"Nihlus, things here are worse than I anticipated." Garrus glanced behind him. Tali paced back and forth across the office while Kal'Reegar stood guard inside the door.
"Worse than several million missing colonists?" Nihlus cocked a hip and crossed his arms, one plate climbing his brow.
Garrus focused his attention back on the Spectre. "Unbelievably, yes. We're balanced on the edge of war here, Nihlus." Shaking his head, he raked his talons over his fringe. "Over the last cycle, thirty five geth platforms have disappeared, so forty thousand or more geth. Legion was the last to vanish." He paced to the edge of the QEC pad and back. "Tali says she and Legion suspected that heretics might have infiltrated the geth and be behind it, but the quarians are acting suspicious as well." Stopping back at center, Garrus leaned into the console. "I need your help, Nihlus. And I need the Normandy and a half dozen heavy frigates to park between the quarians and geth."
The Spectre nodded, the steel in his spine snapping straight. "I'll be on my way within the hour." He scowled his 'all business, decision made, fill me in' scowl, mandibles giving a hard flick. "What's the situation on the ground?"
"The Admiralty Board sent a frigate to pick up the survey team, ostensibly for health and safety testing, but I believe it was to get them out of the crossfire." His frustration escaped in a low rumble that slipped beneath his words. "Between my keen diplomatic skills and Kal'Reegar's rifle, we negotiated a compromise." He keyed in information. "Tali and I have to meet with the Admiralty Board at the flotilla tomorrow. Can you join us there?"
The Spectre nodded. "Send me everything you have. I'll go over it on the way." He let out a long sigh, his hawk's glare softening a little. "You look like crap, Garrus. Have you slept at all?"
The general shrugged. "You can nag me about looking like shit when you get here. I've got to head out and see if I can find any evidence of what happened to Legion before it gets too dark." Garrus let out a long breath. "See you tomorrow, and thanks." He hung up the call, then packaged up everything he had on the geth situation and sent it to Nihlus.
"All right." He turned to the other two occupants of the room. "Kal, I need you to stay at Base One, and make sure no one tries to forcibly remove anyone." Striding over to lay a hand on the Marine's shoulder, he looked past Reegar, out the door. "I don't want to make it too easy for anyone to start shooting."
"And what about me?" Tali asked, stepping up on Garrus's other side, a little of her usual bounce returning.
Garrus thumped Reegar on the shoulder, then hit the door control, ushering Tali through as it opened. "You're going to help me track and find Legion." He led the way down onto the street, pulling in a deep breath and stretching his shoulders as he stopped and looked down at the quarian. "I'm a little out of practice, but I did once investigate cases for a living."
Opening the file the geth had sent him, he sifted through the insane amount of data to find Legion's. "Legion left the upper entrance to their base." Glancing back to Tali, he asked, "You know where that is?"
"Yes." She nodded toward the part of town where they'd met Arax, beckoning with a wave. "Come on, General. We're going to have to move fast. It'll be getting dark in a couple of hours." Hesitating, she glanced over her shoulder, looking around. "Where are Martin and the invisible criminal?"
"Keeping an eye out." As much as he trusted Tali, Garrus left it at that. He'd sent Kasumi to see what she could learn from lurking around the rest of the expeditionary team, and sent Martin into the wilderness around Base One to do some recon.
The general looked up into the twilight sky. Despite not being able to see the space stations around the planet, he knew they could most assuredly see him. If heretic geth were to blame for the disappearances, who knew how deep the infection ran and how much of the Reaper agenda still played out around them. Suddenly, everything he'd spent the past cycle building felt like a trap poised with its jaws set to snap closed on him.
Taking a deep breath, he pushed aside concerns for the integrity of Archangel's entire fleet of geth manufactured ships, and all the geth weaponry and other research. Before he panicked and started tearing Archangel apart, he needed to find Legion. Nobody disappeared without a trace, not even geth.
They walked in silence until the massive geth structure rose out of the rocky hills and cliffs. Garrus stopped and looked up, but through an analytical eye that searched for weaknesses rather than admiring the sweeping gold and bronze lines … the industrial beauty of the place. Storming a compound that well fortified would prove impossible if push came to shove. The geth certainly knew how to defend their holdings.
"So, where's the upper entrance?" Garrus asked, scanning the cliffs surrounding them, the layered rock pressing in and down on them. He squinted, having trouble seeing detail as the semi-polar day darkened toward mid-afternoon.
"Up there," Tali said, pointing to a part of the building lined up with the top of the cliffs. "We can get up there two ways, the easiest means climbing up the pipes."
