Blackness, undifferentiated and absolute. There was no sense of depth or hint of form in the space beyond Shepard's eyes, no way of telling if she was looking out on a starless, intergalactic void, lying face-first against the inner wall of a sealed cargo crate, or just staring at the inside of her own eyelids. She gave the latter a try, just to be sure. There was a familiar sensation of movement, a slight pressure, but her ocular nerves were left unsatisfied. Shepard could have believed that she was still unconscious, trapped in the fog of another dream, but there was no dead world looming in front of her, no shades and shadowed tendrils, no running child. Restful sleep was as alien to her now as anything that she had seen on her first visit to the Citadel.
The Citadel.
Shepard let out a breath and was surprised to see a small, semi-circular ripple form in the curtain of darkness. She blinked a few more times and focused. There were indistinct shapes now, too, quite close by. A few more releases of breath revealed a stretch of liquid that stretched out beneath her eye, deeper, smoother darkness against the uneven mass of gray that was beginning to resolve from the gloom. Some of that fluid splashed into her mouth and Shepard realized that she was lying in it.
It was blood, human blood, and certainly not her own. She had tasted the lingering tang many times before, but it had always been warm, the result of a bitten tongue or cut lip. This was different, gut-wrenchingly so.
Shepard pushed up onto her arms and was rewarded by a lance of pain that originated from her left hip, at point near the base of her spine. The smell of ozone and the flash of a collapsing barrier came back to her, and memory of the Beam flooded in with it.
She attempted to reach up for her ear, but the muscles in her other arm rebelled and she was forced to roll onto her back. A gasp of agony escaped her, echoing off something high above before fading into the silence. The commander cringed reflexively at the sound and realized that the space around her lacked for ambient noise just as it lacked for light. She listened to her own labored breathing for a few moments before the strength required to try for the transceiver again finally returned.
"Hammer, this is Commander Shepard," she said. "Does anyone copy?"
Static.
She fingered a tiny node, manually cycling through presets.
"Garrus, what's your status? Anderson? Wrex, do you read?"
There was nothing but the soft buzz of dead air.
Shepard forced herself into a sitting position and probed her armor gingerly for the breach that she knew must be there. Pain from the pressure of her hand led to the spot quickly, two coin-sized breaches at the seam between the composite-reinforced plastic sheathes that covered her back and upper thigh. It didn't hurt as badly as it had the first time she had moved, an indication that her armor's automated trauma layer was already applying anesthetizing medigel to the damaged tissue. Manual application would be more thorough, but she couldn't do that without peeling off most of the suit, and wherever she was, it definitely wasn't the place.
After a few more steadying breaths, Shepard stood. Even that effort was an ordeal, and not just because every muscle in her body seemed to be on fire. The ground was far from the cleared, melted terrain that had surrounded the Beam – this surface was covered in a thick carpet of heavy, irregular shapes that slipped and gave in odd ways when she put her weight on them. She stepped down and tested the pool of blood with a boot. It was far deeper than she had expected, nearly up to her ankle, but there was solid metal beneath.
It couldn't be blood, then. Coolant or some other light mechanical fluid.
The conclusion seemed to clear away some of the shock-fog that was still slowing her thought processes and she forced herself to start analyzing the situation, disorientation or no. She had made it through the Beam, and there was only one destination at the end of that line. The first priority was to get her bearings – the Citadel was enormous, and she didn't have time to wander aimlessly through its bowels.
Shepard was standing in the cool liquid, feeling about for the weapon that Anderson had given her when her eyes finally adjusted enough to give definition to the gradations of darkness. She spotted the triangular stock of the rifle jutting from a jumbled pile of loose cables and grabbed hold it. The gun came free easily enough, still just a silhouette against deep shadows, but the movement upset one of the cables and an end flopped into the stuff pooled around her feet. The commander was too busy checking the rifle's ammunition and targeting displays to pay the loose end much heed, but when she toggled on the combat lamp, the beam was aimed directly at it.
A human hand lay there, fingers immersed up the knuckle in dark red liquid.
The commander's breathing tapered to nothing as slowly moved the beam upward, casting illumination over an arm, then a shoulder, then a whole tangle of limbs pressed between bodies, stacked one upon the next upon the next.
Dispassionate words echoed through her head, the prothean AI's last warning.
The Citadel is in position. The Reapers are preparing to complete their harvest of your species.
Corpses radiated out in every direction. They were everywhere, everything, arms and legs and pale faces that melded into a landscape of death unlike anything Shepard had ever seen or even imagined was possible. Mounds of unmoving humanity loomed up from the gloom wherever her eyes searched, some of them piled to her full height, others even higher. Ridges and peaks flowed into one another and in the few ragged paths between where bodies lay only one or two thick, dark streams and still, heavy pools choked out any sign of the floor beneath.
There was no strong odor, no obvious signs of putrefaction, no indication that any effort had been made to even remove their clothing. The faces staring out at her were as they had been when they were culled, as though the blood around her feet had pumped in their veins only minutes before. Some had the emotions of their last moments frozen into their flesh, mouths open in fear or rage or agony, but most were simply dead, blank ovals of white, who or whatever they had been before drained away with their bodily fluids.
Shepard fought down a spasm of nausea and forced herself to walk. Spotting a ravine that seemed wider than the other paths between the abattoir heaps, she moved into the deepest part of the blood flow, where outflung limbs and half-submerged human forms punctuated her progress only occasionally. Her boots sent up dark ripples with each forward step and from time to time a slip or misplaced foot would produce a splash that resounded far above the dead hills, giving Shepard the impression that the darkness disguised a space truly vast in scale. She tried to latch onto that thought, to refocus on the task at hand, but there was no way to fully block out the horror that pressed so close all around her.
An older, dark-skinned man in the tattered remnants of the business suit, dried streaks etched into his cheeks and under the corners of his mouth. A crumpled mass of four or five men and women in outdated combat fatigues, several with rents in their chests and backs that exposed ribs and ruined organs. A girl in a tiny green jumpsuit, spread out against the side of a mound like an abandoned doll.
Shepard seemed to be moving out of the darkest part of that hell. The heaps to either side were beginning to diminish in size, now clearly visible without the lamp and slightly tinged with ruddy light. There was the suggestion of a ceiling, girded at intervals by what looked like rectangular support struts, but she had no way of gauging its true distance or determine what was lighting it. The commander's pace quickened and she shut off her guide beam, alert for noise and movement amidst the remains. Then, finally, the dead dwindled away and Shepard found herself on the edge of a precipice.
