Chapter Text
Captain’s Log, Stardate 58551.3. The Cerritos remains in orbit around Zatalix II. We had expected to finish evacuating the colonists from the planet yesterday, but our progress has been delayed by some… stubborn holdouts.
Mariner and Boimler were standing outside a small, pre-fabricated house in the middle of the main settlement. The colonist on the other side of the locked door was refusing to leave, and Mariner had been arguing with him for the past several minutes. It didn’t take a betazoid to tell she was getting annoyed.
“Dude, by this time tomorrow, the air is going to be so toxic it’ll melt your lungs from the inside out!”
“Bah!” the colonist inside retorted, his voice partially muffled by the closed door. “More Starfleet lies! You can’t trick me!”
Mariner made an annoyed sound, but before she could reply, Ransom’s voice came over their commbadges. “Ransom to all evacuation teams: the latest scans show that geological activity is increasing. You’ve got 15 minutes to wrap things up and get back to the shuttles.”
Zatalix II was home to a small Federation colony, one that had only been established a few years ago, and only had a few hundred inhabitants. Which was fortunate, because a couple days earlier, a supervolcano had unexpectedly erupted on the far side of the planet. The colonists had called Starfleet for help as the volcano continued to spew all sorts of unpleasant substances into the atmosphere. By the time the Cerritos had arrived, the biosphere had already started to collapse, and the volcanic emissions had made transporters impossible to use.
“Okay, forget this,” Mariner said, drawing her phaser and tuning it to the right setting. “We’ll just blast a hole in the wall, stun him, and drag him back to the shuttles.”
“You know I can hear you, right?” the colonist interrupted. “You’ll never take me alive! And neither will those slug creatures you’re going to hand this planet over to!”
Mariner rolled her eyes and aimed her phaser at the side of the house, but another voice behind her interrupted before she fired.
“So you know about the slugs too! Smart man!” Lieutenant Levy said as he passed Mariner and Boimler and stopped next to the door. “But don’t worry, they’re not going to be here forever. This planet is actually a trap for them!”
Mariner and Boimler shared an incredulous look, but neither was surprised that Levy had formulated some insane conspiracy theory about this crisis. After all, this was the same guy who thought Wolf 359 was an inside job and the Dominion War never happened. It would’ve been more surprising if he hadn’t cooked up some ridiculous idea.
What did raise their eyebrows was the colonist’s response. “…Really?” the colonist asked in a hopeful tone.
“Oh yeah,” Levy replied confidently. “This is all just one part of a much bigger plot! We’ve got to get out of here, but I’ll tell you all about it on the trip back to Starbase 282!”
The door to the house slid open and the colonist stepped out. Levy smiled and put an arm around the colonist’s shoulder as the pair started the trek to the shuttles. “See, it all began twelve years ago when…”
The two passed out of earshot as Mariner holstered her phaser. “Ugh,” she complained. “Now we’re going to have to listen to that bullshit all the way back to the ship. We should’ve just stunned that idiot.”
Boimler was genuinely unsure whether she meant the colonist or Levy, but decided to assume the former. “If we’re lucky, they’ll be on one of the other shuttles. Besides, at least now we don’t have to fill out a ton of paperwork to explain why a Starfleet officer phasered a Federation citizen.”
Boimler then checked the PADD he was holding. “That guy was the last one on our list. We should head back.”
“Yeah,” Mainer agreed, looking up at the massive ash cloud on the horizon. Though calling it a “cloud” was something of a misnomer. It covered most of the planet’s surface at this point. The wind had picked up and was rapidly pushing it towards the settlement. Nobody wanted to still be on the ground when it got there.
Meanwhile, on the Cerritos, Tendi approached the holodeck, clad in her N7 armor. Pausing outside the entrance, she tapped a few buttons on the LCARS panel to load her latest save file into memory. Then the doors slid open and she stepped inside. The holodeck grid was still bare for the moment, which was a deliberate choice. She had developed a sort of ritual to help properly immerse herself in the game world.
