--> 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.
