[TALI'ZORAH NAR RAYYA]
The woman's voice came out in layers — hoarse from disuse, precise from medical training, fractured by something that eleven months of solitary survival had carved into the space between words.
Dr. Yuki Tanaka sat in the operations center's command chair, the only seat on the station that still had functional padding. Her pistol lay on the console beside her, the barrel pointing at nothing. She'd been pointing it at them when they arrived. Now her hands couldn't hold it steady enough to matter, and everyone in the room was pretending not to notice the way her fingers spasmed when she tried to grip anything.
Tali stood at the sensor console, omni-tool running passive scans of the station's infrastructure. The data was wrong in ways that made her professional instincts itch — power signatures where there should be vacuum, electromagnetic patterns that followed no standard engineering profile, and underneath it all, a low-frequency vibration that her suit's sensors registered as background noise but her bones registered as something deliberate.
Webb knelt in front of Tanaka. Not sitting — kneeling. Below her eye level. The posture of someone who understood that a woman who'd survived alone for nearly a year needed to look down at the people asking her questions, not up.
Garrus held the corridor behind them, Mantis deployed, visor active. The scout team — four militia, all veterans of the siege — covered the station's entry points. Professional. Quiet. The kind of quiet that came from walking through empty quarters where personal effects were scattered across floors and no bodies explained why.
"Start from the beginning," Webb said. "Take your time."
Tanaka's eyes were brown and bloodshot. They tracked something over Webb's shoulder that Tali couldn't see, then snapped back to his face.
"The station was operational. Two hundred and twelve people. Mining consortium — platinum extraction from the asteroid field. Standard contract, standard crew, standard everything." She paused. Swallowed. "Eight months ago, Mining Team Six hit something in Shaft 14. Deep bore, two hundred meters below the primary vein. They reported an anomaly — a chamber that shouldn't have existed, carved from the asteroid's core with precision that no natural process could explain."
"Prothean?" Garrus asked from the corridor.
"That's what we thought. Dr. Voss — our geologist — said the tool marks didn't match any known species. Too old, he said. Older than Prothean. Which doesn't make sense, because what's older than the Protheans?"
"Reapers," Tali thought, and the word sat in her mind like a stone.
"They extracted the fragment on day three. Black metal — smooth, featureless, approximately thirty centimeters long and fifteen wide. It was warm. Not from extraction heat — warm like something alive. Voss put it in the geology lab. That was..." She counted silently. "That was March fourteenth."
"What happened next?"
"Nothing. For a week, nothing. The fragment sat in the lab. Voss ran scans, wrote reports. Standard xenoarchaeological protocol. The fragment didn't respond to any diagnostic — no energy signature, no material composition match, nothing. It was, scientifically speaking, impossible. Voss was thrilled."
Her hands spasmed again. She pressed them flat against her thighs.
"Day nine, Petrov — one of the miners from Team Six — reported hearing music. Not through the station's speakers. In his head. Faint, he said. Beautiful. Like something he'd forgotten and just remembered. I examined him. No neurological abnormalities. No substance use. No history of auditory hallucination. I noted it in his file and moved on."
Tali's omni-tool beeped. She checked the reading — the low-frequency vibration she'd been tracking had shifted. Marginally. Two-tenths of a hertz, too small for human perception but clear on her instruments. The station was responding to something.
"By day fourteen, eleven more crew reported the music. By day twenty, it was forty. Different people, different shifts, different sections of the station. The only commonality was proximity — the closer someone worked to the geology lab, the sooner they started hearing it."
"You didn't evacuate?" Webb's voice was neutral. No judgment. The tone of a man collecting information.
"I recommended quarantine of the fragment. Captain Morozov agreed — we sealed the geology lab, moved the crew to the station's far sections. The music stopped." She paused. "For two days."
"Then?"
"Then it came back. Stronger. People who'd never been near the lab started hearing it. Petrov — the first one — stopped sleeping. Said he didn't need to. Said the song was enough." Tanaka's voice dropped. The hoarseness thickened. "Day twenty-seven. I woke up to find the geology lab unsealed. Someone had overridden the lockout. The fragment was gone."
"Gone where?"
"To the mining bay. Shaft 14. Petrov and six others had carried it back to the chamber where it was found. They'd set it on a pedestal they'd built from scrap metal. When I found them, they were sitting in a circle around it, eyes closed, smiling." Her jaw tightened. "Smiling like people smile when they hear the most beautiful thing they've ever heard."
