Collector campaign
From FABT
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 Clockwise from top left: Collector troops engage the Normandy Squad during the Abduction of Horizon; a scion drags away a screaming Kelly Chambers during the Collector attack on the Normandy SR-2; the Normandy Squad battles the Human-Reaper during the Collector Base Assault; the SSV Normandy is destroyed by the Sarcophagus over Alchera.
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14 August 2183 CE - 9 October 2185 CE | ||||||||||||||||
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Attican Traverse / Milky Way Galaxy | ||||||||||||||||
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Strategic Cerberus victory
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Cerberus gains control over the galactic core | ||||||||||||||||
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- "I don't know what we're going to find in there, but I won't lie to you, it isn't going to be easy. We've lost good people...we might lose more. We don't know how many the Collectors have stolen...thousands, hundreds of thousands...it's not important. What matters is this: Not. One. More. That's what we can do, here, today! It ends with us! They want to know what we're made of? I say we show them...on our own terms! Let's bring our people home!"
- — Commander Shepard giving his speech to his squad just before launching their assault on the Collector Base in 2185 CE.
The Collector campaign, also known as the Collector War to Cerberus, the Collector conflict in some history books, and as the Human-Collector War to humans, was a moderate-scale conflict between the Collectors and both the Systems Alliance and Cerberus, although primarily the latter, that occurred between August 2183 CE and October 2185 CE, taking place in two stages known as the "antebellum" and "combat" phases respectively, which help to specify separate periods of the same conflict. Considered the second stage of the Reaper campaign, the Collector campaign began shortly after the Eden Prime War, a month after the destruction of the Reaper Sovereign and the rout of his accrued forces at the Battle of the Citadel: forced to give up on using the Citadel to enter the galaxy and begin their invasion, Harbinger, the leader of the Reapers, directed the Reaper fleet to depart Infinity and make its way to the galaxy by normal FTL travel, a process which would take a handful of years. During this time, Harbinger directed the Collectors, who had sat out of Sovereign's campaign to retake the Citadel, to locate and destroy the SSV Normandy by any means necessary, eliminating Commander Shepard and removing what Harbinger perceived as a nuisance, and once this was completed, the Collectors were to begin abducting human colonies in order to begin early construction of a Human-Reaper at the Collector Base, as humanity's surprise victory over Sovereign had gained the full attention of the Reapers. Managing to lure the Normandy to Alchera using fake intel on a geth holdout, the cruiser Sarcophagus successfully ambushed and destroyed the ship, killing Commander Shepard in the process. With Shepard out of the picture, the Collectors were free to commence their campaign against humanity from the shadows and without any challengers, and it is the ambush over Alchera that is often considered the true beginning of the Collector campaign (although some believe it truly started with the first abduction), as well as the start of the conflict's "antebellum" phase.
With the death of Commander Shepard, the destruction of the Normandy and breakup of the Normandy Squad, nobody was left to challenge the Collectors, as the Citadel Council and Systems Alliance were quick to dismiss the Reaper threat, and the attack itself was attributed to an unknown ship, allowing the Collectors complete anonymity. Utilizing advanced technology, the Collectors would maintain this anonymity when attacking human colonies, Harbinger not wanting to draw too much attention to themselves and to keep in the shadows until they were ready to invade, avoiding the mistake Sovereign had made so as to avoid another situation in which the Alliance could intervene, using their political complacency to their advantage. For the next two years, the Collectors would abduct entire human colonies one by one, randomizing both their target and the time in which they attack for maximum efficiency, leaving the Alliance to either spread their resources thin trying to defend all their colonies, concentrating defensive measures on a few select colonies and thus leaving dozens of smaller ones as easy pickings, or to be unable to defend them at all: either way, the Collectors held the advantage. Each Collector abduction was identical to the last in operation, executed with methodical precision and efficiency: a single Collector cruiser would abduct each colony, exiting FTL over the target planet and quickly descending whilst, at the same time, scrambling its communications to stop it calling for help. Once in position over the colony, the cruiser would deploy immense swarms of tiny, mechanical robots resembling flying insects called seekers to swarm over a colony, each one equipped with a paralytic toxin that, when injected into the bloodstream of a victim, quickly and rapidly induced paralysis, rendering the victim helpless as they were caught in a form of stasis, one which took hours to wear off. Once every colonist was paralyzed, the cruiser would land nearby and Collector troops would fan out to begin collecting their victims into pods to load onto their ship: in just over a few hours, depending on how many humans were captured, this process would be complete, the Collectors and seekers would retreat back into the ship, and it would retreat back to the Collector Base with its shipment. The operation was clean, surgical and professional, leaving no trace of the suspects behind or any evidence of their methods, and disappearing before investigators could arrive to find out what had happened. Able to take out an entire colony before it could defend itself, every abducted colony was left with no signs of battle or struggle, only puzzling investigators even more in their search to uncover the people behind the attacks, an effort that was doomed to failure as the Collectors expertly covered their tracks. Seldom did Collector forces ever engage in combat during this time, the seeker swarms and their toxin ensuring they never had to, and as such the term "antebellum" is applied to this phase of the conflict, describing a period of unchecked Collector supremacy and one where they were very much coming out on top with no end in sight. The Collectors continued to become more ambitious and confident as a result, gradually targeting larger and larger colonies, with the intention to eventually even target Earth itself, all in the effort to create a Human-Reaper, with their human victims serving as "fuel" for the new Reaper.
