48 The Death of the Hell Hound

--> Horizon in sight. Sporadic heat signatures are occurring at the Sanctuary complex; definite sign of disaster, and almost certainly of combat. Whatever's going on down there, it's happening ground zero on a massive refugee housing center, and civilian casualties are all but guaranteed. The sooner we can contain the situation the better. We'll go in low and see who's killing who, then participate as appropriate.

--> I had thought Cerberus had done its worst, that nothing could exceed the depths to which they had already stooped. I was wrong.

Cerberus had been running the refugee centre on Horizon as a gilded web to ensnare the displaced. What was by all outward appearance a refuge from privation and danger was nothing less than a death camp. No, it was worse. They only killed some of the subjects. The refugees were taken and transformed into Husks. The Illusive Man had contracted Henry Lawson, Miranda’s father, to run this facility as a means to produce and to study Reaper forces and discover the means to control them, with the ultimate intent of controlling the Reapers themselves.

I can’t believe it. I’d once thought the Illusive Man crooked and ruthless, then deluded and a tool, but I never would have thought any Human could have concocted such a twisted and diabolical scheme as this, let alone on an industrial scale. To subject thousands of fellow Humans to the same horrific and agonizing end that they would have suffered at the hands of the Reapers is unthinkable. Is every last Cerberus soldier, engineer, and desk-worker so thoroughly corrupted that this butchery committed en masse under their watch meant nothing to them?

If Cerberus personnel are all Indoctrinated, the Indoctrination is of a quality of derangement, not control. The fighting we found was the last of a bloody contest between Cerberus and a Reaper strike force, clearly sent to destroy the research base and all the information within it. I don't know if it is actually possible for Cerberus to have discovered a means to control Reapers, but it's clear the Reapers themselves are taking no chances. It seems Cerberus put up a tough fight; we walked over innumerable bodies, Cerberus and Reaper troops alike lying dead throughout the length of that cursed facility. The deceptively white and orderly walls and floors marked with dark blood, and the smell of death everywhere. Not a single civilian refugee survived that massacre.

I don’t know how many innocents were lead to the slaughter. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, it makes no difference. Cerberus, which prided itself on being a force for the defence of Humanity, used the Reapers’ own methods on the very people they were meant to protect. My mind refused to comprehend the extent of the horror. But then how could it? How could any mind fathom the unimaginable pain and terror that facility turned out in its gruesome work? But this is only an example in stark contrast. On Earth alone there are millions of souls suffering the same fate at the hands of the Reapers. Sanctuary was but a single facility. The Reapers have made a hundred more.

Leng had left before we arrived, taking with him the completed research data; Lawson he left to the Reapers. My team and I carved our way through the last Cerberus and Reaper forces left in the base, and found Lawson in a stand-off with Miranda, her sister Oriana held by their father as a human shield.

Hostage rescue training takes no prisoners. Mr. Lawson will not have opportunity to stand trial for his deeds. A higher Judge than the Alliance could provide will decide his ultimate sentence. Neither Oriana nor Miranda need fear him any more.

Miranda did us a favour and tagged Leng with a tracer before he bugged out. We have our destination: the Illusive Man’s centre of operations is in the Anadius system. Alliance Command will be pleased to hear this. After having for so long been a menace to Humanity, and the entire galaxy, the centre of the Cerberus web has at last been found.

--> Alliance Command responds. Fifth Fleet is dispatched to Anadius; the Normandy will have the full weight of the Alliance Navy backing her. No halfway measures. Hackett's orders are to seize the data and destroy Cerberus.

It's been a long time coming.

--> Anadius System locked down. The net has been drawn. There is no escape. Cerberus defence fleet moving to engage. Let's remind them what it means to be Alliance.

--> Damn the Illusive Man. Damn him to hell and back again. Our mission, as a mission, is a success; Cerberus is defeated, their main fleet and central base destroyed; we have the Prothean data, but all too late.

