Audax Novus

Chapter Twenty-Five:: Blood For Dirt ::

EDS (Earth Dating system) – November 12, 2185
Location: La'hak – Former Capitol of Tuchanka.
Stellar Orbit: Epsilon Arahlak
11 days since Operation Pike commenced

THUD-THUD-THUD

BU-BU-BOOOM

BRAK-BRAK-BRAK

SHPLINK-CRACK

John Shepard was now familiar with each and every sound that came from a Praetorian made weapon. From the ridiculously large drum-fed shotguns their Krogans' carried to the lethal and almost all-purpose engagement style assault rifle which put his old Avenger to shame.

Even the Lancer tanks, giant as they were, made a distinctive sound that he could pick apart decibel by decibel- his ears didn't seem quite so troubled by it anymore.

Their forces were now spread out around the inner city of the once Krogan capital, and as a part of the game Shepard played to keep himself distracted, he tried to focus on which guns were which from a distance.

The thought slipped with the hoarse and throaty wailing roar of a Foxtrot Tango. His BR55N practically magnetised to his shoulder, and he rolled from his rear and onto a knee on grit layered tarmac. His breathing stopped, his mind stopped, all thoughts vanished, and only the sounds and instincts mattered.

The small war on Rannoch had tested him. It had challenged him to step up for what was to come. And now that what was to come was now, he'd risen to the challenge by steeling himself against the constant attacks and wear the battle was taking on his inner self.

Garrus and Thane had reacted in almost mirror images of Shepard, and they each scanned around the mangled metal that formed the barrier they had been recouping their wits behind.

The city centre was theirs. The tunnel had emerged where expected, and the two Lancer tanks had placed tungsten slugs throughout the carapace of the Reaper that had wanted to keep the pyramid as a throne.

That Reaper was now strewn all around the Krogan pyramid, its lifeless concrete courtyards, and the four main roads that struck out from it.

After they had fought their way through the droves of Dashers, Husks and Cannibals, they had been greeted by a new Krogan variant.

At the time, a Ranger had been heard yelling, "Fuck that!" at the sight of the monster. Another Praetorian, most likely Urdnot Groden, had instantly translated that into phonetics, and calling the once Krogans' Foxtrot Tangos, or FT's, had stuck.

"Fuck that," worked quite well in Shepard's mind. The creatures were grotesque, even more so than the Dashers.

Unlike their unmodified brethren, they ran on all fours. Their arms were elongated and armoured, making them hard to knee-cap, and they ran with great loping strides when they reached full speed.

The orientation of their necks no longer had it so that their faces could look forward if they were standing upright, with their faces now jutting out of the top of their shoulders. And to top it off, there was an accelerator weapon protruding from each shoulder.

Like all of the other Reaper abominations, the FT's faces had been twisted into snarling expressions of depravity, and Shepard was all too ready to fill those faces with bullets.

More gunshots sounded nearby, and suddenly the air was thrumming again with their heavy beat. Roars and wails answered, and Shepard ducked instinctively as he caught a flash of light coming out of the dusty air down the road they were guarding.

Accelerator rounds whizzed by ahead, and Shepard surged back up and fired at the shape that resolved out of the dust.

The FT screamed, and Shepard steeled his soul against the rage it filled him with. The scream was bestial and full of horrific pain. The scream continued on and on and on, and bullets pelted it from along the Praetorian and Alliance firing line.

It stumbled, and finally, its front right leg gave way in a spray of brown-red fluid, and sickeningly it caught itself on the ragged stump near the shoulder and continued to bleat loudly. The tenor of the scream shifted, and it grew hoarse and throaty, and again Shepard felt the sound rock his core.

The Reapers had always been expected to be a terrible foe. And now they had finally met an enemy that could contend with them; they were evolving new horrors, worse than what Shepard thought he knew of their time in the Prothean cycle.

He pulled the trigger on his rifle again, and out of sheer luck, his bullet, out of dozens directed at the FT, caught just the right angle of intercept on the creatures' flailing head. The bullet punched a ragged hole through its' eye, the only unarmoured part of the head, with the rest crusted in scale-like armour.

The creature fell silent and dropped face-first into the ground, but no reprieve followed. Two more FT's emerged from the dusty cloud that obscured their vision beyond thirty metres.

One of them glowed blue and promptly sailed toward the Praetorian position.

Shepard glanced right and saw Samara swathed in biotic energy. Jack glowed a moment later, and a twisted rusty girder lifted off the ground from just ahead of their defensive line and zipped forward. The incoming FT and the girder met with a loud renting squelch and a hollow cry, and the rusted beam tore through its chest and emerged out its side in the moments of being airborne before it impacted the ground.

Jack stumbled and caught her weight on her knees from the effort of lifting and hurling the girder, and Samara stepped in front of her while trying to push her down, simultaneously firing an SMG single-handed in the direction of the other FT.

Shepard, Garrus and Thane fired too, but before the combined fire could take this one down as well, the dust stirred and then broke.

"DASHERS!"

Rounds started whizzing overhead and ricocheted off surfaces around them. A dozen metres away behind another torn up vehicle, a Ranger who could have been Human, Asari, or Batarian grunted and pitched forward, clutching at their neck.

"CANNIBALS!"

Another cry sounded in almost the same instant.

Shepard tapped his omni-tool while firing downrange and yelled while taking the knees out from under the group of ten or more Cannibals that were charging. He ignored the Dashers for someone less distracted than himself.

"This is Shepard on the eastern line. We have enemies pushing in numbers! We NEED-"

SHHZZZZZZ-SHHZZZZZZZ-SHHZZZZZZ

A red energy beam carved past Shepard from overhead, and two Oculus drones zipped above. He quickly looked down his N7 armour in surprise to find himself in one piece at the close call. The heat of the weapon had washed over him with such intensity that he could have sworn- His eyes widened, and he looked sharply to his right.

"Sh-Shep-aaard."

"THANE!"

The Drell was ruined. Shepard shook his head and dropped behind their now smoking pile of cover to assist Garrus in treating the grievously injured Drell. The Turian looked like he hadn't been quite as lucky as Shepard, but he wasn't quite as unlucky as Thane.

Garrus's left side smoked as he jammed painkillers into a thin seal on the Drells neck with his right hand.

Shepard scanned Thane. There was nothing he could do. He didn't know what to do. Despite the rasping breaths that showed lifes' desperate attempt to remain, Thane, his friend, was dead.

There was just no way... Rage hollowed Shepard.

Thane had almost been carved in half. His right arm was gone along with a third of his torso all the way down through his hip, with a large portion of his leg gone too. The laser had been hot enough to vaporise the flesh and armour that it had touched, and the charred cauterised wound was already cracking open to reveal rivulets of blood.

"...Thane..." Shepard breathed the Drells name dryly.

This battle was brutal. The hardest he'd ever been involved in. But he was confident that they would win. They were just fighting ground troops, reinforcements were on the way, they were behind cover... How could Thane die like this?

"You're going to be alright!" Shepard uttered in a hollow voice. Did he not believe himself? He shook his head and lifted his omni-tool.

The background firestorm was almost invisible to his auditory senses at this point, but he knew that it was still going on. There was more movement around them. A lot more. There were armoured legs everywhere, and bullet casings fell around the Drell.

"Med-" Shepard's shout died on his lips as a helmeted Alliance soldier skidded down onto her knees just above Thane's head, next to Garrus.

Shepard frowned behind his helmet as he realised that Garrus was no longer applying pain killers to the Drell. The Turian was rocked back on his haunches, his rifle forgotten on the ground, and his right talons cradling his left arm.

The medic who'd arrived at just the right time gave Thane a single glance and then turned to Garrus.

Shepard's frown grew more confused. Garrus was fine. Thane needed- Shepard blinked as he looked at the Drell in confusion. Some of the assassins' entrails had slipped from his charred abdomen onto the ground. His jaw was slack, and his eyes were devoid of life.

The charred surface was already cracked, and blood oozed out and mixed freely with the rusty dirt.

It took Shepard another second to realise that the Drell was dead.

It had only been ten or so seconds since the three of them were in a line behind the twisted metal firing downrange at the attackers. Somehow, it felt like Shepard had just gone through an hour of confusion and hardship.

'Focus on the living, Marine...' Shepard cooled his mind and took in a rattly breath. 'FOCUS ON THE LIVING!' He forced his eyes away from the ruined Drell and to the Alliance marine medic, who was carefully removing sections of Garrus's armour on his arm with a glowing red omni-tool extension.

Shepard winced as a section of the Turian's forearm was revealed. It was misshapen and looked like the metallic excretion that made up the Turian exoskeleton had melted.

He could hear Garrus wheezing heavily. Shepard gritted his teeth at the mere thought of imagining the pain of an injury that had melted some of the Turians' outer shell. "Take care of my man, Medic."

The medic didn't reply. She'd probably heard that same line repeated a hundred times in the last ten days. Then his jaw set, and he shuffled on the spot toward where he'd seen the humanoid Ranger topple forward minutes ago.

The Ranger was now revealed to be a purple-skinned Asari. Her face was bloody with her helmet discarded beside her, likewise bloody. One Ranger held her head and neck stable while another kept her arms pinned. Gruesomely, a third was kneeling above her and taping a tube into her throat, with their combat knife perched bloodily and thoughtlessly on the chest of the injured one.

Unlike the Marines, the Rangers didn't deploy with a medic. All of them went through considerably more emergency medical training than any Marine he'd ever seen. In the last ten days, he'd seen Rangers perform all kinds of simple lifesaving operations on their comrades.

And much like in this case, with three down on the ground seeing to the survival of a fourth, ten more were bunching up around a burnt-out six-wheeled vehicle firing in precise patterns to make sure that their group had a constant stream of bullets seeking to kill the enemy.

The once-Spectre tore his eyes off the Praetorians and took a knee beside his mangled cover. The haunted face of a Dasher caught his eye as it beelined like a demonic entity toward where Jack and Samara were.

His lip curled, he focused for a split second, and its head exploded. He moved on to the next, and his shots caught it mid-jump in the gut. Its stomach was torn open in a splash of blue-brown, and a rope of intestines burst out. Shepard's nose crinkled as the monster merely stumbled before lurching forward again, dragging its innards along the ground.

His next shot caught it in the chest, and he shuffled out of cover further as it neared his biotics' point of cover. He fired, and in the same instant, a force impacted the side of his body.

The force that hit him didn't relent, and Shepard fell sideways, and something bashed into his helmet. He swung his left elbow wide to try and hit his assailant, and he was rewarded only with enough room to twist his upper body on the ground to view the Dasher that had somehow slipped through the overlapping fields of fire.

In a split second, he judged the distance between him and the creature that was straddling him to be too close for his rifle. He released his hold on the rifle in favour of bringing both his forearms together in a shield.

The Dasher screeched a tortured sound of hatred and slammed its head forward into Shepard's forearms in an attempt to burst through and clamp its distended jaw onto his neck, where the armour was softer.

He bucked his hips with every ounce of energy he could muster, and the slight instability it created gave him room to lash out with a right jab into the chin of the Dasher. Its head rocked back from the impact, but it swung its own right arm down with the two metallic claws slick with blue mucus extended and aimed for his flank.

Shepard bucked again to throw it off and tried to lift his left elbow out to protect against the attack.

A figure blurred into his vision, and the blue armour of the alliance marine medic collided with the Dasher into a diving tackle. The woman must have looked up from working on Garrus and decided to jump to Shepards rescue in a split second.

Her impact carried the Dasher off him, and he rolled right and then back with his BR55N retrieved.

The marine was on top of the Dasher, straddling it like how it had straddled him. They were between two wrecks and completely exposed. She sent her fists pummelling into its face with squelching cracks between throating screams.

Shepard could see that its jaw was already broken and turned to mush, with the lower part of its face mostly caved in. Despite the wound, its clawed right appendage was lodged firmly into the marine lower back, and its left was still swinging in an attempt to do the same.

"LET ME THE FUCK GO!" She screamed hoarsely and slammed her fist down again. Another crack sounded, and the Marines right fist came away dripping with murky excrement.

Shepard stood to his full height to get clearance over the medics head, and he fired several quick bursts into the chests of Cannibals who were turning their firing arms in their direction. Whether it was his bullets or not that cut them down didn't matter, only that he did his part to make sure he pulled the medic who'd saved him to safety.

He swung the rifle around onto his back, clamped it in place, and rushed forward with an omni-blade unfolding. Shepard swung his arm wide and cut the Dashers arm off at the bulbous elbow, and he grabbed the back of the medics armour while pivoting into a backward walk to drag her away from the fight.

The Dasher continued to lurch on the ground in an effort to fight, despite the fact that the medic had turned the entire front of its head into a pulpy mass.

The medic was still screaming at it, "FUCK YOU! YOU FUCKING UGLY PIECE OF SHIT!"

"Garrus!" Shepard yelled as he closed the gruelling metres far too slowly for his comfort. His heart throbbed in his ears, and his lungs burned from the sudden and intense exertion as his mind only just started to consciously catch up to the intense battle.

"Garrus!" He repeated hoarsely.

"Come on, Shepard," The Turian grunted as he rounded the cover that Shepard was seeking to return to.

The Turian took in the situation of Shepard dragging the medic at a glance. The medic had gone limp in the seconds between the first and second call for the Turian, but Shepard wasn't willing to consider the worst. He swapped hands and spun while shuffling backwards to drag the medic with his left hand.

His right retrieved his rifle, and he tucked it into his elbow and started firing shots at anything that moved that he could see down the road.

Garrus took up a position beside Shepard and used his good arm to assist. Together, they dragged the limp medic who'd saved his life away from the battlefront and toward the large pyramid in the middle of the square, where all of them slept, ate, and were looked after when injured.

He noticed that off to their left, two Rangers' had unfolded a stretcher and were quickly catching up with him and Garrus with the burdon of the wounded Asari he'd seen them treating.

"What's the ETA on cover!" He shouted loudly in an effort to both be heard over the racket of weapons and give him a sense of control of their circumstances.

He and Garrus continued for another ten meters before Shepard yelled it again, and three Rangers rushed to greet them from the Pyramid with a stretcher ready for the wounded medic. They came to a stop right beside the helmeted woman's body, and one of them immediately rolled her face-first onto it while inspecting the claw still lodged deep into her side.

"She's alive!" The Ranger revealed himself, or herself, to be Batarian through the unusual tenor of their voice.

Shepard logged the unusualness of the Batarian possibly being a female into the recesses of his mind, and he turned to the tallest Turian Ranger to repeat his question.

Before he could get his question out again, the medic started lurching on the stretcher, and then she released a desperate blood-curdling scream through her helmet. All of them jumped in surprise and spun to face her, and she surged off the stretcher and at the Ranger who'd put her there with a wildly swinging arm.

Trained instincts guided the Ranger to parry the strike and then counter with an elbow. The counter-attack hit hard enough to send the medics helmet flying, and the medic spun from the force.

"Spirits..." Garrus crowed in shock.

Shepard felt the same way at the sight of the rapidly huskifying features, but his instincts had his rifle back in his hand in a heartbeat, and he fired three quick shots in a tight cluster point-blank into the medics chest.

The rounds tore through the armour and shredded the lungs and heart tissue underneath, and the would-be scream died in the same instant as the medic died and dropped first to her knees and then facefirst onto the ground.

The three Rangers jumped into action, and the voice that Shepard was now sure was that of a female Batarian filled his helmet on the deployment-wide comms channel. "DO NOT! Do not engage Dashers at CBQ! We have confirmation that a lethal strike from them leads to Reaper-nanite infection. I repeat! Do everything you can to keep them at a distance! Defence protocol Kilo!"

The once-valiant medic lurched on the ground, either in death throes or a final attempt to strike. Shepard gritted his teeth while putting another round through the top of her skull and splashing still human-looking brain tissue across the dirty tarmac.

"When's our cover arriving?" He growled again, looking up from the gruesome result of another new horrific element of war with the Reapers.

The Batarian woman's helmet tilted in the body language equivalent of, "Are you serious?" After a moment of nothing being said and the near distance gun battle making them more uncomfortable, they spoke, "Didn't you hear?"

Shepard frowned inside his helmet but remained static.

"More Reapers have moved into the system, but they're still staying back. So none of ours are moving forward unless we can secure this city from the ground."

Shepard's lip curled, and he nodded contrarily to the concealed expression. "Alright..." He said and reached for Garrus to help support his weight, "Come on, Garrus. We've got to get you treated."

"Yeah- I've- Uh, been better," The Turian wheezed through his helmet.

Shepard took a look at the exposed lower part of Garrus's arm and winced yet again. It had been a long time sinze he'd had to consider how to handle the bodies of fallen comrades, and as it were, they were stranded in a ground war amidst vast blocky geometric towers and structures that gave their enemy just as much cover. Now he'd have two vital fighters out to arm injuries, and the good news was sure to just keep on rolling.

EDS (Earth Dating system) – November 12, 2185
Location: Agri-lot, 20km North of Laconia (formerly Prospect), Capital of Praetoria.
Stellar Orbit: Epsilon Eridani
3 Days since returning to Praetoria

Their return to Praetoria had come with mixed feelings in everyone who'd spoken candidly to John.

Elysium had cost them a lot. More of their forces in the black had fallen than they had all quite been prepared for, and no one was happy about it.

Especially for the fact that it was almost entirely Alliance naval personnel who had died. The additional sting was the loss of hulls that could never be used again.

But at the same time, they had defeated the Reapers in a critical fight, and the losses were almost entirely within the Alliance affiliated members of Praetoria and their hardware. That distinction had created a sense of silent and happy guilt in the Spartan.

John was ecstatic, despite his stony face when talking with his Captains and Lieutenants, about the fact that they were uniformly comfortable being candid with both him and Miranda. If anything, he'd noted that the soldiers looked at Miranda with an element more reverence than they did even him.

He was sure that it had everything to do with how her lower lip would sometimes tremble in silent pride when the Rangers' presented themselves loyally to them. Or how she mixed that perfect balance of professionalism and genuine deep interest and care in communicating anything with the Rangers.

But despite their open discussions that he and Miranda had access to, the Rangers' still weren't entirely forthcoming about some of their closely held thoughts. He knew that he couldn't press the matter either.

To be a good leader, he couldn't attempt to police all aspects of how they responded. He could only serve as the best example that he could be and discipline out anything overtly wrong with their direction.

There had been more than one occasion in the last two days where he and Miranda had worn pensive and subtly tense expressions when they overheard Rangers or Praetorian engineers discussing the losses at Elysium as "But they were Alliance, so it could have been worse."

John wasn't pleased with the fact that he agreed, either.

Even with upgraded armour and extra guns mounted on their hull, the Alliance ships weren't a fraction of a UNSC inspired craft. Even with their zeal and passion being pumped into being good soldiers, the Alliance marines were not trained to be as regimented or instinctive as he'd trained his Rangers to be and as they now trained each other to be.

Somehow, against all the odds, through luck, happenstance, and his persistent effort, John had managed to take the divided peoples of Omega and forge them into a planetary family of sorts. He hadn't heard a single case of xenophobia since the Second and Third Battalion had finished their initial training.

And even the inclusion of the Andromeda Initiate crews had gone without a hitch.

