LVII

Taming Cerberus: Quiet

The next morning, Garrus was still gearing up in Shepard's cabin when EDI spoke up over the comm. "Commander, Garrus, Liara is in the antechamber, requesting entry."

Beth had on her greaves and boots but was still missing her breastplate, gauntlets, and shoulder plates. She was putting the last pins into her gelled hair for the mission. She glanced over at Garrus, pulling on his boots, with his visor still on her nightstand.

"Up to you, Shepard," he said, answering the unspoken question.

He saw her register the use of her surname, the return to the status quo. Her eyes flicked back to the door. Then, her jaw set and lifted. "Granted."

Interesting. It wasn't technically a breach of the rules she had set. Liara wasn't crew at the moment; she was a guest on Normandy, and Garrus was still in Shepard's cabin instead of belowdecks, so they were still within the letter of the law "it stays up here." But it was a definite violation of the spirit of the law. He wasn't disappointed. Really, she was stroking his ego right now, and he appreciated the gesture.

Still. I'd give a lot to know just what she's trying to prove right now, and to who.

The door to the cabin opened, and T'Soni stepped inside. She blushed violet. "Oh! Am I interrupting?"

"Nothing we haven't done in the cargo hold of the SR-1 fifty times before," Garrus said.

"Of course," Liara said quickly, blushing even deeper. "I'm sorry. I just—EDI and Joker say we're in orbit over Hagalaz. I wanted to make sure you knew."

"Thus the getting ready," Shepard deadpanned. "What does your intel say about the position of the base?"

T'Soni collected herself. "It's aboard a ship constantly following the terminus of the sunset, where the hot and cold air collide. The storm hides the ship's position and makes it more difficult to detect, but also to board. Will your shuttle pilot be up to the job?"

Shepard shrugged, buckling her gauntlets over her underarmor. "He got us to and from a bait Collector vessel, and on and off a planet in geth space under a star gone haywire."

"Yes, but has he ever flown you down into a lightning storm and dropped you all aboard a moving ship?" T'Soni wanted to know.

"No, but I guarantee you Niels will do a better job than Shepard," Garrus pointed out.

Liara relaxed at that, and Shepard pretended to bristle. "Hey, I seem to recall Vasir dropping mines on us and leading us into oncoming traffic yesterday, and we came out fresh as a daisy."

"Tali didn't," Liara chuckled.

Shepard waved a hand. "Details." She grinned, then turned, fully armored for the mission. "I'm going to ask her to join us on the mission," she told Liara. "Figure Tali owes the Broker a little something for some of that trouble she ran into on her Pilgrimage. Most of it was Saren, but the Broker played their part. I'm also going to ask Thane Krios to join us. Don't think you've met the guy, Liara, but you know his work. He's trained to deal with any number of situations we might face down there."

It was a good idea: an old friend and a shadow operative; a shotgun specialist and another sniper; a tech and a biotic. No one likely to talk about anything that went down planetside.

"Grab a high-carb breakfast from Gardner in the galley and head to the shuttle bay," Shepard ordered. "We'll round up the others and meet you there in twenty. If you want to borrow any weapons from the armory, see Jacob Taylor on Deck Two. You're welcome to anything we've got."

"Understood," T'Soni answered, straightening slightly. T'Soni wasn't military, but when Shepard used that voice, it was hard not to respond. She echoed Garrus's own thoughts, smiling. "And Shepard—it's good to be back on Normandy, even for a little while."

She turned around and left the cabin.


The Shadow Broker's ship moved inside a nightmare. Garrus felt the charge of the lightning storm even from inside his hardsuit and was painfully conscious that this model wasn't insulated. The bodysuit underneath was, but that wouldn't save him from a lightning bolt straight to the helmet. He saw Liara's lips move behind the biotic-tech bubble over her mouth that served as her atmo exchange. He didn't really approve of the way biotics tended to use barriers to preserve themselves from a vacuum or other physiologically unfrienly conditions instead of a full hardsuit—the trend had started with the asari and seemed more in service of vanity than anything else, and it had to be biotically taxing.

He couldn't hear Liara's voice over the roar of the storm. After a moment, it crackled over his suit radio. The storm was interfering with suit signals too. "Hagalaz," Liara reported. "The oceans boil during the day, then snap freeze ten minutes after sundown."

Up front, Garrus could see Niels's arms straining on the controls, fighting to keep them on an even course, matching their pace with the cruiser-sized ship down below—a design like nothing Garrus had ever seen before. It wasn't meant for spaceflight. The windflaps, hull features, and everything about it indicated the ship was made to fly here on Hagalaz, in atmo, in constant storm conditions.

The wind shrieked. The temperature readings on Garrus's visor were running riot, one instant far hotter than anything any Citadel species preferred, the next far colder. Shepard's voice sounded inside his helmet, speaking to Liara. "The Shadow Broker lives in this?"

The shuttle lowered. The hull of the ship was eight meters down. Six. "I can't hold it!" Niels yelled. "Gonna have to get out fast, Commander!"

"They've locked down the shuttle bay," Liara told them. "We have to look for a hatch out on the hull, but we won't be able to stay outside for long!"

"Right," Shepard said. She looked out of the open shuttle door, gauging the distance. "Now!"

They jumped one by one into mixed ice, rain, and lightning. Garrus engaged his mag boots on the way, afraid to leave the landing up to chance. He hit next to Krios. Armor and guns would both need extra maintenance after today. He looked up at the shuttle. He could see Niels struggling here too, the winds buffeting the aircraft in every direction.

"Get out of here, Caleb!" Shepard shouted. "Get back to Normandy! We'll extend the ship's kinetic barriers and open the shuttle bay for you when we're done here!"

"Aye-aye, Commander!" Niels said back. "You watch yourself, and get inside quick!" The jets behind the shuttle ignited, and Garrus watched it peel away into the dark.

T'Soni had her omni-tool up, scanning something. "It's hard to pinpoint in this lightning, but I'm picking up signals from a communications array near the back of the ship. There's nothing below but maintenance equipment. We have to find an entrance near the back shielding."

"And yet, we landed here," Tali said. "Lovely. Ouch!" The cry was more from surprise than pain. Lightning had struck a rod just a few meters away.

"Stay away from the lightning-rod hardware," Shepard advised.

"No kidding. Liara, have I told you lately that your missions are the worst? Car chases in adverse traffic, squads of asari commandos—now a crawl over a metal ship hull in conditions like this."

"You weren't there for the asari commandos," Liara pointed out.

"That doesn't mean I didn't hear about them."

"Actually, the asari commandos weren't that bad," Garrus mused. "The acid-spitting insane rachni juveniles, on the other hand—"

"And if you'd complained, I'd understand," Liara said. "But Tali—"

"Shepard was in her keep-the-child-on-the-ship phase," Tali protested. "She only started letting me off Normandy once we hit the Armstrong Nebula." Her hood swiveled toward Shepard. "I still don't get enough time on the ground," she grumbled. "She never fussed over you as much, Liara."

"You were a girl who had only just left home," Liara said. "Your very name then meant 'child.' I already had a doctorate in archaeology and several published studies."

"Yet you never hesitated to remind us how young you were at 106 years old," Tali pointed out. "Am I older than you now, do you think? Analogically speaking, I mean."

"Eyes ahead," Krios warned. Garrus's visor was registering hostiles too—tech signatures rising up in between the fins on either side of the narrow path they were following toward the back of the ship.

