The bridge was crowded as the Normandy made its approach toward Ilos. It had shot through the Mu Relay only twenty minutes before, fortunate considering the crew had no clue how much of a head-start Saren had on them.

Garrus hung back near the airlock, holding the wall with one hand to keep himself steady. Shepard stood behind Joker, asking about their descent, surrounded by Pressly, Tali, Liara, and Kaidan, their voices speaking over each other with a bombardment of information.

He wasn't processing any of it. He watched Shepard silently, taking in his newfound appreciation for her body: the wide, supportive hips not unlike a turian's, though her waist was less slender. He felt like a recruit again, discovering sex for the first time. He couldn't stop thinking about the time they had spent together a few days earlier. They hadn't risked it since, their nerves frayed as Ilos grew closer, everyone on the ship on edge and up at odd hours.

He knew he needed to get his mind off of it, needed to focus on the mission; and when the time came, he would find the focus he needed. For the time being, he took in the sight of Shepard, appreciating her commanding presence as she issued orders on the bridge, remembering how she had tasted, the smell of her hair…

"You're not very subtle," Wrex said, jarring Garrus out of his thoughts.

"What?" he turned quickly to face him. He hadn't seen him arrive.

"You were staring at Shepard like she was a bag of meat."

"No I wasn't!"

Wrex shrugged. "You know, Vakarian, I noticed something the other day when Shepard was training in the cargo bay."

"Please, don't tell me if it's just going to be something crude," Garrus sighed.

"Not crude," Wrex said, a fiendish grin growing on his face. "But Tali was in engineering and Liara was up in her room so no one else was around to see it, which is too bad because I think Tali would have a lot to say about it."

"About what?" Garrus asked, exasperated.

"Oh, she took off her jacket when she started getting too warm and I noticed these bite marks on her shoulder. They've faded pretty well, but I could still see them," he shrugged.

Garrus felt his heart drop into his stomach. "Maybe a varren bit her on Feros," he said unconvincingly.

"Maybe a turian bit her in the bedroom." Wrex jabbed Garrus in the chest with his finger.

"Really, Wrex, I don't know what…"

"Drop the act, Garrus," he huffed. "When this is over, I'm buying you a drink and you're giving me the details."

"I don't think Shepard…"

"Oh, Shepard's invited too," Wrex grinned.

Garrus sighed. "Could you please not mention it to anyone else?"

Wrex shrugged, "My lips are sealed."

Shepard spun around suddenly and for a moment, Garrus thought she had overheard the conversation. Her face was stern and serious as she addressed them.

"We're moving down to the mako. Joker's got a narrow window to get us in there and we have to hurry." She swept past them and headed for the stairs.

"He might toss us into a building and kill us all," Kaidan added, hurrying to follow the commander.

"Thanks for the vote of confidence!" Joker yelled.

Garrus rushed after Shepard, moving past Kaidan and catching up to her in a few steps. When they reached the bottom of the stairs, they bypassed the elevator for the ladder in the med bay, the squad trailing behind them.

"Any sign of Saren?" Garrus asked.

"The geth are there in force. I need your best aim in the mako, Garrus," Shepard said.

"I never give anything less than my best."

They moved quickly down the ladder, one by one, and piled into the mako in a hurry. The cargo bay doors were already open, ready for their departure. Shepard and Garrus squeezed into the front and Tali joined them, even though they were no longer lacking for space with Ash's absence. She was more efficient in assisting them when she could see what she was doing.

Shepard steered the mako forward, pointing it toward the exit, and waited for the signal from Joker. The entire vehicle was tense with anticipation; Garrus' heart was pounding in his ears.

"GO NOW, COMMANDER!" Joker's voice sounded on the mako's comm link.

Shepard slammed her foot on the gas and the mako pushed forward, as fast as the old thing could move, accelerating as it moved closer and closer to the exit ramp. They reached the edge and went flying into the air, a narrow stretch of ground awaiting them below. If Joker had mistimed it, they would slam into the ancient stone structure ahead of them and likely be incinerated.

Time seemed to slow to a halt as they fell. A line of geth was marching into the structure ahead, and right in the center, looking up at their approach, was Saren. He ushered the geth in, desperate to get inside and shut the door before the mako could land. Garrus wanted to fire at them, but any blast from the mako could throw it off balance and ruin their landing.

