VII

Horizon: Plague

At 1000 hours the next day, the call came through. Shepard's voice over the radio was terse and focused. "The Collectors are attacking Horizon. Gear up. We're stopping it." Garrus felt the drive core kick in beneath his feet, the hum of the engines as Joker started toward a relay. He held onto the railing that surrounded the main gun until they were through it. The Normandy's inertial dampeners were top-of-the-line, but no matter how badly the best engineers in the galaxy jumped the laws of physics, they had never quite managed to completely nullify the feeling of displacement after a relay jump, that feeling that your insides should be on the outside now—even if they weren't.

Garrus shook it off, pulled on his gauntlets, grabbed his gun, and headed for the elevator. Kasumi met him there. She grinned. "Oh, are we going down together this time? This should be fun."

Garrus's mandibles flared in response. "Can't wait to see what you can do."

"See," Kasumi mused. "Well, maybe, but only if you're very, very good. You're more likely to see where I've been."She frowned. "Collectors. I know it's not the relay yet, but I hope we're ready."

The elevator opened, and Garrus saw not only Shepard but Massani, Jack, and Grunt down by Niels. "It looks like we're stacking the deck," he said to Kasumi. In the old days, Shepard had preferred to keep a team on the Normandy for backup. Blinking, he realized she still was. Miranda, Jacob, and Mordin were still on the upper decks. The team's just bigger now.

Niels, a small, dark-eyed man with a nicely trimmed goatee, looked grim. He climbed into the pilot's seat, and the shuttle door opened. They all piled inside, seizing the ceiling handholds and sitting on the benches in the back.

"What do we know?" Garrus asked.

Shepard shrugged, but her mouth was hard, worried line. "Collectors descended on Horizon half an hour ago. That's really it. Except Kaidan's there." Before anyone could ask her anything else about that, she brought up a program on her omni-tool. "I'm sending you all a program Mordin's developed for us. It should protect us from the Collector's seeker swarms—the tech-enhanced insects they send out to immobilize their targets. Download and apply it now."

"Some interference on the ladar, Commander," Niels said over the radio. "Everything down there's gone fuzzy—what the hell is that?" His voice went high, panicked.

Shepard punched up a visual on the computer panel by the door. An enormous ship like a fossil or seashell the size of a dreadnaught was parked over the colony. Metal rings moved around it in orbit. It was bulky, hideous, like a child with only the vaguest idea of what a ship was supposed to look like had sculpted it out of clay. Garrus hadn't seen anything like its irregular, primeval design, but he'd reread the reports from Alchera often enough to know what he was looking at.

"Our intel was good. That's a Collector ship, Niels. Keep it steady." Shepard ordered.

"Yes!" Grunt said, eyes alight. His voice was gruff and deep but somehow still sounded juvenile in a way other krogan Garrus had met hadn't. He tried to remember if he'd ever known a juvenile krogan. Kids were rare for the species, for obvious reasons. Garrus looked over the new guy. A Collector attack on a human colony wouldn't have been the first battle he'd have run the unknown on, but there was no denying it would show him exactly what they were up against. Is he biotic? Probably not—krogan biotics like Wrex are anomalies, and I'm pretty sure Okeer wanted his perfect soldier to be more representative. He was equipped with the same Katana model that was Jack and Taylor's primary weapon, adapted for krogan use. Makes sense to use him on the front line.

"Kaidan's here," he repeated, returning to the topic of interest.

"He was the Alliance guy on your team when you took out Saren, right?" Jack asked. "The biotic. Easy on the eyes, at least he is in the vids."

"That's him," Shepard said shortly.

"The Collectors hit one of four places in the galaxy someone on your old varsity team might be?" Jack asked. Her eyes narrowed. "Smells like shit."

"Agreed," Shepard answered. Her eyes were fixed on the Collector ship on the display.

"Just as long as we know we're walking into a trap," Kasumi joked.

"But a trap for who? And who set it?" Garrus asked.

"We'll work out the long game later. Right now our only objective is to stop the Collectors loading the colonists here on that ship."

"Works for me," Massani growled, modding the rounds on his assault rifle.

"Setting down," Niels said. "Good luck."

The shuttle door opened, and they all stepped out onto Horizon. Jack swore under her breath. Clouds of insects swirled and buzzed in the air, funnels and spirals of glittering wings and gnashing mandibles against a sickly, yellow-gray sky. The sound of their wings was a menacing hum. Past that, it was silent. Too silent. Behind them, the shuttle flew away, following protocol and getting out of range so it would be available for extraction if necessary.

The swarms hovered over the empty buildings of Horizon, just meters ahead. So far they hadn't noticed them, but Garrus saw all the others eyeing them just as warily as he was, and he heard Shepard patch the radio through to the Normandy. "We're groundside. Mordin, you sure those armor upgrades will protect us from the seeker swarms?"

