L
The Other Side of Impossible: Down the Rabbit Hole
There was a hull breach in the CIC. Walking past the navigation stations, Garrus looked out on an impossible sky. The thin, blue, mass-effect envelope that was all that was keeping everyone on this deck from suffocating or freezing to death shivered. There was a brief stretch of empty space, and then the slowly orbiting debris field, a wreck of a minefield full of skeletal shipwrecks and broken asteroids, between them and the eerie red relay. And off to the left, slowly coming into view with the quick orbit of the space station, a black hole.
Everything inside Garrus wanted him to scream and run. This place wasn't for organics. If we didn't already know the Collectors were Prothean husks . . . No one could live here and stay sane.
His plates itched. His brain reeled. His fists clenched and unclenched. He had to tear his eyes away from the sight—the death just outside. The Normandy lay sprawled like a drunken insect on the surface of the Collector station—crashed, wounded, and exposed. Garrus figured it was luck that they weren't all dead, and if the Collectors rebooted their external sensors, their luck could change in a hurry.
And yet . . .
They'd come through that impossible sky more or less intact, and every time he glanced outside, that simple fact seemed more and more incredible. Their mass effect envelope was still working. Life support and power systems were still up—and not just the emergency systems. The primary systems were still operational, and every moment, he heard more systems reactivating, rebooting. Enough to get out of here after the attack?
He didn't know.
Ignore it, Garrus decided. There were a hundred things that had to happen between now and any possible survival. So, he turned away from the CIC hull breach one last time and passed into the short hallway in between the lab, armory, and conference room. As he did, he noticed the displaced support column at the conference room entrance, other places where wiring had been knocked loose from the ceiling like it had been in the battery.
Even if we get out of here, it'll be weeks and tens of thousands of credits to repair the damage.
Entering the conference room, Garrus saw Shepard, Lawson, the professor, and Taylor already there. Despite the damage to Deck Two, all of them looked alright. Behind him, Krios, Samara, and Goto were filing in, and behind them came the geth, Legion, which hadn't joined the others in their earlier evacuation attempt. Garrus waited, bracing himself against the conference room table, staring at the door. A silence hung over the entire squad. Did Engineering make it?
Then, there they were, all of them: Grunt. Massani. Jack and Tali. Niels wasn't part of the combat taam, so he was probably on the bridge with Joker or back in Engineering, working to help the pilot and EDI reboot the Normandy's systems. Everyone else was fit and ready for duty.
Physically at least.
Goto was pale. Taylor smelled like sweat. Grunt looked tense and angry, and Jack had a mean, cornered expression he hadn't seen her wear in a while.
But there was Shepard, who'd fought an enemy in the cargo hold and presumably been up here on Deck Two when the hull had been breached. Her armor wasn't even scratched. Her expression was calm, and her gaze was steady. She spread her arms over the table, looking every one of them in the face.
No hint of Beth there now. She's Commander Shepard.
Good.
"This isn't how we planned this mission," she said, "but this is where we're at. We can't worry about whether the Normandy can get us home. We came to stop the Collectors, and that means coming up with a plan to take out this station. EDI, bring up your scans."
The center of the conference room table lit up with a holographic model of the Collector station. It was roughly cylindrical in shape. EDI's energy readouts, scrolling to the left of the holo, from Garrus's perspective, didn't say much about potential enemy strength. However many there are in there, we're looking at worse odds than anything we've faced so far. That station wasn't near the size of the Citadel or Omega, but just looking at it, he thought it was bigger than every turian-made satellite orbiting Palaven, and some of them docked multiple cruisers and served as barracks for thousands.
"Our ordnance isn't going to do a whole lot here, Shepard," he said. There was one part of their plan blown, straight out the gate.
But a large chamber near the middle of the holographic blueprint had lit up. "You should be able to overload their critical systems if you get to the main control center here," EDI told them.
Taylor had noticed a different problem. "That means going through the heart of the station, right past this massive energy signature." He reached out and tapped a reading near EDI's main control center. They looked at the readings in silence. Massani's armor rattled as he shifted. The power readings scrolling up from the label on the holo were unlike anything Garrus had ever seen. That's a huge bundle of power, and a huge power draw for the station. Whatever's there, it's big. Collector reactor core? A factory?