"Maintenance drones," T'Soni said.

The red globes began swarming toward them, wielding charged prods more powerful than the lightning flashing all around them. "Why are they attacking?" Shepard asked, hacking one with her omni-tool.

"They must think we're debris from the storm," guessed T'Soni.

"When the ship's systems register we're not, we might have company," Shepard said.

"How many combatants?" Krios asked.

Garrus saw Shepard shrug in his periphery. "It depends. On the one hand, the Shadow Broker had enough soldiers to write off a platoon and a Spectre back on Illium. On the other, this is where they live. Every soldier here is one more who can leak his location."

She turned a corner between fins on the hull of the ship and led them up an incline. Garrus's hide itched, and his helmet visor darkened in response to the intensity of the light up ahead. "Careful," T'Soni warned, twitching her gun at two pillars of tech dancing with charge up ahead. "Those capacitors discharge built-up lightning."

Two life signs appeared on Garrus's visor readout. He fired. The shower of sparks and the explosion of lightning happened instantaneously. A salarian screamed and fell. Blue-white arcs of lightning ran over his blackened armor for seconds after the capacitor had gone dark. Garrus watched the salarian's heartbeat stop over his visor while the guy's limbs were still convulsing. The human soldier beside the salarian stared. Shepard fired a single shot, and he went down too.

"Well. This might be as fun as that antique store," Garrus observed.

"You know, you have something of a mean streak," Tali noted. "You should let me have the next one."

Fighting across the Shadow Broker's ship really wasn't as fun as playing the proverbial bovine in the ceramics shop, Garrus thought. The wind was so high that any sudden movements could set a person flying out into the storm, into the lightning, into the ice and rain, and thousands of feet above an ocean both boiling and freezing. But the wind flap design that let the Shadow Broker's ship constantly navigate in these kinds of conditions also meant there were a thousand places his mercs could hide. They came from every direction—LOKI mechs and salarian engineers, humans and asari commandos with shotguns. And the capacitors sticking out from the hull like spines were as much a danger as they were an opportunity. They had to be careful not to get too close in case a mercenary they hadn't seen decided to try the same trick they often used against the mercs. Garrus's shields were completely zapped once before he learned what constituted a proper distance from the capacitors.

Krios and T'Soni had the advantage. Before too long, they had the knack of using their biotics to lift the enemy just far enough away from the hull that the forces of the storm overpowered local gravity. It didn't take a whole lot of energy, and soon humans and salarians and a few asari were flying off in all directions like weather balloons sent off by a meteorologist in a hurricane.

"Got them!" T'Soni reported, watching yet another engineer fly away and straight into a lightning strike. She winced.

"Clean kill," Krios complimented her.

"We'll have time for a meeting of the mutual admiration society later," Shepard yelled, pointing with her gun down the side of the ship to a catwalk walking along the edge. "This is our route forward."

Garrus let loose an overload program to fritz out a mech up ahead, and it fell sparking to the walkway. He heard T'Soni gasp behind him. "Okay, looking down was clearly a mistake," she said in a shaky voice.

"Yeah, I wouldn't do that," Garrus advised, trying to avoid thinking about the drop below himself and feeling a palpable sense of relief as the catwalk turned inward to a maintenance array and they had both a floor and ceiling, if only for a little while. He looked around for a hatch, but nothing. "LOKIs up ahead!" he warned.

Shepard, Krios, and Tali fired in succession. The lone survivor just had time to report, "Allied force casualties," before Garrus took its central processor. Then, they were out in the storm once again.

Past the midsection of the ship, they found another maintenance section. From this section, some of the inner workings keeping the ship flying were visible. Power arrays converting electric energy from the storm. Stabilizers, each with three redundant systems he could identify.

"They built this ship specifically for this planet," Tali said in awestruck tones. "Specifically for this flight pattern and these conditions. Shepard, Garrus, are you seeing these power converters? With the money and resources they spent on this one ship, the Shadow Broker could have had a small fleet!"

"It must have taken decades to build in secret," Liara agreed.

"I wonder what happened to the contractors," Shepard drawled.

Garrus saw Liara's face fall behind her barriers. "I think we can guess." Then she brightened, and she pointed at a moving array of mechanical pieces, shifting and pistoning with each change in the storm outside. "Motion dampeners. I bet you can't even hear the storm from inside the ship."

"Meanwhile, still no hatch in sight," Krios observed. "How much further?"

"We're more than halfway to the signals I'm picking up," Liara promised. "Probably not long now."

"I'm trying to think if I've had a more dangerous approach to a mission," Garrus said. "Had an enemy turn off the gravity on a ship once, but I don't think I've ever crawled like an insect over the hull of a ship in high atmo in the middle of a lightning storm."

"Should make quite the story if we survive," Liara answered.

"We survived a suicide mission. We're not dying here going after a shut-in information broker," Tali said.

"More ahead!" Shepard warned them. She blinked out of sight, and Garrus groaned.

"Shepard, you know that in the middle of all these temperature fluctuations it's going to be hard for me to paint you for the others?"

"Ghost in play!" one of the mercs shouted as a pistol shot from nowhere took down his colleague.

"You could try trusting that I'm not gonna get in your lines of fire," Shepard answered Garrus.

"What's the make of your shielding technology, anyway?" Liara wanted to know. "I wanted to ask back at Azure, but somehow it slipped my mind."

"It's custom," Shepard told her, as Tali took out a merc Krios had floated in the air for her. "I think Cerberus based it on the tech the geth use for their hunters. I woke up with the app already downloaded on my omni-tool. Kasumi has a better design—a lot more duration to the functionality. I've been able to make improvements to my app by studying hers, but I haven't been able to convince her to let me copy it entirely. Could copy mine for you, though."

"Stealth infiltration and sniper fire isn't really my style," T'Soni said, "but I could certainly connect you with several arms dealers who would pay handsomely for the technology."

"Lovely," Garrus drawled. "In a few months, murderers and terrorists like these guys could be using our own tech."

"Going to be using it anyway. My version's Cerberus IP," Shepard pointed out. "But you've got a point. I'll send copies to the Council races. That way when other Cerberus operatives start using the tech, at least they're prepared." She knelt behind a weather flap, lined up a shot, and fired, and the momentum of the shot picked her target up off the ship and sent him spinning off into the storm.

The five of them stood and looked around. As far as they could see, the hull had been cleared of enemies. But there also didn't seem to be a hatch or a clear path forward. "Spread out and look around for controls," Shepard ordered. "The mercs we've been seeing had to have come from somewhere."

"Here!" T'Soni called, pointing at a large lightning rod to their right. "This lightning rod is on a rail." She found the console controlling it, flipped the switch, and the rod retracted and folded away, revealing a narrow path down and forward toward the front of the ship.

Tali took point, with Garrus after her, T'Soni after him, and Krios and Shepard bringing up the rear. The path they were on went over what looked like a largely mechanical section of the ship. Engines and power systems roared beneath a narrow foot bridge to the forward section of the ship as the storm raged above. One misstep, and they would fall down to be crushed inside the inner workings of the Shadow Broker's ship. "Not even a guardrail. Somehow, I don't think the Broker's agents have a lot of job security," Garrus mused.

"Less and less all the time," T'Soni agreed.

