Author's Note: Nothing really to say at this point. Read, Review, Favourite and Enjoy!

Chapter 88: Adek Part 1

10M 01D 21H Until the Colossus Fires

The Adek of old was dead. Deep scans of the planet reveal the same shape of the continents in roughly the same places but that was it. The desert world was long gone, replaced by sprawling jungles of concrete wood and steel. The Gaian's had unleashed sprawling jungles across the desert world, complete with a storm of comets that hydrated the dried out world. In the mean time the Gorthikeans had built sprawling cities from the Ruins of the Batarian's slave camps and dockyards.

The Hedonist cults led by the Sathelians and the Predator groups being led by the Tzynn staked their claims in other more subtle ways. The Hedonists were setting up their cults in the open, luring other forces to join their own with their promises of luxury and hedonism.

The Predator groups were harder to spot any sort of uniformity: there are predators that stalk their prey, build traps and lure them in, and overpower them with brute force.

Even more bizarre than that, many were starting to blend together the cults, the common person caught in the middle trying to stay alive, and the ambitious who were attempting to unite the warring factions into one unified force.

In the wake of this, a meteor storm bombarded the planet, all of the rocks in question sent over form the side of the Union. The planet wasn't completely defenceless, the shoddy quality of the planet's previous engineers besides the point.

From the jungles, wormholes suddenly opened up and swallowed up the rocks that were falling from the sky, and spat out on the other side of the planet into the city that had been built on the other side of the planet. Suddenly several buildings opened up as turrets blew apart the incoming projectiles with car sized projectiles. All of this was witnessed by the Union fleet, complete with Dragoon legions.

"General, you're opinion?" Skeletor looked out from the bridge of the surveillance ship.

"We've confirmed the Cult's planetary defences, as well as their disunity." General Victus had not yet gotten the Dragoon upgrade. He fully intended to reclaim the Turian home world with a body that was one hundred percent Palaven born and bred. Besides the greatest benefits he will bring to this campaign is not his body and skill as a foot soldier, but his mind and experience as a general. "The trees took our attack and used it to harass the Squids after all."

"Agreed." It was good that they had competent allies within the Council forces.

"However I have to disagree with you on your terminology." Victus cocked a eye at that statement. "As far as they should be concerned, this wasn't an attack but a natural disaster." That was the story that they were telling after all. "The real attack hasn't started yet."

09M 30D 00H Until the Colossus Fires

While the asteroid shower was hitting Adek, the Union was going around the long way to enter deeper into former citadel territory. They weren't invading or trying to take another planet, rather they were acting in order to seize control of the ships that were on their way to Adek in order to reinforce the planet's forces in anticipation of their own invasion. The vaccines to protect the Gaian's diseases from taking hold had not yet been developed, nor were there any real antidotes as of yet, but there were one group of individuals that were uniquely qualified to fight regardless.

Colonisation was a brutal affair, filled many challenges, including the ability to cut down large swaths of forests with minimal difficulty, possibly with the danger of having to fight off the planet's native wild life, thus the Chain Axe, designed to tear apart trees or tree equivalents with ease while at the same time being enough of a blunt instrument that it could smash unruly animals.

The other was Centurian Mining armour, a heavily armoured exoskeleton equivalent to a tank with a pair of huge huge dusters, theoretically strong enough to deal with any threat in close quarters melee while at the same time serving to excavate in a variety of hostile environments. Most important of all was what this equipment that was designed to chew through extra hard fossils and wooden armour was actually being wielded by.

"Victus General." A Geth Prime planted the butt of his two handed chain axe into the floor after he just finished off the head of the Gaian Ship. "We have seized control over the Plague ship and are awaiting your orders."

09M 30D 00H Until the Colossus Fires

The inside of the Sathelian's ships were filled with water, thus it is only natural that Aquatic species be sent to fight them, Mero, Hanar and even the Tebrids had been teleported on board the ship with the aid of the Pasharti and were now making their way through. Each of them were heavily armoured, through not to protected them from the water. It was to protect them from their own allies.

