Chapter 1
Jack summed it up well when she said, "It's like a damn insect hive."
It was eerie hearing someone speak both through a radio while watching their lips move silently; one of the greatest reminders of being in a zee-gee environment. Shepard knew it would take a few minutes to get used to, as it always did, but like an experienced marine she would soon ignore it and focus only on the actual words. "Come on." She gestured for them to follow her, as she was already moving down the corridor, hand cannon drawn. "I want us off this ship ASAP. Preferably before we work out that their weapons are, in fact, online."
Jack snorted while Garrus and Grunt both merely grunted their affirmative. Perhaps it betrayed the depth of Shepard's apprehension to bring three squad members instead of her usual two, but she didn't want to take any chances.
Garrus moved so her was on her right, nearly a metre behind to be able to cover Shepard's flank. Grunt wasn't far behind the turian, shotgun primed and ready to fire. Jack stayed parallel with the commander on her left, which made Shepard slightly uncomfortable. It was like having a blinder placed beside her left eye; something that would block her peripheral vision and hamper mobility in a fire fight. Subordinates were not supposed to walk beside their commander unless directed and Shepard wished Jack hadn't picked this day to start.
"Penetrating scans have detected an access node to uplink with the Collector databanks," EDI reported. "Uploading signal to your HUD."
It took a second for the small dot to appear on her screen, purposefully muted so it wouldn't distract her in combat. Shepard would have preferred schematics, but EDI would have to access the node for that.
Slightly more focused now that she had a clear goal, Shepard set a measured pace, slow enough to be considered overcautious but fast enough to appease Jack and Grunt. It was only a matter of time before the Collectors showed up and racing around corners was not going to help Shepard's nerves.
Glowing, multi-faceted sacks hung from the ceiling in clumps, occasionally oozing fluid that floated, immobile, in the vacuum. No one except Grunt was willing to walk directly under them; even Jack kept her distance and watched warily for any sign of something hatching. The corridors were wide, likely to allow many Collectors through at once. Or maybe to allow for the pods being carried on and off the ship. The ceiling, however, was curiously low in the hallways for a species that could fly.
The floors and walls were a hybrid of metal sheets and the same strange rock that formed the spires of the ship. What looked like a metal doorway loomed in front of her, but Shepard questioned its presence. Doors were unnecessary on a ship like this, where its inhabitants did not require atmosphere to survive.
Shepard shook herself out of her musing and half-covered paranoia as she passed through the doorway. She needed to stay focused, or she was going to lose the third encounter between herself and a Collector ship.
The sound of EDI's voice had Shepard convulsively tightening the grip on her hand cannon. "Shepard, I have compared the ship's EM signature to known Collector profiles. It is the vessel you encountered on Horizon."
Simultaneously a part of her plummeted while another part soared. She shoved both of them aside. Thinking analytically, Shepard speculated, "Maybe the defence towers softened it for the turians."
Behind her, Grunt voiced the thought she was unwilling to. "Maybe the missing humans are on here. Unless they're dead."
Shepard clamped down her emotions. On a mission one's personal feelings were distractions, nothing more. There was time to be human later in the safety of her darkened cabin, when Commander Shepard wasn't needed. Logic held the reigns in her mind but her disquiet boiled and writhed in the corner where she'd pushed it.
She ghosted through the hallway, hand cannon raised and finger ready to squeeze the trigger in a heartbeat. Jack was stalking beside her, and out of the corner of her eye Shepard occasionally saw a flicker of blue dart over the woman. She knew that she and her squad were likely picking up each others' unease, becoming more wound up and alert. It hung around them, an invisible storm cloud of tension, with thunder just off the edge of hearing and bringing paranoia in its wake; lighting danced sporadically, causing cold adrenaline to spike on her tongue.
In the back of her nose Shepard could almost smell the ozone, a warning of the maelstrom of fear and chaos to come.
Time slowed until they could pass through corridor after corridor in this labyrinth of stone and metal and yet go nowhere. If they didn't meet any resistance soon, Shepard doubted her nerves could take it. It felt like there were metal wires coiled around her stomach, squeezing, tightening until she was sure her stomach would explode.
Shepard reached the end of the newest hallway and checked her HUD for any heat signals. Seeing none did not comfort her in the slightest, and so her hand cannon was raised and ready to fire as she rounded the corner.
It wasn't what Shepard expected – a drop off on her right that was at least fifteen feet wide and forty feet deep, and a gentle ramp on her left. At least it wasn't another corridor and there were no glowing sacks dangling from the ceiling.