But when the bridge ended, it opened up to reveal the front of the ship, and T'Soni rushed forward. "There!" she cried. "That hatch leads directly to the communications signal." She slammed her hand on the access panel, only to hear a buzz denying them all entry. "It's locked. Hang on, I've got a bypass shunt program that can crack it." She fabricated something with her omni-tool and attached it to the door.

"How does the program work?" Tali asked. "I think they've been waiting for us!"

She took up position in the alcove inside the door and signaled off to the right, where a formation of mercs with an asari commando at their head was closing in.

Shepard signaled the formation the five of them should take in response. Tali, Krios, and T'Soni dug into defensive positions around the hatch and the working bypass program. Shepard drew her Locust, and Garrus took out the Mattock. The two of them ranged forward together to meet the enemy. Shepard snatched the shields of an engineer to strengthen her own. Garrus took advantage of the opportunity to hit the human three times with the Mattock before ducking beneath the asari's attack and falling back to draw her out into the others' fire.

"How long will it take?" Shepard yelled at Liara.

Liara grunted, and the asari attacking Garrus shrieked in sudden panic as her barrier seemed to warp and boil away, leaving her exposed to Krios's sniper fire. "I don't know, Shepard. I've never broken into the Shadow Broker's base before," T'Soni said. "Well, not this one anyway."

Garrus turned on his heel to clean up the last of the attacking mercenaries, only to see another squad coming in from the other side. "I could probably take a look," Tali was offering.

"Leave it," Garrus advised. "Just guard the door. T'Soni needs to feel she's doing something."

Tali made a disgusted noise. "I guess we'll have to kill these guards sooner or later." She sent out her own energy drain program, and a vortex of dark energy materialized in front of her target, sucking in two of the attacking mercenaries.

"How's that for contributing?" Liara demanded.

Garrus shot a bullet through the head of one of the suspended mercs. "Nice."

"Ugh, are you sure that shunt is working?" Tali complained.

"It's illegal even on Illium," T'Soni answered. "It didn't come with a warranty."

"But you tested it, right?" Shepard asked.

"On your left, Commander!" T'Soni warned her.

Shepard spun and fired a stream of six bullets at an attacking soldier. "Tell me you tested it!"

There was another asari coming up the side of the ship toward them. Garrus flipped the switch on the Mattock to line up a concussive blast and fired, knocking her in a nerve cluster that took down her barrier in one shot. She tripped backward, and Krios made the kill. Garrus wondered how many mercs the Shadow Broker had.

"No time to talk," T'Soni was saying.

"Fantastic," Garrus muttered. It was the Collector base all over again, up against a locked door with endless waves of the enemy coming at them. Only this time, they didn't have backup on the other side of the door. This time, every second they weren't hit by a lightning blast was a victory. Even inside his hardsuit, his skin had begun to ache from the surrounding electrical activity.

"Liara!" Shepard yelled.

"I . . . I'm sure it won't be much longer!" T'Soni said. Her voice didn't hold a lot of conviction.

Tali laughed. "Remember the old days when you could just put omni-gel on everything?" she asked.

I'm glad it's Tali, Shepard, and Krios instead of some of the others, Garrus thought. No one here's about to panic or do something stupid at least.

"That security upgrade made a lot of people unhappy," T'Soni agreed. "Look out, rocket drones, front of the ship!"

"Watch for heavy weapons!" Krios warned, just as Garrus hit the hull to avoid a shrieking incoming rocket.

"You don't say," he breathed. He took in a breath as he rose. Every time with missiles, there was phantom pain in his face, with or without a flashback to Archangel's base on Omega. But these missiles came from drones, which had a weakness. He twisted his wrist and saw a drone explode midair in a shower of sparks, its systems overloaded with the rest of its rockets. Shepard and Tali helped him with the rest of the drones, and he and Shepard fell back to the doors.

He checked the hatch—Cracking . . . 63.7% his visor reported, translating the asari figures scrolling over the bypass T'Soni had attached.

"We need to hold out a while longer," Krios confirmed.

"More on the left," Shepard said, gesturing to Garrus.

He loaded another heat sink, rolled his shoulder, and headed back out into the storm.

"Their attacks are disorganized," T'Soni observed as she warped a salarian's shields away. "They'd be more effective if they all attacked together."

Garrus's own groan was echoed by Tali and Shepard. "Well, now you've done it," Garrus told T'Soni.

"Yes, could we point out more flaws in the enemy tactics where the enemy can hear us?" Tali seconded.

"Seventy-three percent through," Krios reported.

"I'm red," a merc yelled at his colleague. "Need support!"

Shepard reacted to his call by shooting several rounds from the Locust into him. Garrus gripped the shoulder of an incoming asari, disabled a nerve cluster connected to the biotic abilities in her dominant arm, threw her, and finished her off with a three-burst shot to the face.

"They're almost in!" a merc screamed. "Reform!"

They were coming—from the back of the ship and the right. "The next wave looks like a big one!" T'Soni warned.

"You just had to give them tactical advice," Shepard chided her.

T'Soni grunted with effort, whipping two attackers off their feet with her biotics and sending them end-over-end into the lightning-torn sky. "But now there'll be fewer left to deal with inside."

Garrus crouched beneath a weather flap and fired at a capacitor, baking a merc who'd gotten too close. "Yeah, keep dreaming, T'Soni."

His lungs burned from a combination of effort and adrenaline. His hide felt raw, itchy. His teeth had begun to ache. They were running up against the time they had to spend out here, whether or not the mercs kept coming. Don't know how much more we can take of this. He wondered if it was better or worse for the aliens, if Tali's suit protected her any better or if Krios's skin was more or less sensitive than the rest of theirs. It'd be a physical from the doc for sure when they got back to Normandy.

"There!" Liara cried out. "The hatch is open!"

Krios shot down the last hovering drone and the five of them fell back, into the Shadow Broker's ship.

Garrus's first sensation was one of relief: the exterior of the ship shielded them entirely from the storm. The electric fatigue that had been building up outside and in his hardsuit dissipated, and in a few seconds, he felt like he'd taken a long, freezing shower under a power washer, but not much worse than that. He heard sighs from the others and knew they felt it too. Like T'Soni had predicted, the sound of the storm outside was inaudible here—there was just the normal ship sounds of working engines. The gravity was back on too. It felt a little heavier than Palaven standard, actually. Garrus moved his legs up and down, testing his movement. He'd be slower inside the ship. Bullets wouldn't travel as far or make as much of an impact. He set his visor to calibrate shot calculations to local gravity and peered around.

It was dim inside the Shadow Broker's ship—the Broker had obviously spent their money on the ship's exterior rather than on making the interior homey or welcoming. Garrus was looking at a plain metal corridor, with sickly yellow disk lights only sparsely placed along the ceiling. The ship was about as friendly as a foundry or a rented warehouse.

Something moved in the distance, and T'Soni put up a barrier just in time. Garrus switched his infrared back on and saw three figures at the far end of the corridor. He switched the Mattock out for his sniper.

"More of them!" T'Soni exclaimed. "How many guards does the Shadow Broker have?"

"Told you," Shepard muttered, bringing up her own sniper. T'Soni held the barrier while Garrus, Shepard, and Krios each made their shots, and three life signs died away in the distance. Tali rolled her shoulders and bounced on her toes.

"Well, we made it inside the Shadow Broker's ship. Let's never, ever do that again."

"We're definitely leaving via the shuttle bay," Shepard agreed.

"What's the plan?" Krios asked T'Soni, taking an inventory of his remaining ammo. "We're running low on ammunition."

