We are Harbinger. We are the beginning, you are the end. We are the Harbinger of your ascendance. You escaped us before, Shepard, not again. You do not yet comprehend your place in things. Your worlds will become our laboratories.
Shepard opened her eyes. Her throat felt dry, something close to sore. She almost regretted adjusting the environmental controls in her cabin.
She looked to her left. Thane had also woken, not a moment earlier it would seem, judging from the rapid blinking of his inner eyelids and the slow spread of his sleepy smile.
No, no regrets at all.
Her memory informed her that she used to have dreams, dreams of visions from the Prothean artifact on Eden Prime. She had no recollection of what those dreams were, or whether there was anything disturbing about them.
Her recurring dreams these days were of glowing yellow eyes, a voice intoning tiresome proclamations. Sometimes she would shoot at it, or yell at it, or crack jokes. The dreams were so regular that they were never anything but entirely lucid, finding her unsurprised and unimpressed, night after night.
She used to miss having regular dreams about flying or falling or running from people, but — it seemed like such a juvenile desire, when her waking life had begun to feel so unexpectedly magical.
She swung out of bed, looping a finger through the handle of a mug on her bedside table. She went to the bathroom to fill it with water and quench her parched tongue. On her way, she saw the steady blinking of her personal terminal, alerting her to business.
Thane rose as well, and collected his scattered clothing, pulled on his trousers. The answer to a mess hall bet was that the coefficient of friction of drell skin made it no trouble at all for him to slide into those tight leather pants. Shepard took a moment to watch him through the glass of her display case, until he committed the galactic war crime of putting his shirt back on.
She refilled her mug, thirsting for a second draught of water. She took long swigs as she scrolled through messages on her personal terminal.
"How did you like the bed?" she asked him, eyes still on the screen.
He joined her by the desk, his jacket neatly folded over one arm.
"It was decadent." His fingers traced the contours of her shoulder.
"Good. I wouldn't want you to feel like I was downgrading your quarters."
"Understood, Commander," he whispered in her ear.
She turned her face to meet him in a kiss. It was extended and luxurious, bespeaking a world where there were no duties crying for urgent attention. When they parted, their eyes took place of their lips, holding one another soulfully.
Shepard realized that she had no memories of feeling this way — or any way — about anyone in her lost life, nor any recollection of heartbreak.
"You know, with my mind the way it is right now, I have no way of telling if I'm not just loving you like some dumbass infatuated kid." She tried to pass it off lightly, to staunch her fear.
Thane looked at her steadily. "Perhaps; but I hope you will trust my ability to judge."
She dropped her head to his shoulder in a silent laugh. It had been a foolish fear. The man knew more about being in a committed relationship than Shepard had lost.
She kissed him, softly, on the dark maroon folds of the side of his throat, and moved past him to go to her closet.
Her dress was in the laundry receptacle. She hadn't put it there; he must have done it. She thought, oh my god he is such a fucking sexy widower, followed by, I'm going straight to hell for thinking that, aren't I? Then she thought, I don't even care, no jury could convict.
The dress out of circulation for now, she pulled on a set of Cerberus fatigues that she had never worn. They fit her snugly, as though the Illusive Man wanted to show off the successes of the Lazarus Project.
"Ugh, growing me new skin wasn't enough — they had to make my clothes fit like skin too?" She tugged the shirt down and looked at her reflection in the fish tank. The clinging fit made the tight curves of her body look so nubile, like an off-duty vid model.
"This is why I wear dresses. I want my clothing tailored, not specced to my exact dimensions." At least the pockets were functional.
"It will not be a burden to anyone to look at you in that, siha." Thane stepped close as he consoled her, running his hands along the contours of her waist. His reassurance was so domestic, it made her heart ache.
"That makes me feel better. You're the best dressed son of a bitch on the Normandy."
His soft laugh was the swirling of shells in a seashore eddy. "Thank you, Shepard. Perhaps it was inevitable that we should be together, then."
She laughed. She realized she had a song stuck in her head, some Earth pop star she must have overheard coming from the crew quarters.
She caught herself humming it, all through the rest of the morning.
Kelly was staring at her.
