12: Ruin - Part I

Garrus
Therum
2183 CE

"Commander? I've got good news and bad news. Which do you wanna hear first?"

Joker's voice was almost inaudible through the crossfire. Rattling with impact forces in the driver's seat of the Mako, Shepard snarled at the sudden interruption. Across their flank, a geth energy weapon blasted the shields, which thankfully held fast.

Shepard clutched the wheel and wisely opted not to distract herself with a response.

From his birdsnest in the gunnery pillar, Garrus shouted down to her, "Another walker on our six!" and then spun the turret to meet the advancing geth armature head-on. Click-click-click-SLAM, the cannon reeled into position, locked on, and the targeting assist in Garrus' visor flared encouragingly.

Across the comm, Joker tried again.

"Hello? Anybody? Normandy calling."

"Please hold," Alenko sassed. "The party you are trying to reach is currently helping another customer."

Garrus laughed and stared down the cannon's periscope at the ten-meter monster in front of him. What was the human phrase? One tough customer. Yeah, no way around it. Looking straight into the geth's flickering eye, he flared one mandible in answer, hungry. The increasing pitch of the cannon's warm-up protocol sang a promising song beneath his hands, but it wasn't fast enough. His finger twitched impatiently on the trigger.

"Cannon's still red," he spat. "Incoming! We gotta move!"

Shepard cranked the wheel as Alenko scrambled with the Mako's defenses, flaring up a broadside shield. The geth missile barely kissed them on the ass. Shepard was too quick. While the Mako danced on her toes, Garrus' gunnery pillar rotated in place, spinning freely within its central position in the chassis. The separation between pillar and tank was disorienting enough to make his guts fly out his mouth, but all the nausea was for a good cause: despite her stomach-churning evasive maneuvers, Shepard was carefully keeping Garrus' line of sight free and clear.

As the Commander forced everything outside his crosshairs into a blurry whirl of nausea, he grinned. Home sweet home: he was used to this. Red's insane gravity well was where he lived now.

Finally the Mako came to a lurching halt, the cannon went green, and he squeezed. Before Garrus could waste time on a blink, the armature's head was simply gone. Alenko whooped once in loud approval, but there wasn't a spare second for Garrus to celebrate his stylish one-shot annihilation. Another armature was closing, and this one was moving fast.

Wait. These things could run?

"Shepard, we've got a second platform in pursuit." He shouted. "Different. This one can beat feet."

Garrus reset the gun's sluggish heat ejection protocols at breakneck speed. Popping the massive, overheated sink to tumble into the dirt below, he fed the cannon a fresh eezo core to prep the recharge. Each core could handle ten to twelve shots, carefully lagged ten seconds apart to avoid clogging the sink prematurely. No matter what Garrus did to stretch those sinks, between each mandatory eezo discharge there was still a long-ass wait. Over half a minute. Too long for safety.

He was quickly losing patience with the one-shot wonder of the M-35's accelerator cannon. Tantalizing firepower followed by a vulnerable cooling-off period, forcing him to twiddle his thumbs between flawless takedowns? Bullshit.

The similarities between Red's morning-after antics and her tank's biggest weapon were hardly lost on him. Fine. Lay it on, he could take the heat. A week of late nights in the cargo bay with his hands on all the right parts, and he'd whittle these pointless delays to nothing.

Meanwhile, he growled and switched to the coaxial pea shooter. It sprayed the massive geth platform with an insulting line of surface dents - those would only piss it off.

"Keep moving, Shepard! Cannon's dead for another twenty seconds. I can't scratch it."

Shepard slammed down the throttle and inexplicably swerved off the main mission route, heading straight for the river of lava that lined the entire southern approach. The geth armature loped after them, gaining fast.

"Lava that way." Garrus offered.

Shepard stayed quiet, comforting no one.

Uninvited, Joker's voice crackled back across the comm.

"Alright Commander, I'm gonna tell you anyway! Like my momma always said, 'give 'em the good news first!' The geth dropship turned tail and ran - no more surprise backup, Hooray!"

Shepard blandly acknowledged Joker's update as if passing back a datapad. All she did was grunt with apparent disinterest and rattle in her seat. The Mako flew towards the churning, orange-hot river at full speed, with the geth in hot pursuit.

"Yeah so the bad news?" Joker said, sounding annoyed. "Strange readings…" The comm crackled. "...Really strange... / off the damn charts..."

"What? / the situation / read me Shepard?" It was Kryik's impatient voice in the comm now, cutting right across Joker's shoulder, probably. The signal was rough. Alenko fiddled with his console and tried to clean out the chop. After a quick moment he shook his head in defeat.

