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Chapter Text

“Victus!”

Lieutenant Adrien Victus snaps awake at the sound of his CO screaming at him. Granted, it is a thankful thing to hear at that time. If he was being woken from his hot bunk, it would spell his fate for a day filled with extra work, berating, and a possible temporary demerit. That his commanding officer was screaming at him while trying to shake him and get him off the floor, while a fire pours out of a nearby console, gives him some leeway.

“Present, sir,” he murmurs, weakly raising a hand to his crest as he lays on the floor. Another turian steps around Officer Vakarian and begins inspecting the lieutenant's wounds. Vakarian stands up and shouts something indistinct at another ranker. Yet another velite ran into the room with a fire extinguisher that nearly slips out of her grasp as she levels it at the burning console. The ship rocks as another explosion happens on the lower decks. A support beam above Vakarian loosens and begins to bend downward. Fighting the nausea, Victus jumps to his feet and stumbles towards Vakarian, ignoring the protests of the medic. As the beam gave way, Victus reaches up to stop the hazard, pain radiating through his arms, through his body, down to his feet as he nearly crumples under the weight of the beam. Vakarian steps out of the way and drags Victus along with him; the beam falls to the floor, peeling the metal off the wall as it goes.

“Stay down, Lieutenant!” Vakarian orders. Victus collapses to the floor once more, rendering the order moot. The young man passes out as the exertion and pain finally overtakes him.

The bends are a bad way to go. Hannah knows what is in store for the young man as the tubes detach from his hardsuit and the metal begins to bend. It was a horrible irony. The kid had escaped the blast radius of the grenade only for the moon rocks it launched to damn him. He has just enough time to scream as his blood begins to boil, before he just explodes, the force of the pressure ripping the suit and his body apart. One of the four-eyes shouts something in his disgusting mother tongue, and another charge comes over the crest of the crater. They have the high ground and she is the last marine at the barricade.

“Shepard, get out of there, we’re hauling ass!” the captain yells over comms. Marines did not falter or cower, she keeps telling herself, but a dead one couldn’t carry on. Staying here for some suicidal act of defiance against these monsters would be an insult to her fallen brothers and sisters, a spiteful act to her child. Hannah runs for the transport, the few remaining marines from the 115th Platoon providing cover fire as she dashes onto the ramp. She is on the ship in under ten seconds, a very small victory in the face of yet another defeat. She closes her eyes and holds her breath as Captain Hackett tells the pilot to get them the hell out of dodge. Artillery silently bursts in space around the small ship as it takes off. Every tremor threatens to bring oblivion. But whatever power may be watching over them gives them the mercy of beating the odds. The transport escapes the Faustini Crater and hurtles off into space, bound for Earth.

Luna has been lost to alien aggressors, and the only reason Hannah Shepard still lives is the act of fleeing her own homeworld’s moon. She desperately tries to rid herself of the haunting idea that Earth itself would soon follow.

Chapter Text

“Commodore Arterius is ordering a pursuit,” Captain Oraka says to Vakarian and Victus. The latter is propped up on a gurney, a piece of his fringe missing. The wound was so bad that they had to remove it for fear of gangrene. Now, he looks ridiculous, two prominent features curling off the back of his skull with an inch-wide gap between them.

“Permission to speak off the record, sir?” Vakarian asks.

“You have it.”

“He’s an idiotic prick.”

“I agree, but orders are orders.”

Vakarian stands up from Victus’ bedside and faces the captain, tri-fingered palms outstretched. “One platoon onboard a damaged frigate going through an unmapped relay after a barely scratched cruiser? It’s ridiculous. Even for Arterius!”

“The Council has declared war on the Batarian Hegemony.”

The dryness with which Oraka announces this stuns Vakarian so much that, for a moment, it seems as if his mandibles will snap clean off his face. Victus lazily turns his head and scoffs as he looks out the port window into the starry void.

“We’re the first deployment,” he surmises, “Show them we mean what the Council and the Hierarchy says for us. A concession to start the bloodbath. How pleasant.”

“I would use caution in your wording, Lieutenant,” says Oraka, “The Primarchs speak of bringing back the Loyalty Inspection.”

“And the room has ears. Lovely.” Victus eyes the wall-mounted camera in the corner of the medbay. He’d flip it off if he could lift his arms.

“So we’ve been condemned,” Vakarian sighs, “How soon are we to march to our deaths, then?”

Oraka chuckles; it is a very tired laugh. “Immediately. I’m going to go ready the troops and crew, then I want you on the bridge, Vakarian.”

Vakarian salutes, despite his ire. ‘Yes, sir.”

“And Victus?” Oraka points at the battered turian. “It would be a shame if you could not join us, so feel better. We’re short on bodies.”

“Don’t worry, sir,” Victus groans, “I’m going to try harder to get my nerves to reconnect. I’m hard at work right now.”

“Good. As you were.” Oraka leaves the medbay. Vakarian sits down and joins Victus in looking out to the stars.

“He should be talking to you,” Victus says, “all that whinging.”

“What’s one more act of going above my station when the Primarchs aren’t here to censure me?” Vakarian replies.

“Your wife isn’t going to be happy.”

“When it comes to me, she might not be anything soon.”

Victus shifts uncomfortably in the gurney. “Castis?”

“Yes, Adrien?”

“Would it kill you to face death with optimism for once in your life?”

“This day, it very well could.”

The PFS Havinclaw exits the relay on the far side of the Serpent Nebula relay connection. Having to make two jumps from the Apien Crest to the Serpent Nebula to whatever this system what in a damaged ship, for this a toll was taken. The frigate was barely being held together. The crew, including the platoon that was supposed to be returning to Palaven after a colony control mission in the Apien Crest, remains mostly intact following the skirmish with the batarian cruiser. The same cannot be said for the Havinclaw’s crew. More than fifty percent losses in the ship battle meant that Oraka’s default authority over the platoon was extended as he procured most of their engineers and lower ranked enlisted to repopulate his staff. This left the platoon with only two dozen soldiers for Vakarian to command, just enough to fill the two corvettes in the launch bay.

“Inbound, 15 minutes.” the V.I. announcer says. Marines run to and fro across the bay, trying to get equipment together. Lieutenant Victus sits in a corvette, the Tyrus, holding a Phaeston, Under normal conditions, there is no way in the name of the spirits that he would be cleared for combat, but circumstances beings as they are, he does not get the luxury of being a casualty. Even if he cannot run or walk very well in his condition, he can hold and fire a rifle with semi-decent accuracy. And so, he has been assigned to the Tyrus as a guard for the imminent reconnaissance mission.

As he sits there, checking and rechecking his rifle while ignoring the throbbing pain in the front of his skull, another trooper jumps into the corvette, taking a seat next to him. He’s a velite, very low in rank, likely a conscript, but he does not show any apprehension or fear in his body language as the concept of the approaching war settles over him and Victus.

“I don’t recognize the markings you wear,” he says to the velite, “what colony are you from?”

‘I’m from no colony, sir,” the velite replies frankly, “I have lived all my life on Palaven.”

“Your markings are not the colors of Palaven that I know. The pattern does not even resemble it.”

“Sir, may I ask you a question?” The manner in which he phrases this almost sounds like a child nagging a teacher. It’s not anywhere close to that in reality, of course. The kid is merely green, naive.

“Speak freely.”

“How long has it been since you have been to the homeworld?”

“A good few years. Almost four.”

“Ah. Well, sir, the unified marking was abolished two years ago.”

“I…was not aware of this.”

“I suppose we don’t get to check the extranet for our own interests on duty, do we, sir?”

The kid has manners, and isn’t so much spineless as he is just too soft-spoken for his own good as a turian. Still, his words do concern Victus. Between such cultural change and the declaration of full war against a Council ambassadorial species, by the Council itself and not just the Hierarchy, it was all a sign of change beyond the control of any one group. Something so unknown could not be reacted to the same way as a skirmish or planned for like a colony action. Full scale war was something Victus secretly loathed, for it meant losing the advantage of implicit control over the situation. All he can do as more troops enter the Tyrus, Vakarian included, was check his Phaeston one final time before the doors shut and the interior lighting bathes him in a deep, bloody shade of blue.

Chapter Text

Hannah winces when she shakes the cigarette pack and realizes that it is empty. They could remove all the negative impacts of smoking, as they had done, but if she had no cigarettes to enjoy the benefit with, it was effectively immaterial. She tosses the useless box into the corner of the deserted temple; wind coming through the broken windows continues to carry it, sweeping it through an opening where a door once stood. Her eyes follow the pack until it vanishes outside, and then she lingers on the sight of the barren desert. It was the first time she had ever been to Egypt. With the four-eyes targeting population centers, the lifeless deserts were now seen as a place of safety. Her family is somewhere beyond Cairo, along with other military families and refugees. Every now and again, she casts her gaze in that direction, trying to push out the image of the mothership appearing over the city, the shuttles coming down. Out here in the Giza Plateau, with the losses they’ve taken, there would be nothing she could do but watch.

The transport ride from the moon had taken half a day. It was a remarkable speed, the fastest that humanity had ever traveled from to or from its natural satellite. The four-eyes’ shuttles could make the same journey in less than half an hour. Their mothership could do it in the same time. They are so outmatched that she’d break down laughing at the futility of their tactics and weaponry if the act of doing so wouldn’t immediately drive her to take her own head off. These fuckers just didn’t die. She had emptied entire magazines into their infantry before and watched them continue on, untouched. Meanwhile, she had watched people she trained with be impaled by guns that fired harpoons which exploded with the force of a mortar. From infantry.

“Lance Corporal,” Captain Hackett beckons. Hannah turns her attention to him, only to find that the rest of the platoon is staring at her. She had been looking out the window, dead-eyed, while Hackett was trying to address the marines. She quickly straightens her posture and directs her full attention to the captain, trying to stop her cheeks from flushing in embarrassment. Thankfully, the moment passes, and Hackett resumes.

“There’s no point in lying, You all know how dire circumstances are, but there is a plan.” The jingoistic indoctrination of the United American Military from decades past was long gone. Men and women like the ones in the temple want to know the score, not have their egos and nationalism stroked. It did not fly anymore, especially in the face of alien invaders. The captain continues. “The remaining forces of the Singular Alliance are digging their heels in, buying time. The invaders have locked down the decommissioned nuclear silos in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, but those silos have not had functional warheads for years. There are others we are certain they do not know about yet that are active, and one of them is here, in Egypt.”

The marines look between each other, awed at the implication of using a nuke.

“It’s an old relic from the dictatorship of the 2050’s, but it’s been maintained by peacekeepers under the control act of 2100. And the Alliance has just ordered its use against the mothership. It’s taken weeks to get confirmation without transmitting any data packets to avoid interception. But we’ve finally got it.”

Hackett points to a group of marines standing in the southern corner of the Temple, next to Hannah.

“The technicians from the Alliance Defense Reserves are here to make sure the missile works as intended. We have more reinforcements moving in to bolster our line of defense and give them time to work. That means tanks, aircraft, APCs. It’s the last of what we’ve got, so we have to make it count. Once we move, there is no chance in hell the four-eyes won’t notice us converging on a single location. They’ll be on us like locusts, and you all know firsthand what that means.”

Hackett lets the silence hang for a moment. It shows that he knows the weight of the inevitable loss hangs heavy on the shoulders of the servicemen. To say that an end to it all was within reach would not float as a purely optimistic declaration. Reality was unavoidable, and motivation required officers to move within it.

“But remember, this is our chance to drive back the four-eyes, once and for all. Every time they’ve returned, they’ve brought that same ship. We take the mothership out of the equation, and we’ve won. An end to the attacks, and victory at last!”

The marines holler and pump their fists in the air. Despite the pessimism, Hackett’s sway over his men is powerful enough to support the words he speaks beyond how they would fare coming from the mouth of anyone else. Hannah nods and oorahs with her fellow marines. She did want to believe one missile was all it would take to stop this nightmare. Hackett continued with more words of direction and implicit inspiration as the platoon went about preparing for the coming mission. Stepping outside, she looks back in the direction of Cairo once more before returning to her duties. The coming days would bring death, that was doubtless. She would do her best to make sure that it would be on the part of the four-eyes that this inevitability would be fulfilled. That, she promises herself, and to her family.

The Tyrus departs from the Havinclaw after the ship passes the four gas giants in the outer edge of the system. Victus looks out the virtual window of the corvette as it passes a red planet, orbited by two oblong moons. The marines are all quiet, Vakarian watching over them as they check various scanner computers, taking in all the information they can about the system and traces the baratians might have left. A few times, he passes by to check on Victus, but the latter never acknowledges him, only staring out into the stars.

His head is still pounding. His heart hurts. It takes all the will he has to remain upright. He should not be here, but there was never any way to point that out which would net any results. The 43rd Division demanded his life and commitment no matter what state he was in. It was how turians operated, everything for the cause, your agony for the cause. It did not, however, mean the worry was not there. The velite, Nyx, kept looking at him, that irritating youthful concern in his features. Victus tries to ignore it, tries to just keep his mind on the planets of this system. It is very colorful, a chain of planets shaded the full spectrum. Compared to his home system, it makes the mirror-like sheen of Palaven seem drab. They pass a dull, grey dwarf planet, and that seems more like home.

And then it creeps into view.

The most brilliantly blue sphere he has ever seen, with green, lush land and clouds aplenty. He’s never seen a planet that looked so natural from orbit. As he thinks of the stories of the hanar homeworld of Kahje, he finds that this is almost how he had envisioned it. But all that land, green, or white with snow, and so many plains and deserts still lacking the uniform steel glare of the cities of his own world, that makes it all the more beautiful.

He only gets to see the first half of the sphere before the Tyrus suddenly pitches downward and begins rumbling. The other marines yell, groan, and cling to whatever they can to avoid being tossed around in the artificial gravity.

“Pilot!” Vakarian calls to the cockpit.

“That damned cruiser was sitting behind the moon, engines silent!” the pilot says, “They were waiting for us! Sent fighters out! We’ve taken a hit on the port side, engines at 60% and dropping!”

“Were the shields not up?!”

“Everything’s shorting out! They must have disruptor torpedoes on those pests!”

“Damned, outdated corvettes!” Vakarian tries to climb into the cockpit, but another blast, this time on the starboard side, sends the Tyrus into a spin as the momentum rips the control out of the pilot’s hands. Every turian aboard is thrown to the floor by the force; the discomfort Victus felt as his body hit the riveted metal makes him want to die. A much needed surge of adrenaline enables him to rise to his feet. Ignoring the pain of even being awake, choking down the vomit-inducing spin of the Tyrus, he stubbornly marches over his prone fellows and gradually makes his way to the front of the corvette. Somehow, he makes it into the cockpit. The pilot is slumped back in his chair and Vakarian is on the floor, incapacitated. Victus pushes onward and clambers into the copilot’s chair. He has not flown a ship of any kind for at least a year, and even when he did, they were shuttles or fighters, not corvettes. But he has to try, for the sake of the other lives aboard, for the honor of the Hierarchy, even as he leans on the threshold of the spirits.

Victus lets himself concentrate solely on control of the Tyrus, the needs of the moment drowning out all else. Part of the difficulty about going into a spin in space was the lack of air to aid in pulling out of it. He applies full reverse on the portside thrusters, the dying power supply lasting just long enough for him to stop the rotation. Ladar and radar systems are not working; the auxiliary power light comes on at the same time the atmospheric entry warning begins to wail at him. The corvette is going down. This is preferable; being adrift in space with the batarian cruiser and its fighters around is a death sentence. He tried to find an open space withing the trajectory of the falling ship that he can make it to with what power is left. Across the coordinate options offered by the ship’s computer, the terrain of a vast, open desert on one of the continents near the equator presents itself as the ideal option. His head is again being overburdened with his own physical misery. Before it washes over him, he puts in the coordinates. The autopilot takes over, and the ship starts shaking as it begins atmospheric entry. Victus exhales and passes out, mandibles twitching uncontrollably.

Chapter Text

Hannah coughs as she chokes down on another breath full of sand and smoke. The desert sun pounds down on her as bullets and explosives continue to kick up sand around her. The plateau is absolute mayhem. Hannah checks the ejection port of her Karelia rifle and exits her cover behind a burned out APC and advances with the other marines at the order of Sergeant Hislop. Coordinated fire on infantry units from the four-eyes have largely been the only way they had been able to advance as Hackett has dictated. Their movement en masse towards the missile silo had not gone unnoticed. She empties the latter half of her forty-five round magazine into a four-eyes who is caught in the open as the wind blows a large gathering of smoke and sand aside. The shimmering glow around him becomes brighter and brighter, and as her magazine runs dry, to her left Gunnery Sergeant Coré is also firing. Her rounds break through the wall and finally pepper the invader’s body with several 6.8x51 millimeter holes. Nearly seventy rounds on a fully exposed target they caught off guard to get one kill. The Karelia was falling behind with each new four-eyes trooper that showed up. More gunfire flies towards their line, bits of concrete from a nearby collapsed building spraying Hannah with debris as she moves behind the wall to reload. As she replaces the magazine with a fresh one from her chest pouches, she briefly thinks about the bodies that are again starting to clog the battlefield.

“Left flank!” Hislop yells into his earpiece, “Cover the left flank! We have another shuttle coming in from the west!”

“Harper, Mitra, Shepard!” Coré commands, “On the left flank with me!” With the reinforcements from the Defense Reserves, they have been refreshed with both new recruits and men and women of rank like Coré and Hislop. Mitra was a lance corporal like herself, whereas Harper was a corporal. He, in particular, has that conviction that only a man who had lost everything brings to war. The four soldiers turn their attention to the west, spotting the four-eyes shuttle as it touches down. Mortar fire bursts around the alien craft, unable to break through the “shielding” but keeping the troops from exiting as quickly. Hannah and her comrades take up positions behind cover, destroyed and inert cars and crumbling walls from the buildings in the abandoned desert town. The mortars stop, and the shuttle door opens.

From the interior of the shuttle comes a horde of animals and soldiers in equal measure. The animals are like war dogs mixed with carnivorous fish. These were easier to outright kill, but they were so damned fast. One is able to dash through their gunfire and get up in Mitra’s face. These things are mindless, and Mitra is able to react fast enough to kick the beast in the face before putting a round in its head. Behind them, the soldiers hear barking. More of the beasts have made it to the other marines, and suddenly Coré was barking at her and Harper to give support to Hislop and his men. Hannah put down three of the fishdogs as they dashed through the dust clouds to their human targets. Sergeant Hislop is caught off guard by two of the beasts, their sharp fangs sinking into his flesh. One gets him by the neck while the other grabs him by the legs. He is dragged to the ground screaming in a torrent of bright red blood. Hannah takes the initiative after she and Harper kill the fishdogs, and rushes up to Hislop to try and save him, a packet of medi-gel at the ready.

But it’s too late. It is not just the bleeding, the dogs have also ripped his throat out. Medi-gel cannot bring someone back past the point of death. She kneels over the sergeant and moves his cold hands to rest over his chest. The fighting around her dies down as she does so; it’s what permits her to take the time to do such a sentimental act in the first place. The marine ripped apart by the gases in his own body didn’t get such a rite.

The four-eyes shuttle lifts off and flies away. The ground is littered with human and alien corpses. But somehow, by some twist of fate, the 115 has held the line. Barely.

Corporal Harper runs up to Hannah’s side. “Head in the game, LC!” Harper says, “Can’t do anything for him now.”

“He was your sarge, wasn’t he?” Hannah asks as she stands up.

“He was, yeah.”

“I’ve seen enough of this. You want to just leave him here in the sand?”

“Of course not. But we have no time. Let’s go, LC.”

Harper pats her on the back, ushering her along as they head in Coré’s direction. They and the other marines continue towards the location of the silo, readying themselves for another shuttle to come down from the sky.

Another ship does, but it does not come in to land more troops. Like a meteor, it rockets toward the ground at great speed and crashes in the east. No artillery fire had been heard, and the angular shape clearly isn’t an aircraft.

“The fuck was that!?” Mitra yells.

“115th,” Hackett’s voice crackles through the radio, “send a small team to investigate the object that just crashed half a klick to the east. I don’t want any unknowns in this operation.”

“Copy that, captain,” Coré affirms, “Shepard, Mitra.”

“Yes ma’am,” the two lance corporals respond in tandem. Both run towards the plume of smoke in the east, kicking up sand as they climb over a dune.

The soldiers cough as they crawl and stumble around the wreck of the Tyrus. Vakarian sits in an opening on the right side of the cockpit, where the metal wall had been torn open by the force of the landing and the ship being dragged against some rock formations as it did so. Victus lies with his head in Vakarian’s lap, the wounds on his head where part of his fringe had been removed now reopened. The man was only close to dying before; now, he was actively slipping away. The harsh sun beats on his forehead as he tries to grapple with the reality that he can do nothing to save his junior officer.

His friend.

Adrien’s actions have saved the lives of all aboard the Tyrus, and yet he can do nothing in return. Victus lies still, breaths becoming more shallow. Vakarian knows he too is preparing for the inevitable, trying to drift away without any fuss. Velite Nyx kneels next to them, holding a flask of water. Vakarian takes it, and gently dribbles water into Victus’ mouth, hand almost quivering as he feels him convulse in response to the cold sensation.

“...Sir!”

Nyx jumps back, staring at something outside the Tyrus. Vakarian looks up as well.

An alien stands before them atop a sand dune, a primitive assault rifle aimed squarely at his head.

In his mind, Vakarian compares the alien to some composite of an asari and a batarian. They, she, has five fingers like those species, and while having a face with a nose and lips that much more resembled an asari than a batarian, has a pale skin tone like some batarians he’s seen, only a few shades lighter than the sand around them. She looks bewildered, squinting in the sunlight as she slowly starts to lower her rifle. Vakarian thinks this to be foolish. Any soldier should keep their weapon ready in the face of an unknown.

