The memorial took four hours to build.
Not System-built — hand-built. Webb, Garrus, and two militia scouts from the expedition team worked with cutting torches and salvaged metal from the station's maintenance stores, constructing a marker at the main airlock where most of the crew had walked through. A simple thing: a triangular plate mounted on the corridor wall, engraved with the station's designation and a line that Webb wrote in silence and nobody questioned.
To those who walked into the stars — Kappa-7. 2179-2180.
Dr. Tanaka stood at the airlock's inner door while they worked. She hadn't entered the airlock itself in eleven months — hadn't crossed the threshold where her colleagues had stepped into the cycling chamber and waited for vacuum to take them. Her hands trembled against her thighs, and she pressed them still with the practiced force of someone who'd been doing it many times a day for longer than a person should have to.
"I recorded their names," she said. "All of them. Dates, times, circumstances. I thought someone should know, even if no one ever came."
Webb took the datapad she offered. Two hundred and eleven names. Dates spanning eighteen days. Cause of death, recorded in the clinical shorthand of a doctor maintaining professionalism while her world dissolved around her: voluntary depressurization, artifact-influenced.
"This stays classified," Webb said. "Not because they don't deserve to be remembered. Because the truth would cause panic."
Tanaka's eyes — bloodshot, steady — searched his face.
"What will you tell people?"
"Catastrophic life support failure. Cascading system collapse. You survived because you were in an isolated section with independent air supply. The official record will show a tragedy, not a horror."
"And the artifact?"
"Doesn't exist. Not in any report, not in any database, not in any conversation outside this team." He met her gaze. "I need you to maintain this. Not for me — for the people who'll live here. They deserve to build something on this station without knowing what's sealed in the mining bay."
Tanaka processed this the way a doctor processes a diagnosis — clinical assessment, emotional impact, treatment options. The trembling in her hands subsided. Purpose replacing terror, one measured breath at a time.
"I was a medical officer for six years before Kappa-7. I know how to keep medical records that say what they need to say." She took the datapad back. "I'll prepare the official cause-of-death documentation. Consistent, thorough, verifiable. Nobody will question life support failure on a station this old."
"Will you stay? When we bring colonists?"
"Stay." The word landed like it weighed something. She looked at the airlock. At the memorial. At the corridor where footsteps still echoed that weren't theirs. "I've been staying for eleven months. I suppose I can manage a few more."
---
[Mining Station Kappa-7 — Central Hub, May 22, 2180]
The territory claim happened in the station's operations center, with Tanaka watching from the command chair and Garrus maintaining perimeter security at the corridor junction.
Webb pressed his palm against the operations console. The gesture was familiar now — Tali had catalogued twelve instances of it across their association, each one preceding a construction or system activation that violated known engineering. This time, the effect was different. No physical construction manifested. Instead, the air shifted — a pressure change, barely perceptible, as if the station itself had inhaled.
His eyes went distant for three seconds. The micro-expressions she'd learned to read — jaw tension, pupil dilation, the particular stillness that preceded his invisible interface interactions — cycled through a sequence she hadn't seen before. Longer. More complex. Whatever he was doing required more concentration than building a barrier or a guard post.
[TERRITORY CLAIM: STATION KAPPA-7]
[CLASSIFICATION: OUTPOST TIER]
[COST: 50 MP]
[MP REMAINING: 22/300 (regenerated during transit + station exploration)]
[POPULATION: 0]
[LOYALTY: N/A (UNPOPULATED)]
[DEFENSE RATING: 3/100]
[BUILDING SLOTS: 3]
[ACTIVE HAZARDS: REAPER ARTIFACT (CONTAINED)]
[MULTI-TERRITORY MANAGEMENT: UNLOCKED]
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: SECOND TERRITORY CLAIMED. EXPANSION MILESTONE ACHIEVED.]
[NP EARNED: +100 (EXPANSION — FIRST OUTPOST)]
"Done," he said. His voice carried the particular thinness that followed System use — not pain, but depletion. The hollowness behind his eyes that Tali had correlated with MP expenditure.
"What did you just do?" she asked. Not accusingly. With genuine curiosity — the engineer's need to understand the mechanism, not just the output.
"Registered the station with my... network. Haven's Point and Kappa-7 are now connected. Resource management, communication priority, defensive coordination. Two territories, one system."
"And the colonists we're sending?"
"Twenty volunteers from Haven's Point. Engineers, life support technicians, one militia squad. Garrus will establish security protocols around the sealed mining bay — radiation hazard, restricted access. Standard quarantine procedure."
Garrus appeared in the doorway. His mandibles carried an expression Tali had learned to translate as professional approval with personal reservations.
"Radiation hazard." The turian's voice was dry. "Because people don't ask questions about radiation."
"People ask fewer questions about radiation than about mind-controlling alien fragments. It's a better cover."