"I have some extra heat sinks," Tali told him, handing them over.

"How's everyone doing on biotics?" Shepard asked.

T'Soni looked mildly confused, which Garrus supposed was a good sign. "Nowhere near as bad as the Collector station," Krios said, "but I will not be fit indefinitely."

There was a pause. "Let's hope we took out most of the guards," Shepard said then.

As they moved into the ship, the lines did seem to be thinner. Now, instead of a squad every few meters, they could go nearly two minutes through the corridors without running into any enemies. Quarters were tighter, which wasn't usually Garrus's preference, but after the strain of the fight across the hull, he was about as ready for a straightforward hallway brawl as Tali. It helped, too, that the enemies were coming from a single direction now—in, toward the Shadow Broker.

T'Soni stopped them at a data array to do something with her omni-tool. "I've downloaded the ship's layout," she reported afterward. "We're headed toward the ship's prison block—and Feron."

She had been keeping up her end of the banter well through all the fighting. Now, T'Soni's anxiety showed through. All this—total war on one of the more powerful players in the galactic underworld—all to rescue a single man. Garrus wasn't sure if that made the asari insane or one of the best friends he'd ever heard of. It'd be a good thing for Shepard and the Normandy crew when the Shadow Broker went down. The Shadow Broker's network was the natural place for the Illusive Man to turn for intelligence on the rest of them now that EDI had gone rogue. But if T'Soni hadn't been after the Broker anyway—well, he wasn't sure he'd've thought of assaulting the Shadow Broker or if Shepard would have approved it. This mission had been dicey from the start, and there had been dozens of injured and dead civilians in it already. If they didn't kill the Broker and take the ship now, their odds of getting out alive were pretty slim.

He was pretty sure T'Soni knew it too—and she didn't care.

"What's the rest of the ship look like?" he asked. "How many more guards are we likely to face?"

"Believe it or not, the majority of the ship's interior hosts the electronic and mechanical systems needed to keep it flying in all this," T'Soni told him. "The actual living area suitable for organics is relatively small. I'm seeing space for two barracks of paramilitary operatives. We probably have already killed most of them."

"There's still the Shadow Broker," Shepard said. "Just because they prefer to throw armies at us doesn't mean they can't fight."

"And when we face them, they'll be fresh," Garrus agreed.

"Let's try to look on the bright side," T'Soni suggested. "The Shadow Broker can't be worse than an asari Spectre."

"Too bad we can't put the Broker through a car crash beforehand," Shepard said.

"Too bad for you, maybe," Tali muttered darkly. "Enemies ahead!" she shouted, in a change of tone.

Garrus saw them on his visor—seven life signs: one asari, four humans, two salarians. A lot of tech on the two salarians and one of the humans, and another of the humans was biotic with the asari. Three of them guarding a security cell off the main corridor, the other four ranging around a commons area that branched out into a corridor going to the left.

Krios and T'Soni took cover behind a bulkhead. Shepard switched her tactical cloak on. Tali went left, toward one of the salarians and the human biotic. Garrus headed toward the security cell and the main body of the enemy force, tracking Shepard as she sprinted around to flank his opponents from the other side.

Krios and T'Soni caught the asari in a biotic crossfire. She was halted midcharge, suspended like a marionette in midair as her barrier evaporated and her armor began to twist and melt along with her skin. She screamed, straining to break their hold. Her nose started bleeding, then her ears. Garrus left her to the biotics. He let his shields take a few bullets from two of the humans, then ducked and came up to take one of their shields, while firing at the other for the same effect. That one died from an incendiary to the back of the head from Shepard. Garrus turned his gun on the other and took him out.

His shields read 46 percent. Time to withdraw. Garrus fell back for Shepard to make a run on the remaining salarian and human. He took cover behind a bulkhead and peered out to check on Tali. She'd dealt with one of her targets, and Krios was helping her with the other.

Garrus changed his target and shot the last standing human in front of the security cell door, a couple meters away from where Shepard had finished off his colleague. "One less to worry about," he muttered.

Shepard was slicing the security cell. She gave him a nod, then gestured for Krios and Tali to take up positions in the hallway to guard the rear. "Thane," she added, "grab a calorie bar while you're at it."

The drell nodded. The door to the security cell opened, and T'Soni, who had been pacing back and forth waiting for Shepard to get through, ran inside. "Liara, be careful!" Shepard shouted, but T'Soni had already cried out inside.

Garrus and Shepard bolted inside to see T'Soni, both hands over her mouth, staring at the prisoner. There weren't guards—no traps. T'Soni wasn't in any danger, but she'd had reason enough to cry out.

The drell in the cell—male, young, probably mid-twenties—was strapped into a restraint chair hooked up to all kinds of medical and mechanical equipment. His clothes were caked with sweat and grime, like they hadn't been removed or washed for months, and Garrus could smell the ammonia, rot, and burnt reptile all around him. His scales had a bleached look, and his frill was paler than it should have been. Could be a reaction to the temperature, could be an effect of malnutrition: he looked thin, nearly skeletal beneath his restraints.

It was T'Soni's friend. And he'd probably been tortured for most of the two years he'd been captured.

"Liara?!" the drell gasped. His voice was higher than Krios's, without his markers of Kepral's Syndrome, but it was strained with pain and exhaustion.

"Hold on," Liara told him, stepping to the prison terminal. "We're getting you out of here."

"No—" the drell's protest cut off in an anguished scream as several of the machines he was attached to fired. It was like watching three or four tasers go off at once. Liara leapt back from the console, hands to her mouth again. Her eyes flooded with sympathy.

"I thought this looked too easy," Shepard said, voice grim.

"This chair plugs into the Broker's info network," Feron told them when the chair stopped firing. His voice was ragged, but he was still conscious, and lucid too. "You have to shut off the power. Pull me out now, and my brain cooks."

"Do you know where we can cut off the power?" T'Soni asked.

Feron moved his head a couple of centimeters to either side—all that he could move it. "It won't be easy," he sighed. "You'll have to go to central operations."

Shepard summed up the situation. "The Broker's made sure we can't take Feron without going through every security measure in the place."

"He knows who we are and why we're coming," Garrus said. "And he's not just going to give us what we want."

T'Soni had been scanning the torture chair. "You'll probably be alright until we hit central operations," she said. She turned to Shepard. "That medical equipment there is to make sure he doesn't . . . expire," she explained. "Shepard, we have to shut this place down."

"Always my plan," Shepard reminded her. "Feron. Tell us about the mercs."

The drell tried to shrug. "The Broker's raised his own private force. They're completely loyal to—" his explanation was cut off in another scream.

"Didn't touch the console this time," Garrus observed. "Remote-activated or on a randomized timer?"

"Does it matter?" T'Soni demanded. "We have to get him out of there. Shepard, we really don't have time for this."

"You said yourself he's not going to die," Shepard answered. "We need more intel. Feron, what do you know about the Broker?"

Even in the dim prison cell, you could see the glow of hate within the drell's eyes. "He did this to me."

"Do you know what he is?" Shepard clarified.

Feron sighed a negative. "I never got a good look, but he's big. The guards are terrified of him."

They all looked at one another. Garrus wasn't sure what he'd been expecting the Broker to be, but somehow, he hadn't expected to hear the Shadow Broker posed an actual physical threat. Anyone with this kind of standing army, who handled the quantities of information the Broker did on a daily basis—if he'd thought the Shadow Broker was a he at all instead of an it or a they, Garrus probably would have looked to find a salarian in the office. T'Soni voiced everyone's thought. "A krogan?"