Then she lowers the rifle completely, and then she slides down the dune and steps up to him and Victus. The turians around and inside the Tyrus stiffen, staring at the alien as she moves closer to Vakarian and Victus. Now Castis is confused; she still has her rifle lowered. She kneels down in front of him and Victus, looking at the dying man with intent. Another alien appears over the dune, says something indicative of surprise in his unknown language, and questions the female soldier, who does not reply. She reaches inside a bag attached to her hip, and produces a small, tearable packet from within. The other alien reacts strongly, disapprovingly, and the female soldier silences them with a harsh noise. Vakarian’s translator begins to process some of the language as she does so; it roughly translates her words as the phrase “be silent.”

The alien tears open the packet and squeezes a translucent gel into her gloved hand. She holds the substance over Victus’ head; Vakarian starts to pull him away, but as he locks eyes with the alien, it becomes clear what is happening. Of course it’s an offer of medical aid, the fact that it is even being offered shocks him, but as he feels Victus wheeze and cough in his lap, Vakarian realizes that he cannot refuse it. Nobody is pointing a weapon at him. Victus is dying. Even if the treatment, whatever it is, is incompatible with turian biology, he is obligated to make the attempt to save those under his command by any means that present themselves. So, he holds Victus still, and stares back at the alien, not pulling away, not speaking. She gets the cue, and lathers all of the gel over the open wound in Victus’ crest. Vakarian watches, astonished, as the gel begins to move. As if it has a life of its own, it seeps into the tears in Victus’ flesh and slithers along his body. The sapphire liquid pooling around the base of his neck collar coagulates as the gel moves over it, then it vanishes, leaving only scar tissue over where the grievous wound once was. All across Victus’ body, his injuries are soothed over. His breath deepens, and Vakarian feels his pulse grow stronger. His injuries should have been untreatable even with prompt, high-end field medical assistance, yet this substance, whatever it was, had not only closed his wounds but has begun to remedy his internal injuries as well. It’s damn near miraculous.

Vakarian lifts Victus’ head from his lap and lays him gently on the floor. The lieutenant continues to take strong breaths as the gel does its work. Vakarian stands up and looks at the alien again. He is a good foot taller than her, yet in this moment, despite her inferior weaponry, he feels like he is the one being towered over.

Chapter Text

The first hour spent with a new species is often indicative of what long term contact will be like. Even if it’s not effective as a method to experience the whole culture, how the alien will present themselves in day to day life, and how your people will react in turn, is just as important. To Castis, these “humans” are doing a bang-up job of being appealing as a potential ally. A proud military culture, the stubbornness to face down eezo-civilization with gas-operated weaponry, and yet within that, the capability to differentiate between an enemy and a potential friend, even among those whose kind you have never seen before. The medical technology is unparalleled, as well. The injuries he and the other turians sustained in the crash have been wiped away by that gel. That a species could create such a thing without knowing of even the most basic mass effect technology baffles him.

Beyond that, he has only gotten so much out of the humans thus far. Adrien’s savior, Hannah Shepard, is the only one he has spoken to. Getting her to accept the translator was a tad difficult, but he can understand why she would have an aversion to using anything alien for herself. Once she accepted the device, however, he was able to get his situation through to her clearly.

“I thank you, alien,” he had first said to Shepard, “I could not have imagined that…you saved my lieutenant's life. My gratitude is boundless.”

Hannah, momentarily bug-eyed, had taken a moment to process something, perhaps the fact that she was talking to an extraterrestrial and not locked in combat with one. “...Yes. You’re welcome.” She had then immediately jabbed a finger into Castis’ sternum. “I’m going to be out with it and I want a straight answer. Are you allied with the four-eyes? The aliens attacking Earth?”

“We are associated with the Batarian Hegemony, but they are not our friends. As a matter of fact, we have formally declared war on them as of…I would say, half a day ago?”

“So you’re fighting them, too? We have a common enemy?”

“Indeed, alien. We do.”

“Call me Hannah, or Lance Corporal Shepard. And I am speaking to…?”

Castis had saluted, a little bit of that fiery turian pride returning to him from the feeling of speaking to someone who really seemed to get the attitude war brought out of him. “Centurion Castis Vakarian of the 43rd Naval Infantry Division.” While he had no way of knowing how high in rank a “Lance Corporal” was, even if he was an officer saluting down on a velite, it would be acceptable in his eyes.

The other alien had then stepped up behind Hannah. “Shepard, what the fuck are you doing?” he asked, unaware that Castis could hear his every word with perfect clarity.

“I don’t see you shooting them either, Mitra,” Hannah shot back. “Get someone on comms, we need Coré or the captain here. I’ll keep them occupied.”

“And you’re sure they won’t-”

“Shoot me, Mitra,” Castis had interjected. Mitra looked at him shocked. Of course, he didn’t know what the words were, but he had heard his name come out of Castis’ mouth.

“He…asked you to shoot him,” Hannah then added.

“What?” Mitra stammered.

“Do it,” Castis insisted. Hannah nodded to Mitra. Credit where it was due, Mitra did raise and fire his rifle within two seconds of that second request. The shot was useless, rendered inert by Castis’ shield. The turian stared at the alien and crossed his arms afterwards.

“I’m pretty sure you and I would be dead if this couldn’t be handled with words. Get Coré.”

After that, he and Hannah had resumed talking while Mitra went off to find someone in command. They are still talking by the time the captain Hannah mentioned finally shows.

In that time, Castis has exchanged a fair bit of turian culture, history, and societal objectives in exchange for Hannah’s. From her words, humanity sounds like a culture that has made war the way in which it grows, having even crossed the nuclear threshold and the use of such weapons in combat without an ensuing holocaust. The fury of the krogan without the societal deficiency that saw them annihilate themselves before first contact. That was promising, and so personally fascinating. To have written about a contact scenario with such a species in an academic setting would have killed one’s reputation on Palaven. He wants to read those unwritten papers made in the light of humanity’s arrival.

“Why’re the nukes so special?” Hannah asks.

“All species on the Citadel, bar one, discovered mass effect technology before they ever used nuclear weapons in warfare,” Castis explains. “And that one species is currently all but confined to their homeworld. You’re the first I know of that’s used nukes prior to that filter, and emerged to recover and continue progressing afterwards.”

“Does that reflect on us well or poorly?”

“Depends on who you ask. Since you’re asking me, I’ll say that I admire the restraint. Only two combat usages within days of each other over three world wars. It’s dignified.”

“I don’t think that I would say that, centurion. It’s not a very dignified thing to think about either way. I’m still skittish about the prospect of when these…”batarians” will use them.”

Castis arches a brow. “What do you mean? Why would they use a nuclear weapon?”

“They’re here to destroy us. If they have nukes, why wouldn’t they use them?”

Before Castis can offer an answer, the other humans who have been trickling in, watching him and Hannah converse, turn and salute another human, stepping up over the dune. He is accompanied by two guards carrying weapons he identifies as primitive shotguns. The gentleman is clearly a senior officer, and a senior in age, his just face beginning to gather wrinkles like that of an unmasked quarian or an asari matriarch. On his hip is a holster made of treated hide, carrying a large pistol with a revolving chamber that, despite being powder-based, seems like quite a fantastic weapon. He meets Castis’ eyes and stops. Castis’ troops gather behind him, having previously been waiting and watching the humans from inside the wreck of the Tyrus. Victus is somewhere inside, recovering; Nyx, wielding a Phaeston, steps up to act as a guard to Castis, matching the ones accompanying the senior human. Another trooper, Equite Abrudas, does the same with a Predator pistol.

“Captain Hackett,” Hannah acknowledges the man, stepping aside and also saluting. These humans were nothing if not habitually respectful to the chain of command, yet another quality they shared with most turians.

“If you don’t mind me asking, Lance Corporal, what prompted you to engage in contact with an unknown alien?” Hackett asks, “Who gave you the order?”

“Nobody, sir.”

“You did this of your own accord?”

“Yes, sir.”

Hackett’s mouth is a thin line. He looks down at the sand. Castis looks between the two humans, uncertain. He had seen Primarchs act like this before the most traumatic dressings-down one could expect in the Hierarchy, subtlety preceding the typhoon. Which is why the man’s expression becoming gentler afterward surprises him so much.

“I’m told you saved one of their marines.”

“That’s correct, sir.”

“You’ll get no reprimand from me, Lance Corporal. We need allies, and this is how we build the base layer of diplomacy. I approve of your decision.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The humans’ expressions are a mix of approval and shock. One of Hackett’s guards, a man with hard eyes and brown hair creeping from beneath his helmet, looks dissatisfied, not unlike a kid being denied something they felt entitled to. Castis simply nods.

“So he can understand me, then?”

“Yes, sir, but you won’t understand him. They gave me a translator, like a little chip.”

“Under your skin? Okay…translate for me, then. I do want to know more of what’s in front of me before I do something like that.”

“Nothing wrong with being a prudent man,” Castis says, “though I’m getting the impression that you’re about to make a mistake.” Hannah repeats this to Hackett, and does so with everything Castis says from then on.

“And what would that be?”

“This operation…guerilla warfare isn’t my specialty, but you’re consolidating around something strategic out in this desert, I’ll bet. What exactly are you planning to do?”

“Before I answer that, I must make it clear that you are in our custody, and you will come with us. I can’t risk vital information reaching the four-eyes mothership.”

“They’re called batarians, the ship is called a cruiser, and Lance Corporal Shepard here seems to be under the impression that they’re here to exterminate you.”

“That’s what we believe, yes. That’s why they’ve been targeting our population centers. We return after a retreat, and everything has been razed, bodies burnt.”

“Captain, please tell me you are not planning on destroying that cruiser.”

“And what if I am?”

“Because you have no idea how many lives are aboard it. Human lives. The batarians are taking your people for slaves, and keeping them captive on that vessel.”

When the human marines hear this, they start shouting. Hannah looks disturbed, scratching at her wrist and looking back to some far off point in the desert for a reason Castis couldn’t discern.

“You’re certain of this?” Hackett asks, his stoic voice faltering slightly.

“The Batarian Hegemony runs on a caste system built on slave labor. Diplomacy with them has fallen apart and we’re now at war. They’ve been raiding turian and salarian colonies to take more slaves for their own, and now we can see that they’ve gone as low as taking their stock from species that haven’t discovered mass effect technology. They must be stopped, and we’re here to do that. But if you destroy that ship right now, you’ll be killing your own civilians. Hundreds of them.”

Chapter Text

General Dhorven stands on the bridge of the Shervock, a salvaged hulk, turian pattern, his and his alone for the last decade. With the winnings he has taken using it as intimidation and weapon alike, his status in the Hegemony has escalated from a mere sergeant to a general and prominent political figure. This backwater world was to provide an easy place from which to collect resources so that he may further his advance, his grandest goal to be in the closed off upper crust that decided the face of batarian space on its own, perhaps as a governor or an oligarch. It was supposed to have been easy, for in the early days, each collection run had netted thousands of these humans to be squeezed below decks; bountiful, a harvest worth billions in credits for the labor it would provide. And yet, the damned turians, the entire Council, couldn’t leave well enough alone.

War. It was absurd. He thinks the turian navy’s time would be better spent trying to force their colonies to stay in line with their crumbling empire, or to send all the marines to Thessia so that they may cavort far out of sight and mind with those temptress asari. The troops wouldn’t even wouldn’t even complain, and in such a lovely, albeit fictitious scenario, the salarian worlds would be open for him to take as well. But these mandibled mutants would just have to die. One step into batarian space and that would be it. His people would permit the survivors to enjoy their new life at the bottom of the caste, given the mercy of life and left to fight for anything else. That was their fate, after all, to tear themselves apart. Those leftover should go to Dhorven first.

“General,” Corporal Balak says, stepping up behind Dhorven to give him the latest status report. Dhorven puts his musing aside and turns to face the young soldier.

“What have you got?” he asks.

“Two turian corvettes that we detected on the scanners have been shot down, and we have taken the crews of one of them. But the humans have enveloped the other in the “African” region. We can’t get through right now.”

“It’s no worry. Some more infantry won’t turn the tide. Even if they bring some proper weapons with them, one squad’s worth of mass accelerator firearms doesn’t win a war.”

“What about the frigate, sir?”

“How long until it is in range?”

“Less than ten minutes.”

“Keep us behind the moon. If the frigate starts to turn, emerge at once and fire back. Otherwise, recall the fighters, reload their torpedoes, and give an order for a Verush Maneuver.”

“To draw them in, sir?”

“That’s correct. And once the frigate is gone, send one of the corvettes to the mass relay. I want it deactivated. I don’t care if you have to suffocate those quarians in the engine room to do it fast enough. I want that relay closed until our reinforcements from Khar’shan are ready to come through. The turians won’t send just one ship.”

“Yes, sir.” Balak salutes and strides off to carry out Dhorven’s will. The general returns to looking out at the planet beyond the moon. A real window, not a virtual one, able to withstand any assault while permitting a view of his blue and green prize. He feels like a bloody king.

“There’s been no response from the Tyrus or Maskus, sir,” Optio Corinthus states. Captain Oraka drags his fingers along his fringe and slams his hand down on the desk.

“I’ve just sent some of the best men and women I’ve been assigned to their deaths,” he bemoans, “I hope the Primarchs are satisfied with the results.”

“Sir, the Loyalty Inspection is now in full reestablishment.. There are cameras watching. I may have to-”

“I’ve said nothing seditious, Corinthus. A good turian follows orders, even if he complains. And I’m ordering you to grow a spine and now bring up something so obvious again.”

“Yes, sir,” the young optio’s voice is hollow as his eyes fall to the floor. Oraka almost tears his crests out with the pressure he tugs on them with.

“I’m sorry, optio. All of us are powerless here. But I’m not allowed to be. Do you know the ship we face?”

‘I don’t, sir. Nothing beyond that she was one of our own cruisers.”

“The Empyrion. I served on her as a velite. I was there the day she was brought low by the Hegemony’s varren, and here again, I find myself helpless to stop it. She’s nearly a dreadnought, Corinthus. Mass accelerators and GARDIAN arrays that could blow a hole through the Ascension with ease. They built her to be a glass cannon, but you can’t get close enough to shatter it. I’m unable to think of any way a lone frigate can take her on.”

“I often find that it’s easier to break a window when you’re inside the home.” The voice is not Corinthus’. Both he and Oraka turns to find another turian leaning in the doorway to the captain’s quarters. He has his three crests on three different angles, one on the left and the right, and one running off the back of his skull, dead center. His facial structure is built in such a way that his mouth is always slightly open. By turian standards, he was unique; not quite attractive, but distinct.

“Saren Arterius,” Oraka says, “How did a Spectre board my ship without my knowing?”

“My dear brother, the commodore, sent me here ahead of the war fleet to aid you. My ship followed yours through the relay. I hope the space she occupies in your bay wasn’t being used for anything else.”

“We’re on the brink of walking into our demise and they send one man?!” Corinthus shouts, “This is a joke!”

“Corinthus!” Oraka’s loud rebuke is more of a plea for the young man’s life than it is any attempt to defend the Spectre’s honor, not that Oraka thinks Saren has any, and not that it even works. Saren’s eyes narrow, and with blinding speed born from years of training and experience, he draws an HWMP pistol and places a slug between the optio’s eyes. Corinthus’ brain paints the wall of the captain’s offices, and he hits the floor with enough force to send Oraka’s desk model of the Kara over the side. The tiny ship crashes against Corinthus’ face and snaps in two, one half becoming lodged in his right mandible, which has been bent painfully leftward. Oraka gapes at the fresh corpse, aghast.

“Your optio failed the Loyalty Inspection, captain,” Saren shrugs, holstering the pistol. “A shame. I hope this does not reflect on your capabilities as a leader.”

“That-he wasn’t-!”

“Questioning a Spectre and an agent of the Hierarchy matches the very definition of disloyalty, captain.”

Oraka flicks his mandibles and looks between the Spectre and the corpse. “That was hardly a protest! How could you-”

“Captain, do not finish that sentence.” He takes a step closer to Oraka. “That is the first bit of advice I have for you.”

A cold knot forms in Oraka’s gut; he is paralyzed by the implicit danger being near this Spectre brings.

“The second is for you to start moving towards the batarians instead of waiting here like a coward.”

“To do what, exactly?”

“Exactly what I said. Break these windows open from within.”

Chapter Text

“Give me evidence if you expect me to believe this fucking alien!” General Williams shouts.

“This is not a good example for the turian, Williams…” Rear Admiral Grissom moans, begging his colleague to ease his temper for at least a few minutes.

Major Ryder holds an open hand out toward Williams. “It’s not the most unbelievable thing in the world, Williams,” he argues, “and it lines up.”

“Bullshit,” Williams maintains.

“The cities we’ve retaken have been desolate,” Ryder continues, “and abduction makes more sense than anything else when it comes to accounting for the still-missing casualties.”

“All that abduction crap is the stuff of old world folk stories. This is total war. Annihilation of the enemy is the goal of both sides.”

“One of those “folk stories” is sitting here, telling you this is about slavery.” Grissom refutes, gesturing to Castis, sitting quietly, eyeing each human leader as they bicker. Men like Williams, he has seen a hundred times in his life. Hardcore militants with no escalation in their stratagems, just destruction right out of the gate. The thought process was, invariably, “why give the enemy a chance to do anything within the gaps that inevitably rise out of a structured plan when you can simply bomb every nuisance away?” Castis never got the chance to refute this sadly prevalent barbarism within the turian military; speaking out of turn at the wrong times was a way to be censured or outright killed if it was at the wrong time. But he doesn’t answer to these humans. His rank is outside anything that involves them. They have all been fitted with translators manufactured by his engineer, Equite Abrudas, from resources aboard the Tyrus, and he is not afraid to speak his mind.

“General,” Castis states, “I get the distinct impression that you really just want to use that nuke, and you’re upset that you can’t now.”

Williams’ eyes widen as he coughs, passing up on the words he was about to speak. He tries and fails to come up with a response to refute the turian’s claim. Grissom raises a brow and Ryder nods towards the general, implicitly demanding an answer. Hackett, who has been silent, watching the argument in the Cairo command bunker with his two guards, Anderson and Harper, clears his throat to split the silence.

“That bomb is central to our plan of counterattack, Officer Castis,” he reiterates, “You’re certain we cannot use it?”

“Again, captain,” Castis says with a gentle lilt in his natural flange, “you can use the nuke, nothing’s stopping you. You simply have to accept that you’ll be killing many of your own people in the same stroke. I’ve seen that order be given by particularly…stubborn officers before, so if it means anything to you, there are many turians who would approve of this course of action.”

“I don’t,” Grissom says.

“Seconded,” agrees Ryder, “We need a new plan.”

“You don’t even know that he’s telling the truth!” Williams insists, “He’s an alien, like them! Hackett, you will arrest the idiot that brought him here and get your men back to the target-”

“Enough,” Grissom’s voice drowns out the ire of the general’s, “Vakarian, can you prove, without a doubt, that what you claim is true? If the general is to be so insistent.”

“I can,” Castis answers as he brings up his omni-tool. The humans jump at the sight of the device. Hackett’s guards clutch their rifles. “This is not a weapon,” he asserts, “not by itself. It’s a wrist mounted computer. Haven’t you something similar?”

“A century ago,” Anderson answers, “but they fell out of style like the mechanical devices they replaced.”

“What , do you mean a watch?” Harper questions.

“This does more than tell the time, corporal,” Castis says. From the omni-tool, he projects a video recording on a three-dimensional hologram, produced via omni-gel emitters that create the “screen” he can physically move around. The video is an archival recording recovered from a cached download of an extranet public repository kept on most ships, containing leaked recordings from within the Batarian Hegemony and raids they’ve conducted. “The use of slaves, proudly paraded by the Hegemony as part of its culture, is easy to find on the extranet, and given the batarian’s heavy restriction on extranet access inside their own borders, most of this is from brave souls on the ground risking life and limb to transmit this.”

The series of videos collected in the recording begin with the sights of daily life on Khar’shan; other batarians, turians, asari, salarians, even krogan, volus, hanar and drell, most races are accounted for in the collection of coercion. Castis lets the recording play without any comments, preferring it to speak for itself. The recording drifts from the relatively inane aspects of life in the Hegemony to the conditions of coerced labor. Shots of men, women and children being worked out in fields, down in mines, shaky videos of abuse in the backdrop of the nightlife of the Hegemony’s wealthier cities and colonies by members of the batarian elite. Vexing enough on its own, but then come the videos from raids and abductions themselves. Castis can tell from the solemn, tired stares from most of the present humans that parts of these sights are very familiar to them and their race’s own history.

They watch as families are incinerated with flame weapons. A batarian bruiser blows the brains out the back of a turian’s skull while a child is dragged away screaming. Rows of people in manacles being forcibly marched. Sometimes, the level of intensity lowers and the images return to shots of the labor, or the slave housing, no doubt monstrous but not quite as intense. But more footage and stills of the atrocities come by. Eventually, Castis shuts off the projection, having made his point and not wanting to turn this showcase of proof into a session of sadism. The human leaders’ faces are sufficiently unsettled; Williams, however, appears to remain a tad resistant.

“You’ve invented quantum computing by now, surely?” Castis asks, looking at Major Ryder.

“We have, yes,” Ryder affirms.

“I can send these to you to verify their authenticity, in case anybody here is about to cry about the potential for synthetic footage.”

“You did not even know prior to yesterday that there would be aliens here to convince,” Grissom says, “I doubt that you could have manufactured all this on such short notice. Still, pass it along, however you do so with that computer.” Castis begins looking for the local human networks on his omni-tool, something quite easy to do considering the superiority in encryption technology he has; he doesn’t even need to ask the military leaders to get their techs to grant him permissions. He chuckles to himself as he considers that he has, with their blessing, “hacked” the humans’ information networks, then goes to keep listening to Grissom.

The rear admiral continues, “Besides that, we need to figure out what we’re to do. Keeping a force centered around the missile to defend it is obvious, now that the batarians know or will doubtlessly soon know what lies within that silo.”