The lava was very close now. Too close, by any sane estimate.

"A lot of magnetic interference from this molten rock," Alenko warned. "Comms are down."

"Also," Garrus added in a deadpan, "Molten rock. Dead ahead."

Shepard sighed inside her helmet with disparaging, borderline spousal annoyance, then slammed down the gear shift. She forced the Mako into a violent twirl on the rims of two wheels, and everything went diagonal. The move produced such a stunning crush of g-forces that all Garrus could do was clutch both arms around the turret's periscope and hug it close for dear life.

They slammed to a stop at the edge of a high promontory.

A trickle of stones crumbled beneath them as the Mako's front wheels hooked and teetered over the ridge. Shepard flashed the jets and bumped the tank safely backwards, narrowly avoiding a nosedive.

Not nearly so light on its feet, the pursuing geth armature crashed directly into their rear.

Beneath the geth's gargantuan weight, the Mako's chassis crunched down against her wheels. Inside the hull, Garrus stared slack-jawed at the commotion on the roof, rattling inside his restraint. Up over their heads it went. Thumpity thump thump, it rolled across the roof of the tank with an offended metallic squeal and a mighty smashing of limbs. Then it disappeared over the edge of the cliff.

Still clinging to the gun, Garrus craned his neck and watched the entire tragedy unfold through the corner of the cannon's periscope. In the years heading his own criminal investigation unit, he'd seen his fair share of untimely demises.

Without a doubt, this one topped them all. It was the least dignified death he had ever witnessed.

A thick tongue of flame belched into the air, and Garrus gleefully waited for the explosion as hot rocks and tar splattered back down over the armature's hull. The geth unit upturned, sinking into the smoking current, its legs wiggling as it was slowly dragged downstream. After a moment of pitiful struggle, it burst into white-blue fireworks then disappeared beneath the lava; bubbling, gurgling, and flailing all the while.

Surprising even himself, Garrus let out a peal of frantic, impressed laughter.

Without comment, Shepard eased the Mako back onto the mission path, and drove on.

Once they'd cleared the hot zone, Kryik's voice came back over the comm, still cluttered with static, but readable.

"Shepard. Update. Now."

"Relax, Nihlus. We're fine. What was Joker's bad news?"

Kryik's exasperated grunt was becoming a familiar sound, and Garrus cherished every new, eye-rolling iteration of the Spectre's annoyance with Shepard.

"There's a guard complex ahead. A lot of strange readings. My ground team can't drop until you clear it out. They've got a lot of heavy fortifications. I recommend a back door approach."

"On it," she replied, flat as a board. "Now get off my damn radio and let me drive."

There was a dry cough.

"If you insist," he chided. The channel went quiet.

Half an hour and two eezo cores later, the geth guardpost was a ransacked wasteland.

Ignoring the impenetrable terrain surrounding the post, Shepard had taken advantage of a slot of natural erosion that had eaten through the rock over several long abandoned centuries. Following this narrow, winding trail, they came in from behind. More accurately, they dropped in from above, with zero subtlety whatsoever.

Brute stubbornness to the core, the Commander clambered the Mako up a sheer rock face and then belly-flopped onto Saren's entrenched platoon, transforming the tank into an explosive wad of vengeful, bullet-spewing confetti. With Garrus on her gun, they flattened half-a-dozen enemy troops before the rest of the squad had so much as turned their heads skyward to witness the assault.

A few satisfying booms were all it took before the remaining geth were done for. Then, with assistance from the Mako's machine gun, Garrus forcibly disassembled the automated guard turrets.

Mission accomplished, they ratcheted up the guardpost gates, clearing the way at last. The extraction team swooped down from the Normandy, and Kryik, Williams, and Zorah finally picked their way down into the Prothean dig site. Time to locate Doctor T'Soni and her notorious krogan bodyguard, along with who knows what else.

Meanwhile, the Mako squad kept careful watch on the entrance. Uneasy quiet fell upon them as they sat idling within the tank, ready for anything. Another geth dropship could blink out of nowhere and spew out a surprise platoon. An air strike could raze the entire site from ten-thousand feet. Saren Arterius himself might skydive out of his god-like dreadnaught with a missile launcher slung over his shoulder, screaming about the end of days. Hard to guess what was coming for them when the fight was already this crazy.

Shepard, meanwhile, was stewing in her own self-imposed silence, stiff-backed and motionless, waiting for word from Kryik's team down in the subterranean dig site. Garrus tossed out a few unsteady jokes - these were met with courteous laughter from Alenko and a deliberate wall of ice from the Commander. Garrus understood her aloofness now, though he didn't have to like it.

