Chapter 4: A New Enemy

Jack ran around the next corner into the colony's main square only to find chaos. Prazza and the rest of the Quarian marines had crawled around the rooftops so that their sniper weapons would have an advantage against the LOKI's on the ground. However, the mechs could still get a few good angled shots on the Quarian's using a central water fountain for cover. This forced Prazza's team to retreat to an even higher scaffolding so that the LOKI's couldn't aim at them because of their restrictive arm joints. Jack, Jacob, and Miranda were going to sneak behind the engagement while Tali ran after Prazza from the rooftops.

He had to hand it to the Quarian, while he shouldn't of gone off on his own and stuck with the original plan, this was going surprisingly well. The LOKI's couldn't decide which group to focus on so they blindly started shooting in every direction they could. It was good practice for Jack, only occasionally having to duck behind cover, otherwise it was like his training days. He had always been a good shot at the shooting range but, two years frozen in cryo would make anyone a little rusty. These mechs certainly couldn't multitask as well as the Geth, probably because they were VI's instead of AI's. A programmer could only account for so many scenarios and apparently, an ambush wasn't one of them. A LOKI started running away from the battle forcing Jack to chase after it, turning his back on the Quarian's.

The mech ran down a side alley and Jack followed the best he could. With only one enemy to focus on though, The LOKI started firing back at him forcing Jack to scramble from cover to cover down the alley. Sure, his new armor could take a real beating but, with no helmet, one stray shot could kill him. The mech eventually ran into a dead end and like a chicken who lost it's head, the LOKI started running in circles unsure what to do with itself. Maybe he was wrong to fear these things if they ever got into the wrong hands control, right now they seemed incapable of performing their basic stated function, let alone a coup. Jack used his shotgun to tear the thing to pieces only to turn around and see Jacob and Miranda had followed him.

Jack looked at them, "You should've stayed in the courtyard with the Quarians. Not follow me back here, I think I can handle one LOKI."

Miranda had a short defensive tone, "Your our responsibility Shepard, not some Quarians who don't want us here and clearly have everything under control. We should be looking for Human evidence as to what happened here."

He was about to respond when Tali shouted into his omni tool, "Jack where are you?! Veetor reprogrammed a heavy mech, it's tearing Prazza's squad apart!"

Jack glared at Miranda but opened up the comm channel, "On our way back Tali, just hang on a little longer."

When they ran back to the main square, Jack saw the chaos had quickly turned into a blood bath. The problem was the 10' tall heavy mech which had a large machine gun attached to one hand and a rocket launcher attached to the other. It had thicker armor, probably similar to the stuff he was wearing, and a smaller optical sensor. It was most likely Cerberus' answer to the Geth Prime or a Krogan, and since neither of those were around to help, they were in trouble. The heavy mech had snuck up from the other direction of the Quarians and had knocked down the scaffolding they had been standing on sending them crashing to the ground. It's machine gun started spraying wildly into the debris hoping to kill any Quarian that had survived the fall.

Jack just started charging at the mech and shooting at it's back to get it's attention. The armor of the thing would certainly absorb his shotgun blasts but, Jack needed it to turn around and start fighting his team instead of the vulnerable Quarians. He slid into cover just short of the mech while it turned around and started shooting at him, chipping away at the metal railing he was hiding behind from the sheer amount of bullets coming at it. Jack tried getting directly underneath it so he could take a shot at the optical sensor, however, the shotgun blast just bounced off. Giving it a closer look, Jack saw the mech was somehow generating it's own biotic field around the sensor. How was anyone supposed to kill this thing?

Just as it's guns pointed down at him, ready to pull the trigger, Miranda grabbed him with her biotics and yanked him back to the cover she was hiding behind. Jack was about to say clumping together wasn't a good idea since that thing had a rocket launcher when sure enough, he heard the familiar thwump of a rocket leaving it's missle tube. However, instead of the rocket hitting them, he heard a large explosion where it had been. When the dust cleared, he saw Tali with her omni tool and realized she must've hacked the mech to shoot the rocket at itself. She then immediately ran to the scaffolding rubble to look for Quarian survivors.

He fished out all the medi-gel from his armor and ran towards her, "Tali, let me help you."

She shook her head sounding upset, "No, Quarian reinforcements will be here any minute and they won't play nice no matter what I say. This might be your only chance to go find Veetor and ask him what happened to your people. I'll keep them busy tending to the wounded for as long as I can, Jack. Go."

