Chapter Seven

Garrus Vakarian strolls down the corridor towards engineering. He would have liked to have been sent down on the mission with Shepard, but it's just as well he was left up here. He has business to attend to.

He pauses in front of the door. What will he say? What can he say? What do you say after two years spent moving on, two years trying to forget? He draws in a deep breath, and reaches out to activate the door, but it opens with a whoosh before he has the chance. Garrus is suddenly standing face to face with her, and he is instantly reminded of the last time he saw her, learned she had rejoined the Normandy's crew.

He had been sitting in the mess. She had walked down the hall, heading to the med-bay, and hadn't noticed him. It was enough. His defenses, walls constructed of apathy and defeatism, all came crashing down. He has been skirting around the main areas of the Normandy for the past two days, trying to avoid the inevitable. He should have known two years and thousands of light-years wouldn't have been enough to forget her.

Garrus clears his throat. "Tali..."

"Garrus." Her surprise at seeing him vanishes quickly, replaced by curt politeness. She steps by him into the hallway. "Excuse me."

Garrus turns to follow her. "Tali, I wanted, I want to-"

Tali stops, pivots to face him. "No you don't. We both know that. You feel some kind of misplaced guilt, and you want to clear your conscience. Just forget about it. It's fine." She turns away and continues down the hallway.

"No-"

She stops again, facing away from him. "No? No, it's not fine? If it was fine for two years, why is it suddenly not now?"

Garrus doesn't say anything. He can't seem to find his voice. Tali walks away without waiting for a reply. Garrus leans against the wall, and as the elevator door closes behind her he slides to the floor, feeling anything but fine.

A few minutes later Garrus trudges up the CIC corridor and nearly collides with Joker. He's no expert at reading human facial expressions, but the pilot seems worried.

"Garrus! Ah, can you come up to the cockpit, like, right now? It's really urgent."

"Fine. What is it?" Garrus doesn't feel like talking right now. To be honest, all he feels like doing is going to sleep for a couple thousand years, or killing everybody, or both.

Joker limps ahead of him. "The shuttle the team took planetside, it has a built in transmitter, so that we can pick up its location on the map, okay?"

"So?"

"So, it's not transmitting. We can't locate it, it's completely gone. Now that could just be an equipment failure, Kodiaks are only a step above total shit anyway, but I can't connect to the comm systems either."

"Well, if the transmitter died, wouldn't-"

Joker shakes his head. "No, they're separate. After Akuze the alliance mandated that beacons be entirely independent subsystems. That way even if the shuttle's incapacitated they still broadcast. We've lost all contact with the team. Even suit comms aren't transmitting."

Garrus tries not to think of the worst possible outcome. With Shepard, there are too many to count. "Is it possible to crash one of those things?"

Joker slips into his seat and brings up the keyboard. "Probably possible, but the autopilot is good enough that it won't happen by accident. And we know that's not what happened, or at least it's not what caused the comm blackout."

Garrus allows himself a moment of relief, but it is short-lived. "Why? What happened?"

"Well, if the shuttle crashed we would have got a peak from the beacon as soon as the craft destabilized. But there was no peak, just sudden break-off. I don't want to jump to-"

"Jamming us!" Garrus growls. "Someone's jamming us!"

Joker nods agreement. "That's what I was thinking. I don't want to go yelling about it though, everyone would panic!"

"But we've got to do something! We can't leave Shepard down there!"

"We've got the approximate area the jamming started. I'll take the Normandy down and start a visual sweep."

"You do that. Find where they are, and once we do, I'm going to kick some fucking ass."

Joker nods grimly. Whoever has hurt Shepard is going to pay.

…

Jack groans and rolls over. Her arm is sore, and why do her ribs feel like someone's been playing a drum solo on them? What is that noise? It's—a bird? What the hell...?

Suddenly her eyes snap open. Jack springs to her feet, reaching for her shotgun. "Oh shit!"

"Have a good sleep?" says someone on the other side of the clearing.

Jack whips around, but it's Shepard. He's sitting up on his elbow, and he looks awful, but at least he's conscious. She puts away the gun and saunters over to him. "You're one to talk. Apparently the middle of a battlefield seemed like the perfect place for a nap. We had to carry your ass all the way here."

