Morinth knew exactly what was going on with her mother. When she melded with her to produce a distraction, she had inadvertently pushed the knowledge of Blacklight into her. Morinth couldn't be sure if it was everything. With the exceptions of Samara's reaction to the Reapers, she didn't show much change, meaning not everything was probably given, or at least that is what Morinth suspected. It was either that or the knowledge was still acclimating, perhaps it was still in the process of acclimating.
"Morinth… What is happening to me?"
Samara did not look well. She looked pale as death, with a trembling hand as her head lightly jerked around, like she was shivering, and her left eyelid was twitching.
Had it been less serious Morinth would have relished from Samara's current predicament. Unfortunately, this was not a good thing.
"I don't know," Morinth lied.
Samara closed her eyes as she rubbed her forehead roughly.
"You do know. I know you know. Your body language is screaming that you know. You looked away when you said that. A sign of anxiety. You are standing unusually still, rigid even. What is happening to me Morinth?
Morinth cursed herself. Of course she could spot the signs of lying, which made this unnecessarily complicated.
"Fine. You just sucked up the combined knowledge of an entire species. That is what is wrong with you."
"Blacklight."
"Yeah, them."
Samara leaned against a wall, clearly suffering a terrible headache.
"I never noticed. They're right. The Asari do advance quickly."
Morinth blinked.
"I… That is why you're here. Isn't it?"
Morinth looked away. It was entirely unconscious, but it spoke volumes.
"I don't know where they would keep knowledge like that."
Morinth nodded a bit as she continued to observe her mother. She looked like a wreck. This would probably as good a time as any to run for it, though even assuming that Samara only got a fraction of what Morinth got, Samara still had Justicar training under her belt. Which made that a much less appealing idea.
"Yeah, me neither."
"I… can't think straight."
Morinth knew that feeling all too well.
"You really are trying to save everyone."
Samara was still trembling, but she had this look in her eyes, some combination of confusion and what Morinth could tell might have been hope.
"Well, yeah. After the things they showed me, someone's gotta do it."
"Why you? Why did they pick you? Out of everyone in the galaxy they choose you. That doesn't make sense. Did they see something I didn't? They put so much trust in you. A species that knows so much, on a level that I think I am only beginning to scratch the surface of understanding."
Samara looked Morinth right in the eyes.
"I let you go. I wouldn't let you go. But Morinth, you've changed."
Morinth was starting to feel very uncomfortable about all this. Never mind that this was the one who chased her around the cosmos, never mind that this was who was honor bound to kill her. No, what really made Morinth uncomfortable was her mother's body language. After melding to Blacklight, so many small movements of the face and body made things so much simpler to understand. A simple twitch and blink of the eye told so much about what others were thinking. It was probably as close to mind reading one could get without linking nervous systems.
Samara was torn. That much was clear.
"I think that maybe I want to help you Morinth."
Morinth only blinked.
Miranda sat patiently in her Salarian disguise as Jack tapped her fingers against her leg. They had found the information they needed; thankfully Blacklight wasn't destroyed as they feared. Instead they were simply no longer allowed in Citadel space.
Careful research made a few things seem more obvious now. There were hints of Blacklight biomass that had been left in space retreating to Blacklight controlled systems. Based on her knowledge Miranda was able to deduce that these masses of biomass were the biological mechanisms for the Hive to connect to other Hives. Miranda knew that the methods used by Blacklight to connect between systems were slow. Even within a solar system it could take minutes to hours for a message from earth to reach anywhere else within the system depending on the distance. Especially the Blacklight bioships retrieving resources from the Kuiper Belt.
Of course by now Miranda thought that she should have been able to get her thoughts out to Blacklight even with this issue. They had gone through multiple systems. The only thing Miranda could think that could cause this would be if Blacklight had developed an entirely new method of communication between hives, one she wouldn't be able to develop without knowing how it worked or what biological processes were used.