For the second time in her life, Commander Shepard looked out upon the most subtle and terrible trap ever conceived, in her time or any other. The vastness that loomed beyond her perch was, in practical terms, still the Citadel, the lynchpin of the mass relay network, a forty-four kilometer technological marvel that had served as the seat of galactic civilization for eons beyond organic reckoning. But that wonder was a lie, an illusion that persisted only as long as its five ward arms remained open. They were closed now, locked together in an impenetrable, cylindrical shell just as they had been when Sovereign had appeared to rip the political and economic heart from the Galaxy's incorporated peoples and summon the rest of its kind from their darkspace hibernation. Sovereign had been destroyed before the Citadel's true functionality could be utilized, but the Reapers would not be thwarted. They had reclaimed their masterpiece.
The commander had to grapple with the sheer scale of the scene for a few moments before she could really begin to grasp it. Beyond a gulf of emptiness wide enough to encompass most of the armada Admiral Hackett had led through the Charon Relay, a thick band of black metal wrapped in a semi-circle across her entire field of vision. The deep depression that served as the central axis marked it as the Presidium, but there was no sign of its lavish parks, its lakes or its gleaming, white towers. There was no way to be sure at this distance, but the ring district's atmospheric dome also appeared to be gone, as though it had simply popped out of place and floated off, blowing away everything and everyone beneath in the process.
Shepard knew that the sight should have horrified her – fifteen million living souls had crowded the station when the Normandy had docked last, many of them refugees who had already lost their homeworlds – but it only left her feeling numb. There was only so much devastation a being could bear before either madness descended or it all melded into nightmarish background noise, abstract and impersonal. Shepard wasn't entirely convinced that the former wasn't happening to her, but insane or not, she still had a purpose.
She took a steadying breath, noting the fact that she hadn't asphyxiated and the localized atmospheric containment that implied, and scanned the rest of the vista. Tilting her head up, Shepard saw the great cathedral vault of the sealed wards, their inner surfaces charged with a crimson energy that cracked down the length of the arms in arcs the size of dreadnaughts. The commander was too far away to discern if the metropolis that had once filled the wards with the richness of hundreds of worlds was still intact, but there was no more indication of life there than in the ring. A careful downward glance revealed even less, just a maw of darkness that induced an immediate and intense feeling of vertigo.
There was only one place she could be.
The length of the Presidium's central anchoring pylon stretched out to Shepard's left and right. The dim light only around her to see around one hundred meters in either direction, but it was immediately apparent how much the Reaper's occupation had altered the structure. What had once been block after horizontal block of Council offices and high priority docking platforms had been drawn back into two parallel slabs of superstructure, and the space between put to use by its true masters.
Shepard steeled herself and turned back to face the landscape of lifeless human forms. This was what the Reapers wanted of humanity, millions of years of evolution, millennia of progress, all reduced to biomass.
"...command..."
The word forced its way through a sudden burst of static on her transceiver. Shepard's hand shot up to her ear and she increased the volume, then winced as the voice dissolved into an even louder hissing.
"This is Shepard receiving," she said. "I do not copy. Repeat, I do not copy."
"... moving into... too..."
It was Joker's voice. The commander cycled to a reserve communications frequency.
"Normandy, I'm getting a too much interference on your end. Repeat your last."
When the reply finally came, it wasn't Joker, and the static was slightly lessened.
"Is that you, Shepard?" Anderson's was distant and muffled, as though his transceiver had been knocked loose. "Thank God. We lost track of you during the last push."
"What's your status, Admiral? Do you have any fix on your location?"
"The damned Beam dumped us all across this..." His voice faded out for a moment. "...woke up near some kind of aperture, the thing's end point, I think, but the rest are scattered. I've got a few marines and we might have a fix on..." Another lapse. "...not many of them, but we've already taken casualties. We've got to get to the Tower before any others figure out we're here. Hold on. I think I see..."
Anderson was cut off again, but this time it wasn't static. The familiar report of a sniper rifle echoed through the transceiver, and Shepard heard it in her other ear a split-second later, a faint sound that resounded from her right, beyond the piled corpses.
"Anderson!"
The line was dead again. Shepard broke into a jog, then a run, ignoring the stabs of pain that shot up her back each time her boots impacted the floor. The area closest to the precipice was relatively clear of bodies and she took advantage, covering more distance than she had since waking by the time the next faint shot rang out.
Ahead, the bulk of an enormous, tiered disk emerged from the darkness, jutting out into the emptiness beyond the pylon. Shepard sucked in air and urged herself forward. Unless the Reapers had altered more than just the anchoring arm's substructure, that was the base of the Presidium Tower and their best hope of opening the Citadel for the Crucible. The monolithic construct was more than just the seat of the Council; all of the station's environmental and logistical controls were routed through operation centers embedded in its core, a fact Sovereign itself had exploited while attempting to open the gateway.
Something moved in Shepard's peripheral vision and she stopped short, her rifle at her shoulder and angled towards the activity before she could even process it source. A body was rolling slowly down the face of a particularly large mass, its pale flesh noticeably bruised and mottled. The commander scanned the upper slope of the mound, and, seeing nothing that could have disturbed the corpse, edged sideways around a tangle of limbs that spilled almost to the edge of the abyss, her rifle trained on the place where she had first spotted movement. The corpse came to a halt half a meter from her feet but she ignored it – a faint rustling from beyond a ridge-like pile of dead marines was audible now, jarring against the morbid silence. Shepard emptied her lungs, tensed, and swung around the pile.
A squat, aphid-like creature was shuffling backwards down the mass of bodies on four, thin legs, two similarly delicate arms locked onto the legs of a human twice its size.
"A keeper," Shepard whispered, her weapon dipping.
The six-limbed insectoid planted each of its four feet in gaps in the mass and pulled. The action seemed to require little effort on the keeper's part, but Shepard heard the popping of dislocated bones before the body finally slid free of the press. When it was removed from the mound and spread out on the floor directly in Shepard's path, the keeper flipped the corpse on its back and began to run slender, pointed fingers over its throat, preferencing a swollen area under the chin where three small holes had been punched. The caretaker construct went about its task with the same quick and economical movements that Shepard remembered from hundreds of brief encounters, as at ease as if it was fiddling with a faulty conduit or minding a maintenance interface.