“We can’t hold out much longer,” Hackett says, "Our navies have been scoured from the seas by their fighters. Nuke or not, we need to end this soon.”

“If you want a suggestion,” Castis offers, “you seem to have plenty of infantry left. How many spaceworthy craft do you have?”

“They’re not as fast as yours, clearly,” William mutters.

“That’ll be fixed, you’ll see. What matters is that you have them. Our corvette, Tyrus; the engine is intact. My engineer could have it working again very soon, especially with help.”

“What, you’re asking us to give you a ship so you can run for help?”

“Hardly. Retrofitting one of your sublight craft with the engine from the Tyrus should enable it to reach the batarian cruiser at optimal speed, with minimal chance for resistance.”

“To do what, exactly?”

“Board it, of course. You can’t bomb them out of the sky, but the main advantage they’ve had is their technology, not their numbers. One large troop transport, with your men and women fitted with the best gear you’ve got and the best we can provide or manufacture with what we’ve got, and then you’ll have a force ready to board the cruiser and clear it out, taking it for yourselves.”

The humans in the room look at him with a mix of consideration and shock. Even William’s negative attitude seems to have lifted somewhat. Indeed, it is him who asks, “You can give us weapons like those the batarians have.”

“Not a ton,” Castis explains, “But the Tyrus had a full armory locker and I may be able to get some smaller items manufactured with what we have, like we’ve done with those translators. I’m essentially offering to share my guns and strip the body of my ship bare for whatever it can provide, but this is by no means a long shot. I do have a request, though.”

“Oh, yeah? And what is that?”

“I want Lance Corporal Shepard to be at the front of the assault, with me.”

“The Lance Corporal?” Grissom asks, surprised, “We have plenty of lieutenants and other NCOS ready and waiting.”

“She took the initiative with me and my people. I trust her. If you want our full cooperation, I can give it to you, as long as you don’t mind lending me her for a while.”

“Under your command?” Williams says, “You want us to commit one of our soldiers, regardless of rank, under the command of an alien?”

Castis shrugs. “Yes.” All the other humans look to Hackett.

“She’s from the 115th, captain,” Ryder says, “It’s your call.”

Harper’s face again appears reluctant, like it did when Hackett first spoke to Castis at the crash site. Anderson keeps his eyes on Castis, not focusing on his commanding officer, only the alien and, Castis presumes, the anticipation of the coming hours and days.

Hackett takes a breath in, and gives his answer.

“Barriers are down! Fires on multiple decks! Artificial gravity is lost!”

Alarms are going off across the Havinclaw. Oraka grips the sides of the CIC, listening to the reports coming from the people around him and his own terminal. The ship groans with the rending metal, shakes with each blow to the hull. He feels manic, oddly giddy; he has engaged the Shervock one-on-one in orbit around the blue planet’s moon.

A rough hit on the starboard side rocks the entire vessel. At a 30 degree angle, the captain finds himself gripping the railings of the CIC, velites and equites and engineers rolling down the bridge, while he tries to give orders in this compromised state.

“Confirm?!” he yells; Lieutenant Sparatus pushes up from the floor, grabbing onto the railing with an obviously broken arm, wheezing as he sternly maintains his gaze on the omni-tool he has synced to Saren’s ship and life support.

“He still hasn’t ejected, sir!” the man cries back.

Oraka reaches over and grabs the man by his bad arm, trying to ignore his yelps of pain as he pulls him up to the commander’s platform. The Havinclaw is rocked by another blow, this time on top of the ship, that lifts both of them into the air. They crash down hard on the platform; Oraka’s entire body is buzzing and Sparatus looks like he might grind down his teeth with the pain.

“Sir!” Chief Engineer Lilihierax calls through the comm, “We can’t take much more of this! It’s too much! We’re about to blow the engine and fires are out of control!”

“Just hang on,” Oraka orders calmly, “and prepare to route all power to the engines for one final manuever.” He switches comms. “Lorival! Bank downwards under the cruiser and prepare to pull us away! Can you get us back behind the moon?”

“We’re cutting it close, sir,” the pilot responds; without the comms, he wouldn’t be able to hear her, but from where he kneels on the command platform, he can see her, flying the ship with one hand and wielding a fire extinguisher with the other. “If we want to get away, we have to do it now!”

“Do it!” Oraka yells, then goes back to Lilihierax. “Give us that boost, chief, and then put out the damn fires before my ship is burned out!”

“All power to the engines sir!” the chief engineer replies. Oraka switches to the shipwide comm.

“All crew!” he directs to the entire vessel, “Get into your harnesses! Prepare for evasive maneuvers!” Once more to Lorival. “Do it, optio!”

As he drags Sparatus off the platform, The ship is hit once more. This time it is only a glancing blow to the bow; it is still enough to throw Oraka and Sparatus backwards, tumbling down the stairs from the command platform to the base of the CIC. Groaning, Oraka gets up and lifts the battered lieutenant to walk with him. He places Sparatus in the flight seat next to the starboard wall of the bridge, but does not have enough time to get into his own before Lorival begins the hard bank downwards. The captain deftly swings into the chair with Sparatus, placing himself behind the lieutenant, and locks the harness over both of them. There, he becomes nauseous as he feels the Havinclaw pull a turn it was not meant to in a state it should never attempt such a maneuver in. The ship cries; pipes burst along the lining beneath the steel plated floor, and one optio catches a face full of blisteringly hot steam, screaming as she desperately thrashes in her seat, trying to pull her head away.

The Havinclaw pulls up and surges away, her FTL engines engaging with a distressing rattle that sounds throughout the entire ship. And then suddenly, like a great purging of poisons from the body, all the mayhem and havoc stops, but the paint remains. No longer being blown apart in the heat of battle, the Havinclaw floats through space, power dying and her crew crying.

Oraka leaps out of the harness seat and dashes to the wounded optio across the bridge. She has thrown herself from her harness, but not fast enough to save her face from being scalded. Bits of flesh flake off her; bone is visible. Even her uniform has been partially destroyed by the steam.

“You, Equite Quentius,” Oraka directs, “Get her to the medical bay now, before she dies!” Quentius begins to salute, and Oraka angrily cuts him off. “Don’t salute, MOVE!” The equite frantically nods and picks the optio off the floor, pulling her away to whatever her fate may be. Other soldiers and ship crew bustle around him, carrying out their immediate duties swiftly and professionally. Already, the air is beginning to smell less like smoke.

“Sir,” Sparatus groans from the harness seat, “confirmation. The Spectre’s ship is destroyed.”

“Fine,” Oraka grumbles, "This plan is insane. That man is a lunatic. Dangerous."

“Captain,” Lilihierax reports in, “fires are being controlled, but the engines are completely fried. Totally irreparable without help, and they’ll die soon. Several fatalities, numerous injuries. Respectfully, sir, everything is fucked.”

“Carry on, chief,” Oraka replies, “You’ve done well. Report to me on the CIC once everything is less chaotic.”

“Yes, sir.”

Oraka closes the comm and marches down the smokey and crumbling bridge to enter the cockpit; Lieutenant Sparatus joins him, hobbling along with his broken arm at his side.

“You should go down to medical as well, Lieutenant,” Oraka says,

“Must I, sir? May I at least know what our next move is?”

Oraka’s blood runs a bit cold. Statements that could indicate disloyalty very much included the tacit refusal of an order, like what Sparatus was doing. He may not realize it; even a lieutenant could fall into the trappings of the archaic Inspection. Oraka places a practiced hand on Sparatus’ shoulder and gives a warm grin. “You’re dedicated, I’ll give you that. Accompany me to the cockpit, then go to the medbay. That’s an order.”

“Yes, sir,” Sparatus affirms. Oraka can only hope that in the eyes of the Legates who will watch the mission footage, this is enough to assure them of his loyalty.

Stepping into the cockpit, Oraka and Sparatus look out the windows, the blast shielding lifted off the glass around the cockpit, as even the power required for that goes into the engine. A grand, dusty red planet is in view, slowly coming closer as the wounded Havinclaw pushes onward.

“Massive power loss, sir.” Lorival informs her captain.

“Yes, the chief engineer said as much.” Oraka points the the planet as he puts his other hand on the headrest of the pilot’s chair. “Will you be able to land us here? I don’t want to be a hulk, powerless and adrift.”

“I can glide her in once we’re through the atmosphere. Everything else will be gone by then.”

“Just make sure we touch down, optio, and pray to the spirits that the batarians aren’t here as well.”

Chapter Text

“General Dhorven,” Corporal Balak says, pushing a burned out supercomputer tower out of the way as he enters the Shervock’s war room. The general is kicking other pieces of broken tech out of the way of the walking path around the edge of the holographic table in the center; he grunts as he moves an entire wall-mounted rack of monitors, now displaced and broken beyond immediate repair, and then stands up straight, working the cricks out of his back as he turns to hear what Balak has brought.

“General,” Balak continues, “No fatalities, but the turians took a lot out of us. Another attack and our power systems will be overwhelmed.”

“The damned barriers are meant to recover after an assault like that, aren’t they?” the general grumbles, “One frigate cannot cause such thorough damage.”

“Whatever lunatic flying that vessel was hard to track; they stayed ahead of our auto-tracking guns, until we winged them a good few times with the manuals.” Balak steps over more piles of burnt wiring to face his superior officer directly, “Repairs will not take long, but until they are done, we are vulnerable.”

“Feh,” Dhorven waves his hand in dismissal, “we’re still the most powerful ship in the system. Soon, the Merstor Squadron will have that relay down and out. Then we’ll be able to move our stock to one of the nearby systems and figure out a way back to batarian space once we’re clear of this.”

“Sir,” Balak asks, “Is the plan not to occupy this system and exploit the planet Earth once the resistance has been subdued?”

“Not any longer. The Hierarchy will be coming and I have no doubts now that it will be before we are reinforced.”

“But, the homeworld fleet-”

“The war has found Khar’shan faster than previously anticipated. We have new orders from the Hegemony; denial and escape. We will render “Earth” uninhabitable and make off with the stock we have. I’m ordering one final landing and acquisition run. Then, we will raze the surface.”

“With what, sir? We have no armaments that can destroy a planet of that size.”

“Not within the short timeframe we must set for ourselves, no.” Dhorven brings up something on the holographic table display. “But the galaxy has provided, and we need not bring such a weapon into battle ourselves.” On the display is a representation of the human planet, and its moon. Circling the natural satellite is a selection band provided by the computer program, highlighted in red.

“The moon,” Balak says, “Of course, sir.”

“I heard several humans transmissions during the battle for this rock expounding the absurd personal significance of them continuing to hold the satellite,” Dhorven muses, “So, let’s grant their wish, and give it right back.”

Twelve turians are relatively easy to house among the barracks of the resistance; the biggest hurdle is in providing a meal for them. Much to the aliens’ dismay, though it is not an unexpected outcome judging by how well they take the discovery, human food was incompatible with their biology. Apparently, some races in the galaxy have dextro amino acid chirality, something nearly unheard of in the history of human biology. Hannah’s brain starts to shut down about halfway through Velite Nyx’s explanation, but she gets the gist of it: humans and turians cannot eat or drink the same substances because they have opposing biology, and doing so with anything except for purified water would be akin to imbibing poison. However, the turians need not go hungry. Hannah watches, amazed, as some of the technicians and medical staff jury-rig a small protein farm and even a miniature distillery for their alien guests using some ration samples from the Tyrus. As the turians admit, human genetic engineering far and away exceeds anything the Citadel species have, the finest irony for a “low-tech” species to provide. Within the first day, the turians have meals that, bland as they might be, are more nutritious than their own provided ration packages, and even alcohol, a key offering in maintaining good diplomatic relations, Hannah thinks.

She spends most of the day guarding the turians and occasionally letting Hackett or the Major through to speak with them. Victus is bedlaid, awake and grumpy. He has to go the first twelve hours on Earth without any painkillers because of the lack of turian-friendly medical supplies. Thankfully, the miracle workers who created the food production equipment are able to use the distillery to produce a humble quantity of dextro-friendly ersatz morphine, which Hannah has the boon of delivering to Adrien.

“My jaw is about to fall off,” he mumbles, trying to keep himself from breaking into tears with the pain, “and you expect me to swallow this. You’re cruel captors.”

Hannah chuckles, shaking the morphine tablets in her hand. “Take your meds, lieutenant,” she says.

Victus purses the space that Hannah would call lips if she was certain they were lips, grimaces, and opens wide. Hannah places them on his bluish tongue and pours a bit of water in with them, then steps back. Victus struggles to get himself to swallow, but eventually does, mandibles twitching in agitation. He sighs. “Fuck me, what would Corinthus say, seeing me like this…”

Hannah shrugs. “Maybe he’ll be jealous that you get to take a little vacation.”

“Turians…don’t take vacations. Spirits, that works fast.”

“Lucky you.”

The battered lieutenant was not in a state to talk, to share stories or give insight to these apparent allies. Hannah figures that she would have a better chance of getting such a thing out of Castis. She looks at each turian that walks by and can’t stop her eyes from lingering a second longer than they should. There’s a hesitancy, an implicit mistrust. When she had first offered to help Adrien, she had done so without thinking; it was as simple as her seeing someone who was not a batarian in peril, and treating them as if they were human. Really, she hadn’t even fully acknowledged that these were aliens until after she had already applied the medi-gel. But they were in too deep already. The turians were now key to their survival and plans against the batarian raiders, according to Hackett. Making nice with them was a given, and she could do that as a soldier. As a mother, however, she wanted to know more about these people before she made up her mind on them.

On the second night with the turians, after a briefing with Hackett, the 115th decided to throw a small celebration for the aliens, just for the hell of it. Corporal Anderson and Lance Corporal Mitra were tempting the turians with more booze, new concoctions that had been just devised that day, and soon, the impromptu Cairo barracks, split between buildings, looks like a lively corner in any big city. The turians and the off-duty marines drink and chat the night away; Castis and the captain take a sip of their drinks at the start of the night, then try to hit a bullseye on a paper target with their handguns. That the officers are willing to mix with the rank-and-file at times like this is wonderful to Hannah, and it started endearing the turians a bit more to her, Castis especially. His folding, space-age-looking pistol was sleek and produces a powerful crack that splits the air as he puts a slug into the target; the shot lands left of center. Hackett, in turn, cocks the hammer on his personal weapon, a massive revolver chambered in .600, reinforced so that it would not break his wrist to simply fire the thing, and with a sound like a cannon, places a round dead center on the target. The party goes silent. Then Castis starts clapping.

“Now that is a gun!” he exclaims, “That’s arms technology I’ve never seen! And powder-based?” The other turians share his enthusiasm for the oversized handgun, which leads into the gathering gaining even more energy and the soldiers of both species bonding over mutual interests, military and otherwise. For Hannah, it is a good sign; the species could be socially compatible, she hopes. But she still wants to pick their minds.

Enjoying a drink of her own, she eventually finds Castis when he’s moved away from the larger groups, looking out over a balcony on the second floor of an abandoned shop, staring out into the desert. He has his eyes locked on the half-moon hanging in the sky, the clouds and the stars and all the decorations of the heavens. She steps up next to him, the somewhat muffled din of the gathering below, and takes a sip of her beer.

“For a people in the midst of something close to an apocalypse,” Castis says, speaking first, “you sure do like to celebrate, loudly and in the open.”

“We’ve got more defenses than what you see,” she replies, “Artillery guns a few klicks out around the city, automated targeting solutions, you know. It keeps the big ship from coming down over us. Shuttles can get by if their pilots are fast, but I’ve seen more than a few just disintegrate coming down. It’s great.”

“So you use this respite to get wasted the night before an assault?”

“Hackett and the other captains keep us in line.”

“I’m a bit disappointed, Shepard.”

“What, that we drink before we get to work?”

“No, not at all. I’d be suspicious that you were hiding something if I didn’t see something like that. I’m just upset that there's no sparring.”

“Sparring.”

“Great way to settle grievances before a big fight, make sure nothing is keeping people from cooperating when it’s need most.”

“By…beating the crap out of each other.”

“Blowing off steam is just that, blowing it off. That can mean going blow to blow. You’d be surprised how many vendettas can be settled by a sparring session. Adrien, down there? I used to hate his guts. Rank below me when we met, and he just would not leave me alone. Always chirping in my ear with complaints; if the Loyalty Inspection had been up, I might have shot him.”

Shepard does a double-take, trying to process all the information she has just taken in. “So you guys, if I understand that last part, execute soldiers for ‘disloyal’ actions?”

“It’s unpopular for that very reason,” Castis sighs, “Even when it has been up, most officers just rebuke, temporarily demote, or throw whatever smartass was acting up in the brig for a day. So the Hierarchy installed cameras on all ships and instituted mandatory footage reviews to judge for themselves who was and was not living up to the expectations of the Primarchs as ‘good citizens and servants.’”

“That’s a bit insane, Castis, I have to say.”

“And I’ll say again, very unpopular. Kind of lines up with how Adrien and I met, actually.”

“How’s that?”

Castis weaves her a story about how, at the end of the last implementation of the Loyalty Inspection, he had been rescued from falling on the wrong side of the Primarchs’ graces after a mission on a world called Neith. A group of privateers hired by a cult operating a “mini-empire” out of a section of the galaxy they called the “Terminus Systems” had been running raids on turian colony planets; among other things, they captured slaves, some of which had been incarcerated secessionist figures and rebels intended to be brought to their homeworld for trial. Adrien had been part of a response force who were caught off-guard by the cult’s militia while patrolling the region, and out of necessity, conscripted the prisoners to aid him and his unit, and he was ultimately successful in wiping out the privateers in no small part to their assistance. He had attempted to restrain the prisoners once more afterwards, but they escaped into the Terminus before the Hierarchy could retrieve them; by the judgment of some of the Primarchs, the fact that he had not immediately executed them upon finding them was grounds enough for some of them to demand that he be put to death for treachery. Instead, one Primarch, Fedorian, had opted to censure him, demoting him while also slapping a medal on his chest for “exemplary service” and placing him under Castis’ command.

“The politics of the Hierarchy are often so fraught that I wasn’t sure if him being transferred to me was a punishment or not,” he says, “Coming from Fedorian, I wouldn’t think so.”

“Is he your main ‘Primarch,’ like an emperor?” Hannah asks.

“Hmm? No, we have no emperor. The Primarchs of each cluster share power. Fedorian’s just the only one I know personally.”

“So he’s a friend of yours, or was a friend.”

“He was…is a…uh, anyway, that was a while ago. Point is, Adrien was not happy about the change, naturally. And figuring he had nothing to lose, he took it out on me.”

“His commanding officer?”

“The inspection went down, and he was P.O.’ed enough to just not care. Instead of punishing him further, I decided to settle it in the ring.”

“How’d it go?”

“He beat me within an inch of consciousness, and right when he was about to go for the knock-out blow, I swept his legs out from under him and drove onto the mat with my elbow. I’m pretty sure I almost gave him a concussion. And then he stands back up, staggering, and he laughs.” Castis snaps his fingers, something that Hannah is certain he picked up from Hackett, having seen him do the same gesture earlier in the night. “Just like that, we were inseparable.”

Hannah shrugs, smiling. “Odd way of making friends, but if it works it works.”

“Unfortunately, you can’t count on a ship coming down out of the sky everyday instead.”

“So that makes us friends, then.”

“I’d like to think so. Your people are wonderful, Shepard. Proud and fearless, passionate, with a mix of minds and leaders who can counter the tunnel vision of the warhawks and take a thoughtout approach instead. You’ll be excellent allies. Excellent friends.”

Hannah lets the smile slowly drift from her face. She sets the beer down.

“Friends or subjects?”

The enthusiasm in Castis’ eyes dims a little.

“You don’t trust us, do you Shepard?” he asks.

“I have a son, Castis. A husband, family and friends. I’ve been fighting this war to protect them, keep them alive, and as you’ve shown us, free. I’m not particularly enthused about the idea of having the oversight of another species, friendly or not.”

“I can understand why.”

“Maybe you’re not slavers. But why would I be content with being the subject of an alien empire even if I’m free?”

“Nobody’s said anything about subjugation.”

“So you won’t remain on Earth once this is over?”

Castis says nothing.

“Have you said anything to our leaders about this?”

Hannah could recognize that even though she was struggling to trust Castis and his ilk, her initial kindness had really won her some good grace with him. He seemed wounded by her icy demeanor; he clearly was not a man who was in exact alignment with his empire’s agenda, but he was reckoning with the inevitable.

“A species like yours would be extended the offer to be ‘uplifted’ by the Council if they found you favorable.” he explains, “When the turians arrived at the Citadel, the volus pledged themselves as a client species. We give them support and they do the same for us, but they govern themselves.”

“But they did so willingly, and they were there before you. We would have to be personally ‘uplifted’ by your Hierarchy, indebted to them, supervised under them. We would become an extension of your populace, almost certainly given less consideration than the turians in regards to aid and policy, but given the disciplinary measures you’ve described, it sounds like blood may flow in very short order.” She steps closer to Castis. “Our blood. Castis, that is the very last thing I want.”

Castis fidgets uncomfortably, trying and failing to keep his eyes on Hannah but always looking back at the moon. “You can always refuse.”

“But you don’t want that to happen. Why?”

She thinks of many possible answers Castis could have for her. Revolting ones, empowering ones; the man finally gains the courage to look her in the eyes, and takes a breath in.

Then the sky turns orange, the air becomes like knives, and both Hannah and Castis duck onto the floor of the balcony. Something in the distance has detonated with enough force for them to feel it from miles away.

Out in the direction of the safe haven for civilians and refugees.

