XLVI
Left Behind
"She woke up that thing! She's named it!" Tali paced the battery, waving her arms around in agitation. "What if it turns on us? What if it's just another trap? The geth have worked with the Reapers before."
"In Shepard's defense, the husks were trying to kill this one," Garrus said. "I really don't think they're smart enough to attack an ally to set up a trap for the enemy."
"Maybe they didn't know. Maybe it used that," Tali said. "We've never seen a geth like this before—a platform with so many programs onboard that it can operate independently, like an individual. It's practically made to be a spy."
"A scout, maybe," Garrus conceded. "It's a sniper, and the briefing Shepard sent around said it was probably built for recon on our side of the Veil, but the geth haven't made much effort to disguise it." He tapped his head for emphasis. Tali slowed down and started wringing her hands.
"I don't know, Garrus," she said. "It's a geth. On the Normandy. Shepard doesn't even have it shielded anymore. How can she trust it? At least the Cerberus AI is restricted, but this . . ."
Tali's omni-tool lit up then, and she stopped. She brought up the messaging interface and scrolled text Garrus didn't bother reading backward. She flicked it off, fingers flexing. "She wants me on a mission," she told him then, in an odd, strained voice. "Apparently the geth—Legion—knows about some other geth allied with the Reapers in this area. They have a virus that can make all geth everywhere want to serve the Reapers, and . . . Legion . . . wants to stop them." She said the name EDI and Shepard had given the geth with extreme reluctance. "Joker will be bringing us into the system in three or four hours."
Garrus frowned. He checked his own omni-tool, then the messaging tab on the battery console, but he didn't have orders.
He looked back up at Tali. She looked back at him. "You're not going?" she asked.
"Apparently not."
"But you always go," she protested.
"Apparently not." It was hard to keep his tone even. The last time Shepard hadn't taken him on a mission, he'd been recovering from a rocket to the face, and she'd been going to a quarantine zone for a plague that killed turians. He hadn't been on Shepard's six every mission since, but he had always gone in some capacity. Garrus had a pretty good guess why he wasn't going this time, but he didn't really think a mission to stop a whole contingent of killer geth was a good time to focus on personnel development.
"This is her thing, isn't it?" Tali asked, coming to the same conclusion he had. "Like she did with you and Wrex and Ashley and . . . everyone back on the original Normandy. She wants me to trust that thing, so she's going to try and make me."
"You're not going up against krogan or husks," Garrus told her. "These are geth, and you're better qualified than anyone on board to take them on."
Tali sniffed. "I would still feel better if she had called out two or three extra techs to go with us. At least if we were taking you. What if this is Legion's plan? Do you honestly think we can trust it?"
Garrus hesitated. He had had exactly one conversation with Legion since Shepard had activated it, about three sentences back and forth all told. All he could definitively say was that the platform had saved their lives back aboard the Reaper, and that it was different than any geth he had seen so far. "I think," he said carefully, "that Shepard has an instinct for things like this. I think that I trust her, and if she thinks things with the geth are a little more complicated than most of us believe and there might be some room for negotiation there, some way to build an alliance—or at least get them to stop working with the Reapers—it's probably worth checking out. And—" he hesitated, "—if we're going to do any of that, you're probably the best place to start."
Tali hummed, unconvinced, but considering it. "It's a lot to ask, Garrus," she said. "The geth—they're allies of the Reapers. They killed 90 percent of our population, drove us off the homeworld! They're the reason I wear this mask and can't—" she broke off, and Garrus heard ventilators start up inside her suit. She was crying.
"Tali—" he said, helpless.
She shook her head. Squared her shoulders. "You're right," she said, firmly. "I trust Shepard. She rescued me from Saren. She helped me complete my Pilgrimage, kept me from being exiled and saved my father's reputation. She's never let me down, and she has a way of knowing about these things. If she says Legion is on our side, if she says it can help us and wants me to give it the benefit of the doubt—I can do that. For her."
"You know I'd be there if I could."
Tali reached out and laced her fingers through his, squeezing his hand fondly. "I know. You're a good friend, and you can't stand being out of the action." She laughed once. "But I suppose this mission isn't about you. It's only sort of about Shepard."
"Watch your back," Garrus told her.
"Watch the Normandy," Tali told him in turn. "You realize this is probably the last mission before we hit the relay. In a few hours, EDI will have that IFF integrated into our systems. We'll be able to attack."
"I know."
