The Reaper War

by Cole Price

  At one point, even Javik voiced sincere admiration for the soldiers fighting on Palaven. I made quite sure Diana Allers heard and recorded that for the media.

  Unfortunately, the “miracle at Palaven” came at a horrible cost: almost two billion turians, tens of millions of krogan warriors, about a million humans, and naval tonnage almost beyond reckoning. The Turian Hierarchy had begun the war with the strongest military establishment in the galaxy, but by the middle of June it had fallen to a fraction of its original strength. Late that afternoon, with advice from Garrus and Admiral Hackett, Primarch Victus came to the most difficult decision of the war. He issued orders for the turian navy to withdraw from Palaven, hoping to preserve a “fleet in being” for the final offensive against the Reapers.

  The turian and krogan forces left behind on Palaven kept fighting. We knew they would continue to hold the Reapers at bay as long as they could. We also knew that without support from space, they could not possibly survive for long.

  Everyone aboard Normandy, everyone I communicated with out in the galaxy on that terrible day, all of us knew the war had reached a turning point.

  Within a few days – possibly no more than a week – either we would win, or we would see the beginning of our long, inevitable descent into extinction.

  * * *

  Shepard returned to Normandy late in the ship’s afternoon. I evaded Dr. Chakwas and went down to the staging bay, Samantha and Nerylla in tow, to greet him on his return. He had made a terse call up to the ship, so I knew he had won a victory, but none of the landing party looked happy about it. Shepard, Ashley, James, Garrus, Tali, Vara, and Tania all emerged from the shuttle, battered, wounded, and grim.

  With them came Miranda Lawson. Also a younger woman I didn’t recognize, but who resembled Miranda closely. I could guess her identity at once.

  Miranda had been injured: a straight cut across her cheek just under one eye, and another under her ribs on the left side. Both wounds looked bloody, but not life-threatening. I thought I could guess their origin, and felt a moment of sympathetic pain in my chest. The younger woman seemed unhurt, but I could see deep shadows in her eyes.

  I hurried up to Shepard, gave him a quick embrace, and then turned to Miranda. “I’m glad to see you. We’ve been worried about you for weeks. When Shepard told us he had picked you up . . .”

  Miranda nodded, looking tired, dispirited, and about as far from perfect as I had ever seen her. “At least it’s all over. Liara, this is my sister, Oriana.”

  I smiled and took the young woman’s hand. “I’m pleased to meet you at last. Miranda has spoken of you often.”

  Just a shimmer of interest, in those haunted eyes. “Thanks. I’ve wanted to meet you too, Dr. T’Soni. Although I guess this is a bad time to ask about an internship.”

  I glanced at Miranda with wide eyes. “Is she serious?”

  “I’m afraid so. Ever since she lived on Illium. More so now that she knows you’re the Shadow Broker.”

  Shepard loomed up beside us. “Miranda, ordinarily I would offer to drop you off at the Citadel, but given what we learned down on Horizon, I don’t think we’re headed there next.”

  The former Cerberus operative nodded in agreement. “I understand, Shepard. Things are coming to a head, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, I think they are.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I told them. “Galactic politics have been moving so fast today, I can barely keep up.”

  “Then we need to confer.” Shepard turned to Samantha. “Traynor, would you take Oriana in hand, and find quarters for her and her sister?”

  “Straight away, sir.”

  Soon Samantha was on her way to the lifts and the crew deck, Oriana in tow, both of them talking at a frantic pace. I caught Miranda watching after them with a bemused expression.

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. “Samantha is young, fiercely intelligent, and a technical expert in several disciplines. Your sister will get along with her very well.”

  “All right. Shepard, I’m at your disposal. What’s on the agenda?”

  “We call Admiral Hackett. For the next mission, I want the entire Alliance fleet in my back pocket.”

  * * *

  “Shepard. Please tell me you have good news.”