"I don't know, but not everyone who visits his office comes back out," Feron said.

"We're getting out," Shepard told him. "All of us."

"Good," Feron breathed. He jerked his head again. "Central operations is down the hall. You know the Shadow Broker's waiting for you, right?"

"That would be the point of this set-up," Shepard agreed.

"We'll be back for you, Feron," T'Soni promised.

"I'll try not to go anywhere," the drell answered.

Shepard signaled T'Soni to head back to the front to join the others. "He's got jokes," she said to Garrus and the asari. "That's good. Tali, Thane, how's it looking?"

"There's a squad down the hallway," Tali reported from behind the wall next to the security room door. "They've been making pot shots for a few seconds, but I don't think they like their chances."

There was a divider down the center of the hallway down to central operations. Shepard signaled their approach formation. "Thane, Liara, I want you to come in from the left and the right. Tali, I want you hard on Liara's flank. Garrus and I will follow Thane. Let's clean these guys up and get to the Broker."

A deep, dispassionate voice sounded over the ship's loudspeaker. "I want all teams to Outpost C."

"Get an LOS," an asari down the hall shouted. "Paint the marks!"

But the five of them were already attacking. Krios and T'Soni, barriers blazing, led the pincer charge on the last Broker squad between their team and central operations—three humans, a salarian, and an asari in a scared clump near the door. The salarian managed to take down Garrus's shields before he and his colleagues were overwhelmed. Sometimes, five on five wasn't anything like a fair fight.

Garrus looked down at the five merc corpses. A silence had fallen over the entire Shadow Broker ship. The only noise he could hear was the static and hum of ongoing transmissions through the wires.

"Come on," Shepard told them. The five of them walked down the hallway toward central operations. A reception area came into view.

Garrus saw the last merc standing first, a human, whispering into a radio: "Outposts A to F are down! Requesting backup!" He calculated the firing trajectory. Squeezed the trigger. The merc went down, and T'Soni hit the access panel to enter the Shadow Broker's center of operations.

Garrus's eyes took a moment to adjust to the darkness. There were some dull yellow lightstrips around the floor, several monitors showing feeds meters away toward the back of the room, and a power matrix crackling in a disk over its center, but even all these light sources together weren't enough to light central operations to turian standards—which meant whoever worked here wasn't krogan. Like the Council races and most other species who lived on the Citadel, krogan were diurnal. Aralakh's star emitted a decent amount of light, and you could see it through the gases that made up Tuchanka's atmosphere. The conditions in this room were set for a species night-vision adapted.

It was a second before Garrus could even see the Shadow Broker, seated at a desk in the center of four pillars at the center of the room. When he did, he realized they were all in over their heads.

The thing at the desk had to be close to 2.5 meters once it stood. It was about half again as broad as a krogan warlord. Eight black, emotionless eyes glinted at them from the darkness beneath two massive, curved horns atop the head. The horns were similar to a salarian's but looked much more dangerous. The Broker had three lips instead of two around a mouth that would open like a flower, and inside the lips, Garrus could see a bunch of tiny, sharp, predatory teeth. The Shadow Broker was massive. He looked tough. Garrus's visor registered custom-built armor beneath the Shadow Broker's suit, ready for combat, but the worst of it was he had no idea what species the Shadow Broker was.

No clue what the thing's capabilities were, how it would move. No clue how or where to hit him or what actually killing him might involve. Garrus swallowed.

"Here for the drell?" the Broker asked. Garrus's translator registered the use of one of the asari languages, but the Shadow Broker didn't sound like any asari Garrus had ever heard. His voice was deep enough you could feel it through the floor when he spoke. "Reckless, even for you, Commander."

Beside Garrus, Shepard's teeth flashed in a smile that didn't reach her eyes. "That bombing on Illium wasn't exactly subtle."

"Extreme, but necessary," the Broker answered.

Biotics flickered around T'Soni's skin. "No, it wasn't!" she cried. "Neither was caging Feron for two years!"

The Broker's head turned to regard the asari. "Dr. T'Soni, your interference caused all this. Feron betrayed me when he handed you Shepard's body. The drell is simply paying the price."

"Mm. And now you're paying the price for working with the Collectors." Shepard's voice crackled with danger. The Shadow Broker didn't seem too worried. There were five of them and one of him. He'd lost every one of his mercs, and he was fine. We've got a fight ahead.

"It was a mutually beneficial partnership," the Broker told Shepard. "Fortunately, Normandy's IFF will allow me to salvage the remains of the Collectors' base."

"I imagine it might be hard to keep up operations with no crew," Shepard answered.

"They're replaceable," the Broker replied, confirming Garrus's mounting suspicions that this thing had let all those mercenaries die mostly to avoid the annoyance. He was perfectly confident in his ability to kill every one of them himself. "Your arrival is barely an interruption. Enough talk. My operations are too crucial to be compromised by a traitor."

"You're quite confident for someone with nowhere left to hide," T'Soni told him.

The Shadow Broker's head moved again. "You travel with fascinating companions, Doctor," he said. "The bounty on Archangel remains active, and it will be good to wrap up loose ends with Tali'Zorah. As for you, Sere Krios—I'll give your son my regards."

Garrus ignored the taunting and watched Shepard for a signal. Could they take him down if they all opened fire? Where were the vital points on this thing? Did it have redundant organs? Would it regen like a krogan or a vorcha?

T'Soni got angry again. Her biotics flared.

"You're not putting a hand on anyone!"

"It's pointless to challenge me, asari," the Broker told her. "I know your every secret, while you fumble in the dark."

T'Soni smiled. "Is that right? You're a yahg, a pre-spaceflight species quarantined to their homeworld for massacreing the Council's first contact teams. This base is older than your planet's discovery, which probably means you killed the original Shadow Broker sixty years ago then took over."

Garrus absorbed the information as T'Soni gave it—quarantined for massacre meant the species was deemed too aggressive to join the wider galactic community yet. A Broker after the original meant ambitious murderer—

T'Soni filled in the final gaps. "I'm guessing you were taken from your world by a trophy hunter who wanted a slave . . . or a pet. How am I doing?"

The Broker climbed to his feet. Then, without warning, he threw his entire desk straight at Tali. She had time for a single cry before it hit, knocking her back three meters to the floor. Garrus, Shepard, and Liara all shouted her name. Tali didn't answer, even with a groan. Every instinct of friendship said to go to her, see how bad it was, get her out. Every soldier's instinct told Garrus to stay put. The Broker was up and hostile. He had a modified Revenant he must've hidden under the desk. It was a big, nasty weapon. Accuracy wasn't great at range, but in this room, the Broker wouldn't need it. With the number of bullets that thing could spit at a time, the Broker could shred any of their shields in seconds, and after that, rip them up badly enough that it'd be a good thing they were all different species. It'd be the only way to identify the bodies.

Weaver always liked the Revenant.

"Cover to cover around the room!" Shepard ordered. "Stay behind the support pillars! T'Soni, on Krios! Thane, fall back to Tali! Get her to the guard station. Get her stable."