Chapter Text

Floating free, Saren Arterius plays dead. His personal ship, which he’d commandered a week prior from a krogan mercenary pack who had gone after him after mistaking him for “easy pickings,” is in pieces a mile away. He jettisoned from the ship well before the Shervock locked onto the spacecraft. Now the rest of this stage of the mission depends on the targeting algorithm for the computer he has installed in his hardsuit. A V.I. operated program controls a set of thrusters welded to the back of the suit, gradually carrying him along towards the cruiser with brief jets of air. He should be small enough and the thruster weak enough to slip by the sensors of a ship of her class. Of course, if the batarians have retrofitted her with better equipment, then this would all be for naught, but he has confidence in the greed of Khar’shan’s elite.

One hundred meters. He floats over the outermost edges of the cruiser’s structure. Fifty meters. He turns on the magboots and exhales as the autothruster rotates him for the proper angle to walk on the ship’s port side. Twenty-five meters. He activates an electromagnetic disruptor field, projected from two nodes on the pauldrons on his hardsuit to confuse the ship’s pressure detectors, lest his footsteps be detected the moment he touches the hull.

Contact. Saren stands at a ninety degree angle, and looks out to the void, an ocean of white dots partially obscured from view by the dull grey moon and the watery planet. As his eyes cross the surface of the moon, he notices movement near its surface. He produces a folding pair of binoculars from his belt strap, and peers through the lens toward the satellite. He sees shuttles with the identifying markings of the Hierarchy scratched off, rushing toward the far side of the moon, their purpose unknown. Now he has something else to investigate once he’s inside the Shervock his best guess is that it has something to do with preparation for the coming Hierarchy fleet; perhaps they’ll land the Shervock and step up a forward operating base if they cannot repair the vessel before it comes under assault again. He returns the binoculars to his belt, and begins marching along the hull, looking to choose his point of entry.

Chapter Text

Oraka brushes yet another gust full of red dust out of his face, groaning through his helmet. There is a very likely chance that he is the first sapient life form to stand on this planet, if the Protheans did not do so in the ancient past. His surviving crew totals at just under forty people, less than ten of which were his before he took his share of Vakarian’s troops. They’ve already buried most of the dead beneath the red sand. The equite he saw scalded during the escape did not make it; he is now standing over the grave he dug and laid her in, trying to will himself to return his gaze to the horizon, and continue on with whatever could be called his next “mission” in this shambles of an opening to a war. Now, they’re stranded. Chief Engineer Lilihierax has told him that repair of the ship is impossible without outside help, or the arrival of a friendly fleet. It will have to be soon, for the planet is barren, and if the batarians descend upon them, then there will be no recourse.

“Sir,” Lieutenant Sparatus greets him. The man has his arm in a sling inside his hardsuit, one sleeve hanging empty at his side. He carries a data pad in his good hand, passing it to his captain.

“What’ve we got?” Oraka asks.

“Counting all the remaining supplies, we have enough rations to sustain the crew at current size for just under two weeks. The oxygen recycler is fully intact, so we won’t asphyxiate, at least.”

“Cold comfort, but it’s something.”

“There is something else, sir.”

“Speak, soldier.”

“The scanners swept over the region we landed on during the descent, and according to these readings, there’s an anomaly due west of here, something completely distinct from the rest of the terrain. Judging by the results, it looks like, well…” Sparatus gestures to the pad, now in Oraka’s hands. The captain studies the data, and nods.

“There’s a structure,” Oraka says, “Something made by sapients. A building, or a surface entrance to an underground complex perhaps.”

“That’s just what we need,” Sparatus groans, “If it’s a stronghold the batarians set up, then there’s no way they haven’t noticed us.”

Oraka shakes his head and steps past Sparatus, looking out to the west of the landing site. “I don’t think so, lieutenant. The batarians must have had a reason for coming to this system specifically, instead of fleeing home. What do you think that would be?”

Sparatus takes a moment. “...Slaves, sir?”

“Does seem like something the Hegemony would want to grab on the way out, in case they can’t replenish their supply as fast during wartime. So if this is an inhabited system, then there’s a very good chance…”

Sparatus’ eyes light up. “That there’s an archive here.” The Protheans, the species that built the mass relays, that left the civilizations of the modern day the information they required to ascend to the stars, had a pattern of leaving caches and archives behind near inhabited planets. There are plenty of theories about why; the hanar have taken a religious angle and positioned the Protheans as gods who left their knowledge as a gracious act of magnanimity. More secular theories postulated that the Protheans were observing living species in their earliest stages of evolution, and when they vanished, whatever the cause, they left behind their research outposts and the data within. Regardless of what one believed, it was well known that where there were emerging civilizations in the galaxy, there were very likely Prothean archives not too far away.

“It’s just a guess, but there’s a chance. Maybe there will be something we can work with.”

“It’s a galactic crime to interfere with an archive without Council oversight, captain.”

“Wartime brings necessity, Lieutenant. Gather an infantry team, send them my way, and situate yourself at the CIC; you have the deck.”

Chapter Text

Rael remains hunched over the panel, trying to keep his eyes from having to even catch the peripheral sight of one of the batarians moving behind him on the walkway just off the maintenance station. For once, he is thankful that the mask and helmet are there, for it allows him to silence the audio output and speak freely of his resentment for his circumstances without drawing their attention. In the latter years of his adolescence, he had started hearing more stories about pilgrims who never returned to the Migrant Fleet, and the suspicion of these missing fleet-brothers and sisters being kept within the borders of the Hegemony. He had resolved to not become one of them.

“Quarian,” one of the batarian guards barks at him, “you’re going to the shuttles. We have a job for you.” Rael silently steps back from the panel and moves onto the utility walkway. The powerful engine of the Shervock rattles and roars above him; the four-eyed devils are pushing it harder than it is meant to. Overclocked V.I. based maintenance algorithms wouldn’t keep it in check forever; the entropic nature of working with such a FTL engine meant that unless a dedicated eye was kept on it, it would inevitably fail. He might be here against his will, but Rael was irritated by the premise of any ship being left to become disorderly. With that disorder came danger, and it was not acceptable to invite more to the innocents, quarian or alien, held aboard the Shervock.

His head down, Rael traipses down the utility walkway, one guard in front and one behind him. He figures that Han has already been moved to the shuttle they’ll be taken on to whatever task the batarians have decided to commit them to. Neither he nor the guards see the flicker of electricity arcing in the darkness beneath the walkway. The blur wielding it swings up onto the metal platform; the guard behind him screams, his voice warbling as every nerve ending in his body is agitated by the sparking tool now embedded in his thigh. Rael doesn’t even realize what is happening as he dives forward toward the other guard. Acting on instinct, he is able to topple the batarian and knock the Phaeston out of her hand. Instead of taking the firearm, he grabs and unsheathes the combat knife strapped to the alien’s waist, immediately plunging it into her chest. She cries as he drags it down her torso, the blade catching on organs, shaking in his grip as he clenches it with all the strength in his fingers. He withdraws it messily and stabs her again in the neck, and with a gurgling convulsion, she finally expires. Panting, Rael’s vision glazes over for a second, coming back to himself as he feels a three-fingered hand pul on his shoulder. Turning, the familiar sight of his fleet brother allows him to drop the winding tenseness in his shoulders; he reaches up and reactivates his helmet’s audio with a moment’s hesitation, as if he fears the sadistic roar he released as he butchered the batarian will have somehow been preserved within the speaker.

“How did you get away?” Rael asks Han, pushing off his back-bowed knees to stand up.

“It seems that real experience always triumphs over conscription and intimidation,” Han offers, “It surprised me, how easy it was to wrest a handgun from the grip of one of the bosh’tets.”

“We’ll kill them all for this, yes?”

“Of course. We can’t bring a ship back to the fleet that has an infestation, can we? That would hardly make a good pilgrimage gift.”

Behind his mask, Rael smiles wickedly. A turian frigate would be a gift that would have them remembered for generations in the Book of Ancestors. And to pay back the batarians in kind for the mistreatment, death and torture, that would make the return to the fleet with this prize all the more satisfying. He walks over to the Phaeston and picks it up; behind him, Han fiddles with his omni-tool and checks the heat capacitor on the Carnifex he had stripped off one of their captors. The pair were something of an oxymoron; few quarians had the confidence to be close quarters combatants, given the fragility of their constitution and the risk of a suit breach, but it was not unheard of. What was less common was the frontline military experience both men had that most pilgrims didn’t carry with them into their journey. Indeed, the two had been responsible for holding off a slaver raid before they were legal adults. Neither are even twenty yet; both are filled with the fiery rage of a young adult with no reason not to act in the most aggressive manner available to them.

An alarm above the quarians starts blaring, and the bulkhead door ahead of them on the walkway shuts with a loud crash. Their captors are no doubt watching through a camera somewhere on the engineering deck. Han focuses entirely on his omni-tool. “General lockdown,” he declares, “I can override it, but they’ll be waiting on the other side of the door by the time I do.”

“I’ll handle that,” Rael assures him, “cancel the lockdown.” He reaches down to the still warm corpse of the batarian he killed and pulls a squarish charge off her belt. It’s a standard piece of Haliat tech, easily reprogrammed into a proximity mine. With a few adjustments to the internal configuration, accessed through a retractable opening in the fuse body, the charge is primed with a five-second delay to trigger in response to air disturbances. Rael tosses the mine down the walkway; it skips across the grating and stops five feet short of the door.

“That’s not going to destroy what we’re standing on?” Han asks.

“It’ll be fine,” Rael replies, “That being said, we should be ready to dash out of here once they’re out of the way.”

The lockdown stops; the alarm goes silent and the bulkhead door opens. Rael and Han duck to the floor of the walkway as a squad of batarian troopers rush in. They don’t get more than two steps in before the mine beeps, then detonates; a squall of chunky red viscera and smoke flies across the walkway as every batarian is killed instantly by the explosive. The force of the detonation puts a hole in the walkway, and the metal begins to bow. Rael and Han rise to their feet, leaping over the gap and through the bulkhead door as the walkway collapses behind them.

Chapter Text

The civilian refugee center has been blown to smithereens. It isn't difficult to figure out how this happened. An engineer recovered one of the data drives from a computer in the building being used as the front for the underground bunker complex, and discovered a worm that had opened every armored door. The batarians must have gained remote access to the system while one of their shuttles passed the area; how they detected its presence would probably never be known, though. An errant signal or transmission that broke encryption protocols that led them here? A pilot's keen eye that had singled out the otherwise abandoned settlement as an opportune place to look for potential slaves in hiding? What scares Hannah the most is the idea that somebody may have betrayed the location of the shelter to the batarians in exchange for some guarantee of safety or control. She pushes that thought from her mind; it did not help to become conspiratorial. Her fury was enough for now.

Standing in the gathering area of the main bunker, Hannah found that the lack of bodies inside did not bring relief, but dread. This was so obviously a slave grab that any remaining doubts about Castis' words were immediately smothered. Upturned furniture, marks where people had been dragged away by force, ripped up carpeting from unwilling passengers trying to claw free, and the spinning orange lights still going, the alarms warning people who had already been taken away. While there were no corpses inside, the burning pile outside the entrance made clear what had happened to the few soldiers left on guard duty, their gear incinerated along with their bodies in that mix of smoke tinged with the scent of burning flesh. Her first instinct after storming the bunker with her squad had been to shout for her son, for her husband, and she was not the only soldier to do so. Only the potential for booby traps had kept her from sprinting through each room like her life depended on it.

But now the bunker was cleared out, any traps deactivated, every nook checked. Nobody was inside; all that remained of their presence were their discarded possessions. Mindlessly, she wanders to the section where she knows John and Liam had been set up. She has never been in the bunker before, never seen their living space, but it's plain to see where they slept as she recognizes one of John's toys on a bunk towards the back of the sleeping hall. A stiff plastic marine, one from a display set that Liam had gotten second hand, unpainted and now broken in three places on the cold floor beneath the smaller cot where her son must have slept. She reaches down and picks up the ruined trinket. She almost crushes it in her palm as the reality of what has transpired settles in. She lets out a seething exhale, her arm shaking as she holds the little soldier close.

"Hannah."

Castis has accompanied the response team, even offering some of his own soldiers to aid. Though an ultimately hollow gesture, he has followed her to this hall after seeing her break off from the other marines. She does not look up at him as he approaches, her little soldier taking all of her attention. He stops a few feet away, and lets her do what she needs to. Calming down enough to clear her mind for the moment, she gently places the pieces of the toy into one of the pouches on her combat rig.

"This is where they slept," she says, her voice devoid of all emotion, "they were probably sleeping when the attack came."

Castis lets her remain in her deadened state for a moment. Maybe he doesn't know what to say yet, or maybe he doesn't want to respond right away and risk drowning her earned anguish with an unwelcome reassurance. He waits just a moment, though. "They're certainly still alive, Hannah," he points out.

Hannah slowly turns away from the bunk, her hand tightening around the handguard of her assault rifle.

"Getting your people back is a top priority of the coming assault," he continues, "You have not lost them."

"But we can't get them back by ourselves, can we?" Hannah says as she steps past Castis, "This would make the turians heroes for many. It would make integration for us into your society easier. So many humans would be eager to accept being uplifted by an alien power that they'll overlook everything else that implies."

The alarms continue to blare, the only break in the silence between pensive soldiers from different worlds.

"And that's too much for you," Castis concedes.

"No," Hannah says firmly.

"Really?" The turian is surprised. "Why is that?"

"Because you can help us. This is the way it was always going to go from the moment you arrived." Hannah spins to look Castis in the eyes. "Maybe I should care about becoming the subject of an empire, I should be angered by the lack of other options. How powerless I am in changing the fate of my people here. Maybe I should resent you for that. But I don't care. Because you're going to help us get our people back."

"You're damn right we are."

"Then whatever comes next will have to wait until this is taken care of. But Castis, I need to know...why do you want us in your empire?"

"I'm not a man of higher authority, Hannah. I have no influence on policy."

"But you're a leader, and you have the respect of your men and women, like I do for Hackett. That matters, especially in a hierarchy like the one you've described, doesn't it?"

"People won't listen to me, they never have."

"Castis," Hannah's voice sounds like it's about to break, "Don't deflect. Why do you want humans in your empire?"

The officer waits another moment. "Because from what I've seen, you're resilient, adaptable, and most importantly, passionate. Too many turians have succumbed to the doctrine of discarding the self and the empathy that comes with it. Those aren't weaknesses, and I'm tired of fighting for a civilization that treats them like they are. Maybe it's only been a matter of days, but that's all it takes to learn, if you care enough to reach out. I want humans in our empire because I believe you will be key in restoring its soul, not just through this war, but by putting a warrior's passion back in us."

Hannah looks to the floor, and nods. "I'm ready. We fight as one."

Castis extends his hand; shaking hands with another is a gesture that, by serendipity, is mostly universal among sapient races. He expects her to simply shake his hand firmly, and then turn to move out of the bunker and prepare for the attack on the batarian cruiser, after which he would do the same. And, she does, but he notices that she uses both hands whereas he only uses one, and her gaze falls to the floor as she does so. It's almost an act of exasperation, or worse, supplication. As he watches her leave, he looks at his hand and begins to worry that she still might not understand what he hopes for humanity to bring.

John sits on the floor of the cold metal room. Around him are people, humans and otherwise. Most of them are adults, and they all act like they can't see him. He tries to empathize. He can see they're as scared as he is. He doesn't want to be alone and he can't bring himself to ask for someone to stay with him. But he doesn't cry. Soldiers don't cry.

Daddy was taken away by the four-eyes onto another shuttle when they dragged them out of the bunker. He saw one of them smack him with a metal stick, and he wasn't moving a lot after. He was moving, but he stopped calling John's name. He called back for him and then one of the four-eyes stabbed him with something, and he fell asleep. He woke up in this dark room with all these other people and he hasn't moved an inch since.

To his left, an alien who looks a little bit like a bird and a little bit like a cat cradles a smaller alien in their arms, while another adult leans on the first one's shoulder. A few times, their scary eyes flit over in John's direction. Each time they do, John looks away in fear. In the dark, the alien looks like a hungry tiger, sharp teeth behind their plated mouth and with a face that always seems angry. He's worried that if he tries to get near the alien, they'll bite him to defend their baby. John wouldn't be angry; that's what a parent did, after all, but John doesn't want to be eaten. The longer he remains seated there on that grated floor, though, the more faces he sees in the dark that made him feel just as scared. Someone to his right has no face, just two eyes behind glass that never changed. From the shape of her body, she looks more human than the bird-cat-alien, but she only has three fingers on each hand, like they did. Many of the other people look like tall frogs with horns; their big eyes shift constantly in the dim light, and John is scared that they'll pop like bubbles and make the room even scarier. Another alien is short and tubby, surrounded by a suit with a piece on the helmet that looks like a plastic, rectangular mustache. And one alien looks more like an animal than the rest; it is huge, with legs like tree stumps and a piece of fabric over their grey body. John shuts his eyes and tries to escape, think of anywhere else, go anywhere else, but the silence of the room and all the scared people inside it keeps creeping into focus. He feels his chest spasm; he's about to cry.

"Young man," a kind voice says behind him. John gasps and spins around, keeping his hands close to his face. Kneeling above him is a tall, blue lady. She looks more human than any other alien in the room; she even has five fingers. But instead of hair, she has tentacles like an octopus. She's in a yellow dress, carries a funny-looking hat in one hand, and her expression is gentle, patient, strong like Mommy's. "Are you okay?" she asks, "are you hurt?" John shakes his head sheepishly. She motions for him to follow her; he refuses at first. "How old are you?"

John finds his voice and responds. "Three." He doesn't know many words, but Mommy says he's very smart for his age.

The lady's face brightens, but not in a scary way. "Oh, to go through this...it's cold in this room. Please take a blanket and sit against the wall here, will you?"

John, tired of being scared, gets up and walks over to the wall the blue lady asked him to go to. She drapes a piece of yellow fabric over him; it's not as heavy as he thinks a blanket should be, but it is very warm. He keeps his eyes on the blue lady. She turns away from him and looks to a small group of other blue ladies. Most of them are dressed in cool-looking black suits, but one of them is in clothing that looks like something one of the scientists Mommy used to escort would wear.

"Liara," the blue lady asks the scientist lady, "please keep an eye on him, would you, dear?"

"Of course, mother," Liara says. She scoots away from the lady in the yellow dress and sits next to John. Liara reaches over and readjusts the blanket. "You're very brave," she says to him.

"I'm scared," John admits.

"That's okay. I think everybody is. I'd hoped I would never see anything like this until I was an adult."

Liara looked like an adult; John doesn't understand. "You're old?" he asks.

Liara snickers to herself. "Oh, not really. I'm only eighty."

John laughs, too. "You're old." And for a few minutes, he isn't as scared.

Chapter Text

The batarians had evidently installed a kind of translator-blocking signal emitter within the internal announcement system of the Shervock; their harsh language scratches against Rael's ears constantly as he and Han dart through the maintenance corridors of the cruiser. The repeating message sounds like it could be as much of a threat to the crew as it would be to them. One can only imagine what kind of detention waited for those who failed back within the borders of the Hegemony. But when he thinks of that, Han sees his fellow quarians-made-slaves being subject to that whip first. And so, with each newcomer conscript who has the misfortune of finding the pilgrims in these passageways, he only grows more ruthless. One with a flamethrower tries to get them from the other side of a short utility corridor, but their shields hold out long enough to take cover. Han hits the batarian with an overload, and instead of shooting him with the Phaeston, Rael vaults out of cover and tackles the man to the ground, ripping the flamethrower from his hands and spilling the contents of the fuel container across the four-eyed prick. he ducks away, and launches an incineration blast from his omni-tool, and the man is instantly set aflame. As one would expect, he screams with the terror and agony of feeling every cell in his alien body being sundered, and then Rael decides to raise the rifle and hold down the trigger until it overheats. What remains after his work is done is a chunk that cannot meaningfully even be called the remnants of a person.

"Fleet-brother," Han says, placing a hand on Rael's shoulder, "you need to pace yourself. I fear you may tear your suit open with this fury."

"As if if would be so wasteful a way to die," Rael growls, "everything we do must hurt these bosh'tets as deeply as possible."

Han, taken aback, pulls his hand away from Rael's shoulder and shakes his head. "I understand that you're angry, but this is...so much."

"Of course I'm angry! Frankly, I'm more than a little insulted that you aren't! Is this your way of saying you didn't mind the humiliation of captivity so much?"

"Dragging out the misery of the batarians here isn't going to get us back to the fleet any faster! If anything, you're giving them more time to catch up."

"Then stop wasting our time with this talk, pick up the pace, and make it stick, Han. I don't want to keep looking over my shoulder, fearing that I'll see a knife in your neck because you were too subdued to act in time!"

"That's not fair, Rael."

A new voice says, "On the contrary, I think the shorter one has a point." It carries the distinctive reverb of a turian's vocals; both Rael and Han spin on their heels to find the source standing behind them, partially masked in the humid fog found everywhere through the sweltering utility corridors. He has an unsettlingly distinct set of three prominent crests, and his beady eyes shine even through the moisture around him. He walks forward with confidence; had he been even slightly closer to the softer silhouette of batarian physiology, Rael would have shot him immediately. Instead, he consideres whether the possibility of this being a mercenary should prompt him to fire the Phaeston anyway.

"Where did you come from?" Han demands.

"Around. I started following you about two intersections back. Of course, I think half the damn ship heard you incinerate that last soul, so I'm sure I would have found you anyway."

Rael finally turns the rifle on the turian. "If you're working for them-"

"I'm not. Call me Arterius. I'm a council Spectre, and I'm here to end this little rebellious charade being put on by the Hegemony."

Rael believes the turian, but does not lower the gun. A Spectre was only slightly more trustworthy than a batarian, in so far as one could be sure they would just outright kill you instead of trying to take you for their own uses. The history of quarians being treated as nuisances by the Council, and Spectres' often being the hand sent to enact that persecution, only hardened his compulsion to be ready to end the life of this stalker at any moment.

Han picks up where Rael had been interrupted. "If you are here to stop this," he says, "then help us get to the holding cells. We need to free our people, and your own, before we get to the bridge and ventilate this entire ship."

