Obviously a Mass effect fic. Set in an alternate but superficially similar version of the setting. Not a paragon fic by any means. As always, this represents a draft. Comment and criticism is appreciated, there's no point in posting if nobody speaks up.
O0O
Leeroy Jenkins forced his hands steady and pulled the armor from his locker. It was easier to focus all his attention on the familiar routine than to think about the briefing. He shucked off the regulation fatigues and pulled on the myomer skinsuit, carefully checking and double checking that the clips up the front were all connected to the right partner and the neural jack was solidly connected. The secondary eezo core spun up with a soft whine and he carefully flexed his muscles one by one to check that the myomer bundles were correctly aligned, all good.
Then came the plates, each heavy ceramic piece carefully aligned and strapped to the skinsuit and plugged into the power feeds that ran along the myomer bundles. Once all of them were secure he booted up his omnitool and keyed the primary eezo core on his back to feed power to the skinsuit and felt the weight of the plates drop away to nothing. Another careful inspection and diagnostics check confirmed that all the plates and myomer bundles were receiving current and properly secured. He pulled the collapsed helmet off it's waist mount and waited the second it took to automatically unfold before tugging it over his head and hitting the seals. The check pinged green, the HUD sprang to life on his faceplate, and he was sealed away from the outside world.
He started to drift back to thinking about the mission, then shook his head and focused on something else. Weapons, he still needed weapons. He pulled and checked his issue I series rifle, sniper and shotgun and then carefully lifted out his pride and joy. The Cobra IV had cost him more than he probably should have spent, but he'd been giddy after basic and his graduation bonus had been burning a hole in his pocket. He spent as much time checking it as possible before letting the maglock hold it to his hip.
And then he had to think about it, that horrible still-shot the Captain had shown him. His eyes closed and he pictured it perfectly, his mind stripping out the grainy static to leave the image impossibly vivid. The gleaming towers of Empyrean Arcology burning, covered by that strange organic seeming dreadnought looming impossibly into the sky.
His home...
The hand on his shoulder was so surprising he nearly wound up punching the lieutenant before he remembered where he was. He felt absurdly grateful that the full coverage helmet hid his blush. It was uncomfortable enough working with veterans like Alenko and Shepard already without pulling some boneheaded stunt like that.
“Easy there Jenkins,†the Lieutenant said, “It's rough I know, but you need to keep your head. We'll make it right.â€
Jenkins nodded and waited for the Lieutenant to move away. The man seemed friendly enough, but he was a P3 specialist and a biotic. Jenkens always felt rather inadequate with his own base grade genemods and augs and B1 vocation rating.
He tried to distract himself by focusing on his superiors. The lieutenant had gone back to his own checks, shrugging into his lighter armor. He was using the issue Onyx system just like Jenkins, though it looked to be a IV or V series. He wasn't carrying any weapons besides a slim sub-machinegun, probably no need to when you could throw people away with your mind. It was odd, a veteran like Alenko could probably afford much better gear, from scavenging or loot shares if nothing else. Why would he choose to keep using the basic, barely functional gear the Alliance issued standard.
Jenkins's shook his head. He'd only been working with the man for a few weeks and he'd already decided the Lieutenant was just weird. Not as weird as the Commander, but that wasn't saying much.
A glance across the cargo bay showed the commander frowning over his helmet and Jenkin's shuddered. Commander Shepard was nothing at all like he'd expected. The man was charming, engaging, and always ready with a smile. All of it completely at odds with the stories. The Butcher of Torfan was a legend, and the drill instructors in Basic had relished in covering every atrocity the man had visited on the pirates who infested the Traverse.
The Commander's history wasn't any more comforting than thinking of home, so Jenkins focused instead on his gear. Shepard's kit was the stuff of Jenkin's fantasies, the sort of cutting edge power that he'd dreamed of when he enlisted. Plating from half a dozen manufacturers built around a customized Armax chestpiece linked to an oversized eezo core between the shoulderblades that could probably power an airbus. The rig probably cost more money than Jenkens had made in his life, but he'd heard the Commander had gotten enough shares from the sack of Torfan to buy a starship.
The man looked up and Jenkins turned away quickly, forgetting that the helmet hid is face anyway. He'd heard that people who stared too long tended to mysteriously die on deployment.
O0O
Shepard settled the modified helmet he'd first pried off the unofficial ghortan running Torfan over his head and started the diagnostics check. All the individual components checked out and cleared, and a neural command flicked the quadrants of the blast shield out over the faceplate, letting him confirm with his own eyes that the four photo-receptors which turned the helmet into a death mask were working.
It also gave him the opportunity to grimace in private. The new guy was staring again, the useless fuck. Still, the kid was looking shaky about dropping onto his home planet, it wouldn't hurt to give him the encouraging leader song and dance to bolster him up. Cannon fodder was useless if you couldn't get it running in the right direction. He'd told Alenko to take care of it, but apparently actually leading men was beyond the man. What a lovely hand command had dealt him this time.
The diagnostic pinged green and Shepard flicked the blast shields back to rest along the side of the helmet. The glowing red photo-receptors were sometimes useful for intimidation, but tended to make playing the good guy harder. Another command collapsed the radiator fins on the back down into dormant mode, restoring the hardsuit to it's default balance. Shepard fixed on the expression that always seemed to leave idiots stumbling to follow him and started over the hold to give the new guy enough of a boost to stumble in front of a bullet for better men.
O0O
Jenkins swallowed as the counter above the hanger door ticked down the last minutes before the drop. The Normandy's ME field kept him from feeling anything as the ship slid stern first towards a brush with the upper atmosphere, but he could still imagine the thousand ways for something to go wrong and turn the ship into a smear across Eden Prime's rolling hills.
