Moses: A spiritual leader in the Judeo-Christian tradition. In the Exodus story, Moses was raised in the house of the pharaohs of Egypt but returned to his native Hebrew people later on God's order to deliver them from slavery. A rash and impulsive individual, the Moses of Judeo-Christian Scriptures once committed murder in anger and often lost his temper, but remained devoted to justice and responsible leadership throughout his life after he was called by God.
In black American tradition in the United States, Moses became a powerful symbol of freedom, often a subject of spirituals that signaled resistance or escape, and identified with individuals who fought against slavery and oppression like Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, and Martin Luther King Jr.
XXXVIII
Exodus: Moses
The exiled males were after Ronald Taylor too. It was probably why the LOKI mechs at the canyon exit had been programmed to fire on armed individuals on sight. Acting Captain Ronald Taylor had been taking precautions. The canyon exit had been blocked—several rocks collapsed across it to make it difficult for anyone to get closer to where Ronald Taylor was set up.
Fortunately, LOKI mechs were pieces of crap on a good day, and the ones here had been wearing out for ten years. It didn't take Garrus and the others long to find a faulty one that hadn't detonated when it had been destroyed. Garrus, Lawson, and Shepard worked together to rearm the short-circuited detonation sequence. Shepard set the mech up to explode on a delay, and in less than five minutes, they were through the canyon exit and moving north along the cliffs, back toward the seashore.
Before they had gone half a klick, their radios came on as someone hailed them over an open channel. "This is Captain Ronald Taylor," a human voice said, higher pitched than their Taylor's, but with a similar tone and accent. "Thank God you're here. My crew went insane. I only just got free."
Jacob exploded. "God damn it! It's really him!" Despite all the evidence, he hoped there was another explanation here—that his father went insane on the toxic food after all or that another First Officer Ronald Taylor was in charge here when all this happened. Garrus couldn't blame Taylor for that. Jacob was snapping with rage now, though, simmering like a storm. "'Just got free'?" he growled. "He's covering his ass."
"Look," Garrus said. He pointed ahead at a pile of bodies by a cliffside. There were four of them—one completely skeletonized, dry bones in a rotting uniform, years old. The other three were stinking, still actively decomposing. Maggots writhed in glistening, rotting cavities. No more than a year dead, and probably less than a few weeks.
"The old corpse was posed, like a warning," Garrus observed, seeing the skeletal arms resting on the breastbone, grinning down the canyon obscenely. "The new ones were left where they fell."
"When the Hunters started fighting back," Taylor growled.
"Stay sharp!" Shepard snapped, as three LOKIs marched into view and opened fire. She twisted her wrist, and one collapsed in a shower of blue sparks. Lawson projected a biotic barrier out, giving them some space from the fire. There was no cover, nowhere along the narrow path to move to outflank the mechs.
Garrus immediately fell into a crouch, diminishing the size of the target and steadying his arms at once. To the side, he saw Shepard flip the switch on the Locust to enable disruptive ammo on the gun. Taylor crushed a mech with his biotics, and Garrus fired on the other one. But more were coming.
Dated, failing LOKI mechs, but the environment was all on their side, and Garrus realized why the three Hunters had died right here. There was a grim twist to Shepard's mouth as she hacked into the systems of one of the mechs, turning it to fire on its fellows for them.
Miranda broke out into a sweat, holding the barrier in front of them. "We have to keep moving, Shepard," she gasped. "Charge them. Change the ground."
"Do it," Shepard agreed, switching to her pistol. "Can you cover us?"
"Just for a second," Lawson said. "Now!"
They exploded out from their position, Taylor and Shepard taking point. The LOKIs weren't expecting the tactic and couldn't recalculate for their velocity in time. "Please consider your aggressive actions," Garrus heard one say stupidly before he and Lawson hit it at the same time with overload programs.
They came out of the cliffs and onto another stretch of beach. There was an abandoned camp here, and finally, room to maneuver. Only four more mechs in sight, and they were dispatched in less than fifteen seconds now.
"Alright?" Shepard asked Lawson in a low voice.
"I'm fine, Shepard." Lawson pulled a high-calory nutrient bar out of a pouch attached to her waist, stripped off the wrapper, and took a bite. "We should be careful, though. They're just mechs, but he's positioned them well. I'll say this much for your father, Jacob. He knows how to set up an approach."
