Massive Disaster 5-29

“And how far inside exactly?” Zedd’s question came with a scoff as he stepped over a geth chassis, the entryway still smoking even after the shooting stopped. White coolant threaded beneath his feet, liquid spreading slow and lazy across once-pristine marble. “Because last time we went into a dark enclosed space, we got jumped by monsters. Notably of the never beforeseen kind.”

It wasn’t alone, of course.

The geth, that is.

At least two dozen other flashlight corpses cooled in their own milk, faint sparks still showing off amid shattered glass, powdered marble and dead welcome displays. The facility’s scrubbers were already working overtime to cycle the smoke out of the space as the Mako sat behind them in the middle of the wreckage, sitting there like the absolute worst looking car in a mockery of a showroom.

Somebody’s quarterly’s ruined. Not his, though.

Thankfully.

“Until we find Liara’s mother.” Jane didn’t even look back. “Then we turn around.”

Zedd nodded at that, unable to miss how the asari in question tightened her grip on her gun. “I do like a plan.”

“And I can promise that we won’t be seeing monsters like that again.” John threw over his shoulder, the man falling in line with Jane. “The ‘never beforeseen’ kind at least. You’ve seen geth before.”

Another nod. “I do like promises too.”

The dark hallway past the blown doors was worse than the entryway they left behind, and for the dumbest possible reason.

Simply because it was untouched.

Emergency strips ran low along the floor and just a foot below the ceiling, everything thrown into gloom that made the expensive materials look cheap. But, apart from that, nothing.

No scorch marks, no drag lines through the dust, and not even any dust — air handlers still running and scrubbing as the building kept itself presentable. Zedd panned the corridor, his aviators painting the space in clean geometry with nothing to flag.

Once again, his thumb found his ring and made a snail’s pace over the sapphire as the corridor breathed them out into a proper lobby.

Zedd’s boots met the polished obsidian-black of the concourse, sound echoing loud in sharp synchronicity with that of the crew in the dead air. Dark marble ran out wide and long under a ceiling built to make visitors crane their necks — a common trick every architect across the galaxy knew to abuse — and dead center of it all, a reception desk projected a Binary Helix welcome loop in a soft corporate white and pale gold.

A synthetic voice flickered in every few seconds, dropping into nigh-demonic distortion before snapping back to simple customer-service cheer. “We are currently experiencing a slight delay in—deelay in—delaaAAAAay in—Th-thank you for your patience.” The holo-projection stuttered in time with the words, image tearing at the edges before reforming with it.

But, apart from that, there was nothing else to scuff or stain the pristine floor; nothing and no one to show the Geth had invaded this place at all.

"Of all the places for a firefight…" John’s rifle stayed low and shouldered, eyes sweeping along with his Avenger as he came up the middle. 

"Course not, Big John." Zedd was already as far into the system as he could get from a simple ping, walking the tactical overlay through his aviators. Blue wireframes crawled over dead terminals, nothing warm to show for it. "Place like this is all quarterly reports, not firefights. Well…” He frowned for a moment. “Not usually, at least.”

“Usually?” John looked his way, eyebrow raised. “Why do I feel like there’s a story there?”

“That’s because there are a few.” Zedd turned an eye over at a blank-faced Kai as he recalled some attacks on his facilities that he and Caleb had handled for him. “Now’s probably not the time to talk about corporate espionage, though.”

“Really?” Ashley’s snort almost echoed. “Seems like now’s the perfect time.”

Zedd tilted his head, unable to deny that but even still… “Corporate secrets, though. No point telling a story without context.” He clicked his tongue as Ashley scoffed his way, gaze dragging over the marble. The fact that it was real stone for a lab of all things was just… Actually shipping quarried rock to an ice planet is insane. "You know what's crazy? I actually considered a lobby like this for myself. My Director-General counseled me otherwise. Apparently, she considered it an ‘overt villain move’.”

"Director-General?" Spectre Shepard didn't even look at him, shotgun muzzle tracking the upper balcony rail. “That’s Nina, right?”

“Oh, you remember her?” An eyebrow went up toward Shepard. “She’ll love that.”

“The one who smacked you upside the head? How could I forget?” Jane’s smirk was downright audible. “She gave me the highlight of my day.”

Tali's omni-tool pinged before he could say anything back, glow washing her visor in a bright orange. Two sharp little notes sounded off to dead air, seven sets of weapons twitching to the sound before intelligence could act against instinct. 

"Ah! My fault… trying to access the internal network but it’s…" One three-fingered hand went up, the other still giving off the glow. "The network is fractured. Something about the VI underlay to the system has been heavily fragmented for some reason.”

“Oh, so they can afford marble, but not software maintenance?” Another scoff slipped free as Zedd shook his head. “That’s corporate for you.”