The vehicle hit the ground with a shuddering boom that reverberated through Garrus' spine. Shepard approached the gate into the structure at full speed and Garrus took his opportunity to fire on Saren and the geth. Tali was already fast at work overriding the geth systems: a few of the nearby units exploded on their approach, but none close enough to catch Saren in the blast.

Garrus got one shot in, one shot that would have hit Saren, but the doors slammed shut just in time. Shepard switched to the break, pushing it to the floor in a desperate bid to get the vehicle to stop. It skidded to a halt less than inch from the stone structure's closed door, shook at the force of the stop, and finally fell still.

Kaidan wasted no time in opening the mako's hatch. They rushed out and Shepard fired her gun on the door, but it was no use. Tali and Shepard's hacking skills didn't help either. An ancient electronic mechanism was keeping it shut.

"Saren found a way to open it," Tali said. "There must be some mechanism nearby that will override the lock."

Liara stood behind the squad, taking in everything around her in silent awe. She had spent her life dedicated to researching the Protheans, and now she was standing on a planet no one alive in the galaxy had ever stepped foot on before, a planet she had only read about through second-hand ancient Prothean sources. Tears welled in her eyes and she wiped them away.

"Let's go," Shepard called, marching ahead of them in the other direction.

A narrow passageway could be seen ahead, blocked by downed trees and fallen stones. It was too small for the mako to pass through, so they would have to go on foot.

The world was silent, sunlight filtering down in streams through smoke and forest overgrowth. No animals rustled through the trees, no voices sounded, not even the threat of geth; the place was entirely uninhabited. It made Garrus uncomfortable. He thought of what it would be like to die there, alone, the only person left on the entire planet.

He shook the thought from his mind.

The path they took opened onto a tranquil courtyard, filled with crumbling statues and remnants of a culture that hadn't breathed with life in fifty-thousand years. Liara couldn't take everything in fast enough. She snapped a picture with her omni-tool, apologizing to Shepard for her cavalier behavior.

"Don't apologize, Liara," Shepard said. "The circumstances might not be ideal, but you spent your life studying their culture. If we survive this, you deserve a keepsake of a world no one else has ever seen."

The courtyard continued through a set of dilapidated pillars, into another area filled with broken statues. They seemed to be in a garden of some sort, overrun by plant life, but nothing else. Vines had crept through stone for millennia, eating away at the foundation of buildings and walls, causing them to collapse. Garrus was concerned about how quiet it was. Why would Saren take all of his geth with him into the structure back at the landing zone? He had brought an army. Where were they?

A thunderous noise addressed his concern. A geth armature had fallen, seemingly from the sky. A quick look forward revealed dozens of geth pouring over the sides of the walls enclosing the garden, firing on the squad as they came.

"Get to cover!" Shepard yelled, ducking behind a massive stone block.

Garrus moved quickly, taking out two geth troopers as he ran. He moved behind a pillar, the crumbled top of it reaching just above his head. From there, he took position, firing shots left and right as the garden became a chaotic war zone.

Tali was hiding behind the stone next to Shepard; Garrus could see them off ahead to the left from his position. She was trying to hack into the armature's systems while Shepard focused on taking out its shields. Kaidan and Liara were tossing geth left and right, mowing through the field and sending up a barrier whenever the armature fired on them.

Wrex, foregoing any nuance or strategy, leaped onto the back of the armature and began jumping up and down in an effort to break its exoskeleton, holding its neck with one arm and firing bullets into the geth around him with the other. Garrus had to hand it to him, he'd never seen fighting tactics quite like Wrex's.

"Wrex, you idiot!" Shepard yelled. "Get down or I'm going to accidentally shoot you."

"I've got good armor, and better shields," Wrex yelled back, still stomping on the armature.

The geth in question was spinning its ocular lens around desperately trying to see what was assaulting it, firing its blasts haphazardly in Wrex's distraction. One of the blasts went flying toward Liara and she barely got her barrier up in time to stop it, the force of its impact still knocking her to her feet.