Standing in the middle of the empty holodeck, she closed her eyes. “Computer, resume program,” she instructed. She took a deep breath and cleared her mind as the computer bleeped affirmatively. She heard the holodeck initialize around her, then let out the breath she’d been holding and opened her eyes.
She was no longer Ensign D’Vana Tendi, a science officer trainee on the USS Cerritos. Now, she was Commander D’Vana Shepard, a badass biotic Spectre in command of the SSV Normandy. She was standing in the Normandy’s CIC, in front of the galaxy map, exactly where she’d left off last time.
In her last session, she’d just wrapped up her investigation of Noveria. The boss fight against Matriarch Benezia had been intense, though not as intense as the fight through the Thorian’s lair on Feros. Thanks to the events on those two planets, she now had the Cipher – some kind of ancestral Prothean knowledge – and the coordinates of the Mu Relay, though she had no idea where to go from there. She still had yet to determine anything about the mysterious Conduit that Saren was searching for.
Now, she needed to decide where to travel next: the Artemis Tau cluster, to look for Doctor Liara T’Soni, or Virmire, to investigate a vague lead that the Council had just given her. She’d been deliberately avoiding Artemis Tau. She knew quite well what it was like to have people assume you were involved in some terrible crime just because your parents were involved, and she didn’t want to put someone else through that, even if they were only a hologram.
But she had no idea how to make sense of the strange vision the game kept showing her, and Doctor T’Soni was supposed to be a Prothean expert. Not to mention that there was still one arms locker on the engineering deck that didn’t have a name on it. She suspected that T’Soni was the final squad member she hadn’t found yet.
And she also suspected that T’Soni would be a very powerful squad member to have. She’d noticed that her other five squadmates all aligned with one of the six character classes the game allowed the player to pick from. The only class not represented so far was the Adept class, and since most asari seemed to be capable biotics, it was logical to assume that T’Soni would fill that role.
Tendi knew quite well that Adepts were powerful, because she was playing as one. She still hadn’t thanked Mariner for that piece of advice. Mariner had recently played through the game herself, and had enthusiastically recommended it to her friends. She hadn’t spoiled anything, but she had given them one piece of advice. “When you set up your character, pick a class with biotics. Biotics are ridiculously overpowered and also super awesome.”
It wasn’t hard to figure out why Mariner liked this game so much. A story in which the protagonist is given a vague mandate to defend the galaxy in any way she sees fit, with no rules and no oversight? It was practically tailor-made for Mariner.
Tendi was enjoying it for very different reasons. The original version of the game had been created almost 400 years ago, and provided a fascinating glimpse into human society at that time. On top of that, the impressive attention to detail created a realistic alternate universe that she found herself thinking about even when she wasn’t playing.
And also because Mariner was right: biotics were awesome. Being able to throw things around with your mind was a lot of fun, even if all those things were purely holographic and you needed to wear a special suit of armor with a neuromuscular relay in it so the holodeck could interpret your hand gestures.
Which raised an important question. What would she be tossing around when she went looking for T’Soni? More geth? Hopefully not more rachni. She’d found out the hard way that their acid spit bypassed shields and could eat most of her health bar in one hit.
“Joker, set a course for the Artemis Tau cluster,” she ordered. “Let’s go find Doctor T’Soni.”
Mariner and Boimler arrived at the landing area on the outskirts of the settlement with only a few minutes to spare. They’d seen several shuttles lift off during their walk, and there was now only one left.
“Ensign Rutherford, how’s that intake manifold looking?” Ransom asked. He was standing a few meters away from the shuttle, along with Shaxs – who’d been handling security at the landing area – and T’Ana, who’d been scanning the evacuees for pathogens before clearing them for travel.
They’d had some engine problems when they’d flown down to the planet earlier. Another shuttle had made a quick trip back to the ship to get Rutherford and Barnes, who were now kneeling next to one of the troubled shuttle’s nacelles, putting the last pieces of it back together.
