One benefit to Shepard's three-person squads, Garrus realized as soon as they'd all crammed into the back of the Kodiak and lifted off, was physical space. He'd read the stats that said a Kodiak could hold fourteen, but he didn't see how. Fourteen small humans, perhaps, stacked one on top of the other from floor to ceiling. Fourteen children, maybe. Grunt had to account for the space of at least half a dozen all on his own, if the amount of complaining Zaeed was doing was anything to go by.
"If you don't get your goddamned elbow out of my goddamned face—"
"Your face is in the way of my elbow. These shuttles are built for pyjaks! When the krogan start building their own ships they'll be—"
"Flying bloody deathtraps? You met a lot of goddamned krogan engineers in your day?"
Evidently not content to let an argument rage without offering his input, Javik began, "In my cycle—"
Tali was pushed so close to Garrus' side that when she tilted her head up he could almost make out features behind the clouded purple glass. "You going to say anything?" she asked quietly.
Not, he suspected, that anyone could hear anything over the din of seven clanking, armored, complaining soldiers. She could probably have shouted and still gone unheard. Garrus cleared his throat. Javik was in the middle of explaining the superiority of Prothean engineering—nothing new—while Jack rolled her eyes. Grunt shifted away from Zaeed only to clock Javik in the mouth. Jack's rolled eyes became a snicker.
"Heed your betters, krogan—"
"Maybe we could—" Garrus began. Tali sighed. Funny how even with the bickering, Garrus heard that.
On Garrus' other side, Kaidan swiftly shucked one of his gloves, brought a hand up to his mouth and let out a whistle so piercing the sudden silence afterward still seemed to ring with it. Garrus had to hand it to him: every head swiveled to face them. Even Javik's mouth was a little agape. The Kodiak jerked to the side, but righted itself almost immediately.
From the cockpit, Cortez muttered, "A little warning next time?"
Leaning forward, Garrus rested his elbows on his knees and met every set of eyes now looking at him one at a time. "Right," he said. "You have your squads. The Normandy's not picking up the Empire's signature in orbit, but right now we can't entirely trust our scanners and the storms are keeping us from detecting anything groundside."
"Then why are we here?" Grunt asked, gesturing broadly with one hand. Zaeed ducked away from it, but Garrus didn't miss the way the merc's hand twitched instinctively toward his weapon.
"Mars has the nearest major medical facility. We know they left Earth, so chances are they came through here even if they didn't stay."
"So we're… what? Looking for fingerprints?" Jack asked. "We gotta have more to go on. There's a whole fucking planet down there."
Garrus nodded. "We're looking for clues. Witnesses. Worst case, we're looking for corpses. Anything out of the ordinary. Anything that might point us in a direction."
Jack's expression turned skeptical, her full lips pursed and her eyebrows pulled down. Her ponytail bobbed as she shook her head. "Anything out of the ordinary on a Reaper-blasted planet. You ever heard of looking for a—"
"Needle in a haystack?" Garrus supplied, a little bite in his subharmonics. One of Jack's eyebrows jerked up again. "I never said it would be easy. You want to sit here and keep a seat warm on the Kodiak, go right ahead." He paused, and when he blinked the backs of his eyelids showed the image of Shepard, blackened and broken, her dog tags catching the light, taking that breath. That one breath. He was hinging a whole lot of damned hope on a single inhale. "Look, even if they didn't actually bring her to the facility, the people who have her would've been looking for something a hell of a lot stronger than medi-gel. Even if they're already gone, any bit of information we can use—or that Liara can use—will be better than the nothing we've got right now."
"Understood," Kaidan said. It was the kind of understood that ended conversations—a soldier's understood—and everyone in the overcrowded cargo space shifted and shrugged and nodded, but no one argued. Or complained.
"ETA five minutes," Cortez said. "Might be bumpy. We've got a storm."
