Apologies for typos, this one was a bit more rushed than usual.


"'I don't like this, ma'am," Ash said, eyes narrowing as she stared at the display in the center of the Normandy's bridge. "Not one bit."

Much to Shepard's surprise, they'd managed to find the ship… albeit drifting, on backup power, broadcasting a distress beacon. It was registered to one Doctor Heart, in private ownership, and while that didn't confirm it was who Garrus claimed, it certainly lent credence to his claims.

The only question is what's going on, she thought, eyeing the hologram. The sensible thing to do would be to simply blow it up and pat themselves on the back for justice delivered, but she had a suspicion that wouldn't make Garrus particularly happy… or the rest of the crew, for that matter.

"Garrus," she said without taking her gaze from the display, "this Saleon. Was he skilled in anything beyond genetics? Should we be worried about traps, poisons, or plagues?"

Garrus hummed. "When he was on the Citadel, he was genetics only, but it's been a few years. He might have picked up other skills."

"Right," Shepard let out a short huff. "Wrex, Garrus, suit up – full environmental seals, and take ammo that won't put holes in the hull. Tali and Kaidan, I want you on standby, same gear. Make sure Chakwas is ready as well."

"Me, Shepard?" Tali asked. "I'm not really good with biology."

"I know, Tali, but you are good with suits," Shepard said. "If we need to send in extra hands, I want you checking their gear and making sure they're doing it right."

"Ah! Of course, Shepard. I'll be ready."

Shepard nodded. "Good. Now, his ship is fairly large, so if he's packed it full of organ hosts we'll need to neutralize him and call for someone else to render aid. We simply don't have the space or the equipment to do large-scale rescues on board."

"What about Liara and me, ma'am?" Ash asked. "Standby as well?"

"Unless you have another suggestion," Shepard said. "Compared to some of the things we've done, clearing a freighter is fairly by-the-book."

"If I may," Liara said, stepping forward, "I will stay with Chakwas and prepare to receive any survivors."

Shepard nodded. "Sounds good. Ash, feel free to kit up with the marines if you want, otherwise, I think we have this in hand."

"Understood, ma'am," Ash said. "I'll be ready in case you need me."

"Then if we all know what we're doing," Shepard said, pushing away from the hologram, "let's get to it."


The most dangerous part of any boarding, Shepard's instructors had explained to her, was breaching. It was the easiest place to set up defenses or traps, it was hard to see through a modern ship's hull with sensors, and it posed the greatest danger to the attacking vessel. If the attackers weren't careful, a well-prepared defender could turn the tables and mount an assault of their own, storming their ship and taking it over, or at least dealing significant damage.

To combat this, most boarding exercises used short EVA trips or shuttlecraft to move the boarders to their target vessel, but that was not an option with the Normandy: They didn't carry combat-rated EVA suits, which would leave them as easy targets in the event of hostile defenders while in transit, and the shuttle lacked a compatible airlock.

Which meant that their boarding would be done the old-fashioned way: By parking the Normandy next to the freighter, extending the docking tube, and knocking loudly. They weren't going in completely blind – the Normandy did have external cameras on the outside of its airlock – but it had blind spots, and it was all too easy to hide out of line of sight.

"Cycle complete," Garrus called from the right side of the Normandy's airlock. "Ready when you are."

"Ready here," Wrex grunted from her left side, and Shepard nodded.

"On three," she said, lifting her shotgun. "One… two… three!"

Garrus slammed his talon down on the door panel, then dropped to one knee and readied his rifle while the hatch hissed open to reveal… nothing.

The freighter's side of the airlock was completely empty, save for a few scuff marks on the floor from traffic entering and exiting the vessel.

They moved forward together, weapons sweeping the empty space, only relaxing after moving out of line of sight of the freighter's interior door. "Clear," Shepard called as she settled against the interior wall.

"Clear," Garrus echoed.

"Hold up," Wrex called. "Quiet."

Shepard cocked an ear and frowned. Chakwas had checked her hearing after the mission to Noveria at her request, and told her that while she had some hearing loss in the high frequency range in her left ear, her hearing was otherwise normal, which meant that krogan simply had better ears than humans did. It was something worth remembering for the future, but in the meantime, it meant that when Wrex told her he heard something, she paid attention.