Mordin's rapid voice came over the connection. "Certainty impossible, but in limited numbers should confuse detection, make us invisible to swarms." His tone dropped. "In theory."

Garrus checked his omni-tool, but the app was running. "In theory? That sounds promising."

"Experimental technology. Only test is contact with seeker swarms. Look forward to seeing if you survive," Mordin said cheerfully.

Shepard forced a smile. "Move out," she said. She gestured for Grunt and Jack to take point. With short-range assault weapons, brute force, and heavy biotics, they were the shock troops of the squad. I'm on protection detail with Massani—while Shepard and Kasumi fill in the gaps on the field, flank the enemy, disrupt lines, and generally wreak havoc. It was a well-balanced team, and there were enough of them that they could conceivably fan out if they needed to and hit the Collectors from two or three different sides or get more colonists to safety.

They circled the wall around Horizon. Garrus guessed there were large predators on the world, or they wouldn't have wasted the building material. The seeker swarms buzzed overhead now. Their hum was high-pitched and irritating at this range, but none of the things seemed to be paying them any attention. Mordin's tech was working. But as they made their way through the town gates, they were spotted by something else.

One of them was dragging a human male by his ankles toward a pod of some sort, two meters long. The one that had spotted them was keeping watch, holding a weapon Garrus didn't recognize. He said something to his buddy in a series of clicks that didn't translate, two more looked up, and then yellow energy beams ripped through the air, heating the area with a sizzling hiss. They all jumped away.

"Get into cover!" Shepard cried.

"I'm on it!"

"Going dark," Kasumi warned. Garrus heard her feet pounding the pavement. From where he crouched behind the colony's walls, he tracked her with his heat sensor. Her cloak fritzed out as she reappeared, her tech unable to sustain stealth mode and the omni-tool blade she extended to stab viciously through the back of the Collector leader, under his crest. He choked on the fountain of yellow blood that gushed from the wound, his glowing eyes flickered and faded, and he fell face-forward to the pavement. His companions turned as one unit to fire on Kasumi.

That's when the rest of them opened fire. With a roar, Grunt charged into the courtyard, bodily throwing the Collectors out of his way and firing his shotgun at them on their backs and knees. He'd enabled incendiary ammo, and his shots blazed and burned. Another Collector went floating up overhead. A bullet went into his skull and stuck, caught by the hard chitin the Collectors seemed to be made of, but the vestigial legs on his naked torso stopped waving, and his wings went limp. He slammed into the wall of someone's house with a crunch.

"Haha!" Zaeed laughed, exulting. With the others, Garrus quickly took out the rest of them. After the last one fell, he walked over and looked down at one of the corpses.

There were some weird-looking aliens in the galaxy. Hanar always looked like they should collapse into technicolor gelatin puddles. But Garrus had never seen anything like the Collectors. Four, yellow compound eyes stared hollowly up at the sky, and the chitin covering the body was knobby and deformed—it looked more like rock than like an exoskeleton. The strange beam weapon, locked in his hand through rigor mortis, seemed like it was made of the same stuff—more organic than manufactured, which was somehow creepier than a more ordinary gun. Shepard was kneeling over one of the pods, so Garrus took a quick scan of the weapon. Mordin would get something useful from it, something that might give them an edge in later engagements.

Shepard was frowning. "Look," she said, jerking her head at the body in the pod. The human inside—a female, mid-forties—was breathing, but she was shimmering in some sort of golden energy field, immobile. The man the Collectors had been dragging to another pod was in the same state. Jack nudged him with a booted toe.

"They're frozen," Grunt said with a superb and characteristically krogan grasp of the obvious. "This what those bug things do?"

"Must be," Garrus said.

Kasumi pointed to the man's eyes, flicking from Jack to Grunt to Garrus in helpless terror. "Look. Stuck in stasis but still aware. Tech like this could save me a lot of trouble on a job."

"The problem is they can't move like this, and we don't have time to move them." Shepard said, frustrated. She cursed quietly, then seemed to come to a decision. "Kasumi. Massani. Help us clear a way into the colony. Then I want you to fall back. Secure the colonists in stasis. Keep the Collectors from circling back and picking them up. Got it?"

"Understood," Massani said.

Shepard stood and gestured for them to proceed. Joker's voice crackled over the radio then. "Commander, we're getting . . . interference . . . we can't maintain . . ."

"That ship's blocking communications," Kasumi said.

Shepard's jaw was tight. Well. Mordin's tech is still working, Garrus thought. We do have that.

"We're on our own now," Shepard said.

