Disclaimer: I do not own or make any claim to the Mass Effect universe or the characters contained in this story, all of which are owned by BioWare and Electronic Arts. This is simply my interpretation of some events within the game universe.

[AN: Here you are, my version of the defensive team's valiant stand.

I hope it was worth the wait./AN]

It hadn't taken long for Garrus to get everyone in position; a lot of it seemed second nature after the last couple of hours of unrelenting combat.

He knew he had to keep the team mobile; Harbinger's singularities, the Praetorians' speed and levitation and the Collector's love of grenades made getting bogged down… problematic.

As such, he split them into three 'tiers' and spaced them accordingly:

The first 'tier' would be the breakers, slowing the tide of Collectors and clearing out the majority of the enemy force.

Zaeed, Grunt and Samara made up this group.

All three were tough, experienced warriors, with a knack for survival. Samara had more combat experience than the rest of the squad three time over and Zaeed was as tough as humans came. Grunt for his part had the embedded knowledge of a dozen Krogan Warlords and he was a close to physical perfection as possible for a Krogan.

The second tier needed to decimate the enemy, in the most literal sense of the term. The Collectors fielded a disturbingly high proportion of specialist units (Captains, Snipers, Abominations, etc), and that's not even considering the Scions, Praetorians and the Harbinger Avatar. Experience had shown that the ratio was roughly one specialist for every nine regular units, and each of these units was substantially tougher and more dangerous than their standard counterparts.

It was Legion's and his own job to deal with these threats quickly and efficiently. Only Shepard and Thane could hold a candle to Legion's pure, mechanical efficiency when dealing with enemies, and when you combine that with the small arsenal of weapons it carried, from the Plasma Shotgun to its Widow rifle, there was very little that could stand against it. And Garrus was confident in his own abilities, Shepard had trusted him to take care of the high priority targets in dozens of missions and he hadn't let him down yet.

He didn't intend to start now.

The final tier contained their wildcards; Kasumi, Jack and Miranda. They were safely positioned behind the two other tiers to keep the brunt of the fire away from them, thereby allowing them to exercise their particular specialties to the greatest effect.

While Miranda might not be much of a 'wildcard' per se, she was versatile and highly skilled in all forms of combat, whether it was weaponry, biotics or technology. She would also provide some much-needed guidance for Jack and Kasumi.

Jack, by comparison, was a wildcard in every sense of the word; volatile, aggressive and extremely powerful. Her biotic abilities rivalled Samara's, and since the Justicar was still somewhat drained after escorting Shepard's team through the Seeker Swarms, Jack would be their main source of biotic power.

Kasumi's penchant for causing chaos would be invaluable with the odds they were facing, and her ability to slip in and out of sight with her cloak had led to Garrus instructing her to spread the Collector's thin and keep them from focusing on a single person; if they could force them to fight the group as a whole, then they stood a chance at surviving this.

As a final precaution/exit strategy, he had positioned the two platforms Shepard had left him below the edge of the area they were defending. It meant that they could set up a rolling retreat back onto them and make the fight mobile if it became necessary. They would also serve as a reasonably safe place to put any seriously injured individuals until they had a chance to treat them.

If they had the chance to treat them.

Shaking the foreboding thoughts from his mind, he checked the mission timer on his visor. Five minutes had passed since Shepard had left and the main doors were visibly shuddering now.

Between the security locks Tali had placed on it and Legion's active counter-hacking, the Collector's attempts to override the door had been effectively stonewalled.

So they resorted to brute force.

According to his visor, the door's seam was approaching 300 oC on this side and it still hadn't quite undone Legion's weld; the Geth's plasma torch really did a number on the door. And while Garrus had to grudgingly admire just how impervious the Collector's defensive structures were, he wasn't sure how much longer the door would last against the level of firepower he could only imagine was amassed behind it. He could practically see the Scions firing salvo after salvo at the door while Praetorians slowly burned through the seam weld.

And then it all just… stopped.

No more hissing metal or booming cannon impacts, not even the faint chittering language of the Collectors.