He was saved from further winding himself up by the elevator hatch sliding open to let a single figure in a pressure suit and magboots into the hanger, it took Jenkins a moment to notice the rank tabs on the man's shoulders and snap as close to attention as his heavy armor allowed. He hadn't expected Captain Anderson to see them off personally at all, and found himself regretting the scuff marks he still hadn't buffed out of his left shoulder plate.
The hand on his shoulder didn't startle him this time, and the wide grin on the Commander's face when Jenkins turned his head helped him slow his heart back down.
“Relax kid, Anderson won't bite your head off.†The tone was so friendly, so casual that Jenkins couldn't help but feel comforted. More than that he felt proud. Here was Commander Shepard, the living legend, treating him like a comrade instead of a cockroach straight from training. He could feel his chest swell and his mind clear of all the niggling doubts and uncertainty he'd built up since deployment.
“Shepard, Jenkins, Alenko,†The captain said, giving each of them a nod. Jenkins felt an echo of the same pride he'd felt when Shepard spoke at the casual recognition from the older man. “You already know everything I do so I won't waste your time telling you your jobs. Godspeed to you all.â€
Jenkins arm returned the salute without the need for direction from his own mind. It was better than the vids he'd devoured as a kid, better than he'd dreamed even before training had pounded the fantasies out of him. He belonged.
Dimly he noticed that rather than exchanging salutes Anderson was actually shaking Shepard's hand like an old friend. And then the counter ticked over to the final countdown with a harsh siren and he was rushing towards the opening door behind the others. He saw first Shepard and then Alenko step over the threshold and vanish into the distance. Then Jenkins reached the threshold and felt the Mass Effect fields grab him and throw him like a rocket towards the bow of the ship.
Stars spun around him until he shifted his limbs and twitched his ME field to steady his fall. Eden Prime spread out before him, the familiar continents he'd memorized in his youth swelling up to meet him behind a screen of clouds. It looked peaceful, even the ridiculous dreadnaught the transmissions had shown was too small to be seen from his height. Jenkins felt something surge in his chest and spread his arms as if to embrace his world.
O0O
Shepard carefully hauled himself to his feet and took stock. The ship, if it was a ship, was gone. The displacement of it's liftoff was probably what had thrown him and his squad through the air. It was quiet. There was none of the chittering of the geth or the shrieking buzz that had seemed omnipresent since the moment they landed. And the unearthly howls of those....things that used to be the colonists were gone.
He felt his stomach twist at the thought and forced it away. Focusing on finding Kaiden and Ashley was easier. It was...safer. They'd need to be checked over for injuries too. A sixty meter leap through the air was nothing new to an Alliance trooper, but it was usually done with controlled mass effect fields from the hardsuit, not the air displacement of a ship bigger than anything he'd ever seen.
Miraculously, he'd landed near the objective, though why the geth and the turian that had supposedly shot Nihlus hadn't taken it with them was a mystery. That could be worked out later though. Right now they just needed to secure the object, get a comm message off to Arcturus, and get some support in here for the colony. It only took a quick glance to confirm that Ashley and Kaden were both nearby, laid out on the platform just like Shepard had been. They were on a balcony at the edge of the spaceport, looking our over the rolling fields of grain that supported the colony. Communication with the Normandy was still out, but local transmission was still good enough to pull their suit diagnostics up on his omnitool and confirm that they were both alive but out cold.
He snorted, that wasn't a bad showing for a B4 trooper and a P3 technician. Hell, Alenko was running one of the old L2 series amp implants, it was a wonder he hadn't had an episode and broken his own neck.
Satisfied that the squad was as well as could be expected, he moved on to double checking the objective. The relic was a thin, wedge shaped pillar that looked like carved stone, even though it wasn't. Unlike most other prothean artifacts, the working ones anyway, it didn't have any mysteriously glowing lines or spots. It looked like nothing more than an uninspired statue.
He took one step towards the beacon and suddenly the world fell away as his body drifted up into the air and towards the beacon. He'd felt the mass effect countless times, nobody got into the fleet, much less to N7 without knowing exactly what to do when a biotic got a hold of you, especially not candidates who were biotic themselves. A moment of focus, and he felt the cool burn of dark energy rushing through his body as he tried to use his biotics to counter whatever field was holding him, nothing. He tried to use his own field to pull on the wall of the balcony behind him, but that only slowed his drift. Whatever was powering this field was at least as strong as an Asari adept. Hacking the thing was a lost cause, he didn't have the specialized computers and software needed to interface with prothean technology. He was about to shoot the artifact, mission be damned, when he ran out of time.
His body touched the pillar, and a wave of agony swept out from the point of contact and dragged him into hell.
O0O
The room had not been made to comfort mortal minds. Lines broke and bent, scattering into endless fractals half hidden in shadow, strange organic shapes loomed almost out of sight while countless inscrutable machines twined through and over everything. The eye searing lights gleamed wetly off uncovered patches of flesh and sinew. Half organic channels pulsed unceasingly, sending rushes of ichor flecked with gleaming specks surging through their clear walls like blood. Cloying fog choked the thick air, burning with a harsh, metallic scent. The temperature pulsed in time with the ichor that flowed through the machines, flashes of blazing heat breaking the icy chill. Frost formed and melted and froze again, unceasing.
Saren ignored it. His mind had long since transcended the weaknesses that would have allowed the room to break it. Lesser beings might have spent lifetimes trying to perceive the alien geometries of Sovereign’s form, but Saren's mind rested on other things. The Geth Terminals he'd left to erase the beacon and the human settlement had been destroyed. He'd had the programs that inhabited the terminals deleted without backup as punishment, but the damage was done. Terminals and the remains of the human Converts, as well as the Uplift Spines that produced them, would have the humans up in arms and frothing for war, though they would be pointed in the wrong direction for the time being at least. The beacon was a lesser concern; without the strength granted by Sovereign's influence, any attempt to access the data within would most likely result in madness and death. Nevertheless, it was a potential obstruction.