Garrus walked over to the cluster of huge pipes, leaning against them as he looked up. "Is this how Legion would have come down?" Shoving himself back, he shook his head. "There's a door right there." He cut a hand toward a large double door twenty meters to their left. "Why didn't he just come out there?" No, his gut told him that Legion left via the upper entrance for a reason, and it wasn't a nice climb down thirty or so metres of pipes.
"I don't know." Tali turned back the way they'd come. "The only other way down is to come down the hill. There's a barely passable slope back down the road a ways. It's not an easy climb or descent."
Garrus looked at the maze of pipes for another minutes, then shook his head. "If Legion came down this way and anything happened, the geth would have seen. They've got surveillance everywhere." He turned. "Lead on to the difficult slope."
Ten minutes later, the pair of them scrambled up a steep slope of loose shale and scrub plants. The sky painted the entire landscape a pale blue-purple as Tikkun's weak rays headed for the horizon.
"I don't know how you do it," Garrus said, gasping a little as they paused for a breather. He turned up the cooling in his armour to counteract the combination of exertion and daytime temperatures. Even that close to the polar region, Rannoch's average temperature of 48 C only dipped down to about 35 C. "I feel like I'm going blind." Shadows clung deep and thick around every surface and object, seeming to shift, skittering across the ground. He blinked rapidly for a moment. That part had to be exhaustion.
"Quarian eyes are made for it," Tali said. "That's the reason our masks are shaded out amongst the rest of you. Everything is too bright." She started up the slope, skirting a thick tangle of bramble-like cacti.
"So, the silver we see is reflection?" he asked, jumping up a ledge as he followed her. "You have mirrored surfaces inside your eyes to bounce the light around." He chuffed as he stumbled into a wash. "You'd better take point."
Tali chuckled as she passed him. "Probably best and not just because my eyesight is better. I know where we're going, and you don't. Who knows where we'll end up with you taking the lead." She picked her way up a winding path, pausing now and again to point out hazards.
Garrus scanned the area with both his omnitool and visor as they climbed. For the first fifty metres or so, the ground appeared virgin, disturbed only by animal tracks. He crouched down to check them out, wanting to judge how long the ground preserved traces of movement. Although it had been a long time and all his lessons had been on Palaven's soil, he guessed the tracks to be four or five days old. On that leeward side of the cliff, the uneven ground and low scrub kept the wind from blowing away the soil.
Garrus turned to look out past the geth base. It loomed even larger from above. Beyond, a wide river flowed through a canyon, the water sparkling with a million shades of colour. Even with the base—the monstrous hive of machinery that it was—hanging over his right shoulder, the entire scene before him felt like a symbiotic whole. The energy and life of the place flowed with a light, hushed peace.
"You coming?" Tali called. "It's going to start getting dark for real soon, and we don't want to be climbing up here when the sun goes down."
Garrus opened his mouth to answer, but stopped, a chill shudder running down his spine. Something tweaked his inner alarm. Turning a slow circle, he searched for anything that could explain the sudden dark tear he felt in the fabric of the place. Nothing showed itself, but the feeling continued to build.
On a father/son hunting trip when Garrus was a boy, he and his father had been stalked by an ungentira, the aggressive predator following their every move for kilometers. His father told him that they'd be fine as long as they didn't behave like prey, but it had been six of the most terrifying hours of Garrus's life. That same shiver, the anticipation of death flying at him out of the shadows, arced down his spine like lightning.
Don't act like prey.
"Garrus?" Tali edged closer, her posture suddenly rigid, the silver reflections of her eyes darting about as she reacted to his alarm. "Are you okay?"
As she turned to cover her back against his side, her hand reaching for her shotgun, he nodded and forced himself to give her a reassuring smile. "Yeah, I was just thinking about how peaceful Rannoch feels, even with AI-built constructions erupting from the ground. I hope it can maintain that once cities start going up." He swept a hand toward their path. "We better keep moving."
"Okay." Her eyes stayed locked on him long enough that he knew she saw through his lie, but she just turned and continued up the slope.
After switching on his flashlight, Garrus followed, keeping the beam wandering back and forth over the ground as if merely watching where he put his feet. Eyes watched them, he could feel them like cold fingers sliding over his hide. He just needed to figure out the watcher's hiding place.
The first clue wandered onto their path five metres later. Two sets of quarian footprints appeared at the base of a high ledge, travelling along beside it, no doubt waiting for an easy way up. Garrus faked a stumble and went down on one knee, using the moment to get a better look at the tracks. They seemed fairly fresh, a day old at most.
