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Without a doubt, Eden Prime was the most picturesque place Liara had ever had the pleasure of digging. Feros, Therum, Namakli: they were all fascinating sites, but archaeology usually came with its fair share of discomforts. Cramped housing conditions, rationed food and water, variable temperature… exotic insects…
Eden Prime, in comparison, was a paradise. They were staying in a nearby suburb of Constant, in lovely homestays with freshly cooked meals made of locally grown produce. Liara hoped her funding would never run out.
Certainly, she had no worries about running out of things to study. From what had been uncovered so far, Eden Prime seemed to be a Class A Prothean planet: if not a local capital, at least a major administrative centre. It showed all the attributes of High Classical Prothean architecture, with its devastatingly tall slanted spires and angular exterior incisions on black alloy buildings.
Though she was still young by asari standards, Liara was experienced enough to merit a position as Site Supervisor — at least in comparison with these other human archaeologists. She felt a twinge of impostor syndrome. After all, on Thessia, she could hardly get the average matron to take her seriously about… well, anything. Among the short-lived humans, though, she had esteemed professors attending her lectures. Imagine being a quarter of the way through one’s lifespan before even having a postgraduate degree! It seemed terribly tragic, to her.
Consequently, Liara found herself more comfortable among the younger graduate students than their supervisors, when working onsite. She particularly liked Ann Bryson, a postdoc sent on special commendation from, of all things, the human military. Evidently her father was a project manager for the Alliance. Although her academic background was in an unrelated field — rachni communications, Liara recalled — she brought her own funding, so not much further was asked.
The Eden Prime Project had solicited the assistance of a team of local farmhands, to expedite digging through the more barren upper layers of the site. Many of them were young men who were more interested in Liara than in the meagre payouts at the end of the day. She was sure it was simply because they had never seen an asari before. Indeed, Eden Prime seemed to be quite homogeneously human, even for a colony world.
The farming equipment cut easily through the loamy earth, so quickly that Liara nearly missed it: a rectangular discolouration in the layer.
“Stop! Stop!” she shouted, running forward in the path of the backhoes. She fell forward onto her knees and flipped open a scanning attachment to her omnitool.
“By the goddess. It’s a beacon!”
The other archaeologists swarmed forward into the centre of the trench, while the equipment operators looked at each other in bewilderment. The team was abuzz with excitement. A single beacon could generate enough publications to sustain careers and float entire PhD’s.
“How shall we proceed, Dr. T’Soni?”
It was a tremendous responsibility. If they could see her now… any Thessian would laugh. She felt in no way prepared to spearhead such an important find. One only gets one chance to excavate an artifact, after all.
“We proceed as usual,” she replied, squaring her shoulders and trying to disguise any quaver in her voice. “Layer by layer. Backhoes away, let’s get our trowels out, everyone.”
There was a shimmering chorus of a team of archaeologists configuring their omni-trowels. One at a time, they knelt at their designated grid points and began to dig.
“Ann. Why don’t you help me with this?” Liara beckoned to the young researcher to join her, kneeling at the juncture where the tip of the beacon was kissing fresh air for the first time in at least 50,000 years.
The brunette lit up and picked her way across the grid to reach Liara’s side. “Great!”
Together, they set to levelling out the soil around the edge of the beacon.
Over the next half hour, the top edge began to peek out more and more: a broad shoebox of black alloy.
“This is still all topsoil, Liara,” Ann said, dusting her hands off into a bucket.
“Yes. The beacon must have been positioned at a high point in the ancient landscape.” Liara rocked back on her heels to survey everyone else at work. Nothing else had been recovered so far, aside from the usual mineralized skeletons of native Eden Prime wildlife.
The beacon was made of the same mysterious black alloy as most other Prothean constructs. The method of production of the material was unknown. Liara knew of a few salarian universities working on experimental reproduction of Prothean Black, but their publications rarely circulated outside Sur’kesh. Prothean Black was always very smooth, almost warm to the touch. Its angular green incisions could be either decorative or symbolic; most researchers had given up the question. A beacon should have multitudes of those incisions. Liara loved the way they always seemed to glow of their own phosphorescence.
