Garrus has met a lot of people in his years. Eccentric ones too. Yet, he could safely say that he had never met a person who talked quite as much as Bernard Plim.
"I know some shit you wouldn't believe," he felt the need to inform Garrus when they left the office and made their way for the nearest elevator.
"No one has actually seen Captain Anderson's birth certificate. No way that dude's from London," was what he spouted when they piled into the said elevator.
"Believe it or not, I have irrefutable proof that the Shadow Broker is a drell," he told them next. Garrus couldn't help but glance at Liara and watch as she pretended not to hear him. She crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back against the railing.
Bernard made himself comfortable by shifting his weight back to lean against the cool metal wall. The loose fabric of his shirt shook, agitated by the vibrating surface that his back was pressed against. Garrus felt a sudden stab of trepidation that the human seemed to be settling in, as if to ready himself for a long speech. He looked every bit like a paid lecturer preparing to expatiate to a group of disinterested spectators. With an excited grin and bright, alert eyes taking in each and every one of their faces, Bernard was clearly not one to be deterred by a silent audience.
"The Leviathans are the worst kept secret in the galaxy. Everyone knows about them. Cerberus, the Council, the Alliance, the Hegemony, the Hierarchy- everyone!"
While the human chattered on, Garrus raised his omni-tool and put a call in to Zaeed. While he waited, he stared hard at the orange interface of his device, trying his damnedest to block out Bernard's irksome voice. But with each agonizing second that he had to wait, the human's voice still managed to seep in like piss through the cracks of a wooden ceiling.
"I mean, how stupid do they think we are?" He exclaimed, throwing his arms in the air for emphasis. "Just look at the letters:-" He whirled around to trace a finger along the metal wall as he spelled "-L-E-V-I-A-T-H-A-N. Nine letters!" Bernard turned back around to look at each of them as if he'd just offered vital information blessed by spirits of knowledge.
'C'mon, Zaeed.' Garrus stared desperately at his holo-screen. 'Pick up.'
"If you minus four of those letters, you get 'Latin,' which is an ancient human language. 'Latin' has five letters. And what's five plus four?" He looked around again expectantly, but no one offered the answer he sought. "Nine! It has nine letters! Know what else has nine letters? 'Ascension,' as in The Destiny Ascension?"
More silence. Bernard threw his hands up again. "C'mon, sheeple!"
Finally, Zaeed answered with a distinguishing grunt. It just might have been the most beautiful sound Garrus had ever heard.
"What?"
He felt certain that was the politest greeting he'd ever get from the old merc.
"We're heading down to the subterranean levels," Garrus told him. "Be on the lookout for any sudden changes out there. We might be out of contact for a while."
"Roger that. If I see the winds blow the sand in a slightly different direction, I'll be sure to fire up the engine and send the krogan in." Zaeed's voice dripped with scathing sarcasm. Ah, Garrus loved that man.
"A krogan?" Bernard pinned Garrus with an inquisitive gaze, desperate for answers.
To Zaeed, Garrus said, "You're a true blue prince."
"Piss off."
On that happy note, Garrus ended the call and, reluctantly, returned his attention to his current company: a female human and an asari dead set on ignoring the jabbering male human they were trapped with. Currently, Garrus was the center of his fascination.
"I'm beginning to suspect you guys are more than you're letting on." He narrowed his eyes.
"What was your first clue?" Garrus countered.
"The guns, I guess. You a Spectre or something?"
"I'm not, not a Spectre."
"So you are one."
"Unless, of course, I'm not, not, not a Spectre, working for one, that's working for a representative of the Council that doesn't necessarily report to them or do their bidding."
Silence. Beautiful silence filled the void for almost a full, precious minute, in which the duration was spent under the scrutinizing gaze of Bernard Plim. Alas, all good things must end.
Bernard looked away from Garrus to address the other souls unfortunate enough to be trapped with him. He recovered his momentum with, "And that Saren guy? Always knew he was dirty."
Okay. Garrus didn't mind that statement so much, not that he would tell him.