Shepard's jaw set, and she rotated the hologram, tapping another chamber instead. "That's the central chamber," she said. As she spoke, corridors up to the room lit up and ran away like passages in a maze. "If our crew or any of the colonists are still alive, the Collectors are probably holding them in there."
They all traced the passages leading away from the chamber back to the exterior airlock nearest the yellow indicator light on the hologram that represented the Normandy. "Looks like there are two main routes," Taylor said. "Might be a good idea to split up to keep the Collectors off balance, then regroup in the central chamber."
It was a good idea. They could fight the Collectors on two separate fronts, and the strategy would increase the chances at least someone might make it through to the crew, and maybe to the main control center further on. Lawson isolated and enlarged the routes on the display and made a face. "No good," she said, pointing to blockages at the end of each passage nearest the target chamber. The blockages were flashing red—locked gates. A security shutdown? "Both routes are blocked. See these doors? The only way past is to get someone to open them from the other side."
Garrus pounded his fist on the table. "It's not a fortress. There's got to be something." They couldn't have made it this far just to find there was no way into the Collector base.
Shepard had zoomed back out, examining the holo closely. Suddenly, her face cleared. "Here," she said, pointing out a narrower, parallel passage, hardly a thread on the holo. "Maybe we can send someone in through this ventilation shaft."
They all stood back, thinking. It's a long shot. No telling what's in that shaft or what the conditions are like, and every member of the team now is too valuable to lose.
But Jacob laughed, baring his teeth. "Practically a suicide mission. I volunteer."
Shepard's expression soured, and Lawson's eyes flashed. Around the table, several of the others had tensed. They didn't need to think about dying now. The only thing they needed to be thinking about was how to achieve their objective. Jacob was assuming failure.
"I appreciate the thought, Jacob," Lawson said, voice crisp, "but you couldn't shut down the security systems. We need to send a tech expert."
She's right, Garrus thought. The nightmare scenario here wasn't someone getting trapped inside the vents. Or not exactly. The passage looked small enough on the holo that their infiltrator getting stuck was definitely a possibility. There wouldn't be any room to maneuver in there, and not a whole lot for a person to fight. But the nightmare scenario was their entire team—both squads sent through the passages—ending up with their backs against the wall in a kill zone, unable to open the doors while the Collectors threw wave after wave of reinforcements at them. Their best chance was sending one of the team's top engineers through the vent—and someone pretty small at that.
Our best options are Tali, Goto, or the geth, Garrus realized. The professor was a bioengineer, not nearly as quick at tearing down alien computer systems as he was at tearing down alien bodies, and while Garrus, Lawson, and Shepard herself all had training on various computer systems and mechanical processes, but they would all be more useful in the battle, holding the rest of the team together.
"It's your call, Commander," Taylor said. "Who do we send into the shaft?"
Garrus looked over the rest of the team, trying to think what he would do, in Shepard's place. Legion was probably the single most capable candidate, but even if it was, Garrus would just as soon not trust the lives of the entire rest of the team to it, and honestly, he still had doubts about Goto's nerves. He wanted Kasumi with the rest of the squad, where she could rely on everyone else, not alone in a vent with everyone else relying on her. The vents would be dangerous, no question. And he hated sending Tali into that. But . . .
Shepard seemed to agree; maybe not with his reasoning but with his ultimate conclusion. After a second, she said, "Tali, you're up."
Tali's voice was calm as she answered from her place down the table. "I won't let you down," she promised.
Shepard nodded at Taylor. "The rest of us will break into two teams and fight down each passage. That should draw the Collectors' attention away from what you're doing, Tali."
Lawson stepped forward. "I'll lead the second fire team, Shepard," she volunteered. "We'll meet up with you on the other side of the doors."
Jack lit up. "Not so fast, cheerleader," she sneered. "Nobody wants to take orders from you."
Her shoulders were tight. Her fists were clenched. Miranda's nostrils flared. She tossed her head. "This isn't a popularity contest! Lives are at stake." she snapped. She looked back at Shepard, irritated. "Shepard, you need someone who can command loyalty through experience."
An awkward coldness fell over the room. Lawson was a good XO. She'd been established as one of the go-to lieutenants for the mission for a few weeks now. But her assumption she would be commanding the second squad through the passages up to the central chamber now wasn't about that. It was about the pink in her cheeks after Jack had challenged her. It was about her ego, and it was almost as much of a breach of discipline as Jack issuing the challenge in the first place.
