The Reaper War

by Cole Price

  “No. Not everything is about your people, Doctor.” Eve’s glance at the old salarian seemed almost indulgent. “We destroyed Tuchanka without any help from outsiders. Advanced technology changed us. Life became too easy. The old challenges once posed by simple survival began to fade away. So we looked for new challenges, and found them in each other. Nuclear war was inevitable.”

  Wrex nodded in agreement. “So now our planet is rubble. We’ll need another place to live while we rebuild it.”

  “I’d say helping to defeat the Reapers would be worth a new planet,” said Shepard with a smile.

  “Or ten,” said Wrex with a sly smile. “You haven’t seen how fast we can pop them out.”

  “Wrex!” Eve rebuked the warlord.

  “What? With the genophage cured, we’ll have a lot of catching up to do.”

  Eve only stared at him with narrowed eyes.

  “Yeah, yeah, I get it. Just because we can breed almost as fast as pyjaks doesn’t mean we have to. We want to rebuild Tuchanka, make decent homes for ourselves on some of the old colony worlds. That means we’ll need enough krogan, not too many. Enough hands to do the work, not so many mouths that they eat up everything we’ve gained. Enough soldiers to defend ourselves, and help defend the rest of you, not so many that we scare the crap out of everyone again.”

  Eve nodded. “Even after we can count on being able to bear living children again, we females will want to limit our reproduction. Our children need to be cared for, taught the ancient wisdom, encouraged to reach for something other than eternal bloody strife. That means fewer children, but greater investment in each. Primitive krogan bred for raw numbers. Civilized krogan will breed for quality of life.”

  Shepard glanced at me, his eyes shadowed, and I could tell what he was thinking.

  The salarians never saw this. Because they never looked for it, never moved beyond their own bigotry to guess it could be there.

  I gave him a small encouraging nod.

  “There’s something you should know,” he said. “Back on Normandy, just before we set out for the surface, dalatrass Linron tried to cut a secret deal with me.”

  “What kind of deal?” Wrex demanded.

  “She said they sabotaged the Shroud years ago. The cure won’t work unless we fix it. Liara?”

  I opened my omni-tool again, and played the conversation I had recorded between Linron and Shepard. The krogan began to frown like looming thunderclouds. Even Eve clearly grew angry.

  When it was over, Wrex shook his head in fury. “She thought we wouldn’t know better?”

  “Correctly,” stated Mordin. “Would likely have fooled tests. But familiar with STG work. Can adjust. Did not come this far for nothing.”

  “You just spared our race another genocide, Commander,” said Eve.

  “You didn’t earn the first one, much less another.”

  “Perhaps. At the time the other races were right to fear us. We did pose a terrible threat to them.”

  “Maybe.” Shepard folded his arms and set his jaw in determination. “Everyone deserves a chance to correct their mistakes, to prove they can change for the better. That’s as true for whole species as it is for individuals.”

  “Repentance followed by forgiveness, Commander?”

  Shepard caught Eve’s gaze, saw the gleam in her eye, and a slow smile spread across his face. “I suppose you could call it that.”

  Wrex grinned at his partner. “I told you we could count on him.”

  Eve understands humans better than anyone realizes. I wonder what kind of extranet research she was doing, all those long hours in the medical bay between Mordin’s procedures. Or perhaps Mordin himself taught her.

  Just then, the tomkah began to slow, its brakes squealing on both sides of the passenger compartment.

  Wrex stood. “Why are we stopping?”

  “Sit tight,” said Shepard. “I’ll get out and see what’s happening.”

  As soon as the tomkah came to a complete stop, Shepard popped the side hatch and swung out onto the road. Javik and I checked our weapons and followed him.

  Hot, dry air slapped me in the face, full of a flat alkaline taste. I looked out over the land. We had stopped at the edge of some ancient ruins to the east. In the opposite direction I saw two more decayed roadbeds, even less traversable than the one we were on. Then a few snarls of ancient metal, and then nothing but drifting sand and bitter outcroppings of stone to the distant horizon.