“There wasn’t enough time for a complete fix,” Rutherford replied. “It should hold long enough to get back to the Cerritos, but we’ll have to take it apart again later.”
“Good enough for me,” Ransom said. “Everyone on board! Let’s get off this rock.”
The seven of them boarded the shuttle and took their seats. Ransom was at the helm, with Rutherford beside him to monitor the shuttle’s systems. The rest of them sat on the benches in the back.
“Cerritos, we’re lifting off now,” Ransom reported as he powered up the engines. “ETA six minutes.”
“Understood,” Freeman’s voice came over the comm. “Be advised: that ash cloud expanded faster than we expected. You’ll have to fly through it to return to the ship.”
“Copy that,” Ransom acknowledged as the shuttle headed into the sky.
A few minutes later, they’d just cleared the ash cloud when an explosion suddenly shook the shuttle. An alarm went off at Rutherford’s station.
“The intake manifold just fractured!” he reported, as the shuttle began losing altitude. “The cloud must’ve been more caustic than we thought. The reactor is overloading!”
“Ransom to Cerritos. We’ve got an engine failure. Requesting emergency beam out!”
“We’re locking on now,” Freeman responded. “Stand by.”
The seven of them stood and the transporter beam enveloped them just as the reactor exploded.
On the bridge, Freeman watched tensely as the shuttle was destroyed, then turned to Billups, who was standing at the engineering console at the rear of the bridge.
“Billups, do you have them?” she asked.
“Aye captain,” Billups replied, tapping away at the console. “But there’s a problem. That explosion triggered a surge in the confinement beam. The primary energizing coils just overloaded. Their patterns are stuck in the transporter buffer!”
“How do we rematerialize them before the buffer loses coherence?” Freeman demanded.
“We can’t. But I have another idea,” Billups answered, still tapping buttons. “Perfect. One of the holodecks is already active. We’ll lose primary systems, but this’ll keep our people alive.”
Billups tapped the last few buttons in the sequence, and the lights went dark. The only illumination on the bridge came from the various consoles, many of which now showed gibberish instead of their proper functions.
“I managed to store their patterns before the buffer depolarized,” Billups explained, turning to face Freeman. “But I had to overwrite parts of the main computer to do it. We’ll have to manually bridge our ODN lines into some of the shuttles, so we can use their escape transporters to rematerialize our crew.”
“How long will that take?” Freeman asked.
“A couple hours,” Billups responded soberly. “And in the meantime, they’re not safe.”
Having located some Prothean ruins on a planet called Therum, Tendi was now seated in the Mako, with Garrus and Kaidan in the two seats behind her. The cramped seating was apparently related to adapting the game from its original form, which imposed a squad size limit of two for every mission.
The Mako was falling through Therum’s atmosphere when Billups’s voice came over the comm. “Billups to Holodeck Two.”
“Tendi here,” she responded. “Computer, freeze program.”
But the simulation continued. The computer didn’t even bleep in response.
“That’s not going to work,” Billups informed her. “One of the shuttles had an engine malfunction on their way back from the planet. We were able to beam our people out, but the primary energizing coils overloaded. I had to temporarily store their physical patterns in the holomatrix.”
Tendi’s eyes widened. “Wait, didn’t this exact thing happen on Deep Space Nine?”
“That’s where I got the idea from,” Billups confirmed. “How much do you know about it?”
“I read all about it!” Tendi replied enthusiastically. “It’s a brilliant idea for temporarily holding transporter patterns outside a buffer. Doctor Bashir’s account of how events unfolded inside the holodeck was fascinating!”
“Sounds like you already know what to do,” Billups said. “It’ll take a couple hours for us to get them out. I’ll keep you updated on our progress.”
“How many people are in here?”
“Seven,” Billups replied. “Commanders Ransom and T’Ana, Lieutenant Shaxs, and Ensigns Barnes, Boimler, Mariner, and Rutherford. Good luck. Billups out.”
Tendi gulped nervously. Half the senior staff and all of my closest friends. Still, this shouldn’t be too hard… right?