The quiet seeped into the cavernous space, and it made what followed all the more jarring.

"You fight against inevitability. The Cycle will continue, your races will be harvested and your mortal forms will be destroyed as the price for your defiance."

It would be impossible to describe what it feels like to have a Reaper speaking to you. Garrus had been in the unenviable position of hearing two of them, and the effect seemed to be consistent.

It was simultaneously awe-inspiring, terrifying and violating. You could feel the words enter your mind, seeping into your thoughts as the Indoctrination process tried to establish a foothold, and the effect was enhanced by the sheer power of the voice; a physical sensation more than a sound, a force that moved everything around it and exerted its own draining pressure on those who heard it.

There was nothing else that could be compared to it, and it took remarkable strength of will to resist a Reaper.

"The Cycle cannot be stopped, your cause is hopeless. Submit now, discard your weapons and your ascension will be rapid."

"Hey, Asshole! Come and get them!"

A good thing, then, that Shepard had an preference for strong characters.

And while Jack's phrasing was unique to her, the rest of the squad agreed with her sentiment wholeheartedly.

"So be it."

And then all hell broke loose.

On the plus side, the warped and twisted doors added a bit more cover for the Team to utilise on the rather sparse battlefield.

This, of course, was balanced out by the fact that those doors were all that had been holding the Collector Horde back.

A single, overwhelming biotic attack had ripped the doors apart so violently that they had taken large chunks of the wall they had previously been embedded in with them on their short flight, eventually stopping as they collided with the ground in a cacophony of tortured metal and splintering rock.

The doors had landed uncomfortably close to Samara, but the Asari appeared unfazed. This was good, seeing as how the dust hadn't even finished billowing upwards before the Collectors charged through the gaping wound that used to be a chokepoint.

Their unnervingly accurate fire ricocheted of the team's shields and barriers as they attempted to hunker down behind the meagre cover available to them.

Knowing that they needed to act now or risk being overrun, Garrus primed a pair of grenades (one a frag and the other an arc grenade he had persuaded Tali into sharing with him), and ordered the others to do the same.

The Collectors' fire faltered as ten various explosive devices sailed into their midst, before dying out completely when the grenades exploded. The sound was deafening, from the whooshing rush of ignition as Zaeed's inferno grenades ignited their deadly contents, to the ear-shattering crack of Kasumi's flash-bangs as they detonated amongst the encroaching Collectors, throwing them off balance enough for Garrus' team to return fire.

Which they did, with interest.

Husks fell by the dozens and the Collectors that survived the explosive baptism were met with a hail of lead and tungsten as a reward for their tenacity, their chitinous armour shattering under the assault.

Of course, it seemed Harbinger had the same idea.

A cluster of biotic grenades carpeted the area near Garrus and Zaeed, forcing them to either bunch up closer to their comrades, or risk getting separated from them entirely. Zaeed managed to reach a nearby outcrop in time to shield himself from the blast, but Garrus was slightly to slow. He was far enough away to avoid the worst of the blast's concussive force, but the gravity-warping effects still ended up slamming him into the wall he had been trying to reach.

Shaking his head to try and clear away the fog and pain of the impact, he was once again thankful that Shepard insisted on his team wearing helmets in combat as he felt some new dents pushing ever so slightly against his mandibles and temple; anything strong enough to dent the thick metal and ceramic of that helmet would have cracked his skull open like a… well like that Collector's head over there that had just had a meeting with Grunt's crest-plate.

It seemed a bit had happened in his brief flight and possible blackout.

The fight was well under way now as the original chaos of the breach and first charge dissipated, leaving disciplined Collector troops being directed by their precise and strongly shielded Captains, while husks and abominations flanked and attacked from every conceivable angle, crawling and running over every surface, whether the twisted metal of the doors or their own fallen.

More worryingly, five Scions were now through the gap and taking up position in a wide arc, all the better to saturate his team's position with their brutal cannons and powerful biotic attacks. And if that wasn't enough, a sixth Scion, wreathed in eldritch fire and clearly an Avatar of Harbinger, stood defiantly in the centre of the enemy forces, firing off shockwaves and more of those grenade clusters at his team whenever they made their presence known.