Changing tactics, Bernard pressed, "You know, I spent some time on Omega." The male human wheeled on Garrus once again, his gaze expectant. It took him a few seconds to realize that he was waiting for some kind of confirmation that Garrus was still listening.
"You don't say," he relented without bothering to hide his disinterest.
"Yup." Either Bernard didn't notice, or he simply didn't care. Garrus suspected the latter. "Even saw Archangel." It was Liara's turn to glance at him, but Garrus kept his eyes fixed on the steel wall of the elevator. He was suddenly thankful for his disguise. The armor he had left in the car harbored the emblem of his old moniker.
"Yeah? What was he like?'
"She," he was corrected. Garrus just stopped himself from snapping a sharp look at the irritating human. Though, he failed to prevent his mandibles from fluttering. "Female turian," Bernard declared with all the confidence in the galaxy backing his claim. "Hell of a looker too, but she's in bed with Aria T'Loak." After an awkward silence in which Garrus was sure he wasn't alone in hoping it would last, Bernard added with a wistful air, "Or else I'd tap the hell out of that."
This elevator was giving the Normandy's lift a sluggish run for her money in terms of slowest lift of all time.
"You know about Commander Shepard's disappearance, right?" Garrus continued to pretend he didn't exist. "The Alliance's doing, I bet. That or- and this might sound crazy, but I'm starting to think it's true- Primarch Victus. The Commander likes turians so-"
"Do you ever shut up?" Garrus snapped, ignoring the ping sound that signaled their arrival at the bottom floor.
The skinny human puffed up his chest and looked Garrus straight in the eye. "Never. Silence is how they control you, man."
Bernard wouldn't have lasted a day in the turian military, he decided. Generals like Victus would have had a field day chewing him up and spitting him out. Garrus, in his youth, had learned that nugget of truth the hard way.
The doors opened to a dark, dreary cavern. Gone were the white walls, fake plants, and safety propaganda. In their place was gray stone walls and paved walkways, lined with dim green lights to barely see by. Overhead, white lights lined the ceiling, the functioning ones casting the walls in a dim glow. Many were in desperate need of maintenance as they flickered on and off, while others simply remained dark and broken.
The walkways were a true testament to how long the asari had control of Asteria because it would have taken centuries to carve out the tunnels the way they were. Water could be heard dripping in the distance, echoing off the duracrete floors. It was a sound Garrus savored, knowing he wouldn't hear it for long once Bernard started up again.
"No lights," Garrus quietly ordered. "If anyone's home down here, I'd rather they not know we've moseyed through their front door."
With their pistols drawn and their flashlights off, Liara and Miranda hastily exited the lift, anxious to put some distance between themselves and their new, irksome companion. Garrus was quick to follow, his own pistol drawn, with the aforementioned tag-along on his heels.
"It sure is dark down here," was Bernard's genius observation. "Your people have night vision, right?"
Bernard spoke from behind so Garrus couldn't be sure who he was directing the question to. Obviously, it couldn't be at his fellow human so it must have been to either himself or Liara. Garrus prayed it was the latter, remaining quiet in the hopes that Liara would speak up. To his misfortune, she remained absolute in her silence, likely sharing Garrus' sentiment.
'Fine.'
"That's directed at me, I take it," Garrus drawled. "Yes, but we still need some source of light like everyone else."
"Cool, cool. Oh, something else I wanted to ask. I don't talk to many turians and... I just gotta know. Do you guys have all the same-"
Garrus' omni-tool buzzed, mercifully interrupting that line of questioning. It was Shepard. As he followed his team through the tunnels, Garrus put the call through to his earpiece. No need for Bernard to know who he was talking to.
"I finished reading the files," she told him.
"That was fast."
"Garrus."
"Sorry. Did you-uh... did you tell him?"
He heard a deep exhale on her end followed by a regretful, "No."
"Are you going to?"