"Victors, how about we stow the commentary until after we find Benezia?" Ashley swept her rifle again, weapon aimed at the mezzanine. “You can make your little jokes later.”

"It was tactical commentary, though."

"In the Alliance, we call that bitching."

"It can’t be two things?"

They pushed past the desk, Ashley’s response to him an aggrieved grunt that went nowhere. He chose to chalk that one up for himself as a win, eyes glancing back to the welcome loop. Decent render quality on that thing. That much was undeniable, especially for a simple bit of lab space that was rented out. Especially with the little logo.

A Noveria tenant, upper-mid-tier by mass at the very least.

It’d been a long time since he skimmed their public filings, especially when they came up with a lot of dealings with a familiar little company known as Orpheus Industries, which was in itself a subsidiary of Tainaron Manufacturing. The former had actually reached out to him several years back, in the first few months of Victory’s kick-off. The latter hadn’t done so, but they’d still aimed for a contract for a large shipment of his Mk III VESTs.

He’d almost accepted the offer, too, except for one little thing.

Tainaron had been a reference to something, much less obvious than Orpheus and their extranet message of course, but not layered enough to go unnoticed. Whoever you are, you think you’re pretty smart, don’t y-

Wrex stopped, the krogan’s head snapping up — and everyone stopped with him, Zedd included. Nostrils flared wide as Wrex turned slowly, pulling in a long drag of recycled and refurbished air. “Smells like… acid.”

“...acid.” With the Mantle filtering his air, Zedd couldn’t hope to catch the edge of what the krogan had pointed out and his limited sensor suite wasn’t that good on its own — at least, not for olfactory targets. “That’s new. How about narrowing that down, krantt bro?”

“Yeah, is it…” Ashley’s rifle didn’t lower an inch, the woman smart enough to at least aim it away from the krogan as she stepped closer to Wrex. “Acid like a leak? Coolant, industrial…”

“No. Nothing industrial. Not manufactured.” Wrex’s words came with a grunt, the Scimitar held tight in his grip as he rolled his shoulders. “Old acid.”

Zedd’s eyes narrowed in the silence as everybody let those cryptic words sink in from the usually blunt battlemaster. “You wanna expand on that a little?”

“No.”

Great. Great. The young CEO tucked his chin in a nod. Love a krogan going quiet. Means great things for the rest of us. A solid millenia of watching things die and Wrex was twitchy about a smell of all things.

That went in the file.

That went in the file underlined.

They pushed deeper, formation tightening without anyone calling it — Wrex taking point with both Shepards right behind him. A bank of elevators sat dark and most likely unusable but they didn’t bother to test them, already headed down a service corridor. Soon enough, dark marble faded, giving way to the real facility that wasn’t a simple Binary Helix reno job — bare corrugated alloy for flooring, conduit runs, and temperature more akin to the frozen hellscape outside.

As a twitchy Liara paced beside Tali, both of them in front of him, it took Zedd a solid minute to realize Kai Leng was no longer at his flank which was… good.

Probably.

It meant he was on high alert at least.

When Zedd couldn’t see Kai, it meant the man was doing his job and he could trust that more than anything else. Still wish I could put a little digital bell on him or someth-

Zedd stopped at a door, a blast door, feet frozen before his brain finished giving him a reason.

Heavy. 

Not like the front doors, not even close — those were massive enough to allow in the Normandy SR-1 if the ship made landfall, weather-heavy enough to wait out any storm and impress shareholders who were looking for ‘security’.

This was different.

Vastly smaller, of course, but something more recently set into a poured structure, shield emitters running along the seam in a twin lattice — binary, heh — and the plate itself was pushing near a solid meter of layered composite. What’s this even rated for?

His lenses ran the profile after a quick ask, and Zedd found himself facing numbers he didn’t like on a door that shouldn’t need them. What, are they breeding super-krogan?

“...huh.”

“What.”

Jane Shepard snapped her attention to him immediately, the formation breaking as she focused right on him. Zedd blinked back at her, eyes wide behind his glasses. “I…”

“I know that sound you just made.” Green eyes narrowed his way, the woman managing to promise violence despite standing barely taller than five feet. “Last time you withheld info, we were swarmed with zombie colonists and mutated Asari.”

“Don’t forget the plant monsters.” Williams was quick to add her part.

“And plant monsters.” Jane Shepard almost hissed all three words, eyes almost slits now. “If you’ve got something to say, say it. You seem to know shit.”

“...thank you?”

“That wasn’t a compliment.” Shepard corrected him without even taking a breath. “It’s a headache but the reason you’re on this team. Now say it.”

“Well…” Zedd raised a knuckle to the plate in front of him. “The door’s wrong.” He rapped against it and the metal gave back almost nothing at all, a dead thud felt more than heard and swallowed up by whatever layered the metal. “Like really wrong.”

