"CGC CERBERUS Cruiser 'Normandy.' Class: scout cruiser..." Shep recalled the ship's characteristics while hacking the defense protocols with his portable terminal. Hacking the AI server room door was a long and extremely unrewarding task, so it was easier to power it from an autonomous source and break the protocols.
Of course, if the machine intelligence had been on, biometrics, a mental imprint, and an access code from a CERBERUS employee of lieutenant rank or higher would have been enough, but the universe seemed to think that was too easy...
Getting into the server room by any means other than the single gateway door was impossible. A scout cruiser is essentially a lightened medium cruiser or a line cruiser. Instead of one of the gun decks, it had an engineering and repair workshop and additional life support systems. The cargo holds and stealth systems were also expanded at the expense of torpedo armament.
The most noticeable difference was the modernized sensor complex located behind the bridge and a wider hull in the engine room area.
The AI was located in the space of one of the mess halls and living quarters across three decks. Its lair was an armored capsule with its own reactor and climate control, built into the armored contours of the cruiser.
Interaction with the ship's systems was carried out through an armored cable conduit, and physical access was through a gateway. There were no other openings in the two-meter layer of armor. The gateway door boasted even greater armor...
This is why it was easier to dismantle two robots, using their polymer batteries to power the door and hack the defenses, rather than cutting the armor plates with a torch... An assault "cord" – a powerful thermite explosive – could have been used, but then there was a high probability of damaging the AI components. Therefore, only the software path or careful work with a torch remained.
Shep felt himself sweating from tension, despite the suit's systems. The non-trivial action was complicated by enhanced defense protocols, clearly written by the ship's artificial intelligence itself at someone's command. And the captain guessed who could have given such an order, while also "instructing" the mechanical comrade on how best to do it. He could recognize his old work, even if reinterpreted. Access to these drafts was only available to Argon.
"I don't believe in such coincidences, but to calculate such an outcome for oneself... decades ago? Even for him, it's beyond limits, despite all his analytical abilities!" Shep fumed. "Then the logical question arises: didn't he himself fall into a trap? No. Too insane and reckless for him. The former commander, like Nechayev, has one trait: they don't like losses. And Sergey Nechayev is Argon's protégé, just like me. It's easier for the three of us to go to certain death ourselves... Unless there was no other choice!"
The first gateway door began to slide into the wall. "Argentum" operatives didn't need orders. With a practiced movement, the door was jammed by a pre-cut piece of I-beam, which was placed in the gap.
Having made sure the mechanism was reliably jammed, two people dived into the gateway. They quickly opened the panels covering the niches, revealing the wiring and mechanisms of the inner door. Carefully selecting the fiber optic cables of the terminal, the captain moved forward. Another test of skills awaited him.
"On the other hand, if he hadn't gotten into traps, I wouldn't have met him. It's hard to imagine how my life would have turned out if Viera and Stas and I hadn't pulled him out of the river wounded," Artyom reminded himself, waiting for the system connection.
The captain felt that smell of silt that was there in the backwater then... "It seems like all this wasn't so long ago, and yet it was a lifetime ago. There was no 'Collective' then, no unified consciousness... We were just children. Now... Stas has desecrated Viera's memory, his sister, not letting her go even after death. If I hadn't joined the detachment, maybe I could have stopped him. I know what it's like to be alone. And it turned out that he tortured himself, spat in my soul, and tried to break me in his image, trying to mold a copy of his sister from Miranda. That's why anything can happen in life!"
One death, and such a one, changed a lot. Viera's sacrifice became an example of courage for the USSR. The child saved everyone from a fate worse than slavery. She also pushed him to study AI. He wasn't deceiving himself – Artyom started studying programming precisely because of her sacrifice. He wanted to understand or protect the miracle born from it. The collective mind would not be the same without her act. One event, and such consequences.
After that, he had no time for contemplation. The intelligent system, even without a controlling intelligence, detected the hacking attempt and began to actively resist. Without power, it couldn't activate defensive systems or lower blocking rods, but the defense algorithms worked to their fullest.
"It's just that there's no fortress that the Bolsheviks wouldn't take!" Artyom chuckled maliciously, activating the opening mechanism. The unyielding iron, as if unwilling, obeyed.
An emergency plasma curtain flashed, preventing the server room's atmosphere from escaping.
"Let's go in," the captain said, supplementing with a mental image of who was entering and what the supporting fighters outside with the operatives should do.