Tali nodded, squeezed his hand again, and left the battery, and Garrus was left alone to worry, to pass the time until Shepard's team went out and came back again.
Against killer geth allied with the Reapers.
Garrus sat on his cot in the battery, staring at the wall. Time flew, except when it decided to crawl instead. For instance, when Shepard was out in the field without him, right before their run through the Omega-4 Relay, up against an unknown number of hostile geth, with just Tali and another geth for backup.
It was stupid. A moronic risk the day before the attack, especially on the word of a walking, talking collection of AI they didn't understand yet, which seemed an awful lot like the collections of AI working for the enemy. But there she was, out on that geth station on little more than a whim and a prayer.
Without him.
She should've taken Tali, Goto, him, and Lawson. And probably some kind of electromagnetic bomb.
Garrus sighed. There was nothing to distract you from unpleasant speculation like taking care of something else unpleasant. There had been something he'd been putting off for a while, and now, he was out of time. His guess was they would be launching for the Omega-4 Relay in a few hours. Attacking the Collectors tomorrow. He wanted to believe Shepard that there was a possibility they might come back. But if they didn't—his family would need to know what had happened. His Dad would need to know.
He pulled up a vid function on his omni-tool, held his arm out in front of him. A display to the right of the holocam showed him the feed. He looked back at himself, grimacing into the camera. The bandage he still wore covered the worst of the damage, even though by this point it was pretty useless for actual healing. The scarring would continue to fade. Actually, Doctor Chakwas had said he was healed enough to schedule a surgery to get rid of it entirely. After the Relay Run. Garrus hadn't decided yet what he wanted to do. On the one hand, if he ever wanted to be able to blend into a crowd again, cosmetic surgery would probably be a good idea. It was hard to imagine a more obvious identifying feature than the scarring covering half his face. On the other hand, just getting rid of it felt a little like erasure. In a year or two, Archangel would be an urban legend. That forsaken station was already exactly what it had always been. The only record of everything that had happened was in his memories and on his face. Two years of his life. The worst mistake he'd ever made.
There it was: staring right back at him now. Even with the bandage, the right corner of his mouth was a purple, pitted mess. The muscles of his jaw and mandible stood out under a thinner layer of hide than usual. He could see more traces of the scarring down the right side of his neck, around the back side of the bandage. Objectively speaking, he knew it was the kind of face that gave kids nightmares, the kind of face they put on supervillains in really bad, corny vids. He hadn't shown it to his family since he got it.
But if he was about to die, he wanted to let them know face to face. Garrus straightened his shoulders and hit the recording function. A blue light winked on in the holocam feature. He was rolling.
"Hi," he said into the camera. "It's me. Know it might not look like it. Guess you know now. I had another reason for avoiding video chat. It was closer back on Omega than I wanted to admit. Dad knew. I survived that, but if you're watching this, I didn't survive the mission I'm going to now.
"It was a long shot from the start. I always knew it. But I've been pretty decent at long shots in the past. Or lucky anyway. If I'm dead—it's fine. Well. It might not be. But I'll get to that in a minute. But I was ready, and I don't have regrets—about this, at least."
The words came easily. He'd been putting off this chat for months, but he'd known it was coming. He'd been composing this speech in the back of his mind for weeks without even really thinking about it. He knew what he had to say. What his family had to hear before the end. "We're going through the Omega-4 Relay on a mission to wipe out the Collectors," he continued. "We have an IFF system installed on the ship that we hope will get us through, but it may not work, and even if it does, there's no guarantee we'll come back alive. We don't know the battlefield. We don't know the enemy's strength. But we know the Collectors have to go down. I'm confirming what the vids have started to say: The Collectors are behind the human colony abductions in the Terminus Systems. And they're working for the Reapers, so that means that they'll eventually come for all of us.
"We have proof the Collectors are genetically and technologically altered Protheans, like the husks seen on Eden Prime and elsewhere are altered humans. I'm attaching the medical comp files with the evidence, along with vid I've taken of Collector attacks and Reaper technology we've encountered over the past few months. The footage hasn't been doctored or edited. This is what is actually happening.
"In the footage, you'll see sequences of Collector drones being taken over by an alien intelligence that calls itself Harbinger. The process is nearly identical to what I saw happen with Saren Arterius two years ago during the attack on the Citadel, when Sovereign made use of implants to seize control of Saren's corpse to continue attacking me, Beth Shepard, and Kaidan Alenko even after Saren's termination. We have reason to believe that, like Sovereign, Harbinger is a Reaper directing these Collector attacks, targeting humans because of Commander Shepard's importance in Sovereign's defeat. We have proof that the Collectors have taken hundreds and thousands of humans and may be planning to go after Earth.