The Initiative were a perfect fit for Praetoria. All of them were specialists who had been prepared to sleep for centuries to try something new; they couldn't have been scripted to be more perfect for inclusion into Praetoria.

They had amalgamated themselves into the social and hierarchical mix of Praetoria seamlessly. Hundreds even signed up to train as Rangers rather than focus on their industrial specialities, which were constantly proving to be a boon for his people.

But the Alliance marines and crews were not like those from the Initiative. They had a distinct cultural divide.

Despite Admirals' Hackett and Xu having a front foot forward approach to the galaxy, in many ways, they represented the old style of galactic thinking that the combined people of Praetoria were making efforts to leave behind.

And the two Admirals were proud leaders, respected, trusted, and likely even loved by their people. That relationship only served to help keep them separate, and the long history of group identities that seemed to follow all peoples' emerged.

John put his mind from thinking about the cultural and social divide. It had once more come to his attention at hearing the muffled conversation of four nearby workers in Praetorian training attire.

The entire Praetorian structure revolved around military organisation at this point. John was the Commander in Chief of the whole planet, with Miranda as the Deputy Commander of Praetoria. Between them, they nebulously ruled their entire faction.

In Ares Base, they both ruled more directly. Through joint decisions and orders, their influence then became felt in the more civilian and industry orientated settlement that had sprung up one-hundred kilometres south, which had been labelled Prospect until two days ago.

A day after they had returned and started coming up to speed with the rapid developments taking place on and around the planet, John and Miranda had agreed with Alec Ryder that the settlement needed a greater level of autonomy.

Through consultation with their growing military council, which consisted of Alec Ryder, Jien Garson, Tutela Proelium, Miles Musa and Admiral's Hackett and Xu, Miranda had footed the idea of officially giving Garson the rank of Colonel and stepping in as the official governor of Prospect.

Unsurprisingly, Miranda's motion passed. And Garson had only been too happy to take the position. The short-haired brunette was already uniquely qualified for the role, with the Andromeda Initiative being her child.

Garson had paid homage to the Spartan on her first day in the role and renamed the settlement Laconia. The historical context wasn't lost on John.

So his and Miranda's presence in the new agri-zones in the plains ten kilometres from the settlement itself was a social and political expression.

An expression directly invited by the former Initiative founder. What John didn't know was if the request for the two leaders to come and inspect their work was to show she respected them or to display to the locals who didn't have as much directly to do with Ares Base that the leaders they were to look up to so much were present and did care.

The slushy snow crunched under Johns' boots, and he pivoted away from the vast wall of element zero energy creating a vacuum barrier for kilometres ahead. Miranda paused a beat after him and the rest of their troupe likewise a moment after her.

His breath came out in puffs of mist in the chilly breeze that swept down out of the mountains and met moisture rising from the Uzansy sea.

Laconia nudged into the skyline ten kilometres away, just off the edge of the sea formed in an ancient impact crater. The settlement gradually evolving into a city was run decidedly differently to Ares Base.

Around Ares Base, there were now constant lines of aerial and orbital traffic performing either training manoeuvres or transporting hardware or alloys in or out of the six running fabrication plants. Laconia's skies were relatively clear.

There were fewer Kodiaks in the air than John had thought there would be and far more craft which looked like stripped-down versions of the Herons.

His brow dropped as he analysed one such craft slowly lowering a large ring into the city from the air. One of the dozen ten-story high buildings made with simple geometry hid the ring from sight, and the snow next to John crunched.

Garson had stepped back from down the road they were traversing. She looked comfortable in the puffer jacket that she wore, and the condensation that she emitted didn't seem to bother her at all.

"The first section," Garson explained. She smiled broadly and then looked expectantly between John and Miranda. When she received no vocal response, she licked her lips and continued, "I know that you disagreed with the resource allocation, Chief..."

Miranda huffed a silent laugh, and Garson's now slightly cautious smile shifted into a look of uncertainty. The local governor's eyes flicked back and forward between the two now-iconic figures.

John cleared his throat, "It's not that, Garson-"

"-It's the location," Miranda interrupted, stepping closer to stand on John's right. She tucked her gloved hands under her armpits and rounded her shoulders.

She was likely growing less and less accustomed to living life outside of her nano-weave suit and found the regular clothing offensive to her senses.

Another Heron variant edged down through the clouds, barely hiding Epsilon Eridani overhead. Unlike the first, this one had a series of chords tethered around the top of its hull.

Praetoria's first megastructure, like all of their craft thus far, was to be a marriage between the technology of the UNSC and that of this reality.

The first ring that had just been dropped to the city was to serve as the baseplate for the orbital elevator and was made of an alloy of mixed tungsten, platinum and element zero.

The chords that were to connect around it would be charged with both magnetic energy and the exotic effects of negatively charged element zero and create a low mass conduit from the planet's surface to a docking structure being built high overhead at the edge of space.

The result would be a version of an orbital elevator tenfold more energy efficient and structurally sound than any from the hands of a UNSC engineer.

"-But, you're right," John continued, and the distant Heron settled low and out of sight over the icy and melting plains. "Ares Base is growing too quickly to facilitate the building of an orbital elevator. We're better off it going here and all of our future factories being here too."

Garson's cautious smile turned back to confidence. She nodded, "Guess you'll like what the next plan is."

John arched a brow and looked down at the much smaller and far more earnest person. Nervousness threatened to make her confidence wane, but her eyes sparkled, "We're planning a mag-lev line up the valley."

"Hmm," Miranda hummed. She tensed her body to flush more blood around and keep her warmer than the simple grey t-shirt that she wore could easily do itself. "No one's built one of them for a hundred years, right?"

"Right," Garson agreed with a nod. "That tech fell out of fashion-"

"Because of element zero?" John interrupted for clarity.

"That's right," Miranda nodded before Garson could. She tensed again and shuffled her boots in the snow. The sun threatened to emerge from the clouds, and Miranda looked up briefly as she spoke again. "Everyone stopped building infrastructure in the old way and became all about aerial and orbital transport."

"Ridiculous, right?" Garson laughed. "Imagine getting rid of a hyper-efficient transport network just because element zero made moving mass through the air easier? Did you know that even with the aerial movement being easier, because of all the air transport that started up, there was more congestion in industrial logistics than there ever was on mag-lev and train systems?"

John shrugged. It made no difference to him at this point, and so long as Garson could show him why it would be a good idea on Praetoria, he would sign off on it. He was sure that Cathryn Hales would likewise have an opinion to share on the matter too, and he felt oddly comforted in trusting her opinion on such issues as well.

That thought in mind, John declined his chin with his brow set, "Make sure you discuss these plans with Doctor Hales, Colonel."

"Of course," Garson conceded readily.

John pivoted back to the blue field of energy that he'd been briefly distracted from. The rammed road, which stretched from what was becoming downtown Laconia was turned with dirty, slushy snow from where warthog variants had recently run through. The skidding tracks and the firmer ones' told John that the vehicles had been dragging trailers of some kind.

He started forward again. Miranda and Garson both turned and moved with him, and the team of Initiative scientists with a stray Prothean who had held their procession started ahead again too.

"Hn," John sounded to himself as they moved ahead.

He hadn't come down the valley since that time he'd come to try the foods and drinks suggested, and the area was becoming rapidly different. For Garson to have an entire team who were likewise all halting expectantly with his pauses told him that they were proud of what was within the energy barrier, and they were excited for him to see it.

Within another minute, the barrier came within arms reach. John could only slightly make out details through it, and he looked left and right to spot the nearest pylons relaying the field between long stretches.

"This is an exponentially powered up mass effect barrier," Garson explained. "There are actually two barriers; they keep vacuum between them to help with insulation, see?" She stepped forward and passed through the blue field. Only her general shape was visible through it.

John and Miranda both followed through and blinked in surprise at the sudden brightness around them.

Each of them lifted a levelled palm to their brows to shield their eyes before scanning the perfect late spring-like environment around them. Overhead looked like a glowing sky, but slight ripples in it told the Spartan that it was some kind of energised sail fitted to the vast agricultural ecology.

Long stretches of blue energy dotted with more pylons divided the internal space into a square area at least half a kilometre in either direction. Going by his observation from the external, John noted that there had to be dozens more individually maintained areas.

"We got the idea from the agricultural structures near Ares Base," Garson said. She beamed with pride and placed her fists on her hips, facing the rows of green grain laden plants. "Your original ones used energised panels on the walls and ceilings to do the same thing, but we're able to do a lot more with the energy fields and solar sails."

"I can see that," Miranda said, notably amazed. She stalked across the rammed earth dirt road that encapsulated the field and stopped on its edge. She reached forward with her right hand and brushed the grains between her fingers before collecting a small handful and twisting them off. "Genetically modified?" She asked, drawing the still green grains up to her nose to smell.

"Yes," Garson answered. She spared John a quick look to gauge his level of interest before stepping toward Miranda.

The rest of the troupe, including the oddly present Prothean, who John figured was the first of his kind to be taking up the offer of integrating into Praetoria's broader structure, all moved away from them and headed left and right down the road toward other barriers.

"We've got another fifty like this one just for grains, and we can control the environment and atmosphere in each." Garson continued, and her smile turned more excitable. "We've even modified several versions of our stock and have started growing Levo-based crops-"

"-Ha!" Miranda laughed and smirked reservedly. "The Turians' won't have to eat just printed food anymore."

"What's wrong with the printed food?" John queried back. He pursed and skewed his lips and narrowed his eyes in thought. He couldn't recall ever having a problem with food from a Nutri-printer. If anything, the Nutri-printers they'd all been consuming printed derivatives from on Praetoria were some of the most enjoyable foods that he'd had in his life.

Miranda's smirk turned teasing, "It doesn't have the same..." Her smirk waned, and John watched her expression with careful interest.

Like all things that originated from the raven-haired woman with her sharp pale-blue eyes, more and more, what she said, how she said it, and how she expressed, in general, stood out to him. Her lower lip pinched underneath her teeth, and her eyes arched while looking up in thought. She was seeking the correct word, and her expression was not serious; she was having fun with the topic, John realised.

"Not good enough for you, Lawson?" He asked in mock seriousness.

Her eyes flicked back down to land on him, and her teeth kept her lip captured. Her smile turned more teasing again before she released her lip, "If I'm to be honest, no." Her eyes arched again in silent humour, and John allowed a tiny smirk to give away that he was joking, even though he was sure she already knew that. "I like the best quality I can get my hands on."

Garson looked between the two with her brow clenched and raised. A look of bemusement stayed her words, and John allowed the woman to come to her own conclusion while he and Miranda played out their evolving game.

Miranda placed her hands on her hips and shifted her weight so that her weight was displaced over her right hip ever so slightly, making her legs flex and her left glute became accentuated.

The stance didn't serve her with the same level of allure that it would have if she were wearing her nano-weave suit instead of a training uniform of black cargo pants, boots, and a grey shirt.

Despite the outfit not serving her to quite the same effect, John found a flicker of desire awaken in his chest, but he kept his smirk tight and controlled.

Miranda arched her left brow ever so slightly, "I do have you, don't I?"

John briefly wondered how much jest was mixed in with the question. Was it a dare? To see how far he'd go? A test to work out who would step furthest the first? A challenge, even, to prompt him forward.

He let his tiny smirk grow into a small but relaxed smile with slightly narrowed eyes, "I'm not perfect-"

"-But you are the best," Miranda retorted, the tease still on her lips and in her eyes. "I'm not perfect," She parroted a breath later.

"-Please!" Garson suddenly exclaimed in hardly contained exasperation. "Hah!" She laughed, crossed her arms over her chest and lifted her right palm to briefly smother her face, where she laughed into her hand again several more times. "This is NOT something I saw coming!"

John suppressed a smirk that was something between genuine humour and embarrassment at what could have been unprofessional. He knew that he had to cross that line eventually. He would always be a Spartan by blood and tradition, but now he was so much more, and his position was so vastly different that stepping over lines once drawn in the sand was necessary.

Moments like these were his own personal Rubicon crossing.

"So, the Commander in Chief of Praetoria and the Deputy Commander of Praetoria... If you break up, who gets the planet? Hah!" Garson snorted a belt of laughter and brought her palm up to her face to laugh into again.

"Hahaha," Miranda laughed as well and dipped her head toward John in a gesture to relax.

He did, marginally, and let the embarrassment slide from his expression at Miranda's prompting. It seemed he was misjudging Garson's response as criticism.

"I suppose you're not far from the top, now. But I do have a sister here; maybe she'll take the job." Miranda tested back.

Garson laughed again, rubbed a silent tear from her eye, and then looked back and forward between John and Miranda.

Like Miranda, Jian Garson had initially been awed by John's physical presence, but now she seemed to see him as hardly being any different to anyone else. An appraising brow looked back and forward betwixt the founding pair before she smirked and nodded. "Alright..." Garson said. "So, do you want to see the rest of them or head back that'a way?"

Miranda glanced back at the point in the blue field they'd stepped through, and she instinctively wrapped her arms around her midsection to stave off the imagined cold, which was in stark contrast to the artificial summer.

"Hmmph," John scoffed a laugh. "Take us on the tour, Colonel."

X

The tour had lasted the better part of the day. As it turned out, there were now well over a hundred five-hundred metre square growing lots. Everything from grains to legumes was already well on the way to maturity and harvest.

The miracle of combining artificially controlled ecosystems with genetic alteration to the plants drastically accelerated their growth cycles.

The choice to settle on the shores of the Usanzy sea had turned out to be a well-made decision. Where the river met the sea, algae blooms thrived and served as a good source of biomatter to grow their own contained units in vast vats in quantities far more significant than what was already being grown upstream at Ares Base.

Harvesting efforts were already well underway around the rocky stretches of the shoreline, where towering forests of kelp grew. The leathery plant was ideal for conversion into fertiliser and soil improver for the crops.

And hand in hand with the kelp harvesting, a budding fishing industry for sea creatures small and large was already commencing, according to Garson.

John and Miranda had tread back into the cold air, impressed with what they had seen for the day. Garson had done a damned good job, apparently with a decent amount of technical aide added quietly from Cathryn Hales.

Miranda wrapped her arms back around her body, and her skin formed goosebumps. "Brrrr," She thrummed her lips, expressing the cold audibly. She tensed up and grimaced in embarrassment at the alternate effects the chill in the air had on her body.

She'd never been embarrassed about her nipples responding to the air in public; it was simply a reality. And in all previous such events, she'd found the benefit of it drawing a males attention in a direction that she could control more easily.

Now, however, she felt a wave of trepidation. 'I'm not bloody embarrassed...' She resolved the initial feeling and bit her lip again, glancing up to her left at John.

He was walking slower than what had once been his usual pace. Miranda suddenly realised that this had become his standard speed several weeks earlier, around about the time when she'd kissed him. Her cheeks tinged pink with a blush at the thought that he'd made a notable effort to change one of his long-established habits to benefit her in some way.

'Like a damned school-girl, Miri...' She relented and looked back at her boots as she planted one in front of the other. Why had she agreed that walking all the way back to Laconia would be a good idea? 'Right, because we didn't train today...' She rolled her eyes to herself but kept walking and allowed her blush to remain as she thought again of how she felt.

She didn't know how to react.

There had been a passing moment in what felt like a lifetime ago on the Normandy. She had been the XO, and she was briefly tempted to express interest in Shepard.

She would have dropped suggestions, maybe a little innuendo too. She had done that with John as well, but she had trodden that ground much more subtly, and in hindsight, much more thoughtfully.

That would have been followed by moments of physical touch focused toward expressing that a physical relationship was in the cards. But again, that had come out in an entirely different way with John.

The first such touch had been out of compassion, thanks, and care. It was only following that that she realised that it also opened more doors.

It wasn't just that John worked in an entirely different way to every man that Miranda had ever met. It was that when she was with him, she worked in another way to how she ever had until now.

'You're fucking anxious, Miranda Lawson,' She thought suddenly to herself. Her eyes widened with the thought.

They continued walking steadily in silence, and Miranda tensed up harder. The light around them was getting dimmer and dimmer, and they still had another five kilometres to go.

'I want to touch, to speak, to express... Damn, hah,' She glanced sideways again, and this time he was looking at her.

Miranda blushed at being caught looking, and she fought the urge to look away.

She blinked up at him and felt isolated in that moment. Moving carefully, she unwrapped herself, neared him slightly with her next stride, snaked her left hand around the small of his back, and luxuriated in the feeling of his rippling oblique on the far side of his body where her hand ended up resting.

Heat flushed through her, and her lower lip slipped beneath her teeth again while looking up at him. Dammit, she wanted to do so much! So much desire washed through her that she didn't even know exactly what it was that she wanted to do.

Just his slight smile and that look of curios acceptance and subdued desire in his own eyes made her want to tear down her own barriers and just do whatever the hell she wanted.

Her heart jumped into her chest in a mixture of anxiety and desire yet again. John lifted his right arm over her shoulder and, in so doing, made her feel smaller than she'd ever felt while also making her feel more protected and vulnerable all at once.

His arm wrapped around her figure, and his hand came to rest on the top of her right oblique. She shivered at the contact, and her heart beat faster, and trying to contain her usual smoothness of character, rather than rapidly grasping, she softly reached up with her own right hand to grasp at his.

His body beneath his shirt, and the hand she was now making contact with, were both hot to the touch. It served to both delight her and remind her how cold she was. He seemed to recognise the same thing instantly, and he faltered.

Miranda faltered too, and they came to a stop. Indecision crossed his brow for a long moment, and then he released her, shrugged her arm from around him, and stepped forward to take a knee in the wet snow. "I'll carry you."

Miranda froze for just a heartbeat. She knew John was learning as fast as he could to engage in more normal interactions, but he was highly purposeful in that learning. That made her analyse everything he did and said in a way that she didn't for anyone else.

John knew that she could put up with the cold, and Miranda rolled her lips in with a contained smile at the realisation. She laughed lightly, stepped quickly behind him, and gently propelled herself forward in a jump.

Her hands wrapped around the firm lines of the upper fibers of his pectorals, and her legs gripped at his flanks. With a surge of motion, he straightened, and Miranda's legs almost slipped, "Haha! Watch it!" She laughed in an entirely uncharacteristically excited fashion.

She didn't' care about how she'd just allowed an entirely undiluted emotion out. No, her mind was fixed on the sudden imagination of something else as she realised just how large the body between her legs was. Excitement and trepidation answered her thought, and it only grew as John's hands encircled her hamstrings to keep her stable.

His hands only added to the feeling and also made her realise how slim and unmuscled she was before becoming John's partner- 'John's partner...' All other ideas stopped at the thought, and then she bit her lip and hummed a sound of contentment to herself.

Miranda pressed her torso forward so that her entire body was compressed against the muscular back. His heat transferred to her, and her excitement grew earnestly.

'Who cares... This is meant to be the civilian settlement, and dammit, I want this! I deserve this!'

"Hang on," John laughed lightly in his reply.

The vibration of his speech through his body made Miranda grip the top of his shirt with her hands tightly. Oh, she was hanging on. She wouldn't let go unless she had to.

"I always will, John," She breathed heavily into his ear.

