Mass Effect: Knight of the Old Republic

"...I get traditionalist support if I fight you, and reformer support if I back you. Defeating a Thresher Maw during your Rite of Passage tipped that balance too." Gatatog Uvenk said smugly while Shepard seethed.

Being faced down with several squads of Krogan demanding Grunt joins their clan after fighting for hours against the local wildlife and even one of the deadliest creatures in the galaxy – something she had only previously considered fighting when in an armored vehicle – was enough to put her in a bad mood. Especially because the Shaman they had spoken to earlier had flat out told them such a move was considered forbidden.

Using her crewmate and friend as a tool for politics was just guaranteed to piss her off.

"You talk like he's a thing." She spat. "You're after his power. You don't really want him in your clan."

Uvenk waved her off, "Of course not. I didn't really want to cooperate with Clan Urdnot either, but I had to. Clan Gatatog is on the verge – either of greatness or joining the dust."

Well, Shepard knew which option she preferred, but that wasn't her decision.

"It's your choice, Grunt. What he's offering sounds like an easy job."

"That's the problem." Grunt growled. "I'm pure Krogan. Uvenk, you are the pretender!" He declared, throwing the Clanleader's previous insults back at him.

"Your head is valuable whether you're alive or dead!"

"Then try and take it!"

Weapons were drawn as the 'negotiation' broke down. But this time, Shepard and her team weren't using the Mass Effect weapons they used in the trial to prevent any claims of cheating or such, but the blasters that Revan had given them all.

Garrus was the first to open fire, nailing a rocket launcher wielding krogan in the center of his head-plate. With a normal rifle, there was always a chance the round would fail to penetrate a combatant's shields, armor, or in many cases the thick bone that made up a krogan's plate but the Sith provided weapon practically ignored the kinetic barrier since the energy bolt had very little mass to even act on, pierced the krogan's helmet with little difficulty, and burned through the flesh and bone below.

Shepard's own blaster wasn't nearly as powerful but a handful of bolts were more than enough to deal with any individual krogan, and nothing needed to be said about the monstrosity Grunt had been given. The 'blaster cannon' as Revan called it was powerful enough to nearly dislocate the arm of any non-krogan that fired it. And while it was nowhere near as accurate as Garrus's rifle, it didn't really matter if even a glancing hit turned the target to bloody chunks.

Thanks to that it really didn't take long before Shepard and her team were heading back to the pickup site to call for a ride back to the Urdnot clan holdings.

They weren't expecting to get intercepted by an anxious Mordin accompanied by Samara. Shepard was glad to see the rest of the crew taking her warnings about not letting Mordin or Garrus go anywhere alone for safety seriously.

"Shepard, glad to see you succeeded. New development with Maelon. Urdnot scouts discovered he was taken to Clan Weyrloc camp. Unknown purpose. Estimate not much time."

Shepard sighed at the prospect of another mission right now, but knew she couldn't decline when that meant leaving Mordin's student to captivity or torture.

"Okay, we're done here anyway so we'll get moving as soon as we restock. Samara, I take it you are coming with?"

The Justicar nodded. "Part of my oaths are to assist the helpless. I would accompany you for this."

"Excellent. Grab what you need and then let's go find our wayward salarian."

-o-

"Are we sure this was a hospital?" Garrus asked as they moved through the ruined building. So far they had fought through a small army of krogan and vorcha along with packs of varren. Because as it turned out, Clan Weyrloc had practically founded the Blood Pack with many of its members either joining or working with the merc band. And what the Normandy team had gone through so far seemed better suited to be a fortified bunker or military base rather than a center of healing.

"The Urdnot scout leader informed us it is necessary for a building to be this fortified when dealing with dozens of injured krogan." Samara informed them calmly. "He described it as a requirement to handle those that fall into a 'blood rage'."

Mordin nodded alongside her. "Yes, fascinating survival mechanism. Redundant organ systems and nervous structures allow for survival of a great deal of trauma. Loss of higher level thought functions result of increased instinctual reactions as a side effect. Excellent for harsh environments like Tuchanka. Less optimal for treatment centers."

Shepard thought about being stuck in a building with even a dozen raging krogan and decided she would also prefer thick durable walls between her and them.

That thought took a backseat when she turned the corner and found a corpse shoved off to one side. A human corpse.

"Mordin."

The salarian scientist was already moving, fingers dancing over the interface of his omnitool as he scanned the body. "Sores, tumors, ligatures showing restraint at wrists and ankles. Track marks for repeated injection sites. Test subject. Victim of experimentation."

Shepard felt a mixture of fury and confusion. "I thought this was about the genophage, what are they doing experimenting on humans?"

"Humans useful as test subjects. Much more genetically diverse than most species. Enables exploration of treatment modalities." Mordin explained. "Never used method myself. Disgusting, unethical, sloppy. Used by brute force researchers, not thinkers. No place in proper science. Krogan use of humans unsurprising."

Yes, because proper medical procedure was the issue here.

"Right, like you never used live subjects when modifying the genophage." Shepard said bitterly. "Dammit, if it gets out that krogan are using humans as lab rats, groups like Cerberus are going to have a field day." They needed a human-krogan war like they needed a bullet to the head. Especially with the Collector and Reaper threats growing in the background.

"Never used tests on live subjects. Unnecessary. Limited tests to simulations, corpses, cloned tissue samples. High level tests on varren. No tests on species with members capable of calculus. Simple rule, never broke it." Mordin argued distractedly.

"That's not…that wasn't…nevermind."

Shepard gave everyone the signal to move on as she stewed in her thoughts.