He nodded his head in thanks and left the medi-gel anyways. If he had just stayed in his position instead of chasing the LOKI, he could've warned Prazza and his team that the heavy mech was underneath them. Then again, if he had just let the mech go, it could've found a better position to shoot at them and killed someone. The real problem was Miranda and to a lesser extent Jacob had a beef with the Quarians strong enough to ignore common sense. He was going to have to tell The Illusive Man that his little darlings weren't completely following his orders as promised. Hopefully, they would be done with this arrangement before it became an even bigger problem. That's at least what Jack was hoping for as they entered the seemingly abandoned warehouse.

Miranda turned to him having a scolding tone, "I hope your prior relationships with the Quarians hasn't cost us the chance to find out what's going on here. Freedom's Progress was the type of opportunity that doesn't just crop up everyday."

He was about to snap on her when Jacob stepped in, "Easy Miranda, we still have a chance at finding out what's going on here. Veetor could be an eye witness to everything. Let's focus on finding him instead of yelling at each other right now."

A young Quarian voice could be heard in the shadows, "Monsters coming back, mechs will protect. Safe from swarms. Have to hide. No monsters. No swarms. No-no-no-no-no."

Jack used the flashlight feature on his omni tool to look for Veetor while keeping a friendly tone, "Veetor? If that's you, you can come out now. Your safe now from the monsters."

Veetor's voice got louder, "No Veetor, he's not here! Swarms can't find. Monsters coming. Have to hide. Swarms coming. Storm coming, storm of swarms. Mechs will protect. Have to hide. Have to hide."

The flashlight landed on a Quarian that couldn't be over fourteen curled up in a ball rocking back and forth, it was hard to not be heartbroken for him, "Veetor, my name is Jack Shepard, I'm a SPECTRE with the Citadel Council. I promise your safe now, you escaped. You can come out of there if you want."

Veetor kept rocking back and forth only showing one side of his body, "No escape, can't hide forever. Swarms will find you, monsters find you. No hope. No escape." He turned his helmet towards them, "Wait, your... not one of them. Your Human. They... they didn't find you?"

Miranda had a short business like tone, "Who didn't find us?"

Veetor's large, blue, child's visor looked up at her, "The... the monsters. The swarms. They took everyone."

Jack took a slow, careful, step closer, "We weren't here when it happened Veetor. Let me help you get out of there."

Veetor seemingly ignored him pulling up his omni tool, "Then you don't know, you didn't see. But I see everything."

A large image of the warehouse's window appeared on the wall causing Jacob to start pacing, "Looks like security footage. He must've pieced it together manually."

Jack couldn't help but agree as he watched with one eye and walked closer to Veetor. The images started bouncing around showing a stereotypical Christmas evening on Freedom's Progress. Children were running around with spaceships chasing each other around like they were in a battle. He could even see Veetor happily playing catch with a Human girl in one of the corners of the frame. Jack stopped his movement when the bottom of an angular looking insect crawled across the screen. His gut tensed when he saw it wasn't completely biological, with small purple metal tubes serving as legs and antenna. He was confident that was the same Reaper metal that had been attached to Sovereign and Saren.

Jacob blurted out, "What the hell was that?!"

Veetor spoke over the video as more and more insects started zipping into the frame, "The seeker swarms, no one can hide. The seekers find you. Freeze you."

He watched in pure horror as Veetor was right on the mark. The seekers, as he called them, started throwing themselves at any of the Humans around and stung them. It didn't matter if it was a small child or elderly man, every Human on the camera got stung. Once they were bit, an orange glowing energy field surrounded them and it was clear they couldn't move. Veetor was desperately pulling at the girls hand he had been playing with but she wouldn't budge, eventually making him fall over. He then ran, disappearing from the frame shortly before a new creature entered it. The thing had a brown carapace similar to the Turians but, the comparisons ended there. This creature had a flat, wide, head with four glowing yellow eyes. Each eye had two black pupils and it didn't appear to have a mouth.

The images made Jack's head spin and ache out of the blue. He remembered having a similar feeling on Therum when he needed to operate a Prothean console to rescue Liara. In that instance, Jack had been able to understand the Prothean language shortly after that experience. Was he going to learn something new this time? Suddenly, his vision went black in exchange for only seeing a large microchip. This was from the vision he saw on Eden Prime, why was he seeing this now? The microchip was getting covered in an orange goo Jack could only assume was Prothean blood. Then, an insect looking almost exactly identical to the one on the footage, except for the obvious Reaper additions, got stuck in the goo.

His vision returned quickly and Jack was back in the warehouse on Freedom's Progress. Even though they didn't know what those things were, Jack was unfortunately very certain they were connected to the Reapers. There just wasn't any other explanation as to why a portion of the vision from Eden Prime would replay in his mind like that. Had these things always been part of the Reaper's cycle of extinction and just now showed themselves? Maybe Sovereign was supposed to signal these things but because of the Citadel, that never happened? He wished Liara was here to help him make sense of all this. She could've maybe found a reference to these things in her Prothean research.