Idly, she ran her fingers along the periphery of the top edge of the beacon. The soil in this part of Eden Prime was so moist, almost muddy. It made the area exceptionally well suited as an agrarian colony, but had a few drawbacks for archaeology. Dirt had encrusted along the broad edge of the beacon. All it would take to remove it, would be a little scrubbing from her fingertips…
red death stretching meat the synthetics the synthetic monsters are coming they are coming prepare for your doom you must fight you must prepare the reapers are coming we could do nothing we could do NOTHING
Liara rubbed her eyes with the flat of her palms. Her head ached so badly that her crest-tips tingled.
She was in a room, walls painted white, the soft beeping of medical equipment identifying the place as a clinic. Ann Bryson was sitting in a small chair beside the bed where Liara lay, her kindly face furrowed with concern.
“Liara? Are you waking up?”
“Oh, Ann.” Liara sighed, and winced as she sat up in the bed. “That was dreadful. Is the beacon alright?”
Ann laughed: a wholesome, generous sound. “Yes, Dr. T’Soni. The beacon is fine. Although we’ve had to set up an armed perimeter around it. We don’t want anyone else to get zapped, no matter how hard they try.”
Liara could only imagine some of her zealous coworkers sneaking up in the middle of the night, hoping to get a glimpse of Prothean enlightenment.
Surely, they would be bitterly disappointed.
“I never thought I would say this, but I wouldn’t wish the experience on my worst enemy,” Liara said.
Ann propped her elbows on the edge of the bed, and leaned forward, open curiosity in her round, dark eyes. “Did you see anything? Did the beacon actually transmit anything?”
“I saw… I’m not sure what I saw.” Death. Destruction. “…Nothing’s really clear.”
“But you saw something!” Ann crowed, delighted. “This is huge!”
“Yes,” Liara said, vaguely. “Ann… thank you for staying with me. But… I would like some time alone, to collect my thoughts. I’d like to take some notes, try to ascertain what it is I did see.”
At her crestfallen look, Liara followed up: “I promise to share my findings with you. Who knows, maybe even co-authorship?”
Ann clasped her hands and seemed to sparkle as she headed back out the door, leaving Liara alone with a datapad.
What did she see?
Massive creatures, uncountable, descending from the skies in swaths of destruction. She felt the terror of the Protheans, scattering to the four corners of the galaxy, hiding where they could, fighting to the death where they could not. There were also, she realized, star charts. Diagrams. Trajectories. She realized with horror that they were maps plotting out the route that the Reapers had taken, systematically wiping out the entire Prothean race.
Reapers. The word was not in her usual vernacular. That, too, must have been supplied by the beacon.
The collapse of Prothean civilization was a mystery that had become practically cliché in any undergraduate archaeology course. Despite the inconceivably vast quantity of archaeological evidence left behind — entire planets covered end to end with urban infrastructure, sometimes with still-functioning mechanisms, not even fully buried by sedimentation — there was no working hypothesis for their extinction that seemed to account for everything they knew. 50,000 years ago, there was a massive destruction event. Radio isotope dating could identify the destructions as happening within only a few centuries of each other, across the entire galaxy, from the Athena Nebula to the Pangaea Expanse. And yet they could identify no warring factions, no invasion force. It was unthinkable that something could wipe out entire colonized planets, and not replace them with something else. Hundreds of papers had been put forward, postulating agricultural collapse, disease, network failures — and yet, in the face of the utter absence of any supporting evidence, each hypothesis had to be laid to rest. All the mechanisms of Prothean civilization seemed to be working just fine — if not straining to accommodate a wartime economy — until the day that everything began a slow descent into rust and decay.
And there were almost no bodies. Not for the populations that must have existed. Uncovering a Prothean skeleton was as rare and celebrated an event as uncovering a working beacon.
A few hundred years ago, these questions were chic. Asari scientists made their names cataloguing Prothean relics and seriating their architectural styles. But progress hit a standstill after the pan-galactic dating project was complete. The destructions were so closely contemporary. Researchers were baffled. They began to give up, move on. Smaller case studies were much more en vogue these days. Recovering the details of the turian Unification War, for example, was printing a lot of books.