They held position for nearly half a minute while Wrex pressed the side of his head against the bulkhead, eyes unfocused in concentration. "Something's moving around inside," he finally said. "Something's moving around, and whatever it is, it's not steady."

"Victims of Doctor Saleon, I bet," Garrus said. "We need to help them."

"Wait," Shepard said. "If they're victims of his, why are they just walking around? If they've fought him off and seized control of the vessel, why didn't they answer our comms or flash their running lights?" She shook her head. "Something's not right here."

"This feels wrong, Shepard," Wrex agreed, shifting a talon to cover the trigger of his shotgun.

Shepard shrugged. She didn't really do gut reactions, as a rule, but she wasn't about to argue with the krogan. There was definitely something very wrong on board the vessel, and the usual explanations – test subject escape, potential ambush or trap, hardware failure – didn't fit what they were seeing.

"Agreed, but we have to move forward," she ordered. "I'll take point. Let's go."

The door to the next room opened with a hiss and slight whine, revealing a dimly lit room full of storage crates, and-

"Spirits," Garrus muttered. "Are those… cages?"

Shepard glanced around the room. They certainly seemed like an animal cage, albeit a bit on the large side. You might be able to fit a person in one as long as you didn't care about their long-term mental and physical health.

"Looks like," she said.

"They haven't been cleaned recently," Wrex noted, jerking his head at several smears on bottom of several of them. "Days, at least."

Beside her, Garrus began to tremble slightly. "He's going to pay for this, Shepard, I promise," the turian side, barely-constrained anger in his voice.

"Easy," she ordered, holding a hand in front of him. "We need answers, and we can't get them from a corpse."

"Movement!" Wrex interrupted, aiming his shotgun at a corner of the room. "Behind the desk."

Shepard peered into the darkness and made a mental note to buy better light amplification tech for her helmet. "Lights on," she commed, then activated her omni-tool's lamp.

Cowering behind an overturned office desk was a figure – human, male, naked, and with a glazed look

in his eyes and what Shepard assumed as a foul-smelling mess covering him.

"Cover me," Garrus said, and began walking forward toward the man. "Easy," he said, lowering his rifle, "we're here to help. I'm Garrus Vakarian with C-Sec- I mean, with the Council Spectres."

"Wait," Wrex said, staring at something on the human's neck. "Is that-"

Shepard heard a short beep, then a hiss, and the man's eyes flew wide before he clutched his head, groaned, and let out a guttural roar and leaped at Garrus, sending the terminal on the desk crashing to the floor as he went.

That by itself would have been cause for alarm, but Shepard was far more concerned with the similar groans and cries of rage echoing from other holes and alcoves around the room.

Then the first man exploded.

The sound was nearly deafening in the formerly quiet room, and made all the worse for being in a confined space. The blast seemed to stem from something around the human's neck, but there was no time to be certain, and Shepard was already squeezing the trigger on her pistol at a woman clawing her way out of a gap between two crates with the same kind of frenzy the man had shown.

"WEAPONS FREE!" she yelled over the ringing in her ears as she put three rounds through the woman's torso, Wrex's shotgun thumping beside her.

A quick biotic yank pulled Garrus back from the center of the room. His status monitor didn't report any serious injuries, although his shields had taken quite the pummeling from fragmentation in the blast.

Luckily for the three of them, the crazed explosive-implanted test subjects proved to be poor tacticians and combatants, and needing to crawl out of hidden alcoves and hiding holes slowed them enough to allow Wrex and Shepard to gun them down.

"I read all clear," Shepard called after the last dot vanished from her motion tracker. "Wrex?"

"Clear," the krogan said. "How's the turian?"

Shepard checked her medical monitor, then reached down with a glowing hand and hauled the turian to his feet. "You in one piece, Garrus?" she asked.

"I've been better," he groaned. "Shields don't do much for bombs."

"Speaking of which," Shepard said, holstering her pistol and turning to Wrex, "you clearly recognized that. What was it?"

Wrex didn't answer immediately, instead pulling the shattered remains of one of the collars from one of the people they'd shot. "Batarian slaver collar," he explained, showing the mechanism and batarian script lining the inside of the neck harness to them. "They use 'em in raids. They can give drugs and they have a tamper guard that'll do everything from shock their wearer out to this," he said, gesturing at the gory mess around them.

Shepard nodded. "What are they loaded with, drug wise?"