Shepard walked past the keeper and stepped carefully over the body. As she anticipated, the creature's compound eyes never left its work. There was a smell of decay about the human form, and Shepard noted that its skin was bruised and mottled. She still had no idea how the Reapers kept their harvest so well preserved, but the process was clearly imperfect.
As she left the keeper behind and began to pick up speed again, the commander wondered if the keeper and the others like it were still immune to the Reaper's command signals, adapted over millions of years to obey the Citadel and the Citadel alone.
Several bursts of weapons fire echoed through the vast, open chamber, distinctly to Shepard's right. The enormity of the Tower's base was close enough now that it dominated a full third of the artificial horizon, and some sort of wall or bulkhead loomed ahead at the edge of her vision, ending the precipice abruptly. Shepard looked for a path through the human remains closer at hand and found a wide gulf between two waist-high heaps. The density of bodies decreased as she moved further from the place she had awoken, and with fewer heaps of extinguished human life to obstruct her vision, the commander was beginning to gauge the scope of the slaughterhouse. It seemed to span the full length and width of the kilometers-long pylon, enough space for millions of harvested bodies, even tens of millions. The populations of entire colony worlds would have only filled a corner of it.
The commander had turned her lamp on and was running at the full speed her wounded thigh would allow, no longer agitated by the sound of blood splashing against her boots, when she began to notice figures in Cerberus uniforms scattered amongst the dead. A handful showed signs of advanced physical deformity like those at the Beam, but most were still human in stature. Some lay with weapons discarded at their feet or clutched in stiff hands, and to the last, they were covered in obvious marks of physical trauma, fresh and grievous. Shepard slowed when she spotted another keeper crouched over the wiry frame of a woman in an active camouflage suit. The infiltrator's own composite blade was jammed through her stomach and out of her back, but the keeper seemed to be more interested in something pinned beneath the corpse. As Shepard watched, it shoved the human remains aside and pulled free the torso of a husk, the weave of exposed conduits and brittle gray skin unmistakable.
Something behind Shepard moved. She swung about with her trigger finger tensed and scanned the terrain with the gun's spotlight, but she saw only dark blood and dead flesh. The commander turned a full 360 degrees before she moved away from the keeper, conscious again of the wet noise she sent echoing into the darkness with each forward movement. Her light bounced across the irregular terrain, casting faces and contorted limbs in stark and hideous relief. After another minute of silence, the pool of illumination ran up against something large and metallic – a Cerberus mech collapsed on its side, reinforced cockpit screen smashed and smeared with black.
The pile of stacked bodies nearest Shepard exploded, a half-dozen humanoid deadweights sent into the air by a tremendous impact. One hit her square in the chest and sent her rifle skittering away, its beam carving an erratic path through the darkness as it tumbled. Shepard found herself pinned against a rubbery mound, the mass of the figure that had impacted her now draped across her waist. She grabbed two handfuls of sodden fabric and pushed, finding the corpse far heavier than she would have expected.
Her rifle had landed on the floor several meters to the right and its lamp illuminated a long stretch of pooled blood. The body slid down to her knees and Shepard looked up at the light, in time to see a large shape break the beam and send red ripples down the rest of its course. Adrenaline pulsed and the commander kicked at the corpse with both legs. It dropped away with a dull thud and Shepard was up.
The omnitool on Shepard's wrist flashed to life and the blackness receded by a few paces. A humanoid shape loomed in front of her, bulging and indistinct in the soft, golden light. It surged forward with speed that belied its size, both arms hurtling downward like meteors, but the commander was already moving, wrapped in a head-over-heels dive that cleared her of the mound. Behind, there was another heavy concussion, the sound of pulping flesh and cracking bone. She buried her knee in the back of another of the bodies dislodged by the first impact and spun back, her pistol raised in both hands. The shape at the very edge of the omnitool's luminance, at least two meters tall and bulky. A spasm shook a hunk of meat free from the bristle of spikes that should have been one of the thing's hands and it jerked its face towards her.
Shepard saw the rounded black and gray of a Cerberus combat helmet hanging loose between corded shoulders, its neck seals crushed and cracked as though something had tried and failed to rip it away, and then the hulk was on her again. Four rounds punched into its center mass and the fifth shattered the remains of the helmet, revealing blue-gray eyes and a stiff, toothless mouth, edges peeled back into the cruel likeness of a grin. A nova of agony erupted from her right shoulder and she was falling, the sidearm gone. She hit the floor with most of the attacker's weight bearing down on her chest. The impact blinded her, filled her head with a roaring tide. Shepard couldn't breathe or move or think, felt a gasping scream rip out of her throat in a spatter of blood.
The crushing mass shifted and drew back. Shepard forced her eyes open and caught a glimpse of bare bone and studded metal through a field of field of starbursts and swimming motes. It was enough.
She squeezed her left hand and felt the heat flash of the omnitool's microfabricator blazing to life. The fist arced upward and she felt it impact the creature's jaw. A long, angular shard of molten metal glowed white hot against the gloom, its end buried in the side of a once-human skull. The face, half a meter from her own, sagged and for a moment something like relief flickered across its metal-etched features. Then the flash-forged blade shattered and the dark swallowed them up once again. Dead weight pressed Shepard back against the floor and any reserves she had left drained away.
Shepard had no way of knowing how long she lay there on the edge of consciousness, an island of pain in the sea of darkness. A voice somewhere in that desolation screamed at her, demanded that she stay awake, that she work herself free, but it was all she could do to keep air moving through her lungs. The ruined flesh on top of her was heavy, impossibly heavy, and her ribs pushed to the point of breaking with each inhalation.
With effort, she opened an eye and found a faint simmering of light at the edge of her vision.
The lamp.
She tried to turn her head towards it, but the movement sent a blast of agony from her shoulder up into her brain and she was teetering on the brink of cold oblivion again. The voice screamed against the encroaching clouds of thoughtlessness and she reached out, desperate for something to anchor her against the pain. To her surprise, the hand lying limp and aching to her left responded. It struggled under the bulk of the Cerberus creature, wedged between armor composite and sticky, wet metal. Straining, Shepard turn the flat of her palm upward and shoved.
