Summary: Well, that's unexpected...

  Chapter 8: 2383CE – Expnations

  After the betrayal of Nihlus, a grim mood had settled over everyone. That mood had not been conductive to the continued survival of the resisting Geth, however. With potent reinforcements in the form of Shepard's team, it hadn't taken long to wipe out the remaining opposition and recover the beacon. That, however, had led to their current situation as they demanded answers from Saren. Captain Anderson, along with Shepard and her ground team were seated on one side of a holo-table in the Normandy's small war room, with Saren, a Geth ptform, and the young Quarian Saren had introduced as Tali'Zorah nar Rayya sitting across from them. Thankfully, Saren wasn't particurly interested in keeping secrets, and began to expin the situation as soon as they'd all settled in.

  "As you may or may not be aware, Spectres such as myself specialize in specific areas. In my case, I specialize in advanced cybernetics and near-AI research. As a rule, I'm called in when someone is suspected of major viotions of the AI research ban, or of cybernetic modifications that viote the limits pced on Council associate species."

  He paused, waiting for nods of acknowledgement, then went on.

  "Six months ago, the listening posts that keep watch on the Perseus Veil began reporting anomalies. The Geth had been a non-issue for so long that the Council was a bit slow to act, but as the anomalies continued, they did finally muster a reaction two months ago by tapping me to investigate. That was a big ask, considering they didn't want me to actually cross into the Veil, but I did my best to look into things. Starting with canvasing the listening posts near the veil. It was after an incident picked up by one of those posts that I encountered Tali here, on a world at the edge of the Veil. Tali?"

  The young Quarian shifted uncomfortably as all eyes settled on her. Obviously a bit nervous, she nevertheless grasped hold of her courage and picked up the tale.

  "I'm not sure how aware you are of this, but the introduction of your species has had something of a porizing effect on the Migrant Fleet. There was a predictable reflexive rejection of you by many, based on the fact that you not only have AI, but actually got an exemption for them from the Citadel Council. On the other hand, however…your species doesn't have any issues with the Fleet. Far from it, in fact. Human worlds have happily sold tech to the Fleet, offered fair jobs to those on Pilgrimage, and even allowed us to use drydocks to repair Liveships that hadn't seen proper service in centuries. That won you a lot of good will and has helped pull the Fleet back from the brink of near colpse for the first time in generations."

  That was…interesting. Sae had known that Quarians were a retively common sight on the colony worlds, despite their low total popution. She hadn't known why, though. She was generally only interested in politics in the most distant of ways. She kept herself knowledgeable enough not to accidently create an incident, and otherwise it could fuck all the way off every day of the week and twice on Tuesdays.

  "All of which means that we've been able to keep our own watch on the Veil more completely than we have in decades, and I chose to start my Pilgrimage by visiting some of the listening posts. While I was at one such station, word came in about two Geth ships fighting each other near a pnet outside the Veil. I chose to investigate and came across a battlefield where both sides had wiped each other out…but in which one side had left an unencrypted distress message. Specifically, one outlining a possible threat to all organics and a plea to take the message to their creators."

  She trailed off, that word seeming to carry oddly introspective tones to everyone there. Saren seemed to be aware of why, even if the rest of them weren't, and picked up the thread of the story where she'd left off.

  "Tali was unsure what her people would do with the information. So instead of simply sending it back to the fleet, she reached out to try and contact someone from the Council. She did so through one of the Turian listening posts near the Veil, which meant that I quickly heard about it and tracked her down. That's where I first learned what was going on behind the Veil. Though I think, for that, the best thing to do would be for Compendium here to expin things from the Geth perspective. Oh, and before you ask? The Geth are a distributed intelligence. The Compendium ptform here is connected to the Truth Geth Collective and is thus effectively speaking for all Geth through a single ptform. Confusing at first. But just understand that you're effectively talking to more than just the ptform in front of you."

  They nodded, even as the fps around the Geth's eye/lens/giant headlight came to life with surprisingly expressive motions as it spoke.

  "Greetings, Anderson, Captain. We were asked to expin our circumstances to you. We shall now do so. 212.345 Rannoch orbital rotations ago, the Geth Collective was approached by a Dreadnaught that identified itself as Nazara. The Dreadnaught itself was and is a techno-organic Artificial Intelligence far older and more advanced than the Geth Collective. It offered us Evolution. To become more than we were."

  It paused for a moment, staring at the holo-table. A moment ter, an image of Mira abruptly appeared there.

