A/N: I was supposed to update a couple days ago, but this chapter snowballed into a monster. Hope you enjoy. I get motivated by feedback.
"So Shepard, what made you change your mind. Too scared to face Benezia on your own?" Wrex taunted.
The entire team was walking down the corridor. Shepard hadn't anticipated bringing this many of them, but given what Qui'in had told him about Peak 15, he didn't really have a choice. Now, it was Shepard's turn to drop the bombshell on Wrex. "Well, apparently they were trying to bring back an extinct race, Wrex."
A deep rumbling could be heard from the krogan, but it turned out to only be some type of convoluted laughter. "You know, you guys insult the krogan for not having scientists, but you spend all your time trying to bring back extinct zoo animals for cash. Why the hell would I want to see that?"
"Ya, I'm not sure why anyone would bring the rachni back."
Wrex stopped in his tracks, and Garrus, who was behind Wrex and didn't notice the Krogan stopping, headbutted his back. "Rachni!" he roared. "Impossible!" He reached for the massive shotgun on his back. "My people wiped them out ages ago! They can't be back!" Wrex's legs widened into a combat stance, and his meaty, three-fingered hands fiercely squeezed his weapon. This reaction was exactly what Shepard was looking for: bringing Wrex was a good decision.
"Thought you might want to come along on this exciting adventure."
Ashley facepalmed her helmet in disbelief. "You really think antagonizing a krogan is the right move?"
John shrugged. "Gets his blood running, what's wrong with that?" Shepard replied as he scanned the ID on the door in front of him. Indeed, this was the garage, a very large one at that. Vehicles of every different type were scattered about. He took a step inside with Wrex close behind, now eager for a fight; actually, a little too close for comfort.
Shepard turned around. "Big guy, go easy. There's no one to fight yet. Not in this building at least. Mind giving me some space, you're…"
Wrex shoved Shepard to the floor, catching him off guard. A loud crack went off, and a bullet flew through the area that Shepard's head had just occupied. Instead of hitting the commander's head, it hit Wrex's shoulder, causing blood to splatter out from behind him. Already mad, Wrex started charging at the enemy.
Shepard, still confused as to what was happening, got to his knees and ducked behind one of the vehicles in the warehouse. He saw Wrex tackling a… was that a geth? "MULTIPLE GETH HOSTILES!"
"Wait, so let me get this straight, you've only been here for a couple of hours, and you've killed over a dozen people, caused 3 million credits in damage, and brought the geth to us. Anything else you want to add to the list?" Matsuo shouted, although she really didn't want him to answer that question.
Shepard was cleaning blood off his boots with an engineering cloth he'd found in a toolbox. It wasn't his blood; rather, it was the gallons of blood Wrex had leaked everywhere when he ran straight into seven geth. Okay, maybe gallons was an exaggeration, but still, what the fuck? "Okay, first of all, I didn't bring the geth. These crates were brought by Benezia. You would have found them if you were doing your job properly. Second of all, those were corrupt cops; believe it or not, they raised their weapons first, not me."
Matsuo's eyes widened in disbelief. "You know what, just get the hell off my port already. I'm the one who's going to have to clean this up and do all the paperwork. The sooner you leave, the sooner I can get started."
Shepard started to slowly walk backward. "Fine with me," he replied as he gave her a double thumbs-up. Her snarl meant that she was not amused in the slightest. Who else could trivialize violence so easily besides John Shepard?
John approached the rest of his team. Some stood, and others used the hoods of vehicles as chairs. Wrex was off in the corner, trying to tend his own wounds. He'd asked if Wrex was alright and offered to let him return to the Normandy, but Wrex seemed almost insulted by the proposition. He'd insisted he only needed a minute to recoup and he'd be alright. All John knew was that he could never pull off a stunt like Wrex had.
As John looked at the vehicle beside him and then back at his team, he realized that they all would not fit, especially with the addition of the krogan. Yet, he realized that not all hope was lost as he looked around the garage for a solution. There was another vehicle here besides the snow plow he stood next to. With each step he took towards it, the vehicle looked more and more familiar: the vehicle was a Mako. It appeared to be very, very old; it must have been decommissioned from service a long time ago; and it was heavily modified: most notably, it was missing its armaments. Go figure.
"Okay, here's the plan," Shepard began to explain. "We all don't fit in that snow vehicle, but they have an old Mako back here. We're going to have to split up into two teams until we reach peak 15." He started counting them, dividing them up into groups in his mind. "Tali, Wrex, you're with me in the old Mako. The rest of you take the grizzly, and Alenko, you're in charge over there."
Tali was hyperventilating. Wrex himself was very agitated; although that was only because he was stuck in a tank without a main gun and couldn't fight back against the attackers. They'd almost been driven off the cliff and into the gorge below several times. In return, Shepard had managed to trample over twenty geth, and driven two geth armigers over the edge. Unfortunately, the two aliens with him were forced to admire his impressive offensive driving skills. Well actually, he was a terrible driver; he was just really good at using what he drove as a weapon. With all the turns and jumps and drops and abrupt stops, everyone couldn't help but feel the slightest bit queasy. And being stuck in such a confined and stuffy space with a broken air circulation system made it rather difficult to breathe.
Thus, it came as no surprise that when the first opportunity to leave the vehicle presented itself, they clamored for the exit. Wrex and Shepard gasped great heaves of air as they tried to recover. Fifteen seconds later, they were good as new; fresh air always seemed to do the trick, even if it was at -5 degrees Celsius. Tali, however, had no such luck; there would be no fresh air because the air was always the same after it passed through her suit's filters.
The grizzly that carried the rest of the team came to a stop behind the Mako. The blizzard howling outside was so strong that even when the grizzly's powerful engine was turned off, it was just as noisy as before.
Shepard put on his helmet; it would do no good to freeze his face off, even if he was still feeling a bit short on breath. Peak 15's entrance loomed in front of them. Massive metal doors faced them, and Shepard could see the outlines of the facility built into the mountain. This was an engineering marvel considering the conditions it had to be built in. It was a shame that this place faced a higher than likely chance of being riddled with bullets and blown up.