"The Council and the human Alliance are ignoring the Reaper threat. It's inconvenient. It could impact the economy and shake up their power. So, they led a smear campaign against Commander Shepard and grounded the Alliance crew of the Normandy SR-1 who wouldn't get in line. The nonhuman crew members who tried to speak out, including Dr. Liara T'Soni and myself, were shut down. I shouldn't have let it happen.
"The Reapers are real. They've wiped out every advanced organic species for hundreds of thousands of years, and they're coming back for us. Sovereign was just one Reaper, and it devastated the Citadel. If they attack in force and we're unprepared, they'll wipe us out like all the others. We have to be ready. We have to have a strategy.
"Commander Shepard is our best chance for victory. Cerberus knew that, so they brought her back after Alchera to lead us against the Reapers. But if she dies with me on this mission—" Garrus stopped, took in a breath— "there won't be any third chance. But you'll need that strategy anyway.
"If she doesn't, if she comes back and I don't, don't let them be idiots. Make them listen to her. Cerberus is backing her now, but we know Cerberus can't be trusted, especially once the Reapers branch out to attack other species. And they will. Dad, get the Hierarchy to listen. Get C-Sec to listen. Every species in the galaxy is going to have to work together to beat this thing, and Shepard will need a way to operate, independent of Cerberus."
Garrus took a moment to collect himself. So far, so easy. Just like giving a statement back at C-Sec. The next part would be harder. His mandibles tightened. "I hope she makes it out." he said. His subvocals cracked. "Not just because if she doesn't, we all might be screwed. But you don't care about that, and it isn't the point. If she . . . if she dies, if we both do, you'll need to act on the information attached to this message anyway. And you'll need to do it fast."
He took another breath. "Preparations for the future of the galaxy aside, I'm attaching a link to a secure, encrypted extranet dropbox where I've stashed the latest version of my will and my current account number. I don't have much. What's liquid should go to Mom's treatment bills. I've left most of my physical assets in our house back on Palaven to Sol.
"Dad—" he stopped. "You were right," he continued. "About a lot I never gave you credit for. Or maybe than I wanted to admit. But—Shepard's different. Whatever else I am, whatever else I've done, every time I've gone with her, it was the right thing to do. Even if it wasn't exactly Hierarchy-approved civil service. It was the right thing to do."
He swallowed and began speaking to his sister. "You can't see that, Sol. I think you're probably going to hate me for a while—for 'playing Spectre' and leaving you to take care of everything with Mom, for what you probably see as me lying to you when you asked me a while ago if I was working for an undead, human supremacist terrorist."
He smiled. "Cerberus might possibly be a terrorist organization," he conceded, "but I'm not here for them, and they aren't running the show around here . . . regardless of what they might think. And Shepard—" he laughed. Shook his head. "Well. 'Human supremacist' and 'xenophobic' don't really apply. This is the woman who's actively campaigned to end the genophage—with someone who could actually make a difference. This is the woman who, as I record this message now, is out there trying to take the first steps to reconcile the quarians and the geth in what could be some of her last hours alive. She's here, hand-in-hand with an organization she can't stand, because fighting the Reapers is all that matters. For all our sakes.
"So—Sol, however angry you get at me, however much you hate me after this: don't write off the Reapers. They're real. They're coming. If they can, these bastards will kill us all, and if you're watching this, they've already killed me. Just . . . remember that. Don't let them do the same to you."
Garrus pressed his temples and paused a minute before continuing, in a low, low voice. "Mom. I'm sorry. I wish—I wish I could have been there and here, if it helps. And—I'm sorry I couldn't be there to say goodbye. If I'm dead, and there's a place we go after this—I—I'll see you there." His subvocals cracked again, and he looked straight into the camera, staring through it to the place his family would be watching, then stopped the recording.
He watched the vid again to see if he needed to rerecord any portion of it, saved it, and encrypted it with a program he and Solana had used when they were kids, messaging back and forth in boring classrooms at school. He created a file with links to the dropbox he had mentioned, as well as to the files he'd saved through the mission—on the Collectors, but also on Cerberus and on the geth experiments Rael'Zorah had conducted on the Alarei and the quarians' possible preparations for war. He had debated on whether to include a report on Maelon's research into a cure for the genophage, despite Shepard's gag order. In the end, he had decided against it. He wasn't going to reach out beyond the grave to go against what Shepard had wanted.