For tonight we'll merry be, tomorrow we'll be sober.

Aha. How cute.

Passing the hint through a song and dance routine was new, he had to admit, but the principle was already well-worn. He was no newcomer to secret shame. It didn't matter how sincerely they enjoyed rolling around with a turian in the dark, Garrus' human partners had rarely been eager to flaunt their interspecies preferences in broad daylight . It was difficult to book a swanky candlelit table for two in the long black shadow cast by Relay 314.

Other things happened in shadows; desperate, quick, and messy. No matter, he would suck it up. Hell, if Shepard wanted to be discreet, he could be discreet. In a pinch? A dark closet would do, as long as he could touch her again. In any case, Garrus had been out of his damn mind to expect any kind of special treatment this morning. He realized that now. Commander Shepard wasn't about to go around making goo-goo eyes at a subordinate, no matter how long he could make her orgasm on his dick.

Thirty-two seconds, he wailed internally, shifting his hips and silently shushing his disobedient groin as his blood pulsed impatiently in Shepard's direction.

Indulging himself another glance at the Mako's silent driver, he saw the tension was still wearing tight across Shepard's shoulders. She stared at the console, as if she hoped to force the radio to speak on command. Such a source of annoyance to her earlier, now... too quiet. Comms remained spotty thanks to the dense mineral composition of the landscape, and Kryik's team hadn't phoned in for a long while.

Uncomfortable and ready to move, Garrus shuffled himself around the turret, opening his big mouth.

Before he could speak, the comm crackled. An unfamiliar voice broke through, startling Shepard enough that she jumped half a meter out of her seat.

"Commander Shepard? This is Doctor Liara T'Soni. Can you hear me?"

Shepard turned to Alenko with a stiffened, full-body look of displeasure, as if she'd just been electrocuted and thrown naked out an airlock. After a tense staring match with the Lieutenant, she cracked her ceramic-plated shoulders and hit the transmission relay switch.

"Roger that, T'Soni. Reading you loud and clear. Please confirm the status of Kryik's extraction team. He and two others were sent to pull you out of that dig site."

"Your team arrived, but we were... separated."

After hearing T'Soni's reply, Shepard quickly switched the outgoing to mute. To the interior of the Mako cabin, she hissed,

"Then how did she get into our private mission comm?"

Alenko put his hands in the air, baffled.

"You are probably wondering how I gained access to your private mission comm." T'Soni drawled over the speaker, reading everyone's collective minds.

With annoyance bordering on violated rage, Shepard jabbed a finger where T'Soni's voice was pretentiously broadcasting from the dashboard. Her helmeted face turned in Garrus' general direction.

"Listen to this uppity archaeologist. She thinks she's being cute, sabotaging my top-of-the line equipment."

Thought it was plenty cute when Garrus Vakarian was sabotaging your top-of-the-line equipment, he silently projected at her, cocking his head and raising a single, arrogant brow.

She huffed and turned back to the console. An angry grunt from the background of the channel interrupted T'Soni for a moment, then she came back, her voice harried and breathless. "I could use your assistance down here, Commander."

Shepard twitched her hand over the controls again, but didn't answer immediately. First she turned to Alenko.

"Thoughts? Nihlus says this so-called 'Doctor' is little more than a tomb raider with a fancy degree. Could be a trap."

Alenko was quiet for a second, then shook his head. "I don't think so. What about you, Garrus? You're the cop. What's your read on T'Soni?"

The Commander turned to consider Garrus over her shoulder, her helmeted gaze still indecipherable, but nowhere as hostile as it had seemed aboard the Normandy. Though he couldn't see her face, he could tell that she was internally weighing the options, staring into the back of the Mako as if reading an invisible rulebook. The Shadow Broker's Agents and You! - How to Avoid Deception, Capture, and Untimely Death.

Trying to look like he did this sort of thing every day, Garrus leaned forward around the turret and lowered his voice to a goading purr.

"Hell, I say we go for it. I've always wanted to rescue someone from a secret volcano base - could be years before I get another chance."

"He's got a point," Alenko said, smacking Shepard on the arm with the back of one hand.

She turned back to the console.

"T'Soni. Is Wrex with you?"

"Yes, Commander he-" Another loud grunt in the background, and then the comm line roughly switched hands.

"Shepard. Get that dainty ass of yours down here!"

Turns out, the Protheans had a thing for booby traps.