Without wasting any more time, he stepped through the thin film. As soon as he was in the atmosphere, the microphones on his armor came to life, diligently transmitting the sounds of his steps. The clatter of magnetic boots even slightly deafened him for a moment.
The fighters quickly dispersed throughout the room, ready for battle, but finding no enemy, they began to check the equipment. Standard procedure before restarting the AI.
Artyom himself was looking at what appeared to be an ordinary stain of paint. It looked like a careless stroke, but in the viewer's mind, the paint splashed across the wall, forming a perfectly readable phrase.
"Collectors are puppets. Beware!" read the memetic message. Now Shep was sure that Argon had walked into a trap on purpose.
"Question: why? And did he plan for his death to be like this?" Artyom thought, frowning.
"Now we know for sure that this is not for nothing. What's next?" he said, turning to Miranda.
For him, it was logical to give precedence to the girl now. He was an operative and a field agent, she was an investigator. Her training was more effective than his skills now. However, any member of the Aspect of Protection would have done the same. Choosing a commander for a squad for a specific task was commonplace for a modern army.
"Gathering evidence," Miranda replied calmly. "Let's start with the simple."
The girl turned to him completely. The slight detachment disappeared from her. The investigator "CERBERUS" awoke in her, and he was on the trail.
"You know him better than anyone present. What can you say?" she asked.
"Judging by the message, he walked into the trap himself. Consciously. For him, finding the puppeteers was a matter of personal honor..." Artyom paused. "But, knowing him, he would have left a backup in case of failure. Ideally, he would have gone alone, as he liked to work before he left, but this time something clearly went wrong. Mimics don't fit the overall picture very well... If I had any doubts about this before, they are gone now. Argon didn't like to risk his own. Something extraordinary must have happened for him to change these principles. And an object of the 'Cedar' class is not something to play with on your own territory without special need."
"Knowing you, you wouldn't lead your people into a trap. That's your distinctive feature - loyalty to your own. Even for the Aspect of Protection, your bonds of camaraderie are unusually strong," Miranda mused. "So, there must be a hidden answer here as to why everything turned out this way, or another message. And I suspect the location won't be the most obvious."
"And protected, so that the enemy can't just get access to it," Artyom added. "Start a repeated search!"
Some of the fighters, whose technical qualifications were the lowest, stopped the setup and equipment checks in the server room, joining the investigator and the captain. Robots entered the room, having received orders. Their sensitive optics and machine intelligence could find what a living being would miss.
Luck smiled on Miranda, though not on the first try. Shining her flashlight on the storage array, she alternately unlatched the hard drive bays. Instead of one of them, there was emptiness, cheerfully illuminated by the contact group's indicator. The girl was about to continue the inspection and even took out a multi-tool, but Shep, who had instantly appeared beside her, gently took her hand.
"Why did he choose 'fear' instead of 'beware,' 'caution,' or something else?" he asked the girl. "He had innate literacy, and he learned several languages even before the 'Collective.' But 'fear' in the army signifies something very specific..."
"A warning of an explosion," the investigator guessed, releasing her limb too hastily.
The captain created a complex mental image, more like white noise, and sent it to the tactical network. To Miranda's slight surprise, which she couldn't hide due to irritation, one of the operatives - a tall, intelligent dog - understood correctly, approaching them, extracting sapper equipment from his spatial backpack on the go. A blue flash - and he was already attaching explosion-proof elements.
Artyom and the girl moved away from the explosive technician. Another incomprehensible mental symbol - and a polymer sphere was raised around the sapper by four operatives, which was supposed to contain the explosion if necessary. They took turns controlling the polymer protection, allowing their colleagues to recharge their gloves. The captain controlled the timing of these shifts, preparing to cover with another sphere in case of a critical situation.
The sapper, surprisingly, took too long. The veteran, with great caution, dismantled the server rack, removing some of the units around the array, already seeing a far from ordinary "booby trap" that had been hidden by the hard drive box until then. Only after that, when the casing was also dismantled, did he proceed to disarm the "infernal device."
"I haven't seen anything like this in a long time," the wolf-headed man said aloud, baring his fangs from tension. His cybernetized hands, with only their fingertips, gently removed the explosive, finally freeing it from the detonator. "Clean."
As soon as the sphere fell, Shep's figure blurred into a gray streak, flying to the rack. A second for inspection - and his hand plunged into the mechanism, hooking an old-fashioned "Chebetar" by its chain.