  The Shroud stood there, unlike anything else I had seen on Tuchanka, clean salarian architecture reaching well over a kilometer into the sky. It gleamed in the dim sunlight, reflecting shades of yellow and sickly green. From it, a vast streamer of poisoned air reached up into the sky, merging at last with a thick bank of clouds that blotted out most of the sunlight.

  There, standing close to the Shroud tower, smaller but much more menacing: the insectile shape of a Reaper. It made its mechanical roar, the sound echoing across the desert plain. Small in the distance, I could hear the sound of gunfire. The main krogan force, with humans and turians in support, had collided with the Reaper’s ground units.

  “Wrex, you and Mordin stay with Eve,” called Shepard into his helmet comm. “It’s looking ugly out here.”

  “Will do.”

  Shepard strode away, setting out for the head of our convoy to see why we had stopped. Javik and I followed.

  “Goddess,” I murmured. “Look at that Reaper. It’s like the end of days out there.”

  “That is what the Reapers are,” said Javik. “Wherever they go, there walks the doom even of the gods.”

  We reached the front of the convoy. At once I could see the problem. Just ahead of Wrex’s tomkah the road leaped over a declivity in the land, fifty meters straight down to the desert sands. The ancient krogan had once built a bridge over the gap, and their engineering had lasted almost down to the present day. Some recent shock – perhaps even the arrival of the Reaper destroyer, a few kilometers away – had proven fatal. The road remained mostly in place, but it looked broken and loose, a series of tilted slabs, ready to collapse entirely at any moment.

  “What’s the holdup?” Shepard demanded.

  A krogan scout crouched at the edge of the gap, examining what remained of the bridge. “Road’s out. The convoy can’t make it through.”

  Shepard activated his helmet comm. “Turian wing Artimec, we’ve been delayed. Hold off your attack!”

  Too late. Even then we heard a roaring from up above, aircraft approaching at high speed. “Negative, Commander. Our approach vector is locked. That Reaper already knows we’re here.”

  A squadron of turian fighters soared out of the east and overhead, the thunder of their engines shaking the roadbed beneath our feet. They zoomed west toward the Shroud, already beginning to fire on the Reaper.

  The enemy responded with another deep roar, and then I heard a new sound for the very first time: the resonant, almost musical tone of a Reaper’s main gun firing into the sky.

  “The airstrike is too soon,” said Javik. “We are in no position to move against the Shroud!”

  “Damn it.” Shepard scowled, and I knew he saw his carefully laid plan falling to pieces. He turned to the scout, raising his voice to be heard above the din of the distant battle. “I don’t care if we have to build a new road! We’re going!”

  Then I saw it. The Reaper’s gun fired, grazing one of the turian fighters. It veered out of control, trailing fire and smoke, heading directly for us. “Shepard!”

  His eyes flew wide. “Move!”

  I slammed a barrier down and threw myself flat, just in time for a world-shattering concussion. Flames erupted, singing me even at a distance. I rolled onto my back, in time to see a krogan tomkah arcing through the air, slamming down on its nose in a cacophony of shattered metal, only a few meters away.

  “Shepard, what’s going on out there?”

  “Wrex, get Eve out of here, now. Go!”

  Wrex’s tomkah imme
diately leaped into motion, roaring out onto the dangerous span, the slabs of broken road shifting under its weight. A second vehicle followed, but then the bridge collapsed entirely. I looked back along the rest of the convoy, and saw nothing at first but shattered vehicles and dead krogan.

  Shepard rose to his feet, already looking around him for cover, some point where he could rally the survivors. “Artimec, do you copy?”

  “We have to abort, Commander. That Reaper is tearing us to pieces!”

  “Understood. Save your pilots. We’ll find another way.”

  I looked around, feeling horribly exposed. Then an avenue of escape presented itself. “Shepard, there’s a tunnel over there. Could be a way off.”

  “Get to it!”

  The three of us hurried, leaping across a wide ditch to reach the entrance to the tunnel. Shepard paused for a moment before we ventured deep inside, calling for any surviving krogan to follow. None did.

