The signal origin did not, it turned out, end up being a trap by Saren or his allies. As a matter of fact, it turned out to be exactly what it purported to be: a distress signal, sent by the STG from their camp, so that any reinforcements that they might call would know exactly where to find them. Unfortunately, the fact that it was a trap only made the situation marginally better, because when confronted with the fact that said STG unit had suffered massive casualties, lost their ship, and had -up until recently- been suffering from probing attacks nigh-constantly, Cassandra's first thought was that she could really use a small fleet at the moment.
Unfortunately, she didn't have one, and she definitely couldn't ask for it given the massive formation of enemy ships that had left the system not long after their arrival. What she did have was 100 STG operatives -all of which were exhausted, most of which were wounded to a greater or lesser degree-, three Makos, four N6 commandos, her strike team, and Nihlus. That last one was the biggest surprise, and she'd been shocked to see the man who'd been intended to be her mentor and had relinquished that position specifically because he was too emotionally compromised to be involved in hunting Saren.
The turian had been waiting for her at the edge of the camp by the time her Mako splashed to a halt at the perimeter, standing with his arms folded and his fringe held high beside what looked like the senior salarian officer of the unit. Cassie had taken one look at the familiar silhouette through the windshield, the scarred plates and the distinctive red colony markings, and felt her jaw tighten hard enough to make her molars ache.
She gave herself a slow and steady five-count to settle the spike of irritation before she vaulted out of the driver's seat, boots squelching into the mud as she dropped to the sodden ground. The rain had picked up at some point during the drive, and she idly wondered if Saren had decided to make his base here because it was remote and unpopulated, or because the planet seemed by all appearences quite the paradise.
Which made the lack of colony all the stranger, but the affairs of colonial administrators wasn't -Thank God!- her problem to worry about. Her problems were rather more immediate and martial in nature, and she didn't even try to resist the urge to post her hands on her hips as she came to a stop in front of the veteran SPECTRE.
"Well, Nihlus." she said, the word flat and clipped and less than effusively pleased. "Want to explain to me why the hell you're standing in the middle of an STG camp on Virmire when the last conversation we had ended with you telling the Council and I, in no uncertain terms, that you'd compromised yourself out of this particular hunt?"
Nihlus didn't flinch, which was respectable enough, she supposed. Not that she was all that surprised. The circumstances to one side, he wasn't a rookie, and he probably wasn't entirely unused to being on the receiving end of an unhappy look and annoyed tone. He probably knew he had fucked up a bit, too, but he didn't look like he regretted it much either.
Instead, he met her glare with the kind of calm, level gaze that probably worked very well on junior C-sec officers and rookie operatives, and answered with the careful measured tones of a man who knew exactly what kind of trouble he was in.
"I was compromised for the hunt, Shepard. I still am. That hasn't changed." His mandibles flicked once, a turian equivalent of a shrug. "But the Council didn't send me. The Broker did. The Council doesn't even know that I'm here. Sadly, I've not been able to report in since I arrived."
That was…not the answer she'd been expecting, and she didn't even try to hide her surprise, and her suspicion. The Shadow Broker. The same Shadow Broker that was her aunt, that was Liara's father. Why had Aethyta sent Nihlus here to Virmire, and why hadn't she told Cassie about this place? What sort of game was being played in the shadows this time?
"Why would the Broker send you here? Why not just inform me or the Council?" she voiced the question, eyebrows raising inside her helm, and he made a gesture of discomfort alongside a sigh.
"Because I asked them to. Saren is my mentor, and I need to confront him. Maybe I shouldn't, Spirits know I'm never going to hear the end of it, but this is my stain to clean off our order. This is something I need to do, Cassandra." he admitted, neither ashamed nor proud, only determined, before gesturing to the STF officer -a captain, from the looks of it- standing beside him. "Of course, then I ran into Captain Kirrahe here, and between the information he'd gathered, the information I'd gathered, and the partial intel that the Broker gave me, we figured out pretty quickly that this mission is way beyond us."