Of course, that had been the entire point of the Broker's sudden attack. Hurt one of them bad enough, and he'd known he could take two soldiers out of the fight. But what else could they do? One sideways glance at Tali was enough to see that if the Broker hadn't killed her outright, she still might wind up dead. Garrus's visor was getting life sign readings. It was also pinpointing a fracture across her faceplate. No telling what kind of germs she was breathing in, essentially harmless to all the rest of them, but ticking time bombs to a quarian immune system. All without the trauma she'd already be dealing with from being hit by a flying desk.

As the Shadow Broker turned his back to Krios, moving around behind T'Soni to Tali's position, Garrus felt a rush of hatred. As far as that bastard was concerned, he could fight T'Soni, Garrus, and Shepard now, and Krios later. Whether or not Krios got Tali stable, she was out of the fight for good. Hypothetically, Garrus admired the move. Divide and conquer in practice. As neat an application of the tactic as he'd seen. And it put the rest of them off balance. If the rest of them wanted to kill the Shadow Broker half as bad as Garrus did right now, he might have just destroyed all their discipline.

Instead of doing the dumb thing and charging the Broker, though, Garrus thought about it. The Shadow Broker had tried his hardest to kill Tali right in front of them. As a manipulation tactic. He was going to die. The only question was how.

T'Soni called it a yahg. How did you kill a yahg? A tough fight, to begin with.

Break it down, step by step. The Revenant. Eighty-shot heat sink. Holds up to seven sinks, unmodded on a weapon scaled down for a turian or human frame. He can shoot it full auto, and unless we fight for an hour, he still won't run out of bullets. Only way to fight that's flanking.

Room's good for that. Not a single really defensible position he can get in to guard his back and sides. Advantage to us, but if we get in too close, his size and strength will work against us.

His front was guarded—tech armor. Armor like that wasn't impossible to break, but breaking it was a lot more complicated than firing off a few incendiary rounds or some tech-generated fireballs. The only upside was tech armor took power to generate. Prototype, million-credit omni-tool type power. The Broker's model was a translucent, orange shield that covered him from the base of his horns all the way down to his ankles but left his entire back exposed. And, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you looked at it, T'Soni had made the Broker angry. He was focused in hard on her.

As the door shut behind Krios and Tali, the Shadow Broker fired. Without the ear protection installed in Garrus's armor, the noise would have been deafening. The light from the Revenant's muzzle as it fired was near constant, and as the gun fired, the Broker advanced slowly, moving toward Liara to melee range. T'Soni crouched behind the concrete support pillar she was using for cover as it chipped. She couldn't use any of her biotic mnemonics when she was pinned down like that. She couldn't get a moment free to return fire.

Garrus and Shepard had a little more leeway. The Broker was invulnerable from the front. Any shots or tech attacks they fired would bounce right off that tech armor. From the back, it was a different story. The Broker's custom armor was good, but it wouldn't protect him forever.

Garrus took a breath and really hoped T'Soni was able to intuit a plan. No way they'd be able to vocalize orders even by radio over the din of that Revenant. No way they could trust to hand signals in front of the galaxy's foremost information broker. They would have to play this all by instinct. He knew what Shepard would do. He knew what he would have to do so she could do it. If T'Soni didn't back him up, though, in a matter of seconds he would be dead.

He leaned out from his own support pillar and opened fire on the Shadow Broker's flank. The Mattock didn't have full auto like the Vindicator he'd lost in the Collector base. He hadn't requisitioned or modded a new Vindicator from the armory yet. Yesterday before Vasir's little stunt, he hadn't thought that he'd need to. Not so fast, anyway. The Mattock had more kick. It was more accurate at longer ranges. It was good against armor like the Broker's too. But it didn't have the magazine and didn't have the fire rate, and against a yahg, Garrus didn't know that he preferred three penetrating bullets to seven really annoying ones.

It worked anyway. The Broker turned immediately, about thirty-five degrees, and faced Garrus instead of Liara. Garrus ducked behind his pillar and felt it shaking with the Revenant's fire. Now he was the one pinned down, unable to move or fire again for fear of that Revenant's constant barrage, with the Shadow Broker getting closer and closer.

Fortunately, T'Soni did get the basic idea. She leaned out from behind her pillar and fired four shots from her pistol, and Garrus took the opportunity to roll around the room, farther from the Shadow Broker. As he did, he heard two rifle shots sound out across the din. The Broker roared, only to take a third shot, this time a tech incendiary, to the back. The tech systems the yahg had been using to support his shield burned out, probably diverting to medical systems, but the Shadow Broker entered a sequence into his omni-tool and planted his feet, and the power disk set in the ceiling in the center of the room came alive.

A column of white energy ran down to the Shadow Broker's omni-tool. He was surrounded—protected. Garrus realized what was happening. The Broker had some sort of defense system in place. When he was injured, he could activate it while his armor patched up his wounds. He'd have to stay still, but—

T'Soni confirmed his guess as a biotic attack and two more pistol shots completely failed to land. "The shield's kinetically sensitive!" she yelled in frustration. "Energy and projectiles are bouncing off!"

Shepard reappeared across the room, near a stairway up to some controls. She folded up the Widow, face dark and grim. She caught Garrus's eye, and he folded up his own gun. He knew what came next. He didn't like it.

"Then we do this the hard way."

There wasn't a single turian martial art designed for going hand to hand with a two-and-a-half meter giant, broader and stronger than a krogan warlord and capable of hurling a desk across a room. Fortunately, Garrus did have a human friend who'd received skin, bone, and muscle weaves as a part of Project Lazarus, and there was no rule saying they had to play fair against this guy, any more than he had.

He would've taken point, but Shepard tapped her chest, signaling him, and Garrus stepped aside, letting her move in. She swung, wide and hard, up into the Broker's jaw above his armored jacket. He roared but had to take it—the energy field sustaining him wouldn't let him move quickly. Garrus took advantage, hitting low, digging his talons as they passed through the Broker's already dampened side. One or more of them had hit earlier. It was the reason the Broker had had to bring up the shield.

Garrus followed up on his strike with a kick. He felt the ragged rip as his boot tip cut through the Broker's armored jacket. Then the forcefield switched off.

Garrus had made three revolutions in midair and was across the room before he knew what had happened. He crashed into one of the central pillars and fell with a venomous thud to the floor. Only then did he feel the blows he'd taken to the midsection, to his back when he'd hit the pillars. Head spinning, winded, and sick, he managed to hunch up into a crouch. He looked up. Which way is up? That way.

He expected to see the flashing white muzzle of the Revenant pointing his way. Instead, he saw Shepard—or three of her—bracing herself against the Broker's forearm, keeping him from bringing the gun back to firing position. As he watched, the yahg shook her off, catching her shoulder with a glancing blow from the butt of the Revenant. Garrus lurched forward, but Shepard was already blinking out, moving away. The Revenant fell into place. The tech shield came up, and Garrus dodged behind the central pillar instead of charging the Shadow Broker, adjusting his crooked visor as he went, and wincing against the pain.

"If you can get him to bring up that shield again, I've got an idea!" T'Soni shouted, just as the Revenant fire started up again. She pointed at the ceiling just in case they hadn't got it. Garrus nodded, and the whole dance began again. Hitting him from the flank, flirting with death as the flank became the fire zone, and hoping T'Soni or Shepard was in position and ready on the next side of the room before the Shadow Broker got too close. Only this time, with his head ringing and his vision blurred and the compression and coolness in his armor as the onboard medical systems worked to combat the hits he'd taken.

