AN: Shepard & co invade the collector ship. I shook up the whole "Three man team" for this, as while it makes for good gameplay, it's less good for not making Harry the go-to character to have along on a mission.
I seriously enjoyed writing this though, so have at it.
Shepard looked at her team with a level stare as she finished the briefing.
"Are you all okay with your roles in this? The Illusive Man claims that this ship is drifting, dead in the water. I don't know whether we can trust him or not, but I'm not about to walk onto a ship that may or may not be full of hostiles without one hell of a fall-back plan."
Harry looked round the room, evaluating everyone's response to their commander basically telling them she had no trust for their employer. He would have expected Miranda to tell them to trust the man, but apparently her wardrobe change after their little jaunt to help her sister had included a loyalty change. Clearly Shepard was the leader in Miranda's head now.
Not that Harry had anything against the plan. The Illusive Man – and if that wasn't an even more corny title than any Harry had acquired – was a slippery bastard, that was for sure. Harry wouldn't put it past him to with-hold information simply to ensure his pawns stayed reliant on begging him for every scrap he doled out. But then, Harry had history with the man, so maybe he was biased there too.
The rest of the team looked happy with the situation, though Harry saw Samara eyeing him with narrowed eyes. He still found it odd that Asari mannerisms reflected humanities so closely, like blue skinned space cousins. Still, they were alien, and occasionally you got a glimpse into why – like someone who would jump into a crowded street with all guns blazing still being treated as an avatar of justice. Shepard had clearly finished her own evaluation of the room, clapping her hands together and dismissing them all with a reminder to get some shut-eye before the mission. Harry pulled himself out of his chair, intent on doing just that as he joined the team leaving the room.
Mordin was happily babbling to Jacob about the possible technologies that could be taken from the derelict vessel, the dark-skinned man nodding along with the doctors words, occasionally interjecting a comment which always seemed to send the Salarian along another path entirely. The rest of the team seemed quiet, everyone psyching themselves up for the confrontation to come. Harry took another look around then headed for his bunk. Six hours of sleep sounded like heaven at this point.
The omnitool alarm was, Harry reflected as he woke, the most irritating alarm in all of existence. It felt like someone was trying to electrocute your arm by shaking needles under your skin. Horrible. Still, he had to acknowledge that it was damn effective. Harry stared into the mirror over the sink he had commandeered to wake himself up over. His hair was getting long again, and his stubble was past the point where he looked gruff, leaving him looking like a fourteen year old growing his first beard. Sometimes it wasn't worth even looking in the mirror. Harry sighed, leaning onto the sink with his hands, and pressed his forehead against the reflective sheen in front of him.
Still alone. He had looked, and looked hard. Not one wizard to be found, not one magical species. He'd gone back to earth once. He'd set one foot on the ground, and promptly vomited everything out of his stomach, and a few things that hadn't been in there in the first place. He'd staggered back to the ship, paid the worried looking assistant and crawled into bed till he was out of the gravity well. He didn't know what was wrong with the earth, but from the second he touched the dirt till the moment he got out of the planets atmosphere his magic had felt like it was trying to kill him. Hell, for a few minutes he'd thought it was going to manage it.
And yet, even if all the adult wizards had chosen to stay on a planet that killed them, surely there should have been some trained muggleborn who left. After all, he doubted someone like Hermione would have been happy to stay and die just for the sake of never leaving the planet. But there was nothing, and no-one. He'd even tried to find a trace of accidental magic, but he found nothing. Harry stayed pressed against the mirror for a few heartbeats longer, before being dragged out of his introspection by the sound of the door to the communal bathroom sliding open. Garrus stepped in, nodding at him before moving to the Turian-specific chamber. Harry took a deep breath, looked himself in the mirror and picked up his shaving kit.
"Game face on, Potter," he muttered to himself as he lathered his face up. "Time to go to work."
The full team were suited up in the hold in preparation for boarding the shuttle. Harry ran over Shepard's briefing again in his head while they waited for the shuttle pilot to run through his checks.
Two teams. One to scout the ship and try to find the information on the Omega-4 relay, and one to guard the exit. After all, it would be an amazingly good place to spring a trap. All the collectors would need to do would be wait till the scouts got to the middle of the ship, then wake up. Which is why the guard team would be running hot, ready to hit the collectors from the door side at the same time as the scout team tried to escape. The crossfire would give Shepard's team time to get out. Simple and easy.
