XLIII

The Dreams of Dead Gods: Under Anesthesia

They left Omega that night, like Joker had said they would, with an eight-hour estimated arrival time to the Thorne system in the Hawking Eta cluster, where it would probably be another couple of hours to the Reaper. The relief pilot took over for the transit, and Garrus received his orders, along with Krios, Grunt, and Samara, that the four of them would be the boarding party with Shepard the next day. It was a hard-hitting team, a team that could take on any surprises they found onboard the Reaper, at any range. Lawson would stay back on the Normandy, ready to lead a secondary squad if it was needed.

For a little while, Garrus wondered about putting Samara in the boarding party, instead of leaving her on the Normandy with the rest of the backup. Then he guessed Shepard was probably right. For centuries, duty had been the justicar's escape. Probably the best thing Shepard could do for her after Morinth was to put her right back to work again.

Joker took the ship back a little after 0600, shipside, right after Relief Pilot Esabe reported passing into the Thorne heliosphere. Everyone else on deck ate up and kitted out for anything. Tali reported to the battery to cover Garrus's own station, leaving Ken and Gabby to handle things in engineering.

Tali stood at the console, watching the Thanix readouts, unusually quiet. Garrus, with his guns already clipped to his hardsuit, sat on his cot across the room. "You think the Reaper is really dead?" Tali asked after a while. "Or is it like that Collector ship from last time?"

"No idea. The last reports from the Cerberus survey team said it's been here for millions of years though. Long time to keep a trap set up."

He caught Tali's slight head shake. "What's a long time to a Reaper? Garrus, you were there, at the Battle of the Citadel. It took Shepard and whole fleets to stop Sovereign. What could be powerful enough to kill this thing? I mean, I know the weapon supposedly created the Rift Valley on Klendagon, but . . ." she trailed off. "I don't like you and Shepard going in there," she admitted. "Any of you, really, but mostly the two of you. Without me."

"Come on," Garrus cajoled her. "Who kept the SR-1 core from overloading during the Battle of the Citadel long enough for Joker to lead the fleet and finish off Sovereign? You're with us, no matter where you are. And I'm sure we've done stupider things than crawl through a Reaper's corpse for a system to help us run a relay no one's ever survived running before. Nothing's coming to me at the moment . . ." He let the sentence go, and Tali laughed, as he had intended, though it was a rather shaky laugh. ". . . But I'm sure something will occur to me," Garrus finished, satisfied.

"Be careful," Tali said. "Something happened to the Cerberus team the Illusive Man sent before, and it probably wasn't pleasant."

"No kidding," Garrus agreed. "We're prepared, Tali. As prepared as we can be, anyway." He stood up, walked over, and put a hand on the gun. "Keep her warm for me. Be ready."

"Will do," Tali promised. "Good luck."


Garrus joined the others up by the airlock, sitting on the in-flight seats nearby. Flight was beginning to get rough as they approached the brown dwarf the Reaper was orbiting. Seated by Samara, Garrus could hear Shepard up in the cockpit. "What's with all the chop, Jeff?"

Joker's voice was strained, shouting over the sound of the turbulence. "Doing my best! The wind's gusting at 500 kph!"

Garrus's stomach was flipping now, and Samara closed her eyes.

"I forget how . . . unpleasant space flight can be," Krios remarked.

Grunt pounded his fist into his other hand. "Let's dock. I want a fight."

"There might be nothing on or inside that Reaper except our target," Samara told him. There was a forced quality to the calmness of her voice.

Grunt was still just fine. He scoffed. "How likely is that?"

Garrus braced himself against the bucking ship. "The Mako's worse; the Mako's worse," he muttered to himself.

"Mako?" Krios asked.

"The old ground vehicle on the SR-1," he explained. "If Shepard ever finds one on the ground, don't let her drive you."

"I have noticed no problems in the Hammerhead," Krios remarked.

But Joker was talking again. "There's a second ship alongside the Reaper. It's not transmitting any IFF, but the ladar paints its silhouette as geth."

"Yes!" Grunt said, triumphant.

"I guess we know why the science team stopped reporting in," Shepard said. Garrus could hardly hear her over the winds buffeting the Normandy on every side. He closed his eyes too, and just then, the din outside quieted and the ship's flight smoothed out—and suddenly, he was more apprehensive than ever.

"What just happened?" Shepard demanded.

"The Reaper's mass effect fields are still active," Joker explained, confirming Garrus's guess. "We just passed inside their envelope. Eye of the hurricane, huh?"