Liara’s curiosity, however, couldn’t be turned aside.
This beacon alone could answer so many of her questions. For one, what did the beacons do? They stored data, to be sure, but in what form was that data meant to be disseminated? Surely not the painstaking forensic techniques archaeologists were forced to employ, in order to get the tiniest samples of the treasures locked within.
Now, Liara knew. The beacons interfaced directly with organic neurophysiology, transmitted images directly into the brain.
The images weren’t very nice.
She was tapping absently on the datapad, writing her thoughts stream-of-consciousness style.
The message is clearly a warning. A warning regarding these so-called Reapers. But who is the intended recipient? The Protheans of Eden Prime? Was this a final call for help, for evacuation, from one colony to another?
Liara ran her fingers in the crevices of her crest. Something was bothering her.
Could it be that the intended recipient… was us?
She set down the datapad abruptly. No. That was insane — self-aggrandizing and egocentric. Clearly, it was an internal communication from one Prothean settlement to another. A final letter that Liara was the one to pick up.
In the back of her head, though, was a niggling doubt that she could not shake.
That night, Liara was afraid to sleep. She was certain the visions from the Prothean beacon would chase her into unconsciousness, and make her relive them over and over. When she finally passed out, just a few hours before her alarm was set, she was blessed with insensate darkness — until her nostrils filled with the smell of smoke.
She groaned and rolled over, certain that it was the dream that she had dreaded. Abruptly, she coughed herself awake. It was no dream.
She opened her eyes and looked to the window of the guest bedroom she was occupying for her homestay.
Eden Prime was on fire.
She threw aside the bedcoverings and dashed outside in her nightdress. Her host family was in the living area, throwing belongings into rucksacks. But where were they supposed to run?
The beacon.
Liara had tried to remain staunchly apolitical in her research. Governments were always trying to exploit scholarly work on the Protheans, hoping for a big break, another technological leap forward. Since her work was on the question of the Prothean destruction — a matter of rather low practical utility — she was generally left alone. But any Prothean dig site would be politically charged, whether by military arms of government trying to gain access to its knowledge, or by hanar throwing down PR obstacles in the name of religious freedom.
Liara should have known better. She should have investigated how the information about the beacon was being leaked. She should have vetted the marines stationed to guard it. Instead, she was convalescing, like the meek little Maiden that she was.
Who knows who was trying to loot her dig site now?
Someone organized, at the very least. She ran barefoot across the rocky paths of the agrarian suburb. From the way the sky was burning, this could be no less than a full-fledged military assault.
The batarian Hegemony? Terminus pirates?
It didn’t matter. She had to protect the beacon.
Gunfire. On instinct, she threw herself behind a tree. Its trunk was so spindly that it offered no concealment whatsoever.
On second thought, Liara wasn’t even sure it was gunfire. The peppering ft-ft-ft came at far more irregular pulses than the elegant turian weapons she remembered from Fleet & Flotilla.
Then, from much closer, she heard what she was certain was assault rifle fire: the same wet pew pew she heard sometimes when the local Alliance company ran its drills.
Of course. There was a garrison here. She’ll be saved. Everything will be okay.
She nearly popped out from behind the tree, until she heard a keening death cry from a human voice.
“Nirali!” a woman screamed. Then, booted footsteps, running at a frantic pace in Liara’s direction.
The asari was too afraid to do anything but let the marine run past. It was a tall woman in a white and pink Alliance hardsuit, a rifle in one hand, head down as she ran for her life.
She glanced over her shoulder, caught sight of Liara, cursed, and turned back to grab Liara by the elbow.
“Run! Now!” the woman shouted. Liara didn’t need much convincing, although she admitted that this human did have quite a persuasive air.
She took off as quickly as she could alongside this human soldier, quite able to keep pace despite that she was not of a particularly athletic sort. No doubt it had to do with the fact that Liara was in a nightdress and this other woman was wearing a full set of ceramic plating.
“Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams of the 212,” the woman said by way of greeting. “I’m all that’s left of the garrison, so let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”
“L- Liara T’Soni,” Liara said, trying to conserve her breath at this breakneck speed. “I’m an archaeologist working at the site.”
At this, Ashley seemed to glance at her askance.
“And you thought you would go down there and protect it?”
Liara bit her lip, ducked her head, and focused on running.
“Alright, doc,” Ashley said. “It must be pretty important. Let’s see if we can double back, do what we can to keep the bad guys from winning.”
It all felt wildly surreal. Liara crawled on her hands and knees, her nightdress fluttering behind her, as Ashley scoped through her sniper rifle at the dig site down the ridge. It was swarming with bipedal mechs of a completely alien design. They moved so fluidly, and there was no one around giving them commands.
“No,” Liara breathed. “Could it be… geth?”
“That’s what I was thinking too,” Ashley said grimly.
The machines had co-opted some of the farming equipment, and rigged a crane to the still-buried Prothean beacon. Two drills were set up on either side of the rectangular structure. They clearly intended just to yank it out of the ground.
“No!” Liara lunged forward, horrified at this violation of archaeological integrity.
Ashley grabbed a fistful of gauzy nightdress and pulled her back down. “Keep it together, blueberry.”
Liara’s fists curled, clumping around the fragrant grass of the ridge where they were hiding. There must be a way around this.
“Could you kill the crane operator from here with, um, with that thing?” she asked Ashley, of her sniper rifle. The soldier seemed almost offended that she would ask.
“Sure I could. That still leaves the sea of angry synthetics.”
“We wouldn’t have to face them directly.” Liara summoned a corona of blue biotics. “We just need to bring the beacon to us.”
Ashley pursed her lips, glancing over the display of dark energy. She seemed mistrustful, but resigned to use whatever tools were at hand.
“Alright. Just say when.”
She pressed her eye to the scope, and let her finger rest easily on the trigger.
The drills penetrated deeply into the soil, leaving the beacon nearly free-standing in the earth. The crane began to pull it upwards. Their carefully levelled layers, the pristine stratigraphic face of the baulks, were all for nothing as the geth tore the beacon vertically from the ground, leaving a large pit from whence no archaeological context could be properly determined.
It enraged Liara.
As the beacon swung freely from the hook of the crane, she growled, “Now.”
Ashley’s carefully aligned headshot fired true, and the geth operating the crane crumpled to the ground. The beacon hung indeterminately. The swarm of geth turned, as one, to face them on the ridge.
“Uh, doc…” Ashley warned.
But Liara’s fury was already channeled into a massive pull field. The beacon was leveraged free of the crane’s grip and began an improbable hover toward the two women.
“I’m beginning to think this wasn’t a great plan,” Ashley continued. The geth had begun to stalk up the ridge at an alarming pace. “Were we just supposed to make our getaway with that thing on our backs?”
It didn’t matter. Liara was so angry, so offended that this machine race would have no regard for proper scientific methodology–
A sudden lurch of opposing dark energy tossed Liara to one side. The beacon was wrenched from her biotic grasp by a far greater power.
“This is not your place, little wing,” said a familiar voice.
Liara felt herself encased in the cold grip of a biotic stasis field. Peripherally, she could see that Ashley had met the same fate. Geth approached them, rifles aloft and ready to fire — but seemed to glance at a spot over Liara’s left shoulder, then turned and walked away.
“Do not pursue this, little wing. I cannot promise I can protect you again.”
It was her mother’s voice, and yet it wasn’t. So cold. So… changed.
The swish of footsteps receding, and then the abrupt relaxation of the stasis field. Both Liara and Ashley collapsed, panting, on the ridge.
“Are you alright?” Ashley gasped.
“I… think so,” Liara replied.
They lay there together for a long while, as the wind blew plumes of smoke toward a distant horizon.
The nearest ship to the system was an Alliance frigate called the Normandy. Ashley had found a working comm system in one of the labs, and was speaking with the ship’s captain.
“The garrison was wiped out.” Ashley sounded drained, devoid of feeling. “We need a replacement company ASAP, and a crew to help the wounded and rebuild.”
“What about the beacon?” the human captain asked. He had a shadowed, scarred face, but seemed kind, sincere and professional.