Garrus looked the biotic over. She had to have known Miranda might be leading part of the attack today. Shepard had been running the team the same way for weeks now—with Garrus and Miranda running secondary offensive objectives and Taylor occasionally fulfilling a tertiary, defensive one. Jack hated Miranda's guts now as much as she had since she'd first joined the crew, but even she'd acknowledged Miranda got the job done as a leader. This wasn't about Miranda lacking any qualifications. It was about Jack's fear. She wasn't military-trained. She'd gotten better over the course of their mission, but like Goto, she was in over her head here, and she was scared. She was defaulting to hostility, fighting the enemy she knew: Cerberus.
Shepard had leaned back on one leg as she looked at Jack and Miranda, arms still folded. A tic jumped in her jaw, and her eyes were stormy. She looked at Garrus, and he caught her eyes and glanced at Goto, Samara, and Krios in turn, all of whom were exhibiting subtle cues indicating they agreed with Jack. All four would follow Lawson, if pressed. They trusted her. At least with their heads. But whatever tension they still felt with her could be the difference between life or death in the battle ahead. Garrus understood Shepard's annoyance. It's just one more obstacle, one more thing in our way, and you'd think all of us would be past the infighting. I guess in the clench, it's just not that easy.
Nothing's ever easy.
Shepard gave him a ghost of a nod, and then jerked her head at him more obviously, for the rest of the crew to see. "Garrus, you're in charge of the second team," she announced. "Take Lawson, Samara, Massani, Taylor, and Grunt."
She looked at the others. "Jack, Legion, Professor, Goto, and Krios, you're with me."
The tension around the table settled in everyone but Garrus, who now was even more annoyed than he had been before. Everyone on the squad was almost as comfortable with Garrus leading as they were with Shepard. Garrus didn't think even Lawson would argue.
He met her blue eyes, waiting, and she raised her chin but then seemed to relax and turned back to Shepard. "Aye-aye, Commander," she said.
Garrus looked over his team. Lawson. Samara, Massani, Taylor, Grunt. All professionals or strong enough it didn't matter, and he admired the way Shepard had kept Jack and Miranda apart even after putting Garrus in command of the second team—the friction between the two women was just one more variable they didn't need going into this fight. But Shepard had also stacked the odds in his team's favor. Her team was made up of every undisciplined recruit, solo shadow operative, and tech they had apart from Tali. He understood why she'd done it. She's still the commander of this mission. Everyone she's got will be better off taking her orders than they ever could be from anyone else. But she'd be compensating for them. She would have to. And if her team runs into the bulk of the resistance . . .
But he couldn't say a thing. Shepard's team needed to feel they were ready to take on anything they encountered. Jeopardizing Kasumi or Jack's confidence, especially right now, might be dangerous, and they needed as many members of the team as possible to make it through to the central chamber.
Shepard held his eyes for a moment, waiting to see if he was planning to say anything about the way she'd divided up the squads. When he didn't, she dropped her arms, stepped up to the table, and addressed the entire team.
"I don't know what we're going to find in there, but I won't lie to you: it's not gonna be easy," she said.
She was using the same calm, ringing voice he'd heard her use his first day on the Normandy and in front of the quarian admiralty board. Her "Commander Shepard" voice, the projection that makes everyone under her think we can conquer the galaxy.
"We've lost good people," Shepard continued, looking past the door to the conference room, at the nearly empty ship beyond, where navigators, comm specialists, technicians, doctor, and maintenance crew weren't doing their jobs because they had been taken. "We may lose more. We don't know how many the Collectors have stolen. Thousands, hundreds of thousands. It's not important. What matters is this—" Shepard's eyes landed on each of them in turn, making sure she had their complete attention. You could have heard a pin drop on the deck. "Not. One. More," Shepard finished. "That's what we can do here today. It ends with us. They want to know what we're made of? I say we show them, on our terms." She tilted her head, waiting. "Let's bring our people home," she said.
As a cheer rose up from the others, Garrus looked at her there, standing at the head of the conference table. He shook his head. You'd have thought I'd be immune to "Commander Shepard" by now. But the little human, his best friend in the galaxy, the woman he—at moments like this, she was as impressive as she'd ever been. Determination, conviction, authority, with all the brilliance and prowess she needed to pull it off. As the others pounded their squadmates on the back, shook hands, psyching themselves up for battle, Garrus just smiled at Shepard, letting his mandibles flare wide, knowing she wouldn't misunderstand. He clicked his heels together, stood to attention, and saluted, and she returned the gesture.