He brought the Normandy up alongside the Reaper, to a Cerberus-constructed airlock at a synthetic breach in the chassis. They docked without a problem. Garrus and the others stood.

Shepard had her Locust in her hands. "Let's go," she said, and Grunt and Samara took point, heading through the airlock and into the Reaper.

Garrus's plates itched just walking in—not the way they did around strong biotic fields, but from pure unease. There were bloodstains on the antiseptic, constructed walkway the Illusive Man's team had built inside the Reaper before they had disappeared.

"Smells bad," Grunt opined. "There's blood, but something's wrong with it."

Garrus looked beside him at Shepard. "Exploring an abandoned area, expecting something mechanical and nasty to jump out at any moment?"

Shepard smiled tensely. "Just like old times," she finished with him.

There was a terminal with a flickering science log at the end of the hall. Samara walked over to it and played the recording. A video a dark-skinned man with glasses and a white coat appeared on the screen. The date on it was a couple of months back. "The airlock has been installed at the far end of the holed section," the man said. "We have begun pressurization for shirtsleeves work. The crew is . . ." he pushed his glasses up his nose, hesitating— "edgy. I reassure them it is mere nerves, a superstitious reaction to what this hulk represents: the corpse of a vast, ancient lifeform. Privately, I can't deny the atmosphere. The angles of the walls seem to press down on you. I find myself clenching my teeth."

There was another log on the terminal, dated two weeks after the first one. Samara selected it, and a vid of a different man came up, younger. "We finished cataloguing specimens A-203 and B-016," he reported. "No evidence of active nanotechnology noted. Dr. Chandana believes they would have decayed over the last 37 million years. There's not enough data to support his claim. He asserts that the truth is 'patently obvious.' I am . . . concerned. Chandana has been staring at the samples for hours. He says he's 'listening' to them."

The log stopped, and Garrus looked at Shepard. Her jaw was tight, but she didn't say anything. She recognized the implications, just like he did, but there wasn't a point in worrying the others.

Indoctrination. Sovereign had possessed an ability to brainwash organics that worked around it or traveled on it. Saren had been a raging xenophobe, but he hadn't formulated his plan to ally with the geth and begin attacking colonies—and eventually the Citadel—until Sovereign had taken control. Garrus and the SR-1 crew had seen others—salarian captives, Matriarch Benezia, and the asari following her. On this trip, they had seen evidence that survivors of Eden Prime may have been indoctrinated as well during Sovereign's attack. Eventually, indoctrinated individuals ended up siding with the Reapers, but before that, they got unstable, paranoid. Violent. And there was some evidence that Reaper artifacts were as capable of causing the effect as the actual live Reapers.

Maybe it wasn't the geth that took out the Cerberus team at all.

How long does indoctrination take? Garrus had no idea. Aside from a shortage of available Reaper artifacts in the galaxy to study, experiments on the effects of indoctrination would be unethical, dangerous, and—due to the nature of the research—ultimately unreliable. There would be no way to trust the results. Could they be indoctrinated in a couple of hours aboard a dead Reaper, or would the process take longer?

And is this Reaper really dead?

Like an answer to his question, the entire Reaper shuddered. Garrus threw his arms out, trying to regain his balance as the Cerberus catwalk shook. Samara actually did fall, losing her balance and stumbling to one knee. She went up in a surge of biotic power, ready for anything that might have happened. They all drew their weapons.

"Normandy to shore party!" Moreau, over the radio, sounded panicked.

The Reaper had stabilized. They could stand again. Samara climbed to her feet. They were all shaken, though—figuratively as well as literally. "What just happened?" Shepard demanded.

"The Reaper put up kinetic barriers!" Joker reported. "I don't think we can get through from our side."

Effectively, he was saying the airlock behind them was now impassible. "So we're trapped," Garrus summarized. "Wonderful." Why didn't we expect this again?

Shepard shrugged off the sarcasm. "We'll have to take down the barrier generators from in here. Any idea where they are?"

Of course, since a Reaper was a bit bigger than your average dreadnaught, they could be in here looking for a while. But she was right—it was pretty much the only thing to do.

Fortunately, their friendly shackled AI had a solution. "At the moment of activation, I detected a heat spike in what is likely the wreck's mass effect core. Sending the coordinates now. Be advised: this core is also maintaining the Reaper's altitude."

The coordinates EDI had sent over flashed up on Garrus's visor. Fortunately, it wasn't as far as it might have been. A few klicks across several installed walkways, it looked like, but they wouldn't be all day getting there. The bigger issue was the altitude stabilization.

Shepard restated the problem. "So when we take the barriers down to escape, the wreck falls into the planet's core."