The teams were split sensibly too, in Harry's opinion. Shepard knew her stuff, and it showed. Three of the heavy hitters: Jack, Harry and Grunt, would be in the guard team, while Samara would be in the scouts with Shepard. The scientist and engineer would be with Shepard, able to decipher and crack the computers, while Garrus led the home team, making the best use of the long firing lanes their entrance would have. Thane with the scouts to handle any invisible wetwork when the Collectors inevitably showed themselves, Miranda to lead the big damn heroes of the guard team to rescue Shepard, and Jacob to watch Garrus' back.
It was odd, thought Harry. Not more than a couple of weeks ago the team had been less of a team and more a group held together by Shepard. But it seemed that Shepard's fire and conviction were infectious, spreading throughout not only the team, but the whole ship. Harry had seen a couple of the guys from the hangar deck arm-wrestling Grunt for laughs the other day. One had to go see Chakwas due to pulling every muscle in his arm, but they all got along. Even he was smoothing out, feeling less defensive when people asked him about his whittling, the constant efforts to replace his wand with no magical creatures left to provide a core.
There were still some holdouts – Samara held herself aloof, and Jacob and Thane both had twitchy moments sometimes – but for the most part they were a team. Then again, thought Harry, given how dangerous our opponents seem to be, that might be the only thing that keeps us all alive after all this.
Then the time for waiting was over, and the team piled onto the shuttle for the short hop across to the 'derelict' Collector vessel. Harry wondered if anyone believed that any more. He doubted it.
The guard team were getting restless, keeping themselves on alert in their chosen spots. It had been about an hour now, and there hadn't been a single bullet fired. Suddenly Garrus' radio chirped, and he responded with all the efficiency that Turians are famed for. A few seconds later, Garrus cleared his throat, and the guard team pricked their ears up.
"Shepard says she's nearly at what appears to be the control centre. Get ready." The team responded to Garrus' words with thinly hidden eagerness. Jack and Grunt had clearly been getting annoyed at the lack of movement, though Jack had been a lot calmer since Shepard let her blow up an abandoned base. Harry gave a mental shrug, he was hardly one to comment on the issues of others. As one of the people he'd met on his travels had said, he didn't have issues – he had subscriptions.
There was the sensation of the calm before the storm for the next few minutes, so it was almost a relief when the ship shuddered around them, the lights fixed into the walls flickering into a fuller brightness. The radio clicked, and Garrus' voice burst onto the airwaves.
"Everyone get ready."
The collectors swarmed out of what was previously solid rock. Unseen doors slid down into the floor, and the insectoid aliens rushed out in groups from each one. Garrus took the first kill, along with the second, his rifle throwing a bullet straight through one collector and into his friend. The combat degenerated somewhat at that point, with Jack and Grunt slamming biotics-first into the biggest cluster of enemies that each could see and proceeding to toss the brown aliens around like sparks from a bonfire. Harry hung back a bit, spearing collectors on needles of magic, conserving his power for when they would be told to go pull Shepard out of the fire that the Illusive Man had thrown them into.
The meleè had been running for about five minutes when Shepard's signal finally pinged onto the guard teams sensors, and Garrus let out a sigh of relief. The lack of contact had been worrying him given the numbers that the guard team was facing. Then again, Garrus thought as he took down another pair of bug-eyed collectors with a single shot, whatever was looking after Shepard didn't seem to care about the odds. Show her a fight, and she would blast, charge and headbutt her way through it until everything that wasn't on Shepard's side was either dead or very sorry to be alive.
The radio chirped again, and Garrus instructed his omnitool to open the channel. Shepard's voice broke through, sounding as it always did in combat – exhilarated, and with a touch of blood-lust tingeing the edges.
"Garrus, might be a good time to send the back-up," her voice cut off for a moment as the sound of a plasma beam washed over the radio, before she carried on as if nothing had happened. "They seem to have rolled out a pair of big guys who are giving us a bit of grief."
Garrus rolled his eyes at the clear understatement present in the commander's voice, but keyed his microphone to respond.
"Copy that Commander, the big damn heroes are incoming."
Garrus heard a chuckle from the commander before the line cut off, and retuned his microphone to the teams frequency.
"Alright boys and girls, the Commander's got herself into a pickle. Why don't you guys go be heroes while Jacob and I hold down the fort." Garrus lined up another shot as he waited for a response, and perforated his chosen collector with a bullet to it's oversized cranium.
Miranda's voice cut back across the comms, directed at the heavy hitters of their squad.