They proceeded next door to the armory, with those of the team who didn't maintain and keep their own weapons like Shepard and Garrus did choosing guns for the battle ahead—for all the battles ahead. Then they moved to the front of the ship, toward the airlock and the waiting Collector station.
Near the front of the ship, Garrus saw Joker, dictating to Niels, who was on his knees looking at some wires below the pilot's station. Both men stopped as the team came forward, and Joker, wincing and groaning from his injuries, rose to his feet to snap his own salute. "Get it done," he told them.
"Have her ready to fly when we do," Shepard answered.
"Aye-aye, ma'am."
The airlock into the Collector station opened onto an empty maintenance corridor. The ventilation shaft Tali was going down was a few meters off to the right. Shepard applied an incendiery to melt the grate, which the professor then cooled with a cryo program.
"Give me a boost?" Tali asked him, putting a hand on his shoulder.
Garrus didn't answer verbally, instead forming a stirrup with both hands for her to step in. "Be fast," he told her, lifting her up into the shaft.
Her reply through the Collector station atmosphere was muffled as she began moving down the shaft, away from the rest of them, but it came in clear over the radio, light and teasing. "You're not going to tell me to be careful?"
Garrus hummed noncommittally, smiling, even as worry gnawed at his gizzard. Ignore it. Just ignore it. "More important that you're fast."
"But be careful," Shepard added drily. "If you fall down a secondary shaft or crawl into some razor wire, we're all dead."
"I'll do my best to avoid it," Tali promised, chuckling. "Moving ahead." An indicator light on his visor indicated that she'd opened up a private channel. "And Garrus—you need to be careful," she murmured. "Keep everyone alive until I open the doors. I don't want to lose another team this year. The paperwork is a nightmare."
Garrus was already relegating Tali's voice to the back of his mind, to his personal emergency channel, something to pay attention to only when it became absolutely critical. For however long it took for him to get his team down their passage to the Collectors' central chamber, until she opened the doors on the other side, all that mattered were Grunt, Samara, Massani, Taylor, and Lawson—and any orders or updates Shepard sent over the channel.
The passage they wanted was just a few meters further down. It was open to maintenance, and Garrus scanned it with his visor and the naked eye—a high-ceilinged, shadowed corridor made up of the same organic rock or chitin material the Collectors always built with. Lighting was low—Garrus guessed with four eyes, the Collectors probably had better night vision than a lot of other species—but the space was illuminated with what looked like orange algae lamps protruding from different places in the rock. He could hear air exchange filters pumping, providing life support to the station, and his visor said the air composition and pressurization of the station was within habitable bounds for all of them. Gravity was light, they would travel faster with less fatigue than normal, but the distance would be what they would have to worry about.
And the drops, he noted, observing the so-called passage they had identified on the blueprints was actually more of a catwalk in places, open to roosting platforms set into the walls. The Collectors all had wings. They preferred to walk or run. Probably the Protheans had as well. But they weren't limited to it.
"Watch the full 360," he warned the others. "The Collectors could hit from anywhere. They can't fly or hover for long. But they can have some interesting avenues of attack. And watch the gravity. Step here might take you farther than you're used to."
A glitter of wings shone through the darkness, and a beam of light ignited, driving toward them with a scream of sound.
Samara and Jacob ignited a barrier, deflecting the Collector particle beam. Grunt activated a tech-fueled fortification program around his armor that lit up white around him.
"I'm moving ahead in the ventilation shaft," Tali reported over the radio. "It's hot in here, but it's clear as far as I can tell."
"Keep us informed in case that changes," Shepard replied on the same channel. "Second team, are you in position?"
"In position," Garrus confirmed. "Meet you on the other side of those doors."
He surveyed the room again, then turned to Massani. "Zaeed, I want you back on long-range support with me and Miranda." Massani grimaced; he preferred being on the offensive, but he nodded and switched out his assault rifle for his sniper. He'd campaigned long enough to know that an extra gun on the perimeter in here could make the difference between making it to the rendezvous and getting overwhelmed halfway there. Garrus turned to the others. "Grunt, Samara, Jacob?"
He paused and smiled. "Punch a hole," he said.