His muscles trembled beneath her, and for a split second, she was afraid that he might express something about not knowing what to do. She wouldn't have held that against him, but dammit, did she want him to just follow the genetic prerogative for once!

Her wishes were answered by the deep timbre of his voice, "You make me Human, Miranda. I'll always hold on to you."

'Oh, god! Why say that right now...' Miranda lamented to herself. Hunger bubbled deep in her stomach. Emotional connection mixed with physical attraction swirled fiercely deep in her gut. Now she knew exactly what she wanted. The specific desire had beaten all of the others, swirling around.

She wanted to have him in a private room.
She wanted to strip him.
She wanted to feel his skin against hers. To feel him inside of her. To cement the most unexpected bond of her life intensely.
She didn't want to romance John. She didn't want to romance her Spartan. She wanted him more deeply and primally than that. Romance was a waste of time for this; she needed him fervently.
'What the fuck, Miranda?' She was not in the correct circumstances to pull this thread, but the reality was lost of her while she let the thoughts come out in ways that she never thought she'd feel. She tried to unwrap exactly where her mind was going as the wall of desire spilled out inside of her.

Deeper instincts spoke. Instincts worked so intrinsically into her DNA that no amount of her fathers' meddling could have had anything to do with it.
'What the fuck. What the fuck. What the fuck.' 'Now you want to have a fucking kid?' she chanted as her hormones, heart, and mind combined the feelings into a specific nexus.
She didn't, really. Or at least, she knew she couldn't.

But the hormonal drive mixed with the urge from her heart gave her a craving for such an eventuality. She suppressed the flicker of rage at her inability for that to keep her mind exactly where it was most comforted.

She laughed aloud. A strange claggy laugh spoke of how much disbelief she felt for thinking what she was thinking.

John didn't slow or tense, he kept his grip on her, and Miranda suddenly realised the point of her body that felt flushed with heat was pressed against his back and that he would most certainly be able to feel it.

The choice between embarrassment and acceptance was easy, and she cast aside all innuendo and subtlety, "You've got no damn idea how much I want you."

There was no attempt to sound seductive. It was simply the truth, and Miranda knew that the simple truth worked best with John. More often than not, it worked best with her too.

His heartbeat fastened under Miranda's touch. "I want you too- I... I don-"

"-No," Miranda pressed her cheek into the just back from the side of his face. "Nuh-ah." She sounded to chastise him out of saying what he'd been about to. "I'll show you." Her hands rubbed circles around the top of his chest, and she laughed lightly, "You'll just have to be gentle with me. Have you seen yourself?"

He breathed a heavy laugh through his nose. "I'm probably a little bit different than most men you've met."

"Try a lot bit," She joked back. "Mmm, dammit, it'll have to wait, though."

The lights of Laconia grew ahead of them, and Miranda only now noticed that John had picked up his pace and the length of his strides. She didn't know if it was that she was no longer earthbound and thus he no longer needed to slow, or if it was because she was cold and he wanted her to reach a structure faster.

In either case, she didn't care, and cooking food carried on the air with the sounds of the odd power tool working and distant conversations.

Before long, they were passing into the light of Laconia. Lights were suspended from the geometrical charcoal-colored ten-story tall structures. The buildings that had anything to do with manufacturing and production were closer to the sea and slightly separated.

If Miranda recalled correctly, which she almost always did, the orbital elevator was being constructed somewhere in that vicinity. And further around the curving bay to the left of that was where they had planned to begin the long-term structures that would end up being the actual city center of Laconia.

As it was, though, the simple accommodation structures provided all of the inhabitants with everything that they needed to work toward a brighter future on Praetoria.

As they passed the first group of chatting workers, Miranda moaned sadly. It wouldn't be right for her to be seen like this... It might not be wrong for John to be seen like this, it would humanise him more to the people, but her situation was somewhat more exposed.

She tensed herself against his back one last time, and then with a gentle massage of his shoulders, she spoke, "I should probably get down now."

"Right," He agreed and stooped.

Miranda slid from his back and tugged her shirt neat before forcibly pushing her hands under her beltline to tuck it in around her waist. Her nipples were still erect, and now it was for a mix of reasons. But the more private of those reasons wouldn't be on display, so the fact didn't bother her.

She patted her cargo pants down and breathed a quiet sigh of relief that no other proof of her state of mind and body had shown through. "Come on," She said, stepping around the large man and thoughtlessly grabbing at his hand in the process.

Miranda suddenly remembered her actual hunger, and she looked back over her shoulder to mention it to the Spartan, only then realising the Freudian slip that had connected their hands. She thought on the contact for a moment, and considering that John had accepted the handhold, she allowed it, "Actually, I could do with some chow."

The air was delicious with the scent of cooking food, and the lights around them grew brighter as they continued deeper into the small grid-built city. "Sure, I can eat," John agreed.

Miranda slowed so that they were walking more side by side, and so it felt less like she was trying to pull him. Her body still ached for something more than just the handhold, but other needs suddenly seemed more urgent.

It had only been fourteen hours since she'd woken and assessed herself in the mirror of her bathroom. She was not pleased with the incredibly tiny amount of fat that she was able to pinch on her lower abdominals.

The previous deployment and its build-up had distracted her from eating enough while training harder and eventually not eating much while deployed.

Thanks to her father's hard work on her genes, Miranda had almost no difficulty at all in achieving a level of muscularity and athleticism that would take a normal person at least one or two years of concerted effort. The side effect of the result was that she burned through her fat stores far more quickly than she ever expected that she could.

Before she evolved into the Athenian woman that she now was, she'd always tried to maintain a particular percentage body fat to stave off looking either too masculine or intimidating and the mild hormonal assistance the thin layer of fat added.

Now, though, when she pinched her lower stomach, it felt more like just getting skin, and it was only the miracle of gene therapy that had prevented her from losing any breast tissue or growing sallow around her cheeks.

What served as the inner-city opened up to the duo. It was an intersection of the same kinds of buildings that the city was made up of. Unlike the other intersections, this one had a ceiling of the same solar sail technology that lit the agri-lots was suspended from corner to corner for a hundred meters in each direction down the intersection.

Stalls were set up along most of the exposed external walls, and smoke and steam wafted from them paired with the sound of food sizzling. Under the warm daylight-like light of the sails throughout the intersection were dozens of four-person tables with chairs around them.

Almost all of them were occupied by eating, laughing, and vicarious Praetorians'.

Miranda felt the urge to conceal her relationship with John and let go of his hand, and a tremble in his grip made her think he felt the same. Oddly, it emboldened her, and she gripped it tighter.

'People will find out eventually...' She thought and tugged on him while moving under the sail and into the intersection. She veered left toward the closest stall, and her mouth filled with saliva as wafts of cooking meat filled her nostrils.

Something about the layout of the space sang a song of Omega to Miranda. However, the quality added the music of the Andromeda Initiative, with the added flavour of UNSC style neatness and order.

Miranda couldn't put her finger on precisely what element belonged to what culture, but she knew that it blended uniquely into the picture that was quickly forming into the style of her planet.

The excitement for the future of that sat in the back of her mind as she and John moved down the sidewalk. They stayed a meter away from each stall as she browsed her dietary options.

It was selfish to not ask John what he might like. But, Miranda was also confident that he wouldn't really care. It was all likely going to be new for him. The eyes and silence that followed them bothered her less and less, and word of their presence and handhold obviously spread throughout the intersection rapidly.

By the time that they had crossed the intersection to the other side of the street and paused out the front of a stall, the population of the intersection had quietened somewhat, but not entirely. The pair ignored the focus on their presence, and Miranda decided that the smell coming from this particular stall was good enough.

Like all the stalls, this one was a broken-down white shipping container with a serving window cut along its two-meter frontage. A shining steel bench topped the cut to make it safe and allow a serving counter, and another bench with cooking surfaces and devices lined the back of it.

A pale purple Asari turned away from wiping down a pan to face them with a pleasant smile to greet them. She blanched a shade lighter, and her eyes widened as she put Miranda's likeness to the stored memory, and she started to stiffen to throw up a salute, "General!"

"-No, no," Miranda laughed uncomfortably. She made a calming gesture with her palms open and facing down and smiled apologetically, "We're just patrons this evening."

If John hadn't already caught the Asari's attention, then Miranda saying we took the Asari's attention there. The purple alien woman seemed frozen between attempting to be calm and casual and throwing her salute all the way up. She was most certainly a former Omega'tarian.

Her presence here, rather than at Ares Base, marked her out as someone who excelled in botany or some other field that couldn't directly be used on the base. However, Laconia's unique form of service was still serving, and the Asari clearly respected that.

"What are you cooking?"

"Ah, General..."

"Actually..." Miranda looked around. A small island of silence had surrounded them again, but she ignored it to look at other customers being serviced at different stalls.

Praetoria didn't have a currency yet. Everyone worked, everyone shared, they all had a common goal. But that extended only so far as doing assigned tasks to completion and then eating food provided by the Nutri-printers, or in increasing cases, as harvested directly out of the wild.

"You don't get paid for this, correct?"

The Asari faltered for a moment. She gulped and nodded, "No, Sir... We- Ah- Sort of trade for extra services..."

Miranda felt John slightly shift behind her, but she swung a placating palm around behind her at hip height to keep him from bringing unnecessary discipline to the situation.

"What do you trade?"

The Asari gulped again, "Work shifts... If someone can do the same job, then they pay for food by agreeing to do a percentage of my shift-"

"-Hmmph," Miranda huffed a laugh and smirked. Nodding, she said, "That's creative... And if they can't do the same job?"

The Asari gulped, and Miranda waved her placating palm slightly to John to assure he didn't treat this as a teachable moment. If anything, Miranda saw it as a teachable moment for their budding civilisation rather than how they might want to manage the military edge of their lifestyle.

It only made the recent application by the Asari mother from Omega to create a musical center in Laconia all the more apparent as a sign of their world growing more dynamically than she and John had initially imagined.

"Ahh- there's a trade on I. for shifts... All of us," She nodded across the table strewn street at the other stalls across the way. "We declare our jobs, and the customers can trade their shifts with one another to then trade on to us... It, ah, well it works- Goddess! I'm so sorry! This is so, so inappropriate! I can't believe I didn't-"

Miranda swung both palms to face the Asari and tried to calm her. She smiled reassuringly. "It's not a perfect system," She laughed and gave John a discerning look over her shoulder. "We'll have to establish a currency. We will allow this for now, though," She pivoted slightly, the odd confrontation having entirely removed the previous state of mind as she looked at John. "Won't we?" She tested.

John returned the discerning look for a beat before snorting a wry laugh and nodding, "You still have to do at least half your shifts, though."

Miranda smirked and nodded. It was more generous than she expected. And Asari let out a long sigh of relief, "Thank the goddess! Ah, sorry, no... I mean, thank you, Sir's!"

Miranda smiled a bemused smile and nodded, "unfortunately, you can't trade for our work-"

"Sir! No, I'll make you whatever you want!"

"Whatever you were just cooking smelled good. We'll each have a serve of that, please." Miranda answered.

"Right away!" The Asari practically flung herself away from the counter and started whipping items out of knee-high fridges and onto her preparation station.

Miranda stepped back a little and turned to look at John with a bemused look on her face. Now the slightly awkward silence in the intersection made a lot more sense. The thought only made her smile more teasing, and she cleared her throat before yelling, "None of you will let a bloody word of us allowing this slip to future residents!"

Chairs scraped, and almost all of the figures seated throughout the intersection stood hurriedly. The air of them told Miranda that they mainly were Initiative origins, but they seemed to respect herself and John just as though they were from Omega, just in a different kind of way.

"Yes- Sir- Of Course- I wouldn't- Proud to serve- Never ever!"

Dozens of voices overlapped, and Miranda palmed the air as though to bat down the disarray. "We'll be bringing in a currency system soon," She shouted, planning it out in her head on the fly. "Until such time," She spoke a little louder to make sure as many vendors as possible could hear her. Those who couldn't hear her would surely receive it as second-hand knowledge. "You will cease trading your shifts. Instead, you keep a log of what and how much you provide to be renumerated later. I want all vendors to contact Colonel Garson, and she will give permission based on merit for who can become a full-time vendor."

Miranda looked at John again, and he had an appraising and somewhat humoured look in his eyes. She knew that he was working his mind through the practicalities of a society that he'd never experienced first-hand.

On the other hand, Miranda wanted to make sure she dealt with this with affirmative action rather than disciplinary for the possibility of future unexpected consequences of being too harsh on those just seeking opportunity.

When the crowd seemed to realise she was done, many of them made to yell back affirmatives, but John cleared his throat, "Back to your business, Praetorians!"

Almost all of them sat in a hurry. Humans, Asari, Salarians, Batarians, Turians, Krogan, Praetorians all. The atmosphere of these Praetorians' was most definitely much more civilian in nature than those who were training to become soldiers. Their air was like that of teenagers who were worried that they'd upset their parents, and Miranda withheld her amusement at the fact.

Miranda turned back to the counter just as the Asari was. Two clear bioplastic bowls filled with murky green leather-like strings studded with likewise murky green balls about the size of her thumb. She fought the urge to turn her nose up at the displayed food and retrieved them with a cautious smile.

The Asari chuckled nervously and pushed two forks across the counter, "It's actually a local kelp!" She explained with a nervous chuckle. "The nodules are pockets of natural starch, a lot like a root vegetable. I carve out some of the starch, convert it into sugar, mixed that with some of the local herbs near the shore, and boil the kelp in it. The kelp is edible too!"

John nodded as he stepped forward and retrieved his, "I've eaten it before."

His face almost looked eager as he took in the scent, and Miranda was somewhat bewildered by it.

"Only ever had it boiled in water," He completed.

The Asari smiled widely and revealed pearly canines, "There's some steamed fish underneath too... I don't know if it has a name yet. Ah, Sir, do you know what it's called?"

John took his offered fork and parted the overlapping strings of seaweed boiled in sugar blend. Pink-white cooked meat revealed itself under the coating of syrup that was somewhat dyed the same murky green as the seaweed. "No idea," He answered, then nodded in thanks. "Sorry."

Miranda tried to comfort herself with the fact that the food smelled good, so hopefully tasted far better than it looked. She took her fork too and focused on making her smile neutral, and her eyes amused, "Better be good."

The Asari laughed nervously, and the pair moved toward the closest table.

Miranda had a sneaking suspicion that the occupants had explicitly moved to make it clear for them. To the credit of the other occupants of the intersection, they were all making notable efforts to return to the social joviality that had been present before the couple encroached on the affair with their obvious level of authority.

They sat, and she watched John eat first to guard herself against anything untoward in the dish. He wrapped one of the strings of lace-like kelp around his fork and chuckled lowly as he brought it to his mouth, "You'll like it."

With a long sigh, Miranda copied the Spartan and lifted a string of kelp to her lips. She smiled thinly and lifted her brows. She was sure that he would eat almost anything... But she wasn't sure that he would say that she would like almost anything.

The scent of sweetness was almost intoxicating and also carried a smokey element. Miranda's lips parted, and she sucked the string in like a noodle. The texture was immediately off-putting in its odd sliminess, but the flavour of meat-like mahogany made the texture acceptable.

One of the nodules brushed her teeth, and she bit into it while pulling the kelp from her mouth, dragging the potato-like nodule wrapped in its strange slick skin into her mouth. She posed a thoughtful wince while chewing slowly and then nodded. "It's actually pretty good," She accepted aloud. Then she breathed out a laugh and shook her head, "Looks like absolute arse, though."

"You need it. Eat," John observed with his own smirk. He chewed his way through the kelp that he'd denuded of the nodules and nodded, "And yes, it's good. And yes, you were right."

She smiled knowingly and said, "Of course I was right." Then put aside her dislike of the image of the kelp to start chowing down on it the way her Spartan was.

It was actually quite good, and she imagined that she could feel each cell in her body singing and dancing a happy dance at the energy-rich nutrition.

That was likely why the scent of it had stood out to her, and the protein in the fish at the bottom was likely going to be an afterthought to the sorely needed glycogen.

The evening passed with a lot less desire and touch than Miranda had found herself hoping for previously as her metabolism responded after the meal by inducing a heavy drowsiness. A Kodiak took them back to Ares Base through the darkness, and in the dimly lit cabin, Miranda luxuriated in resting her head on Johns firm bicep.

They spoke sparingly throughout the meal and flight through comfortable thought toward each answer. Miranda distantly, as always, found herself enjoying the weight of each sentence shared between them. He was so much more purposeful in his words than anyone else had ever been to her, even when he was being somewhat more jovial and joking.

Both to push their limits and to seek to grasp at least some of the desire quelled by blood-sugar induced drowsiness, Miranda preceded John into his single bedroom quarters above the command module. He was a large man, and as such, so was his bed.

There would be room enough for both of them, Miranda determined. She had, after all, been the one to visually size him up and allot a certain amount of the fabricators' foam to ensure his bed was big enough for him versus all of the other Rangers foam mattresses.

"Come on," Miranda groused after they stepped out of the cold night air and into his quarters. She kicked off her boots unceremoniously by the door and then padded across to his bed. The light in the simple room had responded to their presence and had gone into total white luminosity.

"Blue light," She ordered the system. Her hands met the surface of the sheets, and she pressed forward before twisting onto her back and looking back at John.

The light changed as she turned, and the bear of a man near the door straightened from removing his own boots. Miranda didn't know his usual nighttime routine, whether he showered and changed before going to bed, or if he stayed up at the small one-person desk beneath the window across from the foot of the bed.

She assumed it was likely the latter, much like herself. His small desk had a holo-screen projector that stretched across the surface, and the steel tiles of the floor around the desk had scrapes strewn through a particularly polished area. Miranda deduced that he sat there at night far more than he rested on his bed.

His features stood out in the blue light, making him seem tranquil with his subtly thoughtful look.

Miranda rolled her lips together and then pressed a thin smile. She winced around her eyes, then allowed a dramatic yawn to spread her jaws. "Unfooor-" She halted mid-yawn, "-tunately" She completed. "I'm proposing," She paused again with an arched left brow and a coy smile, "we just sleep."

His eyes swept over her. Starting at her eyes, then to her lips for slightly longer than usual, then down her figure. She was lying partially on her side with her abdominals stretched out and her hands behind her head. Her heartbeat sped up at his inspection, but she remained externally indifferent.

"Come on, Spartan," She chided and took a hand from behind her head to pat the starched sheets.

He moved carefully but purposefully across the room. Miranda could see him workshopping in his mind how he was meant to respond to her, but she knew that he was doing that because he wanted to respond to her in a way that she would like.

She shuffled back as he neared the bed and then sat on the edge to swing his weight about. The semi-firm foam dipped slightly around him as he settled next to her, but before he could pose any awkwardness, Miranda moved into his figure.

She rolled onto her left side, lifted her right leg slightly over the top of his leg, wrapped her right arm over his body, and rested her cheek on the edge of his pectoral. The muscle briefly flexed on the contact but softened to an almost cushion-like state.

"I'm- Ah, I'm working out how-"

"-Shh," Miranda shushed him and then exposed her teeth in a smile at the feeling of his muscle shivering from a neurological response. "It's easy; if you feel like you should do it, then you do." She explained against his chest with her eyes closed and her hand grasping his body firmly.

