The path of the spine fed them into a wider chamber, ceiling rising higher until it vanished completely into open space and smog-filled air returned in full force.
Zedd stopped his forward movement as Jane, Kaidan and Ashley did the same right in front of him. In any other situation, he might have groused but the sight of the crashed ship in open space had him pushing down his words.
A freighter.
Nothing new, and definitely modular by the looks of it; classic civilian bulk transport no doubt.
“That ship show up in the brief?”
Kaidan’s eyes were just as focused on it as Zedd’s. “Not in the part I saw.”
Ashley looked over the hull as well, a questioning look in her eye. “Could be old salvage.”
“...that thing might as well still be smoking from re-entry.” Zedd nearly bit the words out as he pointed a finger at the ship. “Just look at it.”
Before Zedd could lay into the woman for clear ignorance of the obvious, a Lil V slipped through a gap in the ship’s plating — a partial interior scan fed to his lenses as quickly as the drone could move. Bodies.
Six…
No, seven heat signatures were clustered inside the compartments he already had the telemetry for; three lying down, one fevered, two with low blood pressure, and a final body sitting too still in a chair beside the others, head tilted toward the ceiling.
All of them with the same odd body chemistry as the other colonists in the main plaza. Okay, this is too deep.
A dark-skinned woman stepped out from a side passage in the crashed ship before Zedd could open his mouth; older, maybe late forties or she could have been younger and just worn out by the planet. She wore her brown hair tied back with a strip of dirty cloth, one sleeve of her work shirt torn away to make a bandage around her forearm.
“May O’ Connel. “Her eyes landed on Jane first, the bright red N7 armor calling attention to it. “I hear you’re a Spectre.”
Jane let her shotgun rest back on her shoulder again, the Katana clanking against the plates of her hardsuit. “You heard right. What’s with the ship?”
“Salarian captain crash-landed a few days back during the start of the Geth attacks.” The woman’s mouth twitched as she spoke, a movement that had nothing to do with the shape of the words themselves. “Captain’s comatose inside.”
“And now you use it as overflow housing?” Kaidan’s question snapped her attention over the man, gaze taking him in slow. “Or what?”
“Housing. Storage. Shelter from the Geth. Control system for the colony mostly. Whatever we need.” Her eyes went to the drone as it bobbed back out and hovered around Zedd’s head with a chime; one small section of the separated freighter scanned. “Cute toy.”“Thanks.” Grinning her way, Zedd let another drone slip low along the floor, the little sphere moving behind May to dart beneath a hanging tarp and slide through a jagged seam in the freighter plating.
The returning map read wrong a few seconds later, mostly because the freighter’s lower hold was wrong. A half-minute later, it read as far more than simply wrong.
A throat.
A descending mass of negative space wrapped in heat and moisture, hidden under the dead ship and going deep under the ground into a selection of tunnels that raised more questions than anything bothered to answer.
Zedd did not move, the CEO just blinking the scan away into private storage as he summoned the drone into a quick retreat. His brain was already awhirl with questions and considerations that seemed to loop in on themselves as much as the colony’s infrastructural builds; namely the simply
Jane noticed his stillness after the first fifteen seconds of complete silence. “Victors.”
Blue lenses shifted, Zedd shutting his eyes for a second before he offered Shepard a courtesy glance. “Hm?”
“You found something.”
“We all found something.” It was amazing how light he could keep his voice when the feeling of dread creeping up his spine was a constant thing growing stronger and stronger by the literal minute. “Near-dead captain. Bad vibes.”
“You and your bad vibes.” Ashley scoffed. “That’s your professional consultant opinion?”
“For free?” His cheeks went up, something that might have been a smile if it was at all close to real. “Yeah.”
May’s eyes turned on him as his stayed on her.
“Let’s look inside.” Jane’s eyes slid his way, a look on her face that had him ratcheting up his rating of her intelligence by at least a double digits. “Now.”
The route into the ship’s innards took them through the open mid-section of the freighter, and deeper into the crashed halter’s main control module. Four sets of eyes tracked the injured with careful eyes, Zedd’s lens documenting the faces of each one as they passed: bodies wrapped in thin blankets, an older woman with a badly burned leg, one younger man taking shallow pulls that could barely be called breaths, and a teenager with a bandage tight across his ribs.
Actual injuries. Actual suffering.
And still, apart from some groans, none of them called out.
None of them asked for help.