"You guys get that? Harry, clear us a path to the door, Jack and Grunt keep it quiet at the sides." Miranda's instructions were followed to the letter, Harry cutting loose with a ravening blast of energy that seemed to eat away at the collectors even as it smashed them to the sides in what appeared to be a horrifying combination of a warp and a throw. The gap was almost closed by a group of collectors to the right, however they quickly found themselves introduced to Jack's fists and Grunt's forehead, leaving a group of broken bodies in their wake.
Harry and Miranda ran down the cleared corridor, Jack and Grunt bringing up the rear as Jacob and Garrus turned to their job of picking off the stragglers.
"Left here," Miranda had a map open on her omnitool, studying it even as she put a tight grouping of bullets into a collector on the other side of the room. Jack radioed an affirmative even as she punched a shockwave into a tightly packed bunch of husks that charged straight into the biotic death she was dealing out.
"Door, at our three o'clock," called out Miranda, closing the omnitool. "The Commander's behind it. Care to say hello, Harry?"
"It'd be my pleasure, Miranda." Harry moved up to the door, trusting the three warriors behind him to cover his back as he reached out with his senses. All five of the scouts were in one piece, and it looked like they had managed to deal with one of the Praetorians. This door was a lot thicker than the ones the Council races used, and the lock a lot heavier, but Harry slid his magic through the door and into the locks. Once he had it where he wanted it, he reached out with his mind and twisted.
The locking bolts were three feet thick. The door itself was close to five. All of it was made of starship grade metal-analogue. It made Harry happy that he'd chosen to conserve his power, although even with that it was a struggle. He heard a low voice roaring from a distance, and realised dimly that it was him. The doors were strong, but he felt the metal buckle and tear, the locks rending themselves to pieces under the stress of his magic. With that done he turned his full power to the doors. He could have chosen to simply slam them into the recesses built for them, but with his senses extended he could feel where the Praetorian that the scouts were fighting was. And frankly, he really didn't feel like fighting one of those right now.
With an almighty heave of his magic Harry tore the doors from their sockets and sent them flying straight at the already damaged Praetorian. It had enough time to let off a single shriek, which Harry liked to think of as a screamed 'What the hell!', before 60 tonnes of door slammed into it at speed. The result was pretty comprehensive, but Harry hadn't got where he was without making sure, so he raised the door back up before slamming it down again on top of the corpse of the creature. Then, job done, he doubled up, sucking in deep breaths of air to try and replenish his strength.
The fight seemed to pause for everyone involved as even the collectors stared at what had just happened. The doors which had just been torn from their place and sent flying were some of the heaviest on the entire ship, designed to keep the internal structure of the ship separate from the external passages, which could easily be exposed to vacuum by a lucky mass driver hit. Shepard's team took advantage of the lull in the fighting, slipping out through the new hole to link up with the retrieval team. The addition of five more guns took their toll on the collector force, which retreated in the face of the overwhelming firepower.
Now that the teams had linked up, fighting their way back to the exit point was almost insultingly easy, especially as their enigmatic enemy seemed reluctant to commit more Praetorians to the field given that Shepard's team had shown themselves to be entirely too effective at destroying them. The exit point itself was still held by Garrus and Jacob, though they had been forced to fall back to their own back-up points, holding the collector force off with speedy replacement of thermal clips.
The team threw themselves back onto the shuttle, firing final shots towards the door they had exited by in an effort to keep the aliens from shooting the shuttle as it left. The shuttle then proceeded to repeat the manoeuvre, throwing itself inside the Normandy's cargo bay and allowing it to go to ftl seconds before the main gun of the collector ship tore through the space it was occupying.
The mood on the Normandy was a mixture as the team piled out of the shuttle. Exhilaration, as they had just pulled off an incredibly dangerous mission, and disappointment as the Illusive Man had just shown himself to be completely untrustworthy. EDI had confirmed to the commander on the shuttle that, having re-reviewed the signal sent by the 'Turian scout ship' which apparently discovered the derelict, the signal had been faked using methods Cerberus were already well aware of.
No-one was defending the Illusive Man, and the feeling was the same with everyone. Use the information he gives us, but he'd not trustworthy, and possibly never can be.
Harry spent the next 24 hours asleep on his bunk, suffering magical exhaustion from the trick he'd pulled off, along with the continued fighting both before and afterwards. Still, Harry thought as he rolled out of bed after sleeping the tiredness away, it was totally worth it. The look on Samara's face as she saw him lift 60 tonnes of door and crush a Praetorian into paste was fantastic.