Saren hated potential obstructions.
The sound of footsteps on the slick floors reached his ears, calm and measured, patient. He didn't bother to speak--he had grown out of the habit recently. Sovereign seemed to know all that he thought, and conveyed it to those who needed to hear. He desired the knowledge Benezia possessed, and so she would reveal it.
“The beacon is destroyed, and the remains are en route to the Citadel...†she trailed off, and Saren considered simply pulling the information from her mind directly. It was an unpleasant sensation, using Sovereign’s power thus, but more and more he found himself longing for the perfect clarity it offered, so much less primitive than bothering with distortions in the air. But before he could decide she continued anyway, and the urge faded. “Based on the human's report, it is possible one of them used the beacon before it was destroyed.â€
Her voice had wavered, he noted. Obviously the Matriarch still harbored doubts. No matter, she would come to see wisdom in time. He had spent years wrestling with his own doubts, trying to deny inevitability. He could extend her the same courtesy.
Still, he needed details, details she was too slow in providing. He felt something like desire fill him. It was time for more direct communication. He stood, listening to the matriarch take a hesitant step backward as he descended from the control dais to the floor. There was still fear in her eyes as the cool digits of the arm Sovereign had given him wrapped around her head. She screamed. Saren ignored it; he too had screamed in the early days, when his mind was not yet enhanced with Sovereign's strength, but the pain had passed. Everything passed and then it all became clear.
She would learn, in time.
O0O
It was chaos, a meaningless riot of connections. There was nothing that might be an image, or a word. There were merely...impressions. He had the impression of form, being. He felt that he had a body, but what sort of body, what shape or color, was denied him. He felt place, the impression of habitation, artifice, dwelling. But nothing was clear.
Mostly there was the impression of pain.
He felt unseen blades digging into flesh that was not there, chill spines digging into everything he was. There was a sensation of growth as well, of addition, as if his form was changing, becoming alien in ways he could not describe. He felt other beings around him, a sensation of unity and purpose, or a drive that felt unending. But it did end, guttering like a candle, snuffed out one by one until he was again alone.
For a long time, there was nothing he could understand. Occasionally he felt as if there was something on the edge of perception, waiting for him to....do something. As if he had only to find some key and everything would fall into place. It was only at the end that he experienced anything that might be considered sight.
He felt....nothing, a void beyond comprehension, and then, in the far distance, something alien. His mind skittered away from it, but the presence grew unceasingly, inexorable. It loomed ever larger, until it ceased to feel distant at all. Every direction, or the things that felt like directions, lead to the presence. There was no escape.
And then more pain...
Sight was the first sensation to return as his mind crept back into some semblance of what it had been. At first, he saw only a vague blur--an off white field that neither began nor ended. It just was. Then he realized he was staring at a ceiling, and the world seemed to snap back into place.
Sitting up was surprisingly easy, given that his last clear memory was the cold fire of dark energy he usually associated with biotics magnified a thousand fold running down what felt like every nerve in his body. Now he just felt like he'd been hit with a biotic warp, by a matriarch.
“Welcome back Shepard. How are you feeling?â€
“Been worse doc,†he managed, blinking a few times until the blurry shape standing over him resolved into the ship's doctor, “been a hell of a lot better too.â€
He didn't bother trying to leave the bed as Doctor Chakwas pulled up some sort of full body readout on her omnitool and set a scanner arm spinning around him. It hadn't taken more than a few days aboard before he'd learned that the doctor wasn't nearly as impressed with an N7 patch as most people, and he'd found pissing off medical specialists to be a bad plan in the past. Instead he spent a few minutes taking stock and making sure he wasn't in one of the damn gowns the medics always seemed to shove on people. That done, he was left to suffer the whirling machine.
“What did I miss, other than the evac? Did the beacon make it out?â€
Chakwas sniffed, “You soldiers, fifteen hours unconscious and right to business. You'll be happy to know that you appear to be perfectly fine. Other than some unusual brain activity during your sleep and a slight hormone imbalance from stress, the beacon doesn't seem to have done anything. Your headache should fade in a few hours.â€
“And the beacon?†Shepard pressed.
Chakwas sighed and let the omnitool interface fade away before waving him off the table. “Destroyed, I'm afraid†she said, “Now that you're awake, the captain will want your report. As there's nothing physically wrong with you, I suppose I'll have to let you go before you start trying to sneak out.â€
“Right, thanks doc.†he said, hopping off the table and triple checking that the jumpsuit's throat tab was sealed. He'd wound up flashing his ass after a medical visit years ago, right after being cleared for duty after the Akuze fiasco. Major Kyle hadn't let him hear the end of it...until Torfan changed everything.
“And Shepardâ€, she called just before the door hissed shut behind him, “Do try not to get shot before we reach the Citadel.â€
Shepard gave that the disgusted wave it deserved and let the door cut off whatever she would have said next. He usually liked Chakwas, but she was a damn sight funnier when she was annoying Joker. He still felt sore; for a second, he contemplated canceling his mass to ease the trip to Anderson's cabin. But using biotics with a headache wasn't generally recommended, for good reason, so toughing it out was the order of the day.
Just like every day, he thought as he started to shuffle across the ship's common room towards the Captain's quarters. Sometimes it just wasn't worth getting out of the sleep pod.
O0O
The cafe was halfway down Tayseri ward, on the sixteenth floor of one of the smaller buildings. Most of the seating sprawled across a wide balcony looking over the Dilinaga concert hall and up the ward to the Presidium ring in the far distance, but a good fifth of the seats were booths and small tables tucked inside the premises, most in small alcoves with sound dampening baffles. The upper floors of the building were mostly residential, and mostly filled with Salarians.