"Saren's compound on-planet is a fortress. I lost more than half of my men, dead or captured, trying to investigate. Every hole in the perimeter that we found was a trap, every potential weakspot closely watched, and sabotage is impossible. The only thing that we can hope to do is bombard the site from orbit. It's the only way to make sure." the now-named Kirrahe agreed immediately, one hand folded behind his back while the other gestured briskly. "I don't suppose you're the lead element of a Citadel task group?"
"Unfortunately not. During your time here, the colony of Terra Nova was almost destroyed when batarian terrorists under the Warmaster tried to drop a 22km long asteroid on the planet. I asked the Council to send me with warships, since you were obviously calling for support on a jammed channel from enemy territory, but they didn't think it was wise to create gaps in the patrols around Citadel Space. And thanks to the size of the geth/batarian fleet we saw jumping out after we arrived, they certainly can't risk doing it now." she shook her head, getting a sigh and a nod of understanding from both of the men before her. "Do we have any idea what this facility is for? If it's not of immediate importance, we can all fit on the Normandy long enough to get out-system…"
Kirrahe's nostrils flared as he drew in a long breath, the salarian's slim shoulders tightening beneath the muddied weight of his armor, and Cassandra watched the resignation that crept across his angular features even as he answered. Whatever the news was, she already knew she wasn't going to like it.
"Negative, Commander. Evacuation is not an option." He produced a datapad from somewhere beneath the poncho, sheltering its screen with a cupped hand as he thumbed it to life. "What Saren has built here is a breeding facility, one staffed by an unknown krogan scientist that is producing krogan clones by the dozens, searching for a cure to the genophage. Above and beyond the danger posed to the galaxy, we can't allow such a facility to remain operational, or we'll find ourselves drowning in krogan every time he launches an attack."
He passed the pad over, and Cassandra accepted it numbly and with a sinking feeling as she paged through image after image and report after report, all saying and showing the same things. Cloning vats, arranged in neat rows, with bodies -in various degrees of development- within them, floating suspended in amber-tinted fluid. Surgical bays. Labs. And the krogan themselves, decanted and standing together, and she realized with a jolt that she recognized them. Recognized him, really, because it was the same damn krogan that she'd been fighting everytime she encountered enemy forces since this mission had begun.
Which meant that this was not a recent development, and her stomach sank as she considered the implications.
Months. Possibly years, if she was being honest with herself, given the scale of the operation. Saren -or The Warmaster, because she wasn't entirely sure who was running things any longer- had been growing his own private army of identical krogan elites for who-knew-how-long, and every single one of them was, near as she could tell from the few engagements she'd had so far, at most a third as capable as Wrex was. Which might not sound that impressive, but he was probably the deadliest krogan alive and there was only one of him, so…
She handed the datapad back without comment, the rain drumming a steady tattoo against the crown of her helmet, and let her gaze drift across the camp. The most direct solution -repeated airstrikes with the Normandy- wouldn't do them any good here, not with that dreadnought and its remaining escorts in orbit, and that wasn't considering the concerns of all of the triple-A towers that were still operational.
"Alright then, so we need to plan some sort of attack, and it has to be a smart one. We don't have enough numbers for a conventional fight, we don't have the firepower to avoid a fight entirely, and most of your men are injured and exhausted. So what have you got?"
"We've managed to convert our ship's drive core into the equivalent of a twenty kiloton bomb, but the facility is hardened. Dropping it from orbit may not completely destroy the target, but our investigations did locate a weak point that will guarantee success. There is a geothermal tap, one that powers the entire facility. If we detonate the device there, the cascade effect will destroy the target, and likely everything within a kilometer or two of it as well." Kirrahe answered promptly, displaying a map of the facility and its surroundings as he knew it, a small and blinking red light detailing the location of the aforementioned tap.