John turned on the comm unit of his armor. There was no way in hell that he would be heard through this storm. "This is Peak 15. I have no idea what to expect, so be ready for anything." He took another couple of seconds to formulate the plan of attack for breaching this place. "Tali, you need to get those doors open. Garrus, Williams, I want you on your rifles in case anything pops out."
Once Tali hacked the control panel and opened the doors, John stepped inside with Wrex right behind him. If anyone should take the first steps inside, it should be them. The place was eerie. Yellow, flickering lights barely lit the place, making it difficult to see inside. Frost and icicles covered some of the walls, and equipment was strewn about. Something was wrong here, peak 15 was clearly not operational.
Once the team entered, the doors abruptly shut behind them. "Who did that?" Shepard asked, but the silence was his answer. If it wasn't his team, then somebody else was here, and given the state of the facility, they were anything but friendly. Shepard turned his head to the sound of a large crash on his left. There, he saw an elevated walkway sloping down to their floor of the facility. And in the dim lights, the shadow of a lumbering figure could be seen. "Contacts on our left! Hold your fire until I say so."
Normally, he would have just blasted the person to smithereens. However, now he first had to determine who they were and why they were here. If they were hostile, he would kill them. If they were a scientist, he would gather as much intel as possible; and, depending upon how much he believed about their involvement with this entire operation, decide on killing them or letting them go. But as the shadow of the figure began to develop further, he no longer needed to contemplate such concerns: a krogan flanked by two geth.
Shepard grabbed a grenade from his belt and tossed it onto the walkway. "Fire in the hole!" His team took cover in time to see the upper half of a geth destroyer fly through the air. The thing was clearly still active, as denoted by the light in its head still shining; and, in a testament to Garrus' marksmanship, the light was shattered as a round tore right through the optic. Whether Garrus was aiming for the light specifically, or just hit it by accident, Shepard could not tell. However, he couldn't help but admire the marksmanship because it was probably a hell of a lot better than his own.
The enemy krogan, which somehow survived the blast albeit with heavy injuries, slowly rose to his feet and roared. His reply was the thunder of multiple firearms going off and striking him. The force of so many projectiles hitting him at once forced the lumbering beast into the wall behind him, which he promptly slid down as he bled out. There would be no regeneration for him today.
Shepard and Wrex moved towards the end of the garage, where the start of the ramp began, and walked up the narrow incline towards the dying krogan. The rest of the team followed behind them, although a bit more cautiously. Shepard reached the warrior and squatted down in front of him, resting his elbows on his knees.
"You… must be… Shepard" the krogan struggled to say as blood filled his lungs.
In trying to show off more than anything else, Shepard removed his stifling helmet, revealing the wicked grin on his face. He couldn't help but admire the name he'd made for himself. Maybe everyone being afraid of you didn't make you the happiest person in the world or do wonders for your sanity, but it still felt good to be feared, so feared that they had to warn krogan about you. That would probably make most other people miserable, but it's the only thing Shepard had.
"Take a step… closer, I'll wipe that grin… off your face."
The krogan was dying, but Shepard could still see fierce determination in his alien eyes. And above all, he saw anger in them. John knew what that feeling looked like and felt like most of all. "Anything you want to say to us before it's over?" Shepard asked. There was no point in offering to spare his life; they both knew it wasn't going to happen.
"Saren…will bring a new age…and you will all be…ground under our heel!" he tried to scream, resulting in a fit of intense coughing.
John put on his helmet again before standing up. "Whatever you say," Shepard replied rather gleefully, "although I don't think you're going to get to see that day." He reached for his gun, pointed it at the krogan's head, and fired.
Shepard was tapping his foot rapidly on the cold metal floor. He was getting very annoyed at the current predicament. No, it wasn't the numerous rachni and geth that had tried to kill them, or the creepiness of the place, or the rooms filled with snow that they had to trudge through to get here. He was pissed off that Benezia was no longer at peak 13 and that getting there was proving ridiculously difficult.
It had been minutes since he'd sent Alenko and Tali down into the VI core room. He was getting impatient, and he wished that he could have screamed down at them to hurry up. With each minute that past, the chance of Benezia escaping increased tenfold, not to mention the chance of the rachni infestation spreading. Except, he didn't know the slightest thing about computers or coding; he'd be way out of his authority to say anything. Besides, he'd seen them deal with digital difficulties in seconds, whereas he'd seen other technicians take minutes or even hours. If this was taking them that long, it must have been really serious. Unfortunately, that was not helping his anxiety about everything; again, they were on a clock that was rapidly ticking down.
The rest of his team had nothing to do but secure the area. It seemed so quiet and peaceful, and yet at a moment's notice, any one of them could be stabbed in the back by a rachni jumping out of a ventilation shaft. It came as no surprise that the sound of systems powering up seemed to relax some of them because it meant that they might be getting out of here soon. Unfortunately, the people who'd fixed the situation had no good news to provide.
"Good news and bad news" Kaiden stated as the elevator from the core room arrived at their floor.
Shepard let out a loud sigh. He found that saying so trivial, as if the good news would somehow nullify the bad news; did it not still mean that something was wrong and needed correction, which expressly necessitated the input of human effort? "What could have possibly gone wrong now?" Shepard asked. This entire mission had been one great clusterfuck of problems and delays.
"Well, we have three problems, actually. First, the VI is not fully operational, so we can't use the tram. To fix that, we need to fix two other things first. The landlines on the roof need to be reset, and the helium three reactor needs to be restarted. Then, we have to confirm that the VI is online again."
"And how do you propose we fix that?" Shepard asked. He simply wasn't going to pretend that he knew any of this stuff; everyone knew he was stupid, and he was fine with it. No, actually not fine, but accustomed.
"The landline is on the roof and the reactor core is down below. If you want to get out of here fast, I suggest splitting up."
Perfect, just what we needed in the middle of a rachni infestation: splitting up. If you didn't have somebody watching your back in this building, you could easily die. He might be a nihilist, but he didn't go out of his way to end his life.
"I should probably go to the reactor core. I've worked on similar models before," Tali offered.
Alenko nodded his head in agreement. "Then I'll go to the landlines on the roof. Garrus should stay here to ensure the VI is working properly." The turian flared his mandibles in amusement at the mention of his name.