"You guys like to F-" Smok's curse was covered up by the sound of one of the pipes bursting. Separating and reuniting Electrons and Protons, a more advance application of pyromancy, more difficult to pull off but the trade off? Electricity, or more specifically lightning, lightning that was breaking down the water into Oxygen and Hydrogen, forcing the corridors inside of the alien ships to expand even though that wasn't Smok's final goal. "-find out!" With a snap of his fingers the inside of the ship turned into a sea of flames, the gasses instantly returning to being water as every unprotected scrap of flesh onboard the vessels were left utterly scorched.

"The Crayfish are dead. I don't think we're going to be able to use this ship though." The ship would need extensive repairs before it could be used, probably to the hull as a start, as well as any of the more delicate pieces of equipment that he had broke by essentially turning the entire ship into one big bomb disposal unit.

09M 30D 00H Until the Colossus Fires

Wrex felt something that he would almost describe as disgust welling up from deep within his core, and also deep satisfaction. He recognised the Salarian that was leading this little war-band, despite the lithe wiry muscle mass she had built up, reddened skin and elongated horns and fangs. Dalatress Linron, the bitch who sent Mordin and his band of mad scientists to infiltrate Tuchanka with their new Genophage variant, made using the data that they had given to her ilk to develop a cure to that very disease.

"She. Is. Mine!" Wrex walked forward as his men spread around.

Even if Wrex said that the bitch had prepared defences that were simultaneously humiliating and effective. Wrex recognised the former Gatatog Clan Chief Gatatog Uvenk, the mess of twisted horns where his crest used to be located and the fact he was now thrice his previous size be damned. For all that Wrex disagreed with the man's policies he afforded him a bare minimal amount of respect as a fellow clan leader, and right now that man who had barely earned his respect was trussed up like a Kalikiosaur and acting as a mount for a deranged mad woman.

"Personally I'd like to just kill you but the Union has convinced themselves that they can extract something useful from your skulls, but how about we leave it up to you two eh?" Wrex had already run through everything that he knew about Uvenk through his mind and had already formulated a plan on how he would kill the deranged monster that used to be a Clan chief.

"RRRAAAWWWRRR!" In lieu of Uvenk's usual insults he simply roared as the Dalatress whipped him and he released a Biotic Charge.

"Tear that mongrel apart!" For someone calling someone else a 'Mongrel' Linron did a good cave girl impression with her torn dress turned loin cloth.

"I was hoping that you'd do that." Wrex whipped out a rifle and fired it into the charging brute of a monster. The Shot of exotic plasma met the brute and exploded in his face, covering his body in a layer of green flames as the momentum of the Charge carried over into a far more mundane slide across the floor of the Tzynn ship. Wrex stopped the slide with a barrier, one that exploded immediately yes but it still stopped. "No automated fire suppression system eh? Someone does shoddy work." Wrex had a look around at the ship, at it's lit braziers, like this was some primitive hunter gatherer tribe's base camp instead of the inside of a repurposed cargo bay. "No you guys just disabled it on purpose." Wrex was glad that he had his rebreather and in built system to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen, if he sucked on whatever fumes these idiots were breathing in he might get infected with their stupid.

"RRRAAAWWWRRR!" Uvenk was already getting back up, tenacious as he ever was.

"Don't know well enough to stay down do yah?" Uvenk always had that problem even before he turned into a beast. Stomping his foot Wrex let loose with a Charge of his own and closed the distance with Uvenk, who responded with another of his own. Unfortunately for the brute this wasn't a game of chicken, Wrex aimed his charge so that he passed by the stupid monster and stopped when he was behind it, then fired off his plasma thrower again into Uvenk's flank blowing up his charge once more. Now he would be pissed, and if Linron had any sense in her, not that he counted people stupid enough to Meld with Krogan as being gifted with common sense, then she'd stop her pet monster from flinging another charge at him. Instead the monster was running on all fours as Wrex switched over to another weapon, another shot gun though this one leaned more to the Council's technology with a Union twist. The Great Graal Throw barked spewing foot long spikes in a shot gun spread into the rampaging mutant, spitting out expended heat sinks with every couple of shots as Wrex left his former rival sliding to a stop on the floor with his body perforated full of holes that were pumping blood through whatever mutated organs he had. Linron attempted to flee but Wrex Body checked her with a charge and held her up with one hand. "We have our Intel Packet!" Wrex shouted to his clan-mates as he held Linron up by her head. "Handle the rest however you want!" And so a bunch of pissed off Krogan went on a rampage to kill some uppity Salarians.