The Possessed Scion's barrier rippled violently as it repelled a thundering round from Legion's Widow, but even that was not enough to punch through as it continued to repel the hail of lighter rounds directed at it.

"Jack, take it apart!" Garrus called out as he picked off charging abomination.

"With pleasure," the former convict snarled in reply, diverting her attention towards the repulsive creation.

Channelling the dark energy around her, she directed it in a massive wave towards the Scion, letting the energy wash over the creature's barrier, before forcing it to shear randomly, stressing the barrier beyond even its impressive limits and then pulling at the Scion's armoured hide beneath it.

Legion's following round blew a hole the size of a bioti-ball in its torso, and the next one scattered the remnants of its skull across the room. The flaming energy died out immediately as the massive construct crashed to the ground, the shockwave from the impact reverberating through the platform's metallic base.

There was no time to celebrate, however, as a Captain collapsed to its knees as that damnable energy snaked across its carapace. In seconds it had returned to its feet, it's numerous eyes blazing with Harbinger's control.

"Your attempts are futile, you only damage the vessel."

Ignoring the taunt, the squad continued firing at the encroaching horde, burning through thermal clips, grenades and energy as they met the onslaught head-on:

Zaeed was the man on point, crouched behind the remnants of the bulkhead doors and greeting their foes with a wall of metal from his Revenant machine gun. The tiny tungsten pellets tore through the Collector forces like they were made out of wet cardboard, gouts of their thick orange ichor exploding out from their corpses as they were riddled with heavy fire. After expending two clips worth of ammo that way, he switched to his Firestorm. The flamethrower lashed out with 60ft tongues of flame, its sticky fuel latching on to anything unfortunate enough to be in its path as the napalm-like mix burned at 530oC. Husks and abomination, uncaring of their own safety, rushed headlong through the walls of fire; none of them made it more than five metres before they collapsed. He expended the better part of another tank on immolating a pair of the Scions pinning Grunt down, but he didn't get to see his handiwork as a Captain forced him back into more secure cover with a hail of fire that cut through his shields and impacted the armour beneath.

Said Captain was quickly suspended in the air as Miranda lifted it above its cover, before putting two round form her Paladin heavy pistol in its skull, leaving it little more than a pulpy mass after the high calibre rounds impacted. Then a carefully contained mass of Bose-Einstein condensate arced away from her omni-tool and impacted in the midst of a cluster of Troopers, snap-freezing them all in place.

No longer pinned by the Scions, Grunt charged through the newly created ice sculptures, shattering them into glistening fragments as the half-tonne of Krogan and armour barrelled through them on the way to his main target. An organised fireteam of Collectors were pushing towards Legion's position, and so they were unaware of the practically gleeful Grunt zeroing in on them.

They found out soon enough.

The first one's spine was shattered by the impact of Grunt's forearm, while the second was bisected by the force of the Claymore shot impacting it's skinny torso. The remaining four decided the Krogan was now the more immediate threat and opened fire at point blank range. Even the enormous shield generators stored in the Krogan's armour couldn't withstand such an onslaught for long, and it was barely seconds before rounds started to impact the armour, sticking to it as the Foucault currents coursing across its surface halted all metallic materials. Not that locked up armour joints stopped Grunt form powering forward; his immense strength pushing his limbs forward in the brief windows of time between round impacts. Soon, another two troopers had fallen to his Claymore and the last Trooper and its Captain made a fatal mistake; they both had to reload. Leaking blood from a number of bullet wounds but finally able to move freely once more, the enraged Krogan batted the last trooper away like it was a fly, before delivering a crunching head-butt to the Captain. Picking up his downed foe and raising it high above his head, Grunt brought the unfortunate Collector down on his knee with a sickening crack as bone and carapace splintered. Then he tore the broken form in two with a bellowing roar, getting coated in viscera and cybernetics for his trouble.