Taylor scowled and shook his head, and as if in answer to Lawson's remark, Ronald Taylor's voice came over the radio again. "I had to keep them busy," he said apologetically. "The strength of the Hunters is getting dangerous. Thank God you've come."
Of course, Ronald Taylor couldn't actually hear them. He was tracking their tech signals, maybe, but the open channel he was speaking over gave him no access to their transmissions. His salvaged equipment was ten years out of date anyway. He was only guessing what they were encountering and offering an excuse for it. But the excuse only made Jacob angrier. "He had his fun. Now he wants out. Son of a bitch."
"Watch out!" Miranda snapped.
On the other side of the beach, from another cliffside path, more preprogrammed mechs were coming their way.
This time, the fight was easier. The four of them fanned out through the camp, making use of abandoned crates, trees, and boulders on the beach for cover. Shepard set up a crossfire with Taylor, and Garrus stayed back with Lawson, hurling tech attacks at the LOKIs as they came into view.
For an exploration mission, the Gernsback carried a lot of mechs. Garrus wondered if the Hugo Gernsback had also been tasked with securing the planet against competitors or holding it against Terminus pirates. Otherwise, the number of armed mechs that had apparently been in the cargo just didn't make sense.
After about two minutes, the mechs stopped coming again, and Taylor led the way down the cliffside path where they had come from. That was when they realized Ronald Taylor hadn't killed or exiled all the male survivors from the Gernsback.
"Hunters!" a voice slurred. "Kill hunters!"
A SMG echoed off the cliffside, and Taylor put up the barrier this time. "It took years to train my guards," Ronald Taylor said over the radio. "I'm afraid you'll have to fight them to rescue me."
"Dammit," Shepard swore, with feeling. There were two makeshift stone columns ahead where the path opened up into another camp—probably Ronald Taylor's. About twelve meters away. "Sprint it," she said. "Find cover."
They ran. 77 . . . 43 . . . 15!
Garrus burst into the final camp only to hear a deep mech voice grinding out, "Online."
"Heavy mech!" he screamed. "Get down!"
He dived into cover with a wild man in a Gernsback uniform. The man turned his gun on Garrus. Too late. Garrus had shoved the gun back into his chest, winded and disarmed him, and knocked him unconscious with the pistol's butt in half a second.
The other guards wouldn't be so easy to take alive. Garrus saw them, ranged around the campsite. Five more besides the one he had just taken out, and the heavy mech, firing its miniguns in an arc over the campsite.
Rockets slammed into the mech—Shepard's—she hadn't brought her heavier weapons. She hadn't thought they would need them. And why would she?
Garrus sent an overload program over the cover he crouched behind toward the mech, staying low so the poisoned guards couldn't catch him while his shields regenerated. He heard Jacob's shotgun firing—once, twice—saw biotics over stacked construction markers like pillars in the center of the camp.
Lawson's Locust sang. "Self . . . destruct . . . activated," the heavy mech slurred.
Garrus hit the dirt as it exploded in a wash of heat and flame.
There were two more guards left alive, standing on either side of the pillar he had noticed, back to back and firing out. No way to come at them peacefully. Garrus took a shot. Taylor took the other.
All four of them stood from their positions around the camp. The man by Garrus's side groaned. "We kill so . . . we can go home," he murmured, voice thick with the concussion. He reached for the gun, emptied of heat sinks and a meter away from him, then fell back into unconsciousness. A purple bruise was rising on his temple. Garrus hoped he lived. He wasn't sure he would.
Lawson was pale. Taylor's jaw was tight. There was a tic in it at the bottom of his cheek. Shepard closed her eyes and pressed her lips together. Now that they knew the men here were victims just as much as the women, "exiled" or manipulated like these, killing them felt dirtier. Wrong.
During the tour against Saren, there had been some colonists on Feros under the control of a sentient plant. Out of their right minds. Back then, when the colonists had gone hostile, they'd had some gas grenades to neutralize the colonists without killing them. There weren't any gas grenades this time.
"Was anyone else able to take any of them alive?" Shepard asked, looking at Garrus's man.
No one answered. The waste of it hung over all of them. Jacob kicked a crate. "Throwing people away," he muttered. "Enough. I need to look my father in the eye and hear him justify this!"