  I watched the hologram of Admiral Hackett closely. The past few days had not been kind to him, although only a close observer would have seen the difference: shoulders not quite as firmly braced, face looking just a little craggier than usual, eyes sunk in their sockets with fatigue.

  “I wouldn’t call it good, Admiral, but it’s a hell of a lot better than yesterday.”

  “Go on.”

  “Sir, I took a team down to Sanctuary. We discovered the place nearly deserted, no sign of any of the refugees who have poured into the place over the past few weeks. We found both Cerberus and Reaper forces there, Cerberus was in the process of evacuation, while the Reapers attacked them.”

  “That’s new. Any idea why?”

  “Yes, sir.” Shepard looked more forbidding than usual. “We discovered that Sanctuary is a sham. An enormous Cerberus scientific facility, looking for a way to take control of Reaper troops. Using millions of refugees as raw materials for industrial-scale experimentation.”

  Hackett’s eyes widened in surprise.

  “The place was a concentration camp.” Shepard leaned on the console rail, looking as if he needed the support to continue standing erect. “It had a very pretty façade, but they killed enough people there to put Auschwitz in the shade. Millions. Humans of military age got implanted with Reaper tech and put in the Illusive Man’s army. Other adult humans got turned into husks, for experiments in assimilation and control. Any humans who weren’t useful for either of those tasks – the children in particular – they just killed. Same for every single one of the non-humans. If anyone survived to escape, we didn’t see any evidence of it.”

  Steven Hackett was a very hard man. He had seen and done many difficult things in his military career. He cultivated a great deal of self-discipline, always sharp and alert, never letting his passions gain control of him. In over a century of acquaintance with him, I believe that was the only moment I ever saw him lose that self-control.

  None of us spoke for a long moment, watching as the admiral removed his cap, ran a trembling hand through his silver hair, and then hurled the headgear violently out of the hologram’s focus.

  “God damn them to the pits of hell,” he said, very quietly.

  Then his head rose, his hands clasped behind his back, and the man took refuge behind the admiral once more.

  “Continue.”

  I stepped forward slightly. “Admiral, I think what our team discovered on Horizon explains a great deal. Consider the scope of their scientific work over the past year: the experiments on Paul Grayson; the salvage of Collector technology from the galactic core; the research conducted at their lab on Sanctum; the research conducted by Brynn Cole and her colleagues before their defection. Now we see all of it culminating in Henry Lawson’s work at Sanctuary, developing a system for the complete control of human minds. In short, indoctrination, but for the Illusive Man’s purposes rather than those of the Reapers.

  “Cerberus clearly made some progress along these lines even before the Reapers attacked Earth. I suspect they conscripted their first military force among humans living on Omega. We encountered some of those soldiers on Mars. Sanctuary is the most likely source for the large army they deployed during their April offensive. It also explains how Cerberus has continued to produce large numbers of troops, even after repeated defeats in the field.”

  “That does make sense,” the admiral agreed. “Do you believe their assembly line has been cut off, now that Sanctuary is out of operation?”

  “The data don’t force such a conclusion, but I suspect the loss of such a large facility must cause severe disruption to their logistics. Especially now that they no longer hold Omega.”

  “Adm
iral, all of this is very consistent with what I know of the Illusive Man’s psychology,” said Miranda quietly. “He is obsessed with control. He wants to save the galaxy, but only on his terms. That means humanity dominant over all others, with him firmly in charge of humanity.”

  Hackett stared at Miranda for a long moment. “Ms. Lawson, how involved is your father in all of this?”

  “He was fully involved, Admiral. The architect of Sanctuary. The chief scientist as well. Ultimately responsible for every bloody thing done there.”

  The admiral’s eyebrows lowered a trifle, giving him the look of an intent predatory avian. “I notice the past tense. Where is your father now?”

  “Dead.” Miranda’s chin rose, and she gave Hackett a defiant stare. “By my own hand.”

