It was bound to happen eventually. Statistically speaking, something would have eventually developed immunity to Blacklight infection one way or another.
Maybe, maybe not. We can infect just about any living thing regardless of its nucleotides or polymerase. Just because this thing doesn't have DNA, doesn't mean we can't infect it. At least it shouldn't.
Your kind may be masters of biology, but these things operate on chemistry unlike any other. It is important to remember these things did not evolve, they were built.
To be fair, we are Blacklight. We take the usual biochemical barriers idea as a helpful suggestion rather than any actual rule.
Yes, but they were still designed by a mad man with access to you.
They are unnatural. We hear them, from Sol we hear their songs, but they do not sing in colors. They do not act, only react. They do not live, only survive. They are not many, they are one. They have many bodies, but only one mind. They simply are. What perversion of unity is this?
They are not like Rachni, nor like Blacklight. They are an individual; each body is merely a limb of a greater organism. Truly fascinating.
They are not they, they are it. It is as you once were Thorian. Alone and hungry.
Yes, I suppose it is like the Old Growths, though at the same time so very different. We can speculate on its mentality later however, there are much more important things to discuss. The ship the asari arrived in, it is absent. Could it have severed a limb to increase survival?
That is a distinct possibility. Currently the organism is being propelled into the star as fast as we can make it go using biotics, however it is much more intelligent than that. It counters with its own biotics, slowing its inevitable doom.
The odds are against it, there is a 19/1 ratio of its biomass compared to Blacklight biomass, not in its favor. However, taking the crew into consideration along with the calculated growth of its various methods of gaining energy, assuming the worst, that it awakened the day of the last shipment of altered Varen, it has just under 10 metric tonnes of unaccounted for biomass. If the odds are in our favor, and it awakened at the same time the Eclipse vessel arrived, that is slightly over 300 kilograms of unaccounted for biomass. Either way, it does not have enough biomass for this to be all of it. Our major focus should be finding the ship.
We agree with the nerdy alien root monster.
Shut up Minority… And yes, we also agree. Finding that ship is now our top priority.
We agree as well.
As the asteroid drifted closer and closer to the star at the center of the system, several bioships immediately left the fight with Children of Saleon as they made their way to the Relay. This Relay was a secondary relay, with only three other Mass Relays within its range.
However Blacklight was adaptive, and ships bled many telltale signs of where they had been, not to mention the ungodly amounts of Radiation these things already put off. Following through the relay, three groups of bioships went towards the three directions the ship could have taken, one of which was near a Primary Relay that lead out of the Terminus Systems and into the Attican Traverse, where the most radiation could be detected. From there the chances of finding the ship, or what was left of it would be increasingly difficult to track down, the Attican Traverse would not be easy to navigate, as not only did it have one of the largest concentrations of Mass Relays, but the Citadel officially claims ownership of the Traverse, meaning that technically Blacklight was not allowed there.
Not that that had stopped them before.
The Migrant Fleet, current home of the Quarians, were in the process of passing through a relay into the Vallhallen Threshold, a cluster within the Terminus systems at the outer rim of the galaxy. The Admiralty Board was currently dealing with the general logistics of getting 50,000 ships through a relay, a feat that would take days to finish. Currently, over three quarters of the ships had made it through, and more were coming through.
While this was important work, it is widely known that this was perhaps the most boring part about moving the Flotilla ever. Admiral Daro'xen vas Moreh, a scientific mind if there ever was one, sat lazily at her desk as she watched the names and numbers pass on her screen. Her eyes felt heavy and she nearly nodded off, before jolting awake when she was interrupted.
"Ma'am."
"I wasn't sleeping!", said Xen quickly as she jolted up to see her newest assistant looking at her.
"Of course, ma'am, I'm just here to give you this." Said the young Quarian as he handed a simple tablet to Xen, who took it quickly and began scanning it.
"Another Medigel shipment? You interrupted my work for this?"
