XLV
The Dreams of Dead Gods: Psychotic Break
The geth wasn't hard to find. They saw it as soon as the airlock opened onto the core section, interfacing with the Reaper core. It didn't acknowledge them this time. It was absorbed, focused on the Reaper. As far as Garrus could tell, it hadn't even noticed the section had pressurized or that they had entered. Or the husks moving in on it from three different sides.
Then one of the things touched it, and the geth whirled faster than any organic ever could. It pulled out a pistol and fired twice. But then the third husk was on it, ripping, tearing, snarling, and sparking.
A spark must have hit in a bad place, because the geth went down, sprawling like a piece of junk on Korlus. And the third husk turned and started running toward them, head down, arms akimbo, shrieking, while two of its fellows came up stairs on either side of the walkway leading up to the core.
"Together!" Shepard reminded them. They pushed forward to the console. As a formation, they were stronger against the husks, particularly as they might need to stay put for a while. They surrounded Krios, still dazed and moving slower than he should be, and everyone else had two squad members on their flanks.
Behind him, Garrus sensed rather than saw Shepard push the fallen geth aside with her foot. The Reaper's mass effect core over their shoulders blazed a cold blue brighter than most of the stars in this system. It threw long, black shadows behind the attacking husks, coming up on either side of the walkway up to the core from the observation decks Cerberus had built overlooking the Reaper's cavernous inside. The shadows moved as the husks did, circling around away from the core, an illusion of secondary movement so they had to be especially careful of their shots. Particularly as there weren't a lot left. All of them had been salvaging and recycling expelled heat sinks, but they had been moving so fast through the Reaper's interior, and there had been so many husks, that it had only done so much good.
From where Garrus stood, facing the left flank, Krios and Grunt stood behind him. Shepard was on his left, facing the core, and Samara was on his right, guarding the way they had come. There was a hard knot in his gizzard. His visor was painting the indicator light ahead for him—the airlock they would need to make for as soon as the core went out. If they couldn't fight past the husks or through the changes in g-force once the Reaper's artificial gravity and mass effect envelope went out right along with the barrier keeping them inside, they would fall with this not-so-dead monstrosity down into the dark heart of Mnemosyne.
He fired at another husk, ripping through its chest cavity and out the other side. 15, his visor read, tracking the number of shots left in the Vindicator. He had maybe five more in the Mantis. To his right, Samara was probably better off on ammo, but despite being an asari damn near the matriarch stage with justicar training, it was looking like even she had overdone the biotics. She was sweating, trembling, breathing heavily. She sounded like she was saying an asari prayer under her breath as she fired. Behind them, Krios had fallen to his knees, but he was still firing the Viper, out between Samara and Grunt and Garrus. He was praying too, to gods that Garrus didn't know.
And over the throbbing hum of the core, the mindless, furious shrieking of the husks—indoctrinated Cerberus workers or tech-created abominations of this dead Reaper's dreams, it didn't matter—Garrus heard the Widow cracking out again and again as Shepard worked on the core.
"Use the Cain!" he yelled. Shepard, on some instinct, had equipped the nuke-throwing superweapon once again as they headed out for this mission.
"Can't!" Shepard yelled back. "I'll only get one shot with it. Gotta make it count! Damn! It's shielded!"
Garrus risked a look over his left shoulder and saw metal doors had closed over the mass effect core of the Reaper, like valves in a heart.
"Get it open again!" he shouted, throwing an overload program at a husk. 12, read his visor. "Isn't that what the console's for?!"
"I'm working on it!" Shepard snarled. Behind them, on the other side of the formation, Grunt was in close-quarters battle with another husk—or several. From his direction, shattered bone and the gray, electrified, viscous stuff that passed for human blood and plasma in the husks scattered and spurted over the group. Garrus felt some of it pass through his shields and spatter over his armor, moving too slowly for his shields to stop.
"Are your shots taking effect at all?" Krios panted from where he knelt. He couldn't see Shepard from his position.