The rending pain returned but this time she did not let it stop her. Wrist and arm buckled under the strain and still she pushed. The weight bore down on her, immovable, and still she pushed.
There was movement around her, a faint rustle. Shepard barely comprehended it, knew that if she stopped pushing she would never start again.
Something brushed lightly against her hair, and the hulk began to shift. Shepard gasped and bent what of her own weight she could against it. Her left shoulder rebelled against the exertion, but she did not relent, and with a shuddering crash, she was free.
Shepard lay back on the blood-slick surface, letting her chest rise and fall free for a time, unable to do anything but listen to her own beating heart and the rasp of air escaping her lips. A delicate shuffling sound filled the air under her heavy breathing, and as her lungs fell back into a normal rhythm, she recognized it. One-handed, she reengaged her omnitool's holographic display and urged the hand up a few centimeters.
Three keepers were clustered around the Cerberus creature, peeling back its ill-fitting armor and testing the corrupted flesh underneath with quick jabs of their slender fingers. Once they were satisfied, two of the constructs grasped the thing by its legs and began to drag it off into the gloom, shifting the mass of flesh and synthetics like it was a sack of used filaments. The third lingered for a moment, scanning the surrounding corpses with its huge, jet eyes. It stopped on her last and she bent towards it laboriously, trying to meet its gaze.
"Thanks."
The keeper disappeared after its companions, giving no sign that had even heard the word.
Shepard sank back onto her shoulder blades, wincing. She knew that the keepers were little more than organic, ambulatory omnitools, their behaviors completely defined by whatever presets and protocols that the Reapers had imprinted on them when they were first set to maintain the Citadel, but Shepard was finding it harder and harder to think of machines as simple instruments. If nothing else, the keepers had deemed that her biomass was still adequate, and that was something.
Jack was right, Shepard thought as unconsciousness finally claimed her. I've got a talent for making strange friends.
The scent of leather and citrus drew Shepard from a dream of shadows and walking death.
She felt strong, armored arms under her back and her legs and the swinging rhythm of another's stride. Someone was carrying her.
"Where did you find her?"
Shepard felt the grating of a broken rib each time she drew in breath, and the back of her thigh still burned from its wound, but the thought-rending pain of her right shoulder was all but gone, replaced by a deep numbness that stretched to the tips of her fingers. She tried to flex the muscles of the arm, just to make sure that the limb was still there, and was rewarded by a dull ache that told her it was. Still, there was no movement.
"Two hundred meters into the chamber. I wouldn't have seen her at all if her rifle's combat light hadn't been on when she dropped it. I put some medigel on the shoulder to seal it, but... did a medic make it up?"
"No, I'm sorry. Come on, you can set her down in that bay over there. I'll see what I can do about finding a trauma pack."
The musky smell tickled at Shepard's nose again and she opened her eyes. A turian face was less than a meter from hers, his skin gray in the dim light. She took in the visage for a moment before speaking, the coarse skin of the scar that ran up his jaw and mandible, the deep blue and simple geometry of his face paint, the ocular headset that he wore like he had been born with it.
"You're sweating, Garrus," she said. "Busy day?"
Garrus jerked to a halt and Shepard felt her back begin to slip out from between his arms before he caught himself.
"Shepard! I didn't... are you..." Garrus' mandibles flattened against his face and his back straightened, the turian-stoic-discipline posture he put on when he was startled, but the relief in his tone was impossible to disguise. "I mean... this is the second time I've had to carry you off of a battlefield today, Shepard. Anymore and they'll have to deliver my medals to me with a forklift."
"I see you're still just using me to advance your career, Vakarian."
Shepard ran her left hand along Garrus' crest and then grabbed the raised rim that ran between the shoulder plates of his armor.
"Now, let me down."
"I'm not sure if that's a good idea," Garrus said quickly, but the commander was already sliding free of his arms. There was pain when her feet hit the ground, but the sudden feeling of vertigo that overwhelmed her for a moment was far worse, and she was forced to cling to the turian's side as the world righted itself.
"I'm all right. Just give me a moment."
They were standing in some kind of open courtyard, at least a hundred meters in width but given the feel of a canyon by the immensity of its surroundings. It was bordered to one side by the slaughterhouse and the high-ceilinged chamber that contained it; even from a distance, darkness and oppressive scale made the dimensions of each difficult to grasp. A sheer cliff of smooth, gray metal formed the opposing boundary, so tall that looking up at it wracked Shepard with another wave of disorientation. Rather than sky, the distant, angry glow of the Citadel's arms filled the space above, casting everything beneath in dusky red.
An assortment of shuttles and light troop carriers were clustered in a semi-circle against the base of the cliff, a structure that Shepard knew could only be Presidium Tower. Several of the ships arranged around her were smashed and melted beyond recognition, but the others still seemed to be relatively intact, their access hatches open to reveal empty benches and disengaged cargo clamps. The hull of each was neutral, white or black painted metal, unadorned save for bullet pockmarks and energy scarring, but Shepard knew Cerberus hardware when she saw it. There were the bodies, too, scattered at the outskirts of the landing zone, Cerberus combat suits intermingled with the dark carapace of husks and other Reaper monstrosities.
Anderson and a handful of Alliance soldiers in damaged and blood-stained gear emerged from behind the largest transport, a sleek, multi-tiered vessel parked horizontally against the face of the Tower.
"I was just about to tuck you in, Shepard," the admiral said. He was smiling, but his sagging brow and hard-set jaw were far from cheerful. "Should you be on your feet? You look more than a little beaten up."
Shepard forced herself to let go of Garrus and bit the inside of her lip as muscles from neck to toe screamed in protest.
"No worse than you, Admiral. I can hold it together until we evac." She inclined her head towards the nearest shuttle. "It looks like the Illusive Man was even kind enough to provide us with our own way out, assuming we can get those arms open."
Anderson nodded.
"Some of them might still be space-worthy, but we haven't had time to do a thorough check, just enough to be sure they're all clear. This explains where all those things at the Beam came from, but I'm still not sure why they're here at all. Didn't you say that Cerberus bastard gave himself up to the Reapers when he let them in on the Crucible?"
"I don't think just throwing up his hands and becoming a Reaper plaything was ever his plan," Shepard said. "He wasn't exactly a mood to lay out the specifics the last time we spoke. Whatever's going on, it's got the Reapers off-balance."