"What?" Shepard looked over from her private terminal in the CIC.
"You're just… you're just typing so… jauntily." Kelly had the round eyes of a lost owl. Her screen suddenly issued an obnoxious flash. "Oh!" She came back to her duties. "Ah, looks like the Illusive Man would like to speak to you."
"Fantastic," Shepard grumbled. What a classic fucking killjoy. She was hoping to be on deck at the CIC when Garrus and Tali returned to theNormandy from the Rayya, but naturally that was exactly when the Illusive Man would demand her attention.
That pompous fuck. She loathed him, but intended to wring every credit out of their partnership of necessity. She rolled her shoulders, cracking her neck as she rounded the corridors to the comm room. Waking up with a drell in her bed might have topped up her reservoirs of tolerance. She activated the quantum entanglement array. Maybe this conversation would be civil.
"Shepard." A cigarette dangled from well-manicured fingers. Below them, a glass containing expensive-looking amber liquid. The holo-projector in the conference room never had resolution this high when she was communicating with anyone else. Jackass probably handicapped it to be that way. "An Alliance research team recently discovered that the Great Rift on the planet Klendagon is actually an impact crater from a mass accelerator weapon. A very old mass accelerator. I sent a team to find either the weapon or its target. They found both."
"Let me guess. A Reaper."
"Very good, Shepard." The Illusive Man enunciated with exceptionally punchable self-satisfaction. "The weapon was defunct, but it helped us plot the flight path of the intended target: a 37 million-year-old derelict Reaper. We found it damaged and trapped in the gravity of a brown dwarf. We believe that appropriating the Identify Friend/Foe system on the Reaper vessel will allow you to traverse the Omega-4 relay. The Reapers built the relays; they'll be able to use them unencumbered. Convince the relays you're one of them, and nothing will hold you back."
"I get the feeling this isn't going to be a simple 'swing by and pick up our package'."
"We lost contact with Dr. Chandana's team shortly after they boarded."
Shepard shook her head with an irritated 'k-chhh'. "How do you keep finding more scientists to hire? I don't think I've encountered a single team that wasn't in the process of meeting its grisly death. Doesn't word get around?"
The Illusive Man chuckled. Shepard may loathe him, but he seemed to genuinely like her, in that way of people who are tickled by the rare novelty of defiance.
"I can be very persuasive." He gestured with his tumbler at Shepard.
Those were the moments when Shepard would want to get stomping mad, to lunge at the terminal and brute force a way to extrapolate the Illusive Man's signal, just for a chance at strangling him with her own solid fingers. She was by no means deluded about the way she had been cornered into working for him: brought to life alone and under his thumb, going to the Alliance and finding them already mistrustful from leaked reports that had winged away long before she could contact them directly. And these Collectors — showing her this very real threat, with real human casualties! While the Alliance navy backed suspiciously away, she needed a ship or she could do nothing. He gave her a beautiful one.
Then she found that with every mission, there would be a catch, a nugget that he would conveniently leave out. Every tip he gave her, a setup. There was only ever the thinnest glaze between a Cerberus project and a war crime atrocity. And him, always with a slippery excuse after the dust had settled.
The entire situation smacked of Reapers, on all sides. She only knew she needed to find a way into the middle to detonate the whole thing.
For now, she merely dug her fingernails into her palms and tolerated his smug bullshit.
Someday, I will tenderly skullfuck you with my Carnifex, she seethed.
"Send Joker the coordinates," she said instead, and slammed the channel closed.
"Here we go."
The entire ground team was assembled in the debriefing room. Shepard held a datapad, but didn't refer to it much as she spoke.
"A Cerberus science team has gone silent. This is perhaps the least surprising thing in the galaxy, because, a) they're Cerberus–" Shepard caught Jack's smirk and Miranda's defensive scowl. "–and b), they were studying a derelict Reaper."
She heard Garrus' thoughtful "hrm" in response to that. They had hardly gotten a chance to say hello after his return from the Rayya. She was busy plotting out this mission, but he also seemed a little hurried to get away. He'd looked embarrassed somehow, having difficulty meeting her eyes.
Shepard had some theories about why that might be, but it was not a pressing concern. He was in usual form now, when there was work to be done, and that was what mattered.