"I want to, but..." Shepard trailed off, though he caught her meaning. She understood that the intel on EDI, assuming it was even worth grabbing, was not and could not be at the top of their list of priorities. Shepard was acknowledging how cruel it was to keep Joker in the dark. Yet, the thought of cluing him in just to potentially rip away any hope he had of getting EDI back wasn't any more pleasant.
Emotions and personal stakes had no place in an operation like this.
"Understood," Garrus assured her. "I'll do my best."
"I know. You always do." There was a note to her tone that ignited his heart, causing his affection for the woman to suddenly surge through him. Eager to change the subject, Shepard went on. "Have you had any trouble?"
"None yet, though, apparently, we're locked in. All the more reason to find these artifacts."
"Any sign of mercs?"
"None yet." He tried to hide how much that bit of truth worried him. So far, the only thralls they had encountered were the harmless employees on the top floor. If there were mercs in the building, they hadn't shown themselves yet. With luck, they would be stumbling around, just as mindless as the people upstairs.
"What do you see?"
"We're closing in on the office of that doctor you read about. It's in the subterranean levels so it looks about what you'd expect: Dark, creepy cavern. Some might say ominous."
"Sinister, even?" Garrus could hear the smile in the question.
"You get the picture."
"Who are you talking to?" Bernard blurted at an octave far too high for the stealth Garrus was striving for. He shot an answering glare over his shoulder at the human, not caring that he probably couldn't see it.
"Your mother." A juvenile response, he knew, but he was still feeling a little irritated at the human's previous Shepard comment.
He felt Bernard's eyes on him, probably fixing him with a glare of his own, and then, "I didn't know turians told 'yo momma' jokes."
"Who was that?" Shepard asked him, having heard the unfamiliar voice.
"We may have picked up a straggler. I'm aware of your penchant for taking in strays. Thought I'd give it a shot." At Shepard's resulting and, no doubt, unamused silence, Garrus reiterated with, "He has intel on the artifacts." He threw a skeptical look over his shoulder at the said human. "Or so he claims."
"I do, man!"
"All right." He could hear the apprehension in her voice. "Get to it, mister. I'll keep going through these files, in case I missed something. I'll let you know if I find anything-"
Static burbled in his aural canal and then nothing.
"You there?"
She wasn't. Garrus halted to check the signal with his omni-tool and emitted a frustrated huff at the results.
"What's wrong?" Liara stopped when she heard his irritated sound.
"No signal. We're either too deep in the ground or-"
"It's being blocked," Miranda confirmed, her own omni-tool alight on her arm. "It seems we've walked into a dampening field, the source of which appears to be coming from the end of this corridor."
Garrus swiped his hand across his own holo-screen to see the source of the interference for himself. His omni projected the dampening field as a wide sphere, colored violet, that encompassed the sprawling web of tunnels they traversed through. At its center lay the goal of their destination: Dr. Saitō's office. A cold finger of dread slid its way up Garrus' spine as it dawned on him that her office was likely the source of the signal.
A trap then. Surprise, surprise. Garrus whirled on Bernard.
"What do you know about this dampening field?"
In the darkness, he could make out the skewed, puzzled look Bernard fixed him with.
"Dampening field?" He questioned with a voice conveying his confusion. It certainly sounded genuine enough and it wasn't like Bernard was the one to send them to Dr. Saitō's office. The location of the second artifact had yet to be shared with them and wouldn't be until after they destroyed the first. Garrus turned away from him and continued on ahead without another word.
"Hey, wait!" He heard Bernard hurry to catch up. "What dampening field?"
'Definitely clueless.'
It was another two minutes down the corridor, in which Bernard insisted on soothing himself by singing an Omega bar favorite- Danger Zone, when Garrus' omni-tool predictably, and regrettably, flickered out. A quick glance around revealed that the same fate had befallen his team's devices as well. From what he saw of his interface before it dissolved, they had made it to the heart of the field, which made the utilization of tech no longer a viable option. Well, at least he had two biotics with him, though he was beginning to mourn the loss of his rifle.
Bernard reached the end of the song, or at least finished as much of the lyrics as he knew, and started over. "Revvin' up your engine. Listen to her howlin' roar. Metal under tension. Beggin' you to touch and go- You know? I think that song's about fucking."