"No ma'am, it's just… The fleets coming through are blocking the Neo-Gentek ships from being able to get to us. We're going to be behind again, apparently they didn't bring enough supplies to last them the amount of time it would take for the rest of the fleets to come through."
Xen leaned on her elbow, hand propping up her head as she scanned the document once more, before throwing it back at the Quarian before her. While he did fumble with it midair, he did catch it.
"Just give the info to Nato'Sidda vas Moreh, he's the one who got us the medigel, let him deal with it. I am very busy at the moment."
"Yes Ma'am."
Xen gave a sharp nod as the Quarian left, before her eyes drifted back to the steadily growing list, her eyes widening in horror when she saw that she had missed over two dozen messages, meaning she would have to go back or risk being tangled in more bureaucracy than any living person should ever have to deal with. A frightening concept that caused her no small amount of unimaginable terror.
After all, if she was off schedule again, then she wouldn't be able to get back to her experiments, and she really REALLY wanted to see if Thresher Maw spores could be aerosolized and still survive. If only to learn if she could make Thresher maw into a possible WMD that could be used in a can. Granted spores can take anywhere between years and millennia to develop, but… Well it's still technically a WMD, just a very slow one.
Granted Xen had no idea when she would ever be able to actually use a few billion Thresher Maw spores in a can, but if she ever did find a reason to use it, she was fairly certain it could be fun.
With that thought, her eyes traveled back to her screen, to see that in her day dreaming, she had missed a further 36 messages.
"Keelah this is dull."
Xen got back to work, her official, not particularly intellectually stimulating work. Really the only reason she decided to become the Admiral of the Special Projects was to have complete freedom on what experiments she could take. Turns out that it wasn't quite the freedom she had hoped it was.
Granted, that Klixen did escape containment, but no one got too seriously hurt, and the fire was put out before it did too much damage.
Xen continued to read the messages, all the while the words seemed to blur and merge together as her boredom reached its peak. She wondered if this legally could count as a form of psychological torture.
Here head rested on her left palm as her right drummed her fingers on the table rhythmically.
After a few more moments of tedious reading of ship registries and raw data, Xen's eyes closed, and her head slipped off her palm, banging against the table. Thankfully the face plate was made of very strong materials, but her head had banged against it hard.
"Owwww!" said Xen as she began rubbing her head or rather the glass in front of her face.
She looked back to the screens, to see that this time that she missed 56 messages.
She blinked, right before her head reacquainted itself with the desk.
"UGHHHH!"
What she would give for a distraction.
"Ma'am?"
Xen's head shot up again, to see her assistant once again standing over her.
"What!?" She snapped.
He flinched, before fidgeting nervously.
"I am sorry to bother you, but…."
"What? This better not be about the medigel again? I know you are not here to tell me the same thing you told me earlier. You better not be, so help me if you are here to tell me the same thing I will destroy you and everything that makes you a person."
He backed off a bit.
"Oh don't be a baby. You'll survive… Mostly anyway. I'm sure a psychologist might disagree, but you'll still be alive in a medical sense."
Upon hearing that, he slowly placed the tablet on the desk.
"No it's… Ummm. Admiral Rael'Zorah has had some strange reports from the other side of the relay."
Xen blinked, waiting for her assistant to say something, but he didn't continue instead Xen's assistant handed her a holoscreen, which she quickly snatched out of his hands. This was not too strange, it was standard procedure to document any ship that came too close to the Flotilla for safety reasons; however what was mildly intriguing about this, was exactly seeing what was on the file presents.
It was a relatively short video of a fairly large cruiser that looked like it decided to go through an asteroid field, and hit every asteroid on the way out. It had seemingly exited the relay just before filming, before it began circling it and disappearing back through. What caught Xen's eye however were the readings that were managed to be detected coming off the ship.
Radiation and a lot of it.
"How exactly was that ship space worthy? It looked like it could barely fly. I am amazed it didn't just explode. I wonder where it was headed."
"Admiral Rael'Zorah wanted your thoughts on the Radiation, and Admiral Han'Gerrel believes that the Radiation was the result of some kind of weapon, and… Well he thinks the ship may have been nuked."