The communication device was battered. Resembling an old pocket watch, the device was still in a brass case, like those from the very first batches. The ruby "Star of the Union" in a gold bezel indicated that the device was a military modification. A regular one was simply without any decorations, while for the party leadership and prominent figures of those years, the cases were cast in gold.
"For contribution to socialist science! Sechenov D.S.," read the engraving on the rounded lid, which had become just as battered but remained quite legible. If Sechenov gave someone a gift, he gave it conscientiously. That was Wizard all over...
Obeying the command, the "Chebetar" soared above the glove's palm. The protruding tendril-neuroconnectors, which also served as emitter antennas, nimbly, with a quiet click, opened the lid and connected to the device, issuing a command to play the last message.
Emitting a chirping sound, the mechanism began its work. A beam from a holographic projector, added to the device much later, flashed from the star.
"Greetings, comrades fighters!" the sonorous voice of the former commander of "Argentum" boomed through the server room.
Hearing his voice, the operatives snapped to attention, freezing for a moment in a "at ease" stance. Even though decades had passed, some habits were very difficult to break. Even those who had not served under Colonel Kuznetsov at his post froze. If for those who fought under his command, he was and remained who he was, then for the young he was a Hero of bygone days. A legend.
"If you are listening to this recording, it means that, on the one hand, everything went according to plan, and I am dead..." the murky hologram said calmly. "On the other hand, the 'Normandy' did not return to its home port. This means that I made a mistake somewhere, and the cruiser's crew is also dead, having fallen into the clutches of our enemy. Senseless cruelty in obtaining information, but they didn't need it anyway. The crew... it's hard to give what you don't know, and even harder to extract it from memory. As for those who followed me, they voluntarily underwent lobotomy before the last operation, deleting their data. Even the 'Awakened' cleaned their memory banks. The full extent of the information was only with me. The key word is 'was.' I hope the crypto-protocols worked as intended and completely destroyed my personality, because I don't have any hope for a poison tooth and explosives in my heart. The last copy of the information is only on the 'Normandy,' in case of complete failure. Without knowing the ford and without understanding, the enemy will not get it! Good luck to you, and may you find the right path."
Artyom clenched the deactivated device in his fist, closing his eyes for a moment. Having controlled his emotions, he turned to Miranda, asking under the hushed gazes of the fighters:
"Any ideas? I only have guesses that it will be something related to memetics. The phrase about understanding will be understood even by a madhouse. 'Ford' and 'understanding.'"
"Not exactly..." Miranda replied after thinking for a minute. If there were normal communication with the "Collective," she would have long ago requested help from analysts, but there were too few of them here for a stable communication channel. The investigator could not allow anyone from the Union's space to connect to her. The connection would be established, but with significant delays, which was unacceptable. If there were a thousand of them here, such problems would not exist... Therefore, she had to rely only on herself. "Ford, path. In other words - direction."
The girl turned to the central AI core.
"And direction in interstellar flight is calculated by AI, but this is too simple," Artyom followed her gaze. "I'll bet my rifle that the missing disk had everything, but Argon destroyed it so as not to surrender it to the enemy. On the other hand, he was a boxer and was used to straightforward solutions. Again, it all comes down to the ship's artificial intelligence."
The captain gave a mental command to his fighters: "Turn it on!" There was no point in delaying. It was easier to ask than to search the cruiser again with a magnifying glass. Moreover, explosives had already been planted under the main processor - an addition to the self-destruct systems, just in case.
A moment later, the server room reactor was turned on. It took about a minute to bring the working body to the set temperature to start the thermonuclear reaction. The cooling systems started with a hum, beginning to circulate the liquid through the cooling circuit.
The engine room began to come alive. Beeps and rustles came from the racks. Air cooling fans howled. Terminal screens lit up, illuminating everything around with a greenish light.
Only after checking and querying the equipment did the system supply power to the central processor's power bus. The polymer-electronic crystal, receiving energy, literally came to life, shedding its stupor.
"Operating system loading complete. Personality matrix loading started. Attention. Array integrity compromised! Recovery procedure initiated. Please wait," the artificial intelligence reported.
Minutes of waiting passed. The equipment in the racks became several orders of magnitude louder.
It all ended with a sweet yawn from the speakers.
"A-u-u-u-g!" the electronic personality groaned, as if stretching. "The AI of the VKS cruiser 'Cerberus' 'Normandy' greets you, comrades!"
A moment later, in a much less official tone, which she switched to after yawning, she added:
"Can you remove the explosives from my CPU? They're making me a little nervous, like a gun barrel to your temple!"