“Gone, sir,” Ashley said. “Liara said it was taken by an asari matriarch. Matriarch Benezia.”
Liara turned aside. She had told Ashley that Benezia was her mother, but for whatever reason, the soldier was keeping it to herself for now.
The comm link buzzed with the captain’s sigh. “We’ll trace their signal through the relays as best we can, but we will probably have to find some other means of tracking where that beacon went. Is Dr. T’Soni with you?”
“Yes, sir,” Ashley said, and stepped aside for the asari to move forward into the comm’s field of view.
“H– hello,” Liara said.
“Dr. T’Soni. I’m Captain Anderson of the SSV Normandy. How are you holding up?”
“Um. Could be worse,” she said, twisting her hands together. She was terrible with first impressions.
“What do you think about coming aboard the Normandy, helping us out with tracking down your missing beacon?”
He had kind eyes, and a sympathetic voice.
“Alright,” Liara said, surprising even herself with how quickly she had agreed. Maybe it was because she was in no rush to get back to that poor, mangled dig site, strewn with corpses, stinking with the deaths of everyone she had met there.
Maybe it was because she was still stewing at the way her mother had dismissed her.
“You too, Chief Williams,” Anderson said. “We could use someone of your mettle.”
Ashley also seemed surprised. She saluted. “Yes, sir.”
For the second night in a row, Liara dreaded sleeping. If she woke up to fires this time, well… she memorized the locations of the escape pods. She had been assigned a rack, a little vertical sleeping capsule that could block out sound and other disturbances, but it seemed a touch claustrophobic to her. As much as the Normandy was state of the art, it was still a frigate, and space was tight. Tighter, even, than most of the accommodations she’d experienced in the field.
She grieved for Eden Prime, that devastated paradise.
She sat in on the debriefing in the conference room, meeting Captain Anderson for the first time, as well as his XO, Commander Shepard, and Staff Lieutenant Alenko. It was a little intimidating to be in a room so full of human males. Asari had no equivalent, and their broad bulk and general squareness seemed terribly aggressive to Liara. She presumed that male soldiers were probably even more masculine than average. She was glad that Ashley was seated beside her.
“Alenko, why don’t you show us what you found,” Captain Anderson said, gesturing with an open palm to the Staff Lieutenant.
Of the three, Alenko was the slimmest, with lush black hair and a full, pensive mouth. He rose to his feet and triggered the large display at the back of the room.
“I was able to retrieve some footage of Matriarch Benezia’s vessel from some of the spaceport vidcameras. The OSDs were a little damaged, so I apologize about the poor image quality.” He had a somewhat rough, sensuous voice, like a bassier version of the hardened Thessian commandoes of Liara’s imagination.
The screen flickered to life with an image of the Constant spaceport, festooned with cheery lights and long monorail tracks. Angry clouds gathered over the horizon, and then the delicate tips of what seemed like oversized aphid legs began to poke down to alight upon the ground. As the fog cleared, an enormous structure came into view: not so much a vessel as a monstrous construct, a techno-organic horror that vaguely resembled a cuttlefish.
“That’s a Reaper,” Liara said, unable to stop herself.
“Sorry, what?” Alenko seemed a bit miffed at being interrupted, but maintained polite decorum.
“N– never mind,” Liara said. “Please continue.”
“Well, I was just going to say that this ship doesn’t match any known profiles. Actually, it seems to defy the laws of physics. A vessel this size shouldn’t be able to touch down on a planet, much less take off again. But there it goes.” He scrolled ahead to a timestamp a few hours later, and the giant creature lifted away as gracefully as an airborne leaf.
“Can I– may I see that again?” Liara asked, timidly. Every instinct she had was screaming at her to shut up and stop drawing attention to herself, stop setting herself up to look foolish, but she felt compelled to satisfy the sense of recognition that had dawned on her. It was more than just the message from the beacon. She had seen that shape before.
Alenko dutifully scrolled back and paused on a frame that gave a good view of the entire ship. Many legs tucked up underneath itself, hovering primarily on the balance of two large frontal arms. A diamond shaped thorax. A long, split, pointed tail.
