37Unity of Mankind
Chapter 18
Started: 11 April 2017
Published: 13 April 2017
Pre-note 1: Keep in mind that I'm using the convention of all measurements (time, distance, mass, etc.) being shown in Human measurements, regardless of who's actually talking. So even though, for example, a Thessian 'year' is different from an Earth 'year' (according to the ME codex, Thessia's orbital period is 0.9 years, so presumably their 'year' is ~328 – 329 days instead of 365), when any Asari character quotes a number of 'years' in my story, the actual number presented is measured in Earth years. Presumably she's actually saying a different number than I'm writing down in the text, but that would just get confusing.
The squadron lay still, the rounded wedge-shaped hulls of Alliance and Unity warships floating serenely next to the squared-off bulks of the troop transports. The faint sunlight from the far-off sun of the system was all that illuminated the ships, playing over the smooth white paint of the Alliance vessels as well as the light-blue of their Unity counterparts. With all systems save for life support and passive sensors held at a cold standby, the ships should be all-but-impossible to detect.
Or at least, that was what Captain Shepard devoutly hoped as she stared at the tactical repeater in her quarters. She didn't know what sensors the alien ships used, but they didn't seem to have been able to follow her squadron's retreat from the planet. As it was, most of the alien vessels still held their orbit above the ruin-covered planet, with only their smallest warships patrolling an area several light-minutes in radius around the larger combatants.
It seemed that the enemy were not eager to let Shepard's bombers get another run in. Not that she was planning on another such attack — with all of the shuttles running back and forth between the alien ships, she had no way of knowing which of the enemy vessels held the prisoners hopefully recovered from the crashed Defiant. Of course, it was possible that there were no prisoners — either they had perished in the crash, or had not been allowed to surrender — but Shepard would hold out hope until proven otherwise. It was why her ships had stayed in-system for the five days since the fight, instead of withdrawing through the Artifact. Shepard wasn't leaving until she had some idea of where the enemy may be taking the captured Humans.
In the meantime, her strike craft were useful in other ways. The wing's scout craft stayed as close to the enemy ships as was safe, sending the sensor readings back to Shepard's squadron with tight-beam laser bursts. The light-speed data transmission meant that the tactical readout in Shepard's quarters was nearly a full twenty-four hours out-of-date, but it was worth it to maintain the squadron's concealment. Besides, as soon as the alien vessels made any move to leave their orbit, the scouts were to break stealth in order to send the up-to-date information via FTL grav-pulse before jumping away to safety.
In the meantime, the rest of the squadron got time to rest their crews and repair what damage the ships had taken. For the most part, this meant re-applying the smart-paint to the long gashes that marked the hulls of almost all of the Human vessels. Besides the lost Antietam, Bull Run, Fredericksburg, and Shanxi, the rest of the warships had not sustained any penetrating hits, their armor doing its job admirably when the ships could angle properly towards their enemy so as to not present the flat face of their hull as a target.
As it was, Shepard wasn't even that certain just how necessary re-applying the smart-paint was. Yes, the absorbent material was key to keeping the ships' sensor profiles to a minimum, but even with the damaged areas showing up plainly on the sensors of the other vessels, the Human warships were still easily an order of magnitude harder to detect than the alien vessels were. The enemy ships practically glowed with infrared emissions, and their hulls seemed to do nothing at all to absorb even the low-power radar pulses from the Human scout craft.
Hell, the scouts could watch the alien crew through the windows on the enemy ships. Windows! On a warship! Shepard wasn't certain whether to laugh at or admire those alien sailors who were apparently so indifferent to danger as to go into combat with such a ludicrous design.
Could the aliens be using some other sort of sensor, besides thermal, radar or LADAR?
"Ma'am, Artifact's lighting up!" Her XO's warning jolted Shepard from her thoughts.
"Acknowledged. I'm headed up." She grabbed her helmet off of her desk before kicking off for the door. If the Artifact was activating, that meant one of two things: either she was about to receive some unexpected reinforcements, or the enemy were about to do the same.
In the null-gravity conditions of the Warsaw at rest, Shepard found it difficult to stride onto the bridge as she'd prefer. Instead, she had to make up for it with tone of voice as she floated in through the open hatch. "Any update, Andrew?"
Commander Harris glanced over his shoulder from where he sat in the Captain's chair, before shaking his head. As he removed the restraints holding him in place, he responded "No, ma'am. Our grav sensors picked up the Artifact spiking just a minute ago; matched the pattern for a transit emergence. But we didn't pick up any ship coming through. Artifact's gone silent again, still no ship trace."
As her XO vacated her seat, Shepard flipped over the back of her chair, landing in place and buckling herself in. "Any reaction from the enemy?" Her squadron was lying doggo much closer to the Artifact than the alien ships were. The gravity-wave spike from the Artifact should have reached the enemy just seconds before she entered the bridge, by her mental calculations.
"No grav readings from them yet, ma'am. We should be seeing any response from them shortly." As if to punctuate his words, the tactical display in the center of the bridge briefly flashed, indicating that it had shifted to a new data input stream.