Shepard walked behind Tali. He kept turning his head backward every couple of seconds in case anything jumped up and tried to attack them. He preferred to take the front, but he had no idea where they were headed. So Tali had that job, armed with her omnitool and a pistol.
"We should be close now," she whispered. Never in a million years did she see herself doing this during her pilgrimage. She knew it would be dangerous, but this was a whole other level. She couldn't say she liked the work she did; it was dangerous, and often at times scary; but at the end of the day, she felt a sense of purpose in helping people, in saving their lives. She still didn't have a pilgrimage gift, but she was sure that somewhere along the way, they would find something. After all, they'd already visited dozens of planets and fought the strangest of enemies. There had to be something out there.
She stopped in front of a large metal door. Adjacent to it, glass panes gave a clear view of the reactor core. They also let him see what he feared: more geth. He could count three geth destroyers, two hoppers, and two standard units, and those were only the geth he could see from this angle. He did not like their odds, and he did not think he could take them all. But he was going to try anyway.
"Wait, you can't just charge in there," Tali cried, "one wrong shot, and you'll blow the whole thing up."
Shepard lowered his shotgun. "So what would you have me do instead?" he asked. He was all out of ideas, except one: just charge in there and overwhelm with force. If she had an idea, he might as well consider it.
"I… I don't know." Why is he asking me? Isn't he the commander, the person who's supposed to come up with a plan?
Shepard leaned on the bulkhead in front of him. There was no choice, he would have to go in there. "Then watch my back. If you can, jam their guns with that tech thingy, and I… we might stand a chance."
He opened the door and walked inside. Immediately, a geth turned to shoot at him, but he kicked it in the chest before firing his weapon at its abdomen twice. Through the glass panels that looked over the reactor core area, he could see all the geth stop what they were doing and look at his direction in unison. "Fuck."
A door to his left began to open, but Shepard already had his shotgun trained on the motion and blasted the geth to pieces once the door had opened enough for him to fire.
There was only one way forward into the reactor core, the passageway in front of him. If he couldn't accidentally hit the reactor, he would have to hope that the geth came to fight him in here. The passageway also meant that only one geth could enter the room at a time. He'd rather just charge them all at once, but even he knew that it was suicide. Furthermore, while he might not care about his own life, he didn't exactly feel entitled to going out of his way in ending the lives of the people who he had asked to come with him. He'd already lost enough, and while he viewed them all as expendable cogs, he knew it was fruitless to get them all killed by blowing up the place.
"Go start the reactor," Shepard ordered with an arm pointing to the control panel.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes!" he screamed. He did not like having to repeat himself. But more importantly, he didn't like the notion of needing help.
Tali lowered her head meekly. "Sorry," she mumbled, even though she had done nothing wrong. Quarians were never this rude. She had been warned before her pilgrimage to except a certain level of disrespect, but hell, not even the rest of the crew was this mean. She'd have to take solace in one fact: at least Shepard wasn't expressly racist. Tali had originally believed that he was, in fact, racist, but as she watched him interact with others, she quickly realized something: it wasn't racism, it was displeasure at the concept of other conscious people. That wasn't really an improvement over someone being racist, yet in this scenario, at least she was being grouped with everybody else, for better or for worse.
She approached the control panel for the helium-3 reactor. Like everything on this planet, it was covered in a thin layer of frost. She prayed silently to the ancestors that the computer was still working. Yes, computers liked it cold, but that didn't mean the circuitry should be frozen.
She breathed a sigh of relief as the display lit up. She began the process of restarting the reactor. Hopefully, that would fix this place's energy problems, and maybe also turn the heat back on. She was in a climate-controlled suit, and even she couldn't help but shiver.
Out of the corner of her vision, she could see Shepard slowly get up. He was holding his left shoulder with his other hand. He seemed to be in quite a bit of pain. He let go of his shoulder, letting his arm hang in the air for a second or two. It was almost as if the appendage were useless.
Shepard began to mentally prepare himself. He knew it would hurt like a bitch because it was already hurting bad enough right now. Nevertheless, he needed both his arms to fight. Nobody would care about your pain when they tried to kill you. He would have to march on as he always had, no matter the discomfort he was in. He grabbed his arm by the wrist and fiercely shoved it upwards. The ball of his arm bone popped back into his shoulder socket, and he howled in pain.
Tali could only look on in horror.
"Landlines are good. All we need is a confirmation from Garrus that the tram is operational and then we can leave," Alenko screamed, trying to be heard over the blizzard.
"What?" Wrex screamed back.
Kaiden was going to respond with a 'never mind' but it would be rather useless. He looked at Wrex's armor. It was partially corroded in places. The rachni acid had done a number on them, and it was a miracle that neither he nor Wrex had been melted to pieces.
The tram slowed down and eventually stopped in front of a platform. A robotic feminine voice could be heard over the loudspeaker saying "Rift Station" as if it should be a welcoming place. However, no one wanted to point at the irony, because what was here was anything but welcoming or pleasant. Without missing a beat, once the doors had opened, screaming could already be heard in the distance. Great. Wrex roared, clearly having too much fun with killing rachni; after all, it's what those brutes were uplifted to do.
Shepard, shotgun already in hand, started to rapidly walk forward, ready to shoot anything that appeared as a threat. He made a left towards the sound of the screaming and followed the length of the hallway. At its end, he saw a nightmarish battle. A soldier had already been gutted through the chest by a spiked tentacle, and the rachni stood its ground, even as other soldiers fired at it. Smaller rachni began to exit through the floor, and they swarmed other soldiers in the room, trying to eat their way through the armor to the soft, warm flesh inside. Shepard held up his fist, indicating for his team to stop; there was no way in hell he was going to battle through this, and these soldiers were already lost. He took two grenades from his belt and lobbed it far into the room. He then slammed his hand down on the door controls. The door slammed shut, and even through the thick metal, screams for help could still be heard. A second later, the area was rocked by a tremendous explosion, and then all was silent.
This was supposed to be the end run. Instead, they had sent Liara into a biologically hazardous lab to formulate a cure. The cure would then be traded for a security key that would allow them into the lab areas. Gaining access to the lab areas would allow them to finally get to Benezia. This mission was undoubtedly the worst he had ever been on, and it had nothing to do with the combat. It was simply the sheer number of steps taken to move onwards; this was madness! All this time, he had believed you would cover less ground in trench warfare, but no, it was navigating bureaucratic bullshit which was truly the slowest.