09M 30D 00H Until the Colossus Fires

Samara erected another biotic barrier to block more of the incoming shrapnel from the Squids, then with a Push and Warp combo fired the masses of scrap metal back at the creature in question. There were a large number of engineers among the enemy forces as well, people who thought themselves clever, Salarians, some Quarians, or at least that was what they use to be before whatever mutations and modifications that they are under managed to kick in. Unfortunately for them Samara had dealt with their ilk before. Several invisible masses crushed the enemy units skulls, the grasping mechanisms of the Kraken Model Stealth units being worn by Samara's daughters Falere and Rila de-cloaked as they stood on standby.

"Clear!" To Samara's shout a small woman ran out between them, carrying with her a device that would be much too heavy for her if not for the strength enhancers she installed in herself and in her suit.

"Bosh'tet squids!" Tali had taken their intentions to invade the Eden System personally, not to mention the mess that was Rannoch, now that the home-world had been lost the Moons of the Eden System represented the final colonies of the Quarians. "Let's see how you like it!"

Tali set off her device. Her suit and all of her tech was shielded of course, but did the same hold true for these freaks? The Answer was yes and no. Most of the inside of the ship was shielded against various kinds of disruptive waves like EMPs. However if the ship's control units were completely shielded then the Gorthikians would've not been able to manipulate their fabricator doors or work other parts of the ship's controls using nothing but their minds as well. With no other control scheme, which doesn't seem to be something they have, They'd effectively be dead in the water. What Tali had unleashed was a mass indiscriminate pulse of every kind of signal that she could think of, and once the signals returned positive she could get to work.

"Got you!" Having locked onto several receivers Tali got to work.

A sophisticated P vs MP supported hacking and Decoding program allowed Tali to tear through the Gorthikian's computers, Tali had gambled that they didn't have time to scratch build their own computer systems after all, so it was just a matter of hacking into the Citadel's systems instead.

"Keelah Se'lai you Boshtets!" With a push of a button Tali executed a program, the Gorthikian's ship was turned against them, the entire thing broken down and restructured to isolate the enemy aliens and trap them where they would not be able to escape, Tali then had their own air filters modify themselves to render the aliens unconscious with gasses. With this the various incoming ships of the Cults were intercepted and boarded.

09M 29D 20H Until the Colossus Fires

The boarding operation sadly bore less fruit than they had anticipated, as Mordin was about to explain.

"Linron's interrogation unfortunate." Mordin didn't mean to say that the way he treated Linron was unfortunate, No he like Wrex held a long standing grudge against the Dalatress for what happened on Tuchanka. A Salarian's worst possible enemy was another Salarian: their entire history was permeated with highly unethical experiments for personal gain, and long before the Salarians met another sapient race they only had themselves to play and experiment with, there were literally millions of ways that Mordin could ruin Linron's mind, however warped it had become, and force her to spill her guts. "The God of War the Eater of Worlds is aware of the state of all of his followers. The same holds true for the gods of Stagnancy, Chaos and Desire the Composer of Strands, the Whisperer of Secrets and the Instrument of Desire." Which means that their infiltration plan had failed before it started. The holograms of the various generals could only groan with face with this situation. They can't shoot them from a distance and they can't infiltrate them with their own ships. Both of their main options had been taken off the table.

"We continue to run harassment campaigns against the Four Cults." Udina wasn't a general but as a politician he was one of the figures who would running the supply lines, and thus appreciated how valuable those same supplies were to their enemies. "Fortify our own territory against further invasion, wait until their supplies and energy runs out?"