  “Now what?” I asked him.

  “We cannot continue in the open,” said Javik. “Perhaps these tunnels will lead us around the obstacle.”

  Shepard nodded, a disgusted expression on his face. “Seems as good an idea as any. We have to link back up with the others, try to find a way to salvage this clusterfuck.”

  “Commander, in my cycle we had a saying. No battle plan . . .”

  “Survives contact with the enemy,” Shepard interrupted.

  “Rrrh. It is good to see that some things do not change.”

  “Come on.” Shepard turned, leading us further into the tunnel.

  We descended into darkness, turning on the lights attached to our weapons. I activated the inertial guidance system in my omni-tool, so I could construct a map of the spaces we moved through. All around us loomed stone – floor, walls, ceiling, all was natural stone – massive but cleverly shaped and set, clearly capable of standing for thousands of years. Rubble scattered across the floor, clogged niches and side passages. At the bottom of the tunnel we passed through a square doorway, with lifelike krogan statues standing guard on either side.

  Shepard activated his helmet comm. “Wrex, are you receiving this? Is everyone okay?”

  “Yeah, just scratches, nothing the salarian can’t patch up. Wreav’s tomkah made it out too. The rest of the convoy is going to have to pull itself together and follow as best they can.”

  “The turians had to call off the airstrike. We’ll need a new plan for dealing with the Reaper. Can you reach the ground attack force?”

  “Yeah. EDI is relaying messages.”

  “Have them break contact and fall back for the time being. They push forward too far, we’re likely to face defeat in detail.”

  “Agreed. In the meantime, we have to find you. You still with the convoy?”

  “No, we got separated. We’re underground. We see ruins of some kind.”

  Eve’s voice: “Commander, that’s a city of the ancients.”

  “How do we get out?”

  “No maps exist. It’s been abandoned for thousands of years. Even before the nuclear wars.”

  “You’re a trailblazer, Shepard,” said Wrex. “Get through there, and we’ll find a place to meet up.”

  For a long time we moved slowly through the darkness, clambering over rubble falls and broken flooring. After a while, I began to see hints of a pattern, an ordered layout of streets and enclosures instead of a random maze. Details I had learned at the university, about pre-contact krogan architecture, came to life before my eyes. I began to make suggestions, and those suggestions began to pay off in progress.

  The ground shifted under our feet, just enough to notice. A few pebbles fell from above, clattering on the floor.

  “What was that?” whispered Shepard.

  “A tremor,” said Javik.

  “I’m not sure of that,” I told them. “This region of Tuchanka doesn’t see much tectonic activity.”

  “How do you know, asari? Are you also an expert in planetology?”

  “No, but if this place was subject to frequent quakes, none of these underground passages would have survived across more than four thousand years.”

  “Possibly.”

  We moved on. A few minutes later, while we walked along a straight corridor, Shepard stopped abruptly to shine his light on the wall beside us. We saw a sudden splash of color in the darkness.

  “Now that’s not something I would have expected to see on Tuchanka,” he murmured.

  We saw a fresco, painting on plaster that covered the stone of the wall, remarkably well-preserved considering its age. The style seemed highly formalized, all flat geometry with no sense of perspective. Krogan marched in a procession from left to right, each one bearing a gift. At the far right a larger figure stood, wrapped in ceremonial robes and carrying a tall staff, making a gesture of dominance and welcome.

  “Apparently the krogan could paint once.”

  “Yes. This fits what Eve was telling us about ancient krogan culture. Look here.” I pointed to the procession, my hand moving from left to right across the wall. “Notice how all the krogan carrying objects are male. Each object is different, possibly symbolizing a different clan or nation. Bringing gifts? Or possibly tribute?”

  “The big krogan, there on the right?”

  “Female. A matriarch, receiving tribute from her vassals?”

  “We never hear much about female krogan,” Shepard observed. “I have to wonder what they might be like, once the genophage is cured. If Eve is any indication . . .”

  “Commander, we have little time,” said Javik.

  “True. Come on.”