However, since the attacks began, the Illusive Man had immediately picked up on the casual link between the destruction of the Normandy and the first abductions, believing the two events were related and that the aggressors in both situations were the same. Early on he suspected Collector involvement but lacked the proof, and thus committed enormous Cerberus resources to countering the Reaper threat and finding a way to stop the abductions and discover who was behind them: while this took place, a shadow war took place between Cerberus and the Shadow Broker in 2184 CE for the purposes of gaining access to Shepard's body for Project Lazarus, an ambitious effort to resurrect the deceased commander in order to continue his fight against the Reapers. The Shadow Broker, having recovered the body and wanting to sell it to the Collectors, was eventually outsmarted by one of his own agents, Feron Huul, who enlisted the assistance of one of Shepard's comrades, Liara T'Soni, to retrieve the body for Cerberus, and they were ultimately successful, despite Feron being captured by the Broker's forces. Liara handed the body over to Cerberus, and Project Lazarus kicked into full swing, desperate to bring Shepard back, as he was the lynchpin for Cerberus' effort against the Collectors. Meanwhile, Cerberus continued to investigate the abductions to no avail, and by August 2185 CE, the number of total colonies abducted numbered 14. Growing desperate and out of options, Shepard's final awakening and return to active duty couldn't have come at a better time, as about two days later the Collectors attacked Freedom's Progress on 4 August. Able to arrive on scene faster than any other investigator team, the Normandy Squad was, with the unexpected help of Tali'Zorah who was present on the colony with a platoon of marines to retrieve one of the Migrant Fleet's pilgrims, able to retrieve said pilgrim, who had access to surveillance footage that showed the Collectors abducting the colonists, proving their involvement. This intelligence confirmed what the Illusive Man already knew, but it now gave Cerberus a clear enemy to fight against, and it wasn't long before the new Cerberus-built Normandy SR-2 was deployed, with Shepard as its commander, to commence operations to expand the Normandy Squad in preparation for war with the Collectors. While this squad was being built, the Collectors paid Shepard no mind, not believing he was a threat at the time, and was able to subsequently abduct yet another colony during this time. However the Illusive Man had been developing a plan to draw the Collectors into battle, using a series of undercover operatives to sell information to the Collectors regarding Kaidan Alenko, a former member of the Normandy Squad, hoping to play on the Reaper interest in Shepard to lure them into choosing Horizon as their next target, allowing them to be ready this time and stop the abduction. His intuition proved correct, as the Sarcophagus subsequently arrived to jam the planet's communications and launched their attack, with the Normandy given advance warning of the attack in order to get there whilst the abduction was in progress. What resulted was a turning point in the Collector campaign, the Normandy Squad engaging Collector ground forces for the first time and performing exceptionally well, able to use the colony's unfinished AA defenses to force the Sarcophagus into withdrawing prematurely: while they still abducted half the colony, their abduction was not at all complete, and it was the first time the Collectors had not only been challenged and forced to fight, but had left the job unfinished. The incident was considered an incomplete victory owing to the amount of colonists that were still abducted, but operationally it turned the tables on the Collectors, exposing them officially as the perpetrators of the abductions, ending their anonymity, and forcing them into fighting a more conventional war, ending the "antebellum" phase of the conflict and entering into the "combat" phase.
