Just a BioWare Fan

War of the Words

The nature of the place wasn’t the only surprise Pragia had in store for us. Halfway in we found a freshly-shot varren. I tried not to think of Urz, all alone on violent Tuchanka without me, while Jack, already edgy from the revelation that she perhaps hadn’t been the worst-off kid in the galaxy, paced about raging. It got tougher when the wild dog-lizards started rushing us from dark corners and corridors.

We soon began running into mercenaries, as well. Miranda made half-hearted attempts to counsel us on control, more to prevent Jack from bringing the whole place down on our heads than actual training. I remembered to toss the occasional blast at someone between sniper shots but mostly I just pegged idiots in the head from behind cover. At that I’d had plenty of practice and Miranda barely noticed.

We passed down a hallway of cells that seemed to frustrate Jack even more. “What the hell?” she finally asked. “These cages are even smaller than mine.” Her entire memory, everything she’d believed about herself, had been undermined by what we’d found here. Instead of the most-abused victim of Cerberus she’d been protected from the absolute worst because she’d been the strongest all along.

The Sins of the Mother

Jacob and I saw the women and what few men could be coaxed out of hiding into the shuttle the transport had sent. All of them were crying and some seemed as much afraid as relieved. I imagine nine years of chemically-induced forgetfulness would make any new and strange experience a little scary.

The woman who’d given me the datapad wrung my hand awkwardly, not quite able to shake it normally but knowing some such gesture was appropriate. It gave me hope that they could recover. “You brought us the sky,” she said, “just like he promised.”

I nodded solemnly at her. “I will remember,” she said insistently. Then she turned and shuffled up the ramp. She lifted her hand briefly before disappearing inside and I realized I didn’t even know if she knew her own name any more than I did.

Dead but Maybe Not Gone

I took Urz back to where I’d found him and got a dead pyjack for a goodbye present. “Don’t eat Wrex,” I told him, rubbing my knuckles across his lumpy spine, “but the other clans are fair game, okay?” He slimed my leg one more time, rubbing against it, and then settled to his meal.

I said a fond farewell to Wrex, as well, though without the gift of vermin. He told me the Weyrloc women and children had begun to filter into the Urdnot camps. They would join his clan as his agents had defeated their protectors.

Then he relayed breeding requests from the females with barely-suppressed hilarity: several for Grunt, two for Garrus, and one of his men had sent one in for me. He seemed to have a difficult time getting that last tidbit out between the spasms of thunderous laughter.

Such a compliment cheered me immensely. Apparently I’d become acclimatized to the idea that everyone I’d met since returning from the dead wanted to get in my pants. I did a little dance of “no way am I sleeping with a Krogan but thanks for the compliment” and Wrex had to sit on that throne of his before he fell down.

Fool Me Once, Shame on You The afternoon went as badly as I’d suspected it would. We popped out of FTL travel and cruised to the coordinates we’d received. Garrus and I stood behind Joker, staring as the ship came into view. All of us recognized its design. Indeed it looked identical to the one that had been abducting colonists on Horizon which had been, coincidentally, the very same one that had killed me two and a half years earlier.

I heard Garrus growl beside me and I put a hand on his shoulder in agreement. No matter how comparatively well things had turned out so far we still had a score to settle with the bastards. They’d wrecked our first team, the one that hadn’t included thieves and liars and turncoats. The bastards had killed some of my closest friends and destroyed the only home some of us had had. If I could find a way to blow up that pile of crap I was going to do it today, no matter what TIM wanted.

Miranda and Jack met me at the shuttle and we flew over to land on an outcropping of sorts that I presumed served as a cargo bay. We worked our way in cautiously. Along the way we found piles of rotting corpses, colonists discarded like table scraps, that made all three of us gag in our helmets. I angrily considered the thousands upon thousands of pods stacked throughout the corridors and lining the walls of vast chambers.

Surprise, Surprise, Surprise

I fell into bed, still fully clothed, and slept like I’d been shot. Four solid hours later I blearily opened my eyes, feeling like I’d had a very long and refreshing blink. I hadn’t moved a muscle in all that time and various parts of my anatomy had failed to wake with my brain.

