"Holy shit," Alenko breathed, his mouth dropping open.
Shepard said nothing, a mix of horror and anger blotching her face with color as she stopped walking. The breath she drew was shaky.
The Cerberus station wasn't the nightmare factory Alenko expected, but maybe that wasn't surprising. The Illusive Man lived here. Maybe he was one of the psychos who didn't need a dungeon all fitted with a rack and victims in his basement. Or maybe the messy research was short-term stuff, or was well cleaned up after.
It didn't matter. Nothing not connected to the monstrosity before him mattered.
It was massive, the head, arms and torso built along human lines, ending in a long tail-like backbone. Sightless, lightless eyes stared blankly forward. The lipless mouth seemed to smile or grimace. It hung limply from a specialized mix of cradle and scaffolding, wrists limp, neck limp, sagging under its own weight. It looked as though at least one team had been assigned to scrub it down: two thirds of it were shiny silver, the other third burned and blackened.
Shepard's reports came back to him, the colorless after-action reports written in a sterile fashion that any reader knew would not, could not, convey the horror of what she'd witnessed. She'd described the thing as not even sentient, just instinct against intruders with malicious intent…but it was still a Reaper. Sentience, or lack thereof, didn't matter much.
The amount of firepower it had taken to subdue it…
On the one hand, the fact that it took only four people was reassuring. But they were four very specialized, very heavily-armed people. It wasn't a combination of firepower and ability that was widely available.
And without more team members to handle insertion and extraction, no one would have made it to the proto-Reaper in the first place.
Alenko's guts twisted. He half expected the thing to suddenly light up, or move. Reaper flagships were massive though this one was clearly not that large. However, EDI had specified that the flagships tended to have minor phenotypic variation. He glanced at Shepard, wondering if this was the Reapers' way of acknowledging the closest thing to an opponent they'd ever come across. Maybe it was small because the human population wasn't enough to fill up one of the big ones.
It looked like something out of a vid or a game. And yet seeing it in person…there was nothing lame or cheesy about it.
He wet his lips, swallowing hard before he found his voice. "That's—is that the one the Collectors were building?" It was hard to say if it was better to find out the Illusive Man scavenged this like so much other Reaper tech or if it was better to believe this was just another Cerberus construct, an expensive knockoff but a knockoff nonetheless, not nearly as crazy-dangerous as a real Reaper.
The number of colonists that disappeared during the two years Shepard was gone, and part of the third during which she'd been on the case, staggered him. It was worse, now that he realized just how big the thing was, how many people would have to be rendered down into pulp in order to…fill it out. There didn't seem to be enough people of any or all the species to fill that thing out.
She'd described that too, how close her crew came to joining those mushed-up thousands, the sheer volume of biomass still needed—an incalculable amount, but dimensions always looked smaller on paper. The reality hit him now like a sucker punch. It brought on a sense of gnawing guilt. He hadn't believed her. The Alliance never took the threat seriously. The Council…was the Council.
And while all this was going on right under their noses…
Shepard nodded. She pursed her lips, the horror draining away to reveal something just shy of homicidal intent. He could almost see the thoughts flickering through her mind: she and her team killed it once. Even if it was 'alive' it had to know not to tangle with her and those who followed her again. "I'm surprised Cerberus managed to recover it, much less that much."
"…I wish I came and helped." The words came out quietly, but involuntarily.
"You're helping now. EDI, can you get a read on that…thing?"
Should've, could've, would've. It didn't make him feel better. That was his problem to deal with.
"The proto-Reaper is inert, Shepard," EDI observed. "However, Cerberus is actively using surviving pieces. The central core is being utilized; I believe as a power source."
"Is this thing capable of Indoctrination?" Shepard asked.
That would make a bad thing worse. At what developmental stage did Reapers acquire that ability? He didn't feel any weird vibrations, air compressions, anything out of the ordinary.
"Unknown."
"Then let's not hang around to find out." Shepard switched to her particle beam before starting forward at a brisk trot.
It seemed even more obscene up close, and climbing the scaffolding to get to the next waypoint made him feel like a fly on some giant carcass.
"This thing is so creepy," Shepard breathed from up ahead.
"Creepy is a good word," Javik agreed heartily.
"The Reaper is inert," EDI repeated from behind them. "Except for the core, it shows nothing associated with active function."
"…could it be repurposed for our side?" It was worth considering…
Shepard stopped climbing to glare back at Alenko. She didn't say anything, but her expression could have stopped a high-speed train.
"Just wondering," Alenko shrugged, unperturbed. It was part of her job to be twitchy about Reaper tech, but he didn't point out that imaging and working from blueprints was what he had in mind. Personally, he'd like to fling all the Reapers into the nearest suns. Less muss, less fuss, less temptation to see if they were less dangerous after death.
Her reports described a 'dead' Reaper. It didn't look dead to him. More like comatose; the brain still worked even if nothing else did.