"We've got two objectives when we dock at the research station. I want to find out what happened to the scientists, because in general I prefer to know what is trying to kill me. But our priority is getting an infiltration team into the Reaper itself to access its Identify Friend/Foe protocol. Acquiring that will be the key to activating the Omega-4 relay."
It was a credit to her team, how stoically they absorbed all this information.
"I'm splitting you into two squads to pursue these objectives. Garrus, you and Mordin will lead the team investigating the fate of the scientists. Miranda and Jacob, I want you with them. Your insights into Cerberus operations will be useful. Grunt and Samara, keep them safe.
"The rest of you, you're with me. We're boarding the Reaper. Any questions?"
As she entertained questions from various voices in the room, she gestured authoritatively with the datapad in her hand. Whatever words were there couldn't be read by anyone else in the room.
Infiltration team:
Shepard — squad leader
Tali — engineering tech specialist
Kasumi — access specialist
Zaeed, Jack — heavy hitters
Thane — … … eye candy
The two squads parted ways soon after docking, with Garrus' team heading toward the labs and Shepard's towards the airlock into the Reaper corpse itself.
"Keep me updated." Shepard tapped the side of her helmet. Mordin ducked his head at her, and the six of them turned a corner and vanished from view.
"I would have preferred to stay in the civilized, inorganic part of this station." Kasumi's low intonation betrayed her nerves.
"Oh come on, Kasumi-san, just think of this as stealing. We're breaking in to take something valuable."
"It feels more like grave-robbing. Does anyone else feel a chill?"
"This should be it," Tali said as they passed into an airlock, reading off of the schematics being projected from her omnitool. "The research team pressurized the interior of the Reaper, so we can just break through here and go inside."
The quarian knelt and began bypassing the access blocks on the exterior airlock door.
"Shepard," came Mordin's voice over the radio. "Do not believe research team survives. Have found great deal of blood. No bodies, however. Collectors? No. Too messy to be their MO. Puzzling. "
"That's odd." Privately, this didn't even rank in Shepard's top 100 odd things encountered in her career. "Keep looking. I'd love to get that mystery solved before we return to the Normandy. We're almost through this airlock, preparing to board the Reaper."
"Understood."
"Got it," Tali said, and the door slid open. At the same time, the floor pitched beneath their feet.
"Normandy to shore party!" Joker's voice.
"What just happened?"
"The Reaper put up kinetic barriers! You're blocked from the rest of the research station, and I don't think we can get through from our side."
Fuck. Another trap. Another goddamn trap, and this time in the belly of a 37-million-year-old monster.
Nothing to do but push forward.
"We'll find a way to disable the barrier from in here." Shepard's smooth command denied her team knowledge of her pinched irritation. "Stay sharp, everyone."
Dank gray light filtered through the open airlock door. They stepped through and emerged into what felt like the oesophagus of a techno-organic horror. The curvilinear walls and ceilings were lined with spiralling metal tubing, less like blood vessels and more like chains. Without the walkways installed by Cerberus that ran the length of the interior of the ship, Shepard couldn't imagine trying to navigate the place.
No doubt it was designed for creatures with entirely different ergonomics.
There was so much they could learn here about the deep history of their galaxy. Shame it was an abomination.
"Alright Tali, what's your best guess at where the IFF would be found?"
"Well, if the Reaper was like a ship," she said uncertainly, "it would be near the drive core."
"Same place as the generators powering the barrier?" Kasumi asked, hopeful.
"Probably," Tali said.
"Perfect. Can you estimate its location from here?" Shepard asked.
Tali nodded, adjusting the sensors on her omnitool and taking the lead. Shepard signalled to Zaeed to keep abreast of her and stay watchful from the front.
They moved together into formation. Kasumi fell in behind Tali, shimmering in and out of visibility every time she got spooked. Jack slouched along beside her, her eyes bright and raking their perimeter for something to smash.