The Catalyst, the last piece for the Crucible, is the Citadel. We should have known all along. The two massive stations combined have the power to destroy the Reapers with their own tools. The Citadel controls the Relay Network, and the Crucible serves as a colossal spark plug and guidance system to jump-start and overcharge of the Relays to target the Reapers. The Crucible turns the Reaper's own creation against them.

Had we known this before, we could have taken the now completed Crucible to the Citadel, established the link, and fired it up. The war would have been over, the Reapers caught broadsided and destroyed by their own tools. But that cannot be. The Reapers have taken the Citadel; the Illusive Man learned of the nature of the Catalyst from the Prothean VI, and told the Reapers. Now the last piece of the puzzle is in their grasp. They’ve taken the Citadel to Earth and sealed it shut, surrounding it with every ship they have. What could have been a bloodless victory for us will instead be a desperate struggle, a grim contest of strength against a foe whose power eclipses ours even as a river surpasses a stream. We cannot win through strength alone.

Kai Leng is dead, and with him most of Cerberus, but the Illusive Man himself remains elusive. The nest has been incinerated, but the chief rat is still at large. He'd already left for the Citadel before we ensnared his fleet. He will not escape again.

There are still some diverse fragments of Cerberus scattered throughout the Galaxy, but as an organization, they’re history. With Cerberus dealt with, we can turn our full attention to the Reapers.

--> The word has been spread, the time has come. The final engagement of this war commences at Earth in forty-eight hours. Every fleet has responded, every course set. 

Operation Skyfall has begun.

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34 The Means of Resistance

--> There’s something not quite right here. A vague doubt has been growing in the back of my mind for several weeks, with precious little time to spare for examination; only now that I turn to address it do I comprehend the astounding weight of its implications.

To the best of our knowledge, a certain pattern has remained an absolute constant in the execution of every Reaper invasion: across all previous cycles, the Reapers commenced their invasion by signalling the Citadel Keepers to open the station, actually a large mass relay, to where the Reapers hid in dark space. The Reapers would then surge through and capture the Citadel, and through it, control of the entire Mass Relay network. All movement, all communication, between star clusters instantly shut down, each star system isolated and vulnerable, each fleet and world a hanging fruit for the Reapers to pluck at their leisure. So it was for the Protheans before us.

But unlike previous cycles, the Protheans successfully laid the groundwork for the survival of the next cycle. A team of Prothean scientists hidden in a top-secret research bunker on the planet Ilos survived the Reaper invasion, suspending themselves in stasis until the centuries-long harvesting of the galaxy was complete, and the Reapers withdrew back to dark space. The surviving scientists, no more than a dozen in number, completed their design on Ilos: a small-scale secondary-class Mass Relay, aimed right into the heart of the Citadel. A one-way trip, they went to the Citadel, and rewrote the Keepers’ reception protocols, rendering Reaper signals meaningless.

When the time for our Reaper invasion came, when Sovereign, the Reaper assigned to hide in the Galaxy and choose the time, signalled the Keepers to open the Citadel, they ignored him. So he sought another way into the Citadel, a Turian Spectre named Saren Arterius. With an army of Geth at his back, Saren boarded the Citadel through the Prothean relay, or Conduit as they called it. A fierce battle ensued in and around the Citadel, with the timely arrival of the Alliance fleets putting an end to the Reaper, driving off his Geth like so many jackals. The Reaper invasion had been thwarted. For a time.

The Reapers were denied their easy one-step trip back into the heart of the Galaxy, but they still had other means. They began the long trek on foot, so to speak, and arrived here after three years of FTL space travel. Their course took them through Batarian space first, but their primary goal was the homeworld of those minuscule insolents responsible for the death of Sovereign: Earth.

The Reapers are an arrogant breed, and resented in the extreme the temerity of primitive and puny Humans successfully thwarting them. But once Earth was taken, why not proceed with their established strategy? Once into the Relay network, they could reach the Citadel in less than twenty-four hours. Why on Earth are they instead crawling through the Galaxy in their gruesome conquest upon our people while still leaving us the means to manoeuvre? They could still seize the Citadel, and through it the Relays. But this time around, they have so far completely ignored the Citadel. It cannot be through idiocy; Reapers are cunning and adaptive, and would never abandon in entirety a tried-and-true strategy because the first step was compromised. It cannot be through hubris; the Reapers are taking losses only because our fleets can still mass, evade, and strike where they choose.