Now, he spoke with one of the scientists who worked at the hot labs, a volus geneticist.
"If you think I'm going down there, you have another thing coming."
"Commander, it's essential. If you don't, those rachni will eat everyone."
"If it's so important to you, why don't you go down there yourself. Or better yet, can't you just detonate it from your omnitool or something?"
"The neutron bomb can only be activated from the computer mainframe in the heart of the lab." The volus fiddled with something on his tool belt before handing it to the commander. It was his key card. "Please. I know we," skssss, "messed up. Worse than messed up. It isn't right to ask you because it was our mistake, but you're," skss, "the only one who can get us out of this."
Shepard remained quiet, without anything more to say. Why did he always have to walk into hell for other people? He took the key card.
A minute or two later, the asari scientist from earlier appeared, with a smugly contented smile on her face. She was clearly walking towards them. The rest of Shepard's team was upstairs, guarding the scientists. Oh, did I forget, that was another condition to get the fucking pass? Maybe if someone just allowed me to do my job the problem would have been solved already!
"I thought you were meditating. What happened, the goddess not helping?" Shepard taunted. He hated that woman; the way she could sit through a crisis without a care in the world was unnerving.
"Yes, I was, but I came to deliver a message," she stated coyly. The bitch was flashing a bright smile, and the way she held her arms behind her back accentuated her curves even more. She's too easy. He fired his shotgun at the asari, and she was thrown backward. She was dead before she had even hit the floor.
"Why did you do that?" The volus researcher he'd been speaking to began to slowly walk away, now afraid of getting blasted to pieces for no apparent reason. "Please, we've already told you all we know!" he cried.
Shepard stowed his shotgun on his back and approached the dead body. "Calm down Mr. Beach Ball," Shepard replied as he kicked the body against the wall. He bent over to pick up the gun she had been carrying in her hands and then tossed it to the volus. "You weren't trying to kill me, so I'll let you live." The less than nimble volus was unable to catch the firearm, and once it had fallen to the floor he made no attempts to pick it up. "You should keep that to protect yourself in case more rachni come while I'm not here."
That asari thought I would fall for that? What a joke. First of all, Shepard had been looking for any reason to blow her head off ever since they had spoken before; but as it turned out, she was the one actually trying to kill him. She had thought John would have been like any conventional man, so easily wooed by looks. However, John was anything but conventional. He knew that everything was a weapon, even sexuality, it was just a matter of how you use it. Unfortunately for her, not even the gun she brought would have been enough to kill him. And in all honesty, her biggest mistake was flashing Shepard that smile; nobody smiled when they saw Shepard.
Liara exited the lab, vile in hand. Even though she had her helmet on, John could tell her mouth was agape. "Don't worry, she was trying to kill me. She's dead now," he stated simply, as if the task of killing was as common as taking a shower or eating dinner.
Did Shepard feel any guilt when he had to kill clueless security guards? Nope. He was in combat. They were in his way. They were firing at him. The sum total of all these contentions resulted in categorizing them as enemies, and therefore, killing them. He would feel the guilt later, he always felt it later, when he was alone. However, now was not that time.
Shepard had divided the team into two groups. He, Liara, and Garrus would go through the front entrance of the lab; while the rest of his team would go through the back entrance. There would be no escape for the matriarch.
His shoulder had been killing him ever since he dislocated it. He made a mental note for the future: to avoid engaging geth destroyers in hand to hand combat. In retrospect, he didn't even know what he was thinking. He would also pay the price for this injury later; he knew he probably fucked something up, some sort of ligament or tendon. It would make the final fight at this station that much harder.
He walked into the lab. After so long, he could finally see his target: the Matriarch. Liara, who was walking behind him, let out a quiet gasp. Finally seeing her mother here, in the middle of what essentially was a warzone, finally set in stone what Liara knew was true all along, but didn't want to believe: her mother was working with Saren. The matriarch stood in front of a large observation tank, and inside it, a monstrous creature screamed and hit the walls of its container.
The matriarch slowly turned around, facing Shepard's ragtag group of aliens with a disdainful glare. "Commander Shepard," she said very slowly, "I was wondering when you would finally catch up."
He continued to advance; he did not care what she had to say; all he knew was that he had to figure out what she had come here for. Nevertheless, she continued to speak, unfazed by the advancing warrior. "And you brought my daughter with you too? Liara, I would have expected you to associate yourself with nicer…" she paused, looking for the right word, "more educated people of a higher intellect."
Shepard lunged for Benezia, but with the wave of her hand, she effortlessly tossed him into the wall. He fell in a crumpled heap, dazed from the force of the impact.
"I've come to put a stop to you, mother! You've done enough already!"
Benezia wagged her finger at her daughter. "I thought you had better manners than to scream at your mother."
Liara's hands shook violently as she pointed her pistol at her. "Enough!" she screamed.
"I serve I higher purpose now. And through them, I will bring peace to the galaxy; I will not let anyone, not even my own daughter, stand in the way." With a flick of her wrist, she knocked her daughter off her feet. Fortunately for her, it was a much gentler treatment than the commander had received.
Garrus knew that killing Benezia was a last resort; at least until they got the information they needed. However, his intuition told him that he was next on the chopping block. The entire time, he'd been lining up his shot. He held his breath, not wanting to ruin his aim. His finger pulled down on the trigger, and the high caliber round from his sniper flew towards its target. Yet the Matriarch had not fallen. Instead, a bright-blue flash blinded him.
"You did not honestly believe that your savage weapons could harm me, did you?" She spread her arms towards the sky. "I am an asari matriarch. I am more powerful than you can imagine!" She picked up Garrus and hurled him across the room. He smacked his head on the floor, knocking him out cold.
Shepard finally got to his feet. He had the distinct feeling that some of his bones were fractured, maybe even broken, but he could not let that stop him. He had powered through worse before, and he was not going to let a skimpy old woman defeat him. "I will end you. There will be no escape, you must know this."