"The more prudent move would be to go straight to the bridge and ventilate it immediately," Arterius opines, "the faster all the batarians aboard are dead, the sooner this is over."

"And just leave the slaves in the hold? To go out with the crew?! Are you insane?!"

"If the captain of this vessel gets it in his mind that the best call to make is to run home, we don't want to be stuck here with him. We can ventilate the ship from the safety of the bridge, or sabotage it, let it run, and have it explode in Hegemony space. Who knows, if we're lucky enough, perhaps it'll take a space station or two with it depending on where it arrives. That'll show those four-eyed degenerates the Council isn't to be trifled with. Depending on how badly it scares them, it could even end this war before it starts."

Hand steps forward, leveling the Carnifex at Arterius. "I will not permit such butchery to take place while I still draw breath!"

"It would be faster, would it not?" Rael says, his voice full of vitriol.

"Rael...I can't believe I'm hearing you say this. You know our brothers and sisters are in those cells; we were kept there with them, and now your entertaining the idea of sacrificing them all to this turian's pragmatism?!"

"I never said that...I only acknowledged that it would be faster."

"Is expediency all that matters to you now? One minute you're dragging out the death of these batarians, and now you just want to leave?"

"I want to go home, Han. I don't want to be here. I want to just get rid of the batarians aboard this ship, take it back to the fleet, and put this behind me forever."

Arterius makes a clicking sound; he points one finger in the air and wags it from side to side.

"Unfortunately, this vessel will have to be scuttled, regardless of the outcome." At this, both quarians reaffirm their grip on their weapons and lock their masked eyes with the Spectre.

"Your own Council's salvage laws don't require such a thing, even under these circumstances," Han points out.

"Now that I'm here, what I say is Council law. This ship must go."

"You don't even care about stopping these batarians, do you?" Rael says, venom in his tone, "You're just wounded that this turian vessel isn't under the sway of your Primarchs. You're going to destroy it out of pride. I can't say I blame you; if it were a quarian ship, I'd do the same thing. But we've been through too much. And you're right, Han, so have the others in those cells. No damn way we're going to let you destroy this ship."

Arterius shrugs. "That's a shame. There needn't be total losses in confrontations like this, but people like you always make it difficult."

He moves so fast that Rael doesn't even hear the sound of his footfalls against the metal floor. For a moment, he thinks he sees something like a biotic blur surround the turian, but it's the wrong color; the shade of blue is too deep, too...sickly. The air is driven from Han's lungs as he hears his fleet-brother gasp; faster than Rael could realize what's happening, the Spectre has lunged forward and jammed a Talon knife into Han's chest, purple blood pooling around the handle guard as the Carnifex falls from his hand and vanishes over the guard rail into the depths of the ship. Rael screams as he tries to turn the Phaeston on the turian, but again, Arterius is too fast. He leaves the knife embedded in Han and strikes Rael with a vicious backhand; the force of the impact creates a crack in the outer layers of his mask's opaque visor, and he is sent flying backwards over the railing, losing the Phaeston to the depths below and narrowly avoiding following after it as he crashes against some pipes. Tangled in the array of metal tubing, he watches helplessly as Arterius leans down to yank the knife out of Han, rotating his wrist as to twist the blade as it exits.

A loud crash interrupts him, and the turian looks off behind him, grimaces, and then darts away at blinding speed, further down the metal pathway. Han slumps and falls to the floor with the knife still in his chest. A squad of batarians, yelling after the Spectre, fire down the corridor at Arterius and give chase. They step on and over Han, and Rael realizes that they must assume that he's already dead. None of them turn their heads to look at Rael, and they all vanish down the walkway in the same direction as Arterius, the only indicator to their presence being the evermore distant sounds of gunfire. Rael scrambles to his knees, and climbs up over the pipes and the railing to get to Han's side. He turns his fleet-brother over onto his back and holds his hands over the wound. The knife shakes with every breath Han takes, but Rael is scared that if he pulls it out that it would only make things worse.

"Han...Han! Stay awake! I'm here! Don't you dare slip away from me!"

The gurgling noise Han makes almost sounds like it could be words, but it's all indecipherable. The wounded quarian drags his hand across his fleet-brother's cracked mask, his strength rapidly fading.

"Han! Han, please! I-I can't do anything! Please, you have to stay-"

The unmistakable sound of a pistol unfolding comes from behind, echoing in the pilgrim's ears.

A little earlier...

"ETA, 15 minutes and counting."

The V.I. announcer's updates are becoming a rhythmic comfort, an assurance to the men and women aboard the shuttle that soon, they will have their shot at vengeance. For the turians, it is for their ship, and for the humans, it is for their families. What further unites the too is that it is also for their brothers and sisters in arms.

The team of human engineers guided by Abrudas picked up the basics of mass effect technology very fast, but the limited quantities of element zero to work with meant that they were forced to focus on weapon modification and shields instead of anything to do with propulsion. As a result, they would have to use a converted human transport shuttle; the foremost problem with that was that an arrival time of half a day was unacceptable for the plan to storm and take the cruiser. Abrudas and Sergeant Coré were the ones to crack that problem and proposed something of a rudimentary slingshot, using data from study of the relays as a basis. It wouldn't be strong enough to propel them very far, but it would shave approximately ten hours off the trip from Earth to the moon. The structure was simple to build, and despite the eezo investment, was quickly determined to be essential to the operation.

If it didn't rip the shuttle apart, that is. But the humans and turians alike quickly resolved to push that concern down. They were here to die for their peoples, and for some, the galaxy as a whole. And, when the shuttle was launched and didn't disintegrate, they did not cheer or celebrate. Every one of the dozens of soldiers crammed into this shuttle remained silent, ready and rehearsing their idea of how the coming battle would go.

The remaining eezo was enough to create a few spare shield generators for some of the infantry. One was given to Captain Hackett, another was given to General Williams, who soundly refused to be anywhere but the front line for this fight. A technician named Borys Alenko was picked by the general from a covert attaché to the 115th to report on its operation and record any information the turians might not have shared; he got a shield generator as well. Castis ensured that Hannah got the last one. The turians offer a few of their eezo-based firearms to a select few humans and then keep the rest, the plan being to salvage better arms from their enemy once they board the cruiser, and focus on coordinated fire until then.

Hannah had gotten one of the eezo firearms, an assault rifle called a "Revenant." A big and heavy thing, it is painted a shade of ruby; it is more like a HMG than a rifle. She checks it again and again as Vakarian, seated besides her, looks around the shuttle.

"I'd say this is a worthy concession," he says to Hannah quietly, "I ask for one soldier and they give me whole squads and some officers to boot."

"We don't mess around when we're back into a corner and wounded," Hannah murmurs.

"It's that strength I admire, Hannah. For it's own sake, more than anything."

'I thought you wanted us to serve your empire."

"I do."

"Then why say something like that, Castis? Why not just be direct with it?"

Neither is looking at the other as they continue speaking.

"Hannah. Did you think I said all of that stuff as a pretense? That I was just trying to say 'you're powerful, and I want that power on my side?'"

"That is what you said."

"That's what you heard. I didn't dress up anything in pretty, encouraging words to make myself and my people sound more noble while declaring you to be our new subjects. I meant every word I said, even those you must have thought of as fluff."

"So what are you saying? You want us to rise up and bring new leadership to your stagnant empire? You want total upheaval? Seamless integration and cultural exchange, assimilation?"

"Nothing so specific."

"Then what?"

"I just want you in our empire. I admire your people's passion and resilience."

"But that can't be all of it."

"It is, Hannah. And I'm sorry, I don't know how to break through whatever is stopping you from being able to understand that."

"...But you don't speak for your people."

"Not as a whole."

"You said as much."

"I did."

"So anything you say is meaningless to any turian's perception hopes and wants for humanity except for your own. You're saying that you, yourself, hope we stick through what will most certainly be a painful process of absorption, because you are just curious to see what the end result is."

"More or less, yeah. I'm just trying to say I admire you. Humans. Yourself."

"So it could never be a promise of acceptance or ease."

Hannah thinks for a moment.

"Then again, I suppose I'm in the same boat. It doesn't matter what I think. I have no power, or sway over my people, even less so than you do over yours as an officer."

Castis nods. "Very true."

Hannah checks the Revenant one more time.

"I guess I'll just hope it goes well."

Castis looks down at his hand that Hannah had shaken back in the refugee shelter.

"And that we live to see it."

The inside of the archive on this planet is incredible. It's even larger than the one found on Menae by Oraka's forefathers. Indeed, he is able to pull up the ancient photographs taken by those lunar explorers millennia ago and confirm this. His technicians have already begun the process of analyzing everything within the database through the beacon-like storage centers at the heart of the ancient structure. Getting inside had been somewhat difficult, but fifty thousand years of neglect had ensured that they could find a way within with enough persistence. A collapsed wall opposite the side they approached the site from had deteriorated enough to be easily broken with a grenade; Oraka decided he would think about the consequences of desecrating a Prothean ruin later.

"Sir," Lilihierax says, calling over to the captain. I think we have what you were inquiring about over here."

"Let me take a look," Oraka says as he strides past the other turians to speak with the chief engineer. His eyes races across the reports being projected from Lilihierax's omni-tool; his own background, also based in engineering, enables him to quickly pick out and identify what he is looking for. He smiles and nods; the archive does have a transmission system, one that some others that the Council races have discovered had as well.

"You're sure about this, sir?" Lilihierax asks. Oraka is thankful that he's instilled enough of a sense of trust in his crew for them to speak freely once the cameras were off or away. He pats his chief engineer on the shoulder.

"Scared of reprisal from the jellies, Li?" he asks, snidely. Lilihierax fails to come up with and answer and just shrugs. Oraka continues, "Well, they're not here, and I'm sure the Illuminated Primacy would rather not leave an archive in batarian-occupied space. It's quantum entangled, yes?"

"That it is, sir."

"Use the complex's transmission relay to broadcast the following message to Palaven's quantum receiver outpost, authorization Sanctum-five-seven: 'Ship disabled, archive discovered, batarian contact. Possible abduction route, relay 314 plus. Trace location.'

Lilihierax pauses a moment as he starts the transmission. "Underway, sir. Estimated relative response time, within an hour, physical response ETA unknown. You think they'll send more frigates?"

"My mood has me wanting for a whole damn fleet, Chief. But I'll settle for a cruiser or two."

The initial boarding is rough. Deep down, Hannah knew that ramming the cruiser was the most likely method they would use to get inside the cruiser. That doesn't make the process of crashing through the side of an armored warship any more pleasant to experience. She counts herself as lucky for being reminded by Captain Hackett to affix her hardsuit's helmet properly well in advance, and as the one holding the largest gun on the shuttle, she has the honor of jumping into the fray first. With Vakarian backing her up, she runs out into the Shervock, finger down on the Revenant's trigger. The Shervock dropped a blast shield after the shuttle made its way through the hull, sealing them inside, but the kickback of the Revenant lets all who are in the immediate area know that, for the next few minutes, it is her and her comrades who hold power. Panicked batarians fall before the barrage of slugs pouring from the amazingly powerful weapon. It is unlike anything she's ever fired before in her life, and the catharsis is intoxicating.

Vakarian, aiming a powerful rifle called a "Mantis," vaporizes the head of an armored guard by a door left of the bay the shuttle crashed into. Before he had, Hannah had experienced a moment of panic, realizing too late that her enthusiasm to jump into the thick of it and start tearing through the bastards that stole her family led to her staying exposed for too long. Before his death, the guard had fired a full two-second burst from his own assault rifle at her, and she felt each one connect; shavings of metal striking her hardsuit at relativistic speeds, it should have killed her then and there. But that faint glow she had seen so many times as a precursor to the death of one of her comrades, this time it was protecting her; invigorated, she continues to fire, and Vakarian handles the guard just fine.

After the duo exit a mix of Castis' and Hackett's marines, with Hackett, Williams, and Alenko exiting last and sweeping around the back of the shuttle. A few stragglers are there, and the two officers and spec-ops are quick enough to dispose of them. Williams and Alenko drop their shields with submachine gun bursts, and Hackett uses his revolver to dome each of the unlucky fools before they have a chance to recover. Cleaning up the rest of the bay only takes so long; they've lost the element of surprise now, but the team's entry into this ship has gone without any casualties. The violence dies down, and they take stock.

"That's odd," Velite Nyx points out, "look at these warning messages." He points to a computer monitor at a work station on the left side of the bay, pushing the body of its operator out of the way, "The ship was on full alert before we got here."

"Good," Hackett says, "that means they've got another problem to deal with, which means less heat on us."

"Unless that problem is also a threat," Williams counters, "but that's no worry. We'll kill it all the same."

"Your soldiers should scrounge weapons and shields from the bodies here," Vakarian says, stepping up to the human officers. "As planned, we'll split into teams to cover more ground and take more of the ship over simultaneously. Two should be enough."

"Wait," Alenko says, checking something on an omni-tool he received from the turians. The human agent had taken to the device quite well; already, he was scrolling through it as if he had been using it all his life. "The schematic of the cruiser is should be here the database." He steps up to Nyx and accesses the terminal. Within seconds, he finds the schematic. "Here. Maybe with this, we can get a better idea of where to go."

"Wouldn't we already have a schematic from your databases?" Hannah asks Castis.

"This class of ship is fairly new. For that reason and because of the clearance process, I didn't have an archived copy of it in my omni-tool's database."

"Yeah," Nyx agrees, "makes the fact we lost it even more of a...what was that phrase...a 'kick in the teeth.'" Castis glowers at the young soldier. "S-sir? What's wrong?" Nyx asks.

"Let's not be bringing spirits down right now, Nyx," Castis says firmly, "this is a batarian ship, end of sentence. Understood?"

Nyx nods fervently. "Yes, sir."

"Here we are," Alenko announces. "There are several direct paths to the bridge, other cargo bays, and engineering from here, and the brig is a bit further past the latter. But, it looks like we might be able to snake around the cargo level to get to the brig faster, if that's something we want to do."

Harper, standing next to Anderson, Coré and Mitra, steps forward. "Sir?," he asks, addressing Hackett, What if we sent another, smaller team to scope out the brig to see how many of our people are there, and free them if they can?"

"Along with any non-human abductees, too." Anderson adds.

"That's good, I like it," Hackett agrees, "Castis, you should take a small team to take care of that. Shepard will go with you."

"I'll go too," Williams says, to the surprise of all present, "I want to see how a smaller squad of turians and humans operates in a closed space to see if this exercise in cooperation is worth anything in the long term. Alenko, you're coming with us. Shepard, give your machine gun to...Anderson. I'm sure they'll need it for clearing the wider hallways along the main paths through the ship."

Shepard steps towards the corporal, who is carrying an old, drum-fed automatic shotgun. Anderson handled the Revenant for a while during their night of reprieve, so she's confident he can handle it. He hands her his weapon and a spare drum, which she places on one of her hardsuit's waist hooks. "Give 'em hell, LC," Anderson says.

"And nothing but," Hannah replies.

"Nyx, Abrudas," Castis calls to his marines, "you're with the four of us."

Williams looks at Hannah. "You're on point, Lance Corporal. Alenko, tell us where to go."

"Yes, sir!" he replies. With that, Shepard, Vakarian, Nyx, Abrudas, Williams and Alenko separate from the rest of the assault force, and file into a narrow utility corridor that leads out onto walkways heading off between the walls of the ship. Over the next few minutes, they cover considerable ground. Regular reports from Hackett and the rest convey that the rest are making their way through the ship in two teams; their progress is gradual, but so far, the plan is working. Aside from a few bodies they find in the dimly lit walkways of the utility passages, Hannah's group do not encounter any batarians for quite some time. Those bodies alone tell a story; someone else is definitely making life hell for the four eyes.

Distant screams cut through the unnerving silence. They vanish as well, and are soon followed by the sound of something crashing against metal. The team advances, and Hannah rounds a corner to catch the tail end of a group of batarian soldiers running towards the source of the noise as well.

"Hostiles ahead, moving away," she says, "Don't think they saw us."

"Push forward," Williams orders. Hannah nods and continues ahead, shotgun at the ready. As they draw closer, they hear more gunshots, but closer than that, the sound of someone's voice. It's somewhat muffled by an electronic filter, has a distinct accent, and sounds very distraught. Hannah rounds another corner, and moving through a cloudy hallway, sees two figures close to the floor. She stops, trying to ascertain what she's looking at, and Castis steps past her, through the fog, and draws his handgun. One of the figures turns slowly to look at him. He is wearing a strange helmet, with a large crack running diagonally along the visor.

"Quarians," Castis says.

Chapter Text

Sparks brighten and dim as gunfire is exchanged between the turian-human squad and the batarian defenders in the halls of the Shervock. From the front, Hackett commands the team, slugs bouncing off his shield as he shouts and fires his revolver. Harper watches as his captain stands stalwart in the face of death; with each corner turned, the bluish wall around him almost dims completely, before it is once again struck with weapons fire and envelops Hackett in an aura borne of the imminent grievance of combat.

Harper’s Karelia rifle was left behind on the floor of the bay, replaced by the angular alien weapon he pried out of a dead batarian’s hands. He has to stop himself from habitually trying to reload the weapon, and thus far, it has overheated twice in his grip and nearly scalded him . But, loathed as he is to admit it, the rife is endlessly superior to the weapon he took his oath with. From its pseudo-endless supply of ammunition, he has killed over a dozen combatants. It’s a total power trip for the young corporal. His eyes keep drifting over to Coré, who he can see is similarly enthralled. This power, the cohesion and strength of humans augmented with this magnificent technology, even the questionable presence of the turians cannot detract from it, and the additional guns and bodies are certainly welcome.

Like the cavaliers of the wars in centuries past, the aggressors move through the ship swiftly. Having served at the tail end of one of the successor resource wars, he knew well of the feeling of being trapped within the doctrine of warfare that had evolved little since the turn of the 21st century. Perhaps he was a warhawk at heart, but what human who sought strength wouldn’t arrive at this point eventually? He had pieced together from the japes of these overconfident turians the stories of the “krogan” that their ancestors had all but stamped out as a threat to the galaxy, and internally, Harper envisioned them as a kind of “failed humanity” that had been consumed by war instead of mastering it. With each orange-and-red burst from an exploding terminal or an errant grenade they avoided, he sees in the smoke what he imagines the future to hold. Humans rising above this galactic example of a failure to harness the strength of a species, and making good on their demonstrated potential as warriors and conquerors. The turians would one day respect them as worthy rivals, not as the subjects they would no doubt start as should this battle be won. But that itself would be a powerful vehicle with while to guide humans toward his line of thinking. The rage of those reluctant to be subjugated could be directed into building up humanity’s glory amongst the stars, and taking them entirely for itself.

All this stirs in his mind as he rages hard, the rifle becoming more and more of a familiar presence in his hand. More than once, he catches the shocked side glance of one of the turians looking at him after he effortlessly cycles the heat sink just short of another overheat; already, a human is exceeding their expectations, scaring them with his potential. He grits his teeth, and a sharp smirk crosses his face.

Then he looks to one side as the team enters a command center around the center of the vessel, and he sees Coré’s head burst open from a sniper’s slug striking her square in the mouth. A part of him has wanted to tell the group to stop and gather the personal shield emitters from the fallen batarians in their wake, in order to better protect themselves. Some of the human soldiers had done so, but the group as a whole was moving too fast, and Hackett had made no attempts to make such an order. The turians, who already possess barriers of their own, never suggest it either, and have kept moving ahead after each encounter, eager to jump back into the fray and, presumably, put the human meat shields back on the frontlines. Coré vanishes as her body falls back into the group of human and turian soldiers, trampled beneath the feet of her allies and “allies.” If nothing else would have convinced Harper of the inherent disposability of humans in the eyes of these turians, and the need for humans to rise above them once they had used them as their ladder to the stars, then this cinched it.

The young corporal howls with anger and runs ahead of the rest of the group, Hackett’s orders to return muffled beneath the sounds of gunfire. Strafing the batarians, who have begun using basic mechs to supplement their dwindling numbers, he somehow barrels through the command center without getting so much as a grazing would, though a slug does annihilate his radio receiver as he exits on the far side of the large space and continues on. Fueled by pure adrenaline and anger, he gets it in his mind that he must trap the batarian captain under foot and execute them himself. Such a story would be galvanizing; he could make himself the initial symbol of human aggression and proficiency in war to start his grand vision, if he made it to the bridge before anyone else. He justifies it as revenge for Coré, but somewhere within, he knows that he’s already moved on from her. She’s a story now, a weapon to start his new war once he returns home to Earth.

In the halls of the ship, Harper catches the glimpse of an armored leg, and the tip of a turian’s head crest, disappearing around a corner as they move in the same direction, towards the Shervock’s bridge. He exhales and runs after the image of this turian upstart; he will not be outdone.

Chapter Text

Han takes deep, heavy breaths as the wound in his chest closes, and the medi-gel moves through his alien lungs. Remarkably, the suit he wears seals itself as Hannah withdraws her hands from his torso. His companion, Rael, watches with wide, fixed eyes as she pulls away, then places a hand on the other quarian’s suit collar.

“How are you feeling?” Rael asks, the anxiety in his voice palpable, even through the filter.

“Warm,” Han groans, wrapping a hand around Rael’s wrist, “I definitely have a fever. But, I’m not getting any more suit alerts; maybe a bit woozy from the antihistamines.” He coughs, motioning to assure Rael that it’s nothing major. “I apologize, but I don’t really feel like standing up right now.”

“With all that metal on you, I don’t see how you could,” Hannah jests. Rael looks at her, two bouncing white orbs taking her in with what feels like awe to Hannah.

“What did you do?” he asks.

“It’s called medi-gel. It’ll be like that knife wound never happened, and I’m hoping it helps with that fever. Sounds like poisoning; I can’t do much for that.”

