a/n: The poll had a clear winner, so I'll be focusing on BtC over AYWMS. That isn't to say that Mandatory Service won't receive any additional updates, but it will be less frequent.
Javik awoke knowing that he should be angry, furious even. The disorientation from extended stasis was all encompassing however, and he couldn't remember why.
Prefect Kryneri had opened his pod - he could tell that much. A group of primitives stood off at a respectful distance.
It was their presence that forced Victory's last statement back to the forefront of his mind and the reason for his fury came back into focus. "How many?" He asked, voice tightly controlled.
"Including us? Four," Kryneri answered.
He almost fell to his knees at her answer. He should have listened.
The army he was supposed to lead was gone. His people were gone.
Javik hadn't been so deluded as to think a million protheans could resurrect the Empire on their own. Truthfully, the Empire had been in its death throes ever since the Central Authority had been killed.
At best, he would be leading the Empire's vengeful spirit.
And now I don't even have that!
He seethed. If the damned primitives had found them sooner, if Victory had managed the power better or hadn't damaged the bunker with the purge bombardment, if he had just listened when his advisors had said to seal the bunker!
Javik let out a weary sigh as he looked around at the seemingly untouched landscape. Even the ghosts of his people was gone, any evidence of their struggle against the Reapers erased.
Pointless.
Both Kryneri and Seperek had warned him that this would happen. He allowed it. Chose it, really, by disregarding their warning.
"I should have listened," Javik said, his voice clinical. No amount of blaming the primitives for their slow development would change his own catastrophic failure.
"Perhaps you should have," Kryneri replied, unsympathetically. "But you did not. Our mission remains the same."
Several fiery retorts flashed through his mind. He bit all of them back. "You said there were two others. Who?"
"I don't know, Commander. Their pods still need to be opened. We might yet still find more, as well."
"Let's deal with that first," he said curtly.
Kryneri nodded and then tapped him on the shoulder, Transferring the knowledge she had taken of modern Thessian and her conversation with them up to this point.
"Asari," he muttered. They were not his people, but they had been one of the Empire's projects. It gave him some measure of hope, fragile though it was. They've had even longer than his own people to prepare and for most of that time they should have been aware.
Javik was certain that the Prothean researchers over Thessia would have tried to prepare them for this Cycle, even if he didn't know how they had chosen to do so.
The asari were not the only desperate gamble that the Empire had taken, as well. There were other plans and projects that had been in motion when Vythorik succumbed to the Reapers.
It wasn't impossible for one of those other plans to have found some measure of success.
He would have to find them with very little information, unfortunately, and even less in the way of personnel.
Since the relay network was locked down immediately after the deaths of the Central Authority aboard the Citadel and the collapse that followed, information traveled only at the speed of light through the Beacon network or by courier, with the latter being practical only within a cluster.
While the Beacon network was largely inaccessible to the Reapers themselves, their indoctrinated agents could. Precautions had been taken to ensure that information regarding the Empire's attempts to outlive the Cycle would not fall into their hands.
That often meant that information was generalized to the point of uselessness or never transmitted at all.
Vythorik's dictator and Javik could only surmise that these plans existed, based on the information they had from before the collapse.
If an attempt happened afterwards, Javik was no better informed on it than anyone else.
The asari were one of his few leads and certainly the most promising of them. The Reapers were thorough and he could not rely on recovering anything from the ruins of his people.
It wasn't impossible, however.
At its height, the Empire's holdings were spread across the galaxy. Among that vast number of colonies, outposts and hidden installations, some might have survived intact to have something worth recovering.
It would take too long to gather the scraps. And for what? Javik thought. The Empire was dead. Unless there was another facility like his own that had not come under attack, the Empire's remnants would not be a significant factor.
He would have to make due with the primitives of this Cycle. For better or worse, he had been briefed extensively on the species of this Cycle. For all the good that it would do him.
His information might have actually been useful had Victory been able to resuscitate them when it was supposed to. Now, it was probably wasted effort except for the purely biological information.
And not even that was guaranteed anymore.
He stood up and finally looked at them more closely, "is this their world now?"
"I don't think so, only one of them is an asari," Kryneri said.
Javik hummed, "and the others?"
"Two humans, I believe. I don't recognize the last one."