His triumph was cut short, however, by a Collector Sniper drilling its particle beam into his exposed back. Without shields, the beam of hyper-accelerated particles cleaved straight through the strained armour, leaving a burning gash across Grunts right shoulder and a large portion of his back. The Sniper was about to lance another beam into the Krogan's skull, when a round from legion's widow removed its own, the now lifeless body falling limply from its perch, sans head. The Geth platform then unholstered its pulse rifle and began to clinically eliminate a mass of husks and abomination that were rushing towards it. Seven bullet riddled corpses hit the crystalline floor before the remaining nine reached its position and just as it looked like it was about to be overrun, Legion dropped to its knees and turned used it's kinetic barrier to flash convert a thin layer of air into plasma, letting that wash out from its prone position and burn through the encroaching husks. Two pulses later and the husks were no more than ash and molten metal, slowly pooling on the ground. With the immediate threat dealt with, Legion once again raised its anti-materiel rifle and blew a chunk out of the cannon of another Scion, distracting it from Jack, who it had been preparing to blast.

For her part, Jack was dashing for a new piece of cover closer to the action, Eviscerator shotgun up and living up to its name as it carved through the weak barriers and chitinous plates of Collector Troopers. Seeing how the Scion's attention was now diverted, she launched herself into the air with a burst of biotic power, slamming down on top of the weakened and distracted Scion and jamming a pair of frag grenades into its gnarled hide. Leaping off again, she launched a powerful shockwave to clear her path of husks as she slid behind a nearby rock formation, strengthening her biotic barrier in anticipation of the grenade blasts. The explosives detonated in twin gouts of flame and shrapnel, ripping the Scion to shreds and peppering nearby Collectors and husks with shards of intensely hot and viciously barbed metal.

The few who survived the impromptu shrapnel shower were quickly dispatched by Kasumi as she flitted in and out of cloak to eliminate a weakened or distracted foe. Making full use of her enhanced agility, the thief leapt and sprinted across the battlefield, ducking a weaving between the cross fire before finding some unlucky target and jamming her Locust's barrel into the base of its skull, careful to angle the muzzle so that the back-spray wouldn't coat her and disrupt her ability to cloak.

Harbinger, however, wasn't so easily fooled.

Somehow tracking her through her cloak, the possessed Captain followed her path and, when she stopped and uncloaked briefly to dispatch another Collector, it released a vicious biotic attack that slammed into her left hip and thigh. Screaming involuntarily as the energy burned through her robe and her armour, attacking the soft flesh beneath, the suddenly found herself staring up at the barrel of a rifle, wielded by her former target.

It was only a pin-point shot from Garrus that saved her from her near execution, the round form his mantis entering at the base of its skull and exploding out above its right row of eyes, a trajectory that kept the round far away from Kasumi. Smoothly reloading and taking aim at the next target, he blew the Collector's shoulder joint to pieces as he covered Kasumi's hobbling retreat back towards the relative safety of the team's position. Another round punched a hole through the chest of a Captain and yet another collapsed the Barrier on Harbinger's latest avatar.

Uncaring of the attacks directed towards its puppet, Harbinger forced it on regardless, only to have it reduced to a pile of ash as Samara placed a careful burst through its chest, and another through its head for good measure. A small and short-lived singularity ripped a cluater of husks apart as the impossible gravitational forces broke them down at the molecular level, before exploding outward as it collapsed, blowing another trio of husks and two troopers off their feet and into the surrounding walls, their bodies impacting with audible splats as the force pulverised the remnants of their internal organs.

However, the focus she had expended on maintaining the singularity meant that she missed the remaining two Scions take aim at her.

The first round smashed into her with enough force to send her staggering and it was only barely absorbed by her barriers. The second shot didn't have that problem, it blew through the weakened barriers and slammed the Justicar into a nearby rock pillar. The cannon round had destroyed the armour where it hit, leaving a burned and lacerated mess of purple-stained flesh across her back. The force of the round and her unintended meeting with the pillar had also broken a number of ribs and she could feel the warm, suffocating feeling of blood beginning to enter one of her lungs, presumably where one of those shattered ribs had pierced the organ.