Anyway, if I know the Hierarchy and the Council, if Dad actually gets this to them, they'll just ignore everything about the Reapers to double down on the genophage.
There was a risk of distraction even just including the intelligence about Cerberus and the quarians, but just like Garrus knew Shepard wanted Mordin and anyone who thought like him free to work on a cure for the genophage in peace, he knew she wanted the galaxy to know what Cerberus and the quarians were up to, though for pretty different reasons.
Garrus put everything in a message to transfer to his father's and Solana's personal inboxes, and put the message on a timer to send automatically in seventy-two hours if he didn't countermand it.
There. It's done. Garrus pulled off his visor and rubbed his eyes. Rolled his shoulders. He was hungry. It would probably, he thought, be a good idea to eat while he could. For more reasons than one.
Now that it came down to it, he was almost as nervous about going to see Shepard before the battle as he was about the battle itself.
Which was kind of the point.
He wondered where Shepard was right now and shifted.
He didn't like her in the field without him. It left him twitchy, nervous. It was probably irrational—Shepard was a soldier, a warrior. Even with Alliance soldiers starting basic later than the Hierarchy, she probably had more military experience than he did, and better training too. She was tough, versatile, an expert tactician in her own right, as smart as she was lethal. Theoretically, she could take care of herself.
The problem is, last time she wanted to leave me behind—and I wasn't recovering from a rocket to the face at the time—she was bait for a rapist serial killer. And the time before that, she died.
Garrus put his visor back on and walked out of the battery to see Legion vanishing into the med bay and Tali standing in the center of the mess, looking dazed.
He smiled, feeling a few kilos lighter. There. They're fine. He crossed over to Tali. "You're back. What happened?"
Her visor turned toward him, and even though you never could see a quarian's expression, something about the way Tali moved had Garrus second-guessing his "fine" assessment. "She killed them," Tali said dumbly. She spread her arms, her hands. "She just . . . killed them. All of them. There were thousands of programs, maybe millions, and she just . . . killed them. Legion let her do it. It couldn't come to consensus. It asked her to choose what to do. So she did. Then it helped her." She shook her visor, as if she couldn't get her mind around it.
Garrus stared. "I don't understand," he said. "There were thousands of geth up there? And you're all alright?"
Tali seemed to focus. "Not thousands of platforms," she clarified. "Not thousands of guns. Remember, there may be many geth on a single mobile platform. There were only a couple dozen mobile platforms, and never too many at once, until the end. But Legion has this great trick for hacking the geth turrets, so we were able to hold off even nine and ten of them at a time when they started coming at us in waves. But in the servers on that station, yes, there had to be thousands of geth. Probably a lot more. And Shepard killed them. She could have rewritten them. I expected her to. Legion worked out a programming fix she could have used to get them to change their minds about the Reapers and agree with its geth, the ones still behind the Veil. They would have stopped worshipping the Reapers and become nonhostile to organics—other than quarians, I mean. Or at least stopped being actively hostile.
"I expected her to rewrite them," Tali said again. "It would have been a nonviolent solution. Well. Nonviolent except for the geth we had already killed getting to the primary servers. But she said there was no guarantee the geth wouldn't change their minds again, so she killed them. It was a—I've always hated the geth, but I thought Shepard wanted to understand them. And Legion helped her."
Garrus considered. It wasn't getting spaced or another Ardat-Yakshi, but this . . . this was another level of bad—especially for Shepard. Just hearing about it, he could understand the bewilderment rolling off of Tali. And Shepard would be—he nodded once and looked hard at Tali. "Where is she?"
Tali answered immediately. "She stayed down in the shuttle bay. She stripped down to her bodysuit and said she needed to decompress a while. I guess she needs to come to a consensus within herself like Legion does, in her own way. She ordered Joker to fly to a planet with friendly gravity and breathable air somewhere in the surrounding systems before telling the rest of us to go on. She says we're all going to drill together for a while before setting out on the Relay Run, like we did just before Virmire."
Even as she said it, Garrus felt the ship's engines powering up, felt the Normandy begin to move again through space. In his mind, he projected out when Shepard would order the attack—probably first thing tomorrow. She would want everyone well rested and fed before launch. This afternoon would be their last chance to calibrate the guns for the squad, their last chance to work out any kinks in the team before they hit the relay. The last time to get everyone together before this is over, one way or another. The last squad practice on Virmire had been the last conversation most of the SR-1 crew had had with Ashley Williams. Who will it be this time, I wonder? Goto? The professor?