Garrus continued to focus on picking off the surrounding geth while Shepard and Wrex argued about the armature. Most of the geth were rushing to the aid of the largest unit, making them easy targets. After a few minutes, only two snipers remained, up on the wall to the left. He made quick work of them.

Shepard, fed up with Wrex's antics, walked up to the frantic armature and shot it in the head. It sputtered and sparked and then collapsed in a heap on the ground, sending Wrex rolling off of it.

"Good teamwork, Shepard," he said.

"Is everyone okay?" Shepard asked the squad.

Everyone seemed relatively unscathed, Kaidan's nose wasn't even bleeding yet, so they pressed on, now on high alert for approaching geth.

They wound their way through the garden, down ramps and under massive buttresses jutting from the walls. The place was beautiful, in a disquieting sort of way. Some of the statues that were still intact were the most unsettling, giants of stone with tentacles fanning out from their faces, worn down by time into ghastly creatures. Garrus wondered what it must have looked like when the Protheans ruled the galaxy; he wondered if the likeness in the stone were Protheans.

Moving through the lower portion of the garden, they were met with more geth fire. It was possibly a good thing that, by that point, they had faced so many geth to get to Ilos that fighting them now just felt like going through the motions. The squad knew their roles, worked together to bring them down quickly, so efficiently that Shepard hardly had to issue orders, except the occasional chastising comment toward Wrex.

With the geth cleared, they pressed on, passing under more of the gigantic buttresses, into a clearing with a building overlooking the area. Like everything else in the garden, the building was overrun with ivy, crumbling in places, but they made their way inside regardless, up a set of stairs and into a chamber with a small, rusted console in the center.

Tali stepped forward and pressed some buttons on the console. It sprung to life, a green terminal presenting itself despite all the years it lay dormant. She pressed some more buttons and shook her head.

"It's our tech, but I can't read any of the inputs. It must be written in Prothean, Liara, can you read it?"

Liara stepped forward to examine the screen. "I only recognize some of the words. It seems to be the mechanism for the gate…there's something about archives written here. I can't make out the rest."

Shepard joined them. She pressed a few buttons and an affirmative chirp signaled from the console.

"How did you…?" Liara began.

She was interrupted by a red VI unit firing up to the left of the console. It was distorted by centuries of disuse, flickering without a defined shape, but Garrus was impressed it had any power running to it at all. It seemed to be speaking, but it was a language that his translator couldn't comprehend.

"I wonder what it's saying," Kaidan pondered.

"You don't understand it?" Shepard asked.

Liara's face lit up. "I see now! After your exposure to the beacons and the Cipher, you've developed an understanding of the Prothean language. What is the VI saying?"

Shepard shook her head. "Some of it is distorted. It's a warning about the reapers." She turned and pointed to the console, "That was the gate mechanism. We should head back; Saren's already got a head start on us."


When the squad reached the gate back near the mako, the door was open, revealing a straight path stretching inside the stone structure, deep within to a point that Shepard couldn't see. The way was big enough to fit the mako, so they climbed back in and steered it down into the unknown.

Inside was a sight Shepard couldn't have imagined, and yet she had seen it before in the beacon. Walls stretched up on either side of the mako as far as the eye could see, with pod-like structures jutting from either side, hundreds upon hundreds of them. The sight was both amazing and bone-chilling.

"What are those things?" Tali asked.

"Stasis pods," Liara replied from the back of the vehicle. "The Protheans likely tried to preserve themselves cryogenically, but the power drain would have been far too much for all this time. Most likely the chambers are dead, and the Protheans inside them as well."

"There's hundreds of them," Garrus said sadly.

"And trillions more who were killed by the Reapers," Shepard reminded them.

The path forward seemed never-ending. She was anticipating geth, but none appeared; their absence was unnerving.

Garrus said as much. "Why haven't we encountered anything yet?" he asked. "I would have expected Saren to set a trap for us."

"Don't jinx it, you pyjak," Wrex hissed.

"It makes me uneasy," Garrus' fingers tightend on the grip for the turret's trigger. "Stay sharp, Shepard."

"I'm on edge too," she told him. "Something's not right."