"Yeah," Shepard answered. "I can see the energy disturbance—ah!"
Garrus heard it—the metal shriek as the shield doors slid back from the core once again. Shepard folded up the Widow and pulled the Cain off the back of her armor. "Hang on and get ready to move!" Shepard shouted.
"Brace yourselves!" Garrus yelled.
The Cain never disappointed. An enormous mushroom cloud of heat and radiation bloomed behind them, far too close for comfort. The Reaper core went up in an explosion of shrapnel and flame, replacing the core's cold blue light with an equally brilliant hot red, which rapidly imploded and began to die, leaving only Cerberus's emergency lighting flickering at the edges of the walkways.
Garrus's stomach revolted as the Reaper's artificial gravity failed, as Mnemosyne took hold. On the observation decks below, the climbing, running husks buckled at the knees, fell over their feet, tripped, and went sliding at the change. They had entered a free fall toward the crushing depths of a brown dwarf, a planet so massive it was almost a star. His visor registered the beginnings of a dramatic temperature drop—the life support systems the Reaper had been maintaining for whatever organic remnants were left in the monsters it created, failing.
Thane was vomiting, still on his knees, bracing himself over the Viper.
"Goddess preserve us," Samara breathed.
"Move, move, move!" Shepard roared, and Grunt, covered in husk guts and sweat, clipped his shotgun to his armor and reached out with both hands for Krios, slinging him over his hump, Viper and all, still heaving. As he did, Garrus thought he caught a glimpse of the krogan of old, the ones who fought in the Rachni Wars, bursting to the forefront of the galactic scene with shotguns at the ready and war cries on their tongues, ready to save the whole damned Milky Way. That's a krogan, he thought dimly. No worn-out, selfish merc; no jaded cynic daydreaming of revenge—a warrior in the heart of Hell, covered in the guts of his enemies, a hero glorying in the strength he has to carry himself and every one of his comrades out of the dark.
Then Samara moved, and the vision passed. The justicar staggered as the g-forces of Mnemosyne ripped at the belly of the Reaper, sweeping her arms out in another arc of biotic energy that functioned as both weapon and light for their way. Grunt went after her, holding Krios over his shoulder with one hand, firing a Carnifax with the other. But even as Shepard spurred them to movement, she hesitated herself, and in the growing darkness of the Reaper's interior, Garrus saw her turn her face back to the lifeless chassis of the geth that had spoken to them before.
"Leave it!" Garrus snapped, elbowing a recovering husk out of his face and sending an overload spinning after it. "We have enough trouble!"
Her lips moved, but over the growing howl of the forces outside the Reaper, Garrus heard her over his radio, not through the air. Cerberus's atmospheric support was still holding. They still had air, but Garrus wondered how long Cerberus's systems could withstand the pressure they were falling into.
"Tali said no one's ever captured a geth intact."
Tali would be able to reactivate the thing, Garrus knew. Maybe any of them could. A vision of the Alarei spun into his head, and he shook it furiously. "You know the risk," he warned her.
"I know what we could gain," she insisted, bending down over the geth, donning her helmet at the same time.
"Damn it!" Garrus cursed, bending with her and helping her support the damaged geth between them. On its chestplate, he saw a haunting two letters, blazoned in white—an N7 identical to the one on Shepard's own armor. His eyes met Shepard's over the geth, and he saw by the set of her mouth that she'd seen it too.
They ran. Garrus was functioning by omni-tool only, Shepard was firing left-handed, and ahead, Grunt, still holding Krios, was glaring. "What's the hold-up?" he demanded.
Garrus made a one-armed gesture at the geth he and Shepard were carrying. Grunt snorted.
"Let me down," Krios was saying, weakly, Viper stowed, pistol in hand. "I can fight."
"Hang on, folks," Joker's voice said, coming in over the radio.
"Open the port side airlock," Shepard ordered him.
Samara was at the Reaper airlock, firing back at the husks coming up on either side of them.
