XX
Know Your Enemy: One
Right before they were due to jump to Tuchanka that afternoon, Shepard came over the com again. "Hope everyone enjoyed your shore leave, because we're jumping right into action. The Illusive Man's sent some intel. We're not heading to Tuchanka just yet. There's a damaged Collector ship abandoned out near the Traverse; we have an opportunity here to get some real information on the Omega-4 relay and the technology of the enemy. I'm not ruling out the possibility the Collectors left something nasty behind, so I want all of you to be ready for combat or retreat on my order. Lawson, Vakarian, arm up for recon. Shepard out."
Garrus glanced over the battery console. He paged Joker. "Gun's ready to go if we end up in a fight. You know much about this?"
"Just what I've been told," Joker told him. "Big-ass Collector ship out in the middle of nowhere, dead in the water. I'll be ready. Now get off the line. We've got to fly."
Garrus braced himself for the first jump, felt the engines fire as the mass effect relay shot them across the galaxy. The edge of the Traverse was a lot farther from Illium than the DMZ, they'd be making at least a couple of extra jumps. There were usually ten to twenty minutes between each relay jump—it took that long for Joker to fly off their momentum, turn the Normandy around, and fly the ship back to the relay. Garrus walked down to the armory to wait.
Miranda and Shepard walked in a few minutes after he did, Miranda in a new combat jumpsuit, Shepard in her armor once again. "Expecting trouble?" Taylor asked her.
Shepard shrugged, checking the clips in her Locust. "Not sure. Ship's a cruiser, according to reports. Hard to tell if a ship that size is really abandoned. I'd rather have most of the crew manning the Normandy, ready to leave if there's trouble than take a large boarding party. Taylor, you've got command while we're gone. Garrus, Miranda, I need you two to take a firsthand look at anything we find up there. Keep a special eye out for anything the professor can use. I want Mordin on the Normandy, but I'll just bet he's going to be the first person we want to talk to when we get back."
The engines swelled beneath them. The four of them gripped armory tables as Joker sent the ship hurtling through the next relay. "We'll take care of things here," Taylor assured them as the ship smoothed out. "Be ready to bug out the second the shuttle gets back if we have to. You want the Cain again?"
Shepard shook her head. "Rather have something with a few more shots in it. Give me the particle beam."
"You got it," Taylor told her, handing it over. Shepard spun her Locust around and holstered it opposite her pistol, took the particle beam from Taylor with both hands, and attached it to the back of her hard suit. Garrus attached his Vindicator beside his Mantis.
"Be careful," Taylor told them. He clasped Miranda's arm, bumped fists with Garrus, and saluted Shepard as the three of them left and headed for the elevator.
Miranda looked at both of them. "Just the three of us. That makes a change."
Shepard's mouth quirked. "Used to be standard procedure on the SR-1. Keep the squad small enough there's backup on the Normandy. The size of the team now gives me the leeway to bring a little more power to bear on the enemy—but it can slow us down. I want to keep this fast and tight—in and out."
"Got a bad feeling about this?" Garrus asked.
"Let's just say it feels a little convenient," Shepard said grimly. "A Collector ship floating around just when we need one. It's too good of an opportunity to miss; the Illusive Man's right about that. But we should be ready."
The elevator doors opened on the shuttle bay. Niels was waiting for them, but the shuttle wasn't powered up yet—they still had at least a couple more jumps to go. Shepard gave him a nod and slid down to sit beside the shuttle. Garrus walked over and did the same. "Mmm. Just like old times by the Mako," he said. "Just lucky you're not driving."
Shepard's slap of his arm was purely to relieve her feelings—not much good against full armor. Niels chuckled, and Lawson cracked a smile, and they all tried not to think too much about what they might be heading into as the Normandy hit the next relay.
The breach in the disabled ship was big enough for Niels to fly the shuttle through—which meant no air. Oddly enough, there was a mass effect gravity envelope around the ship that seemed to be holding up just fine, which made for an unsettling arrival aboard the Collector vessel right off the bat.
The ship was enormous, bigger than three professional biotiball stadiums, end to end, and mostly hollow inside. Garrus, Shepard, and Lawson crawled like insects on the crisscrossing ledges that ran down the inside. All the surfaces were made up of a same rough, organic material, similar to the exoskeletons of the Collectors themselves or the material they used to make their weapons. It's like petrified rock. Or a hive.