"This had better mean we're going in the right direction," Jack muttered to Shepard's left.
"Keep moving," Shepard said, shifting the hand cannon in her grip to stimulate more blood moving into her fingers. She led the way up the ramp, planting her feet carefully on the rough rock and keeping her attention everywhere at once. Shepard noted all the niches and holes Collectors could come pouring out of at any moment. In the back of her mind she wondered if it was good to be so cautious around the metaphorical sleeping lion, or if she was just feeding her paranoia. Shepard was inclined to believe the former.
She had nearly reached the top when her attention narrowed to focus on one thing. The commander didn't slow until she stopped less than a metre from it. The pod looked like a cocoon, a tight prison that would undoubtedly transform its occupant in some way. Only it was open and glaringly empty, which spurred a momentary tightening in the metal wires.
"Same pods we saw on Horizon," Garrus noted. "Only they're empty."
Grunt sneered. "Small, like my tank. Bet they begged for mercy."
"A bit hard when you can't move or talk, dumbass," Jack retorted.
"Enough!" Shepard barked before the krogan could argue back. "Let's go."
Shepard turned and surveyed the walkway. There was a large hole in the wall on the left, about thirty metres away. She guessed led further into the ship. With the drop off on the right, one could see about three floors down, all of which were maddeningly still. Ahead was what appeared to be a dead-end chamber. There were heaps of something covering its floor, whatever it was spilling out the wide entryway. Shepard narrowed her eyes. The shape of the mounds looked strangely familiar.
Oh shit.
It was as if a scene had been taken from her past and dumped in front of her. In her mind's eye Shepard saw herself dragging the body of a teenage boy, barely older than herself, to throw onto the growing mountain of stripped corpses. It was what you got for messing with the Tenth Street Reds – killed, relieved of your possessions and thrown on a pile or in a trash can. If Shepard and her fellow gang members were feeling nice, they'd burn the bodies, but that usually took more alcohol than they were willing to spare.
"This looks bad," Garrus said, but his voice sounded faint, miles away.
With each step she took Shepard felt herself become more tense, the metal wire in her stomach knotting further. The pile of corpses loomed closer, step after step, until she could make out facial features. Anxious, Shepard quickly looked over the bodies, praying none of them were Alenko.
"Probably test subjects." Jack's voice was a mix of harshness and resentment. "If they were the control group, they wouldn't have been needed after the experiment was over."
She did a double take at a pair of blank brown eyes, then realised they belonged to a middle aged woman. Shepard felt guilty at the rush of relief that flooded through her. She resisted a sigh as she gazed down at the corpses, brutalised and then discarded like toys a spoiled child didn't want any more, secure in the knowledge he could always get more if he wanted. "They didn't deserve this."
"You get what you get," Jack replied flatly. "Deserve has nothing to do with it." Shepard heard the bitterness ringing beneath her words.
Wordlessly Shepard turned and backtracked. There was nothing they could to do those people, save from making sure it wouldn't happen again. Make their sacrifice mean something was a rule Shepard lived under, from downed gangmates to her lost unit on Akuze to her best friend Ashley Williams.
The other doorway, a crude yet surprisingly large cut out in the wall loomed ahead, an aphotic pit promising to plunge them deeper into the Collectors' twisted plot. Shepard didn't hesitate before stepping through, hand cannon up, every sense alert. An empty room greeted them and it took a few seconds to notice the new hallway. Shepard crept forward, her squad at her back. There was a sharp corner, and something in the room threw sickly yellow light onto the hallway wall. Her visor dulled the bite of the light into a mere tint of colour among shadows.
There was the sound of weapons readying behind her. Shepard led the way, finger on the trigger of her hand cannon. She lifted her fist in the 'stop' command on instinct. Shepard put her back to the wall beside the doorway, checked her hand cannon again and peeked around the corner.
Nothing.
Shepard checked thoroughly for heat signatures and found only weak fluctuations from what appeared to be terminals. In the back of her mind she wondered if Collectors hibernated and if they would give off body heat while doing so. She motioned her squad to follow as she took the first few cautious steps.
She surveyed the room properly, realising that what she had believed to be tables were actually more pods, bathed in the yellow luminosity from the alien displays beside them. Jack took the anxious steps to inspect one and snapped surprised expletives.
"What is it?" Shepard barked.
"There's a Collector in here," she growled. Everyone's weapons raised to aim at the pod, ready for it to burst open at any second and release the vanguard of the Collector's defence. "These bastards are even experimenting on their own?"