Shepard laughs, then coughs roughly, gasping for air. "Ahh, crap. They got me pretty well, huh?"

"You were badly hurt, Shepard-Commander. We did the best we could."

Jack looks over her shoulder at Legion, sitting attentively nearby. "God, he's so creepy," she whispers. "How am I supposed to sleep with him watching me all night with that weird glowing eye?"

Shepard raises an eyebrow. "Really? I think it's sort of comforting."

Jack stares at him for a moment, then shakes her head in disdain. Obviously the injury caused him some kind of brain trauma.

Legion stands up and looks around the clearing. "Shepard-Commander. Can you walk?"

Shepard pushes himself upright with his left arm, gritting his teeth at the obvious pain. "Yes. Don't worry about me. What we need to do is find the signal jammer. The Normandy won't be able to find us unless we can deactivate it." He tries to straighten his back, stumbles, and catches himself on a tree. Jack can tell he's in agony, and doing his best to hide it. "Which way did we come in by?" he asks.

Jack points to the path they took from the crash site. "We crashed over there, not too far away."

Shepard nods. "Good. The crash site should be safe enough. We can track them from there."

"Should be safe enough?" says Jack disbelievingly.

"It's the last place they would look for us, trust me. Besides, we've got no chance of finding anything wandering around in here!"

Jack rolls her eyes, but follows him anyway. After all, there may still be someone there to shoot.

…

The crash site is a mess. Bits of shuttle and tree lie scattered over a charred and mangled field. Tree roots and shards of metal jut out of the ground at dangerous angles. A few wisps of smoke still rise from the battered corpse of the craft. As the squad picks their way through the debris Legion looks about for tracks of their unknown enemy. They're not hard to find; their aggressor has made no attempt to disguise their presence.

Shepard points to the ground by the edge of the crater. "Look at this: Two legs, not heavy enough for Krogan, not two-toed either. That rules out Quarians or Turians. They would have to be Humans or Batarians."

"What about Vorcha?" asks Jack. "This was supposed to be a Blood Pack base, wasn't it?"

Shepard shakes his head. "No, look at the posture. Even strides, uniform distance apart. Vorcha prints would be all over the place. And at this point, I don't believe anything from the briefing."

Legion notices something at the far end of the clearing, and points it out to Shepard.

The commander walks over to it and crouches down, wincing as his shoulder protests. "Hmmm. This impact wasn't part of the crash. Flattened grass, scorched around the edges, goes about a meter wide."

"There's another one over here," says Jack from a few feet away. "Could they be part of the same thing?"

"The same... Yes!," says Shepard, standing up quickly and instantly regretting it. "Ah! Fuck!"

Legion jumps forward, arm out to steady the commander, but he pushes it away.

"No!" Shepard's eyes flash for a split second, and then he looks down, gritting his teeth. " I mean, no. I'm fine."

Jack scowls at him. "You don't look fine."

Shepard returns the glare, voice hard. "I'll decide that. Chakwas can look at it when we get back. It is not serious." He turns back to the strange marks. "That's not important now. What is important is that these are landing marks from a hover craft! The stabilizing jets would have burnt the grass in a pattern like this! This is good news!"

"Why?" says Jack. "They could have come from hundreds of miles away, we'll never know."

Shepard starts striding away towards the trees, and the rest of the squad follows him. "That," he says. "Is where you're wrong, and where we struck lucky. They had us in a tractor beam. What does that tell you?"

"Technology of that level requires a large power source such as a mass effect reactor," replies Legion. "It must be part of a larger installment."

"Right! And due to the short range of the beam, it can't be far away."

"We still don't know what direction they came from," says Jack. "You can't tell that from the landing marks."

Shepard stops suddenly and looks upwards to the tops of the trees. Legion and Jack follow his gaze, not sure what they're looking for. "Actually," says Shepard. "We do know. Hover craft don't travel far from the ground, and these trees are pretty tall. The jets help us again. Look."

Now that Legion examines the forest canopy, it notices a patch of broken branches and displaced leaves. It follows the patch down, and sees that it is actually a trail leading into the distance. It's faint, but visible.

Shepard starts off into the forest, eyes fixed on the treetops. Legion walks after him. It switches the safety off of its rifle. No sense in being unprepared.