The ship did seem to be empty, but every step they took inside it felt like an intrusion. The whole place seemed wrong—alien in a way no human, salarian, or asari ship had ever felt to him. The measured movements of the others told him the others felt the same deep unease. "Nice place they've got here," Garrus said over the radio.
"Shepard, I've compared the ship's EM signature to known Collector profiles," EDI said. "It is the vessel you encountered on Horizon."
Shepard's helmet swiveled. "Maybe the defense towers softened it for the turians."
Silently, Garrus cued up his visor's camera and began recording, looking around to take vid of the dimensions of the ship, the layout of the walkways. "The missing colonists might be aboard. If they're still alive."
"If they're aboard and dead, we'll still know more than we do now," Miranda said grimly. Her fingers tapped the grip of her weapon, and inside her helmet, Garrus saw some of her hair standing up—her biotics, reacting to her nervousness.
Garrus hoped they could find the missing colonists. It would be huge to reclaim those people from the Collectors, and any information they might have could be crucial to their ultimate victory. To survival. But without breathable air—the odds weren't great. And he wasn't ready to take any bets on whether they'd be able to hear anyone not hooked up to a radio in here.
The walkway ahead turned to the right—but on the left, they saw a small stack of five amber pods, each around two meters long, and shaped like a coffin. Each was gaping open—and empty. "Your reports mentioned containers like these on Horizon," she said. "These are the ones they used, aren't they? Only these are empty."
Many of the colonists on Horizon had emerged from the seeker paralysis within two hours of being stung. They had been fully aware even paralyzed, but he imagined how it must have been when they regained control—only to find out that there was no escape. "Horrible. Trapped in these pods, completely at the mercy of the Collectors."
"Where are they?" Shepard wondered, taking the right.
They passed something that looked like a console, and Shepard held up a hand and scanned it before moving on. The pathway was sloping down, and at the end was a pile of something. As it came into view, Shepard tensed, and Miranda hissed. "This looks bad," Garrus said.
Garrus was grateful for the minimal atmosphere, the air filters in his helmet. But seeing the pile of bodies for what it was without the heralds of decay in any natural environment was somehow even more disturbing. There were no maggots, no vorcha—just an oozing mound of detritus. Skin melted into skin, gray and green and purple, falling off of gray or yellow bones. Humorless, grinning skulls seen through withered, rotting lips. There were twenty, maybe thirty of them, naked or in rags, stacked onto one another without any rhyme or reason and left to rot. No signs of fire or any attempt at treating the dead with respect—it was a trash heap of human remains, sterile and abandoned.
He heard Shepard swallow, and he felt sick himself, but he flicked his eye toward 'zoom,' getting a record of the faces, the number of people laying there forgotten. "Why would the Collectors just leave a pile of bodies lying around?" Miranda asked. Her voice sounded thin and shaky.
"Must've been used for testing. I'd say these subjects didn't pass," Garrus said.
"There are worse things than death," Shepard remarked. If Miranda's voice was thin, hers was thick with grief, fury, and frustration. "Like being a test subject for twisted aliens."
Miranda's head turned toward Shepard. "Is that supposed to make me feel better? Because it didn't."
Shepard looked back at her for a moment. "Sometimes it's not about making you feel better. Come on."
The walkway turned left, climbed for a bit, and then dipped low. And when the pathway leveled out, they'd reached a sort of lab station. Two medical tables, some equipment, and a terminal, and on one of the tables was not another human.
"That's a Collector," Miranda said, walking up to the outstretched naked corpse, four, empty, milky white eyes staring up at the ceiling. It was the first she'd ever seen in person, Garrus realized. "Were they experimenting on one of their own?"
Shepard was at the terminal. "Because that would be so new," she muttered under her breath. "EDI, I'm uploading the data from this terminal. See if you can figure out what they were up to."
"Data received. Analyzing," EDI reported. "The Collectors were running baseline genetic comparisons between their species and humanity," she told them.
One advantage of working with an AI, Garrus thought. You get answers fast. But why would they care?
"Are they looking for similarities?" Shepard wanted to know.