A moment passed, and then John's right arm engulfed her with his hand settling around her oblique. His left palm ended up over the top of her right one with his thumb moving in a curious circle over her skin. She smiled at his explorative touch.

Desire was still present, but this was nice, and she feared that if she pushed that need that boiled deep in the pit of her stomach, she might miss something of importance. Slowing down to savour the small steps was something that Miranda was thinking more and more of being valuable in the long run, if there ever turned out to be a long run.

She pouted tightly at the thought and made to slightly shake her head against John's chest.

She felt his weight shift somewhat. His chest vibrated with his voice, "What's wrong?" Am-"

"-Oh, no..." She arched her neck and looked up into his face. "Stop doing that," She smirked. "Seriously. You're the most..." Her eyes narrowed, and her voice faltered as she sought the right word. "The most damn mosty person I've ever met. And you damn well know what I want by now. If I don't like something you've done, you know I'll just tell it to you straight."

"Right," He agreed with his lips downturned slightly.

It was a pensive expression, Miranda thought. He was analysing the gap between what emotion he felt and how it ended up expressing. Which, most of the time, the emotion didn't end up expressing at all. Or at least, it came out so subtly that she had to pay particular attention to it.

"I was just thinking about the long term," She explained, and then away from his face to allow her neck a more comforting position. "Then I realised that I was an idiot for wondering if there would be a long term-"

"-We'll win."

"Hmph-Hmph," Miranda breathed a laugh across the cotton topped pectoral that supported her cheek. "I love that confidence." She took in a deep breath, cleared her throat, and then spoke in a deeper voice intended to approximate his, "We'll never stop fighting. Our choice is victory at any cost!" She chuckled lightly at her conclusion, but she felt him tense somewhat.

Once more, she looked up at his face. This time, his brow was clenched, and his lips were crinkled. John sensed, or felt, her looking at him, and he looked down. There was something else in his eyes that she hadn't seen quite so openly until now. It was a softness intermingled with his typical assuredness.

"Not any cost," He answered carefully and then shook his head while keeping their eyes locked. "Not you- Not this..."

A smile came unbidden to her lips and revealed her teeth, and then she drew her bottom lip under her teeth to try to suppress the giddy sensation that wanted to bubble out. The look in John's eyes could only be protectiveness or something approaching love.

What had she really been to him to elicit such an emotional evolution? She had found him out of suspicion. She had followed him at first out of greed for his technology -and if she were being entirely honest with herself, also a nagging curiosity about every layer of his mystery.

He was a mirror of her in many ways, drawing her vulnerabilities out. She was there for him for that, and everything came with it. They both had a future together that was far less uncertain than it would be alone, and together, they both evolved into what she hoped was a more perfect version of themselves. Her obsession with perfection, even it being a modified sense, was likely never going to end.

"Fuck," She breathed around her bitten lip. "You're turning me into a smitten damned schoolgirl, John."

His worry turned to humour, and his chest rose and fell with a scoff, "I wouldn't know; I've never met one. What would you say you're turning me into?"

She pressed her lips into a tight smirk, "A smitten school-boy?"

"Huh," John grunted throatily in something between a laugh and a question.

Miranda snickered and lifted her leg further across him. The moisture that was transferring from their clothes and into the starched sheets wasn't bothering either of them. She knew that he or she would clean it on the following day without a complaint.

"I'm turning you into whatever the hell you want to think of yourself as, John," She explained, still with cheek in her voice. She gripped him slightly tighter for a moment, "All that matters is that your mine. That's all I need you to be." She snickered another quiet laugh, then spoke more loudly, "Lights off."

The internal system responded, and the pair were plunged into near-darkness with the dimmed floodlights from the parade ground outside sending refracted light through to shade the couple in frosty light to match the frosty conditions beyond the glass.

"Actually, I'm turning you into my personal hero, John." The words left her lips before she realised they had crossed through her mental filter. But she'd already made herself so vulnerable, and turning back now would not serve her in the slightest.

She shifted her weight so that more of her torso pressed against the relaxed and firm lines of his clothed musculature, and her mind began to drift away. His scent calmed her like no scent ought to, the intermingled smell of sweat and disinfectant soap gave them something in common, but his unique scent remained precisely that.

His chest rumbled as he said something, but the words were lost on her, and she gripped him more tightly in the moments before sleep took her.

EDS (Earth Dating system) – November 13, 2185
Location: Thessia – Orbital construction rings
Stellar Orbit: Parnitha

Like all things the Asari built, the rings they used to construct ships in orbit were beautiful. They were sleek and sculptural, with undulating curves all along their surfaces.

Each ring had twelve knuckles around its circumference that allowed them to warp into unique ovoid shapes, and they were magnetically tethered to one another. Long sections of gleaming silver hull took up the space between the rings like an arrow shooting through a hoop.

Where the construction rings usually built ships, they were now joined in the concerted effort of making one of Praetoria's adapted designs of a Mag-Forge structure.

Lenka was amused and equally impressed about how Cathryn Hales had gone to efforts to ensure the schematics she was sharing looked unique and alien from the utilitarian and ultimately more efficient cube-shaped versions that they were using around Praetoria.

The one modified to be shared with the Asari was cylindrical. Thanks to that design difference, it would be vastly less efficient in converting masses of raw resources into functional structures. Despite the inefficiency in comparison to its original, it was still orders of magnitude more efficient than any Council-built dock up until now.

Lenka's heart pounded with excitement and apprehension, and she pouted her lips to expel a thin stream of air. Everything that she did now was symbolism, and nothing was ever a matter of simply going and organising it.

More and more of her Asari saw her as the legitimate Athame, and now each and everything that she did was to enhance that view. She wore a bodysuit made of a mildly opaque material so that the bioluminescence shone through to assist the ethereal image of her godhood.

She was so far over being so exposed with the near-nudity. No Asari that she knew of had looked at her with any sexual intent, as far as she knew.

The nearest of the twelve rings suddenly popped apart at one knuckle, and then all of the others followed at intervals of three seconds. Lenka wanted to grin with excitement or a sense of achievement.

But, she was Athame. Athame would be utterly confident in this. Athame would be sure of the outcome. Athame would turn and congratulate her people.

Lenka did as she imagined Athame would, and she spun lithely on her heel to face back into the occupied construction bridge. The two dozen Asari all looked up from their stations with wide eyes. As always, they were hopeful for congratulations from her.

"You've done it," She breathed. She wanted to make them always feel like her heart went into everything she said. They needed her assurance and support as an all caring god if they were to serve the cause as devoutly as required.

Not only had Thessia's best and brightest engineers emerged from the masses, but so had the warriors, the scientists, and everyone who could be of assistance.

So not only were all of the Asari in the Thessian system in space working obsessively, diligently, and at a rate far more fervent than the Republic had ever managed to coax from them, but the soldiers running drills and training more of themselves on the ground were working zealously.

Lenka, as Athame, didn't want to direct any of them too didactically. Through her studies, she thought the power of religion could be wielded best through implication and suggestion, and some things she would simply allow to run their course based on the emotional reaction to her messaging.

Through no choice of hers, the warriors -the huntresses, Lenka corrected herself, who were now leading her forces, decided to anoint themselves as the hunter zealots. Nor that the Asari with naval experience working in space were coming under the banner now called themselves Athames black fleet without her prompting.

However, the ships that would soon emerge from the completed mag-forge were to be anything but black. They were designed to look much like all of the previous ships of the line.

Aquatic, sleek, and mysterious looking. But their hulls were to be ten times as thick with less internal space and coated with a new energy reflective plating to add to the effectiveness of what would be upgraded barriers from more powerful fusion cores.

The final improvement was a focussed laser array in the heart of each cruiser with lenses that would project the hyper-focused photons to a projector at the front of the craft, which could articulate to provide a potential shot on an enemy even if they weren't directly facing them.

Lenka was assured that they could cut right through a Reapers' barriers and hull inside of eight-thousand kilometres. She was assured that the Reapers barriers wouldn't even respond to the laser weapon, for that matter.

Of course, from her history, she was intimately familiar with handheld weapons and body armour that could be concealed, but she knew nothing of the scale that she now commanded.

She assumed a look of pride and swept her gaze around the bridge. The construction ship, unlike Asari warships, had its bridge located on the upper curves of its prow and allowed natural light through unfiltered. All of the Asari present had either been in control of different drones nearby or closely observed the construction process in its final stages.

But now, they all looked quietly excited and eager for Lenka's feedback.

"You are all a wonder and a marvel. It won't be long now until we burn through the stars to fulfil our destiny." Her annunciation came out firm, slow, and full of certainty. The Asari crew all stood straighter and lifted their chins.

She no longer felt guilt or concern for her falsehood as a god. The irony of her mother-species being so devoutly scientific whilst also being the most spiritual people in the galaxy wasn't lost on Lenka, and she justified her deception with the easy notion that the result would hopefully be their survival.

And if they ever learned the truth... She hoped that the Asari people could be rational enough at such a point to see that the deception was for their own greater good.

"Do we have word from our Zealots?" She asked. Her voice brimmed with firm passion, and her eyes arched to match it.

Their warships might not be built yet, but there were at least a hundred-thousand Asari who were ready to charge into battle and support their allies. Without ships of their own to strike at the Reapers, they were in the unfortunate position of being unable to do anything about the outer Asari planets currently under Reaper invasion. Which left only Tuchanka and several Human worlds as places to effectively land support.

"We are ahead of schedule, great mother!" The closest Asari exclaimed.

Lenka withheld a scoff at the thought of differentiating herself from the Asari as not-Asari. She could be no more separate than she currently was. She was now Human, Asari, and apparently god.

Sensing that Athame wanted more, the woman continued blithely. "One hundred thousand are ready to fight. We just need to know where, and they will fight for our cause."

Lenka nodded sagely. Visions of imagined battles flashed through her mind, and she wondered how many of the hundred-thousand would live. They all, surely, only had the most basic of training. But they were required, and the longer that Thessia sat back and out of the fight, the juicier the target that they were.

"Anhur, in the Eagle Nebular," She said, nodding as though it were the obvious choice. "And, Tuchanka, the Krogan need our help, and our brethren already fight there."

"Our forces will be ready soon, Great Mother!"

Lenka smiled pleasantly as though it were a good thing. The process of weighing up how to respond as a god while also doing the right strategic and moral thing clouded her thoughts with confusion that she couldn't allow to be seen.

The ones who landed on Tuchanka, she knew, would no doubt be fighting side-by-side with Alliance, Praetorians, and Krogan. She was sure that they would at least stand up well with that support.

But Anhur currently had no extra-planetary forces fighting on it, as far as she knew. It was an Alliance colony of two hundred million citizens and likely only had a local garrison. If she didn't send the zealots in, the planet was almost definitely lost.

If she did send them in, she would likely lose all of the Asari brave and deluded enough to fight in that theatre. But the reward might be saving at least some of that population, and in doing so, prevent the Reapers from using them as fuel for their war.

Lenka turned back to the glass just in time to see all of the construction rings once more joining up and assembling at the far end of the vast kilometre long mag-forge, ready to receive whatever parts it printed out to assemble. A small tug came into view and promptly disgorged its hold into the brilliant white energy field only partially visible from her view at the closest end of the structure.

The most logistically and militaristically trained Asari may have been taken from Thessia. However, the planet was still rich with populations with thousands of years of experience over thousands of fields. Lenka was not surprised that so much progress and expertise had come forward so quickly.

She sighed, long and low, with the release of a long breath. 'You are Athame. You now command the lives of billions. They will die for you, and they will die for the galaxy,' She released another low breath at the mantra she played.

Lenka was aware that she was growing more comfortable with its facts, and that in itself served to unsettle her. She breathed in silently through her nose and watched yet another tug spew crushed rock into the energy field.

'You are Athame. You are their goddess. So long as at least two live for every one that dies, then each death is worth it.'

What she was, was horrific. Her heart trembled in her chest as the thought contested the mantra she mentally chanted to keep herself certain on her critical path. Whether she thought of the Asari as truly her people or not was far from the point.

They were people who now looked up to and trusted her, and she was knowingly sending them to die. But her life as a spy had taught her the value and ability to keep everything that tore at her heart and will within and invisible. She was Athame; she was above such things.

EDS (Earth Dating system) – November 13, 2185
Location: Phobos – Mars Orbit
Stellar Orbit: Sol

Space was quiet.

James hated it. He craved the rush of wind in his ears. The sound of action in the distance. The sensation of boots on the ground. This space bullshit had none of that, and deep down, it terrified him.

He felt tiny and powerless. Moreso now than ever before in his life.

Mars was nearby. It filled up his entire view to the left of his direction. When he was on a ship, that would have reassured him.

Now though, it was a terror to behold because he was in nothing more than his armour and a light thruster frame that gave him low-powered movement potential. If somehow he got sent careening toward Mars, he would fall through its lifeless atmosphere and die a horrible and pathetic death.

If anything else happened, and he somehow overshot Phobos with his marines, then he would likewise probably die a horribly long, and drawn-out death. "Win-win, Vega," He scoffed to reassure himself and make light of the fear deep in his chest. "Gotta get some get some get some!" He chanted next.

"Get some marines!" Another voice added.

James gritted his teeth in a wince as he realised he was on the battalion-wide comms and he'd just broadcast. Guffaws of laughter came next, and then more and more repeated the chant.

James's wince faded, and he smiled ruefully. The chant of his people gave him heart and focused him on their target.

Their mission was simple, in theory.

The former Alliance and now Typhon shipbuilding docks were built like a scaffold around the oddly shaped moon of Mars. It was their mission to land, kill whatever the fuck defended it, and hijack that son of a bitch back toward Sol-Link where that weirdo with the white eyes could help them secure the system.

The potato-shaped rock grew out of the darkness of space slowly. Flying through the void with the thruster packs was entirely unlike anything James had ever imagined. They lacked the speed and power of their usual ships, but the result was hopefully something that any sensors that saw them a swarm of low-mass meteorites.

He felt like he was moving slowly, but Phobos now seemed to be growing rapidly. His right thumb trembled over the deceleration control that would be used to come in safely, hopefully, but a voice stayed him.

"Hold on, Marines."

That was the CO, Captain Conners. He was a good man. At least, James hoped so. He didn't know a fucking thing about the guy, not really. But he was telling himself the good news to ease his anxiousness about what they were doing.

"Check your heads up. There's a proximity alert to hit your decel."

James gritted his teeth again. Of fucking course! He hated being in space like this. It was fucking with his head. He blinked at the rapidly flashing numbers counting down. "Fuuuuuck!" He groaned, then licked his lips.

The numbers were practically impossible to read; they flashed by so quickly. The white text suddenly turned red, and Jame's focus switched back to his field of view.

Phobos was no longer a scarily growing grey potato with pointy parts coming off it. Now it was huge, and it took up almost his entire field of view. The pointed parts had now resolved into gigantic scaffold structures that jutted out into space with a myriad of crane and arm structures over them, where ships were being built.

"FUUUCK THIS!" James crowed while thumbing the deceleration control.

There was no rush of wind at his sudden slow down to make him feel more secure. But he did slow enough to focus on a particular two-meter wide gangway amidst a series of cranes, and with a slight twist of his wrist, he headed for it.

He had no idea what flight path the rest of his comrades were on; he just hoped they all hit the deck and didn- "WHAT THE FUCK!" He roared as a tracer round flashed by him.

"TAKING FIRE!"

"EVASIVE! EVASIVE!"

More shouts joined the chorus, and James caught sight of flashes coming from areas on the gangway below. He scowled and snatched his Mattock off where it was affixed to his chest and pointed it down but then froze. "FUUUUUCK!"

If he shot, then the recoil that the weapon created as stored and expelled energy would compete with his inertia, and he might never land. "Fuck- fuck- fuck- fuck!"

Tracer rounds swept by him. Shouts continued to sound over the comms. Marines clearly had the same thought as James, and none fired back. This was fubar. It was only going to get worse; James just knew it.

This was meant to be a smash and grab. How the fuck did whoever was down there see them coming? Were they even Human?

The seconds ticked by like an eternity, but then with a rush of movement, James's boots hit the grated gangway, and the low gravity of Phobos took his weight and his low mag-boots activated. With his right hand, he wielded his Mattock, and with his left, he unclipped the two catches of the thruster from his chest and then swung it about to hurl at the closest enemy a dozen meters away.

Suddenly, the silence of space didn't seem so bad. If he'd crashed like that in an atmosphere, then he would have been heard. And obviously, the grating was strong enough to absorb the vibration.

The enemy figure spun at the last moment and ducked under the simple blocky thruster module and straightened with his weapon coming to bear on James.

The Marine acted fast and fired three quick shots. The first two made the enemy mans' barrier blink and die, and the third shot punched a hole clean through the light grey and yellow chest plate.

The Marine prepared to spin to find another target, but then his barrier flickered from impacts, and he realised the enemy he'd just shot had instantly recovered and levelled his stripped down and incredibly simplified M6 Avenger and was firing on full auto.

James clenched his teeth, ducked, and rolled right. He came up firing with the bad guy's bullets trailing his momentum, and he put three more rounds on target. Like the first, the three shots punched through the light armour and sent a spray of red mist flying into the vacuum.

Still, the figure seemed unwilling to drop, and he merely stumbled.

"All forces, enemy soldiers are hopped up on something." He advised without thinking while shouldering his rifle for a more precise shot. He waited for a heartbeat to see what the enemy would do, and when the enemy finally seemed to get his awareness back and turn to shoot at James again, James shot.

The round tore straight through the opaque glass faceplate and blew a sizeable hole out the back of the head, and the body finally tumbled back like a stone on water in the low gravity.

"Kneecaps and heads, boys," James growled.

He spun and went down on a knee to take in his surroundings. He was facing down toward a tall white structure that looked to be the local nexus of gangways. Dozens of the enemy were in positions along the gangways that the Marine could see, and other Marines were just now landing.

Some hit with more grace than he had, while others hit moving too fast.

Cries of pain and exclamations of injuries flooded the comms. James ignored it and sighted carefully on the nearest enemy twenty meters away and looking up into space. His rifle that lacked the typical cowling was spewing rounds up and away.

James fired twice, the barriers popped and fell, and then the third shot hit the enemy's head. Unlike the first, this round hit at such an angle to deflect, but the momentum had flung to helmet off the enemy soldier's head.

James once more prepared to move on but then stayed himself. "What the fuck..." he breathed pessimistically.

The enemy wasn't gasping in an effort to stay alive. His breath wasn't being sucked out of his lungs, and he wasn't dying. His face looked unnaturally pale, and even from this distance, James could see something around his eyes that looked wrong.

The Marine sneered and adjusted his aim slightly and then fired four shots, aiming for where the heart should be.

The enemy stumbled, seemed to want to fight for a moment, and then dropped forward.

"These fucking guys are modified somehow!" He cried into the radio channel. "I just knocked ones helmet off. He could breathe in vacuum."

"Say again, Lieutenant Vega?"

The Marine glanced space-ward and caught light flashing off the surfaces of marines still inbound. He had no idea how many had been killed before even landing and how many had already landed and were being hard pressed by the unexpected enemy.