They had all donned helmets by this time. The airlock screamed as it opened. Atmosphere howled and streamed past them—Mnemosyne, swallowing the millennia-old Reaper corpse at last. The air was a blur of brown and gray and white, but clearly outlined in the maelstrom was the Normandy, waiting. The airlock was open, and Lawson and Taylor were gripping handholds on either side of the opening, waiting to pull them inside.
Samara emptied the last shot of her gun. Garrus shot down two more husks. 1, his visor read.
"Go! Go!" Shepard yelled. Samara nodded, and jumped.
Grunt hurled Krios after her, and the drell, weak as he was, reached out and grabbed Lawson's arm through the storm on his own damn power.
Grunt landed on the deck of the Normandy with the drell and the asari.
The pressure of the brown dwarf was becoming intolerable. Garrus could feel his armor straining against it, his brain pounding within his skull. He slung his arms back with Shepard's, and the two of them bowled the geth chassis through. Grunt caught it and moved aside with the others, and Garrus jumped.
For a moment, the winds of Mnemosyne clawed and ripped at him, trying to tear him away from both Reaper and the Normandy and into its crushing depths. Then he was home, staggering on Normandy's bridge, being pounded on the shoulder by Taylor. He turned, and saw Shepard leaping, arms and legs akimbo, face white and set and the planet light flashing off her visor. He caught her in his arms, hugged her, once. She hugged him back, briefly, then pushed him away and slammed the airlock controls to seal the ship.
"We're clear!" she shouted down the hallway. "Go!"
They had all been prescribed pills for pressure headache and gravity sickness. Dr. Chakwas had ordered a six-thousand calorie feast for Samara from Gardner, followed by a mandatory six-hour bed rest. And Thane was still in the med bay.
Garrus waited with Shepard outside in the mess hall until the doctor came out, pale and drawn. Karin Chakwas was probably the oldest human onboard the Normandy, in her sixties at least, but Garrus didn't normally think of her as old. Right now, though, she looked it. There were dark purple shadows under her green eyes, and the faint tracery of lines around her eyes, mouth, and over her forehead seemed deeper cut than usual.
Shepard put her arm around the doctor and squeezed her shoulders. "How is he?" she asked.
"He's dying," the doctor said wearily. Seeing the look on their faces, her lips turned up. "Oh, not this instant, not today or this week or perhaps even this month. I can patch up his electrical burns, put him on oxygen, activate a dehumidifier in the med bay, and have him ready for the mission in twenty-four hours. But whatever happens tomorrow, Sere Krios will not outlast the year. His Kepral's Syndrome is very advanced, and it advances further with every strain he places on his respiratory system and every day he spends in an environment unsuited for his species. Perhaps a dozen years ago, it might have been reversible, but now?" She shook her head. "I daresay he's as fast and as lethal of a shot as ever he was, but in melee combat? For extended periods of biotic exertion? The truth is, he ought to be in a hospital for more intensive, regular care than I can provide him on the Normandy. Or in a hospice."
Garrus remembered Krios, firing on his knees, every shot taking down the husk he aimed at. Demanding Grunt put him down even as the g-forces of Mnemosyne tore him apart. "I don't think that's what he wants," he said.
"I agree with you," Dr. Chakwas said. "For Thane, it's irrelevant that we may all be going to our deaths. He sees his death coming in any event, and this is how he wants to die: righting a great wrong and removing a great evil from our galaxy. It's admirable, but as much as I would like to respect his wishes, it goes against all my training as a doctor to patch him up only to allow him to get himself killed another way."
"You all right, Mom?" Shepard asked, quietly.
"What are our chances, Shepard?" the doctor asked, in the same low voice. "Really?"