It was, indeed, bumpy. This time when Grunt's elbow ended up dangerously close to Zaeed's nose, no one raised their voice or snickered or rolled their eyes. A turbulent five minutes always seemed an eternity longer than a smooth five minutes, and by the time the Kodiak landed on the roof of the Lowell City medical complex, on the pad meant for incoming emergency vehicles, everyone who could look a little green did. Garrus swallowed his own unsettled stomach.
Oh, come on, Shepard mocked. That was nothing! Remember the Mako? Hell, remember the Hammerhead? Now that was some grade-A nausea. I could not get the hang of that thing.
He'd have smiled if she'd actually been there to see it. Thought you were immune.
Hell, no. I just always did my vomiting in private. Knew I'd never hear the end of it otherwise. Look at the shit you lot gave Wrex after that time he couldn't stop himself.
To be fair, it was hilarious.
To be fair, I think I was the one who retold that story the most often. He imagined her smirking as she said it. Such a good one. Never knew a krogan could look that pathetic.
He missed her smirk.
Before releasing the hatch, Cortez turned and spoke over his shoulder. "It's bleak out there. Can't get a reading even fifty feet out. Hopefully you lot'll have better luck with your short-range communications and suit-board sensors. Might want a plan B, though, in case I can't get through to you."
"Three hours," Garrus said. "Keep an eye on your time. Everyone meets back here in three. No exceptions. Should be ample time to scour the facility."
A round of nods followed, before helmets were firmly fastened and weapons were checked and double-checked. Garrus opened the door and the whirling wall of red sand immediately blinded him. His visor tried valiantly to give him stats to work with, but even it could only do so much. He was pretty sure an entire squadron of enemy soldiers could've been standing a dozen feet away and he'd have missed them. Of course, he had to hope they'd have been just as blind.
"Right," he said, the tinny sound of his own voice echoing across the comms. "Alenko. Javik. Take the west wing. Should be a hatch, if the schematics Hackett provided are accurate. Tali. You and Grunt—"
"Go east," she replied. He could hear the smile in the tone of her voice, even as she reached behind and released her shotgun. "Back in three."
He didn't know exactly what he'd been expecting, but it wasn't the reality that faced him.
Garrus waited until both teams had vanished off his radar before setting out with Jack and Zaeed. Instead of his usual position at Shepard's six, rifle in hand, he took point with his assault rifle and Jack at his flank. Zaeed followed, and Garrus hoped the merc's Mantis was modded with an enhanced scope half as good as his own.
The blowing sand gusted, scraping against the sides of Garrus' helmet, dozens of tiny pings just loud enough to annoy. He turned his face away from the worst of it and followed the directions on the building map. After descending three ladders and crossing a narrow catwalk with his heart in his throat and his hand firmly on the railing, they hit the ground, and the hospital's main entrance.
It was too quiet. Even with the storm. Even after the Reapers. Drifts of red sand piled against the far wall almost up to the level of the windows, and the only markings in the silt were ones left by the wind itself, little whirls and eddies, eerily artistic. He told himself footprints could have vanished in the wind, but didn't really believe it.
This was the unmistakable quiet of dead things.
He could have gestured Jack and Zaeed forward—the wind down here wasn't creating the same blinding screen of dust—but he found he wanted the sound of voices. "Going in," he said.
"Feels fucked up," Jack replied.
"Goddamned fucked up," Zaeed echoed.
"Eyes sharp," Garrus said, to keep from agreeing with them.
Inside it was worse. Even through the filters of his helmet, he could smell how wrong the place was. Hospitals were clean and sharp, all antiseptic and antibacterial soap with the faint undercurrent of illness. This one smelled of sand. Dry and hot, and under it all the faint fetid odor of death. His nostrils twitched and even trapped within tight confines his mandibles gave a little flare of dismay.
The lights above them flickered and cracked, like whatever backup of a backup generator was keeping them on at all was about to finally give up. They moved slowly through the lobby and into the reception area, but the silence and emptiness and uneasy near-darkness remained. A child's stuffed toy lay beneath one of the chairs, next to a stack of old books with once-colorful covers.
