Garrus wasn't left waiting long.
He would never have called his opinion of Cerberus high, but had to admit they weren't entirely stupid. Hit them hard enough, and they'd hit back.
Also, he didn't think it was coincidence that less than a year after working with Shepard, Cerberus had filled its ranks with pale copies of operatives like the ones who'd served with her so effectively on the Collector mission. The Illusive Man could afford more than his fair share of cannon-fodder, but he'd also watched with his eerie eyes that saw too much as Shepard showed him exactly how well a team of tech specialists and biotics, assassins and soldiers could work together. On cynical days, Garrus was pretty sure the SR-2 had just been one damned giant science experiment. Oh, they'd defeated the Collectors, Shepard had destroyed the base and she'd considered the mission a success as she broke utterly with Cerberus, but it'd hardly stopped the Illusive Man from acquiring Reaper tech or putting into practice what he'd learned from watching Shepard's methods. Garrus saw too much of Thane and Kasumi in the Phantoms for it to be coincidence. Engineers were all Tali. Hell, the first time he ducked out of the laser-sight of a Nemesis, Garrus thought son of a bitch and retaliated with a headshot of his own.
Given the end the first six troopers had met, he'd been expecting their numbers to swell somewhat. Eight, maybe. Ten. He got a dozen. And not just the assault troopers Shepard had dealt with. Three Guardians behind their shields fanned out around a Centurion, followed by half a dozen assault troopers. No Phantoms, thankfully, and no mechs.
He was most concerned about the pair of Combat Engineers. Their turrets were worth ten infantry.
Of course, he had no intention of seeing those turrets set up.
From his cover in the farthest alcove, peering through the scope of his rifle, Garrus watched them come. It wasn't quite the perfect funnel he'd had back on Omega, but as he watched the Centurion wave his men into the chamber, issuing silent commands with unfamiliar hand gestures—another stolen Shepard technique—Garrus thought it would do. He saw their confusion as they failed to find their missing comrade. He saw the first hint of their fear as they realized their sensors were jammed.
He wondered how many of them had already realized they'd walked square into their deaths.
The weight of the gun in his hands felt solid, real. It was right now and right here. It wasn't Shepard, broken beyond his ability to repair. It wasn't the silent Normandy or the corpses on the CIC. It was a fact. It was black and white and nothing whatsoever to do with grey. It was the instrument with which he'd kill twelve men who worked for the wrong side, who'd happened to pull the wrong assignment, and who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Numbers were numbers. Odds were odds.
Even outgunned and outnumbered, Garrus liked his odds.
Soundlessly, he found the first Engineer in his sights and took the shot. Amidst the clatter of so many heavily booted feet, the man went down without a cry. He almost looked like he was bending down to set up his damned turret, except for the part where he definitely lacked almost the entirety of his head. One. Before he hit the ground, Garrus had another clip loaded. The second Engineer turned toward his compatriot, but before he could raise the alarm his head, too, disappeared in a mist of red. Two.
He looked to his left, instinctively seeking out the spot where normally Shepard would have been directing him.
Here. Now. Ten more kills. Ten more kills, and the galaxy would contain twelve fewer people trying to kill Shepard.
I can do this.
The Cerberus troops were milling, losing their cohesiveness in the face of the unknown. The tactician in Garrus suspected it was because they didn't know each other well; it was obvious they weren't an established team. The troopers were green; he could see it in the way they moved, the way they held their weapons. Too stiff. Too unsure. Too uncomfortable. They'd likely been thrown together for the purposes of this mission. Amateur. The Illusive Man should have known better. Throwing bodies at a problem rarely worked, and Shepard was a prime example. She could do with a team of three what whole armies had difficulty accomplishing.
Though the second Engineer's death had been noticed, evidently no one was quite sure where the shots had come from. Garrus reloaded swiftly, automatically, drawing a clip from the pile at hand. Shepard had tried to get him to switch to the Spectre-grade model she favored, but he liked the old Widow better. Slow, maybe, but dependable. Powerful. Got the job done. Always felt like coming home.
And he waited.
His mandibles twitched into a pleased grin as the first assault trooper wandered into his trap. The man, searching for the hidden gunman, stepped too close to the shadows of an empty escape pod, triggering the proximity mine Garrus had already laid. The resulting explosion blew the soldier into his partner, minus his lower legs—three down—and the the second man's gun went off in a spray of semi-automatic fire.
Chaos. All pretense of control disappeared, replaced by guns firing blindly into corners. Bullets ricocheted off the walls, and the rounded escape pods made the trajectory of the projectiles shift in unexpected ways. Another trooper went down as a particularly lucky—or unlucky—slug took him in the side of the head. Four.
A second proximity mine exploded as a Guardian shuffled away from the sudden burst of friendly fire. He fell forward onto his shield, unprotected back a mess of blood and meat and shrapnel. Five. At the same time, diving for cover in one of the escape pod niches, an assault trooper blew himself up on a third mine. Six.