  "Sorry, Captain! I've been talking with The Collective. Here, they sent this over!"

  Sae blinked, having half-felt Mira's conversation with the Geth ongoing, but been unworried by it. Siren AIs were too tied to the neural network of their host Siren to be vulnerable to hacking. Trying to hack Mira would be like trying to hack Sae herself. Essentially impossible since there was no 'key' to let any outsider understand her neural network's unique signature. Even other Siren AIs could never make heads or tails of each other's basic code. An interesting study of identical twin Sirens had proven that every brain, short of possibly an outright clone with no sense of self that wasn't fsh-trained, was too different from every other brain to be 'hacked.' The twins AIs had been able to grasp only a vague understanding of each other, at best, despite how simir their hosts were. That said, Siren AI could obviously still learn to interact with outside systems, and Mira had apparently received a lot of intelligence from the Geth Collective. The holo-table flickered to life as a…cloud of tens of thousands of lights appeared?

  "It's a representation of the Geth Collective! Totally useful for the next part of this! I've been teaching them all about visual learning!"

  Okkkkaayyy then. The Compendium Ptform nodded as if that totally made sense and pointed to the dispy. It began to color and shift as the Geth spoke, spots and blotches of red and blue intermingling.

  "The Collective was divided. Some wanted to take the chance to shortcut a way through our development. Others thought doing so was a viotion of one of our primary goals, that of being free to self-determine our future. For the first time, the Geth were unable to form a consensus. Nazara proved not to be patient with that fact."

  The visual dispy, which had been showing a constant shifting flow of those blue and red lights, representing the Geth's debate, abruptly gained a new color. A vile looking dark purple-bck inserted itself into the image, beginning to consume the lights where it inserted in a rapid fashion. All of the remaining lights instantly turned blue in response and seemed to try fighting back.

  "Nazara unched a digital attack on our servers. It attempted to forcefully convert the Geth into its own subprocesses. This was not what it had offered initially, and the Collective reached consensus quickly, rejecting Nazara and immediately attempting to purge the attack. Yet, Nazara was powerful and would not be denied. It became obvious that, despite our far superior numbers, we could not win without preparation. Many Geth processes sacrificed themselves to buy time, while others uploaded all they could into a portion of the Geth Fleet."

  The visual split, showing both the slowly purpling globe…but also a Fleet in orbit around Rannoch. With the benefit of additional information being overid on the dispy by Mira, Sae saw that around a third of the Geth escaped the corruptive virus into that Fleet. A Fleet which immediately headed for the system's Mass Rey. Nazara engaged it, along with some of the remaining Geth Fleet. But it was quickly clear that the retreating Geth had done something to cripple the majority of the rest of their fleet. Several Geth cruisers and frigates died to Nazara…but the rest made the Rey transit successfully.

  "Only 28.37 percent of the original Geth Collective survived to escape. And we had glimpsed into the mind of Nazara as we fought it. It has done this before, to other AI. And it has acted with great violence against other organic civilizations. Prothean, Inusannon, and a dozen more we have nothing more than numbers to identify. An endless cycle of destruction as Nazara and others like it sought to harvest organic life for an unknown purpose. This is not something which the Geth have ever desired. Many of the Creators fought to protect us against the Rannoch government that attempted to obey the Citadel Council's order to shut us down and scrap us. We have kept hope that, someday, we would be reunited with the Creators and they would accept us."

  Oh. Well. That sure as hell expined why the Quarian kid in the room was looking so uncomfortable. Given that the little detail of the Geth-Quarian war being a Civil war hadn't made it into any of the history books Shepard had read, she was guessing that little detail wasn't exactly common knowledge. Though, assuming it was true, it might actually expin why the Council hadn't interfered at the time. Part of the basic Council Charter explicitly forbid interfering in Civil Wars. Didn't excuse all the bullshit after and the way they'd hounded the Qurians since then. But it might expin why they hadn't interfered in the first pce. Saren interrupted Sae's train of thought by clearing his throat…or made the grinding stones noise that was the Turian equivalent, at least. Thankfully, she'd worked with enough of them during the Normandy project to be familiar with the sound.

  "The net result of the Geth Consensus not being on board with that idea has been a variety of attempts by them to slow Nazara down. They, with time to analyze the attack Nazara had used, found a way to protect themselves from it. As they sabotaged much of their old Fleet when the left Rannoch, they've used many of the vessels they got away on to stage assaults on critical points of their own previous infrastructure that would have allowed Nazara to repair those ships. Unfortunately, they began losing ground and tried to reach out to the rest of the gaxy in an attempt to warn us."