"If that were the case it would be far more damaged than that."
"He mentioned as much, but he believes that it was the only explanation for the amount of radiation they were seeing on the sensors."
"If it was a weapon, it wasn't a nuke, the damage would be much more extensive. Though the fact that the ship just left as soon as it came here is odd enough. I might have some ideas about what could cause this. I take it that the Admirals are gathering to figure this out?"
"Yes. This has a few of them spooked; they may want to follow after the ship."
Xen sighed as she looked back to the missed messages, her eye twitching as the number went higher and higher and higher.
"Well, at least it's better than this."
Admiral Rael'Zorah felt wary as news spread of the strange ship. Currently he was moving with haste next to Admiral Sala'Raan who was in a much similar state. While for all intents and purposes the ship did nothing, its crew piloted the ship in the oddest of ways, almost like the pilots were not quite sure how to fly a starship. Replaying the video, the ship banked far too much when it turned. That could have been the damage, but after Rael's long experience around the Flotilla, seeing a ship fly like that was slightly unsettling.
"Do you think Han is right? That the ship was hit with some kind of weapon?" asked Sala as she watched the video for the third time.
Rael thought about it as he continued to move.
"No, the damage didn't look like the result of an explosion. Too many concave dents. It looks like it rammed into something to be completely honest with you."
Sala hummed to herself as Rael began to speak out loud.
"You've seen the readings on that thing. How can the crew even survive that kind of radiation?"
Sala looked to Rael as he continued to ask unanswerable questions to himself. He knew what he was thinking, it was what everyone was thinking. If the ship was that radioactive, the crew should be dead from radiation poisoning, unless the crew aboard it were synthetics who, with the proper shielding, could easily survive that level of radiation.
Sala assumed the meeting was mostly a formality at this point, the assembling of a team to track the ship, figure out if it revealed any possible threat to the Flotilla.
Unknown to Sala, things would become quite clear very soon.
Admiral Xen sat still, or as still as she could as they waited for the others to come. Standing near her was Zaal'Koris, perhaps the outlier among the Admiralty Board for his sympathetic view of the Geth. Xen didn't really care much for his views. Her belief of Geth as servants was made quite clear over her career, and she still could remember the arguments she had with Zaal, or rather her well thought and detailed arguments and his speaking from the heart. For the record, Xen was fairly sure speaking from the heart was either a mental disorder that should get looked at by a psychologist, or else a person's heart was literally speaking to them, in which case hold all the phones, everywhere, what the fuck, we need a specialist.
On the other side of her was the old aging warship himself, Han'Gerrel, who Xen liked to picture as a sapient assault rifle that learned to wear a Quarian enviro-suit, at least when she was alone, and certainly never to his face. Just on the off chance that Han could shoot bullets from his voice modulator.
It was at this time that Admiral Sala and Rael entered the room and took their place. As soon as they were seated, Admiral Han who stood up and begin to speak.
"I have several of our top minds working on trying to figure all this out…" said Han, all the while Xen resisted the urge to say he didn't have her working on it, and if she wasn't one of the top minds on this fleet, she would eat her omni-tool.
"…As far as they can tell me, they have no idea what could have caused this. Which is why I asked for everyone to come here," said Han as he looked to Xen. "I was told you had an idea of what might cause this level of damage. Assuming this weapon, can you think of what kind it was?"
Xen shrugged.
"Not a nuke, that is for sure, even the smallest nukes make an explosion more than powerful enough to destroy the ship entirely. It appears to be mostly superficial damage to the ship as opposed to any nuclear detonation. It could perhaps be some radiological weapon, like a salted bomb, though those have been outlawed by just about everyone. Even Batarians wouldn't touch them. If this was a weapon, and I am not saying it was, then it wasn't designed to cause an explosion, it was designed to spread fallout and cause radiation poisoning."
"Assuming it was a weapon, who would use such a weapon? More importantly why?" asked Zaal, heart on his sleeve as always if his tone was anything to go by.
