6 Virmire

--> The rocket stations established on Asteroid X57 have been commandeered by unknown parties, status of the civilian engineers undetermined. The Normandy could simply destroy the rockets, but if the engineers are still alive, we would be responsible for their deaths. I’ll deploy on foot with Williams and Alenko to shut down the rockets manually, find out what’s going on, and save the engineers if possible.

--> Mission successful. Asteroid X57 is back on course to a stable orbit. Most of the civilian engineers are still alive. They were being held hostage by Batarian pirates who thought the Asteroid perfect opportunity to do major damage to humans. Saving the hostages required allowing the Batarian leader, Balak, to escape. He’s now on the Alliance’s priority target list. It's only a matter of time before we find him again. Hopefully that occurs before another such nearly disastrous attempt. He’s escaped justice once. I intend to see he does not do so again.

With this emergency resolved, we are free to head for Virmire. We still have no solid intel of the situation there. I’ve requested the Council mobilize forces for deployment, but they remain insistent on only sending the Normandy. Can’t risk provoking the Terminus Systems to war, etc etc. Let’s hope we won’t need reinforcements.

--> Virmire is in sight. Heavy AA fire emanating from a fortified facility on the planet. We also have a fix on the Salarian encampment nearby. We’ll drop in the Mako and clear enough of the AA guns in the vicinity of the encampment for the Normandy to land.

--> The Salarian Captain, Kirrahe, tells me the facility is Saren’s base of operations, a research centre. It appears Saren is on the verge of formulating a cure for the Genophage. With such a bargaining tool, Saren essentially guarantees the allegiance of all Krogan, and given the cure, the Krogan will become populous enough to conquer the entire galaxy.

Kirrahe tells me his transmission asked for an army; his forces are down to half strength, and so long as the AA guns remain in place, the only aid the Normandy can offer them is the away team. Nonetheless, Kirrahe has a plan to destroy the base.

His ship’s power core has already been retrofitted into a twenty-kiloton ordinance. The base, however, is so heavily fortified the bomb will have to be placed inside it to guarantee 

destruction. Kirrahe will break his men into three teams and attack one side of the base while my team infiltrates the other side. We’ll disable the AA guns on foot, the Normandy will land the bomb, we’ll put in place, and evacuate. We won’t be able to leave the bomb unattended for long. Anyone not at the rendezvous point on time will be left behind. There is a very good chance non of us will survive this mission. But so long as that bomb gets set off, the mission will be a success. 

 

I’m sending a transmission to the Council reporting the situation on Virmire and what little we know about Saren’s plans. If all else fails, if Saren escapes and we do not survive, someone else can pick up where we left off.

Wrex is conflicted, naturally. I’ve managed to convince him that allegiance to Saren will in the end be nothing other than slavery. I’ve promised him that, if possible, we’ll recover Saren’s research data before we blow up the base.

Kirrahe needs one of my officers to coordinate the teams, someone who knows Alliance communication protocols. Kaidan will be needed to arm and set the bomb. Williams will accompany the Salarians.

Despite the impending battle, it is peaceful here. The waves break upon this alien shore with the same serene cycle of ebb and flow as any beach on Earth. Strange birds whose names perhaps no human knows call to each other over the lulling song of the breakers. Three-legged craps muddle resolutely about in the shallows upon business of their own, blurbling and mumbling, heedless of the battle brewing above their heads like the distant phalanx of thunderclouds that begin to gather menacingly on the horizon.

The Salarians are moving. It's time to go.

--> The base is destoryed, Saren escaped, Kaidan dead, and what’s left of the Salarians on board the Normandy. Kaidan’s death is on me. When the bomb was in position, the rendezvous sight was overrun by Geth reinforcements. It was a choice of either picking up Kaidan at the bomb or Williams with the last Salarian assault team pinned down on the AA tower. With no time to evacuate both parties, I made the only choice I could, and saved the greater number of lives.