The only possible solution is that something has changed about the Citadel. This change must have occurred after the battle against Sovereign. I know for a fact that the Citadel’s control of the Relay network was in place at the time of that battle: Saren used it to lock out all Relay access to the Citadel to prevent both escape and reinforcement, and I used the same means to open the Relays again for the Alliance Fleet.

So what happened? Is that control blocked somehow? Could it be that, despite their denial, for all of their adamant insistence that Reapers were a myth and Sovereign an isolated threat, the Citadel Council actually did something about it? That they realised their greatest strength, the Citadel’s control of the Relays, was also their greatest weakness, that should any enemy accomplish what Saren so nearly achieved, all resistance across the Galaxy would be crippled and blind? Did the Council uncouple the Citadel from control of the Relays?  If so, then we owe our only means of resistance to the Citadel Council.

I have no conclusive evidence, but this hypothesis matches all of the available data, and explains an otherwise inexplicable mystery.

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28 They're Here

--> It’s happened. I knew this day was coming. I told my superiors, but no one believed me. Now they’re here. And we’re not ready.

But could we ever be ready, really? Could we ever prepare enough to match the Galaxy-ending force that has maintained a cycle of genocide for countless billions of years? Could we ever be ready for the sight of our fleets cut to ribbons and our streets swarming with enemies?

Maybe not. But we could have done more, should have prepared more. The Reapers should have been met when they came by a single, unified force drawn from all corners of the Galaxy to repel the common foe. But instead the Reapers have before them a Galaxy still fractured by mistrust and self-interest, politicians who refused to believe the existence of the threat when they had time, and who refuse to work together now that time is up.

The Reapers hit the Batarians first. I don’t know if there’s any of them left. That gave Earth some margin of warning, but not enough. First we lost contact with two deep space outposts, then communication with all colonies and outposts outside the Sol System. And before we knew it, the Moon had gone silent, and Reapers were landing.

I was in Vancouver when they hit, a nightmare coming down out of the clear sky, hellish blasphemies against the daylight that revealed their monstrous forms. Then the deaths started: soldiers and civilians, men, women, and children, innocents crushed beneath horrible feet of iron or burned to ash, individually or en masse, entire blocks leveled in an instant, whichever suited the humour of the merciless and implacable Reapers.

If the Reapers wished to simply destroy Earth outright, they could do it. We are hopelessly out-gunned, and there is nothing we could do to prevent them using their full firepower to reduce our planet's entire surface to ash and dust. But their purpose here is far more grim than that; the gruesome infantry the Reapers are deploying tell all too clearly their intentions for Earth. They’re not here to destroy us: they’re here to repurpose us. If they continue unchecked, if we can’t find a way to stop them, every Human that doesn’t fall in battle will instead serve as either raw material for building new Reapers, or worse, transformed into Husks, and set loose upon Earth as the Reapers mindless slaves to capture and kill more Humans. This is the fate that faces not just Earth, but every planet in the Galaxy.

The only reason we have any fleets left is because not all were directly in the Reapers path. Our technology had improved, thanks to salvage from Sovereign, but it’s still not enough. I saw a Dreadnought weather three direct hits from a Reaper before being destroyed. That’s a vast change in odds since our battle against the first Reaper three years ago, where its weapons carved through our ships like a knife through butter. But it’s not enough. The Reapers are still too strong, too many, and our ships cannot stop them.

I am sent by Anderson to persuade the Council to lend us aid. It should be him. He’s an Admiral, I a Commander. But he’s staying on Earth to lead the resistance. While I flee the scene of danger. It’s true that I’m a Council Spectre, but Admiral Anderson was for a time Councillor Anderson. He turned in his robes for his old uniform, seeking to do what he could in person to prepare for the Reapers, having faced only intransigence and willful ignorance on the Citadel. Now those same fools I must persuade to help us.

