Shepard's breathing sounded loud in her ears as she watched the crumpled, warped wreck of the Reaper. It twitched feebly like a dying insect. Sweat rolled off her in sheets, causing the fine dust kicked up by the Rannoch breezes to land on her skin and turn to mud. More than the icky, sticky feeling the forming mud left her with, the Reaper was just far too close for her liking…but she stayed where she was, swapping her targeting laser for her Collector beam. Just in case. She wasn't going to believe it was dead until she had a better reason than 'it's down and twitching.'
'Don't go near it until you're sure it's dead' had been one of her earliest lessons, centuries ago in Basic.
"Shepard."
This close—and 'close' was a relative term—the single word rattled every ounce of her body around her bones and, in the sound's wake, left them wobbling like disturbed Jell-O.
Her muscles suddenly clenched in protest of the noise—or to break an onset of paralysis brought on by same—before she managed to raise the Collector beam to her shoulder. "You know me," she answered grimly. With a target that big, she couldn't possibly miss the firing chamber. She felt absolutely certain that she could kill it before it could kill her. Not after it took that many hits.
The firing chamber glowed red, but nothing happened except for a sound of the weapon malfunctioning. When it was obvious to the thing that it couldn't shoot her, it spoke instead. "Harbinger speaks of you."
That came as something of a surprise…but maybe not. She had to be somewhere in the top ten on the Reapers' Most Wanted list. Still…just thinking about Harbinger made her skin crawl. Thinking about Harbinger made her think about the Collector base and what an abomination that had been.
"You resist. But you will fail. The Cycle must continue."
She scrunched her eyes, wishing she was further away. The sound was enough to make her headache—previously uncomfortable and held back by adrenaline—truly painful, little sticks of agony lancing through her brain. That left her with absolutely no patience for Reaper propaganda. "Sovereign's dead. The Collectors are dead. We fed one of you to a thresher maw on Tuchanka…and then there's you. That's just my crew's body count. Seems we're doing pretty well."
"…we are many."
Shepard's lip curled into a grimace. "We are more," she responded. "We're already working together and we're going to beat you—all of you."
"You…cannot comprehend the magnitude of our presence."
"And you're bleeding out alone on a desert world."
A considering silence. "…we represent order. Every organic civilization must be harvested in order to bring order to the chaos. It is inevitable. Without our intervention organics are doomed. We are your salvation."
"Yeah, I've seen some of that 'salvation' plan of yours," Shepard sneered. "So lemme ask you this, tough guy: what's all that biological salvage doing, huh? I mean, no one remembers anyone before the Protheans. As far as I can tell there is nothing left of any harvested race. Just a bunch of goop to fill out your innards. Which sounds like an excuse for Reapers to seek immortality through progeny—a very organic trait." She let the barb sink into it.
"We are beyond your comp—"
"Hey, you. Whatever you were. You may be walking and you may be talking but that species died a long, long time ago." She squeezed the trigger, the beam arcing into the firing chamber in a succession of bursts until something exploded and the Reaper collapsed, all light and signs of life—she used the term so very, very loosely—vanishing. "And now they can rest in peace," she concluded, more calmly than she felt.
It was asking too much of flesh and blood to listen to that half-dead monstrosity quoting Sovereign at her. "Shepard to Legion."
"Legion here, Shepard-Captain."
"It's clear. The Reaper's down and it's not getting back up." Please, don't let it get back up. She glanced back at the ruined husk, remembering the backup systems in EDI's mobile platform.
"Creator Tali'Zorah and this unit are prepared to collect you."
"Shepard," Tali broke in, "Vega and Alenko were picked up by Cortez and Garrus—Raan's shuttle went down and she needs extraction…but I don't think this is over yet!"
Shepard looked skyward, reaching into her web gear, fishing out a packet of painkillers and popping both pills dry. A little relief was better than none at all. No, she bet it wasn't over—not with Adm. Gerrel, that opportunistic idiot, lurking up there. If he smelled any kind of tactical advantage, he'd start shooting before the dust settled.
Why couldn't his ship have gone down? With two out of five Admirals crash landing on Rannoch (to be retrieved by Cortez) why couldn't Gerrel do as much?
She pinched the bridge of her nose, hoping the medication would kick in quickly.
"We'll cross that bridge when we get to it. How far out are you?"
"Minutes," Tali answered. "Legion took us out and back in a hook so we'd be out of sight but able to come back for you quickly."
"Much appreciated. Normandy. Everyone still alive?"
"Crew's fine, Shepard, just a little rattled," Joker answered simply. "Didn't even scratch the paintjob."
There was the smugness she'd been waiting for. "Good to know. Shepard out." She took a deep breath, increasingly mistrustful of the calmness that settled over her magnificent view of Rannoch.
The silence was disrupted moments later by the soft sound of the geth groundship they'd taken, which Legion navigated carefully onto the ledge where Shepard waited.
Tali was out first, hurrying over to her, while Legion followed at a more sedate pace.
"Are you okay?" Tali demanded.
"Bit of a headache," Shepard answered before realizing how ridiculous the answer would sound.
And, apparently, it sounded as ridiculous to Tali as it did in hindsight.