“I doubt it’s poison,” Castis says, “Quarians have terrible immune systems. He’s sick because his suit got ripped open.”

“He’s right,” Rael admits, “But it would be a death sentence if you hadn’t shown up. We owe you our lives, alien.”

Hannah shakes her head, rising from the floor as Rael does the same. “Just consider it a gesture of friendly first contact. I’ve been getting in a few of those.”

“Yes, and you are, uh…?”

“My name’s Shepard. I’m a human. And we’re going to take this ship from the batarians and get them out of our home system.”

“This is your home…” A valiance Hannah does not quite understand radiates through the young man’s eyes. “Yes, I will help you! This is how I can repay you for for saving my fleet-brother’s life. The batarians have had me working on the ship as one of their rotation of slaves; I can help you get anywhere you need faster than you could on your own.”

“I’m pretty good with computers,” Alenko says as a means of playful challenging; Abrudas nods in agreement, though her expression seems a bit more snide. Meeting their challenge, Rael produces an omni-tool and turns to face the further end of the utility walkway. His three-fingered hand dances on the holographic screen for a moment; suddenly, the lights in the corridor cut, and it is as if the ship itself has vanished around them. Hannah feels the presence of her feet on the walkway grow lighter at the sudden onset of the darkness. The lights all come back, and her feet settle down again. Han turns, and even with the mask, she can make out the smug look of self-satisfaction he must have through those small, silver eyes.

“I cut life support to a section of the ship through a local control network I breached earlier. This corridor only lost lights and gravity for a moment; there’s a few signatures that match with tracker beacons for the on-ship guard in the rooms ahead, and they all just went very still.” Both Alenko and Abrudas stare at Rael, their previous self-assurance now disrupted. Abrudas even checks her own omni-tool, and it’s difficult to tell if her mandibles form an impressed smirk or an irritated sneer as she looks something over.

“If that’s what you’ve got, quarian,” Abrudas asks gruffly, “why not just vent them entirely?”

“I’m good, but I can’t fold space. If I tried that again on this network, it’d be easy for them to lock onto and make my omni-tool start spewing molten gel all over me. Learning when you’ve pushed far enough to get the last word is a key part of being an offensive engineer.”

“I’ll have to have you teach me some of your tricks,” Alenko offers.

“Later, lieutenant,” Williams asserts. He looks down at the still-ailing Han. “You share that skillset or are you more of a jarhead? You’re lounging around like one without his CO.”

Han chuckles, clearly not offended; in fact, he seems to fall in line perfectly with Williams’ demeanor. “Fighter and engineer in equal parts. No fever’s going to stop me now.”

“You can’t even stand, Han,” Rael protests.

At that moment, a chirp comes from Williams’ comms receiver. He puts a hand to his ear, and opts to project the audio to the group. “Hackett, talk to me.”

“We’ve run up against a wall, Williams!” the captain’s voice is accompanied by the sound of gunfire and whirring machinery. “We’re taking losses and one of my men just up and bolted like he has his blood up! We can’t get through the doors; they’re locking them down faster than we can get through them!”

“How close are you to the holding area?”

“Just a skip and a hop away according to these maps, but we can’t move!”

“Hold on, I’m sending technical backup. Alenko, you take the quarian with you and help Hackett get to those holding bays. Vakarian?”

“Sure thing. Abrudas, I want you on this too. Get those doors open and those people out of there, and take as many batarians with you as you can.”

Abrudas salutes. “Yes, sir.”

“Come on,” Alenko says, “You get on one side of him; I’ll get the other.” He crouches down to begin lifting Han off the floor as he joins them. Han looks back at his fleet-brother, and Hannah recognizes in both his and Rael’s eyes a familiar exchange of worry. When she first returned to active service, she had shared that same look with her husband and her son. She moves to step between Han and Rael, off to one side, imposing herself while not blocking their view of each other.

“Once we’re off the ship, we’ll have no problems helping with treatment,” she assures Rael, “What we have works for the turians; I’m sure it’ll work for you, too.”

“I’ll put my trust in your words,” Rael replies. He reaches out and places a hand on Han’s shoulder. “Keelah se’lai, Han.”

Again, Han laughs, despite the clear pain it causes. “Keelah se’lai. But don’t get sentimental yet. We’re going to have one hell of a welcome when we bring this ship back.” Rael nods. Alenko and Abrudas affirm their hold on Han, and walk off with him back the way the group came; The three vanish into the condensation at the far end of the utility corridor.

Castis approaches Rael and hands the quarian his handgun. “Bring the ship back?”

Rael sighs. “It’s a plan of ours. At the risk of sounding overly insistent, I’d prefer we discuss this after the imminent threat has been dealt with."

“Agreed. Nyx, on point with Shepard. Move out!”

“Don’t you even think about moving, you bird bastard.”

Harper has caught up to the turian. He had beaten all others to the bridge and stopped this interloper dead in his tracks before he did anything nefarious. A dozen possibilities as to what this alien was up to race through his mind. Perhaps Vakarian had sent him ahead to retrieve something before the humans had a chance to cotton on to it. Aware of his overzealous state of mind, he tries to calm himself as he keeps the rifle firmly trained on the turian’s back. Out beyond him, Harper can see the stars and the surface of the moon; the cruiser has entered lunar orbit and the satellite partially occludes the light from the sun, casting the bridge in a half shadow that makes it apparent that the alien is glowing ever so subtly. The turian turns slowly, and meets Harper’s gaze.

“Aren’t you bold,” he rasps snidely, “Alone, are you? Was that a wise idea, alien?”

Harper does his best not to let his nerves show. It begins dawning on him in real time just how much of a potentially horrid situation he’s placed himself in. Still, he focuses on keeping the rifle steady. He’s ready to fire, the turian is not.

“What exactly do you think I’m here to do?” the turian continues, “And what makes you think you have any right to interject yourself into it?”

Harper’s finger twitches on the trigger. “The batarians marched into our homes, slaughtered and stole our people, and you’re here acting in the shadows doing God knows what. I’m being proactive. I’m defending my world!”

“You don’t know anything, Jack.”

Hearing his name leave the turian’s mouth sends a cold shock running up his spine. He’s confident, no, certain, that this turian was not present back in Cairo. He would have no way to know his first name; it isn’t even on his uniform like his surname is, and even that’s hidden beneath his hardsuit.

“H-how…” He can barely form the word. The adrenaline is gone. The turian smiles wickedly, his mandibles stretching further than they reasonably should.

“And who am I? Take a listen. The universe is full of open secrets.”

His ears suddenly feel full; Harper tries to clear them while keeping his focus, but his throat is becoming dry and a splitting headache is forming in the front of his skull. His limbs go slack, and he falls to his knees, the rifle sliding out of his hands. A voice with no volume speaks a simple phrase in the recesses of his brain, and suddenly, everything clears.

“Arterius. Saren Arterius.”

Saren nods. “We welcome you.”

Harper looks across the turian’s figure while he moves. Dazed, he tries to process what he can in this numbed state. Something is wrong with the turian’s eyes. They look like mechanical implants, imbued with a sickly indigo incandescence that he can only see in the shadow cast by the moon. With thin, quick breaths, the numbness leaves, and he is paralyzed.

Something, an image, burns into his brain; a great machine, a monster, a god, its many legs encircling him as he gazes up into its tremendous, yellow eyes. Dwarfed by the immensity, he can only stare at its magnificence; Saren steps through the image, and grabs the human by the chin, pulling him in close.

“Yes. You’ll do, Jack. But you’ll need time. Prepare for your own little righteous war against a galaxy that’s more than you’ll ever grasp. We’ll be waiting.”

And everything goes dark. The memories of the bridge, they’re leaving, like they’re being extracted, psychological tissue for a biopsy performed elsewhere, and even the sensation of such a replacement fades as he drops into stillness on the floor of the bridge. Saren raises a finger to his receiver, picking up the rifle from the floor as he does.

“Balak. We’re ahead of schedule. Set Dhorven on his way, then break for the red planet.”

Chapter Text

“Understood, thank you, admiral.” Dhorven says. The safe area in the bulkhead under the bow of the Shervock has proven safe, just as Balak assured it would be. Now a fleet from Khar’shan was bound for Relay 314, and beyond that, the human relay. It wasn’t for his sake alone; the Hegemony was making large plays to hold more territory in the opening days of the war, and the Shervock happened to be along a slaving route that was deemed particularly valuable, no doubt due to the billions of humans on Earth. If they could set up a defensive line fast enough, then they would be able to hold this system, even at a numerical disadvantage. The labor resources alone would keep them going for years; with such a boon, victory would be more firmly within the Hegemony’s grasp. With that confirmation, Dhorven smiles, and opens a comm to Balak.

“Corporal,” says Dhorven, “Tell the remaining security forces to move to the escape pods. We’ll reclaim the Shervock once the Forward Fleet arrives. She won’t be moving anywhere they can’t catch up, even if these human pests and their turian lapdogs gain control of the helm. I’ll be waiting for you in Launch Hall 3. Copy?”

Dead air. Dhorven retries the comm connection.

“Balak. Balak, you copy?”

More static, and then a crackling voice.

“I hear you, general,” Balak's voice says solemnly through the other end, “and I pity your inability to see past your own ambitions. Goodbye.”

Dhorven waits a moment, trying to process what he just heard. Then he roars into the comm.

“What the fuck is this, Balak?! You get your ass down here and maybe I’ll only put out two of your eyes for insubordination! You hear me?!”

Silence.

“Balak?!”

Something is pounding on the door to the hold. The electronic lock fails. Dhorven turns to face what has to be one of his men coming to retrieve him after Balak’s sick joke of a check-in.

The door opens, and a human enters. His eyes are blue and have an unusual pattern, probably from a cybernetic implant.

“How the hell did you-”

The human puts a slug in his head, and then leaves without so much as a second look.

“Captain!” Lilihierax calls out.

Oraka turns to face the chief engineer. From behind his helmet visor, he can see the growing shock and fear across his countenance. “Well?” he demands, “Don’t just stare at me. Spit it out!”

“Sensors on the Havinclaw indicate that several shuttlecraft have entered the atmosphere. Their trajectory projects them as heading to this location!”

Every turian present pauses and turns to look at Oraka. The captain curses and unslings the Avenger from the back of his hardsuit; his own preference for volus weaponry used to make him embarrassed to wield the gun in front of his soldiers, but with the respect one earns from experience in leadership, the alien gun now becomes an icon of decisiveness. “They’ve known about the archives. Damn it! Get Sparatus on the comm; I want all power diverted to the ship’s guns and to have them turned on this location. Pack up and move out! NOW!”

The soldiers immediately abandon their stations and begin moving to flee. Oraka gives Lilihierax a hand gesture, and the engineer nods; with a flick of the wrist, he tosses a HE charge into the central collection of storage centers, and then joins the captain in hightailing it for the exit. Behind them, fifty-thousand years of knowledge is obliterated in an instant, anything not saved by the engineer lost forever. If the batarians hadn’t gotten to it first, at least.

Better to make the call now than to regret not making it later.

The alarms are blaring again. Liara, of course, has never served in a commando unit at her young age; in fact she never had military aspirations to begin with. But Lady Benezia had ensured that her daughter received some extra lessons during her biotic gymnastics education, early introductions to proper stance and form befitting those who served the Asari Republics in armed service. It was a practical step at the time, an extra degree of expertise in an activity she already enjoyed doing. Now, she stands among acolytes of her mother and actual commandos, stripped of their weapons and starved out of the ability to use their innate biotic prowess at any meaningful level, but that matters little. They, and every other prisoner in this holding block, are angry, stubborn, and ready to risk what they have left for a chance at life. It took some coaxing, but the elcor, Harrot, stands ready as the batarian death squad opens the door. They had drugged the elcor prisoner to keep him under control, but as clumsy as his movements are, he is able to use his body like a battering ram to bowl over the batarians, even as he’s peppered with slugs. If he does feel the pain, he doesn’t show it; triumphantly, he lords over the incapacitated batarians with blood running down his thick skin.

“I will take no more of this,” Harrot flatly declares, “I will live in splendor, and leave this memory behind. We must go now, Lady Benezia.”

The matriarch nods. She turns to her followers, and to the prisoners at large. Her deep, matronly voice carries across the chamber with a slight echo, giving an enlarged presence to her words.

“Now is the time we strike back. Most of you are not asari, or soldiers, but that matters little. These heathens have taken you from your homes, your families, and left you to die in the dark. The comforting light of Athame’s guidance into the next life is not for us, yet. We will find our way off this ship, back to our homes, back to our families, and we’ll do it together!”

Short and simple, but rousing; the prisoners are reinvigorated and cheer in response. She gestures to the commandos, and they rush over to the batarians. The sounds of necks cracking fills the air, and the asari fish through their equipment, salvaging shields, firearms, and most critically, field rations, which they distribute amongst themselves. Liara is handed one by a commando, and stands by her mother as she organizes and directs her women and the prisoners.

“Liara,” Benezia asks of her daughter, “keep that child close, and follow behind me. Your job is to keep yourselves safe before anything else.”

Liara nods, and looks down to John. He clings to her leg, eyes on the desiccated nutrient bar she has in her hands. She opens it, and breaks a piece off to give to him; he takes a bite, grimaces, and refuses the rest. With a chuckle, she begins eating it herself; the blue shimmer of her biotics returns, startling John. She pulls him back to her and smiles.

“Don’t be scared,” she assures him, “this is a part of who I am.”

“Can you fly?” John asks, a hint of excitement in his voice.

“Well…I can float.”

Through the Shervock, Shepard and company are repeatedly routed and delayed from getting to the bridge. Even with Rael helping them crack through security faster than they could ever hope to otherwise, the batarians refused to back down, supplementing their forces with combat mechs. Indeed, there are more machines than flesh and blood soldiers, indicating that a significant chunk of the troops who staff the vessel have either been killed, or escaped elsewhere. The latter is more troubling; if they took slaves with them, if John and Liam were among them, then no number of dead batarians would help her get them back.

Communications with Hackett’s team come in and out. Rael manages to break through a local jamming signal, and Alenko’s voice comes through. “We’ve been diverted, but we’re moving closer to the bridge. I don’t know where the hell Harper’s gone off to.”

“Forget him, focus on the mission!” Williams barks back. “Helmet-head, how close are we to the command deck?”

“Less than thirty meters from Alenko’s pinged position,” Rael reports, “From there, the command deck is only twenty meters up. Assuming they haven’t barricaded the stairs, or we can break through what is there, it’ll be less than a minute!”

“All right, double time! Forward, forward, forward!” At Williams’ hollering, all those present rush ahead, out of the last stretch of corridors and into an open space, a communal area by the looks of it, though still spartan and lined with tubing. They do not even get to glimpse the stairs before another volley of mass accelerator slugs start ripping through the air towards them. Shepard and Castis dive for cover, while Williams and Rael hang back behind the entryway. The young Nyx is caught between these two groups, and he hesitates as he watches his commanding officer dive away. It’s just long enough for the rounds to rip through his shields, and then through him. His left arm and mandible fly off as the slugs shred him to bits; his body hits the floor with a dull thud, and a piece of his armor breaks off, stabbing into Castis’ fringe and speckling him with dots of the veilite’s blood. The centurion freezes, then fruitlessly reaches out of cover towards the body of his dead colleague.

“Fuck! Nyx, no!” he screams.

“Castis, get back!” Shepard warns him. She grabs him by the back of the collar and pulls him away from the body, exposing herself just long enough for one of the larger mechs to fire a rocket off at her. The projectile collides with the floor behind her, ripping it open, and the metal under her feet is torn away; she goes sliding backwards, and with a gutter yell, tumbles backwards and into the hole. Castis stops short of following her, his extended hand now turned from Nyx’s body to Shepard’s vanishing silhouette in the darkness below. He is unable to grab her before she falls out of sight.

“HANNAH!”

“Left flank! They’re coming up the side of the ship!” Sparatus cries, trying to return fire with his Predator. The turians and the batarians exchange shots across the red dirt; most of the batarian shuttles have landed around the Havinclaw, boxing the Hierarchy troops in and forcing them on the defense. The Havinclaw’s guns have been spent reducing the archives to rubble, and the power is now completely gone from the ship after the shuttles attacked. They have nowhere to run, and not even a wall to put their backs to.

“That shuttle’s coming in for another strafing run!” Lorival calls out. Oraka turns his head upward and sees the one still-airborne craft bearing down on them. A grenade goes off nearby; he merely stumbles, but pieces of his soldiers are sent flying; they’re down to under fifteen, the rest slaughtered outside or cooked inside the ship’s hull when the attack started. But a turian’s duty is not to lay down and die; it is to die while doing your damndest to make sure that doesn’t happen. Even if there’s only one survivor, the fight was worth it.

The shuttle strafes the ground and pulls back up into the sky, having missed its targets for now. Oraka looks out to the shuttles parked around them, and sees one to their right flank whose crew has nearly been taken out. Only two batarians remain hiding behind it, and he can tell they are inexperienced, or unprofessional, from how they both hide to let their guns cool down simultaneously. Without air support, they are as good as dead; this is the chance he needs to take.

“Lorival, get to that shuttle and take it for us! Do some damage. Li, you’re with me, give her cover! Everyone, hang on!” Despite the gunfire, his voice manages to reach all the turians who are left, and they give a prideful holler in return, which turns into a chorus of spiteful screams as they redouble their rage focused on the enemy. Lilihierax and Oraka swing out of cover, slugs peppering their shields, as they give covering fire to the pilot as she runs for the shuttle. It speaks to her skill as she’s able to take out both batarians behind the craft on her own. Her shield nears its limit in blocking the crossfire as she reaches for the hatch.

And then a sniper’s bullet from across the killzone breaks it, and punches through her skull. She falls to the ground, dead.

Oraka does not react verbally, but he charges out after her. He knows she’s gone; but someone has to reach that shuttle, and he decides to put his own life on the line in this do-or-die situation rather than order another soldier to make the charge. Behind him, Lilihierax pauses for a moment, extending an arm and activating his omni-tool to launch a hack attack on the door of the shuttle. He’s successful, and the hatch automatically begins to swing open. Had he not done so, then even if Oraka made it safely, he would have had to manually open the door, something he or Lorival could have done with at least some covering fire, but the chance of which got lower and lower with each fallen turian.

Fitting then, that following this action, that same sniper would zero in on Lilihierax, and like Lorival before him, take the last chip out of his shield and pulverize his cranium in the same shot. His body flies backwards and slams against the ruined hull of the Havinclaw so hard that it breaks the bones in his corpse, which crumples into the red grit. Sparatus screams for his captain at the sight of this.

Blood pumping, Oraka seizes the controls; he has not flown a shuttle in a very long time, but all he needs from the craft is for it to act as an artillery substitute. The remaining turians, without being ordered, turn their focus to providing suppressing fire to give him time to get in the air. A couple of the batarians get the same idea, but he’s already moving up. By the time they’re climbing in their shuttles, he’s piloting this one like it’s a fighter. Yelling as he squeezes the trigger, the shuttle’s guns roar to life, and obliterate two of the parked batarian crafts and the soldiers around them. He pulls around, coming head to head with the batarian harrying them from the sky. Both pilots fire; Oraka has a bead on the other guy first. The shuttle bursts into a fireball as he rolls out of the way, positioning himself to make his own strafing run on the remaining batarians.

As he comes around and accelerates, he spots a glint of light swiveling towards him. That damned sniper; he grips his teeth and lines up the targeting computer to take him out first. But suddenly, he recognizes the silhouette of the sniper, in cover along with the batarians. It’s not a batarian at all; it’s a turian.

It’s Saren Arterius.

Oraka hesitates, shocked; somehow, despite what he’s seen the man do, he feels betrayed. He was a Spectre, an arm of the hawkish Primarchs and the Council alike, but he was still a turian. A part of Oraka cannot fathom what he’s seeing, and it gives Saren enough time to put an armor-piercing round right through the shuttle, aimed squarely at the cockpit. The round misses Oraka, but annihilates the ships computers and damages the connection between the controls and the stabilizers. The shuttle begins to roll uncontrollably; it takes of Oraka’s focus and will to pull the craft back up. From out the virtual window, he watches helplessly as the batarians move out of cover and go to snuff his men out completely. He wants to go back, to make another attack run and stop this, but the shuttle is barely holding together as it is.

In just under fifteen seconds, they kill every last man. Oraka howls, damning Saren and the spirits who let him get this far, as he walks up to Sparatus and runs him through with an omni-blade.

If even one turian is left alive, the fight was worth it.

Someone has to tell the Hierachy about this. Someone has to be able to do something.

With tears streaming down his face, he orients the shuttle skyward, and hurtles out of the atmosphere. As he does, he is frantically attempting to seal the bullet holes with omni-gel, hoping to form a protective layer to keep atmospheric integrity, before doing the same with the computer. He wails as he restarts the barrier monitoring system, and puts the last bit of omni-gel he has left into the stabilizers. The shuttle begins rattling. He falls to his knees and prays.

Chapter Text

Hannah stirs, and rises to her feet. Her shotgun has been lost somewhere in the fall. Looking up, she sees the marks where her boots scraped against the wall as she plummeted. There were enough ledges and pipes for her to bounce between without gaining too much velocity that she’s landed wherever she is without any injury beyond soreness.

“Castis! General!” she cries back up the shaft ripped open by the explosion. She gets no response, and instead turns to figuring out where she is. In the dark by herself without so much as a knife; she tries to reassure herself with the memories of her mandatory unarmed combat training, but with what enemies have been put before her, it is only so much comfort.

Her footfalls echo in the unlit halls. With her hands, she guides herself through the labyrinth. Hannah’s mind begins to drift to memories of ancient poetry. Of Theseus and the Minotaur. She can feel the warm breath of the monster stalking that far-from-home hero creeping down the back of her neck.

Then she realizes: she’s not imagining the breath. It’s really there.

Saren closes his omni-tool nodding to Balak as the remaining batarians gather behind the corporal.