“Huh?”

“A door specced like this means you’re trying really really hard to keep something in.” Zedd met Shepard’s frown with one of his own, the rest of the crew slowly matching them. “As in a team of roided-up krogan on the other side.”

Jane bit her tongue as he finished the sentence, the woman’s hand tightening on her gun. 

"Zedd. The Geth being here have me wondering if Benezia was working on them? Given the variants we’ve seen, at least." John caught the stall from his sister, the man making an attempt to push forward. "You mind accessing their research for us? Can you?"

"Can I?" The omni unfolded over his wrist, the blue light painting his face as he laid his arm against the door terminal. Without wasting a moment, the interface bit back at his intrusion suite with real teeth — layered encryption, rotating keys, a lockout architecture that started rearranging itself the second he touched it; all of it overgeared counter-ICE that was excessively rare considering military-grade omni could simply brute-force most security with enough omni-gel. "That was meant to be a hypothetical. I still can, but I have to mention that their security is… weird."

"Weird how?" Tali came in over his shoulder, close enough that her suit's filter-breathing sat in his ear.

"Weird like—" Another layer of ICE cracked and folded, two more falling behind it in quick succession. Both additional layers were different architectures from the one before them, which meant a lot of things. Namely, separate contractors, which meant compartmentalization at the procurement level, which in itself meant—

"Hold on.” A single eye twitched behind his aviators. “Gimme a second."

Companies didn't over-engineer like this to protect margins. They satisficed after a certain point because that was just human nature and companies were built off hundreds or thousands of humans; humans who were just there for a job. “It’s like…”

Like this is some real spicy shit they’re hiding, something as bad as what I get up to.

"Like they were hiding something before the flashlights ever showed up." Another layer cracked open under his attempts, directory structures and manifests spilling across his omni overlay in clean columns as he started reading. "Waaaay before."

Tali leaned in further over his shoulder, almost clinging to his arm as he broke open said manifests one at a time. It didn’t take long for the quarian’s body language to change, grip going tighter around his arm as she went still.

It didn’t take long for Liara to lean in from the other side, lips moving faintly as she read what was in front of him before stilling too.

"Zedd." Tali's voice went small and quiet. "That is not — this is…"

"I see it." He did. He wished he was seeing something else.

No synthetic hardware anywhere on these ledgers, no geth code repositories, or anything like runtime hosts. Not even a single whiff of the flashlight forensics he'd been half-expecting to justify the whole mess. What scrolled up instead, in the most bloodless and basic bureaucratic syntax was something that made him breathe heavier — incubation protocols, marked and modified with revision eleven. Cryostatic containment yields, tracked weekly and continually trending upwards. Nutritional feed-line specs with a sustained-throughput, scaled for what one line item referred to as a ‘hive’.

Hive.

The word sat in the manifest like it belonged there, right next to a thermal budget that would’ve heated an entire colony block.

"Feed-lines." Liara's voice barely made it out of her. "You don’t run feed lines to a sample. You only do so for a… a population. By the Goddess…" 

"Keelah…"

"These figures… I believe, no. These… these are husbandry records. This is breeding, aimed towards whole generations… th-this should not be possible. They were verified extinct.” He couldn’t fault the asari as her blue fingers came up toward his omnitool and stopped just short of touching it. "...mother, what have you done?”

"Yeah." Nothing else wanted to come out of him as he read the acquisition line again, only for it to read the same the second time. 

For a moment, nobody said anything at all, the corridor humming in the silence.

Then Wrex started laughing.

Low. 

Mean.

Delighted.

He only kept going as the seconds passed, voice warming up with the rolling climbing exuberant joy of someone who’d spent near a thousand years watching a galaxy find new ways to fall apart and had just been handed one of the greatest gifts possible.

Gift-wrapped, even. "They brought them back."

"You know what this is." Jane was an expert at asking questions without asking them, her eyes slitted ever since the word extinct hit the air.

"I fought in wars younger than the songs about them.” The laugh burned down to something that sounded like a gravel road. "I know exactly what this is, Shepard."

"Of course you do." Jane rolled her neck, the motion slow as she tightened her grip on her Katana. "Of course they did. Open it."

"Jane…" John started.

But as usual, Jane rarely let him finish. “No, John. We came for Benezia and the blue bitch is behind that door with what I think she is. That makes our job the same either way. Just a little messier.” The Spectre took in a breath, head snapping to the side as she introduced her spit to a pristine floor. "Crank it open, Victors."

Sure. Yeah. Why not? The blast doors cycled with a single command, no more security in the way of his order.

Plug seals released one after another down the frame with heavy pneumatic sighs, the gap opening up wide as the corridor beyond breathed out at them. 

Zedd pulled one slow breath in through his nose.

"...fuckin' Rachni?"