Javik looked at the primitive. "Turian," he replied after a moment's consideration.
The utility of each species would have to be reevaluated with their technological development in mind. "How useful will they prove to be?" Javik wondered aloud.
He frowned as he stared at them, realizing an uncomfortable truth.
"How useful will we be to them? Four protheans..." he tried to ping the bunker's database. No connection. "With nothing but hardsuits and a few small arms."
He couldn't even expect to trade for their cooperation. The bunker's database had contained a great number of schematics and other documentation that would have proven useful. Perhaps the storage still existed in a readable state, but Javik did not have much hope that was the case.
"They don't view us as we viewed the Inusannon, that much is clear. Reverence, almost," Kryneri said.
Javik snorted at the mention of the Prothean's own precursor species. Even misattributing the relay system to them, it was clear that the Inusannon were not dominant in their Cycle like his people had been in theirs.
He shook those thoughts away. It didn't matter now. His people were very much not dominant anymore. Javik didn't have any way to force compliance from the species of this Cycle if they chose to ignore his people's warnings.
"We will need information before I can decide how to proceed," he said after another few moments of thought.
Kryneri nodded, "we can start with the team that found us. I can't promise how useful their information will be, but they are close at hand."
"As good a place to start as any," he grunted, "after we retrieve what is left of our people."
The two protheans walked the short distance to the primitives and Kryneri facilitated introductions.
"Supreme Commander?" the asari asked immediately after, "Prefect Kryneri mentioned earlier that Protheans were hierarchical. What does your title entail the command of?"
A sneer made its way onto his face before he could stop himself, "three protheans now. Let's go retrieve the other two before we continue this... conversation."
Hearing his rank brought the magnitude of his failure back to the forefront of his mind and he spent the trip to the next pod in silence.
Before the collapse, a Prothean supreme commander led the armies of an entire sector of the Empire - Millions of soldiers, thousands of warships. It was the highest rank that a sector government could legally bestow.
He had failed to live up to expectations of his title. He would not fail the memory of his people or the three that remained.
The Reapers would be defeated.
***
Commander Sarah Shepard sat across from the two protheans in what was probably one of the most awkward shuttle rides of her life.
Vakarian looked uncomfortable, Doctor T'Soni was morose, Prefect Kryneri had the stoicism Shepard had only seen in fanatics and those that thought they were already dead. Supreme Commander Javik looked like he was fighting off despair.
It was a look that transcended species. She'd seen it before. Former slaves. In a mirror after Torfan. More recently from Staff Sergeant Williams in the Normandy's mess.
Shepard was willing to admit she was feeling a little overwhelmed herself at the moment.
The past two weeks had been a mess. Eden Prime had been an unmitigated disaster that she had inexplicably been rewarded for.
Fourteen Normandy personnel and a spectre had been deployed to retrieve a Prothean Beacon.
Herself, Spectre Kryik and the Normandy's marine raider team. Only Staff Lieutenant Alenko and Corporal Cozu had managed to make it through uninjured.
The other thirteen had ended up casualties of varying severity, two of which were fatalities. Shepard had almost made it through uninjured were it not for the Beacon doing whatever it did and then exploding.
That didn't even mention the fact that the 2nd Frontier Division had essentially ceased to exist as a coherent formation.
By every metric, the mission was a colossal failure worthy of parliamentary hearings. It was only through the herculean efforts of Alenko that the colony's capital was still even extant. Disarming a half dozen high-yield explosives of unfamiliar design while under fire was no small feat.
Her brief time on the Citadel just made everything worse for her personally.
Shepard hated it. All of it. She was a marine special warfare officer, not a ship skipper, not a detective and definitely not a damned super-cop.
She was supposed to find someone who had over twenty years on her as a spectre? Fat chance.
She had been beyond lucky when Detective Vakarian and Wrex had offered their assistance. Between the two of them, they covered some of the skill set she flat out lacked.
Saren might be a bastard, but he was right in that Shepard wasn't ready to be a spectre.
Even with the aid of Vakarian and Wrex, Shepard would still be playing catch up if Admiral Hackett hadn't interrupted her search to send her back to Eden Prime.
In the aftermath of the attack on Eden Prime, sensors had picked up some faint, anomalous readings.
