[Far Rim] This Bitter Earth

Veyast. Rimworld. Colonyworld.

The surface here was inhospitable at best; a weak star, a distant body. An equation for long, twilit years. For eldritch, half shadowed skies stretching over shale valleys and rocky crags; predator haunted. Lean things they, all lamplike eyes and taut skin and dagger teeth. The quarians who settled here had sought succor underground rather than brave the harshness of the wastes. They had built their settlements underground. An ever expanding web of metal cells and sapient hives, growing in the fertile, cool dark.

And then sparks. Tinder. The flames of insurrection. The roar of an Uprising. No quarian world had been spared the torch, spared the blade in the accounting that followed.

Here the erstwhile servants had detonated payloads beneath the earth. Rending continents and baring the homes of their former masters to the howling, screaming winds. The broken bones of cities, rusted and pockmarked, stretched naked before an uncaring heaven. Half sunk in their cratercoffins.

Veyast. Deadworld. Doomedworld.

But their world.

Pardon, "their" world.

The geth platform stood on the lip of the platform, resting on its backbending legs. Carbon nanofiber muscle. Silver plated skin. Tubes weaving through, melding and merging. A half metal hood and below two iridescent eyes: primary optics and the secondary module.

It waited, immobile, bracketed by a line of troopers. If one didn't know better-

Presence of experienced/primary program in suitable representative chassis proposed by geth self identified as Maniple. Disputation. Reconciliation. General consensus achieved. Proposed programs: subs- parsing. Immediate modifiers; irregular data flow. Recalculation of list of available/suitable programs. Primary submission: geth self identified as Maniple. Geth self identified as Maniple formally retracts initial proposal. Retraction contravened by totality of local Consensus minus one. Disputation. Reconciliation. Submission acceptable; program self identified as Maniple dispatched to Veyast.

-one might say it was slightly frustrated of all things.

But still, there it stood, buffeted by the stinging hail of dust and stone as up above the storm wracked sky seethed. There was a soft whirring, the oscillation of shutters in mechanical optics.

Waiting. Just waiting.