Grunt grinned and laughed, low and anticipatory, hoisting his shotgun high. "Right."
They attacked. Although none of the Collectors had said a word Garrus had ever recognized in an engagement, and none of their corpses had been equipped with anything the professor had ever recognized as a means of communication, they must have had some way to talk to one another, because within a minute of their entrance into the passage, Garrus and the others were in full-scale combat. This wasn't a gang fight with some piss-their-pants-scared mercs out in the Terminus; this was war with intelligent, armed Reaper foot soldiers.
The Collectors came organized, and they came in formation. At any one time, they usually outnumbered Garrus's team three to one, and it was difficult to see how many reinforcements the Collectors had, waiting in the wings. Fortunately, the enemy couldn't come at them all at once and wipe them out with overwhelming force. They got in one another's way just like any other soldiers, and there wasn't room enough on the walkway and perches immediately surrounding to accommodate them all when their short-range wings gave out. In addition, the Collector drones all seemed to be armed with the same particle weapons, which appeared to fire on simpler straight-line trajectories than the Normandy weapons could. The beams also seemed to lose power over longer ranges, limiting their use for any Collector snipers, meaning that while Garrus and Zaeed could take out Collectors hundreds of meters down the corridor, the Collectors didn't have that advantage.
Garrus decided they'd milk that for everything it was worth.
Some of the Collectors had biotics, employing barriers or warp attacks. Garrus ordered the others to prioritize them. In previous fights on Horizon and the Collector ship, these had been the drones that Harbinger had elected to take over.
But Harbinger didn't show up. Garrus's team gunned down drone after drone after drone after drone, but there was no tell-tale explosion of tech and light in the Collector ranks, no deep, annoying taunting in their heads as a monster like Sovereign hurled black energy at them.
"I don't understand," Miranda panted, about a third of the way down the chamber. The blue light at the end of her Locust flashed with the pulsing of the mass effect accelerators. "Where's the Reaper?"
In the corner of his eye, Garrus saw Samara shoving a mass of Collectors apart for Grunt and Taylor to blast, one by one. He sighted down on a Collector in flight, coming to reinforce the line. Fired and saw the luminescent eyes go dark as the thing plummeted down and out of sight. Behind him, Massani took out two more. There was a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. "Want to make a guess?" he asked Lawson. Beside him, he saw her face, white and set. She knew where Harbinger was focusing its attention.
Garrus opened up the radio connection to Shepard's team. "Garrus here. We're taking heavy fire, but we're moving forward. Report."
There was a growling rumble on the other side of the connection. ". . . feel this!"
"Shut up!" Shepard snapped. There was a burst of Locust fire.
"Not you, Garrus," she gasped. "We're kicking ass. Heavy resistance, but we're moving on as well. Mordin, on your right!"
Then Tali's voice came over the radio, sounding tense and breathless and frustrated. "I'm stuck," she said. "Something's blocking the path. Looks like some kind of gate."
"Heat exchange door," Miranda told Garrus, thrusting her palm forward and boiling away a Collector barrier. "Look around for a switch. A maintenance panel."
"It's here," Shepard said. "We're on it, Tali."
In a moment, Tali had confirmed the gate was out of her way and that she was moving forward. "There'll be others," Garrus said to Miranda.
"What are the odds any panels to disable the gates will be on this side?" Miranda replied. "Samara! More ahead!"
"From an engineering perspective? Not good. From the way our luck tends to go? Even worse." Garrus shot four Collectors in a row, popped a heat sink, and stuck in a spare clip from his belt. "You heard Harbinger, on the radio?"
The walkway sloped down in front of them, and below, Garrus saw Jacob was in trouble. He couldn't keep up with Grunt when it came to pure muscle, so he was trying to keep up with Samara instead, except Samara was probably decades out from the matriarch stage with centuries of practice perfecting her power and endurance using her biotics in combat, and Jacob wasn't even a specialist. Through his visor, Garrus could see Taylor sweating heavily, shaking. Infrared showed his amp overheating. Damn it, he's going to kill himself right here, since Shepard wouldn't let him do it in the vents.
So, without waiting for Miranda's answer, Garrus plunged forward. "Cover me!" he snapped, signaling Massani and Lawson to follow him. He folded up the Mantis and pulled out the Vindicator, running up in between Taylor and Grunt and firing ahead at the main line.