The survivors had built a sort of door to Ronald Taylor's camp, like the statue in the women's settlement. It opened onto a hill that fell down to the sea. The four of them walked through it to confront the monster that had done all this. Jacob's father.
Ronald Taylor was standing on a balcony that had been built to look over the cliffs out to sea. He had his back to them at first, but when he heard them coming, he turned. Garrus had to make a conscious effort not to shoot him.
Ronald Taylor was a smaller man than his son, with rough stubble around his mouth and jaw that showed some gray and white. He was dressed in the same old, threadbare fatigues as the other survivors, but there was a snap in his dark eyes and an even intelligence in his face, completely absent from all the others. It made Garrus sick. Ronald Taylor had purchased that intelligence at the cost of his crew. And then taken advantage of them.
He spotted the N7 on Shepard's armor and immediately addressed himself to her, white teeth flashing in a grin. "You're here. I knew a real squad would blow through just fine." His eyes flicked up and down in a moment, taking Shepard in, and his grin widened. "Sorry if the mechs scuffed your pads. I'll get you something nice when we get back to Alliance space. I've gotta have some backpay comin'."
Garrus was revolted. He had to know they had seen the camp, seen everything coming in. He opened his mouth, but Taylor beat him to it. "What about your crew, Acting Captain?" he demanded. His tone was overtly hostile.
Ronald Taylor glanced at his son, then looked back at Shepard. He didn't recognize Jacob. "Total loss," he said coolly. "Toxic food turned 'em wild. They propped me up here in some kind of ritual behavior. Waiting for a chance to signal has been hell."
"That's the best you can do?" Taylor challenged him.
Ronald Taylor raised his eyebrows. An expression of irritation crossed his face this time, and one of his fists half-clenched. He looked at Shepard again. "You let all your people talk back like that—uh—who are you, exactly?"
Shepard wasn't even looking at him. She'd walked straight past to the overlook and was standing there at parade rest, hands clasped behind her back. "Commander Shepard of the Normandy," she said curtly. She turned then, gesturing at each of them in turn. "Garrus Vakarian, Miranda Lawson. I believe you're acquainted with Mr. Taylor."
Ronald Taylor looked back at his seething son. This time he recognized him. His eyes went wide, and his face seemed to grow gray and old. "Taylor? Jacob. No. Not Jacob."
"Why not me?!" Jacob raged. "Would ten years of this look better to anyone else in the galaxy?" He punctuated 'this' with a wild gesture back in the direction of the camp and the Gernsback.
Ronald Taylor's head bowed. "You have to understand," he pleaded, "this isn't me. The realities of command, they change you. I wasn't ready for that." He looked up, a flicker of anger on his face showing now as he continued to try to justify himself to his son. "I made sure you were taught right before I left. I'd hoped to leave it at that."
Shepard had stepped forward now. Arms folded, weight on her back leg. "I'm not biting, Captain," she said. Her voice was cold. "At some point you chose to do this to your crew. You."
If she was cold, Taylor was still red hot. "What was that moment?" he asked his father. "I want to know that there was an actual reason!"
Ronald Taylor walked away, trying to put the accusations behind him. He spoke like he was talking to himself. "There was resistance to the plan. Mutiny. We had to take a hard line to keep order. Then things settled down." He shrugged. "As the decade set in, we made sure the crew were comfortable. Some even seemed happier. Ignorance is bliss, right? And they were grateful for guidance. Like an instinct." His mouth turned up, remembering. "Pure authority was . . . easy, at first. Months in, the effect lowered inhibitions. They got territorial. Rank, protocol, they couldn't understand." He glanced back at Jacob. "We had to establish dominance. After a while, the perks seemed . . . normal."
Perks. The rape of maybe a dozen women incapable of consenting, women who shivered talking about him and who tried to protect themselves from his son. The murder or exile of any rivals or dissenters among the men. Brainwashing and enslavement. Perks.
Taylor's biotics rippled across his skin. "That's it?! You created a harem and played king? Ten years in a juvenile fantasy?"
Ronald Taylor sighed. "I can't point to where it all went wrong. But when the beacon was ready, revealing what happened didn't seem like a good idea."
Shepard raised her eyebrows. "You didn't feel any responsibility to get out of here for the sake of family?"