"Apparently," Shepard answered, stepping up to what she guessed was the main terminal. Her hands flicked over the controls, searching for any familiarities to systems she knew before deciding it would be too time consuming. Her omni-tool barely made any shadows as it flared to life on her forearm but was crudely effective in breaking into the databank. Shepard opened a channel to the Normandy and copied as much of it as she could across. "EDI, I'm uploading the data from this terminal. See if you can figure out what they were up to."
Grunt bashed the butt of his shotgun against the transparent lid of the pod. Shepard tensed, muscles coiled to spring at the slightest movement.
"I'm fairly certain it's dead," Garrus said. "There's no lights on the pod and the Collector was hooked up to it. See?" He pointed to several tubes running along the inside of the pod to sink into the Collector's shell.
"Data received. Analysing." A brief pause, then: "The Collectors were running baseline genetic comparisons between their species and humanity."
Shepard's eyes narrowed behind her visor. "Are they looking for similarities?"
"I have no hypothesis on their motivations," the AI replied. "All I have are the preliminary results. They reveal something remarkable. A quad-strand genetic structure identical to traces found in ancient ruins. Only one species is known to possess this: the Protheans."
Shepard's mind snapped it together in a heartbeat. "Holy shit. The Protheans didn't vanish – they're just working for the Reapers now!"
"These are no longer Protheans, Shepard," EDI corrected. She explained with, "Their genes show distinct signs of genetic rewrite. The Reapers have re-purposed them to suit their needs."
"You'd think someone would have picked up on this," Garrus rumbled. His voice didn't give his thoughts away but Shepard wondered what was running through his agile mind behind the opaque visor.
"No one has had an opportunity to study Collector genetic code in this detail. I have already matched two thousand alleles to recorded fragments. This Collector likely descends from a Prothean colony in–"
"Superfluous details later," Shepard barked. "What did the Reapers change?"
"I have found three fewer chromosomes, reduced heterochromatin structure, elimination of superfluous 'junk' sequences."
Shepard gazed down at the motionless Collector. A cruel fate to an ancient race, but one that could not be stopped. Even if genetic engineering wasn't illegal there was next to no way the Protheans could be brought back. And even if they were, they were a doomed race. "Whatever they used to be, the Collectors are a danger now. And we still have to stop them."
"No shit," Jack snapped. "I'm not letting them turn me into some screwed up bug thing."
"Huh. . ."
Shepard's head snapped around to see Grunt kneel down and start digging through what looked like scrap metal.
As she approached she realised it was actually a pile of firearms. A chill went through Shepard was she wondered where the Collectors had gotten them from. Grunt bared his his teeth as he inspected an assault rifle and threw it down. "Pathetic," he growled. "Made for small hands and weak arms."
Shepard knelt down as the krogan stood up. Grunt was right for the most part – the majority of the weapons were made for humanoids and were inferior to her equipment. Pistols, hand cannons, assault rifles all shifted and scattered across the floor as she dug around anyway. But a smooth black casing at the bottom of the pile caught her attention. She pulled it out and inspected it.
"Commander, I think that's overkill," Garrus drawled.
"Nothing's overkill when you're fighting mutated bugs and genocidal machines," Shepard replied. The barrel snapped smoothly out of the casing as the M-98 Widow became live in her arms. She looked experimentally down the scope, a smirk tugging at the corner of her lip. Let the Collectors try to dodge this.
She pulled her Viper off her back and replaced it with the Widow. Shepard gently placed her Viper on the pile of firearms, thinking a goodbye. It had served her well on Illium, but a better sniper rifle was a better sniper rifle. Shepard then continued pawing through the weapons for anything else that might be of use. Her fingers brushed against a familiar barrel, then fished it out of the pile. Shepard froze, her eyes widening in horror.
"Commander?" Garrus asked.
Silently, she held up the pistol.
The turian let out a vulgar phrase of marine curses Shepard vaguely remembered teaching him.
"Care to let us in on the secret?" Jack asked irritably. A single glance at her told Shepard she wasn't concerned at her squadmates' distress, merely annoyed.
Shepard carefully examined the pistol, noticing the new dints and other signs of frequent use. It had been upgraded to accommodate the thermal clip system and the grip was worn smooth. The grip she had once changed from fitting her hand to Alenko's.
The HMWP IV – informally called Spectre Master Gear – had once belonged to her until she had preyed on the opportunity to buy a HMWP VI. From there Shepard had adjusted the IV for Alenko's use and passed it on.
