The Reaper War

by Cole Price

  “Sure,” Ashley broke in, a thoughtful expression on her face as she visualized a map. “If you go out two jumps, you get Irune, Kahje, Rakhana, and you’re almost to Earth and Khar’Shan too. That’s just about everyone’s homeworld, except for the quarians and the vorcha.”

  “Liara, I’m guessing you don’t think that’s a coincidence,” said Shepard.

  “Well, the worlds on which new civilizations appear have to be located somewhere. It’s probably a coincidence that in our cycle, so many of them are clustered on this side of the galaxy. But if the Reapers could make an educated guess as to which primitive species were likely to emerge next onto the galactic stage . . .”

  “They could move the Citadel to improve their chances of catching the new cycle early.” Shepard nodded. “So why didn’t they put it close to the Prothean homeworld in the last cycle?”

  “Perhaps they didn’t see any need to move it,” I suggested. “If the Citadel was already in the Pangaea Expanse two cycles ago, then the inusannon would have found it almost as soon as they emerged from their homeworld on Ilos. We’ve never visited the Prothean homeworld, but Javik tells me it’s only a few thousand light-years away from Ilos, in a cluster we have yet to open and map.”

  “One jump away,” Javik muttered. “Close enough for us to find it early in our history. Use it. Fall into its trap.”

  Hackett broke in: “All of this is fascinating, but it doesn’t tell us what just happened to the Citadel today.”

  “I’m also not sure I buy the idea that the Reapers are behind this,” said Shepard. “They can’t control the Citadel’s systems remotely anymore, remember? Even if they dropped out of the mass relays to attack the station, C-Sec would have time to close the ward arms and put up one hell of a fight.”

  I shook my head slightly. “Assuming C-Sec wasn’t compromised in advance, as when Cerberus mounted their coup attempt.”

  Shepard gave me a sharp glance, but I could see he took the point.

  “Commander, I have unlocked this door and secured our path into the station,” said EDI. “I would suggest tabling this discussion for the moment.”

  “Agreed. Admiral, we need to get moving. Cerberus isn’t going to be off-guard for long.”

  “Understood. I’ll see if I can find out more. Good luck.”

  We moved into the depths of the station.

  We encountered surprisingly little resistance as we advanced, small but fierce firefights with Cerberus squads holding choke-points. They brought up a number of engineers, setting up barriers and turrets in our path, forcing us to move slowly and carefully. Shepard’s tactical sense came to the fore here, as he moved us like pieces on a chessboard: combat specialists pinning down the foe in front, technical specialists moving up on the flanks to take down barriers and turrets, biotic specialists deployed to bring down the hammer of wrath.

  As we advanced, we kept coming across offices or labs with active consoles, windows into the vast archives of Cronos Station. With Miranda’s help, I downloaded petabytes of data: instrument readings, communications logs, documents, audio and video recordings of meetings. Data on the Lazarus Project, the recruitment of Shepard’s crew during the war against the Collectors, the construction of EDI and later the Eva mech, Sanctuary, plans for the April offensive, the attempted coup, the intervention on Thessia . . .

  “Does it concern you,” I asked Miranda after a time, “that we’re documenting a great deal of your own work with Cerberus?”

  “Not really,” she said. “I had nothing to do with atrocities or war crimes. For the rest of it, I already have amnesty, thanks to Shepard. If we all manage to survive the Reapers, this will help us destroy whatever’s left of Cerberus.”

  I glanced at her face and saw a mask of fierce determination. I think even at that moment, I knew how Miranda Lawson would be spending her next years, perhaps even the rest of her life. What attachment she still held to some Cerberus ideals, I could not guess. For the organization itself and what it had become, she held nothing but withering contempt.

  We moved on, past the last squad of defenders, into a part of the station that seemed empty.

  “Incursion team, are you still with us? We’re limiting fire as best we can.”

  “Admiral, we’re in deep, and the Prothean data will be in the safest part of the station,” Shepard answered. “Don’t hold back.”