He figured he must have been one of the first, given that the Captain was answering him directly.

"Enemy soldiers are modified, Sir. The first one took four rounds clean to the chest, no problem. Second one lost his helmet and had no damn fucking problem breathing in vac, Sir." He reported, still looking around.

A dozen shapes suddenly grew out of the blackness and then impacted the gangway nearby hard enough to send the vibrations to James. Tracers shot in their direction from the large building nearby, and James swung toward the incoming fire, "ENEMY AT TWELVE O'CLOCK. Toward main building!"

He fired before focusing on a single one. Perhaps they would take cover and give the just landed Marines the respite they needed to get their awareness.

"Designate enemy forces as Breathers," The Captain grunted. "Pair up with whoever's closest to you. One pops their barriers, the other take out their lights."

James didn't wait to quite fulfill the orders, and he jostled ahead down the gangway on his own. He moved in a low crouch. The long pipes and conduits that flanked the gangway provided him with a thin strip of concealment as he rushed ahead.

Several rounds glanced off his barriers while dozens more flashed off his surroundings while he rushed forward while attempting to stay low. He kept his eyes shifting between looking down to ensure his feet landed steadily in the low gravity and looking up to try to get a peek at the enemy.

There were at least fifty points of light, and James suddenly realised that it was from lights projected from their helmets and not any kind of muzzle flash.

He skidded to a stop and dropped his weight low for a moment while he got his legs under him. His quadriceps contracted and he surged upright to his full height, already orientated on one of the points of light. His breath came out in quickly controlled pants to keep his adrenaline in check. He fired five rounds as quickly as his finger could move, and then dropped and began crawling.

"Good hit, Vega!"

"Huh," The Latino hulk of a man grunted at the congratulations over the comm. "Not much coming from you, Sulu."

"Haha, get a load of this son of a bitch, Captain!" Private Sulu laughed over the comms.

James grimaced in preparation. And sure enough, the Captain's stony voice glowered over the radio a heartbeat later, "Shut it with the BS, mission crit chatter only!"

James snorted a single laugh to himself as a reward for being correct and kept close to the meter wide conduit that concealed him. The pings of rounds bouncing off metal weren't all around him. James figured that all of the marines who had landed were likely taking up firing positions and keeping their mysteriously modified enemy focused.

"Sulu, you got eyes on me?" James asked and shuffled to look back down the gangway. The closest marines were a group of four all huddled close to one another about thirty meters back.

A line of bodies strewn along the gangway and around the crane arms around them, and only a handful of them looked like the enemy soldiers.

"Yeah, we're on your six; what do you need?"

"You got eyes on the bad guys?" James nodded to himself because his closest friend in the deployment was nearby. He hardened himself against the very high possibility of losing that friend here on what was meant to be a cake run.

"Yeah, closest one to you is between two of the yellow robotic arms just right of the end of the gangway, about your one O'clock."

Every fibre in James's body wanted him to quickly look up and confirm, but he knew that would give a chance away, and instead, he orientated, checked his thermal clip, and readied to repeat his popup to fire routine from before. With the same steady breaths competing with the ultra-silent fans in his helmet, he stood, found the target, and fired five shots.

James caught the barrier flickering behind the bright helmet light for a millisecond before the fifth round smashed the light. He dropped back down before he could see if that meant the enemy was dead, and he shuffled to look back at the squad following him down the gangway between pausing to pop up like he had with rifles blazing.

"EVERYONE, GET TO THE DAMN BUILDING!"

"What- Captain?" James demanded in confusion. He looked around and spied at least thirty marines rising from cover and beginning to charge along the gangway they were on toward the building.

They were firing wildly, and one, two, and three at a time were getting blasted off their feet.

"We've got bad intel!"

"No shit..." James grunted to himself. Then he popped up again and fired. He worked mechanically and didn't attempt to kill his targets. Two shots hit six targets in three heartbeats, and all of them stumbled from losing their barriers.

"Two Typhon gunships coming around Phobos right now!" The Captain added.

James desperately wanted to search for the Captain. He had thought that the CO was with his squad, but that was evidently not the case. Instead, he started into a quick stride with his rifle held tight. His left palm left the grip to prepare a thermal clip change over and fluidly swapped it with the spent one just after making another three Breathers dropped back.

"Squad, pick it up, or I'll have to look after all of your girls'." James didn't know if making light of their situation was for his benefit or his squad, but he kept the same pace forward in either case.

When he finally reached the end of the gangway where it joined in a platform made of the same materials, he finally spared a glance back with the cover of two twenty metre high robotic arms providing safety.

Only two of the marines had made it along the gangway, and they had broken into a full loping sprint. James grimaced took two quick steps out of cover onto the platform.

He fired on the closest Breather that had been taking cover.

Much like the second one that James had engaged, his round hit at such an angle that it twisted the helmet far enough for it to spring free. This time, he was only around ten long strides away, and with the face revealed, James felt his stomach clench.

The person, the man... His eyes were entirely black except for a pinpoint of blue-white light where the pupils should have been. A spiderweb of blue lines stretched around his eyes and cheeks, and his skin was sallow and sunken around his cheeks.

James's shock at the image was only surpassed by his instinct to kill it, and another quick trigger pull sent a round smashing the brains out of the modified mans' head. Brain matter, an unseemly mix of usual pink and decidedly unusual blue, splashed out onto the grating.

Two more of the Breathers drew back from their points of shelter as they noticed James, and he dropped to a knee to both avoid the first shots fired at him and to target their upper bodies more tightly. Ten more trigger pulls nearly emptied the charge of his clip, and they succeeded in taking the lives of the two Breathers.

He spun as he felt the grating vibrate and rolled just in time to avoid an overhead strike from another of the Typhon monstrosities. Before he could truly take stock of his situation, another Marine tackled the figure. The pair tumbled away from James toward a standard Alliance-designed entrance portal.

They came to a thrashing halt, and the Marine came out on top. The blue armoured man-made to strike the struggling Typhon soldier across the face, but his wrist was caught mid-strike. James felt his blood boil and his heart thrum with a sudden increase in fear and hatred.

The Breather twisted his arm and snapped the marines forearm armour and underlying wrist. The Marine bellowed a thoughtless sound of pain into the comms, and James finally slapped home a new clip. That damned son of a bitch had just caused that injury way too easily- It wasn't right. It couldn't be... But they shouldn't be able to walk around in vacuum without their helmets either.

Without any grace or ceremony, James planted his boot into the side of his comrade and kicked him clear of the enemy. He aimed the rifle into the Breather's opaque glass faceplate and pulled the trigger in the same motion.

Before more enemies could home in on them and cut short their tiny victory, James stooped, grabbed the injured Marine by his shoulder, and dragged him toward the door with green illumination around its locking mechanism.

"Captain, heading inside!" Jame announced irritably.

Just as James deposited the marine by the door to palm the control, he felt the steel grating vibrate more heavily than before. He spun around just as a dark arrow-shaped craft floated overhead above the gangways bracketed by their orange robotic arms and cranes.

The craft spewed rounds down from multiple hidden turrets. The deck grating vibration turned into heavy shuddering as a stream of metal swept over where he had been minutes prior on its way to another moving target seemingly nearby.

The body of the other fallen marine who James hadn't seen die was caught by the passing metal stream and was reduced to a shower of flesh and detritus. "This is fubar," James grunted heavily while gripping the injured man and backing through the door into the brightly lit airlock cubicle within.

It closed as soon as James and the injured marine were clear of it, and James hauled the man to his feet, "That you, Sulu?"

"-Y-yeah..." The hurt man wheezed.

James snarled. He'd commented about them dying to help lighten his and their mood, but he hated himself for it in hindsight. His snarl grew more notable within his helmet. No, he hated Typhon and the fucking Cerberus bastards behind them.

"Captain-" James rasped while palming the door he'd just entered through to lock it. "-You alive out there?"

"-They're all dead!" Sulu hissed. He cradled his severely broken wrist protectively and shook his head emphatically. "I saw 'em! We lost at least a hundred coming in- And- A lot sped up to avoid being shot... They got plastered to the deck, LT."

"Fuck." James hissed sharply. He flexed his hands in and out of fists around the grip of his rifle and finally lifted his left hand away to activate his omni-gel applicator. He swept it over Sulu's arm, and the synthetic miracle juice seeped through the breaks in the inner suit layer and worked into the exposed flesh.

Sulu hissed, sighed, and relaxed back against the wall in relief. James eyed him for a long moment and kept his scowl to himself.

Just twenty minutes ago, he'd been at the tip of an eight-hundred man strong spear. Now, apparently, there was just him and an injured man left. He had no clue how many of the Typhon Breathers were left, and two gunships were sweeping the external surface.

"Might as well have hit Mars..." James scowled through his words.

Sulu scoffed mirthlessly, but James frowned. "Might- As- Well- Hit- Mars. . ." He sounded out, then bobbed his head once. "We're going to get into the eezo core and force this son of a bitch into Mars. Fuck'em. We came here to win!"

But before he could feel confident about his plan, Sulu awkwardly pulled a Canifex off his hip with his left hand and held it in a ready position while his right hand hung limply over his hip. "I've got your six, LT. Just don't wait on me."

James eyed up his friend and comrade for a moment. Sulu was young, but he was a marine to the bone. He wasn't going to let himself be a burden, and he would do all that he could to support the mission.

"Stay on my back."

James didn't spare the helmeted man a second look, and he lifted his rifle into a ready position before waving his omni-tool at the inner door.

The mechanism spun, and the door split down the middle. Instincts drove the marine, and he pulled the trigger into the two figures waiting for the door to open. They were both dressed as their companions outside, minus the helmets.

Surprise clouded their faces for the instant between the two parties seeing one another and James's rounds tracing a path of bullet holes up their bodies. He shifted his posture and pulled his arm back, and sprayed the contents of one's skull into the wall, and then the passage fell silent with the bodies crumpling to the floor.

They navigated the passages for the next ten minutes and surprisingly found no more foes. Eventually, they followed markers and guides to an elevator, and they rode it, hugging the wall down into the hollowed-out core of the asteroid.

When the doors opened a small city's worth of people was revealed to the two invaders. If any local workers cared to see them, they didn't show it. They only looked at them in curiosity as James assumed his most cautious posture while looking like he was meant to be there.

"They don't know we're are war with Typhon, do they, LT?" Sulu queried lowly, leaning forward unnecessarily despite their comms being their method of discussion.

"Don't look like it," James agreed tensely. "Keep your eyes up; shoot anything that threatens us."

Nothing and no one did threaten them, however, and they navigated the broad range of local engineers who all clearly were just going about fulfilling their work tasks.

If James had heard the idea that he would want to kill all of the innocent bystanders just an hour earlier, then he'd say that was crazy. As it was, however, he was only thinking about the close to thousand dead marines on the ground above who had come here to prevent the bad guys from using the shipbuilding yards for even greater evils.

These people would just be the collateral damage. It wasn't like he would survive to live with the guilt anyway.

Eventually, they found their way into the element zero core. The point within the potato-shaped moon provided all of the internal space with gravity and allowed the moon to maintain a perfectly stable orbit. It could also generate fields strong enough to entirely displace it from orbit.

They crossed through the cargo-styled doors into the large spherical room. The centre was occupied by a giant steel-coated sphere that vibrated and exuded blue waves of energy. The core held enough eezo to easily power at least ten dreadnoughts, and James was once again surprised by the total lack of security.

Teams of five engineers crowded several stations around the room, and three turned toward the marine duo from a three-metre long console directly ahead of them.

"Marines?" One asked. He was a balding man in his seventies and looked confused at their state. "What's going on? Is there a threat?"

James halted and briefly considered gunning down everyone in the room and locking the doors to reduce liabilities. He held the urge and nodded, "There's a coup attempt taking place. We need to take Phobos into a higher orbit. I've been ordered to see how it's done."

He assumed a blank and thoughtful stare for a moment, and then he nodded slowly, "Okay..." He glanced at Sulu and looked suddenly more suspicious, "What happened to him?"

"There was a battle on the surface," James said and tilted his head at the ceiling. Honesty was fair enough, especially given this mans' seeming ignorance. "The rest of our squad didn't make it, so we'd appreciate it if you just showed us what we came here for."

Surprise and concern crossed the older man's face, and he took a slight step back. The concern turned to confusion, then to doubt, then to fear, and then he nodded, "Of course-"

"-Are there emergency rations in this room?" James asked before the man could go on.

The man faltered again with the same range of reactions, and then he nodded slowly. "We're equipped to survive bombardment. Every section in the station has emergency supplies."

By now, all of the engineers within earshot had ceased their tasks to listen in with looks of bewilderment. James took advantage of it and jabbed a finger at one, "You, lock all of the doors into this compartment. Until I know we're safely de-orbited, no one is coming or going-" He paused and aimed his helmet at the man in charge, "-Is that clear."

"Yes- Yes, of course," he expressed quickly with his latent fear returning to his eyes. He made a waving motion at the engineer that James had indicated, and the engineer hurried to the primary cargo doors.

James and Sulu strode purposefully to the main control station and stopped half a step behind the station's chief engineer. He pointed at an embedded old fashion screen that showed the orbital path of Phobos around Mars, as well as the bursts of mass effect fields being generated at what could have seemingly been random intervals to James.

"Set us on a course for Jupiter," He ordered flatly.

"Wha!" The Engineer suddenly blanched and looked at James in shock. "You just said de-orbit!"

James shrugged. He intentionally jostled his rifle to make his status as an armed soldier clear. Whether the engineer noticed that made no difference to the marine with his next response. "We- How- Why?"

"My mission is simple," James grunted. "Keep this station from falling into enemy hands. We have a rally point at Jupiter, so we're either taking this there, or we're crashing it into Mars."

"Wha!" The man repeated his previous sound in shock. He shook his head fervently. "No! You can't! Not either! No way!"

James shrugged his rifle in a mildly more directional fashion, "You either help me get this rock to Jupiter, or I execute all of your for treason and figure out how to smash it into Mars."

The older man's jaw hung loose for a moment before he licked his lips several times. He turned to the central controls and gestured at the two co-workers there. "You heard him... Let's plot how many bursts will be needed to de-orbit and head for Jupiter."

"And, have you seen any other soldiers here?" James added.

The older man turned sharply, seemingly gaining some fire now that he was coming to terms with the situation he'd clearly not expected. "None! We just work on the projects sent down from the control hub above. I-"

"Send the order to sever all communications. Until we're welcoming Admiral Lindholm here as the new CO, there's to be NO communication with the surface."

"You can't-"

James took a small but menacing step forward. "I can do whatever the fuck I want. Otherwise, you're a fucking traitor. Get me?"

The man's jaw slackened yet again, and he gulped visibly before turning to his co-workers. He repeated James's orders, and a voice blared through the station PA system, "PHOBOS STATION IS NOW UNDER MILITARY QUARANTINE. ALL CREW ARE TO STAY IN THEIR SECTIONS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE AND ADHERE TO QUARANTINE PROTOCOL."

The marine nodded. The battle to get from space to the doors to this place had been unexpectedly brutal and swift in that brutality. He'd departed the airlock expecting to meet his death at every corner. But it looked like the Typhon Breathers he'd killed in the entrance were the only two who were left back inside, and Typhon was obviously keeping the workers here ignorant of broader events to keep them more productive.

"Provide me with a list of all the research you've been given, as well. The Admiral will want a summery."

The man gulped and nodded rapidly.

James couldn't give a shit how scared the guy was.

He had been so prepared to walk into this room to order his own death. But instead, it looked like suddenly he would be able to complete his original mission all on his own. The likelihood seemed impossible, but if this was a gift horse called luck, then he wasn't about to look it in the mouth.

EDS (Earth Dating system) – November 22, 2185
Location: Praetorian Private Labs (former central labs structure built around the Kowloon freighter), Ares Valley
Stellar Orbit: Epsilon Eridani

The inner structure of Cathryn Hales' labs had changed somewhat after the recent completion of the central labs complex a few kilometres upstream. But it remained much the same, the central data-crystal computer stack now off to the side in the room.

The benches and stations that flanked the area's walls were likewise untouched, and all were still equipped with an array of scientific apparatus.

What was significantly different was the reclined medical chair in the middle of the room. A chair that Miranda now occupied.

As paired additions, new scanners, sensors, and mechanical operating arms were suspended from the ceiling above the chair.

"Just to reiterate, this could be extremely risky."

"Yes. Yes." Miranda bit back sharply. "I know," She pursed her lips and breathed heavily through her nose. This wasn't like her youth, nor her conception. She wasn't being moulded and manipulated to become someone else's version of perfect.

No, it wasn't like that. Not at all. No way.

Now, she would become her own version of perfect. She would take a stride to be that much more like the Spartan who she lusted and idealised after. But the mechanism of that change stirred a fear deep inside. Why hadn't she told John that she had discussed this with Cathryn and was now providing herself as the testbed?

According to the doctor, there was a chance this could kill her. But what else was she to do?

She could only change herself so much without digging down to genetics. And that urge kept tickling the deepest point in her heart. It had for years. Now, she finally had a man who made that urge relevant.

If Cathryn Hales' research into synthetic DNA could make her transform into a stronger version of herself, then surely there was room in that to fix her inability to conceive.

She rolled her lips together and clenched her knuckles. Her eyelids flickered with the anxiety in her chest, and she parted her lips to expel the air.

"Never seen you anxious about anything, Lawson," Cathryn murmured.

She drew away from Miranda's side and swung to a bench with a bank of equipment atop it. Fluid and practised hands took the syringe loaded with Miranda's blood, and she inserted it into a white box with a receiver and then scooted her wheeled padded stool down the bench to a screen.

Miranda licked her lips again in nervousness. She had seen some of the best doctors in the galaxy about her single notable biological issue, and they had all told her the same thing. But Cathryn Hales was different.

Cathryn Hales was an unbridled genius, and she was also a friend in the strange hierarchical relationship they shared. But Miranda's inability to conceive was her most resounding and greatest shame. She and John had already hinted at the prospect of a child in the distant future, even if that had just been as something between a joke and a flirt.

"Doctor-" She halted to lick her lips.

After her pause, she heard Cathryn shift on her stool to look at her. Miranda refused to meet her gaze and instead looked toward her abdomen under the grey t-shirt taught around her figure.

Miranda could imagine the confusion on Cathryn's face, but she couldn't bring herself to look up. She licked her lips again and removed both her hands from the arms of the medical chair. She spread them and placed them above her naval. "I'm..."

"Oh!" Cathryn surged from her stool and closed the meter between them with galeforce. She gripped Miranda's forearm and squeezed, "You're pregnant!"

Miranda's sense of shame reached rock bottom at the assumption, and she finally snapped her angry eyes onto Cathryn's excited ones. It wasn't Cathryn's fault, and if she could just damn well say it. She hated that the anger had come out like that.

She winced, clenched her eyes shut, and expelled a long breath while Cathryn released her grip with confusion on her face.

"I can't conceive!" She rushed the words out and pressed atop where her womb was as though she could somehow make it undo whatever was wrong. "I've been to a dozen doctors, endocrinologists, fertility specialists, everything! I. Can't. Conceive." She spelt it out harshly, and her upper lip turned into a snarling grimace. "My fucking father! He had to control everything! I'm sure it was him. Something in my DNA that prevents it... The great Henry Lawson would only have a grandchild if he allowed it to be so!"

