19 Collector Ship

"5,000 credits says this is a trap and the Illusive Man knows it." I laid down the bet as the ground teams minus Jack took the shuttle into the 'disabled' collector cruiser.

"You're on." Miranda agreed without hesitation, "This mission is too important for the Illusive Man to play fast and loose with us."

"I'm in too." Nodded Jacob in a show of Cerberus solidarity.

"I can already taste the tacos your credits will bring me." I goaded the suckers.

The shuttle ride came to an end and we set foot in the powered down ship. The collectors use of organic building materials over a metal superstructure made the hallways feel like a fossilized intestinal tract. I wasn't bothered by the spooky atmosphere or that the collectors left a few piles of rotting dead humans about. While the team was busy gawking I scanned a few pieces of collector tech and Cerberus instantly funded me 7,500 credits and another 15,000 a little bit farther into the ship.

The big reveal that the collectors are protheans twisted and manipulated by the reapers left everyone else in a tizzy, but I couldn't care less. Javik was an annoying dick and if he was representative of their empire then the harvest couldn't have come for them soon enough. I was already scoping out the pile of discarded weapons while the gawked. It was with great hesitancy and regret that I handed off an M-98 Widow anti-material rifle to the Commander.

"I hope you know how much passing up on this hurts me inside." I moped while also handing a Revenant machine gun to Zaeed and a Claymore shotgun to Garrus.

The turian preferred longer range engagements, but this isn't the video game and the man had no problems operating a street sweeper.

A bit farther into the ship and things opened up from tight corridors into the belly of the beast. A cavernous interior stretched as far as the eye could see and lined entirely with the stasis pods the collectors used to transport captured humans. It didn't take much brain power for Miranda to figure out that the collectors could take the entirety of the human population in the Terminus System and still have room for more on just this one ship. Garrus commented that the collectors would need to target earth to fill their hull as we approached the 'platforming' section of the game. Alpha Team took up position on the control platform giving them access to ships archives, while Beta Team waited in the narrow neck that sloped down to it.

As the Commander worked EDI into the collector systems the trap sprung and the 'disabled' ship sprang back to life and the platform ascended, floating in the air taking Alpha Team out of our reach. More floating platforms began swooping in and docking alongside them and the firefight midair kicked off at the same time the collectors began swarming Beta Team with husks and drones. The Husks rose up out of every possible crevice and rushed out of the corridors we'd come from while the drones flew in on their insectoid wings and began firing on us as soon as their feet touched the ground. In many cases they didn't as we fired on them as much as we could.

Samara took out the majority of the husks using her biotic abilities, and for a time we held them off perfectly, but as the fight wore on Samara's cooldowns began taking longer and longer, forcing more of us to engage the husks and less keeping the collectors away from us. First Tali broke off then me. Garrus and Zaeed kept the stream of accurate fire coming as my hammer lashed out again and again creating electrified explosions that swept the legion of cyborg zombies away.

Everything was shaping up to be another day at the office until the praetorian showed up. The twisted choir of thirty dead humans and reaper technology that I had laughed off on Horizon as being just a one dimensional threat now closed distance on a one dimensional battlefield. If it managed to close the gap it would kill us all, but even at a distance it's laser cannons would hold us down long enough for the collector forces to overrun our position and slay us.

Taking a deep breath I charged up the M-920 Cain and popped up out of cover to fire it. The ship shook as the mushroom cloud formed at ground zero of my attack, but the God damn praetorian kept coming. Fortunately all the nearby collector forces were dealt with by my mini nuke, allowing the team a few moments to engage the beast together. I swiftly realized that we were going to lose the firefight with the big beast. It's lasers could kill us in seconds, keeping at least one member of the team pinned down to cover at a time, and every second we spent engaging it the rest of the collector forces had more time to regroup and their combined fire was starting to keep more and more of us pinned down.

We were either going to be shot to death, or the praetorian would close distance and slay us all with its biotic explosion attack.

It would appear that without Bioware designing the encounters, the collectors were a real threat after all.

I jumped over the cover keeping us alive and fired my rifle to empty while charging the mechanical monster. During this time my shields took an absolute beating from the collector fireteams advancing besides it, but I just narrowly managed to avoid its death beams. I arrived in front of this ridiculously deadly foe and swung a fully charged hammer at its face. The blast damaged many of the human faces that rested inside the metal turtle shell, but the praetorian survived and didn't hesitate to blast off with its two part explosive attack, the aptly named Death Choir. All the nearby collectors had their barriers dropped at the same time my shields fell, and the second explosion sent all of us flying. Me less than them as I weigh as much as four of them together.

Getting hit by the Death Choir was a deep pain. One I didn't want to experience ever again but had no choice. I bounced back up and hit the damn thing with my hammer again before it could gather back up the power needed to explode once more. I struck again and again, firing off the explosive charges built up in my hammer. I kept hitting it until it struck again with the Death Choir, the first charge dropping what had built back up of my shields and the second knocking my over, this blast much weaker and an indication that I had damaged the machine greatly. For some weird reason my hammer felt incredibly heavy so I had to leave it behind, and I charged back at the beast so much slower than usual and began stabbing it with an omni-blade in each hand.

This time the machine exploded in the normal way, knocking me down again, but now I even struggled to get up, let alone charge back into the fray. My arms and legs felt like they were made of lead and I just felt so damn sleepy. I hadn't really felt sleepy since Mordin amped me up a few days prior, and never had I felt the need to nap on the battlefield. Where was all that krogan rage and adrenaline?

The smarter part of my lizard brain realized that I was fucked up, and maybe dying. I could only see out of one eye and what I saw looking at myself would bother most people. My armor was torn open and covered in my own blood. The parts that weren't actively bleeding me to death were burned, and the damn collectors were still putting holes in me. I was starting to resemble swiss cheese.

I hate swiss cheese.

I ended up on my back, looking up at the pods on the ceiling of this vessel. Humanity wouldn't give a shit that Chief Gatatog Grunt died on this damn ship trying to make sure their ungrateful asses never ended up in those stasis pods, but that didn't bother me. I went on this mission for myself, and no one else. I liked the people I fought beside, even fell in love with one of them. I had a kick ass time in space, and would leave this life with too few regrets to mention.

The Space Momma came into view and started dragging me as the rest of the teams tried fighting our way out of the ship. Cerberus did a damn fine job rebuilding her, cause I weighed an assload and a half. Somehow she hauled me into the shuttle and we were flying off to the Normandy. She started slathering medigel on me while saying something, but I could barely hear it with how much my head ached and my ears were rang.

"Maybe I'll just sleep it off." I grunted before passing out.