  “This isn’t Elysium, Shepard. I don’t need a hero, I need you and your team back with us when this is all over.”

  “We’ll be fine, Admiral. Just take Cerberus down, once and for all. Please.” Suddenly Shepard’s voice surged with emotion.

  I glanced at him with some concern, my mind reaching out to brush against his, offering strength and love. He reached out and laid a hand on my shoulder, thanking me.

  “Understood, Commander,” said Hackett. “All ships, you are free to fire.”

  Before long we could feel and hear the Alliance bombardment, dull booms and crashes through the massive body of the station, an occasional shock, never quite enough to make us stumble. Shepard’s assessment seemed correct. At least for the moment, we faced no real danger from our own side.

  EDI directed us along a shattered hallway, between fires burning on either side, then to the right and a drop of about three meters. One by one, we all made the jump.

  I stopped, looked around me with terrified awe. We had reached the central core of the station.

  I saw a vast open space, a rough cylinder standing on end, about forty meters in diameter but over two hundred meters long. Catwalks and scaffolding provided a path forward, leading up toward the central labs and the Illusive Man’s inner sanctum.

  At first I couldn’t figure out what hung in the middle of that open space. Some kind of machinery? A random assemblage of metal parts? An enormous experimental apparatus? Then I looked up and saw the shattered remnants of a face. It looked almost asari, or human, except for the presence of two “eyes” in its left socket. Suddenly my eye could see, my mind make sense of, the shapes and their arrangement. Head, torso, two great arms stretching out to either side.

  “Is that . . .”

  “Yes,” said EDI. “This appears to be the proto-Reaper Shepard destroyed at the galactic core.”

  “What’s left of it,” said Shepard. “I’m surprised Cerberus managed to recover even this much from the Collector base.”

  “Astonishing.” I stared upward at the colossal wreck. “I can’t believe you fought that. On foot, no less.”

  “I can hardly believe it myself, and I was there,” Miranda said.

  I nodded, recalling the experience second-hand from Shepard’s memories. How he, Miranda, and Samara had faced the thing and defeated it, barely escaping from its death throes.

  “A well-placed Cain shot certainly helped,” said Shepard.

  “Those poor colonists,” I murmured, remembering how the Collectors had built the machine we now saw in wreckage. The raw materials they had used.

  “The Illusive Man convinced me to work with him to save the colonies. But he never really cared, did he?”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Miranda. “Back then he hadn’t gone so far. He certainly saw himself as humanity’s leader and savior, but I think he still valued individual human lives.”

  Ashley shrugged. “Maybe. Of course, maybe once you start thinking you know better than anyone else what needs to be done, no need to let little things like freedom or sentient rights get in the way of your plans, then sooner or later you get Sanctuary.”

  “Or maybe it’s just the habit of working in secret,” I suggested quietly. “Making your decisions without having to consult with the people whose lives you change along the way.”

  Vara glanced at me sharply.

  Shepard shook his head. “You’re not him, Liara. You could never be.”

  “If it could have saved Thessia?” I sighed. “I don’t know.”

  “I know.” He looked up through the dead Reaper, pointed to a spot
several levels above us. “I think that’s the access leading to the core complex. Come on. Maybe if we hurry, we can take down the Illusive Man himself.”

  Chapter 52 : Revelation

  19 June 2186, Cronos Station

  I have seen combat in hundreds of places in my life. A bitter fight in the dark wreckage of a mining outpost, a monstrously large moon hovering overhead. A vicious close-quarters battle on a sunless rogue planet. A desperate flight through a burning forest. A sudden ambush at night, among million-year-old ruins. A full-on assault through horribly deadly jungle, against fortified positions. So many places we sentient beings have chosen to shed one another’s blood, end one another’s lives.

  I still think the strangest battlefield I have ever seen was there, on the scaffolds and catwalks of Cronos Station, climbing through the guts of a dead Reaper.

  Cerberus was almost finished. Admiral Hackett and the Fifth Fleet had pounded most of the station into wreckage. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Cerberus personnel had already died. Yet this one last army did its best to prevent us from reaching the Illusive Man’s final retreat.

