Collector General: the voice that ran the human abductions

The Collector General was the entity that oversaw Collector operations from beyond the Omega 4 Relay, and the thing on the other end of the voice that announced "I am assuming direct control" whenever a drone on the battlefield straightened up and started glowing. It bought and haggled and threatened like a person, and at the very end it turned out not to have been one. When the Collector Base fell, Harbinger berated the General for failing and then released it, and the light went out of its eyes for the first time.

What is the Collector General?#

The Collector General was the commander of the Collectors, an individual distinct from the drones it ruled, running the harvest of humans in the Terminus Systems from a position nobody in the galaxy could reach.

Its anatomy set it apart before its behaviour did. A standard Collector is roughly humanoid. The General was insectoid and centauroid, with a torso carrying eight forelimbs and a body carried on six legs, four planted and two usually folded away. Every forelimb ended in a blade rather than a hand, which made it useless for fine work and lethal at contact range. Its head was larger than a drone's, built to drive many command interfaces at the same time. Its wings retracted and were good for hovering rather than the full flight ordinary Collectors managed.

The possession was the real weapon. The General could seize any drone regardless of how far away it was, and a possessed drone became a different opponent: eyes lit like the General's own, enhanced, and suddenly capable of biotics. That is why a Collector squad could go from manageable to dangerous between one breath and the next.

The deal for Shepard's body#

A month after the SSV Normandy was destroyed, the General struck a bargain with the Shadow Broker to take possession of Commander Shepard's body. The deal did not run smoothly. Both the Illusive Man and Liara T'Soni were chasing the same corpse, and the delay they caused left the General furious and with no option but to wait.

The handover happened at the Broker's base on Alingon. The General sent a humanoid drone to stand in for it and warned the Broker's people that the Collectors would tolerate neither dishonesty nor another delay. Its first look at the body satisfied it, and it praised the Broker for the work. Then the Broker's agent Feron claimed the Broker now wanted the whole payment in advance, and the General refused: half now, half once it had confirmed the identity itself, exactly as agreed.

Speaking straight to the Broker, the General accused him of betrayal. The Broker replied that Feron had conspired with Liara and cut his link to the base. The General's answer was a boast about being everywhere at once compared with the Broker's imitation of the same trick, followed by an order relayed through its drone to the enforcer Tazzik that Feron had turned. It moved to recover the body and it was too late. Liara got off Alingon with Shepard.

The harvest and the trap#

Once the abductions were under way, the General worked mostly through possession, taking direct hold of drones on Freedom's Progress and again on Horizon, where it stepped in specifically because it had seen a resurrected Shepard walk into its operation.

The Collector Cruiser was the General's attempt to end the problem. The ship was left apparently dead and waiting to be found. When Shepard came aboard and started pulling data out of its computers, the trap closed: a virus wearing the General's face came close to taking the Normandy SR-2, Collector ground troops moved in, possessed drones among them, and the cruiser began powering up with Shepard's team still inside. They got out, and they left with proof that the Collectors were indoctrinated servants of the Reapers.

The Collector Base#

At the base itself the General finally committed everything it had. Shepard's team learned there that the mass abduction of humans existed to build a Human-Reaper inside the facility, and the General called in every drone available to defend the construction. It possessed several of them during the fighting. Against a fire team that kept forcing it to react in more than one place at once, it spread itself thin, and the Human-Reaper was destroyed.

What happened next is the part worth reading twice. Harbinger told the General it had failed, said the Reapers would find another way, and released its control. The General's eyes lost their glow for the first time in the entire story, which meant that the General had never been the one giving orders. Harbinger had been speaking through it all along, and by extension through every drone the General had ever possessed. In the seconds it had left, the General looked confused or dismayed at being dropped, which suggests something of its own had been in there underneath.

It died with the base. The base itself has two endings, since Shepard chooses whether to destroy it outright or hit it with a timed radiation pulse, and either way the Collectors still aboard did not survive.

Arrival#

The General also appears in the Arrival mission, though its role there depends on the order in which the player does things. Sent to rescue Dr Amanda Kenson, Shepard ends up running a project to delay the Reapers by throwing an asteroid into the Alpha Relay. If the Project is triggered before the Collector Base assault, Harbinger appears by hologram in the possessed body of the Collector General for a short exchange about how pointless resistance is. If the Collectors have already been beaten, Harbinger turns up as itself instead.

Fehl Prime#

While Shepard was working toward the Omega 4 Relay, a drone matching the General's description was overseeing the harvest of Fehl Prime in person. It cut a deal with the Cerberus agent Messner: intelligence and safety in exchange for stopping the surviving members of Delta Squad from attacking the Collector ship.

The General did not honour it. Messner's incompetence had led the soldiers to the ship in the first place, and the asari travelling with him would contaminate the human material, so the General decided to process him along with everyone else. Two Delta Squad soldiers went after it. It ran a forelimb through the biotic Essex, and Essex used the grip to drag them both off the edge.