  Hackett nodded firmly. “Good.”

  “Sir, I’ll have an after-action report for you within two hours, and Liara has promised an intel assessment as well,” said Shepard. “The executive summary is that with Miranda’s help, we recovered and analyzed message headers from her father’s communications to the Illusive Man. We also picked up Kai Leng’s trail as he headed back into the relay network. It all fits together. I am confident that we now have the location of Cerberus headquarters.”

  Slowly, an ice-cold smile began to spread across Admiral Hackett’s face.

  We got to work, planning a battle.

  * * *

  It was late in the evening before I noticed that Vara had gone missing.

  I had seen her emerge from the shuttle after the Horizon mission, but then I had been busy for hours. Only when I took a late meal with Shepard and Nerylla did I have time to take stock. No one had seen her since she left the med-bay after the mission.

  I thought hard for a moment, and then took the lift down to the engineering deck. I knew one place on the ship that almost no one ever visited, at least not since Jack had moved out months before.

  Sure enough, I found a small bundle of black leather with light blue accents, and the sound of quiet weeping. Vara sat on Jack’s old cot, curled into a tight ball in the far corner, arms around her knees, face hidden from the world.

  I crossed the deck, making as little sound as I could, and eased myself down on the cot beside her.

  The sudden sense of my presence caused her head to jerk upward, a wild silver-eyed stare meeting my gaze. At once she began to uncoil, getting ready to stand at attention. “Despoina . . .”

  I reached out and caught her hand, held it tightly. “None of that, Vara. There’s no one here to see. You don’t have to be my acolyte right now.”

  For an instant she remained rigid, and then she nodded and relaxed once more, sitting beside me and permitting me to hold her hand. “I’m sorry, despoina. Liara.”

  “Don’t be.” I leaned my back against the wall, staring up into the dimness. “Difficult day?”

  She took a deep breath, let it out as a great shaky sigh. “You have no idea. Goddess!”

  I did my best not to flinch, but that apparently wasn’t good enough.

  Vara blinked at me. “Hmm. I’m sorry again, Liara. Force of habit.”

  “You never were an initiate of the Athame cult, were you?”

  “No. Never even visited the Temple, back when I still lived in Armali. My lineage has been siari for over a thousand years.”

  I shook my head and gave her a rueful smile. “No reason for that matter to strike you as hard as it did me, then. Never mind. Tell me about today.”

  “It was . . . terrible. At first we only had a mystery. Where did all the refugees go? Why is Cerberus here, and why are the Reapers apparently attacking them? Then we began to see the truth, one piece at a time.”

  “Mass murder.”

  “Yes, but not just that. Cerberus was so efficient about it. As if they ran a big, elaborate industrial plant, every process worked out to the last detail, everyone filing reports and getting letters of praise for getting the job done on time. Probably drinking coffee and gossiping with their colleagues the whole time. While they processed millions of people.”

  “Yes.”

  “They had a process for removing the clothing from the dead. Light textiles in one pile, heavy in another. A third pile solely for their footgear. Each pile went into different nanotech processes for reclamation. They must have had to evacuate in a panic when the Reapers arrived. We found the last batch, already sorted out but not yet fed into the recyclers. A pile of shoes . . . higher than my head, tens of thousands of shoes . . . and suddenly I couldn’t help but think of all the people who had worn those shoes, all of them dead, all of them murdered . . .”

  She broke down again. I put my arms around her and held on tight.

  “I know,” I murmured once she became quiet again. “I’ve studied human history closely over the last few years. On the whole, they are decent and honorable people. Yet there is a hole in their minds, some flaw that makes things like Sanctuary possible for them. I could list over a dozen incidents like this one, going back three hundred years or more.”

  “I don’t think that’s the point,” she whispered. “Is there a single race in the galaxy that doesn’t have some terrible crime on its conscience?”