"It's a lie."
"It's a necessary one."
The distinction mattered to Garrus. Tali could see it in the way his mandible scar caught the light — the physical record of a career built on truth, now bent into a shape that accommodated deception in service of survival. He'd been bending since C-Sec, and each bend left marks that didn't fade.
"I'll write the security protocols," Garrus said. "Full containment perimeter. Motion sensors, automated alerts, biometric access. Nobody gets within fifty meters of that bay without authorization from you, me, or Tali."
"Do it."
"And Tanaka?"
They both looked at the doctor. She sat in the command chair, the datapad of names on her lap, her hands finally still. The memorial's metal gleamed in the corridor behind her — new steel against old, a marker for the dead planted by the living.
"She's one of us now," Webb said. "Whether she likes it or not."
---
[Mining Station Kappa-7 — Docking Bay, May 22, 2180, Evening]
The first colonist transport arrived at 1847. Twenty volunteers — twelve engineers, four life support technicians, four militia from Garrus's training program. They filed off the shuttle with the cautious energy of people stepping into a place that had a story they didn't know.
Tali met them at the docking bay with Kowalski, who'd made the trip from Haven's Point to supervise the infrastructure assessment. The chief engineer walked the station's corridors the way he walked every new space — hands trailing along conduits, fingers tapping junction boxes, mouth moving in a silent conversation with systems that spoke a language only engineers understood.
"Station's in better shape than the distress call suggested," Kowalski reported after his first pass. "Life support is functional — Tanaka's been maintaining it manually for a year, which is either impressive or insane. Power grid needs a full overhaul. Artificial gravity is running at eighty percent, which explains why my coffee keeps trying to escape the cup."
"Timeline to full habitability?"
"With twenty people? Three weeks. With proper resources? One."
"You'll have proper resources. I'm authorizing a supply run from Haven's Point — materials, equipment, whatever you need."
Kowalski's jaw worked. The old reflex — the one that preceded questions about where resources came from — surfaced and subsided in the span of a breath. He'd long since traded curiosity for pragmatism, and the trade had held.
"I'll send a list by morning." He paused at the docking bay entrance. "Webb."
"Yeah?"
"The station's got good bones. Mining infrastructure, refinery potential, defensive positioning against the asteroid field. Whoever built this place knew what they were doing." He glanced toward the sealed mining bay corridor, visible at the far end of the main passage. "What's behind the quarantine?"
"Radiation hazard. Legacy mining equipment with degraded containment."
"Hmm." A sound that contained an entire conversation's worth of skepticism compressed into a single syllable. "I'll route the colonists away from that section. Standard hazard protocol."
"Thanks, Kowalski."
"Don't thank me. Just keep the impossible engineering coming. I've got a reputation to maintain."
He left. The docking bay settled into the orderly chaos of colonists unpacking gear, engineers running diagnostics, and militia establishing perimeter watches. Through the viewport, Haven's Point was a distant point of light — their first home, now one of two.
At the operations center, Tali updated the comm relay. Haven's Point and Kappa-7 were linked — data, voice, emergency protocols. Two points in a network that would need to grow much larger before 2183.
The containment chamber's sensor relays fed data to her omni-tool. External readings only, as promised. The fragment's emissions were constant — a low-frequency pulse that registered on her instruments as a whisper below the threshold of perception. Steady. Patient.
"Callback: The Geth modification code from Theta-7. The harmonic ratios in the Geth data matched Prothean encryption exactly. Now I'm reading emissions from a Reaper artifact that use the same harmonic foundation. Prothean technology and Reaper technology share a common mathematical root. The Reapers didn't just harvest the Protheans — they built their indoctrination tools from Prothean science."
She filed the analysis. The implications were staggering, and she needed more data before drawing conclusions she'd have to defend. But the pattern was forming — a picture of an enemy that didn't just destroy civilizations. It studied them. Learned from them. Used their own knowledge against the next cycle's victims.
Haven's Point celebrated the expansion announcement that evening. Vasquez's voice over the colony-wide comm: "Haven's Point is proud to announce the establishment of Kappa-7 as our first outpost territory. Twenty brave colonists have begun rehabilitation of the mining station, which will provide valuable mineral resources and strategic depth for our growing community."
Cheering. The distant, tinny sound of celebration filtered through the comm relay from Haven's Point to Kappa-7's speakers. The twenty colonists in the station's mess hall heard it and smiled.
Tanaka heard it too, from the operations center. She didn't smile. She looked at the corridor that led to the mining bay, where two hundred of her colleagues had walked past a memorial that told a lie about how they died, and she pressed her hands flat against her thighs until the trembling stopped.
Twenty colonists slept in quarters where ghosts walked. The containment chamber hummed at a frequency that was almost silence.
Almost.
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