Luckily, T'Soni was there to help. Sort of. Over their linked suit comms, the Doctor had already walked them through several pitfalls. Rooms of poison gas, rows of impaled, unfortunate geth, and Garrus' personal favorite: an invisible flesh-melting laser grid. Voice steady as a university lecturer all the while, T'Soni guided them to her location along the ruin's ancient and dangerously rigged passages. Her expertise was uncanny.

"What is this place?" Alenko asked, keeping his voice low and his steps cautious.

Garrus couldn't blame him for sounding spooked - the ruin would have been supernaturally creepy even with the lights on.

"A Prothean burial city," T'Soni's voice explained. "Late Empire," she added condescendingly. As if it were obvious.

After millennia of abandonment, scavenged by thieves and left to rot beneath an active volcano, this "city" certainly felt haunted. On every side the squad was hemmed in by dense black slabs of mirror-smooth, unbroken stone. Their reflections oozed along beside them as they walked, always distorted, sometimes bent into jagged pylons - and during one particularly unsettling stretch of corridor - they appeared completely upside-down.

Aside from the ramshackle excavation equipment, the only lights were dim, leaf-green lines of energy carved into the walls. Perfect, gleaming horizontals, like fractal cracks in the fabric of time. Every few minutes, the lines would pulse and emit a dark, rumbling whub .

Garrus hugged his assault rifle a little tighter, feeling as if he were trapped within an old heart that was struggling to beat.

"Nihlus?" Shepard tried to reach the Spectre again - it seemed like the hundredth attempt. Nothing on his channel, not even static. She rattled angrily in the back of her throat and switched to T'Soni instead.

"Where exactly are you, Doctor?" Shepard grumbled. "Why not meet us halfway, since this place is rigged to blow at every step?"

"Regretfully I am… currently detained."

The krogan butted in.

"What she meant to say is that she got herself stuck in a big damn bubble. Your friends got tied up with Saren's troops, trying to find a way to blast her out of there. I'm getting sick of fighting off these ugly robots on my own. Get. Down. Here."

"Aww, what's really bothering you, Uncle Urdnot? Did'ja miss me?" Shepard cooed, tones surprisingly warm.

"Ha! You'd like that." A few heavy shotgun blasts echoed across the comm, making Garrus' ears ring, then Wrex grunted and returned. "No... I figured it out. Taking your sweet-ass time to rescue an old krogan - you want some whiny revenge for the Rachni Wars, right? Punch me in the quad for your fancy dad's honor, huh? You never told me you were a damned turian, Shepard, but I see how it is."

"Didn't tell you? Wrex. You never asked."

"Will you two please be quiet?" T'Soni sighed, beginning to sound a mite frantic. "Shepard, you should be nearing a series of pressure panels in the floor. Be careful, they are quite sensitive."

Garrus put one foot down, heard a clunk, then swallowed real hard.

"Found one," he choked.

There wasn't even a second to flinch.

The panel gave way, dissolving in a fizz of bright green energy beneath his feet. His body plunged into darkness without him.

Knocking all the air from his lungs with the effort, he threw out both arms and barely caught the lip of the nearest chunk of solid floor as his legs dangled wildly into nothingness. The joints in his arms strained unnaturally, ligaments popping on his bones. Grinding teeth in an effort not to screech, he prayed under his breath.

Not today, not this stupidly.

Where once had been solid ground, he was now dangling into a sudden, spectacular pit. Bottomless, probably - he expected nothing less. As he slid a few inches further into the black, something sucked on his heels.

That something felt like the space between the stars, and it whispered to him, dark and many-voiced.

"Oh crap," he said.

The surrounding panels were too smooth, it was impossible to get any leverage, and his fingers slipped...

Shepard's hands sank into his arm and held fast, pinning him in place.

She was right on top of him, the faceplate of her helmet flashing in the dim green light. As her head lowered closer still, the angle of refraction shifted and he could see clear through the glass.

Beneath her armor was something far stronger than ablative plate. She was wearing that decimating, enemy-razing look in her eye. The look worn by a ferocious mystery woman that had once declared straight to his face, I'm going to be perfect.

"I've got you," Red said to him now, tightening her grip.

Inevitably, he believed her.

As he blinked in thankful awe, Alenko closed and grabbed his other side. Together, he and Shepard heaved, and they pulled Garrus back out of the singing abyss. Once his legs were clear, the floor panel reappeared. It instantly flickered back into existence as if nothing strange had happened at all.

"Who does that?!" Garrus yelled. Offended, shaken, and shivering from head to foot.

