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“Always so forrandson,” said the ancestor VI, as it always did “Call h to have grandchildren anyhow”
“You bosh’tet,” whispered the captain “How long?”
“All my life”
“And you never told me”
“How could I? But she’s… She’s truly extraordinary, Qetsi She helps me think Her capacity for deduction is unique There is hardly anything she can’t figure out, although her answers don’t always make much sense But she’s not… Don’t be afraid She’s not alive Her deductive abilities co—”
The captain crouched down and stared at the little holograht back “It’s an abomination,” she said finally
Senna sighed It was the longest sigh of his life In that sigh, a thousand hopes crumbled “Neorld, new rules,” he said in vain
“Not like this Soeth murdered my family Perhaps, because they did notthis is”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Senna growled, through a jaw clenched so tight he thought his teethat what the geth did to nored hihteousness
“You do not know, not the way I do, that machines are not to be trusted I tried to tell the Initiative that, with their revolting Pathfinders, eanic host, it anic and machine They will find that out sooner or later, whether we reach the Nexus or not But this? This is the aboeth came to life You have repeated the end of the world, Senna On my ship Get it out of here Airlock it Burn it to ash I don’t care”
“Qetsi, please!”
“I never took you for stupid, Senna! That’s not your grandmother! It’s a copy, a copy s toward it Don’t you think the old ones felt soeth? And what happened to them? No I would not allow the quarian Pathfinder to take the iences on my ship Delete her, or I will”
Qetsi’Olaht possible She reached for the disk, her furious breathing audible even in her suit But there is an instinct for protecting family that is faster still Senna had wanted to explain everything carefully to Qetsi, how Liat could help, how, by uploading her progra her as an executable function within the Keelah Si’yah, she could —bolstered and expanded by all his tinkering with the guts of the other VIs—long enough to hack the worh the failed systems, deep into the core of the codebank and exterminate it for them But eventually, he had wanted to tell the captain that the sheer massiveness of the ship’s systems would overwhelm and drown out the little pieces of Liat’Nir that s left of personality in the great sea of the ship’s core It was a suicide ged her not to embark on One he hated with every ounce of his soul One he illing to sacrifice the thing he loved most in all the world to accomplish Why couldn’t Qetsi listen? Why couldn’t all her rhetoric about the new rules of Androentle, noble speech he wanted to give, and accept her gratitude for his sacrifice?
Instead, he cried out the corandmother: “GO FISH!”
Liat’Nir’s eyes went out like candles She disappeared Qetsi and Senna stood motionless in the shadows of his quarters