It occurred to him: 'I think he's right.'
A door could be seen ahead and to their left, softly lit by a white, flickering light mounted on the opposite wall. As much as Garrus wanted to turn back from the very obvious trap, he knew they had no choice but to press on. When they finally approached the door, he noticed a bronze plate with the name, Dr. Akari Saitō engraved on it. The letters flickered in and out ominously in the din.
"Ride into the danger zone." Bernard stopped to cast a withering look at the door. He then opened his mouth to give voice to some inane comment, likely at how creepy the atmosphere was. Or, so Garrus guessed, because all that came out was a string of incomprehensible words he couldn't understand.
Garrus rounded on him. "What?"
Bernard jumped at the sound of his voice and stared at him wildly before uttering another mishmash of garbled sounds.
'Oh crap.' It would seem that the field had not only knocked out their omni-tools, but their translators as well. His was implanted in his head, as was Liara's and Miranda's, but even theirs weren't immune to the effects of the interference if the bewildered looks they gave him were anything to go by. At the back of his mind, Garrus briefly entertained the thought of what his speech must sound like to them.
Liara tried to say something, but Garrus was just as successful at deciphering her speech as he was with Bernard's. They then looked to Miranda and watched, with a small amount of humor, as a look of regret crossed her face when she realized she was now the only one that could communicate with their annoying escort.
Comprehension must have registered with Bernard as he leaned into Miranda's space and spewed another string of words at her. Much to Miranda's obvious chagrin, they must speak the same human language and Bernard undoubtedly used it to say something she didn't like. Garrus could almost hear her resulting eye-roll.
Thankfully -or unfortunately, given Garrus' suspicions- the door opened, without resistance, into an almost pitch-black room. The flickering light from outside would be their only source of illumination. Garrus flicked the light on his pistol before carefully stepping inside and began scanning the walls and floors for any sensors or tripwires. Without the use of his omni, it would be a manual search that needed to be conducted with a naked eye. Fortunately, his weren't the only trained eyes on the scene as Miranda and Liara followed suit, using the glow of their biotics around their hands as a light with which to see by.
Bernard would have moved to follow them in if Garrus hadn't grabbed both his shoulders and all but placed him just outside the door. He then pinned the human with a pointed look, hoping his meaning would come through as a universal translation- Stay here and don't touch anything. By then, anxiousness bloomed on Bernard's face. The way his head swiveled side to side to take in the near-black corridors around him, suggested he understood.
Garrus stepped away from him and resumed his search, checking every now and then to make sure he followed directions. For the most part, he did, moving only to shift his weight awkwardly from foot to foot and ask the occasional question that was ultimately -'And mercifully'- lost in translation. Sometimes Miranda would respond to him, but for the most part, Bernard went ignored as she focused on the task at hand. He continued to soothe himself with his apparent ear worm and, though Garrus could no longer understand the lyrics, the tune of Danger Zone remained the same.
Satisfied with the safety of the perimeter, Garrus made his way to the only desk in the otherwise empty room. As he placed his hand on the first drawer, memories of Erash came to him. He saw flickers of the salarian's mischievous smile as a small, but potent shrapnel bomb was lovingly placed in a desk drawer, wired to explode and cripple the next unfortunate merc to open it. A lot of Blue Suns lots many limbs to that salarian's tactics.
"Hope those sons of bitches have the creds for good prosthetics," Erash hissed gleefully.
Garrus blinked hard, willing the memories of vulgar expletives and laughter away from him, and gently pulled the drawer open. He focused hard in order to detect the slightest tension of a pulled wire or perhaps the whirring beep of an explosive just before going off, but as he dragged the drawer toward him, it opened empty. He repeated the process with two more below the first until he came to the fourth drawer, located in the top right of the desk.
Garrus stopped when the drawer opened and his eyes fell on a button atop a gray plastic pad, screwed into the bottom of the drawer. With the severe interference coming from the room, the button had to have a ground wire in order to properly function. The said ground wire likely ran down through the desk, under the tile to... where?
