-Not Our Own-

Tiranni Provincial Medical Center, Rannoch.

[Ira'Muri vas Rannoch nar Neema lays in a sterile, white bed. The young woman is wrapped tightly in an environmental suit with several lines attached to her arms and sides, pumping medication into her body. Shining like gold in the dark room, her omni-tool wraps around her hand, her thumb is pressed delicately next to the "self-medicate" button. Doctor Karlesh'Verra watches over her with intent in his eyes.]

It's hard being a quarian, y'know? I mean, we're the "vagrants and thieves" of the galaxy in everyone's eyes. We're ostracized because of our suits, our culture, our legacy. Banned from the Citadel, treated like crap in any system our fleet enters.

[A weak snort.] And here I am, complaining about it all. Doesn't make things any better does it?

[Doctor Verra]: I really must advise against this interview. You need rest, Ira.

[Ira'Muri]: Ha. [She waves off the doctor.] Let the man ask his questions, doc. [She turns back to me.] Plus, I'm a big girl. I can handle whatever he has to throw at me.

So, our people's problems began long before the words "Reaper" or "indoctrinated" ever surfaced. We had a litany of our own issues. There were rumors of a virus spreading from ship to ship, something that our suits couldn't stop from infecting us. Suicide rates spiked from the previous years, a lot of hopeful mothers were miscarrying, that played a huge part in it. We still didn't have a homeworld.

But these issues were well before my time. I was born during the war, needless to say it was a confusing time for me. The Fleet never stayed in one system too long, while the Heavy Fleets would always go on long deployments and come back with less ships than when they started out. I didn't know at the time, but it turns out we were getting our asses handed to us by the geth at several key locations. Haza was one of them.

Haza?

It was the outermost planet, a gas giant, within our home system, Tikkun. Over the period of several months, our military led excursions into Tikkun, hoping to finally push the geth out and "reclaim the quarian people's true homeland".

Haza was meant to be sort of a forward base for our military, allowing us to perform the necessary raids before we could assault Rannoch. But the geth had defenses set up, and obliterated a third of the forces that entered.

What I wasn't told at the time was that these geth weren't hostile. Not initially anyways. We opened fire on them first.

No…[She pauses, her thumb clamps down on the "self-medicate" button.]…the geth were the mistake of our people, and they would kill any quarian the first chance they got. That's what we were always told as children They were like the legion of big bad wolves from those human fairytales. To be shot at on sight. Not even given a chance.

So, as I said, that's why our fleets would always come back with fewer and fewer vessels. The reason for us moving from system to system so frequently, however, I found out on my own.

You see, information was hard to get if you were a sixteen year-old at the time. Our connection to the extranet was crap to begin with, and they had blocks and firewalls up to prevent us from doing too much digging.

Admiralty was trying to shelter the younger generation. It was Admiral Zorah who headed it all. Her heart was in the right place, sure, but we needed to know.

To not know about something like that…sure, it would send the little ones into a panic, but everyone within the Fleet needed to know. So I did what any sensible teen would've done, I cornered my mother and forced the information from her. I would say I took the information better than most would've.

Giant machines were making a push to wipe out every advanced sentient race in the galaxy, all the while transforming captured organics into bio-mechanical abominations and using them as foot soldiers. So we were at war, I told myself, I huffed and accepted that fact. Then she told me about indoctrination, and that was when I nearly pissed myself. The Squids could reprogram a living being, very subtly, into its twisted version of a double agent.

I became a little paranoid, y'know? Like, "what if so and so was indoctrinated" and "what would happen if they got into sensitive stuff aboard the ship". Typical teenage thoughts, I suppose.

[She snorts, laughing at herself.] Who am I kidding? I turned into a nut. I stopped talking to my friends for the longest time, barely kept up with my work…I even snuck into the security room aboard the Neema and began copying files. Indoctrination became my own personal nightmare, only perpetuated when I found the reports that the Alliance was sending to the Admiralty Board.

"Notice: Indoctrinated Reaper agents possibly implanted within Alliance parliament, similar infiltrations within other governing bodies likely. Be on the lookout for any of these following traits…"

Reading something like that sparked my already raging paranoia, and I guess the Admiralty were spooked as well.

Soon everyone had to go through mandatory "health examinations". They claimed there was a outbreak of scale-itch spreading about. [A quiet laugh, followed by a pained hiss.] Did they think we were idiots? They didn't even have us take off our suits for these examinations, the doctors just gave us "questionnaires" while someone in another room monitored our suits' biometrics.