One of them even turned his head as Zedd passed with a bit of a smile on his face.
The central systems room was barely worthy of the name by the time they entered. Three consoles, two standing towers of exposed wiring, a cracked haptic display, and a wall of physical breakers old enough to vote, if not drink, sat in oddly warm and wet air; condensation clinging to the ceiling pipes and gathering in slow droplets that fell one at a time onto a damp floor.
Zedd stepped up to the main console and stared. “Oh, this is disgusting.”
A thin cable pulled free from his omni-tool, he plugged the cord directly into the freighter interface before the system could ask permission. The screen flickered, protested, and then folded like wet cardboard under the weight of his intrusion, old maps and available systems unfolding over his lenses; everything from power and water to maintenance locks and colony sensor suites.
Every system was bad.
That much was expected.
Every system was bad in the same direction.
That was not.
“Motherfucker…”“Victors.” Jane Shepard managed to make his name sound more like a hiss as she spoke to the back of his head. “We’re not in your head. Just talk.”
Oh, so now you want me to talk. Zedd’s fingers moved through the air, shifting invisible blue windows that responded to the haptics in his gloves. “Bad news, very bad; system’s not at all prioritizing survival.”
“You sure?” Ashley stood near the door, standing guard as she faced outward into the corridor with Kaidan. “I’m seeing a lot of survival on my end.”
“Not what I mean. ‘The purpose of a system is what it does.’ Have you heard of that?” Zedd leaned closer to the console. “What am I talking about? You’re fucking jarheads. Like you’d know Stafford Beer. Point is…”
He hissed in air, lips thinning as the blue of his omnitool flared warnings right to his eyes. “The purpose of colonial systems is that they at least try to keep people alive. Even dumb automated systems can do that much; you get oxygen and heat to habs. Same with water and every fucking thing else to keep a colony alive. Inefficiencies abound, sure, especially with budget brand garbage, but the purpose is there.”
“And this…” Kaidan paused for a breath, hand on his head. “This doesn’t?
“The purpose of whoever set this up is clearly to deprioritize human life.”
The silence in the room was enough to let him breathe in another hiss as he looked down at the air recyclers. These aren’t failing. If anything, they were just refusing to finish the job — Zedd suddenly glad he had put in the effort to make his Mantle rated for vacuum like any hardsuit of military make.
Thse filters were cycling, sure, but all they did was route particulates out of the lower intakes only to then reroute a fraction of said matter back into the main colony’s breathing loop in a constant — almost elegant — cycle of fucking poison. The water was no different, nothing about it scarce at all; no, it was just being staggered in micro-bursts through the lower humidity system, enough to keep the air damp in places that should have been dry as bone.
Heat was a third member of the same family; humidity being fed into the freighter’s buried sections in pulses.
Warm.
Wet.
Everywhere — which made it weird.
Zedd’s tongue pressed against his teeth. I’m gonna shoot an ExoGeni exec in the head if I get the chance. At the very least — he was going to make them suffer for whatever sick experiment they were running on these people, and that was a Victory-branded promise.
“...Victors?”
He blinked up to see Ashley looking down at him, seemingly more nervous than she had been before — at least judging tby the look on her face. “...ye.”
“Are you alright?”…Is that kindness, Ashley? Your hardsuit breached? He raised an eyebrow her way. “Yeah? Why?”
“Because you look like you want to kill someone.”
A hand went to his face, Zedd suddenly aware his cheeks were still pulled tight and high in a rictus of a smile that had yet to leave his face. “Just thinking I might bump up my terrorist rating on the Alliance side by testing some Directed Energy moon-crackers on ExoGeni HQ.”
Kaidan frowned over his way as Ashley’s mouth moved silently for a moment. It took her nearly a second of gaping before the man found the words she couldn’t. “...that’s not something to joke about.”
I’m not sure I’m joking. “They can’t all be winners.”
“So…” Jane leaned over the console. “You’re saying the Geth aren’t the only problem we have to deal with. That they didn’t do this?”
“No.” Zedd shook his head before freezing halfway, the movement aborted into a hesitant nod that had the woman in red frowning at him. “I mean, yes. It’s not Geth.”
“You sure?” The question was almost hopeful, Jane’s teeth gritted as the question strained its way out of her. He understood, of course, and you didn’t need to have a stupid-high IQ to piece together exactly why. Jane Shepard liked easy problems; problems you could shoot, punch, or blast your way out of.