"I have no hypothesis on their motivations," EDI told her. "All I have are their preliminary results. They reveal something remarkable. A quad-strand genetic structure identical to traces collected from ancient ruins. Only one race is known to have this structure: the Protheans."
Garrus took a breath and checked the corner of his visor, ensuring he was still recording. This changes everything. If the Reapers didn't wipe them out, everything we know is wrong! "My God," Shepard whispered. "The Protheans didn't vanish; they're just working for the Reapers now."
"These are no longer Protheans, Shepard," EDI told them. "Their genes show distinct signs of extensive genetic rewrite. The Reapers have repurposed them to suit their needs."
Shepard understood immediately and looked more clinically at the corpse on the table. "So they're like husks . . . or Keepers. You'd think somebody would've picked up on this."
"No one has had an opportunity to study a Collector genetic code in this detail," EDI corrected her. "I have already matched two thousand alleles to recorded fragments. This Collector likely descends from a Prothean colony in the Styx Theta cluster, but there are signs of extreme alteration. Three fewer chromosomes. Reduced heterochromatin structure. Elimination of superfluous gene sequences."
Modded and stripped down like weapons—no more than the Reapers need them to be. The Collectors are mutated tools—just tools. Hands and legs for whatever the Reapers are doing. And if the Collectors are comparing their genetic structure to humans—they're trying to figure out how humans work.
Garrus looked at Shepard, remembering Harbinger and its fixation on her back on Horizon. Or how she works.
Shepard's fingers skated over the corpse. Behind her visor, Garrus saw a trace of pity on her face. "The Reapers didn't wipe out the Protheans. They turned them into monsters and enslaved them. Still. They're working for the Reapers now, and we have to stop them."
Lawson squared her shoulders. "They're not doing to us what they did to the Protheans!" she declared.
Shepard looked at her with an unreadable expression and didn't say anything. Beside the lab station, there were three partially disassembled weapons—human weapons the Collectors had probably picked up from a colony somewhere. The best ones. With a pang, Garrus recognized a Revenant. There was a monster shotgun, similar to the one they'd requisitioned for Grunt on Illium—and—
"What is that?"
Shepard picked it up—a long, mean, black rifle as big as a rocket launcher folded up. Heavy, from the way she moved her arms. She reassembled the parts in about three seconds and sighted down the scope.
"Is that a Widow?" Garrus demanded. It was a turian anti-materiel weapon—a tank-killer, a gun that could take down a krogan warlord in a single shot. A kick like a son of a bitch, humans couldn't even fire them. Not enough protection on the shoulder, and a turian who didn't know what they were doing could still shatter or dislocate something. But this one was smaller. Shock resistance built into the stock. Some mad genius had tried to adapt the gun for human use, maybe asari. "Will it even work?" he wondered.
Shepard smirked. "I can't wait to find out."
Spirits. Garrus swallowed and started to sequence in his head. 1. 1. 2. 3. 5. 8. 13.
He registered Shepard's order to move out and followed after her, continuing the sequence in his mind and looking everywhere but at Shepard's six and that enormous, impossible gun in her arms. At the disquieting walkways, the cavernous interior of the ship. 610. 987. 1,597. 2,584.
Then they passed out from under a ledge above them, the ceiling came into focus, and he didn't need another distraction. The entire interior of the ship was honeycombed with the pods they'd seen on Horizon. "Look on the ceiling. More of those strange pods."
"There must be hundreds of them," Miranda murmured. "How many do you think are full?"
"Too many," Shepard muttered.
"I detect no signs of life in the pods, Shepard," EDI said over the radio. "It is probable the victims inside died when the ship lost primary power."
It made sense. No nutrients. No air. But hundreds of people starving or suffocating above—it was unimaginable. Garrus zoomed on the pods, going over row after row for the vid, capturing the scope of it. People had to know what was happening out here. The Reapers aren't a ghost story anymore. People are dying. Hundreds. More.
The weight of the death overhead pressed down on them even in the light, artificial gravity of the disabled ship, and the three of them walked on in silence. Lawson captured intel from another data node for the professor.