He wasn't moving well. Once, he didn't roll away to the next column fast enough when it was his turn to play provocateur. The Broker charged. Garrus tripped trying to avoid a mammoth swing with the butt of the Revenant or a blow that might have killed him. Then his shield took about seven shots before the warp field to the Broker's rear, an incendiary, and a Widow blast forced the Broker to turn around and defend his flank instead of coming in for the kill.

Garrus limped into cover, panting. His visor was screaming at him in bold blue type. 2%! Restoring . . . restoring . . . ERROR . . . ERROR . . . Shield system damaged.

"Oh, that's just great," Garrus muttered.

An increase in the noise level was probably Shepard, saying something, but with the Revenant firing again, he couldn't make out what she'd said. Her helmet was facing him behind the Shadow Broker, only it still looked like two helmets behind a larger blur. A blur closing in on T'Soni's position.

My turn again now.

Garrus programmed the Mattock to interface more directly with his visor's targeting systems. Fired. The Widow went off. The Broker's tech shield shattered, and he spread his stance. The energy field came up around him once again.

Garrus swung the Mattock over to its magnetic holster and staggered forward. "Garrus, wait!"

He'd hardly registered the order before he was flying again. The Broker? The Broker's hands aren't that small—that's Shepard. Beth. Five fingers per hand. Humans can lose two whole fingers and still fight.

He hit a terminal and slid to the ground, and from the distance, heard her giving another order, this time to T'Soni. There was a huge flash of light and sparks right where he had been a second ago. He smelled ozone and electricity. Biotics. Burnt flesh. Heard the sound of broken systems and an electrical fire burning. He blinked.

Words were still scrolling across the top of his visor: Shields 2%. System damaged. ERROR . . . ERROR . . .

The field was crooked again. Garrus reached to adjust his visor again only to feel the back of it was chipped. Must've hit it somewhere.

Guess I was overdue for a frame replacement. Lasted through a rocket and a suicide mission. Sensat would've been proud. Hope the tech's still good.

He tasted blood. He spat, and thought he saw more than blood hit the floor in front of him. By the fire, he saw Beth with an extinguisher, putting out the flames around a massive corpse. There were other sounds around the room now—voices. It was annoying, really. His visor didn't say anything about an error in his translator implant, but he was hearing more noise than anything he could actually make sense of. Voices from worlds all around the galaxy—synthesized. Feeds. Turian voices, salarian voices, human voices, volus. About three seconds after they started speaking, the translation would kick in.

Garrus closed his eyes. Brain glitching. Not the translator.

He lifted his hand to the chip in the back of his visor frame. As if in response, the pain in his head, which he hadn't been feeling alongside the pain in his back and midsection, finally came to throbbing, sickening life. Head injury. Yeah. Definitely. Makes sense.

He opened his eyes, flicked through the options on his visor, ignoring the error message about his shields. Have to get that fixed, Vakarian.

With which credits? Cerberus won't be paying you anymore. And Shepard gave away all the rest of our money.

Uuugh . . . figure it out later.

He shut off his translator, and the garbled noises of the tech inside his head trying to catch his lagging brain up to all the voices in the room a beat-and-a-half behind time went mercifully silent. Unfortunately, the room didn't. He still heard about thirty-two different synthesized voices speaking about twenty-seven different languages, raised in various panicked and interrogatory inflections.

Then another voice, one he knew. Outside the translator, T'Soni spoke one of the most widespread and influential of the asari dialects—an old, primary language that had originated on the asari homeworld of Thessia and was still spoken by almost all their best respected politicians and academics. Pretty to listen to, for all there were almost no consonants to it. It was a little like a song.

The harsh modulator T'Soni was using to alter her voice over whatever channel she was speaking on wasn't quite so pretty. But when she stopped speaking, so did all the others. Garrus sighed with relief and slumped lower against the terminal.

Another voice spoke from the door—a sibilant hiss.

Krios? Or Feron?

T'Soni said something else. The drell, whichever one it was, answered. Then another voice—lower more powerful than the others, using more consonants than either. Alliance Standard wasn't pretty like Central Thessian, but he did know some of the words.

"I'm not . . . this won't be . . . help . . . you sure this is . . . you . . ." A question.

T'Soni started to answer, but her voice broke halfway through. Garrus heard her sob. Another exchange between the three voices, lower this time. Then Beth was next to him, kneeling. Her helmet was off again, her face was flushed, and her hair was escaping its mission gel, just like always. Her mouth moved. Maybe human voices were a little flat, without subharmonics, but Garrus had always liked watching human faces when they talked. They did so much with just their mouths. And Beth had such a nice one. Or he thought so, anyway.

She gripped his shoulder. Said his name.

He tapped his ear. "Translator's glitching," he said. "Or it's probably the concussion. I'll be fine, Shepard."

Shepard made a face, then smiled down at him. Then she slung his arm over her shoulder, and he let her half-drag him to his feet. As they walked out the door, Garrus looked back over his shoulder to see T'Soni, standing over one of the Shadow Broker terminals.


Garrus woke up in Normandy's med bay. He had a pounding headache, and his hands and side throbbed at every heartbeat, but his vision was clear. So was his brain.

His jaw felt thick, and there was cotton in his mouth. Garrus poked at it with his tongue, pushed it out his jaw, and felt three, four missing teeth where it had been. That's going to look awkward until they grow back. Lose one tooth, no one notices. Four, and everybody knows you lost a fight.

Didn't lose this one, though.

Because T'Soni was smarter than you and Shepard. Weaponizing the environment instead of a body so much smaller than the Shadow Broker's. Why didn't you think of that?

"Hello, Garrus."

Garrus blinked. The voice was T'Soni's. The language was once again his own. His translator had been turned back on while he was out. He turned his head and saw Liara, seated in Doc Chakwas's chair, which probably meant he wasn't nearly as bad as he felt. "T'Soni."

"Doctor Chakwas tells me you want to keep those scars of yours. If you wanted new ones just in case those fade away, there are less drastic ways to get them," T'Soni observed.

"Your idea to go after the Shadow Broker, not mine."

"Mine and Shepard's," Liara corrected him. Her face fell then, and he could see the guilt beneath the surface. "I'm sorry you and Tali were so badly hurt."

Abruptly, Garrus remembered the desk hitting Tali, the cracks in her environment suit. "Tali . . ."

"To your left," Liara told him. Garrus turned his head the other way and saw Tali lying on the infirmary bed next to his. She had a new suit on—this one black and gold and whole instead of purple and gold and damaged. It was still hooked up to a chemical IV. But Tali's chest rose and fell. She was asleep. Drugged, natural, or unconscious?

T'Soni answered the question for him. "She's still recovering from the anesthesia. She had several fractures. Dr. Chakwas had to perform nanosurgery to heal them. Thanks to Joker, she has plenty of experience, and the ship has the technology to handle the procedures. The bones should mend completely within a few standard days. And as far as head injuries went, Tali came out better than you did. It's the suit breach she sustained in the fight that will be most dangerous now. She was exposed to what could have been several foreign influences. Still, Dr. Chakwas is hopeful. More importantly, so is Tali."

"We weren't ready to fight that thing. Not with what was supposed to be five of us going in."

"I know," Liara admitted. "I made mistakes, Garrus. As soon as Shepard gave me Cerberus's information, I went for Feron. I wasn't thinking, and the Broker was on us before we could make a plan. People were hurt for my mistakes. People died for them. Shepard warned me . . . but I didn't listen. And in rescuing Feron, I nearly got two other friends killed. What would I have done then? Made another stupid plan to get revenge?" She fell silent, staring at her hands in her lap.