Shepard and Thane brought up the rear. The scope of Thane's rifle swung this way and that as he scanned the darkest corners of the passageway, in all the places a hostile might linger. She had made that joke to herself about 'eye candy' in the role assignments, because she didn't want to write: 'Thane — generally improve chance of mission success'. She trusted him, she knew he was adaptable and cool-headed, and the breadth of his skills made him versatile. He was ideal for entering an unknown situation. Right now, she knew there could be no one better to scan their six for stalkers than a hunter of his calibre.
"Shepard, new evidence." Mordin's clipped tones over the radio. "We believe the science team suffered from indoctrination. Research logs include evidence of confused behaviour, psychosis, some memory merging phenomena."
Memory merging. That was strange.
"Great. So even if you find survivors, keep your guard up."
"No sign of survivors yet. Nor of corpses." He paused. "Troubling."
"Keep me posted. Shepard out."
They proceeded apace along the catwalk, passing unlocked terminals that flickered mutely to life as they walked by. Toolboxes were left open, their contents spilled out. As they descended a short ramp, Thane stopped, dropped into a crouch.
"Hold," Shepard called softly over comms, and the group stopped, tensing for combat.
"I believe there are hostiles underneath the walkway." Thane's low growl was cool and alert. He spoke with the minimal inflections of a predator.
Zaeed turned his assault rifle down to the grate beneath them. "I can't see a goddamn thing down there, drell. Have you got x-ray vision or summat?"
"No. I can feel them deadening our footsteps. They are clinging to the underside."
"Oh now that's creepy," Kasumi said, and just then a hoarse groan preceded the appearance of an openmouthed gray face over the bottom edge of the catwalk.
Zaeed took its head off with a rapid spray of thermal slugs, but the creeper was already replaced by another.
"Beta team, enemy contacts," Shepard said into her radio as she readied her plasma attack to incinerate the next creature over the railing. "Husks."
The hollow gasps of the monsters were beginning to fill the chamber. Jack was destroying them en masse with liberal swaths of shockwaves, mowing them off the edge of the metal walkway, but there were still more.
"Fall back," Shepard said, and although it may have seemed premature to call for retreat, no one questioned the command in her voice.
Five pistol shots, and three large tanks ahead of them exploded in flames, consuming the remaining husks on the walkway and superheating the metal grating underneath. Flashes of light beneath the floor indicated where the remaining hidden husks were transformed into fireballs. Eventually they all loosened and dropped away into the indeterminate blackness below.
The flames quickly exhausted their fuel and burnt out. Shepard sprayed a layer of cryo particles out in front of them, lest they burn their feet on hot metal.
"Shepard. We found dragon's teeth." It was Garrus this time.
"So I guess we know what happened to the research team." Shepard was grim. "We've found them. Miranda, what was the complement on this station?"
"Scientists, lab workers, administrators and maintenance… two hundred and sixty-seven," she replied through the radio. "It was a high priority project."
"And we just felled approximately forty," Thane said, at her side.
Zaeed stepped closer, fiddling with the heat sink of his rifle. "They don't seem too bright. Maybe they'll keep attacking in small numbers."
"They attacked because they had been made," Thane murmured, for Shepard's ears only. "They were lurking, tracking us. If they had gone undetected, they would probably have waited to strike at a time when they had the advantage." He paused, casting a gaze at one of the twisted and charred corpses. "Judging from their method of engagement, that advantage would probably be… numerical."
Shepard nodded, her gaze already far away as she began to plot a defence. "Let's press on."
The eerie quiet persisted as they rounded the corners of the Cerberus catwalks. Blinding emergency floodlights only made the cavernous darkness around them press with a wicked omen. There was the stink of human carcasses from an indefinite origin, and a darker note of death and lingering hatred from millions of years ago.
"Movement up ahead," Kasumi said, her keen augmented eyes adjusting more effectively to penetrate the darkness. "More husks, but also… something awful."
Shepard tolerated her fearful vagueness. "Can you give me a description?"
Zaeed and Thane were already raising their sniper rifles.
"Huge. Humpbacked. It's sort of lumbering, like it's… deformed."
Shepard heard Zaeed mutter, "Oh, Christ," and abruptly lower his rifle.
"Damn, something spooked the old guy," Jack said. Judging from the flush in her cheeks, the Pavlovian response from her childhood training was giving her an excess of anxious energy in this black and threatening place. "Sounds like something I can get friendly with."