Liara had to refer to her books. When the meeting adjourned, she slipped off to find a quiet space to plug into a local comm buoy and try to retrieve her personal library.
There weren’t a lot of quiet spaces on the Normandy.
She finally decided to sit on the ground on the far side of the sleeper pod hallway. It seemed the most out of the way. Omnitool open, she flicked through the titles on her list, trying to jog her memory of where she had seen that shape before.
Someone was approaching. She focused on not looking up. She was doing something important. If she ignored them, they would ignore her.
It was Commander Shepard, and he sat down cross-legged beside her.
“What’s a Reaper?” he asked.
Each of Anderson and Alenko were quite tolerable on their own. Liara didn’t have a problem with males per se; she’d had to work with many of them in her career. One at a time, they were not a problem. Even a bunch of them in a coed group was fine. But when Shepard had walked into the room — that was when she felt she was in trouble.
He was terribly tall, firstly. Almost turian height, and without a fringe to tack on those last few inches. His face was gaunt and sculpted, with piercing eyes that were almost asari blue. And although he wasn’t grotesquely large or muscled, he seemed to radiate a certain masculine control that Liara found– well, threatening. Even in his posture, his power and presence seemed to pulsate from his flat, dense abdomen, and the mysteries of the male groin.
His tapered, curve-less body just seemed so aggressive.
It made her feel warm in a… not wholly unpleasant way.
“Dr. T’Soni?” He leaned forward, raising a brow to check if she was listening.
“Ah– oh! Um. Sorry.” Keep it together, blueberry. “I’m– not really sure. The beacon gave me visions, and it put that word in my head. Associated with monstrous synthetics that came and wiped out the entire Prothean civilization.”
Great. She sounded like a lunatic.
Wait. Why does she care if this Shepard thinks she’s a lunatic?
He looked at her with gentle, faintly amused eyes. “And you didn’t think that would be pertinent information in the debrief?”
Liara’s eyes widened. “I– No, I– I thought I should corroborate my suspicions first–”
It was almost worse that he was taking her seriously.
“Okay, then what have you got?” Shepard settled himself more comfortably against the bulkhead, leaning to look over her shoulder at her omnitool.
He smelled like musk and spice. Liara felt lightheaded.
“What’s that one about?” he asked, poking at one of the titles. Chemical resilience of wall painting at the billion year old Pyrathan site of Namakli. “A billion year old site? Is that even possible?”
Liara almost sneered. He didn’t even comment on the persistence of wall paintings, as stated in the title. Laypeople.
Her comment died in her chest. Namakli. That was exactly where she had seen that shape.
She whipped her head to stare at Shepard, who seemed mildly alarmed at her disproportionate reaction.
“How did you know?”
“Know what?”
Liara opened the book with a furious tap of the finger, and swiped through to the figure that she knew was inside: a schematic of the wall paintings of Pyrathan. It was a nearly perfect two dimensional rendering of the ship Alenko had called impossible, not twenty minutes prior.
Shepard whistled, impressed. “Go me.”
“That image is nearly a billion years old,” Liara hissed, flipping her omnitool into standby mode. She turned to face Shepard, fixing him with the full intensity of her gaze. He seemed unmoved. She ignored this. “That means that the Reapers were here long before the rise of Prothean civilization. Which means that they came back to kill them all. Which means they could come back for us.”
That, at least, got some reaction out of Shepard. His expression darkened, and he scrubbed his thumb across the stubble of his angular jaw. The gesture made Liara’s already racing heart leap.
She channeled the adrenaline into something more productive.
“Assuming it’s a cyclical pattern, we just need to figure out the trigger. The Prothean collapse occurred 20,000 years after they discovered mass effect technology. Along the same trajectory…” She thumbed a few calculations into her omnitool. “We should have about… 17,000 years of civilization before the Reapers come around again.”
She leaned back and thumped her head on the wall behind her. “That’s just about 34 asari generations.”
Shepard glanced at her quizzically, then assumed a similar posture, relaxing against the wall. “Then I guess we have time.”
“For what?”
“To get to know each other.”