good question," she murmured. "Because…. As far as I remember, the ship itself did most of the killing."

Phantom picked up the impact sound of the elevator car being sliced open, and was positioned outside the corridor when they emerged. Hidden under his cloak, he hid in a doorway intersecting the elevator corridor and crouched low to the deck, out of the way of enemy eyes and sensors.

Core, transmitting data on intruders, he reported as the spindly figure of a turian emerged, wearing a ratty, bullet-riddled cloak. The glowing eyes and chrome skin indicated an Exo. The turian was trailed by a neo-quarian in red and black spacer's jacket and jumpsuit, a looming krogan in white armor, and a humanoid female in gray armor plating that covered her head to toe, a high-frequency blade in hand.

We receive, Core replied. Analyzing.

The Exo gestured forward, and he and the neo-quarian advanced up the passage toward the mess. The krogan and the woman with the HF blade turned and began moving in the opposite direction, toward Phantom's hiding spot. He slowly pushed himself back, out of their path, and made sure his drone spoofers were ready to conceal himself from scouting clouds.

Uploading analysis. Intruders identified.

Phantom took a quick glance over the dossiers that Core sent him, and suppressed a curse as the names and information passed. While the name Cayde-6 meant nothing to him, the fact that this crew had been responsible for the shitshow on Illium meant that the Shadow Broker was right behind them.

So, turian Exo, unknown age and iteration, armed with "unspecified thermal weaponry" and extensive combat skills, blah blah. Urdnot Bakara, krogan shaman, doctor, scientist, diplomat, heavy weapons specialist. Oddly intelligent for a krogan. Unknown neo-quarian, specialist in sidearms and marksmanship. Woman with the blade, unknown, but possibly-

A twitch ran through Phantom's body, a physical reaction to his uploaded personality having an unexpectedly intense spike of pure, seething, rage.

There was a greater than even chance the woman was Miranda Lawson.

Phantom's fingers hurt, and he relaxed the iron-tight hold on his blade's grip. But as he watched her and the krogan moved down the corridor, sweeping toward the aft end of the crew deck, he noticed telltale elements of the way she moved. Placement of the feet, the smooth, quick precision of her pistol as she checked each corner, the balance in the torso and hips. He recognized them perfectly.

After all, they were his.

Once the pair passed him, none-the-wiser, Phantom relaxed. His fingers loosened around the grip of his blade, and then tightened. With a smooth, arcing lift of his hand, he drew his sword from its scabbard, the weapon emerging in still silence.

Core, they're heading toward T'Soni's pod, he transmitted. Will engage at best opportunity.

Acknowledged, Core replied. Directives updated. Terminate all of Cayde-6's crew.

With pleasure, he replied, and took a silent, prowling step out of concealment toward the pair. He tried to steady his hand, but a tremor of anticipation flickered through it.

Please be Lawson, he thought, and an ugly clone's grin twisted his features beneath his mask. Please pleaseplease.

The elevator to the bridge was locked down, and surrounded by half a dozen armored figures who had died protecting the doorway.

"This scoring on the walls means the plasma came from multiple directions," Mesa said, examining the bodies while Cayde unlocked the elevator. "They were caught in a crossfire."

Cayde looked up. They were at a T-junction, with side passages splitting off into gunnery and ops rooms for the Valkyrie's main batteries. There was no way to access those compartments without coming down this passage.

"Either these folks could teleport, or they had set up an ambush by the time these men got down to this corridor," Cayde mused, poking one of the mercenary corpses with his foot. Or maybe….

"Psychic?" he suggested, glancing up at the neo-quarian. "Maybe mind control, or a super-fast Physical like your boyfriend?"

Mesa's scowl told him all he needed to hear regarding that, and he went back to checking his intrusion software. A quiet ping that was only audible to his AR audio indicated that they were in, and the doors slid open.

The lift was functional, unlike its previous companion, and they rode it up in silence, weapons at the ready. When the doors slid open, they stepped out into the warship's bridge and CIC. It was a single compartment, long and narrow, with banks of consoles surrounding a central holographic projector. The pair's guns swept over dead consoles and even more dead crew, who had been cut apart by more plasma beams that sliced through chairs and terminals, leaving scattering hunks of molten machinery and ceramic littering the deck.

"How many dead, you suppose?" Mesa wondered as they stepped out into the CIC.

"Ship this size?" Cayde-6 replied. "Normally has a meatspace crew of about thirty, maybe five to ten infolife or VIs. Plus a platoon of Replica, we're looking at sixty to seventy."

"Fits," Mesa said, crouching beside a turian wearing gray a naval jumpsuit. The crewman had died with a gun in hand. "No mind control," she said after a second. "Been checking these weapons. Mostly kinetics and a few lasers. All of the bodies died to plasma fire. Very precise plasma."

"Like a marksman rifle?" Cayde asked as he circled around the CIC. "Hey, there's the captain's chair up there."

"Not a sniper rifle," she murmured. "These beak marks… make me think of a plasma cutter, only with much longer range. Burned hot enough to boil right through armor…."

She crouched next to another body, inspecting it, and then glanced up to Cayde. There was a ramp that rose up beside the elevator, leading to a platform toward the bow of the ship. A pilot's station was located up there, and directly over the elevator was a chair surrounded by consoles. Cayde leaned over it, peering at the electronics while spinning the chair around with a finger.

"Some of these plasma cuts start halfway along the torso and slice outward. Thermal ablation across the armor plating indicates… looks like the plasma was briefly halted by a kinetic barrier before it broke through the shield and cut apart the armor and the body underneath. That implies some serious kinetic force behind the plasma…."

"Yeah?" Cayde-6 asked, lighting up his omnitool and plugging a wire from it into the captain's console.