Grunt and Jack led the way into the colony. The buildings cast cold shadows on the new concrete, but the doors here weren't locked. They stood open, their empty interiors gaping like mirthless grins. The people here hadn't stepped out for a party. They'd already been taken. Garrus realized the ones back in the first courtyard had been running. But up ahead, Collectors were still busy in the street, putting their prizes into pods. They still had time.

"Fan out!" Shepard shouted. "Hit them from both sides. Cover as many colonists as possible! None of the Collectors get away!"

Fighting the Collectors added an additional dimension to a gunfight, Garrus thought. It wasn't just stairs and catwalks you had to watch for. The bastards had wings, which means they could come in from directions he wouldn't normally think to cover. Stairs and catwalks he could usually turn to his advantage, but none of their team could fly. Fortunately, their wings seemed to be designed more for short-range transport than for long-term hovering. As the Collectors on the ground called to others in that language that didn't translate, others flew in from all sides, but they were all landing quickly.

If we had a brig on the Normandy, we'd want to take one alive. See if we could get enough out of him for Mordin to develop a translator patch, maybe with EDI's help.

But Cerberus hadn't used its resources to build a brig, and both the cargo holds were occupied, and the Collectors didn't seem to be interested in surrendering. "Garrus! Get high!" Shepard ordered him. "I'll cover you!"

Garrus understood immediately. He jogged up the stairs of a nearby building and climbed a ladder to the roof. One of the settlers seemed to have stored hardware here—the first building materials to construct long-term, climate-specific structures to replace the standard prefabs. Power tools and a few sacks of cement were stacked up against a ledge. Garrus knelt by the ledge, his rifle in his hands. Behind him, he heard Shepard's pistol, picking off Collectors from the nearby rooftops and the guy that had followed them up the ladder. Garrus looked down at the yards and lanes below.

"Okay," he said over the radio. "Jack, Kasumi, they're setting up a formation to your left. Grunt, Zaeed, they're trying to hem you in against that building. Just ahead and to your right. Watch the guys above you." He lined up a shot, disrupting the skinny line the Collectors were forming ahead of the merc and the krogan. A yellow, bulbous eye popped and the corpse was flung backward by the blast. Grunt roared and charged bodily into the others, while Zaeed opened fire on the formation. To the left, a blue shockwave was Jack. The Collectors flew again, and this time it wasn't their choice. The sound of Kasumi's SMG ricocheted off the concrete prefabs of Horizon along with the shorter blat of Jack's shotgun. Behind him, sharper, louder cracks rang out. Shepard had switched to her rifle. Incoming Collectors fell from heights of six and seven meters. Their bodies broke apart on the paved pathways and in the greenery beds.

Jack took up a position by a group of stacked Collector pods, wreathed in blue. "Come and get 'em, assholes!" she shouted. On the other side of the building Garrus was posted on, Zaeed had taken cover behind a tree bed in the middle of the field, covering Grunt's charges into the remaining Collector formation up ahead.

Garrus magnified the view on his visor. Something was up. The Collectors ahead of Grunt were making way for something else. "Watch the field!" he warned. "They're sending in melee fighters!"

A senseless roar of rage split the air. Arcing electricity sizzled around a charging blue-and-grey thing. It leapt on Grunt's back, opening its mouth to reveal thirty-two teeth, some meant for vegetation, some for meat—but all much more effective than they looked and capable of much more force than a turian's bite. The eyes in the skull were blazing craters that shone with an unnatural blue light. Before the thing could bite down, Grunt ripped it from his shoulders and stomped it into the ground. It erupted into satisfying gray-and-blue viscera, but with that viscera came a charge that flashed over Grunt's armor. He bellowed in pain and surprise, and then another two were on him, twenty sharp, narrow little fingers scrabbling for his eyes.

Behind him, Shepard swore. An arc of fire flew out from her omni-tool and into the small knot of the things converging on Grunt. One of the things went up in flames, staggering forward toward the krogan even as it burned. "Jack, 'round the building! Now!" Shepard cried. She shot another, but then they were all a mess of limbs and death. None of them could risk shooting into the frenzy and hitting Grunt.

"Garrus—" Shepard started, looking across the gap to the other building, where the Collectors had started assembling again to take advantage of the distraction.

"I see them." The two of them lined up against the ledge, firing at the Collectors just as Jack ran into the things assaulting Grunt.

"Hell, yeah!" she cried. She broke two attackers away from the krogan, and Zaeed was able to open fire again right along with her, but from the looks of things, her heroic rescue might have been unnecessary from the start, Garrus thought, clocking the action out of the corner of his eye.

Grunt's rage had turned to glee. He opened his arms wider with every shock, mouth open in a grin far more menacing than the mindless shrieking of his attackers, taking the pain and using it to fuel him. He used his elbows and the butt of his shotgun as blunt-force weapons capable of shattering bone to shivers, and Garrus saw him do it. His greaves were spattered with gore to the thighs from stomping the corpses into the mud. "Hahahahaha! Right on your ass!" he yelled.