"If I had to guess," said Xen, "the only reason to use it would be if someone wanted the ship mostly intact."
"Wouldn't the radiation make the ship uninhabitable anyway? It's not like anyone could use it afterwards for tens of thousands of years, even Asari don't live that long." Said Zaal.
Xen once again shrugged.
"Unless they didn't have to worry about the radiation."
It was at this point Rael began to speak.
"Like say for example a synthetic?"
The room quieted down after that. Xen thought about it for a moment, before nodding.
"That is possible; they wouldn't have as much to fear from high levels of radiation as any living organism."
"Do you think this might be Geth?"
"If it was, they would have done far more to the ship than that. The only reason to use something like a salted bomb is if you wanted the ship or something on it intact."
"Now hold one a minute," said Zaal. "we don't even know if this was the Geth or even if a synthetic race was involved. It could have been an accident. To make an assumption like it being the Geth only exists to further demonize them. We have no evidence of anything right now. Just a heavily damaged ship leaking a lot of radiation."
Han crossed his arms in distain as Zaal spoke, but he didn't refute him. After all, as much as he didn't like the sympathizer, he was still right.
"Then we'll have to find out for ourselves. I suggest we assemble a squad to follow after the ship. I can't imagine it got too far from the other side." Said Han.
"I second the motion. We need to find out what did that. If the Geth are involved then we must know; if they are not, it is our duty to at the very least help those people. Someone had to be alive to pilot the ship." Said Rael.
"I suppose we should. At the very least to help anyone on the ship." Said Zaal.
"Then the motion passes."
Kal'Reegar, a Quarian and member of the Migrant Fleet Marines, strapped himself in as his brothers in arms took their seats. Kal wasn't much for gossip, nor did he particularly care about the ship that everyone else was talking about. As far as he was concerned, if it didn't attack them, it was not their problem. However, if the Admirals wanted to know more about it, then they would know more about it, and he would get that information to the best of his ability.
Once everyone was strapped in, the ship began to shake as it activated. Through the side porthole, Reegar watched as the Migrant fleet got further and further away as they neared the relay.
It was at this time, something very unexpected happened. The Relay activated and something very big came out.
"HOLY SHIT!" screamed the pilot as the ship violently dodged the giant creature that drifted past their ship.
Reegar watched as the black carapace, lit by the light of the relay, passed under them. A large mouth, with many triangular razor sharp teeth, surrounded by four large pincers and massive green compound eyes with a distinctive pseudopupil that stared right at their ship. The creature was so massive, it could have easily swallowed their ship whole. Two mantis like raptorial forelegs slowly moved towards them, right as voices came through the radio.
'You have nothing to fear. We are Blacklight. We are looking for something. We can detect the radiation, and it came through here. Where is it?'
The raptorial limbs stopped just short as the creature moved its massive head to look in the direction of the rest of the Migrant Fleet that had not made it to the Vallhallen Threshold. It retracted its limbs as it quirked its head.
Rael'Zorah watched as the giant Blacklight bioship looked towards his ship. The massive creature had a body not unlike an eel, only with several tentacles that waved around it. A distinct Biotic corona could be seen around it as it moved, before the ensign got Rael's attention.
"Sir, the… Bioship is sending a message."
"Patch it through," said Rael immediately.
'Dangerous lifeform came through here, highly radioactive, and traveling by starship. It cannot be allowed to live.'
Rael looked to his Ensign, before nodding.
"Contact the admirals, and ask the Bioship to remain where it is. We need to discuss this."
"Yes sir."
We're going to need to speak with the Quarians. Saleon's Children came through here, and they were following. We must let them know what they are, before they follow any further.
Do we truly have the time for this? The longer we are here, the greater chance they escape.
If they don't know what is going on here, they will follow us. Curiosity is a fickle thing.
They are like many individuals, separate from unity, they have a growing curiosity that must be filled. It is in their nature.