Jacob's father waved this off. "I gave him a good start," he said irritably. "He was a smart kid who was better off not following me. We figured that out a long time before I took jobs in deep space. After things escalated here, seemed best to just disappear off the galactic map."
Taylor snorted. "Till you needed someone to save your ass," he muttered.
Shepard stared at Ronald. "The other officers didn't agree," she said. It wasn't a question.
Ronald shrugged. "Anders found his conscience a little late to step back," he said bitterly. That had to have been the first log they found, Garrus thought. "He had an accident. Things got . . . tense. End of the day, I was the one with the mechs. I got a little basic in setting examples, but I was kind to my people once things settled down. Seemed like I'd earned some peace."
Jacob stepped forward. He jabbed a finger at his father. "You fought over people like they were toys, things."
A movement at the edge of the structure caught Garrus's attention. More hunters had followed their trail through the mechs to get here. They prowled at the edge of Ronald's camp, eyes bright and fevered, clutching their pistols and submachine guns in too-tight hands. Garrus signaled Shepard. She nodded and signaled him and Lawson to guard the perimeter.
For a moment, Garrus wasn't sure Lawson would obey. She looked half-inclined to hand Ronald Taylor over to the people he had abused for so long. But then she turned and raised her pistol, holding it on the hunters. Garrus did the same, and this time, the hunters held back, sensing, maybe, that whatever happened, the evil here was over.
"The stores from the ship couldn't last forever," Shepard was saying to Ronald Taylor. "You had to know this would end one day."
Ronald Taylor's answer was offensively blasé. "Dining for one can really stretch things out. Besides, I can think of a lot worse retirement plans than stripping down and joining the droolers. That was before the hunters, of course. Dumb or not, I'd feel it if they got their hands on me now. They want blood. I'd prefer to keep it."
Garrus heard Taylor scoff. "It's all about you. Everything."
"What triggered the males to change and threaten you?" Shepard wanted to know.
There was a pause before Ronald answered. "This planet has some strange cycles to it," he said finally. "I've seen some plants around I never saw before. Odd weather. Maybe some just adapted a little too well."
Taylor laughed. It had a wild sound to it. "And if you treat them like animals, big shock! They become animals."
Garrus watched Jacob out of the corner of his eye, still keeping the hunters covered. Jacob was incredulous, furious. Dangerous. Garrus knew Taylor could be rash, impulsive. He was a decent man and a reliable soldier, but he had a temper, and his discipline didn't always outweigh his impatience or his anger. Well. He got fed up with Alliance bureaucracy and joined Cerberus. He knows what they are, but as uncomfortable as their policies make him, he still hasn't left.
Biotics flickered around Taylor's body.
Don't do anything stupid, Jacob. He ought to be shot. But if you do it, you'll never forgive yourself. If we do it or let these hunters have him, you'll never forgive us.
. . . Damn. I sound like Shepard.
Shepard spoke to Jacob directly, her voice calm and controlled again now. "We can help these people," she told him. "Cerberus can have ships here in days and pull everyone out."
Jacob's biotics surged, and he raised his pistol and leveled it at Ronald Taylor's left eye. Ronald Taylor stared up at his son, looking lost, old, small, and pathetic. "He's not worth the fuel to haul him out or the air he's breathing," Jacob said from between his teeth.
Then his biotics died. He lowered his gun. "He's damn lucky I don't think he's even worth pulling the trigger." He was disgusted, but the reckless, righteous anger was under control now. "I don't know who you are, because you're not any father I remember."
Shepard's eyes were like shutters. "We'll secure him for an Alliance court. For every year here, he'll have ten to think about it."
Jacob shook his head. "Give him all the time in the galaxy. The man who did this doesn't know right from wrong."
As Lawson radioed Niels to give him a rendezvous position and have the Normandy send the call to Cerberus and Shepard's Alliance contacts, Ronald Taylor let Shepard take him into custody. Garrus continued to cover the hunters. "I'm sorry, Jacob," he heard the man say to his son, quietly. "I did the best I could."
Jacob Taylor laughed in his father's face—a harsh, broken sound. "I'm ten years past believing that."
The Normandy stayed in the Alpha Draconis system for four more days, until Alliance compassion transports arrived to evacuate every one of the survivors from the Hugo Gernsback and place Ronald Taylor under formal arrest. The women were easy to move; they couldn't get into the evac shuttles fast enough. Trained military medics had to take the hunters out with tranquilizers. They didn't understand.