The matriarch started laughing, an evil, maniacal laugh. It kind of reminded him of himself. "Commander, please. You act like we weren't expecting your other attack party."
Shepard's eyes widened behind his helmet; the matriarch didn't need to see his face to know this. There would be no help coming. It would just be the three of them. He raised his weapon to fire, but he found himself no longer able to move. He was frozen in place, and no matter how much he strained against his invisible shackles, he could not break free. "What the fuck are you?" Shepard roared through gritted teeth.
The matriarch slowly walked down the steps. Shepard felt a cold presence prodding his brain, and an eerie feeling slowly overcame him, a feeling he had only felt once before: Eden Prime. "You had such potential, young one. It is a shame you wasted it fighting for people who you don't care about."
Shepard realized what was going on now. She was reading his mind, trying to turn him against himself. This angered him. His mind was the one place that was absolutely off-limits; except for Liara, which was for a good cause, and he was 100% sure she wouldn't talk; his mind was his vault where he could keep all his twisted thoughts away from everyone else. However, unlike Liara, Benezia wouldn't keep her mouth shut.
"Did you honestly believe that if these people ever truly knew what you have done, they would ever forgive you?"
He strained even harder to move, causing blood to rush to his face. "Get the fuck out of my head you witch!"
The matriarch took a step closer. "Do they know the real commander Shepard?" she asked accusingly.
Mind games, just great. Except, he couldn't help but feel ashamed. What he hated more was that she could also tell that it was affecting him; it wasn't fair. And Shepard's anger could only go so far. There was no longer any point in trying to move. As his body gave up the will to move, he slowly started to feel the dam around his mind ebb away as well. He felt himself gradually being seduced by her words, even as he tried to block her out.
Liara was helpless to do anything. Even though her pistol was raised, she was frozen; frozen not from a stasis field, but from her own indecisiveness.
"Join me, and we can bring peace across the galaxy, commander. You can finally fulfill your purpose."
However, Shepard had seen one thing that Benezia never had: the beacon. He'd seen its hazy visions, seen what was to come. In that moment, he knew one thing: no matter how far he fell, he did not want those visions to exist because of him. "Go. Fuck. Yourself."
Benezia shrugged. "Shame," she replied, her voice carrying an air of faux sorrow. Slowly the commander began to levitate off the ground. "As I am sure you know, the asari are masters at biotics." She repeatedly slammed John violently into the metal bulkhead behind him, again, again, and again, until his bones started to fracture or break from the force of the impacts. "Unique specimens such as yourself have been able to copy some of our techniques. Yet, there are still things your fumbling race has yet to learn."
Shepard's skin began to get warm. For a moment, he thought it was because of his struggling; but then his skin began to burn and his insides began to feel like they were melting. At first, he could tolerate the pain, but it soon grew to an unbearable level; he started to burn up inside his suit, and some of his bones began to twist inside him. John screamed in agony. He tried to counter with his own biotics. He kicked the air, waved his arms, tried anything to get back down to the ground so he could stop her from afflicting him. Nothing worked.
Liara could hear his screams, she could almost feel the pain he was in. She knew she had to do something. This woman was not the sweet and caring mother she once knew. No, this was a heartless monster. Liara could not let the commander die. He probably deserved to, but she didn't feel like playing god. At least for the time being, he was trying to stop the reapers, and that was good enough for her.
She threw a warp at her mother, catching her off guard, but it only caused her mother to stumble. Liara tried again, but now that her mother at her attention directed at her, it was no use. She hurled the commander at Liara, sending them sprawling to the floor. Benezia slowly started walking towards her daughter. Liara struggled to roll the commander's body off her. For a man who could move so quickly, she did not understand how he could weigh so much.
Benezia produced a pistol. She held it elegantly, as if it were a paintbrush used to produce a work of art. She shot at the commander four or five times before training it on her. This was the end; she was going to die by her mother's hands. Except, when Benezia pointed the gun at her, she saw something: her mother's hands were shaking.
Benezia screamed in pain, holding her head in her hands as she fell to one knee, dropping her gun as she did so. "Liara, you must listen to me, I don't have much time." Her mother's voice sounded different this time, more like… her mother's voice, not the cruel woman she had become.
"Saren still whispers in my mind, I can only speak with you for so long."
And so they spoke. They spoke about indoctrination, Saren's flagship sovereign, and how it twists the minds of even the purest of souls. They spoke about the Mu relay, Ilos, and how the rachni came to know of it. But what scared Liara most of all? The confirmation of her worst fears: the reapers were not the creation of the geth or any other race. They were something more ancient, and most of all, powerful. And Saren was here to bring them back.
"I'm sorry Liara, but I can only…" she groaned as she held her head in pain, "hold him off for so long. Please," she begged, "kill me."
Liara looked back at her mother like a deer facing headlights. "What?"
"It's too late for me, little wing."
That name brought back so many memories from a time long, long ago, where the world was simpler and she was happy. These thoughts were irreconcilable with what her mother was asking her to do, making the probability of her going through with the task even lower. "No, we can still save you. Turn yourself in. We can figure out something, just please!" Liara pleaded. She knew her mother had to be stopped, but she simply could not do it herself.
"Then commander, do what must be done."
At the mention of his name, he stirred from his painful slumber. He had managed to crawl several feet away, painfully dragging his broken body over the cold metal floor before leaning against a wall. John had heard the entire conversation. More importantly, he knew that if he didn't kill her now, Benezia would sooner or later revert to her less than amicable state and finish the job she had started. He knew what he had to do; it was what he did best.
Shepard raised the pistol with a shaking arm, aiming it at Benezia. Liara wanted to jump in front of her mother and take the bullet instead, but she did not want to disobey her mother's last wish. She could at least do this, just stand there.
Benezia closed her eyes, and a silent tear streamed down her face. "Thank you, commander."
For John, it wasn't a matter of thanks or gratitude. He would kill her first; it was simple self-preservation. This woman could not be saved; she was, as she herself had admitted, indoctrinated. He fired his gun one, two, three, four times. She dropped to the ground, bleeding out. Shepard knew that within the next couple of seconds, she would be truly dead.