"Keelah, you're clumsy," Tali exclaimed, turning back. "Are you okay, or do you need me to carry you?" Her fists returned to her hips in a gesture so reminiscent of his mother that a pang of homesickness squeezed his chest tight for a moment. Tali seemed to have decided to follow the Shepard method of running a crew, turning everyone into a big family. The band around his ribs squeezed harder for a couple of breaths then loosened.
Garrus drew her attention to the footprints then stood, shaking the rest off. "I'm fine, just wasn't looking where I was going. I've lived on a space station for over a cycle, the floors are all flat there." He looked up at the ledge. "We're going to find somewhere a little saner to climb that, right?"
Tali gave him a quick nod and headed down the path. "It gets climbable up here a bit further." She turned back. "Will you be okay, or do you want to hop on my back?" She crouched down a little.
"You're cruel, Tali'Zorah vas Rannoch. Shepard taught you well." He winked and hopped up ahead of her, using the moment of balancing himself with a hand on the ground to brush aside the prickly plant stalks. A thrill of mixed excitement and fear sizzled along his nerves. The tracks led up the hill away from the geth base, joining a much more travelled path. Along the path, geth footprints mixed with quarian, trampling the ground to where he didn't need his flashlight to pick them out.
Picking his way along the ledge as he followed the trail, he felt Tali hurry up behind him, one small hand latching onto his armour. Garrus reached up and patted her fingers, suspecting she'd begun to feel the same dark pressure of unseen eyes. He turned his flashlight to the path, but aimed it high, past caring if his quarry knew he was tracking them. The growing darkness danced along every nerve, prying at them like crowbars dragging a stubborn nail screaming from the wood.
"Garrus—"
He threw up a hand to silence Tali as the dry trickle of falling sand and pebbles whispered up the trail from several metres ahead. Foot catching, Garrus hobble-stepped to a halt, shining the light ahead, but seeing nothing. He glanced toward the setting sun, the already weak rays washing the entire landscape in indigo with obsidian shadows. After a moment, he closed his eyes, straining to hear past the echo of his heartbeat bouncing off the inside of his skull.
Rannoch crouched beneath its pale sun like a sleeper long resigned to never waking, even the wind moved silently over the rock, no insects droning, no animals scurrying. For a moment, Garrus wondered if it shouldn't have been left alone, a tomb not to be disturbed by running feet or laughing children.
Tali pressed in against his hip. "Garrus?"
He glanced back, whispering, "Do you see anything? Hear anything?" Those pale gleams stared back, unblinking.
"I can feel something up there." She pointed above them rather than ahead.
"Are there any predators we need to worry about?" he asked, mentally adding, 'Other than the two legged, sapient kind'.
"No. The largest predator in this region eats small lizards and rodents." She stepped even closer, her back pushing him ahead a half step. "Someone is watching us."
"Yeah." He nodded toward the path. "Let's see where this trail goes." He reached up for his assault rifle, but let his hand drop. With visibility worsening, he didn't want to accidentally shoot someone because they appeared out of nowhere. Walking forward, he cursed the crunch of their boots on the stone, it echoed back from every direction, sounding like an army on the march. It would be hard to hear anyone approaching.
"Is it bad to miss the days of fifty geth coming at us with rifles roaring?" he whispered.
Tali grumbled. "No, this is giving me the creeps."
Ten metres up the path, they stepped around a corner, the air shifting, wind picking up as it whistled down through the river valley and onto a wide, open area. With it, the breeze carried a new scent. Garrus inhaled, only needing a moment to identify the thin current of blood, urine, and feces—the stink of fear and death—that slipped beneath the spice and dust of the desert wind.
"Hold up, Tali." Sharp talons pinched his gut, twisting it slowly as he raised the light, shining it around the area. Every single instinct he developed over his cycles at C-Sec started screaming at once. A half-dozen metres to his left, the beam gleamed slickly off long strings of black streaked across the rock as if thrown from a heavily laden paint brush. Gesturing for Tali to stay where she was and keep an eye on their six, Garrus moved in, taut with dread, reaching out into the murky half-light.
A talon touched the end of one of the sly cords, then raised to his nostrils. Definitely dried blood. A metre away, another reflection caught his eye. White bubbles lined the cracks in the rock delineating a wet patch where some sort of fluid had seeped into the soil. He crouched to gather some on a talon. Geth, and spilled only a couple of hours before.