  We pressed onward. Another tremor shook the floor under our feet. Then another, hard enough to push us off-balance for a moment.

  “That didn’t feel like a quake,” I said fearfully. To be trapped down here . . .

  “Wrex, are you guys feeling these tremors?”

  “Not up here,” said the warlord.

  Eve broke into the channel. “It could be something else, Commander. It is said that Kalros, the mother of all thresher maws, lives in this region.”

  “Which is another really good reason for you to get your ass out of there, Shepard! Step on it!”

  We clambered up onto a tall rubble pile, used it to cross into another enclosure, possibly an ancient temple.

  “Kalros, the mother of all thresher maws. Sounds troubling,” Javik murmured.

  I nodded in agreement. “If the krogan name a thresher maw, I suspect it must be something remarkable.”

  “Like this?” asked Shepard, a note of awe in his voice.

  He had come up to a great wall, apparently the back wall of the enclosure we stood in. He shone his flashlight up the wall, to reveal another fresco: a long, segmented creature, rising in coil after coil to a barbed crown far above our heads. Stylized krogan figures stood on both sides, in attitudes of reverence.

  I shook my head in wonder. “Kalros, I presume.”

  “Impressive,” said Javik. “I remember thresher maws from my cycle. They were not so large then.”

  “How so?” asked Shepard.

  “It was possible to ride them.” Javik looked up at the fresco. “I would not want to encounter such a creature.”

  “All the more reason to get out of this place,” I said.

  Ten more minutes passed. We felt a few more tremors, small ones, as if something massive moved in the earth at a great distance. We lost track of how far we had come, although my omni-tool indicated it had been nearly two kilometers in a straight line. The ancient ruins seemed to go on forever.

  Javik was the first to smell something off in the vicinity, a scent of death and corruption. Despite our distaste, we followed air currents toward the smell. We reasoned that if anything living had made its way down into these tunnels to die, it might still lie close to a way out.

  When we found the corpse, it made my gorge rise. A twisted heap of bloated flesh, not even remotely asari-like, all black exoskeleton and pink sacs of corruption.
Some kind of mechanical weaponry had been fused into its upper body.

  “Rachni,” said Javik.

  “Are these like the creatures you had to fight on Utukku?” I asked Shepard.

  “Yes. The Reapers captured the queen we freed on Noveria. They forced her to bear children to be twisted into this. Living weapons, like miniature artillery pieces.”

  “I’m glad you were able to free her. But why are we finding these ravagers here now?”

  “Bound to be more than just the ones we killed.” Shepard scanned the corpse with his omni-tool, while I clamped my hand over mouth and nose in a futile attempt to keep out the stench. “Wrex, we’ve got rachni here. Keep an eye out.”

  “Yeah, I know. A few of them just attacked us. Nothing we couldn’t handle.”

  “Commander. Look!”

  We stared up into the darkness where Javik pointed. At first I couldn’t see anything, but then Shepard turned off his flashlight. The darkness closed around us, but we also saw a glimmer of light.

  “A way out,” said Shepard. “Come on!”

  We climbed a long staircase, emerging in a long colonnade that led out to the surface. To one side I could hear water running. In the dim sunlight, the place seemed stark, but quite beautiful.

  I took a deep breath, almost enjoying the hot, dry air of the Tuchanka surface. At least it tasted fresh and clean. “I wish I had known more about this place, while I still worked as an archaeologist. I would have loved to come and study these ruins.”

  “Rrrh,” growled Javik. “The remnants of a failed species.”

  I glared at the Prothean, but my distaste made no impression on him.

  Shepard led us out of the colonnade, onto the edge of what appeared to be a wide plaza. Great buildings rose on all sides, squat and massive, ruined and decaying like the rest of the architecture we had seen that day. I still remained impressed by a culture that could erect such grand edifices, still standing despite nuclear war and thousands of years of neglect.

  “Wrex, we made it back outside.”

  “Well, if you can see sunlight, that’s progress.”

  “And green,” I murmured. “I didn’t think this region could support plant life.”