Shepard glanced at the readout and frowned. "Scouts grav-pulsed us the data." She gestured to the now-shifting enemy warships in the display. The small enemy pickets were moving back in closer to their capital ships, whose own grav-distortion readings were climbing back towards the levels that they'd displayed in combat several days ago. "Looks like the aliens weren't expecting the Artifact activation, either."
"Strange. Not one of theirs, then?"
"Possibly. Then whose?"
A sudden chirp heralded the sudden appearance of another ship-readout. But it was not near the enemy ships.
Instead, the yellow-coded unknown popped into being barely a dozen kilometers off the port beam of the Warsaw. In the middle of a Navy squadron on alert.
Un-detected.
No sooner had the action-stations alarm automatically begun to sound than the new contact's representation on the tactical display shifted from unknown-yellow to friendly-green.
Shepard blinked in surprise. Who in the—
A different chirp sounded, from her communications console. Reflexively, she tapped the key to answer the incoming message.
And unknown woman's face looked back at her from the small display projected in front of her command chair. An unknown face, attached to a body wearing a Unity Navy Commander's uniform.
"Captain Shepard, my apologies for dropping in unannounced." The woman nodded sharply. "Commander Cheng, Unity Navy. I've brought a message for you from Alliance Command. Transmitting now."
Shepard nodded slowly in response, even as her console beeped in to acknowledge the receipt of the message. "Can't say we were expecting you, commander."
Cheng's lips parted in a slight grin. "I should hope not. If you didn't see us coming, then hopefully these aliens won't either."
"Interesting." Shepard glanced at the tactical readout before responding. "Can I hope that you're here to help in the counter-attack?"
The Commander's grin disappeared. "I'm afraid not. My ship's a raider, not a set-piece warship." She coughed, awkwardly. "I believe that the message should contain your new orders."
Shepard held the Unity officer's gaze for a second before glancing down to read the message. They weren't here to help rescue the Defiant's crew? As soon as the message was decrypted, she started reading. As she scanned through the text, her eyes gradually narrowed into irritated slits. After nearly a minute of reading, she was done.
Glancing back up, she glared at Commander Cheng. "My squadron is to retreat back through the Artifact, and abandon the Defiant's people?"
At least Cheng had the decency to look embarrassed. "I didn't cut the orders, ma'am. I just carried them to you."
Shepard took a deep breath, looking away and fixing her gaze back on the tactical readout. The enemy warships looked to be at full readiness now, their pickets spread out enough to foil a bomber run but still close in enough to be an effective combat formation.
And they still outnumbered Shepard's squadron several times over.
Turning back to Cheng, the captain let out her breath slowly. "Well, you've stirred up the enemy enough that I definitely can't get in a surprise attack now. And I can't make a run for the Artifact just yet, either — jumping to FTL would leave a grav wake big enough that the enemy could intercept us at the Artifact easily." Frankly, she wasn't sure why the enemy were patrolling near the planet, instead of camping on top of the Artifact and trapping Shepard's squadron in-system. "As soon as they calm down, my squadron will withdraw. Will your ship accompany us?"
"No." The commander shook her head. "We'll remain in-system here, ready to ambush any targets of opportunity that present themselves."
"I see." Shepard tapped a few commands into the command chair's controls. "I've forwarded you the recorded sensor data we've got on the enemy since the Defiant was downed. Note that we have yet to identify which enemy ships have our POWs aboard."
"Received. We'll take that into account."
Liara leaned back on her bunk, staring at the ceiling above her. A computer sat on the desk which took up much of the remaining space in the small stateroom, but she'd long since run out of interest with it. The Hierarchy fleet that had arrived in the system earlier had not left a communications-relay buoy behind at the Relay, and according to Benezia the Turian Admiral in charge had refused to split off any of his ships to do so since. And without the buoy, the computer in Liara's compartment had no extranet access.
She frowned. Then again, seeing as how the ship she was on was technically still in an active warzone, it was likely that any communications would have been restricted, anyways. At least, that matched what she'd always seen of wars in movies and stories.
Rolling onto her side, the young maiden let out a sigh. So far, her experience of the 'war' had been five minutes of mind-numbing terror, followed by several hours of sitting idle in a corner of a Human ship's cargo bay, and then nearly four days of equally mind-numbing boredom onboard the diplomatic-service frigate that she now found herself aboard.
Benezia had been too busy talking with the leaders of the two Citadel military formations and talking to the Human prisoners. Shiala — usually the one person in the T'Soni extended 'family' who had always been happy to talk to Liara when she had been younger — and the rest of the commandos were too busy guarding those same prisoners, especially when they were short two commandos from the fighting.
And Liara wasn't allowed to get involved in any of it. She knew well enough to stay away from her mother's negotiations with the other leaders — Liara had learned at a young age that diplomacy was not a topic that she had any interest or particular skill in — and the commandos wouldn't let her talk to the prisoners. She wasn't sure if she wanted to talk to them so soon after the firefight that she had been caught in earlier, but at least it would be something to do.
As it was, she'd simply retreated to her room, and had almost finished reading through all of the books she had stored on her omni-tool. Goddess willing, something interesting would happen before she finished her last book.
Just as she reached over to re-activate her 'tool for another chapter, a soft knock at her cabin door interrupted her. Frowning, she glanced over to her right. Who could that be? "Hello?"