  The battle seemed weirdly three-dimensional. We had difficulty finding any useful cover. Cerberus troopers and centurions moved out onto catwalks, not only on our level, but above and below us. Nemesis snipers lined up shots, our only warning a moment’s flash of laser light. Phantoms soared across empty space to land on our level, and then run in under their tactical cloaks to stab and slash. All of us craned our necks wildly, trying to stare in every direction at once.

  All the while, the dead Reaper watched us, its vacant three-eyed stare making the back of my neck itch.

  Shepard saved us, somehow keeping a map of the whole maze in his head, always knowing just where Cerberus forces would appear next. The great space echoed to the blast of his shotgun, his biotic flare, the sudden zip-boom of his flash-charge. Behind him, the rest of us kept moving, firing at targets of opportunity in all directions.

  We climbed, up one level, then two.

  We almost lost everything when Cerberus engineers placed two turrets in front of us, pinning us down, and then a whole team of Phantoms leaped into the middle of our formation. A few seconds of chaos followed, gunfire and biotic displays going off everywhere, all of us fighting desperately to avoid getting slashed or impaled. Vara drew her own captured sword to fence with one Phantom for a moment, and proved surprisingly competent, keeping her foe at bay until Shepard could bring his Claymore to bear.

  “Where did you learn that?” I asked her as we moved on.

  “Twenty years of fencing lessons when I was young,” she told me. “My mother followed the ancient martial arts. She insisted on them for physical training.”

  I smiled, and silently decided to put Vara in charge of training all of my acolytes in the blade. Not to mention me. Shepard approved of being competent with every possible weapon, and I had come to believe the same.

  Finally we emerged on the top level of the scaffolding, just under the dead Reaper’s monstrous head. A final catwalk led us into laboratory space.

  Miranda and I moved over to an active console, and once again we found data of interest: reports and technical data covering Cerberus research into the use of Reaper technology on organic subjects. All of it, dating back to Jack Harper’s experiences on Palaven after the First Contact War.

  “Oh my God,” said Miranda as she scanned some of the more recent data.

  “What is it?”

  “Look.” She shook her head in utter disgust. “I can’t believe he was so foolish.”

  I watched a series of recorded discussions, involving the Illusive Man and a female scientist named Jana. At the end, he ordered her to implant him with Reaper nanotechnology, similar to that used on Paul Grayson.

  Begin the procedure. No anesthetic. Computer, end recording.

  I shivered in horror at what he must have done to himself.

  Shepard loomed up behind us as the recordings came to an end. “He did it, didn’t he? Just like Saren.”

  “Probably for the same reason,” I suggested. “He was already indoctrinated without realizing it. No doubt the Reapers appealed to his ego. They whipered to his subconscious mind, telling him that out of all humanity, he could accept the implants and their benefits without losing his free will.”

  “It would fit his psych profile,” Miranda agreed.

  “I imagine this was inevitable, once Cerberus started playing with the enemy’s toys.” Shepard rested a supportive hand on Miranda’s shoulder. “I am damn glad all three of us got away from him before this started.”

  Miranda gave him a haunted look. “What if the three of us breaking away from him is why this started?”

  “That’s probably so,” I said. “Yet it was his choice, and he made it with eyes wide open.”

  “Yes.” Miranda took a deep, cleansing breath. “Still. What a waste.”

  “Come on,” said Shepard gently. “If you’ve got all the data, let’s go see if he’s still here.”

  * * *

  The Illusive Man had vanished.

  We stepped out into his office, a space Miranda recognized from the days when she remained loyal to Cerberus. The Illusive Man’s most trusted agent, here now to help bring him down.

  We saw a great circular space. Windows stood almost all the way around the perimeter, opening out on swollen Anadius, the distant stars, the occasional movement and flash of the battle in space. Tiles on the floor and ceiling, highly polished and reflective, gave the illusion of drifting in a starlit abyss. All seemed empty and quiet, nothing in all that space but a single chair, an array of holographic consoles and displays before it, a holoprojection stage behind.