Yet they continued to move forward unhindered, their path clear, the stasis pods the only sight ahead or behind them. They drove for what felt like hours, but was surely only minutes, all of them on the edge of their seats, hearts pounding, anxious for what lay ahead. Shepard wasn't as worried about fighting Saren as she was about potentially facing a reaper.

After miles of unimpeded driving, a shimmering purple barrier came into view ahead of them. Shepard slowed the mako to a halt, worried the barrier would be impassable. Her fears were confirmed when the edge of the mako bounced off the field and would pass no further.

"Guess we found Saren's trap," Wrex sighed.

"I do not think this is Saren's doing," Liara said, shaking her head. "We should get out and investigate the area."

Kaidan lifted the hatch and they all climbed out onto the path. Their feet were met with a shallow layer of water as they jumped down. The walls around them seemed even larger and more imposing than they had within the mako; looking up at them too long gave Shepard the feeling that they were falling in on her.

"Over here," Garrus called. "There's a door."

Recessed into the wall, barely visible and certainly impossible to see from the mako, a door with a green access light stood closed. Shepard pressed her hand against the access light and the door flew open, allowing them entry into a vast cylindrical chamber filled with hundreds more of the stasis pods, stretching up and up and up. A small ramp led them down to the center of the chamber. A VI unit fired up on their approach, nothing but red static in image, but Shepard could understand the words it began to speak.

"You are not Prothean," it said. "But you are not machine either."

"I can understand it!" Liara cried.

"I have been monitoring your communications since you arrived at this facility. My programming adjusted my output accordingly. I do not sense the taint of indoctrination upon any of you," the VI paused for a moment, the effort of running its programs after fifty-thousand years of dormancy was probably a great strain. "My name is Vigil. You are safe here for now, but soon nowhere will be safe."

"Did you put up the barrier that stopped us?" Shepard asked.

"Yes. I brought you here so that you might listen. You must break a cycle that has continued for millions upon millions of years. But first you must understand what we did, or you will make the same mistakes," Vigil explained.

Shepard could practically feel Liara trembling beside her, full of so many questions, but aware of the time-sensitive nature of their task.

"The Citadel is the heart of your civilization, the seat of your government, just as it was for us. But this is a trap. The Citadel is actually an enormous mass relay, one that links to the empty void beyond the galaxy: dark space."

Shepard shuddered, her mind flooded with images of the Reapers descending upon the protheans. She suddenly realized that the Citadel had featured in those images, that the Reapers had begun their assault on the galaxy at the heart of it.

"Spirits," Garrus muttered, piecing together the implications of Vigil's statement.

"When the Citadel relay is activated, the Reapers will pour through, and all that you know will perish," Vigil said, confirming Shepard's fears. "We were taken by surprise. The Reapers succeeded at their task thanks in part to their use of a seemingly benign organic species. The keepers maintain the Citadel and each cycle that inhabits it allows them to do so, ensuring that no race ever discovers too much about the Citadel's technology."

"One surprise attack could wipe out the seat of galactic civilization…" Garrus said.

"So it was with us," Vigil replied. "The Reapers entered through the Citadel relay and destroyed our entire government before most of the galaxy even knew it was under attack. From their position in the Citadel, the reapers had access to all of our records, a detailed map of the galactic spread of our civilization. They also had access to the mass relays. One by one, they cut off communications between systems. Entire clusters went dark in an instant. Then, over the span of several decades, they systematically obliterated prothean civilization. Those who surrendered were taken by the Reapers and mutated, indoctrinated, used to lure their own people in. One by one we were either killed or enslaved, until none remained."

Liara let out a quiet sob and turned her face away, brushing tears from her eyes. "To know…what truly happened…it is…horrible."

"Once the prothean genocide was complete," Vigil continued. "The Reapers wiped out all evidence of their invasion and retreated to dark space through the Citadel relay, sealing it behind them. I have brought you here so that you might stop them from gaining access to this relay. This facility was once a top-secret research base. Before we perished, we were on the cusp of uncovering the science behind the mass relays. We built a small-scale version of a relay here, one that linked directly to the Citadel, the hub of all galactic communication."

"The Conduit," Shepard said, suddenly realizing. "It's not a weapon at all, it's a back door to the Citadel. But how did the people here survive long enough to build it?"