Shepard adjusted her optics to delve into the distant dark and focus on the coming threat. Her curses joined Zaeed's. "Those are scions, or at least that's what Mordin decided to call them — some type of horticultural term related to grafting two plants together."
Zaeed spit. "Does seem to describe them somehow," he grumbled.
The Commander continued, speaking in measured tones. "We encountered them on Horizon. They are dangerous as shit, almost took down Grunt before we knew what they were capable of. Watch for their dark energy attacks. They ignore cover."
"Great. I don't give a fuck about cover anyway," Jack said, cracking her knuckles. "This is gonna be good."
"Jack, wait, it's better at long-range–"
But the convict had already dashed forward to engage them. "I will kill – you – all!"
Shepard had to move fast. "Tali, get Chiktikka out there, keep them distracted." She followed suit with her own drone. "Focus on the head and the hump," she shouted over her shoulder, already approaching with her pistol firing and plasma bursting from her left hand.
She heard the shockwave attack first, and felt the catwalk judder beneath her before she threw herself into a roll to get away. Husks were beginning to crawl from the shadows, their rasping groans filling the air with horrible foreboding. Zaeed turned aside to deal with some that were straying too close, and it saved him from being in the line of fire from the scion's biotic attack. Jack, however, was well ahead of the rest of the squad, and was hit point-blank.
Her tattooed body was knocked backwards, her shield generator failing with a flash. She landed hard, stunned, and it took long enough for her to get back up that Shepard knew she was not okay. "Cover me!" she shouted, and kept low as she ran towards Jack's prone form.
Dodging this way and that, staying out of the arc of the scions' shockwaves, she crouched by Jack and hooked her over her shoulders in a fireman's carry. The biotic moaned half-aware curses at her, but didn't resist. Shepard's combat drone hovered obnoxiously at the nearest scion's disproportionate head, zapping it into berserking distraction. Jack was not an especially heavy burden. Shepard darted back with her to the safe pocket of the squad.
"We need to draw them back into a killzone," she said breathlessly. Without a word, Zaeed helped to lay Jack down on the catwalk, behind the cover of a thick wall partition.
"Is Jack alright?" Tali knelt by them with her omnitool.
"I think so. Just knocked cold. Zaeed, take up position there." Shepard indicated a section of platform with a narrow gap between large containers, perfect for a rifle's scope. "Thane–"
The sound of his Viper firing neat salvos into sacs of horrific, eezo-injected juice. He was already there, stretched out in the shadows atop a scaffold.
"Perfect. Kasumi, join Thane up there and make sure no husks sneak up on him."
"He doesn't seem like the type to be caught by surprise, but sure thing, Shep." Kasumi turned and swung deftly up a wall on scant footholds.
"Tali, do the same for Zaeed. I'll be running interference."
Tali lingered briefly, clearly biting back the urge to admonish her commander for running back into the line of fire, but brandished her shotgun and went to her task nonetheless.
Shepard's two snipers were steadily wearing down the scions as they plodded nearer. One's sac burst open in a gruesome spill of electric blue fluid. But despite their grievous injuries, the creatures did not slow their advance. Shepard could not permit them to get within range to unleash their deadly shockwaves on her squad.
Alone on the broad straightaway, she faced the scions as they approached from either side. She focused on the one with the exploded sac, firing shot after shot from her Carnifex into the once human head lolling from its twisted oversized shoulder. Two combat drones — Chiktikka, and her own — harried the other scion, slowing its progress. She rolled and dodged, feeling the sickly blue gravitic slams of its attacks whistle all too close to her each time. She exploded nearby fuel cells, showering the scion in shrapnel and burning fluid. Finally, the first one went down.
She heard Zaeed's "Yeah!", but Thane's Viper did not miss a beat, switching targets to the second scion, steadily punching through its grotesque membrane.
She kept mobile, and danced around the scion's perimeter, trying to entice it to backtrack to pursue her. She kept up her firing rate with her Carnifex until her stomach dropped at the futile clicking of an empty chamber. Out of ammo.
She switched to her Locust. It would be little more than a background buzz to this hulking, armoured monster, but she doggedly trained it on her target nonetheless.