"Of course," Nihlus added, gesturing to the map. "We obviously can't go lugging something of that size around, especially not with enemy ships in orbit. We'd make one hell of a sitting duck. What we have to do is infiltrate the facility, wipe out as many defenders as we can, deactivate the AAA turrets, and have the Normandy drop off the modified drive, before making our escape before it goes off and vaporizes all of us."
He said it so simply, so casually, as if the actual doing wouldn't be insanely complicated, incredibly dangerous, and likely to cause more than a few casualties. But the two men before her were right, the facility did have to be destroyed, and if this was the only practicable plan that didn't involve a pitched fleet battle -drawing a significant number of ships off the line and putting Citadel Space in greater danger- then they were just going to have to figure out the details and get it done.
"Alright. There's no way you guys haven't come up with a plan yet, so why don't you lay it on me?" she huffed, getting matching grim smiles from the two men, and the explanation began in earnest.
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Ashley watched as her lover -and that's exactly what her Commander was, for all that they'd not actually had sex yet- listened to the plan created by the two battle-worn men in front of her, one of her ears absorbing details even as she kept her focus on Cassandra. She watched the slight gleam in Cassandra's eyes, felt the hair on her arms raise, felt the tingle in her soul, and knew that The Phoenix Force was speaking to it's host, guiding her and advising her.
As she watched her Skipper start to dismantle the plan and devise a better one -she felt bad for the salarian, embarrassed as the man probably was, but she was right. His men were not frontline heavy infantry. Using them for a frontal insult was as insane as it was likely to fail- she marveled over that knowledge. The knowledge that her lover was the Host, the partner, to an entity old enough that it had been Created in the first moment. An entity that was, essentially, on a first name basis with God Himself, for all that the Force called Him 'The One Above All'. Which was a name that she rather found that she appreciated, in the moments that she had that weren't already occupied by daydreaming about her new family, worrying about her birth family, fighting, getting ready to fight, and waffling between existential dread and faithful euphoria.
Yeah, it was a hell of a thing for a girl to grapple with, it really was. Probably would stay that way too, if she was going to be honest, even if she'd reached a sort of steady calm that let her function, while helping her avoid completely freaking out the woman she loved by…well, suffice to say, she was glad that 'rolling with the punches' and 'coping' had been parts of her life for so long that she could maintain a semblance of normalcy even in the face of this sort of…reevaluation.
Ah, her Skipper had asked her, or rather the proverbial room at large, if her plan was clear. Quickly cycling through the instructions she'd been absorbing even as she focused on her own inner monologue, she nodded briskly and voiced her own confirmation of understanding. The plan was a good one, she could tell that much, and less likely to have horrific casualties.
Simply put, rather than launching a frontal assault using everyone but a small infiltration team to keep Saren's troops busy -which, Cassandra had pointed out quite reasonably, would just make the experienced SPECTRE assume something tricky was going on, STG not being famous for their frontal assaults-, they would use multiple false infiltration teams and the three Makos to draw the defenders away from the actual targets...and the fire teams that would be assaulting them. The anti-aircraft master control, the geothermal tap, and the central command center in the hopes of securing any intel that might be there. Then, the Normandy would pick up the Mako crews, rendezvous with the team at the geothermal tap, dropping off the bomb and the rest of their forces to defend it.
Once the bomb was prepped and nearing detonation, they pack it up and evacuate the planet, the system, and hopefully the entire damn cluster before hightailing it back to secured Citadel Space and dropping off all of their extra passengers.
It wasn't the simplest plan, of course, it had a lot of moving parts and if any unit was caught out or too slow, they wouldn't survive, but it was a better plan than the one that they'd been preparing on carrying out before the Normandy had arrived.