It was the perfect place to do a little hacking, anyone tracing the extranet feeds to the cafe routers would find it nearly impossible to tell who had been accessing them, given the way Salarians treated secret hunting like a national sport.
Garrus Vakarian frowned at the terminal. It was a cheap off brand he'd picked up at an unlicensed hawker in the lower wards. It was probably illegal, especially since the seller had insisted on an unmarked chit payment rather than a transfer.
That was fine, really. In fact, it was the whole point. There was nothing on the thing to link it to him, or to C-Sec at all, and he'd gone over every one of the slicing programs and data mining tools he'd loaded it down with twice to make sure it stayed that way.
It was looking like he might as well not have bothered.
This whole investigation made him edgy. It had come from on high, right from Executor Pallin and he'd said he was just passing it on. Alone that would have been big, but obviously the spirits didn't feel that was enough trouble to drop in Garrus hands. The whole time he'd spoken, Pallin had been dropping hints to flub the whole thing, just write some bullshit reports and turn them in. And for an investigation that couldn't have been ordered by anyone but the Council, Garrus had hit a truly remarkable amount of obstructionism.
Every record was sealed, no reports could be released, no exemptions on Security Clearance for any reason. It was like The Council didn't want to risk any chance of evidence being found to substantiate whatever accusation had been leveled at Saren.
That just made Garrus more and more certain that the evidence was there, waiting to be tracked down.
It was odd, he'd always hated the idea of Spectres and yet here he was, again, wishing that just once he could bend the rules, ignore the restrictions and just get it done. His father would be furious no doubt, and all his training railed against the feeling. He sighed.
'Not a fun time to be Garrus Vakarian' he thought, and went back to digging, carefully tapping the haptic keys with his talons without pressing too hard and damaging the table beneath.
Not for the first time, he wondered what it must be like for Asari or Batarians, to have so many extra fingers. It must make typing difficult.
O0O
The door chime provided a welcome distraction for Captain David Anderson, and he gratefully turned away from the unpleasant contents of his private terminal and waved the door open. He started a bit when the door hissed open to reveal his ground team leader looking like he belonged on a slab.
“Shepard, sit down son before you fall on my deck.â€
Anderson repressed the urge to snort as the younger man seemed to waver between indignation and relief before folding a seat out of a wall niche and very nearly collapsing into it. Shepard was stubborn as a mule, a good soldier. But sometimes Anderson had trouble remembering that Shepard was barely six years younger than himself. He seemed so young...
Silence stretched between them, or as close as anything ever got to silent shipboard. Anderson wasn't surprised. Shepard had always been...contained, in ways that tended to make people uncomfortable. He knew that some of the officers Shepard had served under hadn't understood what to make of him, hell some people thought that Kyle's breakdown had something to do with his second in command. It wasn't impossible, Shepard had been odd, those months after Akuze. There had been serious concerns about clearing him for duty, but the Allied Fleet didn't have enough troops capable of handling the N program to throw one away lightly, especially not when an entire cadre had just been eaten by thresher maws.
And then Torfan....nobody said much about Torfan. They'd had a trial, declared Shepard sane and loyal and not said a word otherwise, letting the rank and file, and every government with even a casual intelligence program, build The Butcher into a nightmare legend.
Anderson was more than half certain he'd been assigned Shepard because nobody else was quite sure how to deal with the man. He didn't look like a monster, didn't act like it. Yet everyone knew that in the heat of battle, when his commander had descended into babbling madness, Shepard had taken control and smashed an understrength unit through four lines of Batarian defenses and into their headquarters. And that once inside, he'd lead the remnants of his team through the complex and personally killed every single enemy. Through it all, he'd been cold, calm, perfectly normal.
Anderson had watched the helmet footage, both Shepard's and some of the other survivors. It hadn't been pleasant.
The irony was, he wasn't sure how to 'handle' Shepard any more than the others. He doubted anyone really knew what went on behind those eyes, even the counselors he'd seen off and on since the rescue units pulled him off Mindoir.
“Sorry, Sir.â€
Anderson didn't manage to stop the snort as Shepard finally spoke up.
“All that waiting and that's all you have to say? I don't remember giving you permission to go all formal on me.â€
For a moment, the tension broke, and Anderson shared a small smile with the man who was everything he'd tried to be. Maybe that was why they'd foisted Shepard off on him, maybe not. But it was convenient. Anderson relished the moment while it lasted.
“I won't lie to you Shepard. The Beacon destroyed, Nihlus dead, it doesn't look good. The Council wants answers, and from the comm I just got, they aren't inclined to take the word of a human soldier and a terrified dockworker.â€
The mood dimmed. Anderson watched the small smile fall off Shepard's face, the usual coldness seeping back over his expression.
“And the other evidence? The helmet recordings, security footage?†There was something dangerous in his look now, it reminded Anderson of the footage he'd watched from Torfan, right before Shepard started that final push.
“They'll allow that there was an attack, they don't have much other option with three arcologies in flames and footage of those synthetics. Not to mention those spikes and the....things they made...†Anderson heaved a sigh, “but they aren't even pretending to take accusations against Saren seriously.†Anderson shrugged. “We're doing what we can, Udina's promised to keep poking as many sticks into the establishment as he can manage. And we're bypassing Deus Relay and making the jump to Serpent from Chalven Relay, it should buy the C-Sec investigators another week or so to dig.â€
“Will they find anything?â€
Anderson sighed. “I hope so son, if not...†He didn't bother to finish the thought. “Now, I already watched your helmet footage, and Alenko and Williams covered most of the mission, but you were the commander on the ground, you know the drill.â€
A smile creased Anderson's face as Shepard groaned and rested his head in his hands.