And tonight . . .
Garrus's mandibles tightened. The attack against the Collectors was tomorrow's problem. His assignation with Shepard was tonight's. Right now, the problem was making sure Shepard was in the right headspace to take on anything. After "deleting" several hundred geth—AI that may or may not possess souls.
He reached out and gripped Tali's shoulder. "Thanks, Tali."
"Are you going to talk to her?" Tali asked him. "I wanted to, but . . ." she twisted her hands. "I didn't know what to say. Once Legion said there was a way not to kill the geth, I never expected her to kill them! Some people would say that individually, they're just strings of data, but for someone like Shepard—do you think she might think it was genocide?"
It's Shepard. I'm pretty sure. But he just gave Tali a noncommittal nonanswer on his way past her to the elevator.
He found Shepard in the shuttle bay, right where she'd been after Horizon, and looking the same way she'd looked then. This time, when she saw him, she left the punching bag and walked away from him, running her fingers over her scalp. "Tali send you?"
"More or less."
"Damn it," Shepard cursed in a low, fervent voice. Then she burst into violence, spinning and giving the punching bag a vicious kick. The chain shrieked at the sudden onslaught. "Damn it!" she said again, in a shout this time. She broke into a flurry of attacks, avoiding his gaze. "What the hell was I supposed to do, Garrus?" she demanded. Her voice was gravelly and grim, two whole steps lower than her usual contralto, and painfully even and articulated between breaths, but no less furious for that. She still didn't look at him. He didn't really think she even wanted him to answer. "There were two options up there: kill every last heretic on that station or rewrite them, brainwash them out of worshipping the Reapers. They're synthetics—I could have done it. They were planning to do the same thing to every nonhostile geth behind the Veil, only the other way around. Then that damned thing got in my head."
She paused, and since some response seemed to be called for, Garrus asked, "Harbinger?"
Shepard made a disgusted noise. "Legion. One of the first things it said in our conversation when I first woke it up: 'Geth believe all life should self-determinate.' God. How do I argue with that? How many bad things in this universe start when someone decides they have the right to step on someone else's choice? Every revolution we humans have ever had on Earth. The Krogan Rebellions, the genophage. This war between the geth and the quarians. We went to that space station because Legion's heretics—the geth allied with the Reapers—had made up their minds they could force the rest of the geth to agree with them. Then, suddenly Legion was saying we could do the same damn thing to them."
Garrus nodded, understanding now. "So you killed them."
Shepard stood back from the punching bag. She let out a breath. All the energy seemed to leave her body at once, she took three paces, and hit the bulkhead with her shoulder. She slid down the wall to sit, bracing her elbows on her knees and holding her head in her hands. "Yeah. I killed them. I thought, better they die free than live as slaves. Just . . . programs. Data anyone can rewrite. They made their choice. I decided to respect it, even if it meant both of us couldn't live in the same galaxy." She laughed bleakly. "Great moral stance, eh, Garrus?"
Garrus looked down at her, small and thin in her black bodysuit. I hate it when she leaves the ship without me. He walked over and sat beside her. "I don't know."
"There were thousands of them," Shepard murmured from in between her hands. "Tens of thousands. Maybe hundreds. They aren't like us, Garrus, but they're alive. They think. Pretty sure they feel. I didn't leave the ship this morning thinking I was going to commit mass-murder."
"What did you think you were going to do?"
Shepard pressed her eyes. "I don't know. Something. There's always . . . something. We had to stop them helping the Reapers, from getting more geth to join them, but . . ." she trailed off. Her shoulders convulsed, once.
Tentatively, Garrus held his hand out, palm up, parallel to her leg. She saw it, hesitated, and then wove their gloved fingers together. Her fingers didn't lace as easily with his as Tali's had that morning, as any turian woman's would. But they made it work. Shepard folded both of her legs up under her in a way that made him blink and wonder if it hurt, and she leaned up against him, still holding his hand. He felt her shudder again. Once. Twice. But then she was still, breathing deeply, staring at the floor in front of them.
"I think what we take from this," Garrus said after a few minutes of silence, voicing the thought that had been chasing around inside his skull all day long, "is that it's a pretty bad idea for you to leave the ship without me. At least in a backup squad." He was joking, but he meant it too.
Shepard laughed wetly and shoved him. "Don't! It isn't funny, Garrus!"