"May I come in?"
Liara started in surprise. "Of course, mother."
The door hissed open, and Benezia stepped through. Not Lady Benezia, Matriarch T'Soni, but simply Benezia, Liara's mother. The young maiden relaxed at seeing that her mother had shed her old commando armor in favor of a flowing yellow dress.
Benezia closed the door behind her, and took a seat on the corner of the desk across from the bed. For several long seconds, she silently looked back at Liara. For her part, Liara was struggling to find a way to start the conversation that Benezia presumably intended to have. The last time the two of them had had a 'heart-to-heart' had been in Liara's bedroom in the family manor on Thessia, many years ago on the night before she left for University.
It…hadn't gone well. Liara had been able to practically feel the disappointment radiating from her mother when she had discovered that the young maiden had already laid out her course schedule. Prothean history, archaeology, several of the sciences, but none of the psychology, xeno-history, or political-science courses that Benezia had all-too-obviously held out hope for.
Just as the silence was becoming awkward, Benezia spoke softly. "How are you, Liara?"
The young maiden considered her options. She could lie, but Benezia had literally centuries of experience at reading other people on top of being her mother. Truth it was, then. "Bored." Before her mind could clamp down on her mouth, another word slipped through. "Lonely."
Benezia swallowed, glancing away. "I am sorry to hear that." Sighing, she turned back. "I acknowledge my own fault in your predicament, as well. It has been a…difficult…few days."
"I understand."
Her mother cracked a warm smile in response. "I know you do." Her smile dropped suddenly. "Has not Shiala been talking with you since…" she waved one hand expressively, trailing off.
Liara shook her head. "She's been too busy pulling guard duty over the prisoners, since Ephea's still recovering from her wounds and Meveera's gone." Thankfully, Meveera had been one of the House commandos that Liara had never really interacted with as a child. As awful as it sounds, after all of the shocks Liara had gone through the past few days, Meveera's death just hadn't really rattled the young maiden as much as she felt it should have. "I tried talking to Ephea down in the medical bay, but she's still to far-out on painkillers for real conversation."
"So I've heard." Benezia grimaced. "She was hit with an eezo-laced explosive at point-blank range. Frankly, it's a miracle that she survived at all."
Liara nodded silently, feeling the gloom of the week's experiences settling down to smother the conversation. One glance at Benezia's solemn features was enough to remind the maiden that her mother had likely had enough stress from her own work already. Casting her mind around for something happier to comment on, a particular memory from after the fight earlier drifted to the top of her thoughts. "I think one of the Humans might be a medical doctor or medic. Maybe she can help?"
"Oh?"
"Yes, the one who wore the large armor. After the…" Liara swallowed before continuing "after the fight at the first meeting in the Prothean hangar, she went to one of their people, who had been shot several times in the chest." She waved one hand over her abdomen. "It was…messy."
"I am sorry you had to see that."
"It wasn't the worst thing I'd seen by then." Liara shook her head, seeing Benezia wince out of the corner of her eye. "As I was saying, the armored Human — Harper, she said her name was — spread some chemical from a pouch worn around her waist on his wounds. Less than a minute later, and the bleeding stopped. He sat up and was talking barely five minutes more after that."
"Interesting. But why do you think she would help us? She's an enemy soldier, after all."
"Well, she was the first of the Humans to ask if I was okay after the fight, and she checked over all of the wounded, not just the Humans. And when the ship we were on crashed, she covered me from the debris bouncing around in the cargo bay."
"Really?" Benezia's eyebrows shot upwards, the black-paint marks above her eyes arching in surprise. Reythe had the same sort of paint applied above her eyes, and had once told a younger Liara that it was done to mimic the patches of hair that Quarians grew above their eyes. "It sounds like I may owe this 'Harper' my thanks." She paused for a second. "In fact, would you like to ask her if she would be willing to look at Ephea's wounds?"
Liara thought for several seconds before answering. Did she want to talk to the Humans again? She still had difficulty sleeping well, memories of the frantic fire-fight in the hangar earlier waking her up throughout the night. She glanced over at her de-activated omni-tool. Then again, it was something interesting to do. And as Benezia had pointed out, Liara should take the opportunity to thank Harper for protecting Liara during the crash earlier. Nodding, she turned back to face Benezia. "Yes, I think I would."
'Captain' Jackie Harper sat in her cell, contemplating the intricate paint adorning the walls and ceiling. Flowing lines of calming colors mixed in a pattern that evoked the gentle roll of ocean waves, circling around the small room.
All things considered, she doubted that her cell was intended for holding prisoners. It felt more like some passenger liner's stateroom than anything else. And not an 'economy-class' room, either, what with the indirect lighting coming from recessed strips along the upper corners of the walls.
The locked door, and the guard that she knew was standing outside of it, were nevertheless quite up to the task of keeping her contained in the room. Without her armor, she had no hope of forcing the door open, and the electronic lock which glared red at her from the middle of the door was clearly password-encoded. She couldn't even find any proper controls for the lock on this side, but it was possible that those had been removed before she had been ordered into the room.