"Kirrahe, you know your men best, I'll let you divide them up. Kaiden, you'll join the N6 unit and act as their tech and biotic support for close security on the bomb itself. Wrex, Garrus, I want the two of you to accompany Nihlus and some of the STG guys to the AAA master-control. The girls and I will go straight for the CIC, and hopefully get a shot at Saren or the Warmaster while we're at it. Anyone who sees them, don't try for a capture. Any intel they might have isn't worth trying to extract them by force with that damn Reaper in orbit. Normandy is quick and quiet, but I'd rather not find out if she's quick and quiet enough."
A round of confirmations, verbal and physical alike, rolled around the space, and Ashley rolled her shoulders as she bounced lightly on the balls of her feet, marvelling slightly at how good she felt about the fight that was about to happen. How confident she was, how sure that things would go the way that they had hoped and planned.
She took a moment to glance at the other two members of her burgeoning family. Liara and Tali were talking quietly, about what she couldn't hear, but judging from the way Tali was glancing at Wrex and Liara was smiling softly at her, Ash would be willing to bet the young quarian was worried about the old krogan losing his cool and Liara was reassuring her. That was understandable, they were discussing a plan to blow up a facility that could well be researching a way to cure the genophage -some of Kirrahe's intel certainly suggested it, though whether that was true or if it was purely a cloning effort didn't seem set in stone either way- in front of man who would obviously wish to see the genophage cured.
For her part, Ashley wasn't too worried. She wasn't exactly close with Wrex, but she wasn't entirely unfamiliar with him either. He frequently helped with the armory, after all, and she'd made an effort to get to know him as a part of her wider campaign to understand her hero more as a person than an icon. And who better to tell her what Cassandra was like than one of the people who had -after a certain, dramatic point- helped raised her?
As he'd helped her come to understand her commander better, she'd some to understand him pretty well, and it was that understanding -slim though it might be, he was actually rather complex despite his outward appearances and attitudes- that left her just as unworried as Liara was. Simply put, Wrex trusted Cassandra to do what was best for his people in regards to any of the data contained within the facility. Destroying it, keeping it, using it…he knew how his 'niece' felt about the genophage, and he certainly knew that she valued what was right over any of the positions that she now held.
Perhaps a different Urdnot Wrex, one that hadn't known Shepard as long as he had, one that didn't understand and trust her as much as he did, would have done something else. Perhaps, then, he would have been a threat to the plan, a threat to the crew, and threat to Cassandra. But this Wrex wasn't and never could be, and Ashley marveled briefly at the absolute confidence she thought the words with, and confidence she never could have imagined that she would ever feel about any alien.
'Alright, we're moving out! This is it, everyone!" Cassandra called, and the camp broke into action, getting ready for their own parts even as Ashley joined Liara and Tali in following Cassandra towards the distant fortress. It would take them some time to reach it, to get themselves into position for the other units to do their own part, but once they did things would be getting very interesting very quickly.
A prediction that, unsurprisingly, was promptly proven true an hour later.
The first target for the main strike team was, while not the most important, perhaps one of the most strategically vital: a radio communication tower with a triangulation antenna that was more than capable of monitoring, tracking, locating, and perhaps even listening in on any of the transmissions that the attacking Citadel forces might make. Without it, they could use their comms freely and safely, and if it stayed up…well, the likelihood that someone would be left behind or that a unit might fail their objectives and ruin this whole operation were pretty damn high. Something that obviously Shepard didn't want to risk, and something even more clearly that shouldn't be risked if it didn't need to be.
Fortunately for everyone involved, it's guards didn't last long and it didn't last much longer than that. Thank God for plastic explosives.
Then, quite by chance, they found massive and powerful satellite uplink disk. One that was entirely capable of near-instantaneous communication with orbit, and the destruction of which would buy the attacking force many precious minutes, slowing down the arrival of any potential reinforcements and reducing the ability of geth already on the ground to communicate and coordinate. Not by much, maybe -there probably wouldn't be any real way to tell- but any advantage was important. Besides, with any luck, the geth would have been relying on secrecy and the combined efforts of the dish and the antenna instead of setting up multiple smaller relays.