Tali looked at Webb. His expression was stone — no reaction, no tells. But his right hand had moved to his thigh, fingers pressed flat against the fabric. Grounding. The gesture of someone fighting something internal.
"I sealed the mining bay. Emergency bulkheads, manual overrides, every lock I could find. Cut the section off from the rest of the station. Petrov and the others were inside. I... left them there."
The silence in the operations center had a texture. Heavy. Wet. The kind of silence that filled the space between confession and absolution.
"It didn't matter. The mining bay was sealed, but the fragment's influence wasn't contained by bulkheads. Day thirty-two, people started walking to airlocks. No suits. No distress. Smiling. They'd open the inner door, step into the chamber, and cycle the lock. The outer door would open, and..." She stopped. Breathed. "They walked into vacuum smiling. Saying 'the song is beautiful.' Over and over. 'The song is beautiful.'"
"How many?" Garrus's voice from the corridor. Quiet. The particular quiet of a man who'd investigated atrocities and recognized another one.
"All of them. One hundred and ninety-nine people. Over eleven days. Some in groups, some alone. The last one — Captain Morozov — sealed the bridge, barricaded the door, and lasted seventy-two hours. I heard him on the intercom, singing along. Then he stopped singing and started walking."
"Why not you?"
Tanaka touched her left ear. A hearing aid — visible now that Tali looked, a small device tucked against the cartilage.
"Congenital hearing loss. Left ear, seventy percent deficit. The fragment's frequency operates in a range my left ear can't process. My right ear caught fragments — whispers, not music. Enough to feel the pull, not enough to follow it."
She looked at each of them in turn. Brown eyes, bloodshot, carrying eleven months of solitary survival on a station full of ghosts.
"It's still singing. The fragment, in the mining bay. I sealed it and I've never gone back, but I can hear it through the walls. Every night. A whisper that's almost a melody." She paused. "You just can't hear it yet."
---
[Haven's Point Scout Team — Station Kappa-7, Mining Bay Approach, 1440]
Tali walked beside Webb through the station's lower corridors. Garrus took point, the Mantis's barrel sweeping each junction with the automated precision of someone who'd been clearing rooms since before Tali finished her engineering apprenticeship. The scout team held the operations center with Tanaka.
The mining bay's emergency bulkheads were visible at the corridor's end — heavy blast doors, manually sealed, with Dr. Tanaka's crude warning painted across them in maintenance marker: DANGER — DO NOT OPEN — RADIATION HAZARD.
Not radiation. Something worse.
Webb's omni-tool projected the station's schematics. The mining bay sat behind three sets of sealed doors, each one reinforced with Tanaka's jury-rigged locking mechanisms. Beyond them: Shaft 14, the excavation chamber, and the fragment.
"My scans are showing energy readings behind those doors," Tali said, pulling her omni-tool data. "Low-frequency electromagnetic emissions, consistent across the last three hours. The frequency is... unusual. It doesn't match any standard power signature. It's organic in structure — harmonic ratios that correspond to biological resonance patterns."
"Biological resonance," Garrus repeated from point position. "Meaning it's tuned to affect living things."
"Specifically organic neural tissue. The frequency targets the same brain regions associated with auditory processing and emotional reward. It makes you hear music and feel good about hearing it."
[SOVEREIGN MANDATE SYSTEM — WARNING]
[REAPER-ORIGIN ARTIFACT DETECTED]
[CLASSIFICATION: INDOCTRINATION NODE — FRAGMENT]
[HAZARD LEVEL: EXTREME]
[PROXIMITY WARNING: PROLONGED EXPOSURE (>4 HOURS) RISKS INITIAL NEURAL PATHWAY ALTERATION]
[RECOMMENDATION: DESTRUCTION OR SYSTEM-ENHANCED CONTAINMENT]
[CONTAINMENT CHAMBER — COST: 150 MP]
[CURRENT MP: 95/300]
Webb read the notification. His expression didn't change, but Tali caught the micro-shift in his posture — the slight tension in his shoulders, the way his breathing paused for a half-second too long. He was reading something she couldn't see. Something his "Prothean abilities" showed him.
"Options," he said. Not a question to them — a statement directed at the air. At whatever interface he was consulting.
"I want to study it." The words came out before Tali's professional caution could filter them. "A Reaper indoctrination device — if that's what this is — would give us everything we need to understand the Geth modification code. The mechanism, the frequency patterns, the neural targeting protocols. With this, I could develop countermeasures."
"Or it could turn you into a smiling zombie walking toward an airlock," Garrus said. "No. We space it. Open the mining bay to vacuum, let the debris field take it. Problem solved."