Shepard spoke with the xenobiologist that came with the Alliance to give her chemical data the beacon VI had on the planetary flora. Professor Solus had also collected samples from the planet and shared some of his initial findings. The three of them were hopeful that the Alliance could synthesize a treatment to reverse the neural decay the Gernsback survivors had sustained in their decade on what their expedition had believed was a colony world suited to human habitation. The Gernsback crash on Aeia would go down with the other survival horror stories that filled the histories of spacing, and taught colonists a little more each time. But even if the survivors one day recovered from the neural decay, they would never get that decade back, or what Ronald Taylor had taken from them.
It turned out that Lawson had been the informant that had sent them to Aeia, that she'd come across the location of the Gernsback crash site among all the other intelligence data she processed for Cerberus. She had tried to keep her tip to Jacob anonymous. It had been a security breach for her to tell him. The whole thing came out when Taylor went to the Illusive Man after the mission asking where the information had come from, and filtered through scuttlebutt after that.
Garrus thought hard for a while after Tali told him.
He was still thinking about it when he went off duty for the evening meal the day they left Aeia's orbit to make the days-long journey across star systems to the mass relay. He walked out of the battery and caught sight of Shepard, just getting up to leave. She looked tired, but there was a satisfaction in the lines of her face. She knew they had done good here, and she felt good about it.
He thought things had been a little awkward between them since Pragia, but it also felt like something had thawed this last mission, or maybe since the shuttle bay beforehand. He waved her down, and she paused by Gardner's station. She'd turned her tray in already, but she waited for him to get there.
Gardner saw him, greeted him, and changed his gloves to serve Garrus his meal. He didn't always remember that. It wasn't an issue for Garrus, of course, but Gardner had had to remake Tali's meals more than once, and twice someone who ate after one of them had had a minor reaction to dextro residue. Ah, the logistics of interspecies space travel.
"Have you talked to Lawson?" Garrus asked Shepard in an undertone.
Shepard focused on him. "Not since rounds yesterday, and not about anything in particular. Anything I should know?"
Garrus shrugged. "Nothing you don't know already, probably. She sent us down there, and she broke protocol to do it. No doubt about it, it was a good thing we went, but you have to wonder why she did it. I'm sure Jack would be interested."
Shepard's eyes narrowed. Mindful of EDI and the ears in the mess hall, she didn't strike up a conversation about the ramifications of what Garrus had said, but he saw she understood them. Why was Cerberus's bitch suddenly tugging at the leash? It was the first time any of them had seen Miranda Lawson be anything less than perfectly professional. She protected Cerberus's interests and followed Cerberus's policies to the letter on everything else—why break the rules for Jacob's father? It could just be Jacob, of course. Taylor and Lawson were close. As close as Lawson ever was to anyone, anyway. She couldn't have had any more idea of what they would find on Aeia than the rest of them had. But if Lawson had been willing to go against Cerberus once to do what was right—in a small way, true, but still—then that was probably something they should know. And something they could work with.
"Could be a conversation I need to have with Miranda," Shepard said casually. She reached up and clasped Garrus's shoulder in silent thanks for the tip, and Garrus turned toward Gardner for his food.
Shepard left, and Garrus took his food and scanned the mess hall. Often, he ate with Tali or Goto, sometimes with the professor, Hawthorne, Rolston, or Niels. But Tali hadn't made it down to the mess yet tonight, and Garrus saw Taylor sitting alone near the edge of the dining area. He tipped his head at Jacob first to make sure he was up for company, and when Taylor gestured to the seat opposite him, made his way over and sat down.
"Jacob."
"Garrus. Thanix still hanging in there?"
"It hasn't melted down on us just yet. Probably just a matter of time."
"The amount of time you spend calibrating that thing . . ." Taylor shook his head. "Have to wonder if it was worth the investment."
"It will be," Garrus promised. "The Hierarchy developed the technology from Sovereign's weapons, and the galaxy had never seen anything like what that thing could do. It's fussy, sure. First models of a new technology, there are always bugs to work out. But properly aimed, the Thanix can cut through barriers and shielding like they aren't there. We're getting to the place where we'll need that."