  “I suppose not. A few days ago, I might have been tempted to say we asari weren’t capable of such terrible deeds, but now?” I sighed. “We’ve clearly found our own ways to betray all life.”

  “Yes.” She was silent for a long moment, still leaning into my embrace, wiping the tears from her face. “Maybe the Reapers are right. Maybe, before we can grow onto the galactic stage and find a way to commit truly cosmic crimes . . . maybe being harvested is exactly what we deserve.”

  “No.” I didn’t even have to think about it. “Absolutely not.”

  She blinked at me. “All right. But why not? I’m not seeing it right now. All I can see is that pile of shoes.”

  I thought about it for a moment, and then had to smile. “Because organic life doesn’t just produce monsters. Most of the time it produces basically decent people who don’t have much power, either for great good or for great evil. Once in a while it produces people like Shepard.”

  To my chagrin, she didn’t smile. She turned her face away, clenching her jaw in the grip of some strong emotion. I couldn’t tell if it was anger or shame.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

  “He saved my life today.”

  I waited.

  “It was after we saw those piles of clothing, the pile of shoes. I don’t know. I tried not to let it affect me. Tried to use my anger. I thought it was working. Then one of those banshees ambushed us.”

  I shuddered slightly. She must have felt it.

  “You have that right,” she went on. “Usually those things are so slow. They stand there and scream, and throw balls of biotic force at you, and you can dodge those. Plenty of time to pound on them with gunfire and biotics, wear them down from a distance. Not this one. The creature came out of nowhere, flash-charged in on us, boom-boom-boom, and then it was right there, right in the middle of our formation. I tried to turn my weapon on it, but I might have been distracted, or it moved too quickly. It hit me with some kind of neural charge, blasted my reflexes and my mind into so much shattered glass. Then it picked me up.”

  I bit my lip.

  “I was dead. I knew I was dead. It must have been like when that Cerberus assassin stabbed you yesterday. It almost seemed to cherish me, looking into my eyes, holding me gently. But I knew I was about to feel its talons rammed through my gut, and that would be the end.

  “Shepard charged it.”

  My eyes went wide. My bondmate had deliberately flash-charged into a banshee’s reach?

  “He was careful. Came in on the opposite side of the thing. The concussion still nearly knocked me out. Somehow it kept its hold on me, but it turned toward Shepard. That scream again, right by my head. Then he set off a nova-blast. That made it drop me.

  “Next thing I knew, the rest of the squad gave the mons
ter everything they had. It felt like I huddled in the eye of a hurricane. It died still standing above me. Its ashes settled all over me.

  “Then Shepard stood there. Bending down. Offering me his hand to pull me to my feet. Asking if I was all right.”

  “There he is again,” I murmured. “The tower of strength and courage.”

  “Yes. Somehow I got through the rest of the mission. I ran, fought, listened to orders, contributed ideas. I survived.” She shuddered. “But it felt as if the world had withdrawn behind a panel of glass. I could see it, I could react to it, but it didn’t seem real anymore. I’m still not sure if any of it feels real.”

  I nodded, recognizing what she was telling me. Something had happened to Vara down on Horizon: some limit had been passed, some essential component of her mind had been wounded.

  I tightened my embrace. “Vara, listen to me. This is real. This quiet place, my voice, my arms around you, these are all real things. Take strength from them.”

  She sat motionless in my embrace.

  “We need you, Vara. I need you.”

  “No. You don’t,” she said miserably.

  I drew back a little, enough to look down and stare at her face. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re my right hand, you have been ever since Illium.”

  “That was before Shepard came back.”

  Then I saw it. Not just terror at the apparent end of all things staring us in the face, not just horror at what Cerberus or the asari people had done. Nothing so simple as envy or jealousy.

  Shame. A sense of inadequacy, of failure.

  “Vara . . .”

  “No, Liara. It’s time I faced the truth. I was so proud of being your first acolyte, of standing with you through everything.” Silence for a moment. “I was a fool.”