"The records of our facility were destroyed in the initial attack. The Reapers did not know of our existence, and so we were temporarily spared. The scientists here eventually put themselves into stasis. I was programmed to safeguard the facility and awaken them when the Reapers had retreated. But the genocide of an entire species is a slow process. Centuries passed and yet the Reapers persisted. My energy reserves dwindled. As the result of contingency programming, I began to shut down stasis pods of non-essential personnel to conserve energy. By the time the Reapers retreated back through the Citadel relay, only a few dozen scientists had survived. These scientists, understanding that the prothean race was doomed, used the last of their resources to formulate a plan to stop the Reapers from returning."

"Using the Conduit? But how?" Shepard asked.

"The key is through the keepers," Vigil answered. "The Citadel was programmed to send out a signal to the keepers when the time of the Reapers return came again. The keepers would activate the Citadel relay and allow the Reapers to access it. But the scientists used the Conduit to access the Citadel and alter the signal. This time, when the signal was sent, the keepers ignored it. In order to bypass the Citadel's defenses, Sovereign requires Saren to access the Citadel through the Conduit. Once inside, he can transfer control of the station to Sovereign. Sovereign can then override the Citadel's systems to open the relay, allowing the cycle of genocide to begin anew."

"Then we have to hurry!" Kaidan yelled. "We have the information, if we don't go soon, Saren will turn access over to Sovereign."

"He's right," Shepard said. "Can you lift the barrier and let us through?"

"It will be done. But first, take a copy of the data file from my console. When you arrive on the Citadel, upload it to the station. This file will corrupt the Citadel's security protocols and grant you temporary access over the station. This may give you a chance against Sovereign. When you pass through the Conduit, you must stay inside your all-terrain vehicle. The force of the relay is too strong to pass through without defense. Once on the other side, follow Saren. He will lead you to the Citadel command center," Vigil told them.

Tali uploaded a copy of the data file from Vigil's console onto her omni-tool. "Let's go, Shepard."

"All right. Let's move out."

"Good luck, fellow organics. May your efforts succeed where ours could not," Vigil said as they hurried out of the room and back to the mako.

Outside, the barrier barring their way had fallen. They climbed into the mako and Shepard hit the gas as hard as it would go. The seemingly never-ending path they had been traveling on thus far did in fact have an end: a steep drop down into a shallow canal. The canal twisted and turned, making the going rough for the sturdy but slow mako.

"So let me get this straight," Wrex said. "If we make it in time, we stop Saren and keep the Reapers from accessing the Citadel mass relay…which slows them down. But eventually they'll find a way through from dark space, and then we all die. But if we don't make it, they come through now and we all die sooner."

"Yeah, that's about right," Garrus nodded.

"So you think if we pull this off the Council will actually start giving a shit about what Shepard has to say?"

"I won't hold my breath," Shepard said, swerving around a curve. "But having a head start on the total destruction of the universe can't hurt anything."

They came over the crest of a hill and the Conduit came into view: a series of metal arches rotating around a bright central core. It was just as Vigil had described, a miniature version of an actual mass relay.

Liara said what everyone was thinking, "It's so beautiful."

Ahead, they could see Saren's vehicle escaping through the relay.

"There's geth ahead Shepard, you better gun it. We don't have time to fight them off and Saren will close the relay as soon as he has a chance," Garrus warned.

Shepard pressed her foot against the pedal until it touched the floor, the mako zooming forward as fast as it could muster. Time seemed to stretch as they approached the relay, the geth surrounding it and firing from all sides.

"Hey," Tali said. "If we don't make it out of the Citadel alive. I just want to say…you're some of the best people I've ever worked with. I'm proud to call you all my friends."

"Me too," Kaidan said.

"You're the best friends I have ever had," Liara added, teary eyed.

"You're all right," Wrex grumbled.

"I'm not saying goodbye," Garrus growled. "When this is over, we'll meet at the bar."

"Drinks are on Garrus!" Shepard yelled.

The mako sped up, collided with the Conduit, and shot through the relay in a burst of blinding light, leaving Ilos behind.

The Citadel awaited.


A/N: Thanks as always for reading! Trying to stay pretty regular with my updates. This chapter was kind of a slow necessary filler chapter, but there will be more Shakarian good-ness soon!