If that was the case, it might not be so small a change after all.
A single rocket, fired by a launcher taken from one of several dead geth, dealt with the landing pad, its fuel tank, and the geth drones that were getting ready to launch from around them. After that, the only thing that they had to do was breach the door, have Tali hack into the alarm system to set off false alerts all over the place, and make their way inside.
Which is when things promptly got distinctly less simple and effoicient.
It started with being forced to engage a 'small' group of three krogan clones, heavily armed and armored, though fortunately not biotics. It hadn't been the most difficult fight they'd ever had, but it hadn't been quick or easy either, not with the team trying to -quite paradoxically, given the circumstances- limit collateral damage.
Then they'd found the surviving, imprisoned STG troopers, locked away in cells and -in the case of all but one- no longer in control of their own minds. Instead, they were babbling, shrieking, drooling, clawing at the walls of their cells, or even simply…standing there staring at nothing. Those were the ones that Ashley found the most disturbing, the ones that simply did nothing but stand there and breath, barely even blinking.
The lone survivor -the lone sane survivor- was the youngest of the agents, his skin pale and clammy under the harsh fluorescent lighting of his cell, hands trembling as he wrung them together, visibly breathing the sort of steady breaths any sapient did when they were trying to maintain their equilibrium. He looked up as the four of them approached, eyes wide and hollow, but there was still a flicker of awareness in them. Still a person inside that exhausted shell, which was more than could be said for his comrades. And it was a person that wasn't broken, either, for all that he was bloodied and battered in body and soul.
"Captain… Kirrahe?" he rasped, his voice cracking from disuse, fragile but with an edge of hope as he took them in. "Did the Captain send you?"
"He did. We're here to destroy the base." Cassandra's voice was gentle in a way that Ashley had only heard her use a handful of times, and she watched as her lover stepped up to the cell and met the agent's eyes. "What's your name, trooper?"
"Lieutenant Ganto Imness, Third Infiltration Regiment, Salarian Special Tasks Group. Serial Number Theta-Epsilon-Two…" he started to list off by rote, before shaking his head and visibly steadying himself a bit. "Sorry. Been repeating that for a while now. One of the things that's kept me together."
"You're fine, Lieutenant, no need to apologize. You deserve more than a few compliments for keeping yourself together, I'm not going to give you any flak for being a little bit out of sorts. Tali, get to work on the cell, would you?" Cassandra said, getting an obedient nod from the quarian, who stepped up with her omni-tool already activating, before turning her attention back to the man in front of her. "What can you tell me about the situation here? What happened to the rest of your men?"
"Yes, ma'am. Thank you ma'am." he responded, watching Tali work with a distinctly brighter gaze than he'd had a moment before. "We were captured during recon, managed to transmit most of our intel to the Captain just before they got us. That's when Saren started his experiments. That dreadnought of his, he calls it Sovereign, and it has the ability to…to get inside your head. To twist you, to hollow you out until the only thing you can do is what Saren wants you to do. You can't think, feel, decide…you're a puppet. A meat puppet dancing to their tune. The only reason I'm not like that is because they wanted to use me as a control group."
"So instead they forced you to watch as they killed your men's souls, and left you surrounded by the living dead." Liara said softly, reaching out and placing her hand on the clear viewing window in as comforting a gesture as she could manage with the cell door between them. "I'm so sorry, Lieutenant."
The lieutenant's throat worked as he swallowed, his oversized eyes blinking rapidly, and Ashley felt something twist hard and ugly in her gut at the sight. She'd seen men come back from bad deployments before—hell, her own father had carried things back from his postings that he'd never quite managed to set down—but this was something else. This was the look of a man who had spent days watching his brothers in arms reduced to husks, knowing that the only reason he hadn't joined them was that someone had decided his suffering unharmed was useful to them.