A small, weary band was gathering around them. Humans made up most of it, men and women with dinted helmets cradled in their arms and deep shadows under their eyes, but a salarian stood with them as well, supporting his weight on one of the long, spindly anti-personnel rifles favored by the Special Tasks Group. A krogan crouched on the other side of the group, a raw, jagged rent where his right eye used to be, and a male quarian stood next to him, arms crossed. They were eleven, all told, and none of them were in fighting shape.
"We're it," Anderson said. "Everyone who made it through the Beam and out of that place. I stayed at the exit aperture as long as I could for reinforcements, but there were more hostiles in the vicinity. Not many, but we had to break and make for the objective when we started taking casualties."
"Enemy forces are spread pretty thin up here," Garrus said, handing her one of his sidearms. She took it with her left and sighted along its barrel one-handed. "I ran into few after I came to somewhere in there, but they were too busy fighting other husks to take much notice. Hopefully, Sword's got the same kind of competition. My comms have been spotty since the Beam."
Shepard nodded and slipped the pistol into her hip holster.
"We've got to assume Hackett's still waiting to bring Crucible in. Admiral, do we have a way into the Tower?"
"The Illusive Man covered that, too," Anderson said. "Come on, I'll show you."
He gestured to a pair of marines and they fell in beside him as he made for the largest transport. Shepard hung back for a moment.
"Anyone short on ammo? The Reapers haven't been able to stop us from getting this far, and I'm not about to have someone's empty clip do the job for them."
There were a few shaken heads and murmurs, and several of the soldiers exchanged thermal charges and grenades. Shepard heard no tense banter, no cursing or praying or pats on the back, no indication that anything was keeping them going but ingrained discipline and survival instinct. Harbinger and what had lain beyond the Beam would have pushed anyone to the breaking point. There wasn't much a few words could do to lessen that weight, but she had to try.
"I don't have to tell you who we've lost today. There's no forgetting them, and I'd never ask any of you to try, even for a moment. All I want you to do is remember that there are still people fighting down on Earth, and on Sur'Kesh, and on Tuchanka. On every world that the Reapers haven't consumed, there is still life. We are not alone. And when this day is through, if we see this thing to the end, there won't be anything left to fight."
There was no cheering or applause, and Shepard hadn't expected any, but a few of the ragged band had pulled out of their own heads enough to look her in the eyes as she spoke. It was something.
She nodded at Garrus and he inclined his head in response.
"All right, let's get some guns in cover." Garrus broke from the circle and began pointing at Cerberus craft. "There, there, and there. I want a sniper covering the main approaches, and explosives on hand by that wreck, the furthest one out. If they come hard, they'll have to clear that first."
Shepard caught up with Anderson as he was rounding the transport. Like the other ships, its cargo doors were wide open, and by the size and configuration of the bay within, it had offloaded more than just troops.
"From the blast marks, Cerberus had to force its way in," Anderson said, indicating to a point at the base of the artificial cliff. "Somehow, I doubt that the Reapers would have needed to bother."
Sheltered to one side by the transport's forward compartment, a section of the wall was blackened and melted, the flooring around it strewn with rubble. A square hole yawned at the center of the destruction, three meters by three meters. It looked like first part of the space within the breach had been carved out of solid metal with great effort, but after a few paces it opened up into a cleaner and more orderly chamber, lit by strings of excavation lights.
The four of them moved inside slowly, weapons in hand and combat lamps engaged, even with the guide lights ahead.
"I take it you haven't had time to check this place for booby traps or a rear guard?" Shepard said.
"Just a quick scan," Anderson replied. "We'll just have to hope that the Illusive Man was in as much of a hurry as we are, wherever he was headed."
The inner chamber was strangely mundane given the carnage and ancient vastness just outside. A path had been cleared through the middle of the room for whatever Cerberus had moved from the transport and there were holes blown in two of its walls, but otherwise the space was a standard office area, from the rows of data terminals and padded chairs to the automated coffee dispenser that lay overturned in one corner. There were no bodies, but that wasn't surprising. Even though the station had been taken utterly by surprise, the Council would have had time to issue an alert and evacuate non-essential personnel to hardened shelters... collection points the Reapers had likely built into the Citadel explicitly for that purpose.
Shepard nudged a discarded datapad with her foot and her thoughts wandered to Commander Bailey and the other C-Sec officers she knew, saw their faces on bodies buried deep the mounds of prepared flesh or drifting frozen in hard vacuum. Armando, at least, would have died with a gun in his hand.
"I guess the Reapers didn't have much time to finish purging the place," Anderson said as he eyed the cabinets and blank viewscreens that lined the walls.
"I'm not sure that they reached this part of the station at all," Shepard replied, kicking the datapad away. "It's a big tower. Let's see where we are."
The office opened into a wide, two-storied hallway that might have evoked an outdoor plaza if it hadn't been so dark and devoid of life. More strings of portable illuminators lit the right-hand length of the corridor at intervals, and Shepard could make out the outlines of dozens of other doors, some of them marked with compact, precise lettering in a number of languages. As they approached the first light, she could make out a few signs in English: Maintenance Area, No Entry Without Authorization, Observation Suite 008-24.
"I should be able to pull a location from that, Commander." One of the marines accessed the station schematics that had been loaded onto the omnitools of every member of Hammer. "Wait one. All right, looks like we're in one of the main operations areas. There's a control hub near the center of the level, straight two hundred meters and then another two hundred to the left."
"That hub is plugged directly into the Citadel's primary systems," Anderson said. "If we can't open the arms there, we won't be able to do it anywhere."
"And it's a good bet that that's where Cerberus was headed." Shepard tried to move her right arm, grimaced, and activated her transceiver with her left. "Garrus, do you read me? We've got a fix on the target and a probable on the Illusive Man. Get everyone into the Tower. We might need every gun for this one."
There was no response. When a repeat transmission yielded the same result, Shepard turned to one of their escorts and was about to send him back to the landing zone when a flurry of muffled sounds echoed down the hallway from the direction of the tunnel.
Shepard's ear crackled.
"Garrus, what's your status?" she shouted over the interference.
