We hit the road again. On top of a nearby hill there's a damaged transmitter tower. Repairing it adds a bunch of interesting stuff to our map.
Those new points in the corners of the map are the survey stations that Atwell's missing people went to check out. We've already been to the one in the bottom left. On top of
another nearby hill we find this.
You can turn the music on and it plays cheesy elevator music... which I think is a disappointing missed opportunity to have AC/DC play as the soundtrack for the rest of this mission, but whatever. Actually it occurs to me that doesn't have to hold
us back, so if you're so inclined...
Much better! Next up we check out the survey station at the bottom right of the map.
She's dead too - hands up if you're surprised. Nobody? Thought not. Her logs say the batarians found her hiding inside the hut:
Here's the next torch station - the lights indicate the outer edge of Mr Genius Engineer's minefield, so we get out and proceed on foot.
Basically you've got to weave your way through the minefield without getting too close to any individual mine. Which would be all well and good, except halfway across the field a bunch of batarians (including Rocket Troopers) pile out of the torch station and start shooting at us. This is a job for Immunity and getting to close range ASAP!
Inside is another warehouse type environment filled with batarians and flying drones. This one very kindly gives us a little raised battlement to hide on though, which trivialises most of the fight.
When the torch is shut down, Kate calls us up again.
"Are you there? You've got to hurry. You've really pissed them off. Their leader's setting charges everywhere. I think he's going to blow this whole facility... don't shoot, please!"
Subtitles spoil things again - this is Balak.
Kate refuses to say, so Balak shoots the hostage in the head. They're really laying it on comically thick with this batarians are evil thing - I almost
expect Balak to turn around and boot a fluffy kitten across the room at this stage.
Balak cuts the connection, so we're forced to go on to the third torch without our radio buddy.
That's Kaidan getting up after collapsing from a couple of measly direct hits from rockets. Emo.
This station distinguishes itself from the others with its cool nightclub lighting and its U-shaped layout, which forces most of the stupid AI enemies to run down, around the bend and straight into our killbox in small groups without us ever having to leave the entryway.
With the final torch shut down (if you ignore the laws of physics) we've just saved the planet below. Now there's just the remaining batarians to mop up. once again the game pulls its "spawning behind you" trick and we find these guys waiting for us on the way out.
"Oh I don't know about that..."
"We can do this the hard way... or we can end this peacefully."
"N'yeah, you obviously haven't met my friend Commander Shepard - with her, the peaceful way
is the hard way..."
"I signed on to make a little profit. A quick slave grab. Nothing more."
I know it pales somewhat in comparison to smashing a giant asteroid into a planet, but I don't see how he thinks telling us that he was 'just' here to enslave a bunch of people for profit is supposed to make us want to shoot him any less. Maybe it's there to give us a bit of insight into the batarian mindset (they're quite big on slavery, and don't see it as the absolute moral evil that decent regular people do).
So it's against her better judgement that Grunka decides to metagame and sacrifice combat XP for Paragon points:
We go with the Paragon/Charm "Forget Balak" option and this is what Grunka decides to go with:
ParagonShep - making deals to help criminals get a promotion instead of shooting them in the face since 2183CE.
Charn gives us the access code to the main facility in return for letting him go, and walks his troops out the door. Fortunately this
does pay off with a reasonable haul of Paragon points.
One more survey station to check out on the way to the main base.
We follow the footprints over the hill and find another body. It's been shot by a sniper, apparently.
Nothing left but the main base now. It's protected by a heap of moving turrets, which are taken out with the usual Benny Hill running in circles routine.
Immediately inside the door is the lobby we saw Kate in during the cut scenes earlier. Pretty crap hiding place, if you ask me. An office or a storeroom or an air duct or... basically anywhere else, really, would've been a better choice. No wonder they got found.
Inside is a large multi-level circular room. As an aside, this area was apparently built for an early version of Liara's recruitment mission, which somehow involved a salarian drug lord and this was his hideout or something. That stuff got cut (which is why Therum is shorter than, say, Feros or Noveria) and the level got recycled here instead.
There's a bunch of batarian soldiers running around in here, supported by flying combat drones. Let's get to killing them all!
We even find a rare use for the sniper rifle!
