The low-pitched buzz of a rotary cannon was all that could be heard above the din of cries that emanated from the collector troops as they died. It was the only sound that the lone enemy soldier made as the weapon swept back and forth, pausing on any single target only long enough to see it reduced to little more than ash. Though perhaps lone soldier is not the right term, for while there was indeed only a single physical form, the entities that resided within it numbered in the tens of thousands. That was the way of the geth, and this platform now contained the entirety of the programs required to operate both a dreadnought, and the ground combat platforms that it carried, along with nearly seven thousand of its own native runtimes.<br/><br/>To put it bluntly, that is a heckuva lot of computing power, and every last ounce of it was being wholly dedicated to discovering the fastest, most efficient way to vaporize anything and everything collector. Needless to say, it was doing a very,<span style="font-style: italic">very</span>, good job. It had arrived mere hours before, and while the dreadnought carrying it and the assault force that was to fall under its purview had been destroyed within minutes (by both the asteroid field and the base defenses), this one sole unit had survived the catastrophe. Having cost more resources to build than even the dreadnought that had ferried it, the Exalted Combat Platform 042 had little trouble escaping the destruction of its mother ship, and having nowhere else to go, every program aboard had uploaded to the unit and now lived on for the sole purpose of the complete destruction of the collector base.<br/><br/>Even for an Exalted Combat Platform, it was very certainly an impossible task. The odds mattered little to unit 042, however, and it simply kept advancing forward, spraying a veritable wall of projectiles as it went. The unit itself was roughly comparable in size to the chassis known as a prime, and clearly built for the thick of combat; its relentless assault had not ceased since it arrived. That changed, however, when a tremor rocked through the structure around it. It was barely enough to be noticed by any organic, especially in the heat of battle, yet it was as clear as the tolling of a bell to the synthetic sensors of the geth.<br/><br/>::Anomaly detected. Compiling data...::<br/><br/>The weapons fire slowed, the unit taking a fraction of a second longer to align new targets than it had before, and it ceased its forward movement entirely.<br/><br/>::Compilation complete. Analyzing...::<br/><br/>The weapons fire slowed further then stopped altogether as the unit devoted more and more runtimes to sifting through everything it knew that pertained to this new occurrence. Chief among this information were two facts. The first being that the tremors originated from the direction it had come, and the second that nothing short of the main guns on a dreadnought should be capable of causing tremors of that magnitude this far inside the base. Weapons fire from the collectors pelted its shield as it analyzed the data, but had little effect beyond creating a pretty blue light show.<br/><br/>::Analysis complete. Anomaly unresolved.... Consensus reached.::<br/><br/>The unit spun back the way it had come and took two steps before disappearing from sight. Whatever had caused the tremors was going to be very bad for at least one of the two forces waging their small war inside the base, and if it was going to cause harm to the geth or interfere in their mission, then it would have no choice but to die. Consensus had decided that it would be better to confront it now than to wait for it to choose the battleground.<br/><br/><br/><br/>It was only a matter of minutes before the unit encountered a second anomaly, or rather a second<span style="font-style: italic">and</span>a third, in the form of two human males, one of whom was seemingly both unarmed and unarmored. In the absence of any logical explanation of this occurrence, the unit halted and disengaged its stealth unit, raising the rotary cannon to center on the more threatening of the two men as it did so. With the cannon aimed at the armored man (Del Pilar), and a distance of twenty meters between them, it decided to make an inquiry.<br/><br/>"Human-soldier; this unit requests that you disarm and state your intentions."<br/><br/>Ok, so maybe not an inquiry so much as a request. By way of an order.