"Contact! Again, we've got contact! Husks, cannibals, definitely not Cerberus this time! They aren't..." The turian faded out briefly. "... a lot of them! We can hold this position for now, but they'll be all over us if we let go of the kill zone. Find that control room and get the Citadel unlocked, Shepard! We'll keep them off your back as long as we can!"
Again, his voice dissolved into incoherent background noise. A persistent patter of gunfire emanated from the blasted office door, layered over other sounds, baleful and animalistic.
Shepard's hand dropped from her ear and she stared back down the corridor for a few moments. She knew Garrus was making the right choice, and that the landing area was a more defensible position than others that he had held before, but still...
The eyes of the marines were on her back, and she could feel their uncertainty grow with each second that passed. Even Anderson was silent, waiting on her lead. Fist clenched, the commander turned and began to walk towards the next bubble of light. She felt strength returning to her legs as the others moved to match her pace, and soon all of them wre running. The admiral behind quickly, his limp adding a dissonance to their pounding footfalls, but he made no complaint and they reached the fork in the hallway more quickly than Shepard would have believed possible.
The rumble of an explosion rippled after them as they were turning, but they had come too far to even consider turning back. The new passage was nearly as wide and high as the main one, but it had only the single level and rose at gradual intervals, broad steps that angled towards a distant point of light. The illuminators were gone and Shepard had to rely on the soldiers flanking her to highlight the steps as they surged forward. The walls to either side closed in on them, marked by fewer and fewer side passages and doorways, and the commander realized that an indoctrinated trooper with the aim of a hanar could probably take them out with little trouble if he was positioned at the end of the hallway.
Light filled Shepard's field of vision, but no bullets flew in their direction, no garbled voices called for backup or screamed with half-sentient rage. Two figures resolved against the glare and Shepard trained her pistol on the closest, but she saw immediately that neither was moving. Both were clad in white and black assault gear and slumped against opposite walls, their bulky combat shields and heavy repeaters discarded some distance away, as though they had been thrown. Neither man was bloated like the one that had nearly crushed her, but glowing cables and organic wiring boiled from breaches in their face plates and under their arms like wet roots. The tendrils seemed to be growing into the walls and floor, a carpet of biomechanical ivy that already covered much of the corridor's final stretch. Shepard slowed as she passed the motionless things, careful not touch the growth.
As the commander's eyes adjusted to the brightness, a faint and sourceless feeling of disorientation began to tug at the back of her skull.
The hub was a circular chamber more than twice the diameter of the Normandy's war room. Little remained of the facility that Council personnel had operated there for thousands of years; most of the floor tiling had been ripped out and dumped in heaps against the encircling wall, smashed ceramic and sheet metal mingled with whole banks of data displays and shattered screens. Positioned amidst the wreckage, four huge floodlights converged on the center of the room, where a tangled mass of machinery taller than a human being sprawled, organic form composed of artificial components. Shepard had enough time to take in several thick bundles of cabling fused to the exposed understructure of the hub, an expanse of the same stark, pale material that covered the Tower's edifice. Then, another knot of conduits shifted and she saw the human being attached to the end of it.
"You never fail to impress, Shepard."
The Illusive Man turned from an array of flickering projections and appraised the commander with eyes that shone almost as brightly as the floodlights trained on the enormous device. His ocular prosthetics had been removed or simply transformed, replaced by featureless globes of electric blue, and filaments of black, carbon-infused skin etched their way horizontally from the corners of his eyes. Two suspended cables sprouted from between his shoulder blades and entwined behind his head before arcing back into the mass of networked mechanisms. The tubes glistened with something wet and repositioned with wide, jerking movements when the Illusive Man took a step forward and crossed his arms in front of his chest.
"I never expected that Leng would defeat you a second time, but to reach me here? You set back my timetable again and again, and still I underestimated your resolve. Oh, well. A final error in judgment, and one that won't cost me."
"That's something else your wrong about," Shepard said. "There's no rationalizing or forgiving the things you've done, and I'm going to make sure you answer for them. Right here, right now."
There were more dead Cerberus agents bonded to the floor around the machine, little more than metallic vines coiling from ragged engineering uniforms.
The Illusive Man smiled, utterly unfazed by the threat.
"Now that I think of it, I'm quite glad that you've come. I know that you've never appreciated my goal for what it truly is, Shepard, but I've always appreciated yours. You've fought for humanity's survival from the moment I brought you back from the dead, and you deserve to see our triumph firsthand."
"How is humanity served by this?" Shepard moved forward and aimed her pistol directly at the Illusive Man's forehead. "Tell me! You know better than anyone how many people were killed on Horizon. You knew what would happen if the Reapers learned that we had discovered the Catalyst's location, and you brought them down on the Citadel anyways. Millions of humans have been slaughtered by your order, and billions more may die because of what you've done!"
The smile faded from the Illusive Man's lips, but he didn't so much as glance at the gun.
"Do you think I enjoy watching our people die, Shepard? Even you can't be that blind. Yes, I've made sacrifices. People have died because of me, innocent people, too many people. But I did it so the rest of humanity wouldn't follow them into that fate, or a worse one. What is the lesson of the protheans, Shepard? The rachnai? The krogan? Civilizations fall, and their populations are either enslaved or exterminated. It's happened time and time again, and not just because of the Reapers. You've sacrificed people to save ships and planets, Commander. How many more would you give up to save our entire species, for all time?"
Anderson stepped up behind Shepard.
"We don't have time for this, Commander. The Crucible can't wait."
"Ah yes, the Crucible." The Illusive Man inclined his head toward Anderson. "Something else I'm grateful for. You saved me the trouble of hunting it down, or having to construct my own. The plan couldn't be completed without it."
"Enough!" Anderson raised his rifle to his shoulder. "Men, rip him out of that thing. Blow him out of it if you have to."
The Illusive Man simply smiled again, and there was something in his expression that made Shepard turn towards the marines.
One was on his knees, a hand spread across the face of his helmet as though he was trying to keep something from escaping it. The other stood with his face bare, staring blank-eyed at a point on the ceiling as he mouthed a single word over and over again. The muzzle of his rifle was flush against the kneeling man's head. As Shepard watched, the helmeted marine raised his own weapon one-handed and pressed it to his companion's stomach.
"I won't let it," he said, frozen in place save for his firing arm. "I won't let it in. I won't."
Shepard tried to move forward, could see herself knocking one of the men to the floor, could feel herself wrenching the weapon from the other man, disarming him with her right hand.