He signaled Liara and Miranda to him and pointed out, with his lit sidearm, the button. He then drew the stream of light down the front of the desk and sent it dancing a line along the tile, hoping they'd understand. The human and asari glanced at each other, which caused Garrus to long for Shepard's presence once again. If she were there, she would understand him with or without the use of a translator. Human and turian vocal cords were far too different to speak the others languages, but between Garrus and Shepard, verbal words only played a small part in their communication.
Garrus endeavored to hide his frustration as he stooped beside the desk and pried his talons behind it to pull it away from the wall. His frustration grew when he was met with resistance, which made him glance to the feet of the desk and discover that it was bolted down into the tile. Now, he could definitely rip the desk off the bolts, but doing so could put tension on the cord he was trying to find, rendering it useless at best or potentially explosive at worse.
Liara followed Garrus' gaze to the bolts and finally understood. She raised a hand and the bolts suddenly blossomed in a blue light of dark energy before they simultaneously spun and loosened their grip on the floor. Once pulled away, Garrus carefully pulled the desk from the wall just far enough to peek behind it and spot the suspected wire. It was fastened in place to the back of the desk by metal brackets, but its trail could be traced down to the tiled floor where it disappeared through a hole. The direction the wire took after that was indeterminable, but his biotics had crowded around him for a look themselves.
Miranda placed a hand on his shoulder and applied a small amount of pressure. Move away, it said and he obliged, crawling away from the biotics before unraveling his body as he stood from the floor. Liara moved to one side of the desk as Miranda took up post at the other. Then both their five-fingered hands glowed blue just before the closest tile, on either side of the desk, separated from the others and was lifted from the floor. There, on Miranda's side, the concealed wire became visible.
Liara abandoned her side of the desk to join Miranda as the two biotics lifted the remaining tiles, following the line of the wire as it snaked along the floor, curving around pipes and axles. The removed tiles flew across the room to settle in a neat pile in the far corner, should they need to be replaced again in order to maintain the secrecy of their presence. At last, the hidden wire was made completely visible, revealing its destination in the wall to the right of the room's entrance.
"Child's play," Sensat would say.
Bernard's song devolved into a nervous hum. Garrus could feel his eyes on his back.
With a closed fist, Garrus knocked on the wall to test the sound. As he expected -'and hoped'-, he was met with the hollow thunk of a fake wall. His talons traced along the surface, finding the slight cracks that were invisible in the dark, separating the fake wall from the real one. Finally, confident that the button wouldn't kill him, Garrus approached the desk once again and pressed it. Sure enough, the base of the fake wall slowly swung towards them and then lifted itself to the ceiling, revealing a small alcove barely wide or tall enough for him to stand in.
Waiting on the other side, their eyes fell on their prize. It was a perfect sphere, stabilized by tapered, needle-point protrusions of metal that pinned it in place by both the top and bottom of the artifact. The surface moved and rippled like water, reflecting the flickering light that shone in from the open door. And, beside it, laid the long dead remains of a female human. Skin still clung to her gaunt face, but it was wilted and decayed. She was dressed in a white lab coat with a gold-plated name tag pinned to her breast.
'Dr. Saitō,' his mind supplied.
Her body was seated, back against the wall with her head turned and her chin resting on her shoulder. Her sunken, withered eyes eternally rested on the sphere she died beside. If the ominous datapad logs he and Shepard found on Desponia were any indicator, starvation was the likely cause of the doctor's death. A chill ran up his spine as he recalled the ending of the last one they found, 'It's so good not being hungry anymore.'
It was then Garrus noticed the deafening silence that had befallen the room with no lingering trace of any song or hum to be heard. For the first time since meeting him, Bernard had gone quiet. An icy stone fell to the pit of Garrus' stomach. He tore his eyes from the artifact and looked to the doorway to find Bernard still standing there, but something wasn't right. He was no longer fidgeting nervously. He just stood there, staring back at them, a black figure that blended in with the dark room and flickered in and out of existence in time with the faulty light that silhouetted him.