This… this was not that. “Are you really sure?”
“You can never be sure about anything.” Zedd admitted. “But yes, I’m sure.”
“That…” If Jane Shepard were as strong as a krogan — even an adolescent — Zedd was sure that her Katana would not be surviving her current mandhandling right now. “...that makes no sense.”
“Welcome to my life.” He pulled another layer of logs, eyes narrowing as he found the same dumb pulse commands he’d seen before. “But this is actually bringing up something that I wanted to mention before. Something about ExoGeni…” He leaned in closer, voice a hush as he tightened their channel to keep it from broadcasting out as audio. “I think they’re running an experiment on this colony. You’ve noticed it, right?”Jane’s lip curled but didn’t mention his sudden shift of their channel. “Since no civilian screamed when that David guy lost half his head, yeah.”
Good. No matter how much shit he gave them, it was an encouraging thing to know he wasn’t playing consultant to a bunch of idiots — Alliance jarheads or not. “I’m thinking EG is running something, using this colony as a test before they launch this out to other colonies. See, they’ve always had rather high turnover, especially for a frontier company. Places like this already filter for those who are willing to deal with more shit than most. Unfortunately, those kinds of people tend to be a teensy bit high in disagreeability.”
Yeah, and the First Contact War was just a minor police interaction. Zedd ran a gloved hand over his face, well aware of how hard it was to appease frontier colonists — unless you came heavy with the bread and circuses on tip of everything else at least. It was honestly a lot easier to go through their kids and the younger generation, definitely easier to buy their loyalty than the adults at least. “...even still, to lose that many colonists means you’re doing the bare minimum and expecting them to manage.”Green eyes narrowed. “Point?”“My point is that all of this weirdness seems pointed to a kind of placidity drug, possibly carried on the air and designed to keep the colonists focused and working and not even thinking of calling it quits.” He met Shepard’s narrowed eyes. “Aka the perfect worker drones.”
“...shit.” Kaidan’s muttered curse sent Zedd’s gaze his way.
The biotic had one hand raised to where his temple would be under the helmet, the man pressing tight like he was trying to keep something behind his eye from pushing out.
“You good?”
“Yeah.” The other man sent him a smile that Zedd knew was just as false as his right now, if for a different reason entirely. “Just pressure.”
“Biotic?”
“Seems like it.”
“If we survive this and you’re looking for a new career…” Zedd let the rictus ease as he let himself make a genuine offer. “...I could fix that right up for you. Y’know, if you don’t mind blue hair and eyes. The nails would look cute on you, though.”
Kaidan just grunted back, the man rolling his eyes.
“Stop trying to poach my men, Victors. It’s a-”
Jane paused her rant before she could build up steam, head turned toward the sealed door as Ashley whispered a single word over the channel that had everyone still.
“Commander.”
Jane gripped her shotgun tighter. “I hear it.”
She wasn’t the only one either, Zedd raising his head at the sound of bootsteps nearing their location; staggered but somehow in an odd synchronization. This was no marching, and they certainly weren’t running, but they were gathering all the same.
Outside the systems room, the ship had gone quiet in a way that made the silence feel packed with bodies as Zedd slowly looked up from the console.
The walls here were thin enough that with the silence he could pick out the undeniable sound of breathing on the other side. Three people.
No, five… and definitely more beyond those even. His system, still attached to the ship’s own central functioning, fed him camera data.
Colonists stood near the door.
May O’Connell was one of them.
Over the channel, Zedd said as much and Ashley’s rifle didn’t waste any time in rising all the way up. “That’s definitely normal.”
“Sure.” Zedd swallowed down a laugh that wasn’t funny enough to deserve air. “Very friendly colony. Strong community involvement.” As he finally unplugged from the console, the comms cracked; static cracking across the channel loud enough that Ashley flinched and Kaidan’s hand lit faintly blue.
“Jane.” John Shepard’s voice came through raw, breath fast and clipped in a way Zedd hadn’t heard from the man before. “Jane, respond.”
Jane stood up straighter. “John?”
“We’re inbound.” Shardfire screamed somewhere behind his transmission, followed by a heavy burst of return fire with Garrus snapping something too distorted to catch. “Need you to meet us back by colony center. Now.”
“What happened?”
Another burst of static sounded out before the other Shepard spoke again. “I think…“John!”“I think we found why Saren sent the geth.”