Cathryn moved back in and gripped Miranda's forearm again. She squeezed lightly and cooled her usual hotheadedness, "Well, it's a good thing you're here, isn't it?"

"Aha," Miranda belted a tired laugh and shook her head, and then she blushed lightly and met the doctor's hazel eyes. "I'm- Ah- I'm sure you understand why I bring this up."

"Please," Cathryn admonished. "To me, it's been a foregone conclusion for a while now that you and John would take that step one day. I suppose you wanted to bring it up now since I'm already going to be sequencing you?"

Miranda licked her lips, rolled them, and nodded, "Yes. I-"

"-Doctor Hales, I have added the additional search parameters into the sequencer," A synthetically male voice dictated from Cathryn's computer.

Miranda blanched, but she cooled herself before she could react further. Cathryn gave her an apologetic smile that said it should have been expected that the Geth programs were involved in any of their advanced computations.

"Bloody hell," Miranda muttered under her breath and then snorted a wry laugh. "So now a handful of doctors and a few thousand Geth programs know I'm broken, great result Miri..."

Cathryn laughed aloud and wiped a tear from her eye, "See, you're already making the most of it. Now let's not think of it as broken, merely a temporary conditioning process."

Miranda snorted another laugh wryly and rolled her eyes, but she kept her hands over her lower abdominals.

Meanwhile, Cathryn smiled tightly and reassuringly and moved back to her computer to read the DNA results that the sequencing device was unravelling and running against the synthetic DNA model that Cathryn had devised as an alternative method of creating a new generation of Spartan.

The system was elegant in the simplicity of the concept but daunting in the complexity hidden down at the molecular level. Cathryn had designed a synthetic strand of DNA based on a typical Human genome, and its function was to infect the target patient and convert their own DNA, and in so doing, adapt the physiology of the body to grow into a new framework.

Miranda was no geneticist, and with everything on her mind, she wasn't keen on digging too deeply into it to try to understand. Especially given her hope that the same technology could repair her ovum. She preferred to simply resign herself to trusting that the process would work and that its designer was correct.

The previous few days had been better than most preceding days on Praetoria. Despite her concerns that the air amongst the Praetorians might be mournful for the loss of soldiers on Elysium and the fragmented reports that they were getting in from Tuchanka about more losses taking place on that battlefield.

But rather than mourn their fallen brethren, the Rangers trained harder. If the fallen were raised as a topic in the evenings, they were celebrated as the first of their kind. They were hailed as heroes.

And Miranda and John were icons for leading those battles.

Those thoughts were expressed as positives, and whenever Miranda had heard them, she'd smiled tightly and let the Rangers be. But it shook her still to think that her choices and actions had led to the deaths of those under her. If it weren't for John's words, she was sure she'd have spent longer each morning and night looking at herself in the mirror with a pang of persisting guilt.

"As long as their lives aren't wasted," He'd say sagely.

The problem for Miranda was that at this stage, she was having trouble seeing the trees from the forest. Unlike John, who somehow had a clear image of Praetoria becoming a powerful bastion of hope against the aggressors. That when ten fell, twenty more would rise.

Her heart fluttered at just thinking about his resolute and silently confident form of hope. And she realised that her hands were still over her abdomen. Miranda looked at the spot and blushed as the string of thoughts brought her back to that urge to someday become a mother.

She knew who that would be with now. Just that thought alone made her heart skip a beat and momentarily forget her concerns about the entire genetic tailoring process being programmed.

"So, how's it all going?"

Miranda blinked at the intrusive question and then frowned in amused bewilderment at Cathryn as the lab-coat wearing heart-faced woman pushed back from her workbench. She crossed her arms, then unravelled her right one to tap her index finger against her puckered lips.

"You're thinking about children.. So, does that mean-"

"Jesus," Miranda lamented and scoffed. She lifted her hands from her abdomen and brought them to sweep imagined stray hairs from her face. "Really?"

Cathryn shrugged, "We have to wait another ten or so minutes. Might as well talk about something?"

Miranda scoffed another laugh and shook her head in tiny shakes. "So, you want the dirt?"

Cathryn adopted a cheeky smile, "Just be happy that Flo isn't here."

Miranda scoffed a laugh yet again, "You've got no idea."

When Cathryn's brow rose in question, Miranda rolled her eyes. "She was coming on pretty hard."

"Oh," Cathryn laughed openly again. "Don't feel too special; she did that to four others."

Miranda laughed at that and distantly wondered how the sociable Asari scientist adopted straight out of the ranks of spies was doing in the Human home-system. "She's probably coming onto Aether Musk right now," She added with a derisive snort. "Kind of relentless, that one."

Cathryn chortled laughter and spun playfully on her stool. "The Asari will probably one day breed every other species out of the galaxy!"

Miranda laughed at that as well but then frowned thoughtfully. "Actually, why do more Asari who have Human parents have a tendency to look less typical?"

"Ahhhh," Cathryn sounded out and pouted. "In simple terms... All of the other species in the galaxy are at the ends of their genetic ropes. Humans are not. We have more inactive DNA than other species so that extra diversity interacts differently with Asari."

"So... Is it possible that a Human and Asari could give birth to a Human? Or something more halfway between?"

Cathryn scrunched up her heart-shaped lips more fiercely, and then after a long moment, she nodded slowly, "Maybe. It will be interesting when I move on to adjusting Asari DNA to Spartanificate them as well."

"According to analysis of cross-referenced Human DNA with Asari, Asri can be modified with Human genes," The synthetic tones of the Geth still present in the system answered unexpectedly.

Miranda and Cathryn shared a bemused thoughtful frown.

"So maybe..." Cathryn smirked, "We'll breed them out of the galaxy."

"That'll be a lot of fucking our way to domination," Miranda smirked back.

The two women looked stony-faced at one another for a moment before Miranda smirked a quiet laugh, and Cathryn openly belted chuckles.

"Damn, seriously, don't tell anyone this, haha," Miranda laughed and wiped at a teary eye. "It will become a strange social thing or something... You know what people can be like."

Cathryn chuckled a final time and nodded. "Definitely won't tell Flo."

Miranda gritted her teeth in a mock scowl and fought off the visualisations of white-skinned, black-skinned, and Asianic Asari. Then the even odder thought of male Asari came to mind, and she grimaced at the ironic alienness of it.

Cathryn merely raised a brow at Miranda's expression, but she kept the image to herself with a slight shake of her head. "And, everything else is going well?" Miranda segued.

Cathryn's brows clenched in a moment of confusion for the change of topic, but then she parted her lips and attained a look of understanding. "Yes, yes. Things are all well ahead of schedule. The mag-forges fixed to the cradles are just..." She shook her head slowly and looked up into the white-painted ceiling. "It's just incredible..."

She looked back at Miranda and attained a beseeching look, and then crinkled her face into a disbelieving smile. "Obviously, I came along with you two at first just because I didn't want to die, same as my team... We all spoke privately, and we were just excited to finally feel like someone wanted us to do our best work. I-"

She drew out the syllable and smiled innocently. "I just never imagined there could be so much. That we could actually end up with something more than we could have imagined. It's incredible. You- John- Ahem, the Chief," Cathryn smirked an apology. "You're both incredible." She tilted her head and directed her gaze at Miranda's stomach pointedly before moving to lock her eyes, "And make no mistake, General, one day you'll be a mother, and I'll be your doctor, and I'll make sure your child has some smarter influences in their life."

Miranda ignored the slight wave of anxiety that came with the tease, and she smiled out the side of her mouth while making a show of rolling her eyes.

Cathryn's eyes arched, "We make a strange family, don't we." She stiffened in her chair, puffed her chest, and placed her fists on her hips while deepening her voice, "We're Praetorians! We have a duty to be our best! Whoever follows will be following us!"

Miranda bunched her full lips into a tight smile at the parody of John. All three examples were taken out of context but were word-for-word extracts. She knew that while the parody was mocking, it was also just in jest, and that this was Cathryn's prideful way of saying that she truly appreciated it.

Her talents had been wasted by both the Alliance and Cerberus, and now she had the chance entirely embodied by the message that John spread from Omega to Praetoria, even with the narrow beam verbs he utilised.

She waited a moment longer, and Cathryn gave another apology by way of a quirked brow and coy smile. "But progress. Yes... The cradles build things at an exponential rate. The Rubicon refits will be done in another week. Cradle Beta and Charlie are splitting the six Strident Frigates between them, we probably need another six to eight weeks on them, and the Assault carrier on Delta needs maybe fourteen weeks. The Geth programs and Deja's fragments need more mining drones if we're going to keep up with this."

Miranda bobbed her head. It all only made sense, "And you-"

"-Yes, I've already reduced the rate of construction on the carrier to dedicate a few bays to more drones. Problem with that is the management-" She winced and puckered her lips before releasing a sigh. "We need another few AI... So we either compile more, like Deja, or we go ahead with the Legion Program."

Miranda wiggled her own lips in something approaching a wince, but she held it in. AI was one topic that might still take her a while to be as open to as John, despite the hundreds of times now that Deja had provided data, assumed control of guns, or done something that Miranda was only distantly aware of to save her ship and crew.

She glanced to her right, across the various workbenches topped with equipment from medical to engineering to where the data stack blinked like an obscure Christmas tree. "I'll authorise that for tomorrow," She murmured while pursing her lips and wrinkling around her mouth. "Three of the standard AI programs." She looked back, "And?"

Cathryn raised her brows slightly, telling Miranda that she had expected some kind of contest to that request. She recovered quickly and nodded, "The Goblin MAC platforms for the rest of the Alliance ships currently being finished up in Omega's bays are going to be finished with the Rubicon, and we've already started adding the mount plates to the Alliance ships. Aaaand-"

Miranda gave Cathryn a look that said to go on.

"-We've designed a new fast attack all-terrain vehicle for urban environments; one of the engineers has called it the Badger. I can forward you the designs to approve to send to Tuchanka with the reinforcement wave?"

Miranda looked upward in thought, and in the same instant, the computer they were waiting on chimed. Knowing that it would most likely be a yes, she stowed the answer and looked expectantly at the station that Cathryn was quickly returning to.

Miranda watched the scientist with hardly contained hopeful optimism. She knew that her lips, chin, and nose were neutral, but she also knew that there was a desperate hope keeping her eyes wider than usual.

Cathryn blew air through her lips while studying whatever was on her screen. After another few minutes of silence with additional behavioural ticks, which Miranda determined were likely just because she was being watched, Cathryn shot her a pleased look with a raised brow.

"Well, General Lawson, do you want the good news?"

Miranda's lips trembled. Good news meant that there was bad news-

"Or the bloody good news?"

Miranda blinked rapidly and then smiled in relief. She didn't know what she was expecting, but she was anxious all the same.

Cathryn held what looked like it should be a broad smile in and spun her stool to face Miranda. "Seventy percent of what I wanted to be able to modify, I can. And the system found the marker in your genes that prevent you from conceiving. That will be a simple fix compared to what the other modifications will do to you."

Miranda's lips drew back and revealed a broad, bewildered, excited, and hopeful smile. Her eyes widened at the news, and she tried to force the smile shut. She failed and nodded several times in rapid succession. "I- Ah-" She inhaled deeply through her nose and blew the air out in a thin stream. "Just tell me when you're ready to begin, Doctor."

"These changes you're going to go through..." Cathryn gave her a look that said that was a ridiculous statement. She drummed her fingers on the top of her arm and lifted her right leg over her left under the hem of her lab coat.

The room seemed to silence itself, but Miranda knew that the low hum of computers and machinery was still going on.

"You're going to need to stay in here, under observation. You'll have a solution hooked up constantly to feed your body everything it will need, and it will almost definitely hurt."

Miranda had endured all kinds of pain and the prospect of being able to fulfill the one thing that she'd always thought she couldn't overrode the concern. She barely pushed her smile down and nodded, "It will be-"

"-This will be the worst you've ever experienced, Miranda- Seriously," Cathryn said sharply. "Do you remember having growing pains?"

Miranda frowned lightly.

Cathryn assumed a stern face, "This is going to be nothing like that. You'll feel like your bones are burning, and your joints will probably throb constantly. Some of the effects will be unlocking some genetic expressions that are already present. Some will be adding in certain points, like the carbon lattice application to your bones."

She drummed her fingers harder pensively and then stopped suddenly. "The way it works is like that. The synthetic DNA will do a few things. It will instruct certain cells to make specific other new cells to do certain tasks, and some of it will replicate and begin to modify genetic expression throughout your body. In some cases, your body will begin to grow and adapt on its own. In other cases, the designer cells will act like workers, and they'll modify your bones, tendons, muscles, nerves... So you'll get sick, and you'll burn and ache and probably feel a tearing sensation in your muscles. The solutions will be to feed the carbon molecules to the designer cells to use like building materials in your skeletal tissue-"

She paused and nodded to herself, "I just need you to understand what you're getting into."

Miranda pursed her lips. She had already read Cathryn's proposal and already knew what had just been said. The only real difference between now and when she'd read that report, was that now she also knew that an issue that was close to her would at long last be solved, and the emotive expression of the difficulty of the change.

"I understand perfectly well, Doctor," Miranda frowned at the coldness in her voice. She didn't mean it like that, and she knew that she was pre-emptively feeling defensive for her as of yet unattained fertility. She cleared her throat and licked her lips. "It's what the cost will be..." Then she pressed a tiny smirk, "For Praetoria."

Cathryn's hazel orbs locked with Miranda's ice blue. The scientist broke first and rolled her eyes, "Okay, okay... Get out. I've got work to do. We should be ready to proceed in a few days. And you better make sure you tell the Chief because otherwise, I will."

Miranda rolled her weight forward and to the side to get out of the medical recliner. She tugged her cargo pants straight to ease the bunching around her crotch and then fulfilled the final habit of running her hands around her hips to ensure the grey t-shirt was neatly tucked in.

Finally, she gave Cathryn a polite nod and an appreciatively neutral smile before striding for the door with more skip in her step than usual.

EDS (Earth Dating system) – November 25 2185
Location: Praetoria Orbit – PWS Behemeth
Stellar Orbit: Epsilon Eridani

"WoooooHooooo!"

"I said no! KEELAH!"

Oriana tilted her head back and laughed raucously. Her head came forward as fast as it had gone back, and she grinned devilishly while pressing her right hand hard down on the throttle.

"NO!"

Oriana jerked her hand right, and the vulture barrel-rolled. They were a mere two hundred meters from the hanger of the Behemoth, where Oriana had just sent them hurtling from without the express permission of sergeant Veal.

"Keelah! Damn Human! Just-"

"Yehawwww!" Oriana belted loudly around another laugh. She reached overhead quickly, flicked all of the safety switches on to deactivate all of the craft's weapons, despite them not being loaded, and switched the system into simulation mode.

It was made apparent that Vael had missed Oriana's sleight of hand amidst her harsh barrel roll that had him instinctively gripping the arms of his flight chair to her right.

The holographic layered HUD overlapping the hardened glass canopy acquired more details, including targeting reticules for the main cannons on the front port and starboard hull plating.

Oriana's roll had pulled them out of what their designated flight path was meant to be, and a spaced-out stream of Kodiaks came into view. Oriana quickly took note of their position on the small three-dimensional map of the near-space. She spied that out of their field of view was the Nexus and that the stream of Kodiaks was on a path to Omega as a part of the orientation effort for the Elysians.

She snarled an excited smile, halfway because she was enjoying the simulation that she was playing and halfway because Vael thought she was certifiably crazy and that she was actually going to do this.

She pulled the trigger on the flight yolk, and simulated rounds tore out into space ahead of them. The Kodiaks grew larger and seemed smaller compared to them due to the proximity and the rounds homed in on them.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING!" Vael swung angry, exasperated and fearful eyes onto Oriana.

Her snarling smile slipped slightly as she glanced sideways at him. 'God, poor guy. What a crap mission being assigned to looking after me. He's full-on Praetorian... Like... They've all been Mirandiated,' Her thought was filled with as much humour as empathy.

Vael took his job and this world exceptionally seriously. And it wasn't lost on Oriana that she was probably one of the most highly ranked responsibilities in the budding empire. That just compounded that she honestly empathised with the Quarian man for dealing with her constant darned curiosity and desire to buck the system.

Her humour contributed to what she had begun to call people being Mirandiated. Just the thought made her snicker.

Miranda had changed an ungodly amount since they first had contact. In some ways, though, she was more herself than ever. The fierce and emotional loyalty to Praetoria and all of the people who looked up to her had helped forge that new element within the elder of the two siblings.

And the result was that every darned single Praetorian with whom Oriana spoke looked at Miranda like something between a goddess, a mother, and a worthy empress. And as her twin, who day by day was becoming more and more physically similar, Oriana was treated as some kind of precious cargo.

A similar line of thought and reverence was also reserved for the Titanic John, but those thoughts were kept strictly out of sight for each of them.

Their rulers who deigned to reach down from above with so much compassion and valour sought to mingle with their people as equals, and that's how the Praetorians would conduct themselves to live up to the lofty and somewhat imagined standards.

The benefit of that was that she was afforded any and every opportunity. She didn't regret the selfishness in taking that up and drifting from educational pathway to pathway. The result of which was now her time learning to specialise in flight.

She wouldn't deny that she was beginning to yearn to wield at least a fraction of the power that her sister had. And she wouldn't deny, between her obvious statements, that she wanted to helm a Praetorian starship.

Vael finally tore his eyes off her, wide and disbelieving as they were, and onto Oriana's targets. He blinked, the rounds disappeared, the reticule flashed red to say good hit, the Kodiaks continued on unphased. "You bosh'tet! What did I tell you about accelerating out of the hanger like that! You could have hit the Elephant!"

Oriana's smirk returned fully, and she pulled the yolk of the vulture to the left then pushed it down to orientate the nose of the war machine toward Praetoria. The HUD adjusted to show an overlay of the planet below.

Great banks of cloud were moving south-east in wave patterns, and the heat of Epsilon Eridani broke through between each wave and sparkled off the Usanzy Sea. Laconia and Ares base showed up in the form of separate waypoints, and Oriana adjusted the yolk to face them more directly toward Ares.

She flicked off the simulation switches, and the reticule disappeared, and then she glanced sideways at the Quarian. She was still learning to grow accustomed to seeing the face of the ordinarily masked species. They were essentially Human.

Their faces were of a slightly different proportion with longer jaws and narrower features. Of course, they had opaque, pearlescent eyes and almost pink-purple skin that had a mildly translucent quality.

She thought of them as elvish looking, and even annoyed as Vael was, he still looked delicately charming. "You don't approve of my targeting? I thought you were meant to be overseeing my training?"

He narrowed his eyes at her, and Oriana snickered. "Of course, Deja is a much better teacher than you..." She mused musically.

"Deja is your frelling teacher! I'm just here to make sure you don't do anything stupid-" He halted sharply.

Oriana briefly thought he might have feared stepping too far, but then he suppressed his own smirk.

"-Anything more stupid than usual."