  “No sign of Glowy Eyes,” said Ashley, after she scanned the whole room.

  “No sign of anyone,” I said, disappointed. “He must have abandoned this place. Either that, or he’s hiding somewhere else on the station.”

  “We need to locate the Prothean data,” said Shepard. He strode forward, slinging his shotgun on its attachment point on his back, moving to sit down in the single chair.

  The rest of us fanned out, EDI moving to work at a console, some of us searching the space for clues, others simply moving out toward the windows to look at the admittedly magnificent view.

  Then . . .

  “Shepard.”

  All of us turned, weapons at the ready, and saw the Illusive Man’s image standing in the focus of the holoprojection stage.

  “You’re in my chair,” he stated.

  Shepard lowered his sidearm. “This chair is about the only thing you have left. Cerberus is finished.”

  “Hardly. We have accomplished everything I ever imagined.” The Illusive Man paused for a moment. “Well. Almost everything.”

  “Yeah,” said Shepard in weary disgust. “We all saw what you accomplished at Sanctuary. It’s not the same thing as controlling the Reapers.”

  “A significant hurdle, I agree, but Sanctuary brought me within a single step of success. Thanks to the Prothean VI you recovered for me from Thessia, I now have everything I need to finish the task, once and for all.”

  “The Catalyst.”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it?” Shepard demanded. “How will it help you control the Reapers?”

  The Illusive Man shook his head. “You’ll have to pose your questions to the VI, Shepard. I’m done helping you.”

  “When did you start?”

  “Shepard. You think because I’m willing to use the enemy’s methods, their technology, that they’re no longer my enemy? Everything I’ve done – everything – has been to uplift humanity. Not only over the other species in this galaxy, but over the Reapers themselves.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Ashley said harshly. “There’s not a damn thing you’ve done that hasn’t been to promote your own power. You’re just one more in a long line of fascists.”

  The Illusive Man’s face twisted with contempt. “You haven’t th
e slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I saw Sanctuary. That told me everything I needed to know.”

  “Then you’re a shallow fool.” The Illusive Man turned back to Shepard. “Do you let your attack dog speak for you now?”

  “I trust Ash’s moral judgment a lot further than I trust yours.” Shepard walked up to the stage, almost into the Illusive Man’s personal space, had he been physically present. “I think I know where you are. You’re on the Citadel.”

  “A reasonable deduction.”

  “You moved the Citadel, didn’t you?”

  “Two in a row. Good to see you can still think, even without your pet asari to do it for you.”

  “How?”

  “That’s a very long story, and there just isn’t time.” The Illusive Man took a deep drag on his cigarette, holographic smoke drifting away from his face into oblivion. “I’m here to give you one final warning, Shepard, because you were a useful ally once and I don’t want to see that go to waste. Events are already in motion. You have a part to play, and I think you already know what that is. Final victory over the Reapers can still happen, so long as you don’t stray from your role.”

  “You still think you’re going to beat the Reapers?” Shepard folded his arms and stared at the Illusive Man. “Don’t you see that everything you’ve done has been exactly in line with their plan?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Come on. You’re a talented man, but you’re just one man. Do you really think you can outmaneuver an entire race of sentient machines with five billion years of experience? They’ve seen others just like you in the past, thousands of times. You’re a problem they know perfectly well how to solve. They’ve been ahead of you the whole time.”

  “I’ve already outmaneuvered the Reapers. Just as I’ve long since outmaneuvered the Council, the Alliance, your Shadow Broker, and you.” Another long drag on the cigarette, then it fell to the floor, to be ground out under his heel. “Shepard, I appreciate your skills and your idealism, but I had your measure a long time ago. You can’t beat the Reapers. Even if you could, the only thing you would do with that victory is to destroy them. That is the worst mistake we could possibly make. No. I have the Catalyst. I don’t have the Crucible, but I’ve arranged matters so that you have no choice left but to bring it to me. Once you do, the Reapers will be mine to command.”