Not all was lost, however. Blacklight still lived, and while no ships would willingly go to Blacklight space, apparently there were a few planets where Blacklight still were allowed on, most of them in the Terminus Systems, the largest concentration of Blacklight being on Omega, which was where Miranda and Jack were heading towards now.
It was good knowing that their greatest fears of Blacklight extinction were unfounded. Still, they had to get their knowledge to Blacklight of that Salarian base. While they had no pure samples of Blacklight, they still had samples of altered lifeforms created with Blacklight biomaterial, which even if they were free of the virus itself was still far too dangerous.
Neither Miranda nor Jack knew if leaving those scientists alive was a wise thing to do, but without a connection to the many, both felt lost. At the time they were barely sapient, little more than the minds of multiple Varren and an emergent sentience that was still learning before splitting into two separate minds. Miranda was still cautious, and Jack still thought that leaving them alive was a mistake, but once they got to the others, they would know what to do, and at last they would be home.
Mordin watched as the shroud released the newly modified genophage into the atmosphere. Already his thought shifted to what he knew. His task over and done with, he had already prepared a ship to return to Omega and warn Blacklight of the lab. There was no telling what happened after Saleon left. Any information his worm sent was now heavily coded, and while Mordin was able to decode some, the bulk of it remained undecipherable, at least with current data.
Mordin knew that Vurlon and Jobol were still trying to find Saleon, wherever he may be. Mordin thought that if Saleon was as careful and lucky as he had been, the chances of finding him were null at the moment. Still, the insane Salarian's luck had to run out eventually. The question was only a matter of when.
Mordin was unsure as to whether or not Saleon would continue his experiments. For the brief time Mordin spoke with the mad scientist, and what information he was able to gain from the extranet, it seemed likely. The Salarian struck Mordin as one who thought himself infallible.
Mordin couldn't think of a worse individual to have access to Blacklight. If there was any mercy in the universe, then Saleon wouldn't have had time to get his hands on any samples during the containment breach. Mordin however was not one to think the event likely. Even a single cell of whatever experiments the man was working on could cause untold damage in the right, or wrong, hands.
Still, Mordin didn't pay the sociopathic Salarian much mind. No, it was Jobol he knew was the real danger. Mordin knew they still had samples, and that they were still doing something with it. Whatever it was he couldn't be sure of. Mordin only knew he had to get back to Omega, and warn Blacklight. Now that his job here was finished, he intended to do just that.
Saren stood over the rubble and debris left over of what for a few months he called home, an empty feeling in his gut as he observed the torn landscape, like some great titanic behemoth had rose from beneath the earth itself.
Saren had seen the aftermath of war, and he had personally witnessed the aftermath of a Blacklight Attack when his fleet initiated the disastrous first contact with them. He had seen the footage of soldiers melting into hungry biomass, he had seen mens' bodies warp and change against their will as their skin sprouted roots and blades and tendrils burst from their bodies.
Now, looking over the destroyed countryside, he knew immediately what happened here, and when he saw no signs of life, not even so much as a single drop of blood, he knew the fate of his brother.
Saren felt empty and hollow.
Memories of two young Turians playing war danced in his mind. The day he and his brother both were assigned to the 23rd patrol fleet replayed over and over again as the destructive aftermath of what was unmistakably the results of a war against Blacklight.
Saren looked over everything, and knew anger, he knew hatred. All of it was directed at an entire species.
Saren swore, Blacklight would pay. He didn't know how he could do it, but if it was the last thing he did, he would destroy the cancer, purge it from existence itself.
Jona Sederis looked at the readings, a collection of sedated Salarian Slaves and even more eggs in the Cargo. An enlarged partially cybernetic Varren at her side panting as she looked to the only one on her ship who knew a damn thing about what the readings actually meant. Though she guessed that the red graph was anything but good and if her sensors were anything to go by, the whole place was highly radioactive.
"What the fuck happened here? Was he nuked?" asked Jone. She couldn't imagine what else might have happened here. To her it was the best explanation. Then again, she was hardly an expert on radiation.