The walkway was climbing up again, making for some kind of command center, a place where a couple of paths converged, when Joker spoke over the radio. He sounded excited. "Commander, you gotta hear this," he said. "On a hunch, I asked EDI to run an analysis on this ship."
"I compared the EM profile against data recorded by the original Normandy two years ago," EDI reported. "They are an exact match."
It was like a cold wind had blown over all three of them. Lawson tensed. Shepard's rhythm slowed for half a beat. This is the ship that spaced her. They went after Alenko on Horizon, called her name when she fought. And now it's just empty, abandoned?
"This same ship dogging me for two years?" Shepard repeated. She shook her head. "Way beyond coincidence."
"Something doesn't add up, Commander," Joker warned. "Watch your back."
"Be ready to bug out in a second when I give the word," Shepard told him. She pressed a button on her omni-tool. "Niels. Stand by."
"Affirmative. I'm ready."
The channel flicked off, and they continued toward the center of the vessel. Beneath them, Garrus could see more pods, and he nodded for the others to take a look. "This is unbelievable."
Lawson stared. Blue sparks danced at the edges of her fingertips. "They could take every human in the Terminus systems and not have enough to fill these pods." Her voice shook.
The conclusion was less of a jump and more of a step away. "They're going to target Earth." It had taken the Reapers all of two years to come up with a Plan B to jumping straight through the relays to the Citadel: this was it. The Collectors are the vanguard for the Reapers, and it's already started. And if Shepard slowed them down, she also refocused their attention squarely on the humans. The Reapers will hit Earth first and hardest, because the fact that there could be more like her scares them out of their synthetic minds.
"Not if we stop them," Shepard muttered. We'll take the Collectors out if it kills us, Garrus thought. She'll make sure of it, but before we do, this has to get to the Council, to the Hierarchy, the Alliance. We have to be ready.
Without anyone ordering it, they'd picked up the pace, making for the command center, like a knot in the center of the empty space of the cruiser. For the first time, Garrus noticed a series of platforms hanging in midair—mobile perches for the flying Collectors, he guessed. He zoomed in on them with his visor camera. He'd noticed they hadn't flown for long distances back on Horizon; this seemed confirmation. They weren't endurance fliers. Couldn't hover, which limited the damage they could do from overhead—by time, at least.
One of the platforms in the center of the ship, currently attached to the walkway they were on, had a blinking console in the center. "There: on the platform," Garrus told the others. "Looks like some kind of control panel."
Lawson kept rotating, covering all sides as they walked down the path. "Where are the bodies of the Collector crew?" she asked. "Aside from the corpse at the lab station, we haven't seen any. Careful, Shepard. Something doesn't feel right about this."
Shepard jerked her head in acknowledgment and walked up to the console. She activated her omni-tool. "EDI, I'm setting up a bridge between you and the Collector ship," she said. "See what you can get from its data banks, and we'll get out of here."
"Data mine in progress," EDI said coolly.
There was a noise over the radio. An alarm started blaring through the Collector ship, and beneath their feet, the platform started moving. Garrus windmilled, trying to keep his balance as Shepard and Lawson grabbed the console and the platform began to move of its own accord deeper into the ship on some preprogrammed flight pattern. "That can't be good," Joker said over the radio, then the feed flickered out into static, and Garrus knew the trap had been triggered back on the Normandy too.
In the cavernous shadows of the interior of the Collector cruiser, Garrus saw movement on the walls as amber pods they'd assumed were empty or full of dead humans opened. Garrus pulled up targeting and checked the armor penetration ammo on his rifle as their platform stopped in the middle of the cruiser—away from any of the walkways.
Crap.
The radio flickered back on. "Commander!" Joker was shouting. "Commander! Can you read?"
"Everyone's alright, Lieutenant. What just happened?" Shepard said. Her voice was calm, even as she checked the tech panel on the Widow, shook her head, clipped it to the back of her armor, and pulled out her Locust. None of them knew how many were coming. She crouched down behind the console. Garrus took up position on her left as Lawson did the same on her right, guns facing out.
"Major power surge," Joker reported. "Everything went dark, but we're back up now."
"I managed to divert the majority of the overload to noncritical systems," EDI told them. "Shepard, it was not a malfunction. This was a trap."