"Sorry, citizen, it's a mining procedure. What if you want to kill us when you wake up?" Artyom waved his hand for his fighters to remove the explosives.
"As one of the engineers said: 'I loved your cat... but I didn't follow protocols like this,'" the artificial personality elegantly bypassed the profanity. It seemed that no forbidden word was spoken, but everyone understood. "I understand that I, all beautiful, am on a frozen and dead ship? And also riddled by you, you boors (even not considering the gender of some of you)?! So..."
The ship's intelligence began to imitate rhythmic breaths, as if it were a biological being.
"I apologize, comrades. After the reboot, I will be eccentric for some time... I understand that you need something from me, since you turned me on? Otherwise, I would only be activated in dry docks. Oh, what am I saying? Allow me to introduce myself - the great and incomparable Susie!!! May the programmer who created my personality matrix be forcibly made a robot-lover... And may a robot-perforator love him through the seventh engineering hole!"
"That's problematic," Artyom, who instantly understood what Susie was talking about, said. "The diameter is too different..."
"Tell that to that asari..." the AI said dryly. "In some moments, I regret having analytical programs. And again, I apologize... captain. I hope you won't take me apart, as you usually like to do?"
"Personality marker recognition has started working..." Shep stated. "And yes, we need your help, although I'm not sure you can help. What do you know about Argon's plans?"
At first, the captain didn't understand what was happening because a rasp came from the speakers, but then he understood.
"I... about Argon's plans?" the AI chuckled. "No one knew about them. He regularly cleaned my memory so that I definitely wouldn't find out. Now he's also removed the disk from the array. I can't even say where it was now. The maps were on it. The only thing... I can say that he talked with the ship's navigator for a long time the day before. I can't say for sure, but the coordinates of the Citadel and the relay network were mentioned. That's all I know."
"That's a lead. And the words about the path, after the AI, are more suited to the navigator," Miranda noted.
"I don't like it when I'm not called by my name. Don't do that," Susie said. "I am also a person..."
"No one argues," Shep said. "Squad, follow me!"
The operative headed for the exit of the server room, which had already been tidied up by the group's fighters. It was foolish to leave the door to the ship's holy of holies open.
On the way, Artyom asked the artificial intelligence:
"While we're going to the navigator's cabin, tell me, who attacked the cruiser?"
"We attacked," Susie replied. "The collector's cruiser. They tied it up. They landed Argon with his 'ghosts' - that's what the crew called the operatives who followed him. And then four enemy cruisers flew in, and I got caught in an artillery bag. What happened to the crew, I can't say, because the ship's captain knocked me out at the very beginning of the boarding, but the collectors tried to take them alive."
"Where did the mimics come from?" Shep asked.
"From one of the planets we visited. We've crossed the galaxy several times over the years. Argon was looking for something and seemed to have found it... I can only judge indirectly here. In theory, after this operation, we were supposed to go out of autonomous mode and transfer all the data. Only the cruiser won't fly. The warp drive is destroyed, or rather, its heart. All the plates are dust, according to protocol! I can also add that everything that can be is encrypted, and you will still need to find the cipher. Returning to the mimics, they were created to counter such collectors and their masters, an extinct race from over five hundred thousand years ago. They were released as a last resort... Again, I can't tell you more due to the memory block."
"Well, you didn't just sail the galaxy all the time, did you?" Miranda asked.
"No, of course, we also destroyed pirates! That was easy. We managed to extract a lot of interesting things from them. For example, the contacts of the Gray Broker... if only I knew what that was myself."
"Broker? There was something in the analytical note. So it's something important," the girl said thoughtfully.
"So, you've been in contact with Space for a long time?" Risa, who had been silent until then, asked.
"Naturally, but data collection is not full contact. Argon was afraid to communicate with the USSR. He was afraid of 'agents'," Susie indicated the quotes with her intonation. "Processed by various enemies. That's why he didn't let the crew off the ship. It didn't help. Two dissidents were liquidated. The third turned out to be the first assistant and helped the enemy with the boarding. In a word - a fanatic, but, in my opinion, a robot-lover. He scared me. He kept talking about the purity of my mind lately. It turns out, not in vain. You came, by the way."
"We didn't even have to look for a memetic mark," Shep said grimly, looking at the ceiling where an obstruction of twelve dots and many circles was drawn with special paint. You could only see it, like reading it, if you had read the first part.
"'Relays and a trap, and something more. The countdown is on them. The numbers will tell you. Choose the right ones.' Interesting..." Miranda read.