"Revenge is tricky," Garrus said. "Never seems to go the way you plan."

"No," Liara agreed. "Everything turned out fine for me in the end. We saved Feron. I'm the new Shadow Broker."

"I missed that," Garrus confessed. "Everything went a little bit fuzzy at the end there."

"You were knocked four and a half meters into a concrete pillar by a person approximately three times your size and five times your mass," T'Soni said.

"Still, congratulations."

"I can pay for the damages to your hardsuit," T'Soni offered. "I want to make things right. As much as I can, in any event. I'm going to donate all I made in my time on Illium, anonymously, to the families and buildings we destroyed there. Following Shepard's example again, but I think I might be able to do a little bit more than you did. I was a very good information broker."

"You still are," Garrus pointed out. "Isn't the Shadow Broker supposed to be the most infamous information trader in the galaxy?"

Liara smiled. "I had to do something if I was going to keep up with Archangel," she joked. "I'm going to reallocate my entire network and all resources toward helping Shepard defeat the Reapers. Of course, the galaxy at large won't know it."

Garrus hummed, closing his eyes, trying to dispel the throbbing pain in his head. Eventually, he'd probably need to vomit. But that would be an awkward way to end the conversation. "And to think, we only came so the Illusive Man couldn't get at us sideways," he said. "Thanks."

"It's really the least I can do. You and I both know, Garrus: we're in for a war."

Garrus nodded wearily. "Have you talked to Shepard?"

For a while, the asari didn't answer, and Garrus cracked his eyes open again. When he'd managed to find T'Soni again, her face was wistful and a little sad. "I did," she said. "Things won't be the way they were with us. They can't. Two years—almost three, now—never seemed like a long time to me before, but now . . . I think we've both changed too much."

Garrus considered. "Well, you've changed," he agreed at last. "Shepard hasn't changed that much."

T'Soni looked at him. Again, she was silent for a moment. She kicked at the leg of Chakwas's chair. "You know, the first time I ever made mental contact with a person outside of my own people, it was with Shepard," she told him. "Right here on Normandy. Or, on the SR-1. To help her make sense of all the Prothean telepathic data she received in our mission against Saren."

"I remember."

"I thought, because of that, I had to know her better than anyone else in the galaxy. She was so private, always guarded, but I had been inside her mind. I knew how much she cared for everyone around her. I knew her strength, the kind of grace she had under the worst kinds of pressure. And I knew how lonely she was. It—the loneliness—was something the two of us always had in common. But Commander Shepard isn't lonely anymore, is she?"

Garrus's mandibles tightened. T'Soni nodded just as if he'd given her an answer. "There are other things, of course," she added. "There are things about Shepard I always ignored before, despite the access I had to her mind on three separate occasions. Too focused on the beacon, perhaps? On my fascination with the Protheans, my first real contact with humans. On a childish infatuation. I never realized how her strength can manifest as stubbornness, for example. That she can be as unreasonable as anyone else and have as many faults as anyone else. Did you know?"

She kicked the legs of the chair again. Her tone was light and offhand, her expression careful, but you could see in her posture that the question wasn't as casual as she wanted it to seem. Garrus shifted again. "Nobody's perfect," he answered. "Shepard's a good soldier. Good commanding officer. Good tactician. She can get results like no one we've seen. But we've gone round and round a few times. We did even back on the SR-1. I wanted to kill Saren. She initially hoped we'd be able to take him alive, send him to trial. Once this trip—after Sidonis—it even came to blows, between us."

"Yes, I kept tabs on Sidonis, after you asked about him. I heard what happened," T'Soni agreed. "You let him go?"

"Reluctantly."

"And after everything, you still care about her?" T'Soni asked. "Garrus—do you love her? Really?"

On the cot beside him, Tali's breathing had changed. It was quicker, shallower—not in a bad way, but in a conscious way. There was no visual tell she was awake. His visor was probably in the gear locker across the med bay. He wondered if T'Soni would pay to fix it too. He remembered it'd been damaged. But anyway, he couldn't see Tali's vitals, and she was keeping her eyes closed. Somehow, he still knew she was awake. Awake, and listening to every word he said.

"I think we all do, in different ways," he answered. "Jack—you met her on Illium. Wrex. Mordin. The yeoman, Kelly Chambers. Joker and Chakwas."

"Even Kaidan," Liara agreed. "You know, we've been corresponding. He hasn't forgotten your run-in on Horizon. I think he moves between feeling guilty for the way he argued with Shepard and convinced there's no way she is what she seems to be. I've been keeping him apprised of your movements and telling him what I can to persuade him of Shepard's true intentions."

And, of course, that was when the head injury caught up. The room began to spin, and Garrus's stomach lurched. He sat up abruptly, leaned forward, and braced himself on his knees. He started counting his breaths, in through his nose, out right past his missing teeth.

"Ah. That would be the nausea," T'Soni observed. "I should get Doctor Chakwas. She told me to once you'd woken up. She's just in the mess, having lunch."

"She's just going to run a bunch of tests and tell me I'm recovering from a head injury," Garrus muttered.

"One of the benefits of no longer being crew on Normandy is I don't have to listen to Doctor Chakwas's lectures on safety in the battlefield," Liara told him. "I'm not coming in for one because I left you without her attention."

"You're charging Alenko?" Garrus interrupted, as she stood to go.

Liara paused. "I am," she answered. "I thought that if he wants to pay me to tell him things Shepard would tell him for free if he just asked, he might as well pay me."

Garrus tried to smile, but his stomach turned over again, and he groaned instead. "Good," he managed.

"For the sake of your dignity—and the datafeeds and reports I really should get back to—I'm going to go," T'Soni told him. She paused again at the door. "I don't approve of how Commander Alenko is behaving," she added. "I can only speculate that he mourned Shepard as much as any of us and is dealing with her return the best way he knows how.

"As for you and Shepard—it's early days yet. But I hope you know, Garrus—she loves you. I'm not saying what kind of love, but she does. Certainly more than she loves any of the rest of us. I think I'll always be a little jealous of you for that. But I'll also love you too. Thank you—for both of us."

She slipped out of the room. "So," Tali murmured, without sitting up beside him. "The new Shadow Broker. I suppose if anyone has to have access to creepy information on everyone in the galaxy, I'm glad it is Liara. I don't think I would want to be you, though. She knows about the Archangel thing. Did Shepard tell her, do you think, or has she been spying?"

"Oh, she's definitely been spying," Garrus answered. "She's been watching me since we first landed on Illium month back. Saved my life once with it too, in addition to tracking down Sidonis. She's got feeds on Normandy too—or the Shadow Broker does. That thing she just said . . ." he trailed off and gulped at the air.

"But then again, she's not the only spy, is she?"

"Hey!" Tali protested. Her voice was weak. "It's not like I could help when I woke up. And you knew I was awake. I wasn't being sneaky."

"Neither was she," Garrus pointed out. "Quoted me to tell me about the feeds. Look, Tali—glad you're alive, but do you think you could go back to pretending to be asleep? I'm about to vomit."

"You saw me back in the car chase," Tali retorted. Then she sighed and turned over, and Garrus looked up to see Chakwas hurrying into the med bay. For once, he was glad to see her on these kinds of terms.