Shepard looked at Garrus. He waited, and she squared her shoulders and raised her chin. "They're a hell of a lot better than they were," she said. "The Normandy's in top fighting form, and so is her crew. Everyone on the squad is fully committed and focused on our objective. Our team fights together well in any number of configurations and against any kind of enemy. Is that a guarantee of success? No. We don't know what we're flying into or the kind of numbers the Collectors might have. But I'm confident we've given our team the best possible chance to take out the Collectors and make it home afterward for the real war, and that's what I'm saying we're gonna do."
Dr. Chakwas looked at her for a long time. Then she took both Shepard's hands in hers and held them for a moment. "Then I believe you," she said. "We need you, Shepard, for the fight ahead. We're going to need all of you," she added, looking at Garrus. She reached out and clasped his shoulder once. "Especially you."
"Thanks, Dr. Chakwas," Garrus said.
The doctor smiled, and stepped back from both of them. She frowned again and looked over her shoulder, back toward the med bay. "What are you going to do with the geth?" she wanted to know. "They've put it in the AI core behind my med bay, and I have to say, I'm a little uncomfortable."
"You and me both," Garrus muttered under his breath.
Shepard shot him a look. "Right now, we're not going to do anything," she said. "We all need a good shower and some rest. I've got Joker heading toward the Chandresekhar relay and EDI working to integrate the Reaper IFF into our systems. Garrus, I'll expect you at a leadership meeting in the conference room at 1600 hours with Miranda and Jacob. We'll decide what to do about our dormant passenger then. Karin, I assure you we will take every precaution, whatever we do."
Garrus's mandibles set. He didn't like the sound of that whatever we do, and from Doctor Chakwas's face, she didn't like the sound of it a whole lot either. But there was an energy about Shepard now that hadn't been dampened even by one of the worst battles they had ever fought and definitely the most exhausting. A barely contained enthusiasm. He'd seen it before, and it was always dangerous, on a galaxy-redefining scale.
Garrus got a sinking, swooping feeling in the pit of his stomach. Somehow, he knew that whatever he and Lawson and Taylor said later, they weren't going to change what Shepard had planned for the geth.
Doctor Chakwas looked long and hard at Shepard. Then she sighed and clicked her tongue. She reached over and cupped Shepard's face in her hand. "Be careful, Shepard," she warned. "People every bit as intelligent as you are have meddled with artificial intelligence before. "It never ends well. They don't think like organics do. They can't. They simply don't have the capacity. But they have power. We've seen that with the Reapers. I don't fancy allowing this geth to kill us before we get to its more dangerous partners."
"Don't worry about that," Shepard said. "I don't have any intention of letting this thing kill us."
At 1600 hours, Garrus reported to the conference room, showered and rested and ready for action. No one knew how long it would be until EDI had the Reaper IFF fully integrated into the Normandy's systems. But they all knew that IFF and Krios's recovery was all that stood in the way of Shepard's order to begin the Relay Run.
A quiet intensity had fallen over the Normandy. At their various stations, the crew was on their omni-tools, writing or recording last messages home, or running final checks on the systems they supervised across the ship. He'd seen some of them praying, hugging other crew mates, offering words of encouragement to the others. Morale was high. They were ready.
Except for that damned geth.
Lawson was talking as soon as Shepard entered the room, plait still damp behind her back. "I think we need to discuss the unique piece of salvage we recovered. We need better equipment to fight the Reapers. An intact geth would be invaluable to Cerberus's cyberweapons division."
Garrus caught Shepard's eye, and she didn't have to say anything for him to understand that they wouldn't be giving anything to Cerberus's cyberweapons division if they didn't have to. Cerberus had built EDI already, and even though she'd saved their lives half a dozen times since Garrus had joined the crew, he wasn't even close to being ready to give Cerberus any more ammunition to turn the galaxy upside-down with their own rogue AIs.
Oddly enough, Taylor seemed to be completely with them on that. "We'll have to disagree on that, ma'am," he told Lawson. He turned back to Shepard. "I saw enough of these things on Eden Prime. Space it."