“The engineer had the data from the archive,” he says, “The transfer has been completed.”

“You know the deal, Spectre,” Balak asserts, his soldiers raising their buns to train them on the turian, “we see what you’ve got in your database before we let you go. The council gets nothing we can’t counter, and they get less than we do.”

“To maintain my cover, yes, yes. You’ve done nothing but insist upon that check from the moment we organized this plan. Step forward, batarian. I’m waiting.”

Balak scoffs, and approaches Saren. He brings up his omni-tool and runs a full scan on Saren and every computer he has on his person. It’s outright invasive, but Saren has willingly disabled every firewall and protection he has, as per his agreement. Balak’s omni-tool sifts through Saren’s files at great speed, and within seven seconds returns the final results. “I’m surprised,” Balak says, “we agreed on a 50% deletion of files Council-side, but you’ve only kept 30%.”

“It makes more sense if the destruction of potential knowledge is a little more severe than an even split,” Saren replies, “and given the Council’s dismissal of the Hegemony’s knowledge capital, it’ll further persuade them to buy the interpretation that you may have chosen to destroy everything instead of keeping anything for yourself.”

“But your kind destroyed the archives.”

“Another example of the Council’s hypocrisy for you to use when instructing those permitted to know about what has transpired here today.”

Balak grins, and nods. “It’s been a pleasure doing business with you, Arterius.”

“Our business isn’t done,” Saren insists as he steps forward, making all of Balak’s men flinch. “I can still move resources to help your war, Balak, don’t forget that. I don’t care who wins, it affects me and my work little. But you still have a part of the agreement to keep. Break it, and it will cost you dearly.”

“I am a professional, and once I am promoted in the Hegemony thanks to these files, you’ll have your wish granted. This machine will be built. But it will not be used against us.”

“The only place this machine will be used is in Council space. In fact, I intend to use it at the Citadel itself.”

“Even so, the project will take years to complete with the alterations you’ve specified.”

“I’m a patient man, and I serve a cause that always takes the long road.”

“Very well. We’ll be in touch. Move out!”

Balak and his men go to leave in their shuttles; one is left behind for Saren. He’ll check it for traps before he leaves, and then go make a sweep for Oraka. If the arrogant twit escaped the atmosphere successfully, Saren will have to silence him, but the most likely outcome is that he’s already dead, or stranded in space and soon to be lost. The only other loose end at this point could be those quarians, but they’re of no concern in his mind; to them, he was simply a Spectre behaving as those tall tales said they did: ruthlessly, violently, and fanatically in the name of the Council. He would always be seen as their champion, no matter what the quarians might say.

Saren steps into the shuttle, and launches off the ground. With a flick of his finger, he reactivates the Havinclaw; the bug he installed in their power management system when he first boarded still remains, and brings the ship back to life. He sets the parameters to put the eezo core into critical state; with too much electricity running through it, coupled with the remaining ammunition onboard the ship, the ensuing detonation will obliterate everything, removing all traces of the battle and making it seem like a crash instead. Satisfied, he flies off into the sky on the shuttle. Exiting the atmosphere, he grins as the blue flare of the distant detonation below him fills the periphery of the virtual window. Shutting the window off, he begins his scan for Oraka’s shuttle. Like a predator in the wild, he eyes the radar and emissions screen, waiting for anything to appear so that he may pounce on it.

Nothing appears. If Oraka is not dead already, he should be soon. And if he ever reemerges, Saren will take care of it then.

This leg of his work is done. He races away from the red planet, out into the starry void. There, a flagship awaits. Something glorious, the true source of his drive to succeed at any cost.

When nothing immediately happens, but the wave of breath continues to wash over her back and down her neck, Hannah decides to turn around. A part of her was vehemently against it, as if looking at the presence would invite it to become real, and dangerous. But her circumstances being what they were, she had become hardened enough to spite her own fears and self-preservation. That’s what a marine does, after all. Slowly, she turns, and upon realizing where the breath is coming from, looks up.

On the ceiling, imprisoned with metal chains and electric restraints holding them there, was another alien. This one was enormous, a great reptilian head on a bulky body with a hump, faded red armor covering everything but that scaled face. They have a headplate above their brow covered with deep grooves and scars that told unheard stories of many battles. Two eyes with blood-red irises, the pupils constricting as they met Hannah’s, reminds her of a turtle’s or a snake’s. The alien huffs and another wave of warm, and now noticeably odorous breath, sweeps across her. She bears the stench and asserts her gaze on the trapped creature above her.

“For a big guy, you sure are quiet,” she muses.

“Cute,” the alien says, his voice deep and gravelly, reverberating in her ears more strongly than the natural flange of the turians, “you think you’re hot shit already, newcomer. But considering where you are, I’m guessing it’s been a rude awakening.”

Hannah does a double take. She honestly did not expect such snark and practiced attitude from this brute. She thinks of something about books and their covers, and then inspects the restraints keeping the alien fixed to the ceiling.

“Why’ve they got you up there?” she asks.

The alien gives a bitter laugh. “Too much of a buzzkill. You kill a dozen or so batarians when they raid a colony you’re hunting a bounty on, and they chain you up. Keep you separate from the rest so you won’t be a problem. Draw knives down your neck in the places where it hurts the most, but won’t kill ‘ya. Real poor hosts. But that’s okay.” His stare becomes intense, bloodthirsty. “I’ll pay them back in kind. That's how Urdnot treats all their enemies, alien or krogan.”

“You’re name’s Urdnot, then.”

“My clan name. Call me Wrex. Don’t wear it out, or I might have to kill you and take your name instead.”

“I don’t know if the name ‘Shepard’ suits you, Wrex.”

“Shepard. Shepard. It rolls well off the tongue. Maybe I’ll take it from you anyway. Unless you cut me down.”

“You’re gonna be a problem if I do that.”

“Only for the batarians. You want that, don’t you, Shepard?”

“What I don’t want is a rogue marauder endangering the other prisoners on this ship. I can see exactly what you are, Wrex. You’re gonna peel through anyone, not just batarians, to get out of here.”

“You’re keen. It doesn’t change anything, though. You’re dead on your own.”

“Better to die trying to save my child than unleash something that could absentmindedly kill him.”

Wrex’s expression changes; he actually seems surprised. “Your child is here?” he asks, voice full of sonder, “A son? He was taken?”

“I’m not leaving this ship unless he’s alive.”

Wrex looks away for a moment, considering something. Hannah had not expected him to be so empathetic to the prospect of family; he looked like a being that existed solely for himself, and she had started to convince herself that all of his kind would be that way.

“This isn’t something I usually do, Shepard, but I’ll do it just this once. I promise not to hurt anyone who isn’t a batarian. As long as they don’t shoot me first. After that, all bets are off. And once we’re done, we’re done. I’m taking the first ship out of here I see.” He sounded almost like a tired parent, trying to make a compromise with their insistent child. Maybe Wrex understood even more than Hannah expected, and he wouldn’t be the first alien she trusted this way thus far.

“Fine. Let me see what I can do. I’ll have to find something to get you down from there with.”

“Shouldn’t be too hard. Someone’s coming down the corridor to the left. I can hear their footsteps.”

“I don’t hear anything.”

Wrex chuckles. “Because your ears are weak. Look at those things.”

Hannah shakes her head, and presses herself against the wall adjacent to the intersection attached to the corridor Wrex indicated. Indeed, she hears quiet footsteps approaching after a moment. She tenses up, preparing to lunge out at the first sight of movement.

The seconds stretch out into eternity, and then a blur, the profile of a pistol appears. Immediately, Hannah shouts and tackles the person around the corner. They cry out and fall to the floor underneath her. The two struggle, as the stranger tries to raise the gun on her, and Hannah prepares to incapacitate, possibly even kill them. But then her limbs go stiff, as do the other’s. They stare at each other. Wrex looks between them, confused as to what’s going on.

“Liam?” Hannah gasps.

“Oh…Hannah! Hannah! Holy shit!” Liam exclaims, wearing that handsome smile of his. Her husband lets go of the pistol and moves to embrace her. Stunned, she draws him in, and as he wraps his arms around her, the emotional dam breaks, and she sobs tears of relief into his shoulder. He runs a hand up and down her back soothingly, then pulls back, takes her head in his hands, and kisses her.

“Ugh,” Wrex grumbles, “what a boring courtship dance. You both reek.”

“Shut…the fuck up, Wrex,” Hannah says, half laughing as looks up at the krogan. Liam stares at the krogan, then raises an eyebrow at Hannah.

“You can understand that thing, too?” he asks.

“I’m shocked you can,” says Hannah.

“They put these things under our skin when they brought us onboard the ship, and ever since then, yeah.”

“That would be the translators. I’ve got one, too. We have alien allies now, Liam. The turians, they’re helping us push the batarians back.”

“Yeah, I’ve gotten to know some turians in the holding cells. A bunch of them helped break us out after another alien started a revolt in another area. I didn’t see that part, but I ran out, trying to find John, but I got separated from them, and then I got lost, and-”

“Liam. Do you know where John is?”

“No. I’m so sorry, Hannah, they took him from me. I-I couldn’t do anything-”

“Shh, shh. It’s okay. We’re going to get him back, together.”

Liam gathers himself and nods in agreement. Wrex grumbles again, and both humans turn to look at him.

“The turians will bring you nothing but misery once they’re done “helping” you here. Turn ‘em away. It’s the best piece of advice you’ll ever get.”

Hannah pauses, then rises to challenge Wrex. “Maybe we’ll be losing something after this, but it’s better than genocide and slavery at the hands of the batarians.”

“Genocide and enslavement is exactly what you’ll get. They’re not as tricksy as salarians, but that just means they’ll look you in the eye when they pull the trigger, or sterilize you. Like they did to my people!”

Hannah’s voice hitches in her throat. She recalls something Castis said about another species, one who had used nuclear weapons, being restricted to their homeworld, and she remembers the dismissive, almost contemptuous twang to his words as he said it. “Is that…did they do that?” Wrex nods, a single, strong, angry nod.

“Hannah,” Liam interjects, tugging on her shoulder as he also stands up, “let’s not do this now. We need to find John. What do we do?”

Hannah shakes off the discomfort, putting it aside for the moment. “Yes…yes, you’re right. Here.” Hannah leans down and scoops the handgun off the floor. It is a bulky, heavy thing, and she turns it upward towards Wrex. The krogan doesn’t even flinch as she fires a shot at the chains, breaking several of them. She does the same with two more shots, and all of the chains fall away, swinging gently as they hang from the ceiling. “Okay, Wrex, I don’t know how I’m going to do this without hitting you, but-”

“Shoot me.”

“What?”

“Do it, Shepard!”

She pulls the trigger before he even finishes the sentence. The slug embeds itself in his neck, thick crimson blood pooling around the wound. Wrex grunts in pain, and then screams like an animal. His pupils dilate, and the electric restraints around him begin to rattle. Hannah slowly lowers the pistol, and she and Liam watch, equally astonished and scared as Wrex moves his arms outwards, bending the restraints through sheet strength. Once his arms are free enough, he takes a proper hold of the restraints and pulls them even further apart. They give way under his strength and body weight, and he follows from the ceiling to the floor, which he does with enough force to launch Hannah and Liam into the air by a foot. The humans land, regain their footing, and hold their breath as the Krogran stands up towering over them with a crazed look in his eyes. Wrex smiles.

“I need to find my hammer.”

Chapter Text

“Back, back, get them back! Hold the line!”

Hackett barks at human and turian alike, the open floor of the commons area that comes before the route to the bridge having become a battleground. Even as he ducks in and out of cover, using up what is left of the ammunition he has for his revolver, he still marvels at the scale of the interior. Human warships on the seas have always been cramped by necessity; no exceptions come to mind in the chaos of this moment. Surely, this would count as “cramped” within the expanse of space, or to a populace used to population numbers that could be in the trillions between the collective races of this “Council,” but the commons are large enough to serve as a staging area, a galley, an emergency medical center; he sees so much room to work with, now all presently occupied by what has to be the last brunt of the batarians aboard this ship. Some minutes ago, a squadron of fighters landed aboard the cruiser, and bulwarked the remaining defense. While they do have the batarians against the wall, their forces have been diminished. Castis’ turian marines have been reduced to just under a dozen. While the turian officer, along with Williams and another stranger, had regrouped with them shortly after Alenko, Abrudas and another wounded alien did, nearly all their powder weapons have run dry, and the remaining marines are struggling against the batarians and their mechs.

“Dammit, Hackett, we’re going to be steamrolled!” William shouts. The new alien, a “quarian,” covers the general with a handgun and an electric burst from his omni-tool as Williams drags a wounded Anderson back behind cover. Anderson, mobile but in pain, shrinks down and begins treating the gunshot wound through his arm with a packet of medi-gel and some gauze. “We need to pull back and find another way around!”

“There is no other way!” Castis shouts into his comm, “If we let the pressure up now, they’ll move to the bridge, lock it down, and jump out of the system with us aboard! Even one more ship with more reinforcements would be a death sentence; we can’t let them run for help!”

To his left, Hackett swears he hears the sounds of distant gunfire in an adjacent corridor. Then it grows closer, and he realizes his hearing hasn’t gone bad from the constant cracks and explosions from gunshots and bombs. From behind a translucent blue film that spills from the hands and bodies of a group of blue, lithe women, a new group emerges into the commons area. Those at the front, humans and aliens alike, carry scavenged weapons to protect groups of unarmed civilians he can see moving behind them. Not from one but three different levels in the commons area these newcomers step out, laying down fire from the higher balconies of this grand space. He smiles as he makes eye contact with one of the blue alien women, a stern figure in a bright yellow dress; next to her, one of her compatriots carries a wide-eyed human child, safe behind the barriers his guardians project around them.

“Keelah!” Rael says gleefully, “They’ve broken out. My fleet-brothers and sisters are among them as well! Vakarian, we must get them out of this killzone!”

Castis nods. “Hackett, Williams, you have the larger share of troops. I think I have to leave this to you.”

“Don’t be so sure, Vakarian.” A female voice, distinctly turian, comes in over the comms.

“Kandros! You’re alive! What happened to the Maskus?”

“Our corvette was boarded and the batarians actually bothered to take most of us prisoner. We have a matriarch up here calling the shots, Lady Benezia, but with you here, I’m ready to submit my soldiers to your authority. Vyrnnus, Pallin! To Vakarian’s side once we descend to the first level! Everyone else, move with the civilians!”

The additional firepower is enough to push the batarians back into cover for a moment; one of their mechs detonates with enough force to shake the entire commons area.

“Get them through!” Hackett shouts.

“Move it, move it!” Williams adds, “Marines, not a single shot gets to the prisoners that doesn’t kill you first! Hold the line!” He is met with a wave of oorah’s in response.

Gradually, the prisoners are able to move down or across the commons space. Hackett, Williams, and Vakarian direct the forces available to them, and the soldiers joining from the prisoner pool strengthen them even more. But the power of the remaining batarian mechs keeps the battle at an effective standstill. Vakarian is joined by Kandros and the two marines she ordered to go with her; a massive grey alien charges along the wall behind them to give Kandros cover with their body while she moves in. Some slugs catch the quadrupedal alien in their side, but if they feel anything, they don’t show it, and they reach the other side and join the other escapees soon after. The lady in the yellow dress, who is easy enough to discern as Benezia, ducks down with Hackett, Alenko and Williams, accompanied by the other alien who is carrying the human boy.

“You’re bringing a kid to the front lines?” Williams questions her.

“This entire ship is a battlefield,” Benezia replies, “The safest place is that which can provide the most protection from assault, and right now, that’s here with the barriers and cover, until we can move the whole group of prisoners to the areas of the ship your forces have already torn through.”

“Those blue fields you project, those are shields?”

“Somehow, in those days, biotics never came up, did they?” Castis muses before stepping out of cover to fire a sniper round at an infantry mech. He takes its head clean off, and before his shield breaks, he ducks back down. “Put short, some people can use eezo nodules that form in their bodies to project barriers, manipulate objects; a whole bunch of stuff, and we call them biotics. All these asari are biotics.”

“Interesting,” Alenko says, quickly acclimating to the situation out of necessity, “Can you give us cover to move some of our wounded out with you to the back of the cruiser?”

“Of course,” Benezia affirms with a nod. This momentary calm is interrupted by an explosion of dust and debris, stemming from a hole that has suddenly been made in the wall to their left. A monstrous roar echoes from the hole, and out of it lunges a red and beige blur bathed in the same biotic glow as the asari. The blur collides with a batarian trooper after breaking through the deployed cover he is hiding behind, sending his mangled body flying. With uproarious laughter, the large being, a reptile-like alien, spins around and sweeps up more troopers and mechs with the giant, pneumatic warhammer he wields, shrugging off shots that would be fatal to anyone else.

“Where the hell did the krogan come from?!” Castis exclaims.

“Found him down below, Vakarian,” a voice from the hole says, “Seemed like an interesting idea to bring him to the front.” Everyone turns to look at the source of the voice; Hannah stands there, a human male behind her, and both stare in overjoyed shock at the sight of the boy in the younger alien lady’s arms.

“MOM! DAD!” he shouts.

“John!” Hannah and the man reply. The boy leaps from the asari’s grasp and runs up to Hannah; though he has never met him before, Hackett figures out quickly that it must be the lance corporal’s husband. He nods, happy with the reunion in the midst of this chaos. The boy and his parents embrace, then break apart a second later, still recognizing the ongoing battle.

“Oh, thank god,” Hannah sighs, “It’s going to be okay, Johnny. Here, stay with your father. Liam, back up.”

“But, Mom-!” John tries to protest, but Liam pulls him close before he gets a word in edgewise.

“Your mother still has work to do,” Liam says, “and the best thing we can do is keep ourselves safe so she doesn’t have to worry about us. Come on.”

John looks pained, but Hannah gives him a gentle look, running a hand along his face. “I’ll be okay. I always come home, don’t I? So make sure you do too, my little soldier, and be brave.”

“What about Liara?” John asks. Hannah raises an eyebrow, and then looks to her left as the asari woman next to her taps her shoulder.

“Yes, uh, hello. I’m Liara.” The rampage provided by the krogan out in the fray gives them time to continue this aside. “I’ve been looking after your son in the hold. He’s quite a bright one!”

Hannah looks uncertain, and then her face settles on one of appreciation, thankfulness. She looks back to John. “We’ll all make it out of here, John. I’ll do my best to make sure.”

“Okay…get ‘em, Mom.” John says with a triumphant swing of his little fist.

“We’ll move you out of here with the next wave of prisoners,” Benezia says to Liam, “Liara, get ready to go. I’ll stay here and help end this fight.”

“No, mother!” Liara says, “The prisoners need you to lead them, to keep them calm. I can stay.”

“That’s not-”

“I’ve had enough experience, mother. I can do this. Believe in me, please!”

The matriarch looks uncomfortable, but that appearance vanishes in an instant as she makes up her mind.

“Stay close to the soldiers, Liara, and don’t try to play the hero. Today is about survival through victory, not glory.”

“Yes, mother, I understand.”

“Sir, come along, we need to go now!” As Benezia rises to her feet, motioning for Liam and John to join her, a batarian on the far side of the commons area barks another order; more mechs enter the space, arriving from elevators and the ramps from the bridge. Hackett checks his revolver. Only two rounds left.

“You go, Steven,” Williams says, that old glint in his eye shining bright, the soul of the war hawk eager to cut loose, “I’ll take charge of the offense while you cover the evacuation. Alenko, Shepard, you stay here.” The human soldiers give an affirmative grunt.

“Kandros, you and the rest go with them,” Castis orders, “There should be escape pods on the lower level, if you remember what the layout of these cruisers is.”

Kandros gives a wry chuckle. “Of course I do, sir. Rip ‘em up.” Vyrnnus and Pallin look at Vakarian and each give a small, short salute. He acknowledges them with an upnod.

Hackett nods, then places his hand to his ear. “All marines, unless otherwise directed, move back with the prisoners and hold position. If we can, we’ll be leaving this ship.” He gives Williams, Shepard and the rest one last look. “God speed.” Stepping out of cover, he jogs to the side and fires the last two shots from his .600; each one rips through the shields of a batarian trooper and drops them. The captain vanishes into the crowd of retreating marines and civilians, and as the newly deployed mechs step into the battlefield, Liam, John and Benezia join the flow of escapees, the boy and his father giving Hannah one last look. She smiles, and then turns to face the batarians kneeling down next to Castis. His turian marines, led by Kandros, join the crowd, providing covering fire as they go. Those who remain in the commons area, facing the batarians as they continue to fire intermittently across the space, are Hannah, Castis, Rael, Alenko, Williams, Liara, and out in the “No Man’s Land,” Wrex.

“Here,” Castis says as he hands Hannah an abandoned rifle from the ground, the weapon unfolding into her grip. “It’s an Avenger, volus-made. Pretty basic, but…”

Hannah vents the heat sink in a single motion, like she has been handling these weapons all her life. “I like it.” she mutters. A missile soars over their head and slams into the wall behind them. The blast sends particulate washing over them; Hannah wipes it out of her eyes and peeks out of cover. “Hey Wrex! Are you still alive?”

The krogan, at first out of sight, leaps from the wreck of a destroyed heavy mech and brings his hammer down on another trooper, before sliding behind a fallen section of wall. “Ha, ha!” he roars, “You’ll never need to ask that question, Shepard! Let’s get this started for real!”

“Here we are,” Admiral Karem hisses as the Kha’vira exits Relay 314. The cruiser acts as the flagship of the hastily assembled “First Retaliation Fleet.” Their mission is to grab as much territory and as many resources as they can to determine the new border the Hegemony will be holding in the coming war; their first stop is to aid her sister ship, the Shervock, and reclaim her valuable cargo of slaves and prevent her from being scuttled. “All ships, guns at the ready. Any vessel we don’t recognize, open fire, no warning.” A series of affirmative responses come in from the ships following the Kha’vira. He sneers; even if the conflict becomes one solely focused on defense, it will be a victory for the Hegemony. The Council, already notoriously slow to move, would be even more lethargic in their response to an area that was barren of anything worthwhile. Once the operation was done, their sweep of their prospective territory could resume. Such actions were a glorious demonstration of his race’s might amidst the sea of stars; Karem seeks to etch his name into the history of discovery and conquest that he thinks all great leaders should aspire to.