"Was this Reapers?" Zaeed asked, his voice—even muffled by transmission over the comms—far too loud.
Garrus tore his gaze away from the books and the abandoned toy, shaking his head and gesturing for them to follow. This wasn't like Earth or Palaven. This was quieter. Sadder. This was Horizon. Both times. Stolen lives. Hopeless ones. Just as the silence outside had asked for voices to fill it, in here the quiet begged to remain undisturbed. They moved like ghosts through the hallways, the sound of their boots too loud against the tile. After two empty rooms, behind the third door they found bodies laid out in neat rows.
"It's a hospital," Zaeed muttered. "Why not take 'em to the goddamned morgue?"
"Maybe the morgue was full," Garrus replied. Kaidan's route went that way. Garrus did not envy him. Beside him, Jack shivered and then straightened her shoulders even more defiantly.
They found more dead in more rooms. He was no medical examiner, but he'd seen a lot of bodies in his time and these weren't new ones. Even if Shepard's captors had come through here, these corpses weren't their doing. If he had to guess, he'd put most of them dead months. The pattern of what they discovered told a story he didn't want to admit could be truth: these people were dead because they'd been forgotten. The whole damned planet had been left to die when the Reapers came. Maybe some had been collected, turned to husks or paste or worse. But when the Reapers pulled out, they left survivors, and those survivors had no one. Nothing. Dwindling supplies and no help in sight, while their government clashed and their military dealt with bigger, more immediate threats on bigger, more immediate planets.
It was the damned Valiant, but instead of watching Shepard—and only Shepard—slowly starve, he was seeing the aftermath of a whole planet's slow death.
They'd come here last, he thought. To the hospital. The big, safe building at the center of the city, relatively untouched by Reaper fire, Reaper forces. They'd held out here for weeks, for months, waiting for someone to find them.
And no one had come.
He'd never wanted something to shoot so badly. A pyjak. A rabid varren. Anything. This? This wasn't a soldier's work. It wasn't even a cop's work. Mars was a planet that needed only benedictions now, to lay its many lost souls to rest.
"This is worse than fucking Pragia," Jack muttered, and Garrus couldn't help but silently agree with her.
#
Agitated by their failure to find anything of value on the planet's surface, the last thing Garrus wanted as he opened the Kodiak door and strode out into the shuttle bay was to find Traynor nervously shifting from foot to foot. Relief washed over her features as soon as his eyes met hers, but she waited until the disheartened squad had cleared out before speaking. Private, then. "The admiral's on vidcom, sir. He's been, uh, waiting for some time."
"How much is some?"
Traynor glanced down at her datapad and winced. "Two hours. He said he'd wait. As long as it took."
"Damn. He tell you anything?"
She was shaking her head even before he finished asking the question, not that he'd expected anything else. He rested a hand briefly on her shoulder and was relieved when her distress seemed to ebb. A little. At least he couldn't see the entirety of the whites around her irises anymore. "Look," he said, "it'd be a big help if you could make sure everyone—everyone—gets something to eat and spends a little time… doing something—anything—that takes their minds off what we saw down there."
"That bad?"
For a moment, he debated telling her a little lie to soothe the reality of red sand scouring white bones clean, of thin skeletons curled in corners of empty rooms. "Worse," he said. "Made Earth look like a vacation resort. I… couldn't tell you how much was the Reapers and how much was just…"
He saw understanding settle on her features. "The cost of war?"
"The cost of war," he agreed. "That damned ruthless calculus."
He took a few steps toward the elevator before Traynor's quiet voice stopped him. "Sir? Garrus? After the call… make sure you get something to eat, won't you? And spend a little time doing something to take your mind off what you saw down there?" She paused. "I'm sure the battery could use a few moments of your time."
His mandibles flared in a weak smile. "Aye, aye, Specialist. Aye, aye."
As soon as the elevator doors closed, leaving him alone, he dragged his hands over the dust-stained blue of his armor. Red sand. White bone. Skeletons. Ghosts.
And nothing of Shepard. Nothing.