Garrus didn't say anything. Shepard already knew he was with Taylor, but he could tell from her face that she was every bit as resolved on some third option as she had been outside the med bay talking to Chakwas—the option tempting enough to her that she'd stopped while still aboard a husk-infested Reaper falling into the gravity well of a brown dwarf. She hadn't made him drag that geth's useless chassis through another squad of husks to the airlock just to space it.
Lawson knew that much too. She tried again. "Cerberus has a longstanding cash bounty for intact geth," she said. "I assure you, the reward is significant."
"Because that'll work," Garrus muttered, unable to stop himself. Lawson glared at him. Shepard just stared at the center of the conference table. Her fingers tapped on the edge.
Garrus sighed. She'd looked that way on Noveria, right before she let the rachni queen go. She'd looked that way on the Citadel, right before the Ilos Run, when she'd mutinied against the Alliance. And this tour, she'd looked like that back on Tuchanka in that repurposed krogan hospital of Weyrloc's, right before pressing one of the only guys in the galaxy who could do something about the genophage to do something about the genophage, to save the research that would give him a head start. Here we go again.
"I've killed hundreds of these things," Shepard said slowly, "but I've never had a chance to talk to one. This one tried to communicate with us. Hell, it probably saved our lives. Why?"
Miranda tensed as she caught Shepard's drift. "Reactivating the geth is a risk," she said sharply. "If you do so, it should be for humanity's best interests, and not your curiosity."
Shepard grinned at them, and Taylor folded his arms. "I still think our best interests involve an airlock."
Shepard stopped trying to horrify Lawson. "I want to know why it has a piece of N7 armor strapped to its chest," she said seriously.
Garrus remembered that—the white N7 illuminated by the dying Cain explosion and the Cerberus emergency runners. Clumsily welded into a rip in the geth's chassis, right over where the rib cage would be on a bipedal organic.
"Battle trophy, maybe?" Taylor speculated. "Would a machine care about that?"
Lawson was already shaking her head. "No. Trophies imply emotions that AIs don't have. I doubt it's more than a convenient field repair."
Garrus looked at Shepard again. She wasn't convinced, and to tell the truth, neither was he. Granted, people didn't run into a lot of AIs. Ever since the geth had turned against the quarians, AI production had been severely restricted in and outside of Citadel Space. Apart from Sovereign, Garrus had met or heard of a grand total of four fully realized AIs in his life, three of them while he was travelling with Shepard. But only one of them had been the cold, emotionless, logical thing Lawson seemed to be referencing and Chakwas dreaded—the nightmare stereotype, the absolute alien, more removed from a turian than any creature that bled ever could be.
The other three had all displayed some kind or degree of recognizable emotion. Shepard had described an AI on the Citadel she had killed with Tali and Williams, obsessed with vengeance, desperate not to die alone. The one Garrus and Alenko had killed with her on Luna had sent out a binary scream of fear and anguish as it died, a plea for help that had never been answered. And then there was EDI—she was shackled, but Garrus could swear he'd seen her hurt by the crew's nervousness at her omnipresence, anxious for them when things got dangerous, and eager to help out in a way that didn't always seem tied to programming. Even if she was manipulating them, trying to get them all to relax their guard around her, either to fulfill objectives given her by Cerberus or for reasons of her own—that manipulation would probably require more empathy than an entity with no emotions could have.
The story Tali told about the geth and the start of the war on Rannoch indicated there was more to AI than people thought too. The war had allegedly started when some of the geth had begun asking the quarians if they had souls. And that, Garrus knew, was what interested Shepard most. That maybe these things had a spirituality, a self-awareness and an aspiration to the kind of life that organics could connect with.
But what Garrus didn't think Shepard understood was that even if AIs did feel, even if somehow, some way, the things really could evolve and synthesize spirits, and fifteen minutes ago, they had stumbled across the first unbound AI or AI-affiliated entity not out to kill every organic it encountered, that didn't mean it could be trusted. Just because the geth on the Reaper had talked didn't mean they would be able to communicate with it or come to any kind of understanding.