"Hold on ma'am, I'm getting a visual."
After only a moment, the screen lit up with the remnants of Saleon's lab. It was partially melted in places, exposed to the harsh elements of the large asteroid it was built into. She turned to Sayn. Said Salarian just stared at the screen with obvious confusion on his face.
"Was he nuked? I mean it wouldn't surprise me if someone was that pissed off at him. Guy was an ass."
Sayn however shook his head to the negative, before wiping his eyes clean.
"No not nuked. Well, it might as well have been. It looks like his reactor went critical. There is something wrong here, though. Very wrong. I can see the reactor from here, and it doesn't look damaged. Did the idiot break containment on purpose?"
Sayn pointed to his screens as he turned to Jona.
"The fallout is bad, really bad, long term effects is that space station and the asteroid around it is fucked for the next tens of thousands of years, or at least it should be."
"What do you mean it should be?"
"I have no idea what Saleon was doing, but I think it goes beyond my understanding of physics into and right the fuck into bullshit land. The radiation is still there, and it's just concentrating on something, or a lot of somethings."
Jona stared at Sayn with a raised brown.
"Bullshit Land… Whatever, couldn't it just be concentrating on plutonium or some shit, you know the stuff that made the reactor work? The same stuff that is probably where the radiation is strongest." Said Jona to Sayn condescendingly.
Sayn shook his head again.
"Normally yes, I would agree with you, except the radiation is concentrated nowhere near the reactor, its concentrated where the bastard did his experiments."
Jona blinked.
"So… Bullshit Land."
"Yep. Unless Saleon thought it was a good idea to store radioactive materials in a bio-lab without any form of containment. Which rates as a 10 on the dumbshit-o-meter. So I doubt even he would do that."
"Any ideas?"
"Yeah, let's just get out of here before we start glowing. I don't think we need monster Varren bad enough to risk exposure. I'm detecting various forms of radiation, some of which we don't have any suits strong enough to block any of that shit."
Jona found herself hard pressed to argue with that. Sayn however was far from done speaking.
"You know, it's weird. I keep looking at these readings, and some of these radioactive materials should have fucked off by now. I mean some has a half-life of only a few seconds. At least I think it does. I'm no nuclear physicist, but that's my understanding of thing. This doesn't make any sense."
"And hanging around here to find out makes more sense?"
"I never said that. It's just… well, bullshit."
Jona shrugged.
"Fair enough, let's just fuck off from the radioactive hellhole. I may not want any fucking kids, but I like the option."
Sayn nodded as he prepared to get the ship reoriented. It was a move he had done hundreds if not thousands of times, it wasn't even a difficult move. Yet his controls were unresponsive.
"Quit fucking around Sayn, and let's get out of here."
"I'm trying, the ship isn't moving."
"The hell do you mean the ship isn't moving?"
"I mean it isn't moving. It's not responding to my… is that what I think it is?"
Jona looked from Sayn, to where he was facing, it was a small window, one that allowed one a view of the nose of the ship. At first Jona didn't see anything, just the empty vacuum of space, at least that was until she noticed it wasn't the void Sayn was looking at, it was the node of the ship itself. The telltale iridescent blue glow of a biotic field hovered just above the hull of her ship, presumable wrapping all around it. The azure corona was barely visible, but it was there. Jona, for her part, couldn't do anything but watch.
"The ship has been wrapped in a mass effect field ma'am."
Jona took a frightened step back.
"We've been locked in a biotic stasis? But… Even an Asari Matriarch doesn't have that kind of biotic power. The only thing that does is a dreadnought-sized Blacklight bioship."
"The only heat readings are from the lab ma'am. Can blacklight survive at these levels or radiation?" asked the ensign.
"How the fuck should I know?" screamed Sayn.
With those words the bridge turned chaotic, Eclipse mercenaries, some with decades of experience under their belt backed into corners with weapons drawn. Screaming and prayers could be heard as everyone waited for something to happen.