"Jacob, fall back with Massani," he ordered. "We need you two on our right flank." He jerked his head to show where he meant, sending an overload program at a Collector tech shield on a platform ahead and following up with a stream of fire.
Taylor nodded wearily and holstered his shotgun for his pistol, moving out and back to close ranks with Zaeed. Up ahead, Grunt was laughing as the incendiary ammo he had on his own shotgun burnt the wings on two Collectors to ash. In the dim light of the cavern, his blue eyes glowed with battle rage.
Over the radio, Garrus could hear Tali and Shepard, going back and forth. She was running into more heat exchange doors in the vents and sounding increasingly panicked. She'd said it was hot—he was starting to get the impression conditions were more than uncomfortable in that ventilation shaft: they were dangerous.
"Three-pronged attack," he shouted over the sound of the sound of particle beams and gunfire. "Samara and Grunt, keep pressing forward. Taylor and Massani, watch our right! Lawson, take the left and the rear with me!"
Garrus felt the change immediately. With mid- and long-range support on both flanks of their formation, they'd set up a brutal crossfire, and Grunt and Samara moved ahead faster with less to fear from incoming Collector reinforcements.
"Turn up ahead," Lawson reported. She was sweating too, but she was pacing herself with her biotics, relying much more on her omni-tool and submachine gun. "I think we might be coming to the end."
"Should know better than to say things like that," Garrus answered. He heard a familiar banging, hissing noise ahead and pulled out the Mantis again, taking a knee to stabilize his rifle and sight down the Collector heavy. "Think you can keep the drones busy a second?"
He peered through the scope, using the Mantis laser to pinpoint the gray, slavering head of the hunchbacked, tech-packed husk monster packing the cannon ahead. He sighted down, plotted a firing trajectory. At this range, three shots, maybe four. The Widow could take down one of those things faster, but for whatever reason, he'd never got one. The geth gets one, but not me.
Grunt dodged out of the way of a blue plasma cannon blast. He roared defiance, plugging a drone in the stomach, hurling its corpse up ahead.
Lawson was staying over his shoulder, covering his back and flank. A shimmering barrier rose up around him for an additional layer of protection, making his plates itch. Garrus fired. Chambered another heat sink. Fired again. Gray goo and tech oil spurted over the cannoneer's heavy armor, but the thing kept coming, howling mindlessly through blackened teeth. It fired again, and Samara danced out of the way, turning her shotgun to fire on one of the biotic drones, swooping in from a side platform.
"Can you hurry it up, Garrus?" Miranda said through gritted teeth, firing on three other drones, only one of which went down. "There's not a whole lot of cover here."
Garrus held up a finger at her. Fired once more. That did it. Grunt was in range of the heavy now too, and fired within the same second. Its head exploded, and it crumpled to the ground up ahead. Garrus rose to his feet, chambered another shot, and retargeted a drone over Miranda's shoulder in a second, firing and sending it plummeting down to the abyss below. "He probably could have handled that," he mused.
"Maybe. He also might have got himself shot three times in the back charging the cannoneer," Miranda said.
"Thanks," Garrus added.
"Please. Shepard would never forgive me if I let you get shot," Lawson told him, a smile flickering over her tense and sweating, shadowed face. "It's been that way since Day One."
"And she's trusted you to be there, since Day One," Garrus answered, just now realizing it himself. Shepard had probably hated Lawson almost as much as Jack did, in the beginning, but from the moment she'd found him on Omega, she'd trusted her, charging Miranda to do for Garrus exactly what Garrus himself had always done for Shepard—to watch his back, see what he missed, keep him alive. And that's why she's here with you now instead of down the other passage with Shepard. Otherwise, you would have got Jack.
There was no sound from Lawson but the fire from her gun for a long moment, then she replied. "I . . . suppose that's true." Another moment. Taylor and Massani were yelling at each other, encouraging one another and hurling insults at the Collectors as they fought.
"Hah!" Jacob laughed. "Take that, you zombie bastards!"
The radio crackled. "Looks like another one of those things in the way," Tali panted. "Got to help me out again, Shepard." Her breathing was heavy. There was a note halfway between anxiety and panic in her voice, along with something that sounded like pain. She sounded worse than she had unarmed in a crashing ship with a Collector drone and a hull breach right outside the door.
"We're on it, Tali," Shepard answered. "Just hold on!"