In a moment, it was all over. Their section of the colony was as silent as it had been to begin with, save the buzzing of the seeker swarms overhead—and those, Garrus saw with apprehension, were retreating. They're falling back. To regroup for another attack or to retreat with the colonists?

Shepard climbed down first, and he followed her. They reformed around Grunt and Jack, looking down at one of the corpses of the Collectors' shock troops. "They're like the husks the geth used under Saren," Shepard said, echoing his own thoughts.

They were humans, stripped of every physical feature that made them unique and every mental and emotional one that made them sane, rational beings. Rabid monsters intent on slaughtering everything in their path and stuffed with enough tech to be dangerous even as they died. Their glowing, furious faces, all of them identical, all of them empty of anything but the desire to kill, were terrifying on a deeper, psychological level. It's not that they're all that deadly—they're not, really, unless they mob you all at once like that. They're too stupid to be. It's what they represent.

It was probably worse for the humans, Garrus reflected, and sure enough, as he looked around, he saw that even Massani's expression was a little uneasy.

But husks here represented even more than an abomination against nature. Shepard was scanning one, taking pictures from various angles, jaw tight, eyes like flint. "The geth got their technology from Sovereign," Garrus said, for the benefit of the others. He saw the others recognize what he meant.

Even Kasumi couldn't smile. "Looks like Mr. Illusive was right: the Collectors are working for the Reapers."

Jack nudged the corpse with her toe. "Guess we know what happened to the colonists," she said.

Garrus shook his head. "No. The geth impaled their victims on giant spikes to turn them into husks, but we haven't seen any. The Collectors must have already had the husks. They want the colonists alive for something else."

"These husks are different from the ones I fought on Eden Prime," Shepard said. "They're more advanced. Evolved."

Jack's lip curled. "They still die when you shoot them."

Shepard looked at her. "They're using the colonists to develop Reaper tech," she explained. She looked back down. "Why? What's the end game?" she asked. She seemed to be talking more to herself than to anyone else.

"Maybe it's better not to know the details," Garrus suggested. He could see the speculation turning in her head, the fear and guilt building behind her eyes. The trouble with making yourself responsible for saving the galaxy was the guilt you took on when you missed a spot. And I should know.

Grunt shrugged. "We'll find out when we stop them," he said. His confidence seemed to bolster Shepard. Garrus glanced at the krogan. His eyes were bright and focused. No talk about killing us now, Garrus noted.

Shepard nodded. She looked ahead. They seemed to be at a narrowing in the pathways, a choke point. There could be more Collectors where the path widened again, but here there was enough cover for two of them to hold the buildings they'd secured already. "Zaeed, Kasumi, stay here," she instructed. "If the colonists start moving, tell them to get inside their homes and lock the doors. Keep the Collectors out."

"We're on it, Shep," Kasumi agreed. "Stay safe out there."

"Let's move out," Shepard ordered the rest of them.

"Whatever you say, boss lady," Jack drawled. She pulled a nutrient bar out of her pocket and took a bite.

Garrus made his way to the front with Grunt. Overhead, the Collector ship still blocked out the sky. They were still here. But it was too quiet. The path opened up again. Garrus looked around. The pods on the ground here were empty—but the buildings seemed to be, too. "It's too quiet," he warned. His visor registered a flash ahead, and he dove to the side just in time. "Look out!"

"They're right ahead of us!" Jack shouted.

Another attack it is, Garrus thought. He rolled around and behind a planter, taking stock of the Collectors that had set up the ambush. On the building to the left, on the building to the right. A formation down the middle of the field and up the stairs that led to the heart of the colony.

A single Collector flew high above the others. A yellow-orange energy field flickered and buzzed around him in a way that was horrifically familiar. He lit up from the inside, burnt out like an asteroid. His yellow eyes glowed orange, his limbs blazed, and a crackling orb of energy, like biotics, but a sickly black-and-orange, coalesced around a rugged fist.

Garrus had seen this kind of thing before, just once, when Sovereign had taken complete control of Saren Arterius's indoctrinated corpse on the Citadel. The Reaper had overloaded and seized the tech Saren had had running through his body, ostensibly to hold his many battle scars together. The power of it had burned most of his body away, but he'd leapt around like a geth ghost, and he'd been capable of hurling energy that cratered and shattered the Council chamber stonework. The last few minutes of that battle, they hadn't been fighting Saren—they'd been fighting Sovereign itself.

A deep, dispassionate voice echoed from the creature hovering over the battlefield, the mirror of another voice Garrus had once heard on Virmire. A chill ran down his spine. And not an excited, this-is-fantastic chill either.

"I am assuming direct control."