And now it was here, lying discarded in a pile of weapons.
"Well?" Jack pressed, one boot tapping an unsteady rhythm against the floor.
"It belonged to a close friend of mine. He was at Horizon," Shepard explained neutrally. She shoved the gun into the empty holster on the opposite hip from her own pistol and rose to her feet. The metal coils were carving through the soft flesh of her stomach, they were so tight, and no doubt blood was welling from the incisions.
"Then let's go already," the bald woman growled. "Get some payback on these sons-of-bitches."
Agreed, Shepard thought, though she would never admit it out loud. That would only encourage Jack. "Move out," she ordered, leading the way down the next walkway. It was a short tunnel, the light from a cavern ahead shining back through and grappling with the sickly yellow beams from the room behind them. The metal wire tightened convulsively. She raised her hand cannon again, gripping it tight with both hands. Jack was light on her feet, keeping pace with her while she sensed Garrus and Grunt close behind her.
They stepped into a huge grotto of pods. It was perversely breathtaking – the pods hung like glowing chrysalis' from the walls, jutting from the rock like rows upon rows of teeth in a mutated shark. Some hung from the ceiling while others clung on all sides of an excavated tunnel just further ahead. The Collectors had made use of any and all available space to cram as many pods in as possible, resulting in uneven and jagged construction, with a few spare pods littering the ground and leaning against walls. Quantity had obviously been their goal, not quality or ease of use. The pods glowed and reflected light off each other, illuminating the hall and leaving no shadows for anything to hide in.
She couldn't stop herself from wondering if Kaidan was in one of those pods, at the expense of yet another tightening in the metal wires slicing her stomach to ribbons. Unless he was at the bottom of one of the piles of corpses? If he wasn't, were the pods doing anything? The comparison to a chrysalis came back to send a chill down her spine. Were the pods even active? If so, was he conscious? Was he even still alive?
"Hundreds," Jack remarked, and despite her drawl Shepard sensed the tension radiating from her. "I wonder how many are filled?"
"Too many."
"I am detecting signs of life in some of the pods, Shepard." Her heart leapt at the words. "It is probable that the pods are linked to a secondary system so those abducted aren't killed when primary systems fail."
"Horrible." Shepard could imagine the way Garrus' mandibles would flare once, then sit tight against his face. "Trapped in these pods, completely at the mercy of the Collectors."
"Or lack thereof," Shepard murmured. Louder, she ordered, "Jack, you're guarding the entry we came from. Grunt, you're on the stair thing at the opposite hallway."
As they moved to carry out her orders, EDI chimed in, "It would appear that in case of emergency all inhabitants in the pods are outfitted with breather masks in case of pod breaches, or if they need to be moved manually in the case of complete pod failure."
"Makes sense," Garrus muttered.
"And it takes care of one problem," Shepard replied. "EDI, can you tell me which pods have people inside them and can you release them?"
The turian pointed out, "Uh, Shepard, a few hundred thousand people have been abducted. . ."
"I know, I know," Shepard said. "EDI?"
"One hundred and eighty two pods are active," the AI reported.
One hundred and eighty two out of two hundred thousand. Words failed to provide voice to what went through Shepard at hearing that.
"Shit, that's nothing!" Jack's tight voice snapped over their radios. Shepard's head jerked over to the young woman, who was pacing across the entryway. Blue flared down her spacesuit-clad body. "Where the hell are the rest of them?"
What were the chances Kaidan was among that tiny fraction?
"Other than the ones that were experimented on?" Grunt snorted.
Garrus muttered, "Never thought she would care."
"I heard that, asshat!"
"Enough!" Shepard barked. "EDI, where are the rest of them?"
"There are no other active pods on the ship, Shepard. Only the ones here."
Shepard closed her eyes for a brief moment, then looked around. "Maybe the turians damaged something and the power cut to the other pods, or the Collectors purposefully rerouted power to another system."
"Both theories are plausible," EDI acknowledged. "To be able to free the humans in the pods, I will need to uplink with a server node and override the current protocols. There is a node behind you on the wall."
Shepard turned and quickly spotted the bulge of metal grafted onto the wall. An occasional figure darted across the screen, which she guessed was to show it was in hibernation mode or the Collectors' equivalent. Her lithe fingers darted over the holographic keys on her omni-tool as she hacked past the firewalls on the system to make a path for EDI.
"I can release those trapped in the pods."
Shepard scanned the cavernous room once and said, "Do it."