"Look at me, you nasty fucker," she hissed under her breath. It slowly lumbered around to face her. "Yes, good…"
But she had gotten too close. There was less room to manoeuvre on this side of the platform, and when she saw it begin to launch its biotic attack, she could not muster the necessary distance in her leap to take herself out of range.
She landed hard on her side, and felt the static discharge of her shields failing around her. She scrambled to her feet and tried to escape.
Turning it around had given her snipers a clean view to its quavering membranous sac. The creature did not communicate any real pain, but it did stumble forward as the sac burst, scattering eezo-infused liquid in a gory spatter behind it. The gap closing between them, she could no longer see Zaeed's perch, or Thane's scaffold. She could only see the empty, silent howl of the scion's unnaturally-positioned head, its enormous biotic gun arm rising to batter her–
Its gray skin shimmered to a foreign blue life as a warp field enclosed its body. Shepard covered her eyes and braced herself in a defensive curl.
The biotic detonation rattled the hinges of the catwalk, clattering through the entire cetacean hollow of the Reaper's belly. The scion fell to its knees and collapsed.
Shepard rose. A near-death experience should perhaps be trivial to a woman like her, who staked her career on an ever-escalating sequence of them — not to mention having had an actual death experience — and yet, her heart was thudding in her chest, her eyes wide and overalert. Even her nostrils felt flared, her whole body tensed and ready and afraid.
A steadying breath. It's over for now.
"Close call, team," she said over comms. She could trust her voice to sound cool, no matter how she felt. Almost. "How's Jack doing?"
"She's awake, and still swinging." Zaeed sounded faintly amused.
Walking up the ramp to her squad's position, Shepard could hear Jack's voice off-comms.
"Those fuckers! I will tear them apart!"
"They put you on your arse, girl. Don't get hasty and stupid."
"Hold still, Jack! I'm working as fast as I can!" Tali, fixing her damaged shield generator.
Shepard's own repair subroutine was already nearly done.
"I could see a doorway from where I was down there." Shepard was already racing to their next step. "From its position, I'd guess that's the drive core."
"Then I guess that's where we're going," Kasumi said. "I'll go take a look at that door." Her image wavered, then vanished.
Thane descended from his sniper position with a limber jump. He moved close to Shepard, locked eyes with her.
"Thanks for the rescue," she murmured to him, touching him tenderly on the hip.
"Hm." His uncharacteristically brief response did not seem angry; only troubled, somehow.
He moved past her to descend the ramp from whence she had just come, and knelt at the body of the second scion.
"Ah. As I suspected." He hoisted the body, its horrific amalgamation of human corpses, and flipped it on its back. "I did not deal the finishing blow."
The topmost human head had been blasted backwards with a single massive shot. It left the tortured face a smoking ruin, the characteristics of which Shepard did not recognize from any weapon she had ever known.
The shot had come from the opposite direction of her squad.
Thane lifted his eyes and scanned the darkness, as though reading auguries in the shadows. After a long moment, he shook his head and rose to his feet. "This is the mark of stealth and precision that I cannot begin to fathom. It does not seem possible for an organic being."
Shepard felt a chill in her veins. "Well, good thing it's on our side, then."
"Shepard, bad news." Garrus' voice came through on the radio, urgent and low. "There's a problem on the Normandy. Joker's had to break off from the station and engage a hostile ship." There was a long pause. "It's the Collectors."
Shepard's eyes went wide. She bit hard on her lower lip, staving off the urge to curse wildly and throw everything in arm's reach into the pits of the dead Reaper's guts. The trap had ensnared them all. "Well that's bad," was all she said.
"Yeah, no kidding. Miranda says there would be Cerberus shuttles docked in one of the landing bays around here, so we've got an escape route. How are you doing with the barriers?"
"We've been delayed. We're regrouping outside what looks like the drive core now."
"Great. Soon as you get the package and bring down those barriers, we'll come by for pickup. Good hunting, Shepard."
"Thanks, Garrus," she said, even as her heart turned to ash. Her ship. Joker, take care of her. And this time, if you have to, get in the damn escape pod.