"They'll make it," Lawson told him, even as Tali reported she was free and moving forward. "Hang on—I see the door."
Garrus had seen it too. He connected back to Shepard. "Garrus here. Making good progress. Meet you at the rendezvous." He looked off to the right again, and squinted. There was a hazy glitter in the air—a hundred or more tiny, metallic wings. The Collectors had released seeker swarms, like on Horizon, but these ones—these ones weren't ignoring them.
They've been reprogrammed, Garrus realized, a dull, throbbing horror falling over him like a shroud. Or there's too many for the professor's tech solution. In seconds, they could all be paralyzed, easy prey for the Collectors.
The swarm descended like insects on a harvest, headed toward Jacob and Zaeed. "Wha—"
Jacob's biotics bloomed, pushing the Seekers out, away. Then they flickered and died.
"Samara!" Garrus shouted. "Four o'clock!"
The justicar whirled. Her eyes blazed blue and she thrust both arms out in a gesture of repudiation. A wave of dark energy hit the seekers, somehow ignoring both Taylor and Massani, and over a hundred insects ignited in midair, glowing red and then falling as ash to the chamber floor. Jacob stumbled, and Massani hurled him roughly to his feet, thrusting him forward, firing on a cluster of drones ahead. And behind them, there were three other swarms incoming.
"Samara, to the rear!" Garrus ordered. Ahead, Grunt had reached the door to the central chamber, still locked. He had turned, putting his back to it to fire to their left and right. "Grunt, stand guard," Garrus commanded. "Taylor, get some calories in you!"
"I can fight—" Jacob started.
Garrus cut him off. "Get the damn 'suicide mission' out of your head!" he snarled, "You are not dying today! Tali! We're at the doors!"
"Hold on!" Tali told them. "I'm almost there!"
Samara had put up a barrier all around them, lifting both hands to raise it high. To hold it, she had had to holster her weapons. Garrus, Zaeed, and Miranda took up positions all around her, firing out at the drones, rapidly closing in behind them and moving to surround them. Massani had applied incendiary ammo like Grunt's. The falling Collectors left trails of fire behind them as they died, and a smell of ozone and smoke was rising through the atmospheric filters of Garrus's helmet.
Taylor was choking down calorie bars from his utility belt, crouched beside Grunt and the Claymore. Garrus took a Collector through the jaw, another in the gut, a third through the throat. He applied an overload program to a Collector caught up in one of Lawson's warp fields, igniting a biotic explosion that caught a second Collector in the blast and sent a third to the floor, wings alight.
And in the distance, he heard more bangs and hissing. Another cannoneer, approaching.
There's too many. There's just too many.
Then the doors opened up behind them. Garrus sensed rather than saw Taylor fall back through, climb to his feet alone and hoist his shotgun high.
"About time," Grunt growled, scooping up one of Massani's ejected heat sinks, still smoking, to insert back into his weapon.
"Fall back, through the door!" Garrus ordered. "Hold together!"
Grunt fell back with Taylor, followed by Lawson and Massani. Garrus signaled for Samara to proceed him into what looked like an antechamber, a small tech hub in between their corridor, Shepard's, and the central chamber. He saw Tali on the other side of the door as he entered, working feverishly at a small computer panel. Her suit was sweat-stained, and there was carbon scoring several places along it. She'd been singed up in the ducts, probably burned, and there was fog all over the inside of her visor. But her fingers were as quick as ever, flying over the Collector controls.
There was a pounding on the second of the three doors leading off of the antechamber, the one that led back the way they had come, down the corridor where Shepard and her team were. Shepard's voice cracked out over the radio. "Come in!" she ordered.
Garrus was still facing down the Collectors back down their corridor, forming ranks for a charge up the path. "Look out! Seeker swarm!" he warned, as another glittering mass of metal and wings shimmered to the left, meters away. Samara sent out another biotic pulse. Grunt, Lawson, and a steadied Taylor took up positions at her side as Garrus and Massani faced down the Collector line.
Then the door closed behind them—thick, heavy, and armored. Garrus heard the lock engage.
"We're in position," Shepard was saying, "I need this door open, now!"
Tali glanced at the door panel to Shepard's passage. It would be wide open to the incoming Collectors on Shepard's side once she unlocked the door.
"Go, we'll cover you!" Garrus promised.