He dusted himself off and noticed Shepard's hand still clinging to his elbow.

"Alright, Vakarian?" she asked, jostling his arm. Her face was hidden from him once more, but her grip was too tight to be anything but worried.

He nodded quietly, expecting his voice would give him away. Satisfied, she slid her hand to his back. Then she hit him. Hard.

"Watch your step."

Delicate as pollen on the wind, they slowly weaved through the rest of the corridor. Finally, after a few sweaty, butt-clenching minutes, they finally came upon T'Soni's location.

Wrex hadn't exaggerated. The Doctor was actually stuck in a big damn bubble. She hovered in midair in the middle of a vast chamber, arms and legs akimbo, looking incredibly impatient. The bubble originated from a sizeable plinth at least a storey tall, giving the effect that the archaeologist had become the carefully preserved prize relic of her own dig. Well, that was embarrassing.

"Took you long enough," she griped.

"Yeah, you're welcome." Shepard bit back, approaching the towering pedestal. "How'd you even get in there? What the hell is this thing?" she asked, gesturing to the containment field.

"What it is - is a long story," said the archaeologist. "No time to explain. You need to stop Wrex before he-"

"Shepard!"

The Commander whipped around. To everyone's surprise, the voice was Kryik's. He limped from a crumbling alcove and waved, followed by a sluggish Zorah and a thoroughly bloodied Williams.

"What the hell happened to you?" Shepard demanded, running to intercept them.

"Saren's got a few extra krogan on his payroll, apparently." Kryik offered, nursing a bruise on his neck with one hand. He let Shepard sling his other arm over her shoulders and take some of his weight. "Weird krogan, like nothing I've ever seen." he added. "They kept us busy, but they're paste now, thanks to Williams."

As if winded by Kryik's compliment, Williams stopped to catch her breath. She bent at the waist and dizzily clutched her knees. As she stared deep into the floor, she swirled her tongue inside her mouth and then spat up a thick gob of blood. Zorah patted her on the back sympathetically.

Still heaving, Williams gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up to the crowd.

Shepard tightened her grip on Kryik and looked around the cavern.

"Where's Wrex?" she asked.

T'Soni answered, quick and frantic.

"He said he was tired of waiting. I… may have... accidentally activated this security device when I was extracting the artifact. I believe it is… scanning me. The sensation is. Deeply unpleasant.

"But if Wrex sets off that mining laser…"

In unison, Kryik and Shepard said,

"What mining laser?"

"Hey Shepard!" someone called, with a voice like a thundering rockslide. "Watch this."

Everyone turned to towards the back of the cavern, where a seven-foot-tall scarlet-red krogan was dragging a heavy piece of mining equipment at his heels like a varren pup.

"Wrex…" Shepard warned, sounding suspiciously like Garrus' mother. "No! Bad idea."

" Bad idea, she says. Don't sass your elders, Shepard. You wanna get out of this creepy little shithole or not?"

He fired up the laser and keyed in a complex code: punching his fist straight through the control panel.

"Oh shit." Shepard hissed. "Hit the deck!"

No one needed to be told twice. They scrambled for the perimeter of the room.

Inside her bubble, T'Soni shouted, "NO! Do you have any idea how valuable this site is to posterity?!"

Her poorly-timed academic complaints were cut off when the laser fired.

The beam crashed through the pylon with a smoking-hot WHAM of pure light. In a split-second it carved a hole wide enough for the Mako to drive through, and then the laser abruptly turned off.

Even with the pylon destroyed, the Prothean bubble was still intact. Within it, T'Soni was trembling with rage.

For one anticlimactic moment, the cavern went dead silent.

Then everything started to shake.

The pylon beneath T'Soni's bubble crumbled into ashes, inverting down into itself in a quiet fluff of air as if it had been formed from dust. The horizontal lines of light that illuminated the cavern walls flared in alarm - pulsing faster, brighter - seething a frenzied green. Deep beneath the cavern floor, something woke up from a long slumber and rumbled loud enough to make Garrus' teeth vibrate in his skull.

The entire room buckled, swelling up beneath them, and then on the far side, a passageway opened.

"What." T'Soni said, awestruck. "This is - incredible. The Protheans… they are… guiding me to the surface."

Her bubble fell to the floor and started to roll, with her still trapped inside. As it moved, the energy barrier singed the titles beneath, leaving a smoking path in its wake. "Follow me." she suggested, as the bubble picked up speed and tumbled into the magical corridor.

Still huddled together, Kryik and Shepard exchanged a look, and then the Commander said,

"You heard the lady."