As it was, her internal chronometer was just passing ninety-seven hours from the surrender aboard the Defiant, and nothing interesting had yet happened. Just sitting in her room for most of the day, interspersed with regular food deliveries to her room. She would have called it 'room service' if the meals hadn't considered of Alliance MREs. Then again, for all she knew the aliens considered arsenic to be a common spice for their own food, so perhaps the MREs were tolerable in the end.
Harper often heard people walking past outside, and could even hear their conversations through the door. They weren't speaking Citadel Standard, so she couldn't understand them, unfortunately. And none of the guards — three of them that Harper had learned to tell apart by the sound of their voices — had talked back to her when the Unity officer had tried to start up a conversation in her Citadel Standard. She knew they could hear her, almost as well as her enhanced hearing could hear them through the door, but they didn't respond. It wasn't that they were nervous or shy, just well-disciplined.
Harper chuckled. They certainly weren't shy — the same guard followed her on her scheduled visits to the bathroom down the hall, and stood silently watching her the entire time, as if she would violently escape even while her under-suit pants were bunched up around her ankles. At least the bathroom facilities were familiar enough to use, although she noted that the toilet seat seemed to be of a single immobile piece with the rest of the assembly. That probably amused the male Alliance POWs, assuming that they were still being held on the same ship. At least it solved the age-old debate on what position to leave the toilet seat in. Maybe the Asari had grown tired of that old argument, and put an end to it.
She frowned. Come to think of it, she hadn't yet seen any male Asari, and they were the only species of alien she'd seen aboard the ship since she had been marched aboard from the Defiant's wreck. Talking with Liara all those days ago had informed her that the 'Turians' and 'Batarians' whose bodies had been recovered were, in fact, different species entirely.
A loud knock on the door to her cell drew Harper from her thoughts. A sharp laugh worked its way out of her throat. What, were they asking her permission to come in? With laughter in her voice, she called in Citadel Standard "Sorry, I'm too busy to take visitors right now. Please schedule an appointment with my secretary, standing by the door."
After a heartbeat of silence, she faintly heard a short conversation in the vowel-heavy flowing language that the Asari seemed to speak among themselves. A second later, and the red light on the door flashed to green as it split open.
The Asari from the first fight — Liara — stood framed in the doorway, the guard glaring in at Harper from over the other Asari's shoulder.
"Ah, Liara. Glad to see you again. Come right in!"
"Uh…thank you?" The Asari stepped inside, the guard following her and standing to the side of the doorway as the door itself hissed shut once more.
"I'm afraid I wasn't expecting visitors, sorry." Harper waved to the half-eaten MRE packet lying on the empty desk opposite of her bed, and the canteen with it. "I can offer you a choice of water or no-water."
Liara just stared back, mouth slightly open.
A laugh that Harper couldn't hold back erupted out, her head cocked back as she collapsed onto the bed. After several seconds, she managed to wrest enough control over herself to sit back up.
Liara still stood just inside of the doorway, head cocked slightly to one side. The guard behind her was doing her level best to glare a hole straight through Harper's skull. Harper's eyes followed the guard's left arm to where her coiled fist was wreathed in a familiar blue glow.
Suddenly mindful of that she was entirely unarmed and un-armored, Harper quickly got her laughter under control. "Sorry, I haven't had much anything to do for the last few days, and messing with you seemed a fun diversion."
Liara slowly grinned. "I can understand." She walked over and, after a moment of hesitation, took a seat on the edge of the desk, facing Harper.
"So, did you come down here just to let me mess with angry-eyes over here," Harper nodded towards the guard, who kept up her glare "or did you have another reason?"
Before responding to Harper, Liara entered another rapid-fire conversation with the guard. After perhaps two lines each, the guard lowered her fist and worked her jaw, visibly trying to relax her posture. Turning back to face Harper, Liara said "Don't be too hard on Neyana. Her younger sister was badly wounded when they first tried to force their way aboard your crashed ship."
"Ah." Harper nodded slowly. Mulling over her thoughts for a second, she turned to face 'Neyana.' "My apologies, miss." Her voice darkened. "Many people lost friends down there. All cope differently."
Neyana did not respond, until Liara spoke another slow sentence in their Asari language. Finally, the guard managed to croak out "Apology accepted." A pause, and then came a gruff "Thank you."
Excellent. It was good if Harper could try to form some sort of connection with the aliens. Maybe they would let her talk to Williams, see how well he was recovering from his wounds? The medigel should have taken care of the structural damage from the shots, but the Human body needed time to heal from the shock and internal damage.
Turning back to Liara, she added "And you? Are you okay after the fighting?"
"I am…well. Actually, that's another thing I wanted to say: thank you for protecting me when your ship crashed."
"Ah, yes." Harper remembered reflexively shifting to push Liara into the corner of the cargo bay, and then covering the small alien with Harper's armored body. Really, the action was more reflex than anything, that and a drive to protect the only non-violent and talking alien prisoner they'd taken at the time.
But it wouldn't hurt to build some better reasoning for it. After a second of thought, Harper continued, "You reminded me of one of my older daughters. She was caught up in a fire-fight when she was three years old, and wasn't the same afterwards." Harper looked over the Asari, nodding. "You look around as old as she was, then."