"Problem destroyed. Along with the most important xenoarchaeological find since the Prothean beacon on Mars."
"Tali, two hundred people died because of that thing."
"Two hundred people died because they didn't understand it. Understanding is the difference between a weapon and a study subject."
Garrus's mandibles locked tight. The disagreement between them was real — not hostile, not personal, but real in the way that mattered: two intelligent people with incompatible assessments of the same risk.
Webb stood between them. Between the scientist and the soldier. Between the need to know and the need to survive. The corridor's emergency lighting cast his face in amber and shadow, and for a moment he looked older than the body he wore.
"Containment," he said. "Not destruction. Not open study."
He walked to the corridor wall. Tali watched his hand flatten against the metal — the same gesture she'd seen at the Geth relay station, the same impossible construction that preceded every miracle she couldn't explain.
[DEPLOYING: CONTAINMENT CHAMBER — SYSTEM-ENHANCED]
[COST: 150 MP]
[MP REMAINING: 0/300]
[FEATURES: PROTHEAN-DERIVED SHIELDING, FREQUENCY DAMPENING, NEURAL ISOLATION FIELD]
The chamber assembled behind the first bulkhead. Tali's instruments went haywire for eight seconds as exotic materials manifested from quantum vacuum fluctuations — she'd been studying the phenomenon since the barrier on the relay station, and the readings still defied everything she knew about material science. The chamber was three meters cubed, seamless, with an internal dampening field that her omni-tool registered as a frequency null-zone. Absolute silence inside. Not quiet — the absence of sound at a molecular level.
"Garrus, open the mining bay. Get the fragment into the chamber. You have ninety seconds of safe exposure based on..." Webb paused. His eyes tracked something invisible. "Based on the data."
"Ninety seconds."
"Not ninety-one."
Garrus looked at the containment chamber. At the sealed mining bay. At his rifle, which was useless against a threat that operated through sound.
"I hate this," he said, and moved toward the bulkheads.
Tali watched the turian unseal the first door, then the second, then the third. Through the gap, the mining bay was dark. Cold. The air that escaped carried a scent — or not a scent, exactly. A sensation. Like standing near a power transformer, the feel of electricity on the skin. Except this electricity tugged at something behind her eyes.
Garrus entered. She counted. Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty. At forty-seven, he emerged carrying a black metal fragment in both hands, arms extended, mandibles pressed tight against his jaw. His eyes were focused with an intensity that bordered on desperation — the focus of a man deliberately not listening to something.
He placed the fragment in the containment chamber. The door sealed. The dampening field activated.
The sensation vanished. The tug behind Tali's eyes released. She hadn't been aware of it until it stopped, and the absence made her breath catch.
Garrus leaned against the corridor wall. His hands shook — the first time she'd seen the turian's hands shake for any reason.
"Forty-seven seconds," he said. "That's how long I was in there."
"And?"
"And I heard it." His voice was rough. "Music. Beautiful music. And the worst part is, I wanted to keep listening."
Behind the containment chamber's seamless walls, the fragment sat in silence. Absolute, manufactured, Prothean-engineered silence.
Webb pressed his forehead against the corridor wall. His eyes were closed. His hands — pressed flat against the metal — trembled.
"Is anyone else getting a headache?" he asked. Not casually. With the specific focus of someone checking a symptom against a diagnosis.
"No," Tali said.
"No," Garrus confirmed.
"Good." He straightened. His expression had closed — the analytical mask he wore when the situation exceeded his emotional bandwidth. "The fragment stays in containment. Nobody opens that chamber without my authorization and a minimum of three people present. Tali, you can study the emissions through the chamber's sensor relays — external only. No direct contact. No unsealing."
"That limits my research significantly."
"Your research continuing at all limits the probability of you walking into an airlock smiling. I'll take the trade."
She wanted to argue. The engineer in her — the quarian who'd been trained since fourteen to understand systems, to take them apart, to learn by doing — screamed at the waste of keeping the most important artifact they'd found behind a wall she couldn't touch.
But Tanaka's story was fresh. Two hundred people. Smiling.
"External study. Agreed."
The containment chamber hummed. Or didn't. The dampening field should have eliminated all emissions. But standing three meters from the sealed fragment, Tali's suit sensors registered a pressure fluctuation — barely measurable, well within tolerance — that pulsed at a rhythm just slow enough to match a human heartbeat.
"Imagination," she told herself.
She didn't believe it.
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