“Can't this wait a day, my head is trying to kill me.â€
“No rest for the wicked, Commander.†He tried hard not to laugh at how Shepard's shoulders slumped.
“Fuck.â€
O0O
Leeroy Jenkins forced his hands steady and pulled the armor from his locker. It was easier to focus all his attention on the familiar routine than to think about the briefing. He shucked off the regulation fatigues and pulled on the myomer skinsuit, carefully checking and double checking that the clips up the front were all connected to the right partner and the neural jack was solidly connected. The secondary eezo core spun up with a soft whine and he carefully flexed his muscles one by one to check that the myomer bundles were correctly aligned, all good.
Then came the plates, each heavy ceramic piece carefully aligned and strapped to the skinsuit and plugged into the power feeds that ran along the myomer bundles. Once all of them were secure he booted up his omnitool and keyed the primary eezo core on his back to feed power to the skinsuit and felt the weight of the plates drop away to nothing. Another careful inspection and diagnostics check confirmed that all the plates and myomer bundles were receiving current and properly secured. He pulled the collapsed helmet off it's waist mount and waited the second it took to automatically unfold before tugging it over his head and hitting the seals. The check pinged green, the HUD sprang to life on his faceplate, and he was sealed away from the outside world.
He started to drift back to thinking about the mission, then shook his head and focused on something else. Weapons, he still needed weapons. He pulled and checked his issue I series rifle, sniper and shotgun and then carefully lifted out his pride and joy. The Cobra IV had cost him more than he probably should have spent, but he'd been giddy after basic and his graduation bonus had been burning a hole in his pocket. He spent as much time checking it as possible before letting the maglock hold it to his hip.
And then he had to think about it, that horrible still-shot the Captain had shown him. His eyes closed and he pictured it perfectly, his mind stripping out the grainy static to leave the image impossibly vivid. The gleaming towers of Empyrean Arcology burning, covered by that strange organic seeming dreadnought looming impossibly into the sky.
His home...
The hand on his shoulder was so surprising he nearly wound up punching the lieutenant before he remembered where he was. He felt absurdly grateful that the full coverage helmet hid his blush. It was uncomfortable enough working with veterans like Alenko and Shepard already without pulling some boneheaded stunt like that.
“Easy there Jenkins,†the Lieutenant said, “It's rough I know, but you need to keep your head. We'll make it right.â€
Jenkins nodded and waited for the Lieutenant to move away. The man seemed friendly enough, but he was a P3 specialist and a biotic. Jenkens always felt rather inadequate with his own base grade genemods and augs and B1 vocation rating.
He tried to distract himself by focusing on his superiors. The lieutenant had gone back to his own checks, shrugging into his lighter armor. He was using the issue Onyx system just like Jenkins, though it looked to be a IV or V series. He wasn't carrying any weapons besides a slim sub-machinegun, probably no need to when you could throw people away with your mind. It was odd, a veteran like Alenko could probably afford much better gear, from scavenging or loot shares if nothing else. Why would he choose to keep using the basic, barely functional gear the Alliance issued standard.
Jenkins's shook his head. He'd only been working with the man for a few weeks and he'd already decided the Lieutenant was just weird. Not as weird as the Commander, but that wasn't saying much.
A glance across the cargo bay showed the commander frowning over his helmet and Jenkin's shuddered. Commander Shepard was nothing at all like he'd expected. The man was charming, engaging, and always ready with a smile. All of it completely at odds with the stories. The Butcher of Torfan was a legend, and the drill instructors in Basic had relished in covering every atrocity the man had visited on the pirates who infested the Traverse.
The Commander's history wasn't any more comforting than thinking of home, so Jenkins focused instead on his gear. Shepard's kit was the stuff of Jenkin's fantasies, the sort of cutting edge power that he'd dreamed of when he enlisted. Plating from half a dozen manufacturers built around a customized Armax chestpiece linked to an oversized eezo core between the shoulderblades that could probably power an airbus. The rig probably cost more money than Jenkens had made in his life, but he'd heard the Commander had gotten enough shares from the sack of Torfan to buy a starship.
The man looked up and Jenkins turned away quickly, forgetting that the helmet hid is face anyway. He'd heard that people who stared too long tended to mysteriously die on deployment.
O0O
Shepard settled the modified helmet he'd first pried off the unofficial ghortan running Torfan over his head and started the diagnostics check. All the individual components checked out and cleared, and a neural command flicked the quadrants of the blast shield out over the faceplate, letting him confirm with his own eyes that the four photo-receptors which turned the helmet into a death mask were working.
It also gave him the opportunity to grimace in private. The new guy was staring again, the useless fuck. Still, the kid was looking shaky about dropping onto his home planet, it wouldn't hurt to give him the encouraging leader song and dance to bolster him up. Cannon fodder was useless if you couldn't get it running in the right direction. He'd told Alenko to take care of it, but apparently actually leading men was beyond the man. What a lovely hand command had dealt him this time.
The diagnostic pinged green and Shepard flicked the blast shields back to rest along the side of the helmet. The glowing red photo-receptors were sometimes useful for intimidation, but tended to make playing the good guy harder. Another command collapsed the radiator fins on the back down into dormant mode, restoring the hardsuit to it's default balance. Shepard fixed on the expression that always seemed to leave idiots stumbling to follow him and started over the hold to give the new guy enough of a boost to stumble in front of a bullet for better men.
O0O
Jenkins swallowed as the counter above the hanger door ticked down the last minutes before the drop. The Normandy's ME field kept him from feeling anything as the ship slid stern first towards a brush with the upper atmosphere, but he could still imagine the thousand ways for something to go wrong and turn the ship into a smear across Eden Prime's rolling hills.