Joker's reply was tense and sharp. "And that means everyone dies, yeah. I got it."

Shepard was calm. "If any helmsman can pull us off this thing before it reaches crush depth, it's you. We'll make a sweep for survivors and recover what data we can. Stand by."

"Aye-aye," Joker said. "Good hunting." The radio went silent, and Garrus, Shepard, and the others looked at one another.

"So it's Therum," Garrus said.

"Sub a brown dwarf for the erupting volcano, and aboard a dead Reaper with active kinetic barriers, but that's the basic idea," Shepard agreed. "We'll get through this. Come on."

"Wouldn't have missed this," Grunt remarked simply.

Grunt was pretty much the only one happy about the situation. The krogan grinned, staring through the dim interior of the Reaper into the dark, daring whatever hid there to come face them, but Garrus could feel the biotic energy coming off of Samara, even though she was powered down for now. Both Krios and Shepard seemed distilled, boiled down to coiled, alert, and deadly cores. No one said a word as Shepard opened the one airlock left open to them—the one that led deeper into the hollows of the ship.

The Cerberus research team the Illusive Man had sent here had done a lot of work constructing interior scaffolding to investigate the Reaper. As they passed through the airlock, Garrus thought that they must have installed life support throughout the entire wreck, repressurizing it in sections and adding atmosphere so the humans here could work in comfort. Classy. Expensive. Probably a little bit stupid.

In other words, typical Cerberus.

Unfortunately, the extant atmosphere inside the hulk of the Reaper also left them completely at the mercy of the wave of stench and decay that swept over them as the air rushed in from the next section. Sweet and sickly and rotting, it was more than the smell of old blood, it was the smell of bodies. Garrus could see them under the work lights, strewn left and right across the walkway. There were four of them, unidentifiable, weeks dead.

"I've heard stories about this sort of . . . atrocity," Krios observed after a moment. "I thought they were exaggerated."

"I wonder if the data they recovered was worth all these lives," Samara murmured.

Grunt shook his head. "What a mess," he said bluntly. "Anyone else hungry?"

Garrus chuckled, and he punched the krogan's arm as they walked carefully down onto the new walkway. Garrus turned the lamp on his rifle on, shining it out into the blackness off the walkway.

Nothing.

But something had killed these people. Unless they'd killed one another.

There was a blinking terminal off to the left of the entryway. Shepard walked up to it and nudged off the corpse leaning over the railing beside it. "Security camera footage," she said. "Terminal's only finding one meaningful exchange." She played the log, and two men came up on the screen.

"You're married?" a man in an engineering uniform asked one in a white coat. "You never mentioned that."

The scientist shrugged. "Katy had anger management issues. When my brother got married, the best man tried to hit on her. She kicked him down the church steps."

Garrus almost dismissed the log as irrelevant, but then the engineer in the vid said, "What? Katy's my wife. I . . . must've told you the story."

He sounded confused. The scientist replied, "No, I know my wife. I remember: that day was the only time I saw her wear stockings."

On the vid, the two men stared at one another. "Yeah . . . the kind with seams up the back. That's what I remember too. What the hell is this? How can we remember the same thing?"

The log cut out, and Samara looked from Shepard to Garrus. Her jaw was tight. "This place affected their minds," she said. It wasn't a question.

Shepard just gestured for them to move ahead, down the walkway the only way they could go—to the right. Then her gun lamp caught something, climbing up the sides of the Cerberus scaffolding. Not a geth.

"Up front!" Grunt yelled, as an electric, primal snarl sounded.

He fired.

There were several of them, though—gray and crawling, glowing blue with Reaper tech. They hoisted themselves up over the railings of the walkway with primate strength and ran, sparking, barreling toward Garrus and the others. They screamed and yowled, mouths open on filthy, black-and-gray teeth.

"Look to the high-pressure tanks!" Krios called, lighting up a different blue with his biotics and nodding his head at construction supplies on the walkway ahead. "They might be useful as improvised weapons."

Grunt took the suggested shot, and the inside of the Reaper lit up in a sudden conflagration as compressed air ignited and four husks fell in screaming, flaming heaps on and off the walkway. Shepard had out her Locust; Garrus and Samara shot their assault rifles. Fire rate was more important than accuracy when dealing with husks.

The things kept coming for about forty-five seconds before silence fell again. When the fighting was over, there were bits of eight more bodies on the walkway. More had fallen down into the depths of the Reaper. Garrus stood with the others, breathing heavily.

"I had wondered if the technology to make husks came from the geth or Sovereign," Samara said finally.