"Dunno," Wrex said, tossing the broken collar at Shepard, who caught it and peered at the device. "I'm no slaver."

Shepard keyed her comm and held the drug reservoir up to her suit camera. "Chakwas, Shepard," she called, "Snoop my suit visual feed. I need to know what meds this thing is loaded with."

"Just a moment, Commander," Chakwas' calm professional voice said in her ear. "I don't have batarian loaded in my translator. I'll comm you as soon as I know."

"Shepard," Garrus said, his voice grim. "Come take a look at this."

Shepard peered over at the bodies of one of the people they'd killed. "See all the incisions? It's just like before. These people are being used to grow organs."

Sure enough, the woman Garrus was kneeling by was covered in small slice marks, some of them sewn up, others seeping blood and other fluids slowly. "Understood," she said, "but unless we have a way to counter whatever is making these people aggressive and disable the collars, we can't afford to get close… or let them get close to us."

Garrus' mandibles flared. "But-"

She stepped forward and rammed a finger into his chestplate. "But nothing. These people are walking bombs. Unless Chakwas comes back with a good answer, we're shooting to kill."

"There must be something we can do," he protested while she drew and began checking the heatsink on her pistol.

"There is," Shepard said bluntly. "We can end their suffering as quickly and painlessly as possible. Do you want to finish this, or do you want to wait on the ship?"

Garrus set his jaw and drew his rifle. "No. I want to be there when he pays for this."


"Bad news, Commander," Chakwas' voice said in her ear after a few minutes. "Those collars are loaded with three substances – a hypnotic, a sedative, and what I believe is an experimental combat drug."

"So something to keep them docile, something to knock them out for surgery, and something to make them fly into a rage on demand," she said. "Anything we can do to counteract them?"

"Not without getting close enough to stick them with a needle," Chakwas said grimly, and Shepard pursed her lips. While holding a raging human in place to administer drugs would be no problem for a biotic, doing so without triggering the proximity explosive built into their collar was a different story.

"Do we have a tranquilizer gun in our equipment?" she asked.

"I already checked," Chakwas said. "We do not."

"Make a note that we need to fix that. What about hacking? Any chance Tali can disable them?"

"I'm- I'm sorry, Shepard, I don't have the first idea how they work, and without a few hours to figure it out-" Tali's voice sounded almost broken on the radio.

"No, it was a silly idea," Shepard reassured her, then released the radio button and sighed. "Wrex, Garrus – shoot to kill."


Garrus was a mess.

He was furious with Saleon, disgusted with himself, horrified with what he was doing, and aghast at his commanding officer, all at the same time. The combination was… not a pleasant one, to say the least, and it wasn't made better by the headache from the explosion he'd walked in to earlier.

The suicide bomber, you mean, he corrected himself, then bit back the urge to spit on the ground.

Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, the test subjects presented little actual danger to the three of them after Shepard ordered them to gun them down. It was cruel, and cold, and he hated himself more and more with every impact of recoil against his hardsuit, but it didn't change the fact that gunning down drug-addled surgery outpatients was not particularly challenging. It meant that he wasn't in any immediate danger, but with that freedom from life-or-death stress came the freedom to think about what it was he was doing.

And, truthfully, what his commander was doing.

He knew she had other sides to her, as well as a past that was nowhere near as wholesome as her present behavior and demeanor would indicate. He'd been mollified a bit when she'd taken up with the young asari – after all, Liara was about as kind and innocent as one could expect someone in her situation to be, and she wouldn't spend time with somebody with a hidden heartless streak.

"Vakarian, cover me," the human in question ordered as she stepped up to a computer terminal.

"Aye aye, ma'am," he said automatically, taking position behind her to guard against possible attacks. "What are you looking for?"

"Patient records," she said, tapping on the display. "He has to have records about which hosts are ready for harvest, which should give us a headcount."

"Why? You want to know how many people we've killed?" he asked bitterly.

"No," she replied, "I want to know when we've neutralized everyone."

He fought the urge to turn around and look at her. "You've been keeping track?"

"Twenty four so far, plus the two dead ones in the surgery bay we passed earlier," she answered promptly.

Wrex let out an appreciative grunt. "I lost track at eleven."

"And how many are left?" he asked.

Shepard sighed and turned the display off. "None," she said in the same calm voice. "Everyone is accounted for."