He was saved from further winding himself up by the elevator hatch sliding open to let a single figure in a pressure suit and magboots into the hanger, it took Jenkins a moment to notice the rank tabs on the man's shoulders and snap as close to attention as his heavy armor allowed. He hadn't expected Captain Anderson to see them off personally at all, and found himself regretting the scuff marks he still hadn't buffed out of his left shoulder plate.
The hand on his shoulder didn't startle him this time, and the wide grin on the Commander's face when Jenkins turned his head helped him slow his heart back down.
“Relax kid, Anderson won't bite your head off.†The tone was so friendly, so casual that Jenkins couldn't help but feel comforted. More than that he felt proud. Here was Commander Shepard, the living legend, treating him like a comrade instead of a cockroach straight from training. He could feel his chest swell and his mind clear of all the niggling doubts and uncertainty he'd built up since deployment.
“Shepard, Jenkins, Alenko,†The captain said, giving each of them a nod. Jenkins felt an echo of the same pride he'd felt when Shepard spoke at the casual recognition from the older man. “You already know everything I do so I won't waste your time telling you your jobs. Godspeed to you all.â€
Jenkins arm returned the salute without the need for direction from his own mind. It was better than the vids he'd devoured as a kid, better than he'd dreamed even before training had pounded the fantasies out of him. He belonged.
Dimly he noticed that rather than exchanging salutes Anderson was actually shaking Shepard's hand like an old friend. And then the counter ticked over to the final countdown with a harsh siren and he was rushing towards the opening door behind the others. He saw first Shepard and then Alenko step over the threshold and vanish into the distance. Then Jenkins reached the threshold and felt the Mass Effect fields grab him and throw him like a rocket towards the bow of the ship.
Stars spun around him until he shifted his limbs and twitched his ME field to steady his fall. Eden Prime spread out before him, the familiar continents he'd memorized in his youth swelling up to meet him behind a screen of clouds. It looked peaceful, even the ridiculous dreadnaught the transmissions had shown was too small to be seen from his height. Jenkins felt something surge in his chest and spread his arms as if to embrace his world.
O0O
Shepard carefully hauled himself to his feet and took stock. The ship, if it was a ship, was gone. The displacement of it's liftoff was probably what had thrown him and his squad through the air. It was quiet. There was none of the chittering of the geth or the shrieking buzz that had seemed omnipresent since the moment they landed. And the unearthly howls of those....things that used to be the colonists were gone.
He felt his stomach twist at the thought and forced it away. Focusing on finding Kaiden and Ashley was easier. It was...safer. They'd need to be checked over for injuries too. A sixty meter leap through the air was nothing new to an Alliance trooper, but it was usually done with controlled mass effect fields from the hardsuit, not the air displacement of a ship bigger than anything he'd ever seen.
Miraculously, he'd landed near the objective, though why the geth and the turian that had supposedly shot Nihlus hadn't taken it with them was a mystery. That could be worked out later though. Right now they just needed to secure the object, get a comm message off to Arcturus, and get some support in here for the colony. It only took a quick glance to confirm that Ashley and Kaden were both nearby, laid out on the platform just like Shepard had been. They were on a balcony at the edge of the spaceport, looking our over the rolling fields of grain that supported the colony. Communication with the Normandy was still out, but local transmission was still good enough to pull their suit diagnostics up on his omnitool and confirm that they were both alive but out cold.
He snorted, that wasn't a bad showing for a B4 trooper and a P3 technician. Hell, Alenko was running one of the old L2 series amp implants, it was a wonder he hadn't had an episode and broken his own neck.
Satisfied that the squad was as well as could be expected, he moved on to double checking the objective. The relic was a thin, wedge shaped pillar that looked like carved stone, even though it wasn't. Unlike most other prothean artifacts, the working ones anyway, it didn't have any mysteriously glowing lines or spots. It looked like nothing more than an uninspired statue.
He took one step towards the beacon and suddenly the world fell away as his body drifted up into the air and towards the beacon. He'd felt the mass effect countless times, nobody got into the fleet, much less to N7 without knowing exactly what to do when a biotic got a hold of you, especially not candidates who were biotic themselves. A moment of focus, and he felt the cool burn of dark energy rushing through his body as he tried to use his biotics to counter whatever field was holding him, nothing. He tried to use his own field to pull on the wall of the balcony behind him, but that only slowed his drift. Whatever was powering this field was at least as strong as an Asari adept. Hacking the thing was a lost cause, he didn't have the specialized computers and software needed to interface with prothean technology. He was about to shoot the artifact, mission be damned, when he ran out of time.
His body touched the pillar, and a wave of agony swept out from the point of contact and dragged him into hell.
O0O
The room had not been made to comfort mortal minds. Lines broke and bent, scattering into endless fractals half hidden in shadow, strange organic shapes loomed almost out of sight while countless inscrutable machines twined through and over everything. The eye searing lights gleamed wetly off uncovered patches of flesh and sinew. Half organic channels pulsed unceasingly, sending rushes of ichor flecked with gleaming specks surging through their clear walls like blood. Cloying fog choked the thick air, burning with a harsh, metallic scent. The temperature pulsed in time with the ichor that flowed through the machines, flashes of blazing heat breaking the icy chill. Frost formed and melted and froze again, unceasing.
Saren ignored it. His mind had long since transcended the weaknesses that would have allowed the room to break it. Lesser beings might have spent lifetimes trying to perceive the alien geometries of Sovereign’s form, but Saren's mind rested on other things. The Geth Terminals he'd left to erase the beacon and the human settlement had been destroyed. He'd had the programs that inhabited the terminals deleted without backup as punishment, but the damage was done. Terminals and the remains of the human Converts, as well as the Uplift Spines that produced them, would have the humans up in arms and frothing for war, though they would be pointed in the wrong direction for the time being at least. The beacon was a lesser concern; without the strength granted by Sovereign's influence, any attempt to access the data within would most likely result in madness and death. Nevertheless, it was a potential obstruction.