Unperturbed by the interruption to his operation, Harbinger made Shepard and Cerberus a priority target for the Collectors, ordering the abductions to continue but now actively waging an operation to counter Cerberus' moves against them. Hoping to once again lure the Normandy into an ambush and swiftly destroy it, the cruiser Sarcophagus attacked and destroyed a turian patrol in the Relic system of the Eagle Nebula, then faking a turian distress signal claiming to have disabled the cruiser, knowing Cerberus would be listening and would send the Normandy to capitalize on an irresistible opportunity, the Sarcophagus shutting itself down and the crew going dormant in an effort to sell the trick. The Illusive Man knew it was a trap and sent the Normandy anyway, wanting to board the ship and learn of a way to get through the Omega 4 Relay in order to take the fight to the Collector homeworld. The Collectors successfully sprung their trap, but the Normandy was able to escape, doing so with the knowledge of what awaited them beyond the Omega 4 Relay, and that they needed a Reaper IFF to gain access to the Collector Base. Shortly before a successful Cerberus operation to recover said IFF from a derelict Reaper in the atmosphere of Mnemosyne, the Collectors suffered a significant defeat when an abduction attempt on the planet Fehl Prime ended with the cruiser Cenotaph completely destroyed, a loss Harbinger was unwilling to tolerate and wanted Cerberus dealt with. Detecting that one of their IFFs was being installed on the Normandy and knowing its purpose, Harbinger tracked the Normandy's location and sent it to the Collectors, who then set up a new trap by leaking fake intel claiming they were going to attack Eden Prime next, when in reality the target was the Normandy, and when the entire Normandy Squad was deployed groundside, the Sarcophagus attacked and boarded the ship, abducting the entire crew and escaping with them back to the Base: shortly after, the cruiser Ascendancy was sent to abduct Eden Prime for real around the same time the Normandy commenced its assault on the Base itself, blitzing through the relay and successfully landing on the Base after destroying the Sarcophagus. The resulting battle proved to be the end of the Collector threat, the Normandy rescuing its crew, destroying the Human-Reaper, detonating the Base's reactor and escaping through the relay before the Base exploded, killing every Collector onboard and destroying the Sojourner in the process. With the loss of the Base and destruction of the Human-Reaper, the Collector campaign ended in a decisive Cerberus victory, ending yet another phase of the Reaper campaign and forcing the Reapers to change their plans once again. The Ascendancy, which had survived the attack and had only just begun loading its victims onto the ship, became an ark containing the only surviving Collectors in existence, and they quickly abandoned their cargo and soon thereafter retreated into hiding, awaiting their masters before they would emerge again.
The Collector campaign proved to be another stinging defeat for the Reapers, and frustrated their plans once again, this time depriving them one of their best assets: the Collectors had served the Reapers faithfully as their primary harvesters and labor force since the second cycle, and their loss was a massive setback for their harvesting efforts, further stalling their attempt to build new Reapers. Despite the victory, a difference in ideology and methodology towards the end of the Collector Base assault resulted in Shepard and his squad parting ways with Cerberus, taking their ship and resources and going rogue whilst simultaneously ruining the Illusive Man's plan to capture the Base and use its technology to find a way to control the Reapers, with Shepard destroying it once he realized Cerberus' true intentions for it. This led to conflict between Shepard and Cerberus, ending what had been an extremely beneficial alliance, an event that would prove useful to the Reapers and ultimately nullify the victory against the Collectors. By the time the Reaper War began, Cerberus had firmly established itself as an enemy of both the Reapers and Shepard, although in reality the Illusive Man had been indoctrinated by the Reapers, acting as a troublesome fifth column to help the Reapers defeat the galactic powers in detail, a tactic that worked extremely well. Despite the loss of the Normandy and the only Reaper IFF in their possession, Cerberus was ultimately able to acquire Sovereign's, using it to gain access to the ruins of the Base and research new technologies for their own use, with the first application being state-of-the-art particle cannons and force fields reverse-engineered from scavenged Collector technology found at the Base.