On the LADAR screen, something blips, a cold object moving at sublight screens, and very close by. He arches a brow and leans over the console, eyeing the pinging monitor with growing irritation. “What is that?” he asks the helmsman, “Is this thing broken?”

“Can’t be, sir,” the helmsman replies, “it was calibrated not five hours ago.”

“Begin a visual scan. We can’t have anything unaccounted for.”

“It may be the Shervock, fleeing the slave system.”

“Perhaps, but nonetheless. Keep an eye on it. Be ready.”

“Admiral!” Optio Kryik calls out as he runs to catch up with his superior. Admiral Orinia walks briskly, head locked forward amidst the bustling chaos through the CIC of the Dreadnought Indomitable. She matches her pace with the optio’s but does not let him lead; he has to adjust to keep up with her as he continues. “Scans confirm, the batarian fleet is in system. We’re drifting closer, heat is near critical.”

“The IES is failing?” she asks, her voice cool and even. She comes to a stop in front of the main viewport at the bow of the ship, a septuple-reinforced barrier to the cosmos, and on the blueprint, the only major weak point. To stand here with an enemy fleet potentially mere miles away in the vastness of space was the most dangerous thing she could be doing at this moment.

“It’s holding but near the terminal limit.”

“Only one hour…pitiful. This must be remedied. Hold it as long as it can and do not release until we have confirmed contact with the enemy.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Kryik remains at her side.

The distress call had been received from the distant system on a quantum outpost, and now the Indomitable had been roped into leading an impromptu retaliatory force. The number of ships assembled on the far side of the relay could itself constitute a small fleet by any standards other than the Hierarchy’s; compared to what she was used to working with, it is little more than a contingent fit for a minor police action.

But it will still bring the batarians to heel. That she is confident of. They’re too predictable, thinking that showing their might will get them whatever they want, and she also knows that they think her people operate under the same mantra. While strength is impressive, it is useless with tact, and while many of the Primarchs often forget this, Palaven has given her free reign to execute on this operation however she sees fit.

The Indomitable carries a unique advantage over other ships, a secret development from the home world. It has been fitted with an internal emissions system, an IES, that allows it to keep the heat emissions all starships give off within the hull for a set amount of time to keep it off sensors. The advantage was obvious; on a dreadnought especially, it dramatically reduced the range from which the ship could be detected, but the time it could be active was abysmal. One hour on a dreadnought was pushing it, and in terms of preparation for space combat on such a large vessel, it really was not a lot. The Primarchs against the retrofitting had called it a trillion-and-some-waste of taxes and the public sentiment was not much better. But now, Orinia is confident that it will return that cost and so much more; it was her ship, the only one with an IES, that was now sitting in wait for the arrival of the batarian fleet whose dispatch was leaked to the Hierarchy from an unknown source. Orinia wouldn’t have so easily followed the orders if she couldn’t twist Fedorian’s arm on where the intel had come from; it was sourced by a Spectre, and if Fedorian was working off this wholeheartedly, so would she.

The Indomitable sits in wait, minutes away from the stored heat breaking through the IES, the lone vanguard to watch for the arrival of the batarians. On her signal, the rest of the ships under her command will come through the relay and catch the batarians off guard.

The limit draws closer. She can feel the creeping sensation of the heat trying to escape through the walls of the ship. For a moment, her conviction is shaken, and a knot forms in her stomach.

“Admiral!,” Kryik screams much too loud, though it breaks the tension, “Confirm, unidentified signatures, nine degrees right ascension from galactic plane! In the direction of Relay 314, ten solar units and closing!”

“Vent IES!” Orinia barks. A prolonged hiss fills the air as the heat is finally released. Through the viewport, she has a clear view of the diffusion system, which rids the ship of stored heat as an energized gas. It forms a deep blue corona-like fluorescence around the ship, brightening her visage like an asari’s biotic glow.

“Ready weapons, full alert! Signal the fleet!”

Chapter Text

The commons area of the Shervock is host to a spectacular battle between Shepard and her allies and the final brunt of the batarian slavers. Only seven individuals against an outfit of shock troopers and mechs, on paper, sounds like a battle stacked about the numerically inferior force. The spirit of that force, however, and any ability or experience they have that a larger assembled force may not share as evenly, is a weapon in of itself. Despite being in the presence of two other humans who outrank her and have several times over more experience in combat, Hannah leads by example; fearless, she runs from cover to cover, the Avenger an extension of herself as the slugs from its muzzle streak through the air. Her boldness is on par with Wrex, the krogan warlord chanting, laughing, and even singing as his hammer finds target after target, rending machine and organic alike in a blowing flurry of biotic blows. The two are, at times, completely out of cover, yet they do not fall beneath the hail of gunfire from the opposition.

Vakarian’s rifle cracks again and again; at his back is the quarian Rael, who wields a heavy pistol in one hand and technological armageddon in the other. A combat drone races around them, intercepting missiles from the mechs as they keep a defensive zone clear around the center of the massive room. Aiding the dextros, floating above them with shocking biotic might given her youth, is Liara, the matriarch’s daughter. Two more humans, a general and a specialist, bring up the rear, Williams and Alenko’s guns further enhancing their strength as a unit.

A batarian officer shouts something, his throat thick with anger, words masked by a translation obfuscator. The batarians rally and charge out of cover, moving to overwhelm the seven and put them down for good.

“Come on, princesses!” Wrex roars jubilantly, “Let’s get over the top!” In that moment, all seven of them may as well have been born krogan. The fury of something deprived, the drive for revenge, shared equally among people from different worlds, against a force crueler than the sum of that it is in physical stature.

An echo of the future, their own and their progenies'; a tragedy, then, that it could only be more bitter than this.

Far across the stars, in a small pocket of space never once glimpsed by humanity, turian and batarian ships clash silently in the cosmic sea. Rooted at the viewport, Orinia watches the rhythmic destruction of ship after ship. Like celebratory munitions, they pop and burn; fighters act as the star trails from sparklers, with every large vessel around them the grand display in this demonstration of war’s capacity for performance.

Perhaps it was easier to see in times like this than at any other why turians were the masters of conflict among the known races. The krogan live for rage, and the asari rest in the crook between culture and refinement. Salarians, volus, elcor, all the others were off to the side when it came to war. Turians were the masters of the form in its purest sense; how else could she see this chaos and filter it through the things she found wondrous as a fledgling? Kryik yells damages and kills, losses and rescues, as she watches the subject of his updates meet their fates with a five-second-following report. She’s disabled the audio emulators, for if she can’t handle watching a frigate explode in silence, cannot recognize the unheard screams of her crew not lucky enough to die in the break-up, then she should not be commanding anything at all, let alone a fleet.

Then, she sees it. Over the many minutes of battle, as both forces have come into visual contact, one cruiser has been moving in an unusual manner. Nothing in the batarian fleet outwardly stands out as a “flagship.” Thinking about it, it made sense; there would be no reason to risk a dreadnought out here, so early into the war. A command vessel for the batarians would look like any other cruiser or frigate that serves under it. While her knowledge of batarian command and social structures is limited, Orinia does understand the impact on morale and coordination the loss of a flagship always incurs. Turians fought that danger by making their flagships dreadnoughts. The batarians. They would probably have to hide them, keep them from the front of the fleet when anticipating a battle. The IES had been invaluable in hiding them long enough to get the first shots off, but this was another issue entirely. Only Orinia’s suspicion about this cruiser, lilting oddly as it moves to remain on the fringes of the battle, gives her any indication that this could be the batarian flagship.

She raises a finger and gives the command. “All port guns on that cruiser now. And I want audio from our codebreakers who have a bead on that vessel. Feed it through the V.I.”

The responses from her crew are drowned out in her mind as she watches the shells arc through the void. A rogue signal, captured by the techs on the Indomitable. The warbling sound of panicked voices, unmistakably batarian; the unclear words turn to screams as the cruiser breaks up. The effect is immediately noticeable. Kryik’s reports of downed batarian fighters, scattered and confused, become more numerous.

She smiles, for she knows the battle is won, and this set of relays with it.

Victus looks out over the desert, sitting in the shade in a wheelchair. The human doctors assure him that he’ll make a full recovery, eventually, but he’s already getting antsy. Mitra’s shitty attitude isn’t helping; he swears the human gets entertainment from goading him by showing off his own physical prowess. While technically only his “guard,” the lance corporal insists on doing his workout routine wherever it suits him, even out on the balconies of the repurposed refugee site. The human is halfway through his third set of crunches, and there’s a very strong temptation in Victus’ heart to rip off the casts and show him up; the agony would be worth the spite, he tells himself, and yet he remains seated.

From out of the sky, distant blurs come closer, matching the profile of starships and military cruisers in low orbit. Mitra finally stops his irritating show and turns his eyes skyward. Other humans in the camp do the same; he silently chuckles, and with effort, turns his neck towards the anxious lance corporal.

“Turian cruisers,” Victus explains, “looks like we won.”

The aftermath of the battle for an entire world and its people is not what one would expect it to be. The major faces fade into the background as entire groups come together to discuss the goings on. Returning on a shuttle, the seven who trounced the batarians in the Shervock scarcely look at or talk to each other. Williams is escorted along with Hackett to meetings with turian admirals and generals from the arriving fleet; Alenko accompanies him, and they vanish into the crowd of soldiers and seniority figures. Wrex, for as large as he is, quietly exits the picture, perhaps not wanting to stick around in an area full of turian military bigwigs. Liara goes to her mother, and remains silently by her side, only breaking from this habit to wish John the best as the young boy runs after her. He is scooped up by his father, and brought to his mother for a proper reunion.

Rael, also going his own way, finds and takes Han from the custody of the turians. His fleet-brother, still fighting a light infection from his suit exposure, has been placed in a wheelchair.

“Where exactly are you taking me, Rael?” Han asks as he is rolled away from the camp, “I don’t think this is spaceworthy.”

“I’m thinking about that myself,” Rael admits, “The sooner we can get on the move, the better.”

“Don’t wish to stick around for anything official?”

“Absolutely not. It’s going to be a flurry of politics and species interaction, and any quarians there are going to be maligned as a tolerated example of a people who ‘messed-up.’ I have no desire to be made an object of discussion at the negotiation table by alien diplomats.”

“That’s a pretty harsh assumption,” Vakarian says; the turian has snuck up on the quarians, following them as they moved away from the larger crowds. “Humanity hasn’t even really met any of your people, yet.”

Rael scoffs. “So optimistic.”

“I would like to think so. You leave now, and there isn’t going to be much in the way of quarian presence in the minds of humans as they’re brought into the fold.”

“‘Brought into the fold,’ sure, like the krogan. That woman fought with the fury of one, turian, for the sake of her child. This planet’s people won’t live with the passivity of the salarians. I doubt they’ll find your ‘guidance’ a universally appealing option. Not that you’re giving them a choice, are you?”

Vakarian says nothing, then sighs. Stepping forward, he reaches out and clasps Rael’s hand. The quarian is resistant, but Vakarian coaxes his hand open and within it places a small data stub.

“The forward section of the Shervock has been locked down by turian requisition officers by this point. I’m going to put your names down as contracted salvage workers, we use pilgrims for that all the time. You’ll be told to bring the Shervock out a ways and then ‘scuttle’ it. But after that, salvage law means we don’t have any rights to it anymore.”

Rael stares at the stub, shocked. “And…this is?”

“A standard IFF signal; we use them in rotations so this will be obsolete in two weeks or less, but that’s time you have to get the cruiser back to your fleet.”

Rael and Han look at each other, eyes wide behind the visors. “But…why? This was one of your own vessels before the batarians stole her.”

“And yet the Hierarchy only wants it destroyed, so they don’t have to think about it anymore. Make no mistake, the guns will be removed by the time you get there. I’m not giving you a weapon. But things would have been a lot worse if it wasn’t for you, and if I have to express the gratitude my people are capable of on my own, so be it.”

Rael is dumbstruck. He holds the stub close , bringing it to his chest with both hands, and then raises his head. “The one who stabbed Han was not a batarian,” he says with conviction, “he was a turian, a Spectre.”

Vakarian arches his brow. “You’re certain?”

“Bosh’tet admitted it before he nearly killed me,” Han adds.

“Here,” Rael says as he taps something on his omni-tool, “I’ll send you a copy of our ambient audio recording; we always keep them on when on alien ships as a matter of safekeeping.” Vakarian looks at the received file while Rael resumes pushing Han along. “I can’t express to you how grateful I am for this, Vakarian. I will make this up to you one day, I swear it.”

“You may have done so already with this file, Zorah.” Vakarian reasons.

“This is just for you, really. Do you think anyone of suitable authority will admit to the presence of a Spectre here?”

“...Likely not. But thank you, nonetheless.”

“Keelah Se’lai, Castis Vakarian. I won’t ever forget what you’ve done for us.”

“Farewell, and take care,” Han bids him as Rael pushes him away. Vakarian watches the quarians go off to tend to whatever they must in the interim. He looks at the file again, and then up to the sky.

“Why was a Spectre here, Oraka?” he asks aloud. But he knows he’ll never get an answer. The rescue fleet already confirmed that the Havinclaw and her crew are no more; a crater on the surface of the fourth planet in the system, ravaged by the Shervock and her fighters before they could arrive, no doubt. But the presence of a Spectre in any operation always muddied things, and anyone who could tell that story was gone. Though he is saddened by the lost of his friend, and many others beyond that, he must grapple with the expectation that hangs over every turian. Die for the cause. Even an outlier like himself has become jaded to death, and so he goes to return to the crowd, head up and eyes ahead, like a soldier always should be.

The patch job is failing. Soon, the holes in the shuttle will be ripped open as the omni-gel layers break down. Even after converting every piece of gear he had on him short of his suit, it was not enough to provide a full seal, and so, Oraka sits at the controls of the dead shuttle, waiting to join the spirits of all those explorers and military men lost in the sea of stars in centuries past.

He wears a glazed expression, so tired and dissociated that he could be mistaken for dead. Despite this placid exterior, in his heart burns the purest rage he has ever felt. Saren’s treachery, as a turian and a supposed ally, outdoes any slight done to him in his life by a wide margin. Forcing him to watch his men be executed as he spirals through the air, and his own cowardice in running away, as sensible as it was, all of this coalesces into a hardened sense of utter hatred that consumes his entire being. The warnings about his imminent decompression do not steal his attention away from this anger building within him.

He leans his head back and waits for this ire to burn out with him in the vacuum of space. He exhales.

And through the virtual window, he is suddenly assailed by a burst of light that burns out the sensors. The shuttle, though intact, shakes violently, Oraka is thrown from the pilot’s chair and scrambles for something to hang onto. Gritting his teeth, all he can do is wait out this ordeal; eventually, the quaking stops, and Oraka feels himself become heavier. What has occurred isn’t difficult to figure out; the shuttle has been scooped up out of the void by another, larger ship, and is now resting inside its launch bay. The sealed doors begin to hiss, and he knows it to be the sound of a high-intensity plasma torch cutting through the hull. Still moved by the spite Saren has inspired in his heart, Oraka resigns himself to the fate of whatever lies outside that door, and he rushes to his feet to open the shuttle himself. With a flick of his wrist, the door clicks and begins to move; The captain leans back on the console, facing the exit, prepared for anything, even Saren, to walk through that door and deal him his fate.

But he could not have expected to be met with a group of synthetic bodies, with three fingered hands and flashlight heads.

“In five days' time, humans will be on the Citadel,” Castis says to Hannah. A week out from their victory onboard the Shervock, and ostensibly, Earth is looking better than it has in literal centuries. As eezo-based technology is gifted to the various governments under the Singular Alliance, their representatives speak more openly of unity and hope in the presence of aliens than they ever did on their own. While the situation is still developing, there is naturally still the presence of concern and resistance among humanity. What frustrates Castis most is that he’ll have to wait to see what the long-term result of this integration will be, and that the one human whose thoughts on it he values most is still so icy with him.

“Not sure if I’ll make it out that way myself,” Hannah says, taking a sip from her glass of wine. The duo are standing on a pier along the eastern coast of a landmass known as “North America.” Specifically, the region is called “Maryland,” and while Hannah has no ties to the region, it is close enough to one of humanity’s central points of power that they can venture out to be on their own without anyone getting concerned about where they’ve gone. “I want to get everything settled with my family before I even think of heading back out into space.”

“They’re giving you leave, like they said?”

“Of course. Because apparently, I’m an icon now. A lowly grunt who rose beyond her station and led the fight to repel a batarian invasion with our benevolent turian benefactors. I’m getting a headache just thinking about it.”

Castis chuckles. “You’d like it better on Palaven. It really takes a lot to become a hero on this scale.”

“So we’re just going to be moved into the norm of the whole picture,” she snaps her fingers, “just like that. Hmm.”

“It’s not that simple, necessarily, but after you see it happen a few times, you start to understand how calm the transition into a galactic society really is. It’s everything that happens before or after that stands out in the mind. The change itself is shockingly mundane.”

“Even when you’re not the one controlling your own fate?”

“I can’t help the policies of the Council or my people, Hannah. However your autonomy is negotiated is what it will be for the foreseeable future. That’s just life under representatives, anywhere in the galaxy.”

“And how did that work for the krogan?”

Castis looks away, pained, to the ocean. “I wondered if Wrex had said anything. He seemed the type.”

“We would all have heard about it eventually, Castis.”

“True, but I didn’t know if I’d still be here when you did.”

“Well?”

“I mean, what do you want me to say, Hannah? It was a decision made long ago out of necessity.”

Hannah looks out to the sea. “A necessity. Is that from the textbooks or did you come up with that yourself?”

“Hannah, you’re not a krogan! What do you want me to say?!”

Hannah sets down the wine glass and looks over at Castis. “I don’t want you to say anything, Castis. I’m going to be looking out for my family and figuring out where they fit into this new world of ours. All I can ask is that you do the same thing for yourself. It’s not hard to tell you don’t line up a hundred percent with the general ‘turian ideal.’ So what the hell are you doing here?”

“...What?”

“Do you expect me to give you some sense of redemption for any shame that you feel on the part of your empire? We are of your empire, now. Go find your own answer, protect and justify what’s important to you. And come find me when you do. Then we’ll catch up.”

The two do not say much more through the rest of the night. It would be the last time they saw each other for a long while.

Within weeks, Castis seeks a discharge from the military, transferring to the Citadel for a position within its C-Sec police force. He briefly tries, but fails, to begin an investigation into Spectre involvement with human first contact, and nearly loses his new job in the process. He is placed on suspension and spends the intervening time on Palaven. When he does return, he brings with him his wife, a turian named Siena who will become the mother to his two children.

Hannah and Liam bring John to Vancouver, and decide to make the city their home Earthside. Within a year, they have another child, a young girl named Jane, and Hannah returns to active service after some time, steadily climbing the ranks. Within a few years, it becomes apparent that the young Jane is one of the first human biotics, and is given the opportunity to be trained to understand her gift on the asari homeworld of Thessia, with the direct tutoring and assistance of Matriarch Benezia and her daughter, Liara. As such, the Shepards become spacers by necessity, living among the stars on ships and in sprouting colonies.

“Brother.”

Desolas looks to the door. Saren makes himself at home in his office, as he is entitled to do. Flicking his mandibles in a welcoming gesture, the commodore pulls a bottle of brandy from his reserves, and opens it Pouring himself and his brother a glass, the two turians do a customary military toast before continuing their discussion.

“Your new man is prompt,” Desolas says after he takes a sip of his drink, “this human has already begun providing material resources that will give us a decent starting presence on Earth.”

“Still years off the mark from completion,” Saren admits, “but it advances the schedule considerably.”

“I will ask, Saren, was it necessary to use such a…direct method of persuasion?”

“Harper will serve his purpose well before the decay sets in. The jingoistic nature of the man will make sure he focuses on the human side of these compulsions we’re now feeding to him. I might have to bring him here; I’m sure he’ll want to meet you eventually.”

“Let him come. Let us enrapture him with all the promises of a hypocritical grunt made a figure of great influence in his race’s brave new world. I could tell him that I’m going to saw off his arms and he’ll thank me for it, but I had hoped for a more competent mind, a free one, you understand.”

“The disposition of a human is too much like a krogan for it to be worth that kind of consideration. Trust me, it’s no great loss.”

Desolas leans forward. “So, what of Sovereign?”

Saren smiles wickedly. “The Old Machine is working out in geth space, some odd reports out there from his ‘converts’ as it were.”

“Escapees?”

“No more dangerous than lost property. Trapped between Sovereign and the Terminus, they’ll be out of the picture soon.”

“Then all that’s left to do is to wait. Now that is frustrating. It’ll make one restless.”

“I feel it too, brother, but patience is a virtue every god must master.”

On this day, March 1st, 2158, it is formally recognized by the Citadel Council that the Singular Alliance, representing humanity, has joined the Citadel as an ambassador species under the direct supervision of the Turian Hierarchy. The Singular Alliance will operate as an autonomous body within its home system, and all colonial development will be done under supervision by the Navy of the Turian Hierarchy. On behalf of all Citadel races, humanity, we welcome you.

Tevos, Asari Council Member.

Chapter Text

Hello!

It's been a while, hasn't it. Had to experiment with some ideas in and outside of fanfiction, revisiting old concepts, before returning to and continuing this story. The first chapter of the sequel to OPFOR, "Ills Upon The Achaeans," is now live at this link! Since some of you are still bookmarked on this story, it seemed the best way to spread the word. I'll be updating when I can; thank you for your patience and I'll see you all again soon!

- gestaltopinions