"Cayde, I've never seen a plasma gun operate like this," Mesa said, standing up. The Exo looked up, eyes widening by the sliver his turian construction allowed.

"You saying this is new?" he asked.

"Most plasma is a violent river of thermal, burny murder," she said. "Hard to control to any precise degree even with magnetic fields. There's a reason why most people use kinetics for extreme-range sniper weapons. These are plasma wounds, but they're laser-precise. No one has tech like that. Least not that I know of."

"Eliskni, maybe?" Cayde asked, but shook his head. "No, this isn't their style. They'd have stripped the ship. Most of the dead they leave behind don't have these wounds, either."

Mesa rose and began checking the aft end of the CIC, stepping over and examining each body and beam mark.

"Could be Collectors," Cayde called as he worked through the captain's security. "Not familiar with their personal weapons, but they use some kind of precise beam gun on their ships. Particle accelerator, I think."

"No, this is plas-" Mesa said, and then halted.

"Oooh, find something?" Cayde asked, looking up. Mesa was standing in the middle of the deactivate holographic projector, crouched by an object on the deck. In the light-beam from her omnitool, it a kind of egg-shaped hunk of smooth metal or plastic.

"Maybe," Mesa replied. "Looks like a cyberbrain storage unit…."

"Just lying on the deck in the middle of the bridge," Cayde said cocking his head to the side.

"Yeah, except I think it's…" Mesa reached down toward the device, and brushed her fingers over the surface.

And at that moment, right as every console in the ship lit up, Cayde-6 realized that they had fucked up.

Spencer was rooting through the debris in the cargo hold and shuttle bay, listening to Ellie's Juggernaut platform hum to itself, when a distinct tingle ran down his spine. He jumped up to his feet, hands clenched.

"Oh, hey, power spike," Ellie exclaimed, dropping the debris she was moving and reaching for her plasma cannon.

"What was that?" Qui'in called over the comm, as Ellie pivoted, plasma cannon lighting up and rising to her shoulder.

"Anomalous energy spike!" Ellie yelled back, all smiles and sunshine. "We might be about to die!"

Spencer grunted, but the tail end of the cave-man vocalization was drowned out by the sudden whine of engines and crackle of electricity.

And in the middle of the bay, the enormous eliksni machine lurched up off the deck, , cannons lighting up and a glowing, malevolent purple light erupting from the front vents of the machine.

It pivoted toward them, and lightning erupted from the cannons and seared across the bay toward Ellie and Spencer.

"The hell is this?" Miranda murmured as she stood in front of the looming eliksni machine on the crew deck, hidden behind a formerly-secure compartment.

"More alien technology," bakara said, sizing up the stasis pod. "It contains an asari. One of the researchers, most likely."

"Best clue for figuring out what happened here," Miranda said. "Can we get it open? Get her out of there?"

"I will need to examine the machine and check her vitals," Bakara muttered. "Then I can determine-"

They both spun at the same moment, both the krogan and the human reacting to the presence behind them - the latter through her cyberware and sensors pickup a faint electromagnetic distortion, and the former through pure instinct.

A high-frequency blade flashed under Bakara's arm as she brought her shotgun up, pierced her armor like it was an eggshell, and erupted out her back in a spray of orange blood. Miranda skittered sideways, her own HF sword rising up and stabbing at the armored figure who'd emerged from cloak behind them.

The man was already ripping his blade free, pushing off against Bakara's chest as the krogan thrashed, snarled ing gasping. He twisted his head and body underneath Miranda's blade, weaving away from the sparking edge as if he knew where she was aiming before she herself did. His weapon came loose in another spray of krogan blood, and whipped up, knocking her sword aside and slicing toward her face. A crash of arcing lightning lit up the corridor as she parried, and he backed away, sword rising to a high guard.

"Trick or treat, motherfucker," he muttered, his tone low and mocking. His face was hidden behind a blank Replica's visor, but Miranda could hear the smile in his voice, before he darted forward, bloodstained sword cutting toward her.

"Mesa, don't touch the thing!" Cayde yelled, while every intact console in the bridge lit up, their screens showing flashing sprays of gibberish and alien code.

The neo-quarian was already jumping back, tumbling through a grainy, low-res hologram displaying the battered remains of the frigate. Consoles surrounding her erupted in sprays of electricity and sparks like something from a pre-space sci-fi vid, and blue light swam around the cyberbrain, enveloping it and expanding.

And then it began to stand up.

"Oh, crap, that's not very shiny at all," Cayde-6 said, drawing the Last Word. He saw mesa rise up from her panicked tumble, a laser and kinetic pistol in hand. She started to level them at the glowing figure in the middle of the bridge, but froze.

The blue light shifted to a mixture of red and yellow, the figure resolving into a humanoid form. Flickering bits of light ran through the figure's body, like streaming alien code, and it…flickered, for lack of a better word, jumping back and forth by a few centimeters every couple of seconds. The cyberbrain now formed the center of the thing's head, glowing white-gold orbs of light where most humanoids' eyes would be located, and a black cloud of smoke wafted off of its skull. A sleek, black weapon had formed in its hands, like a plasma rifle but with chunks of it cut away to reveal the gleaming green inner circuitry.

Mesa stared, eyes wide and glowing like distant, hazy suns, jaw dropping open, her shoulders rising and falling as she took sharp, horrified breaths.

"Mesa? What the hell is-" Cayde-6 stopped, because he understood. The glowing creature's form became more apparent, and he could see the thing's proportions. The shape of the hips and legs. The number of fingers.

It was a quarian.

Cayde-6 takes a long drink.

Shepard shares it with him after a moment. The Exo watches him swallow. Waits for it.

The Sentinel lowers his drink, meets the Exo's eyes, and says what everyone usually says at that moment in the story.

"What the fuck."