"Oh. I, uh, I think we may be measuring 'years' very differently. I am seventy-four years old."
Harper felt her eyebrows shoot upwards in surprise. "Huh. That's more than three times me." She paused, thinking. "Here, what fraction of a year has it been since you marched me out of the Defiant?"
To her credit, Liara answered after only a few seconds of apparent confusion. "About four three-hundred-twenty-eighths."
After some quick calculations, Harper responded "So your year is around ninety-percent of ours. Wow." She looked back over Liara. "You look good for that sort of age."
"Ah…" Liara stammered, Harper noting with some amusement that the Asari's cheeks flushed purple. "Thanks?" She shook her head before continuing. "So that makes you…twenty-eight? And you already have at least one daughter?" Liara leaned in, head tilted to one side in what Harper assumed was curiosity. "What is the normal age of biological adulthood for Humans?"
"That's a complicated answer. For base-line Humans, generally somewhere between ten to thirteen years. Legally, it starts between fifteen to eighteen years, depending on the country."
Liara blinked several times. "That's so…young." Her brow furrowed, the unmarked fine scales there shifting. "Wait, 'baseline'?"
"I wondered if you'd caught that." Harper smiled. She had considered whether or not to describe how she was different from the other Human prisoners, but had decided that it may be worth it to make herself 'stand out.' She gestured to herself with one hand. "I am not a baseline Human. I am a genetically-engineered member of the Unity, a group of artificially-improved Humans. Marking a particular age of 'biological adulthood' for such as me is…difficult. Our bodies do not actually do the work of creating children, but rather our minds. But at least 'societal' adulthood in the Unity starts between two to three years. I fathered my first daughters when I was four."
Liara's eyes shot open in surprise, as she leaned back against the wall behind her. "That's…wow. The Salarians have nothing on you." Her eyes shifted focus back to Harper after a second. "Also, 'fathered'? Not 'mothered'?"
"Unity bodies are grown, non-sentient, in tanks until their brains have matured enough to support a conscience. Then, they are 'imprinted' upon by the mind of a person who links with the system as the bodies are de-tanked. Those whose minds are awoken by the imprint become full Unity members, the daughters of the 'father' who gave them life."
There were several long seconds of silence before Liara responded. "Wow. That's really weird. We don't have anything like that in Citadel space — too illegal." Her brow furrowed once more, and she asked "But what happens to—"
The guard interrupted the conversation with a quick sentence of the Asari language.
"Oh. Ah, right." Liara responded in Citadel Standard, pausing before continuing to talk to Harper. "Not that that isn't fascinating, but I do have a more important question."
"Go ahead." Harper nodded. She was rather interested to learn more about the 'illegal' aspect that Liara had hinted at, but the whole purpose of this conversation was to try to make herself seem friendlier to the Asari, so the question would have to wait.
"One of our people was badly wounded by an explosive — Ephea, Neyana's sister — and we don't have the medical supplies to treat her here. Back after the first fight" Harper's hearing managed to catch the microscopic hitch in the alien's voice at the word 'fight' "I saw you treating one of your wounded. He had been shot in the chest, and something you did healed him in minutes. Could you — would you — do that for Ephea, too?" The alien's next few words rushed out in a torrent "IfYouDon'tMindBecauseYou'reADoctorMaybeAndIt'sTheRightThingToDo."
Harper paused. Technically, giving non-emergency medical care to an enemy combatant did fit the definition of 'treason' under both Alliance and Unity military conventions. But then again, it would endear her to the Asari, which would aid in her mission to gain both their trust and information. For that matter, if the Asari apparently believed that Harper was a medical technician, then that would give her a good reason to ask to see Williams, to 'make sure that he's recovering.'
Finally, she nodded. "I would certainly be willing to do so. It is my duty to see that all those wounded in combat recover swiftly." She would ask about Williams later, once the 'moral inertia' of her helping the wounded alien had had time to build up.
Harper saw Liara's eyes light up in response, and held up a hand to stall the Asari, adding "But first, I need access to my kit. It was taken from me when I surrendered onboard the Defiant." The medigel was a slurry of nanomachines and bio-engineered 'blank slate' cells which took their shape and function from the surrounding natural cells. There was no mechanical reason why they shouldn't work with alien biology, simply replicating the patterns already present. "And second, I need to know how badly she is wounded. My medigel should be able to heal any injury short of major organ destruction."
Liara glanced to the guard, and the two passed a few sentences back-and-forth that remained irritatingly unintelligible to Harper. She'd see about fixing that later, too. The alien turned back to Harper. "That should be fine. Her injuries are mainly muscle and bone damage to the lower legs."
"Good. That should be very simple to treat." Harper swung her legs over the side of her bed, and made to stand up. "When do we start?"
After a quick discussion with Neyana, Liara walked side-by-side with Harper down the corridor. After the junior commando had cleared their idea with Shiala and Benezia, they had departed from the stateroom-turned-cell, moving towards the medical bay. One of the other commandos had gone off to retrieve Harper's gear from where it was held in the cargo bay of the diplomatic vessel.