Her right hand.
She focused on the arm, felt the dull ache and unresponsive muscle, and then she was standing where she had been an instant before, still transfixed by the marines. Anderson was motionless as well, his rifle dipping in a crystallized moment of confusion.
"What do you..."
Two simultaneous gunshots and the hiss of overloaded kinetic barriers drowned out Anderson's shout. The kneeling marine collapsed face first onto the floor plating, but the other teetered for a moment before he began to fall, his mouth still working. Shepard was moving before he hit the floor, actually moving, and she felt herself fire a round straight into the Illusive Man's sneering mouth, saw the splatter and the dimming the dimming of his eyes.
Stop!
She blinked and the world realigned. Anderson was in front of her now, and her pistol was leveled at his forehead. He stared past the weapon as though he hadn't fully processed it, utterly still, his face contorted with confusion and half-formed rage. Shepard could feel her trigger finger tensed against the metal firing tab, the barest pressure from activation.
"The lives lost at the Sanctuary research facility were not spent for my amusement," the Illusive Man said, his voice sharp with condescension. "Unlocking the Reaper control signal was the overriding objective, of course, but Mr. Lawson's experiments also yielded a tremendous amount of information on the processes involved in indoctrination. There's nothing mystical about the means by which the Reapers subvert organic minds, not even anything telepathic. It's accomplished through the precise and subtle modulation of ultrasonic frequencies. Sound, Shepard, sound is all we need to bend any and every alien species to our will."
The Illusive Man strolled into Shepard's field of vision and passed between Anderson and the gun, just centimeters from its muzzle. The tubes bobbed after him like the strings of some macabre marionette.
"Of course, this sort of control, so rapid and complete, is well beyond anything I ever thought was possible before coming to this structure. The very material in the walls here acts as some sort of resonator, amplifying and focusing my indoctrination protocols. What normally requires days or weeks of constant exposure to Reaper artifacts I can accomplish in minutes, and that's just the start of it! The indoctrination frequencies transmitted within the tower accelerate the rate of biosynthetic augmentation nearly a thousandfold, facilitating the assimilation of the external mass necessary to flash-fabricate superior soldiers from organics with only light Reaper modifications. The troopers I set to guard the Beam and the tower perimeter were only dry runs. Think what we, all humans, could become when this technology is fully researched and implemented!"
Even though the rest of her body was lost to her, Shepard found that she could speak with only minimal effort. He wanted to hear what she had to say.
"And what about the dry runs back in the hallway and around our feet? Your soldiers and your scientists? Were they not human enough for this evolution of yours?"
The shadow of something flickered across the Illusive Man's face, but it was gone again by the time he opened his mouth to respond.
"The transformation process is... intense, and I didn't adapt to my own implantation quickly enough to moderate it for the first effected individuals. There will be plenty of time to perfect application of the resonance when the control signal has finished subjugating the Reapers in this system. That's the priority right now."
"Can't you see what you're doing?" Shepard struggled to keep her tone calm. "Those monsters out there? They aren't human anymore. How is what you did to them, what you're doing to us right now, any different from what Harbinger and the rest did to Earth? Are you going to start harvesting human biomass, too?"
The burning orbs that had once been eyes narrowed behind blackened lids.
"Reasoning with you was always pointless. Very well. I'll show you first-hand what I've done for humanity, and you will understand."
"And if I don't?"
"You will, Shepard. Even your fortress of self-righteousness can't withstand the power of this place if I turn it fully against you."
A spasm shook Anderson and his mouth wrenched open, agony raging behind his eyes. The words that belted from his throat were guttural and half-formed, barely recognizable as his own.
"Don't. Let. Him. Change. You."
The Illusive Man glanced at him and stepped clear of Shepard's line of fire.
"I think the admiral had best join his men. This demonstration is just for the two of us."
Shepard's finger depressed and a wave of light and heat exploded across Anderson's chest. He remained absolutely still as his skin-tight shield flickered about his upper body, then faded from visual spectrum. The second shot sent sparks racing across skin and cloth as the kinetic barrier overloaded, and this time Anderson staggered back half a step from the impact. His chin jerked up, but those eyes were still locked on hers.
No!
Shepard felt fire rip down her back, as though her spinal column had ignited and burst through her skin. An intense feeling of generalized movement and an even more intense burst of pain overwhelmed her senses, and for an instant, she was certain that the Illusive Man had tired of the puppet show and transmitted some sort of organic kill code. But her vision cleared rather than darkening, and she saw that Anderson was still standing in front of her, blood beginning to well from a spot on his waist. The gun, still clutched in her left hand, was angled down from where she had aimed it for the first two shots, even though she could not remember it moving.
"That shouldn't be..."
The Illusive Man caught himself quickly, but Shepard heard something in those words she had never encountered in all of their previous interactions.
Doubt.
The Illusive Man had shown her annoyance and curiosity, pride and anger, but his air of smug self-assurance had never before wavered.
He was looking at her, probing deep with those spheres of light, and she began to wonder what they were actually seeing.
"It must be the prothean cipher. Its impact on your neurochemistry was never fully accounted for." He turned his head towards the center of the chamber and inclined his head slightly, considering. "All right, Shepard. The admiral can join us for whatever amount of time you've left him with. Now, if you'll allow me a moment, the control signal has almost completed its cycle and we need to be in position for the final transmission burst."
Shepard felt herself toss the pistol away and then her body was hers again. The sudden surge of reactivity sent her sprawling face first onto the floor. She let the normal flow of sensation and response realign in her mind until her heartbeat began to slow, testing her extremities just to make sure that they were actually hers and relishing the fresh waves of agony radiating from her wounds.
When she finally looked up, the Illusive Man was hunched over his holographic displays, his back conduits swaying with each small movement. Anderson lay next to her, hunched over a slow-spreading pool of blood. His eyes were open and one arm was outstretched. Biting back the pain, Shepard took his hand in hers.
"I... expected better aim than that from you," he whispered.
Shepard edged closer and pulled herself into a sitting position.
"How bad is it?"
"Didn't hit anything vital, I think." He tried to fight back a cough and failed. "Just need to get some pressure on it to stop the bleeding."