"That will only work for so long." Admiral Hackett didn't outright shut down the idea but he was going to point out gaps in it. "They already have wormholes, it's more surprising that they're using ships at all frankly, and if we make it too much of a problem to use them then they'll simply stop."

Tevos was satisfied that the Union was getting a piece of what they felt like fighting them.

"We aren't completely out of options either, their ships are surprisingly easy to board especially with former Batarian pirates and Chozo Marauders with lots of ship boarding experience." Ironic. Batarian Pirates had been arrested for doing the exact same thing that the Union government was having them do right now. Proof that the difference between Pirate and Privateer was who signs your pay checks it seems.

"We've had plenty of time to experiment with the threads." And help from the Parshati and Formless though SpeedJunkie would never admit as such. "We have the technology to keep worm holes from opening where we don't want them to, mass production is the next step."

"Leave that to us." Mass production was the Formless's area of expertise. They would get the Raw Omni-gel and majority of the standardised components ready in no time, as well as the Astral Threads ready.

"Aside from the assistance with the Astral Thread Technology, do not divert the current flow of components." The Great Kahn stated tapping a taloned finger. "The Colossus takes priority. Ensuring that we have all the materials we need for it is of top priority." It wasn't just the Colossus that was getting all the components, for the time being the Formless were blindly building up a stock pile as they slowly worked to rejuvenate their own civilisation, engineering experts like the Salarians, Tebrids, Quarians and Lithoids were all working around the clock to distribute them to the best possible locations to best manage the war against the cults.

"Can this technology be put onto a ship?" Sparatus questioned as he brought up the obvious solution. Putting the anti wormhole device on the most heavily armed and armoured ship that the Union has and flying it near enough to Adek to stop their wormhole based defence system, invade and take the planet then move onto the next, build a fleet of them and sweep through what use to be Council space until the cults are burned out.

"Theoretically possible." SpeedJunkie didn't deny the possibility. "We'd have to rethink the ship design to accommodate it, or the design of the machine in question, it's not so far as to call such a device a colossi after all." They already had enough of those on the go at the moment.

"Have we been able to establish contact with our missing people in Citadel Space?" Tevos seized on the momentum now that the head of the scientific fleet seemed to have been occupied by trying to rethink his design. "At the bare minimum we must resume rescue and retrieval efforts of our missing people before anymore of them fall victim to the cults."

"No. But we suspect that the existing communication infrastructure has been destroyed. Right now our best resort is to go up to them and try and talk to them, the ones that we can get through without a fight at the very least. Or not much of one anyway." Admiral Shepard's mind was elsewhere it seems, most likely her still lost daughter. "For now infiltration remains the priority. The engineering team should focus on building up our defences and our intelligence teams need to find a way into the enemy camps."

With that the break down of distribution of jobs that needed doing and who would be doing them was established, of course just because they didn't know about it doesn't mean that the plan wasn't being acted upon.

09M 25D 13H Until the Colossus Fires

Shepard had been on her way to Adek, when her entire ship was unceremoniously seized, swallowed up by a much bigger ship and everything seemed to turn off on her.

"Well this is a fine mess you've gotten into now isn't it Shepard?" A mist of some kind came out of the vents of the ship, under normal circumstances Shepard would have a fully functional suit sealed from the environment with it's own life support system built in. This armour didn't have much built in, most of the pieces didn't fit together and some weren't even in the right places either. Shepard could try to block off the air vents but she kinda needs those, not to mention that she doesn't even know what that stuff is. Speaking of-

"An analysis of the mist Shepard." Shepard's roommate already fabricated a super magnetic attached to a drone, which was now gathering together a dust like material as it flew through the cabin. Luckily the AI requested the materials to shield itself and it's power sources from Electromagnetic attacks, otherwise Shepard wouldn't have taken the priority to pick them up for it. "It appears to be a nano-tech medical supplement, the kind that's designed to build machines inside of the body."