Liara glanced to her left, looking over the Human. In her armor all those days ago, Harper had towered over Liara, seemingly large enough to bench-press a Krogan. Come to think of it, the Human had apparently won a fist-fight with Wrex during the confused melee in the stairwell at the start of this entire mess.
But now, wearing only her grey-and-white suit, Harper looked to be barely any taller than Liara was. It was hard to reconcile the glad-to-help woman walking beside her with the gruff, armored giant that had stomped around the battlefield in that damned hangar.
The small group came to a halt outside of the medical bay, where Sersha met them, the commando holding the same fabric pouch that Harper had described earlier. The Human grabbed the pouch and opened it, drawing out a palm-sized cylinder. She held it up to her face, squinting at the small display on the side of the opaque container. "Good, still some left. Should be enough to get the job done, but it might not work as fast."
"Oh?" Liara looked closer. The Human letters meant nothing to her, but the whole assembly still piqued her interest. "How exactly does it work, anyways?"
"It's mostly bio-engineered organic tissue by mass, stuff designed to be reshaped into about any form of organic life known to Mankind." Harper glanced up at Liara. "Should be able to adapt to working with alien tissue well enough, but it will throw an error and stop the process if it can't, so there shouldn't be any danger from mal-formed cells."
"'Throw an error?' That sounds more like a machine."
"Well, yes. The…" Harper trailed off, brow furrowed. Liara watched with curiosity as the small patches of hair above the Human's eyes emphasized the movement. She knew that the inked-in markings on her own face were an Asari fashion meant to mimic the narrow eyebrows of Quarians, but the Human equivalent seemed to be broader in shape.
Liara started as she realized that Harper was looking at her, curiosity etched on her face. "I'm sorry, I missed what you said there." No way on Thessia was Liara going to admit that she'd been staring.
"Ah. I was saying that I don't actually know the right word in Citadel Standard. At any rate, the very-very-very-small machines in the medigel actually do the work of forming the new tissue into shape, reading the DNA of surrounding natural cells to get their instructions."
Liara, Neyana and Sersha glanced between each other, none of them needing to state what they were thinking.
Harper sighed. "Let me guess, something in that is also illegal for you?"
"I don't know if nanomachines — the small machines I think you were talking about — are exactly 'illegal,' but they're certainly restricted. It's more that combining that with bio-engineering — which is definitely illegal — is…controversial."
Switching to Thessian Standard, Liara asked Neyana "What do you think? Ephea's your sister."
The guard eyed the container that Harper held. "It's not anything I'd try, but really, the decision's up to Ephea." Nodding slowly, she added "I'd ask her before trying anything."
"Okay. Ah, it's probably best if you ask her."
"Agreed." Neyana walked over towards the airlock leading to the sealed environment of the medical bay, chuckling. "Either way, twenty credits says Reythe will really be interested in the nanomachines."
Liara and Sersha snorted in response. "No bet." Commented Liara. "My budget's thin enough without losing twenty credits on a certain loss."
Still grinning, she turned back to Harper, and switched back to Citadel Standard. "We'll check with Ephea whether she wants to try it or not. Is that a common medical treatment for Humans?"
"Sounds like a good idea. And no, it's mostly just the Unity who use medigel widely. Most non-Unity civilians, at least, prefer more standard nanomachine-only treatments. But those are much slower, not much faster than natural healing. However, for soldiers in an actual battlefield, I find that most soldiers are fine with anything that stops the pain and stops it fast."
"Makes sense to me." Commented Liara.
Just then, Liara's omni-tool lit up, acknowledging receipt of a message from Neyana. Reading it, Liara nodded. "Sounds like Ephea wants to try it." She looked up at Harper. "You're absolutely certain that it won't hurt her, right?"
The Human nodded. "Completely." She held up the medigel canister, pointing to a bright-red button near one end of the container. "Worst-case scenario, if anything happens then I press the emergency stop, and the nanomachines instantly disassemble themselves into harmless base elements. Just carbon, oxygen and nitrogen. Without them, the base-biomatter is entirely inert, and can be removed without harming the patient."
"Interesting. Out of curiosity, could just anyone apply this 'medigel,' or is there some trick to it that requires training?"
"It works well enough for anyone, just stick the nozzle past the blood and hold down the 'apply' button. But even then, there's a trick to knowing just where to apply the medigel and in what amounts to make the healing proceed at the fastest pace." Harper paused, frowning briefly. "Again, I don't know enough about Asari physiology to really be able to judge that, now."
Harper paused for several seconds. Just as Liara was about to speak, the Human tapped the side of her head with the hand that wasn't holding the medigel canister and continued. "Normally, I could mind-link with the nanomachines and guide them to work even faster, but my transceiver's broken, so that's no good, either."
Liara and Sersha exchanged another glance. "Mind-link?" It seemed that every other sentence with this Human led to another one-word question from Liara.
"Yes. All Unity members have mind implants that let us link with many of the machines we design, to better control their use. It also lets us link minds with each other, speak directly between brains without the rest of the body slowing things down. It's also how we link with our daughters when they are 'born' to imprint them." She grinned at Liara. "I know that sounds a bit weird to most people, but it works for us. And no, I can't read your mind; it doesn't work that way."