Following up on those readings led to the discover of a significant underground Prothean installation. Or at least the reamins of one.
Best they could tell, the orbital bombardments that had destroyed most of the 212th and 232nd had resulted in some seismic activity that ended up uncovering the installation.
The scientists from the Beacon dig site had poured over the parts of the facility they could access, but almost everything was broken beyond any kind of scientific use. The only things of interest were the pods.
The Normandy had been tasked with picking them up to ferry to some other location within Alliance space.
Reading between the lines, the Alliance didn't seem too eager to share their discovery with the rest of C-space. They probably should have told Shepard that before she brought a gaggle of foreign nationals to the discovery and accidentally blew all of it out into the open.
She only decided to start hitting buttons after having a really disconcerting sense of familiarity with the controls. In retrospect, that had probably been related to her interaction with the Beacon.
This probably worked out better for her mission, though, instead of just disappearing the pods somewhere else.
If Alliance Command didn't like her making decisions like this in the field then they shouldn't have pushed for her becoming an unaccountable super-cop.
Her complaints aside, the actual task in front of them was easy enough and hopefully some living Protheans would help in making sense of whatever the Beacon had tried to stuff into her brain.
Retrieving the third pod was quick and painless. The protheans had a quick discussion amongst themselves before rejoining Shepard and the others at the shuttle.
Kryneri introduced the newly retrieved individual as Prefect Khadir. Again, they deferred further discussion to after the retrieval of their last remaining survivor.
Shepard hadn't decided what to make of the survivors. She felt a little bad for Doctor T'Soni - here was the answer to all of her questions and there simply wasn't the time.
And they seemed a prickly sort, so far. It might be their recent experiences, whatever that had happened immediately before going into their pods. They were military, the hardsuits, clear training and weapons made that clear.
Still, as curious as she was, she had other priorities that needed to be seen to first.
Once they opened up the last pod and Prefect Seperek was introduced, Shepard cut right to the heart of matters. "I'm sure we both have a lot of questions for each other, but those will have to wait. I'm on a bit of a time crunch."
She opened up her omnitool and displayed an image of Arterius' ship. "Do you know anythi-"
Her question was interrupted by muttered words, curses most likely by the sound of them. All four of them glared at the image and Seperek had an ominous corona building around her consistent with especially angry biotics.
"I take it that you recognize this thing? Is it Prothean?"
"No," Kryneri said for them, her unwaveringly placid expression replaced with a much more intent one. "That is a Reaper."
"That's a Reaper ship?" Shepard asked. She hadn't learned much about Saren's intentions yet, and T'Soni hadn't offered any insights into his or Benezia's. They were after something called the 'Conduit' and doing so would somehow bring the 'Reapers' back.
Why they would want that, she didn't know. Why they left, how they would get here or where they were coming from were all mysteries. Why they even needed Saren to facilitate their 'return' was equally unclear.
Of course, Shepard didn't need the answers to those questions. Between the name 'Reapers' and the technology shown so far, there was no question that Saren needed to be stopped.
The answers to those questions probably meant that the threat wouldn't be fully stopped, though. That problem would be for future-Shepard.
"No, the ship is the Reaper. They are synthetics," the prothean woman shifted her intense gaze to Shepard, "when was this picture taken? Where?"
Behind her, Seperek had turned to Javik and was shouting something in whatever the prothean's spoken language was actually called.
"It was taken about a hundred kilometers that way," she explained, pointing to the west, "about two weeks ago."
"Damn it," Kryneri muttered. She went to say something further, but the brewing argument finally got her attention and she turned to interrupt.
"Well," Vakarian commented quietly, "at least we'll be able to convince the Council of the threat with their testimony."
Kryneri stopped and looked at Vakarian, "Council? Is that the leadership of this planet?"
"No? They're the Citadel Council. They're on that big forty kilometer long space station your people left spinward and coreward of here."
She turned fully to face the turian, "Were you on that station after the Reaper appeared on this planet?"
"Yes, ma'am," Vakarian said, apparently cowed by the unblinking stare.
Kryneri spun around and shouted, "Seperek, stop! We're not too late. Something has happened - they haven't locked down the relays!"
There was so much to hate about that that one sentence.