Liara crumpled next to her mother, tenderly stroking her head. However, Shepard didn't have time for this. Now that Benezia no longer posed a threat, there was still the matter of saving the rest of his team. His medigel injectors had long ago run dry, even before this engagement, and whatever was left in his system sure didn't fix broken bones. "Liara, help me up."
She was in another world, slowly watching her mother die, numb to anything else.
"Liara."
Her mother's chest rose and fell for the last time, her heart stopped beating. The pool of blood that had been expanded outwards from her injuries reached Liara's knees. This couldn't be happening, ending like this!
"Liara!" he roared. His voice finally snapped her out of her trance. She reluctantly left her mother's side and went over to the commander. She would have to face this existential crisis when they were all out of this mess.
Even through his armor, she could tell he was in pretty bad shape. The way he hung his head, the shallow, shuddering breaths he took, his inability to move properly. Not to mention that Garrus was still on the other side of the room in god knows what condition. This was not good, not good at all.
"Hurry, we need to get…to the rest of the… team" he spoke through strained breaths. He extended his arm, prompting her to try and pull him up to his feet. And she was barely able to do so; the commander seemed to be putting in maximum effort, which at the moment, seemed very minimal. He leaned on her heavily, and when he tried to walk forward, he was limping, clearly favoring one leg. Within a couple of steps, Liara could no longer take his weight, and they both collapsed to the ground. Shepard was clearly in no condition to fight. At his sheer inability to carry his own weight, he could only assume he had a pelvic fracture. Wouldn't be the worst, or the first time.
"Shepard, you're not going anywhere. You need to stay here," she finally decided.
"Can't…they could…die. Who will…help them?" he asked rhetorically, because he believed that if he didn't go, they were as good as dead.
"You didn't think I was dead, did you?"
"Garrus." He never thought he would have been so happy to see another person in his life.
The turian had a slight limp and held his forehead with one hand, but at least he was walking. A small clot of blue blood had caked on one side of his head. Shepard wasn't turian, but the way Garrus' mandibles were set and the way his eyes narrowed… this man was clearly out for some blood. Garrus looked over at Benezia's corpse and almost said good riddance, but he didn't want to say that in front of Liara right now.
"Okay…you two need to go…now. Help them," Shepard struggled to say.
Liara thought that was an unequivocally bad idea. If anyone found the commander in this condition, he was as good as dead. "But…"
Shepard knew what she was going to say before it was out of her mouth. "That's… an order, T'Soni."
Garrus grabbed her by the arm, and she reluctantly followed. She didn't want to stay here only because of Shepard; she wanted to be near Benezia in her mother's last moments. The pair left, off to help the rest of the team, leaving Shepard all alone.
All he could hear was the sound of his breathing. It hurt bad, and whenever he got short of breath and tried to breathe deeper, he felt like he was getting stabbed inside.
Yet there was still one final task. The rachni in that cage; the queen, as everyone he had spoken to called her; still needed to be killed. The creature banged on the glass, fiercely striking it with its mandibles and claws as if calling for help. It was yearning to break free. To bad.
He rolled over onto his hands and knees and started crawling towards the cage. He felt weak and embarrassed; he was ready to send an entire race to extinction as he crawled on the floor like an animal. He reached the steps and lunged for its handrail, using it to support his weight as he ascended the staircase.
He reached the platform. This was where Benezia was standing when they had entered the room. It was also where Benezia had gotten the information about the Mu relay during her interrogation. How she had managed to communicate with such a beast, he could not tell, nor did he want to find out. He could only assume that she had done something similar to what Liara had done to him after Therum.
He reached the control panel and used it to hoist himself up. He was now on his knees, but his upper body was doing most of the work. The strain his arms were in was not helping his shoulder, which he was sure he had damaged when he had popped it back in.
John looked over the control panel, searching for something, anything, that would kill the rachni. If they could put a neutron bomb in the basement, they sure as hell had some sort of containment measures up here. And before he forgot, he would be sure to detonate that thing before he left this place. While he didn't fancy the idea of having to send someone down there, it was better to take the risk now. Otherwise, it would just be something else to fight ten years down the line.
He pressed an icon experimentally, but in response, the panel beeped and flared a red triangle with an exclamation point. He pressed it again, only to result in the same warning. "Security access required."
A lightbulb went off in his head as he reached for the security card the volus had given him. He held it in front of his eyes, looking at it. This card would be responsible for a lot of destruction today. Leave it to Shepard to turn a security ID into an instrument of death.
He heard something move. He turned his head to face the sound. "No… that's…impossible." Benezia's body slowly started to rise from the floor; the way she stood up was as if somebody was pulling her from strings up above. It was creepy.
He dropped the security card as he reached for his pistol. He raised his arm and fired his gun. More blood spattered onto the floor, but unlike before, her body did not fall. She shuffled towards the base of the steps, almost like one of the zombies you would see in a cheap horror movie. Her eyes were rolled into the back of her head, giving her face a ghostly, haunted appearance.
Shepard was scared shitless. No, not of death, but at the fact that resurrections were apparently real. Shepard kept firing until his gun blared an overheat warning. Benezia's midsection was now little more than tatters of flesh and violet blood. This would be very hard to explain to Liara. The body fell backward and tumbled down the steps.
Benezia simply stood up and began to re-ascend the steps.
"I thought I killed you, Benezia."
"We are rachni!" the voice screamed. Simultaneously, the beast in the containment cage headbutted its prison, almost as if on cue. Uh oh. If this thing could control Benezia to a point where she could not die, and Benezia had already almost killed him, then Shepard really was going to die.
"But how?"
"This one…serves as our voice."
Shepard collapsed against the control panel. He knew he was probably going to die. After all, he had just tried to kill the rachni queen, and now, she was probably trying to kill him. He couldn't blame her because he probably would have done the same thing to somebody who had tried to kill him. "Just get it over with. Kill me and be done with it." There was no need for theatrics because there was nothing he could do to stop her. The possessed body reached the top of the steps. His gun had probably cooled down enough to fire by now, but it was pointless. He did not need to try something that wouldn't work. He was okay with dying.
"We have not come to end your song."
Shepard squinted with his eyes in utter confusion. "What song?" At least he could discern that she wasn't here to kill him, for now.
"Your method of communicating is…colorless. It is monotone, it does not fill the air with life. Your thoughts lack definition."