Perhaps Anderson sends me for the same reason that everyone else expects me to have a plan for stopping the Reapers; I was the one who warned everyone, first about Sovereign, then about the rest of the Reapers. I am inexplicably and absurdly credited with having killed Sovereign. I am the symbol of the resistance, known across the Galaxy as the one who warned and was not listened to, the one who killed a Reaper. If Earth falls, I must survive as a banner for the Galaxy to rally round. Anderson stays to fight, perhaps to die, so that hope can live.

I never wanted this. I’m a soldier, not an icon. My job is to kill the enemy and save lives through direct action, not look good for an audience of billions.

Admiral Hackett has ordered me to meet Dr. T’Soni at the Mars Archives before leaving the Sol System. The transmission was garbled, but he said something about “only way to stop the Reapers.” Is it possible that Liara dug up some Prothean information on a superweapon capable of turning the tide? It seems unlikely. If they had such information and lost, what more good will it do us? We’re scrambling to catch up late in the game, caught with our proverbial powder wet and flat-footed.

The Normandy is airborne, pulled out of retrofit by Lieutenant Commander Williams with but a skeleton crew. We are en route to Mars, leaving behind us our home to be crushed and burned.

I should be back on Earth. There's a lot of people dying there, and live or die, my place is with them. The world is going down in flames.

But I cannot, must not, will not, despair.

Never.

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27 Epilogue

--> We did it. By gosh and by golly, we did it. The Collector base, the processing plant for their victims, is destroyed in glorious, purifying inferno. We arrived not a moment too soon. Chakwas, Daniels, Donnely, Gunther, everyone taken from the Normandy would have been gone in another few seconds, melted down like so many thousands of Human colonists had been before them as material for building a Human Reaper. Everyone is back aboard the Normandy, safe and sound.

Revenge is sweet. The Normandy met its old enemy, the same cruiser that destroyed its predecessor, and blew it to hell. It was a horrific sight inside that base, and seeing the team plough through it like avenging angels was beautiful to behold: Garrus dropping enemies like flies with headshot after headshot, Jacob scooping up enemies to dangle helplessly as targets for all, Grunt barrelling through barrages of gunfire that would instantly drop even most Krogan, Zaeed riddling hostiles, Legion gunning down enemies with streamlined efficiency, Tali guiding the non-combatants back to safety, Kasumi slipping in and out opening doors and striking from behind, Mordin halting enemies in their tracks with ice and neural shock, Thane mingling gunfire, biotics and hand-to-hand in flawless sequence, Samara shielding the team from Swarms with a benign biotic cover, Miranda crushing an enemy with biotics and shooting the next in the face, and Jack laying waste to wave after wave of husks.

Collectors fell before me like leaves before a strong autumn wind, the rifle in my hands growing warm as the carcasses of the fallen foe piled high. They’d killed me, and I had returned, a veritable Revenant to match the name of my weapon. I cannot bring back all those whom the Collectors took, but the wronged dead will sleep soundly having seen the vengeance meted out upon their foe.

I misjudged Miranda. When the Illusive Man signalled in upon our reaching the core and told us to disable the base instead of destroying it, I fully expected Miranda to turn on me for ignoring him. But instead she directly disobeyed an explicit order to do so, and closed the channel. As if there were even any question about destroying the base. It was built by the Reapers. It would have turned anyone who possessed it. I wouldn’t give such a thing to my worst enemy, a position which the Illusive Man has done a laudable job vying for.

I must have gunned down Harbinger a score of times or more as he moved from host to host. But he’s still alive, and will come with a thousand more of his fellow Reapers. We stopped Sovereign and the Collectors, but the true danger is still to come. I assembled a team to defeat the Collectors. The entire Galaxy will be needed to defeat their masters. The Reapers are coming, and we need to be ready.

But for now, we’re done. There are amends I must make. It’s time to go home.

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