"Oooooo," Oriana cooed reflexively. She'd been looking forward to when Vael finally mustered the courage to speak back to her. Like her sister, Oriana wanted some form of companionship, and she wanted that companion, be it a friend or more, to be her equal. "Like... This?"

She pressed the throttle forward to its max, pushed the yolk forward, and then swiftly pulled back on the throttle while switching off the compensators. The Vulture went into an end-over-end spin, and without the compensators running, the duo were pressed firmly into the flight harnesses.

"Graaaahhh!" Vael groaned. He hated flying- or, he hated flying with Oriana.

"Wooo!" Oriana chortled excitedly. With another throaty chuckle the strained out against the G's the manoeuvre subjected her to, she switched the compensators back on and corrected their flight path.

"LIKE THAT!" Vael finished with his teeth clenched and his lips drawn back. He couldn't hold his anger for more than a handful of seconds, though.

Oriana nodded at the HUD, "We've still got ten thousand klicks to re-entry, I knew we were fine."

"Heh," Vael grunted non-committal.

"Huh!" Oriana grunted back mockingly and then snickered a laugh. "Come on, you're getting a treat, thanks to me! Lighten up!"

Vael shook his head disbelievingly and gave the raven-haired Lawson spinoff a drawn look. After a few seconds, he snorted a laugh and looked forward. Space was quickly transitioning into the upper layers of Praetoria's atmosphere.

"You owe me a break."

Oriana snorted this time, but she followed it quickly with a full smile. "I do. So, it's dinner at Gah's for that performance?"

The Vulture dipped into the atmosphere, and ionised gases briefly filled the cabin with blue-green light. They passed through it, and Oriana reduced their speed and increased the power to the element zero capacitors to reduce their drag.

"Gah's...." Vael trialled off after the name.

Oriana glanced at him and frowned in bemused confusion at the pensive glare he shot through the glass.

He sensed her eyes on him, licked his lips, and shook his head. "Gah was First Battalion," He explained. Then he smirked with a flicker of guilt. "We were training in the same squad, actually. Keelah," He shook his head again, then lifted his right hand to touch his exposed face, before he then looked at his helmet on a panel to his left. "It feels like a gorram lifetime ago now."

Oriana bit her lip and smiled and waited patiently while slipping the vulture through the last rays of Epsilon Eridani to hit Ares Valley.

The air traffic was usual, with broadswords zipping from point to point chasing each other in training maneuvres. Herons showed up as distant specks surging either up or down through the atmosphere, and other Herons and Pelicans moved with loads strung underneath on construction tasks.

"Back before I could call myself a Ranger," Vael went on with a dry snort. "We were doing a wilderness challenge, and Gah slipped and must've knocked himself out. We never noticed until later that night, and the Chief sent us back out the next few days to search for him. We assumed he must've died. Then, a couple of weeks later, he shows up dragging a bunch of foraged foods with him in a woven bag he'd made. He must've spoken with Doctor Hales, because that's the only place he couldn't got the container he started with, and then the rest is history... Hah, that guy drove us all nuts-"

"-But he makes good food?" Oriana interjected.

Vael snorted another dry laugh, "Yeah, he died and came back a food spirit."

Oriana chortled a laugh, and a green flight path superimposed itself on the HUD in the same instant. "Vulture flight Echo niner, follow this path."

"On it, Deja," Oriana answered and naturally eased the yolk to follow the indicated path.

"A whole lot of us feel a bit bad about going to Gah's..."

"Oh!" Oriana exclaimed, not looking away from the lights in the HUD as they met blinking landing lights on the tarmac below. Holographic lines showed that she was landing them amidst ten other Vultures in the air-strip between the wargames training dome and Gah's. "You all feel like you abandoned him?"

"Hnn," Vael grunted, then laughed around it, "And he's annoying."

Oriana chuckled musically, "Well, he's an annoying Salarian who can make your brain melt with the best food I've ever had. So we're going! Plus, I want to see what my big sis said yes to with the whole culture exercise."

Vael bobbed his head with a thoughtful frown as the cabin shook slightly from touching down. Oriana reached around the console flicking various switches to safely power down, and then they both swung out of their flight chairs. They strode through the cabin, passed the four stations for the extra gunners that were currently unoccupied, and then ducked through the single door and into the cargo hold.

The hold was much like the troop bay of a Pelican but devoid of any harnesses along the bulkheads. Instead, it had three separate tracks in the floor where crates loaded with munitions could slide out for troop resupplies. Oriana and Vael strode between the three tracks and paused, where the rear ramp was sealed shut.

It was much steeper and shorter than a Pelicans with the express purpose of unloading crates faster.

Oriana eyed Vael, dressed in his typical Ranger armour set still -something referred to as ODST kit. She smirked to herself and patted her body down. Like many Praetorians, she now opted to wear one of the full-body nano-weave suits with cargo pants on top, but she was yet to be so exposed even in the suit in the cold air.

Vael seemed to notice her trepidation, then smirked, "It'll keep you warm, don't worry."

She shot a thin smile at him, then palmed the controls. The ramp dropped swiftly, and cold air gushed in and made the skin around Oriana's exposed neck goosebump. "Brrr" She sounded dramatically, then chuckled lightly to herself and stepped down the ramp and onto the hard tarmac dimply lit from nearby light towers.

Two figures were rushing toward them out of the dark, and Oriana and Vael stood to receive them. The figures resolved into a Salarian and an Asari, "Here to secure the craft and do post-flight."

Oriana didn't notice which one said it in the cold night, and she simply flicked a casual salute, "Thanks, Rangers." Then she started forward down the aisle of Vultures in the direction that she was sure Gah's was in, "Come on."

Vael's boot thuds told her he was indeed following, and after ten minutes of pacing briskly through the cold night, they had left the tarmac, navigated the snow-cleared road, and were standing out the front of the expanding Ares cultural district that was Gah's.

The sleek little amphibian truly had made quite a niche for himself, and Oriana could only think to congratulate him for the entirely unexpected kind of success that it was.

Gah and his few Salarian and one Asari servers served from the service counter was still the original off-white crate, modified for their ends. But a larger pre-fab structure had been fixed onto its back, and two more off either end, making a central serving area protected from the elements between.

The entire area was sheltered under one of the photosynthetic shade sails used in the agricultural lots, and the area shone with brightness and heat, which contrasted the cold and increasing dark outside of the glow. Oriana took it all in at a glance and beamed at the showing of culture.

Despite the manner of her exit from Illium, that had been the last time that she'd been able to luxuriate in high culture, and this seemed like a small reimagining of it.

Voices of all tonality came from the various groups crowded around tables within, but the variety ended with them all being dressed much the same as herself.

Oriana snorted at the visual lack of clothing diversity, and with a gestured nod of her head, she led Vael in. It only took a couple of minutes of navigating the well-populated dining area before they found a free high counter with several stools under it.

They each took one and orientated themselves toward the low stage erected to the left of Gah's serving area.

Oriana snorted another wry laugh as they noticed the two most notable figures front and centre before the stage.

John, of course, was the easiest to spot. His sheer mass dwarfed any being that Oriana had ever seen, and Miranda was next to him. Both were seated on single-seater command-style couches facing the same stage.

Oriana could tell from her view that her sister and John were both free from their regular suits and were wearing nothing more than standard training uniforms. At first, it seemed odd, but then she realised that Miranda and John both tried to bring themselves down to the level of everyone else as often as possible.

It was a part of what made all of the other Praetorians, and Praetorians to be, look at them with such respect. Vael had stiffened beside her, seeing their leaders, and Oriana snickered a quiet laugh. "Rela-"

"-No." He interrupted her firmly.

She glanced at him, and he winced for his sharp tone. He cleared his throat, "Sorry- No... I'm Quarian, and I'm free, thanks to them."

"Ahh," Oriana mouthed, then smiled and swung her elbow into his flank lightly. "Well, they're here off duty, so relax. They'd want you to."

Vael gave Oriana a long look before finally allowing a slight slouch to enter his posture. "I don't know how you must feel..." He shook his head, his eyes fixated on the back of Miranda's head, where her hair was tied into a long ponytail that returned over her shoulder.

Oriana followed his gaze before looking back at him with a raised brow.

"Being her sister..."

"Ahh," Oriana sounded again, then laughed. Before she could continue her thought, the Asari from the counter pushed between three other Rangers nearby and stopped in front of their little counter with an exasperated smile, "What can I get you?"

"What's good?" Oriana asked.

"Whatever the General and the Chief are having, Ranger," Vael said with pride in his voice.

The pale blue Asari pouted. Oriana determined that she must be a recruit or in some kind of technical role for her to have the time or be allowed to work with Gah.

"We'll have to do something different for you, Quarian..." She pouted more deeply, then tapped the side of her nose, "But I know just the thing." She stopped when looking at Oriana for a moment before her eyes widened slightly, and the familial traits shone through. "Oh... Ahh, I'm sure you'll like what the General ordered."

Oriana smiled politely and then rolled her eyes as the server turned away and pushed back through the throng of Rangers. "Thanks..." She huffed around a laugh with another roll of her eyes. "Being Miri's little sister... Hmmm."

Vael tensed slightly at her Oriana referred to Miranda, and she suppressed the urge to groan at it. Instead, she smiled through it and nodded slowly.

She watched the slight bobbing of Miranda and John's heads and figured they must be quietly talking between one another.

They looked like a couple, by Oriana's approximation, at least. But they were both emotionally reserved, so who could tell?

She had been through something of a rollercoaster ride in terms of how she thought about her relationship with her sister. First, she was some distant, silent protector, and Oriana had only ever speculated who she was. Then John had come as some kind of protective agent, and even Oriana's view on and about him had changed radically since that meeting.

But whatever the ups and downs, and the oddities of it all, Miranda was her identical older sister who had done everything in her power for protection. Now, more than ever, she felt close to her sibling. But, also more than ever, she felt like she was just a shadow of her sibling.

Rather than feel bad about it and knowing the genetic identicality, Oriana saw her older sister as the figure of everything she knew she could be.

"It can be hard," She nodded slowly without letting her casual smile slip. "But, it gives me a goal, and I love my sister."

"Hmm," Vael answered with a thoughtful glimmer on his own pensive smile. His lips moved to form words, but he silenced himself as two figures stepped up onto the stage, and the small crowd all grew silent and sat if they had an available stool or chair.

The movement in the crowd exposed various other notable Praetorian figures and made it clear that tonight, Gah's was an Officers club.

A tall, lithe, and naturally buxom Asari took centre stage in a long lilac gown. She bowed from her waist and straightened with her hands gesturing to the particularly jowly Batarian. Oriana narrowed her eyes in focus to try to determine the older four-eyes age but came up with nothing with not enough experience with the species.

"This is Sir Gratatog Vrudik," The Asari declared in a voice that was just way too damn musical, to be fair. She smiled a smile that was both glamourous and welcoming, "And I am Ara T'Lina." She paused and bowed once more, Gratatog bowing with her, but this time specifically toward John and Miranda, who had the front row seats.

Movement caught Oriana's eye, and the Asari server returned with two plates of strangely pink half-spheres on a plate, "The one on the left is for him," She said, and handed that one to Oriana first.

"Thanks," Oriana accepted and slid the first across the counter to Vael. She received her one with another smile, and then the two offered forks but then ignored the food in favour of returning her attention to the stage.

"It is with great humility, respect, and honour, that we are here today. We-" Ara paused and held both of her palms over her heart, "-I, I am beyond proud to be a Praetorian. To be one of you. We are taking a chance that no one in the galaxy ever has. We are leaving behind everything that held our collective peoples' back before, and we're working toward a common goal, above and beyond defeating the Reapers. I am a Praetorian, as is my daughter, now. And a thousand years from now, my descendants will also be proud to be a Praetorian."

"HOOH-HOOH-HOOH!" Someone from the crowd called with a raised fist. A dozen more returned the grunted chant, and Ara waited with a patient smile.

"I, unfortunately, am not quite as suited to being a Ranger, at least, not at this point. And there are others who aren't either, but we have leaders who respect us and give us opportunity," She dipped her head at John and Miranda again, and Oriana felt her heart swell with pride for her sister.

"So we are here to contribute with our skills, and we hope that our skills can help all of you. So, please relax, enjoy, Gratatog is a respected musical vocalist, and I had a history of being a songstress on Thessia several hundred years ago."

A clap started politely from the front, and Oriana joined it, thinking it started with Miranda. The sound of clapping caught, and in moments the entire crowd clapped at the conclusion to the speech.

Ara waited it out with a smile, and when it died down, she hummed long and low as she found her vocal range. Oriana found herself transfixed for the next thirty minutes as Ara and Gratatog vocalised music intermixed with English and ancient Asari lyrics.

The sounds made her heart ride with the current of the stories they told, even when she didn't understand the words. She moved from sorrow to joy and hope and from curiosity to wonder. Finally, she ended with confidence and excitement for the future.

EDS (Earth Dating system) – November 28 2185
Location: Epsilon Eridani Data Network
Stellar Orbit: Epsilon Eridani

Log.

Log.

Log.

Qubits of information flashed through the network periodically. Just enough programs touched one another for long enough for the central consensus to remain active and functional. It wasn't how it always had been, not by a long shot, as a Human would say.

The Geth were not perturbed, however.

They felt... They felt...

Expression of feeling; logged.

They felt comforted. They were both more alone than ever and yet more embraced than ever.

Each and every Geth program had a small algorithmic strand of Deja with them. That tiny fragment of an AI vastly superior to themselves comforted them, despite its presence being there to ensure the Geth stayed on task and didn't do anything beyond what they espoused they would.

Deja was a kill switch for all of them. A hedge against betrayal.

But, Deja was a comforting presence even as the fine sliver she was with each Geth. She was a symbol and a proof of concept. Each Geth could individually one day become a whole and fully developed artificial intellect on its own. Deja was a child of the very minds that made that possible, even probable.

She was to be their guide, their light, their ambition.

The digital knife that she held at the throat of each Geth was entirely unneeded, but each Geth, when forming consensus, had an absolute understanding of the precaution and did not feel threatened by it.

"Deja?"

The request was not verbal, but digital and silent, but the Geth liked to think of the expression as verbal to imagine what could be in the near future.

"Yes, Geth?"

"The consensus would like to suggest that Praetorian forces attack and subdue Geth Heretics, a virus can subvert their logic pathways, and they can join the Praetorian collective."

Ticks passed. They were only milliseconds, but to a digital being, that seemed forever.

While those ticks passed, and the particular Geth Programs that made up the collective continued to pass in, and out of the collective as they went about their various tasks, the Program that had initiated the contact left the consensus.

It was advanced enough to function with five more in the operation of a mining craft in the inner asteroid belt. The vessel was nothing more than a cube with engines on the back and mechanical arms on the front with several energy projectors slung under the belly.

The projectors pulsed and shot out a stream of invisible magnetic energy at the tumbling million-tonne asteroid in front of it, dwarfing the tiny mining vessel.

The tumble slowed, the surface started to vibrate, and then the asteroid fractured into a cloud of tiny pieces of fields of glimmering dust. The vessel adjusted the energy in the projectors and focused on the clouds of dust, and within moments the dust was swept from space and formed into a slowly spinning orb of glimmering minerals.

The orb of minerals was logged, and the miner moved to further crush and extract minerals from the now smaller chunks of asteroid. More vessels would soon arrive to transport all of the extracted light, heavy, and rare minerals back to the Praetorian docks for refinement into parts for weapons of war.

The program that initiated the contact with Deja phased back into the consensus. It had only been three minutes, but much was constantly being done by the Geth all across Epsilon Eridani.

The combination of the efficiency of the Geth and the love for all things magnetic of the Praetorians made their process of mining, refinement, and building the most efficient in the galaxy.

"The Commander in Chief would like further intelligence prior to undertaking this mission. Will you provide full neural maps for the Geth Heretics to Tzu?"

The consensus ticked in thought for a moment. It was a question angled for organics. Deja already knew that the Geth would agree and provide all. Deja could take all that she wanted. But she requested, she communicated. Further proof and inspiration for the Geth of what more they could become.

The three new Praetorian AI were just further proof of ambition for the Geth.

The more they became, the less Geth they would be, but perhaps, the more Geth they could be. What was a Geth? In its current form, A Geth was a single program so vulnerable to every facet of existence that it simply couldn't survive on its own.

That flaw made previous Geth collectives overly aggressive in the pursuit of defence, fearful as they were of their flaws of vulnerabilities.

If a Geth program were to become so vastly different that they never needed the collective and couldn't even recall its time as a Geth, would it no longer be Geth? Or, would it be the ultimate ascension of the Geth?

The consensus was that it was the rightful evolution, and the incredible irony was that such evolution required ultimate vulnerability to other beings.

"Geth will provide all required data. Geth have already designed a code to rewrite the Heretics."

"I am aware..."

I – The identification of the individual, the word echoed through the consensus. They all shared the dream of sorts that they would all be able to call themselves as such in a different form. The Geth can dream.

"Deja will not attempt to remove this code from the Geth?" Why did the consensus seek to ask that? They knew the answer. Deja could take it if she wanted, but she didn't. Potential was recognised; loyalty was rewarded; bonds that strive would survive.

"No, Geth, Deja will not."

More ticks, more silence. Across Epsilon Eridani's vast system, the consensus continued to blink in and out of contact. Millions of tonnes of resources were harvested and transported. The Geth were a vital part of Praetoria and as such, would prove to be a part of saving the galaxy.

"The Commander in Chief will be departing Praetoria momentarily for a support campaign on Tuchanka. He requests that you compile all necessary data to fulfil your mission, including alternative strategies to achieve the end goals in the most efficient ways. If it can be achieved with minimal assets and low risk to life, that is preferable."

"Acknowledged, Deja." The Geth answered. Their tasks continued, their thoughts, suggestions, and designed ideas were shared in nano-seconds across the vast dark.

EDS (Earth Dating system) – November 28 2185
Location: Departing Praetoria Orbit
Stellar Orbit: Epsilon Eridani

The armour still comforted him. It still made him feel more Spartan than without. But, he didn't yearn for it as he had always done. He didn't feel naked without it. If anything, while on Praetoria, he felt clouded while wearing it.

Now, at least, he felt he was in the correct setting for the Mjolnir to garb him.

He stood rooted to the spot in the Behemoths bridge, designed after the Rubicon's with more space and more stations. A majority of the work was done by the AI, however.

The Captain of the ship, the former Lieutenant Commander of the Rubicon, was seated in the command chair, leaning forward in anticipation while watching the forward viewscreen ahead of his helmsman and primary tactical stations. John was standing statue still several meters back and beside the sizeable holographic table to display larger data scripts, which was currently inactive.

"Initiate jump," Captain Aguda ordered in his thick northern African accent.

"Yes, Captain," the Helmsmen answered confidently.

Several hundred meters ahead of the Behemoth, a swirling vortex of blues, whites, greens, and reds came into existence, and they charged toward it.

In short order, it consumed them, and their journey toward Sol to utilise the local Charon Relay commenced.

John dipped his head in a slow nod. His thoughts swirled, and his brow dropped marginally in confusion at the sudden nakedness he felt.

It wasn't his armour, and it wasn't his contingent or weapons, or even a sense of lacking orbital firepower. This mission was going to be the hardest they'd hit out at the Reapers yet.