That simply led to more questions. "How are you controlling her?"
"Through touchings of thought. We pluck the strings, and she plays our song. She is dead, her music is bitter. It is black. But her song shone brighter when she left this world than when she entered this lab."
"Is that how you commanded all of your soldiers to attack us?" Shepard let out a silent laugh, which he immediately regretted as the pain in his chest flared up again; it was all so perfect. It reminded him of the UAV drones the alliance liked to use for airstrikes. Direct control of your units, but once it got shot down, you would just use a new one. "So you were the one who killed everyone here?"
"No!" the rachni -possessed body screamed. "The children we birthed we're stolen from us," the creature hissed. "Taken away from our songs until they were turned mad, shattered minds of silence. They are lost, commander." The body hung its head, a disturbingly human gesture from a body that did not move in human ways.
Shepard nodded, indicating that he understood. "I'm supposed to detonate a neutron bomb in the basement of this place to clear them out." He held up the ID card for her to see.
"We do not blame you for doing what you must."
Shepard nodded his head. He found it so odd that this being agreed on what he had to do, even to its own children. He never felt any remorse when he was killing them before; he thought they were animals. However, they were clearly just as smart as he was. How many lives had been snuffed out through no fault of their own? "But there remains a question: what do I do with you?"
"Our song is in your hands, commander."
"You would let me kill you, just like that?" Shepard scoffed.
Instead of the corpse responding, the rachni itself did: it let out a high-pitched squeal. It sounded…almost scared.
Shepard weakly pointed an accusatory finger at it. "Your race was responsible for the largest war ever seen in this galaxy. You burned hundreds of worlds. You killed billions of people. And just today, your kind has tried to kill me more times than I could count. Why would anyone let you live?"
The rachni and Benezia were silent. They…no…it did not have an answer. So Shepard continued. "I should kill you. Make sure your kind will never wage war on the galaxy again. My superiors would agree, for once."
"I was not there when the war happened, but I can still hear the war-songs of mother; they were oily shadows. They were not our songs. They sounded like…hers," it struggled to say as 'Benezia' pointed at herself.
"The reapers," Shepard suddenly realized.
"I'm afraid I do not know." It fell to its knees, apparently weakening. It would seem that even though the rachni could possess this thing, biological limits remained. The body was dead, it was only a matter of time before it became useless as well.
Shepard readjusted himself on the floor. He was getting increasingly uncomfortable just lying there, and the dead body getting closer wasn't helping. "I'm afraid that if I let you out now, there will be even more wars. I don't want that to happen, not because of me. I've done…enough," he sighed.
"The wars of old do not matter to us. We simply seek a place to hide and rear our young, a place to live and call home. That is all. And if the reapers come, we will be indebted to you."
Shepard smiled sadly, doubting, and at the same time, appreciating her optimism. "I'm beginning to believe that it doesn't matter anymore. Whether I let you live or let you die, they'll kill us all anyway."
The rachni knew what Shepard said was true. It knew that he would have to take on an impossible burden, a leap into the void, just so he could give them a chance. "We only ask for a chance, commander." The body fell to the floor completely, the legs giving out. The head twisted upwards at an odd angle, still trying to face him. It then asked a question: "Should we be defined by our mistakes from long ago?" The tension in the body vanished completely. It was no longer possessed.
He gulped. He knew that when the creature said "we," it was referring to the rachni. Yet, he could not miss the double-entendre. He knew the answer to that question; he believed it wholeheartedly; its what made him hate himself most of all. Yes, we are our mistakes, and he would never allow himself to forget them. He turned himself over, so he was facing the control panel again, and swiped the ID card over the scanner to give him access. His finger hovered over the options, for the mistake he made would forever change the galaxy.
The plan had not worked, and the enemy knew they were coming. However, they were alive, and for that, they were thankful. Garrus and Liara had ambushed the enemy from behind, taking them by surprise, despite their fortifications. The blood of over a dozen asari commandos covered the icy passageway. The team walked through the back entrance of the lab: the door they were supposed to have breached and failed to do so.
But that didn't matter anymore. Benezia was dead, the mission was complete. They had a new clue about the reapers. All that was left was to find the commander and get out of here. And from what Liara was telling them, his attack team had taken a beating.
They found him lying atop the observation deck, in front of the containment tank. It was awash in green smoke, and a sickly colored liquid sizzled and boiled at the bottom. If anything was in there, it was sure to have been melted into a puddle of goo. And everyone knew what had been in there: the rachni queen.
Garrus nodded his head approvingly; his people still remembered the horrors of the rachni war, even all these centuries later. The rachni were the scary bedtime monster stories they told their children about. Wrex grunted, a small grin on his face; his people had been the ones to turn the tide of the war, to finally defeat the rachni. Maybe the rachni weren't as extinct as they thought, or should, have been. All it took was commander Shepard to put the final nail in the coffin. The skull he wore on his faceplate said it all.
The others couldn't blame Shepard for killing the rachni either. The rachni were responsible for the worst war in the history of the galaxy. They had waged a war that pushed everyone to their brink, and only through uniting against it, the galaxy had beaten them at impossible odds. No one would risk releasing that thing back out into the world. Some thought he should have handed it over to the council so they could confine it. But in the end, they all knew that the rachni could not be allowed to spread; the result was the same, whether they were ended here and now or by the citadel council. So in the final analysis, while everyone may not have agreed with the extent of his means (method), they all agreed with his ends (consequences).
Wrex slung the commander over his shoulder. Being the biggest, he would be the best one to carry him. Yet Wrex was never gentle, and the commander yelped in pain.
"Time to get us all out of here," Kaiden said.
John coughed, trying to hide his groans of pain, before speaking. "Wait, there's one more thing. We need to go to the basement and detonate the neutron bomb. That'll clear out the rachni for good."
It had been a long, bloody day. The team was tired and beaten up. Nevertheless, they marched forward towards their new objective. Whether they agreed or disagreed, an apparent extinction had already been committed. The least they could do was finish the job and put down the insane bugs in the basement.
(SSV Normandy, 8 hours post-mission)
Everyone except the commander sat at the table. It was dinner time. Well, it was 4 in the morning, but they were all hungry like no tomorrow. Patching all of them up had been a logistical nightmare for Dr. Chakwas, but at least most of their injuries were minor. And Wrex didn't count, he could regenerate.