I suppose if they were to follow the ship, they could bring it to them. No doubt the abominations would feed on all of them, and bring them to the brink of extinction. The Quarians will be needed for the Reapers to come. They cannot fall until then.
You have no sense of altruism. You know that, right?
I was individual for many millennia, altruism for me would end in eventual death. If I had no thralls, I would eventually perish. Their will, their sense of self was unneeded. I do not require to be altruistic, nor do I desire it.
You are not an individual any more.
You are a part of many now Thorian.
It is my nature. It may one day leave me, but that day is not this one.
Enough talking about this. The behavior of Saleon's Children is curious. The Migrant Fleet has biomass, why would they leave it be?
Perhaps the sterile nature of the suit wearers environment, bereft of microorganisms is undesirable, or perhaps the ship was deemed too dangerous to fight. Perhaps they are far more intelligent than their bestial behavior suggests them to be.
Considering they appear to be smart enough to drive a star ship, I think we can safely guess they aren't dumb animals.
They are unnatural, hungry, and desperate. They do not sing, they merely are. Perhaps… they are in search of a garden world.
That has very scary implications.
Implications we must consider. We know precious few facts of these beings.
The Quarians are contacting us. They want us to speak with their Admiralty Board. We will have to speak on this later.
Then let's talk.
Saren sat still on the Presidium as the various races went about their day as they always did. Clenched in his talons was the barrel of what once could have been called a sniper rifle, a very familiar one to Saren. Titanium Steel alloy, custom made, and now terribly bent. He gazed upon it tightly as he rolled the bent piece of metal to burn the image of it into his mind. It was all that he could find. That and rubble. Jaw clenched tight Saren lowered the foot long piece of hollow metal as he leaned back in his seat, his eyes scanning the crowds.
Sometimes, he could swear he would hear the voice of Desolas in the distance, but he never searched to the origin of that voice, never turned his head to where he thought it came from. He just went along his way. There was no way that any trick of sound could be what he really did wish it was, and acknowledging it would only make things worse.
Saren closed his eyes, the remnants of a sniper barrel still in his hand. Even with the people talking and the general hustle of the Presidium, Saren managed to ignore the sounds. He simply say there, breathing and thinking of memories of better times, times before Blacklight, times before the deaths, times when he had someone to watch his back.
He would miss those times.
"Are you alright?"
Saren opened his eyes, and saw an Asari Matriarch standing before him, looking at him with what he supposed was concern. Saren recognized this Asari as one of the ones who questioned him earlier about the… 'disappearance.'
"I'm fine," said Saren bluntly.
The Asari hummed to herself as she motioned to move next to the Turian. Saren said nothing as she sat next to him.
"You don't seem fine. Perhaps it would be best to talk about it? I find it helps when things go wrong."
"And what makes you think anything is wrong?"
Saren did not turn to the Asari as he spoke; his eyes were firmly glued to the barrel in his hands.
"I suppose I may be projecting. If it were my daughter who went missing… well, I know I wouldn't be fine."
Saren grunted before looking back to the barrel. The Asari spoke once again.
"I sympathize with you, I truly do. Tevos speaks highly of you; she has assured me that your brothers disappearance will be examined fully. We are however running into a few issues."
Saren glanced at the Asari. He told them what he could, leaving out anything related to the Collectors, Blacklight, the Cure, or the Reapers, whatever they were. Desolas worked in secret. If that was his wish, then so be it. Saren knew who to blame, and to him, that was all that mattered.
"What issue?"
"The planet he was last on is deep in the Terminus Systems, any investigation we launch will have to be small so as not to provoke a war."
"Politics never change. Just another way for things to be much more complicated than they ever really should," said Saren with a hint of a growl in his voice, the barrel clutched tightly in his hand.
The Asari on the other hand, hummed to herself.
"Perhaps I can help you."
Saren only glanced at the Asari.
"Why would you want to help me?"
"I have my reasons."
Saren placed the barrel in his boot as he stood up.
"Who are you?"
The Asari smiled.
"You may call me Benezia."
_