Garrus let his head fall. Intellectually, he knew that it was going to be impossible to rescue the people he'd gotten away from the Citadel with. It had been far too long, and even a short tenure as an organ host with whatever procedures Saleon was using did awful things to a person's insides. Still, even if he knew they were lost, to lose another group when he was right there-

The knot of anxiety in his chest snapped, to be replaced with a warm and righteous anger. "Well, we can at least make sure he doesn't do it to anybody else," he said grimly, flicking the safety on his rifle off for good measure.

Shepard nodded. "That we can," she said. "Let's finish clearing this place out."


"Alright," Shepard said after a tense fifteen minutes of sweeping through storage rooms, auxiliary labs, environmental controls, and prison-like stacked cages. "Only things left are the senior crew quarters and the bridge, and he's not on the bridge."

"Bastard's probably hiding in his quarters," Wrex rumbled.

"Probably," Shepard agreed, "we can break the-"

The hiss of a hatch opening behind them cut her off, and Garrus' eyes widened at the abrupt appearance of a batarian coming from the ship's guest quarters behind them… as well as the small disc sailing through the air toward them.

"GRENA-" he began to shout, only for Wrex to knock him flat into the deck in a dash to put himself between the two of them and the incoming explosive. A brilliant flash of light and deafening crack echoed through the narrow halls, briefly illuminating the krogan's armored profile in a halo of light before pitching him flat on his face in front of them.

Garrus was halfway through drawing his sidearm, his rifle pinned underneath Wrex's considerable bulk, when Shepard crouched down and leaped the eight horizontal meters between them and the batarians in a burst of biotic energy.

The impact sent the unfortunate batarian crash back into the doorframe, but the commander wasn't finished. Her entire body limned with blue, she hoisted the batarian into the air, then swung him around into the wall hard enough that Garrus was almost shoved back to his knees by the force of the impact.

Spirits, he thought, in more than a little awe, then shook himself and began helping Wrex to his feet.

She was saying something, too, to somebody inside the room, and both he and Wrex rushed to provide backup, trying not to stare at the corpse of the batarian embedded a good six centimeters into the steel bulkhead on the way.

"You will kneel with your hands behind your head," she ordered in a space-cold voice at a pair of batarians standing in the room. "Any other voluntary movement will be treated as hostile and result in your death. Do you understand?"

"Butcher," one of them whispered, while the other collapsed to his knees and began putting his hands behind his head.

"Do you understand?" she repeated, adjusting her aim to center mass of the still-standing batarian. "Kneel. Now."

"I- no, I don't want to die! Please, we've been trapped-" the still-standing one stammered.

Shepard shot him.

"Shepard, what are you doing?!" he exclaimed while the batarian's corpse crumpled to the floor.

Shepard spared him a flat, empty look that made his skin crawl, then turned back to the kneeling one. "You will be taken prisoner and delivered to a Citadel Council court, where you will face charges related to the operation here. If you do not follow my orders, I will shoot you. Do you understand?"

"I- I understand," the kneeling batarian whispered.

"Good. Wrex, stand guard. I would prefer him alive, but if he tries anything, you're far more important than he is." She pursed her lips. "Garrus, do you have handcuffs?"

"Uh," he blinked. "Yes, I do."

"Good. Cuff him," she ordered.

Garrus stowed his pistol and pulled a pair of locking polymer cuffs out of one of his hardsuit's storage compartments, carefully fastening them around the batarian's hands while Wrex leaned against a wall and watched.

"Now let's go take care of Saleon," she said, and without waiting for a response, walked out of the room.


Garrus followed the commander out into the hall in a daze. He didn't know what to think, let alone what to feel, and the contemptuous ease with which she'd killed a begging noncombatant hadn't been something he'd expected.

Making things worse was the issue that the batarian she'd gunned down had deserved it, at least if his suspicious about their role on board this ship were correct. Batarians on a ship where batarian slave collars were being used? Claiming to be trapped, but armed with grenades? Discovered in the guest quarters instead of a cage? No shuttle craft on board? All the evidence pointed to them being a part of the crew, possibly even a contact for acquiring more people for Saleon's operation.

I just wanted to make sure Saleon didn't get away again, he thought desperately. I didn't want to watch people beg for their lives before being executed.