As the numbing feeling of Shock began to encroach on her consciousness, she used the brief respite from pain to focus enough biotic power around the two Scions to wrench their immense forms off of the ground and into the air over the cavernous drop that made up most of the space. A pair of dull thuds were just barely audible twenty seconds later, but by that time Samara had already blacked out from her injuries.

Seeing the Justicar collapse and the substantial amount of blood pooling around her prone form, Garrus swore colourfully before activating his comm.

"I need covering fire NOW, Samara's down and she's about to be cut off," he ordered, not waiting for confirmation before he dashed out from his cover, his Carnifex pistol booming as he fired into the Collector horde.

Of course, the rest of the team responded immediately, breaking cover almost simultaneously and forcing their foes into defensive positions with an onslaught of gunfire, riddling those who were too slow or didn't heed the warning.

Wasting no time once he reached Samara's position, he holstered his pistol and slung the gravely wounded Asari over his shoulder. Leaving a frag grenade as a parting gift, he rushed towards the evac platform, where Kasumi was still tending to her leg.

"Woah, what happened to her?" The small thief questioned as she stared in mute horror at the grisly wound.

"Scion," was Garrus' terse reply as he eased the Asari to the ground, the violet blood smeared across his right hand side reflecting the light in macabre ways. "I need you to get some medigel on that wound, keep her from bleeding out. After that, stay her and keep both of you safe; there's nothing more we can do until we can reach Mordin or Chakwas.

The thief just nodded in understanding as she immediately set to work on the still-bleeding Asari.

Glancing at his mission clock as he took up a firing position once again, Garrus could see that it had been eighteen minutes since Shepard's squad had left. He should have ordered a fall-back minutes ago according to the Commander's orders, and he definitely should now that they were two down and the Collector's showed no signs of running out of troops anytime soon; Spirits, any other Turian Commander would have followed the order to the letter, and maybe Samara wouldn't have been fighting for her life at the moment.

But he couldn't fall back just yet, doing so would give the Collectors a clear shot at Shepard, Tali and Thane, and then the whole mission would have been for nothing.

"Sorry Shepard, but I've never been a very good Turian," he said with a muttered sigh.

By the time Shepard's order to extract had come through ten minutes later;

Three Praetorians had entered the fray and turned a previously semi-ordered defence into a desperate scramble form cover to cover and the floating leviathans hunted them down.

Jack had nearly been gutted by a Captain's double-bladed knife, receiving a deep gash to her abdomen after twisting at the last moment, instead of losing her entrails. There wasn't much left of the Captain anymore, but Jack had been in no state to fight after that, leaving Miranda as their only active biotic left.

And Grunt had taken so many hits that the only reason he was still standing, let alone fighting, was because of his barely suppressed Blood Rage. His body was trying desperately to keep up with the number of gashes, burns and bullet wounds he was accumulating, ranging from inconsequential to severe, but he kept charging headlong into battle and shrugging off the pain he must have been in.

Not wasting any more time as the odds continued to stack against them, Garrus ordered an immediate retreat to the platforms. It was a pretty quick affair, seeing as how three of their number were already there in various states of consciousness and the others had been pushed to within meters of them anyway.

Garrus was the last one to board, and as EDI piloted the platforms away from the amassed forces of their enemy, a single, shilling sound shook the entire cavern; the unmistakable blaring of a Reaper's horn.

Looking back to see the Collectors take flight down the tunnel that the sound had come from, Garrus couldn't help but wonder what his friend had gotten himself into this time, and pray he would make it out safely.

[AN: And that's that, sorry it took so long, but I got stuck at a couple of points, trying to work out how I wanted to progress it.

So what did you all think of it? I think a couple of parts didn't flow to well, but I figured it would be best to get it all posted and see what you guys thought about it.

The final chapter should be up within a week, with any luck, and those of you following my prequel story, that will be the next thing to get an update, very soon hopefully.

Thanks again for reading! /AN]