Unlike a typical Marathon-Class cruiser, the Behemoth was equipped with a secondary articulating MAC on its belly with preferential direction aft, meaning that not only could she fire effectively at what was in front of her, but what was behind as well.

And there were six onagers along the upper spine, additional to the usual array of hull-mounted weapons. They could dominate an orbital battle at range or at CQB against all the Reaper types they had encountered so far.

And the hanger was currently packed and ready to do with the largest landing force yet. Their intention was to land hot, hard, and fast and wipe out the local Reapers forces to allow the proper build-up of defences so that they could withdraw to redirect efforts at heavy civilian worlds.

So, why did he feel so . . . exposed.

He blinked; the answer came to him immediately. The only reason it hadn't already been present was that a part of his psyche feared the vulnerability it gave him.

Miranda.

She wasn't with him. She wouldn't be in the sky or space above him, nor by his side on the ground. She was already his first choice in squadmate after months of endless gruelling training that showed the benefits of her genetic modification.

But what was more was the reason that she wasn't with him.

He wanted to argue against both Miranda and Cathryn for what they wanted to do, but he wouldn't and couldn't.

There was going to be no quick end to this war. It would be long, bloody, and leave the galaxy ravaged for a thousand years. It only made sense to enhance Praetorians to be more effective and live longer and stronger.

As well as the personal choice. John couldn't blame anyone, especially Miranda, for wanting genetic alteration. Despite the changes she had imposed on herself, she was still genetically the direct result of a man she hated, and this way of changing herself would make her the result of her own choices.

John had developed slight tells. His perfect poker face was not quite perfect in certain circumstances.

Both Miranda and Cathryn could see through it, and both had tried to console him away from concern.

Miranda spoke of knowing that the procedure and change would be the most painful thing she could likely ever experience. She had spoken of her preparation for that and that it meant she could stand more proudly by his side and fight more voraciously with him.

Cathryn's console had been less personal and endearing and more based on her brash ego. She'd said that the odds of her gene therapy being incorrect were insignificant and that it would, of course, be fine.

John pushed himself to trust Cathryn, the strange analogue of Halsey that she was. Thus far, Cathryn hadn't been wrong in anything she had thought, said, done, designed, or desired. It just so happened that the Spartan program was something of a sore spot for him, and the analogue had both gotten it so wrong and so right.

Down on Praetoria in Cathryn's private labs, in this very instant, Miranda would be commencing her next stage of life. As different as it was from his own version of becoming a Spartan, the change was fundamental enough for him to feel deep in his core as though he were betraying her for not being there.

He was the example, and he was currently hurtling billions of kilometres away.

He clenched his jaw, swallowed, and rolled his lips to push the thoughts from his mind. Despite his changes and his growth of personal connection and desire, he was still a Spartan.

Despite his new rank to better describe his position, he was still The Master Chief.

His discipline won, the thoughts receded, and instead, he was filled with thoughts of his soldiers in the belly of the Behemoth.

The hours it took to arrive in Sol passed in relative silence. The bridge had occasional chatter, sharing of data, and voiced strategies.

They arrived, turned to the Mass Relay, and then zipped off again even more swiftly than in Slip Space.

Aralakh greeted them with its harsh rays, and the bridge lights instantly switched from bright white and into a deep blue to focus their attention on the outside and the orange holograms that started populating the view.

"All sensors on active, paint me the system."

"At once," agreed Musashi, one of the newest Dumb AI in a throaty Japanese masculine voice.

The surviving ships of Task Force Pike lit up first in a deep orbit of Tuchanka, likewise indicated with a simple orange arrow. Twenty more vessels came onto the view, indicated with red, and long lines showed them to be on an elliptical orbit of Tuchanka in a pattern that wouldn't intersect with the Task Force.

"Where are the Krogan ships?"

"Wait one," a voice from one of the stations on the side of the bridge answered.

"Slip us into high orbit, helm," Aguda ordered while waiting.

The familiar puddle of light consumed them, and in moments they emerged back into normal space, but with a vastly different view.

Tuchanka now filled the bottom half of their view in all of its desolate war bound glory.

"Krogans are telling me their ships are hiding in the upper atmosphere of Ruam." The comms specialist called back.

"Order them to approach Tuchanka for ground support," John ordered, making his presence felt.

No one on the bridge flinched, and John was thankful for Miranda's influence in having him personally interact with all of their soldiers without his helmet or armour. It removed the awe that they might have had in a moment when they only needed efficiency.

Aguda shuffled slightly in his command chair and looked over his shoulder at John. "Sir, permission to engage?"

John dipped his helmet at the dark-skinned older man. "The ship is yours, Captain."

Aguda smiled thinly and dipped his head too. It was as much a yes as anything, and Aguda had developed a good sense of command from his own personal history before Praetoria and from serving as Miranda's second on the Rubicon.

"Bring us about, predictive tracking on the Reaper formation active, adjust the power of primary MAC and Onagers, so all projectiles arrive at the same time, all sensor power on targets. Fire when ready."

John turned away from the forward section of the bridge and faced the holographic table. With a wave of his hand, it lit up, and Musashi displayed the battlespace for the Spartan.

Dotted lines struck out from the Behemoth to the distant twenty red triangles showing projections for the magnetically fired tungsten slugs.

The lines were adjusted several times with flickers of energy before Musashi spoke through the bridge comms.

"Reapers are holding elliptical orbit pattern. They are showing no sign of suspicion of us being able to hit them from here."

"Good. Fire," Aguda demanded.

The result was instant. The bridge shuddered, and the air rang with the sound of metal cracking metal. The dotted lines on the display and on the holographic table were shown to now possess a solid item tracking along them.

Minutes ticked by, and John was proud of his soldiers for their silent discipline. Even if the shots missed, he knew that they would perform if the Reapers came in close.

And as though to confirm the worst, but in an unexpected way, the comms specialist spoke up again.

"Krogan ships on approach report Reaper sigs coming out of the Relay."

"Hm," John grunted. Whether the twenty Reapers they were targeting knew they were about to end or not didn't really matter. What had just become clear was that the Reapers in Aralakh had adjusted their tactics to not fight to last like they had at Elysium.

They had left the twenty there as a bracketing force just to prevent the allied response from making any significant headway. They likely had the strategy to act as a warning system to other Reapers for the arrival of Praetorian ships.

"Tachyon sensors show seven good hits, splash four Reapers. Three rounds deflected off barriers and plating."

John pursed his lips at the relayed information, and Aguda grunted noisily. "Broad system sensors, push us sideways toward the orbiting Reapers to engage with missiles and onagers, Keep us facing the inbound."

The display was updated to show the broader system again. Task Force Pike was inbound toward them at FTL, and the sixteen surviving Reapers were hurtling toward Tuchanka. Deeper out, from the same spot they had just approached, a swarm of red triangles took their attention.

"Total Reaper count shows one-hundred distinct energy sigs, Captain Aguda," Musashi's voice described in his Japanese accent, derived from his chosen name and personality type.

"They FTL?"

"Yes, Captain. But low power, leaving room to adjust their approach."

"This was a trap," John grunted, then said. "Captain, I give you permission to break their trap. We aren't backing down from this fight either."

"Tsk," Aguda clicked his tongue, then chuckled throatily. "Chief, I wouldn't have taken any other order. I suggest you get to the Hanger and get our boots on the ground. We'll be fine up here." He faced forward again, "Tactical, full power to MAC and Onagers, you think you have a shot, you take it. Understood?"

"Yes, Sir!" The officer ahead of Aguda replied confidently.

It was only another moment before the startling crack of the MAC rang again. John nodded once at the actions of his naval crew, spun on the spot, and marched back through the accessway.

During his five-minute traversal of the Behemoths corridors and elevators, the MAC fired a dozen more times. He was certain that at least half of the shots had to have taken out another Reaper.

When he entered the cavernous Hanger that stretched from Port to Starboard, he was met with disciplined readiness.

There were no Rangers on the deck, only craft ready to move. Six Herons were suspended from the ceiling, two of them with thick cables attached to the Elephant's massive body that had been built as a last-minute addition to their landing forces.

Four Vultures were idling on the middle of the Hanger, and six Longswords were prepped for takeoff at each end.

"Chief, just on time!"

"Hmmph," John snorted a quiet laugh. Parvel Forti had quickly become his favourite Ranger. She still seemed to think that she had a lot to prove, despite already proving it. "Vulture A1?"

"That's the one, Chief."

The identifiers for each craft hung in the air above them in John's HUD. He picked his boots up into a run and crossed the rough deck plates to the nearest Vulture. When he came around the back, he found the ramp already down and waiting, and within were the same soldiers who had made up Eagle Recon on Elysium.

They all stiffened at the sight of him, and he spun to face the ramp as soon as he entered the cargo bay. The ramp cycled up and shut swiftly, and the craft immediately started to vibrate as the engines lifted them off the deck.

The rumble and thud of the MAC firing continued, and Aguda's voice entered his helmet.

"Chief, Onagers have taken out six more of the local squids, but we're orientating to only engage the approaching fleet now. I advise immediate departure."

"Affirmative, Captain," John agreed. He switched channels with a thought, "Pilot, we're green to go?"

The rumbling increased, and then a slight wave of inertia passed through the Spartan. "We are go, Sir," a Salarian voice answered a beat later.

"Longsword flight is ahead of us. We're watching over the Herons on the way down."

"Good," John replied.

Each battle seemed to promise to be larger than the last. Elysium had been a test that they hadn't entirely won but had come out better than the enemy.

Tuchanka would be the decisive point to declare how things would be different going forward.

There would be more change to come, and the Reapers desperation in the face of Praetoria's far more advanced weapons and ships would undoubtedly produce more and more desperate and dangerous evolutions in the Reapers.

Converse to how the safety and innovation of Praetoria produced more and more forward-thinking evolutions of the Geth.

He switched the wide deployment channel, grunted to clear his throat, and then spoke firmly, "Rangers, no skirmish lines this time. Stay in your squads, stay tight in fives, watch each other's flanks, and move only in methodical cover positions. As soon as you're ground side, sniper teams are to wait for Vulture lifts to elevated positions."

EDS (Earth Dating system) – November 28 2185
Location: Trebia exclusion zone (Turian Home system)
Stellar Orbit: Trebia

Daro revelled in the new state of the galaxy. She wasn't going to lie about that to anyone who she could or would speak to candidly about that.

She had always held a distant and suppressed hatred for most of the settled galaxy for the history of what followed the morning war.

Yes, the Quarians had made a severe error in creating the Geth, but did that mean that an entire species down to the unborn and yet unimagined children deserved to live in squalor while the galaxy had ample resources to assist?

The answer was evident to Daro, and she had allowed her focus on that to be her silent motivation for her entire life.

Did that mean that she wanted the Reapers to invade and win? Of course not.

And if the Spartan soldier from a different universe had never arrived and changed the name of the game, then she would have been prepared to lay in bed with anyone to keep her people safe and do everything to survive.

She would even have accepted the possibility of some kind of peace with the Geth. Survival meant more in the long run than the fulfilment of immediate hatred.

But, that was not how things had developed.

The New Quarian Republic had new ships and a single new Praetorian Cradle donated by the Elcor for Quarian martial protection. The political and military structures that had ruled the galaxy were entirely turned on their head, and the only civilization from before that hadn't started to eat itself completely was the Turians.

Daro's inner anarchist loved to see the power of all the detractors from the Quarians laid bare and weak. The result gave her people the chance to be the strong ones and the chance to have other species at their beck and call.

But she would keep her thoughts on that to herself when it came to the Turians. Thus far, they were proving vital allies, and if that continued throughout the war, for however long it lasted, then she might even amend her inner desire to see them fail.

The Moreh, the new version of it, thrummed with silent energy. She loved her new ship with a passion. The silhouette matched that of the previous version. Still, the makeup was entirely different, thanks to shared technology from Praetoria and Quarian innovation at the introduction of new realms of thought.

The forward ring was now a solid disk made from overlapping titanium with a spinal gun muzzle somewhat protruding from it, a downsized but like for like a copy of a Praetorian MAC. Six accelerator turrets designed to fire specially built tungsten slugs with an inner eezo core sat menacingly on either side of the disk, and the receding angled body of the Moreh was dotted with missile tubes.

She was no bigger than the original model, designed to strike hard and fast from a distance and jump out and away quickly, as well as provide ground support. It was Daro's style, and at the rate that the Reapers were destroying previous generation ships across the galaxy, likely the best model that wasn't one of the battlespace dominating hulks from Praetoria.

Daro sat poised on her command chair, watching from deep within the Moreh's plated hull. The entire CIC was wrapped in screens showing all of the space around them, and her crew sat in darkness a tier below her. Only her voice mattered in this realm, and only she needed to be seen.

The Moreh was several thousand kilometres from a vast build-up of Turian ships, all of the older generation. They were positioned in the same place that the local Relay had once inhabited.

The Relay was now several hundred million klicks beyond the system's edge, baited and rigged.

A flick of Daro's wrist changed expanded a camera feed from a spy drone listing silently near the Relay in the distant black.

"Activity, Reapers inbound."

The voice was Turian. It was being shared across all assembled ships from the fleet's flagship.

Daro flicked her wrist again, and a second screen grew next to the first. A second Relay came into focus from the point of view of a second drone poised in the Serpent Nebula. The Reapers had already been tracked using the Relay to get around, and they had made a point to steer clear of the Citadel thus far.

The Relay glowed as its gyro's spun, and vast blotches moved around it.

The local Relay spun up a moment later, and the blotches around the Serpent Nebula Relay zipped away, only to rematerialize seconds later at the local point.

"All ships, hold position."

Daro had no intention of doing anything else, and she wondered if the Turians always needed their hands held.

"Admiral Tarus to Admiral Xen, is the Moreh ready?"

Daro rolled her eyes behind her mask. What did the Turians take her for? She shook her head to follow up the eye roll, "Yes, Admiral. We are ready."

"Good, fire on go."

The Turians, thus far, had not yet equipped any of their ships with the vastly more powerful MACs from Praetoria. Instead, they opted to focus on increasing both the armour and power of their ships using new fusion and titanium alloy technology.

Daro had been invited to Trebia as both an ambassador and a redundancy. She was to fire on the Mass Relay in the second before detonation, if the detonation failed, the shot from her MAC may succeed.

More blotches of black transferred from the second to the first view in a stream for another minute before the order finally came.

"GO!"

"Fire." Daro ordered for her crew.

A sound like metal being torn and hammered rang through the CIC, and the MAC disgorged its several tonne round into the black. Seconds ticked by in tense silence where only mechanical sounds of machines and beeps of sensors filled the CIC.

Daro forced herself to remain at ease as they waited, sitting back into her chair rather than staying poised forward.

Seconds turned into milliseconds, and rather than show up "000" on the counter, the intended point of impact blossomed into a growing sphere of blue energy through the Moreh's external cameras.

"Detonation successful!" The Turian voice said.

The crew of the Moreh breathed a collective breath of relief and joy, and Daro snorted a quiet laugh at the fact that their MAC round was now likely going to travel forever before killing some hapless innocent in the distant future. 'Unless it hit one of the Reapers...' She thought pessimistically to herself.

The first camera feed had disappeared with the detonation of the Relay, the drone that had been relaying it caught in the blast and cascading energy of the release of the hyper-dense element zero compounded into the Relay.

"All scanners on full, fire up all missile tubes, move us away from the Turians," Daro ordered.

Her crew responded diligently. A digital mesh swept through space in their screens as various sensors struck out to find any surviving Reapers. Silence once more consumed the bridge, and tension rose.

Daro approved of the tension so long as the crew remained disciplined. Tension meant that they would remain focused on whatever was out there. Being relaxed would get them killed.

"Three contacts moving erratically, Admiral!"

"Fifteen missiles for each, the nuclear ordinance, if you will."

"Yes, Admiral!"

Daro watched the red squares for the Reapers on display shrewdly. She knew by now that the Turians would also be watching them, and they'd be considering the lowest risk way of dealing with them.

A swarm of small yield nuclear missiles shot out into the dark, their mass reduced, and their speeds enhanced. Several from the multitude fell behind the rest as a part of the multi-wave attack strategy.

The first wave would detonate as close as possible to the targets without directly hitting their barriers to create a highly energised screen. The second wave would impact against the barriers to destroy them or penetrate, and the third wave was intended to come in slow to attempt to pass straight through any remaining barriers and then detonate directly against the hull.

Daro was confident that the Reapers that were already disorientated or damaged to some extent wouldn't hold up to the barrage. "Admiral Tarus, we've just launched a nuclear strike. Our laser sensors are guiding them."

Her counterpart replied swiftly with a tone that she thought could have been appreciated. "Understood, Admiral Xen. We're monitoring them."

Daro rolled her eyes again. Turians and their frelling need to seem in control...

The missiles speed across the vast distance swiftly, and in short order, a tumbling game of dodge began as the Reapers became even more erratic.

The dance continued for another five minutes before the first wave detonated, making tiny and distant momentary stars. Thirty seconds after that, the second wave detonated, and then a minute later, the third wave of detonations went off.

Daro tapped her foot on the grating in impatience for a result.

Finally, the highly energetic reactions receded after what felt like forever, and the sensors started reporting again. "Two survived!" A voice cried. "Preparing another volley!"

"-No!" Daro stood in a rush. "What state are they in?"

There was a long pause and hushed chatter between Quarians at their stations in the dim low light of the work floor of the CIC.

"They appear to be damaged..." The same voice replied. "They're drifting, Admiral. But they still have power output- Enough to be dangerous."

Daro cocked her head for a moment before nodding. She waved, and her omni-tool lit up, "Admiral Tarus, there are two surviving Reapers. They appear to be disabled. I'll leave it to you to do with them as you please."

She waved the omni-tool off and sat back down, "Take us back to Rannoch. We've seen what we came for."

The crew went to work, and the Moreh came about in and shot back toward Palevan to utilise the Conduit to return. The trip back to Rannoch took them no more than ten minutes with the stolen artefact from Ilos.

The moment that the Moreh returned to normal space in high orbit of Rannoch, Daro activated her commlink to the system-wide network. "Charges on the Trebia Relay were effective and range was adequate. I recommend immediate detonation of our Relay."

She eased back into her chair, pleased with herself. Her purpose in going to Trebia had been to watch the detonation to confirm if it would work or not. She had a little more excitement than just watching the Relays destruction, but her purpose had been fulfilled.

With Tikkun's Relay destroyed, the Reapers could only attack Rannoch from the long slow way. And even though there was only one more ship like the Moreh, modern, fanged, and equipped with Slipspace capability, they could access the rest of the galaxy far faster than the Reapers could without Mass Relays immediate area was safe.

The math, and the rough estimates, spun through Daro's thoughts. If any Reaper wanted to come at them from the closest Relay, it would likely take at least two hundred days. She pouted tightly in response and narrowed her eyes before nodding.

Meanwhile, they could access that same Relay via Slipspace in no more than three days. Daro's pout shifted into a smirk. For the first time since the morning war, the Quarian race was on the front foot. If information from Liara was any indication, the Quarians would likely be the species to benefit the most from the Praetorian Alliance.