Apparently no time had passed because Veetor finished with, "Then the monsters take you away."

Miranda stared at the screen with her eyes wide and her mouth open, "My God, I think that's a Collector."

Jack rubbed his head as the pain slowly disappeared, "I've never heard of them before. Are they some kind of new advanced species?"

Jacob looked at him, "Sort of, nobody really knows much about them other than they came through the Omega-4 Mass Relay around the time you disappeared. People have never returned trying to go through it."

Jack frowned gritting his teeth for a moment out of fear, "Whatever they are, they have to be part of the Reapers plan. I just saw a piece of my Eden Prime vision again, those insects were there."

Miranda tapped her chin and he could almost see the wheels turning, "That doesn't surprise me, The Illusive Man is hardly ever wrong when he has a feeling about something. We'll need more evidence though before we can act. I just wonder how Veetor got away."

Veetor started shaking back and forth again, "Swarms didn't find me. Monsters didn't know I was here."

Miranda frowned obviously frustrated with the non answer, "The Collectors aren't known for being careless. Maybe his enviro-suit kept him from showing up on their sensors."

Jacob added with a shrug, "Or they were using technology specifically designed to detect Humans. Only Human colonies have been hit so far."

Veetor started repeating himself, "It's how they find you. Seeker clouds. Machines like tiny insects. They go everywhere. They find you. Then they sting you. Freeze you."

Miranda tapped a foot on the ground lost in thought, "Sounds like miniature probes, maybe. Find victims, then immobilize them with a stasis field or nerve toxin."

Veetor started getting louder, "The monsters took the people onto the ship, and then they left! The ship flew away, but they'll be back for me! No one escapes!"

Jacob frowned looking concerned for the boy, "I think that's probably all we're getting out of him, Commander."

Jack agreed and gently put a hand on his arm, "Thank you Veetor, you've been very helpful. I'm going to help you get home now ok? Other Quarians are going to take you home."

Veetor shook his head, "No, I can still help, I studied them. The monsters. The swarms. I recorded them with my omni tool, lots of readings. Electro-magnetic. Dark energy."

Jack saw it was true from his omni tool but, he also saw a wide gash of a suit puncture. No wonder he was in this state, not only did he have to deal with the emotional damage of watching all of his friends get taken away by those things in the past twenty four hours but, he must've had an infection too. Jack put his armored hand on as much of it as he could, he had a choice to make. Tali had said the Quarians arriving weren't going to mess around with anyone Cerberus related no matter what was said so, calling for them could get risky. However, if they just left Veetor here for the Quarians to eventually find, he would surely die from a medical infection.

The answer was an easy one for Jack as he used his omni tool, "Tali, get over here now, bring everyone, Veetor needs help!"

Miranda grabbed his arm turning off the omni tool, "What the hell are you doing Shepard? We need to get this data to The Illusive Man." She looked at Jacob, "Grab the Quarian and call the shuttle to come pick us up."

Jack would've punched her if his hands weren't busy containing the breach in the suit, "Absolutely not, Veetor is injured and just a child! He needs medical treatment from his own people, not an interrogation!"

She snapped back in anger, like she was talking to a child, "We won't hurt him! We just need to see if he knows anything else. He'll then be returned, unharmed."

Jacob just stared at her, "Miranda, The Illusive Man told us to follow Shepard's orders. We need to honor that."

She glared at him just as angry, "Do you honestly think the Quarians have enough responsibility to handle something this serious after their display outside?"

Jack was relieved when Tali's voice answered, "Prazza was an idiot, and he and his men paid for it. You're welcome to take whatever Veetor's omni-tool data is, but please. Just let me take him." She quickly replaced Jack's position, putting medi-gel on the gash.

Jack stood up, "Copying now, if you have a problem with this you can wait on the ship..." When Miranda actually left he said, "You know when this is over Tali, I could use your help, it is the Reapers."

Tali looked up at him sounding sad, "I want to Jack, but I can't. I've got a mission of my own, and it's too important for me to abandon, even for you. When it's over, and I'm still alive, we'll see what happens."

Jack raised an eyebrow, "What's the mission? Maybe I could help."

She looked over at Jacob, "I don't think Cerberus needs to hear about it, but it's in Geth space. That should tell you how important it is." Other Quarian voices could start to be heard at the entrance of the warehouse, making Tali whisper, "Go, I'll make something up. Good luck Jack."

He and Jacob slowly made there way back to the already running shuttle. They had a lead now, the Collectors.