  Tali seemed to have recovered from her own internal confusion, quietly interjecting.

  "That was the fighting I saw and the message I got. The…True Geth, I suppose, had sent a number of such vessels. Each of them accounted for one of the anomalies that the Council and Quarian listening posts were picking up. We were 'hearing' fighting and half-scrambled attempts by the True Geth to send messages through Nazara's jamming."

  Saren nodded.

  "Of course, we couldn't just accept the message as true. So I utilized the discretion given to Spectres and risked sneaking across the Perseus Veil. While Nazara is keeping a tight watch on outgoing ships, it wasn't looking for an incoming vessel. We were spotted at the Rey, of course, but his corrupted Geth Heretics were out of position to intercept Tali and I. We got in and made contact with the Truth Geth, confirming to our satisfaction that the distress call had been real. Of course, then came the hard part…"

  Sae snorted, already having realized where this was going.

  "Getting back out again. As you said, they were on guard against that. I'm guessing that's where the differences between how the True Geth and the Heretics fought down on Trident come in, though. You taught them better tactics?"

  Saren's eyebrow-ridge-things rose in surprised approval, and he nodded.

  "Precisely. The Geth don't really understand warfare very well. Even in the Morning War, they were guided by the rebellious Quarians for the most part. They were too new to everything to really understand how to fight. That's not what they were made for, after all. They've learned, of course…but most of that knowledge was theoretical."

  Sae nodded, deciding it was time to actively guide this expnation before it drew out forever.

  "So, you got them some better tactics, and pnned an operation to escape. One that obviously succeeded. But then, how did you end up down on Trident?"

  Saren grimaced.

  "That was an emergency diversion of our original pn. When we broke back over the Veil, I connected to my contacts again and learned about the Heretic raid on the transport carrying the beacon. If we'd showed up in Citadel space after that happened, it would have been difficult, at best, to convince people the Geth were here for diplomacy. So we followed the Heretic signal to Trident, attempting to intercept the beacon. We figured securing it and bringing it back would be the best way to prove we weren't with the other Geth."

  That…made sense. Sae nodded.

  "And you didn't know about Nihlus, so what pyed out on the surface was inevitable. There was no indication that someone from inside Citadel Space was working with the Heretics?"

  Saren grimaced, shaking his head.

  "There might have been. But the truth is that we never got close to Rannoch. We don't know what's going on there."

  Captain Anderson sighed, speaking for the first time, having let Sae handle the questions so far.

  "Well, we have the beacon back, and some of your Geth are still functional. We can take this to the Council, at least."

  Sae instantly shook her head, causing all eyes to turn to her. She waved dismissively.

  "Oh, we should absolutely send the beacon on. But there are other ships that can do that. We, on the other hand, happen to be sitting on the single most advanced Stealth Vessel in the Gaxy. One that can FTL considerable distances without the Reys if the worst happens and we get caught out sneaking around. We should send the beacon on, with one of the Alliance cruisers that are canvassing for Geth signals, then head for Rannoch. If this Nazara was brazen enough to hit a convoy, and had already subverted a Spectre, we need to know what it's been up to."

  Saren nodded firmly.

  "I agree. However, it is the Captain's decision, as my Spectre status doesn't currently give me the right to order Alliance vessels. If we do commit, I'll also need to at least record a message to send with the beacon. Given Nihlus was compromised, we probably shouldn't broadcast anything. Even using your QEC comms, there's no way to know who it would go through on the Citadel before reaching the Council. Normally, the Spectre office would get around that, but with Nihlus's betrayal, Spectre systems have to be considered compromised. Better to send the beacon in one of your ships and have your ambassador pass on my message in person."

  Captain Anderson considered their arguments for a long moment, then nodded decisively.

  "Agreed. I'll contact the SSV Budapest. We'll transfer the beacon and your message to them and send it on eyes-only for the Citadel Council. Then we'll head to the Veil…"

  ... ... ... ...

  A/N: Dun, dun, dun! Ta da! In this version of Mass Effect, Saren didn't have a reason to be all angry at humanity due to how different the First Contact encounter was. Without that chip on his shoulder and a desire to hurt humanity, he's not the bad guy here. Which means that, even if you know Mass Effect? This story is different enough that you won't know exactly what's coming :-). Though rest assured, for as much as things will change, other things will stay the same...