"What was Saleon working on?" screamed one merc.
"The crazy bastard was experimenting on Blacklight. Oh God, we were delivering food."
"Jona. What the fuck are we going to do."
"SHUT UP!"
Jona released a biotic pulse that pushed everyone away from her as she tried to regain control of the situation. The panicking died down, but only for a moment. Sayn, who was still looking at the screen got to his feet. He was blankly staring at the reading as he took a hesitant step back.
"It's moving."
Jona was about to shoot Sayn, when what he said processed in her mind.
"What's moving?"
"The radiation. The center is moving. It's moving. It's alive."
Before anyone could say anything, the ship shook. Many a mercenary was brought to the ground as the biotic glow intensified, and turned from the normal calm blue, to a sickly green. Slowly, the ship began lurching towards the radioactive hell that once was Saleon's labs.
The sensitive electronics of the ship fried, and as sparks flew from the now damaged computers who hissed like some type of animal as they were damaged. The crackling and hissing noise cascaded down the halls. That white noise drowned out the screams of fear and terror as they got closer and closer to the labs.
Jona, never was a believer, but for the first time in her life, she prayed old siari prayers, she prayed to Athame. She even prayed to the spirits of the Turians. Her answer was that echoing white noise and the sound of sparking electrodes as the ship stopped. Fully docked, and held in place by some unseen monstrosity that was no doubt making its way to the ship right not. Then the electronics failed.
The only light within the ship were those of the sparks still coming from the consoles and screens arranged around the bridge. The white noise had stopped, only to be replaced by the screaming and the creaking of metal. Through the brief flashes of visibility brought along by those sparks, Jona watched as some walls around her deformed inward as the sickly iridescent green glow of the biotic aura expanded into her ship, crushing the walls and bringing them down like they were nothing. Some of them fell on her.
Jona did not know if it was extreme luck or careful planning that left the walls that held the vacuum of space at bay untouched. It was only the walls inside of the ship that were destroyed. That spoke of a skill of biotics that went far beyond what Jona thought possible.
Jona began scratching and clawing at the metal, which continued to bend again and again over and over. The friction of which caused it to grow hot to the touch, hot as a stove. So much so that she could feel her hands blister as her nails raked uselessly against the metal.
It was in a moment of clarity that she was able to summon the resolve to use her own biotics to throw the rubble off her. In doing so she caused it to blast away from her into a panicked Sayn who was immediately knocked unconscious or killed. Jona didn't know which.
The now freed Jona looked at the remnants of her crew. She felt something that she had not felt since her Maiden years. She felt helpless. The feeling of helplessness was nothing new to Jona, not by any stretch of the imagination. However it was not one she wanted to ever experience again, not since that day when she was almost taken by slavers when she was barely a century old.
There was something inherently terrifying about not being in control of your own fate, or of any given situation. That forlorn feeling of hellish vulnerability that brought on memories Jona had long thought repressed.
She couldn't stand it.
She didn't know if it was Blacklight, or some other thing that should have remained undiscovered that was tearing her ship apart, but she had no intentions of finding out what horrid fate waited for her. No, her fate would be in her own hands. Without hesitation, she took her pistol, placed the muzzle beneath her chin, and pulled the trigger.
Sayn woke slowly with a pained moan as he sat up, blinking rapidly to banish the sluggishness that came with awakening he observed his surroundings.
It was dark, with only dim red blinking lights giving any form of visibility. The air was stale and cold. There was a lingering feeling of something growing is his gut as he slowly began to recall the previous events.
Death and Fear.
It was the last thing he remembered, and as soon as it dawned on him, he shot up as fast as he could to look around at the remnants of the bridge. The blinking lights of the various machinery made it difficult to see, but in the shadows he could see them. Everyone he had known now lie dead. Some impaled on the debris of the ships, or crushed under it. He couldn't see them, but in this state of blindness brought on by the darkness, his imagination built a terrible scenes of carnage and corpses hidden just outside his field of view.