She knew it was a bit unfair to keep beating Mordin over the head with how little she approved of something like the genophage. She always struggled to detach herself from a situation to just see the numbers rather than the people they represented.

It was why she was so uneasy with Revan's plan to prepare for the Reapers, since millions of innocents would get caught up in it even if it did work.

And while Mordin was apparently brilliant enough to sidestep the need to actually test his modified plague on the population of Tuchanka, he repeatedly failed to see that those affected were more than numbers.

They were living beings that raged and wept over the bodies of unborn children, that threw themselves into deadly fights just to have a legacy, or that would apparently do horrific experiments in order to find a cure.

She doubted Mordin's simulations could truly account for that.

That was a fact that was only reinforced when they were confronted by someone calling themselves the speaker for Clan Weyrloc. Shepard tried to make him see reason, to convince him that tearing across the galaxy on a wave of blood like Weyrloc was aiming to would only make things worse and turn everyone, even the sympathizers against the genophage, into enemies of the krogan but nothing she said would convince them. The Clanspeaker – and even with the short time she had met the krogan, Shepard could see how he got that title – was happy to pontificate how everything would be conquered by the new krogan empire and that Shepard knew nothing of their situation.

And while Shepard normally wouldn't mind not convincing someone to her point of view, she wasn't about to just walk away and let them keep experimenting on people. Or ruin what Wrex was building for his people. Which meant…

"You talk too much."

…Clan Weyrloc had been upgraded from obstacle to objective in her mind.

Shepard snapped her blaster up and squeezed off a single shot.

While the hospital was built with raging krogan in mind, there were still the occasional feature that clearly made it a non-military building. The very exposed pipeline with a flammable hazard symbol on it was one such feature. And while the metal casing was enough to stand up to Tuchanka's weather and a lack of maintenance, it wasn't able to prevent the red energy bolt from burning a hole straight into it and igniting the gas flowing through. The resulting explosion was enough to completely engulf the Weyrloc Clanspeaker and his group, incinerating them all in seconds much to Shepard's surprise.

"Did you mean to do that?" Garrus asked from behind her.

"If anyone else asks; yes. But off the record I was expecting it to just distract them long enough to give us an advantage."

"The Sith's weapons are formidable." Samara commented with only a bit of distaste.

"Takes all the fun out of a fight." Grunt groused.

Shepard shrugged. "From what the speaker was saying before I blew him up there's plenty of krogan and mercenaries for you to fight up ahead. I'm guessing that's where the labs are."

Going through the labs didn't improve Shepard's mood much.

They found an active console with details about the experiments. Not only were the krogan being incredibly thorough in their tests, but they were actually on the right track to a potential cure according to Mordin. Words were said, some Shepard regretted saying but not the feeling behind them, and it quickly became apparent that while the Salarian scientist was proud of his work – and the more she learned about how slim the margins of error were for modifying the existing genophage – Mordin wasn't nearly as at peace with what he had done as he first seemed.

Sure he had excuses and justifications. Things he could point at and say this is why his work was needed. He even shared how the work with his previous team was the best time in his life. A scientist with a team, a problem, and unlimited resources.

But when Shepard asked if he still kept in touch with the old members of his team the cracks in his facade started to show.

He told her about how he didn't celebrate after the project ended. How he opened a clinic on Omega because it was easy. No complex ethical concerns for him to worry about for the final decade of his life. Something that reminded Shepard that despite Mordin sounding and acting like an old man sometimes, he was actually probably around Shepard's age or just a bit older.

The mask fell away almost completely when they found the body of a female volunteer who had died during the experiments. She never had a chance of being cured of the genophage induced sterility but she had gone ahead with the tests anyway. Mordin was furious at the wasted life and depressed that someone would throw theirs away for the hope of a cure.

Shepard did her best not to rub it in his face that none of his simulations or models could take the individual emotions of those affected into account. She didn't have to, Maelon did that for her when they found him not only working freely on the cure, but the one greenlighting the experiments.

So now she was in the interesting position of trying to convince Mordin to not kill the person he requested her to help save.

"Unacceptable experiments. Unacceptable goals. Won't change. No choice. Have to kill you." Mordin declared, shoving a gun up to Maelon's face.

"Okay, let's just wait one second." Shepard interrupted. "You sure you want to do this, Mordin? We came here to save him, not kill him."

"Wasn't expecting this."

"I don't think any of us did. But this isn't a fight. He's helpless. You aren't a murderer." At least she hoped he wasn't. Mordin had spent a lot of time arguing otherwise.

"No. Not a murderer. Thank you, Shepard."

Things thankfully were pretty calm after that. Mordin locked the genophage data down and told his old apprentice to politely go to hell. The last thing to do was figure out what to do with Maelon's data.

Samara and Garrus thought they should destroy it. Just the existence of a potential cure would be enough for some krogan to go to war with the galaxy and they didn't want that for a number of reasons.

Grunt was surprisingly indifferent about it.

Shepard was torn. On the one hand, the krogan were far too fragmented to agree on how to use the data even if they could. And even if they weren't, none of them would likely be able to make a cure without resorting to the kind of experiments they had just put an end to.

On the other hand, the genophage was a mistake she would love to see corrected.

"I think we should hold onto it for now." She suggested. "Make the deaths worth something if a cure does ever need to be created."

"Yes. True cure still years of work away. But with this, much closer than starting from scratch."

"Great. We done here?" Grunt asked.

"Yeah, pack it up people. Let's get back to the Normandy before Raven and Tali kill each other." Shepard said. "After all this I think we could use some downtime before we go rushing to our next mission."

-o-

"Shepard, I'm being accused of treason!"