"And understandable..." Artyom said, taking out Argon's "Chebetar" again. Having entered the sum of three numbers: the Enterprise number, the founding year of "Argentum," and the order number for the creation of the squad, he turned on the playback of another message.
"It's not as simple as it seemed..." Argon's voice was tired. "Mass effect technologies are indeed a trap, but with a double bottom. The relay network is much more extensive than they think. There are simply unused sections in this... cycle, and there are completely abandoned segments."
Kuznetsov's hologram put his hands behind his back, as he usually did during briefings when he wanted to emphasize something. After a pause, the recording spoke again:
"The Citadel - it's not alone. There are many of them. Definitely more than three. How many exactly, neither I nor others who tried thousands of years ago managed to establish. Therefore, sabotage or destruction will not play any role. They will use another one."
Despite the not-so-good quality of the hologram, the veteran's irritation was visible on his face. The hologram extended its hand, and another memetic symbol lit up on its palm, exactly repeating the one on the ceiling. In the minds of all who watched the recording, there was a sudden click, as if someone had assembled the last piece of the mosaic. Only they could not share their sudden discovery with each other. When they tried to say it out loud, their tongue tingled warningly, and a mental image simply did not form. Artyom, however, had a feeling that even memory viewing would not help. Only a direct order from a superior with a demonstration of the symbol could remove the block. It was impossible to simply transmit an approximate map of the entire relay network.
"The entire system has a dual purpose. It's not so much a transport network as a system for circulating dark matter throughout the galaxy. Element Zero attracts it. If there's a lot of it, there's stagnation. If a lot of matter accumulates, a void will appear. A void that destroys stars. Traveling through the relays, intelligent beings allow it to flow, preventing it from accumulating. They are pipes, while the Citadels are valves. The faster the circulation, the less remains until the end of the cycle. Therefore, the more developed a civilization is, the faster it will reach the end, but even abandoning zero-element technologies will not help avoid the end." Now all the links can be put together...
The hologram went out, leaving the fighters in somber silence. It wasn't every day that some of them touched such information.
"Even I understood that we need to go to the company cabin," Risa grumbled, proudly perched on Miranda's coolant backpack. "But I wish I hadn't seen this... It's like a multi-part horror movie. It's scary, but you want to finish watching it."
"And in my opinion, it's more like a tour in kindergarten. 'Look, children, this thing can cause the end of everything... Let's move on,'" Shep grumbled tiredly. For him, much knowledge was much sorrow.
"That's all good, but I can't understand why he did what he did?" Miranda asked.
"It would have been more logical to report all this to the government. I don't understand his motives."
"No one understands them," the explosive technician said. "They didn't call him a ghost for nothing..."
"That's true," the cat operative supported him. "The commander usually appeared out of nowhere, did his thing, and only then it became clear how, why, and for what purpose."
"It's not fitting for a higher race to stoop to obscenities," Risa hissed at the cat.
"Guilty," the fighter clicked his magnetic boot heels. Felinids have a matriarchy, albeit with reservations.
The group moved to the nearest company cabin. Again, a stain of paint that turned into text: "There is only one way!" After thinking, Shep entered Argon's personal file number. The recording turned on as soon as he pressed the last digit.
"Who is our enemy?" Kuznetsov asked. "There are too many answers to this question. They like to shroud themselves in mystery and pathos. What I know for sure is that even if a solution to the dark matter problem is found, without periodic... 'system resets,' the enemy will still perform a reset. In fact, if you discard all the tinsel, they are conducting an experiment that has been going on for a very long time. Each time, practically the same boundary conditions, like an equation they try to solve over and over again. Even if they get an answer, they will want to collect statistics. They are like machines carrying out an order, only they don't have anyone to cancel it, but they are something more than a mechanism."
Argon fell silent for a long minute, as if gathering strength.
"They like to use tools, entire races-puppets. Collectors are their current tool... In this cycle, they became interested in us. Therefore, they will come for us last, so that the offer sounds more tempting. But in fact, everything I said may be far from the truth. They tried to ensure that no one knew the variables until the last moment..."
"That's why you're sacrificing yourself," Artyom said affirmatively, understanding the meaning of everything his mentor had done.
"If only they are not given the variable we know..." Argon seemed to age instantly. "If any of my comrades see this message... fulfill the promise made to me."
The "Chebetar" emitted a ragged sound, and the recording turned off, as if the last string had been cut.
"And what promise?" Miranda asked quietly.
"Not to regret a bullet for him..." someone from the operatives said just as quietly.