The Union did make use of nano-technology, association with the Reaper's damned the technology, that said as Sun Tzu once said 'know they enemy as one knows thyself and you will be the victor of a thousand battles' so Nanotechnology was reverse engineered, remade from the ground up and fail-safes installed. Firstly, all capacity for Nanites to directly interact with organic matter was disabled on a mechanical level, so no risk of Union nanites turning people into husks existed, secondly once programmed with a task it is impossible for nanites to be turned to another task only turned off and retrieved, which will prevent them from being turned against their hosts by malicious intent. Third if two different groups of Active nanites are introduced to each other, they are designed to eliminate each other with extreme prejudice, so that should help prevent husk infestation.

Even then Nanite technology is rarely used, more often than not there is a normal sized machine that can do whatever job you planned to assign them better. Which makes sense, since you're basically asking ants to do the work of full grown workers.

"Any idea what they're trying to build?" Shepard questioned because that might give her an idea as to what was happening here.

"Unknown, it appears to need a living host." Thus the part about being medical nanites, even if they weren't allowed to interact directly with organic matter they could build things inside of the body, typically cybernetic implants when surgery wasn't a option. As Shepard was thinking about this, light appeared through the view window of the ship, the hatch bay that nommed her in the first place opening up to reveal a planet in front of the ship in question.

"Hey you're bolted down right?" Shepard asked as she moved to grab hold of a handle bar bolted to the wall.

"Yes you bolted me down don't you remember?" Shepard observed the ships that were closer to the newly opened exit being pushed into the planet's atmosphere.

"Just checking."

And with that the Ship Shepard had been living on was pushed out of the bigger ship. The entire thing was air tight, so there was no risk of explosive decompression, and much like a car most ships were designed with 'selective crumpling' in mind so that if it would crash into a planet the frame would bend and break in such a manner to give the crew the maximum chance of survival. Perhaps that in of itself was not enough, but add in Aerodynamic frame that's designed to make sure the ship comes down in a very specific way and direction and add in the Medical suite that was built into Shepard's body and she was narrowly able to ride out the crash. That said, the ship itself was totalled, so now she was on foot. Of course Shepard had no intention of abandoning her room mate, and unbolting the AI/Fabricator unit and strapping it to her back was a simple affair. What was a less simple affair was the other being on the ship.

"Alright you!" The Wanderer's containment cell had survived the crash intact, and luckily Shepard already had the foresight/free time to prepare a portable one. "You can pack yourself up or I can pack you up!"

What Shepard had prepared was a suitcase, lined with Zro and laced with circuits and speciality devices designed specifically to contain an Unbidden. It also was extremely cramped, the equivalent of a contortionist fitting himself into a trunk and using that to smuggle himself away. It was a brutal method of transportation but Shepard found herself unwilling to care, she was trapped in this mess because of Wander to begin with, he was the one to sell his soul and he would be the one to pay the toll. For now Shepard had to figure out the hell she was in order to get back home.

"Any idea where we are?" Shepard looked up at the night sky and let out a sigh. Even if Astrology was something she had a legitimate interest in the bloody stars and planets had been rearranged, the classical methods of identifying unknown worlds when your lost were out the window now. "There are a limited number of planets that we could've arrived at in the amount of time that we were aboard their transport ship." The Roommate chimed in. "Including our intended destination."

"My luck is not that good." Shepard warned ruefully. As they thought that an explosion sounded off, a ship was just blown out of the sky above the planet.

"The Union appears to be trying to take the planet, the likely hood that this is our intended distinction has shot up considering our theoretical proximity to the boarder, the likelihood of being returned to Union territory even higher provided their attempts to assault the planet bear fruit." And yet... "So why are you not happy?"

"Is there some part of 'I have Mot luck' you do not understand?" Shepard asked in an annoyed tone of voice. "For instance, why would the Aliens abduct us, attempt to implant us with technology, and then dump us on some random world on the border with the Union for no good reason?" As Shepard was asking this, a loud high pitch noise echoed from throughout the forest and Salarian strumbled out into the clearing formed by Shepard's ship, a glowing device on the back of his neck as he started screaming in pain and then attacked Shepard.

"Oh look bad news. Happy now?"

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