But that's not going to stop her from trying. She can see the possibilities if we pull it off. She can taste them. Shepard's own spirit, the same spirit that had driven her on Noveria, through the Ilos Run, in that hospital on Tuchanka, was driving her now. Every other day of the year, Beth Shepard was the kind of Spectre his father didn't believe existed—safe, conservative, adhering to the letter of the law, never stepping outside the bounds. Then there were moments like these, moments when she stopped being safe and conservative and started being crazier than Garrus ever was. A dangerous, iconoclastic revolutionary, lightning in ceramic plate, and willing to turn the entire political landscape of the galaxy upside down on a hunch. Made the ground fall out from underneath him every single time.
And damn, but if there was only one reason I'll follow her to hell and believe we can make it back, that would be it.
Shepard nodded, deciding. "I'm not deciding one way or the other until I know what we've got here. I want to start it up, interrogate it," she declared.
Lawson didn't like it. "If we activate it, there is no guarantee we can deactivate it again."
Taylor's jaw was like granite. "Bullets can."
"That's not what I—" Lawson started, but Shepard cut her off, raising a hand.
"Thank you—both of you—for your recommendations. I've made my decision."
Taylor gripped the table and shot a look at Garrus. "Tali's gonna freak when she hears about this," he muttered. Then he nodded. "So, what about this Reaper IFF?"
EDI's holographic representation of herself rose up from the center of the conference table. "I have determined how to integrate it with our systems," she told them. "However, the device is Reaper technology. Linking it with the Normandy's systems poses certain risks."
"I trust you, EDI," Shepard said. "I know you won't let anything happen to the ship."
Garrus wondered again if he was imagining the pride in the light female voice when EDI answered, "Understood, Shepard. It will take several hours before the IFF is ready for shakedown. I will alert you as soon as it is ready."
"Sounds good," Shepard said. "Till then it's business as usual. Dismissed." The blue orb over the conference table winked out. Lawson and Taylor left. Garrus didn't.
"Take backup when you reactivate the thing," he told her, without preamble. "I know you're excited, but that geth can do more damage faster than Grunt could when you woke him up, if it's not as friendly as it seems." He didn't mention the Alarei. He didn't have to.
The light in Shepard's eyes dimmed a bit, but she nodded. "Understood. Can I count on you to stand behind me if it isn't a threat to us? There could be an opportunity here."
Garrus hummed. "For us or for the Reapers," he pointed out. "But I'm behind you, Shepard."
She smiled at him then. "I appreciate it. Jacob's right: I'm gonna get hell from Tali."
A/N: Okay, I hate this section of the game, but I really like the way this chapter and the end of the last one turned out. We're moving forward. The next eight chapters will all take place within seventy-two hours in-universe and function as the emotional and actional climax of the fic.
Re: Thane's injury—I've tried to nod throughout to the things you can find out about the crew on the suicide mission. Mordin and Kasumi are shadow operatives unused to out-and-out combat. Tali is immunocompromised, and a single injury in the wrong place could kill her. Jacob and Miranda and Thane just can't keep up with Jack and Samara's biotics (though Jack doesn't have other crew members' military experience), and Thane has other health issues besides. And Grunt is an army unto himself.
Unfortunately, we are not looking at a seventy-two hours of real time before I have this all up. I have two of the next three chapters written, but the second of the three is the one that I'm still working on. Bear with me! I'm refocusing on this in my fanfiction endeavors. In addition to writing out the chapters for Collector Station, its prelude, and aftermath, I'm also getting down the dialogue for the denouement of Sometimes Grace, focused on the game DLC and here my Beth Shepard's fully conscious strike at Cerberus after their falling out and succeeding gambit to get back into the Alliance's good graces.
If you're still reading, thanks! If you take the time to drop a line and review, thank you very much! I always reply to reviews, and I'd be delighted to answer any questions or just discuss the chapter or this section with you.
Best Always,
LMSharp