Saren hated potential obstructions.
The sound of footsteps on the slick floors reached his ears, calm and measured, patient. He didn't bother to speak--he had grown out of the habit recently. Sovereign seemed to know all that he thought, and conveyed it to those who needed to hear. He desired the knowledge Benezia possessed, and so she would reveal it.
“The beacon is destroyed, and the remains are en route to the Citadel...†she trailed off, and Saren considered simply pulling the information from her mind directly. It was an unpleasant sensation, using Sovereign’s power thus, but more and more he found himself longing for the perfect clarity it offered, so much less primitive than bothering with distortions in the air. But before he could decide she continued anyway, and the urge faded. “Based on the human's report, it is possible one of them used the beacon before it was destroyed.â€
Her voice had wavered, he noted. Obviously the Matriarch still harbored doubts. No matter, she would come to see wisdom in time. He had spent years wrestling with his own doubts, trying to deny inevitability. He could extend her the same courtesy.
Still, he needed details, details she was too slow in providing. He felt something like desire fill him. It was time for more direct communication. He stood, listening to the matriarch take a hesitant step backward as he descended from the control dais to the floor. There was still fear in her eyes as the cool digits of the arm Sovereign had given him wrapped around her head. She screamed. Saren ignored it; he too had screamed in the early days, when his mind was not yet enhanced with Sovereign's strength, but the pain had passed. Everything passed and then it all became clear.
She would learn, in time.
O0O
It was chaos, a meaningless riot of connections. There was nothing that might be an image, or a word. There were merely...impressions. He had the impression of form, being. He felt that he had a body, but what sort of body, what shape or color, was denied him. He felt place, the impression of habitation, artifice, dwelling. But nothing was clear.
Mostly there was the impression of pain.
He felt unseen blades digging into flesh that was not there, chill spines digging into everything he was. There was a sensation of growth as well, of addition, as if his form was changing, becoming alien in ways he could not describe. He felt other beings around him, a sensation of unity and purpose, or a drive that felt unending. But it did end, guttering like a candle, snuffed out one by one until he was again alone.
For a long time, there was nothing he could understand. Occasionally he felt as if there was something on the edge of perception, waiting for him to....do something. As if he had only to find some key and everything would fall into place. It was only at the end that he experienced anything that might be considered sight.
He felt....nothing, a void beyond comprehension, and then, in the far distance, something alien. His mind skittered away from it, but the presence grew unceasingly, inexorable. It loomed ever larger, until it ceased to feel distant at all. Every direction, or the things that felt like directions, lead to the presence. There was no escape.
And then more pain...
Sight was the first sensation to return as his mind crept back into some semblance of what it had been. At first, he saw only a vague blur--an off white field that neither began nor ended. It just was. Then he realized he was staring at a ceiling, and the world seemed to snap back into place.
Sitting up was surprisingly easy, given that his last clear memory was the cold fire of dark energy he usually associated with biotics magnified a thousand fold running down what felt like every nerve in his body. Now he just felt like he'd been hit with a biotic warp, by a matriarch.
“Welcome back Shepard. How are you feeling?â€
“Been worse doc,†he managed, blinking a few times until the blurry shape standing over him resolved into the ship's doctor, “been a hell of a lot better too.â€
He didn't bother trying to leave the bed as Doctor Chakwas pulled up some sort of full body readout on her omnitool and set a scanner arm spinning around him. It hadn't taken more than a few days aboard before he'd learned that the doctor wasn't nearly as impressed with an N7 patch as most people, and he'd found pissing off medical specialists to be a bad plan in the past. Instead he spent a few minutes taking stock and making sure he wasn't in one of the damn gowns the medics always seemed to shove on people. That done, he was left to suffer the whirling machine.
“What did I miss, other than the evac? Did the beacon make it out?â€
Chakwas sniffed, “You soldiers, fifteen hours unconscious and right to business. You'll be happy to know that you appear to be perfectly fine. Other than some unusual brain activity during your sleep and a slight hormone imbalance from stress, the beacon doesn't seem to have done anything. Your headache should fade in a few hours.â€
“And the beacon?†Shepard pressed.
Chakwas sighed and let the omnitool interface fade away before waving him off the table. “Destroyed, I'm afraid†she said, “Now that you're awake, the captain will want your report. As there's nothing physically wrong with you, I suppose I'll have to let you go before you start trying to sneak out.â€
“Right, thanks doc.†he said, hopping off the table and triple checking that the jumpsuit's throat tab was sealed. He'd wound up flashing his ass after a medical visit years ago, right after being cleared for duty after the Akuze fiasco. Major Kyle hadn't let him hear the end of it...until Torfan changed everything.
“And Shepardâ€, she called just before the door hissed shut behind him, “Do try not to get shot before we reach the Citadel.â€
Shepard gave that the disgusted wave it deserved and let the door cut off whatever she would have said next. He usually liked Chakwas, but she was a damn sight funnier when she was annoying Joker. He still felt sore; for a second, he contemplated canceling his mass to ease the trip to Anderson's cabin. But using biotics with a headache wasn't generally recommended, for good reason, so toughing it out was the order of the day.
Just like every day, he thought as he started to shuffle across the ship's common room towards the Captain's quarters. Sometimes it just wasn't worth getting out of the sleep pod.
O0O
The cafe was halfway down Tayseri ward, on the sixteenth floor of one of the smaller buildings. Most of the seating sprawled across a wide balcony looking over the Dilinaga concert hall and up the ward to the Presidium ring in the far distance, but a good fifth of the seats were booths and small tables tucked inside the premises, most in small alcoves with sound dampening baffles. The upper floors of the building were mostly residential, and mostly filled with Salarians.