Tali didn't need any more urging than that. She staggered across the room to the panel, and Garrus took up position, waiting with Grunt on his right and Massani on his left to take down any enemies Shepard had pinning her down. Tali made a noise of frustration and despair. "Something's wrong, the door's stuck!" she cried.
"Tali . . ." Garrus said, adrenaline racing through him. He could hear someone on the other side, kicking or banging at the door for entry.
Tali banged her left fist on the panel and twisted three wires together in her right hand. "Got it!"
The door opened, and Jack and Kasumi staggered through. Shepard, Mordin, Thane, and Legion came slowly, facing outward back toward the corridor. "Here they come!" Shepard called. "Fall back!"
Down a brighter but more twisting corridor than the one they had come through, Garrus saw no fewer than twenty Collector drones in the distance—and one lit up with the bright, burning tech that signaled Harbinger had taken over.
"Suppressing fire!" Garrus ordered his team. "Don't let anyone through that door!"
Everyone with an automatic weapon fired through the gate—Garrus, Lawson, Massani, and Samara. Shepard, Goto, Krios, and the professor. With an outward thrust of her right arm, Jack sent a vicious warp field straight toward Harbinger's avatar, and Legion brought its Widow up to its shoulder and fired one brutal, follow-up head-shot. The Reaper's latest puppet crumbled in an explosion of ugly tech.
"Gotcha," Tali muttered, and the door slid shut again. Again, Garrus heard a deadlock engage. He lowered the Vindicator, breathing heavily, feeling the adrenaline coursing through him, and looked around the room.
Shepard's face was the first he saw as she unsealed her helmet—red and sweating, bright-eyed, with a halo of darkened curls escaping her gelled-down head already. She hitched the helmet to the back of her breastplate and leaned over on her thighs for five seconds, breathing, before standing straight and meeting his eyes with a nod. All around, the others who had worn helmets or air filters through the fight were unsealing or retracting them as well. Everyone was standing. Krios was glassy-eyed, suffering from biotic overexertion like Taylor. There was a jagged hole in the plating of Legion's right leg—an injury that might have been fatal to an organic but that hadn't left the geth even limping. And Goto was white faced, hyperventilating and shaking. The professor, bleeding green from a forehead graze about four centimeters above his left eye—was trying to calm her down. But everyone was alive. No one even looked very seriously hurt.
Samara went to join Mordin and Kasumi. Jacob walked over to Thane, gripping his shoulder and offering him a calorie bar. Grunt punched Massani's arm, grinning. And Beth walked over to Tali and shook her hand. "Nice work, Tali," she breathed. "I knew you wouldn't let me down."
Meanwhile, Miranda had gone through the third door in the antechamber, one Tali had opened right before closing Shepard's corridor. "Shepard," she called, a strange note in her voice. "You need to see this."
They all walked out into the central chamber—an enormous cavern, with a ceiling too high to see. There weren't Collectors here. Here there was nothing except masses of tech on either side of the walkway aisle. Rows of Collector pods, like the pods on Horizon, fitted into stands or something like tanks, with tiny tubes shooting out from each, into larger, corrugated metal tubes, each a third the diameter of a thresher maw, and soaring off into the dark heights above.
Miranda was standing in front of one of the pods, moving her hand over the see-through surface, like thick, synthetic amber. "Looks like one of the missing colonists," she told Shepard.
"There's more," Jack reported from down the row, looking into other pods. "Over here."
Shepard walked over to stand beside Miranda, peering in at the colonist. She tapped on the front. Garrus couldn't see inside the pod, but he saw every muscle in Shepard's body tense when she saw something.
"God, she's still alive!"
Then a pneumatic pump hissed through the tubes overhead, and a muffled, liquid screaming rose all around them. In the nearest pod to him, Garrus saw Vidir Rolston from the Normandy, submerged in some sort of fluid that had just started to bubble. His brown eyes shot open, and his fists started to pound at the glass, and inside, his skin started to dissolve.
A/N: Alright! Moving forward. Sorry to leave you on a cliffhanger, but I promise, I'm hard at work, driving forward to finish this story. Fourteen chapters left! Should be wrapping up right around the time we're all finishing our second or third playthroughs of the Mass Effect Legendary edition.
To those of you who have checked in—another big thanks from me. Your encouragement is a huge deal, especially now.
Wish you all the best, and leave a review if you've got something to say,
LMS