Balak only turns up once you've killed all of his mooks...
"You're almost more trouble than you're worth."
"I can't just let you go, Balak. Not after what happened here. Plus I promised to kill you so that some other shady four-eyed bastard could take over what's left of your gang.
"This is nothing. You humans have done far worse to the batarians. We've been forced into exile. Forced to survive on what we can scrounge up. It's been like that for decades."
"Well why don't you cry about it - with all those eyes, I think you'd be pretty good at it. Otherwise don't make it sound like you're the innocent party here. You brought it upon yourselves."
LOL - Balak managed to blink all four eyes right as I took that screenshot. After building the batarians up as puppy-kicking Nazi puppy-rapists throughout this mission, Bioware decided to shoehorn in a morality element right at the last minute. It doesn't seem to be working on Grunka.
He's really nailing this blinking thing!
"You couldn't possibly understand... actually, you just don't want to understand. And I'm done wasting my breath. Now if you want your friends to live, I suggest you step aside."
At first i thought it was out of character (or a textbook bad villain mistake) that Balak even took hostages, since he just killed everyone else he found outright. But note that he only started taking hostages
after he found out there was someone fighting back that he might need leverage over. Clever, I guess.
Anyway, we're presented with two choices - attack Balak, or let him go so we can disarm the bombs and save the hostages. With apologies to anyone who'd like to see Balak die I chose to metagame this one too and save the hostages for the Paragon points. And because it's good to save hostages. But mostly for the Paragon points, in the hope they'll get us back on track to unlocking the Paragon-only side quest.
He blinks all the time on camera, and now his varren is yawning. Nice. Balak runs away, we're left to disarm three bombs in two minutes and he spawned a bunch more drones to hassle us while we're doing it...
...but we got our sweet 24-point Paragon haul, so that's the most important thing, right?
There's a bit of a goof in this too, by the way. We had to run around and disarm three bombs in the main chamber, but if we'd chosen to kill Balak instead, then only
one bomb would have gone off, inside the room where hostages are being held, killing them and nobody else. It was obviously done for gameplay reasons (sauntering over to disarm just one bomb wouldn't be very difficult, while letting the main chamber bombs go off after killing Balak would kill Shepard too and wreck the joint for the epilogue) but before we have time to ponder that properly, Atwell the Useless Engineer appears out of nowhere.
"I... there might have been something I could have done to help. I thought I should be here. I know this asteroid better than anyone."
"And I know the business end of a gun better than anyone - everything in its right place, old man."
"Oh. Even so, I thought you'd still like to know..."
"I ran the numbers, Shepard. X57 would have struck near the capital city. The most densely populated region. But that's not going to happen, thanks to you. Is Katie in here? Is she all right? Is her team?"
"Balak was holding them hostage. I let him go to save them."
Atwell offers us a reward for ending the batarian threat and saving his world (he offers it regardless of whether you choose to kill Balak or save the hostages, BTW). Here's our choices:
Part of the reason I've put off doing this DLC until now is the equipment rewards you get here scales with your level, and at high levels he actually gives out some pretty rare stuff. His omni-tool in particular is a really good one. Thing is thanks to the millions of credits we've dropped at the supply ship we're all sorted for omni tools, quarian armour, medium armour and heavy armour. Liara could still use a better set of light armour though, so we go with that. We get a set of Colossus XI, which is pretty sweet.
The same scaling applied with the reward weapon you get for completing the side quest in
Pinnacle Station BTW - but the difference there is that regardless of your level, the weapons he gives you are always crap. High level crap, if you wait, but still crap
"Have you found them?"
"Yes, all of them. Their bodies, anyway."
"Oh. I see. Well, then. I guess it's better than not knowing."
That just leaves releasing the hostages - yes, we actually left them locked up while we talked with the doddering old man.
"I half expected you to just let us die. Sacrifice the few for the many."
"Your brother was the one Balak killed?"
"Yes. Aaron."
RIP Private Red Shirt. You red shirted just as hard as you knew how. We finish up some small talk with Kate, and somehow come away from the conversation a bit over 200,000 credits richer.
And that's it, mission over! Tune in next time for... well, for whatever you vote for below!