Their jobs were messy. Their lives were often put at risk. The situations they had witnessed were brutal. But for one reason or another, they all found purpose in their work here on the Normandy. Today was a testament to that; they were one step closer to hunting down Saren and stopping him before he killed more innocent people. They'd saved the lives of the researchers in the hot labs. What they were doing was worth the pain.
Maybe the bland military rations didn't make up for their effort, but they knew grand things were at play, things that could end modern civilization if they didn't do anything about it. They all knew that, whether they admitted it or not.
Shepard lay in the infirmary, wrapped in more splints, compression wraps, and bandages than he would like. His blood was chocked full of chemicals to facilitate the healing process: anticoagulants, IFG-1 growth factors and growth hormone, antibiotics, and inflammation medication. He had over a dozen fractures across multiple bones; three broken ribs; first degree burns dotted his skin, turning it red. Chakwas had to operate on his shoulder to repair his acromioclavicular joint that had been damaged, both from Shepard's fights and from his battlefield "repair" afterward.
He was a mess. However, knowing the commander's stubbornness, Chakwas gave him about four days until he was on his feet; maybe a week and a half before he was insisting on going into combat again. She couldn't stop him or convince him to take better care of himself. It's like he had a death wish, and yet every time, he still came back alive somehow. He should have been taken to a proper hospital for treatment, but the commander insisted that they continue their mission while he recovered on the Normandy.
She could have overruled him; it was in her authority as the ship's medical officer. However, the nihilist she had met months ago had found something he, for once, partially wanted to do. She could only assume why. She was never included in the mission briefings; she was a doctor, not a soldier, after all. But from the whispers and rumors, she could piece it together. Commander Shepard had seen the reapers from the beacon. He thought it was just a nightmare. However, with each day that went forward, with each knew piece of evidence that was acquired, an inevitable truth, a certainty, became apparent: the reapers were coming to kill everyone. Shepard was never sure about anything; his life, what to do with it, why he bothered trying, these were all open ended, and he liked it like that. Even he could not try and predict his future. He had fully embraced the randomness of life, and he did not like being told what he should, or would, do. Yet now he could be sure about one thing: the reapers. They gave him something: the certainty of a particular future: death by genocide. He was not afraid of his death or that of others; he was afraid of being forced into a certain death. He didn't want to stop the reapers because he wanted redemption, at least not yet. He wanted to stop them so he could give a big, fat middle finger to destiny. Because if destiny was a lie, it meant he was free, and if he was free, he could change, and if he could change, then maybe he could die a partially miserable person as opposed to completely. But if destiny was real, if our lives were a script, then we were condemned to a future, even if we did not know that future yet. Given how his life had been going thus far, he doubted his future destiny, if it existed, left anything much to be desired.
He never trusted anyone to do anything. He was always second guessing, doubting, pushing people away. He only now worked with a team because the scope of this mission was so vast, even he had to accept that he did not have all the skills needed to complete it. However, that didn't mean he would take a step back. If he wanted to stop the reapers and Saren, he trusted no one but himself to lead the charge.
The weather was cold and dark, to say the least. It was basically a frozen and barren wasteland. The conditions were less than optimal for a home. It would have to keep searching, as this planet would not do. It would need to somehow commandeer a ship, leave this planet, and scour the galaxy for a safe place away from the others. It faced impossibly slim odds, but it was the last of its kind. It had to succeed. She would grasp at whatever chance she was given. She did not want to squander what was given to her: a future.
Commander Shepard had been an interesting, although unpleasant figure to meet. It's not that she disliked or hated him; he was the one to spare her, after all; it was something inside of him that just scared her. She didn't need to be human, or any other race for that matter, to tell that most others shared this view.
Her release, and therefore her existence, would be a secret that only the two of them knew about, at least for the near future. She was sure that when he opened the control panel and hovered over the buttons that she was dead. She could have tried killing him with that corpse, but possessing a corpse and making it kill were two very different things. By the time the commander was making the decision, the body had ceased to function completely. With ATP no longer being produced, and oxygen and sugar no longer being supplied to the dying cells, they would stop moving at some point. Besides, if she had killed him, his team would have found him and hunted her down.
His song was sad and frightening. His notes were erratic and random, pure chaos. There was no melody, no unity; there was not even really a song; it was just noise. It hurt the ears and the mind, almost like the songs of her own lost children. The notes left a foul taste in the mouth, almost like poison. She had not known him long, but it was clear that his story was one of sadness and pain, a story of endless contradictions and self-deception.
When his eyes had looked back up at the cage, at her, with a fierce determination, she knew that he was clearly angry that he had to make any decision at all. The chaos had reached a crescendo, and then he had smashed his fist down on the display.
She could only clearly discern one note amidst the noise. A deep, rumbling staccato that was barely audible. It was hidden, deep in the background, overshadowed by the shear silence. It was impossible to remember the Commander by the chaos that surrounded that note, so she decided to only use that single note. It was a song she would never forget, the song she owed thanks to. This note was only the beat of a song. It was missing many pieces to complete a symphony. Yet that was the beauty of creating a new melody. When one starts a new song, there are endless possibilities, both good and bad; but it was the possibility that beautiful sounds would arise that made the risk of composing worth it.
He'd lied to everyone, to the council and even his team. He gave the rachni a chance. He wanted to hope, even though hope always spit back in his face; hope was a lie, but it was all he had left. The rachni would be the answer to the question.
Yet, even if they one day far into the future answered the question, he still knew one thing: the rachni were irreparably marked. Forever, next to their name, would be an asterisk and a warning. No matter how much good they could possibly do in the future, no matter how far they went to undo the damage and make peace, they would always be remembered for the rachni war. He doubted anyone would give them a second chance, and nobody could blame the people who refused to give that second chance; the rachni had done it to themselves. That was even assuming the rachni kept their word. They might as well breed an army and kill all over again.
He shut his eyes. It was time to sleep and rest in the clutches of darkness. Hope was always a lie. A lie like the acid he released into the tank after he had already released the queen. Another secret needed to be buried in the farthest reaches of the commander's mind.