Shepard twisted around to get at one of her hip compartments and dug out her last trauma patch. She took an end in her teeth and slowly guided the admiral onto his back. The bullet had clipped the lower edge of his chest plate and buried itself just under his ribcage, punching easily through the unshielded fabric of his combat vest. One-handed, Shepard ripped a hole in the bloody weave and pressed the patch against the seeping puncture beneath, applying as much pressure as she dared. Anderson gasped and clenched his hands into fists, but Shepard maintained contact for a full twenty-count. If the patch formed a seal, the infused medigel solution would begin to numb the pain, but that would only happen if she could stem the bleeding.
A light tremor shook the floor, followed swiftly by a muffled clank and rumble that emanated from beyond the enclosing wall. The sound resounded upward into the ceiling, but even as it faded away, a fresh vibration radiated through the surface beneath them. Seams manifested in the wall's smooth surface and it pulled away in quarter segments, sloughing cascades of rubble into the widening gap. Careful to keep her hand clasped to Anderson's side, Shepard looked toward the Illusive Man, but his back was still turned to them and he seemed to be completely engrossed in the machine.
Anderson's hand pushed against her left sleeve.
"Stop him, Commander." His voice was thin, almost lost in the mounting vibration. "Whatever he's managed to do, whatever he shows you, it's not worth the price."
Shepard's stomach dropped before she could respond, flattening against her groin as it did during high-speed combat extractions. They were moving up. She looked towards the ceiling in time to see it slide away with the wall segments, and then the circle of gutted flooring was hurtling up a vertical shaft. The inner mass of the tower shifted and compressed as they rose, creating empty space instants before they passed through it and sending shattered pieces of plated insulation and mangled fragments of technology raining down on the platform. Somewhere in the rearranging mass of superstructure, a public concourse tipped up and flattened against the wall of the shaft, sending an eight-meter tall granite statue tipping through the air directly above the Illusive Man and his machine. At ten meters, it exploded into hunks of white stone, dashed against a kinetic barrier that deflected the impact with barely a stress shimmer. The commander caught a quick glimpse of the statue's head as it fell away, a stern and stylized asari face, heavily cracked by the destruction of its body.
The tower was freeing itself of millennia of habitation as easily as an animal shook away a coating of mud.
The barrier didn't stop more rubble from falling away from the platform as it continued the ascent, and the floodlights began to tumble off with the dusty tide. When the last vanished over the side, Shepard realized that something else was lighting the shaft. A slash of red split the far surface as it rushed by, thin but widening by the second. Pulses of illumination washed over the platform, and in their sanguine glow she watched as the entire wall drew back and integrated with the shifting mass to behind her.
"Anderson..."
There was no response. Shepard looked down at the admiral and saw that his eyes were closed. Gingerly, she lifted her blood-caked hand from his side and found that the trauma patch was bonded to his skin, firm and watertight. The hand moved up to his neck and she located his carotid artery, waited as crimson engulfed them both.
Clearing the upper edge of a retreating wall segment, the platform emerged from the shaft and shot up an indent in the tower's tapering exterior. Void and artificial vastness loomed at every other angle, the ravages of hard vacuum held back by the same unseen shield that maintained the human biomass far below. At the apogee of the metal sky, a vortex of crackling, undulating light fulminated in place of a star, swelling to a blinding intensity and then releasing its collected energy in an electric wave down the surfaces of each of the five ward arms. Dark masses of geometry that had once been city blocks and sprawling dock assemblies stood out like missing teeth on a bare, red skull as the pulse washed over them.
"As you can see, the Citadel has reached maximum energy output." The Illusive man didn't speak up over the vibration of the platform or even turn away from his displays, but she heard him as though he was talking with her own throat. "The amount of power flowing those arms is incredible, more than enough to obliterate any parasitic external structures and kill all lifeforms still in the wards – assuming any survived the initial environmental systems shutdown."
Shepard stood slowly and found that keeping her balance was easier than she had expected. They were decelerating.
"Your doing, I assume? Another unfortunate sacrifice?"
"A necessary stalling tactic. After I let the Catalyst data fall into their grasp, the Reapers took the Citadel almost immediately and without their normal thoroughness, just as anticipated – my team was able to slip inside undetected while they eliminated the Council's defenses and moved the station through the local mass relay. When the Reapers began pooling their harvest and moved to consolidate their hold on this construct, I was forced to interface with logistical control and distract them until the control transmitter was fully installed. Blowing the habitation zones into space accomplished that effectively, and had the added benefit of reducing the number of indoctrinated forces within the station. Until I access the Citadel's full power capacity, this device is only able to disrupt communication between the prime Reapers and their servants – having a full-strength army of husks breathing down my neck didn't factor well into the final stage of the plan."
The platform eased to a halt and socketed itself into the end of a broad, downcurved slope. They had reached to the tower's apex, and nothing stood between Shepard and the Citadel's interlocked extremities but kilometers of cold, dead space.
Seeing that the Illusive Man's back was still turned, Shepard took a few steps towards the slope and looked down. The landscape of smooth, light-hued metal curved gradually for several hundred meters before dropping away and merging with the tower's sheer flanks. A raised, cavern-like opening emerged from the base of each side of the slope, designed to accommodate the secondary appendages of a Reaper capital ship, judging by their shape and size.
"I don't recommend an escape attempt, Shepard," the Illusive Man said, turning from the machine with a wide flourish of his suspended tubes. "You wouldn't make it far without my containment field, and there are still husks lurking on the upper levels of the tower. I wasn't able to purge them all. Besides, you've got a front row seat to the most important moment in human history. Why waste it?"
Shepard stepped away from the edge of the platform and looked back. On the gutted floor near the tendriled machine, she caught a glimpse of something angular and metallic.
"Reapers aren't husks," she said, quickly matching the Illusive Man's piercing gaze. "What makes you so sure that they can controlled, even with the Catalyst powering that machine? Every time someone has tried to use their technology they've been enslaved or destroyed by it. What makes you so different?"
"Vision, Shepard. Vision, and careful planning. I've spent half of my life working towards this moment. I know the technology, and I know my own mind. This is what I was born to do."
Behind him, panels lining the side of the device's boxy core component opened and extended silver filaments into the air. The low humming emanating from the machine ramped up in volume and pitch and sparks of the same dark red energy pulsing down the station's length began to jump between the exposed transmitters.
"Now, watch the birth of a human universe."