He'd joined C-Sec to help people. He wanted to protect the innocent and stop the guilty, because it hurt him when innocent people had their lives shattered by the callous actions of criminals. A part of them wanted to inflict the same agony on the people who lacked the empathy to understand the pain they inflicted on people, yes, but a bigger part was simply wanting never to need to tell a woman her husband had been killed by a fight between two red sand dealers, or watch the light leave a kid's eyes because the medics couldn't fix the damage the shiv through his chest had wrought.

In his world, there were the innocent – or the mostly innocent, at least, after all everyone was guilty of something – and the guilty. Black and white. The innocent were to be protected or, at worst, gently reproved. The guilty were to be punished and stopped from hurting people. Anything that hurt the innocent or protected the guilty was bad, and had no place in his world.

But that didn't help here, where his commanding officer was cold-blooded and the slavers were crying and begging for their lives. He wanted Saleon to pay, and in his dream world, that payment would consist of finally forcing the monster to feel some of the pain and fear he'd wrought before making sure he couldn't hurt anyone ever again.

Can I really kill him if he's crying in a corner?

He looked down at his hands, clenched them into fists once, and called out to the Spectre. "Shepard, wait."

"Hm?" she glanced over her shoulder at him. "Something wrong?"

He glanced away, then squared his shoulders and met her gaze. "That batarian… did he need to die? The one who didn't kneel?"

She paused, frowning slightly. "I could say yes, he did, but realistically speaking, no, he didn't. I could probably have incapacitated him without excessive risk, and we could have delivered both of them to face justice with the Alliance or C-Sec. I made an assumption that you preferred a direct kind of justice. Was I wrong?"

He opened his mouth to insist that of course she was, that he never liked gunning down people and that he didn't know how she got that impression, but a cold icicle of memory trickled through his mind. Conversations with a Spectre outside a medical clinic in the wards about risks. Ceaseless complaints about the amount of red tape he had to put up with, and how much easier it was to just take matters into his own hands. Talking up the "enhanced interrogations" he'd conducted with C-Sec, even if all he'd done was raise his voice and insinuate a little.

I've spent so long with my hands tied, I grew used to complaining about it and didn't know to stop when the shackles were taken off, he thought in horror. She took me at my word, and now someone is dead. Well, a batarian slaver is dead.

That might be less of a tragedy, then.

"I..." he began, then shook his head. "I'm sorry. I've spent years complaining about red tape, and tied hands, and justice denied by paperwork. I'm still getting used to actually being able to, well…" he pantomimed a pistol firing at someone on the floor. "Bang."

"I understand," Shepard said, nodding. "One of my psychologists once said that it is only when we are empowered that we can truly choose who we are. Until then, we are simply surviving as best we can in a system where somebody else sets the rules."

She gestured at the door behind her. "Assuming Saleon is actually in there, we will be faced with a choice about what to do with him. Have you changed your mind? Do you still want to do it this way, or do you want to take a different approach?"

Garrus furrowed his brow and thought.

He'd come here with two goals: Get closure for the living victims of Doctor Saleon, and prevent him from hurting anyone else. He'd thought he might be able to rescue some more people while here, but fate didn't seem to favor that outcome, and so it came down to his original objectives.

C-Sec might be able to prosecute him, and they might not, he thought to himself. The prosecuting attorney isn't bad, but she's busy, and worse still he might get off on a technicality. No. Never again. I came here with a goal, and I will do it. I don't give up on people.

He looked back up at Shepard and nodded his head once, slowly. "If Saleon is here, he doesn't leave alive. He's hurt too many people, and I don't trust C-Sec to deliver justice."

It hurt a little, admitting that out loud, but he believed it was true. As long as he remembered what justice was, he didn't need to worry about his former boss' admonitions about slippery slopes and taking matters into his own hands.

"Very well," Shepard said, and turned back for the door. "Let's make our introductions."


They stepped through the tattered wreckage of the hatch with weapons ready but not raised. Standing in the center of the room, looking a little disheveled and slightly older, was Doctor Saleon.

"Thank you!" he said, rubbing his hands together while they entered the room. "Thank you for saving me from those slavers!

"Commander, that's him," Garrus said, surprised at how even his voice was. "That's Doctor Saleon."

"W-what?" Saleon stammered. "My name is Heart! Doctor Heart! Please, get me out of here!"

Shepard ignored his protests. "Are you sure it's him?" she asked calmly.