I hobbled my way across the room, pins and needles jabbing me, and settled into the chair at my desk, glancing at the photo that Councilor Anderson had given me. Kaidan leaned forward and looked awfully grim, like he was rushing the person who took the picture. I wondered what had been going on when it was taken. I brushed my fingers over his fiercely-drawn brow, mentally wishing him a good morning, and turned to my terminal, still active from the night before.

Leaping in with both feet, regardless of how numb one of them remained, I went straight for the message from TIM. Instead of a dossier, it asked me to give him a call in the holo chamber. Wow, I thought. That was easy. I read through the rest of the notes quickly, smiling at a couple of thank you notes and a bit of spam from a merchant with whom I’d dealt on the Citadel back when we’d still had the SR-1. It looked like I really was alive again if I showed up on such mailing lists once more. I’d almost missed offers of help to increase the size and function of my imaginary man-parts.

“They’re alive!” I yelled as the others piled through the doors behind me. As I watched in horror, Chambers’s face became blotched and the skin began to peel away. The fluid in her pod turned a frothy, bloody pink and she beat at the port with hands from which the flesh had sloughed down to bone. “Get them out,” I screamed frantically.

We hammered and pried at the pods on the floor as the eight plugged into the network of tubes along the wall flushed obscenely behind us. I didn’t know who had been in the other seven pods, didn’t want to know. I may have scorned Yeoman Chambers’s attempts at manipulating my life but nothing she could ever have done could have merited the torture and dissolution that she’d suffered. I saw Garrus help Dr. Chakwas stand shakily and would have started crying if tears hadn’t already been streaming down my face since the moment I saw that at least some of my crew was still alive.

We opened the pods that we could reach, finding twelve more of my crew and seventeen colonists. Empty pods hung across the vast walls and across the ceiling. Hundreds of them filled each of the distant outcroppings that dotted the chamber. There was no way to tell if those were empty and no way to reach them directly, beyond the fact that the Normandy couldn’t carry all of them even if we could release the prisoners. My heart ached as I realized that anyone still alive in this chamber would have to be left behind. I wanted to smash each of those pods, preferably with the face of a Collector, and save every human on this station but we simply couldn’t. They were as doomed to die as if we’d never come.

The hull was intact as we approached the ship. None of us was prepared for the destruction we found inside. We stared at the remnants of the cargo, what had been secure enough not to get blown out of the hold when EDI had opened the doors. I made my way through the halls and rooms, finding only two of my own crew, both dead before the decompression had gotten to them, as Garrus and I supported Thane on the way to the med bay with the hope that we could do something for him.

But Dr. Chakwas was gone and Mordin had his hands full just running triage on the team’s injuries. We got Thane settled into a bed, back on oxygen as dry and pure as it came. I wanted nothing more than to stay beside his bed, stroking his forehead and holding his hand. He shooed me away, however, speaking calmly despite the rumbling in his chest.

“Joker needs you now,” he said, “more than I do.” I wanted to argue but I knew that we had to go straight after the Collectors. I would be damned if I would let them have my entire crew, regardless of their nominal employer. These were my people. I kissed his fingers and headed for the bridge.

Good, Clean Fun

I established the tank with EDI’s assurances that it would sustain the hulking infant for the time being. No sooner had I finished than Joker told me that TIM wanted to chat about something so I made my way up to the briefing room where a holo chamber beamed me to wherever he sat. I seriously wondered if he wasn’t stashed somewhere on the ship, quantum entanglement explanations be damned, considering the nigh-instantaneous nature of the system no matter where in the galaxy I might be but I figured he wouldn’t really put himself in direct danger. That was for those he considered inferiors, like me. Damn, I hated him.

He popped up in his wacky room, the only smoker in a four-system area, acting suave. Sorry, TIM darlin’, but you’re trying too hard. I rolled my eyes while he had his back to me then I gave him an earful about how useless his “intelligence” network was in compiling the so-called dossiers. I would happily forgo details of gory exploits if it would get me information on basic things like gender, current employer, and the likelihood that they’d be dead before I got there. I may be playing nice but he’d hardly expect me to be a pushover, particularly when he’d endangered my team.