"You laughed," Garrus pointed out.
Shepard closed her eyes. "I did. What is wrong with me?" She sighed. "How's Tali?"
"In shock," Garrus told her honestly. "She's really surprised Legion helped you up there."
"Me too," Shepard admitted. "Destroying the station was all Legion's idea in the first place, but I wonder if it regrets it. Heretics or not, they were geth. Legion's people. Geth never understood why organics fight civil wars—wars against our own species—unless it was due to our inefficient processing. Until now."
"Mmm. Maybe they really are alive," Garrus remarked. There was no frame of reference for this. Hundreds of thousands of sapient entities dead, because what it came down to in the end was a choice between giving them a dignified death as enemies with their own minds or mind equivalents or denying their rights to self-governance and subjecting them to slavery and worse. The moralities of it were almost too big to wrap his mind around. They didn't even seem real.
All that seemed real was Shepard's hand in his, the smell of her—gunpowder and gun polish and sweat, and something else that was probably sadness—the heat coming off of her and the flyaway hairs from her head tickling his mandible and trying to climb up his nose. And that, staring death in the face in the morning and with the word "genocide" on the table this afternoon, he was glad she was here beside him, more or less intact and still making the calls.
I hope she makes it out. Not just because if she doesn't, we all might be screwed.
"What was I supposed to do?" Shepard asked again, very quietly. This time, he could tell she did want an answer, and he shifted. "Garrus, what the hell was I supposed to do? Should I have reprogrammed them? Would that've been better?"
Garrus sighed. "Would reprogramming them have been a permanent solution?" he asked. "The way I see it, the geth are either alive or they're not. If they're alive, real AI, they can change their minds. Even if someone writes in new programming. If they're not, then does it matter?"
Shepard nodded against his chest. "That's what I thought," she confessed. "Doesn't make it any easier."
"But nothing's ever easy."
"You're right about that," Shepard agreed. She sat up and squeezed his hand, then released it. Interpreting the gesture as back to business, Garrus stood with her.
"Will you be all right?"
Her mouth quirked humorlessly. "No. But somehow, I don't think anyone cares much at this point. We've got Collectors to beat. I want to run the team one more time, no fire conditions. Make sure there aren't any last kinks to work out and everyone has Legion hammered into their heads as a friendly. See that Thane is up to speed again. I think Jeff found the kind of planet we need for it. We should be there in a few hours. I'll run over the plan of attack with you and the whole crew then—as much of it as we can know right now before we have eyes on the Collector defenses, anyway. Then I'll see you again tonight."
Garrus's mandibles flared and tightened. "I . . . see you tonight," he said lamely.
She managed a tired little half smile at his tone, reached out and clasped his hand again, and let it slide away. Then, rolling her head from side to side to dissipate some of the tension in her neck, she bent, picked up the stacked pieces of her hardsuit, and strode off toward the elevator.
Garrus watched her go. How does she even go on? He didn't have the first clue, but he knew why.
She does what she has to. And it's time for the rest of us to do the same.
Despite everything she had done today—taking a stance on moral conundrums no one could and stay completely sane, making the first efforts to bring the geth and quarians together after a three-century-old, bitter war—tomorrow, Shepard would lead the entire team into what was supposed to be a suicide mission to save the rest of the galaxy, and her calls would make the difference in whether it was actually a suicide mission or not. And unlike today, he would be there, to do his damnedest to make sure it definitely wasn't suicide for her.
Straight into hell, he thought, with fresh determination, and out the other side.
A/N: This is one of three events Shepard herself didn't want to tell me about in Disaster Zone: Resurrection. Liara's involvement in selling her body to Cerberus, Heretic Station, and what goes down in the Bahak system all cut way too close to home for her. And if I were Garrus, I probably would develop some kind of phobia about Shepard leaving the Normandy without me. I seem to recall reading somewhere that there's some sort of instruction in the official strategy guide I haven't read that if you're playing on Insanity difficulty, you should never, never take Garrus out of your party. But even from a story perspective, bad stuff tends to happen to my Shepard when Garrus isn't with her, Mordin's recruitment mission aside. She commits genocide (twice), gets knocked out and held captive for a couple of days, gets involved in a nasty ground war for control of a space station, almost drowns and/or has her mind burnt out by psychic, aquatic eldritch abominations, occasionally dies or gets horribly wounded—I'm just saying. If I were Garrus, even after this mission, I'd get paranoid.
Best Always,
LMSharp