"Positive," he replied. "Inward facing horn tips with inflection point five centimeters from the end, skin mark running from beneath right eye to left cheek and another one from the top of his left eye to the center of his right. It's him."

"Very well," Shepard said, and stepped back.

Garrus raised his rifle. This was the moment he'd been waiting for, for years. It didn't quite feel real, but then again, few momentous occasions ever did. "No more butchering for you, Doctor."

Saleon began backing up, shuffling away from the pair. "You're crazy. He's crazy!" he frantically looked over at Shepard, who was keeping a steady eye on the proceedings. "Please, don't let him do this to me!"

Garrus nearly winced at the salarian's begging, but he knew the score going in to this one. The doctor had butchered people for money, and there was nothing stopping him from making sure it never happened again.

He shifted his finger inside the trigger guard and exhaled while Doctor Saleon panicked before him. "No, please! PLEASE-"

The three-round burst ended his protests.

"Well done," Shepard said from behind him.

"Thanks, Shepard," he said, lowering the rifle. "For everything."

Shepard walked over to the doctor's corpse, checked for vital signs, and began going through the doctor's personal effects.

"What are you looking for?" he asked.

"Personal effects, data chips, the usual," she said with a half shrug. "From your story and the log from earlier, he struck me as the sort who'd keep notes."

Garrus nodded. "If it's alright with you, I'm going to step out for a moment," he said.

"Take your time," Shepard said without looking up.

He stepped out through the wreckage of the door and stood in the hallway, his hands not shaking but also not quite as steady as he'd have liked.

It's done.

He'd killed someone in cold blood. There was no way that Doctor Saleon had been a threat to them, which made what he'd just done murder. Murder in the cause of justice, yes, but it was still willfully taking a defenseless life, and he wasn't quite sure how to feel about it.

Part of him – most of him, even – was immensely satisfied. Nobody had slammed his rifle barrel down before yelling at him. Nobody had told him it was wrong, or he couldn't do it, or that it was against the rules. Another part of him was also worried precisely because of how satisfied he was. It was one thing to say that a slippery slope wasn't a problem, and it was another to like the violence he'd just committed.

He wasn't quite sure how to feel about all of it.

"All done?" Wrex's familiar rumble called from the less-ruined door.

"It's done," he said, echoing his earlier thoughts.

"Salarian doctors and messed up medical experiments," Wrex grunted. "Name a more iconic duo."

Garrus chuckled, then frowned. "How's the batarian?"

"He tried to shank me, so I punched him, then kept punching until he stopped pretending to be unconscious," Wrex called back. "Hope Shepard's got a plan for this one, he's gonna be a pain to keep prisoner, and I gotta sleep sometime."

Well, at least I'm not Wrex, he thought grimly. "I'm sure Shepard can shoot him, or something," he said.

The krogan waddled out of the other room and scowled at him. "Your first kill?"

"I've fought before," Garrus said, a little reproachfully.

Wrex shook his head. "Not what I meant. Shooting someone who's trying to shoot you, that's just self defense. Shooting somebody who can't fight back, that's different."

Garrus eyed the krogan, and after figuring that he wasn't mocking him, nodded slowly. "Yeah. Yeah, it is."

"Well, if it's got you this torn up over it, that means you're probably not a serial killer in waiting," he joked, slapping Garrus on the shoulder. "I'm gonna go drag this guy back to the Normandy so Chakwas can make sure he's not dying or whatever. Let Shepard know?"

"Sure," Garrus said, then shook his head when Wrex began hauling a thoroughly battered and bleeding batarian down the hall by his boot.

He sat there a while after Wrex left, staring up at the stars through the window built into the ceiling while his heart rate steadied and his hands stopped their not-quite-trembling.

"Hey," Shepard said, emerging from the wrecked room. "You good to go?"

He glanced at her. "Yeah," he said. "Find anything?"

"Some data chips," she said. "Not sure how important they are, but someone in C-Sec-" she gave him a meaningful glance, "-might want them."

She held out a hand and he took the offered chips, tucking them into a pouch in his hardsuit. "Thanks. Wrex took the captive back to the Normandy, by the way."

"Yeah, I heard," Shepard said, jerking a thumb over her shoulder the ruined door. "He's not quiet and that door doesn't really offer much sound dampening any more."

He smiled at her, then sighed and looked back up at the stars. "Hey, you mind if I ask you a question?" he asked.

