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The soldier assesses her situation. Air, breathable. Injuries, bad but she can still use her hands. Everything hurts. Armor, damaged beyond repair. Omnitool, unusable. No apparent hostiles. No apparent friendlies. With no shields, she overrides her instinct to raise a biotic barrier. Conserving her energy is more important.
She prioritizes.
With no hostiles and breathable air, and the communicators in both her armor and her omnitool ruined, her injuries are her next priority. She doesn’t feel her armor’s first-aid interface working. She thinks about her arms, then her legs and feet one by one. Everything hurts. Better than not being able to feel.
She struggles and undoes her chestplate, and notes as it breaks apart in her hands. The ablative layers have fused onto the skin layer, but it still did its job and nothing melted onto her skin. Multiple wounds, mostly burns and shots.
She notes that one of the cracks is near an internal medigel reservoir. James used to complain when she would quiz him on armor layouts. James isn’t here. Nobody’s here. No friendlies. No evac. No help coming. She doesn’t give herself more than a moment to wish she could get to Dr. Chakwas. She pries open the medigel reservoir. No dice: the blast that melted her armor charred it beyond use.
She tries her greaves next, hands scrabbling for edges to peel layers of armor off one by one. Carefully, she breaches the medigel reservoir. Score!
Applying it by hand is normally a waste of the precious material. Also, increases risk of infection, especially with nothing to sanitize or wash her hands. Still, the risk is lower than leaving the wound untreated. Moreover, she has no other options. She starts with the biggest wound sites. She winces. Touching them makes the pain worse.
She finds a relatively clean piece of lining from her chestplate and rips it out, dipping it in the medigel and using it as a fine brush.
With her non-medigel-covered left hand, she checks for wound sites on her head and neck. Nothing severe. Reaper weapons rarely leave people with less-than-fatal head injuries. She applies medigel to the scratches she finds anyway. Head injuries can bleed a lot and she can’t see how bad any of them are.
Her medigel starting to run low, she considers her options for her limbs. She might be able to learn to compensate for a lack of a double-handed grip with a biotic field. She’d never fight again like that, not unless someone was desperate, but she might live. She’d still need at least one hand for fine tasks.
One arm, then, that’s her highest priority.
After that, maybe her legs. In a survival situation in an unknown environment, mobility is just shy of paramount. Paramount, if someone else can handle the manipulation tasks. Lastly, her other arm. If she has to leave part of her body to get infected and then find a way to amputate it, it should be one of her arms.
She starts undoing the armor on her right arm. Pain flares hard enough that she cries out involuntarily.
Just below her elbow, the whole thing’s melted through. What used to be a protective composite is now fused to a burn wound on her skin. Taking off the armor tore the charred flesh.
Well. She pauses, then starts to reassess, detaching pieces from her armor so she can leave as much off as possible without disturbing the burn site. Then on to the left. She’ll learn to write left-handed if she has to. Shoot, too.
Her left arm is in better shape. The armor detaches cleanly. A few wound sites, small ones that get the brush. She thinks about her lover. Did she make it? She has to have. She was on the Normandy. If the ship made it, she made it. Otherwise, nobody did.
She struggles to bring her legs in reach to get her armor off, her muscles straining, pain flaring in her legs and abs.
Her muscles respond. Her injuries aren’t incapacitating. She can push through. So she will. So she does.
She tries the other leg’s reservoir, hoping that maybe she can find more medigel. She finds it almost empty.
Make do with what she has. Every nerve and muscle in her legs and abs screams at her as she pulls her legs in to check them over for wounds.
She doesn’t have enough medigel.
The reservoir that had been on her right arm was now part of the charred mess she hadn’t been able to remove. Her shaking hands spill half of what she finds opening the one on the left.
Well.
She’ll make do. Triage. The worst wounds that can be treated with the least medigel get it first, and keep going until she runs out. Both sides. Whatever she can do with what she has to reduce risk of infection. Whatever she can do to make sure she can.
Shelter, Water. Also priorities. Then food.
First priority with shelter is to keep her body heat from leaking into the ground. The remains of her hardsuit can do that if she arranges them under her. She’s slept in it before. She curses herself for not having packed an emergency blanket. It was light, but she needed the weight for more juice. It’s not like her omnitool couldn’t have made an emergency blanket. But it’s broken now.
The weather seems tolerably warm. She has no idea how long that will last, or how often this planet rotates. It’s not earth; the sky’s too dim, the sun too orange. It doesn’t look like anywhere she’s been before, but many garden worlds have diverse enough ecosystems she can’t know for sure. She wouldn’t be so lucky that there’s a colony just over the horizon.
She looks around and finds a cleft in the rocks conveniently nearby, maybe a couple dozen paces. She hauls the wreckage of her armor that distance, lays it out, and lies down.
She stares at the rock above her as she rests, pulling an energy bar out of a pocket on her hardsuit and biting into it. She’s sheltered from the wind, and the rain. If she’s lucky (and she’s been lucky, so lucky), she’ll wake up with the medigel having done some of its work and feel better enough to look around, build a proper shelter, find water.
If she isn’t, maybe she’d get eaten or freeze to death or wake up cooked.
She’d been lucky so far. That blast from a Reaper beam weapon wasn’t her luck running out, if the shape she's in after surviving it is any indication. She could be a lot worse. She's not. She's alive. Maybe taking a break from the “and kicking” bit, but things could be a lot worse.
She closes her eyes and makes plans. Let the medigel do its work on her, then when she can sit up without excruciating pain, get at least some part of her omnitool working again. Find water. Find out if there’s anything edible in this ecosystem. Is this even a levo world? Surviving whatever that was and landing on a habitable garden world only to starve because it has a dextro ecology would be a horrible way to go. No good way to find out until she gets her omnitool working again.
Still. With what she’s pushed through, her chances are better than they were when she came to.
Find every edge you can and make them count. That’s how she fought the Reapers.
If she could trust the Catalyst (trust the malevolent AI that created the Reapers?), that’s how she beat the Reapers. Unless of course the whole Crucible thing was a trap.
Not worth thinking about now. Nothing she can do about it.
She focuses instead on remembering her lover’s face, freckles on her blue skin, and drifts off to sleep.