It was the perfect place to do a little hacking, anyone tracing the extranet feeds to the cafe routers would find it nearly impossible to tell who had been accessing them, given the way Salarians treated secret hunting like a national sport.
Garrus Vakarian frowned at the terminal. It was a cheap off brand he'd picked up at an unlicensed hawker in the lower wards. It was probably illegal, especially since the seller had insisted on an unmarked chit payment rather than a transfer.
That was fine, really. In fact, it was the whole point. There was nothing on the thing to link it to him, or to C-Sec at all, and he'd gone over every one of the slicing programs and data mining tools he'd loaded it down with twice to make sure it stayed that way.
It was looking like he might as well not have bothered.
This whole investigation made him edgy. It had come from on high, right from Executor Pallin and he'd said he was just passing it on. Alone that would have been big, but obviously the spirits didn't feel that was enough trouble to drop in Garrus hands. The whole time he'd spoken, Pallin had been dropping hints to flub the whole thing, just write some bullshit reports and turn them in. And for an investigation that couldn't have been ordered by anyone but the Council, Garrus had hit a truly remarkable amount of obstructionism.
Every record was sealed, no reports could be released, no exemptions on Security Clearance for any reason. It was like The Council didn't want to risk any chance of evidence being found to substantiate whatever accusation had been leveled at Saren.
That just made Garrus more and more certain that the evidence was there, waiting to be tracked down.
It was odd, he'd always hated the idea of Spectres and yet here he was, again, wishing that just once he could bend the rules, ignore the restrictions and just get it done. His father would be furious no doubt, and all his training railed against the feeling. He sighed.
'Not a fun time to be Garrus Vakarian' he thought, and went back to digging, carefully tapping the haptic keys with his talons without pressing too hard and damaging the table beneath.
Not for the first time, he wondered what it must be like for Asari or Batarians, to have so many extra fingers. It must make typing difficult.
O0O
The door chime provided a welcome distraction for Captain David Anderson, and he gratefully turned away from the unpleasant contents of his private terminal and waved the door open. He started a bit when the door hissed open to reveal his ground team leader looking like he belonged on a slab.
“Shepard, sit down son before you fall on my deck.â€
Anderson repressed the urge to snort as the younger man seemed to waver between indignation and relief before folding a seat out of a wall niche and very nearly collapsing into it. Shepard was stubborn as a mule, a good soldier. But sometimes Anderson had trouble remembering that Shepard was barely six years younger than himself. He seemed so young...
Silence stretched between them, or as close as anything ever got to silent shipboard. Anderson wasn't surprised. Shepard had always been...contained, in ways that tended to make people uncomfortable. He knew that some of the officers Shepard had served under hadn't understood what to make of him, hell some people thought that Kyle's breakdown had something to do with his second in command. It wasn't impossible, Shepard had been odd, those months after Akuze. There had been serious concerns about clearing him for duty, but the Allied Fleet didn't have enough troops capable of handling the N program to throw one away lightly, especially not when an entire cadre had just been eaten by thresher maws.
And then Torfan....nobody said much about Torfan. They'd had a trial, declared Shepard sane and loyal and not said a word otherwise, letting the rank and file, and every government with even a casual intelligence program, build The Butcher into a nightmare legend.
Anderson was more than half certain he'd been assigned Shepard because nobody else was quite sure how to deal with the man. He didn't look like a monster, didn't act like it. Yet everyone knew that in the heat of battle, when his commander had descended into babbling madness, Shepard had taken control and smashed an understrength unit through four lines of Batarian defenses and into their headquarters. And that once inside, he'd lead the remnants of his team through the complex and personally killed every single enemy. Through it all, he'd been cold, calm, perfectly normal.
Anderson had watched the helmet footage, both Shepard's and some of the other survivors. It hadn't been pleasant.
The irony was, he wasn't sure how to 'handle' Shepard any more than the others. He doubted anyone really knew what went on behind those eyes, even the counselors he'd seen off and on since the rescue units pulled him off Mindoir.
“Sorry, Sir.â€
Anderson didn't manage to stop the snort as Shepard finally spoke up.
“All that waiting and that's all you have to say? I don't remember giving you permission to go all formal on me.â€
For a moment, the tension broke, and Anderson shared a small smile with the man who was everything he'd tried to be. Maybe that was why they'd foisted Shepard off on him, maybe not. But it was convenient. Anderson relished the moment while it lasted.
“I won't lie to you Shepard. The Beacon destroyed, Nihlus dead, it doesn't look good. The Council wants answers, and from the comm I just got, they aren't inclined to take the word of a human soldier and a terrified dockworker.â€
The mood dimmed. Anderson watched the small smile fall off Shepard's face, the usual coldness seeping back over his expression.
“And the other evidence? The helmet recordings, security footage?†There was something dangerous in his look now, it reminded Anderson of the footage he'd watched from Torfan, right before Shepard started that final push.
“They'll allow that there was an attack, they don't have much other option with three arcologies in flames and footage of those synthetics. Not to mention those spikes and the....things they made...†Anderson heaved a sigh, “but they aren't even pretending to take accusations against Saren seriously.†Anderson shrugged. “We're doing what we can, Udina's promised to keep poking as many sticks into the establishment as he can manage. And we're bypassing Deus Relay and making the jump to Serpent from Chalven Relay, it should buy the C-Sec investigators another week or so to dig.â€
“Will they find anything?â€
Anderson sighed. “I hope so son, if not...†He didn't bother to finish the thought. “Now, I already watched your helmet footage, and Alenko and Williams covered most of the mission, but you were the commander on the ground, you know the drill.â€
A smile creased Anderson's face as Shepard groaned and rested his head in his hands.
“Can't this wait a day, my head is trying to kill me.â€
“No rest for the wicked, Commander.†He tried hard not to laugh at how Shepard's shoulders slumped.
“Fuck.â€
