#32 Hidden secret

After the command center was completely taken in, it took only a short time until the rest of the station was secured.
All surviving Cerberus employees were brought on the York for custody.
The other teams who came to support also found no evidence of the whereabouts of the missing soldiers.

Shepard hoped to find clarifying information in the computer archives of the station.
First attempts on the terminal to get access to the information were unsuccessful.
To gain access to the main frame of the station was only a small obstacle.
The decoding of the encrypted Cerberus databases was something different.
The specialists of York needed only briefly to decipher the first log entries.
This station belonged to a scientific cell of Cerberus, which were working on a project called "Hermes" for more than two years.
Exactly project details were not mentioned in the logs. Shepard wanted first information about the missing crew before they look for other things.
Apparently, the troop carrier was not the first ship that was hijacked. According to the records, the crews were exposed on the planet, which the station orbited.
The vessels were then assigned to the Hermes project. After Shepard got the coordinates, she ordered immediate rescue shuttles from the York.
Then the technician tried their luck on the Hermes database. The files showed a significantly higher encryption. Patience was not one of Kayla's virtues.
After an hour, Shepard got feedback from the York that more than 200 survivors had been found.
Some had to be supplied medically before they could be transported to the York. That was, after all, already a good news.
While the technician continued to work on decoding, Shepard continued reading the logbooks.
The commander of this cell was Major Harry Mayfield. He also had command of the Cerberus cruiser Apollon.
That ship was responsible for the attack on the plant by Hahne-Kedar. While Shepard watched the technicians at work,
she could not resist to think about how long it would take for Tali.

After about three hours they had finally made it.
Cerberus had somehow managed to obtain Vigils database from Ilos. They had succeeded to reactivate Vigils VI to access information.
After about two months, the Hermes project was launched. Enormous material deliveries arrived here and were transported further to an adjacent system.
Four months later, the work was interrupted abruptly.
The matrix of Vigil had become so unstable that they received no further information.
But what was built right here was not the part of the records. Shortly before the war, the work was resumed.
With a copy of Victory, the VI which Shepard had recovered on Thesia, they could repair Vigils matrix.
It only took a brief moment to restart the VI. Unlike last time Vigil’s hologram now looked like a Prothean.
Cerberus had probably disabled all security barriers of the VI since she responded to all questions.
The original goal of project Hermes was to manipulate the mass relays that only should Cerberus friendly ships could pass.
Tests with a remote mass relay leads only to the fact that this relay had been completely disabled. As an alternative they tried to build their own mass relay.
For it they took the original blueprints of the prothean conduit.
Two prototypes were already well advanced.
But through the damage of the portal network through the crucible, there were massive delays because it simply lacked of resources.
Through raids on nearby worlds and ships they tried to find the missing materials.
Shepard wanted to back up all data. Even if Cerberus were not successful so far, the data could possibly help to repair the damaged relays.

Posing and rendering in blender.  Don’t upload my work anywhere without my permission.
Mass Effect and its characters belongs to Bioware / Electronic Arts

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