"Over here," Tali called softly, pointing to a dark patch of rock. "More blood." Bending down, she picked up a short, heavy branch. One end bore the same stain, a dark crimson in the light.
Garrus opened his mouth to say something … maybe to ask why quarians and geth would be clubbing one another in the middle of nowhere … maybe to ask something a little more intelligent, but then a sound rolled down on them from above. Short, guttural screams and roars tumbled down the slope like boulders, crashing into Garrus. Choked and unnatural … almost mechanical, they rocked him with the unspeakable agony and horror that propelled each one. He backed away as they grew in volume, tearing into his mind and heart with savage claws. For more than a minute, the being howled, unformed words tangled into the wails of a thousand nightmares.
Then silence fell, a clean cut from a keen-edged axe dragging a groaning sigh of relief from Garrus's throat. Relief turned to shame as he realized he'd been wishing for whomever it was to die, just so long as the horrific, blood-curdling shrieking ended.
"Garrus?" Tali called, her voice tiny and frightened. "That couldn't have been a person, could it? It had to be some sort of animal. No quarian … ."
He reached back, his eyes never leaving the top of the cliff. When she wrapped both hands around his talons, squeezing hard, he said, "Come on. It came from up there." He released her, hearing the unmistakable sound of her shotgun as she pulled it from the small of her back. Well, at least one of them was ready with the bullets. He still didn't feel certain enough of the situation to start discharging death.
Shining the flashlight ahead, he picked his way around the edge of the clearing and back onto the upward slope. Here and there, blood drips and spatters—both organic and synthetic—gleamed up at him from the rock and the prickly leaves of the cacti.
Just before they reached the top, they emerged onto a small ledge overlooking the clearing where they'd found the first blood and heard the terrible screams.
"It's a cave," Tali whispered, nudging Garrus with the butt of her shotgun. She nodded toward a dark tear in the fabric of the cliff. Edging that direction, she glanced back. "Want to take bets on something really horrible waiting for us in there?"
Not a bet he'd touch. He shook his head and turned to look her in the eye. "Don't open fire unless we're attacked, and then aim to disable rather than kill. Corpses can't answer questions." He took a couple of steps. "And turn on your flashlight." When her light blinked on, shining just behind his, he walked to the cave entrance.
Damn, he hated walking into anything blind. He called up his smuggler's room scanning program and pressed himself into cover against the rock, extending his arm into the space. It read as a short entrance tunnel that opened into a chamber that seemed fairly wide, maybe seven or eight metres. He signalled for Tali to stay along the right hand wall, and cover that side. A sharp nod answered him, and he headed in.
The tunnel darkened to pitch before it turned a sharp corner and light blinded him, shining in his eyes from large stand-mounted fixtures. Throwing up a hand, he found himself staring at absolute insanity. Two geth stood a couple of metres away, stumbling around to face the intruders. One reached behind it for a gun, bringing the weapon around slowly, fumbling with it a moment. A harsh cough from Tali's shotgun and it crumpled. The second one stared at them for a moment, then its light went out and it fell over as well.
"What in the name of the ancestors?" Tali asked, edging further into the space. She stopped three steps in and let out a garbled moan. "How?" She retched and spun away, one hand slapping against the wall to support her as she bent over, wrapping her other arm around her stomach.
Garrus understood her reaction. In the center of the space, under the lights, two quarian bodies lay on tables. At least, most of them was quarian. Tables next to the bodies held a wide array of surgical equipment and tools, all of them covered in blood. Once the shock broke, Garrus hurried forward to check if the two victims were alive. Neither was, and he counted it a mercy. Nearly a third of their bodies had been replaced with grafted on geth parts.
After a closer look, he suspected the first body of being their screamer. Their bottom jaw had been removed and replaced by tech … some sort of vocal synthesizer that could explain the horrible sounds. As well, his visor read the body temperature at normal. It couldn't have been dead for longer than a few minutes.
He winced away from the brutalized quarians. Who or what could have butchered them that way? Finally allowing himself to turn his back to the carnage, he looked down at the two now nonfunctional geth. Both were the new platforms. Their chassis were covered in blood, but … . In the corner next to the tables, a pile of partial geth platforms lay heaped in a jumbled pile. Garrus counted six. All of them new platforms. That accounted for eight of the missing platforms, but what of the runtimes?
What the hell had been going on in that cave?
Swallowing the urge to throw up, he reached up to his radio. He needed to get everything packaged up in stasis containers. Dr. Chakwas could autopsy the quarians, and they could take the geth back to Omega … try to figure out what the hell was going on.