In the shadows, Garrus saw other platforms like theirs lining up on the walls. Collectors were flying down from their hiding places to land on them. The first two platforms glided across the void. Five, maybe seven of them. "You don't say," Shepard said drily, looking off the edge of their platform.
It was no good, Garrus knew already. They were hovering in the middle of the empty space of the cruiser, far from the paths on the sides, at least twenty-five meters from the bottom, maybe more. Without jets or drag-reducing equipment, there's no way. Their only chance was for EDI to figure out the Collector tech and get their platform back to the the pathways.
Shepard had come to the same conclusion. "We need a little help here, EDI."
"I am having trouble maintaining connection. There is someone else in the system," EDI said, sounding fairly distracted.
"Great," Lawson muttered. "I'm not dying here!"
"No one's dying," Garrus told her, hoping very much it was the truth.
"Connection reestablished," EDI said. "I must finish the download before I can override any systems."
The platforms had reached them. "Look out. We've got company," Garrus warned.
"Of course we do," Shepard sighed. "EDI, work fast," she ordered, as the gunfire began.
It had been a well-structured trap, but the hover-platforms seemed to run on preset trajectories, and it was working in their favor, because instead of coming in on either side of them to catch them in a sandwich of death, both incoming platforms docked ahead of them, forming a path that led off at an angle on either side. The Collectors were stationed behind consoles, and as Garrus watched, one of the ones on the left lit up with a yellow-orange energy field. "You cannot stop me," Harbinger intoned.
"Great," Shepard muttered. "This guy again."
"Is it—?" Miranda started.
"Yes. Primary target, whenever it shows up. It's a rallying point for the others, and aside from hurting like hell, I'm pretty sure the energy Harbinger's minions fire at us can speed up the indoctrination process. On me!"
As one, Shepard and Lawson stood up out of cover, hitting Harbinger's latest puppet with a double shot of biotics and inflammatory tech. Garrus sprayed the others with an arc of assault fire, providing cover as the puppet went up in a blazing violet column. Lawson kept her barrier up to keep firing as Shepard ducked down to let her shields recharge.
"Don't worry about crowd control!" Lawson called over the gunfire and alarms. "I've got it! Just kill the bastards!" She balled her left hand into a fist. On the right platform, a Collector drone was pulled off of his feet and floated horizontally in an arc in front of all the others. At least twenty enemy bullets perforated his corpse, and as Shepard faded out, Garrus switched to his rifle.
He switched on his infrared and lined up his first shot, watching the orange and red silhouette that was Beth Shepard vaulting over the console, up the step to the right, into the enemy. He took one shot, then another, with Lawson's SMG fire providing the melody to his percussion. On the right, two short bursts of fire were Shepard's counterpoint as she stole one of the enemy positions to flank them.
But two more platforms were incoming now, and there was still no exit. No way out. "EDI, get us out of here!" Shepard called. Bang! Bang! Bang!
Shepard somersaulted left as the viscous, plasma burst of the heavy husks they'd seen on Horizon hit next to her. Where the blasts hit, the platform bubbled and steamed. There were just two of these guys, but there wasn't a lot of room to maneuver, not enough ground to evade them like there'd been on Horizon.
"I am simultaneously fighting Collector firewalls in over eight thousand nodes," EDI said. "I am tasked to capacity." She sounded almost as stressed as they were. Which is saying something, Garrus thought. By his side, Lawson was shooting at the three Collector drones still firing on them on the left. "Move!" he cried, as one of the heavies fired, forcing them from cover. He constructed a firing solution as he dove, took the shot. He blew off half the husk's face, and it roared and raised its gun again.
Then a deafening crack! split the air, and Garrus saw the other husk's severed spine rip the rest of the way through the weapon on its back. Blood and bone exploded outward, and the other heavy fell to the ground, not so much a terrifying monster anymore as it was a wreck.
"Shit!" Shepard cried from the right. The drones and the other husk turned toward her. Garrus ejected his heat sink, loaded another shot, and fired, and the husk fell back off the edge of the platform and plummeted to the depths of the ship. Crack! The ribs of one of the Collector drones burst through the hard chitin of its torso like paper. The hole in its chest was the approximate size of its entire head.
Garrus blinked, breathed, and hit the shields of one of the last two drones with a blinding overload. It flinched, and six bullets from Lawson's SMG put it down.