Liara was quiet for several seconds before responding. "That…does not sound as weird to me as you may think it does." Her mind was overflowing with even more questions — was there another species (well, sub-species, by the sound of it) in the universe for whom melding was normal, even if these Unity-Humans managed it with technology instead of biology? — but there were more pressing matters. She shook her head before responding "We should talk about that later. For now, let's see how your medigel works on Ephea."
Liara led Harper over to the med-bay entrance, Sersha following behind. The three of them walked into the airlock, the outer door hissing closed behind them. Grabbing two of the over-suits from the rack on the wall, Liara held one up to the Human. "This one looks to be your size."
Harper looked at the blue-white garment and laughed. "Bunny suits?"
"Bunny?" Liara cocked her head at the foreign term.
"Earth animal." Harper shook her head. "A 'bunny suit' is old slang for an over-garment that one wears to protect the environment from contamination." She grabbed the suit and began slipping it on over her own clothes. "Haven't seen one of these except in history lessons. Most everything that's environmentally-sealed these days uses a nanofilm to coat anyone entering the area, and intercept any contaminants that way."
"Ah." Liara responded, halfway through putting on her own 'bunny suit.' "Well, it seems that you Humans are more comfortable with such technologies than most are in Citadel space."
"Well, at least we're close enough to the same shape that this thing fits easily." Just as Harper was about to lower the suit's hood over her face, she added "Oh, one more thing."
Voice muffled by the hood over her head, Liara responded "Yes?"
"Once Ephea is recovering, may I inspect the wounded Humans as well? Their health is my responsibility, and I suspect I'm the best-qualified person aboard this ship to check that they are recovering properly."
"I don't think that should be a problem. I'll clear it with the guards once we're done here."
The three people walked through the inner airlock door, their cushioned feet padding against the floor. As they walked over to the bed where Ephea lay, Harper commented "Huh. I thought you were in charge here."
"Really?" Liara glanced over, grinning at Harper through the clear face-plates of the suits' hoods. "Why?"
"Well, if you aren't the senior-most at seventy-four years old, then who is?"
Liara paused mid-stride, before laughing hard enough that her hood dislodged and shifted sideways slightly. Pushing it back into position, she responded between breaths "You're…a bit off. As it happens, I'm the youngest Asari aboard."
Now it was Harper's turn to numbly respond "Really?"
"Really."
"Huh." Harper nodded slowly. "I think we will want to talk more later. But for now…" the three stopped at the foot of Ephea's bed, Neyana standing next to her sister's head, holding her hand through the commando's own bunny suit. "…our patient."
Liara nodded, turning to meet the gazes of both Neyana and Ephea, in turn. "Are you certain that you want to try this?" Liara herself wanted to see how the process worked, and to learn more about the Humans. She more-than-suspected that Benezia had supported the idea more to get the apparent-leader of the Humans to socialize and open-up more, to make later negotiations easier.
But if Ephea or her sister objected, then Liara would absolutely hold off on the procedure.
Neyana looked down at Ephea, the two sisters looking at each other before nodding. The maiden laid out on the bed replied, her voice much clearer than when Liara had last tried talking to her several days ago. "If it gets me out of here faster, I'm all for it. They flushed the pain-meds out of me when you proposed this" she weakly waved to the four people standing over her "earlier, so the pain's coming back. But being only half-conscious from the pain meds isn't much better. I'd rather be rid of the whole mess."
Harper looked to Liara, who realized that the injured commando had reverted to her native Thessian Standard. "She said she wants to try it."
"Good." Harper looked down at the purple-stained wrappings around the maiden's legs, covering everything between her knees and her feet. She reached for the loose end of one bandage before asking "Should I be the one to remove this? I don't know the nerve-pattern of Asari feet well enough to properly minimize the pain."
Neyana walked up next to her, and began to remove the bandages. "I'll get these."
As the bloodstained bandages finally came free, Liara swallowed hard to quell the bile rising in her throat. Ephea's legs essentially stopped just below the knee, only mangled flesh and specks of shattered bone linking the knees to the lumps of tendons and sinew that remained of the maiden's feet.
"Uhh…" drawled Harper. "This may be just on the limit of what medigel can fix in any short amount of time."
"Yeah." Responded Ephea, hissing at the air blowing softly over her wounds. "Still, the medical report says that I'm looking at several months of recovery at the least, so anything's better than that."
"Very well." Harper gingerly applying medigel over the Asari's wounds, the grey paste seeping into the torn flesh. After a minute of work, the Human straightened. "That's the last of it. Should take a few hours to fix what it can, but that won't be very much with what materials it has available." She held the medigel container up, examining it. "Definitely not enough to re-build more than around a quarter of the damaged volume. But…"
"But?" Asked Liara.
Harper gestured to Ephea's damaged legs. "It looks like most of the tissue and bone mass is still present, just deformed. The medigel doesn't have enough innate supplies to re-construct her legs entirely, but the nanomachines can be set to salvage materials from on-site."
"Wait, so it would take her legs apart for spare parts?"
"And then put them back together again."
The two of them looked over to Ephea, who glanced back, eyes wide. "I, uh, think that that might be a bit much."