A nagging voice in my mind tells me that I made the choice I did, not to save the greatest number of lives, but to save Williams. She crosses my mind all the time. I keep forgetting that she’s a soldier like me, and I her superior officer. For the first time since I enlisted, I find myself wishing I were not a soldier in the Alliance Military. But I have more urgent matters to attend to. I can sort out personal issues once this Reaper situation is resolved.

The Reapers are perhaps even more of a threat than we realized. While in Saren’s base, we found another Beacon. It is unknown whether Saren found it already on Virmire or brought it there for more thorough study. As Liara had predicted, touching the Beacon filled the gaps in the Visions. The Visions were a distress signal and a warning of the at the time ensuing Reaper invasion; a warning come too late, it would seem. Through glimpses of images in the Visions, Liara recognized the planet Ilos as being of prominent importance, almost certainly the location of the Conduit. We still don’t know what the conduit is, and we cannot reach Ilos without access to the Mu Relay, which Liara says was blown by supernova into a nebula thousands of years ago. It could take decades of searching to find the Relay. We can only hope Saren remains as ignorant of its location as we.

And we discovered something else on Virmire. Sovereign, Saren’s ship, is not a vessel of Reaper design, but is in fact itself a Reaper. Where it has been lurking for thousands of years we can only guess, and why he has chosen now to take action can only be surmised. He claims, for we spoke to him through Saren’s office terminal, to be a “life form beyond our comprehension,” “transcending our very understanding.” He says the numbers of his kind will “darken the skies of every world,” that “organics exist because his kind allow it,” that we will end “because they demand it.”

Despite the very real threat Sovereign poses as one sole creature, let alone what an invasion of more of his kind could do, I detect unwarranted hubris in his speech. He claimed to be the “pinnacle of evolution,” and almost immediately after said his kind had no beginning or end, “eternal.” This super-intelligent, ultra-powerful machine, this sentient dreadnought of incredible age and awesome power, is exhibiting traits of arrogance and self-contradicting blather. Whatever their origins, whoever made them, whatever the reasons for why they establish this cycle of extinction, they are clearly not without limit, not purely logical. They’re flawed, and flaws can be exploited.

Until further information sheds more light on the subject, given that the Reapers left alone the primitive Asari, Human, Turian, and other races when they exterminated the Protheans fifty thousand years ago, and the monstrous ego issues Sovereign exhibits, it seems most likely that the Reapers simply wait for organic civilizations to reach a point of technological maturity where they can put up at least a token challenge, then the Reapers squash them and leave, waiting for the next crop of organics to grow, replenishing and increasing their strength from the harvested species.

I have of course reported everything to the Council, but they insist that Saren is deluding me, that the Reapers do not exist, that there is nothing to worry about.

We don’t know where Sovereign and Saren have gone, or what their next step is. We have one more lead, the rumours of Geth activity on Noveria. But first to the Citadel, to drop off Captain Kirrahe and his men.

For centuries, humanity has prided itself on its supremacy, believing itself to have shaken off the primitive superstitions that haunted our collective subconscious for untold millennia; monsters, ghosts, and demons, beings of malignance and power beyond our mortal ken. For ages these hostile creatures lurked in the shadows of our cultural imagination, slowly fading from memory as humanity reached for the stars.

Then we found the Relays, and all pretensions of invulnerability vanished in an instant. What would we find, we asked ourselves, if we opened that door? Phantoms we thought we'd forgotten grew suddenly real again in our minds, a thousand mists hiding as many horrors…

But our fears once again faded as we met what lay beyond the Relay. The Turians, the dominant military force in the Galaxy, the martial spacefareing species strength we tested in battle. They were an enemy we could match, even surpass.

Now we meet a Reaper, and it seems that our darkest dreams have come true. A host of beings, any one of which is more than a match for any vessel conceived of, emerge from the dark recesses of the distant and unsounded past, bringing with them all of the suppressed nightmares we'd learned to scoff at. These monsters destroyed not only the Protheans, but an uncounted number of races that preceded them; civilization after civilization, culture after culture, all have fallen before the Reapers. And we're next.

The Reapers have yet to meet their match. It's high time this game of theirs was ended.