"You know about Commander Shepard's disappearance, right? The Alliance's doing, I bet. That or- and this might sound crazy, but I'm starting to think it's true- Primarch Victus. The Commander likes turians so-"
Garrus stared at him.
"You know about Commander Shepard's disappearance, right? The Alliance's doing, I bet. That or Primarch Victus."
Garrus remembered the scientists on Mahavid after they were released from the artifact's grip. When Shepard asked them what year it was, they blinked and looked at her like she was the one who was crazy, and answered, '2176.'
"You know about Commander Shepard's disappearance, right?"
Shepard's reappearance has been all over the news for months.
"Primarch Victus."
And the current state of the reformed Council, with Adrien as the new turian Councilor, was common knowledge. Yet, he was unaware that Shepard had been found. He was unaware that Adrien Victus was no longer the Primarch of Palaven. Granted, turian politics was never something most humans take the time to look into, but Adrien's actions during the Reaper war had carved the Victus name into the recollection of most survivors. He was anything but unknown.
Barnard said he'd only been in the mine for three weeks, but what if it was more along the lines of over a year?
Garrus wanted to kick himself. Maybe he would have picked up on all that if he hadn't been so dead set on tuning him out.
"Bernard?" He knew the name would sound garbled without working translators, but he had to hope it would still get his attention. It did. Bernard's widened eyes snapped to Garrus. He could see red veins lining the white surface of his eyeballs. The flickering light showcased them intermittently.
"YOU'RE NOT THE ONE," Bernard boomed in a voice far deeper than Garrus had heard from him. It was a menacing rumble beyond the capabilities of any organism he had ever heard, let alone from human vocals. It was almost like it was voiced in his own head. More unsettling still; Garrus understood him.
Garrus raised his pistol and whipped around to point it at the artifact. Just as his finger tightened on the trigger, Bernard shouted, "YOU'RE NOT THE OOOONE!"
The words themselves seemed to vibrate within his skull and Garrus found himself struggling not to flinch at the sensation. Then the artifact exploded at the impact of his bullet.
Liara and Miranda hastened to cover their eyes and quickly stepped away from the shower of shrapnel that rained down upon them. He then turned in time to witness Bernard collapse to the floor. Garrus hurried to him, turning him over to see that he was still alive, but white as a sheet and shivering in his hands.
Then Liara was next to him, standing over them with her arms stretched out to the sides. A blue, biotic field emitted from her open palms, spreading just wide enough to encompass the three of them. Miranda, however, did not join them. She stood in the middle of the room, arms also outstretched and her hair flying with the force of the crackling biotic energy she was conjuring. It was then Garrus understood that, despite the lack of translators, Liara and Miranda had quickly worked out a plan between them. Liara would provide a shield while Miranda-
Garrus was knocked back by the force of the opposing biotic fields colliding against each other. He had just enough sense of mind to hope the explosion wouldn't bring the tunnel down on them. The next thing he knew, he was blinking through a cloud of dust and everything in the room was destroyed. The desk was in shambles, the neatly stacked tiles had shattered in all directions, the walls stood precariously with holes blown into them, and bits and pieces of Dr. Saitō littered the floor and walls in a grisly display.
"Are you all right?" Garrus heard, and comprehended, Liara asking him.
Where ever the jamming signal was, Miranda had just destroyed it. Garrus raised his wrist to test his omni-tool and felt relief at seeing it fire right up. He then turned his attention back to the stricken Bernard Plim. His close proximity to the floor at the time of the explosion had prevented him from moving far.
"Bernard?" He gave the male human a light shake. "You okay?"
Bernard still looked white and he shook like a leaf. He looked at Garrus with wide, terrified eyes. His self-assured demeanor was broken.
"I'm cold," he whispered hoarsely. "I'm so cold."
"Yeah," Garrus nodded solemnly. "That's what happens."
"W-when what h-happens?" He asked through trembling lips.
"When Leviathan takes control."