"Stand down!" the Centurion shouted, abandoning silent hand gestures in favor of the Cerberus-frequency signal. His panic was palpable, and enough to make Garrus' smile broaden into a grin. Centurions were clever, but they weren't Shepard. Agitation from a leader was the surest path to team hysteria. Even in the worst circumstances, Shepard never betrayed that kind of panic.
Almost never, Garrus thought, remembering a gunship and an explosion and a woman's voice screaming his name.
"The pods are rigged!"
Without the safety of the pod alcoves, the Cerberus troops had no cover. The Centurion deployed one of his smoke bombs, but Shepard had spared no expense on Garrus' scope, so he merely watched the soldiers attempt—and fail—to organize themselves.
In the instant before he pulled the trigger, Garrus saw the Centurion's vitals fluctuating wildly. And then they went quiet, and the man lay dead. Seven.
Taking advantage of the smoke, Garrus lobbed another proximity mine at the open doorway. A trooper ended himself on it as he tried to run. Eight. Coward. Then, at last, he edged out of his cover, creeping with Shepard-like silence toward the flank of one of the remaining Guardians. The man behind the shield made a surprised sound as he fell. Nine.
In the smoke and confusion, one of the two remaining troopers had managed to creep up behind him. Garrus heard the click of the man's gun about to fire, and though he knew his armor was good and that he'd spent entirely too long calibrating his shields for maximum output, he still didn't want to meet a bullet at point-blank range. Garrus sacrificed stability for speed, flinging himself sideways. His visor told him the shot had clipped his shields—not shutting them down entirely, but rendering him all too vulnerable to attack from another quarter.
The trooper glanced at Garrus and then at his own gun, as though he couldn't believe he'd missed. Opponents rarely expected a sniper to be equally good hand-to-hand. It was something Garrus had used to his advantage on more than one occasion. With the trooper momentarily baffled by his failure, Garrus shifted his grip, slamming the butt of his rifle backward, into the armor at the other man's throat. The trooper went down, but self-preservation kicked in.
Though the trooper's tackle was weak, it was enough to bring Garrus down to one knee. The Widow dropped from his hands, spinning away sideways. Grappling for better purchase, the man tried to grab the spur on the back of Garrus' leg, and settled instead for a tugging grip on his shin.
A bullet skimmed through the air above Garrus, just where his head had been a moment earlier.
On a battlefield, it doesn't matter how many you've killed. If one's left standing and you lose sight of him? You'll be just as dead.
It was his own damned cardinal rule, the thing he'd drilled into the heads of his men over and over and over. Hell, the thing that had been drilled into his head, back when he was fifteen and cocky and thought he was invincible. He admonished himself even as he swiftly scanned the room. Trooper at his six. Guardian near the door. And the man at his feet. Ten. Eleven. Twelve.
The Cerberus trooper whose arms were wrapped around one of his legs had saved his life. He couldn't afford to return the favor. The man scrabbled for his dropped gun, but Garrus got there first, grabbed it in one hand, wrapped his other arm around the trooper, and twisted just in time to let the human take the brunt of the shot that had been once again intended for him. Ten.
Still using the dying man as a shield, Garrus unloaded the rest of the Hornet's clip into the trooper who'd been aiming at him. Even with its shoddy calibration, and even though Garrus was no fan of submachine guns, enough bullets hit the body to mean death several times over. Eleven.
The last of the Guardians, still safe and solid behind his giant shield, was slowly backing toward the door. Escape is not an option. Garrus faked a move to the right before dropping, sliding, and grabbing his fallen Widow. On one knee, he lifted the weapon, took a breath, aimed, and sent a perfect shot through the shield's slot.
Twelve.
#
Alberts was whimpering.
Marine or not, training or not, a battlefield amputation was always going to be hell. A battlefield amputation with no sedatives, limited medi-gel, and a nervous civilian doctor not quite finished his training probably deserved a few tears. At a different time, in a different place, Shepard would have comforted the woman. Girl, really. First tour as a marine. First shore leave. The day before, they'd all been laughing and drinking and raising their glasses in increasingly raucous and maudlin toasts. To their favorite guns. To ships and planets they'd served on. To comrades. To the Alliance. To hopes and dreams and always having a cold beer waiting at the end of a long day.
Now Alberts would never walk without assistance again, the batarians were throwing everything they had at an increasingly desperate defense, and they were fighting for their damned lives.
Shepard felt for Alberts. Hard not to. But the marine had enlisted. She'd volunteered. She'd known what she was getting herself into. And understandable as it was, the noise was distracting as hell. Demoralizing, too. It played a strange, upsetting counterpoint to the heavy thump of whatever crude shells the batarians were using to attempt to break the defenses. Shepard pressed her fingers tight to her throbbing temples and paced to the other end of the room. The sounds followed her.
Shepard knew the Alliance had to be on their way. It had been hours. Reports were coming infrequently, mostly by word of mouth because the communications systems were shot to hell, but Elysium wasn't a backwater colony in the middle of nowhere. It was Elysium. It was important. The Alliance wasn't going to let the oldest human colony on the Skyllian Verge fall to a bunch of raiders.
Dammit, Shepard wasn't going to let the oldest human colony in the Skyllian Verge fall to a bunch of raiders. They'd already lost too many in the initial onslaught. Commander Vale. Graves. Kho. Masaka. Both Smiths, Alex and Jillian. Too many civilians whose names she didn't know and couldn't add to her running memorial list.