The Human shrugged. "Patient's choice. Even as-is, you should heal several times faster than natural." She tossed the small medigel container to Neyana. "Keep this. If anything seems to go wrong, hit the red button on the end, and the nanomachines cease work immediately. Should be about a ten-meter range on the signal."
The two sisters looked back at her. "Thank you."
Nodding, Harper turned to Liara. "Now, may I perform my inspections of the rest of the wounded?"
A few minutes later, and the small group were walking further down the corridor outside of the medical bay, Harper being led to where at the very least Williams was being kept.
The Unity officer grinned to herself, careful to keep her exterior features motionless despite the spreading sense of self-satisfaction she felt. She'd not only managed to get out of her cell and form at least a limited map of the ship that she and the other prisoners were held on, but she had also gotten a few of their captors to hopefully hold a better view of Humanity. That could be useful, later.
And even in case it didn't, that was military-grade Unity medigel that she had applied to the wounded Asari. The nanomachines would only turn inert if ordered to halt, not disassemble themselves. Harper's own neural transceiver wasn't working well enough to potentially re-active the nanomachines at a later date, but she could cobble together a simple transmitter from some of the rest of her kit, if only she could get access to it.
Having one of their guards be susceptible to a sudden hijack of her own nervous system could also be useful, depending on the plans that Harper and the Alliance soldiers decided on.
After all, the foremost duty of any POW was to escape.
AN1: One of the things that I just realized while writing this chapter is that several parallels can be drawn between two canon characters that I've never actually seen compared before: Liara and Jack Harper. Both were people who, at a young age, saw people they cared about killed by a combination of an evil Turian and Reaper technology.
Liara saw Benezia commit 'suicide by Shepard' to escape Indoctrination caused by Saren, while Harper saw his close friend Ben Hislop killed by the Reaper artifact from Shanxi, after being (presumably) repeatedly exposed to it on Desolas's orders.
Both Liara and Harper then see someone whom they love (Shepard for Liara, Eva Coré (implied) for Harper) killed, and eventually take steps to have that person brought 'back to life' in one way or the other. Liara hands Shepard over to Cerberus for the Lazarus project, while Harper presumably models the name & personality of the infiltrator-robot in ME3 (the one whose body EDI takes) after Eva.
Both Liara and Harper come to lead massive intelligence networks around the galaxy (Broker network versus Cerberus) to fight against the Reapers, both implied to have done so as a reaction to seeing their friends killed.
And both end up being targeted (with very different degrees of justification) by their species' governments. Aethyta manages to talk the Republics down from apparently ordering Liara's assassination, while Cerberus ends up being hunted by the Alliance (with much better justification, admittedly).
AN2: One of the other things I wanted to play with in this story was having a more weird trans-Human faction. Plenty of other ME-fanfics on this site have interesting trans-Humans (usually AIs or extreme cyborgs), but they're generally shown as being still quite Human in terms of many societal factors (ages, family units, etc.). I wanted to have the Unity be, while still Human enough to be recognizable and fun to write, still strange enough to stand out.
As it is, I've changed their 'age' norms (adulthood at a point where normal Humans are learning to walk and talk at the same time) to create a number of interesting angles that I want to explore later in the story. I mean, people 'born' into the Unity are popped out of a growth tank, and can walk and talk the instant that their body comes on-line. Does that sound like any other lovable young fellow we know from ME canon? Grunt's going to fit right in.
AN3: I'm also changing medigel slightly, both to fit my storyverse and to better explain how it works as it does in the games. I mean, in canon ME medigel is purely bio-engineered matter which acts only to hold wounded flesh together until it can be healed later, after the fight. However, in-game it acts as a magical healing salve that instantly restores HP in the field without any later healing required.
So in my story, medigel is a combination of biological and mechanical matter, with nanomachines that essentially look around them when inserted into a wound, and take 'instructions' from surrounding cells before building more of the flesh around them. I'll go ahead and hand-wave just how they know where to build different types of body-bits (say, different muscles) so someone doesn't end up as one solid-connected blob of tissue.
Also, I think this does a better job of explaining how medigel works on both organics and synthetics (it would be rather annoying if neither Legion nor EDI could be healed in-battle), and why it actually accomplishes healing the target instead of just being a super-effective band-aid.
AN4: I don't remember exactly if nano-machines are illegal or not in canon ME, so I kinda played them down the grey area in the middle here. I'm mostly paralleling current-day real-life opinions that I've seen towards such technology: "it's dangerous, creepy, and the subject of far too many horror movies & grim techno-thrillers (Michael Crichton's 'Prey', anyone?) to trust, but if it saves lives I'll tolerate it."
Heck, come to think of it, the modified medigel in my story is pretty much like the nanomachines from Crichton's 'Prey' (a novel that I greatly enjoyed reading as a kid), but beneficial instead of homicidal (I promise! Huehuehue), and without the explicit intelligence.
AN5: Oh, and yes, it's quite possible that medical over-coats used for protection in a sterile environment have an entirely different nickname other than 'bunny suits.' But that's the term that's used for such clothing in a sterile machining-lab (like those used for assembling microchips and the like), so it's the one I'm most familiar with.
AN6: Also, woo! Longest chapter yet!