Crack! The head of the last Collector drone was simply gone, exoskeleton, brain, and all vaporized into a fine, yellow mist. In the shadows, Garrus's visor couldn't pick up any more platforms. There was still movement on the perimeter, on the walkways, but after forty-five seconds, Garrus decided the Collectors had probably run out of the platforms. Doesn't mean there aren't heavies out there bringing in the rockets or a beam with a longer range. We should hurry.
"Well," he said as Shepard hopped back over to them. "I'd say the new gun works."
Shepard rolled her right shoulder. "I'd say so, but God! This thing kicks like a son of a bitch!"
"Shepard, you must manually reestablish my link to the command console," EDI informed them urgently.
Shepard nodded and brought up her omni-tool, and in five seconds, EDI reported she'd regained control, and their platform started moving again. Unfortunately, it seemed Garrus's theory about the platform trajectories was right, because it started moving perpendicular to their previous path, halfway across the ship from where they wanted to be—but they were headed toward the walkways again, and he guessed that was progress.
Shepard's mouth twisted, but she said, "I knew you wouldn't let us down, EDI."
"I always work at optimal capacity," EDI replied. She sounded proud. Just how complex are her emotional subroutines? Garrus wondered. She's alive. Fully self-aware, but she was scared back there. Worried about us—and not just because it's her job. They probably programmed her, shackled her to enjoy her work, but can you program an AI to care about organic life?
He decided to save the questions about the nature of their AI's programming for later. "Did you get what we needed?" Shepard asked.
"I found data that would help us successfully navigate the Omega-4 relay," EDI confirmed. "I also found the turian distress call that served as the lure for this trap. There is something unusual about the source."
Shepard shrugged. "Seems logical to me that they would have used the initial message as bait."
"No," EDI told them. "It is unusual because turian emergency channels have secondary encryption. It is corrupted in the message. It is not possible that the Illusive Man would believe the distress call was genuine."
Shepard paused as their platform docked to the pathway, and beside her, Lawson tensed. "Why?"
"I found the anomaly with Cerberus detection protocols. He wrote them," EDI explained.
Garrus grimaced. Should write Dad about the Hierarchy encryption protocols, he decided. Last thing we want is Cerberus tapping into all our channels, and if they've got it, someone else might too. Might be time to change things up.
"He knew it was a trap," Joker concluded. His voice was incredulous. "Why would he send us into a trap?"
Shepard squared her shoulders, stooped to the ground where a couple of heat sinks had fallen out of Collector weapons, and scooped them up. "We don't have time to throw blame around. We'll question him when we're out."
Garrus looked at her. "This is a bad time to become an optimist, Shepard." The Illusive Man had sent them in here blind. Why?
"No, the Commander is right," Miranda said, but her voice was shaking, and when Garrus looked at her, he saw her hands were too. "There must be some other explanation."
She sounds like a woman trying to convince herself more than us.
But Shepard was already striding forward. "I'm not convinced he wasn't running his own experiment on his own people," she said. "I just think we need to get out of here."
"Hey, guys, we got another problem!" Joker cried, suddenly panicked. "The Collector ship is powering up! You need to get out of there before their weapons come online. I'm not losing another Normandy!"
Yeah, that's the next move, Garrus thought. Keep us from leaving. Can't trap us and take us out in the center of the ship, you shoot down the Normandy and fly away, cutting us off from reinforcements. Then take your own sweet time hunting us down. We don't know the ship, we don't know the tech. We've got no food, and there's only so much ammo.
Shepard shifted from a quick stride to a steady, loping jog, and Garrus quickened his pace to match her. "I do not have full control of their systems," EDI warned them. "I will do what I can."
Shepard opened the channel. "Niels, send us the coordinates for shuttle extraction! Come on, let's move!"
A/N: Confound the rules of dramatics, sometimes the urgent crowds out the important. Actually, if you try to play the game as I've written here, you'll find you can't. Mr. Illusive will force you to go after the Collector ship sometime after picking Tali up but certainly before you can recruit Thane. I forget exactly when it happens, but I know it's impossible to play the game exactly like this. It just makes more sense this way.
Leave a review if you've got something to say,
LMS