"Just did," Shepard said, "but go ahead."

"Are you happy with what happened here?"

She frowned. "That depends on you," she said.

"On me? Why?" he asked.

"Let me answer your question with a question," she said. "Why do you think I came here today?"

What? "To help stop a psychopathic doctor from murdering more people, of course."

"No," she said gently, but firmly. "I'm not here for them-" she gestured down the hall where the slaves were caged, "-or for Saleon."

"Then why-" he began, only to be cut off as the smaller human reached up and tapped his hardsuit.

"You, Garrus," she said. "I'm here for you, or more specifically, because I want you happy, focused, and willing to keep helping me."

"Saren needs to be stopped," Garrus protested automatically. "I would never abandon you."

"There's abandonment, and then there's abandonment," Shepard said. "If I've learned anything from my time leading soldiers, it's that if you want someone to give a mission everything they have, you need three things: Buy in, belief in success, and focus. They need to believe the mission is valuable; that's the buy in. They need to believe it's possible to succeed at the mission; that's success. The last one is focus. If a soldier has things on their mind, or is harboring doubts, they might miss something, or not make a suggestion that could be the different between victory and defeat."

She lifted a hand and gestured at the starry window above them. "Out there are thousands of worlds, each with millions if not billions of people. Statistically speaking, our presence here changes nothing: So long as the hegemony and alliance exist in their current forms, the batarians will capture and enslave people and the Alliance will retaliate. So long as society is structured as it is, people like Doctor Saleon will prey on the weak and the vulnerable. If we really wanted to prevent this from happening again, we would seek to correct those injustices, not shoot a small time criminal."

"But," she said, "we're only mortal. We work and feel on small scales. It is difficult to take emotional comfort in knowing that a boring policy change has saved the lives of several million people when we still see suffering in the streets and are beset by the destitute begging for spare credits. Which brings me to why I'm here."

"I am here," she reiterated, "because of you. My mission is to prevent the subjugation or extermination of trillions of people, Garrus. You are willing to lend your time, your skills, and possibly even your life to that cause. Anything I can do – anything – that makes you more focused and committed to that task is worth doing. If putting your mind at ease means coming to a mostly empty terminus system to dole out justice to a slaver and organ harvester, then I will do that. Even if putting your mind at ease and practicing clearing a freighter only increases our chance of success in my mission by a hundredth of a percent, when the outcome of our mission keeps the entire galaxy from falling under the domination of a misanthropic psychopath, then it's still worth doing."

That was… while not technically wrong… still the most terrifying version of "the ends justifies the means" that he'd ever heard, even if in this case it was only being used to justify bringing a criminal to justice.

Spirits, by that logic, she could justify nearly anything!

Which, he realized with a mixture of terror and awe, might be exactly why they picked her for the Spectres in the first place.

He could see it now: A cold-eyed Shepard, ordering the deaths of millions in order to save billions, watching unblinking while countless people died in order to save countless more. It was terrifying, yes, but there was an attractiveness to the strength it took to make those choices.

"That… answers a few questions, I think," he said after a long pause.

"To your satisfaction?" she asked.

"Maybe," he said after a moment's hesitation. "I'll be honest, Shepard, you've done some things that bothered me. I've seen a lot of criminals in my days at C-Sec, and there have been a few moments where you reminded me of them in ways that you really wouldn't like."

Shepard smiled. "I think I know what a few of those are."

"Yeah, probably," he said with a small smile of his own. "I'm not sure how comfortable I am with this, or what we did here, or what you're doing… but you have my support in it regardless, because Saren must be stopped."

He reached out a taloned hand, and Shepard shook it.


Next up: Virmire lead in. Figure the whole mission will be 2-3 chapters, then a short interlude before Ilos, which is actually going to be quite short in comparison. There's a decent lore dump that happens, but in the end it's mostly action, and I'm not a huge action writer.

Plans going forward: Yes, I will be continuing this into ME2 and eventually ME3. I may toy with the format a bit, but overall, expect more of the same.

As for Garrus in this chapter, it's a bit different because in the original game he's basically just a cowboy cop with little to no depth and you can either agree with him or shoot him down. I vastly preferred the nuance he had in the second game, and I tried to pull some of the back here to show where it might have come from.

Shepard's starting to let her guard down in a limited sense, as well. More on that in the next chapter, where we'll be back in her shoes again.