"Tali," he said, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat. "Call back to Base One, get them to do a head count. We need to know who these people are."
Spirits, I could use your insight right now, Kahri.
Instead, he opened a channel to get everybody in motion.
"Neural activity rising. No, not so fast. Keep an eye on her sedative levels. Can't risk her going into shock."
"We're showing rapid eye movement." Delighted laughter and a single, resonating clap of hands. "She's dreaming. Damn it, she's actually dreaming."
"Jane Gwendolyn Shepard, what are you doing?"
The serving wench's reflection passed through the background of the full length mirror, but Jane did her best to ignore the interruption. After all, she was Captain Jane Shepard of the pirate ship Doom Bringer. Small things like nagging wenches meant nothing to the scourge of the seven seas. Besides, she'd just taken a fine beaver-felt tricorn off the captain of a british ship of the line. Running her fingertips along the brim, she tipped her head and gave herself a rakish smile. Stunning.
The brigand returned, hands on her hips, mouth set in the 'I'm two seconds from starting to yell' position. "You have studying to do, young lady." The wench turned away, but then spun back. "Is that my garden hat? What have you done to it?" She snatched the tricorn right off Shepard's head. "Staples? You stapled my hat?" The wench stormed off, taking the hat with her.
"Woman! Bring back that hat! It's the finest beaver!" When she received no reply, the fearsome buccaneer turned back to the mirror, admiring the rest of her regalia. Before her, skinny arms and legs clad in overalls and a striped t-shirt transformed into muscled limbs outfitted in velvet, leather, and gold braid. She dusted off the wide lapels of the velvet jacket. "Very nice."
Brandishing what appeared to be a feather duster to the uneducated eye, Shepard sliced the air , the polished steel of her cutlass gleaming, its hilt wrapped in gold wire and studded with jewels. "Do any of the rest of ye scurvy dogs dare to side with the woman? If so, step forward and prove your challenge against the skill of me blade." She laughed as the first mate stepped forward. "Ah, Williams, I knew ye wanted me ship. Too bad she'll never be yours!" Riposting, parrying, feinting with nimble grace, she fenced her opponent to the ground. With a decisive thrust, she stood over the vanquished mutineer. "Anyone else?"
"What are you doing?" The mutinous wench returned. "Put this all away where you found it and get to your studying."
"What am I doing?" Shepard asked and crowed. "Why ye scurvy, underhanded bilge rat. How dare ye question your captain? I be the pirate queen of the caribbean seas, the scourge of three navies, the true ruler of the oceans, and I'll never bow down to the likes of ye."
"You're the ... what have you done to my duster?" The woman snatched Shepard's cutlass from her hand. "Go! Study! Now!"
Chains wrapped around the pirate queen's arms and legs. "I swear to ye. I'll escape this bondage and wreak bloody vengeance upon ye all!"
The wench cuffed Shepard in the back of the head. "I've had about enough out of you today, pirate queen." A hand between her shoulder blades shoved Shepard out into the kitchen and into a chair. "Now, the asari transcendentalists … ."
The mutineers tied a massive book around Shepard's neck, weighing her down with yards of chain and a couple of really ugly sculptures. "So, it's to be the plank, is it?" she said, her voice a low growl.
"Paintings, now."
Letting out a long, defeated sigh, the pirate queen sank beneath the waves. "Fine." She looked down at the first page. "Time Bends, the third painting by Lanail F'aril," Shepard recited, keeping her voice as monotone as humanly possible. It amounted to a small protest, but a protest nonetheless. "The painting was praised as being one of the first non-religious depictions of the asari place in the cosmos."
"Value?"
"It is insured for 2.8 billion credits, but has no sale value as it is housed in the Thessian National Archives in Armali."
"Very good. Next painting."
Shepard turned the page in her mother's massive agent scrapbook. As she looked down at the painting, pain bloomed behind her eyes, as hot and fierce as if someone had poured molten steel into her skull. "Mom?" She clapped a hand over her forehead, the pain making her retch.
"What is it, Jane? Let's just get this over with. Why do you have to make everything so difficult?"
A tickle under her nose diverted Shepard's attention from her splitting head and rolling belly. When she reached up to scratch it, her hand came away bloody. "Mommy?"
"Put her all the way back under. Now! I told you to watch the sedative levels. You let her come too far up."
"She's fine. The levels will normalize."
"She's bleeding from her nose and ears, on what planet is that normal? Do what you're bloody told. Drop her back down. Now!"