It was all bullshit and we…

[She breaks into a coughing fit before she can continue. Machines by her bedside begin to wail, springing her Doctor into action.]

[Doctor Verra]: Okay, that's enough for today. [He signals a nurse to enter.] She's tired and her body's been taxed enough for today. Ira needs her meds. We can continue this another time.

[Ira]: You better come back…I'm not finished with you yet.

Watkins-Jennings Bio-Mechnical Research Facility, Eden Prime.

[Constantly patrolled by heavily-armed Alliance soldiers and private military contractors alike, the Watkins-Jennings Facility resembles more of a military base than any scientific outpost, but that doesn't seem to faze Andriy Pasternak. He's been a "guest" at this facility ever since the official end of the war. His pale skin is unblemished, his unkempt black hair has no traces of gray in it. The man is supposedly in his fifties, but appears to be barely out of his teens. Four marines are watching the both of us, armed with shotguns and high-caliber pistols. Beyond a one-way mirror, a team of scientists are observing the man, gauging his every movement.]

I must say it's a real pleasure to meet you, my friend. Not many people come to visit an old man such as myself. [He immediately begins laughing, seemingly amused at his own joke.] I'm sorry, sorry. That just gets me every time.

So, where do I begin? This is like…a uh, how do you say it? An interview, yes? Yes!

[He enthusiastically rubs his nose and sniffs loudly.] Yes, and I suppose I should start at the beginning of my little tale, hmm? Well I was born on the colony of Redding, in a bustling little port city that made its living off of the sea and travelers from the stars. [He throws his arm into the air for effect, and then giggles.]

Grew up in a happy home, dad worked hard, mom took care of me and my brothers quite well. Not rich, but not for want either. Y'know, that ideal happy family that got along with each other most of the time.

I was…an okay student in high school, more worried about getting laid than getting an 'A', but hey, teenage hormones and all. I didn't get any offers from colleges, wasn't very good at sports, and wasn't nearly pretty enough to get a cushy job, so I joined the local militia. It wasn't actually a bad deal. Free room and board, taught how to shoot properly, and all that gung-ho bullshit and uniforms to impress the ladies.

Another great perk was that no one in the known universe gave two shits about Redding. Besides the extremely rare pirate or bandit raid off the coasts, nothing ever really happened.

The most I had to deal with was relief efforts when Hurricane Svenson rolled in. We handed out water and food, evacuated poor shits who couldn't get out of their homes, give teddy bears to kids. You know, cushy PR stuff they put on recruitment vids.

The only time I truly fired my service rifle was right after the hurricane cleared out of the city of…of uh…God, what was its fucking name? Oh, yeah! Kazia. Official population of roughly two, maybe two and a half mil. And once that storm rolled on in and out, boom! Ghost town.

You couldn't find a single soul on the streets, at any major urban center, or even the shitty poor districts of Kazia. [He looks amused.] I honestly thought that this must have been the first time that the citizenry as a whole took heed of how bad this hurricane was going to be, wisely getting the hell out of dodge in time. When boots hit ground ODIN*, our city-wide emergency network, couldn't pick up anything, which was astounding to me.

*ODIN – Operationally Deployed Information and Identification Network. System adopted on many colony worlds where natural disasters occur higher than average. Registers citizens to a broad network and enables tracking and real-time information streaming of anyone who is in a danger zone, allowing for faster rescue response times. Provided they have voluntarily submitted themselves to be a part of the ODIN system.

Now, you had to realize, not every person registers to ODIN, especially in a city as large as Kazia. So that's why we were deployed to the area, typical search and rescue, with a secondary objective of warding off looters.

We hot-dropped into the southernmost district of the city as a part of a thirty-five man unit. Eleven other units were dropped at various areas of the city, all assigned to search the city for survivors and escort them to Valhalla Tower, this ugly piece of "modern architecture" that had a courtyard large enough to hold the evac ships.

But like I said before...ghost town. Not a damn soul in the entire city. It was actually unnerving.

There would at least be fucking looters or something, hell, goddamned corpses should've been floating about in the flooded parts of the East Quarter! But there was not a soul.

Every unit reported the same thing to my Captain, nobody was finding anything.

Was there a possibility that...