He instantly became aware of his current situation. Here he was on a derelict ship, surrounded by those he had come to know and care for. Only a thin sheet of metal protecting him not only from the vacuum of the abyss, but of an unseen radiation from the remnants of now destroyed labs, labs that he recalled may not have been as empty as he had believed.
The epicenter of the radiation, it had moved right before his ship was pulled from above to dock. No matter how skilled a pilot he was, a power able to drag shuttles across the void was a terrible power, one that caused him to envision twisted monstrosities he had seen in the scant few videos of Blacklight he could recall.
He took a careful step into the dark, reaching out blindly for some wall he could touch and follow.
Deep down, he knew there was no chance of survival. No one knew where he was, and the remnants of Eclipse deep within the Terminus Systems were left unawares of the dealings with Saleon. Jona was adamant that only she and a select group were aware of the dealings with the mad scientist.
Sayn was alone, isolated in an empty ship, where there was no way out, yet these thoughts did not slow him. Instead he wandered. Finally laying his hands against the cold metal walls. A sigh of relief as he slowly took his steps, being mindful of the rubble and corpses that no doubt littered the ground around him.
A primal fear grew within him as the ship began to settle. Where every creak and moan of metal was the quiet footsteps of some horrid thing in the dark. Something that could see him, but he could not see. It took all his will to denounce these creaks as the end result of the damage done to the ship.
Of course after banishing the thoughts of terrible monsters, his mind flew to more terrible things. What if the structural integrity of the ship had been compromised more than he believed? What if a single step was all that was needed to collapse the entire vessel around him? Burying him beneath what he had once thought of as his home?
He froze. Afraid that maybe it was possible that he would bring down the foundations of the cruiser. His hand trembled and a soft whine escaped his lips as he carefully maneuvered himself to place his back against the wall.
He stood still. Afraid to so much as twitch. Trying to bring the shakes under control.
Was that a creak? Like someone taking a step on the floor?
Was it a survivor? No, they would say something. Cries for help or asking the dark if someone else was there.
Was the ship still settling? Maybe.
But that raises the question, how long was he out. How long had he been unconscious? Why was it that places never seemed to settle when light was present? Only when it was dark. His gut twisted as those sounds that only ever seemed to come at night happened again and again.
There was a rhythm to them. Each creak separated by only a few seconds. Like footsteps maybe, or maybe not.
Then Sayn remembered something, and his fear dimmed considerably.
Sayn walked slowly against the wall, making his way towards the hallway that lead to a small cluster of escape pods. They may have been useless for escape, but they were designed to have their own power, capable of not only ejecting, but producing a distress signal. If one was still powered, maybe he could activate the signal, and get someone, anyone to come and get him off this death trap.
But what if no one detected the signal? What if they came and saw the condition of the ship and left, thinking it void of life? What if the radiation made them hesitate to come aboard and choose to ignore them?
So many 'what ifs'.
No, Sayn had to do it. Even if it didn't work, at least he would try. At least he would have done something to prevent his death. A small chance was better than no chance after all.
Steeled with a newfound determination, Sayn reached out towards the angled hall, but did not look around the corner. Was that another creak? Or a foot step?
A shivering chill ran up his spine, and he hesitated to simply lean forward to catch a glimpse of whatever was down the halls.
It would be too dark to see anyway.
Sayn was about to look over, when the movement of his foot kicked an unseen bit of debris a few inches. He froze. The sound echoed all over the halls of the ship. He stood ramrod straight. After a moment however, nothing happened.
Feeling brave, Sayn reached down and felt along the ground, hoping to find that small bit of rubble to use as an improvised weapon. After a moment of searching, he found it and gripped it hard in his hand. Then he leaned forward, into the hall, the rubble raised high above him to bash whatever may have been behind the halls.
Nothing.
Granted it was dark, but by this point his eyes had adjusted enough to see movement. He exhaled in relief. Right as the thing in his hand started to squirm.