And maybe it tasted a little like revenge, but she'd be damned if a bunch of batarian bastards were going cart off Elysian civilians the same way they'd stolen and slaughtered the people of Mindoir. Not on her watch.
She'd been helpless then. Now she wasn't.
A girl with long hair and eyes glimmering with unshed tears moved around the room, offering water to the wounded. The hair was the wrong color and the eyes were dark instead of grey, but the age was about right. Shepard wished she'd been half so brave back then.
You're not that coward anymore.
"Hey," Shepard said, motioning the girl over. "You should be somewhere safer. With your family."
The girl's expression was mixed of equal parts terror and resolve. Determination won. The girl's chin took on a defiant tilt. "I can help. My mom's a nurse."
"It's dangerous."
"Everywhere's dangerous. And I can help."
Shepard clapped a hand to a too-thin shoulder, and the girl inflated under the attention. "You know how to shoot?"
"A little," she said, clearly lying.
Shepard flipped the small sidearm pistol out of its holster at her hip and offered it grip-first. She felt the slim fingers tremble as they took the weapon, but the girl didn't flinch, didn't grip too hard, and held the gun at almost the right angle. "Don't you need it?"
Shepard patted the heavier pistol on her other hip, cocked a thumb at the sniper rifle on her back, and shook her head. "Extras. Look, something comes at you, pull the trigger. Got it? Try not to think. Thinking takes too much time. Just do. Batarians have a lot of eyes. Aim for one of them."
The girl's brow furrowed in confusion and she glanced around the room. It made her look even younger, and Shepard glanced away. "Why me, though?"
Shepard said, "Just don't hesitate. Now, can you bring Alberts—she's the blonde one—can you bring her something to drink?"
The girl didn't move at once. Her dark eyes, already too old, already seeing too much, lingered a moment longer on Shepard's face. Then she nodded. Firmly.
Screw half. Shepard wished she'd been a quarter so brave.
The rhythmic sound of shelling grew louder. Too loud.
"They're going to break through," Alberts gasped, ignoring the water, hands clenching and unclenching around her uninjured thigh as though she already imagined losing it. "We have to fall back. We… we can't hold this position, Shepard."
"We can," Shepard said. "We can and we will." Glancing around, she took in the terrified, pale faces. The half-dozen marines watched her calmly, waiting for orders. It occurred to her, just for a moment, to wonder why they were looking to her, and then the moment passed and she said, "We can't protect the whole damned planet, but we can protect this spot on it. The Alliance is coming. We know the Alliance is coming. All we need to do is hold the line. They'll come for us."
"How?"
Shepard didn't see who asked the question. It didn't matter. Not really. "I need every bit of metal we can muster. Cutlery. Nails. Jewelry. Anything. Think shrapnel." She looked to the marines. "And I need your grenades. Anything explosive. Fuel, if you can find it."
"But—" Alberts began.
"They are going to break through," Shepard said. "But they're in for a hell of a surprise when they do."
A little of the terror on the expectant faces was replaced by hope. Shepard straightened her shoulders, lifted her chin, and gave her people, military and civilian alike, a bolstering smile. Then she saluted them, her proud, brave warriors, her last line of defense. "We can do this."
I can do this.
It was the girl who nodded first, and scurried away to find what metal she could, pistol still clutched protectively in one hand.
Shepard gathered the grenades, pulled out her omni-tool, and started making a bomb.
The batarians were going to rue the goddamned day.
#
The wall fell. A chunk of stone clipped Shepard's head, sending a spray of stars across her vision and blood running down her face. A second, larger piece knocked her backward, and a third fell on her legs. She bit down on the inside of her cheek to keep from screaming.
Her pity for Alberts grew exponentially. But Alberts no longer needed pity.
Alberts wasn't whimpering anymore.
The girl with the dark eyes and long hair lay silent and sightless at Shepard's side, hand still clutching the Alliance-issue pistol.
No, she thought. No, this is all wrong. This isn't the way it's supposed to go.
The girl was supposed to survive. She was supposed to tell Shepard her name—Lily—and introduce her to her nurse mother. Shepard was supposed to tell Lily's mother what a hero her daughter was. There was supposed to be cheering. The celebration was supposed to last three days. Shepard was supposed to eat dinner at Lily's house. Ten years later, Lily was supposed to be an N7 graduate leading her own ground team against the Reapers.
It wasn't supposed to be like this.
She tried to pull herself up, but her legs were pinned tight beneath the chunk of fallen masonry. A batarian, hate glittering in all four eyes, came scrabbling over the stones. His mouth opened and closed; she thought he was trying to speak to her. Shepard didn't waste time grieving the loss of the girl or trying to decipher the hostile's words or wondering why she knew things meant to happen in a future she hadn't lived yet—in one smooth motion, she pried the gun from the dead girl's fingers and shot.
"What the hell, Shepard," said the batarian. In a voice with unmistakable turian flanging. A pained and irritated turian flanging. "That wasn't a concussive round."