"I'd say this confirms it as Reaper tech," Garrus said. He flicked through the options on his visor and started a new recording, looking all around the hull of the Reaper, lingering on the bodies of the husks, the unchanged bodies of the Cerberus crew.

"Come on," Shepard said. "We have no idea how many of those things there might be."


A lot, it turned out. Every few steps along the walkway, more of the husks attacked. They had fought more than eighteen of them before they got halfway through that first section, and Garrus caught every minute on vid.

Three of them climbing on Urdnot Grunt, sparking and shrieking until he ripped them off one by one and stomped them into the metal of the walkway or broke them apart on the railings. Crawling toward Samara even after she'd blown holes in their torsos or their legs away from their bodies.

They moved as quickly as they could, fighting husks all the way, aware the things could drop from the bulkheads overhead or crawl up from underneath, hit them from any direction.

A little over halfway through that first section, they found another terminal and another security camera log.

In the video, there were two construction workers building the walkway Garrus and the others stood on now, and one of them was complaining. "Third day with this headache," he grumbled. "You'd think Chandana would let me have a few hours off. Goddamn!" he yelled suddenly.

The other one jumped. "What?"

"That thing, that just . . . gray thing! It disappeared when I looked straight at it," the first worker said. "It came out of the damn wall, where we took off that panel!"

There was silence on the vid for a moment. Then the second worker said, "I don't see anything. You should lie down."

"I'm telling you, this ship isn't dead," the first guy insisted. "It knows we're inside it."

"Calm down," the second guy told him. "Now I'm getting a headache."

The recording cut out. "Where do you think they come from?" Shepard asked, quietly. "Not all of these things were members of the research team."

"I don't think we should stay here long enough to find out," Garrus said, just as quietly, as the five of them moved forward again.

Then a huge, echoing crack rang out—once! Twice! "Sniper!" Garrus's nerves blazed, and he whirled. Two husks who had crawled up ahead of them fell, but Garrus wasn't looking for them.

The sound of those shots was unmistakable—it was the sound of a M-98 Widow antimateriel rifle. But Shepard was still carrying her Locust. Her Widow was folded up, riding the back of her armor. Garrus stared through the blackness to the left, at shadows of scaffolding all the way across the section. "Krios?" he asked Thane.

The drell shook his head. "I missed them."

"Survivor from the science team?" Garrus wondered.

Then there wasn't time to speculate about it anymore. A snarling sounded up ahead, and four more husks crawled over the railings of the walkway, and they were fighting again.

Garrus saw Samara work with Krios to warp three husks to cinders, saw Shepard's shields overload as the discharge from an exploding husk she was impaling on her omni-tool hit. He saw Grunt rip another one in half with his bare hands, sending rotten, sparking flesh and metal in two separate directions. He was kicking at one husk, shredding it with the toes of his boot, shooting another.

Then they were all standing at the end of the section's walkway. A constructed wall and airlock led off to the next section to the right, and ahead, Cerberus had built a sort of room—a square arena of scaffolding and railing surrounded by white work lights. And just beyond it, hideous, sharp spires rose from the floor of the Reaper itself, wrapped around with tech, and stained with the blood of men and women impaled on their tops. Men and women in Cerberus uniforms. But their rotting skin was already growing wires and tech, like some sort of perverse, poisonous, glowing creeper. They were being converted. Changed.

Off to the side of the room, another terminal flickered with a video log. Shepard played the vid recorded there, and Garrus went cold at the image that came up—a man, with bright, insane eyes staring into the camera, holding a sharp, surgical knife, and covered in the humans' shockingly dark red blood.

"Chandana said this ship was dead," he told the camera in a far-off, dreamy-sounding voice, stroking the side of his knife. "We trusted him. He was right. But even a dead god can dream. A god, a real god, is a verb. Not some old man with magic powers. It's a . . . force. It warps reality just by being there. It doesn't have to want to, it doesn't have to think about it; it just does. That's what Chandana didn't get, not till it was too late. The god's mind is gone, but it still dreams. He knows now. He's tuned into our dream. If I close my eyes, I can feel him. I can feel every one of us."

The log cut out. In the white light of the work lamps, Samara looked pale. Even Grunt had stopped looking like he was having the time of his life.

"We should leave," Krios said. "Quickly."


A/N: I finally decided to post this. I'm not really close to having the five chapters finished that I wanted to have finished before I posted regularly again. Garrus—or the IFF mission—just started being really hard for me to write. But I've had this chapter done for months, and so if there's anyone out there still reading this, I thought you deserved to read it.

LMS