"Don't be, ma'am." Imness rasped immediately, straightening up a bit. "My boys fought as hard as they could, resisted as long as they could. I'll remember them as they were, and I'll make sure that Command and the Council both understand the danger that this…technology, or whatever it is poses. Just…make sure this place doesn't survive?"
"That's a guarantee, and you're going to help make it happen. I'm not going to force you to try and outrun the bomb we're going to destroy this place with, which means you're coming with us. Just keep to the back and support as best you can. You're not used to my team, you're exhausted and injured, so I don't want you on the frontline, but you're not broken and I won't treat you like you are."
The cell door hissed open the moment Tali finished her work, and Imness took one careful step out before his legs gave a violent shudder beneath him. Ashley moved without thinking, closing the distance in two long strides and getting a shoulder under the salarian's arm before he could collapse, overwhelmed by an exhaustion that likely had very little to do with his body.
"Easy there, sir." she murmured, adjusting her grip until she found a hold that wouldn't aggravate any of the obvious injuries. "We've got some medigel and stims for you, and a weapon."
A glance at Cassandra had her flushing slightly, the pride and approval radiating out from the other woman filling her heart with warmth, and she knew why. She might not have hated aliens, before she came under Cassie's command, but she certainly wouldn't have gone out of her way to give one this level of support either. She had grown, she knew she had, and the fact that the woman she loved and respected more than any other saw that same growth in her meant more than words could possibly portray. Smiling back at her love, she turned her attention back to the man she held and gave him a grin and a squeeze of the shoulder.
"Come on, LT, we've got some bad guys to kill and a galaxy to save."
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Liara was shaking. Not with fear, though she was afraid. Not with rage, though she was very angry. No, she was shaking from raw indignation and disappointment, because there was a fully intact and functionalProthean Beacon in the middle of this damn control room, and they were about to have to blow it up!
Unless her lover absorbed it like she'd absorbed the one from Eden Prime, which wouldn't be subtle in the least, and while she wouldn't worry very much about just that being done if it was only their foursome present…well, Ganto Imness seemed like a fine enough fellow, but he was both a stranger to them and a member of the STG. Of course, now that she thought about it, the Council already knew that Cassandra had absorbed at least some knowledge from the first Beacon, so perhaps no harm would come of it.
She'd let Cassandra decide. The point was, Cassandra or not, this beacon would be destroyed soon enough, and that was a damned waste. A waste that might have been avoidable if it wasn't for the fact that the Council wouldn't send reinforcements. And yes, the Council's reasons were good ones, and they'd been proven prophetic by the sight of the massive fleet that had left the system not long after they had arrived, but if you asked Liara? It would seem like a much better idea to have called in the full might of Citadel Space and have the inevitable, massive fleet battle that was clearly imminent in orbit around an essentially-insignificant and unpopulated planet rather than someplace like the Citadel itself.
"Girls. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that interface avatar up on the balcony looks an awful lot like this 'Sovereign', doesn't it?" Cassandra's words were casual, breaking through her thoughts, but the tone with which she said them and the weight that they carried most certainly was not.
Liara's gaze, along with that of her companions, snapped upwards immediately to follow Cassandra's pointing nod, and she felt a tendril of ice trickle its way down her spine, because Cassie was right. The crimson holographic figure that loomed over the upper tier of the control center was a massive, hulking, many-limbed silhouette that greatly resembled -in fact, seemed to be a perfect replica of- the hulking, athropodic dreadnought from both Eden Prime and orbit of this very world.
"…well, we might as well get up there. If nothing else, it will be easier to reach the Beacon. I'm going to see if I can do what I did on Eden Prime." Cassandra sighed after a long moment of contemplative silence, one that followed and preceded resigned affirmations from her feminine companions.
A few minutes later, they were standing before the image, looking at it…and the image, for all that it lacked eyes, was clearly looking back.
"You are not Saren…"