No! That's what frightened me the most! No system, especially ODIN, was ever that efficient and there were always outliers in a population, those who would never take the storm seriously and stayed.

But nothing. Not one fucking soul. We soon found out why.

Suddenly, a unit to the north got ambushed by something, radio chatter that came through was hectic, but ultimately garbled. Something was screwing with our comms, scrambling it through a brute-force hack. A literal swarm of junk data and static flooded our systems, radios were sapped, my HUD was fried. Bio-metric readings for our squad flat-lined, despite the fact that everyone was still alive up to that point.

It was a standard electronic warfare assault, we were briefly trained on it, but never had experienced anything close to it firsthand. We panicked, bunched up close together as we tried to find the source of the hack.

Bad idea...there's several good reasons why you should never bunch up next to your fellow soldiers in a combat environment, and we found out quickly.

A high-caliber round punched through my Captain's face, came out the back of his head and hit our grenadier that was next to me. Round had tumbled through the air, but was still fast enough to fry through his shield and hit him square in the back of the neck.

[Andriy's eyes drift to the floor, his tone becomes noticeably lower.]

Head nearly came off, held on by a bit of sinew.

Then a grenade tumbled into our mix, whether it was one of ours or there's I couldn't tell, blew off my leg the same in any case. The blast threw me in the air, shrapnel cutting into my back and through my leg. Burning, breaking bone, cutting.

When I landed I saw that a good portion of my squad was dead or maimed. Our designated marksman, Koraselich was her name, was literally disemboweled from cunt to ribcage, guts pouring out of the cracks in her armor. Our two other riflemen, Stone and Intrek, were in various states of missing limbs and had enough arteries slashed open to bleed out within minutes. When it came to our medic...I forget her name, but let's just say nothing in her bag could do anything for the concussion wave from the blast that puréed her internal organs and turned her brain to mush inside her own skull.

...That's why you don't bunch up in combat.

So there I was, no leg, rifle thrown from my hands, utterly fucked.

[His smile returned.]

So I started crawling, crawling towards my rifle as gunfire whizzed by overhead. I grabbed it and took cover behind an old car. Then I got to work on my leg. Halfway down my calf, shrapnel had cut through my shields, armor, and bone. I had to work quickly or I was going to pass out from blood loss, so I slathered that stump with a fuck ton of medi-gel while I mainlined painkillers.

Then...then I got to do my job. [His smile grows wider.] High as a kite, I rolled onto my belly and took aim.

And I couldn't see anything, whatever attacked us had cloaking tech. Ghosts in the firefight. Then I spotted the tell-tale shimmer as it passed through a cloud of dust, the particles of tiny debris sticking to the cloaking field. The shimmer stood over Koraselich's corpse and fired a round into her temple, I suppose seeing her intestines pouring out through her cunt wasn't clue enough that she was dead.

The cloak failed as soon as the shot was fired…it was a geth trooper, a unit I had never seen before. Jet black armor, thick plating. High tech comms suite attached to its back, probably connected to a planet-wide network.

So I lined my sights up with that stupid fucking flashlight head of its, and squeezed my trigger. First round, deflected off its outer casing, ricocheted upwards into the air. It turned its head towards me. Second round, square in its face. It had diverted all internal power to its cloaking tech, kinetic barriers were down. Third, fourth, and fifth rounds, all in succession, right on target. Milky white shit started spewing everywhere, dripping down that armor. [He turns to his left, miming a rifle in his hands. He follows an imaginary target.] I shot it again as it fell to its knees, the rifle it carried dropped from its hands. Bang! Bang! Bang! It fell over on top of Koraselich.

[His smile is gone again.] I lost it once I saw it fall. I took my rifle off semi-automatic and put it on burst. Firing off burst after burst until my weapon overheated, I was screaming and cursing at the thing, more bullets hitting it, the ground around it…[Eyes start drifting to the floor.]…into my fallen comrades around the geth's body.

They…the other geth. Acted quickly. Found me. Then…

[A harsh, drawn out tone goes off from the PA system in the room. The guards behind Andriy tense and take their weapons off safe. Andriy merely smiles and stands up.]

Apparently it is "bed time" for now. But do come back.

[Two guards approach him from behind, keeping just out of arm's reach. He lifts his pant leg as he is escorted by me. It appears that his leg is perfectly intact.]

Take care.

[As he is led from the room, he winks at me.]