"Feels like we're coming close to the end, doesn't it?" Jacob agreed. "Everyone in it and committed, all this extra training Shepard's doing. Don't guess there's a lot between here and the Relay. I'm ready. Are you?"
Garrus turned his fork over in his hand then answered honestly. "The Collectors need to die. As much for their own sake as for what they're doing to the colonists for the Reapers. What I'm concerned about is what comes after."
"Assuming we live," Jacob joked darkly.
Garrus paused. Then, deliberately, he said, "There's two ways this plays out. One—we all die trying to take out the Collectors. Maybe our mission succeeds and we just don't come back. Maybe we fail. Either way, there's a lot more to do after the Collectors die. We can guess the Collectors aren't the only tools the Reapers are using. We can guess the Reapers will come at the rest of the galaxy some other way. But we aren't around anymore to fight them."
Jacob grimaced, acknowledging the point. "Thought you were doing something about that, though. Miranda said she thought you might've been taking some video back on that Collector ship."
Lawson had been upset on the Collector ship. Garrus was somewhat surprised she had noticed, but he took the news in stride. "I'm doing what I can. I can send my dad, the executor back on the Citadel, everyone else I know who might listen to me a big, fat video right before we go through the Relay. I think I'm going to. Doesn't mean they'll believe me, or be able to do anything about it even if they do."
Taylor poked at his food, eyes dark. "It's some kind of bullshit, Garrus," he said finally. "We're the best people in the galaxy to do something about the Reapers, now or later. If we don't act now, who else is gonna do it? If we act now, we may lose our chance of acting later. Bullshit." He looked up at Garrus. "You think we have a shot of surviving?"
"I don't know," Garrus admitted. "But you can bet this mission will be a walk in the park compared to what comes next."
"That's the truth," Taylor agreed. "I don't know, Garrus. Knew going in that this was probably a one-way trip. Signed on anyway. Someone had to take out the Collectors. Might as well be me. Then I found out about the Gernsback. Hard to die then, without finding some answers. Closure, you know? Kinda wish I hadn't found out what I did."
"All right?" Garrus asked simply.
Taylor's eyes were distant, and his body was tense all over. "It is what it is. My father did what he did. It doesn't have to change who I am or what I'm about. But it's some kind of messed up, is all I'm saying. Was surprised no one else shot that fool in the head. Specially you. No offense."
Garrus was quiet for a moment. When he thought about what Jacob's father had done, he was still almost too angry to speak. Certainly to say anything that might help Jacob now. Finally, he said, "Remember back on Illium, when Lawson's friend Niket sold her and her sister out to their father?"
"Yeah," Jacob said, nodding. He saw where this was going.
"Lawson wanted to kill him, to protect Oriana and to punish Niket for betraying her, but Shepard wouldn't let her, and you said she made the right call. Sure, the guy ended up dying anyway, but Lawson didn't kill him—we didn't kill him, and that mattered."
"Miranda wouldn't have liked it. Maybe then, but not later," Jacob agreed. "Whatever he turned into, he was her friend. Once. You're saying it was the same with my father?"
"Not the same," Garrus admitted. "Niket was taking a payout, but I think he still wanted what he thought was best for Oriana. Your father . . ." he trailed off. Is a murdering rapist, was the only real way to finish that sentence. He's shown zero remorse for his actions, only—a little—for the way you feel about them, and if his life hadn't been in immediate danger, he would have kept on the way he has for the past decade for the rest of his life. But Jacob knew all of that. "Like you said, he did what he did," he finished lamely. "But he's still your father. If anyone ever needed a bullet to the brain, he does. But it wouldn't have been right for you to fire it, and if we had fired it for you—or left him to the hunters, maybe—you would have had a problem with it. Maybe not now, but later."
Jacob considered this. "You're probably right. Would've been satisfying in the moment, though." He shoveled the last bit of his meal into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. He stood. "See you around, Garrus." He paused, then looked back. "Thanks for checking in. Not a lot of people 'round here have had the guts, after what happened." He knocked once on the table, then walked away. Garrus finished the rest of his meal by himself.
A/N: So, one of a couple of really messed up loyalty missions in ME2. I'm not sure about this chapter, but I hope you guys enjoyed.
Leave a review if you've got something to say,
LMSharp
